Marian Burchardt

Gesellschaftliche Konflikte werden weltweit immer wieder mit Religion und Kultur in Zusammenhang gebracht. Dabei geht es nicht nur um Glaubensfragen, sondern um tief verankerte Vorstellungen von Zugehörigkeit, Identität und dem „Eigenen“ und „Fremden“. Solche Deutungen werfen Fragen auf – auch im Schulalltag, etwa wenn religiöse Symbole zum Streitpunkt werden oder kulturelle Unterschiede irritieren. Die Autor*innen betrachten diese Spannungen aus soziologischer Perspektive. Sie untersuchen anhand konkreter Beispiele, wie Religion als kulturelles Erbe verstanden wird, welche Rolle sie bei der Bildung nationaler Identitäten spielt und warum Auseinandersetzungen etwa um die Burka im öffentlichen Raum so stark polarisieren. Lehrer*innen gewinnen ein tieferes Verständnis für die historischen und aktuellen Dimensionen des Verhältnisses von Religion und Kultur.

In this article, I outline why materiality and human-object relations matters for the study of secularization. Social scientific research on secularization, secularism and secularities has been, for the most part, excessively focused on what people (no more) believe in, how these beliefs have been conceptualized, made explicit and canonized, and how beliefs (and their transformation into knowledge qua evidentiary practices) relate to how people practice their religion, or cease doing that. As I will show below, materiality has played little to no role in that. But, as the articles in this collection demonstrate, materiality—objects, food, atmospheres, light, and dust—has palpable consequences for configurations of religion and secularity, folding its own temporalities and intensities into religious and secular experiences. I also argue that religious and cultural heritage is an especially fruitful field to examine the role of materiality in secularization processes.

Raising timely and urgent questions about the forms, scope and boundaries of religious authority and practice, this article offers novel ways for the study of secularities and secularisms in contemporary African societies. In recent scholarly debates on secularity, Africa has been marginal. Part of the reason, it was suggested was that African ways of being in, and knowing, the world lay outside the religious-secular divide. We contest such positions. Secularism was clearly part of modernists colonial ideologies that called for the eradication of African beliefs described as backward and irrational. We find that the colonial encounter had a powerful historical impact, essentializing and othering African societies as marked by holistic indigenous cultures rather than differentiated religions. We suggest that the complex interplay of different African and European cultures has simultaneously shaped the social construction and historical development of multiple secularities. We propose that the concept of multiple secularities provides creative avenues to rethink religion, political authority and belonging. We consider secularities as contested arrangements of religious and other spheres whose dynamics include processes of de-differentiation and de-secularization.

Based on ethnographic research in northern Ghana, this article explores the complex logistics of blood and the ways in which the availability of blood has been transformed through the introduction of drones. We explore how drone services affect this ecosystem of supply and contribute to reshaping the practices of physicians, nurses, facility pharmacists and stock managers, as well as the expectations and experiences of patients and their families. Situated at the interface of medical anthropology, critical studies of infrastructure and anthropological studies of digital innovations in healthcare, our paper attends to the emerging anthropological research on medical logistics as a means of connecting people with medical resources. It demonstrates the fundamentally ambivalent nature of technological innovation: on the one hand, drones have fueled health workers' hopes and transformed access to blood. On the other hand, their introduction has also led to connectivity without stock. In line with STS scholarship, we highlight the important role of the physical properties of objects such as blood in shaping their circulation.

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which religious communities, along with non-religious ones, produce particular emotional regimes through which they shape their members’ affective lives, produce knowledge on how to live with, endure and regulate certain emotions (e.g. pain and desire), and on how to make certain emotions as well as physical and mental state sufferable, as Geertz (1969) famously suggested. We pay particular attention to how religion and emotion have been theorized within the French and German sociological traditions, while also scrutinizing the contemporary assessments of these classical approaches. After this historical account and their relevance for secularization theory, we turn to recent studies that interpret religion and the secular within the framework of the affective turn that prioritizes embodiment, movement, practices, and spaces over individual feelings and beliefs in order to theorize the relationships between religion, emotion and institutions in relational and material ways.

Over long periods, interdisciplinary debates in urban studies on the relationships between religion and urban space were influenced by mainstream versions of modernization theory. These were based on the binary of urban modernity and nonurban (religious) tradition. However, historical urban research has shown that cities were also more often sites of religious innovation. Inspired by Jennifer Robinson’s understanding of cities as “ordinary” sites of sociality, with this special issue we contribute to this vibrant debate on religion and urbanism. The articles in it examine the role of places of worship as spatial and urban projects and address the following questions: How do religious actors become spatial entrepreneurs whose spatial projects shape cities? Which religiously motivated social and material forms emerge in cities? What are the practices and regimes that contribute to the spatialization of religion? How does the nature of places of worship alter and adapt to rapidly changing urban environments? And what are the consequences of religious buildings and other material forms for the social reality of cities? We argue that in contrast to former periods, when religious buildings were considered and constructed as authoritative buildings, these buildings are now much more fluid. Broad social transformations profoundly changed the roles played by and the social meanings attributed to them. Religious buildings and informal religious sites are not mere static architectural structures but bring with them a wide variety of spatial, economic, political, affective, and spiritual investments which make their construction, presence, and transformation a slippery object for urban planning logics and experts.