Whose Sociology of Religion? Provincialising Core Concepts

The sociology of religion has long operated with a set of concepts — secularisation, deregulation, new religious movements, religious individualism — that were forged primarily in the contexts of Euro-American historical experience. These concepts have travelled widely as analytical tools, but their universality are increasingly interrogated. Whose experience do they obscure?

East Asian religious landscapes might sit uneasily within frameworks built on Christian institutional models and the particular trajectory of Western modernity, while similar tensions arise across the Global South, where secularisation theory struggles to account for religious landscapes for instance.

Drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty's call to "provincialise Europe," this session invites papers that subject concepts in the sociology of religion to critical scrutiny from non-Euro-American vantage points. We are not concerned simply with adding new empirical cases to existing frameworks, but with asking whether those frameworks require fundamental revision — or, in some instances, replacement.

The session welcomes theoretical, comparative, and empirically grounded contributions from scholars working across diverse regional and religious contexts.

Session Organizer:

Veronique ALTGLAS, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom, v.altglas@qub.ac.uk

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