Chasing the Secular

Abstract

How can we engage the secular in ways that encourage empirical investigations of its specific and embodied expressions? Locating the secular in particular places and situations invites the scholar to recognize it, to say “there it is.” However, the secular seems difficult to pin down precisely: it quickly expands into everything that is not considered religion in a given context, and the distinctively secular seems to evaporate into nothing. This article explores the slipperiness of the secular, not merely as a conceptual obstacle, but as something that emerges from the way the secular is fundamentally constituted upon the absence of religion rather than any specific forms of presence. It probes what kind of spatial, material, and embodied presence such absence of religion might have, and it suggests that an answer to this question may provide us with a methodological way out of the slipperiness.