Secularism is best studied through bodily attitudes and sensory structures, not doctrine alone.

Evidence

An anthropology of secularism should thus start with a curiosity about the doctrine and practice of secularism regardless of where they have originated, and it would ask: How do attitudes to the human body (to pain, physical damage, decay, and death, to physical integrity, bodily growth, and sexual enjoyment) differ in various forms of life? What structures of the senses—hearing, seeing, touching—do these attitudes depend on? In what ways does the law define and regulate practices and doctrines on the grounds that they are “truly human”? What discursive spaces does this work of definition and regulation open up for grammars of “the secular” and “the religious”? How do all these sensibilities, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors come together to support or undermine the doctrine of secularism? — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Forwards the reader’s stated interest in bodily regulation as latent normativity; connects to Foucault-body registers already in the vault and to how Cooper’s secularism claims rest on unstated bodily/domestic norms.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: reading ‘immodesty’ and dress panics (the vaulted ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece) precisely through Asad’s lens of sensory-bodily grammars being the real substrate of the secular/religious distinction.