Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies

Abstract

Edited collections notoriously raise the problem of coherence among the contributions; this one succeeds admirably in avoiding that problem. The structure is straightforward. Each contributor applies the theoretical framework of “multiple modernities” to a particular sociopolitical example as a means of examining the role(s) of religion in the processes of modernization that these societies are enacting. Turkey, Iran, Russia, Nepal, and Nigeria are the primary sites of this analysis, with others being touched upon along the way. Always present is the contrast, sometimes implicit but usually explicit, with the “standard, Western” account of modernization, understood as entailing the development of secularism at the expense of religion. A key theme of nearly all contributions is the way in which this standard framework fails to accommodate the realities of the plural processes of modernization occurring in different ways in different societies, especially in relation to the many varied, and sometimes contradictory, roles that religion (itself of various types) is playing in this process.