In talking about the College, Richman says: ‘Sociology thus
became an essential resource for the College’s investigation of the interface
between the social and the political as a key to understanding the nature of
collective movements’ (2002, 113) and a little later: ‘With its claim that
death is the underlying catalyst for movements of attraction as well as
repulsion, and that the need to mediate encounters with it prompts the
consecration of sacred places, persons or things, the College united under the
banner of a sacred sociology’ (2002,
114, italics in original). There is, of course, much more to Richman’s complex
and sophisticated analysis of this movement, but there are a number of things
that really appeal to me even in those two passages and that makes me want to
explore this whole movement further.
In the first passage the concern is with the ‘interface
between the social and the political’. That is essential in today’s world and
something that I personally find difficult to grasp. It is this interface,
Richman suggests, that is ‘a key to understanding the nature of collective
movements’. For those collective movements that really concern us today
(radical Islam and the like) this is undoubtedly true and while considerable
work has been done on collective movements, and the interface between the
social and the political, since the 1930s much of this has veered away from any
direct concern with religion. The second passage talks about death as the ‘underlying
catalyst’ and the need to mediate encounters with it through a greater
understanding of sacred places, persons and things. In the 1930s the College
had difficulty in engaging with the rise of Nazism and their solution, in part,
was to see this as a ‘sacred’ movement, or at least a movement that had
elements of the sacred within it. The contemporary movements can be seen very
clearly as ‘religious’, and we may or may not want to use the word ‘sacred’ to
describe them. Far less has been said about the centrality of the encounter
with death (in all its forms, not just suicide bombings) that sits at the heart
of such movements and, I would suggest, must sit at the heart of any analysis
of the movements or any attempts to counter them. It is this, Richman suggests,
that led the members of the College to ‘unite under a banner of a sacred
sociology’. Does this imply, therefore, that we might now need a new ‘sacred
sociology’ to counter the contemporary collective movements? I think that it
probably does.
I am just about to go off on another holiday, another tour
with long hours of bus and train travel, this time in Southern Spain and
Morocco. I want to use that time, in part, to reflect on what such a ‘sacred
sociology’ might look at (not as a parody of the theory of religion as with ‘metaphorics’)
but as a way of engaging with the real issues that we face as sociologists and
theorists of religion in the contemporary world. I am clear that Richman, and
the College, is not talking about a sociology of the sacred here, far less a
sociology of religion. I am also clear that they are not talking about a
religious sociology (as in Catholic or Islamic sociology) that is not in any
sense what I am talking about, although there may be something to learn from
these sources. The emphasis on the word ‘sacred’ with its roots in Durkheimian
sociology and its connection with ‘death’, the ‘collective’ and, later in
Richman’s analysis with the ‘erotic’ is where I think we need to begin.
Obviously to really begin to construct (or is it to ‘reconstruct’) a new sacred
sociology is going to demand much more reading, research, debate and
discussion. It cannot be put together, like a spoof theory, on a bus travelling
through the mountains of Morocco. I can, however, begin to think through the parameters,
the limits and the possible shape of such a sacred sociology. That, I really
believe, has to be my next task.
I will come back and report on how I have done (and also
attempt to bring together the various posts from the last few weeks) on my
return…
