Distinguishing “Religion”. Variants of Differentiation and the Emergence of “Religion” as a Global Category in Modern Asia

The existence of religious diversity is mostly taken for granted in today’s world society. Despite all apparent differences, however, world society theory proposes the hypothesis of a single function system of religion. At the same time, in the case of religion a process of semantic unification is highly disputed. Until recently, such debates had not paid much attention to the “translingual practice” (Liu) that has produced “religion” as a global category over the last two hundred years. Drawing on recent studies, this article traces some semantic transformations in regard to “religion” in 19th and early 20th century Asia and highlights the importance of three contested distinctions connected with “religion”. It also relates these semantic changes to recent debates about the differentiation of religion in theories of secularization. Any visibility of regional differences in the religious system of modern world society should be understood as the result of the emergence of this global category. Such a focus on semantics highlights the way in which speaking of “religion” as a specific instance of “culture” in world society becomes possible and “religion” becomes observable to itself and from the outside only as a result of these transformations.

Frequency-based Segregation of Syntactic and Semantic Unification during Online Sentence Level Language Comprehension

During sentence level language comprehension, semantic and syntactic unification are functionally distinct operations. Nevertheless, both recruit roughly the same brain areas (spatially overlapping networks in the left frontotemporal cortex) and happen at the same time (in the first few hundred milliseconds after word onset). We tested the hypothesis that semantic and syntactic unification are segregated by means of neuronal synchronization of the functionally relevant networks in different frequency ranges: gamma (40 Hz and up) for semantic unification and lower beta (10–20 Hz) for syntactic unification. EEG power changes were quantified as participants read either correct sentences, syntactically correct though meaningless sentences (syntactic prose), or sentences that did not contain any syntactic structure (random word lists). Other sentences contained either a semantic anomaly or a syntactic violation at a critical word in the sentence. Larger EEG gamma-band power was observed for semantically coherent than for semantically anomalous sentences. Similarly, beta-band power was larger for syntactically correct sentences than for incorrect ones. These results confirm the existence of a functional dissociation in EEG oscillatory dynamics during sentence level language comprehension that is compatible with the notion of a frequency-based segregation of syntactic and semantic unification.