英语论文网

Anthropological Theory(London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)

Introduction
Modalities of transnational transcendence
Thomas J. Csordas
University of California San Diego, USA
The rhetorical force of religious moods and motivations in contemporary society andhuman experience may be as compelling today as at any period in history. In the first
half of the 20th century the thoughtful appreciation of religion was still perhaps best
summarized in Freud’s (1957[1928]) phrase ‘the future of an illusion’, expressing ananticipation that enlightened rationalism and sober secularism would render religionobsolete. By the second half of the century, the scene on the horizon was already muchbetter captured by Peter Berger’s (1969) phrase ‘a rumor of angels’, anticipating aresurgence of religious sensibility and a revitalized appeal of the transcendent. Indeed,the present global situation calls into question an understanding that the world is undergoinga progressive and irreversible secularization (Asad, 2003) or disenchantment
(Gauchet, 1997). The sleeping giant of religion, whose perpetual dream is our collective
dream as a species, has never died, and is now in the process of at least rolling over and
at most leaping to its feet. Yet in one of the most vital contemporary arenas of scholarlydebate in the human Sciences, that which deals with world systems, transnationalism,and globalization, the role of religion remains understudied and under-theorized.
Are we in fact witnessing a resacralization or a re-enchantment on a planetary scale?If so, are the consequences for individuals de-alienation or remystification? While dealienating
possibilities may exist in principle, to suggest that contemporary global
religious manifestations amount to authentic de-alienation would have the dubiousmethodological distinction of repeating the claims made by many of those religionsthemselves. Such religions are distinctive not because of their de-alienating potential,but because they are critical components in the ideological/religious dimension of aglobal social system. Insofar as religion is a cultural component of any social system, itwould be a mistake not to recognize that religious developments must accompany thedevelopment of a planetarized social system that includes a global economic order, globalcommunications, and global population movements and diasporas. Specifically, it would
appear that the increasing articulation of the world social system generates an ideologicalimpulse toward formulations of universal culture. What requires empirical determinationare the conditions under which global religious phenomena have an agentiveimpetus toward the status of universality – toward becoming world religions in a literalsense – in contrast to conditions in which they are examples of religious ideology as

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jonathan Friedman for the invitation to organize and guest edit an issue of
Anthropological Theory, to Joel Robbins during the review process, and to editorial assistantsJon Bialecki and Naomi Haynes. I presented a very early version of the argumentmade in this introduction to the World Congress of Sociology in Montreal in 1998 atthe invitation of Philip Wexler. I had the good fortune to present later versions as partof the Presidential Roundtable on Religion at the Meetings of the Society for theAnthropology of Religion in 2000, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2002,a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。