Introduction: Globalisation and Knowledge

In this chapter I treat both pragmatism and postmodernism as movements that challenge the authority of traditional religious institutions and their claims to knowledge. They are intellectual movements that are therefore intimately connected to questions about ‘positions of knowledge’. Indeed, they raise fundamental issues about science and objectivity. While these intellectual movements were often constructed to question the secular idea of rationality as the legacy of the Enlightenment and the development of positivism in the social sciences, they inevitably challenge the universal knowledge claims of all authorities, including religious authorities. These movements had their origin in the West, but they have global implications for religious life in general. We need therefore to situate these cultural developments within the broader context of globalisation.

While I have described these movements as intellectual developments, postmodernism can also be regarded as a social and cultural movement that had widespread effects on architecture, film, literature, fashion and design. In cultural terms, post-modernism was expressed in conceptual art, pop art, happenings, and Theatre of the Absurd. However, the impact of postmodernism was most amply seen in architecture with the publication of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi and Brown 1972). This publication was an attack on modernism in architecture in which Las Vegas was seen to be a ‘non-city’ that had been created out of a ‘strip’. Postmodernism has influenced all forms of communication. Television, film and popular music have transformed youth cultures including Muslim youth cultures (Rakmani 2016).

Postmodernism has been a disruptive movement with respect to religion. It has been analysed by Akbar Ahmed (1992) in Postmodernism and Islam and by Ernest Gellner (1992) in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. Gellner claimed that we face three ideological options – religion, postmodernism and reason. He regarded postmodernism as simply a repeat of relativism. In contemporary anthropology, postmodernism was a conflation of subjectivism and liberal guilt over the legacy of imperialism. In criticising white Western anthropologists as outsiders, as either direct or indirect representatives of Western colonialism, these critiques overlooked the experience of many anthropologists who defended aboriginal cultures and rights against predatory colonial settlement. Gellner feared that the obsession with the position of the ethnographer would make fieldwork impossible, leaving anthropology as the study of texts.