Response: The Circle Without a Center: Rethinking Religious Authority in India
Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0410
This response offers a context within which to expand one’s reading of the previous four articles. Those four articles are representative works in the study of religion as an instrument of social hegemony. Taken from the lexicon of Marxist sociology, the term hegemony highlights the importance of consent in the constitution of hierarchical societies. Hegemony marks the differential between the coercive power of an institutional elite and the active acceptance of that elite’s authority, wisdom, values, and goals by those who are outside it. This term has received its most nuanced explication in the writings of Ernesto Laclau, who offers a neat four-part schema for the structure and inner working of a hegemonic articulation. I use Laclau’s schema to illuminate the matter of hegemony in conjunction with the subject matters of Orr, Kaimal, Sanford, and Dempsey’s individual articles.