(Published in: The Island, July 3, 2008)
State dispensations today:
Debating and quantifying the label ‘secular’
by Michael Roberts
This is a slightly modified version that appears in a global blog site devoted to the understanding of political fervour. Both, in turn, are summary versions of a longer essay involving an unfinished debate with Mark Whitaker. It presents disjointed thoughts on readings of the concept "secular" in academic circles without recourse to the voluminous literature on the issue. Note that it drew a refreshing and critical response from Fr. Aloysius Pieris, s.j. SEE http://sacrificialdevotionnetwork.wordpress.com.
The LTTE has been characterized as a secular organization by Robert Pape and a number of scholars. The term is taken as understood, but when I deployed the concept in order to challenge this reading as facile, I was immediately confronted by Indian scholars who asked for a clarification of the term. Their approach in turn was informed by the manner in which the concept has been deployed in India since Nehru's time as well as more recently in opposition to fundamentalist forces in both the Hindu and Islamic camps.
In the conventional reading "secular" denotes an organization that is not explicitly linked to a religious denomination or forms of government guided by religious notions. It is sometimes implicitly linked to the idea of rationality so that its opposite is deemed to be "irrational" (and thus magical, superstitious, otherworldly). As such, it is implicitly or explicitly opposed to the category "religious."
My definition of "secular," however, is coined in opposition to the broader category "supra-mundane," a term that embraces "religious" sentiments without being confined to them. The "supra-mundane" refers to any beliefs and practices that have faith in cosmic principles as a force in the world of human activity. Besides religious rites and ideas, it embraces activities guided by astrology, numerology, superstition, shamanistic notions and other practices that would fall within the Weberian idea of "the enchanted."
It follows that I define "secular" in a strict fashion. Guided by British colleagues I find that Britain is not a secular state because of its links with the Anglican Church through the Crown. Indeed, all you have to do is to look closely at British coins to see this imprint. But this reading is then qualified by my insistence on the force of context: in this instance, a society, British society, that today is permeated by secular practices and ways of being, so that committed religious practice is confined to a distinct minority of Britain's population.
Such an emphasis on context in my perspective places an onus on the "embodied practices" of the population from which an organization springs, and to which it necessarily caters. "Embodiment" stresses the power of the faculties associated with ear, nose, mouth, eye and touch. Taken together such forces carry insidious weight and instill many taken-for-granted practices that re nevertheless meaningful. When I refer to people "becoming" Sinhala, Tamil, Burgher or whatever, therefore, I am underlining the significance of processes of embodiment and nurturing that work at profound levels.
This phenomenological emphasis on the meaningful actions of those under study means that I go beyond the formal declarations of any organization. The focus is upon the organisation's 'daily' operations - operations that are deciphered by the yardstick of "supra-mundane" opposed to "secular."
Likewise, where any organization fosters practices that embrace a number of religious denominations in ecumenical fashion (without necessarily favouring one denomination) that organization is deemed "non-secular" because it has oriented itself on such occasions towards the supra-mundane, supernatural, cosmic world.
Ever since the second-in-command Seelan died on 6th July 1983 the LTTE began a process of legitimization and mobilization that can be described as "dead body politics" (Katherine Verdery's phrase from another context). The expansion and institutionalization of their rites for their dead, the mavirar (great heroes) as they are called, has also been identified as a "cult" by scholars who are not antithetical to the LTTE. In this usage "cult' is not disparaging (though rationalists would tend to use the term in with such an implication). In my reading, then, the mavirar cult and its supra-mundane potentialities undermine the facile identification of the LTTE as secular. Such practice, of course, work within the LTTE's primary goal of self-determination for the Tamils of Sri Lanka as they seek a state of Eelam under their command.
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