Le sécularisme comme objet anthropologique ?

Framed in the religious terminology, in the social thought of Christianity, and reinvented in a time of profound changes in the environment of religions, the notions of “secularism” and “secularization” first applied to Christianity but have quite quickly been generalized to the broader situation of “religion” (as a whole) in the “modern world”. In face of historical realities, this model reveals the underlying monotheistic and ethnocentric structures of secularism. The interest of Anthropology toward the domain of the secular is growing –although the study of the secular has long been left for other disciplines– and the old tradition must operate a conversion of perspective on its subject-matters but preserve the ethnographic and comparative methods. What could anthropology of secularism look like, then? Following Talal Asad (2003) and other anthropologists’ reflections, this paper attempts to lay a few basic points about an emerging field of knowledge, aiming at de-westernize the approaches of secularism.