Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality

Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology and UCLA Foundation Chair, will present his unpublished paper «Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality» at the joint session of the seminar «Boundaries of History» of the Department of History HSE-SPb and Laboratory for Comparative Social Research.

The unpublished paper will be circulated among the participants of the seminar. The paper will be discussed by Alexander Semyonov of the Department of History, Edward Ponarin of the LCSR, research fellows of the LCSR and international research project «Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism.»
The seminar is organized together with Center for Cultural Studies of Postsocialism KSU. 

Participation in the seminar is RSVP only.

Time and venue:   May 19, at 13:00, room 301, 47a, prospect Rimskogo-Korsakova

Linguistic and Religious Pluralism: Between Difference and Inequality

Through what political, economic, and cultural processes is difference transformed into inequality? Specifically, how are linguistic and religious pluralism implicated in the production and reproduction of inequality? Brubaker considers the political rules that privilege some languages and religions and dis-privilege others; the processes that confer differential economic value on particular languages and religions; and the discursive and symbolic processes that confer prestige, honor, and stigma on particular languages and religions. He argues that political and economic forces generate deeper and more consequential forms of inequality between languages than between religions in contemporary liberal societies, while discursive and symbolic processes generate more profound forms of inequality between religions. The major sources of religious inequality derive from religion’s thicker cultural, normative, and political content; while the major sources of linguistic inequality come from the pervasiveness of language, and from the increasingly and inescapably "language” nature of political, economic, and cultural life in the modern world.