Talal Asad
바깥 2012. 1. 21. 17:36http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/asad/index.html 에서 퍼온 것
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“Thinking About Blasphemy and Secular Criticism” is the title of the Presidential Lecture to be presented by Talal Asad, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Living up to his family name (which means lion in Arabic), Asad has been a major force in the field of anthropology, always pushing its boundaries. In his own words:
…I’ve been constantly trying to pull away from established anthropological positions and move in interdisciplinary directions. One reason is simply that even if you think of British anthropology, its most fruitful moments have involved engagements with something outside: theology in the nineteenth century, classics at the beginning of the twentieth century, sociology through Durkheim, linguistics through Saussure, political economy and history through Marxism, and so forth. Whatever one might say about each of these, about the results of each of these encounters, they have certainly been fertile moments generating interesting questions. So I see myself as somebody who was educated in this very loose discipline called anthropology, familiar therefore with most of the major texts in its history, valuing it as a tradition.[1]
Born in Saudi Arabia and brought up in Pakistan, Asad attended a missionary boarding school where he was one of only a few Muslims among a majority of Christians. This situation seems to have given Asad a particular view toward East-West relations and influenced his later studies. After his boarding school experience he was sent to England to be schooled in architecture. The study of architecture had no special appeal to him and he moved on to Edinburgh where he began his studies in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. In general the British anthropology scene at the time was concerned primarily with the study of social structures. But at Edinburgh he was exposed to American styles of anthropology, such as psychological anthropology, symbolic anthropology, and the like. After obtaining his M.A. at Edinburgh he went on to Oxford to work with the renowned social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who had done studies in the Middle East and Africa, notably on the Nuer tribe of the Sudan and the Sanusi of Libya. It was as a result of his association with Evans-Pritchard and his work that Asad chose to do his field studies for his book on the Kababish during a five-year stint teaching at the University of Khartoum in the Sudan, a position he obtained through the close relationship between the Sudanese university and Oxford.
Asad’s book The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe (1970) was a reflection of his thinking at the time about colonialism and anthropology. Asad’s interests became focused on colonialism and on the ways the West defined the East as “non-Western.” On colonialism, Asad later wrote: “The historical process of constructing a humane secular society, it is said, has aimed at eliminating cruelties. Thus it has often been claimed that European rule in colonial countries, although not itself democratic, brought about moral improvements in behavior — that is, the abandonment of practices that offend against the human.”[2] He continued: “I want to propose, however, that in their attempt to outlaw customs the European rulers considered cruel it was not the concern with indigenous suffering thatdominated their thinking, but the desire to impose what they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population — that is, the desire to create new human subjects.”[3]
During his time as a lecturer at Hull University, Asad and his colleagues Roger Owen and Sami Zubaida began holding regular seminars and publishing papers on Middle East studies, and they founded the journal Review of Middle East Studies(1975- ) in order to publish the papers from these seminars. When Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism was published in 1978, its popularity was a reinforcement and encouragement to Asad’s own investigations on the uses of Western-world standards as measures of the non-Western world.
After his time at Hull, Asad moved across the Atlantic and joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research as a professor of anthropology. His book Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam(1993) was published after his move. Parts were written and published separately prior to his relocation. The work was well received and much reviewed. Bryan S. Turner in his review of Genealogies stated: “The book concludes with an analysis of the nature of British national culture under the impact of multiculturalism, Islamization, and religious change, especially as these issues have been illustrated by the case of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.”[4]
The work defines religion as being contextual: each religion is the product of its specific cultural and historical developments. This follows Asad’s view on the interchanges between East and West, between the “developing” and the “developed” worlds, and on who should participate in them. As Bruce Lincoln writes in his review of Genealogies, Asad “maintains that ethnographers and others ought to limit themselves to description, reserving critique to those who participate firsthand in the language and culture under discussion: that is, people who offer their criticism on the basis of shared values and are prepared to engage in a sustained conversation of give-and-take.”[5] Measuring non-Western societies with a Western Christian measuring stick places the non-Christian, non-European societies in a position of never being able to advance to that standard.
Asad’s recent writings have been focused on his investigations into secularism and modernity (e.g., his book Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 2003.) In his essay Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt, Asad defines secularism thus: “A secular society [...] is a modern construct based on the legal distinction between public and private, on a political arrangement requiring ‘religion’ to be subjected by law to the private domain, on an ideology of moral individualism and a downgrading of the knowing subject, on a celebration of the physical body as well as on a range of personal sensibilities, that all emerged in Western Europe together with the formation of the modern state.”[6]
On modernity Asad has said, “One of the things that modernity has done, as you know, is to extinguish various possibilities."[7] Further, in an interview with Saba Mahmood published in the Stanford Humanities Review, Asad explained that Western academics “still make assumptions that prevent them from questioning aspects of Western modernity. For example, they call these movements [such as Islamism] ‘reactionary’ or ‘invented,’ making the assumption that Western modernity is not only the standard by which all contemporary developments must be judged, but also the only authentic trajectory for every tradition.”[8]
Given his background and interests, Asad has of late become a popular commentator on current events: he has been asked to talk and write about fundamentalism in the Islamic world, and his analyses of secular societies facing fundamentalism have been the focus for a number of recent articles.[9]
[1] Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006. p. 274.
[2] Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003. p. 109.
[3] Ibid. p. 110.
[4] Bryan S. Turner, Deakin Univeristy, in Sociology of religion, V. 55, N. 3, (Fall 1994) pp. 371-373.
[5] Bruce Lincoln, University of Chicago, in History of Religions, V. 35, N. 1 (August 1995) pp. 83-86
[6] Thinking about secularism and law in Egypt. Leiden, ISIM, 2001. (ISIM papers, 2) p. 1.
[7] David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, editors, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006. P. 274.
[8] Interview, “Talal Asad, modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions” by Saba Mahmood. Stanford Humanities Review, v. 5, n. 1 (http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1/text/asad.html)
[9] E.g., Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt. Leiden, ISIM, 2001 (ISIM papers, 2), and “Reflections on Laicité and the public sphere,” Beirut Conference on public spheres, October, 22-24, 2004. (http://www.islamamerica.org/articles.cfm/article_id/94/)
Talal Asad...
...on religion and religious movements
In much nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, religion was considered to be an early human condition from which modern law, science, and politics emerged and became detached. In this century most anthropologists have abandoned Victorian evolutionary ideas, and many have challenged the rationalist notion that religion is simply a primitive and therefore outmoded form of the institutions we now encounter in truer form (law, politics, science) in modern life. For these twentieth-century anthropologists, religion is not an archaic mode of scientific thinking, nor of any other secular endeavor we value today; it is, on the contrary, a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other. From this it seems to follow that the essence of religion is not to be confused with, say, the essence of politics, although in many societies the two may overlap and be intertwined.
(Genealogies of Religion, p. 27)
The contemporary salience of religious movements around the globe, and the torrent of commentary on them by scholars and journalists, have made it plain that religion is by no means disappearing in the modern world. The “resurgence of religion” has been welcomed by many as a means of supplying what they see as a needed moral dimension to secular politics and environmental concerns. It has been regarded by others with alarm as a symptom of growing irrationality and intolerance in everyday life. The question of secularism has emerged as an object of academic argument and of practical dispute. If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable. But does it follow that secularism is not universally valid?
(Formations of the Secular, p. 1)
...on the discipline of anthropology
But we need to see anthropology as a holistic discipline nurtured within bourgeois society, having as its object of study a variety of non-European societies which have come under its economic, political and intellectual domination — and therefore as merely one such discipline among several (orientalism, indology, sinology, etc.). All these disciplines are rooted in that complex historical encounter between the West and the Third World which commenced about the 16thcentury: when capitalist Europe began to emerge out of feudal Christendom; when the conquistadors who expelled the last of the Arabs from Christian Spain went on to colonise the New World and also to bring about the direct confrontation of ‘civilised’ Europe with ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples; when the Atlantic maritime states, by dominating the world’s major seaways, inaugurated ‘the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history’; when the conceptual revolution of modern science and technology helped to consolidate Europe’s world hegemony. The bourgeois disciplines which study non-European societies reflect the deep contradictions articulating this unequal historical encounter, for ever since the Renaissance the West has sought both to subordinate and devalue other societies, and at the same time to find in them clues to its own humanity.
(Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter, pp. 103-104)
What first attracted me to anthropology was that it encouraged one to think of human beings as having different kinds of possibility. One of the things modernity has done, as you know, is to extinguish various possibilities. I think anthropology is important when it comes to questioning the hegemony of our modern capitalist assumptions. I think that that aspect of anthropology needs to be kept alive in thinking about human existence. My point is not simply the familiar one about anthropology as the mirror of humankind. I believe that the serious study of different modes of being and thinking helps us conceptually. It provokes us to think about the assumptions that underlie some of our most cherished and taken-for-granted notions, which mobilize our ways of life, and it disturbs us by other, very different kinds of assumption. Out of this, perhaps, there can emerge other things that are equally human, so to speak, but entirely new.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 274)
...on current events, public reactions, and private reflections
I was totally knocked out by 9/11 and also by the way “informed” public opinion represented it. Not since 1967 had I been so disoriented. The attack itself was shattering. But then even more so was the torrent of stuff that started coming out in the electronic and print media about Islam and Arabs. For me it was a very personal experience, as well as an intellectual one. The confidence and sense of security one had had in everyday life was seriously dented, of course. And I'm not referring here to a fear of further terrorist attacks. I began to see how one could be thoroughly unnerved even though living in a modern secular society. And when I say unnerved, I don't mean myself, I mean the population in general and the Muslim immigrants in particular. Muslims and Arabs have been beaten, and a few killed. Mosques have been burned and vandalized, individuals have been arrested on mere suspicion and not allowed access to lawyers, and so on. All of this is familiar now. But I must say I felt stunned when I opened “serious” newspapers like the New York Timesand whenever I watched television news. The rapidity with which an entire population felt its nationalistic sentiments aroused, the cleverness with which the Bush administration exploited them, the slyness of so many public intellectuals and politicians, who had at last found something they could together denounce, all of this was not merely disturbing, but eye-opening. I was watching open intimidation being practiced by a secular nation-state. Many people here and in Europe described this as “fully understandable,” by which they seemed to mean fully justifiable.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 299-300)
I began at that time [in the late 1960s] to be seriously interested in colonial history and the complex conditions that colonialism created — of which those who dominated and those who were dominated were joint authors — in the different countries with which I was more familiar. In a sense, everyone's fate was being partly decided somewhere else. Obviously I don't mean that everyone has the same power of decision, or that everyone is equally innocent in what he or she decides to do. On the contrary, the asymmetry of colonial and postcolonial power makes the lives of many people open to intervention by others in a nonreciprocal way. That seems to me a fairly straightforward proposition that was illustrated by the Middle East. Power is central in history both in the obvious sense of what some people can do to many, and also of what someone can do to himself or herself. That was what was so interesting about the student uprisings in the 1960s, in spite of their many absurdities and overall failure. It seems to me they were at once a confrontation with power and an exploration of the limits and possibilites of power.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 254)
I interacted intensively with academics who were Marxist activists, although I never joined any political group. [...] I was very reluctant to join a group because of the unease I felt about making too tight a connection between intellectual work and political work. That is, I didn't see the two as being quite so straightforwardly connected. I felt myself to be unequivocally on the Left politically. But I didn't see that that fact should determine all the work I was doing and the kinds of questions I was asking. I've always been somewhat pessimistic about the possibilities of political activism, and certainly skeptical about the idea of political revolution. I even became increasingly skeptical about the idea that a rational politics would lead to emancipation.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 255)
I had become disturbed by my experience in Saudi Arabia, by media presentations of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Britain, by the media reactions to the student uprisings. All the rational demonstrations of what was wrong in each case — so it seemed to me — were clearly not having any significant effect. So I rediscovered the wheel: the assumption that rational argument will persuade people that they are wrong is an incredibly naïve idea. You ask any ordinary person in the street, and she knows this already without having read any philosophy, but for blinkered idiots like us, intellectuals, or rather for myself, rational criticism was thought to be the way to show somebody what the truth is. And so in a very primitive and blundering way I started to rethink this.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 265)
...on rationality and irrationality
When I was young, from at least the age of fourteen, I developed an enormous admiration for the West — or rather, for a certain idea of the enlightened West. I was very much imbued with the idea that the West was where one would find Reason, where one would find Freedom, where one would find all the wonderful things which were lacking in Pakistan. And my experience in Britain and then here in the U.S. — and now I speak of a long durée in my life — was one of a slow disabusement. There were different phases, which are connected to my work [...], but put simply, I began to realize how saturated with prejudice people in England were. You might say I was terribly naïve to think otherwise. And I certainly was naïve, but I had to learn to see my naïveté. This seemed to me an incredible discovery, that I had failed for so long to see people in England as prejudiced, as soaked in prejudice. People are prejudiced everywhere, of course, but the English were supposed to be living in an enlightened Western country.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 249)
Then came 1967 and the Six Days War. That was an enormous watershed in my life, intellectually as well as politically. The first thing was the reaction of the English, which astounded me. I couldn't get over the fantastic delight at the utter defeat of Egypt and the other Arab countries. Joy expressed in TV and newspaper reports and in photographs (I still have some of these) at the thousands of humiliated, exhausted, peasant soldiers, forced to walk barefoot over the hot desert. I could understand the joy that Israelis must have felt at their victory. But the English? What was the emotion that fueled the exultation of this enlightened nation toward the ignominous defeat of a wretched, oppressed oriental people? This question began as a rhetorical one for me, as a reproach, but slowly it pushed me to rethink the assumptions I had for so long carried with me about Rationality and Justice in politics.
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 253)
What has interested me since the late 1970s is this: What is there about this process of drawing out implications that strikes me as evident, obvious, important, but doesn't so strike other people? This is not a plea for empathy but a recognition that I am leaving something out of this entire process, namely, how people engage with language and with their emotions too. This is where I began to be interested in reconceptualizing the question of ideology in terms of the experiece of the body-mind-heart.
[...] At one level I see that there are political implications, but what that means concretely is no longer always clear to me, and I want to do some more thinking on that. What does it mean to say there are political implications? Here's a text, I read it, I point to some of its assumptions and what I think are certain political implications. But what does this mean in the real world? I want to complicate for myself the whole question of how one interprets these texts and what it means to draw political implications from them for a particular situation. What does it mean to respond politically to “implications”? And how can they be grasped by someone other than myself? What is the difference between my seeing them and somebody else seeing them? How can a theoretical work be linked objectively to a particular situation?
(“The Trouble of Thinking,” p. 267)