Articles by Marian Burchardt
Das politische System Südafrikas, 2017
Nicole Burzan (Hg.) 2019: Komplexe Dynamiken globaler und lokaler Entwicklungen. Verhandlungen des 39. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Göttingen 2018., 2018
Política & Sociedade, 2017
resumo Os debates acadêmicos sobre a secularização e o secularismo atingiram um impasse infecundo... more resumo Os debates acadêmicos sobre a secularização e o secularismo atingiram um impasse infecundo. Os teóricos ortodoxos ou neo-ortodoxos da secularização insistem na universalidade epistemo-lógica e na aplicabilidade universal de conceitos mais ou menos uniformes de secularização. Por contraste, as críticas pós-coloniais procuraram provincianizar a noção de secular, enfatizando sua origem ocidental e sua coimplicação com o Estado-nação, a violência e o colonialismo. Neste artigo, ocupamo-nos criticamente dessas abordagens e sugerimos, como perspectiva alter-nativa, o conceito de "secularidades múltiplas". Se, por um lado, as abordagens universalista e pós-colonial tendem a dar forma e essência ao secular, nós pretendemos, por outro lado, historici-zar e culturalizar a secularidade. Fazemo-lo argumentando que a secularidade se sustenta cultural e simbolicamente em formas de distinção entre as esferas e as práticas sociais religiosas e não religiosas e que as institucionalizações dessas distinções serviram como modo de lidar com dife-rentes problemas. Não obstante reconheça as historicidades particulares da secularidade, nossa conceptualização liberta-a, de forma significativa, de suas associações singulares ao Ocidente e à modernidade.
Sociology of Health & Illness, 2016
This article analyses and theorises the practice of biographical storytelling of HIV-positive AID... more This article analyses and theorises the practice of biographical storytelling of HIV-positive AIDS activists in South Africa. Combining research in illness narratives, studies of emotions in social activism and analysis of global health institutions in Africa, I explore how biographical self-narrations are deployed to facilitate access to resources and knowledge and thus acquire material and symbolic value. I illustrate my argument through the analysis of the case of an AIDS activist who became a professional biographical storyteller. Based on the analysis which I claim to represent wider dynamics in human-rights-based health activism in the Global South, I propose the concept of narrative economies by which I mean the set of exchange relationships within which biographical self-narrations circulate and produce social value for individuals and organisations.
Affective Trajectories: Religion and Emotion in African Cityscapes, 2020
Nigerian-born Pastor Emmet is the founder of a Pentecostal church in Jo-hannesburg where we atten... more Nigerian-born Pastor Emmet is the founder of a Pentecostal church in Jo-hannesburg where we attended services in 2014. The church was the largest and the most structured church of the four migrant-initiated congregations we visited in the city, but according to its leader it has not always been like that. In a long talk about his religious and migrant journeys, Emmet explained to us his dreams, prophecies, and migratory struggles and the miracles that had helped to shape his personal journey, as well as how he became the founder of a transnational ministry with branches in Nigeria and Kenya. After witnessing him hosting church services and Bible schools, hearing his prayers on a radio show, and watching his web-based video messages, it became evident that this pastor's subjectivity and practices conveyed more than biblical knowledge. In one of our encounters, Emmet told us that as an engineering student he began to attend prayer groups and fellowships organized by friends from his university. Through these experiences he gradually became knowledgeable about the Bible as much as he started to feel the "miracle of faith." In one conversation he explained to us why faith needed to go beyond biblical knowledge:
Religion and Urbanity Online, 2020
Departing from the analysis of religious events, this chapter aims to understand historical and c... more Departing from the analysis of religious events, this chapter aims to understand historical and contemporary religious uses of public spaces in Mediterranean cities. Taking our cues from the sociology of knowledge, we develop the concept of doing religious space and use it to analyse processes of the eventisation of religion amidst broader processes of the eventisation of urban landscapes. Through the analysis of the evolution and transformation of the Barcelona religious landscape, we show that religious events are privileged sites for understanding the spatialisation of religion, the ritualisation of religion in urban space, and the enactment of governmental regulations over public religious expressions. We also argue that one of the hallmarks of doing religious space is that it always involves references to places beyond the city proper, such as the transcendent, the global, the diasporic, or the historical.
Law & Social Inquiry, 2019
Over the past decade, controversies over Muslim women’s face veiling have become increasingly wid... more Over the past decade, controversies over Muslim women’s face veiling have become increasingly widespread in societies across Europe. This article comparatively explores the socio-legal dynamics of claims making by proponents and opponents of prohibiting full-face coverings in Belgium and Spain. In Belgium, a federal ban of full-face coverings was adopted in July 2011 and, after intensive judicial struggles, received judicial validation by the Constitutional Court in 2012. In Spain, local burqa controversies led to municipal bans in the region of Catalonia in 2010, which were annulled by the Supreme Court in 2013 after effective legal counter-mobilizations. In spite of the diverging legal outcomes, we argue that justificatory repertoires have become increasingly standardized as burqa controversies are transposed from locally embedded political fields to transnationally structured judicial fields. We suggest that this standardization of justificatory repertoires in the long run facilitates the rapid spread of burqa bans across Europe.
Religion, State and Society, 2019
This contribution explores how religious diversity is governed at the urban level and seeks to ex... more This contribution explores how religious diversity is governed at the urban level and seeks to explain patterns of regulatory practice. It does so by developing the notion of the urban religious diversity assemblage, by which I mean heterogeneous regulatory apparatuses that are territorially ambiguous and fluid, change over time, and operate as enabling and constraining conditions for religious expres- sions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non- state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, tech- nologies, and artefacts), laws, and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure reli- gious diversity as an urban social reality. I draw on empirical examples from my fieldwork in Quebec to illustrate the arguments. Based on these theoretical concerns, the contribution identifies and elaborates on fields of regulatory practice and shows how they are shaped by law and judicial contestations.
Foucault-Handbuch - Leben – Werk – Wirkung, 2014
Wenngleich Foucaults Äußerungen zur Problematik des Geständnisses eher verstreut sind, durchziehe... more Wenngleich Foucaults Äußerungen zur Problematik des Geständnisses eher verstreut sind, durchziehen sie doch sein gesamtes Werk von den frühen Forschungen zur Geschichte des Wahnsinns und der Strafjustiz bis zu späten Arbeiten über das Pastorat und die Technologien des Selbst auf eine Weise, die dem Geständnis einen zentralen konzeptuellen Ort zuweist. Zeugnis über sich ablegen, sich in Anwesenheit eines anderen offenbaren, die Wahrheit seiner selbst erkunden, entziffern und sich zu dieser bekennen – die politische Bedeutungszunahme und Vervielfältigung all dieser Prozeduren seit dem Mittelalter haben Foucault zu der berühmten Aussage veranlasst, dass der Mensch im Abendland ein »Geständnistier« geworden sei (WW, 63). Foucault definiert das Geständnis als »sprachliche(n) Akt, mit dem das Subjekt eine Behauptung über sein Selbstsein aufstellt, sich an diese als eine Wahrheit bindet, sich in ein Abhängigkeitsverhältnis gegenüber dem anderen begibt, und zugleich dadurch das Verhältnis zu sich selbst verändert« (VL 1981/82, 452), als »obligatorischen und erschöpfenden Ausdruck eines individuelle(n) Geheimnisses« (WW, 65). Es ist damit ein erzwungener Diskurs des Subjekts in einer Machtsituation (DE II, 1006), in der Individuen zur Produktion der Wahrheit mittels detaillierter Introspektion mit sich selbst ins Verhältnis gesetzt werden.
SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2019
Illness narratives are stories whereby those afflicted articulate experiences of disease and illn... more Illness narratives are stories whereby those afflicted articulate experiences of disease and illness. They are ways of subjectively and intersubjectively making sense of illness by linguistic means. Especially in the case of chronic diseases, illness plays a central role of people’s lives and everyday experience and practices, while the initial diagnosis is often experienced as a moment of major biographical disruption. Such diagnoses call into question past experiences, current life circumstances, and the possibility to extend established routines into the future. They may even call into question the possibility to devise future plans and biographical projects at all. Against this backdrop, illness narratives can be viewed as efforts to construct illness as a meaningful event and to bring different moments into a temporal and meaningful order with some level of coherence
Citizenship Studies , 2018
With regard to notions of legitimate masculinity, Black South African men are torn between two an... more With regard to notions of legitimate masculinity, Black South African men are torn between two antithetical discourses: one organized around liberal notions of rights and freedoms and driven by secular civil society, the other grounded in the values of ‘traditional’ masculinity. In this article, I draw on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields as well as recent ethnographic work in Cape Town and substitute this dichotomy with a fourfold matrix of liberal, traditional, youth gang-oriented and religiously based masculinities. Employing a relational methodology, the article explores how Pentecostal men in Cape Town’s townships position themselves within this field of masculinities and the shifting impli- cations of this positioning for the politics of sexual citizenship. I argue that Pentecostal masculinity is not a stable and fixed con- figuration of gendered attitudes, values and performances, but a set of cultural distinctions that shift with the problem-space these distinctions address as well as the values they are meant to articulate.
Religion and the Global City, 2014
In this chapter, I explore Pentecostal engagements with urban materialities and spiritualities in... more In this chapter, I explore Pentecostal engagements with urban materialities and spiritualities in Cape Town and their practices of protecting people from what I will call ‘urban risks’. While Cape Town is not a command point of global finance, it has developed over the last two decades into a regional economic hub of services, tourism and real estate industries that draws a massive continual flow of internal and international migrants. Importantly, the flow of international migrants has reconfigured the urban religious landscape, notably by connecting the city to the global circuits of Pentecostalism. Global Pentecostalism works through transnational hubs and networks with decentralized functions in ways that can be compared with Sassen’s analysis of the networks of firms that helped produce global cities. However, in Cape Town, global Pentecostalism also feeds on notions of spiritual superiority over ancestral spirits that are bound to the soil, which for most migrants means their home village in the South African countryside or their countries of origin such as the Congo or Mozambique. While demonizing ancestral spirits, Pentecostal practices reproduce ancestral relationships to rural hinterlands, which thwarts the disjunctures between global cities and regions that Sassen described.
Journal of Religion in Africa, 2017
Legal anthropologists and sociologists of religion increasingly recognize the importance of law i... more Legal anthropologists and sociologists of religion increasingly recognize the importance of law in current controversies over religious diversity. Drawing on the case of South Africa, this article explores how such controversies are shaped by contestations over what counts as 'religion'. Analyzing the historical context and emergent forms of institutional secularity from which contemporary contestations over religious diversity draw, the article explores debates and practices of classification around religion, tradition , and culture, and the ways in which these domains are co-constituted through their claims on the law: on the one hand through an analysis of religion-related jurisprudence ; on the other hand through an examination of the debates on witchcraft, law, and religion. I argue that the production of judicial knowledge of 'religion' , 'cul-ture' , and 'tradition' is tied up with contestations over the power to define the meaning of the domains. In fact, contrary to notions of constitutionality in which rights seem to exist prior to the claims made on their basis, in a fundamental sense rights struggles help to constitute the contemporary human rights dispensation. Against the Comaroffs' claim that judicialization depoliticizes power struggles, I show that legal claims making remains vibrantly political.
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019
Why has the face veil become the centre of political debates about Islam in urban contexts? What ... more Why has the face veil become the centre of political debates about Islam in urban contexts? What kinds of experiences and ideas have animated its framing as a practice in need of regulation? Focusing on Spain, we argue that space and emotion are the key categories for explaining the micro-politics of face veil conflicts and that constitute face veiling as an object of contention “on the ground”. We suggest the notion of regimes of public space and highlight three central components: (1) understandings of ideal public space; (2) regimes of urban visibility; (3) emotional regimes. Taken together, these dimensions filter forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerge from regulatory practices and feed into graduated forms of urban citizenship and frame people’s sensibilities. The article also illustrates how the spatial analysis complicates the secular-religious dichotomy.
MMG Working Paper 16-02, 2016
In this article, I explore how nations without states, or “stateless nations” respond to new form... more In this article, I explore how nations without states, or “stateless nations” respond to new forms of religious diversity. Drawing on the cases of Quebec and Catalonia, I do so by tracing the historical emergence of the cultural narratives that are mobilized to support institutional responses to diversity and the way they bear on contemporary controversies. The article builds on recent research and theorizations of religious diversity and secularism, which it expands and specifies by spelling out how pre- existing cultural anxieties stemming from fears over national survival are stored in collective memories and, if successfully mobilized, feed into responses to migration- driven religious diversification. I show that while Quebec and Catalonia were in many ways similarly positioned before the onset of powerful modernization processes and the resurgence of nationalism from the 1960s onwards, their responses to religious diversity differ dramatically.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2015
Drawing on cultural sociology approaches to the role of narrative and framing in politics, this a... more Drawing on cultural sociology approaches to the role of narrative and framing in politics, this article explores urban contestations over Muslim face veiling in Spain. We argue that regimes of religious diversity are shaped by the ways that the framing and narrating of rights and culture acquire cultural resonance and political traction in urban society. We find that the meanings attached to the face veil and mobilised in public discourses draw on memories and stocks of knowledge emerging from recent histories of urban society. In order to resonate with broader publics and their sensibilities, actors organise these meanings through storylines and integrate them into narratives. We demonstrate that those in favour of the ban on face veiling were able to construct a coherent and expressive narrative around values of social harmony while simultaneously framing it in the language of rights, which allowed them to influence local media and popular discourse in decisive ways. Arguments against the ban, on the contrary, were mostly based on a much narrower rights-based approach that remained abstract and highly difficult to convert into a narrative.
Critical Analysis of Religious Diversity, 2018
In this chapter, I explore how in post-apartheid South Africa religious diver- sity is defined, r... more In this chapter, I explore how in post-apartheid South Africa religious diver- sity is defined, regulated and constituted in the medium of the law. For centu- ries, for many South Africans living side-by-side with adherents of other faiths has been an experience of everyday life. Religious diversity rarely raised the spectres of a politics of difference simply because the politics of racial differ- ence, and racist oppression relegated all other forms and categories of cultural membership and identification to a subordinated status. Simultaneously white supremacy implied and was, to important degrees, based on the oppression of Africans’ culture and traditions. Enfolded in this system of material and cul- tural domination was the idea that contestations over the meanings of “reli- gion” and “culture”, of “tradition” and “custom” had been historically settled. As even superficial observers of South African cultural life would be able to as- certain, Africans had “tradition” (as in “traditional leadership” and “traditional healing”) and “customs” (as in “customary law” and “customary marriages”) but not religion because in the dominant view and despite the increasing circula- tion of the term African Traditional Religion this term chiefly referred to world religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. But how is religion defined and recognized in post-revolutionary South Africa?
Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism, 2018
The links between religion and urban space have attracted the interest of an increasing number of... more The links between religion and urban space have attracted the interest of an increasing number of sociologists over the last decade. Starting from a critique of the assumption that urbanization leads to the decline of established religions, scholars have focused on the vitality of urban religion spawned by religious innovations, urban religious events, and transnational migration (Hervieu-Léger 2002; Casanova 2013; Orsi 1999). In order to analyse this complex context of multiple urban diversities emerging from new waves of immigration, scholars have drawn upon the concept of superdiversity, coined by Vertovec (2007). Starting from the observation that the number and type of religious communities settling in European cities after the Second World War have multiplied spectacularly, in this chapter we explore how in contemporary European cities, different historical memories, each storing a variety of collective religious and secular experiences, are layered upon one another: materially and symbolically in architecture, immaterially in urban religious imaginaries, and socially through the coexistence of multiple religious mobilizations and expressions.
Qualitative Sociology, 2019
This article examines a recent controversy over the Catholic Church's registration of Cordoba's i... more This article examines a recent controversy over the Catholic Church's registration of Cordoba's iconic Mosque-Cathedral as official Church property in 2006. In analyzing the controversy, we take up broader theoretical questions regarding the politicization and contestation of national cultural heritage, and the sociology of public controversy more generally. Drawing upon Alexander's work on civil discourse and practice, we focus on the importance of performative aspects of civic debate. We argue that effective performances of Bpublicness^ involving the conscientious suppression of visible signs of particularity, especially those related to Islam, have been critical to the successful politicization of the Mosque-Cathedral's ownership and management. Politicization, however, has not produced any significant movement toward consensual resolution. In explaining this failure, we offer a more nuanced account of the conditions that limit the potential for consensus and Bcivil repair^ as an outcome of public controversy in deeply divided societies. Our findings also have implications for understanding the growing role of international institutions and declarations in shaping the contours of localized controversies surrounding national cultural heritage.
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Articles by Marian Burchardt
urban contexts? What kinds of experiences and ideas have animated its
framing as a practice in need of regulation? Focusing on Spain, we argue that
space and emotion are the key categories for explaining the micro-politics of
face veil conflicts and that constitute face veiling as an object of contention
“on the ground”. We suggest the notion of regimes of public space and
highlight three central components: (1) understandings of ideal public space;
(2) regimes of urban visibility; (3) emotional regimes. Taken together, these
dimensions filter forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerge from
regulatory practices and feed into graduated forms of urban citizenship and
frame people’s sensibilities. The article also illustrates how the spatial analysis
complicates the secular-religious dichotomy.
opportunities, and religious contexts in Johannesburg and Bilbao are enormously
different, the similarities in Pentecostals’ emotional repertoires in
these two urban contexts are striking. In both settings, emotional repertoires
included skilled ways of relating emotions such as anger and sadness
to the specific social and moral ills believers faced because of their status as
migrants, and of relating positive emotions such as joy and love to individuals’
acquisition of spiritual knowledge and their cultivating such knowledge
through religious practice. This chapter is conceived as a transnational comparison
of Pentecostal emotional engagements with the challenges of urban life in
the diaspora in two geographically distant migrant hubs.
Clearly, these resonances between pastors’ narratives are not only outcomes
of their positions as migrants and shared transnational imaginaries:
they were also produced by emotional forms of connectivity and belonging.
Feelings and sentiments are the symbolic bridges between “spaces for the
establishment of kinship and social networks while extending the emotive
religious experience initiated by Pentecostal churches in the homeland”
(Akyeampong 2000a, 209). In other words, emotional and cognitive experiences
seem to travel with African Pentecostals in the diaspora while being
shaped by a transnational emotional regime that leads people to “live loss
and hope as defining tension[s]” (Clifford 1997, 312).