Vortrag Jens Kreinath: Politics of Religious Secrecy

Veranstalter: Elite-MA CSME

This lecture aims to introduce the Arab Alawites which since centuries inhabited the rural areas of the coastal mountains stretching from Southern Turkey, Syria, to Northern Lebanon. By taking the unique traditions practiced among Alawites in the Turkish most southern province of Hatay (present-day Antioch) as primary point of reference and source of information, the politics of religious secrecy will be featured as a configuration of social relationships based on lines of demarcation through forms of coded communication. Its main argument is that religious secrecy among Alawites cannot be confined to maintaining social separation or to enforcing the differentiation between public and private spaces. Instead, it is understood that any study of religious secrecy must extend to initiating and demarcating zones of interreligious contact. To refine theoretical approaches for studying religious secrecy as contact, Kreinath introduces the notion of a double bind to account for such forms of coded communication. By moving the distinction between the visible and invisible to the forefront of analysis, as conceptualized among Alawites in Hatay as zahir and batini, this lecture demonstrates that the Alawite politics of religious secrecy frames the diverse contexts through which they interpret their interactions with members of other religious communities. The focus of its analysis is on how Alawites perform their religious secrecy to conceal, maintain, and negotiate their identity through public interactions within the various webs of social relationships. This approach helps to reconstruct the Alawite perspective on religious secrecy by tracing this distinction of the visible and invisible through theoretical accounts and ethnographic instances.

Kontakt:

Gharevi, Schayan Institut für Orientalistik Telefon 0951 - 863 2214, E-Mail: schayan.gharevi@uni-bamberg.de

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