Afterword

Afterword: de-and neotraditionalisationOur essays are sharply different in tenor, concepts, vocabulary, disciplines and modes of analysis.This hardly comes as a surprise.It is to be expected that such differences manifest themselves in this broad comparative effort.Each contribution examines historically and culturally divergent forms of Vergesellschaftung as the societal and symbolic context of the processes of de-or neo-traditionalisation analysed here.Only on such a broad basis is it possible to identify normative authorities and deviations from them in text and practice.We thus found a starting point in the relationship between specific historical constellations and encounters, and the opportunities they open up to reformulate what given historical actors and groups regarded as tradition and as transgression or deviance.With the Athenians, in Jan Bremmer's chapter we see a concentration of immigrant and native intellectuals who started to disseminate destabilising and subversive ideas.Yet the power of public order remained the factor that determined courses of action.A similar view concerning differences in power is shared by Richard Gordon in his chapter.For Gordon, the fundamental issue in relation to 'deviant' religious action in the Roman Empire was the differential distribution of religious knowledge-practices within a highly stratified social order, and the efforts of socio-political elites, both central (i.e. at Rome) and local, to claim that only their version of practices worked.For the 'deviants', such claims made no sense: why should the political elite prescribe to everyone else how to exploit the resources of the divine world?Avner Ben Zaken argues that it was the crosscultural circulations of a grimoire, and its multiple receptions among key Renaissance thinkers, that transformed natural magic from belonging to the realm of esoteric practices into a coherent alternative philosophical program that challenged the tenets of late medieval philosophy of nature, making possible the rise of a new science.Turning from Mediterranean antiquity and the European Renaissance to South Asian modernity, we encounter a period of continuity and rupture, in which several traditions were coined while others were contested.The past was now reread in anti-colonial as well as patriarchal and sectarian ways and these were, at times, intertwined.Kumkum Sangari's contribution looks at nationalism and anti-modernity in the early twentieth-century writings of Annie Besant and M. K. Gandhi as they responded to the situations in India and England in a comparable way.The dissenting milieu in late nineteenth-century London acted as a trigger for both.The

Decadence, Literature, and Society · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity