What does "I am not religious" mean in India and Germany?

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems&nbsp; School of Social Sciences</strong> CSSS Colloquium <strong>Dr. Johannes Quack</strong> (University of Zurich) a talk on <strong>What does "I am not religious" mean in India and Germany?</strong> Date :&nbsp;<strong>September 8th 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract:</strong>&nbsp;The academic study of religion(s) is researching - not surprisingly - religion(s) and its representatives. The "work in progress" presented in this talk, however, is part of a larger attempt to describe and analyse how and why people understand themselves as not (very) religious in different socio-cultural settings. Methodologically I draw on a combination of biographic and ethnographic approaches. The underlying idea is to not reproduce the often researched perspectives of those presumably at the centre of a given religious field, but to look at religion and the world in general through the eyes of those would locate themselves at its periphery or outside of it. The respective positions and perspectives are, of course, context-dependent and heterogeneous. In order to highlight the corresponding diversity I attempt to compare life-histories and case studies of a variety of people from India and Germany. <strong>Bio:&nbsp;</strong>Johannes Quack is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include religious traditions, secularity, secularism and secularization, therapeutic pluralism, knowledge (trans)formation, as well as biographic and ethnographic methods. He is the author of Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India (OUP, 2012) and he co-edited the volumes The Problem of Ritual Efficacy (OUP, 2010), Religion und Kritik in der Moderne (LIT, 2012), Asymmetrical Conversations: Contestations, Circumventions and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries (Berghahn, 2014 - together with Harish!), and he co-edits the book series Religion and Its Others: Studies in Religion, Nonreligion, and Secularity (De Gruyter).