Regulating Visibility: Secrecy and Surveillance in Insular Religious Communities

Abstract

Insular religious communities offer significant insights into some of the issues facing contemporary Western societies, including the issues of religious secrecy and surveillance. The role of secrecy in these communities involves dynamic strategies invoked for many reasons in equally numerous contexts. The behaviours and practices of these groups often reflect much larger issues present in today’s society. In this way, they can guide us in understanding the role of surveillance from a sociological perspective in the current climate of tensions and anxieties. These communities are especially useful for thinking about questions of why some religious groups rigidly control and restrict access to bodies of secret, sacred knowledge or activities and in turn how religious secrecy is viewed by the wider social worlds in which their degree of visibility fluctuates. Here, I suggest an opportunity emerges for the study of secrecy in relation to the notion of regulating visibility by reorienting the focus from the roles of secrets and of secretive practices to one that also considers the more visible forms and strategies through which secrets and secretive practices come to be and are sustained.