International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 18, No.

1, Fall 2004 ( C 2004)

Theorizing Religion in a Globalizing World

Christian Karner1 and Alan Aldridge

Drawing on the globalization theories proposed by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and Manuel Castells, this article examines the contemporary signicance of religious ideas, practises, and discourses. We show that novel patterns of social stratication, identity construction, economic polarization, and the impact of the alleged postmodern crisis on the modern paradigm of science provide the context to the manifold contemporary resurgence of religion. Establishing an analytical dialectic between relevant social theory and the empirical record on millenarianism, religious radicalism, and the relationship between middle-class consumerism and religiosity, we argue that the social and psychological consequences of globalization have heightened the appeal and relevance of religions: As discourses of political resistance, as anxiety-coping mechanisms, and as networks of solidarity and community.
KEY WORDS: globalization; network society; desecularization; millenarianism; consumerism.

In Intimations of Postmodernity, Zygmunt Bauman favorably contrasts a new sociology of postmodernitythe systematic and critical study of an arguably novel historical era and social conditionto postmodern sociology.1 The latter shares certain conceptual characteristics (notably a relativistic epistemology) with the heterogeneous cultural and intellectual movement designated as postmodernism. Baumans prolic career since 1992 has been largely dedicated to the former project of a new historical (or historized) sociology focused on the current epoch and its manifold implications. Increasingly uncomfortable about being confused for a postmodernist,2 however, Bauman has subsequently re-named his object of analysis and critique as Liquid Modernity.3 As such, he has become part of a group of distinguished commentators for whom globalization is the dening characteristic of the contemporary world.
1 School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK;

e-mail: christian.karner@nottingham.ac.uk. 5
0891-4486/04/1000-0005/0
C

2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

Karner and Aldridge

In this article, we examine seminal analyses of globalization and contemporary society including those proposed by Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Manuel Castells. Following a clarication of terminology and the delineation of a historical focus, we will draw on inuential (and in many respects complementary) theories to discuss the place and signicance of religious beliefs, practises and identities in times signicantly shaped by the forces of (economic) globalization. We will argue that the new (postmodern or liquid[ly] modern) patterns of social stratication, politics and identity formation identied by Bauman, Beck and Castells map onto and hence underline the continuing relevance ofsome of the traditional concerns in the anthropology and sociology of religion. The rst part of this paper will therefore counterpose the sociology of globalization and religious anthropology to demonstrate their mutual relevance in the contemporary world. In the second part of the paper, we continue our engagement with the sociology of postmodernity by exploring the relationship between religion and consumerism as well as debates about (de-)secularization in times of globalization. Arguing for a mutualy enriching dialectic between theory and empirical data, we critically engage with theories of globalization by drawing on existing studies of millenarianism, religious radicalism and violence, the spiritual supermarket and the contemporary blurring of the secular divide between religion and politics. While not in consistent agreement with their respective interpretations of religion, we thus selectively draw on the contributions made by Bauman, Beck and Castells to argue that, if synthesized with other recent and inuential social theory, they enable the construction of a theoretical model that can shed new light on the empirical record on religion and religiosity in the contemporary world. PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATIONS A discussion of the place and signicance of religion in times of globalization must surely begin by establishing working denitions of the two implicated concepts, the meaning of neither of which is self-evident or uncontested. In the case of religion, earlier attempts at establishing universal denitions based on necessary and sufcient criteria have gradually given way to an appreciation of the multi-faceted and context-specic character of beliefs, practises and identities more or less widely recognized as constituting a religion. Among the earlier classical denitions, the intellectualist paradigm (and its emphasis on the cognitive, explanatory character of religious belief) and the social, Durkheimian approach (with its focus on social integration/reproduction achieved in and through religious ritual) continue to shape much thinking in the study of religions in the AngloSaxon world. What has changed, however, is their former status asin terms of explanatory ambitionuniversally applicable and single-handedly

Theorizing Religion in a Globalizing World

sufcient denitions. Recognizing religion to be a complex phenomenon that potentially comprises ritual, doctrinal, mythic, experiential, ethical/legal, organizational/social, material and political/economic dimensions,4 recent scholarship has addressed the related question as to how many of these dimensions need to be present for a given phenomenon to qualify as religious. The following discussion will adopt a working denition inspired by a Wittgensteinian5 or prototypical6 approach, which denes the concept in terms of family resemblances and degrees of similarity with an ideal type or prototypical case. Conceptual boundaries are thus blurred, giving rise to unbounded categories [that] render religion an affair of more or less rather than (. . . ) a categorical matter of yes [i.e. x is a religion] or no [i.e. y is not].7 Whilst limiting ethnocentric bias, such redenitions emphasizing family resemblances and degrees of t also underline the socioeconomic and political embeddedness of religious practises, ideas, discourses, and identities. In contrast to what we may term the textbook approach of conning its analysis to a largely self-contained chapter, religion thus emerges as intrinsically intertwined withand only meaningful in relation toits wider contexts and historical conditions of possibility. The concept and, perhaps more importantly, the historical time frame of globalization also call for comments of introductory clarication. Ulrich Beck has famously distinguished between globalism, globality, and globalization. The concept of globalism, according to Beck, entails an economic bias that tends to reproduce the ideological tenets of neoliberalism including the notion of an allegedly all-embracing and all-explaining world market system. Globality, on the other hand, captures the totality of social relationships (. . . ) not integrated into or determined (. . . ) by national state politics.8 While Beck underlines that cross-border, supra-national social relationships have dened human interaction for a long time, his third notion of globalizationthe processes through which sovereign national states are criss-crossed and undermined by transnational actorsintroduces a more narrowly delineated historical focus. In our current times of second modernity, Beck argues, globality and globalization have become multidimensional and irreversible.9 While Becks tripartite schema rightly establishes an analytical distinction between economic exchanges, social relationships and political processes that transcend the territorial container of the modern nation state, we will use the term globalization in this article as a shorthand comprising economic, social, political, technological, and cultural dimensions. Accepting the postulate that we are currently witnessing a qualitatively novel historical conditionvariously identied as liquid,10 second11 or late12 modernitythe remaining introductory question is when to date the beginning of this current epoch. Instead of insisting on a single rupture marking the historical watershed between modernity and liquid/post-modernity, seminal contributions to

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this debate can be read as revealing a gradual, rather than sudden, transformationspanning across the second half of the 20th century13 of social, economic and political relations into their current, and more or less full-blown, globalized state. Different facets of the resulting social condition have been captured by Bells notion of post-industrialism,14 Baumans account of Fordist production-based economies becoming postmodern and consumption-focused,15 the emergence of self-consciously uid identities since the 1960s as reected in the ideological challenges and political subjectivities constructed by new social movements,16 the development of the network society17 and the emergence of risk as a dening characteristic of life under conditions of reexive modernization.18 In terms of political developments and milestones, the growing hegemony of neoliberalism in the 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 as well as the subsequent collapse of Soviet communism stand out as dening moments in recent history that heralded a fundamental reshufe, though certainly not the once enthusiastically proclaimed end of history,19 of global power structures and their previous bifurcation into two superpowers and their spheres of inuence. Rather than the optimistically anticipated historical victory of liberal democracy and social stability, the post-Cold War era has witnessed political fragmentation, socioeconomic polarization and an increase in the incidence of violence widely attributed to identities assumed to be primordial and mutually exclusive. The emergence of neotribal movements,20 the global politicization of culture21 and the rise of ethnonationalist politics22 over the last two decades raise the question: What role is religion capable of playing in a world increasingly dominated by the forces of economic globalization and the contradictions thus generated in the lives of countless millions? Robertson and Chirico theorized the interplay of religion and globalization almost two decades ago, arguing that the virtually worldwide eruption of religious and quasi-religious concerns and themes cannot be exhaustively comprehended in terms of (. . . ) what has been happening sociologically within societies and that globalization enhances, at least in the relatively short run, religion and religiosity.23 It is to these and similar issues that we now turn.

GLOBALIZATION: HUMAN COSTS AND RESPONSES In The Individualized Society, Zygmunt Bauman arguesin noticeable contrast to Robertson and Chiricothat what is (amongst other things) historically unique about the currently dominant social and cultural condition is a conspicuous absence of notions of immortality and transcendence: [T]ranscendence, that leap into eternity leading to permanent settlement, is neither coveted nor seems necessary for the liveability of life. For the rst

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time, mortal humans manage to do without immortality and do not seem to mind.24 Referring to our working denition of religion based on broadly conceptualized family resemblances, the assumed existence of some form of transcendental order25 continues to be a, perhaps the only, core characteristic necessary for a phenomenon to be recognized as religious. The absence of notions of immortality or transcendence described by Bauman would thus appear to imply a fully secularized society. Contrary to such a reading, and indeed contrary to a whole lineage of secularization theorists ranging from Wilson26 to Bruce,27 we will demonstrate that religious beliefs, rituals, discourses, and identities can be discerned in the interstices of the sociological globalization literature. In the following analysis we argue that the social and psychological implications of globalization and postmodernity reveal the continuing or, more accurately, revived cultural relevance of religion: As an existential/cognitive coping mechanism in times of widespread (and socially determined) anxiety, and as a millenarian discourseas well as a source of group solidarityin the face of growing economic polarization and the resulting social marginalization of large sections of humanity. In a later section, we will return to these themes to relate them to the postmodern de-differentiation28 of spheres clearly demarcated in earlier times of modernity; such dedifferentiation underlies recent anti-secular tendencies29 that blur the religious and the political. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieus argument that crises transform the undiscussed (doxa) into discourse,30 we argue that globalization entails crises one consequence of which has been a politicization of religion. While in part already supported by data and existing studies, the following argument aims to set the stage for future empirical work on religion and globalization. New Divisions in the Individualized Society In his monumental trilogy on The Information Age,31 Manuel Castells demonstrates that life in the last quarter of the 20th century underwent a series of profound transformations involving the emergence of a novel economic and cultural logic based on international networks of interrelated and adaptive nodes of activity, cooperation and communication. Revolutionary developments in information and communications technology which Castells in large part attributes to the convergence of economic entrepreneurialism, high quality research, and a growing counterculture of hackers in California (and particularly Silicon Valley) of the 1970sare shown to have been key catalysts to the emergence of a new informational mode of development.32 The global integration of nancial markets, the key role of multinational companies (and their own complex networks of economic cooperation) in the globalization of markets for goods and

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services, as well as fundamentally altered experiences of space and time are all dening features of a new and increasingly global social (dis)order. The implications of this novel era in human history are manifold, re-shaping national and international politics as much as peoples working and domestic lives. While Beck speaks of the disempowerment of politics33 and a resulting de-nationalization shock,34 Castells stresses the continuing impact of the structural parameters provided by state institutions as well as the strategies of (national) politicians on the differential (local) effects of globalization.35 Such theoretical nuances notwithstanding, Castells concurs with Beck in observing the triumph of markets over governments. The global economy is a network of interconnected economies; if any economy disconnected itself from the network it would simply be bypassed, with devastating consequences for itself but not for the network, in which resources of capital, information, technology, goods, services, and skilled labor, would continue to ow freely.36 A position within, and adaptability to, the global market of economic networks are thus necessary to avoid exclusion from what Castells terms the space of ows and the dead end of stiing poverty such exclusion entails. He documents a range of marginalized areas and territories including subSaharan Africa as well as inner-city ghettos in North America and Western Europe, their lowest common denominator being the fact that international ows of information, capital and labor bypass them. However, life inside the network has similarly been transformed in the information age. Whilst dismissive of simplistic and empirically unveried assumptions that information technology inevitably causes rising unemployment, Castells emphasizes that peoples working lives have been profoundly restructured by the forces of neoliberal ideology, privatization and deregulation, and the rise in the number of ex-timers. This has entailed a fundamentally altered relationship between capital and labor: in the network society, capital is global and labor is local and individualized. The class struggle has been subsumed into the more fundamental opposition between the bare logic of capital ows and the cultural values of human experience.37 Substantial parts of the remainder of this article will investigate the place of religion(s) as part of the cultural values of human experience informing practises and discourse of resistance against the bare logic of capital ows. Baumans and Becks respective contributions to the sociological analysis of globalization similarly point to the disarticulation of transnational or nomadic38 capital on one hand, and ordinary peoples localized, uncertain and increasingly individualized lives on the other. Bauman repeatedly emphasizes that in times of liquid modernity the economic dominance of multinational capital (capable of relocating to wherever production costs are lowest) increasingly disempowers the nation state as one of the dening institutions of industrial (or solid) modernity. Politics continues to

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be conducted locally, nationally or at most in supranational bodies such as the European Union, but real power liesin the nal analysiswith multinational capital.39 Like Bauman, Beck investigates the profound effects of unrelenting economic globalization on the lives of ordinary people who continue to live in localities (rather than in airport lounges or cyberspace). Both theorists have reported a condition aptly described as structural unemployment, which is unlikely to improve with the next economic upturn but is seemingly written into the logic of the contemporary world. Millions of people, and by now generations within the same families, are condemned to long-term or permanent unemploymenta trend corroborated by recent gures indicating that the global number of the (documented) unemployed had risen to some 186 million in 200340 and many more millions have to make do with part-time work or xed term contracts. Meanwhile, the employed can never be sure that they will not be included in the next round of downsizing or streamlining.41 Whilst capital keeps moving, governments lose out on huge amounts of tax revenue and welfare states become increasingly difcult to sustain,42 resulting in a situation where wealthrmly in the hand of multinational corporationshas become global, while poverty has remained local.43 The individualization of work coupled with the gradual dismantling of yesteryears safety nets give rise to a situation dened by Beck as condemning individuals to search for biographical solutions of systemic contradictions.44 The scene seems set for a new form of social polarization separating a global business elite, comprising frequent-ier executives, nanciers, bureaucrats, professionals and media moguls45 who control the nodes of the network society, from the many localities where job insecurity and existential uncertainty turn into chronic anxiety. Thus we return to a founding theme in the sociology of religion.46 However, the explanatory direction of the Weberian paradigm is now inverted: In place of the economic consequences of doctrinally induced salvation anxiety during early capitalism, we are now confronted with economically induced survival anxiety, for which religions appear capable of offering some form of antidote. Religious Reactions These last statements must of course be seen as hypotheses, as open questions to be addressed by further research. That being said, however, the empirical record strongly suggests that the connection between socioeconomic polarization/marginalization and anxiety on the one hand, and a widely documented47 contemporary religious revivalism on the other, is not merely conjectural. What we appear to be witnessing is a de-privatization of religion, a global desecularization of the world,48 an increase in antisecular49 movements and discourses disenchanted with the project of

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modernity and insistent on the political potential and public role of religious beliefs and practises. Remarkably, this public revival of religion spans continents as much as traditions, reected as it is in a Catholic resurgence from Manila to Krakow, from Santiago de Chile to Seoul,50 in a Protestant upsurge across Latin America51 and sub-Saharan Africa,53 a Buddhist revival in East Asia,53 the growth of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel and America,54 the rise of Hindu nationalism55 as well as of a wide range of Islamicist56 organizations in many parts of the Muslim world.57 Though these phenomena and movements differ hugely in their political methods and aspirations,58 their respective emergence and increasing appeal have largely coincided with the rise of the network society59 since the 1970s. While we will return to what appears to be more than a mere historical coincidence in due course, the suggestion that religious discourses and identities can counteract social marginalization and survival anxiety requires further discussion. Re-appropriating Benedict Andersons terminology, Bauman has suggested that our contemporary age of postmodernity is also the age (. . . ) of the lust [and] search for community, invention of community, imagining community,60 spurred by a perceived lack of shared meaning and group solidarity. Not altogether dissimilarly, Castells writes of communal heavens or resistance identities61 as reactions against the information age, symptomatic of a new conict between the Net and the self, between networks of instrumentality, powered by new information technologies on one hand, and the power of identity, anchoring peoples minds in their history, geography, and cultures62 on the other. Social anomie63 is, of course, no more peculiar and to the contemporary era than economic inequality or indeed their co-occurrence. This is illustrated by Kenneth Burridges inuential study of millenarian activities, which surveys the historical and anthropological records on religious reactions to the weakening or disruption of the social order and a widespread resulting awareness of being disenfranchised.64 Burridge demonstrates that, commonly in situations compounding political marginalization with the failure or disintegration of existing social relationships, initial attempt[s] to explain and comprehend the fact of disenfranchizement precede activities geared towards the construction of a new culture, a new social order, a new religion, orthodoxy and moral community. Importantly, millenarianism transcends politico-economic issues,65 re-appropriating established religious traditions in an attempt to comprehend and rectify a social (dis)order experienced as deeply unsatisfactory, unjust and de-humanizing and reected in the expectation that ultimately some supernatural power [will] overcome the crisis.66 The objective of millenarian movements is the re-establishment of human integrity, a political re-ordering that affects personhood as much as social relationships, envisag[ing] a new condition of being.67 In the analytical terms of

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the social sciences, millenarianism therefore combines what has been termed the cognitive function of religion68 in such cases geared towards the explanation of (perceived) injustice and disorderwith the political intentions of a discourse of critique and social reconstruction. The question arises whether the contemporary desecularization of the world69 constitutes, at least in part, a millenarian reaction against the effects and human consequences70 of globalization. Some corroborating evidence of such a correlation was already provided in the very early stages of the (then) emerging network society. Robert Bellah thus interpreted the new religious consciousness in California of the 1960s and 70s as a reaction against a crisis in modernity, experienced as a crisis of meaning or the inability of utilitarian individualism to provide a meaningful pattern of personal and social existence.71 A decade on (and in an altogether different cultural context), Gananath Obeyeskere reported on the cult of Hu niyan that had sprung up in post-1965 Sri Lanka among urban proletarians in times of rapid social change. According to Obeyeskere, (Hu niyan) sorcery [had become] the symbolic idiom which expresses the conicts endemic in urban society, including poverty, unemployment, over-crowded living conditions in ghetto-like areas, family conict and the absence of larger kin units.72 Echoing the long-standing social anthropological interpretation of religious belief as, in part, a way of explaining (mis-)fortune73 and of ritual as, in part, a coping mechanism for anxiety,74 Obeyeskere portrayed the social dislocations brought about by urbanization and the frustrations and anxieties experienced in times of declining employment opportunitiesin short, urban anomieas the context to the rise of a new (though culturally grounded) religious identity and set of practises. It is worth noting that Burridge observes that the most favorable political conditions for the emergence of a millenarian movement seem to be when tolerance is a euphemism for the kind of [political system] which is either not powerful enough to suppress [millenarian] activities, or which for a variety of reasons is inhibited from deploying the power at its disposal.75 Such (arguably involuntary) tolerance aptly describes the contemporary world, if tolerance is not taken to mean the nal victory of liberal democracy (in Fukuyamas sense), but as capturing the ability of the Internet, the information superhighway, to make information readily available and to disseminate it widely, quickly and relatively cheaply in the network society. Whilst information and communication technology appear to provide technological conditions of possibility for hard-to-suppress millenarian activities76 , the earlier-mentioned sharpened economic inequalities,77 the exclusion of countless millions in large parts of entire continents as well as in impoverished inner city ghettos much closer to the powerful nodes of the information age, constitutes a social climate of widespread and chronic disenfranchizement

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typically conducive to millenarian awakenings. A well-documented example of internet-mediated resistance against disenfranchizement induced, or at least exacerbated, by globalization was provided by what Castells has termed the rst informational guerrilla movement78 the Zapatista struggle against the effects of liberalization policies on Indian peasant communities of rural Mexico between 1994 and 1996. Initially struggling for land rights, these peasant communities were further threatened by Mexican liberalization policies in the 1990s, which ended restrictions on imports of corn and protection of the price of coffee.79 The Zapatista movement involved peasant unions, Maoist groups as well as Catholic priests, whogiven their appeal to strong religious feeling among Indian peasantsfullled a vital support- and legitimation role within the movement. Crucial to the eventual success of the Zapatista struggle, reected in important concessions enacted through a constitutional reform in 1996, was the use of telecommunications, videos and computer-mediated communication to mobilize a worldwide network of solidarity groups.80 Internet-based worldwide alliances coupled with conceptions of a moral economy81 supported by the Catholic Church were therefore core components in the Zapatistas opposition to the new global order. Their struggle against the exclusionary consequences of economic modernization represented a serious challenge to the assumed inevitability of a new geopolitical order in which capitalism becomes universally accepted.82 Six years after the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran, Robertson and Chirico rst observed a more general, increasingly global trend towards the politicization of religion as a reaction against the strains and discontents brought about by the process of globalization.83 This trend has clearly intensied since, as reected in the marked increase and visibility of religious movements geared towards political reform and/or social support in contexts as varied as north Africa, central Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.84 Picking a random sample from a rapidly growing database, it seems hard to overlook a recurring connection between social marginalization and economic insecurity on one hand, and religious revivalism on the other. The upsurge in conservative Protestant Christianity, particularly pronounced in Latin America and in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa over the last three decades, involves the creation of a sub-society [for] those who count for little or nothing in the wider world.85 The appeal of religious support networks86 to those excluded from the global space of ows87 also emerges from the recent observation that Islamicist movements as well as Pentecostal Christianity spread among the unemployed victims of urbanization, poverty-stricken slum dwellers struggling to survive in the informal economy who are both disillusioned with the (emancipatory) ideologies of yesteryear and unprotected by non-existing welfare systems.88 Jean and John Comaroff postulate an even clearer correlation in arguing that the

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unprecedented manifestation of zombies in the South African countryside is a response to a world gone awry and has grown in direct proportion to the translocalization of management and destablization of labor, which have led to a shrinking labor market for young men and to corresponding feelings of erasure and loss of kinship and community.89 Job insecurity and managerial decisions taken elsewhere correspond very closely to Baumans assessment of the contemporary economy as entailing global wealth and local poverty90 as a manifestation of the disarticulation of nomadic capital from local (as well as largely disposable) labor.91 Further consequences include, as we have seen, the gradual dismantling of welfare states in the developedperhaps more aptly described as Western or northern world. The human consequences of globalization, including the atomization of social life abandoning isolated individuals92 to the aforementioned search for biographical solutions of systemic contradictions,93 also affect middle-class consumers and hence the relative, or at least temporary, winners in the global economy. The appeal of (quasi-)religious promises of stability or assurance, as a psychological antidote against social/economic uncertainty, is also revealed in a documented increase in middle-class interest in fortune- and tarot readings, ranging from Thailand to the US and centering on questions of job (in)security.94 While we will say more about (contemporary/ postmodern) middleclass religiosity in due course, the place of religious practises and identities among those compensating for the lack of state-funded welfare in the rich nodes of the network society is also worth noting. Bridget Andersons study of migrant domestic workers in several European cities provides a powerful critique of the exploitation of women from developing countries at the hands of middle-class Europeans. Anderson not only demonstrates that these women workers fulll a crucial structural requirement (i.e. the service of care) in a post-welfare age, but she also points out the often contradictory effects of religious identities in these womens lives: As a crucial network of support and meaning helping them to cope with the experience of exploitation thousands of miles from their own families, and simultaneously as a signier of difference and exclusion from their (very often not particularly hospitable) host-societies and families.95 Radical/Violent Resistance For a discussion of religion in the contemporary world to be at all adequate let alone complete, mention must be made of the much discussed and widely as well as justiably feared specter of terrorist violence seemingly grounded in religious Weltanschauungen. With 9/11 and, more recently, the attacks in Madrid on 3/11/04 as watersheds in contemporary history and

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arguably but the tip of an iceberg the depth of which we have yet to grasp, there is a strong case for the analytical integration of these atrocities in a broader historical framework postulating religious violence as a simultaneously extremist and revealing reaction against the contemporary global condition. Within such a historicized framework we can distinguish between popular as well as academic interpretations96 that attribute causal power and a violent propensity to religion per se on one hand, and more thoroughly contextualized interpretationspreferred by the present authorsof certain religious discourses as vehicles for the articulation of socioeconomic despair and profound political disillusionment on the other. An advocate of such historically and sociologically contextualized accounts of the radical religious movements often somewhat problematically designated as fundamentalist, Gilles Kepel links their emergence with widespread perceptions of a crisis of legitimacy besetting the global economic order, and with the social and technological changes that have reshaped all our lives since the 1970s. If workers movements were characteristic of the industrial era, religious movements have a singular capacity to reveal the ills of society, for which they have their own diagnosis. This diagnosis itself yields a clue, which must be investigated.97 One such empirical investigation has been carried out by Mark Juergensmeyer in a series of case studies centered on some of the feared individuals and radical movements that go far beyond millenarian discontent and anticipation in perpetrating acts of violence they seek to justify in religious terms. Based on his interviews with participants in movements as varied as Hamas, militant Sikhism and Aum Shinrikyo98 as well as with leading actors within the North American Christian Right, Northern Irish sectarian movements and radical Jewish groups, Juergensmeyer99 argues that their lowest common denominator is an ideological adherence to a (sub-) culture of violence. Such groups, as Juergensmeyer demonstrates, regard themselves and the world at large as being embroiled in a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil. Violence is consequently constructed (and condoned) as a defensive strategy against encroaching (supernatural or, very often, satanic) powers. While their Manichean worldviews are shown to appropriate parts of pre-existing religious traditions in highly selective ways, Juergensmeyer also investigates their social bases and concludes that the imagined soldiers of cosmic wars tend to be young and male (. . . ) members of nancially and socially marginal groups for which there is a great need for empowerment.100 As Juergensmeyer himself concedes, however, such marginalization can be relative or a merely anticipated and feared future possibility. In this regard, our discussion of religious radicalism and globalization can be tellingly extended to include Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) as a

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predominantly urban middle-class/upper caste ideology widely identied with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), until very recently at the head of Indias (coalition) government, but also closely associated with the destruction of Babars mosque in Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh) in December 1992 and the wave of communal violence that swept across India in its aftermath. Although the philosophical roots of Hindu nationalism can be traced to the 19th century101 and the main organizational vehicles of Hindutva originated in the rst half of the twentieth century,102 it was not until the 1980s that long-established Congress hegemony gave way to the saffron wave103 of what Bhatt terms the majoritarian, chauvinistic, anti-minority ideology of Hindu supremacism.104 The BJPs rapid rise to power over the last two decades was in at least two respects signicantly aided by the forces and consequences of globalization. Firstly, economic insecurity and reforms of economic liberalization during the 1980s left many middle-class Hindus increasingly fearful of their once privileged status,105 and hence susceptible to the discursive invocation/construction of a Hindu nation to be asserted and defended against external enemies106 commonly condensed into the symbol of the Muslim. Secondly, the global Hindu community came to provide important nancial and symbolic backing for the projects of Hindu nationalism, most notably reected in the transnational transfer of money and consecrated stonesdedicated to the planned re-construction of Rams temple in Ayodhya107 from the diaspora to the homeland.108 As a prime example of globality or the social relationships transcending the nationstate container,109 this ideological participation of diaspora Hindus in Indian politics has also been interpreted as reecting a widespread politicization of culture110 brought about by experiences of migration, social marginalization and vulnerability.111 However, Hindu nationalism also confronts a profound ideological dilemmahow to reconcile the nancial and symbolic advantages the BJP has sought to derive from foreign investment and diaspora connections with an earlier (and in important Hindutva quarters continuing) espousal of economic nationalism.112 Several discourses on economic globalization, local contexts and globality co-exist, albeit in considerable tension: BJP supporters advocating privatization and deregulation policies are challenged by Hindutva hardliners opposed to neoliberalism and Western-style consumerism;113 part of a near-global Hindutva network, local organizers among Hindu communities in the UK discursively adjust to diaspora contexts, while some previous BJP voters among Delhis lower middle-class feel threatened by foreign investment and hence strongly disapprove of the governments adjustment to global economic trends.114 Thus we return to the themes of marginalization, actual exclusion and/ or the fear of future disenfranchizement recurring throughout the globalization literature.115 The empirical studies reviewed in this section broadly

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corroborate Manuel Castells interpretation of, for example, Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms as resistance identities growing out of the experience of exclusion from the dominant nodes in the network society in general, and as an attempt to reassert control over life (. . . ) in direct response to the uncontrollable processes of globalization116 in particular. However, given that the mere fear of marginalization117 can grant sufcient appeal to the exclusivist demands and discourses of religious radicals,118 future empirical and theoretical workto which we can only here allude in anticipationwill have to attempt to illuminate the circumstances under which millenarian protest becomes actively hostile and violent. All along, we are confronted with the persisting challenge of human agency: The fear or experience of marginalization and disillusionment do not single-handedly turn individuals into religious nationalists, radicals or terrorists; on an individual level (and repeating a sociological maxim), socioeconomic circumstances are imperfect predictors of ideological conviction and, even less, of social practise. Clearly, the broadly discernible patterns discussed in this section therefore represent generalized observations and correlations but certainly not social laws. In other words, human agency and discursive contestation must be included as mediating variables in assessments of radicalized religion as a by-product of globalization. POSTMODERN CONSUMERISM AND RELIGION In Intimations of Postmodernity,119 Bauman elaborates on a theme recurring in much of his more recent writingthe changing forms of social control and reproduction as solid modernity becomes liquid, as industrialism turns into postindustrialism and capital becomes nomadic. Our current historical epoch, Bauman argues, operates with a novel mechanism of discipline and control that relies less and less on the panoptical schema of industrial modernity analyzed by Michel Foucault.120 Instead, social integration is achieved through consumerist seduction reected in peoples ongoing reconstruction of their uid identities through ever changing commodities and lifestyles. With the exception of politically marginal groups and individuals who either refuse or fail to consume (and hence continue to be subject to panoptical surveillance/repression), consumerismaccording to Baumansufces to guarantee (relative) order and social reproduction.121 Bryan Turner has advanced a similar argument, though one more immediately relevant to religion, in suggesting that the public realm in late capitalism can function without an overarching system of common legitimation grounded in religion, despite the chaos of personal life-styles (. . . ) enhanced by the consumer market.122 In describing the relative beneciaries of the global economy rather than the disenfranchized discussed above,

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such accounts thus portray consumerism as the new opium and consumers as politically apathetic, hedonistic, manipulated, and thoroughly individualized. In this section, we critically engage with these and similar arguments by examining the relationship between consumerism and religion as well as its implications for discussions concerning the (de-)secularization of society. The contemporary period of reexive modernization entails social problems, inequalities, and risks that, though global in distribution, are endured and experienced individually as personal inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conicts and neuroses. (. . . ) Social crises appear as individual crises.123 While peoples experiences of environmental risks, economic uncertainty and political instability are of course profoundly shaped by class, status and geography, individualization, anomie, and anxiety also affect afuent and relatively secure middle-class consumers.124 This analysis implies that social actors, however much part of the network society they may be, cannot be reduced to the singular subject position of the apolitical consumer permanently freed from all existential fears. It also raises the question whether the contemporary relevance of religion discussed above, as a political and cultural reaction providing solidarity and meaning as well as psychological assurance, can be observed among the privileged as much as among the disenfranchized. If so, religious identities, beliefs, and practises among the former can be expected to differ from the millenarian and radical reactions discussed in the previous section. Mapping this onto the argument that liquid modernity implies consumerism, we may also ask if middleclass religiosity has been reshaped by consumerist seduction? Do afuent consumers religious practises and identities necessarily reect the logic of global capitalism, thus constituting the hegemonic (or hegemonized) opposite to the movements and discourses of millenarian resistance discussed earlier? The Spiritual Supermarket Religion, Paul Heelas declares,125 would appear to be the very last thing that can be consumed. His view represents the opinion of many sociologists, including those specializing in the study of religion and also in the eld of consumption. However they are dened, consumption, consumerism, consumer society and consumer culture are seen as corrosive of religious belief, practise and institutions. Admittedly, if we take a Durkheimian perspective anything can be socially constructed as sacreda rock or a tree, as Durkheim said, so why not a commodity? The sacred may, Featherstone argues,126 sustain itself within consumer culture, but at what price? In Jesus in Disneyland, Lyon127 fears the consequence will be the atrophy of prophecy and social critique, as religious communities celebrate the social order rather

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than confront its problems and challenge its injustices. It will be, in the most banal sense, society worshipping itself. Consumption stands in contrast to various Others, most importantly production, investment, conservation, and citizenship. In these binary oppositions, consumers are painted pejoratively: Parasitic consumers versus useful producers, proigate consumers versus prudent investors, selsh consumers versus responsible conservationists, and passive consumers versus active citizens.128 These contrasts go to the heart of Western societies selfunderstanding; they express visions, anxieties, and ambivalence about the good life and the good society, reecting core themes that inform the sociological classics. Analogous oppositions are overlaid, forming a potent armory for the critique of culture: public/private; social/individual; serious/frivolous; sacred/profane. In each case, the category religion is located under the rst term and consumption under the second, dominated term. Underlying them all, we would argue, is an opposition whose salience to sociological theorizing can scarcely be understated: The opposition between cultural pessimism and optimism. Secularization theory is, we would argue, one the foremost examples of full-blown Kulturpessimismus. Almost all of its leading advocates, including Bryan Wilson and (at least before his recantation) Peter Berger, follow Max Weber in voicing profound despair at the unstoppable outworking of rationalization socially, culturally, and individually. For Wilson in particular, secularization entails demoralization: Moral judgements are replaced by causal explanations, and culpability yields to excusability. As community declines, society is increasingly co-ordinated by technical controls rather than by morally charged social bonds. Echoing Daniel Bells analysis of the cultural contradictions of capitalism,129 Wilson argues that the Protestant ethic would be dysfunctional were it to continue to command adherence in the consumer society.130 Such a society requires hedonism, not asceticism. The values of consumer society invite contempt and cynical detachment, but cynicism can achieve little by way of collective resistance, and even fuels the demoralization from which it simultaneously recoils. In such a cultural climate, religion can no longer perform the soteriological task of reconciling humanity to evil and suffering. Given this context, what might the spiritual supermarket131 connote except superciality and hedonism? Shopping in supermarkets and shopping mallsRitzers132 cathedrals of consumptionstands as paradigmatic of consumerism: A realm of self-indulgence underpinned by the active ideology that the meaning of life is to be found in buying things and pre` packaged experiences.133 Faith is reduced to pick-and-mix134 or religion a la carte,135 a fragile confection lacking, in Wilsons pungent phrase, social signicance.

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Shopping is iconic of Western decadence; even Western discourse appears to concede that this is so. Nothing could be more mundane, more selsh or more trivial; it has little of the sacred about it. Bauman136 makes great play with these themes. For him, spaces of consumption typically encourage action but not interaction, since consumption is an irredeemably individual activity. Any encounters that do take place in such spaces are brief, shallow, scripted, and subject to constant surveillance. Shops and malls are often crowded, but there is nothing collective about them. That being so, the spiritual supermarket is scarcely a development to be greeted as a sign of a religious renaissance. Yet when we turn to a sophisticated, theoretically-informed empirical study of shopping, such as Daniel Millers wryly entitled book, A Theory of Shopping,137 we nd a different social world: Women, often on a tight budget, frequently in charge of children, engaged in the heavy physical labor of selfservice, with the prospect of a lack of appreciation from their partners when they return home to cook supper. The fact that it is a womans world may account for its disparagement; perhaps one might add masculine/feminine to our list of binary oppositions. As well as being productive labor, shopping can be a site of ethical struggles. Green consumerism, for example, is the source of considerable market power. The late twentieth century saw a large number of protable ventures in green consumerism, including fairly traded tea and coffee, environmentally friendly detergents, cosmetics free from testing on animals, organic and biodynamic produce, biodegradable packaging, recycling programs for household waste, furniture from sustainable developments, ethical and environmental investments, fuel-efcient engines, low emission fuels, renewable energy sources, and, in the case of products lacking these qualities, consumer boycotts. Green consumerism admittedly has its limitations. Green products carry a premium price, one which not all consumers will wish or be able to pay. Corporations parade the green credentials of their products, but there may be an element of sham in thisit can be little more than a marketing ploy. Consumer boycotts can be circumvented: In the apartheid era, South African wine was re-routed via Eastern Europe and then exported to the West as a product of (state) socialism. And, of course, green consumption tends to be just that: Consumption. If a commitment to the environment means consuming less, green consumerism is not the answer. It does not follow from these limitations that green consumerism is either inauthentic, or supercial, or of no consequence. Think global, act local is more than a slogan; it expresses a powerful social-political current in contemporary Western societies. If there is more to the spiritual supermarket than culturally pessimistic secularization theories recognize, a key issue needs to be confrontedthe problem of cultural reproduction. As Haynes points out,138 Millions of

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people take part in religious rituals, but they are not necessarily those of their parents: Religious pluralism in Western Europe, often drawing on Asian spiritual traditions, appeals to many people who feel that Western Christianity has accommodated itself too readily to the materialistic norms of contemporary society. The question is, what will the current generation be able to transmit to their own children? In Hervieu-Leger s analysis,139 religious faith is decreasingly seen as a sacred trust to be passed on faithfully from generation to generation, but as a cultural heritage on which people draw selectively and at their own discretion. Her own evidence from Catholics in France shows that parents typically see the socialization process not as indoctrination in The Faith but as a vehicle for equipping young people with the cognitive and affective tools they will need to make their own mature choice of faith, or decision to have no faith. On this view, the fundamental challenge to faith is neither reason nor rationalization, but cultural amnesia. The chain of memory linking the present to both the past and the future is in danger of being irreparably severed. The cultural amnesia of a consumer society can, of course, be interpreted as a symptom of secularization: Each succeeding generation has a depleted stock of religious capital to pass on to its descendants.140 In opposition to this interpretation, we argue, following Beckfords lead,141 that what is taking place is the deregulation of religion. Far from being extinguished by global consumerism, religion becomes a potent cultural resource that can be drawn on selectively and creatively in pursuit of projects asserting cultural identity. Cut free from their anchorage in traditional communities of faith and the authority structures which govern them, religious ideals and symbols become increasingly volatile and destabilizing. The much debated and seemingly ambivalent relationship between religion and consumerism therefore raises the intriguing question whether the same (or closely related) religious practises can, on one level, be shaped by the consumerist ethos of choice and individualism and, on another level, serve as a discourse critical of late capitalism? Such ambivalence, we contend, does indeed characterize certain contemporary religious communities: Jean and John Comaroff thus describe situations where Pentecostalism meets neoliberal enterprise (. . . ) offering everything from cures for depression to nancial advice to remedies for unemployment,142 thereby balancing strategies of accommodation with globalized capitalism with the earliermentioned creation of space143 for the marginalized. De-Secularization: Globalization and Lliquid Modernity as Crisis In the concluding section of this paper, we formulate the emerging hypothesis that the various, and in many respects very different, forms of

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religion and religiosity discussed so far can be subsumed under an overarching model. Jeff Haynes suggests that in normal circumstances modernization results in secularization except when religion nds or retains work to do other than relating people to the supernatural.144 Simultaneously building on and departing from this argument, we have proposed that the millenarianism of the disenfranchized and the postmodern religiosity of afuent consumers represent different responses to the crises brought about by the forces of globalization: Heightened social inequalities and anomie-inducing individualism. We suggest that what Haynes portrays as the normal circumstances of modernization were, on the contrary, historically unique experiences of solid modernity peculiar to the Keynesian welfare state in (certain parts of) the Western world. In the contemporary era of economic globalization, however, the disempowerment of the nation state and the disintegration of welfare systems have granted renewed relevance and urgency to the social and psychological work traditionally done by religion145 including the provision of networks of sociality, solidarity, and meaning and of anxiety-coping mechanisms. Whilst in broad agreement with Baumans assessment of the structural, psychological, and human consequences of globalization,146 we have challenged his earlierquoted assessment of contemporary society as indifferent to notions of immortality and transcendence. We now conclude by integrating our observations into a theoretical synthesis of Bourdieus account147 of the cultural effects of crisis with Becks historical sociology of contemporary risk society. Pierre Bourdieu argues that crises turn peoples habitus, their largely unconscious categories, tastes and predispositions that constitute the commonsensical cultural backdrop to their lives, and doxa, the universe of the undiscussed, into discourse. Previously taken-for-granted cultural meaning is thus brought to the forefront of social actors consciousness and selfunderstanding. Culture becomes ethnicity by virtue of being politicized148 and hence the basis for political claims and demands as well as the reexive ground of self-denition. Steven Vertovec149 has shown the contemporary relevance of this theoretical model in the context of one of the empirical examples discussed earlier, by arguing that the interest taken by diaspora Hindus (and their active participation) in homeland politics reect such politicization brought about by the unsettling crisis of migration and living/surviving in culturally alien as well as economically hostile environments. However, experiences of crises appear to be far more endemic to the globalized (and liquidly modern) condition. Haynes, for example, describes postmodern uncertainty as unsettling if not unbearable.150 Following Anthony Giddens assessment of the value of predictable, socially reproductive routine behavior for the maintenance of ontological security,151

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we need to rethink the countercultural potential of religious beliefs, rituals, and identities in a globalizing world.152 Thus we return to the cultural values of human experience that Castells juxtaposes to the contemporary and historically unique experiences brought about by the technological revolution of the Information Agethe space of ows that is the network society and timeless time including ideological and technological attempts to deny death.153 In contrast, by ordering domestic and frequently public space as well as by structuring daily routines, calendar time and individuals life-cycles,154 religion indeed appears ideally placed to counteract the unpredictability, virtuality and ephemerality of the contemporary world: Simultaneously as an organizing principle of time- and space-bound human lives and as a cosmology of transcendence centered on the inevitability rather than the denial of death. Such counteraction often appears to be reexive: Even Western Europe, which might appear to be the showcase of secularization if measured by declining church attendance/public worship and the individualization of values, thus exhibits a shift inrather than the often proclaimed disappearance ofreligiosity.155 Haynes corroborates this by arguing that today millions of [Europeans] take part in religious rituals, but they are not necessarily those of their parents and it therefore cannot be concluded that Britons, French, Spaniards and so on are (. . . ) becoming less interested in the spiritual and religious.156 Moreover, the ideology of global capitalism and religious-cum-cultural values can coexist within groups and individual social actors, being drawn upon according to context. This is powerfully illustrated by, for example, many in the Sikh and Hindu diaspora communities: An emphasis on professional achievementand hence successful participation in the global network societycoexists with a clear preference for ethnic/religious (and frequently caste-) endogamy157 ; cultural continuity and religious identities, it appears, can sit alongside an occupational orientation towards the space of ows. Exacerbated social inequalities and the psychological effects of individualization have already been shown to offer powerful incentives for the contemporary religious resurgence in its heterogeneous manifestations, ranging from fundamentalist politics to a new middle-class religiosity partly molded by the ideological practises and tenets of consumerism. Returning to the question as to what denes liquid modernity, we may add a profoundly signicant culturalor, perhaps more accurately, epistemological dimension to such socioeconomically induced and individually endured crises. According to Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, the postmodern condition is characterized by an incredulity towards metanarratives, the crisis of scientic knowledge (. . . ) represent[ing] an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge.158 A few years and the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl

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later, Ulrich Beck argued that reexive modernization had resulted in a new form of secularization no longer aimed at religious institutions but at the modern faith in science and progress:
[S]cience has changed from an activity in the service of truth to an activitywithout truth (. . . ). The scientic religion of controling and proclaiming truth has been secularized in the course of reexive scientization. The truth claim of science has not withstood penetrating self-examination (. . . ).159

Bauman has made a related and relevant argument in speaking of a moral crisis associated with the decline of the modern institutions and discourses of (universal) morality. Rather than seeking support of the law-like, depersonalized rules aided by coercive powers, Bauman argues, liquid modernity brings re-enchantment and heralds a new-found respect for human emotions, moral ambiguity and the inexplicable along with mistrust of unemotional, calculating reason.160 Beck also argues that risk society has subverted and nullied the modern law of differentiation. Consequently, monopolies are breaking upthe monopolies of science on rationality, of men on professions, of marriage on sexuality, of politics on policy.161 Synthesizing Becks assessment of an epistemological crisis besetting the modern scientic paradigm with his observation of the processes of dedifferentiation, a model capable of subsuming the various empirical and theoretical trajectories explored in this paper emerges: Globalization, as dened and analyzed by Bauman, Castells, Beck and others, entails economic polarization, social atomization, as well as cultural crises that transform taken-for-granted, ascribed or inherited meaning into discourse. Aided by a loss of faith in the paradigm of science and reason,162 and by widespread disillusionment with modern politics, the various projects aimed at repoliticizing religion examined above constitute, we would argue, reexive (and selective) engagements with religious traditions that challenge the modern monopoly of secular politics over the public sphere. Millenarian and radical movements among the marginalized and those fearing disenfranchizement grow out of crises and self-consciously subvert the secular connement of religion to peoples private lives.163 A different form of dedifferentiation can be discerned among the relative, or at least temporary, winners: While consumerism has arguably colonized religious beliefs and identities, the latter are still (and despite their commodication) capable of revealing the political and psychological effects of globalization. Among other things, religions explain and reassure. As we have seen, there is an acute need for explanation and reassurance in a world increasingly dened by networks and ows as much as by inequality and solitude.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Asked to comment on the contemporary signicance of religion, Manuel Castells contrasts Europe to the rest of the world:
Religion is a fundamental dimension of human existence (. . . ). And religious identity is increasing all over the world as a source of meaning. It is only Europe that feels that it is beyond this need. This would mean the absolute triumph of reason, but we know that this is not the case; we know that people have some deeper feelings, about love, about search, about fear, about protection, that cannot be found in their immediate experience. (. . . ) [T]he fact that in Europe religion became institutionalized in oppressive apparatuses (. . . ) insured the durability of Christianity but also cut it off from the inner life of many people. America, and the rest of the world, has a more personal, exible approach to religion, sometimes as a deep experience, but sometimes also as a consumer good or as soap opera, which makes religion more human and, ultimately, more effective in securing people in a world of fear and aggression.164

Castells thus corroborates the now common acknowledgement that with the exception of much of Western Europe, the secularization thesis has not come to pass.165 As we have seen, however, there is a strong case to argue that even European religiosity has not disappeared but has been reshaped by an ethos of choice, individualism and consumption. On another level, Castells observations condense important aspects of this paper relating to many peoples quest for meaning, community and psychological security. Contrary to the assertion that God is dead,166 we have argued that religion is of renewed signicance to those excluded from the dominant nodes in the space of ows167 as well as to many among the included, to disenfranchized vagabonds as much as to participating (yet fearful) consumers and tourists.168 Globalization has increased social inequality and exacerbated individualization. New patterns of social stratication and exclusion as well as a dominant culture of atomizing consumerism have broadened the spectrum of religious identities and discourses, which now range from fundamentalist, radical resistance to commodied religiosity. Whilst the empirical record unequivocally suggests that new manifestations of religion are emerging under the qualitatively novel historical condition of liquid modernity, this article can merely hope to help pave the way towards future research. Among the questions raised here and yet to be explored in more detail, we anticipate issues of human agency, the transformation of millenarian resistance into violent radicalism, the consequences of a (widely perceived) epistemological crisis besetting the paradigm of modern science, and the counter-hegemonic potential of consumed spirituality to inform many a future reection on the relationship between globalization and religion.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for a Special Research Fellowship that made the work underlying substantial parts of this article possible. ENDNOTES
1. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3965. 2. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 96. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 4. Ninian Smart quoted in Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 24. 5. Alan Aldridge, Religion in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 31. 6. Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion (New York: Berghahn, 2000). 7. Saler, Religion, p. 25. 8. Ulrich Beck, What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 10. 9. Beck, Globalization, p. 11. 10. Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 11. Beck, Globalization. 12. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 13. Also see Roland Robertson, After Nostalgia? Wilful Nostalgia and the Phases of Globalization. In Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. B. Turner (London: Sage, 1990), p. 53: Robertson provides a different though in many respects complementary model, which distinguishes between a rst phase of globalization (roughly dated from 1880 through the rst quarter of the twentieth century) and a second phase. This second (and contemporary) phase, Robertson argues, is closely related to the rise of postmodernist ways of thinking (. . . ) began in the 1960s [and] involves the reconstruction and problematization of the four major reference points of globalization (societies, individuals, international relations and humankind) [as well as] the strengthening of the particular-universal dialectic. 14. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 15. Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 275. Also see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). 17. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1996]): Castells arguably works with the clearest notion of a radical historical rupture or discontinuity between industrial modernity and the information age. The revolutionary development and renement of communication- and information technologies, particularly since the 1970s, thus emerges as a crucial watershed in human history, marking the onset of the network society. 18. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society (London: Sage, 1992). 19. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992). 20. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity. 21. David McCrone, The Sociology of Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998). 22. Stanley Tambiah, Leveling Crowds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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23. Roland Robertson and JoAnn Chirico, Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: a theoretical exploration. Sociological Analysis, Vol. 46, No. 3, 1985: pp. 222, 240. 24. Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 250. 25. See, for example, Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 26. Bryan Wilson, Salvation, secularization, and de-moralization. In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, ed. R.K. Fenn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 27. Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: from cathedrals to cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); God is Dead: secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 28. See, for example, Bryan Turner (ed.), Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage, 1990) or Beck, Risk Society. 29. Carl Hallencreutz and David Westerlund, Anti-Secularist Policies of Religion. In Questioning the Secular State: the worldwide resurgence of religion in politics, ed. D. Westerlund (London: Hurst, 1996). 30. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 31. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1996]); The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); End of Millennium (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1998]). 32. Castells, Network Society, p. 17. 33. Beck, Risk Society, pp. 191200. 34. Beck, Globalization, p. 14. 35. For example, Castells (End of Millennium) argues that the inability of Soviet statism to respond to the new structural requirements (e.g. organizational exibility and unfettered innovation) of the information ageitself dened as a novel mode of development that has replaced industrialism and as such is not peculiar to (though, as it happens, has been monopolized by) the capitalist mode of productionwas a root cause for the collapse of communism. 36. Castells, Network Society, p. 147. 37. Castells, Network Society, pp. 506507. 38. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Liquid Modernity. 39. Also see Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and, more recently, Jean and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism: rst thoughts on a second coming. In Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, eds. J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 10: Jean and John Comaroff further corroborate that the market and its masters (. . . ) of nomadic, deterritorialized investors, appear less and less constrained by the costs or moral economy of concrete labor. 40. http://www.orf.at , accessed on 23/1/04. 41. Bauman, The Individualized Society. 42. Beck, Globalization. 43. Bauman, Globalization. 44. Beck, Risk Society, p. 137. 45. Jean and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism, p. 13. 46. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930). 47. See, for example, Jeff Haynes, Religion in Global Politics (London: Longman, 1998); Castells, Power of Identity. 48. Peter Berger, The Desecularization of the World: a global overview. In The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, ed. P. Berger (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999). 49. Hallencreutz and Westerlund, Anti-Secularist Policies of Religion.

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50. George Weigel, Roman Catholicism in the Age of John Paul II. In The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, ed. P. Berger (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999), p. 19. 51. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics. 52. David Martin, The Evangelical Protestant Upsurge and Its Political Implications. In The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, ed. P. Berger (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999). 53. Tu Weiming, The Quest for meaning: religion in the Peoples Republic of China. In The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, ed. P. Berger (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999). 54. Jonathan Sacks, Judaism and Politic in the Modern World. In The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, ed. P. Berger (Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999). 55. Peter van der Veer,Religious Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave (Princeton University Press, 1999). 56. Given that the term fundamentalism is steeped in the history of American Protestantism and tends to evoke derogatory connotations, we follow Haynes lead (Religion in Global Politics) in opting for the term Islamicism to denote a heterogeneous range of religiously revivalist and politically oriented movements. 57. Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 58. See, for example, the seminal Fundamentalism Project edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby: Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Fundamentalisms and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Fundamentalisms and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Accounting for Fundamentalisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 59. Castells, Network Society. 60. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, p. 134. 61. Castells, Power of Identity. 62. Manuel Castells and Martin Ince, Conversations with Manuel Castells (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 149150. 63. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (London: Routledge, 2002 [1897]). 64. Kenneth Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: a study of millenarian activities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), pp. 8, 105. 65. Burridge, New Heaven, p. 108. 66. Susumu Shimazono, The Development of Millennialistic Thought in Japans New Religions. In New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change, ed. J. Beckford (London: Sage, 1986), p. 56. 67. Burridge, New Heaven, p. 112. 68. Gary Ferraro, Cultural Anthropology (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1992), p. 292. 69. Berger, The Desecularization of the World. 70. Bauman, Globalization. 71. Robert Bellah, New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis in Modernity. In The New Religious Consciousness, eds. C.Y.Glock and R.N. Bellah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 337339. 72. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Cult of (Huniyan): a new religious movement in Sri Lanka. In New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change, ed. J. Beckford (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 214218. 73. Edward Evans-Prichard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1937]). 74. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 [1922]), pp. 414427. 75. Burridge, New Heaven, p. 34. 76. For comparable observations concerning the effect of improved means of communication on the spread of new religious movements in post-World War II Western Europe, see James Beckford and Martine Levasseur, New Religious Movements in Western Europe.

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Karner and Aldridge In New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change, ed. J. Beckford (London: Sage, 1986), pp. 3132. See, for example, Michael Storper, Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: globalization, inequality, and consumer society. In Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, eds. J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 89. Castells, Power of Identity, p. 79. Castells, Power of Identity, p. 74. Castells, Power of Identity, p. 80. James Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant: rebellion and subsistence in South East Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Castells, Power of Identity, p. 77. Robertson and Chirico, Humanity, Globalization, and Worldwide Religious Resurgence, pp. 238239. See, for example, Haynes, Religion in Global Politics. David Martin, The Evangelical Protestant Upsurge and Its Political Implications, p. 41. Such observations resonate with the instrumentalist paradigm of ethnicity, according to which ethnic/religious identities can play signicant economic, political as well as possibly psychological rolesincluding the provision of networks of solidarity, alliance, meaning, and coherencein the lives of individuals. See Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (London: Routledge, 1969) and, more recently, Peter Delius, Sebtakgomo; Migrant Organization, the ANC and the Sekhukhuneland revolt. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1989: 581617. Castells, Network Society. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums. New Left Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2004: 534. Jean and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism, pp. 2526. Bauman, Globalization. Bauman, Liquid Modernity; The Individualized Society; Wasted Lives (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). Bauman, Liquid Modernity; The Individualized Society; Beck, Risk Society, p. 137. Jean and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism, p. 21. Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work: the global politics of domestic labour (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 38, 154. See, for example, Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Touchstone, 1998); Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God, p. 11. Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese neo-Buddhist religious movement, was responsible for the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, killing 12 and injuring some 5500 people. Its spiritual leader, Shoko Asahara, was sentenced to death by a Japanese court in February 2004 (www.newsbox.msn.co.uk accessed on 2/27/04). Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: the global rise of religious violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Juergensmeyer, Terror, pp. 190191. Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996). Hansen, Saffron Wave. Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism, p. 1. This form of status anxiety was also reected in widespread (and violent) middle-class, upper-caste opposition to V.P. Singhs governments decision in 1990 to implement the so-called Mandal recommendation to increase the number of places reserved for the socalled backward castes in education institutions and government service (van der Veer, Religious Nationalism, p. 4).

77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

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106. See, for example, Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, pp. 170187; Catarina Kinnvall, Nationalism, religion and the search for chosen traumas: Comparing Sikh and Hindu identity constructions. Ethnicities, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2002: pp. 9899. 107. According to the controversial and contested Hindutva version of history, Ayodhya was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram and center of his kingdom as depicted in the Ramayana. A temple marking Rams birthplace, so the Hindu nationalist narrative continues, was destroyed by the Babar, founder of the Mughal dynasty, in 1528 and replaced by a mosque. 108. Chetan Bhatt, Dharmo Rakhshati Rakshitah: Hindutva movements in the UK. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2000: 559593; Parita Mukta, The Public Face of Hindu Nationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2000: 442 466. 109. Beck, Globalization. 110. We here borrow David McCrones terminology and denition of ethnicity as politicized culture (Sociology of Nationalism). 111. Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2000). 112. For a detailed discussion of these ideological contradictions between calibrated globalisation and swadeshi economic nationalism, also see Hansen (Saffron Wave) and Bhatt (Hindu Nationalism). 113. Thomas Blom Hansen, The Ethics of Hindutva and the Spirit of Capitalism. In The BJP and the Compulsion of Politics in India, eds. T.B. Hansen and C. Jaffrelot (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 114. See Christian Karner, The Categories of Hindu Nationalism: a neo-structuralist analysis of the discourse of Hindutva (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, forthcoming). 115. Bauman, Liquid Modernity; The Individualized Society; Beck, Globalization. 116. Castells, Power of Identity, p. 26. 117. Juergensmeyer, Terror. 118. Though their wider contexts, demands, numerical strength, and conditions of possibility differ greatly, the middle-class constituencies of Hindu nationalism and Aum Shinrikyo respectively provide but two well-documented instances of religious reactions against the fear of marginalization. 119. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, pp. 9798. 120. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991 [1975]). 121. Post-9/11 history and heightened security measures against the ever present risk of terrorist attacks (including the extensive use of close circuit television) provide but the arguably strongest challenges against Baumans notion of the demise, or redundancy, of the panopticon. 122. Bryan Turner, Religion and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1991), p. 241. 123. Beck, Risk Society, p. 100. 124. Bauman develops these and similar themes in two of his most recent books, The Individualized Society, and Society under Siege (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 125. Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: the celebration of self and the sacralization of modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 102. 126. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), p. 126. 127. David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: religion in postmodern times (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 128. Alan Aldridge, Consumption (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 7. 129. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Second Edition) (London: Heinemann, 1979). 130. Bryan Wilson, Salvation, secularization, and de-moralization, p. 49. 131. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics. 132. George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: revolutionizing the means of Consumption (London: Sage, 1999). 133. Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 50. 134. Bruce, Religion in the Modern World.

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135. Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods: the poverty and potential of religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987). 136. Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 137. Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). 138. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, p. 67. 139. Daniele ` Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000 [1993]). 140. Bruce, God is Dead, pp. 7173. 141. James Beckford, Religion and Advanced Industrial Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Social Theory and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 142. Jean and John Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism, p. 23. 143. Martin, The Evangelical Protestant Upsurge and Its Political Implications. 144. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, p. 216. 145. Ferraro, Cultural Anthropology. 146. Bauman, Globalization; The Individualized Society. 147. Bourdieu, Outline. 148. McCrone, Sociology of Nationalism. 149. Vertovec, Hindu Diaspora. 150. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, p. 214. 151. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1984). 152. For a relevant psychoanalytical discussion of religious nationalism as a source of ontological security and an antidote to existential anxiety in times of globalization, also see Kinnvall, Chosen traumas. 153. Castells, Network Society, pp. 481484. 154. See, for example, Jean Holm with John Bowker (eds.), Rites of Passage (London: Pinter, 1994); Sacred Place (London: Pinter, 1994). 155. Berger, The Desecularization of the World. 156. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, p. 67. 157. See, for example, Roger Ballard (ed.), Desh Pardesh: The South Asian Presence in Britain (London: Hurst, 1994); Karner, The Categories of Hindu Nationalism. 158. Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 39. 159. Beck, Risk Society, p. 166. Italics in the original. 160. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 33. 161. Beck, Risk Society, p. 232. 162. As is well known (see, for example, Martin Marty and Scott Applebys Fundamentalism Project), radical/fundamentalist movements tend to call for the reordering of political structures along lines allegedly sanctioned by religious texts and traditions, whilst often embracing technologyand hence some of the applications of modern scienceas part of their strategies of mobilization and dissemination. In other words, they exhibit a selective appropriation of science as a means to religious ends. 163. For a comparable and relevant argument concerning the renewed mobilizing potential of ethnic identities in times of late capitalist modernity, see Steve Fenton, Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 164. Castells and Ince, Conversations, p. 111. 165. Haynes, Religion in Global Politics, p. 215. 166. Bruce, God is Dead. 167. Castells, Network Society; Power of Identity; End of Millennium. 168. Bauman, Globalization.