NSRN annual lecture 2018 by Samuli Schielke by NSRN Deputy Editor

In his keynote lecture lecture to the NSRN conference in 2018, Samuli Schielke thinks together his fieldwork in Egypt and critical anthropologies of the secular, and argues that thinking about secularism as a form of discursive power that promotes specific subjectivities can provide a useful but partial understanding of various developments regarding state power, faith, and imagination that are going on in a God-fearing part of the world. Rather than trying to think them through the somewhat mystifying entity of “the secular”, he suggests that they may be understood in a clearer way as different shapes of the relationship between humans and God. Some of these shapes  correspond with a binary model that juxtapose Islamic and secular-liberal traditions as distinct, mutually external regimes; and some of them do not. Schielke proposes to add to the theme of secularism a more complex landscape of heresies and imaginative explorations that either unsettle a tradition from within, or have different concerns altogether.