Liberal scholarship marginalizes conservative cultural groups it finds repugnant

Evidence

Susan Harding observed over a decade ago that despite the increase in the study of “cultur, ally marginal” groups within a range of academic disciplines, there is a marked absence of studies that focus on groups considered the “cultural and political Others” from the perspective of progressive,liberal scholars-such as the Protestant fu entalist Harding writes about in the United States (Harding 1991 ). These “culturally repugnant” groups continue to be understood in oppositional terms-as antimodem, fundamentalist, backward, irrational, and so on-without any regard for how conditions of secular modernity have been crucial both to their production and their reception (see Harding 2000). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the study of how progressive scholars frame religious/illiberal groups; parallels the reader’s earlier work on moral panics and how outsiders’ cultural logics get dismissed as backward.