Talal Asad
Talal Asad, a post-colonial theorist and anthropologist, is among a generation of scholars deeply influenced by--and who has significantly furthered--the work of such scholars as the French intellectual, Michel Foucault (1926-1984), and the American (though born in Jerusalem and raised in Cairo, Egypt, and Palestine) scholar of comparative literature, Edward Said (1935-2003). Moreover, he is part of a recent trend in anthropology--best exemplified in the work of James Clifford--in which the object of focus has turned from the so-called native to the means by which the ethnographer comes to know the native--that is, the ethnographer's tools, questions, categories, assumptions, etc. Like Foucault, Said--whose groundbreaking book Orientalism (1978) was among the first to introduce some of Foucault's early work to the North American readership--was interested in the intersection between systems of knowledge (such as classification systems) and systems of control (as in ways of asserting political power and influence). Thus, Foucault's thoughts concerning the complex inter-relations between knowledge/power were worked out by Said with regard to the manner in which early modern Europeans developed a way of understanding themselves and their worlds in relation to what they understood themselves not to be--that is, defined in relation to politically useful stereotypes about the so-called "Orient," the name once applied to the world of Arab language and culture. Working in this tradition, Asad is an essayist whose work explores the ways in which systems of knowledge and systems of discipline interact to produce specific ways of talking about, and thereby organizing, the world. Of the many classifications used by our own culture to enable us to know something about the world in which we live, Asad is perhaps best known for his focus upon the distinction between the sacred and the secular and the manner in which this distinction helps to make possible a specific sort of social identity: the modern nation-state.
Major Works
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973; editor)
The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986)
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam (1993)
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (2003)
Quotation
"In what follows I want to examine the ways in which the theoretical
search for an essence
of religion invites us to separate it conceptually form the domain of
power. I shall do this by exploring a universalist definition of religion
offered by an eminent anthropologist: Clifford
Geertz's "Religion as a Cultural System." My intention ...
is to try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produced
our concept of religion as the concept of a transhistorical essence--and
Geertz's article is merely my starting point.... My argument is that there
cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent
elements and relationships are historical specific, but because that definition
is itself the historical product of discursive processes."
- from Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (1993)
Select Web Resources on Asad
City University of New York (CUNY) faculty web site for Talal Asad
AsiaSource
Interview with Talal Asad (December 16, 2002)
Stanford
Humanities Review interview with Talal Asad (1996)
"What
Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Inquiry," by Talal Asad
Secondary Literature on Asad and Religion
Charles Hirschkind (ed.), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad
and His Interlocutors. Stanford University Press, 2006.