"In its first edition Religion and the Domestication of Dissent focused on the events of 9/11 and the representation of Islam. Scholars and pundits effectively demonised a whole faith by wilfully apportioning blame and by ignoring the differences within the Islamic movement. This volume examines how the classifications we use to name and negotiate our social worlds - notably 'religion' - are implicitly political. This cutting-edge new edition continues to be relevant to society today. During recent US campus protests over Israel's ongoing actions in the Gaza Strip, a Jewish student claimed that Jewish people protesting against Israel's actions were akin to gay or black people supporting President Trump, i.e., asserting the supposedly authentic and homogenous identity of a group; that do not represent their community and therefore should not to be taken seriously. This is also the stand of scholars and pundits now using the term "Christian nationalism" to describe what they see as the operationalization of Christian symbolism for political purposes. In other words, consider that no "mainline" commentator would ever designate the onetime US President Jimmy Carter-a person whose version of Christian faith was very much part of his public persona while in and out of office-as a Christian nationalist, demonstrating that the term is being used to rank and isolate winners and losers in ongoing contests over what ought to constitute American, let alone Christian. It is therefore not a descriptive but, rather, a socially formative category that accomplishes work in liberal democracies"--
The cutting-edge new edition of Religion and the Domestication of Dissent examines how the classifications we use to name and negotiate our social worlds - notably 'religion' - are implicitly political, and is therefore not a descriptive but, rather, a socially formative category that accomplishes work in liberal democracies.
In its first edition,?Religion and the Domestication of Dissent?focused on the representations of Islam that circulated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—representations that scholars, pundits, and politicians alike used either to essentialize and demonise it or, instead, to isolate specific aspects as apolitical and thus tolerable faith. This little book’s larger thesis therefore argued for how the classifications that we routinely use to identify and thereby negotiate our social worlds -- notably such categories as 'religion' or ‘faith’ -- are implicitly political.
This new edition, which updates the first and adds a new closing chapter, continues to be relevant today – a time when assertions concerning supposedly authentic and homogenous identities (whether shared by “us” or “them”) continue to animate a variety of public debates where the stakes remain high. Thinking back on how Islam was often portrayed in scholarship and popular media in western Europe and North America offers lessons for how debates today unfold on such topics as, for example, Christian nationalism – a designation now prominent among pundits intent on identifying the proper and improper ways in which religion intersects with modern political life. But it is this very distinction (between religion and politics) that ought to be attracting our attention, if we are interested not in which way of being religious is right or reasonable but, instead, in determining why some social groups are known as religious in the first place. Seeing the latter question as linked to studying how socially formative categories function in liberal democracies, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent offers an anthropology of the present, when the longstanding mechanisms of liberal governance seem to be under threat.
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