LEIPZIG UNIVERSITY

The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities" investigates forms and arrangements of differentiation between religious and other social spheres, practices, interpretive frameworks, institutions and discourses in different eras and regions. We refer to such arrangements, which are often contentious, with the heuristic term "secularities". Based on the hypothesis that drawing boundaries between the religious and non-religious is not an exclusive sign either of modernity or of the "West", we explore corresponding emic taxonomies, forms of social differentiation and modes of demarcation. These are to be analysed in their internal developments as well as in relation to modern "Western" concepts of social order. In this way, we hope to explain current forms of secularity in different regions and the concomitant conflicts about the power of interpretation and claims to validity. The particular nature of this..

Primary location: Leipzig Ukraine