Research projects

Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities

The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences "Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities" investigates forms and arrangements of differentiation between religious and other social spheres, practices, interpretive frameworks, institutions and discourses in different eras and regions. We refer to such arrangements, which are often contentious, with the heuristic term "secularities". Based on the hypothesis that drawing boundaries between the religious and non-religious is not an exclusive sign either of modernity or of the "West", we explore corresponding emic taxonomies, forms of social differentiation and modes of demarcation. These are to be analysed in their internal developments as well as in relation to modern "Western" concepts of social order. In this way, we hope to explain current forms of secularity in different regions and the concomitant conflicts about the power of interpretation and claims to validity. The particular nature of this project is that it transcends modernisation theory, as well as the evolutionary, ethnocentric and normative perspectives, which are often peculiar to debates on secularisation and secularism, whether affirmative or critical. We are therefore opening up an interdisciplinary, global research perspective, which otherwise appears distorted by the narrowness of current debates. We bring together the perspectives of religious studies and sociology, different area studies, as well as history and anthropology. The systematic inclusion of pre-modern cultures is another novel element. Lastly, we transcend the isolated issue of the transcultural applicability of the term “religion” by focusing on the processes of differentiation between "the religious" and "the secular" or related distinctions. In the first four-year period of its work, the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences will focus on different regions of the "Islamic world" as well as of Asia – deliberately not starting with Europe or the US as the areas that might first come to mind when the secular, secularism and secularity are being dealt with.

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Piety and Secularity Contested: Family and Youth Politics in post-Kemalist “New Turkey”

Turkey was, until the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010, often regarded as a model for an Islamic country that successfully balanced a conservative religious outlook with a commitment to a liberal Western political order. In recent years, this view has changed considerably. Currently, it is more common to interpret the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/AKP) government as following an authoritarian path framed by Islamism.

This project aims for a more nuanced, empirically grounded analysis of political and social change in Turkey in the wake of the AKP’s rise to power in 2002. We take Turkish family and youth politics, which are of high symbolic significance for the negotiation of the boundaries between religion and the secular in Turkey, as a showcase for the recent transformation. Our project employs a perspective on governance that conceives of state politics and societal developments as part of one intrinsically connected process. We therefore combine analysis of the policies of the AKP government in the domains of family and youth, and the ideals and rationales driving them, with a micro-level investigation of what individuals from various socio-politically and religio-culturally specific milieus experience as the pressing issues in these domains.

The following questions guide our research: How are AKP family and youth politics represented and negotiated in the public sphere? What can be said about the normative rationale behind this politics, and what kind of political subject does it aspire to form? How does AKP family and youth politics translate into policies, laws, and regulations from the national to the municipal level? Conversely, what are, from the perspective of NGOs engaged in the field, and of Turkish citizens of different milieus, central questions and problems concerning the domains of family and youth? How does the AKP slogan of ‘raising a pious generation’ resonate in the imaginations of Turkish citizens of various social and economic backgrounds?

The research is organized into two sub-projects, on the domains of family and youth respectively, which will address our guiding questions drawing on a variety of methods connected by a Grounded Theory framework: (1) analysis of AKP discourses and policies as well as the debates surrounding them in the public sphere, (2) focus group interviews with topic-related NGOs, and (3) milieu-specific group discussions with Turkish citizens in cities and neighborhoods with different socio-political and religio-cultural fabrics. Particular attention will be given throughout to how family and youth politics (such as those regarding gender relations and religious education) are negotiated in public discourse and on the micro-levels of everyday life.

With its focus on the relationship between the top-down AKP politics of normalizing a conservative national subject on the one hand, and the dynamics of subject formation at the micro-level of society on the other, this project follows a line of investigation that pursues the question of secularism and religious revivalism as an empirical one, beyond the confines of both conventional master narratives (of modernization, for example), as well as counter projects invested primarily in unmasking the former (such as post-colonialism). The Turkish experience with governance of religion is too complex to be explained with a binary secularist versus Islamist modelling. Thus, we address how the AKP’s reformism is positioned rhetorically against Kemalist secularism, while at the same time maintaining some of its features, such as a propensity to keep religion integrated in and thus subordinate to the state structure, and to actively use state agencies to propagate its vision of correct religion, effectively turning religion into a means of government. Unlike Kemalism, however, AKP discourse connotes religion in positive terms; enhancing it has become an objective of government, epitomized in the pledge to ‘raise a pious generation’.

Theorizing religion and politics in the Turkish context needs to be adjusted to this new constellation. Inquiring into religion as a factor that is inscribed in AKP governmentality requires moving beyond the debate on secularism, which tends to attribute to religion the role of an object of politics rather than a generic source of motivation. A focus on the governmentality of the AKP needs to ask about the vision of the AKP’s piety project without succumbing to the secularist bias that portrays the anti-secularist and anti-liberal undertones of AKP discourse as merely a revisionist response to Kemalism, instead allowing for an exploration that is open to discovering other genealogies. With these considerations in mind, we approach Turkish family and youth politics as contested arenas that are shaped by secularist legacies and prospective pious futures, without ever being able to be reduced to either.

It is from this vantage point that we aim to inquire into the contours of the religious subject that the AKP aims to establish, the genealogies that it tacks onto, and the means through which it is to be created. The focus on AKP governance is decentered by empirical investigation into the experiences and hopes that ordinary Turkish citizens articulate with regard to the domains of family and youth. We do expect that these articulations by Turkish citizens of various milieus will relate to experiences with AKP governance, and react to the ideal of a pious subject that Turkish society is being confronted with so forcefully, but we do not from the outset conceive of them as merely reactive to AKP politics. In this context, we also ask about points of dialogue, as well as shared spaces between Islamic and secular sensibilities and imaginaries. We thus aspire to establish an analytical framework for studying the politics of Islam and secularism that recognizes the complex entanglements of religious and secular sentiments and worldviews.

 

Projekt Duration: 01.04.2021 - 31.07.2026

Project team members:

Mission as Laboratory: Attempts to Contest Competing World Interpretations in Japanese Translations of the Early Jesuit Mission (DFG)

Director: Prof. Dr. Katja Triplett

Funding period: 01.2018 – 12.2022

German Research Foundation (DFG) Project number 520963481

The research project explores, on the basis of Japanese translations from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, how Jesuits and Japanese converts dealt with competing world interpretations in an effort to create a new order of knowledge and values for a Catholic Japan that was to be uniform and harmonious. The focus of the research is on the translation into Japanese of compendia written in Latin, produced in the years 1593–1595 especially for the mission to Japan. The translated compendia are available in the form of manuscripts in European collections and will be examined in the project, also considering later sources, with regard to normative and cognitive ideas of the body and associated bodily practices.

Publications:

Triplett, Katja. 2026. "Catholic Catechisms in Early Modern Japan: Translating the Embodied Practice of Baptism." In Contents of Faith in Transfer - Texts and Contexts of Early Modern Catechism Translations, ed. Elena Parina and Dagmar Bronner, 333–358. Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-72538-2_15

2026. „Translationsräume: Asiatisch.“ In Handbuch Übersetzen in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Regina Toepfer, Peter Burschel, Annkathrin Koppers and Jörg Wesche. Berlin; Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-68654-6_42-1

2025. „Translations on Martyrdom During the Early Modern Persecution of Christians in Japan.“ In Gegenläufigkeiten. Subversives Übersetzen in der Frühen Neuzeit / Contrarieties. Subversive Translation in the Early Modern Period, ed. Jörg Wesche, Regina Toepfer and Peter Burschel, 55–82. Berlin, Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-69149-6_4

2025. „Material Religion in Translational Encounters in Early Modern Japan: A Typology of Image Creation and Practice (Special Issue „Christian Mission and the Religious Other: Multidirectional Perspectives in the Early Modern Period,“ ed. Rebekka Voß und Antje Flüchter)." Historical Interactions of Religious Cultures 2 (1): 195-218. https://doi.org/10.1628/hirec-2025-0010

2025. „Typography and Jesuit Mission Prints.“ In Splendours of Japan: Highlights from the Bodleian Library, ed. Bodleian Library, 155–184. Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing.

2025. „Fróis, Luís: From the Conversion of Dōsan (1585), Introduced and Translated by Katja Triplett.“ In Global Secularity. A Sourcebook Volume 3: Buddhist Asia, ed. Christoph Kleine, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Hubert Seiwert, 245–249. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111254081-033

2025. „Anonymous: Decree on Banishing Christian Missionaries (1587), Introduced and Translated by Katja Triplett." In Global Secularity. A Sourcebook Volume 3: Buddhist Asia, ed. Christoph Kleine, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Hubert Seiwert, 250-251. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111254081-034

2025. „Ishin Sūden: Statement on the Expulsion of the Missionaries (1614), Introduced and Translated by Katja Triplett.“ In Global Secularity. A Sourcebook Volume 3: Buddhist Asia, ed. Christoph Kleine, Karénina Kollmar-Paulenz and Hubert Seiwert, 252–256. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111254081-035

Working Wonders With Words: Language and Power in the Pre-modern Era Between Religion, Magic and Medicine (DFG)

Director: Prof. Dr. Tina Terrahe (University of Greifswald)

Members of the Research Network at the Institute for the Study of Religions, University of Leipzig: Prof. Dr. Katja Triplett (Co-Director), Dr. Yasmin Koppen

German Research Foundation (DFG) Project number 529626047

Funding period: 2023 – ongoing

This interdisciplinary research network explores the cultural paradigms underlying how premodern societies understood concepts within verbal magic regarding the power of language and writing at the intersection between religion, medicine, and magic. The network aims to determine how the supernatural effects of words, language, and writing come about according to various sources, and to identify which principles are universal, and which are unique. To ensure the broadest possible perspective, the object of research is jointly analyzed from the perspective of diverse academic disciplines: With a focus on Old German studies and the study of religions, the range of disciplines includes ancient Egyptology, ancient Oriental studies, Arabic studies, historical studies, Iranian studies, Jewish studies, Celtic studies, classical philology, art history, history of pharmacy and medicine, Sinology and Scandinavian studies.

Six workshops will explore the materiality and performativity of magical language and writing (Marburg & Basel 2024), the institutionalization in the service of healing and magical principles of efficacy (Leipzig & Hamburg 2025) as well as the terminology and methodology of magic as science (Wolfenbüttel & Greifswald 2026).

Further Information: www.wortwirkungwunder.de

Cognitive Dissonance and Factors of Resilience in the Face of Failed Religious Practices: A Comparative Study of Three Local Christian Communities

This research project examines how Christian believers cope with the absence of religious healing and miracles.

The failure of a (religious) expectation generates cognitive dissonance (Festinger et al. 1957). Certain forms of communication and behavior become necessary to make this disappointment plausible. A central question is therefore: Can religious communities permanently immunize themselves against experienced contingencies?

The theory of cognitive dissonance is also to be expanded to include recent findings from sociological resilience research. Methodologically, the project aims to compare three local Christian communities. Linked to this is the goal of developing a comprehensive typology of the communicative factors of resilience.

Project Management: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Schüler, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Bernadett Bigalke, Dr. Sabrina Weiß

Project Duration: 01.02.2020 - 31.01.2024

During the coronavirus pandemic, we worked with students on Soviet religious propaganda posters from the State Museum of Religious History in St Petersburg.

 

Religious studies research into the involvement of religious young people with a migration background in associations

As a democratic migration society, Germany is characterised by cultural and religious diversity, especially in urban areas, and at the same time by a high level of civic engagement on the part of associations and individuals. However, established Christian children's and youth organisations have long been faced with the challenge that they hardly reach young people with a migration background. Instead, they become independently involved in their own religious and cultural organisations and associations. The aim of the project is to reveal the reasons for this development, thus closing a research gap in youth and association research from a religious studies perspective and expanding concepts of empowerment to include religiously and culturally based orientation in an interdisciplinary exchange. The thesis guiding the research is that young people develop collective empowerment by establishing their own organisational structures beyond migrant communities and established associations, thereby compensating for religious, ethnic and cultural minority experiences. At the same time, they can participate as independent organisational units in support structures and networks that promote their structural empowerment (professionalisation and access to resources). Using the documentary method and social network analysis, the comparative religion project reconstructs a sense of orientation and corporate behaviour in group interviews with representatives of Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and non-religious youth associations with a migration background (VJM). The project has great potential for religious research in the field of migration and youth and will also discuss transdisciplinary participation structures for civic engagement with actors from the field and make their networking digitally visible.

Project Management: Dr. Sabrina Weiß

Project Duration: 01.12.2019 - 30.11.2022

Constellations of the relationship between religious minorities and majorities in plural societies

The network pursues the research question of how religious minorities and majorities constitute themselves discursively, i.e. how they understand themselves and how they are perceived and addressed as such by other parts of society. By focussing on religious institutions, networks and movements, the network aims firstly to identify religious minority-majority constellations (MMK) and to reveal how they understand themselves not only in differentiation from the majority society, but above all also in differentiation from or in networking with other religious minorities or majorities. The underlying working hypothesis of the network members is that minorities and majorities are most likely to be attributed as religious or see themselves as such when other attributions such as ethnic, political, socio-economic etc. are avoided and certain interests are concealed. Secondly, consequences for the perception of MMK and their religious, social and political status are analysed. For example, in political and social debates, the monocultural nation - whether it is understood as either Christian-Jewish or secular - is often presented as the norm. As such, or as a state that should at least be maintained or restored, boundaries are drawn in relation to other religious and cultural positions. In this context, the idea of a multicultural society is a view that gives minority positions too much of a voice or a disproportionate claim to equal rights. People are once again increasingly classified in the media and politically on the basis of their (supposed) religious affiliation (‘the Muslims’, ‘the Jews’), everyday areas of life and public institutions are declared to be religiously significant symbolic places (see the cross debate in Bavaria) and interreligious dialogue is postulated as a solution for peaceful coexistence. Especially in institutions such as schools, public authorities or even the regional churches themselves, the handling of religious minority positions is negotiated. The network aims to expand the current state of research, which often only focusses on religious minorities as such. After all, how MMKs emerge in the respective social formations, how they can be identified, how they are mutually dependent and what consequences result from the discursive demarcation of boundaries is an open question. The results of the network will be presented in workshops and at conferences and made available for discussion on a dedicated website and in academic publications.

Project Duration: 15.10.2019 - 14.10.2024

Project management:

 Dr. Sabrina Weiß und Dr. Sarah Jahn

Japan’s Translated Religion: Christianity, Transculturality and Translation Cultures in the 16th-17th Century (DFG)

Director: Prof. Dr. Katja Triplett

Funding period: 01.2022 – 12.2022

German Research Foundation (DFG) Project number 405033311

The project explored early modern translation cultures in a phase of lively transcultural exchanges between Europe and East Asia, here Japan, from a study of religions perspective. As part of the Priority Programme “Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450-1800)” (SPP 2130) the project looked at the dynamics of exchange processes between Catholic missionaries and Buddhists in late medieval and early modern Japan. From the encounter of two radically different translation cultures beginning with the Jesuit Mission in 1549, new approaches of translation and language theory developed in Japan that have so far not been looked at closely. The project took on two challenges regarding the radical difference of the translation cultures of Japan and Europe: The investigation of (1) social networks of actors and their oral as well as textual transfer of fiercely contested bodies of knowledge and, directly connected to this, (2) the involvement of the languages (Chinese, Japanese, Sinitic) and the complex East Asian writing systems they engaged with during the translation projects. The problem of a differentiation between Christian and “secular” texts from Europe was discussed in the project as an important topic in the study of religions. This differentiation was formulated by the Japanese authorities during the time when the prohibition of Christianity was implemented in order to distinguish between the legal and the illegal. The censorship included not only the textual products of the Jesuit translation teams but also the utilisation of books in European languages imported to Japan. The aspirations to obtain new knowledge were dampened in this period by the strict bureaucratic regulations and the conservative stance of Buddhist clerics. Overall, considerations of language and translation theory in early modern East Asian culture provided an important case for comparative research on other non-European regions and early modern Europe.

Part of the DFG Priority Programme “Early Modern Translation Cultures (1450-1800)” (SPP 2130)

Publications

Triplett, Katja, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe, Eds. 2025. Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation and Transnational Relations. Übersetzungskulturen der Frühen Neuzeit Bd. 5. Berlin; Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70424-0

Triplett, Katja, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe. 2025. „Introduction: Japan in the Early Modern World—Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations." In Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation and Transnational Relations, ed. Katja Triplett, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe, 1–15. Berlin; Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70424-0_1

Triplett, Katja. 2025. „Bridging Religion, State, and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century: John Evans and the Bodleian Japanese Jesuit Missionary Print of 1596.“ In Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation and Transnational Relations, ed. Katja Triplett, Yoshimi Orii and Pia Jolliffe, 119–143. Berlin; Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70424-0_7

2024. „Translation Policies, Material Book Culture, and the Contempt for the World in the Early Jesuit Mission in Japan.“ In Politiken des Übersetzens / Translation Policy and the Politics of Translation, ed. Antje Flüchter, Andreas Gipper, Susanne Greilich and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, 173–201. Berlin, Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-67339-3_9

Triplett, Katja, ed. 2023. Translated Religion: In a Forest of True Words. Translated by Chris Abbey. With Contributions by Thandi Allen, Schriften aus der Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 53. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-845469

Triplett, Katja. 2023. „Introduction: Translating Religion.“ In Translated Religion: In a Forest of True Words. Translated by Chris Abbey. With Contributions by Thandi Allen, hg. von Katja Triplett, 5–7. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-845469

2023. „Translating from India to China and Japan: Tracing the Diversity of Writings and Teachings in East Asian Buddhism." In Translated Religion: In a Forest of True Words. Translated by Chris Abbey. With Contributions by Thandi Allen, ed. Katja Triplett, 77–84. Leipzig: Universität Leipzig. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-845469

2023. „Text(ilien) der Ohnmacht. Fragmente einer Erzählung.“ In Übersetzen ist Macht. Essays zur Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Ulrike Draesner, Annkathrin Koppers, Regina Toepfer and Jörg Wesche, 65–87. Hannover: Wehrhahn.