How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions âsecularâ, âsacredâ and âreligionâ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
The Thai King as Secular and Sacred
Again, thousands and thousands of people have come to the sacred heart of the âCity of Angelsâ (khrungthep) to get as close as possible to the place where King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand (r. 1946â2016) will be cremated. One day earlier, at 5 AM, the gate had opened briefly to allow several thousand people in, most of whom had been waiting for three days and nights, enduring burning sun and heavy rains, in the hope of being among the happy few to enter. The early morning television news interviews one of them, a young woman in tears, overwhelmed by exhaustion and gratefulness: she will show her love, respect and gratitude to âfatherâ in the closest proximity possible for an ordinary person. This Thursday, the day of the actual cremation, people have been queuing since the early morning at various replicas of the Royal Crematorium Stadium, to offer sandalwood funeral flowers in commemoration of the king. It would take people up to eight hours to reach the spaces in front of the cremation replicas to offer their flowers. At the Royal Plaza, the square with the most important replica in terms of size and centrality, the crowd has grown to such a size that even the streets leading to the actual beginning of the queue are completely congested. What makes people want to endure such hardships?
One possible answer lies in the specific figure and reign of the king himself. The death of King Bhumibol on 13 October 2016 left many in the kingdom in grief and confusion. With his seventy yearsâ reign, only a few of his subjects had lived without him on the throne. In the general perception, the king, working hard and suffering difficult circumstances, had lived a life of self-sacrifice for the wellbeing of the nation and the people. In tribute, people would be very much willing to endure their one-day-only hardship.
Another possible answer lies in a specific entanglement of religion and politics. The emotional mass pilgrimage to the mourning site and the eventual cremation for one part attests to the sacred status of the Thai king. This sacredness draws on Hindu-Buddhist notions of the ârighteous rulerâ whose charismatic royal merit and virtue (bun barami) are supposed to protect and sustain the nation and its people. In this perception, the monarch is regarded as a beneficial power above politics. In the course of his long reign, King Bhumibol gained currency as âpillar of stabilityâ in a country where politics are characterized by a seemingly endless sequence of coups dâĂ©tats, new constitutions and corruption scandals.
The sacrality of the king seems obvious in this context, yet it would be wrong to suggest that peopleâs devotion to the king is owed exclusively to the religiosity of the Thai people, to a kind of inherent magical thinking. It is not uncommon for Western media outlets to present Thai royal rituals as somewhat outlandish expressions of extreme religiosity. As orientalist perceptions of Asian religiosity tend to do, such exoticism blinds our understanding of specific intricacies of religiousâpolitical entanglements. For instance, when highlighting the religious dimension, one obscures the fact that the Thai king is not only a religious figure, but also someone of political presence in a secular state, if only as the single most important national symbol.
Within the legal framework of the Thai state, a nominally democratic regime of popular sovereignty upholding a religiously pluriform society, the kingâthe head of stateâhas no formal political authority, and his tasks are limited to specific ceremonial executive duties. The Thai stateâwhether governed by an elected government or by a military juntaâfollows a secular model. Yet, whatever the regime, the king is brought forward as the symbol of sovereignty of a democracy. Hence, devotion to the king implies devotion to the (secular) nation. This raises the issue how this formally secular nation relates to the equally uncontested sacredness of the king.1 In order to understand the political and religious implications of a shared mourning ritual such as that for the recently deceased Thai king, we would need to unpack carefully the ways in which religion, secularity, power and popular emotion are conjointly invested.
Such questions how secular and sacred authority is enmeshed make up the central theme of this book. How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiments become entangled? The Thai example resonates in many ways with other spectacles of religious-secular belonging. Across the world religion and nationalism are re-articulated in new modes that often challenge existing paradigms and approaches. From the Brazilian carnaval, with its roots in religious festivities, its development into secular celebration, which in turn is embraced by national politicians as hallmark of Brazilian national identity (see Oosterbaan and Godoy in this volume), to the ways in which religious diversity in Nigeria is performed and challenged by spatial practices such as the Ashura ritual procession, performed by Shia Muslims (see Ibrahim), from public transgressions and expressions of disgust through graffiti in the streets of Berlin (see Verrips), to the magical power of colonial statues in the Dutch national imagination (see Balkenhol), the role of religion and secularity, sacrality and profanation in demarcating communities increasingly demands our attention. Over the past decades, we have witnessed a spectacular rise of often polarizing sentiments concerning religion and national identification across Europe and the globe. In Europe, feelings of home, emotional appeals to community and even the âpeopleâ (Volk) are entwined with and fueled by the increasing presence of religion in European public spheres, long considered to have been thoroughly secularized. For instance, new nationalists and the continentâs political and cultural elites frame the presence of Islam as a threat to the âsecularâ character of the nation. At the same time, religious, for example, âJudeo-Christianâ roots of secular nations are increasingly mobilized (Hemel 2014).
In short, contrary to the commonly held view that nationalism offers an alternative imagined community for the religious community (Cavanaugh 2011), this book is inspired both by recent developments in which religion, secularity and nationalism are interconnected in new ways, as well as by recent scholarly approaches that are sensitive to the interconnections of nationalism and religion. Generally, scholars have traditionally identified nationalism as religion, nationalism or religion, and nationalism and religion (Anderson 1983; Safran 2002). Instead of focusing on the creation of meta-categories, we argue that religion and secular nationalism can both partake in processes of sacralization and de-sacralization. This book focuses, not on the separation of categories, but on the interconnections and the new forms of sacrality that arise as a result of new connections (Meyer and de Witte 2013). As the mourning rituals for the Thai king demonstrate, the emotions involved are connected simultaneously with the secular Thai state, with the king as its religious figurehead, and with the modes of belonging that are produced by its interconnections (see Stengs, this volume). Secular nationalism and religious dimensions are connected in many ways and we need to unpack the many folds carefully and according to the context in which they arise. A focus on emotions, we propose, allows us to bring together practices, both religious and secular, that are often studied in isolation. We propose to approach the way in which emotions are implicated, performed and become legible by using a concept we call âthe secular sacredâ.
The Secular Sacred: A Praxeological Approach
The Thai king, âUpholder of the Buddhist Religion, and Defender of the Faithâ and head of a religiously diverse secular state, but also the sanctification of tolerance as a âJudeo-Christian valueâ, and the human right of religious freedom, used as a global value to define and defend religious practices (see Salem...