Lecture 1 4 Sept.

, 2019

Introduction
● What is globalization?
○ Economic dimension of globalization
■ Expansion of markets across the world
■ Expansion of global economies
■ Changing consumption patterns
○ Enables greater movement of people
■ Migrants, asylum seekers, refugees
■ Looking for opportunity or escaping persecution
○ Exposure to more cultures
■ Contributes to a global self-consciousness
■ Makes you feel like you live in a world as opposed to a place
○ Changing experience of both time and space
○ History and legacy of globalization under the guise of European and Western
imperialism
■ A world made up of nation-states
■ Came about from colonialism and empire ⇒ very important to current
globalization as well as to the spread of religion
● What is the connection b/w religion and globalization? How is religion implicated in the
process of globalization?
○ Importance of missionary work, how it affected nation-states
○ How seemingly secular institutions arose from religious ones
■ i.e. Weber’s “Protestant Ethics” and how it relates to capitalism

Painting on slides
● A kind of pilgrimage
○ A village in background (right) with a church tower
○ Entirety of community, ceremonially walking around the boundaries of the village ⇒
“Rogation Day”
■ Agricultural and economic significance
■ Everyone dressed in their Sunday best
● The parish was a very important part of village life
○ The parish is a territorial unit; a jurisdiction rather than a building
○ Communal, a ritual about everyone together not just individuals
○ Reproducing the community, embodied in people who lived there
○ A ritual with a sacred space; shows you what people believed in
● Take-away: what kind of religiosity is shown? A performance or statement of who
these people are; establishing themselves
● An element of nostalgia
○ Micro-communities in which religion had a certain role

Themes in this course

 ● ‘embedded’ vs ‘disembedded’
○ Embedded = rooted
■ Connected to everything else, cannot be distinguished from others
■ Embedded religions cannot be neatly separated from economic and
social life
○ Disembedding consequences of modern globalization
■ What does that have to do globalization?
● Non-European, non-modern globalizations
○ A lot of globalizations have happened in the world
○ They have had many consequences ⇒ will explore these as well
● Modern globalization
○ What is modern? Dating back to about 500 years ago
○ Disembedding consequences of modern globalization
■ Rise of territorial states
■ Rise of standing armies to defend said territorial states
■ Expansion of markets and capitalism
● Industrialization + urbanizations
■ In the 20th century: capitalism on steroids
○ Modern religious pilgrimage (i.e. Mecca)
● Cosmopolitanism
○ What is the impact of being more aware of the world?
○ How can religion within globalization be a re-embedding force?
■ Certain nations have religious salience ⇒ importance of one religion

Questions we will explore

● What happens to religions amid this embedding and disembedding?
○ Life experiences secularizing
● Why are some countries more religious than others?
● How do these globalizing forces impact the nature of religious identity and practice?
● What gives globalizations a propensity towards secularization?
○ Why is the feeling of modernity associated with putting religion away?
● What role does religion play in migrant context (i.e. community of immigrants)?
○ For instance, the symbol the Virgin of Guadalupe

Examples
● Mobilizing forces are changing the way people think of their nations
○ A Danish school wanted to eliminate pork in their menu instead of
accomodating immigrant kids of Muslim background
○ Lot of backlash from non-immigrant Danish people who said porc was part of their
national and cultural identity ⇒ prior to this, nobody thought of pork as a Danish
symbol (until it came under attack)

Novels
● Pay attention to where religion comes into the stories
 ● ‘Robinson Crusoe’ by Daniel Defoe
○ Captures spiritual self-possession and autonomy as an archetype of
disembedded-ness
○ A person who feels at home anywhere in the world
● ‘Minaret’ by Leila Aboulela
○ Author is British-Sudanese
○ A semi-autobiographical account of being a refugee in Britain
○ Relates to modern migration and displacement, an ambiguous relation to the
homeland, and religion in relation to the migrant experience

Lecture 2 6 Sept., 2019

Painting (continued)
● The economy is local ⇒ intimate community
○ Before advent of market systems and capitalism
■ National monetary systems are a recent phenomenon
● Transitions between the community where things are valued in abstract terms

Disembedness
● Disembedding of economic and social life ⇒ depersonalization of life
● Globalization is arguably driven by capitalism
○ Previously unseen urban expansion ⇒ cities like Berlin, London and Chicago tripling in
size
■ Urban migrants fleeing economic and political instability
○ Similar processes are being experienced by people in similar conditions today,
but outside the West
● The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
○ Talks about how individuals entered hyper-modern, industrial city life in the age
of explosive urban growth
● How did people go from the painting we analyzed, to large metropolitan cities?
○ What elements of that are reproduced from village life within immigrant
contexts in hyper-modern cities like Chicago?
○ What did people preserve? What role did religion play in preserving traditional
life?

Photographic portraits
● Colorized by an artist
● New Yorkers in the 1840s → oldest people living in the newest way of representation
○ People who were old enough to remember the French and American
Revolution, faced by a radically different environment
○ The experience of a changing time and space
 ■ Must have been shocking to live through
○ Waves of global migration represent experiences that have been felt by a lot of
people for a long time
● Canal was built, railroads were also a new arrival
○ Railroads connected inner American states to the coast

The 1940s
● The advent of industrial capitalism occurs
○ Begins changing Europe, especially the periphery
● Characteristics
○ Movement of people
○ Increasing relevance of claims on your everyday behavior by colloquial
capitalists
■ Political experience was previously very localized and experienced at
the community level (unlike nation-states)
● By the 19th century, nation-state are formed ⇒ idea of the nation as a symbolic community
○ Part of the process of disembedding
○ War begets nation-states, and nation-states beget war
■ They both consolidate each other to create solid national entities
■ A nation-state that is worthy enough that individuals will kill and die for
● Characteristics playing into disembedding
(1) War-making
(2) Education
■ Political authority becomes concerned with educating the population
■ Notion that everybody needs some kind of basic education
■ A way to consolidate nationalism and create a shared identity

Experience of time and space

● Difficult to convey
● Globalization and globality implies some kind of heightened relevance of things going
on in other parts of the world
○ Far away events have a day-to-day importance that they wouldn’t have had
prior to this disembedding process
● India
○ A long way after imperialist British India, at the end of the 18th century
○ Back then, it took about 6 months to sail from London to Kolkata (and 6 months
to get back), in the best of circumstances
■ Distance and time was vital is shaping experience
■ Imagine a charter company managing offices in India, who want
communication updates → takes about a year/year and a half to know what is
going on London-Kolkata
■ You need to formulate your correspondances clearly enough that your
exact questions are answered (can’t call them up to clear up
misunderstandings)
 ■ If the head of the shop in India died, by the time the British got there
and back, he would have been dead for over a year
○ Key take-away: there were consequences to distance and time
● Time and modernity
○ The importance of time wasn’t felt before disembeddedness
○ What is time for us?
■ Time is money, time is getting a job
■ Time is getting things done or worrying about what you’re not getting
done
○ We are a world consumed by time
■ First ‘clock’ was the chronometer
○ What was the world like before all this was true?
■ No such thing as standardized time (kept by some guys in England)
■ People sailing never knew where they were if they didn’t know the time →
hard to accurately tell time in a boat (to figure out longitude)
○ Why did time arise in England?
■ Something to do with empire-building
■ Better ships ⇒ more people wanted to travel ⇒ needed to be better at placing
yourself on a map
● Arrival of the telegraph
○ Sending morse code messages across geographical space
● Shrinking time and space ⇒ immediacy of experience
● Arrival of rail transport
○ Probably more important than the standardization of time
○ Standardized time was used to table departure/arrival times for trains so they
wouldn’t collide
● Linking of time and space
○ Experience of time in colloquial village setting is local, occurs in a
circumscribed environment
■ Involves a church bell
○ Time in embedded communities didn’t consciously or subconsciously invoke
Greenwich, a city far away in the nation, or trains

Full Steam Ahead - BBC Documentary

● A documentary that tries to recreate impacts of railways in the 1800s, when 80% of
people lived and worked in villages
● The norm was local produce by local craftsmen
○ Individual crafts came under threat when railways arrived b/c villages no longer
had to be self-sufficient; they could import things
● Thatched roofs were hard to maintain, could only be fixed after the harvest when hay
was available
○ Slate roofs were more durable and easier to maintain; needed to get slate
material into villages from the cities
 ● Take-away: nature of technological and economic globalization impacts the nature of
insulation in these villages
○ Represents the loss of ancient, local trade
○ A cheaper more durable way of fixing roofs with slates ⇒ material coming from a place
where villagers have never even been

Robinson Crusoe
● Crusoe as a disembedded homo economic man ⇒ more than the end of the journey
● Can look at:
○ (1) Spiritual success in how he behaves
○ (2) Temporary embeddedness in island and feast
■ How Crusoe tries to keep a holy day
○ (3) Disembeddedness as an extracting process