Charting the Boundaries of the Religious Field (until 2012)

On the difference between religion and politics, law and sciences as evolved over time

It is generally agreed that religion and politics, law and sciences are no historically invariant categories; likewise, we are not dealing with purely analytical concepts, the differentiation of which can make sense for functionally sophisticated and, in this sense, ‘modern’ societies at best. Rather, what religion ‘is’ and what politics, law or sciences ‘are’ is largely the result of contingent, incomplete negotiation processes in which different players each draw different boundaries between the religious and the political field, between religion and law, sciences, medicine etc. This, however, means that religion and politics and the other social fields are what they are only in relation to one another.

These interrelations are established by the social players who, from different positions, draw boundaries between the respective ‘areas’ of the various fields. Thus, as it were, by virtue of the topic of ‘boundaries’, the contested ‘intermediate zone’ – the ‘and’ in the cluster’s title – is focused on: the border areas between religion and politics, but also between religion and law as well as religion and sciences.
This cross-epochal and cross-disciplinary study group has a twofold aim: On the one hand, the practices of the symbolic and social drawing of boundaries between religion and politics (and the other social fields) as they emerge in the projects of the study group’s members will be discussed and investigated together as to typical characteristics and differences. On the other hand, the dynamics of these practices of drawing boundaries will be deliberated on the basis of a re-reading of classical texts on field theory and differentiation theory (Weber, Bourdieu, Luhmann).

This study group resumes one of the topics of the study group Conflicts in the Area of Religion and Politics which completed its work in July 2010.