Abstract
Contemporary anthropological studies confirm the core premise of Peter Berger’s “two pluralisms” hypothesis: that the most consequential feature of religion and ethics in our late-modern age is not religion’s secularizing decline, but the globalization and co-existence of powerful discourses of secularity and religiosity. Two generations of anthropological research also suggest, however, that the phenomenological psychology the two-pluralisms hypothesis uses to characterize the transition from pre-modern to modern societies is too simple. The need and ability to shift between different modes of cognitive and affective experience are not unique to our late-modern age, but characteristic of cultural psychology in most human societies. This is a simple point, but it encourages a subtle shift in understanding as to just why the experience of the two pluralisms can be ethically disquieting, and what measures might be most effective for containing movements of political and religious totalitarianism today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Further Reading
Asad, T. 1983. Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz. Man: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(2), 237–250.
Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Berger, P. L. 2014. The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Bloch, M. E. F. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder: Westview.
Bouchard, G., & Taylor, C. 2008. Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Montréal: Commission de Consultation sur les Pratiques d’Accommodement Reliées aux Differences Culturelles, Québec Government.
Bowen, J. R. 2010. Secularism: conceptual genealogy or political dilemma? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(03), 680–694.
Brubaker, R. 1984. The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Casanova, J. 2011. The Secular, Secularization, Secularisms. In C. Calhoun, M. Juergensmeyer, & J. Van Antwerpen (Eds.), Rethinking Secularism (pp. 54–74). New York: Oxford University Press.
Douglas, M. 1970. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Pantheon.
Ewing, K. P. 1990. The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency. Ethos, 18(3), 251–278.
Festinger, L. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fox, J. 2008. A World Survey of Religion and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, H. 1983. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C. 1973a. Religion as a Cultural System. In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 87–125). New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C. 1973b. The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind. In The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 55–83). New York: Basic Books.
Hanne, O., & de la Neuville, T. F. 2014. L’État islamique: Anatomie du nouveau Califat. Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli.
Hefner, R. W. 2000. Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jordan, D. K. 1993. The Glyphomancy Factor: Observations on Chinese Conversion. In R. W. Hefner (Ed.), Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation (pp. 285–303). Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Kuru, A. T. 2009. Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. 2012. When God Talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Knopf.
Martin, D. 1978. A General Theory of Secularization. New York: Harper & Row.
Roy, O. 1996. The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge: Harvard.
Sperber, D. 2001. In Defense of Massive Modularity. In E. Dupoux (Ed.), Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development (pp. 47–57). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stepan, A. 2012. The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes. In C. Calhoun, M. Juergensmeyer, & J. Van Antwerpen (Eds.), Rethinking Secularism (pp. 114–144). New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, C. 1994. The politics of recognition. In A. Gutman (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (pp. 25–73). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, C. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Voegelin, E. 2000. Order and History: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
