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Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello everyone, welcome to the new Books Network. I'm Kia-Tibsullan Kumar, the host of this channel. And today I'm here with Dr.
Lucien and Dr. Eurek to talk about their edited book, Metro Perspective on Religion, Conflict and Violence. I think this is a very interesting book as it brings about the Metro Perspective on this aspect that you are talking about. And I think I believe we'll have a fruitful conversation even today also.
So let me straight away go to one of the editors and I'll ask one of them to introduce one by one. Yeah. My name is Visham Felira. I'm very happy to be here on the show.
And I'm working at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I'm doing research in profiles of religion in situations of violent conflict. And well, since a few years I've worked together with Eric Meinema, who is sitting next to me. And we give classes together for the last, I think it's six or seven years now.
And the topic of these classes are religion and violence. Yes, and I'm Eric Meinema. I do research as a scholar of religion on religious diversity in the coastal region of Kenya. I did my PhD on this topic, which was also supervised by Visham Felira, but we've been teaching together for many years as Lucien said.
And we have a common interest in the topic of religion and violence. And this is how we ended up working on this project together. No, that's really interesting that both the supervisor and the students are actually going on to work together and doing such wonderful work. It's really good to hear that one.
So moving on, I think this is an interesting work. And as Dr. Ira Gausle said, it was part of his PhD work. But tell me the journey of coming towards this work and this book in particular, right?
What was the journey in terms of the academic journey that was there in terms of the conceptual formation and how all the chapters came together? Yeah. That's really great question. I think my interest in the whole question of religion related violence started even before 9-11.
I was living in Jakarta then in Indonesia and I saw how people responded to what happened in the United States. And of course, in the slipstream of 9-11, there were a lot of interpretations and perspectives and views on how what really happened was caused by belief and by faith or by ideology and by frustration and all kinds of terms came to the fore to interpret what happened in the US. I was always a little bit dissatisfied. Although I know that these interpretations were available, I was thinking something was missing because they were very general perspectives and very general views on the causes of religion and religious violence.
And I was thinking that we should focus more deeply on the actors of violence and what they think they were doing and how they relate to specific networks they live in and what kind of ideas are related to their specific backgrounds. So all these questions came to the fore during, in a time, you might say between 9-11 and the genesis of this book. In conflict studies, there was a lot of focus on these mentalistic approaches on violence. So if we speak about the causes of violence, people tend to speak about situations of discrimination, social exclusion, economic deprivation and that kind of things.
However, there is less attention for a specific biographical note on why people commit violence and how these reasons are related to the networks to which they belong to the specific individual biographies of people. And I always thought this was the interpretations of more general views on the violence were not satisfactory in the analysis of violence. So that's when Eric and I worked together on the material approach and here in Internet we have a very good context because we work both in the group of Birgit Maier, who is very much focused on so-called religion, religious matters, so the material interpretation of religion. And we thought, well, this is very interesting to combine conflict studies on the one hand with more general mentalistic approaches towards violence and on the other hand also material religion and the very sensibility that creates material religion towards things of conflict.
So and that was the initial intuition you might say of what that created to this book. Yeah, quite interesting. Eric, can you also tell us about your academic journey? Yeah.
Yeah, I can also say a little bit more about that. I think that as a scholar, we're interested in religious diversity and how religious diversity is also regulated, for example, by governments or by civil society organizations in legal debates. Of course, if you're interested in the topic, you are interested also in how things are perhaps regulated in a way that leads to cohesion, but sometimes also to tensions and conflicts. So that is one reason why it's also always been interested in the topic of religion and violence.
And also particularly in relation to our book, I think we've been teaching a course on religion, conflict and violence together, Lucian and I for quite a few number of years. And we've always been dissatisfied also in the way in which religion is primarily often approached as a set of concepts, very mentalistic approach of religion, by asking questions, for example, about how religious traditions legitimize violence or perhaps even promote violence through particular radical or ideological understanding of particular religious traditions. And these interpretations have their value, but as Lucian said, if you approach also religion from a material perspective, other things come into view, namely the ways in which religions are also tied to ways of living together, tied to ways of interacting with things and objects, how people are drawn together also by particular religious infrastructures, religious traditions can also provide things like humanitarian aid and conflict situations. So if you approach religion from this material perspective, much more can be seen.
And we thought it was interesting to include this in understanding also of religion related violence. Yeah, interesting. And I think part of you also kind of talk about how the topic of religion and violence has been studied and looked at and also part of you are coming to give different perspectives to each. So can you give us an overview of the scholarship on religion and violence?
Can you give us an overview there? Yeah. Thank you. This is a very wide question, sir, to say.
Well, I think there is one great impact on the study of religious violence that started in the late 1960s with the literature of Johann Galton and later on also with Pierre Bourguier, with the introduction of concepts like symbolic violence, cultural violence, structural violence, and these concepts really widened the focus of scholarly research if it comes to religion. The idea behind this was that violence is much more than the knife that is used to hurt or to kill people or the weapon that is used to hurt or kill people. Violence is always something that is already prepared in the structures in a society in which people tend to justify the use of violence towards certain subjects. And these intuitions had great impact on studies of violence as such.
If it comes to religious specifically, we have, of course, since 1999 the literature and even before 1992 already the literature of Marc Jürgen-Smire, which he has conducted great interviews with actors of religious violence or those people justifying religious violence, but what he did also was using this concept of cosmic war as a leading concept in analyzing religious violence in which he says that people have a tendency to distinguish between what is huge and what is bad, but not so much on a social level, but much more on an ontological, say, metaphysical or even a transcendental level. And this had great impact on the scholarly of religious violence. So the problem with this view, although it might be true in some cases, look at American evangelicals, for example, some branches of American evangelicalism with their ideas of an apocalyptic Armageddon and that kind of themes. I think they are very important also to analyze their stand in the political realm of the US, for example, but it doesn't count for all context of religion-related violence.
And what we do is we ask attention for the specific locality of violence, the infrastructure of violence that is much broader than how people afterwards interpret what goes on. So it's being attention to how people understand what goes on, not only at a metaphysical level based on ideas that are generated by the religion, for example, but also in the specific locality. What happens? What happens if a church is burned down, for example, or a mosque is burned down in a certain conflict?
What does that do to the local community? How do people interpret the violence of the other, for example? How does that create identities? And there is a tendency also that identities are problematic in the analysis of violence, and specifically in the analysis of religious violence, as if religion would be an identity or identical to certain identity formations.
However, on the other hand, you can also argue, like Max Pericles has done, in his fantastic book on Generative Violence, that identity might be generated through episodes of violence. So identity might also be resulted from violence from violent situations. So and that is more or less the intuition that we had, that the complexity of violence is much more greater, and the idea that there is something like a cosmic war, or there is a transcendental idea, there is a belief in the legitimation or justification of violence, only leads a straight in some sense, because it generates general terms in which religious violence should be understood. And that is not very fruitful for the analysis of what really happens at cross-rooms level.
Yes, quite interesting. Yeah, so coming to Dr. Eurek, I wanted to ask something about religion. Obviously, in this podcast, I've been asking almost everyone the aspect of what is religion and all this definition of respect of religion.
But I think in academic violence, I think we have gone beyond the very definition of respect of religion, and we actually look at religion from a very different perspective now. So you talk about the structural and conceptual aspect of religion. So can you explain a little bit about what this religion is and how you're looking at in terms of this conflict? Yeah, I think if you look at material approach to the study of religion that has been developed by scholars such as Big Ed Meyer, but also David Morgan, religion is primarily seen as discursive, but also material means through which people connect themselves to something that is bigger than themselves.
You can call that transcendence or beyond or gods or divinities. And that is intrinsically also material because people relate to particular material forms through which a sense of the sacred is generated in the interaction between humans and things. And we find that approach instructive. And I think also if you look at the work of scholars such as Big Ed Meyer, she has also thought about incorporation, but several scholars are about how different approaches to the ways in which people relate to gods or spirits or ancestors whatsoever may also lead to conflict.
Because the same objects or the same things might also function differently in plural settings, in diverse settings. And conflicts over how to relate to gods or spirits may cause conflicts or tensions. In our book, we've also tried to broaden this approach by also looking at how people generate a sense of community along religious lines through their engagements with things. So people might, for example, feel very closely connected to their church or their mosques because it provides them a place in which religious practices take place.
And if those places or other objects that are important to particular groups are destroyed or harmed in situations of conflict, this may also influence conflict situations. So we've kind of looked a little bit broader by looking also at the infrastructures on which religious practices and also a sense of religious communities depend on how they become contested in situations that are characterized by conflicts and violence. So in that sense, we take inspiration from this material approach to the subtle religion, but also look a bit broader by not only looking at those specific objects that are directly connected to religious practices in which people generate a sense of interaction with something that can be called divine or transcendent, but also looking at how religious lives and sense of religious community are sustained by the ways in which people interact with things with religious infrastructures. And these may often be also very important in situations in which conflict arises or violence arises along religious lines because it's not always ideology that is very important, religious ideology that determines or legitimate violence or causes violence by, for example, digitimizing violence, but also a sense of having unical access to religious infrastructure, not having the same opportunities as other religious groups to manifest oneself or one's religious community in public life or not having the same economic or political opportunities via the religious infrastructures to whom one is connected.
So in this sense, sometimes religious infrastructures are much more important and much more contested and debated in situations that are characterized by conflict and violence than religious ideology. And we think that this is one of the central points of our book, that it is important to look at these broader religious infrastructures and not at religious ideology alone. And in this sense, this is also demonizing this, how religious infrastructures are connected to conflict situations. It's also one way in which we aim to contribute to the field of the material study of religion, in which things like iconoclasm and also offensive images have been often been theorized.
There's some very good scouring work out there already, but the topic of conflict and violence itself has been less often explicitly theorized. So in this sense, we also into contribute to the field of the material religion by demonizing and theorizing this in our edit form. Maybe just to add something, if I may. So religion for us is not just power, it's not just authority, it's not just texts, it's not just community, but it's the complicated relationships that people have with each other around certain discourses and around certain materiality that you might understand as the infrastructure in which people relate to each other, in which they build their networks.
Yeah, quite an elaborate overview actually. So one of the foundational aspects of your work is also based on the material turn in religious study, what we call as a material turn. So can you, any one of you elaborate on this material turn in religious studies? Yeah.
I think that's, yeah, better for you to do. Well, I already said quite a bit about this in my previous answer in the sense that we are inspired by the material turn in the study of religion, because it offers us a broader way of theorizing religion that not only focuses on religious ideas and religious ideologies or a mentalistic construction of religion, but emphasizes material aspects of religion. And in this sense, we can all recognize that religions are a material true and true. They do not exist independently from the bodies of people, the things that people do, the things with which they interact.
And we have taken this as a starting point to reflect more broadly on what the role is of religion in religion related conflict and violence. Anything to add to that? I think that's great. Well, of course, materiality functions within religious communities, and materiality is part and parcel of how people understand what they exactly believe.
So what we want to get rid of is that religion or the material religion approach wants to get rid of, is that religion is only circles only around belief and faith and a set of doctrines. Religion is much more than that. It's not not that, it's also that, but it's also materiality. It's also the building in which people gather.
It's also the statue of Mary, it's also the crucifixion and the representation of that. It's also the senses and the smell of churches in mosques or in Hindu temples. So religion is also appeals to the senses of people, both visually or all kind of in smell or in what you hear and how you hear it, how you understand the voices of your leaders, for example. It's not only content, it's also formed in a certain sense.
Yes, yes, true. Now, both of you have also pointed out on the some of the aspects of this network approach that you have talked about. Now, I want to go into this one and where I want any one of you to elaborate on this network approach to religion and conflict or religion and violence versus so, can you elaborate on this network approach? Yeah, sure.
The subtitle of our book is Things of Conflict. So if you think about it, things of conflict, what precisely is a thing of conflict? And we argue that everything can become a thing of conflict in a certain sense because it is part of a social network. How does a thing become a thing of conflict?
People talk about something, people discuss something, people contest something, people try to understand something, people destroy something. And these things they become charged with how social networks and social communities perceive these things. And so they become important in certain contexts, in certain historical contexts, and also they become middleised, for example, think about the Muhammad cartoons, think about the burning of the Quran, that kind of things, they become middleised, things of conflict. But the interesting thing is that the thing in and on itself is just a thing, right?
So it's the meaning that is given to what happens to the thing is the perspective of the community. And this community may be heard in a certain sense by what they think has been done to the thing. So they see the Quran being burned, for example, in Baitari-Jones, in southern parts somewhere in the United States, but it is mediaised and people in Jalalabad, or in Jakarta, they go to the streets to protest against it, not because the Quran can't handle this, but the Quran represents this community. It's not the Quran that is heard in a certain sense, but it's a community that is heard in a certain sense.
And there is a moral perspective that is living in this thing in a certain sense. So people relate to the thing and they feel heard because of this moral judgment that they think is present in what people do to these things. Yes, yes. So I think the discussion of the book really revolves around, you know, icon, idolatry and infarct and all of those aspects.
And I think the contributors are really brought out in a different perspective. So again, both of you, you know, bring out some of the perspective from the contributors that are there, which will help aid in, you know, understanding the methodological perspective, but also at the same time help aid in understanding some of the findings that are there, right, some of the relevant findings in terms of the material perspective or religion. So yeah, I can borrow if you bring out some of the data aspects in the, in the chapters. Yeah.
Yeah, I can do that. I think if you look, for example, at the chapter by Tommy Wilkes, who wrote about parts of the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi being bulldozed in order to make place for a bypass road, it shows very nicely and interestingly how religion is much more than ideas alone, because part of what was destroyed by the bulldozers in the Kibera neighborhood were some of the buildings that belonged to a particular Muslim community, a new being Muslim who live in Kibera and who depend on these buildings, who they rent out for sustaining themselves. So they saw these properties as vital for their existence in Kibera. And as soon as these buildings were destroyed, it raised a lot of questions also about how how the state relates to their community, how it respects their rights or not, how they relate also to their neighbors in Kibera.
So I think that chapters very nicely, how the religious infrastructures are important to take into account in situations in which the violence of the gods. And also, I think what I just said relates to also what is written about by Crystal Baumgard and his chapter who writes about how certain temporal formations, so how time is being organized by the German state, influence opportunities for various religious groups to express themselves or not to express themselves, because in some cases the German states or different boonders lander use respect Christian festivities in their calendar, which of course allows Christians to celebrate their religious feasts, but not necessarily the same space as given to other religious groups or even German citizens who consider themselves to be secular. So also the ways in which diversity is organized by the state is hardly ever neutral and might lead certain temporal formations to become things of conflict. So I think this illustrates very well how things of conflict arise often in settings of diversity, because people have different interpretations of how temporal forms or material objects would be organized, how they should be respected or cherished or how they might be idols or whatsoever.
So the tensions arise in context of diversity, but also that states are very often very much involved in regulating this diversity, and that state regulations themselves may also be contested and often open up tensions and conflicts to arise. So these are just two examples I think from the chapters of our book that illustrate some of the more general theoretical points that we want to make, but perhaps you have more ideas. Yeah sure I think every chapter has a specific focus on a material theme, and I would like to do very attention also to the first chapter written by Unisamifar on the role of weapons in Iranian militia fighting Islamic states. And this is very interesting because what he shows very well I think is that in such a battle the ideology is not important.
So the specific identity of these groups are not important, what is important is the social life is being socialized in finance and creating a specific micro network in which weapon becomes your best friends. So weapons are personalized in that situation. It's not about radical Islam or something like that or fighting the wrong ideology for these actors. The weapon is best friends and it's something that you share with your peers in a micro combat zone.
So this is also very important and say something about violence that also relates in my view to what Renu Collins is doing in his micro-analysis of violence in which he says well it's not about motives in situations of fight and conflict, but it's about well finding domination for example, relating the relationship between perpetrator and victim, which is very important in that sense for the outcome of the violent situation. And he wants to get rid of these motives in authority, in tax and ideologies, in religions, etc. And this for us is of course very important and interesting because it gives us the opportunity also to develop some kind of a micro situation that relates very much to the infrastructure and to the things of conflict that we bring to the foreign group that are charged with these social networks and so with these interpretations saying a weapon for example or a calendar as in the article by a piece of bomb cartner or even a bulldozer as a weapon in the article by Tommy Biltz. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and Christ.
Now as we come to the end of the discussion, I want to ask both of you this one and I want to ask one part of your perspective and answer on this right, since one of you are teaching this course on religion and neutrality and conflict, I wanted to ask one of you an advice for like early scholars or students who are looking into this aspect, okay, I want to work into this, methodologically how do I approach this and what is the future in the research of this right in this area. So can you give us some kind of advice also at the same time some kind of methodological perspective as to how to approach this for an early scholar or a student who is looking into this aspect, yeah. Shall I start or shall you start? Okay, you can this is absolutely very fascinating question.
I did not expect this one but it's absolutely very fascinating. I would say but please add something to this. I would say that in conflict analysis that's in false religion or religious actors, people identifying with religion and and being in a conflict situation that is seen also by the outside world as religious, we should focus on micro situational elements like materiality, like how are frustrations and how is anger organized for example in these micro situations, how are accidents interpreted, how are narratives spread, how is gossip developing, how is leadership understood, but also all kind of other elements like well the example of weapons, how are weapons seen as personalized trends in those situations, how is alcohol and drugs which also plays an important role in some conflict situations, how does this impact how people relate to to a violent situations and so my general advice would be to look very closely at the infrastructure of violent conflict and not to take all kinds of motives for granted, not to dive into religion or ideology and pit it against each other or to see all kinds of political exclusions or traumatized societies that kind of elements they might be important but they are only important if they are translated to a micro level of violent conflict, so that would be my advice, start bottom up, start in the locality and then see what kind of elements are there that we can identify and that we try to understand how this relates to the social networks in which they are becoming meaningful. Yeah, yeah and I think the advice that I have very much along the lines as Lucian described because if you talk about conflicts and violence often representations of it are very much contested so people have very different perspectives on if violence takes place about what exactly happens, how it should be interpreted and nothing about these representations should be taken for granted instead we should very closely study how these representations and interpretations of conflict, how they arise and how they contrast or align with other empirical elements that we can study and of course exactly this is often very difficult in situations of conflict and violence because it is often very difficult to study this directly empirically because that can be dangerous but nevertheless I would encourage people to not take those representations for granted but to study very closely empirically how they arise and how they connect to what happens exactly indeed in those micro situations the micro dynamics of violence in cases in which violence arises.
Yeah I would like to add some one point and that's that if we look as humans as episodes of violence we have of course a very quick moral judgment because we are very much against violence right and that also determines how we look at it and how we try to analyze it because we we love if conflict is black and white we love it if there are perpetrators and victims because then we can support the victims the problem is that conflict is very complex and it's very messy and bad guys and good guys are not always distinguishable so that would also be a lesson if you look at conflicts of course the attraction of conflict is that we want to take position because that's only human to do so but the challenge is to analyze and to look at micro situations and that's even perpetrators think that they have the reason to do what they do. Yeah yeah very good advice from both of you yeah really interesting and you know there are so many more things to be discussed but I hope that listeners have gotten overview of the work and some of the conceptual and you know methodological framework now I'm sure people as people listen to this podcast people like to ask some questions to both of you or you know approach part of you for some clarity on your work in which you're away so if people want to approach to you how do they approach you email social media which way will be better yeah yes we are very happy if people have questions or if they want to contact us just write an email I think that's best great great and so to both of you what is your next project academically what are you looking at and you know what are the fun things academically ahead of both of you yeah well actually building on the project that we are discussing today we are now developing a new project on the meaning of weapons in which we want to closely study or more closely study because some elements were already in the book but we want to more closely study how weapons figure in situations that are characterized by violent conflict you know they are also interpreted in various cultural and religious settings so we've recently sent out a call for chapters and we are developing a new project based on that and the reason why we focus on this is that we think that one of the aspects that is very interesting about our previous project but was not or could be highlighted the materiality of violence itself so what happens in the close interaction between humans and weapons at the moment and which violent conflict takes place and how are also these relationships between people and weapons how are they interpreted or given meaning in particular cultural and religious settings so that is the focus of our of our next project and it is an interdisciplinary project so we want to invite also scholars not only from religious studies but also from conflict studies from psychology from media studies to reflect on this because of course we all know how weapons figure very prominently not only in conflict situation but also in a ways in which conflict are mineralized also in movies and video games sometimes even in museums and these kind of settings so we think that it is high time that the meaning of weapons in different cultural and religious settings and conflict situations is given more attention so that is the focus of our next project yeah very interesting I think one of your current project and the next project that is there I have of you is very much you know very much relevant to the society in terms of understanding conflict understanding ourselves and you know how do we really resolve all of those things ahead of us by having a multi-sided understanding of this aspect so that is something which is very interesting thank you very much Dr. Lucian and Dr. Eric for being here at New Books Narrow I'm sure the listeners have loved the conversation with you and I request the listeners to get a hold of your book called Truth and if you don't understand anything as some of their aspect and if you want to produce your father you can actually approach both of them and yeah it has been a wonderful time having this conversation with both of you thank you very much and take care bye bye thank you very thank you for having us