Agenda de l'ENS de Lyon

The workshop will focus on the intermingling notions of ethnicity, religion and society in order to understand the common dynamics that religious groups and individuals share with other religious groups or faith groups in our global world of today. State management of religious pluralism in Europe and in China can provide the contextual framework for understanding the different trajectories of religious mobilizations in society in the past or today. Do the constitutional contexts, the secular regime, the historical formations of ethnicity or the social stratification of a society play a role in the way religious groups – for example Muslims - act? Do all these characteristics related to law, public policies towards faith, sociological attributes of a society interact simultaneously or sequentially in the construction of ethnicity and its transformations in history? The workshop will aim to draw some crossed analysis between different local/national contexts in Europe and in China in order to address this epistemological challenge for the study of ethnicity and religious mobilization in society.

In China cities provide a space for civic life and social integration, on which Buddhist temples, for example, work as an axial point of the prosperous economic practice and active social life of medieval Chinese city. The sacred space is also a place to educate and entertain people and ascribe them to a shared identity, i.e. a Chinese Buddhist. Nowadays, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and Lama religions exert a great influence on people out of the Tibetan communities, or even foreigners. Why the Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries and Lamas in Kham area have been moving during the last decades, monasteries moving closer and Lamas even traveling worldwide? The workshop will highlight the new goals and strategies developed by Tibetan Buddhist elites, and focuses on the frame of interactions and coexistence between Sino-Tibetan parts in terms of social governance and relative autonomy. What about Chinese religions and Buddhism in Europe? What about new practices and new transnational circulation of religiousness resources?

The focus on the society will also lead us to discuss the political nature of the society. State formation through its representations, discourses and government of immigration, religious minorities, do influence the society. State recognition of ethnic differentiations can lead to a productive and positive polarization if the State considers it necessary for its rational organization and functioning which continuously evolves. However, this purpose will need to encourage at the same time freedom of religion and individuation of religion. The latter cannot be fully analyzed without taking into account the globalization of religion and, more particularly here, the transnational relations enacted by Muslims or Buddhists. How Muslim and Buddhist transnationalities and translocalities participate in the interaction of ethnicity, Islam and society? Religious transnationalities and translocalities are built, transformed by processes of inclusion and exclusion marked by frontiers established in some cases simultaneously with the State.

This workshop will analyze interactions between ethnicity, religion and society in Europe and in China to draw theoretical and epistemological continuities and discontinuities between European and Chinese sociologies, to produce common knowledge and to improve the paradigm of Post-Western Sociology.

Speakers

• Laurence Roulleau-Berger, CNRS Research Director
• Wang Chunguang, professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
• Fan Ke, professor at Nanjing University
• He Rong, professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
• Fang Ling, Research engineer at the CNRS
• Bai Li, associate professor at Nanjing Normal University
• Dru C. Gladney, professor at Pomona College, Clarement, California
• Nacira Guénif, professor at University Paris 8
• Yan Jun, lecturer at Shanghai University
• Samadia Sadouni, associate professor at Sciences Po Lyon
• Zheng Shaoxiong, associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
• Abdellali Hajjat, associate professor at the University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre
• Foued Nasri, associated researcher at Centre Max Weber, Lyon 2/CNRS
• Mei Xiao, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences