Formations of the Secular

By Asad, Talal
Stanford University Press, 2003, Paperback, 269 pp., ISBN: 0804747687

Asad (anthropology, City U. of New York) offers a preliminary anthropological study of the connection between the secular as an epistemic category, and secularism as a political doctrine.

The recent resurgence of religion, he says, has raised questions about the previously presumed universal validity of secularism.