Agency is a historical concept that shapes religious-secular boundaries.
Evidence
It is essential, I think, to consider how, by whom, and in what context the concept of agency is defined and used if one is to get a better understanding of the ways “the religious” and “the secular” are continuously made and remade. Shifts in that concept, and in its connection with ideas of responsibility and consciousness, are crucial to revisions in our understanding of the religious—and therefore of the secular. What this calls for is not an abstract inquiry into mere changes in linguistic usage, but a response to questions about how the body lives pain and punishment, compassion and pleasure, hope and fear. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 483
Categorization
Category: Craft and Method
- DEFINE: Defines the method: agency as a socially situated and historically shiftable concept, analyzed through the body’s lived experience rather than linguistic change.
Related
- Redefining agency shifts the boundary between religious and secular (similarity 0.91)
- Agency is a historical concept, not a natural category (similarity 0.89)
- Agency should not be equated with history-making or self-empowerment (similarity 0.82)
- Agency only has meaning within its own conceptual and institutional grammar (similarity 0.80)
- Secularity is constituted through specific conceptions of agency and pain (similarity 0.79)