Continuing the Conversation:Rogers Brubaker Replies to

Responses to His 2012Gellner Lecture

Rogers Brubaker*University of California, Los Angeles

I am grateful to Michael Banton, Abby Day, Steven Mock, Trevor Stack, and MariaAbascal and Miguel Centeno for their thoughtful comments on my 2012 GellnerLecture.1

Religion and language, Michael Banton argues, are in the first instance emic, notetic constructs (to use the standard anthropological distinction); they are folk, notanalytical, categories (to use Banton’s own distinction); they are categories ofpractice, not categories of analysis (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction). I fullyagree. This same holds, he observes, of race and ethnicity. It also holds, of course,for many other categories that are often employed as analytical categories in socialscience, including – to name just three that I have addressed in my own work –identity, nation, and diaspora.

* Rogers Brubaker is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He has written widely on socialtheory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and ethnicity. His books include The Limits ofRationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (1984); Citizenshipand Nationhood in France and Germany (1992); Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood andthe National Question in the New Europe (1996); Ethnicity without Groups (2004);and Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (with MargitFeischmidt, Jon Fox, and Liana Grancea, 2006). Grounds for Difference will be publishedby Harvard University Press in 2014.Editorial Note: At the 22nd Annual ASEN Conference, entitled ‘Nationalism, Ethnicityand Boundaries’, Rogers Brubaker delivered the Gellner Lecture entitled ‘Religion, Lan-guage and the Politics of Difference’. In response to this lecture, Studies in Ethnicity andNationalism (SEN) invited responses from Michael Banton (formerly of Bristol Univer-sity), Trevor Stack (Aberdeen University), Miguel Centeno and Maria Abascal (PrincetonUniversity), Abby Day (University of Kent), and Steven Mock (Balsillie School of Interna-tional Affairs). These responses appeared in volume 13, issue 1 of SEN in the special featureentitled ‘Continuing the Conversation: Responses to Rogers Brubaker’s 2012 GellnerLecture’. Here, we continue the conversation further with Brubaker’s own reply to theseresponses. We hope you are enjoying this ongoing exchange between these renownedscholars, taking place right here within SEN.

bs_bs_banner

Rogers Brubaker: Continuing the Conversation

256

Banton argues that emic categories like these need to be distinguished carefullyfrom etic categories, folk categories from analytical categories. I am again in fullagreement, and have myself made this argument at some length. With respect toethnicity, for example, I have argued that ‘we should not uncritically adoptcategories of ethnopolitical practice as our categories of social analysis’.

I therefore find it puzzling that Banton attributes to me precisely the contraryview: the view that language and religion – and ethnicity and nationhood to boot –do not need to be refined in order to be used for the purpose of analysis. Of coursethey need to be refined. Like Banton, I have spent a good deal of my career seekingto do just that: to develop more rigorous categories of analysis, and to escape thetrap of simply taking over categories of practice as our categories of analysis. I donot hold the view – attributed to me by Banton – that ‘ordinary language sufficesfor sociological analysis’.

Certainly, emic constructs need to be refined if they are to be used for thepurposes of analysis. But the degree and mode of appropriate refinement andconceptual rigor vary with the occasion and with the problem at hand. For theGellner lecture, I wanted to make an argument about the world, not an argumentabout the categories social scientists use to apprehend the world. There is indeedmuch to be said about problems of using categories of practice like language and(especially) religion as categories of analysis. But I did not want to use thisoccasion for conceptual analysis. ‘While fully acknowledging’, I wrote, ‘that“religion” is a problematic and deeply contested category – contested both as acategory of analysis and as a category of practice – I don’t want to enter here intothe debate about the category. Since the scope of my argument is limited tocontemporary liberal polities, I am content to work here with a relativelyunreflexive, common-sense category of “religion.” ’

I took this tack because I wanted to read one domain of cultural practice againstanother, in order to suggest ways in which linguistic and religious pluralisminvolve different sorts of ‘difference’ and pose different kinds of challenges toliberal polities. In particular, I argued that religious pluralism tends to be moreintergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalized than linguistic plural-ism in contemporary liberal societies, and that religious pluralism entails deeperand more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot, I suggested, is that religion hastended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the politicalaccommodation of cultural difference – a striking reversal of the longer-termhistorical process through which language had previously displaced religion as theprimary focus of contention.

Maria Abascal and Miguel Centeno observe that linguistic and religious catego-ries and identities may overlap or cut across one another. This is of course true, andthey are right to point to the large literature that addresses the ways in which theseand other categories and identities intersect in mutually reinforcing or cross-cutting ways. Abascal and Centeno also rightly observe that the idiom in whichdifference can legitimately be articulated and contested changes over time asdiscursive opportunity structures change. Coming a bit closer to the issues Iaddressed, they note that apparently religious or linguistic conflicts are not solelyabout religion or language, but are generally driven by other issues as well. I agree

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013

257

with this as well; I do not argue otherwise in the lecture. I have myself warned, asAbascal and Centeno do, against taking participants’ accounts of conflict at facevalue; I have argued, for example, that the ethnic or nationalist frames throughwhich certain conflicts are ordinarily represented – frames that may be deployedbecause of their legitimacy in certain settings – can mask the pursuit of clan,clique, or class interests.

Try as I might, I was unable to find anything to disagree with in the first twocomments, save for Banton’s claim that we disagree. But since nothing would bemore tedious than full agreement with one’s critics, I was delighted to receivesome weeks later a third comment from Steven Mock, with which I was able to findsome uncommon ground.

Mock’s interesting commentary criticizes me for defining language and religionin incompatible ways: specifically, for defining language in expansive functionalistterms, and religion in restrictive structuralist terms. If one defines both in expan-sive functionalist terms, according to Mock, one comes up with a different pictureof the relation between language and religion.

Mock rightly observes that if one defines religion in expansive Durkheimianterms, then religion can be seen as just as universal a social phenomenon aslanguage. I note this in my lecture. But if the realm of religion encompasses allbeliefs and practices related to sacred things, and if one defines the sacred inDurkheimian terms as all things that are set apart and require an attitude of specialrespect, then this is a domain of phenomena very different from the domain ofphenomena that interests me. So while Mock goes on to make an interestingargument about the domain of phenomena that interests him, this has a limitedbearing on the main lines of my argument.

I can’t fully engage Mock’s own argument here, but I would like to register twopoints of disagreement. First, I don’t think my (implicit) definitions of languageand religion are incompatible or inconsistent. I started from an interest in thepolitical accommodation of cultural heterogeneity – that is, from an interest in thepolitical accommodation of linguistic and cultural pluralism. Given this interest inpluralism and the politics of difference, it made sense to limit my attention to therealm of organized, recognized, individuated religions, rather than focusing, asMock does, on the phenomenon of religion in the singular, as a putativelynecessary and universal mode of normative integration. This is consistent with myfocus on the plurality of languages, rather than on language per se. I don’t believeI am comparing, as Mock suggests, ‘the whole of one phenomenon with onlyparticular instantiations of another’.

Second, I disagree with Mock’s assertion that it is merely a ‘superficial’religious pluralism that is institutionalized and legitimated as an enduring pres-ence in liberal societies. It is true, as Mock emphasizes, and as I note in my lecture,that immigrants and their descendants often change their forms of religiouspractice to conform to prevailing understandings of religion, even if they do notchange their religious affiliations. But Mock’s functionalism leads him to overem-phasize, in my view, both the functionally ‘required’ and the actual degree ofconformity to prevailing models of privatized religion, and to minimize thesignificance of ‘deep diversity’. The privatization of religion is indeed, as Mock

Rogers Brubaker: Continuing the Conversation

258

suggests, a profound transformation. But Mock neglects the strong counter-trend,analysed by Jose Casanova and others, towards the de-privatization of religion – atrend that arises not from immigration but from within core religious communities.And it is precisely de-privatized or non-privatized religion, both endogenous andimported, that can give rise to problems of deep diversity.

Having found some grounds for disagreement, I thought I had successfullydischarged my duties as a respondent to my respondents; but then two furthercommentaries arrived. Abby Day focuses on the distinctiveness of ‘northern’contexts (Scandinavia and the United Kingdom), in which there are close tiesbetween states and churches that remain (except in Sweden) established or quasi-established national churches. This distinctiveness is incontrovertible. But in theNorth, too, there is a movement towards greater even-handedness, if not towardsstrict neutrality or separation. This need not take the form of disestablishment(though the Church of Sweden was formally disestablished in 2000, and theChurch of Norway is moving in that direction); it may also take the form of movestowards a more open and pluralistic form of state engagement with and recognitionof other religions, as in the United Kingdom. So while the Northern contextremains distinctive, it is not exempt from broader trends – contested, to be sure –towards accommodation of religious heterogeneity in a more pluralistic andeven-handed manner.

Trevor Stack criticizes me for reproducing rather than ‘thinking around andbeyond the categories of liberal thought’ – especially the category of ‘religion’itself, and the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’. In calling for critical scrutiny ofkey categories, Stack’s comments connect with Banton’s. And as I indicatedabove, I could not agree more, especially when the categories in question – like‘religion’ – are not simply tools of analysis but categories of practice that aredeployed, with real consequences, in political, social, and cultural struggles. Thereis indeed, as Stack suggests, much of interest to be said about the ways in whichstates – both liberal and illiberal – define what is to count as ‘religion’ and‘religious’. And Stack makes interesting observations along these lines. But giventhe purposes and scope conditions of this paper, I was willing to work with acommon-sense category of ‘religion’ (as well as ‘language’), and to leave thecritical analysis of categories for another occasion.

Note1 The lecture was published as ‘Language, Religion, and the Politics of Difference’ inNations and Nationalism volume 19, issue 1 (January 2013), pages 1–20; the comments,together with an introduction by Jennifer Jackson, were published in Studies in Ethnicityand Nationalism, volume 13, issue 1 (April 2013), pages 91–114.

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013

259