Religion and Nationalism: Identity and Behavior in a Comparative Perspective
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Natan Sachs is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research interest is on the formation of political cleavages and especially the politics of religious identity, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is also interested in the use of experiments in comparative politics and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia, using experimental methods.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Natan Sachs
CDDRL Fellow 2010-2011
Speaker
Seminars
Religion, State and Multiculturalism in Israel
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Michael Karayanni, Edward S. Silver Professor of Civil Procedure and Director of the Harry and Michael Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on private international law and inter-religious law, civil procedure, and multiculturalism. He holds an LL.D in law from the Hebrew University (2000) as well as an S.J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, received in 2003. He is the author of "Conflicts in a Conflict" (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012)
Event Summary
Professor Karayanni's talk addresses the question of why religious and political issues in Israel are dominated by the conflict around disproportionate funding for Jewish institutions and norms, and the implications this emphasis has on jurisdictional authority in Israel. Professor Karayanni points out that while there are 14 recognized religious communities in Israel, less than 2% of the budget for support of religious institutions goes to non-Jewish organizations. However, as a result of the relative lack of official recognition, the Israeli Supreme Court has in some cases deferred from enforcing Israeli administrative law, a practice that has afforded greater freedom to some private religious institutions such as religious schools, as Karayanni outlines demonstrates with examples from several recent court cases . He then describes how judicial freedom for some religious groups can create a "multicultural predicament" in which the autonomy allowed to minority religious groups may conflict with the best interests of more vulnerable members, such as women and children, in groups with illiberal social and judicial norms. Nonetheless, Professor Karayanni argues that the perception of being multicultural is important to the Jewish state, as it is in Egypt, Jordan, and India, where minority religious groups have similar autonomy.
A discussion session following the talk addressed such questions as: Is there any political will to divorce Jewish identity from the state and instead have it represented only through community institutions? How many Christian Palestinians live in the Palestinian Territory versus in Israel? How do they operate legally within the Palestinian community? How are minority Jewish sects treated in Israel? How would a binational state resulting in the absorption of Palestine affect these religious issues?
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Michael Karayanni
Edward S. Silver Chair in Civil Procedure; Director, The Harry and Michael Sacher Institute for Legislative Research and Comparative Law, The Hebrew University
Speaker
Seminars
Nancy Ruttenburg
Building 460, Room 418
Main Quad
Stanford University
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ruttenburg@stanford.edu
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature
Professor of English
Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Professor, by courtesy, of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Workshop on Islam and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey
This workshop is sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Program, and co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Europe Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center
Stanford faculty, students, scholars and staff are welcome to attend. To RSVP, please contact medstudies@stanford.edu.
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:
November 15th
10:30 am – Noon: Conceptual Explorations
Haldun Gulalp (Department Political Science, Yildiz Technical University)
“Rethinking Islam and Secularization in Turkey: A Durkheimian Perspective”
Ahmet Kuru (Department of Political Science, San Diego State University)
“Islamism, Secularism, and Democracy in Turkey”
2:00 pm- 3:30 pm: Managing the Difference
Aykan Erdemir (Department of Sociology, Middle East Technical University)
“Faith-based Activism for Secularism: The Transformation of Alevi Collective Action Repertoire in Turkey”
Murat Somer (Department of International Relations, Koc University; Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University)
“Islamic-Conservative and Pro-Secular Values and the Management of Ethnic Diversity and Conflict”
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm: Claiming Secularism
Umit Kurt (Department of History, Clark University)
“Military’s Perceptions of Islam and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey”
Kabir Tambar (Department of Religion, University of Vermont)
“Staging Alevi Pasts in Secular Time”
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November 16th
10: 30 am- Noon: Turkey’s “Islamists” and “Secularists” Abroad
Betul Balkan (Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Northeastern University)
“Opinions of Turkish Immigrants in Houston About Secularism and Islam in Turkey”
Zeynep Atalay (Department of Sociology, University of Maryland-College Park; The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University)
“From the Neighborhood to Umma: Global Networks of Muslim Civil Society in Turkey”
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm: Contextualizing the Turkish Case
Hootan Shambayati (Division of Public Affairs, Florida Gulf Coast University)
“Controlled Democratization, Moderate Islam, and Radical Secularism: Lessons from Turkey and their Implications for the Middle East”
Nora Fisher-Onar (Department of Politics and International Relations, Bahcesehir University; Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford)
“Vision or Cacophony?: Mixing Liberal-Democratic, Religious-Conservative, Power Political, and Ottomanist Metaphors in Contemporary Turkey”
4:00 pm- 5:30 pm: Concluding Session
Riva Kastoryano (Center for International Studies and Research, Sciences Politique)
Larry Diamond (Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University)
Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room
Workshops
Religions of Korea Yesterday and Today
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The earliest Western visitors to Korea at the turn of the last century routinely pointed out that Koreans were a people who often called on supernatural powers and carried out rituals for otherworldly reasons. Historians tell us that Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shamanism have all been prominent in Korea since early history, informing people's view of life both here and in the afterworld. It is thus little surprising that even contemporary observers remark that modernization has not affected the demand for religions in this country, a land dotted with countless crosses standing for churches in the cities, while countryside teems with Buddhist temples of every type.
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Secondary - Community College