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Review Essay:
Talal Asad: Genealogies of Religion, and Formations of the Secular
Kevin Seidel
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
The salutary and unsettling effect of these two books by Talal Asad-an anthropologist of Muslim beliefs and practices-is to make strange the "religion" of the West, as it is conceived by various tribes of the academy, and to make almost savage the concept of "the secular" that is so precious to natives of Western liberalism. Quietly powerful and carefully argued, Asad's essays move with extraordinary skill between fields as diverse as history, literature, moral philosophy, politics, psychology, religious studies, and sociology. Anyone working in these fields and grappling with questions of religion can learn a great deal from Asad, but where he breaks new ground is in his analysis of the secular, bringing to light the way it depends on and circumscribes the conceptual boundaries of religion.
Genealogies of Religion is a collection of eight essays, all previously published except for one, which are held together with the help of a good index and cumulative list of references. In the introduction, Asad says that his "explorations into Christian and post-Christian history" are "motivated by the conviction that its conceptual geology has profound implications for the ways in which non-Western traditions are able to grow and change" (1). The essays are organized into pairs in four usefully named sections-"genealogies," "archaisms," " translations," "polemics"-with each section roughly marking a stage in Asad's inquiry.
In the first section, Asad criticizes the way anthropologists have constructed religion and ritual as realms of merely symbolic activity, unrelated to the instrumental behavior of everyday life. Anthropologists habitually read cultural phenomena like texts, Asad says, and as a result they too often overlook the way religious discourse depends on practices and discourses that are often not "religious" at all, at least not in ways that textualized concepts can catch. In the second section, Asad examines changes in medieval practices of penance and judicial inquiry in order to unsettle the assumption that pain and discipline are basically religious concepts that steadily wane in significance...