Download the full version of the ebook at

https://ebookultra.com

Formations of the Secular Christianity Islam

Modernity 1st Edition Talal Asad

https://ebookultra.com/download/formations-of-the-
secular-christianity-islam-modernity-1st-edition-
talal-asad/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookultra.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Powers of the Secular Modern Talal Asad and His

Interlocutors 1st Edition David Scott

https://ebookultra.com/download/powers-of-the-secular-modern-talal-
asad-and-his-interlocutors-1st-edition-david-scott/

ebookultra.com

Hydrocarbons in Basement Formations 1st Edition M. R.

Islam

https://ebookultra.com/download/hydrocarbons-in-basement-
formations-1st-edition-m-r-islam/

ebookultra.com

Europe s Encounter with Islam The Secular and the

Postsecular 1st Edition Luca Mavelli

https://ebookultra.com/download/europe-s-encounter-with-islam-the-
secular-and-the-postsecular-1st-edition-luca-mavelli/

ebookultra.com

Religious Conflict from Early Christianity to the Rise of

Islam 1st Edition Wendy Mayer

https://ebookultra.com/download/religious-conflict-from-early-
christianity-to-the-rise-of-islam-1st-edition-wendy-mayer/

ebookultra.com
Jesus in Islam Christianity and the Jewish Talmud 1st
Edition Abu Iyaad

https://ebookultra.com/download/jesus-in-islam-christianity-and-the-
jewish-talmud-1st-edition-abu-iyaad/

ebookultra.com

Islam Modernity and the Liminal Space Between 1st Edition

Mark W. Meehan

https://ebookultra.com/download/islam-modernity-and-the-liminal-space-
between-1st-edition-mark-w-meehan/

ebookultra.com

The Unromantic Orient 1st Edition Muhammad Asad

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-unromantic-orient-1st-edition-
muhammad-asad/

ebookultra.com

The Curse of Ham Race and Slavery in Early Judaism

Christianity and Islam David M. Goldenberg

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-curse-of-ham-race-and-slavery-in-
early-judaism-christianity-and-islam-david-m-goldenberg/

ebookultra.com

Christianity Islam and Liberal Democracy Lessons from Sub

Saharan Africa 1st Edition Robert A. Dowd

https://ebookultra.com/download/christianity-islam-and-liberal-
democracy-lessons-from-sub-saharan-africa-1st-edition-robert-a-dowd/

ebookultra.com
Formations of the Secular Christianity Islam Modernity
1st Edition Talal Asad Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Talal Asad
ISBN(s): 9780804747677, 0804747679
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 10.73 MB
Year: 2003
Language: english
 Formations of the Secular
C RlSTlA I TY l LAM, M DERN I TY

TALALA AD
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

Q :t003 by the Board of Trwtccs of the

Leland Smnford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archlval-quality paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Asad, Talal.
Formations of the secular : Christianity, Islam, modernity I Talal Asad.
p. em. - (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8047-4767-9 (cloth :aile. paper)-
ISBN o-8047-4768-7 (pbk. : aJk. paper)
1. Secularism. 1. Islam and politia. ~- Christianity and politics.
1. 1ide. 11. Series.
BL :t747.8 A75 1003
10010110t4

Original Printing 1003

Last figure bc:low indicates year of thU printing:
11 u 10 09 o8 07

Typeset by1im Roberts in ull3.s Garamond

Contmts

Admowkdgmmts ix

Introduction: Thinking about Secularism

SECULAR

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 21

2 Thinking about Agency and Pain 67

Reflections on Cruelty and Torture 100

SECULARISM

4 Redeeming the "Human" Through Human Rights 127

5 Muslims as a "Religious Minority" in Europe 159

6 Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 181

SECULARIZATION

7 Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt 205

Intkx 257
Acknowl~dgmmts

Earlier versions of several of the chapters of this book have appeared

before. Thus large parts of Chapter 4 were published in "What Do Human
Rights Do?" Th~ory and Evrot, vol. 4, no. 4, December 2000 (Johns Hop-
kins University Press). Chapter 2 is a revised version of"Agency and Pain:
An Exploration," published in CuhuTYand &ligion, vol. 1, no. 1, May 2000
(Cunon, UK). Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of"On Tor-
ture, or Crud, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment," first published in So-
cial &starrh, vol. 63, no. 4, Winter 1996 (New School for Social Research).
Chapters first appeared under the tide "Muslims and European Identity:
Can Europe Represent Islam?" in Cuhural Encountm, edited by E. Hallam
and B. Street (Routledge, 2000). Chapter 6 first appeared in Nation and
&ligion, edited by P. Van der Veer and H. Lehmann (Princeton, 1999).
The remaining portions of the book were not published previously, al-
though Chapter 1 is based on the Rappaport Annual Distinguished Lecture
in the Anthropology of Religion, delivered to the Religion Section of the
American Anthropological Association in March 2000, and Chapter 7 on
the ISIM Annual Lecture delivered in October 2000 to the International
Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in the University of
Leiden.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to rhe many friends and col-
leagues who have read the book as a whole or in part: Hussein Agrama,
Engin Akarli, Steven Caton, William Connolly, Veena Das, Charles
Hirschkind, Baber Johansen, Webb Keane, Boris Nikolov, Saba Mah-
mood, John Milbank, David Scorr, George Shulman, Hem de Vries, Je-
remy Waldron, and Michael Warner. I have benefited much &om ex-
changes with them, both written and oral. Bur I am also conscious of
having failed to meet many of their criticisms, and ro respond adequately
to all their probing questions.
FORMATIONS OF THE SECULAR
Introduction: Thinking about Secularism

What is the connection between "the secular" as an cpistcmic cate-

gory and "secularism" as a political doctrine? Can they be objects of an-
thropological inquiry? What might an anthropology of secularism look
like? This book attempts. in a preliminary way, to address these questions.
The contemporary salience of religious movements around the
globe, and the torrent of commentary on them by scholars and journal-
ists, have made it plain that religion is by no means disappearing in the
modern world. The "resurgence of religion" has been welcomed by many
as a means of supplying what they sec as a needed moral dimension to sec-
ular politics and environmental concerns. It has been regarded by others
with alarm as a symptom of growing irrationality and intolerance in
everyday life. The qucsrion of secularism has emerged as an object of aca-
demic argument and of practical dispute. If anything is agreed upon. it is
rhar a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secu-
lar is no longer acceptable. But docs it follow that secularism is not uni-
versally valid?
Secularism as political doctrine arose in modern Euro-America. It is
easy to think of it simply as requiring the separation of religious from sec-
ular institutions in government, but that is nor all it is. Abstractly stated,
examples of this separation can be found in medieval Christendom and in
the Islamic empires-and no doubt elsewhere roo. What is distinctive
1 Introduction

about "secularism" is that it presupposes new concepts of "religion,"

"ethics," and "policies," and new imperatives associated with them. Many
people have sensed this novelty and reacted to it in a variety of ways. Thus
the opponents of secularism in the Middle East and elsewhere have re-
jected it as specific to the West, while its advocates have insisted that irs
particular origin does not detract from irs contemporary global relevance.
The eminent philosopher Charles Taylor is among those who insist that al-
though secularism emerged in response to the political problems of West-
em Christian society in early modernity-beginning with its devastating
wars of religion-it is applicable to non-Christian societies everywhere
that have become modern. This elegant and attractive argument by a
highly influential social philosopher demands the attention of everyone in-
terested in this quesron. 1
Taylor takes it for granted that the emergence of secularism is closely
connected to the rise of the modern nation-state, and he identifies two
ways in which secularism has legitimized it. First, there was the attempt to
find the lowest common denominaror among the doctrines of conflicting
religious sects, and second, the attempt to define a political ethic inde-
pendent of religious convictions altogether. It is this laner modc:l rhar is ap-
plicable throughout the world today, but only after we have adapted to it
the Rawlsian idea of an ov~rlapping consmsus, which procc:cds on the as-
sumption that there can be no universally agrc:cd basis, whether secular or
religious, for the political principles accepted in a modern, heterogeneous
society. Taylor agrees with Rawls that the political ethic will be embedded
in some undersranding or other of the good, but argues against Rawls that
background understandings and foreground political principles need nor
be tightly bound together as the latter maintains. This model of secularism
is not only intellectually appealing, it is also, Taylor believes, one that the
modern democratic state cannot do without.
Taylor likes Benedict Anderson's thought that a modern nation is an
"imagined community'' because it enables him to emphasize two features
of the modern imaginary that belongs to a democratic state. These are:
first, the horizontal, direct-access character of modern society; and second,
its grounding in secular, homogeneous time. Direct access is reflected in
several developments: the rise of the public sphere (the equal right of all to
participate in nationwide discussions), the extension of the market princi-

1. Charles Taylor, • Modes of Secularism," in Rajccv Bhargava, ed., S«uiAr-

ism and Its Critia, Delhi: Oxford Univc:~iry Press, 1998.
 /ntrod1~etion

pie (all contracts are between legal equals), and the emergence of citizen-
ship (based on the principle of individualism). Apart from the idea of a
direct-access society, homogeneous time is a prerequisite for imagining the
totality of individual lives that comprise a (national) community in which
there are no privileged persons or events, and therefore no mediations. This
makes the sources of political legitimacy in a modern direct-access, tem-
porally homogeneous state radically different from the sources in a tradi-
tional temporally and politically mediated one. ~Traditional despotisms
could ask of people only that they remain passive and obey the laws," he
writes. ''A democracy, ancient or modern, has to ask more. It requires that
its members be motivated to make the necessary contributions: of treasure
(in raxes), sometimes blood (in war), and always some degree of participa-
tion in the process of governance. A free society has to substitute for des-
potic enforcement a certain degree of self-enforcement. Where this fails,
the system is in danger. "2
Is this account persuasive? Some doubts arise at this point. Surely,
the payment of taxes and induction into the army depend nor on self-
enforcement but on enforcement by the state? "Some degree" of partici-
pation in governance (by which Taylor means taking part in elections
once every four or five years) explicitly refers to a statistical measure of the
entire population and not to a measure of how strong individual motiva-
tion is. It depends, therefOre, on the political skill with which large num-
bers are managed-including the organization and financing of electoral
campaigns-rather than on the ethics of individual self-discipline. The
distinctive feature of modern liberal governance, I would submit, is n~i­
th~r compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that
uses "self-discipline" and "parricipation," "law" and "economy" as ele-
ments of political strategy. In spite of the reference to "democracy, ancient
or modern," which suggests a comparability of political predicaments, the
problems and resources of modern society are utterly different from those
of a Greek polis. Indeed Taylor's statement about participation is not, so
one could argue. the way most individuals in modern state-administered
populations justify governance. It is the way ideological spokespersons
theorize "political legitimacy." If the system is in danger it is not because
of an absence of self-enforcement by citizens. Most politicians are aware
that "the sysrem is in danger" when the general population ceases to enjoy
any sense of prosperity, when the regime is felt to be thoroughly unre-
7.. Ibid., p. 43·
4 Introduction

sponsive to the governed, and when the state security apparatuses ate
grossly inefficient. Policing techniques and an economy that avoids disap-
pointing too many in the general population too seriously are more im-
portant than self-discipline as an autonomous factor.
In today's liberal democracies a strong case can be made for the the-
sis that there is less and less of a direct link between the: electorate: and its
parliamentary representatives-that the latter are less and less representa-
tive of the socio-economic interests, identities, and aspirations of a cultur-
ally differentiated and economically polarized electorate. And the absence
of a direct reflection of the citizen in his political representation is not com-
pensated for through the various extra-parliamentary institutions con-
nected to governance. On the contrary. The influence of pmsurt groups on
government decisions is more often than not far greater than is warranted
by the proportion of the electorate whose interests they directly promote
(for example, the Farmers Union in Britain; AI PAC and the oil lobby in
the United States). Opinion polls, continuously monitoring the fragile col-
lective views of citizens, keep the government informed about public sen-
timent between elections, and enable it to anticipate or influence opinion
independently of the electoral mandate. Finally, th~ mass m~dia, increas-
ingly owned by conglomerates and often cooperating with the state, medi-
ate the political reactions of the public and its sense of guatantee and
threat. Thus in crucial ways this is not at all a direct-access society.' There
is no space in which all citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one
another. The existence of negotiation in public life is confined to such
elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary legisla-
tors, and business leaders. The ordinary citizen does not participate in the
process of formulating policy options as these elites do-his or her partic-
ipation in periodic elections does not even guarantee that the policies voted
for will be adhered to.
The modern nation as an imagined community is always mediated
through constructed images. When Taylor says that a modern democracy
must acquire a healthy dose of nationalist sentiment4 he refers to the na-
tional media-including national education-that is chatged with culti-

3· See the interesting article: by Bernard Manin, "The: Metamorphoses of

Representative: Government." Economy and Soci~ty. vol. 2.3, no. 2., May 1994·
4· "In other words, the modern democratic state needs a healthy degree of
what wed to be called patriotism, a strong sense of identification with the polity,
and a willingness to give of oneself for its sake" (Taylor, p. 44).
 lntTTHiuction

vating it. For the media are not simply the means through which individ-
uals simultaneously imagine their national community; they mt!diate that
imagination, construct the sensibilities that underpin it.~ When Taylor says
that the modern state has to make citizenship the primary principle of
identity, he refers to the way it must transcend the different identities built
on class, gender, and religion, replacing conflicting perspectives by unify-
ing experience. In an important sense, this transcendent mediation is sec-
ularism. Secularism is not simply an intellectual answer to a question about
enduring social peace and toleration. It is an enactment by which a politi-
cal medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends partic-
ular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through
class, gender, and religion. In contrast, the process of mediation enacted in
"premodern" societies includes ways in which the state mediates local iden-
tities without aiming at transcendence.
So much for questions of space in modern secular society-the al-
leged absence of hierarchy and supposed dependence on horizontal soli-
darity. What about time? Here, too, the reality is more complex than Tay-
lor's model suggests. The homogeneous time of state bureaucracies and
market dealings is of course cenual to the calculations of modern political
economy. It allows speed and direction to he plotted with precision. But
there are other temporalities-immediate and mediated, reversible and
nonreversible-by which individuals in a heterogeneous society live and
by which therefore their political responses are shaped.
In short, the assumption that liberal democracy ushers in a direct-
access society seems to me questionable. The forms of mediation charac-
teristic of modern society certainly differ from medieval Christian-and
Islamic-ones, hut this is not a simple matter of the absence of "religion"
in the public life of the modern nation-state. For even in modern secular
countries the place of religion varies. Thus although in France both the
highly centralized state and irs citizens are secular, in Britain the state is
linked ro the Established Church and its inhabitants arc largely nonreli-
gious, and in America the population is largely religious bur the federal
state is secular. "Religionn has always been publicly present in both Britain
and America. Consequently, although the secularism of these three coun-
tries have much in common, the mediating character of the modern imag-
5· Sec Hent de Vries, "In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and
the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies," in &ligion anti Mttiill,
ed. H. de Vries and S. Weber, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2.001.
6 Introduction

inary in each of them differs significantly. The notion of toleration between

religiously defined groups is differently inflected in each. There is a differ-
em sense of participation in the nation and access to the state among reli-
gious minorities in the three countries.
So what does the idea of an ovtrlapping consmsus do for the doctrine
of secularism? In a religiously diverse society, Taylor claims, it allows peo-
ple to have different (even mutually exclusive) reasons for subscribing to
rhe independent, stcularethic. For example, the right to life may be justi-
fied by secular or religious beliefs-and the laner may come in several va-
rieties that belong to different traditions. This means that political dis-
agreements will be continuous, incapable of being authoritatively resolved,
and that temporary resolutions will have to depend on negotiated com-
promise. But given that there will be quarrels about what is to count as cort
political principlts and as background justifications, how will they be re-
solved? Taylor answers: by persuasion and negotiation. There is cenainly a
generous impulse behind this answer, but the nation-state is not a generous
agent and its law does not deal in persuasion. Consider what happens
when the parties to a dispute are unwilling to compromise on what for
them is a matter of principle (a principle that articulates action and being,
not a principle that is justifiable by statements of belief). If citizens are not
reasoned around in a maner deemed nationally important by the govern-
ment and the majority that supports it, the threat of legal action (and the
violence this implies) may be used. In that situation negotiation simply
amounts to the exchange of unequal concessions in situations where the
weaker party has no choice. 6 What happens, the citizen asks, to the princi-
ples of equality and libeny in the modern secular imaginary when they are
subjected to the necessities of the law? It emerges then that although she
can choose her happiness, she may not identify her harms.
Or to put it another way: When the state anempts to forcibly estab-
lish and defend "core political principles," when its courts impose a partic-
ular distinction between "core principles" and "background justifications"
(for the law always works through violence), this may add to cumulative dis-
affection. Can secularism then guarantee the peace it allegedly ensured in

6. Intimidation can take many forms, of course. As lord Cromer, consul-

general and agenr of the British government and informal ruler of Egypt at the
end of the nineteenth cenrury, put it, "advice could always take the substance, if
not the form, of a command" (cited in Afaf Lutfi ai-Sayyid, Egypt Rnd Cromtr,
London: John Murray, 1968, p. 66).
 Introduction 7

Euro-America's early history-by shifting the violence of religious wars

into the violence of national and colonial wars? The difficulty with secu-
larism as a doctrine of war and peace in the world is not that it is European
(and therefore alien to the non-West) but that it is closely connected with
the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states-mutually suspicious and
grossly unequal in power and prosperity, each possessing a collective per-
sonality that is differently mediated and therefore differently guaranteed
and threatened.
Thus a number of historians have noted the tendency of spokesper-
sons of the American nation, a tendency that has dramatically resurfaced
since the September 11 tragedy, to define it as "good" in opposition to its
"evil" enemies at home and abroad. "It is an outlook rooted in rwo dis-
tinctive American traditions," says Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia
University. "The country's religious roots and its continuing high level of
religious faith make Americans more likely to see enemies not just as op-
ponents but as evil. Linked to that is the belief that America is the world's
last best hope ofliberry, so that those who oppose America become the en-
emies offreedom." 7 lncluded in this pattern, these historians tell us, is the
tendency to denounce public dissent as treason and to subject various im-
migrant groups to legalized suppression. The historians have traced this re-
curring pattern of American nationalism (where internal difference, espe-
cially when it is identified as "foreign," becomes the focus of intolerance)
from the end of the eighteenth century-that is, from the foundation of
the republic-to the present. Is it to be understood in relation to its reli-
gious origins? But in the rwentieth century the political rhetoric and re-
pressive measures have been directed at real and imagined secular oppo-
nents. Regardless of the religious roots and the contemporary religiosity
that historians invoke in explanation of this pattern, America has-as Tay-
lor rightly observes-a model secular constitution. My point is that what-
ever the cause of the repeated explosions of intolerance in American his-
tory-however undersrandable they may be-they are entirely compatible
(indeed intertwined) with secularism in a highly modern society. Thus it
seems to me there has been scarcely any sustained public tkbau on the sig-
nificance of the September 11 tragedy for a superpower-dominated world.
On the whole the media have confined themselves to rwo kinds of ques-
tion: on the one hand the requirements of national security and the danger

7· Robef( F. Wof(h, "A Narion Defines l!self by Its Evil Enemies: Truth,
Right and the American Way, • in the Nnu York 7imn, February 24, 2.002..
8 Introduction

to civil liberties of the "war on terror," and, on the other, the responsibility
of Islam as a religion and Arabs as a people for acts of terror. (A number of
thoughtful articles on the September tragedy have been published, but
they do not appear to have affected the dominant intellectual discourse.)
This absence of public de bare in a liberal democratic society must be ex-
plained in terms of the mediadng representations that define irs national
personality and identify the discourses that seem to threaten it.
Another instructive example is India, a country that has a secular
constitution and an outstanding record as a functioning liberal democ-
racy-perhaps the most impressive in the Third World. And yet in India
"communal riots" (that is, between Hindus and various minorities-Mus-
lim, Christian, and "Untouchable") have occurred frequently ever since in-
dependence in 1947· As Panha Chatterjee and others have pointed our, the
publicly recognizable personality of the nation is strongly mediated by rep-
resentations of a reconstituted high-caste Hinduism, and those who do not
fit into that personality arc inevitably defined as religious minorities. This
has often placed the "religious minorities" in a defensive position. 8 A secu-
lar state docs not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures
of ambition and fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence since its ob-
ject is always to nogu!au violence.

II

If secularism as a doctrine requires the distinction between private

reason and public principle, it also demands rhe placing of rhe "religious"
in the former by "the secular." Private "ason is not the same as private
spac~; it is the entitlement to difference, the immunity from the force of
public reason. So theoretical and practical problems remain that call for
each of these categories to be defined. What makes a discourse and an ac-
tion "religious" or "secular"?
A book entitled Th~ Bibk Dt1ign~J to B~ Rtad as Littrahm, published
in England before the Second World War,9 has a format that does away
wirh the traditional double columns and numbered verses, and through

8. Sec, in this connection, Partha Chatterjee, "History and the Nationaliza-

tion of Hinduism," Soda/ Resrarrh, vol. 59· no. 1, 1992.
9· Th~ Bibk Dnign~d to B~ &ad at Liuratu", ed. and arranged by E. S.
Bates, London: William Heineman, undated.
 Introduction 9

modern page layout and typography aims to produce the effect of a con-
tinuous narrative with occasional breaks for lines of poetry. As the Intro-
duction explains: "although a great part of the Bible is poetry, the poetry is
printed as prose. The prose, on the other hand, instead of being primed
continuously, is broken up into short 'verses,' and arbitrarily divided into
'chapters.' The Bible contains almost all the traditional types of literature;
lyric poetry, dramatic and elegiac poetry, history, tales, philosophic trea-
tises, collections of proverbs, leners, as well as types of writing peculiar ro
itself, what are called the Prophetic Books. Yet all these are presented in
print as if, in the original, they had the same literary form" (page vii). The
changes in layout certainly facilitate a reading of the Bible as "literature.''
But as the passage quoted implicitly acknowledges, "literature" has an am-
biguous sense-at once "art," "texts dealing with a particular subject," and
simply "printed matter."
If the Bible is read as art (whether as poetry or myth or philosophy)
this is because a complicated historical development of disciplines and
sensibilities has made it possible to do so. Hence the protest the Intro-
duction makes to the effect that a concern for literary reading is no dero-
gation of its sacred status ("And indeed, to make a rigid division berween
the sacred and the secular is surely to impoverish both") is itself a secular
expression of the text's malleability. An atheist will not read it in the way
a Christian would. Is this text essentially "religious" because it deals with
the supernatural in which the Christian believes-either a text divinely
revealed or a true record of divine inspiration? Or is it really "literature"
because it can be read by the atheist as a human work of art? Or is the text
neither in itself. but simply a reading that is either religious or literary-
or possibly, as for the modern Christian, both together? For over the last
rwo or three centuries it has become possible to bring a newly emerging
concept of litmltur~ to the aid of religious sensibilities. However, until
someone decides this question authoricatively, there can be no authorized
allocation of what belongs to private reason and what to "a political ethic
independent of religious belief" (a public ethic that is said to be sub-
scribed to for diverse private reasons-that thus become little more than
rationalizations).
Let me pursue this point briefly with reference to what is described
in our media, and by many of our public intellectuals, as "the Islamic roots
of violence"-especially since September 2001. Religion has long been seen
10 lntrodu~tion

as a source of violence, 10 and (for ideological reasons) Islam has been repre-
sented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singu-
larly oppressive). Experts on Mlslam," "the modern world," and "political
philosophy" have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to em-
brace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from
its violent roots. Now some reRecrion would show that violence does not
nud to be justified by the Qur'an-or any other scripture for that matter.
When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president
Hafi:z al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town
of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur'an-nor did the secularist Sad-
dam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi'a
population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and
terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not-so far as is publicly known-in-
voke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua's destruction of every living thing
in Jericho. 11 Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western
or non-Western, nutkd to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against
civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in
some cases do so because that seems to them just-or else expedient. But
that's very different rrom saying that they are constrainrd to do so. One need
only remind oneself of the banal fact that innumerable pious Muslims,
Jews, and Christians read their scriptures without being seized by the need
to kill non-believers. My point here is simply to emphasize that the way
people engage with such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their
sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and tra-
ditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the per-
ceived demands of particular social situations.
The present discourse about the roots of "Islamic terrorism" in Is-
lamic texts trails two intriguing assumptions: (a) that the Qur'anic text will

10. "In the case of the Bible the tradition handed down from the Middle
Ages has been to regard it as a collection of texts, any of which could be detached
from its surroundings and used, regardless of the circumstances in which it was
written or by whom it was spoken, as divine authority for conduct; often (as we
know) with devastating consequences. Tens have been set up as idols, as crud as
ever were worshiped by savage idolaters" (ibid., p. viii).
u. The Torah is, of course, replete with God's injunctions to his chosen peo-
ple ro destroy the original inhabitams of the Promised land. But it would be in-
credibly naive to suggest that rdigious Jews who read such passages arc thereby in-
cited to violence.
 Introduction 11

force Muslims to be guided by it; and (b) that Christians and Jews are free
to interpret the Bible as they please. For no good reason, these assumptions
take up contradictory positions between text and reader: On the one hand,
the religious tat is held to be determinate, fixed in its sense, and having the
power to bring about panicular beliefs (that in turn give rise to particular
behavior) among those exposed to it-rendering readers passive. On the
other hand, the religious mukr is raken to be actively engaged in con-
structing the meaning of texts in accordance with changing social circum-
stances-so the texts are passive. These contradictory assumptions about
agency help to account for the positions taken up by orientalists and oth-
ers in arguments about religion and politics in Islam. A magical qualiry is
attributed to Islamic religious texts, for they are said to be both essentially
univocal (their meaning cannot be subject to dispute, just as "fundamen-
talists" insist) and infectious (except in relation to the orientalist, who is,
fortunately for him, immune to their dangerous power). In fact in Islam as
in Christianity there is a complicated history of shifting interpretations,
and rhe distinction is recognized between rhe divine text and human ap-
proaches ro ir.
Those who think that the motiv~ for violent action lies in "religious
ideology" claim that any concern for the consequent suffering requires that
we support the censorship of religious discourse-or at least the prevention
of religious discourse from entering the domain where public policy is for-
mulated. But it is not always clear whether it is pain and suffering as such
that the secularist cares about or the pain and suffering that can be attrib-
uted to religious violence because that is pain the modern imaginary con-
ceives of as gratuitous. Nor is it always clear how a "religious motive" is to
be unequivocally identified in modern society. Is motivated behavior that
accounts for itself by religious discourse ipso facto religious or only when it
does so sinctrr/y? But insincerity may itself be a construction of religious
language. Is it assumed that there is always an unconscious motive to a reli-
gious act, a motive that is therefore secular, as Freud and others have done?
But that begs the question of how to distinguish between the religious and
the secular. In short, to identify a (religious) motive for violence one must
have a theory of motives that deals with concepts of character and disposi-
tions, inwardness and visibility, the thought and the unthought. 12 In mod-
em, secular society thi~ also means authoritativ~ theories and practices-as

12. Two excellent conceptual investigations appeared in 1958: G. E. M. Ans-

combe, lntmtior1, Oxford: Blackwell; and R. S. Peters, Th~ Conapt ofMotivation,
12. Introduction

in law courts, or in the hegemonic discourse of the national media, or in

parliamentary forums where the intentions of foreign friends and enemies
are assessed and policies formulated.
It would be easy to point to innwnerable "secular" agents who have
perpetrated acts of great cruelty. But such attempts at defending "religion"
arc less interesting than asking what it is we do when we assign responsi-
bility for "violence and cruelty" to specific agents. One answer might be to
point out that when the CIA together with the Pakistani Secret Service en-
couraged, armed, and trained religious warriors to fight against the Soviets
in Afghanistan, when the Saudi government facilitated the travel of volun-
teer fighters from Arabia to that country, we had an action with several
part-agents, nerworks of actors in an evolving plot. There was no single or
consistent motive for that complex action not only because there were sev-
eral part-agents but also because of the diverse desires, sensibilities, and
self-images involved. But beyond this recognition of agentivc complexity
we can press the question further: When do we look for a clear motive?
When we identify an unusual outcome that seems to us to call for justifi-
cation or exoneration-and therefore for moral or legal mponsibility. A5 I
said above, there are theories as to how this attribution should be done (the
law being paradigmatic here), and it is important to understand them and
the circwnstances in which they are applied in the modern world. In brief,
although "religious" intentions are variously distinguished from "secular"
ones in different traditions, the identification of intmtions as such is espe-
cially important in what scholars call modernity for allocating moral and
legal accountability.

III

Many critics have now taken the position that "modernity" (in which
secularism is centrally located) is not a verifiable object.l.1 They argue that
contemporary societies are heterogeneous and overlapping. that they con-
tain disparate, even discordant, circumstances, origins, valences, and so

London: Roucledge & Kegan Paul. Herbert Morris, On Guilt and lnnocmu (pub-
lished by University of California Press in 1976), looks at the question of motiva-
tion from an explicitly juridical perspective.
13. For example, Bernard Yack's Tht FttiJhism ofMotltmitin: Epochal Stlf-
Consciousnns in Contnnpon~ry Social and Political Thought. Notre Dame, IN: Uni-
versity ofNouc Dame Press, 1997.
 Introduction 13

forth. My response is that in a sense these critics are right (although the
heuristic value of looking for necessary connections should not be forgot-
ten) but that what we have here is not a simple cognitive error. Assump-
tions about the integrated character of "modernity" are themselves pan of
practical and political reality. They direct the way in which people commit-
ted to it act in critical situations. These people aim at "modernity," and ex-
pect others (especially in the "non-West") to do so roo. This fact doesn't dis-
appear when we simply point out that "the West" isn't an integrated totality,
that many people in the West contest secularism or interpret ir in different
ways, that the modern epoch in the West has witnessed many arguments
and several irreconcilable aspirations. On the contrary, those who assume
modernity as a projrct know that already. (An aspect of modern colonialism
is this: although the West contains many faces at home ir presents a single
face abroad. 14 ) The imponanr question, therefore, is not to determine why
the idea of"modemity" (or "the West'') is a misdescription, bur why it has
become hegemonic as a politit:al goal what practical consequences foUow
from that hegemony. and what social conditions maintain it.
It is right to say that "modernity" is neither a totally coherent object
nor a clearly bounded one, and that many of its elements originate in rela-
tions with the histories of peoples outside Europe. Modernity is a projur-
or rather, a series of interlinked projects-that certain people in power
seck to achieve. The project aims at institutionalizing a number of (some-
rimes con8icting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral au-
tonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism,
freedom of the marker-and secularism. It employs proliferating tech-
nologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that
generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of con-
sumption and knowledge. The norian that these experiences constitute
"disenchantment"-implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of
myrh, magic, and the sacred-is a salient fcarure of the modem epoch. It
is, arguably, a product of nineteenth-century romanticism, partly linked to

14. "Simuhaneowly, and despite the parochialism of the governments at

home, • wrote Count Carlo Sforza, "a sort of international solidarity was slowly
evolving in the colonies .... Out of interest if not out of good will, an embryonic
European understanding had at last been found in Mrica. We could hate one an·
other in Europe, but we felt that, between two neighbouring colonies, the interest
in common was as great as between two white men meeting in the desert" (Europt
11nd Europtllm, 1936).
14 lntrodJ«tion

the growing habit of reading imaginative literature 1S-being enclosed

within and by it-so that images of a "pre-modem" past acquire in retro-
spect a quality of enchantment.
Modem projects do not hang together as an integrated totality, but
they account for distinctive sensibilities, aesthetics, moralities. It is not al-
ways clear what critics mean when they claim that there is no such thing as
"the West" because its modern culture has diverse genealogies taking it
outside Europe. If Europe has a geographical "outside" doesn't that itself
presuppose the idea of a space-at once coherent and subvertible-for lo-
cating the West? In my view that is not the best way of approaching the
question. Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of
living-in-the-world. Since this is true of every epoch, what is distinctive
abom modernity as a historical epoch includes modernity as a political-
economic project. What interests me panicularly is the attempt to con-
struct categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern
living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to as-
sess their adequacy. For representations of"the secular" and "the religious"
in modern and modernizing states mediate people's identities, help shape
their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.
But what evidence is there that there is such a thing as "a modern
project"? In a review article on the new edition of The Communist Mani-
festo, the political scientist Stephen Holmes recently claimed that "the end
of Communism has meant the collapse of the last world power officially
founded on the Hegelian belief in capitai-H History, loudly echoed by the
Manifesto. The end of the Cold War means that, today, no single struggle
spans the globe." 16 Yet this attribution of a universal historical teleology
solely to a defeated Communism is less than convincing. Leaving aside
nco-Hegelian apologists for the New World Order such as Francis Fuku-
yama, Holmes's disregard of U.S. attempts to promote a single social
model over the globe is puzzling. Especially over the past fifteen years, the
15. Benedict Anderson's discussion of "print-capitalism" focuses on the sig-
nificance of newspaper reading for imagining the nation as a community (I98J),
but he does not consider the simultaneous growth of serialized novels published in
periodicals and the enormous expansion in the market for imaginative "litera-
ture"-both prose and poetry-that mediated people's undemanding of "real"
and "imagined." Sec Per Gedin, LitmztuiY in th~ Mllrkap14ct, London: Faber and
Faber, 1981 (Swedish original 1975).
16. S. Holmes, "The End ofldiocy on a Planetary Scale," London &vi= of
Books, vol. 10, no. 11, October 19, 1998, p. 13.
 lnmduction 15

analyses and prescriptions by international agencies dominated by the

United States (OECD, IMF, the World Bank) have been remarkably sim-
ilar regardless of the country being considered. "Seldom," observes Serge
Halimi, "has the development of the whole of humanity been conceived in
terms so closely identical and so largely inspired by the American model."
As Halimi notes, that model is not confined to matters of free trade and
private enterprise but includes moral and political dimensions-promi-
nent among them being the doctrine of secularism. 17 If this project has not
been entirely successful on a global scale-if its result is more often further
instability than homogeneity-it is certainly not because those in a posi-
tion to make far-reaching decisions about the affairs of the world reject the
doctrine of a singular destiny-a transcendent truth?-for all countries.
(That the opponents of this project are themselves often driven by totaliz-
ing ideologies and intolerant attitudes is undoubtedly true. However, it is
as well to mess-in the aftermath of the September 11 tragedy-that my
point here is not to "blame America" and "justify its enemies," but to in-
dicate that as the world's only superpower, the protection of its interests
and commitment to "freedom" require America to intervene globally and
to help reform local conditions according to what appear to be universal
values. The reformed local conditions include new styles of consumption
and expression. Whether these are best described as "freely chosen" or
"imposed" is another question.)
We should look, therefore, at th~ politics of national progress-in-
cluding the politics of secularism-that Bow from the multifaceted con-
cept of modernity exemplified by "the West" (and especially by America as
its leader and most advanced exemplar). But should we not also inquire
about the politics of the contrary view? What politics are promoted by the
notion that the world is not divided into modern and nonmodern, into
West and non-West? What practical options are opened up or closed by
the notion that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on
the contrary, divided into overlapping. fragmented cultures, hybrid selves,
continuously dissolving and emerging social states? As part of such an un-
derstanding I believe we must try to unpack the various assumptions on
which secularism-a modern doctrine of the world in the world-is
based. For it is precisely the process by which these conceptual binaries are
established or subverted that tells us how people live the secular-how

17. Sec S. Halimi, "Liberal Dogma Shipwrecked," Lt Montk diplom4tiqw,

Supplcmcm to Tht Gll4rriian ~tk{r, October 1998.
16 Introduction

they vindicate the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign sdf
in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses.

IV

It is a major premise of this study that "the secular" is conceptually

prior to the political doctrine of"secularism," that over time a variety of
concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form "the sec-
ular." In the chapters that follow I therefore begin with a panial genealogy
of that concept, an effort aimed at questioning its self-evidenr character
while asserting at the same time that it nevertheless marks something real.
My resort to genealogy obviously derives from ways it has been deployed
by Foucault and Nierzsche, although it does not claim to follow them rdi-
giously. Genealogy is not intended here as a substitute for social history
("real history," as many would pur it) but as a way of working back from
our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our
certainties.
But precisely for this reason, because the secular is so much part of our
modern life, it is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it is best pursued
through its shadows, as it were. That is why in the first chapter I pay special
attention to the notion of myth (central to the modern idea of "enchant-
ment") in some of its historical guises-and then, in Chapters 1 and 3, I
discuss agency, pain, and cruelty in relation to embodiment. From these ex-
plorations of the: secular, I move to aspects of secularism-to conceptions of
the: human that underlie subjective: rights (Chapter 4), the notion of"reli-
gious minorities" in Europe (Chapter 5), and the question of whether na-
tionalism is essentially secular or religious (Chapter 6). In the final chapter
I deal at some length with some: transformations in rdigious authority, law,
and ethics in colonial Egypt that iUuminate aspects of secularization not
usually attended to.
Finally: Can anthropology as such conuibutc: anything to the clarifi-
cation of questions about secularism? Most anthropologists are taught that
their discipline: is essentially defined by a research technique (participant
observation) carried our in a circumscribed field, and that as such it deals
with particularity-with what Clifford Gc:c:rtt, following the philosopher
Gilbert Ryle, called "thick description." And isn't secularism a universal
concept, applicable throughout the modern world-capable at once of ex-
plaining and moderating the volatility of cultural multiplicities?
 lntroduNirm 17

In my view anthropology is more than a method, and it should not

be equated-as it has popularly become-with the direction given to in-
quiry by the pseudoscientific notion of "fieldwork." Mary Douglas once
proposed that although conventional accounts of the rise of modern an-
thropology locate it in the shift from armchair theorizing to intensive field-
work (with invocations of Boas, Rivers, and Malinowski), the real story
was very different. The account of modern anthropology that she favors
begins with Marcel Mauss, pioneer of the systematic inquiry into cultural
concepts ("Foreword" to Marcel Mauss, Tht Gift, London: Routledge,
1990, p. x). Douglas herself has been a distinguished contributor to this
tradition of anthropology. But conceptual analysis as such is as old as phi-
losophy. What is distinctive about modern anthropology is the comparison
of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently lo-
cated in time or space. The important thing in this comparative analysis is
not their origin (Western or non-Western), but the forms of life that artic-
ulate them, the powers they release or disable. Secularism-like religion-
is such a concept.
An anthropology of secularism should thus start with a curiosity
about the doctrine and practice of secularism regardless of where they have
originated, and it would ask: How do attitudes to the human body (to
pain, physical damage, decay, and death, to physical integrity, bodily
growth, and sexual enjoymem) differ in various forms of life? What struc-
tures of the senses-hearing, seeing, touching-do these attitudes depend
on? In what ways does the law define and regulate practices and doctrines
on the grounds that they are "truly human"? What discursive spaces does
this work of definition and regulation open up for grammars of "the secu-
lar" and "the religious"? How do all these sensibilities, attitudes. assump-
tions, and behaviors come together to support or undermine the doctrine
of secularism?
Trying to formulate such questions in detail is a more important task
for anthropology than hasty pronouncements about the virtues or vices of
secularism.
SECULAR
What Might an Anthropology
of Secularism Look Like?

Sociologists, political theorists, and historians have written copiously

on secularism. It is part of a vigorous public debate in many pam of the
world-especially in the Middle East. Is "secularism" a colonial imposi-
tion, an entire worldview that gives precedence to the material over the
spirirual, a modem culture of alienation and unrestrained pleasure? Or is
it necessary to universal humanism, a rational principle that calls for the
suppression-or at any rare, the restraint-of religious passion so that a
dangerous source of intolerance and delusion can be controlled, and polit-
ical unity, peace, and progress secured? 1 The question of how secularism as
a political doctrine is related to the secular as an ontology and an episte-
mology is evidently at stake here.
In conuast to the salience of such debates, anthropologists have paid
scarcely any attention to the idea of the secular, although the study of reli-
gion has been a central concern of the discipline since the nineteenth cen-
tury. A collecdon of university and college syllabi on the anthropology of
religion prepared recently for the Anthropological Association of America/

1. These two points of vic:w are represented in a recent debate on this sub-
ject between Abdcl-Wahab ai-Messiri and Al.iz ai-Azmch, published as Al-
itlmtiniyya taht al-mijhar, Damascus: Dac al-Fikr al-Mu'asir, 2000. I take up the
theme of secularism and law in Egypt under British rule in Chaptcr 7·
~ Andrew Buckscr, comp., Couru SylLzbi in th~ Antllropology of &ligion,
Anthropology of Rdigion Section, American Anthropological Association, De-
cember 1998.
2.2. SECULAR

shows a heavy reliance on such themes as myth, magic, witchcraft, the use
of hallucinogens, ritual as psychotherapy. possession, and taboo. Together,
these familiar themes suggest that "religion," whose object is the sacred,
stands in the domain of the nonrational. The secular, where modern poli-
tics and science are sited, makes no appearance in the collection. Nor is it
treated in any of the well-known introductory texts. 3 And yet it is common
knowledge that religion and the secular are closely linked, both in our
thought and in the way they have emerged historically. Any discipline that
seeks to understand "religion" must also try to understand its other. An-
thropology in particular-the discipline that has sought to underStand the
strangeness of the non-European world-also needs to grasp more fully
what is implied in its being at once modern and secular.
A number of anthropologists have begun ro address secularism with
the intention of demystifying contemporary political institutions. Where
previous theorists saw worldly reason linked to tolerance, rhese unmaskers
find myth and violence. Thus Michael Taussig complains that the Weber-
ian notion of the rational-legal stare's monopoly of violence fails to address
"the intrinsically mysterious, mystifying, convoluting, plain scary, mythi-
cal, and arcane cultural properties and power of violence to the point
where violence is very much an end in itself-a sign, as Benjamin put ir, of
the existence of the gods." In Taussig's opinion the "institutional interpen-
etration of reason by violence not only diminishes the claims of reason,
casting ir into ideology, mask. and effecr of power. bur [it is] also ... prt·
cistly tht coming togtthtr ofrtason-and-violmc~ in tht Statt that crtaus, in a
ucular and motkrn world, th~ bignm oftht bigS-nor merely irs apparent
unity and the fictions of will and mind rhus inspired, bur the auratic and
quasi-sacred quality of that very inspiration ... that now stands as ground
to our being as citizens of the world.''' Once its rational-legal mask is re-
J. Take, for example, Brian Morris's Antbropo/QgiCill Studi~s of&ligion. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1987, and Roy Rappaport's Ritu4/ and &li-
gion in th~ Malting ofHumanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
neither of which makes any menrion of"secular," "secularism," or "seculariution,"
but both, of course, have extensive references to the: concept of"the sacred." Ben-
son Saler's survey entitled Concrptu4/izing &ligion. l..ciden: E. J. Brill, 1993, refers
only-and symptomatically-to "secular humanism as a religion," that is, to the
secular that is also religious. Recent anthropological interest in secularism is partly
reflected in a number of brief statements on the subject in a special section of So-
cial Anthropology. vol. 9. no. 3· 2001.
4· M. Taussig, Thr Nmwus Systnn, New York.: Routledge, 1992, p. 116, ital-
ics in original.
 What Might an Anthropology ofSuularism Look Lik~ 2.3

moved, so it is suggested, the modern state will reveal itself to be far from
secular. For such critics the essential point at issue is whether our belief in
the secular character of the state-or society-is justified or not. The cat-
egory of the secular itself remains unexamined.
Anthropologists who identify the sacred characrer of the modern
stare often reson to a rarionalisr norion of myth ro sharpen their anack.
They take myth ro be "sacred discourse," and agree with nineteenrh-
century anthropologists who theorized myths as expressions of bc:liefS
about the supernatural world, about sacred times, beings, and places, be-
liefS thar were therefore opposed to reason. In general the word "myth" has
been used as a synonym for rhe irrational or the nonrational, for anach-
ment to tradition in a modern world, for political fantasy and dangerous
ideology. Myth in this way of thinking stands in contrast to the secular,
even for those who invoke it posirively.
I will refer often ro myth in whar follows, but I am not interested in
theorizing about it. There are several books available that do thar. 5 What I
want to do here is to trace practical consequences of its uses in the eigh-
teenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to invesrigare some of
the ways the secular was constituted. For the word "myth" that moderns
have inherited from antiquity feeds into a number of familiar opposi-
tions-b~liifand knowkdg~. rrason and imagination, history and fiction,
symbol and alkgory, natural and supmuuura~ sacrrd and profom·-binaries
that pervade modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode. As
I am concerned with the shifting web of concepts making up the secular, I
discuss several of these binaries.
The terms "secularism" and "secularist" were introduced into English
by freethinkers in the middle of the nineteenth cenrury in order to avoid
the charge of their being "atheists" and "infidels," terms that carried sug-
gestions of immorality in a still largely Christian society.(• These epithets
S· For example: Ivan Strenski, Four Throri~s ofMyth in 7itlffltitrh-Cmtury
History: CtUSirrr, f.1Uuk, /.n.Ji-StratiSS and MaliMwski, Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1987; Robert Segal, T~orizing About Myth, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1999; and Bruce Lincoln, T'""rizing Myth, Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2.000.
6. The word ·secularism" was coined by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851.
"Secularism was intended to differentiate Holyoake's ami-theistic position from
Bradlaugh's atheistic pronouncements, and, although Bradlaugh, Charles Watts,
G. W. Foote, and other atheists were identified with the secular movement,
Holyoake always endeavoured to make it possible rhar the social, political, :md
24 SECULAR

manercd not because the freethinkers were concerned about their personal
safety, but because they sought to direct an emerging mass politics of social
reform in a rapidly industrializing society. 7 Long-standing habits of indif-
ference, disbelief, or hostility among individuals toward Christian rituals
and authorities were now becoming entangled with projeCts of total social
reconstruction by means of legislation. A critical rearticulation was being
negotiated berween state law and personal morality. 8 This shift presup-
posed the new idea of society as a total population of individuals enjoying
not only subjective rights and immunities, and endowed wim moral
agency, but also possessing the capacity to elect their political representa-
tives-a shift that occurred all at once in Revolutionary France (excluding
women and domestics), and gradually in nineteenth-century England. The
extension of universal suffrage was in turn linked-as Foucault has point-
ed out-to new methods of government based on new styles of classifica-
tion and calculation, and new forms of subjecthood. These principles of
government are secular in the sense that mcy deal solely with a worldly dis-
position, an arrangement mat is quite different from the medieval concep-
tion of a social body of Christian souls each of whom is endowed with
equal dignity-members at once of the City of God and of divinely cre-
ated human society. The: discursive: move: in the nineteenth century from
thinking of a fixed "human nature" to regarding humans in terms of a con-
stituted "normality" facilitated the secular idea of moral progress defined
and directed by autonomous human agency. In short, secularism as a po-
litical and governmental doctrine that has its origin in nineteenth-century
liberal society seems easier to grasp than the secular. And yet the rwo are
interdependent.
What follows is not a social history of secularization, nor even a his-

ethical aims of secularism should not necc:ssitate subscription to atheistic belief, in

the hope that liberal-minded theists might, without prejudice to their theism, join
in promoting these ends-an attitude to which he persisted in clinging, despite
the small success which it achieved." Eric S. Waterhouse, "Secularism," Encydopt-
dia ofR.tligion and £thief, vol. 11, ed. James Hastings, p. 348.
7· Owen Chadwick, Tht Smtl4rization oftht Europtlln Mind in tht 19th
Cmtury, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
8. That moment was a critical part of a much longer history. See the account
of the gradual withdrawal of legal jurisdiction over what comes reuospecrivdy to
be seen as the domain of private ethics from the Middle Ages through the nine-
teenth century in James Finjames Stephen's A Hutory oftht CriminAl lAw ofEng-
land, London: MacMillan, 1883, vol. 2, chapter 25, "Offences Against Religion."
 What Might an AnthtTJpology ofS~cu/arism Look Lik~? :1.5

tory of it as an idea. It is an exploration of epistemological assumptions of

the secular that might help us be a little clearer about what is involved in
the anthropology of secularism. The secular, I argue, is neither continuous
with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest
phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the op-
posite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular ro be a con-
cept that brings together certain behaviors, knowlc:dges, and sensibilities in
modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show that what appears
to be necessary is really contingent-that in cerrain respects "the secular"
obviously overlaps with "the religious." It is a matter of showing how con-
tingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts-that is, how the
changes in concepts articulate changes in practices. 9 My purpose in this
initial chapter, therefore, is not to provide the outline of a historical narra-
tive but to conduct a series ofinquiries into aspeets of what we have come
ro call the secular. So although I follow some connections at the expense of
others, this should not be taken to imply that I think there was a single line
of filiation in the formation of "the secular." In my view the secular is nei-
ther singular in origin nor stable in its historical identiry, although it works
through a series of particular oppositions.
I draw my material almost entirely from West European history be-
cause that history has had profound consequences for the ways that the
doctrine of secularism has been conceived and implemented in the rest of
the modernizing world. I try to understand the secular, the way it has been
constituted, made real, connected to, and detached from particular histor-
ical conditions.
The analyses that I offer here are intended as a counter to the tri-
umphalist history of the secular. I take the view, as others have done, that
the "religious" and the "secular" are not essentially fixed categories. How-
ever, I do not claim that if one stripped appearances one would see that
some apparently secular instirutions were mtUy religious. I assume, on the
contrary, that there is nothing rssmtiaUy religious, nor any universal essence
that defines "sacred language" or "sacred experience." But I also assume
that there were breaks berween Christian and secular life in which words
and practices were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced pre-
vious ones. I suggest that the fuller implications of those shifrs need to be

9· The notion of grammar here is of course derived from Wittgenstein's idea

of grammatical investigation. This notion pervades all his later writing. But sec es-
pecially PhiloJophical lnvntigatiom, section 90.
26 SECULAR

explored. So I take up fragments of the history of a discourse that is often

asserted to be an essential part of"religion"-or at any rare, to have a close
affinity with it-to show how the sacred and the secular depend on each
other. I dwell brieRy on how religious myth contribured to rhe formation
of modern historical knowledge and modern poetic sensibility (touching
on the way they have been adopted by some contemporary Arab poets},
but I argue that this did not make history or poetry essentially "religious."
That, too, is the case with recent statements by liberal thinkers for
whom liberalism is a kind of redemptive myth. I point to the violence in-
trinsic to ir but caution that liberalism's secular myth should not be con-
fused with the redemptive myth of Christianity, despite a resemblance be-
tween them. Needless to say, my purpose is neither ro criticize nor to
endorse that myth. And more generally, I am not concerned to attack lib-
eralism whether as a political system or as an ethical doctrine. Here, as in
the other cases I deal with, I simply want to get away from rhe idea that
the secular is a mask for religion, that secular political practices often
simulate religious ones. I therefore end with a brief outline of two con-
ceptions of "the secular" rhat I see as available to anthropology today,
and I do this through a discussion of texts by Paul de Man and Walter
Benjamin, respectively.

A reading of origins: myth, truth, and power

West European languages acquire rhe word "myth" from the Greek,
and stories about Greek gods were paradigmatic objects of critical reflec-
tion when mythology became a discipline in early modernity. So a brief
early history of the word and concept is in order.
In his book Th~orizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln opens with a fascinating
early history of the Greek terms mythos and logos. Thus we are told that
Hesiod's WOrks and Days associates the speech of mythoswith truth (al~th~a)
and the speech of logos with lies and dissimulation. Mythos is powerful
speech, the speech of heroes accustomed to prevail. In Homer, Lincoln
points out, logos refers to speech that is usually designed to placate some-
one and aimed at dissuading warriors from combat.
In the context of political assemblies mythoi are of two kinds-
"straight" and "crooked." Mythoi function in the context of law much as lo-
 What Might an Anthropology ofSuu/orinn Look Lik~? 27

goi do in the context of war. Muthos in Homer, "is a speech-act indicating

authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a full attention to
every detail " 10 It never means a symbolic story that has to be deciphered-
or for that matter, a false one. In the Odyssey, Odysseus praises poetry-
asserting that it is truthful, that it affects the emotions of its audience, that
it is able to reconcile differences-and he concludes his poetic narration
by declaring that he has "recOUnted a mythOS. II n

At first, poets tended to authorize their speech by calling it mythos-

an inspiration from the gods (what moderns call, in a new accent, the
supm'llttural world); later, the Sophists taught that all speech originated
with humans (who lived in tbis world). "Whereas the Christian world-
view increasingly separates God from this world," writes Jan Bremmer,
"the gods of the Greeks were not transcendent bur directly involved in nat-
ural and social processes.... It is for such connections as between the hu-
man and divine spheres that a recent study has called the Greek world-view
'interconnected' against our own 'separative' cosmology." 12 But there is
more at srake here than the immanence or transcendence of divinity in re-
lation to the natural world. The idea of "nature:" is itself internally trans-
formed.13 For the representation of the Christian God as being sited quite
apart in "the supernatural" world signals the construction of a secular space
that begins to emerge in early modernity. Such a space permits "nature" to
be reconceived as manipulatable material, determinate, homogeneous, and
subject to mechanical laws. Anything beyond that space: is therefore "su-
pernatural"-a place that, for many, was a fanciful extension of the real

10. Richard Martin, Th~ l.anp4g( ofH~ro(s, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Universiry
Press, 1989, p. 12, cited in Bruce Lincoln, Th(orizing Myth, Chicago: Universiry of
Chicago Press, 1000.
11. Marcel Detienne nores that Herodotus calls his stories logoi, or hiroi, and
never mythoi. "The famous 'sacred discourses' which our usage interprets as
'myths' all the more easily since these traditions are often connected with ritual
gcsrures and actions-these arc never called mythoi." Marcel Detienne, "Rethink-
ing Mythology" in Bmu~rn &liif and Trt~nsgmsion, ed. M. lurd and P. Smith.
Chicago: Universiry of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 49·
11. Jan Bremmer, Gruk Rrligion (published for the Classical Association,
Oxford University Press, 1994), p. S·
13. For an early account of such transformations sec the study by R. G.
Collingwood, Th~ ltka ofNaturr!, Oxford: Cl:=ndon, 1945. in which Greek co.-
mology is contrasted with later views of nature.
28 SECULAR

world, peopled by irrational events and imagined beings. 1 ~ This transfor-

mation had a significant effect on the meaning of"myth."
The mythoi of poets, so the Sophists said, are not only emotionally af-
fecting, they are also lies in so F.u as they speak of the gods-although even
as lies they may have a morally improving effect on an audience. This line
is taken up and given a new twist by Plato who argued that philosophers
and not poets were primarily responsible for moral improvement. In the
course of his attack against poeuy, Plato changed the sense of myth: it now
comes to signify a socially useful lie. 11
Enlightenment founders of mythology, such as Fontenelle, took this
view of the beliefs of antiquity about its gods. Like many other cultivated
men of his rime, he regarded the study of myth as an occasion for reflect-
ing on human error. "Although we are incomparably more enlightened
than those whose crude minds invented Fables in good faith," he wrote,
"we easily reacquire the same tum of mind that made those Fables so at-
tractive to them. They devoured them because they believed in them, and
we devour them with just as much pleasure yet without believing in them.
There is no better proof that the imagination and reason have little com-
merce with each other, and that things with which reason has first become
disillusioned lose none of their attractiveness to the imagination." 16 Fon-
tenelle was a great naruralizer of "supernatural" events in the period when
"nature" emerges as a distinctive domain of experience and study. 17
But in the Enlightenment epoch as a whole myths were never only
objects of"belief" and of"rational investigation." As elements of high cul-
ture in early modern Europe they were integral to its characterisric sensi-
bility: a cultivated capacity for delicate feeling-especially for sympathy-
and an ability to be moved by the pathetic in art and literature. Poems,

14. Amos Funkenstein's Thtology and tht Scimtific ImaginAtion: From tht
MiJJJt Agts to th~ Stvn~tunth Cmtury, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986, traces the new scientific worldview, with its ideals of the univocation of signs
and the homogeneity of nature, as well as of mathematization and mechanization,
that emerged in the seventeenth century. Funkcnstcin shows-especially in Chap-
ter 2, entitled "God's Omnipresence, God's Body, and Four Ideals ofSciencc"-
how this required of theology a new ontology and epistemology of the deity.
15. Lincoln, p. 42.
16. Cited in Jean Starobinski, Blmingr in Duguut; or, TIN Morality ofEvil,
Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. p. 186.
17. Fontenelle's debunking Hutoi" tks oracln (1686) was rapidly published
in English as Tht History ofOracles, and tht Ch~ats ofPagan Priests, London, 1688.
 What Might an Anthropology ofSecularism Look Likt? 29

paintings, the theater, public monuments, and private decoration in the

homes of the rich depicted or alluded to the qualities and quests of Greek
gods, goddesses, monsters, and heroes. Knowledge of such stories and fig-
ures was a necessary pan of an upper-class education. Myths allowed writ-
ers and anists to represent contemporary events and feelings in what we
moderns call a fictional mode. The distanced idealization of profane love,
the exaggerated praise for the sovereign, were equally facilitated by a fabu-
lous style. And this in turn facilitated a form of satire that aimed to un-
mask or literalize. Ecclesiastical authority could thus be attacked in an in-
direct fashion, without immediately risking the charge of blasphemy. In
general, the literary assault on mythic figures and events demonstrated a
preference for a sensible life of happiness as opposed to the heroic ideal
that was coming to be regarded as less and less reasonable in a bourgeois
society. But, as Jean Starobinski reminds us, myth was more than a deco-
rative language or a satirical one for taking a distance &om the heroic as a
social ideal. In the great tragedies and operas of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, myths provided the material through which the psychol-
ogy of human passions could be explored. 18
So the question of whether people did or did not beliroe in these an-
cient narratives-whether (as Fontenelle suggested) by appealing to the
imagination untruths were made attractive-does not quite engage with
the terrain that mythic discourse inhabited in this culture. Myth was not
merely a (mis)representacion of the real It was material for shaping the
possibilities and limits of action. And in general it appears to have done
this by feeding the desire to display the actual-a desire that became in-
creasingly difficult to satisfy as the experiential opportunities of modernity
multiplied.
Some modern commentators have observed that statements such as
Fontenelle's signaled a mutation of the older opposition between sacred
and profane into a new opposition between imagination and reason, prin-
ciples that inaugurate the secular Enlightenment.''' This change, they sug-
gest, should be seen as the replacement of a religious hegemony by a secu-
lar one. But I think what we have here is something more complicated.
The first point to note is that in the newer binary Reason is endowed
with the major work of defining, assessing, and regulating the human
imagination to which "myth" was atrributed. Marcel Detienne puts it this
18. Starobinski, p. 182.
19. Among them, Srarobinski.
30 SECULAR

way: "exclusionary procedures multiply in the discourse of the science of

myths, borne on a vocabulary of scandal that indicts all figures of other-
ness. Mythology is on the side of the primitive, the inferior races, the peoples
of nature, the language of origins, childhood, savagery, madness-always the
othn-, as the excluded figure. ":!II Bur the sacrtd had not been endowed with
such a function in the past, and there was as yet no unitary domain in social
life and thought that the concept of "the sacred" organized. Instead there
were disparate places, objects, and times, each with irs qualities, and each re-
quiring conduct and words appropriate w it. This point requires elaboration,
so I will now discus.~ the sacred/profane binary before returning to the theme
of myth.

A digression on the "sacred" and the "profane"

In the Larin of the Roman Republic, the word saur referred to any-
thing that was owned by a deity, having been "taken out of the region of
the profanum by the action of the State, and passed on inro that of the
sacrum." 21 However, even then there was an intriguing exception: the term
homo sacn-was used for someone who, as the result of a curse (sactr rsto),
became an outlaw liable w be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus while
the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sa-
credness of homo sactr made him eminently subject to violence. This con-
tradictory usage has been explained by classicists (with the acknowledged
help of anthropologist colleagues) in terms of "taboo," a supposedly prim-
itive notion that confounds ideas of the sacred with those of the unclean,
ideas that "spiritual" religion was later to distinguish and use more logi-
cally.zz The conception that "taboo" is the primordial origin of"the sacred"
20. Dclicnne, pp. 46-47, italics in original.
21. W. W. Fowler, "Th., Original Meaning of th" Word Saur," in RomAII Es-
says a11d lmtrprnatiom, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920, p. 15.
11. "If this is the right meaning of the word saur in sactr tsto, WI! may, I

think, trace it back to the older stage in which it meant simply 'taboo' without ref-
erence to a deity; and we have scl!n that it sl!ems to be so used in on" or two of the
anc:iem laws" (Fowler, p. 21). Bur the evolutionary aplanalion offered here is at
once dubious and unneces.sary. Giorgio Agamben has more interestingly argued
that the "sacred man," object of the curse saur mo, must be understood in relation
to rhe logic of sovereignty, which he regards as rhe absolute power over life and
death in Homo Saur: SovnYign Pou~r and Ba" Lifo, Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
 Wh11t Might1111 Anthropology oJStcularism Loolr Lilrt? 31

has a long history in anthropology, from which it was borrowed not only
by classics to understand antique religion but also by Christian theology
to reconstruct a "true" one. The anthropological parr of that history is
critically examined in a study by Franz Steiner in which he shows that
the notion "taboo" is built on very shaky ethnographic and linguistic
foundations ..!J
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "sacred" in early modern
English usage generally referred to individual things, persons, and occa-
sions that were set apan and entitled to veneration. Yet if we consider the
examples given in the dictionary-the poetic line: "That sacred Fruit, sa-
cred w abstinence," the inscription "sacred to the: memory of Samuel But-
ler," the: address-form "your sacred majesty," the phrase "a sacred con-
cert"-it is virtually impossible to identify the setting apan or the
venerating as being the same act in all cases. The subject to whom such
things, occasions, or persons are said to be sacred does not stand in the
same relation ro them. It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and
theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages
rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single im-
mutable essence, and claimed it ro be the object of a universal human ex-
perience called "religious. "2'1 The supposedly universal opposition berween
2.3. In fact Steiner claimed that the problem of taboo was a Victorian inven-
tion, OCCJSioned by ideological and social developments in Victorian society itself.
Sec Franz Steiner, Taboo, London: Cohen & West, 1956.
2.4· The classic statemem is Durkheim's. "All known religious beliefs. whether
simple or complex, present one common characteristic," writes Durkhcim. "They
presuppose a classification of all things, real and ideal, of which men think, into
two classes or opposed groups. generally designated by two distinct terms which arc
translated well enough by the words profont and Jacrrd (proJallt, wcrl). The division
of the world into two domains, the one comaining all that is sacred, the other all
that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dog-
mas and legends arc either representations or systems of representations which ex-
press the nature of sacred thin&>, the vinucs and powers that arc auributc:d to them,
or their relations with each other and with profane things. But by sacred things one
must not understand simply those personal bein&> which arc called gods or spirits;
a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can
be sacred. A rite can have this character; in fact, the rite docs not exist which docs
not have it to a cenain degree. There arc words, expressions and formulae which
can be pronounced only by the mouths of consecrated persons; there arc gestures
and movementS which everybody cannot perform" (Einnmtllry Forms oftht Rtli-
gious Lift, 1915, p. 37). Critics have objected that Durkheim was wrong to claim that
p. SECULAR

"sacred" and ''profane" finds no place in premodern writing. In medieval

theology, rhe overriding antinomy was between "the divine" and "rhe sa-
tanic" (both of them transcendent powers) or "rhe spiritual" and "rhe tem-
poral" (borh of rhem worldly institutions), not between a supernatural sa-
cred and a natural profane.
In France, for example, the word sacrl was not pan of the language
of ordinary Christian life in the Middle Ages and in early modern times.l~
It had learned uses, by which reference could be made to panicular things
(vessels), institutions (the College of Cardinals), and persons (the body of
the king), but no unique ap~rimct was presupposed in relation to rhe ob-
jects to which it referred, and they were nor set apan in a uniform way. The
word and the concept that mattered to popular religion during this entire
period-that is, to practices and sensibilities-was sainutl, a beneficent
quality of cenain persons and their relics, closely connected to the common
people and their ordinary world. The word sacrt becomes salient at the time
of rhe Revolution and acquires intimidating resonances of secular power.
Thus rhe Preamble to rhe Dlclaration tks Droits de /'homme (1789) speaks of
"droits naturels, inalienables et sacres." The right to property is qualified
sacrl in anicle 17. "L'amour sacre de Ia patrie" is a common nineteenth-
century expression. 26 Clearly the: individual experience denoted by these
usages, and the behavior expected of the citizen claiming to have it, were
quite different from anything signified by the term "sacred" during the
Middle Ages. It was now pan of the discourse integral to functions and as-
pirations of the modern, secular state, in which the sacralization of indi-
vidual citizen and collective people expresses a form of naturalized power. 27
Fran~ois Isamben has described in detail how the Durkheimian

profane and sacred are mutually exclusive domains because profane things can be-
come sacred and vice versa. (See William Paden, "Before 'The Secular' Became
Theological: Rereading The Durkheimian Legacy," Mrthod a11d ThMry in 1M Stwly
ofRrligion, vol. 3· no. 1, 1991, who defends Durkheim against this charge.) More re-
cently. critics have: protested that in ordinary life sacred and profane are typically
"scrambled together." But even such critics accept the universality of the sacred,
which they represent as a special kind of power. What they object to is the idea of
its rigid separation from "the materiality of everyday life" (see Colleen McDannell,
Malnial Christianity, New Haven, Cf: Yale University Press, 1995, chapter J).
15. Sec Michel Despland, "The Sacred: The French Evidence," Mrthod and
Throry in thr Stwly of&ligion, vol. 3. no. 1, 1991, p. 43·
16. Ibid.
17. See the excellent history of universal suffrage in France: Pierre Rosan-
vallon, Lt sacrr du droym, Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
 What Might an Anthropology ofS«ul4rism Look Likd 33

school, drawing upon Robertson Smith's notion of "taboo" as the typical

form of primitive religion, arrived at the scholarly concept of "the sacred"
as a universal essence. 28 The sacred came to refer to everything of social in-
terest-collective states, traditions, sentiments-that society elaborates as
representations, and was even said to be the evolutionary source of cogni-
tive categories. :N The sacred, constituted first by anthropologists and then
taken over by theologians, became a universal quality hidden in things and
an objective limit to mundane action. The sacred was at once a transcen-
dent force that imposed itself on the subject and a space that must never,
under threat of dire consequence, be violated-that is, profaned. In brief,
"the sacred" came to be constituted as a mysterious, mythic thing, 30 the fo-
cus of moral and administrative disciplines.
It was in the context of an emerging discipline of comparative reli-
gion that anthropology developed a transcendent notion of the sacred. An
interesting version of this is to be found in the work of R. R Marett,; 1 who
proposed that ritual should be regarded as having the funaion of regulat-
ing emotions, especially in critical situations of life, an idea that enabled
him to offer a well-known anthropological definition of the sacraments:
"For anthropological purposes." he wrote, "lc:t us define: a sacrament as any
rite of which the specific object is to consecrate or make sacred. More ex-
plicitly, this mc:ans any rite which by way of sanction or positive blessing
invests a natural funaion with a supernatural authority of its own." 12
This notion of the sacrament as an institution designed to invest life-
cycle crises ("mating," "dying," and so forth) with "supernatural authority,"

28. F. lsambert, L~ s~m J, sacrl, Paris: Les &fitions de Minuit, 1982.

19. But this original inclusiveness, !sam bert points out, was precisely what
made it useless for identifying the particularity of religion: "On voir ainsi que cene
expression du domainc sacrC: etait bien faite pour fonder l'idCc: d'une evolution des
divers secteurs de Ia pens« a partir de Ia religion. Mais, pour Ia mcmc:, Ia notion
dc:vc:nait impropre a Ia determination de Ia specificire du domaine n:ligieux" (op.
cit., p. 211).
a
30. "C'est ainsi que ie sacn! c:n arrive ctre constituC: en objet mythique"
(op. cit., p. 256).
31. Marett is famous for the claim that "savag.. religion is something not so
much thought out as danced out." R. R. Marett, Th~ Thraho/J of Rtligion, 2nd
ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914, p. xxxi. He was also the authority for Fowler's
venture into evolutionary anthropology \sec: above. p. 30, n. u).
32. R. R. Marc:n, Sacrammts ofSimp!~ Folk, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1933· p. 4·
34 SECULAR

of its being essentially a "religious psychotherapy" as Marert also puts it, is

presented as having general comparative application. But it stands in marked
contrast, for example, to the medieval Christian concept of the sacrament.
Thus the twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Vicror, responding ro the
question "What is a sacrament?" first considers the conventional defini-
tion: "A sacrament is a sign of a sacred thing," but then goes on to point
out that it will not do, because various statues and pictures as well as the
words of Scripture are all, in their different ways, signs of sacred things
without being sacraments. So he proposes a more adequate definition: "A
sacrament is a corporeal or material element [sounds, gestures, vestments,
instruments] set before the senses without, representing by similitude and
signifying by institution and containing by sanctification some invisible
and spiritual grace." For example, the water of baptism represents the
washing of sins from the soul by analogy with the washing of impurities
from the body, signifies it for the believer because of Christ's inaugurating
practice, and conveys-by virtue of the words and actions of the officiat-
ing priest who performs the baptism-spiritual grace. The three functions
are not self-evident but must be identified and expounded by those in au-
thority. (Medieval Christians learnt the meanings of elaborate allegories
used in the mass through authorized commentaries.) Thus according to
Hugh, a sacrament-from the moment of its authoritative foundation-
was a complex network of signifiers and signifieds that acts, like an icon,
commemoratively. The icon is both itself and a sign of what is already pres-
ent in the minds of properly disciplined participants; it points backward to
their memory and forward to their expectation as Christians. 33 It does not
make sense to say, with reference to the account Hugh gives, that in the
sacraments "natural" functions are endowed with "supernatural" authority
(that is, a transcendent endowment), still less that the sacramenrs are a psy-
chotherapy for helping humans through their life-crises (a useful myth).
Hugh insists that there are conditions in which the sacraments are not rec-
ognized for what they are: "This is why the eyes of infidels who see only
visible things despise venerating the sacraments of salvation, because be-
holding in this only what is contemptible without invisible species they do
not recognize the invisible virtue within and the fruit of obedience. "34 The
authority of the sacraments is itself an engagement of the Christian subject
33· I discuss Hugh of Sr. Victor's account of the sacraments in some detail in
Gm~alogits o[Rtligion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 153-58.
34· Hugh of St. Victor, On th~ Sacrammts ofth~ Christian Faith, ed. R. J.
Defarrari, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951, p. 156.
 What Might an Anthropology ofSecularism Look Likd 35

with what his eyes see as an embodiment of divine grace.'~ Grace is con-
ceived of as a particular state of unawareness within a relationship, not as a
divine payment for ritual assiduity.
What facilitated the essentialization of "the sacred" as an external,
transcendent power? My tentative answer is that new theorizations of the
sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European
world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction
of "religion" and "nature" as universal categories. From early modern Eu-
rope-through what is retrospectively called the secular Enlightenment
and into the long nineteenth century, within Christian Europe and in irs
overseas possessions-the things, words, and practices distinguished or set
apart by "Nature Folk" were constituted by Europeans as "fetish" and
"taboo."'b What had been regarded in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies in theological terms as "idolatry" and "devil-worship"37 (devotion to
false gods) became the secular concept of"superstition" (a meaningless sur-
vival)JB in the framework of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evolu-
tionary thought. But they remained objecrs and relations falsely given
truth status, wrongly endowed with virtuous power. They had to be con-
stituted as categories of illusion and oppression before people could be lib-
erated from them, as Freud knew when he used "fetish" and "taboo" to
identify symptoms of primitive repressions in the psychopathology of
modern individuals.
It may therefore be suggested that "profanation" is a kind of forcible
emancipation from error and despotism. Reason requires that false things
be either proscribed and eliminated, or transcribed and re-sited as objects
to be seen, heard, and touched by the properly educated senses. By suc-
cessfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it) universal reason dis-

35· According to John Milbank, a profound shift occurred in the later Mid-
dle Ages in the way the "sacrament" was understood, making it the external dress
of spiritual power, a semantic shift that had far-reaching consequences for modem
rcligiosiry (personal communication). See also Michel de Certcau, J11e Mystic Fa-
bk, Chicago: University of ChiCigo Press, 1992, especially chapter 3·
36. William Pien.. "The problem of the fetish, I," Rr~, no. 9· 1985; Steiner,
op. cit.
37· Margarc:t T. Hodgen, Early Anthropoklgy in the Sixteenth and &Wtltemth
Cmturies, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Universiry Press, 1964.
38. Sec Nicole Belmont, "Superstition and Popular Religion in Western So-
cieties," in Bt'~m Bfliifand Transgrnsion, cd. M. Izard and P. Smith, Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1982.
36 SECULAR

plays its own status as legitimate power. By empowering new things, this
status is further confirmed. So the "sacred right to property~ was made
universal after church estates and common lands were freed. And the
~sanctity of conscience" was constituted a universal principle in opposition
to ecclesiastical authority and the rules casuistry authorized. At the very
moment of becoming secular, these claims were transcendentalized, and
they set in motion legal and moral disciplines to protect themselves (with
violence where necessary) as universal. 39 Although profanation appears to
shift the gaze from the transcendental to the mundane, what it does is re-
arrange barriers between the illusory and the actual.
Developing a Durkheimian insight, Richard Comstock has suggested
that "the sacred, as a kind of behaving, is not merely a number of immedi-
ate appearances, but a set of rules-prescriptions, proscriptions, interdic-
tions-that determine the shape of the behavior and whether it is to count
as an instance of the category in question. "40 This is helpful, but I think
one also needs to attend to the tripartite fact that (1) all rule-governed be-
havior carries social sanctions, but that (z) the severity of the social sanc-
tions varies according to the danger that the infringement of the rule con-
stitutes for a particular ordering of society, and that (3) such assessments of
danger do not remain historically unchanged. Attention to this fact should
shift our preoccupation with definitions of"the sacred" as an object of ex-
perience to the wider question of how a heterogeneous landscape of power
(moral, political, economic) is constituted, what disciplines (individual and
collective) are necessary to it. This does not mean that "the sacred" must be
regarded as a mask of power, but that we should look to what makes cer-
tain practices conceptually possible, desired, mandatory-including the
everyday practices by which the subject's experience is disciplined. 41 Such
39· Thus Durkheim on secular morality: "Ainsi le domaine de Ia morale est
comme entoun! d'une barriere mysterieuse qui en tient a l'ccart les profanateurs,
tout comme le domaine religieux est sustrait aux atteinces du profane. C'est un
domaine sacrr." Cited in lsambert, p. 134-
40. "A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious
Studies." Thf journal oftlu Ammcan Aaulnny ofRrligion. val. XLIX, no. + 198t,
p. 631.
41. It is of some interest that attempts to introduce a unified concept of "the
sacred" into non-European languages have met with revealing problems of trans-
lation. Thus although the Arabic word qaddsa is usually glossed as "sacredness" in
English, it remains the case that it will not do in all the contexts where the English
term is now used. Translation of "the sacred" calls for a variety of words (muh4r-
 What Might an Anthropology ofS~cu!.zrism Look Lik~! 37

an approach, I submit, would give us a better understanding of how the sa-

cred (and therefore the profane) can become the object not only of reli-
gious thought but of secular practice too.

Myth and the Scriptures

I referred above to some functions of myth as secular discourse in

Enlightenment an and manners. The pan played by myth as sacred dis-
course in religion and poetry during the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies is more complicated. Inevitably, in what follows I must select and
simplify.
It has been remarked that the German Higher Criticism liberated the
Bible from wthe letter of divine inspiration" and allowed it to emerge as wa
system of human significances."•~ We should note, however, that that lib-
eration signals a far-reaching change in the sense ofwinspiration"-from an
authorized reorientation of life toward a telos, into a psychology of artistry
whose sourc~ is obscure-and therefore becomes the object of speculation
(belief I knowledge).4 3 It was a remarkable transformation. For in the for-
mer, the divine word, both spoken and written, was necessarily also mate-
rial. As such, the inspired words were the object of a particular person's rev-
erence, the means of his or her practical devotions at particular times and
places. The body, taught over time to listen, to recite, to move, to be Slill,
to be silenr, engaged with the acoustics of words, with their sound, feel,

ntm, mutahhar, mukhtasr 'bi-1- 'ibtUI4, and so on), each of which connects with dif-
fen:nr kinds of behavior. (See below, my discussion of the self-conscious resort to
myth in modern Arabic poetry.)
4~. E. S. Shaffer, "K,b/4 Khan" and The Fall ofJerusalem: Th~ Mythological
Schaol in Biblkal Criticism and Suu!.zr Liunttu~Y, IJ?O-r88o, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975, p. 10.
43· In the middle of the twentieth cenrury, T. S. Eliot attempted a formula-
tion that embraced both religious and secular senses of the notion: "if the word 'in-
spiration' is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer
is uttering something which he docs not wholly understand-or which he may
even misinrerpret when the inspiration has departed from him. This is certainly
true of poetic inspiration .... (The poet) need not know what his poetry will
come to mean to others, and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his
prophetic utterance." "Virgil and the Christian World" [1951), in On Pomy and
Pons, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957, p. 137·
38 SECULAR

and look. Practice at devotions deepened the inscription of sound, look,

and feel in his sensorium. When the devotee heard God speak. there was a
sensuous connection between inside and outside, a fusion between signifier
and signified. The proper reading of the scriptures that enabled her to htar
divinity speak depended on disciplining the senses (especially hearing,
speech, and sight).
In contrast, the mythic method used by the Higher Biblical Criticism
rendered the materiality of scriprural sounds and marks into a piritual poem
whose effect was generated inside the subject as believer independent of the
senses. An earlier change had assisted this shift. As John Montag has argued,
the notion ofKrevelation" signifying a statement that issues from a supernat-
ural being and that requires mental assent on the part of the believer dates
only from the early modern period. For medieval theologians, he writes,
"revelation has to do primarily with one's perspective on things in light of
one's final end. It is not a supplementary packet of information about 'facts'
which are round the bend, as it were, from rational comprehension or phys-
ical observation."« According to Thomas Aquinas, the prophetic gift of rev-
elation is a passion to be undergone, not a faculty to be used, and among the
words he uses to refer to it is inspiratio:1s A nco-Platonic hierarchy of medi-
ations linked divinity to all creatures, allowing the medium of language to
facilitate the union of the divine with the human.
With the Reformation (and the Counter-Reformation) an unmedi-
ated divinity became scripturally disclosable, and his revelations pointed at
once to his presence and his intentions. Thus language acquired the status
of being extra-real, capable of"representing" and "rdlecting"-and there-
fore also of"masking" the real. "The txpmmmt, in the modern sense of the
word," notes Michel de Certeau, "was born with the deontologizing oflan-
guage, to which the birth of a linguistics also corresponds. In Bacon and
many others, the experiment stood opposite language as that which guar-
anteed and verified the Iauer. This split between a deicric language {it
shows and/or organizes) and a referential experimentation (it escapes
and/or guarantees) structures modern science, including 'mystical sci-
ence. '" 46 Where faith had once been a virtue, it now acquired an epistemo-
logical sense. Faith became a way of knowing supernatural objects, parallel
44- John Montag. "Revelation: The False leg2cy ofSu:i=," in RAdkal Ort!Jo-
doxy, cd. J. Milbank. C. Pickstock, and G. Ward, New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 43·
45· Montag. p. 46.
46. Michel de Ccrteau, Thr Mysti• Fabk; Vo/umr Ont: Tht Sixumth anJ
Sromumtb Cmturirs, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. p. 123.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
than the Fifth Avenue, he proceeds to the Canadian side of
the Falls. Here he spends a few hours, and then returns,
without encountering more inconvenience than saving his
hotel expenses by buying a suit of clothes, on which he pays
no duty on his return. Thereupon he finds that by so simple a
process he has obtained Copyright in the United States, in the
dominion of Canada, in Australia, India, France, Germany,
and Great Britain! We can imagine the lively twinkle of his eye
as he crosses the Suspension-bridge, to think what cute
people the Britishers are to have secured all these privileges
for him.
We believe, therefore, that American authors are not very
anxious about the matter. By taking a little trouble, they can
secure all they wish.
English authors have not been fairly treated. They are at
great disadvantage, and must be satisfied for the present to
work for fame, or but for little more. Fortunately for them, the
American publishers, seeing that they do what they are legally
entitled to do, are quarrelling amongst themselves, and are
crying out for protection.
[Here is introduced the case of an American publishing-
house stated by themselves, which concludes thus:—
... “A review of these facts naturally suggests the reflection
that the interests of the book-trade in this country, no less
than the protection of authors in their just rights, require
further legislation at the hands of Congress. It is high time for
the passage of a well-considered International Copyright-Law,
such as will wipe away from our country the reproach of what
are known as ‘pirated editions.’”]
We quite agree with this. Some legislation is called for. But
now comes a third party, the public, which has its rights as
well as the others. We shall very likely incur some odium for
admitting that the million have any rights whatever to the
productions of men of letters, and may be told that
emanations of the brain are as much the private property of
their authors as the guineas are of the man of business. So
they are, so long as they keep them, to themselves; but when
they have communicated them to the world they are no longer
their exclusive property. It is right that they should have a
modified protection, and we think it must be admitted that
English authors are amply protected in their own country. We
think, however, that the American public will not be disposed
to give them the same amount of protection there, nor is it
well that they should have it. They are, however, entitled to
some protection, and we hope the day is not far distant when
English authors will reap some solid advantages wherever the
English language is spoken. We are disposed to think that
seven years would generally be long enough for the purpose;
although so short a time would be hard upon such men as
Grote, Motley, Merivale, Webster, and others, whose lives
have been spent upon their works. We take it for granted that
the law, when modified, will be the same on both sides, and
that Dickens and Longfellow will receive equal treatment. We
are too selfish to give up our cheap editions of Longfellow,
and American citizens are not what we take them to be, if
they would, for a whole generation, debar themselves from
popular editions of Dickens.

(From The Bookseller, June 1, 1869.)

Copyright in Canada.—Letter by the Times’

correspondent:—“Under the English Law, English Copyrights
reprinted in the United States are imported into Canada,
subject to the same duty as other imported articles; but these
Copyrights cannot be reprinted in Canada, the consequence
being that the Canadian public is almost entirely dependent
on the United States for reprints. The English author is
seriously injured, inasmuch as not one-tenth part of the
reprints which find their way to Canada are entered at the
Custom-house or pay duty.”... Mr. Rose replies:—“The
undersigned is ready to admit that the principle involved is
 theoretically at variance with the general policy of the mother-
country, in so far as the object of that policy is to secure to
authors an absolute monopoly in works of literature for a term
of years; but it must be remembered that the necessity for this
exceptional legislation arises out of a previous partial
departure from this theoretical policy, which in its practical
operation is shown to afford a premium to the industrial
interests of a foreign country, &c. If it could be shown that the
concessions asked for would result in any way to the practical
disadvantage of the author, or lessen the protection which it is
intended to secure to literary labour, there might be some
reason for withholding them. If the rate of duty, whether import
or excise, were inadequate, it would be an equally reasonable
argument against the extension of the law; and in that case
the rate could be augmented. But the undersigned fails to see
any reason why, so long as the importation from abroad is
permitted, the publication in Canada at an equal rate of duty
should be withheld.”

(Extract from the Atlantic Monthly, October,

1867.)

... This work, we repeat, cost the author 24,000 dollars to

produce. Messrs. Harpers sell it at 15 dollars a copy; the
usual allowance to the author is 10 per cent. of the retail
price, and as a rule, it ought not to be more.

(Extract from the American Booksellers’ Guide,

June 1, 1869.)

At a public meeting recently held in Montreal, respecting

the Copyright-Law, it was resolved to apply to Parliament for
an amendment permitting Canadian publishers to print British
Copyright works upon the payment of 12½ per cent. to British
 authors.... The payment by the publisher of 5 or 10 per cent.,
or of a fixed sum, for a Copyright of a book, whether by an
American or British author, does not necessarily increase the
price of the book.

(Extracts from an Article in the Athenæum, July

17, 1869.)

This great question is of especial interest at the present

time, in consequence of opinions and demands put forward
by Canada with relation to Copyright property in the United
Kingdom. It appears that for some time past a
correspondence has been carried on between the Canadian
Government and the Imperial authorities upon the subject of
“Copyright-Law in Canada.” This “Correspondence” (having
been laid before the Canadian Parliament) has been printed
and published. It commences with a resolution of the
Canadian Senate (passed 15th of May, 1868) that the
Governor-General should be prayed “to impress upon Her
Majesty’s Government the justice and expediency of
extending the privileges of the Imperial Copyright Act, 1847,
so that whenever reasonable provision and protection shall, in
Her Majesty’s opinion, be secured to the authors, Colonial
reprints of British Copyright works shall be placed on the
same footing as foreign reprints in Canada, by which means
British authors will be more effectually protected in their
rights, and a material benefit will be conferred on the printing
industry of the Dominion.”...
All the North-American colonies soon availed themselves of
this Act of 1847, and Orders in Council were founded upon
them; the rights of British authors being deemed sufficiently
protected by an ad valorem import duty of 20 per cent. upon
the value of the “foreign reprints,” that, being about one-tenth
of the price of the works as published in England!
 There appears to have been no debate in either House
upon this Act of 1847, and it seems to have escaped all public
notice on the part of British authors and publishers during its
progress in Parliament. From the time Her Majesty’s Orders in
Council enabled the colonies to avail themselves of that Act, it
has operated as a stimulus and considerable premium to the
“legalised robbery” of British Copyright property in the United
States, and has, practically, given printers and publishers
there a monopoly in “foreign reprints” of English books. The
Act of 1847 is, therefore, a partial confiscation of those
Copyrights which have been acquired in England under Earl
Stanhope’s Act of 1842, because the colonies have, for the
last twenty years, been almost exclusively supplied with
English books by United States reprints of those books....
In 1867 the “dominion of Canada” was created by the
Imperial Act of that year, which united all Her Majesty’s North
American Colonies. It was then found that printing had
become much cheaper in Canada than it was in the United
States; and amongst the earliest Acts of the first session of
the Canadian Parliament two statutes were passed—one, “An
Act respecting Copyrights;” and the other, “An Act to impose a
Duty upon Foreign Reprints of British Copyright Works.”
Under the first of these Acts, no work of “any person resident
in Great Britain or Ireland” is to be entitled to the protection of
that Act unless “the same shall be printed and published in
Canada.” And under the second of the above Acts it is sought
to keep alive the injustice of allowing “foreign reprints” to be
imported into Canada as a basis for that resolution of the
Canadian Parliament to which we have called attention.
Such are the facts which preceded the Canadian
“Correspondence.” It commences with the resolution which, in
effect, advocates “the justice and expediency” of enabling Her
Majesty’s Canadian subjects at their discretion (and without
the permission of the owners) to confiscate the property of
authors of British Copyright works upon the terms of the
publisher paying such authors a royalty of 12½ per cent. upon
the price of the Canadian reprints, that being about one-tenth
of the publication price of the work in England! It appears the
“justice and expediency” of adopting this Canadian resolution
has been pressed very strongly upon the authorities at the
Colonial-office, and likewise at the Board of Trade, by the
Hon. J. Rose, the Canadian “Minister of Finance.” He frankly
admits that the policy of the Act of 1847 (so far as respects
the protection of British authors) has long been an utter
failure; that the amount of duties received for their benefit “is a
mere trifle;” and that “it is next to impracticable to enforce the
law.” These statements are confirmed by a letter, dated June
11, 1868, from Mr. John Lovell (a Montreal publisher) to Mr.
Rose, and which appears in the Correspondence. Mr. Lovell
says: “At present only a few hundred copies pay duty, and
many thousands pass into the country without registration,
and pay nothing at all; thus having the effect of seriously
injuring the publishers of Great Britain, to the consequent
advantage of those of the United States. I may add that, on
looking over the Custom-house entries to-day, I have found
that not a single entry of an American reprint of an English
Copyright (except the Reviews and one or two magazines)
has been made since the third day of April last, though it is
notorious that an edition of 1,000 of a popular work, coming
under that description, has been received and sold within the
last few days by one bookseller in this city.”
In support of the Canadian resolution, the Hon. J. Rose
likewise urges the greater cheapness now of printing in
Canada than in the United States. Upon this point he is also
confirmed by Mr. Lovell, who says: “It is undeniable that
Canadian printers would be enabled to comply with the
requisite conditions (that is, of paying a royalty of 12½ per
cent. to the author), and produce books, thanks to the local
advantages, at a much cheaper rate than they can be
produced in the States, and so bring about a large export
business.”...
 This application on the part of the Canadians is answered
at considerable length by the Board of Trade; the substance
of that answer being “that the question raised is far too
important, and involves too many considerations of imperial
policy, to render it possible to comply with that application. My
Lords, however, fully admit that the anomalous position of
Canadian publishers with respect to their rivals in the United
States of America is a matter which calls for careful inquiry;
but they feel that such an inquiry cannot be satisfactorily
undertaken without, at the same time, taking into
consideration various other questions connected with the
imperial laws of Copyright and the policy of International
Copyright Treaties, and they are, therefore, of opinion that the
subject should be treated as a whole, and that an endeavour
should be made to place the general law of Copyright,
especially that part of it which concerns the whole continent of
North America, on a more satisfactory footing. The grievance
of which the Canadian publishers complain has arisen out of
the arrangement sanctioned by Her Majesty’s Government in
1847, under which United States reprints of English works
entitled to Copyright in the United Kingdom were admitted into
Canada on payment of an import duty, instead of being, as in
the United Kingdom, absolutely prohibited as illegal.”...

A circular by Mr. Purday contains the following:—

A fact transpired only a few days since of an order being

sent for some of the musical works published in Bond-street,
on which it was stated that they must be “American printed
copies”.... It is said that the Americans have the means of
disposing of 30,000 or 40,000 copies of any popular book or
song they choose to reproduce. This, of course, is a fine
premium for supplanting the English publisher in the sale of
his own Copyright works in his own colonies.
 FROM A MANUSCRIPT STATEMENT BY MR.
PURDAY.
The Act of 1 and 2 Vict., c. 69, was passed into a law under the
title of “An Act for securing to Authors in certain cases the benefit of
International Copyright,” the date of which was July 31, 1838. The
14th section is in these words: “And be it enacted, that the author of
any book to be, after the passing of this Act, first published out of
Her Majesty’s dominions, or his assigns, shall have no Copyright
therein within Her Majesty’s dominions, otherwise than such (if any)
as he may become entitled to under this Act.” Section 9 says that no
protection of Copyright shall be given to a foreign author, unless
such protection shall be reciprocated to an English author by the
country to which the foreign author belongs. Now, nothing can be
clearer than that the Act of 5 and 6 Vict., c. 45, never contemplated
giving protection to a foreign author; but, on the contrary, that it was
passed solely for the benefit of English authors.... At last the whole
matter was brought before the House of Lords, where it was decreed
that a foreign author was not an author within the meaning of the
Acts of Parliament, and could neither claim any Copyright himself
nor assign any to an English subject, unless he was resident in the
British dominions at the time he sold his work, and published it there
before there was any publication abroad. This, after eleven years of
litigation by various parties, among whom my brother was the most
persistent defendant, he being perfectly convinced that if the subject
came to be thoroughly investigated, no such claims as were set up
by the monopolists could be maintained either at common law or in
equity. The House of Lords, however, were not called upon to decide
what was meant by the term residence. This, therefore, gave rise to
an attempt on the part of an English bookseller to contrive a scheme
which, to the not very creditable honour of English jurisprudence, as
it appears to my humble understanding, succeeded. The scheme
was this: An American authoress of little repute wrote a novel, one
copy of the manuscript of which, it is said, was handed over, for a
consideration, to this English bookseller, to publish in England; the
work was got ready on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the
other side, and, after agreeing as to the date of entry at Stationers’
Hall, and the publication of the same in London, the lady was desired
to go over the Victoria-bridge into Canada, one of the British
dominions, and remain there a few hours or days, while the
publication took place in London; then she was to go back again for
the protection of the same work, as a Copyright, in her own country.
Meanwhile, another English publisher, hearing that such an artifice
was about to be attempted, procured an American copy of the said
work, and republished it in a cheap form. The consequence was, that
an application for an injunction was applied for by the first party,
which was granted, and appealed against to the Lords Justices, who
gave it as their opinion that the word “author” in the Act of Parliament
was to be interpreted in its widest sense, and that there was no
limitation to that word in the Act of Parliament; therefore, it was
maintained that any author could have a Copyright in England who
complied with the requisitions of the Act, and this defective scheme
was confirmed by Lord Chancellor Cairns, who remarked that none
of the former decisions had stated that it was other than necessary
to be in the British dominions during the time of the publication of the
work. This device may have facilitated the desire for an international
law upon a righteous foundation, now so loudly advocated in
America.
In the judgment given in the House of Lords, in the case of
Boosey’s assumption to the exclusive right of printing the opera of
Bellini, the subject of residence in England was debated, and Lord
St. Leonards used these remarkable words: “Now the American
Legislature have no such difficulty. They have expressly enacted that
Copyright there shall be confined to natives, or persons resident
within the United States. Those are the express words of their
statute.” And we may remark, farther, that unless an alien author has
resided at least twelve months in America, and has made a
declaration in these words, “I do declare on oath that it is bonâ fide
my intention to become a citizen of the United States,” &c., he
cannot obtain the privilege of Copyright in anything he may publish
there. This conflict of opinion must necessarily end, therefore, in a
new Act of Parliament, which has been long needed to settle this
and other much-vexed questions of Copyright.
 LETTER FROM THE SAME.
24, Great Marlborough-street, June 15, 1869.
Dear Sir,—I think your suggestion of the payment of a royalty upon
the publication of an author’s work, if made mutual in both America
and Great Britain, would go far to reconcile the two nations to
abandon the present unfair reprisals; more especially if it were left to
the option of any publisher to reproduce such works in the form most
suited to his particular trade. Some publishers choose to publish in
one form, and some in another, more or less expensive, according to
the taste or want of their customers. It is true, there might be some
difficulty in arranging the percentage per copy upon such a scheme;
but that might be regulated according to the price and style of getting
up of the work, which should always be determined upon before the
work is issued.
The question of Copyright in music is one which presents features
appertaining to itself exclusively. One feature which it shares along
with the other fine arts is this great fact: that music is a universal
language, and addresses itself equally to all nations. Its range,
therefore, is far wider than literature. It needs no translation.
The taste for music is more widely diffused than that for painting
and sculpture, from which it differs in a way that causes very
considerable embarrassment when the question of Copyright comes
to be particularly dealt with. Like paintings and statues, music may
be reproduced in a permanent form; but, unlike them, the chief value
of its Copyright privilege is reproduction in sounds, and, therefore, in
a form unsubstantial and transient. He, therefore, who would deal
satisfactorily with this branch of the wide question of Copyright has
to provide for a demand, and overcome difficulties, such as do not
belong to literary and artistic Copyright. But, still further, music—say
that of an opera—may be separated into parts without serious
diminution of its revenue-bearing value. Once more, there is the
libretto; it belongs to the range of literature. Questions, therefore,
arise, and must be provided for, with respect to the affinity of that
part with the music, its reproduction in the form of translation, and its
being, as it occasionally is, the work and property of an author other
than the composer of the music.
There is still so much uncertainty, approaching to confusion, as to
what really is the law, especially with regard to international
Copyright, in this branch, that thorough revision and immediate
international negotiations are absolutely necessary.
The laws of Copyright should be divested of all ambiguity and
superfluous legal verbiage. In fact, they should be made so plain that
“he that runs may read,” and understand them. The payment of a
royalty on foreign works is not a new thing here. Chappell pays 1s. a
copy, besides a considerable sum for the Copyright, of the last work
of Rossini—viz., the “Messe Solennelle,” for the exclusive selling of
the work, and for the right of performing it here. Any other
information I can give you I shall be happy to afford.
I am, dear Sir, yours obediently,
C. H. Purday.
To R. A. Macfie, Esq., M.P.
 EXTRACTS FROM
CORRESPONDENCE ON COPYRIGHT
LAW IN CANADA.
Laid before the Canadian Parliament by Command of His
Excellency the Governor-General.

Extract from a Report of a Committee of the

Honourable the Privy Council of Canada,
approved by His Excellency the Governor-
General in Council, on the 27th May, 1868.
“On the recommendation of the Honourable the Minister of
Customs, the Committee advise an uniform ad valorem duty
throughout this Dominion of 12½ per cent., being the rate fixed and
collected in the Province of Canada, previous to the Confederation of
the Provinces—and to establish such regulations and conditions as
may be subsistent with any Act of the Parliament of the United
Kingdom then in force as may be deemed requisite and equitable
with regard to the admission of such books, and to the distribution of
the proceeds of such duty to or among the party or parties
beneficially interested in the Copyright.”

(From Memorandum by the Minister of Finance.)

“Not one-tenth part of the reprints which find their way to Canada
are entered at the Custom-house, or pay duty.... It is proposed, in
order perfectly to secure the English author, that every Canadian
publisher who reprints English Copyrights should take out a licence,
and that effectual practical checks should be interposed, so that the
duty on the number of copies actually issued from the press should
be paid into the Canadian Government by Canadian publishers for
the benefit of the English authors. It is believed that the English
authors would benefit enormously by the proposed change. At
present the amount received by Canada for duty on English
Copyrights, and paid over by Canada to the Imperial Government for
the benefit of English authors, is a mere trifle.”

(From Mr. Lovell.)

“Montreal, June 11, 1868.
“In 1849, I believe, the Government of Canada, with the sanction
of Her Majesty the Queen, gave United States publishers the right to
bring reprints of English Copyright works into this country on
payment of Customs duty of 15 per cent., which has since been
reduced to 12½ per cent., the proceeds of the duties to be forwarded
to the English authors as a compensation for the privileges secured
to the American publishers.
“The people of the Dominion, and especially the printing and
publishing interests, feel that they ought to possess at least equal
privileges to those conceded to the foreigner. There are several
establishments in the Dominion that would esteem it a great boon to
be allowed to reprint English Copyrights on the same terms as are
now secured to United States publishers, and would gladly pay the
12½ per cent. to the English authors on the total number of copies
printed, sure to be very considerable. At present only a few hundred
copies pay duty, but many thousands pass into the country without
registration, and pay nothing at all; thus having the effect of seriously
injuring the publishers of Great Britain, to the consequent advantage
of those of the United States.”

(Extract from Letter from Sir Louis Mallet to the

Under-Secretary of State, C.O.)
 “It is obvious that, looking to the geographical position of the
United States and the North American Confederation, any
arrangement with respect to Copyright which does not apply to both
must be always imperfect and unsatisfactory, and it is therefore
extremely desirable, if possible, that the Canadian question should
be considered in connexion with any negotiations conducted with the
United States Government.
“Another serious objection to the sanction by Her Majesty’s
Government of such a proposal appears to my Lords to be, that,
while the public policy of the mother-country enforces an absolute
monopoly in works of literature for a term of years, it is very
undesirable to admit in British Colonial possessions an arrangement
which, whatever advantages it may possess (and my Lords fully
admit that much may be said in its favour), rests upon a wholly
different principle.
“It would be difficult, if such a principle were admitted in the British
Colonies, to refuse to recognise it in the case of foreign countries,
and thus it might come to pass that the British public might be called
upon to pay a high price for their books, in order to afford what is
held to be the necessary encouragement to British authors, while the
subjects of other countries and the Colonial subjects of Her Majesty
would enjoy the advantages of cheap British literature provided for
them at the expense of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom.”

(Extract from a Paper by the Minister of Finance

on the Copyright-Law in Canada.)
“The consequence of this anomalous state of the Law is that
Canada receives large supplies of American reprints of English
Copyright books, which are sold at a much higher rate than if printed
in Canada; while, at the same time, so generally is the payment of
the 12½ per cent. Customs duty evaded, and so trifling is the whole
amount realised from that source (the total received last year for the
whole Dominion of Canada being only $799.43, or 164l. 5s. 3d.
sterling, the average of the preceding four years being only 115l. 1s.
3d., sterling), that so far as regards the pecuniary or other interests
of English authors, for whose protection the duty was imposed and in
whose behalf it is collected, the effect is practically the same as if the
reprints were avowedly admitted duty free....
“It is believed that if this privilege were extended to Canadian
publishers, they would avail themselves of it to a very large extent,
and as the Excise duty of 12½ per cent. could, under proper
regulations, be very easily levied, a substantial revenue would
accrue therefrom for the benefit of English authors; and further, that
a great impetus would be given to the interests of printers,
publishers, paper manufacturers, type founders, and other important
kindred branches of material industry, and indirectly to the interests
of literature and literary men....
“An American or any other foreign author, by publishing his work
first in the United Kingdom, may obtain for himself all the benefits of
the English Copyright-Law. One of those benefits, as the law now
stands, is to prohibit its reprint in any portion of Her Majesty’s
dominions out of the United Kingdom. He can equally procure its
Copyright in the United States, and the consequence is that the price
of literature is enhanced to British subjects in all Her Majesty’s
Colonial possessions, since to them and to them only can the
prohibition to republish apply or be made effectual.
“England does not confine the protection which she thus extends
to her own authors. The foreign author is protected against all her
Colonial subjects, provided he publishes first within the confines of
Great Britain and Ireland. She will not recognise a publication in a
Colonial possession as a compliance with the Copyright Act, but
limits the place of publication to the United Kingdom.
“Such the undersigned understands to have been the solemn
interpretation of the law by the House of Lords in the recent case of
‘Routledge and Lowe’ (‘New Law Report,’ Appeal Cases, vol. ii., pp.
100-121), and he would very strongly call attention to the unfair
position in which the policy of that law places the Canadian publisher
and the Canadian public.
 “The mere circumstance of the publishing in the United Kingdom
gives the author a monopoly throughout the entire area of the British
dominions—that author, in the opinion of the then Lord Chancellor
Cairns, need not be a native-born subject of the Crown; he need not
be an alien friend sojourning in the United Kingdom; he need not be
sojourning in a British Colony, but he may be a foreigner residing
abroad. This protection is afforded, in the language of Lord Cairns, to
induce the author to publish his work in the United Kingdom.
“If the policy of England, in relation to Copyright, is to stimulate, by
means of the protection secured to literary labour, the composition of
works of learning and utility, that policy is not incompatible with such
a modification of law as will place the Colonial publisher on a footing
of equality not only with the publisher in the United States, but even
with the publisher in the United Kingdom....
“If the rate of duty, whether import or excise, were inadequate, it
would be an equally reasonable argument against the extension of
the law; and in that case the rate could be augmented.”
 TENDENCIES OF COPYRIGHT
AMENDERS.
That pretensions under Copyright are becoming so formidable as
to demand very serious attention on the part of statesmen and of all
who desire to maintain the integrity of our national inheritance of a
world-wide, heartily-united empire, and imperial freedom from
odious, inquisitorial, and impracticable restraints, especially such as
might hinder intellectual and moral development, will be evident to
any person who takes pains to study and follow out to their
necessary consequences the provisions contained in the following
transcripts from a Bill lately introduced by an ex-Lord Chancellor, “for
Consolidating and Amending the Law of Copyright in Works of Fine
Art:”

Fine Arts Copyright Consolidation and Amendment. [32 Vict.]

Design.—An original conception represented by the author
thereof in any work of fine art.
Drawing or Painting.—Every original drawing or painting,
made in any manner and material, and by any process.
Photograph shall mean and include every original
photograph.
Sculpture.—Every original work, either in the round, in
relief, or intaglio, made in any material, and by any process.
Engraving.—Every original engraving and lithograph made
upon a plate, block, or slab, of any material, by any process,
whereby impressions may be taken from such plate, block, or
slab, and the impressions taken from the same.
Work of Fine Art.—Every drawing, painting, photograph,
work of sculpture, and engraving as herein-before interpreted.
 Extending to all parts of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, and
all the colonies and possessions of the Crown which now are,
or hereafter may be, created or acquired.
3. The author of every original work of fine art, if made, or
first sold, after the commencement of this Act, such author
being a British subject, or resident within any part of the
British dominions at the time such work shall be made or first
sold, and the assigns of such author, shall have the Copyright
of sole and exclusive right of copying, reproducing, and
multiplying such work, and the design thereof, in the British
dominions, by any means, and of any size, for the term of the
natural life of such author, and thirty years after his death, but
subject to the following conditions and restrictions; (that is to
say), &c.
9. If the author of any work of fine art in which there shall be
subsisting Copyright, after having become divested of such
Copyright, or if any other person, not being the proprietor for
the time being of the Copyright in any work of fine art, shall by
any means unlawfully repeat, copy, imitate, or otherwise
multiply for sale, hire, exhibition, or distribution, or cause or
procure to be repeated, copied, imitated, or otherwise
multiplied for sale, hire, exhibition, or distribution, any such
work, or the design thereof, or any part of such design, or,
knowing that any such repetition, copy, or other imitation has
been unlawfully made, shall import or export into or out of any
part of the British dominions, or sell, publish, let to hire,
exhibit, or distribute, or offer for sale, hire, exhibition, or
distribution, or cause or procure to be so imported, or
exported, or sold, published, let to hire, distributed, or offered
for sale, hire, exhibition, or distribution, any unlawful
repetition, copy, or imitation of any such work, or of the design
thereof, such person for every such offence shall forfeit to the
registered proprietor for the time being of the Copyright
thereof a sum not exceeding twenty pounds, and not less
than two pounds, for every first offence, and not less than five
pounds, for every subsequent offence, &c.
11. All repetitions, copies, or imitations of any work of fine
art, or the design thereof, wherein there shall be subsisting
Copyright under this Act, and which, contrary to the provisions
of this Act, shall have been made in any foreign State, are
hereby absolutely prohibited to be imported into any part of
the British dominions, except by or with the consent of the
registered proprietor of the Copyright thereof, or his agent
authorised in writing; and if the registered proprietor for the
time being of any such Copyright or his agent shall declare, or
if any officer of Her Majesty’s Customs shall suspect, that any
goods imported are prohibited repetitions, copies, or
imitations of any such work of fine art, or of the design
thereof, then such goods may be detained, unpacked, and
examined by the officers of Her Majesty’s Customs.
12. The Commissioners of Customs shall cause to be
made, and publicly exposed at the several ports of the United
Kingdom, and in Her Majesty’s possessions abroad, printed
lists of all works of fine art wherein Copyright shall be
subsisting, and as to which the registered proprietor for the
time being of such Copyright, or his agent, shall have given
notice in writing to the said Commissioners that such
Copyright exists, stating in such notice when such Copyright
expires, and shall have made and subscribed a declaration
before the collector of the Customs, or any justice of the
peace, at some port or place in the United Kingdom or in Her
Majesty’s possessions abroad, that the contents of such
notice are true. The provisions contained in the Acts now in
force, or at any time to be in force, regarding Her Majesty’s
Customs, as to the application to the courts and judges by
any person aggrieved by the entry of any book in the lists of
books to be made and publicly exposed by the said
Commissioners under the said Acts, and the expunging any
such entry, shall apply to the entry of any work of fine art in
the lists thereof to be made by virtue of this Act, in the same
manner as if such provisions were herein expressly enacted,
with all necessary variations in relation to such last-mentioned
lists, &c.
13. Every person who shall import or export, or cause to be
imported or exported, into or out of any part of the British
dominions, or shall exchange, publish, sell, let to hire, exhibit,
or distribute, or offer, or hawk, or carry about, or keep for sale,
hire, exhibition, or distribution, any unlawful copy, repetition,
or imitation of any work of fine art, in which, or in the design
whereof, there shall be subsisting registered Copyright, shall
be bound, on demand in writing, delivered to him or left for
him at his last known dwelling-house or place of business, by
or on behalf of the registered proprietor for the time being of
such Copyright, to give to the person requiring the same, or
his attorney or agent, within forty-eight hours after such
demand, full information in writing of the name and address of
the person from whom, and of the times when, he shall have
imported, purchased, or obtained such unlawful copy,
repetition, or imitation, also the number of such copies,
repetitions, or imitations which he has obtained, and also to
produce to the person requiring such information all invoices,
books, and other documents relating to the same; and it shall
be lawful for any justice of the peace, on information on oath
of such demand having been made, and of the refusal or
neglect to comply therewith, to summon before him the
person guilty of such refusal or neglect, and on being satisfied
that such demand ought to be complied with, to order such
information to be given and such production to be made
within a reasonable time to be fixed by him.
14. Upon proof by the oath of one credible person before
any justice of the peace, court, sheriff, or other person having
jurisdiction in any proceeding under this Act that there is
reasonable cause to suspect that any person has in his
possession, or in any house, shop, or other place for sale,
hire, distribution, or public exhibition, any copy, repetition, or
imitation of any work of fine art in which, or in the design