Vortrag von Werner Schiffauer

Chair: Schirin Amir-Moazami

Werner Schiffauer ist Mercator Senior Fellow an der BGSMCS und arbeitet momentan an seinem Forschungsprojekt "Die Islampolitik der deutschen Innenministerien - Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Staatsapparate".

Abstract:

The way the German ministries of the Interior deal with Islam as a religion in general and with Muslim organizations in particular allows insight into the relation of knowledge production and strategy development in bureaucracies.

In my talk I will inquire into the conditions that underlie the production of knowledge about Islam in state-bureaucracies. I understand bureaucracies in general and ministries of the interior in particular as structured settings of departments and subdepartments each being assigned a specific task and deriving a sense of vision and mission from it. Relating to Latour's concept of modes of existence I will show how specific types of departmental knowledge (like security knowledge, integration knowledge and normative social knowledge) emerge from that bureaucratic division of labor. In a second step (this time relating to Bourdieu and Luhmann) I will discuss how these types of knowledge are negotiated within the ministry and how the logics of these negotiations reflect and reproduce the power balance between the departments. Thirdly I will discuss the techniques with which the plurality of voices is transformed into one authoritative voice and thus into governemental orthodoxy. I argue that this step is of key importance as the creation of orthodoxy is a key feature of all state-bureaucracies. I end with discussing the embeddedness of the state apparatus. The fact that it is a machinery for the production of powerful knowledge makes it an object to be conquered by societal groups.