Social Shifts
Two Birds, One Stone?: Reshaping Nationhood and Secularism through the Regulation of Religion in Quebec, Canada View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dia Dabby
In 2019, the Quebec provincial government passed An Act respecting the Laicity of the State. While this piece of legislation is currently before the courts on multiple grounds of discrimination, this legislative exercise was singular from earlier iterations on the regulation of religion undertaken in the last decade in this province for two reasons. On the one hand, this act expanded secularism’s nomenclature, by introducing laicity to the dialogues on regulating religion. On the other, the act also embedded the ‘nation’ into a provincial human rights’ charter. Both reasons telegraph important transformations for religion in the public sphere. This paper analyzes how laicity and nationhood were mobilized during the legislative hearings before the provincial National Assembly by drawing on memoranda submitted by various social actors. It then examines how these concepts circulated and were translated into the context of ongoing legal contestations, namely Hak v. Quebec (Attorney General), now awaiting a decision by the Court of Appeal. Finally, this paper reflects on how An Act respecting the Laicity of the State’s renaming of ‘new’ and ‘old’, in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, has ripple-down effects in the public sphere. More broadly, it considers the shifts engendered to understandings of time and space and ultimately, how this statute seeks to refashion narratives of identity in Quebec and Canada.
Interpretation of Armenia's Religious Heritage in Tourism Practices - Goshavank Monastery
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pawel Plichta, Anna Duda
Armenia, which was the first Christian state in the world, has the most ancient symbols and places of worship for its religion. The cultural heritage of the country, which has returned to the forefront of foreign news in recent months, is for many reasons a unique example of the importance of a particular group in the history and the continuity of the influence of religion on the identity of its members. The key element of this heritage is architecture, especially religious buildings, which is a unique combination of elements of nature in the form of stones and rocks with human civilization achievements in the design of, among others, places of worship for which the country is commonly called “Hajastan-Qarastan”. Churches, chapels, monastic complexes, khachkars, combined with the dominant mountain landscape, remain attractive places also in terms of tourism. Considering the great cultural and religious significance of the selected places for Armenians, it was decided to investigate how this heritage is interpreted in the tourist practices of the representatives of foreign tourists visiting them. The following place was selected this time is Goszawank Monastery. In this study such aspects are analyzed: opinions and recommendations of these places, published on the TripAdvisor - as short traveling texts online.
African Precarity and the Evolution of Religious Imagination View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenneth Amadi
If the religious imagination of pre-Christian Africans was ever fixed, such imaginative stagnation was ruptured by the intrusion of Christianity upon the African socio-religious ethnosphere. Sensitive to the effects of a dynamic relationship between indigenous African religions and Western Christian culture, and to developments in a rapidly changing world, scholars are divided on what constitutes the religious imagination of African Christians. Those who champion the continuity of pre-Christian imagination in contemporary African Christianity are challenged by their counterparts who argue that (Western) Christianity brought about a decisive rupture in what constitutes the pre-Christian African religious imagination. Synthesizing these views, this paper argues that the complexity and precarity of Africa’s socio-religious experience renders untenable any supposition that African Christians could be identified by a simplistic and uniform religious imagination. Depending on their unique experiences and ritual sensibilities, individuals and groups within contemporary African Christianity may react disparately or uniformly in their attempt to exploit religion in coping with the challenges of everyday life.
