SSRC
Not long after his return from Cairo, where he was doing fieldwork, I spoke with Talal Asad at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Distinguished indeed: with books like Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular, as well as numerous articles, Asad’s work has been formative for current scholarly conversation about religion and secularity, stressing both global context and the ways in which their interaction has been shaped by local histories, in the West and the Middle East. Most recently, he co-authored (along with Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood, and Judith Butler) Is Critique Secular? (University of California Press, 2009) and contributed a chapter to the just published SSRC volume Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011).
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Nathan Schneider: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?
TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.
NS: “We’re all in it together.”
TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.
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