RT Article
T1 Accepting the post-colonial challenge: Theorizing a Khaldûnian approach to the Marian apparition at Medjugorje
JF Critical research on religion
VO 1
IS 2
SP 158
OP 176
A1 Spickard, James V. 1948-
LA English
PB Sage
YR 2013
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1752583299
AB This article seeks to expand the sociology of religion’s conceptual toolkit beyond the focus on religious belief and on organizational structures inherited from Western Christianity. After criticizing these origins, I use Ibn Khaldûn’s notion of al ‘assabiyyah or “group-feeling” to analyze the events surrounding the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Bosnia, in the 1980s and the later events in the same region during the 1990s Bosnian wars. This concept’s strength is its ability to treat religious and ethnic solidarity as part of the same phenomenon—something that previous literature on Medjugorje and the Bosnian war failed to do. Its weakness (for this case) is its focus on centripetal (attractive) solidarity rather than solidarity created by heightened social boundaries. The solidarities at Medjugorje were more often of the latter kind.
K1 Bosnia
K1 Ibn Khaldûn
K1 Ethnic conflict
K1 Religious Conflict
K1 social solidarity
K1 Social Theory
DO 10.1177/2050303213490039