Colloquium Series: “An Interface with the Anthropology of Secularism: A Little Scholarly Genealogy and Beyond”

2018 Mar 30, Friday
Seminar Hall, 10th Floor, Pixel A (Azim Premji University)
An Interface with the Anthropology of Secularism

About the Lecture

My lecture is an attempt at forging the basis of a revitalized analytics of secularism, one that takes the very normative question of our secular moral/legal commitments seriously, while juxtaposing the latter against the claims of an anthropology (and history) of secularism. In perspective, throughout the course of my lecture, is what I am terming a little scholarly genealogy that I hope to complicate through a series of traversals in the literature given over to the anthropology of secularism. Built into the structure of this appraisal is a framework seeking to redeem normative secularity from the genealogical constrictions that define and/or frame it. The reflection also implicates a thought about ‘normativity’ as performative, one that could re-orient our reflections about contentious socio-political norms and ideals such as secularism.

About the Speaker

Sasheej Hegde teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. His research and teaching has concerned a subject area intermediate between ‘philosophy’, social and political theory, and culture critique: the question, specifically, of the enabling histories with which one works and the conceptual basis of human inquiry and socio-political activism. More directly, his work has implicated three domains of inquiry: the Structure and Dynamics of Disciplines; the Interpretation of Modernity; and Research on Normative Political Languages. He has published fairly extensively in each of these spheres, while invariably retaining a reflective focus and incorporating many epistemological questions and socio-historical settings. His current work actively negotiates the design of inquiry across disciplinary domains, while also opening up to new questions of law/ethics and constitutional jurisprudence.