Religion as a Chain of Memory
For most of the last twenty years, sociologists have studied the “decline” of religion in the modern world—a decline they saw as a defining feature of modernity, which promotes materialism over spirituality. The revival and political strength of varying religious traditions around the world, however, has forced sociologists to reconsider.
This paradox has led Hervieu-Léger to undertake a sociological redefinition and reexamination of religion. For religion to endure in the modern world, she finds, it must have deep roots in traditions and times in which it was not defined as irrelevant. This reasoning leads her to develop the concept of a “chain of memory”—a process by which individual believers become members of a community that links past, present, and future members. Thus, like cultural tradition, religion may be understood as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw upon the deep well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present.
Hervieu-Legér also argues that the modern secular societies of the West have not, as is commonly assumed, outgrown or found secular substitutes for religious traditions; nor are they more “rational” than past societies. Rather, modern societies have become “amnesiacs,” no longer able to maintain the chain of memory that binds them to their religious pasts. Ironically, however, even as the modern world is destroying and losing touch with its traditional religious bases, it is also creating the need for a spiritual life and is thus opening up a space that only religion can fill.
She was a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1974 to 1993.[1]
As president of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) from March 2004 to March 2009, she undertook significant changes in the institution, particularly lowering the level of students before admission to the Master to abandon school diploma for the benefit of aligning the university system of LMD. She has also initiated a relocation of the school outside Paris, in Seine-Saint-Denis, to integrate it into a new academic center for education, now called "Campus Condorcet", whose composition is constantly changing.
In late 2008, Hervieu-Léger was appointed by the Minister of Research, Valérie Pécresse, Chair of the Steering Committee for developing the national strategy of research and innovation,[2] and resigned in 2009.[3]
Among her awards, she received the CNRS Silver medal in 2001, was named Knight of the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur and Officer of the National Order of Merit and the Academic Palms.[1]
She wrote a number of books and articles, notably on the Catholic Church[4][5] and on cults.[6][7]
Introduction
Part I Doubt about the Subject Matter
Sociology in Opposition to Religion? Preliminary Considerations
- From religious sociology to the sociology of religion
- Science opposed to religion
- Undermining the subject?
The Fragmentation of Religion in Modern Societies
- The future of religion in the modern world: the classical sociological approaches
- Constructing a new perspective
- Defining religion: a new look at an old debate
- Religion and systems of meaning: an inclusive approach
- In contrast: a much more restrictive framework
- A false opposition
- One way out of the dilemma?
The Elusive Sacred
- The sacred: an impossible concept
- The genealogy of the sacred: Isambert's contribution
- Emotional experience vis-a-vis religion
- Between the sacred and religion: the example of sport
- The sacred opposed to religion: the emotional culmination of secularization?
Part II As our Fathers Believed...
Religion as a Way of Believing
- Metaphorical religion, following Jean Seguy
- Towards an analysis of the transformation of belief in contemporary society
- Religion as a way of believing: the example of apocalyptic neo-rural communities
Questions about Tradition
- Tradition opposed to modernity
- The creative power of tradition
- Religion as folklore
- The religious productions of modernity: is this concept meaningful?
- Back to the question of definition
From Religions to the Religious
- A second look at sport as a religion
- Two ways of thinking
- Is the notion of a religious sphere still a helpful one?
- From the sociology of religion to the sociology of the religious: a political example
Part III A Break in the Chain
Religion Deprived of Memory
- Memory and religion: a structural connection
- The crumbling memory of modern societies
- Secularization as a crisis of collective memory: the example of French Catholicism
The Chain Reinvented
- Utopia: a major manifestation of religious innovation in modernity
- The religious reinforcement of elective fraternities
- The rise of ethnic religions
Conclusion: Post-traditional Society and the Future of religious Institutions
- Post-traditional religion and the institution of the religious
- Beyond secularization, de-institutionalization
- The institutional production of a chain of memory
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index of Names
