By Jacob Copeman and Mascha Schulz
On World Drama Day 2017, a theatre group in Sylhet, Bangladesh, staged a martial arts inspired dance known as Bratachari (bratacārī nr̥tya), which stood out in a programme otherwise made up of street theatre plays advancing clear didactic messages. The Bratachari performance was distinct not only for its aesthetics and impressive rhythmic choreography, but also for the absence of any narrative or explicit message of the kind promulgated in the other acts. And yet, according to the leader of the theatre group, which is known for its radical progressive agenda, the group had chosen to perform this particular dance because of its secular nature: to perform such cultural traditions is to help cultivate secularist sensibilities.
Many readers might find the performance of an apparently non-polemical dance as a means of fostering secularity puzzling. Yet many Bangladeshi secularists find the association between secularism and certain cultural genres obvious and self-evident. This is partially related to the history of secularism in Bangladesh and its particular connotations, which has resulted into a close association between Bengali performative arts and secularity. However, we suggest that a further key reason why dance as a form of secularist activism can occasion surprise is due to the ongoing salience of (unhelpfully) normative conceptions of non-religion and the secular as dematerialized and belief-centered, composed principally of debates, public discourses and personally held non-religious convictions. But sociologists and anthropologists of non-religion have recently begun to move beyond this to focus on lived non-religion rather than abstract formal doctrine – that is to say, the focus has shifted from atheism to atheists – with several scholars urging us to pay closer attention to practical, material, affective and sensory dimensions of non-religion.
In the introduction to the recently published edited book Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’, we engage the work of Birgit Meyer to show how study of non-religion might take inspiration from concepts developed by scholars of material religion. In so doing, we foreground the mediated, material and affective basis of non-religion. Such an approach enables us to grasp not only why Bengali cultural activists associate local cultural genres such as folk dances with secularity, but also to provide new perspectives on non-religion more generally. Rather than considering non-religion as negation, absence of religion or a neutral ground, we argue that a focus on non-religious fabrications enables us to ask pertinent questions about how non-religiosity is produced and made tangible and socially significant in different contexts.
Non-religious is not non-material
We are not the first to note that typical considerations of non-religion as ‘all in the mind’ are a problem and barrier to understanding. Lack of research on non-religious sensoria and aesthetics is attributable to the conventional assessment of secular humanism that it is a hyper-intellectual exercise (Lee 2012; Engelke 2012) that is antithetical to aesthetics (Binder 2020) and so unconcerned with, indeed divorced from, matter, affect and the senses. This is ironic given the normative commitment of secular humanists to materialism. On the other hand, there does indeed exist ‘a kind of “Enlightenment story”, in which bodies, affects and emotions are supposed to play minor roles’ (Engelke 2019, 200). This is a story that should be taken seriously as informing some atheists’ self-understandings and that indeed is reflected in certain self-ascribed labels such as ‘freethought’, ‘scepticism’ and ‘rationalism’, but it is a story that should not be treated uncritically or taken for granted, and it is important to recognise its bias in terms of European intellectual history.
Non-religious Fabrication
In the study of religion, Birgit Meyer has been key to the endeavour to foreground the material and affective bases of religion and thereby to counter dematerialised belief-centred approaches that define religion in terms of internalised mental representations and propositional assents. We suggest that Meyer’s (2014, 209) emphasis on the significance of ‘form’ – ‘not as a vehicle but as a generator of meaning and experience’ – and interest in processes of fabrication (via texts, sounds, pictures, objects, etc.) as means of generating a sense of the sublime or transcendent are as apt for non-religion as they are for religion. We suggest that a sense of the immanent, of the non-religious, should not be considered the neutral ground from which such religious fabrications begin, but that it is a sense that itself must be fabricated. To paraphrase Meyer (2014), foregrounding fabrication in the study of non-religion prompts very concrete empirical questions about the specific practices, materials and forms employed in generating senses of the non-religious. Which materials are used and how are they authorised as suitable? What steps are involved in procedures of de-sacralisation? How does a non-religious fabrication inspire or help sustain non-belief?
Nonreligious Fabrication and the Bratachari Dance
Secular humanists have sought to fabricate selves, spaces and events free from, or beyond, religious iconography in various ways. Taking away or covering religious symbols at a chapel for a humanist funeral forms an obvious example for Christian contexts. In South Asia, non-religious fabrication can consist of attempts to overcome communal boundaries based on caste or religion. Transgression of food-based purity taboos at gatherings where different caste communities share meals is one such vital means. In these cases, activists attempt to materially engineer what we call ‘immanent, this-worldly other worlds’ that both represent and hope to eventuate a condition of moving beyond normative religious identities. In other cases, such as non-religious commitment to body donations as a means both of circumventing religious death rituals and contributing to medical science, it is precisely because non-religion is so often considered in terms of mental attitudes and interiority that many atheists find it important to give their irreligious convictions a material form.
Yet non-religious fabrication does not necessarily take the form of enactment or materialization of secularist convictions. This becomes clear in the example of the Bratachari dance. Through engagement with its physically demanding choreography, one can ‘become a whole human’, the group’s leader suggests, irrespective of religion, class and caste. Such a connection between aesthetics, a specific cultural genre that supposedly indexes ‘Bengaliness’, and the cultivation of universalist humanism indicates a prominent Bangladeshi notion of secularism that foregrounds non-communalism and equal respect to all religious groups. The close association between ‘Bengali culture’ and secularity is the outcome of a complicated history in which language-based and Islam-based nationalisms competed for dominance. Initiated amidst increasing communal tensions in the 1930s, the Bratachari movement sought a spiritual and social renewal of the Bengali ‘nation’ irrespective of sex, religion or caste through engagement with folk traditions and physical exercise. Its founder, Gurusaday Dutt (1882– 1941), like many cultural activists saw folk culture as contributing ‘significantly to the development of a national culture by providing indigenous models of secularism’ (Chatterji 2016, 101). So, while Bratachari dance certainly indexes particular ideals and ideological commitments, it serves more broadly to affectively reproduce and revitalize a regionally specific and historically salient notion of secularity that co-implicates Bengali culture and aesthetics and the secular. In consequence, reference to, and appreciation of, certain aesthetic traditions by itself is considered sufficient to demarcate oneself as secular.
To be able to grasp such affectively charged and engaged forms of secularist activism requires scholarly engagement with aesthetics and material practices, including consideration of the different media through which non-religion is made tangible, whether oral, material, visual or affective, which are not neutral: we must pay attention to ‘the consequences of the particular materiality within which [non-religious] objectification…takes place’ (Miller 2001, 152). Essays contained in Global Sceptical Publics do exactly that, highlighting the striking diversity of non-religious aesthetic and material encounters ranging from the aesthetics of sceptical propagation via speech, film and street theatre to the affective strategies employed by Lebanese atheists on social media, the role of humour and ridicule in the criticism of religion in a US TV series and the visually arresting ‘ungodly’ memes shared among young Indian atheist social media users. In such ways, Global Sceptical Publics reflects but also extends emerging approaches to non-religion that no longer treat it as a domain divorced from aesthetics and the sensory.
Bio notes of the authors:
Jacob Copeman is Research Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, and Distinguished Researcher (Oportunius). His most recent monograph, co-authored with Dwaipayan Banerjee, is Hematologies: The political life of blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019). His most recent edited collection, co-edited with Mascha Schulz, is Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’ (UCL Press, 2022). He is principal investigator of the ERC-funded project ‘Religion and its others in South Asia and the world: Communities, debates, freedoms’.
Mascha Schulz is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project ‘Religion and its others in South Asia and the world (ROSA)’ and is based in the Department of Anthropology of Politics and Governance, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is a political anthropologist currently working at the intersection of politics, economics and non-religion. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in urban Sylhet (Bangladesh), she is working on a book titled Cultivating Secularity: Politics, embodiment and criticism of religion in Bangladesh. She has also published on the state, political parties and student politics in South Asia.
Jacob Copeman is Research Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, and Distinguished Researcher (Oportunius). His most recent monograph, co-authored with Dwaipayan Banerjee, is Hematologies: The political life of blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019). His most recent edited collection, co-edited with Mascha Schulz, is Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism’ (UCL Press, 2022). He is principal investigator of the ERC-funded project ‘Religion and its others in South Asia and the world: Communities, debates, freedoms’.
Mascha Schulz is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project ‘Religion and its others in South Asia and the world (ROSA)’ and is based in the Department of Anthropology of Politics and Governance, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. She is a political anthropologist currently working at the intersection of politics, economics and non-religion. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in urban Sylhet (Bangladesh), she is working on a book titled Cultivating Secularity: Politics, embodiment and criticism of religion in Bangladesh. She has also published on the state, political parties and student politics in South Asia.
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