Religious and Non-Religious Modes of Coping with Contingency in an Individualised Society
Final Report Abstract
The humanities and social sciences tend to regard dealing with contingency as a primarily religious phenomenon. As a result of such a narrow view, non-religious forms of coping with contingency have not received the systematic examination they deserve. Moreover, the largely theoretical and intellectual-historical analyses of experiencing and dealing with contingency not only lack empirical foundation, but even the kind of conceptual precision necessary to adequately delineate the phenomenon. The project addressed these desiderata in considering both religious and non-religious practices of coping with contingency. To this end, the project examined specifically modern experiences of contingency that are caused by current societal developments and which agents experience in the mode of a biographical conception of their lives. In this way, it was possible to develop an empirically founded theory to explain the coping with contingency in an individualized society. Within the framework of a qualitative research design, this task was addressed in three dimensions: By analyzing the (1) emergence and (2) manifestation of late-modern biographical experiences of contingency and, in relation to this, by reconstructing various (3) modes of religious and non-religious coping with contingency. Within the religious realm, it compared coping practices influenced by Christian, Muslim and Hindu traditions. The study’s results will serve, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the functionality of religiousness and non-religiousness in processes of coping with contingency; on the other hand, they will contribute to bringing up to date sociology’s understanding of coping strategies under conditions of late modernity.
Publications
-
Das Nichtreligiöse in der Kontingenzbewältigung. Vortrag beim Auftaktworkshop des Arbeitskreises ‚Säkulare Weltanschauungen‘ an der Universität Leipzig, 07. Dezember
Rajamannan, Nanthiny
-
Die Religion als Ressource und Risiko in der Kontingenzbewältigung. Vortrag bei der Tagung ‚Nun sag, wie hast Du's mit der Religion? Zur Bedeutung der Religion für die Soziale Arbeit‘ an der Universität Vechta, 31. März
Rajamannan, Nanthiny
