La médiatisation de la guerre ethnique en ex-Yougoslavie et surtout les aléas de son dernier épisode déroulé au Kosovo sont devenus depuis longtemps monnaie courante en France comme dans les autres pays occidentaux qui ont participé à étouffer le conflit par les moyens de la force de frappe. Les raisons de cette médiatisation ont été multiples, politiques et politiciennes, suivant l’engagement des uns et des autres, mais aussi, je dirais, par déformation professionnelle, médiatique ou intellectualiste. Rares ont été malheureusement les tentatives de démystifier tant soit peu cette donne. Dans le cénacle de la société savante, parmi ceux et celles qui se sont préoccupés des guerres ethniques en ex-Yougoslavie, Véronique Nahoum-Grappe s’est proposée, du haut du séminaire sur la violence dirigé par Françoise Héritier au Collège de France, de réfléchir sur le fait social de la cruauté et son usage politique. Je me suis intéressé plus particulièrement à son article, car il me paraît tout à fait symptomatique d’un certain type d’approche qui est malheureusement assez répandue et que je qualifierai volontiers d’intellectualiste et d’ethnocentriste, ou mieux, d’intello-centriste.

Charles Stewart asked us to respond to the following challenge: ‘Are the majority of anthropologists virtually card-carrying secularists?’ At first, this might seem the sort of outdated question that historians debated heatedly thirty years ago. On further elaboration, however, it turns out to be centrally tied up with the issues that have been puzzling so many of us over the past decade, concerning modernity and the role of anthropology in the negotiation of global hegemonies.

In questioning secularism and the limits of secularism, I see two possible lines of inquiry: first, the critical assessment of the intellectual and historical secular foundations of anthropology and the evaluation of how this secular foundation of our science has affected our understanding of religion and society. And, second, the exploration of how, in writing and practice, anthropology interacts with the secular or religious states and societies we live in and communicate with: in other words, our positioning as social scientists with political and ethical responsibilities and possibly with a certain amount of bias due to this privileged status.

According to Charles Stewart there is ‘an emerging consensus’ among anthropologists that secularisation hasn’t happened. Is this in fact so? I would argue that there is no such consensus, and that if there is, it is wrong. There is a consensus, no doubt, that the strong secularisation thesis, as held in the 1950s – the idea that there had been, and would continue to be, a unilinear, inevitable and irreversible evolution from religious belief to rationality and consumerism – was naïve and indefensible. The strong secularisation thesis has evidently been falsified by, among other things, the rise of religious fundamentalisms (Kepel 1994). But broadly understood, and putting aside such straw men, secularisation has happened and is happening. The overall trend is for the role, power, scope and influence of religious institutions to be in decline – of course, this is just a generalisation, not a force of history; there are plenty of counter-currents and no particular situation can be predicted in terms of it. Yet I am somewhat surprised that some contributors should wish to deny this trend of the longue durée.

Secularism defines the orientation of most contemporary thought in the philosophies and social sciences. So much an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment, their secularism manifests the potency of human thought finally liberated and liberating, a demythologizing force that replaces God with Man, that sees human beings as the architects of their own destinies. This is the thoroughgoing argument of the discipline of anthropology regardless of conceptual or methodological orientation. Secularism also declares knowledge, all branches of valid knowledge to be grounded in rationality, a rationality guided by the rule of reason and usually that defined in European and North American Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment discourses. Here the commitment of anthropology is less certain and considerably divided. What constitutes reason and rationality is at the root of much anthropological endeavour and the history of debate over theory and method in the discipline resounds with its irresolution. In many ways the dominating figure of Kant looms over anthropological discourse (even in his current Nietzschean extension or rejection) but there is a deep suspicion as to whether ideal or transcendental reason is independent of its daily or ordinary articulations in routine practices. In other words, abstract reason is always directed and filled with cultural assumptions constructed in the dynamics of a contemporary history. All reason and rationality is of this order. Scientific or logical Reason is no exception and anthropologists argue the problematics of this fact when applied to the rigorous exploration and understanding of human practices which are formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. Such a problematic is compounded in a view, held by many anthropologists, that all human beings are in one way or another authorities as to what is the nature and meaning of being human. In other words, the authority does not rest with any particular and historically specifically located body of human beings, no matter how politically, economically or technologically dominant. In fact, forms of practical knowledge or reason constructed in such contexts of dominance may distort and subdue other forms of practical knowledge that otherwise may yield understanding of both a specific and more general nature. Louis Dumont's annoying point, anathema to many, but a development from the great Marcel Mauss, is that the mythologised realities of an India of his investigation refuse comprehension through the individualistic terms of a European modernism. Simultaneously, serious attention to such Indian discourse (perhaps most tragically revealed in the very crisis of its colonial demythologisation or securalisation) provides insight into the nature of colonial structurings and the kinds of reconfigurations of the human subject underway in recent European and North American history.

The recent case of Steve Thoburn, a local grocer in Sunderland, convicted because of his refusal to sell products by the imperial kilo (Scott 2001), demonstrates how ‘Europe’, and its laws are increasingly encroaching on the daily lives of many. Europe, no longer simply a geographical space with various imaginings attached, has become a centre of decision making whose rules extend to its vast populace. Cris Shore, tackling the growth of the bureaucratic influence of Europe in his recent work, rightly points out that: ‘The construction of the EU represents the most exciting and profound development in European politics and society of the twentieth century. It therefore deserves careful and rigorous analysis’ (p. xi).