CASI Research Seminar: Saving Society from Suspect Religion: Secularism and Popular Views of the Need for State Intervention in the Religious Sphere in Kazakhstan and Neighboring Countries

June 15, 2016

June 15, 2016

John Schoberlein (Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan)

Abstract: This talk examines the ways that post-Soviet society, particularly in Kazakhstan, compels us to rethink the character of secularism as an identity and an institution that entails forms of popular engagement. In Kazakhstan and similar cases, we see that there is a sense of shared interest between the state and a large part of the population that presupposes that it is important for the state to maintain fairly tight control of religion, both in terms of intervening in the “private” aspects of religion, and promoting certain forms of public religion. This pattern, while not particularly noted in scholarship on the “classic” secular societies, is also widely present there and elsewhere, and an examination of the post-Soviet cases can prompt reconsideration of secularism generally.
The talk is based on anthropological field research on Islam and secularism in a number of regions of the former Soviet Union (especially Central Asia, southern Russia, and Georgia). In examining the cases of Islam, especially in Kazakhstan, where large non-Muslim populations are also present, I will seek to open a comparative analysis of secularisms in general, which often display deep ambivalence about religion and always entail debate about how religion might need to be contained or controlled.

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