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W1971006674 abstract "AbstractThrough what political, economic, cultural and social processes is difference transformed into inequality? Specifically, how are linguistic and religious pluralism implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality? I consider the political rules that privilege some languages and religions and disprivilege others; the processes that confer differential economic value on particular languages and religions; the discursive and symbolic processes that confer prestige, honour and stigma on particular languages and religions; and the differential informal treatment of persons who speak different languages or practice different religions, as well as the ways in which linguistically or religiously differentiated social networks entail differential access to the resources that flow through such networks. I argue that political and economic forces generate deeper and more consequential forms of inequality between languages than between religions in contemporary liberal societies, while discursive and symbolic processes generate more profound forms of inequality between religions. The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion's thicker cultural, normative and political content, while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language, and from the increasingly and inescapably ‘languaged’ nature of political, economic and cultural life in the modern world.Keywords: LanguageReligionDifferenceInequalityPluralism This paper was presented as the keynote address to the conference on ‘States, Rights and People: Trying to Manage Diversity,’ April 10, 2014, organised by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Fung Global Fellows Program, Princeton University, and to the Workshop on Ethnocultural Diversity, Religious Freedom and Forms of Claims-Making, organised by the Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University. Thanks to Andreas Wimmer, Matthias Koenig, Noah Feldman, Graziella Moraes Silva, Michael Gordin, Mária Kovács, Paul Statham and participants in these workshops and conferences for comments.This paper was presented as the keynote address to the conference on ‘States, Rights and People: Trying to Manage Diversity,’ April 10, 2014, organised by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the Fung Global Fellows Program, Princeton University, and to the Workshop on Ethnocultural Diversity, Religious Freedom and Forms of Claims-Making, organised by the Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University. Thanks to Andreas Wimmer, Matthias Koenig, Noah Feldman, Graziella Moraes Silva, Michael Gordin, Mária Kovács, Paul Statham and participants in these workshops and conferences for comments.Notes[1] For a broader discussion of the ways in which categories of difference—and specifically citizenship, gender and race and ethnicity—are implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality, see Brubaker (Citation2015, chapter 1).[2] I use ‘pluralism’ throughout the paper to refer to this actual or perceived plurality of languages or religions. Pluralism in this sense is a condition, not a normative or political stance.[3] On Hinduism, see Van der Veer (Citation1994); on objectification, with specific reference to Islam, see Eickelman and Piscatori (Citation1996, 38ff).[4] On the emergence of the discourse of ‘world religions’, see also Masuzawa (Citation2005).[5] I focus here on the state, but other organisations too have linguistic or religious policies. Examples include English-only rules in workplaces; policies adopted by employers to provide for the ‘reasonable accommodation’ of employees' religious beliefs and practices (Ringelheim, Bribosia, and Rorive Citation2010); and policies and practices of prisons to provide religious services to inmates (Beckford and Gilliat Citation2005).[6] This and the next paragraph draw on Brubaker (Citation2013).[7] Bader (Citation2007, 82ff); Danchin Citation2012. For a different critique of the ideal of neutrality, see Mahmood (Citation2006). As I shall note below, the power to define what counts as ‘religious’ can enable states to circumvent well-institutionalised legal norms protecting the free exercise of religion and requiring the equal treatment of religions. On the broader debate in political theory about the ideal of state neutrality vis-à-vis competing understandings of the good, see Koppelman (Citation2004). Koppelman acknowledges the incoherence of the idea of complete neutrality, yet he affirms the continued relevance and value of neutrality as an ideal.[8] This is the domain of what Torpey (Citation2010) calls ‘latent religiosity’.[9] This generates inequality within minority-language communities between monolinguals and bilinguals. Bilinguals who occupy key nodes in networks may profit from a monopolistic mediating position (see De Swaan Citation1988: chapter 3 for a sophisticated treatment of this in connection with the historical development of national languages and state education systems in Europe). Inequalities between monolinguals and bilinguals also transform authority structures and socioemotional patterns within families, notably when bilingual children must mediate for monolingual parents (Zhou and Bankston Citation1998, 170).[10] For seriously religious persons, to be sure, religion is—at least ideally—a universal medium of interaction. One's religious identity and commitments colour every interaction, and impose obligations—or at least make relevant religious ideals—at every moment. One is never outside the sphere of religion; indeed it makes no sense to think of religion as a separate sphere of life alongside other spheres. This may impose special burdens and specifically religious or religio-moral hazards for such persons when they are obliged to go outside the sphere of (serious) co-religionists. When this ‘outside’ world is deemed religiously dangerous—notably for women, since such marking of the ‘outside’ world as morally and spiritually dangerous is often gendered—opportunities may be severely restricted.[11] At stake in such struggles are not only core rights of religious belief and expression, but also privileges like exemption from taxation or exemption from military service on grounds of religious belief. Scientology, for example, was involved in a decades-long—and ultimately successful—battle with the Internal Revenue Service to be recognised as a religious organisation (Urban Citation2011). On the politics of defining ‘religion’, see Beckford (Citation2003) and Sullivan (Citation2005).[12] This point would have to be qualified in a fuller discussion. While religious beliefs are very strongly protected in liberal settings, the protection afforded religious practices is more qualified. Conduct that would otherwise be illegal or that can be construed as harming others, is not automatically protected by virtue of being characterised as ‘religious’. For American constitutional jurisprudence on the ‘free exercise’ of religion, see Greenawalt (Citation2006). Moreover, there are signs that the neo-assimilationist turn in liberal politics (Brubaker Citation2001) extends increasingly to certain religious practices – or, more precisely, since the category “religious” is chronically contested, to practices that can be construed as religious by those engaging in them. In France, for example, citizenship can be withheld from applicants whose conduct or putative attitudes are judged incompatible with ‘values essential to French society’, and notably with equality between the sexes. Justifications for such refusals of citizenship have been carefully framed to avoid the appearance of discrimination on religious grounds, but the underlying concern with certain forms of religious practice seems clear (Bowen 2011; Hajjat Citation2011a, Citation2011b).[13] The following paragraphs draw on Brubaker (Citation2013).[14] Restrictions on proselytism are problematic in liberal contexts, where the free exercise of religion may be understood as entailing the freedom to proselytise. And efforts to protect prevailing but threatened religions are generally more problematic, in liberal polities, than efforts to protect prevailing but threatened languages—yet another indicator of what Zolberg and Long (Citation1999) characterised as the asymmetrical stance of liberal states towards religious and linguistic pluralism.[15] On ‘linguistic imperialism’, see Phillipson (Citation1992).[16] Laitin (Citation1995) has analysed an interesting flipside of this. If religious or ethnic minorities are excluded, formally or informally, from a range of socially esteemed occupations, yet at the same time monopolise, formally or informally, certain stigmatised yet lucrative occupations or economic niches, the economic benefits of social marginality can solidify boundaries and inhibit processes of assimilation.[17] Obviously, people's linguistic and religious choices are not driven exclusively—or even primarily—by economic considerations. But choices are sensitive to the perceived advantages and disadvantages of different linguistic and religious repertoires, whether these are seen as deriving from political privileging or disprivileging, from economic valorisation or devalorisation, from cultural prestige or stigma or from informal social networks or discrimination. On the micro-sociology of language choice, see De Swaan (Citation2001, chapter 2), focusing not on economic value directly, but on the sensitivity of language choice to differences in the ‘communication value’ of different languages.[18] In liberal settings, where religious difference is generally less politically and economically disadvantaged than linguistic difference, especially in post-migration contexts, this logic of differential opportunity or advantage leads more routinely to changes in language repertoires than to changes in religious repertoires. Changes in religious repertoires are of course common in contemporary liberal settings, but they are generally driven by less pragmatic concerns. Where social inclusion has lagged behind legal emancipation, however, a pragmatic orientation to perceived advantages and disadvantages may lead to shifts in religious repertoires as well. In the last decades of Imperial Germany and the Habsburg Empire, for example, it was not uncommon for Jewish parents to have their children baptised as a strategy for overcoming limits on opportunities (Richarz Citation1998, 15).[19] The religious economies literature (critically reviewed in Chaves and Gorski Citation2001) has developed this ecological perspective, treating religious organisations as analogous to firms competing for customers.[20] For an ecological perspective on language competition, see Mufwene (Citation2002).[21] On such struggles between Czech-identified and German-identified organisations in East Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, see Zahra (Citation2008).[22] I refer to ‘speakers’ as shorthand for persons who use language in various ways, involving not only speaking (with varying degrees of competence and in varying domains) but also writing.[23] On the emerging field of language dynamics, in which language competition is formally modelled, see Wichmann (Citation2008).[24] A final step in the dynamic interplay between individual choices and aggregate patterns in the distribution of languages is that the increasing prevalence of a language—an aggregate result of many individual choices sensitive to the value of that language—can end up decreasing its value in certain contexts. English may be indispensable for many forms of mobility, but it has lost the scarcity that made it especially valuable in certain contexts, as for example in early post-communist Eastern Europe. This is similar to the logic of credential inflation and devaluation.[25] A sustained consideration of the factors accounting for the growth and decline of religions and languages is beyond the scope of the paper, but one observation may be made in passing. In liberal polities, the reproduction and growth of religious communities are less constrained and conditioned by demographic strength, economic value or state support than are the reproduction and growth of language communities. The growth of a religious community depends on its cultural content or ‘message’ in a way that the growth of a language community does not, notwithstanding the powerful symbolic associations that attach to particular languages. But in many other settings, political support and military power have been crucial to the growth of particular religions, just as they have been to the growth of particular languages.[26] A fuller treatment would address the issue of ideology, specifically the broad body of work on language ideology (reviewed in Woolard and Schieffelin Citation1994), and the debates about religion and ideology.[27] Of course a broad definition of the political and institutional domain might incorporate discourse and representations. But then one would still want to distinguish between processes that work through formal regulation (law, policy or procedure) in the state or formal organisations and processes that work through discourse and representation in the state but also outside the state.[28] Devaluation, stigmatisation and symbolic violence might seem to work rather similarly in the construction of religious authority, inducing the dominated to be complicit in their own domination by acknowledging the superior value and prestige of orthodox forms of belief and behaviour and devaluing their own forms of competence. Yet on closer inspection, symbolic devaluation and de-legitimation can be much more drastically consequential within religious than within linguistic traditions. Religious traditions are structures of authority, and religious authorities may control the means of physical as well as symbolic violence. Symbolic violence can thus prepare and legitimate physical violence. Heresy and apostasy, which may be punishable by death, have no counterpart in the domain of language. (One might think that issues of heresy and apostasy pertain to inequality within religious traditions, while I have been concerned here with inequality between languages and between religions. But this again shows that the distinction between ‘within-religion’ and ‘between-religion’—or within-language and between-language—forms of inequality is not just an academic distinction, but a stake of practical struggles. What legitimately belongs to a religious tradition and what can be condemned as heretical, or as grounds for apostasy, can be a matter of life and death. The boundaries of a religion, and the distinction between inside and outside, are eminently practical questions.)[29] The term indexicality has not been used to designate this sort of devaluation by association in the domain of religion. Indexicality—and Peiercean semiotics more broadly—has been adopted in the sociology of religion in other contexts, notably by Rappaport (Citation1999).[30] It is important to recognise, to be sure, that religious traditions contain not only the cultural and symbolic resources for the authoritative stigmatisation and devaluation of outsiders, but also the cultural and symbolic resources for the de-stigmatisation and valorisation of outsiders (Stamatov Citation2014). So while religion lends itself to deeper and more totalising forms of othering than does language, it is also a potent source of criticism of, and opposition to, all forms of social exclusion.[31] Of course language too—in traditions of analysis that reject the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole—is shot through with power, authority and inequality. But religion is or can be a structure of authority—of authoritative rules for the conduct of life, and authoritative judgments about doctrine and practice—in a way that language is not.[32] The putative unassimilability, for example, may be understood to derive from the number of speakers, their concentration, their isolation in separate regions or institutions, their alleged cross-border nationalist sympathies or commitments or the availability of a dense network of mother-tongue institutions sustaining the language. The only feature of the language itself that could be even tangentially relevant to the claim of unassimilability would be the sheer linguistic distance from the prevailing language, which could make linguistic acculturation more difficult than it would be for speakers of another, more closely related language.[33] One might make an analogous argument about religion. One could argue, for example —quite correctly, of course—that violence is not intrinsic to Islam, any more than it is to Christianity, and that the putative dangers of Islam are not properties of the religion per se, but properties associated—correctly or incorrectly—with Islam in a particular social and political context. This is certainly true, as far as it goes; but it neglects the fact that wherever we draw the line between religion per se and all the things that are said or done in the name of a particular religion, or associated with a particular religion in a particular context, religion per se—at least in the case of scriptural religions or those with differentiated structures of religious authority—has a rich ideational, normative, cultural and political content that has no counterpart in the domain of language.[34] To underscore the relative normative and cultural ‘thinness’ of language vis-à-vis religion is not to deny that language may carry ‘thicker’ cultural meanings and commitments in some contexts than in others. See Carens (Citation2000, 128–129) and Bauböck (Citation2002, 177–178) on ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ theories of language in relation to cultural commitments.[35] Of course, these often involve gross misrepresentations, highly selective and one-sided interpretations or essentialising readings that neglect the chronic struggles within highly differentiated religious traditions.[36] Members of stigmatised and subordinate categories, to be sure, need not simply internalise the stigma; they may instead challenge and contest dominant schemas of evaluation and appraisal through strategies of transvaluation (Wimmer Citation2013, 57–58) or de-stigmatisation (Lamont and Mizrachi Citation2012).[37] In the USA, language is not designated an impermissible grounds of employment discrimination, but national origin is. Since accent may indicate national origin, it can be illegal to discriminate on the basis of accent. However, employers may successfully defend themselves against the charge of discrimination if they can show that the accent ‘interferes materially with job performance’ (quoted in Lippi-Green Citation1994, 171).[38] This independence—the fact that discrimination is prima facie economically irrational—is what gave rise to the literature on the economics of discrimination (Becker Citation1971).[39] Discrimination has been studied empirically mainly with respect to race (Pager and Shepherd Citation2008), and chiefly, in recent years, through field studies (reviewed in Riach and Rich Citation2002) that seek to identify discrimination in gatekeeping encounters by systematically varying race while holding constant candidates' functionally relevant characteristics. Although field studies present methodological difficulties of their own, their quasi-experimental method seems clearly preferable to the statistical procedure of attributing residual differences in outcomes to discrimination, after controlling for other explanatory factors. A few field studies have addressed discrimination on the basis of religion, suggesting notably that Muslims face employment discrimination in France. One experiment (Adida, Laitin, and Valfort Citation2010) found that among matched job candidates with obviously Senegalese surnames, those with an obviously Catholic first name were 2.5 times more likely to be called back than those with an obviously Muslim first name. The experiment is ingenious, but it is not necessarily generalisable, since religion and country of origin cannot be neatly distinguished for the vast majority of Muslim migrants and their children in Europe.[40] The ways in which ‘indexical’ associations between language and social categories are implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality have been widely studied by sociolinguists, but the analogous phenomenon has received much less attention in the sociology of religion.[41] There is an interesting ambiguity here. The obligation to marry (or preference for marrying) a co-religionist is analytically distinct from the prohibition on marrying (or preference against marrying) a specific category of religious outsider. In the first case, outsiderhood is defined residually and as it were indiscriminately: all who are not co-religionists are outsiders. In the second case, outsiderhood is defined directly and in a discriminating fashion: it is specific categories of outsiders that are excluded. In both cases, discrimination is categorical: it works through categorically identified insiders in the first case and through categorically identified outsiders in the second. But we would probably hesitate to speak of ‘discrimination’ in the first case, especially where minorities are concerned, for example in the case of Jews (outside Israel) who feel obliged to marry other Jews, or Muslims in Muslim-minority settings who feel obliged to marry other Muslims. This brings into focus the tension between the implicit moral universalism that gives ‘discrimination’ a strongly pejorative meaning and the culturalist particularism that legitimises and valorises the projects of cultural reproduction that may depend on certain forms of ‘discrimination’.[42] The remainder of this section draws on Brubaker (Citation2015), chapter 1.[43] The distinction between externally driven and self-enforcing modes of linguistically mediated inequality, to be sure, applies only to inequality-generating processes within particular sociolinguistic environments, not to the larger-scale processes that have shaped those environments. The large-scale transformations involved in colonialism, nation-state building and the spread of global capitalism, for example, have created vast inequalities among languages, raising the economic, political and social value of some, and devaluing others (Gal Citation1989, 356–357).[44] The inequalities arising from network-mediated goods and opportunities are always double-sided: they not only advantage those included in the networks, but disadvantage those excluded from them. Recent work in the sociology of religion has become more attentive to the ambivalent workings of religious social capital and strong religious boundaries (Edgell Citation2012). On the ways in which network effects can amplify inequality, see DiMaggio and Garip (Citation2012).[45] Some ostensibly religious norms with powerful implications for informal social relations—notably norms about appropriate behaviour for women—may alternatively be understood as ethnocultural norms that are only contingently associated with religion in particular contexts. The distinction between cultural and religious norms is not an academic nicety; it is the stake of practical struggles. Distinguishing between the universality of religion and the particularity of ethnic culture, tradition and custom, for example, can give second-generation immigrants leverage and legitimacy in criticising—from the standpoint of a religion ‘purified’ of merely ‘cultural’ and ‘ethnic’ encrustations and deformations—the practices and customs favoured by their parents. We think of fundamentalism as inherently conservative, but as Jacobson (Citation1997) has argued with respect to second-generation British immigrants of Pakistani background, the idea of a pure, de-ethnicised Islam can be used in family contexts in a liberalising direction, for example, to criticise arranged marriages and restrictions on women's activities. Once again, we are confronted with the deep ambiguity of ‘religion’, a problematic category of analysis precisely because it is a deeply contested category of practice.[46] See, for example, Portes and Zhou (Citation1993, 86, 90). Such strategies of insulation seek to keep children out of certain undesired networks and to embed them in alternative, preferred and more surveyable networks formed by ethnic churches, language schools, camps and so on. The promotion of more or less arranged marriages with home-country spouses also belongs to such strategies of insulation.[47] For the strategy of subsumption in the study of politicised ethnicity, see Rothschild (Citation1981, 9); Horowitz (Citation1985, 41); Posner (Citation2005); Chandra (Citation2012); and Wimmer (Citation2013). Important theoretical antecedents for this strategy include Weber's (Citation1978, 43ff, 341ff) discussion of social closure and Barth's (Citation1969, 15) injunction to focus on the nature and dynamics of ethnic boundaries rather than on what he somewhat dismissively—and to his later regret (Citation1994, 17)—referred to as the ‘cultural stuff’ enclosed by those boundaries. Thoughtful correctives to the one-sided focus on boundaries at the expense of ‘cultural stuff’ include Cornell (Citation1996) and Jenkins (Citation1997, chapter 8). Zolberg and Long (Citation1999) is one of the few works to give sustained attention to the distinctive dynamics of linguistic and religious pluralism." @default.
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W1971006674 title "Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality" @default.
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