Trygve Wyller – The spatial and the religious: The emergence of an embodied ‘act of citizenship’?
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Event Date: 7 February
Christodoulou Meeting Room 11
Walton Hall campus
Open University,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship
The conference addresses the performative and creative side of social movements, practices of identity negotiation and political participation questioning the meaning of citizenship. Which actors, sites and rights are constituted in contemporary power struggles redefining ‘the political’? Which neo-colonial or neo-imperial nodes emerge from the analysis of issues such as democracy or secularism? Under this light, how is the language of law challenged and remoulded?
Panel 18: Religion and the Political
Professor Trygve Wyller (University of Oslo) – The spatial and the religious: The emergence of an embodied ‘act of citizenship’?
The paper will discuss whether religiously based citizenship activities can in any way contribute to a non-orientalist notion and practice of citizenship. Traditionally, there are thousands and millions of Christian social practice activities in the world, all aiming at the improvement of the life standard for one or more kind of “groups”. Often these activities are motivated by classical Christian discourse, such as compassion, charity and love. But historical experience and research has taught us that much of this work is more disciplinary than really liberating. Is it still possible to reconstruct a the language of compassion as an interpretation of religiously founded practices for the sanspapiers?
Based on the reflections developed in the book Heterotopic Citizen (2009, T.Wyller ed.) the paper will take some experiences from a religiously based activities for undocumented immigrants (sans papiers) in Gothenburg as the starting point for the discussion. In Gothenburg the Philantropic organization Rosengrenska Stiftelsen cooperates with a local church, Bergsjøen, in the development of health,social and legal advices for undocumented staying in Sweden. The practices for the sans papiers are obviously a case of what Isin calls “Acts of Citizenship”, but the question is whether these practices also might be labelled a post-colonial expression of compassion? Agamben claims that the way Western societies meet the sans papiers is nothing but cruel violence. But is there, then, alternatives to this violence? Focusing on the body as space might be a way out.
The paper will ask whether the religious discourse still expresses experiences, which the more cognitive, rational discourse of justice and rights lack. One way of approaching this is connected to a spatial discourse. This theoretical approach to discuss this will start from Kim Knotts The Location of Religion. A Spatial Analysis (2005)
Knott connects to the spatial theories developed from Foucault, Lefebvre and Soja and takes them into a discussion in the religious field. Based on the short fieldwork from Gothenburg the paper will discuss whether and how bodies and body relation in this area can be the starting point of a non-orientalist act of citizenship and thereby renew the religious discourse of grace and compassion.
The central argument in the paper will be that instead of the language of law or of the liberal discourse ethics, the ethical demand for citizenship should be discovered in the demand coming from the body – heterotopias. This is an argument following Foucault, but developing his spatial theory to the body as a topos and to the impact for the developing theory of citizenship.
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