The Materiality of Secularity

Abstract

The main argument put forward in this article is that, while both religion and secularity cannot be but material, it is important to acknowledge the materiality of secularity for two reasons. One, doing so allows the resort to materiality to be criticized and transcended as part of a politics of ousting manifestations of religions perceived as Other from a dominant perspective (as is the case with views of Islam in Western societies). Second, it allows a gap to be recognized between drawing a boundary between the religious and non-religious in the name of secularity on an abstract level of analysis, and the actual ways in which secularity contains material religious forms (such as defunct Christian buildings and discarded artefacts, or a missionary collection of indigenous spiritual artefacts kept in an ethnological museum) in ways that keep the religious alive and affective. New conceptual and methodological possibilities arise from taking the materiality of secularity seriously.