Transnational

Transnational Civil Society

As globalization theory took shape in the 1990s, anthropologists and cultural studies theorists began to refer to the global culture. These crossborder flows of capital, information, and people have been characterized as varyingly nonisomorphic “scapes,” network societies, and emerging hybrid cultures that have weakened the centrality of the nation-state in the social imagination. Methodologically, the transnational is often distinguished from the global by the former's attention to the everyday and the particular or, as one anthropologist put it, the more “humble” aspects of globalization. Given this attention to the translocality of global flows, transnational ethnographies are often multisited, tracking daily life across various borders, in several time zones, and via many networks.

The study of transnational cultural forms and communities (and later the religious reverberations of the September 11 attack on the World Trade [Page 1303]Center) sparked a cross-disciplinary interest in religion that has produced a burgeoning body of work. One of the most prescient of these collaborations was the project of Susanne Rudolph, a political scientist, and James Piscatori, an Islamicist, to rethink Cold War conceptions of national security by exploring various expressions of a religiously informed transnational civil society. They argued that religious memberships in social movements and nongovernmental organizations challenged both the presumed secular dominance of the public sphere and the state-centric presumptions of fields from international relations to security studies.

Since then, transnational civil society has become a rich and contested concept and the religious actors in this transnational public sphere, far more visible. Given the cross-border reach of many religious institutions, religious political action has challenged a state-centric model for centuries. In the 18th century, Quakers on both sides of the Atlantic were key figures in the transnational campaign against the slave trade. They came to this shared decision through prayer, moral reasoning, and prophetic dreams. Transnational religious activism, then, presumes a multidimensional scope of action involving a wide range of actors. These have been characterized by Keck and Sikkink as transnational activist networks that have multiplied in the latter part of the 20th century as advocates for global issues such as the environment and women's rights. As scholars indicate, transnational feminist networks and environmental movements have strong religious advocates and detractors at the global, regional, and national levels. One particular forum for transnational advocacy is the American evangelical community. Their intervention in U.S. domestic and foreign policy is expressed as an “evangelical transnationalism” that has become more nuanced as they interact with Christians in the Global South, who too are projecting a new global “progressive Pentecostalism,” balancing evangelism and social concern.

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