Gregory Starrett

The Varieties of Secular Experience

Taking the Egyptian case as an example, this article examines secularism (and its cognates secularity and the secular), not so much as a failed social project, but as a problematic concept. Reflecting on the on-going scholarly interest in the notion of waning secularity in Egypt, I will suggest that the idea reveals as much about the scholars studying it as it does about a changing social world. Building on the work of British philosopher W. B. Gallie, I will argue that secularism is an essentially contested concept, its meanings fluid, variant, and elusive. This is not merely to observe, as many others have done, that “the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories” (Asad 2003: 25), or that “the secular” is so difficult to grasp directly that “it is best pursued through its shadows, as it were” (ibid.: 16). It is to say that the secular’s unfixedness is one of its essential features, and that its significance, therefore, is a function of the arguments it generates and the conflicts it organizes, rather than of some phenomenon it purports to describe. Two things follow from this. The first is that the secular’s usefulness as an analytical concept is deeply suspect. The second is that growing scholarly interest in studying the secular—Michael Warner (2008: 609) writes about “the emerging realm of secular studies” on the model of religious studies—is a phenomenon that requires our attention.”

Signposts Along the Road: Monumental Public Writing in Egypt

Studies of writing in developing societies generally focus on book, newspaper and commercial literacy, and do not address the cultural significance of writing on craft and manufactured objects, on the one hand, and the use of writing on public signs, murals and billboards, on the other. Although ‘scattered’ indeed, the two latter genres of writing are important. They are also quite similar in their social roles, for although commodities circulate between public and private space, and public signs form relatively permanent parts of the built environment, both are manufactured displays which use writing in exaggerated form, and act simultaneously as geographical and identity markers, art, and foci of ritual acts. Given the centrality of written texts to the theology and practice of Islam, and also the importance of calligraphy in the visual art of the Islamic world, it is surprising that not much attention has been paid to these alternative uses of the written word. Thus I would like here to examine a specific subset of written culture in urban Egypt: the use of monumental writing in public space.

Authentication and Affect: Why the Turks Don't Like Enchanted Counterpublics, A Review Essay

Anthropological fashion moves in a rhythm unlike the deliberate seasonal cycle of the couture houses that design the foulards the French find so troubling these days. But if gray or green is the new black this season in Paris and New York, public has been the new structure in anthropology for several long seasons now, and is only just beginning to live up to some of its considerable potential as a design element in cultural analysis, and also to show its age. The advantage of the public sphere as a concept is that—like its predecessor, structure, which can stand against chaos, anti-structure, agency, process, and so on—“public” resides within a rich semantic network in which it can signify a number of oppositions and complements: privacy, secrecy, domesticity, isolation, individualism, sectarianism, market, state. Despite its normative reputation as a concept associated with rational deliberation over the public good, in the hands of John Bowen, Lara Deeb, Charles Hirschkind, and Esra Ozyurek, the public sphere turns out rather surprisingly to rely on cultivated affect and on sets of embodied dispositions that it shapes in the process of peoples participation in it. Like Bourdieus Kabyle house writ large, the public sphere is an opus operatum , a space channeling the interactions that create it, a set of relationships maintained by the interests and capacities it generates.