Cosmopolitanism, Religion and the Public Sphere by Maria Rovisco & Sebastian C. H. Kim

Author:Maria Rovisco & Sebastian C. H. Kim [Rovisco, Maria & Kim, Sebastian C. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, International Relations
ISBN: 9780415819381
Google: euq0MQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 16218681
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

Cultural awareness and dis-embedding

The first stage of mobility is dis-embedding the cultural form from its context. Dis-embedding requires cultural reflexivity to determine both, which parts are integral to the phenomenon itself and also those that can be translated. What must occur for cultural forms to be able to contemplate mobility? The cultural form is made mobile through the adding of meaning and its multiple ambiguous forms to allow it the broadest possible democratization. Dis-embedding as a process is accompanied by meaning awareness and meaning-making processes. Here pluralism is not about choice between commitments as is usually understood in contemporary culture, but about possibility of holding multiple yet ambiguous commitments at the same time. The validity here is located in adding meaning, not in excluding it. For example, the charismatic authority of Sathya Sai Baba articulated in his life story, unifies his sacredness and charisma and extends it into the possibility of including gods, demigods, saints and gurus, all of whom are worshipped by the devotee base. This extension draws from the Hindu tradition of multiple godheads, an embedded form of plurality that makes Hinduism, and by extension Indic culture, comfortable with a native cosmopolitanism; a vernacular cosmopolitanism. So, while devotees might feel a sense of agency in ‘picking’ the form of godhood they feel a kinship to, the underlying principle of plural form is never diminished by this choice. But teleological pluralism — i.e. what has evolved as a response to the fragmentation of western Judeo-Christian culture and finds its way into contemporary discourses on cosmopolitanism and pluralism — is about a replacement of a single, lost sacredness. In a sense, then, theorists are struggling to understand the contemporary gestalt, in which people find it possible to hold multiple meanings as they break away from the assumption of a singular commitment. Hence the concept of pluralism itself is political and subject to various meanings based on its derivation.

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