Responses 207
Critique, though indispensable, can occupy only a small part of a
Responses
Tnhl Asad
1 am grateful to the authors of these essays. All of them-and no1
least those who have taken strong issue with my arguments-have con1
pelled me to think again about what I said. I11 Fornrations of thr Srculai: I
tried to extend certain ideas that I touched on in Genralogies ofRr1igion. I I I
some ways, the former was harder to write than the latter. It is much molt
exploratory, and I am not satisfied with everything 1 said in it. This is wily
it has been valuable for me to elaborate some of the ideas that were inco111
pletely or inadequately stated. Whether in doing so I have responded S:II
isfactorily to each ofthe authors 1 don't know.
The only point I want to stress at the outset is that for me a n t h r ~ ~
pology is a continuous exploration of received ideas about the way giv1.11
modes of life hang together. More precisely: What is included or exclu<l
ed in the concepts that help to organize our collective lives? How? W l l ~ i
With what probable consequences For behavior and experience? Such ,111
inquiry requires that one be ready to break out of the coercive constrail~~a
of Sociological Truth-the axiom that the social is the ground of bei~il:.
The results, however provisional, can be uncomfortable, and they I ~ I . I ~
sometimes point to politically incorrect conclusions. What we eventu:~ll~.
do with them is another matter, because we are not abstract intellec[~l;~l,.
All of us live in particular forms of life that constantly demand decisi~t~~*.
and that in general presuppose a variety of committnents. And we all I ~ ; I I , I
particular me11101-ies,fears, and hol~cs.
life that is lived sanely. It is nevertheless possible to be alert to the tension
between the unconditional openness required by a n t h t ~ ~ o l o g i cinquiry
al
and the decisiveness demanded by ethical and life. The two al-
ways go together but not easily. In my view, anthropological inquiry and
political commitment should not be confused. It is not o d y that we do
not know for certain what the Iong-term future will be. More importandy,
we do not know which aspects of the past it will be reasonable (and vital)
to restore or invoke when we get to the future. So we do not know what
the past will be. In my view. anthropological inquiry is therefore an un-
ending labor of revision and reconsideration, while political commitment
requires decisive action (even calculated waiting is an action) regardless of
how ignorant we are--and regardless of the fact that sometimes we may
only be moving in time from one social distribution of pain and cruelty
Response to Casanova
In the first few pages of chapter 6 in Fornrations, I tried to address
Casanova's broad argument because it seemed to me-and still does-of
considerable interest. In particular, I regard his disaggregation of the three
lnain elemellts in the secularization thesis and his comments on them as
a11 obvious advance in the debate. However, in the final analysis, his at-
tclnpt to save the "core of the theory" did not seem to me successful. Ca-
~nnovacomplains that I have misrepresented his attempt at teformulation,
nlrlnough he proposes that in our intellectu~lendeavors we are both in
fl~ndamentalagreement. I plead that my concern in that chapter was not
1.0 write a review essay on Public Religions in the Modern World; it was to
conduct a series of skeptical inquiries about secularism, beginlli~lgwith a
11k at his reformnlation of the thesis. I cannot pick up every disclaimer
11sa11ovahas made in his own defense, but I stand by my reading. Here I
ill confine myself to restating my objections to the basic argument of his
IIOL. Finally, although I admire his erudition and hurnaniry, I am not per-
tuudcd that our projects are quite the same.
In Casanova's view, the core of the theory of secularization is the claim
tl1111 innoder~nsociety is characterized by "the differenriation of the secular

spheres from each other and from religious institutions and norms." This
claim he regards in his book as "srill defensible." Now, as I see it, the first
problem is that the characterization virtually equates secularization with
modernity, as many sociologists have defined it, and I'm not sure how dif-
ferent this makes it from "the ce[eologicaltheory of religious development"
that Casanova rightly disparages. Secondly, it doesn't help us to identify the
different kinds of secular life and the political reasoning on which they are
based. For example, in the United States the population is largely religious
and rhe federal government is conscicucio~lallyrequired to be neutral, and
yet Christian movements have historically been able to mobilize effectively
in support of important policies (antislavery, Prohibition, anti-abortion,
pro-Israel, etc.). Conversely, the federal courts are fi-equently required to
decide whether particular forms of public behavior deserve to be protected
under the principle of fi-eedom of religion; in this way, the legal appara-
tus of rhe state lnusr continually define what is truly religion. In France,
where the populal-ion is mostly nonreligious, the aggressively antireligious
state owns all church property built before 1908, except in Alsace and Lor-
raine (which were at that time a pal-t of Germany), where allcliurcli prop-
erty is now stal-e property and where priests, ministers, and rabbis are statr
employees. A state that maintains the basic conditions for the practice ol'
religion in society is itself religious. Thus in these two societies the sratc
tesponds very differenl-ly LO religious institutions and nonns, although i l l
neither case are stal-e and religion completely separate. Right through thr
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American religiosity fed into feder:~l
policy-making in ways quite ullparalleled in France; the French state, ,711
the other hand, controls religious property in ways unl-hinliahle in Amcr
ica. And yer both the United States and France are in theory and practii,.
secular states. I'm sure Casanova is aware of these facts, but my point i r
that his core theoly of secularization impedes their full investigation hc
cause it avoids exa~niningthe complicated prejudgments on which relit
tions between religion and state appear to rest in constiturional law.
This brings me to my final difficulty with Casanova's thesis: if ''IIII.
deprivatization of religion" is compatible with "modernity," doesn'l- t l ~ i r
jeopardize the "core of the theory of secularization," according to w h i ~ l ~
the structural differentiation of modern society requires that distinctive 51)
cia1 activities belong to appropriate social spaces? I think Casanova sell\<.,.
Responses 2 o9
the paradox here, which is why he says that "in the modern secular world,
the boundaries between the religious and the secular are so fluid that one
ought to be very cautious when drawing such analytical distinctions." I
only wish he had explored the implications of this statement for his ar-
gument. The point I would sttess here is not merely that religion and the
secular interpenetrate, but that (a) both are 11istoricalI~constituted, (b)
rhis happens through accidental processes bringing together a variety of
concepts, practices, and sensibilities, and (c) in modern society rhe law is
crncially involved in defining and defending the distinctiveness of social
spaces-especially the legitimate space for religion. In Formations of the
Secular I ended the chapter that began with Casanova's reformulated the-
sis by saying that in modern society the law finds itseIfcontinually having
to redefine the space that religion may properly occupy because the repro-
duction ofsecular life ceaselessly disturbs the clarityofits boundaries. I ob-
served that "the unceasing pursuit of the new in productive effort, aesthet-
ic experience, and claims ro knowledge, as well as the unending struggle
to extend individual self-creation, undermines the stability of established
boundaries." The point that interests me, therefore, is not that we need to
be careful in drawing analytical distinctions-I take that for granted as a
general requirement for clear thinking. My concern is with the process by
which houndaries are established and by which they come to be defined
RS modern. Thus in the United Srates the courts have a tendency to define
"religion" in terms of systems of belief in order to determine whether some
local administrarive constrainr substantially burdens the "free exercise of
religion." In France i t appears that rhe state is primarily concerned with
"the ostentatious display of religious symbols in public schools" regardless
of belief. I simplify, of course, but what kinds of authorized memory and
pesentiment go into these contrasting definitions of religion in "secular"
at~cietieslMy impressior~is that such questions do not interest Casanova.
I endorse Casanova's call to scholars "to abandon the eurocenttic
vicw that modern Western Eutopean developments, including the secu-
larization of European Christianity, are general universal processes." but I
curious as to why the kind of global developments to which he I-efers
nplvovingly in contemporary non-Christian religions seem largely to be
linked (for good or for ill) to Western Iiberal conceptions of person and
~~'lirics. Liberalism is of course a complex tradirion: Locke is not Constant
111111 C011stant is not Mill and Mill is not Rawk, rhe history of liberalism

in North America is not the same as rhat in Eutope-or, for that matter,
in parts of theThird World, where it can be said to have a substantial pur-
chase. But as a value-space, liberalism today provides its advocates with a
common political and moral language (whose ambiguities and aporias al-
low i t to evolve) in which to identify problems and with which to dispute.
Such ideas as individual sovereignty, freedom, limitation of state power,
toleration, airdsecukzrism are central to that space, not least when they are
debated, In referring to religion as liberal, I refer to its adjustmellt to these
(often incompatible) ideas, but unfortunately this questio~~ is one that Ca-
sanova does not investigate.
More generally, I tried 7706 to describe l~istoricaldevelopment here
in terms of a lineal- sequence of ideas, as Casanova and other sociologisis
often do ("Protesrant Reformatio~i'as a cause and "secular modemity" as
an effect), because a gellealogical investigation presupposes a more com-
plicated web of connections and recursivities than the notion of a causal
chain does. When I referred to the Renaissance doctrine of humanism, thi.
Enlightenment concept of nature, and Hegel's philosophy of history, I wah
talking not about causes but about doctrinal cle~nentsthat are part of thr
genealogy of seculatism. It's odd rhat Casanova should represent my re11
erence to them as "triumphalist." because that implies I have an essential-
ist view- of secularism. I wish that he had not confined himself to the onc
chapter of Formatiol7s i n \r~llichI ~nentionhis book hut instead had real
it all, because then I think he would have been better able to understancl
what my genealogical efforts were aimed at.
Response to Caton
Caton is an excellent ethnographer and a fine linguist, so I find it .I
matter of regret that he hasn't grasped the basic point of Genefilogiesof HI.
ligion. The chapter in which I deal with Geertz is followed by a number (11
studies that are integral to its argument, yet Caton ignores them. Had 111
read the entire book, he might have realized that it was not a critique 01
Geertz (although I am critical of his influential approach to religion) h o ~
an attempt, through an engagement with an essentialist definition of rrli
gion, to create a conceptual space in which "the construction of religio~l.I,.
an anthropological category" (the title of my first chapter) can be avoidccl
Respo17ses 211
I do not have space here to deal with every one of Caton's cou~~tercriticis~ns
in defence of Geertz, so 1will confine myself to the larger argument.
To begiu with, chapter I of Gel7ealogics is not about how a religion
acquires its authority in a particular society. It is about how religion is con-
structed as an anthropological category. My argument is that the vely pro-
cess of offering definitions of religion as a universal category has roots in a
Christian history, a modern Christian history in which "belief" is given a
unique place, and which is at the same time a history of comparative reli-
gion as an intellecrual subject. It is in this context that I speak of "autho-
rizing discourses" in the first chapter-the ways in which various elements
are included or excluded historically to create the concept of religion. My
concern is with the conditions of possibility of "religion" rather than with
its substance. I refer primarily to a col7stitutiue process (that which makes
the concept "religion") and secondarily to a r e p l t i t ~ cone (that which en-
o be properly "religious"). There is a complicated relation-
e rwo that certainly involves coercive force, but not always
Caton's Yemeni ethnography (his analysis of rain prayers) is intended
prove that my notion of religious authority is an impoverished one be-
use it is "external": the question Caton asked his informants-"Whose
ords (or what text) authorized these prayers?"-could not be answered
ecause no utterance or text did. Caton wants to say that the authority of
IC prayers he describes derived not from an external, textual source but
'om the semantic structure of the language of the rain prayer itself. The
nrhority of that discourse, he tells us, depends on the recursive character
self-citation. Caton is right to seek an inrritrsic structuration, but the
lgualism he defends in Geertz is precisely what prevents him from seeing
c embodied character of authoritative discourse, its articulation of the
~rsorium.I n accounting for authority in terms of a determining linguis-
c structure, Caton ~rproducesGrertz's questionable assumption about
te :lutonomy of signs. It will be recalled that according to the latter's defi-
iun of religion as a irrltural system, it is precisely the given character of a
letn of symbols rhat determines observable "religious" behavior, a sys-
1 that the anthropoIogist is asked to specify and interpret. The idea that
s dcrects in Geertz-the self-authorization of religious symbols-is pre-
I#cly a reflectiou of the latter's textualism.