Organisation : ERLIS – Harri Veivo, Christian Bank Pedersen, Frédérique Harry

Lieu : MRSH, Campus 1, Université de Caen Normandie

Pour la dernière séance de l’année du séminaire “Poétiques sociales des pays nordiques”, nous aurons le plaisir d’accueillir l’anthropologue norvégien Sindre Bangstad (KIFO).
Velkommen !

Résumé : The Nordic countries have long been among the most secularized countries in the word, and according to available statistics, the general trend towards secularization continues unabated. This has happened in countries which for all its professed adherence to principles of secularism, or a division between state and religion/church, for practical purposes still retain a dominant status for Protestant Lutheran churches. Norway, with its population of 5.2 million, where a formal separation between the state and the Church of Norway (Dnk) was enacted in 2012 presents an interesting case. For here, all religious and life stance communities have since the 1970s been entitled to extensive state funding parallell to that received by the Church of Norway. As membership figures in the Church of Norway continue to fall, and membership figures in minority religions and the Norwegian Humanist Association (HEF) rise, the Norwegian model has lately come under increased political pressure. In this lecture, I will present recent data on religion in Norway, and discuss these data in light of the literature on the ‘secular’ (Talal Asad, Charles Taylor) and the ‘post-secular’ (Jürgen Habermas).

Sindre Bangstad (b. 1973) is a Norwegian social anthropologist, and research professor at KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion & Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway. The author of ten monographs and edited volumes in English and Norwegian, he received the 2019 Anthropology in the Media Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University in the USA in 2022-23. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Engaging Mbembe due out with Duke University Press in 2027.