asad geneologies of religion

8/2/2019 Asad Geneologies of Religion

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/asad-geneologies-of-religion 1/16

Genealogieso f Religion~ ~

~~r DISCIPLINE AN D REASONS[r~ OF POWER IN CHRISTIANITYt

~ .

.AND ISLAM

I;~If: TalalAsadt,

f~

I

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltiinore and London



I ~ TH E C O N S T R U C T I O N

~ I T ' H O NA ~

AN A N T ~ P O L O G I C A LC ~ C A T E G O R Y

'-CrI'J , J ~{\,1\ij'NJ C ~ , ~ JJ

9 J \ ' ~ " ~

In a character'i:Stically subde passage, Louis Dumont has told usthat medieval Christendom was on e such composite society:

. I shall take it for granted that a change in relations entails a change inwhatever is related. If throughout our history religion has developed(to a large extent, with some other influences at play) a revolut ion insocial values and has given birth by scissiparity, as it were, to an autonomous world of political institutions and speculations, then surelyreligion itself will have changed in the process. Of some important

t. Thus, Fuste! de Coulanges 18730 Originally published in French in 1864, this was'"In influential work in the history of several overlapping disciplines-anthropology,·>bi\>lical studies, and classics.



28 ReJigicn as an Anthropological Category 29E N E A L O G I E S

and visible changes we are all aware, but, I submit, we are not awareof the change in the very nature of religion as lived by any givenindividual, say a Catholic. Everyone knows tha t religion was formerly

a matter of the group and has become a matter of the individual (inprinciple, and in practice at least in many environments and situations). But if we go on to assert th at this change is correlated with thebirth of the modern State, the proposition is not such a commonplace as the previous one. Let us go a little further: medieval religionwas a great doak-I am thinking of the Mantle of Ou r Lady of Mercy ..Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacityand became one among other apparently equal considerations, ofwhich the political was the first born. Each individual may, of course,and perhaps even will, recognise religion (or philosophy), as the sameall-embracing consideration as it used to be socially. Yet on th e level of

social consensus or ideology, the same person will switch to a differen t configuration of values in which autonomous values ( r e l i g i o u ~ ,

political, etc.) are seemingly juxtaposed, much as individuals are juxtaposed in society. (1971, 32; emphasis in original) .

cordin to this view, medieval religion, ervadin c Q . . . . m p a s s i ~ g

o}oer categQries, is nevert e ess ~ l y t i c t ! l b i d c n J ; [ i ~ ~ ! e . ~ ;

t h ~ tmakes i ~ S S 1 6 l eto say that religion has the same essence today as .i ~ d l eAges, although i t § ~ e x r e n s i o nand functionwere different in the tw o epochs. Yet the insistence that religion has'an autonomous essence-not to be confused with the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense-invites us to define religion(like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomen on.It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand i n ou r time that it be kept quite separate from politics, law, and science-spaces i n which varieties of powerand reason articulate ou r distinctively modern life. This definiti on isat once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and(for liberal Christians) ofthe defense of religion.

anthropologist is confronted with, as a consequence, is no t merelyarbitrary collection of elements and processes that we happen to

~ ' r e l i g i o n . "

For the entire phenomenon isto

be seen in large meain the context of Christian attempts to achieve a coherence in.doctrines and practices, rules and regulations, even if that was a state

fully attained. ~ m e n tis tbat there cannot be a universalo f - - ' ! ~ - -- - - I.. L __ _ .. __ !-- -----:- .. -- _1 - _ _ _ _ _ _ :I

2. Originally published in 1966, it was reprinte d in his widely acclaimed. The I n ~ - l1',..1IIion of Cultures (1973). \ '\ -"\"". . \ . \.v". '-._. \

\,~ ;Yet this separation of reli . 0 .h" norm. the pro uc 0 a moue post-Reformation hist·

I •

A

' ~ "



30 31E N E A L O G I E S

(-;;; 'h an awea of factuali tha ltlwLmot ivatio ns seem~ n i q u e l yreari bc 1(90). In what follows I shall e x a m ~ l -tlon, no t only in order to test its interlinked assertions, bu t also toflesh ou t the counterclaim that a transhistorical definition of religionis no t viable.

Th e Concept of Symbol as a Clue to the Essence of Religion

Geertz sees his first task as the definition of symbol: "any object,act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a conc eption-the conception is the symbol's 'meaning'" (91). But this simple,clear statement-in which symbol (any object, etc.) is differentiatedfrom bu t linked to conception (its meaning)-is later supplemented byothers no t entirely consistent with it, for it turns ou t that the symbol

is no t an object tha t serves as a vehicle for a conception, it is itself theconception. Thus, in the statement "The number 6, written, imagined,laid ou t as a row of stones, or even punched into the program tapes ofa computer, is a symbol" (91), what cons titutes all these diverse representations as versions of the same symbol ("the number 6") is of coursea conception. Furthermore, Geertz sometimes seems to suggest thateven as a conception a symbol has an intrinsic connection with e m p i r i ~

cal events from which it is merely "the oretically" separable: "the symbolic dimension of social events is, like the psychological, itself theoretically abstractable from these events as empirical totalities" (91). Atother times, however, he stresses the importance of keeping symbolsand empirical objects quite separate: "there is something.to be said forno t confusing our traffic wit h symbols with ou r traffic with objects orhuman beings, for these latter are no t in themselves symbols, howeveroften they may function as such" (92). Thus, "symbol" is sometimesan aspect of reality, sometimes of its representation. 3

These divergencies are symptoms of the fact that cognitive ques

3. Compare Peirce's more rigorous account of representations. "A representation isan object which stands for another so that an experience of the former affords us aknowledge of th e latter. There must be three essential conditions to which every representation must conform. It must in the first place like any other object have qualitiesindependent of its meaning. . . . In th e 2nd place a representation must have a realcausal connect ion with its object. . . . In the third place, every representation addressesitself to a mind. It is only in so far as it does this that it is a representation" (Peirce 1986,62).

Religwn as an Anthropological Category

tions are mixed up in this account with communicative ones, and thismakes it difficult to inquire into the ways in which discourse andunderstanding are connected in social practice. To begin with we might

'. say, as a number of writers have done , that a symbol is no t an object or. event tha t serves to carry a meaning bu t a set of relationships betwee n

. objects or events uniquely brought together as complexes or as concepts, '" havmg at once an intellectual, instrumentat, and emotionalsigmhdliifr. 5 If we dehne symbol along these lines, 6 a number of

" . questions can be raised about the conditions that explain how such.complexes and concepts come to be formed, and in particular how'their form ation is related to varieties of practice. Half a century ago,

::Vygotsky was able to show how the development of children's intellect.' ,is dependent on the internalization of social speech. 7 T h i ~ , m ~ ~ . ~ _ t h a t

. , ~ efOrmation of what we have here called "symbols" ( ~ ( ) m p l e x e s ,

"conce ts is condition ed b the social relations in which the growing~ h i l dis invo lved -by th e social activities that he or she is pgroltt£ orencouraged or obliged to undertake in which other symbols ( s p e : . e ~ h

arid'significant movements) are crucial. Th e c onditions (discursive and. ~ o n d i s c u r s i v e )that explain how symbols come to b ~constructed, and

how some of them are established as natural or authoritative as opposedto others, then become an impor tant object of anthropological inquiry.I,t must be stressed that this is no t a matter of urging the study of theorigin and function of symbols in addition to their meaning-such a

'::.distinction is no t relevant here. What is being argued is that the au" .

j ~ ; ) h o r i t a t i v estatus of representations/discourses is dependent on the. -. 4· Vygotsky (1962) makes crucial analytical distinc tions in th e development of con''Ptuai thought: heaps, complexes, pseudoconcepts, and true concepts. Although,

·.::\Ccotdingto Vygotsky, these represent stages in the development of children's use ofIa.O.guage, the earlier stages persist into adult life.

:r. Collingwood (1938, bk. 2) fora discussion of th e integral connection betweenr:;,;t,hought and emotion, where it is argued that there is no such thing as a universal emo

function accompanying all conceptualization/communication: every distinctive~ c O g n i t i v e / c o m m u n i c a t i v eactivity has its ow n specific emotional cast, If this view ist,y¥id, then the notion of a generalized religious emotion (or mood) may be questioned.

c;:'':,'::'6. The argument that symbols o'lfR1lizeprlUtic:e, and consequently the structure of. ' c ~ t i o n ,is central to Vygotsky's genetic psychology-see especially "Tool and Sym

,: bol in Child Development," in Vygotsky 1978. A cognitive conception of symbols hasi r e c ~ n t l y b e e nrevived by Sperber (1975). A similar view was taken much earlier by Lien; ~ t ( 1 9 6 [ ) ,

..7, "The history of the process of the internaJizatWnofsocW speech is also the history o fsocialization of children's practical intellect" (Vygotsky 1978, 27). See also Luria andI nu i rh 1971.

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/something.to

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/something.to



32 G E N E A L O G I E S

appropriate production of other rep.r sentations/discourses; the twoare intrinsically ~ no t just ! ~ ! m ! . ~CooRected.

Systems of symbols, says Geertz, are also culture patterns, and theyconstitute "extrinsic sources of information" (92). Extrinsic, because"they lie outside the boundaries of the individual organism as such in

that inter-subjective world of common understandings into which allhuman individuals are born" (92). And sources of information in thesense that "they provide a blueprint or template in terms of whichprocesses external to themselves can be given a definite form" (92).Thus, culture patterns, we are tol d, may be thought of as "models forreality" as well as "models lifreality."8

This part of the discussion does open up possibilities by speakingof modeling: that is, it allows for the possibility of conceptualizingdiscourses in the process of elaboration, modification, testing, and so

forth. Unfortunately, Geertz quickly regresses to his earlier position:"culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect," he writes; "theygive meaning, that is objective conceptual form, to social and psycho- .logical reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it tothemselves" (1973, 9;). This alleged dialectical tendency toward isomorphism, incidentally, makes it difficult to understand how social.change can ever occur. The basic problem, however, is not with theidea of mirror images as such bu t with the assumption that there aretwo separate levels-the cultural, on the one side (consisting of symbols)and the social and psychological, on the other-which interact. Thisresort to Parson ian theory creates a logical space for defining the essenceof religion. By adopting it , Geertz moves away from a notion of symbols that are intrinsic to signifying and organizing practices, and backto a notion of symbols as meaning-carrying objects external to socialconditions and states of the self ("socia l and psychological reality").

This is not to say that Geertz doesn't think of symbols as "doing"something. In a way that recalls older anthropological approaches toritual,9 he states that religious symbols act "by inducing in the wor

8. Or, as Kroeber and Kluclchohn (1952, 181) put it much earlier, "Culture consistsof patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted bysymbols."

9. If we set aside Radcliffe-Brown's well-known preoccupation with social cohesion, we may recall that he too was concerned to specify certain kinds of psychologicalstates said to be induced by religious symbols: "Rites can be seen to be the regulatedsymbolic expressions of certain sentiments (which control the behaviour of the individual in his relation to others). Rites can therefore be shown to have a specific social

Religion as an Anthropological Category 33

shipper a certain distinctive set of dispositions (tendencies, capacities,propensities, skills, habits, liabilities, proneness) which lend a chronic

:'character to the flow of his activity and the quality of his experience"(95). And here again, symbols are set apart from mental states. But

. how plausible are these propositions? Can we, for example, predict t he"distinctive" set of dispositions for a Christian worshiper in modern ,industrial society? Alternatively, can we say of someone with a "distinctive" set of dispositions that he is or is not a Christian?lO The3.i;swer to bo th questions must surely be no. The reason, of course, is

it is not simply worship bu t social, political, and economic instilUUons in general,11 within which individual biographies are livedqu t, tha t lend a stable character to the flow of a Christian's activity andtothe quality of her experience.

• symbols, Geertz elaborates, produce two kinds of...2.is

ns, moods and mqtivations: "motivations are 'made meaningful'ference to the ends towards which they are conceived to conwhereas moods are 'made meaningful' with reference to the

' . : ~ . : , , \ ' u l l w d o n sfrom which they are conceived to spring" (97). Now, a(!::hristian might say that this is no t their essence, because religious

even when failing to produce moods and motivations, arereligious (i.e., true) symbols-that religious symbols possess aindependent of their effectiveness. Yet surely even a committ ed

.;-uu:stian cannot be unconcerned at the existence of truthful symbolsto be largely powerless in modern society. He will rightly

to ask: What are the conditions in which religious symbols can

produce religious dispositions? Or, as a nonbeliever would pu tdoes (religious) power create (religious) truth?

when, and to the extent that, they have for their effect to regulate, maintainna,rransmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the constit ution of

d ~ p e n d s "(1952, 151).Some ways in which symbolization (discourse) can disguise !Juk of distinctivenessI brought out in MacIntyre's trenchant critique of contemporary Christian writ

he argues that " Christian s behave like everyone else but use a different voin characterising their behaviour, and also to conceal t heir lack of distinctive1,24).

phenomenon of declining church attendance in moder n industrial societyits:progressive marginalization (in Europe, at least) to those s ectors of the popula

. directly involved in the industrial work process illustrates the argument that iflook for causal explanations in this area, then socioeconomic conditions in

will appear to be the independent variable and formal worship the dependent.: e · . d i ~ i n f e r e s t i n "discussion in Luckman 1967, chap. 2.



G E N E A L O G I E S3+

Th e relation ben.yeen power an d truth is an ancient theme, and noon e has dealt with it more impressively in Christian thought than St.Augustine. Augustine developed his views on the creative religiousfunction of power after his experience with the Donatist heresy, insist

ing that coercion was a condition for the realization of truth, an ddiscipline essential to its ~ a ' i n t e n a n c e .

For a Donatist, Augustine's attitude to coercion was a blatan t denialof Christian teaching: God had made men free to choose good o r evil;a policy which forced this choicewas plainly irreligious. Th e Donatis twriters quote d the same passages from th e Bible in favour offree will,as Pelagius would later quote. In his reply, Augustine already gavethem the same answer as he would give to the Pelagians: the fmal,individual act of choice must be spontaneous; but this act of choicecould be prepared by a long process, which men did not necessarilychoose fur themselves, but which was often imposed on them, againsttheir will, by God. This was a corre,ctive process of " teaching," eruditioJ and warning, admonitioJ which might even include fear, constraint,and external inconveniences: "Let constraint be found outside; it isinside that the will is born."

Augustine had become convinced that men needed such firm handling. He summed up his attitude in one word: disciplina. He thoughtof this disciplina J not as many of his more tradit ional Roman contemporaries did, as the static preservation of a "Roman way oflif e." Forhim it was an essentially active process of corrective punishment, "asoftening-up process," a "teach ing by inconveniences" -- R per moles-tias eruditio. In the Old Testamen t, G od had ta ught his wayward Chosen People through just such a process of disciplina J checking andpunishing their evil tendencies by a whole series of divinely-ordaineddisasters. The persecution of the Donatists was another "controlledcatastrophe" imposed by God, mediated, on this occasion, by thelaws of the Christian Emperors . . . .

Augustine's view of the Fall of mankind determined his attitude tosociety: Fallen men had come to need restraint. Even man's greatestachievements had been made possible only by a "straight-jacket" ofunremitting harshness. Augustine was a great intellect, wit h a healthy

respect for the achievements of human reason. Yet he was obsessed bythe difficulties of thought, and by the long, coercive processes, reaching back into the horrors of his own schooldays, that had made this

, __ i00/ i5Religion as an Anthropological Category 35

intellectual activity possible; so "ready to lie down" was the fallenhuman mind . He said he would rather die tha n become a child again. 0 rNonetheless, the terrors of tha t time had been strictly necessary; for \they were part of the awesome discipline of God, "f rom the school

masters' canes to the agonies of the martyrs," by which human beingswere recalled, by suffering, from their own disastrous inclinations.(Brown 1967, 236-38)

were to be systematically excIuded;-tOrbidden, denounced-made as" much 3S possible unthinkabl e; others were to be included, allowed,. praised, and drawn into the narrative of sacred truth. 1 he con6gura

t'ions of power in this sense have, of course, varied profoundl y in Christendom from on e epoch to another-from Augustine's time, through

,the Middle Ages, to the industrial capitalist West of today. Th e pat, ' t ~ r n sof religious moods and motivations, the possibilities for religious'knowledge and truth, have all varied with them and been conditioned

,by,them. Even Augustine held that although religious truth was eter.nal, the means for secu ring hum an access to it were not.

From Reading Symbols to Analyzing Practices

One consequence of assuming a symbolic system separate fro m-practices is that important distinctions are sometimes obscured, or;. even explicitly denied. "That the symbols or symbol systems which

12. This was why Augustine eventually carne around to the view that insincere conversion was no t a problem (Chadwick 1967, Z2.2-24).



36

~ 'I'" \,7, &--') D '}f'Cl'>,1-

G E N E A L O G I E S

induce and define dispositions we set of f as religious and those whichplace these dispositions in a cosmic framework are the same symbolsought to occasion no surprise" (Geertz, 98). But it does surprise! Le tu.s gran t that religious dispositions are crucially dep ende nt on certain

religious symbols, th at such symbols ope rate in a way integral to religious motivation and religious mood. Even so, the symbolic processby which the concepts of religious motivation and mood are placedwithin "a cosmic framework" is surely quite a different operation, andtherefore the signs involved are qu ite different. Pu t another way, theological discourse is no t identical with either moral attitudes or liturgical dis course s-of which, among other things, theology speaks. 13

Thoughtful Christians will concede that, although theology has anessential function, theological discourse does no t necessarily inducereligious dispositions, and that, conversely, having religious disposi'tions does not necessarily depend on a clear-cut conception of the

cosmic framework on the part of a religious actor. Discourse involvedin practice is not the same as that involved in speaking about practice.It is a modern idea that a practitioner cannot know how to live religiously without being able to articulate tha t knowledge.

Geertz's reason for merging the two kinds of discursive processseems to spring from a wish to distinguish in general between religious and·secular dispositions. Th e statement quoted above is elaborated as follows: "For what else do we mean by saying that a particula rmood of awe is religious and no t secular, except that it springs fromentertaining a conception of all-pervading vitality like mana and no tfrom a visit to the Grand Canyon? Or that a particular case of asceticismis an example of a religious motivation except that it is directed towardthe achievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and no t a c:;onditione d one like weight-reduction? If sacred symbols did no t at one andthe same time induce dispositions in hum an beings and formulate ...general ideas of order, then the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience would no t exist" (98). The argument that aparticular disposition is religious pardy because it occupies a conce p

13, A modern theologian puts it: "The difference between the professing, proclaiming and orienting way of speaking on the one hand, and descriptive speech on the other,is sometimeS formulated as the difference between 'speaking about' and 'speaking to. 'As soon as these two ways of speaking are confused, the original and unique character ofreligious speech, so it is said, is corrupted so t hat reality-for-the-believer can no longer<appear' to him as it appears in professing speech" (Luijpen 1973, 90-9 1).


: ~ e ways In WhICh authonzmg discourses, presupposing and ex'riounding a cosmology, systematically redefined religious spaces have

of profound importance in the history of Western society. In the"c,lVlIUdie Ages, such discourses ranged over an enormous domain, de

and creating religion: rejecting "pagan" practices or acceptingauthenticating particular miracles and relics (the two con

··.,r. ...... ",rI each other); 15 authorizing shrines; 16 compiliqg saints' lives,

',' 14. The series of booklets known as Penitential manuals, with the aid of which Christian discipline was imposed on Western Europe from roughly the fifth to the tenth' c ~ n r u r i e s ,contains much material on pagan practices penalized as un-Christian, So, for.example, "The taking of vows or releasing from them by springs or trees or lattices,

,':' in'y:where except in a church, and partaking offood or drink in these places sacred to the'.' f o l k ~ d e i t i e s ,are offenses condemned " (quoted in McNeill [933, 4-S6), (For further de

see McNeill and Gamer 1938.) At the same time, Pope Gregory th e Great (A.D.C4.o-004-) "urged that the Chur ch should take over old pagan temples and festivals and

them a Christian meaning" (Chadwick 1967,254-). The apparent inconsistency oftwo attitudes (rejection or incorporation of pagan practices) is less important

t h ~systematic exercise of Church authority by which meaning was assigned.Is'. "On the one hand, then, bishops complained of crude and too-avid beliefs in

.:.unauthorized and unexamined wonders and miracles, while on the other theologians:ir.:...sibly also these same bishops) tried to come to terms with the matter. Although

attempted to define miracle by appeals to universal natu ral law, such defmitionsnot entirely successful, and i n specific, individual cases, common sense was a bet

guide than medieval cosmology. When papal commissioners sat down to hear testiIny about Thomas Cantilupe's miracles at London an d Hereford in 1307 they had in

::fr9nt of them a schedule of hings to ask about such wondrous events: they wanted to:know, for example, how th e witness came to learn of the miracle, what words were used

';b)rthose who prayed for the miracle, whether any herbs, st ones, other natural or medic~ preparations or incantations had accompanied the miracle; the witness was expectedidsay something about the age and social situation of the person experiencing the mira

. where he came from and of what family; whether the witness knew the subjectas well as after the miracle, what illness was involved, how many days he had seenperson before the cure; whether the cure was complete and how long it took for

· : : ; : : f ~ i n p l e t i o n .Of course witnesses were also asked what year, month, day, place and in" , ~ : : w h o s epresence the wonderful event i tself occurred" (Finucane [977, B).

:[6. ,'By being authorized, shrines in turn served to confirm ecclesiastical au thority :bishops of West ern Europe came to orchestrate the cult of th e saints in such a waybase their power withi n the old Roman cities on these new 'towns outside th e.' Yet it was through a studiously articulated relationship with great shrines that




both as a model of and as a model for the Truth;17 requiring theregular telling of sinful thoughts, words, and deeds to a priestly confessor and giving absolut ion to a penitent; 18 regularizing popul ar socialmovements into Rule-following Orders (for example, the Franciscans), or denouncing them for heresy or for verging on the heretical(for example, the Beguines).l9 The medieval Church did no t attemptto establish absolute uniformity of practice; on the contrary, its authoritative discourse was always concerned to specify differences, gradations, exceptions. What it sou ght was the subjection of all practiceto a unified authority, to a single authe ntic source that could tell truthfrom falsehood. It was the early Christian Fathers who established theprinciple that only a single Church could become th e source of authenticating discourse. 20 They knew that the "symbols" embod ied in the

lay at some distance from t he city-St. Peter's, on the Vatican Hill out side Rome, SaintMartin's, a little beyond the walls of T ours-that the bishops of the former cities of theRoman Empire rose to prominence in early medieval Europe" (Brown 1981, 8).

17. The life of St. Antony by Athanasius was the mod el for medieval hagiographies,and the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, pro bation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, together wit h knowledge and authority, was reproduced again and again in t hat lit erature (Baker 197Z, 41).

18. The Lateran Council of 1215 declared that annual private confession should bemandatory for all Christians: "Every fide/is of either sex shall after the attainment ofyears of discretion separately confess his sins with all fidelity to his priest at least once inthe year: and shall endeavour to fulfil the penance imposed upon him to the best of hisability, reverently receiving the sacrament of the Euch arist at least at Easter: unless ithappens that by the counsel of his own priest for some reasonable cause, he hold t hat heshould abstain for a time from the reception of the sacrament: otherwise let him during

life be repelled from entering th e church, and wh en dead let him lack Christian burial.Wherefore let this salutary statute be frequent ly published in churches, lest any assumea veil of excuse in the blindness of ignorance" (q uoted in Watkins 1920,748-49).

19· For a briefintroduction to the varying reaction of ecclesiastical authority to theFranciscans and the Beguines, see Southern 1970, chaps. 6, 7. "Beguines" was the namegiven to groups of celibate women dedicated to the religious life but not owing obedience to ecclesiastical authority. They flourished in the towns of western Germany andthe Low Countries but were criticized, denounced, and finally suppressed in the earlyfifteenth century.

20. Thus, Cyprian: "I f a man does not hold this unity of the Church, does he believe himself to hold the faith? If a man withstands and resists the Church, is he confident that he is in the Church? For the blessed Apostle Paul has the same teaching, andsets forth th e sacrament of unity, when he says, 'The re is one body, one Spirit, one hopeof our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.' This unity we ought firmly

to hold and defend, especially we who preside in the Church as bishops that we mayprove the episcopate also to be itself one and undivided. Let no one deceive the brethren by falsehood; let no one corrupt the truth of our faith by faithless transgression"(quoted in Bettenson 1956, 26+)'


practice of self-confessed Christians are not always identical with thetheory of the "one true Church," t h a t . . r ~ g i o ~ ~ e q u i r e sauthorized

• practice and auth orizing d octrine t and that there is"arwaysatension' , b ~ e nthem-sometimes breaking into heresy, the subversion of

:;;:Truth -which underlines the creative role of institutional power. 21

..;; I he meClievilC h u r c h - ~ a y sdear about why there was a continuous need to distinguish knowledge from falsehood (religion fromwhat sought to subvert it), as well as the sacred from the profane

" (religion from what was outside it), distinctions for which the authoritative discourses, the teachings and practices of the Church, no t theconvictions of the practitioner, were the final test. 22 Several timesbefore the Reformation, the boundary between the religious and thetcular was redrawn, bu t always the formal authority of the Chur!,:h

remained preemin ent. :rii'titer centuries

21. The Chur ch always exercised the au thority to read Christian practice for its relitruth. In this context, it is interesting that the word heresy at first designated allof errors, includin g errors "unconsciously" involved in some activity (rimoniaca.

and it acquired its specific modern meaning (the verbal formulation of denial or

defined doctrine of the Catholic church) only in the course of he methpdological controversies of the sixteenth century (Chenu 1968,2.76 ).

. 22 . In the early Middle Ages, monastic discipline was the princip al basis of religiosKnowles (1963, 3) observes that from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries,

, , . onastic life based on the Rule of St. Benedict was everywhere the no rm an d exercised, ·from time to time a paramount influence on the spiritual, intellectual, liturgical and::apostolic life of the Western Church .... he only type of religious life available in the4·countries concerned was monastic, and the only monastic code was the Rule of St., .~ e n e d i c t . "During the period the very term religious was therefore reserved for those; living in monastic communit ies; with the later emergence of non monastic orders, t heterm came to be used for all who had taken lifelong vows by which they were set apart

the ordinary members of the Church (Southern 1970, 214-). The extension and:.':,siriiultaneous trans format ion of the religious disciplines to lay sections of society from

<:the twelfth century onward (Chenu 1968) contributed to the Church's authority be

;:coming more pervasive, more complex, and more cont radictor y than before-and sothe articulation of the concept and practice of ay religion.

' 23 . Thus enabling the Victorian anthropologist and biblical scholar Robertson Smi ththat in the age of scientific historiography, "i t will no longer be the results of

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/Beguines).l9

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/1968,2.76


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/Beguines).l9




4 0 G E N E A L O G I E S

The Construction of Religion in Early Mode rn EuropeL:".(;

It was in the seventeent h century, following th e fragmentation of the unity and authority of th e Roman church and the consequent wars of religion, which tor e European principalities apart , that the earliest s tic attempts .a . . rsal defin itio n o ~ n~ . r ert's De veritate was a significant step in this d e f i n r : : ~ '

tional history. "Lord Herbert," writes Willey,

differs from such men as Baxter, Cromwell, or Jeremy Taylor mainly in that, not co ntent with reducing the creed to the minimum number possible offundamentals, he goes behind Christianity itself, and tries to formulate a belief which shall command the universal assent of all men as men. I t must be remembered that the old simple situation, in which Christendom pictured itself as the world, with only the foul'

\:.) paynim outside and the semi-tolerated Jews within the gates, had ."e J 11" passed away for ever. Exploration and commerce had widened the~ s y horizon, and in many writers of the century one can see that the

religions of the East, however imperfectly known, were beginning topress upon the European consciousness. I t was a pioneer-interest inthese religions, together with the customary preoccupation of Renaissance scholars with the mythologies of classical antiquity, whichled Lord Herbert to seek a common denominator for all religions,and thus to provide, as he hoped, the much-needed eirenicon forseventeenth-century disputes. (193+, 114)

Thus, Herbert produced a substantive defmition of what later came to be formulated as Natural Religion-in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), p r ~ ! ! ~ ~ c s . - f . icode of

onduct based on rewards and punishmemsater this life)-said to ,\ l e x ! s t - i n , a l L s o c i ~ ~ ;24 This emphasis on belief meant that henceforth

(. "

theology that we are required to defend, but something prior to theology. What we shall have to defend is not our Christian knowledge, but ou r Christian belief" (19I2,

, ., .... no). Christian beliefi s no longer expected to fasten on the Bible as divine revelation but I':' as "the record of divine revelation-the record of those historical facts in which Go d has

revealed himself to man" (1912, IZ3). Therefore, the principles of historical interpretation were no longerstricdy Christian, only the beliefS whic h that interpretation served.

2+. When Christian missionaries found themselves in culturally unfamiliar terri

tory, the problem ofidentifying "religion" became a matter of considerable theoretical difficulty and practical importance. For example, "The Jesuits in China contended that the reverence for ancestors was a social, no t a religious, act, or that if religious. it was

f , " ' ' - \ ., .iI v ' \.. ,\-.vV " . . .-ld


Th e idea of scripture (a divinely produced/interpreted text) wast'essential to this "common denominator" of religions partly be

"duse Christians ha d become more familiar, through trade and colo,. nization, with societies that lacked writing. But a more important

reason lies in the shift in atten tion that occurred in the seventeenth:.century fr?m God's words to God's w . " ~ t u r e "became th e real: space of div' e wnnng, and eventuall th e indis utable authonty TOr

texts written in merely human lanp'uas.re d. t l f i ""h,IS'

Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity popularize d a new versionof Christianity by r e d u c i ~ its t o c t ~ eto.-the lowest common denominator of belief in Jesus as t e Messiah, whose advent had been

. ~ t o l din the prophecies of the O ld Testament. Even this reducedS;; ;d was to be measured against the background of Natural Religionand of the Rehgtffii o n ~ a t a l a iScience, so that Iteveiadon m aa&tlonto bein re uired to sri itselfb Locke's standard, had to pres t

its,SlCas a republication of Natural Religion. For a time indeed theWord of God assumed it secondary posit ion to his works as set forth inthe created universe. For whereas the testimony of the latter was universal and ubiquitous, the evidence of Revelation was confined to

sacred books written in dead languages, whose interpretation was not

agreed even amongst professed Christians, and which related more-,over to distant events which had occurred in remote times and in!

places far removed from the centres oflearn ing and civilization. (Sykes1975, 195-9 6)

hardly different from Catholic prayers for the dead. They wished the Chinese to regard" Christianity, not as a replacement, not as a new religion, but as the highest fulfillment, of their finest aspirations. But to their opponents the Jesuits appeared to be merely lax.

In 1631 a Franciscan and a Dominican from the Spanish zone of Manila travelled (i1le-,\gaIly, from the Portuguese viewpoint) to Peking and found that to translate the word. mass, the Jesuit catechism used the character tn, which was the Chinese description of',the ceremonies of ancestor-worship. One night they went in disguise to such a cere

. mony, observed Chinese Christians participating and were scandalized at what theysaw. So began the quarrel of ' the rites,' which plagued the eastern missions for a cen~ .; mry and more" (Chadwick 196+. 338).




In this way, Natural Religion no t only became a universal phenomenon bu t began to be demarcated from, and was also supportive of, anewly emerging domain of natural science. I ~ emphasize that

the idea of Natural Reli 'on was a cruci e in the formation of them ~ once t o religious belief, ex erience , and practice, an d thatit was an idea developed in response to prob ems speci IC to fiiIStIantheology at a particular historical juncture .

By 1795, Kant was able to produce a fully essentialized idea ofreligion which could be counterposed to its phenomenal forms: "Theremay certainly be different historical confessions,n he wrote,

\ \,.{tthough these have nothing to do with religion itself but only withchanges in the means used to further religion, and are thus the prov

. ince of historical research. And there may be just as many religiousbooks (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.). Bnt there can

~ ~ -only be one religion whjcb is valid for '!II ~ ~ tim;s"1;lWs the. ~ ~ o n f e s s i o n scan scarcely be m o r ~ n . t - h ~ i c l e s . . . Q i r e l i :

',1 gion; these are fOrtuitous, and may vary ' ! ith differenc:g-,jn time or._pIaCe. (Kant 1991, Wf) - - - - ~ -.. l(\ v t..JV v \ ~ \j_,

- J ~ ~

from here, the classification of historical co ions into lower andigher religions became an increasingly popular option for philosohers, theologians, missionaries, and a nthropologists in the ninete enth

and twentieth centuries. As to whet her any particular tribe has existedwithou t any form of religion whatever was often raised as a question 25

, bu t this waS recognized as an empirical matter no t affecting the essence of religion itself.

Thus, what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident,namely that.:r.c1igjon is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linkedto ideas of ~ e n e r a lorder ( e x p r e s ~ e dt h ~ e r O r 1 i o t h rite ~ n d

~ dOd:!"wP) t ;;; .t has eneric f u n c t i o n s l f e a t u r e s ; a n a - f l l a t T t m ~ t

b l l ~ n f u s e dwith any ofits particular historical or c tural forms, is ~

fact a view that ba s a specific Cb tittian histort, F r ~ ~ 2 e i n ga concreteset of practical (ules attached to specific processes of power and knowl~ religion has co-;Ue to b;;-bstracted a ~ < ! . . u n i v e r s ! Y i z c d . i 6 1 n : t F i i s

movement we have no t merely an increase in religious tolera tion, cer

2.5. For example, by Tylor in the chapter ''Animi sm'' in part 2. of Priminpe Culture.

2.6. Phases in the gradual evacuation of specificity from public religious discourse inthe eighteenth century are described in some detail in Gay 1973


,..~ + L , ~"L:., ~ : )

,_, v' j. ,

Q ; . R . J ) ' ' ' ' ' t ' ~ . _ ; _ ) _

~ ; " K e u g I U n as Meaning an d Religious Meanings



44 45E N E A L O G I E S Religion as an A nthropologica.l Category

ory arid practice, Qvt wrong-oo see it as essentiall¥ cQg!!!tive,as a meansby which a disembodied mind can id 'f re ' .o n J n t ~ ~ e -

dean pomt. e connection between religious theory and practice isfundamentally a matter of intervention-of constructing religion inthe world (not in the mind) through definitional discourses, interpreting tru e meanings, excluding some utterances and practices andincluding others. Hence my repeated question: how does theoreticaldiscourse actually define religion? What are the historical conditionsin which it can act effectively as a demand for the imitation, or the

27. Th e way in which representations of occurrences were transformed into mean

ings by Christian theology is analyzed by Auerbach in his classic study of representations ofrea1ity in Western literatu re and briefly summed up in this passage: "The totalcontent of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removedthe thing told very far away from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener wasforced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning.This implied the danger that the visual element of th e occurrences might succumbunder the dense texture of meanings. Let on e example stand for many: It is a visuallydramatic occurrence that Go d made Eve, the first woman, from Adam's rib while Adamlay asleep; so too is it that a soldier pierced Jesus' side, as he hung dead on the cross, sothat blood and water flowed out. But when these two occurren ces are exegetically interrelated in the doctrine that Adam's sleep is a figure of Christ's death-sleep; that, asfrom the wound in Adam's side mankind's primordial mother after the flesh, Eve, wasborn, so from the wound in Christ's side was born the mother of all men after thespirit,the Church (blood and water are sacramental symbols)-then the sensory occurrence

pales before the power of the fIgUral meaning . What is perceived by the hearer or reader. .. s weak as a sensory impression, and all one's interest is directed toward the contextof meanings. In comparison, the Greco-Roman specimens of realistic presentation are,though less serious and fraught with problems and far more limited in their conceptionof historical movement, nevertheless perfectly integrated in their sensory substance.

They do not know the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which per meates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality" (I953,+8-+9). As Auerbach goes on to demonstrate, Christian theory in the later Middle Agesinvested representations of everyday lite with characteristic figural meanings, and sowith the possibilities for distinctive kinds of religious experience"Figurai interpretation, in Auerbach's usage, is no t synonymous with symbolism. Th e latter is dose'toallegory, in wh ich the symbol is substituted for the object symbolized. In figural interpretation the representation of an event (Adam's sleep) is made explicit by the represep,tation of another event (Christ's death) that is its meaning. Th e latter representation

fulfills the former (the technical term, Auerbach tells us, was f'IJUr4m implirt)-it isimpli&itin it.

glOUS S.}']U£!21StunctIon to tUlflll that need. It tol- ~ l f ' )1<>--'

~ h a thuman beings have a deep dread of disorder. "There are at;,.." ;pJe!lliL three points where chaos-a tumult of events which lack no t just

• ihterpretations but interpretability-threatens to break in upon man: at\ ~ elimits of his a n a l y ~ i c .c a p a b i ~ i t i e s ,at, th.e limits of his. powers of T l v e ~ten durance, and at the hmIts ofhls moral mSlght" (100). It IS the func- J

;"tion of religious symbols to meet perceived threats to orde r at each of t'J .,:<Vtesepoints (intellectual, physical, and moral): "The Problem of Mean- 0 "I' e v,~ irtgin each of its intergrading aspects . .. s a matter of affirming, or at "'(:leastrecognizing, the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice

the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationare characteristic o f the world as a whole. An d it is in terms of

"-,::28. Cf. Douglas (1975,76): "The person without religion would be the person cont odo without explanations of certain kinds, or content to behave in society with

,;,;\out,a,single unifying principle validating the social order." ',2,9. When the fifth-century bishop ofJavols spread Christianity into the Auvergne,

th e peasants "celebrating a three-day festival with offerings on th e edge of a. .' . 'Nulla est religio in stagna,' he said: There can be no religion in a swamp"1981, (25). For medieval Christians, religion was no t a universal phenomenon:

'-"::tililtion was a site on which universal truth was produced, and it was dear to them that V(.Is no t produced universally.



46

\ ' 1. ~ ) ".. J.Q/o/lA'l..1 +" 0; ,G\v€ ~ ' ' ' ; ~ )<;v\\-<"'7,e-\(·

G E N E A L O G I E S

ignorance, pain, and injustice, and religious symbols are a means ofcoming positively to terms with th at condition. O ne consequence isthat this view would in principle render any philosop hy that performssuch a function into religion (to the annoyance of the nineteenthcentury rationalist), or alternatively, make it possible to think of religion as a more primitive, a less adul t mode of coming to terms with thehuman condition (to the annoyance of the mo dern Christian). In eithercase, the suggestion that religion has a universal functio n in belief isone indication of how marginal religion has become in moder n industrial society as the site for produ cing disciplined knowledge and personal discipline. As such it comes.1o resemble the conception Marxha reli 'on as i d ~ l o g y - t h a tis, as a mode ";;f consciousness wfiIQi:.iS2ther than consciousness..?f reality, extern t ~ t i o n s . 9 f~ -~ t ; l ~ r o d u c i n gno knowledge, bu t expressing at onc e the a n ~ ~o ~ o E p r e s s e dand a sEurious consolation.

Geertz has much more to say, h o w e v ~ ,on the elusive question ofreligious meaning: no t only do religious symbols formulate conceptions of a general order of existence, they also clothe those concept ionswith an aura of f actuality. This, we are told, is "the problem of belief."Religious belief always involves "the prior acceptance of authority,"which transforms experience: "The existence of bafflement, pain, andmoral paradox-of the Problem of Meaning-is one of the things thatdrives men toward beliefin gods, devils, spirits, to temic principles, orthe s p i d t u a L c : : f f i c a c ~ rof cannibalism, . .. bu t it is no t the basis uponwhich those beliefs rest, but rather their most impo rtant fieid of application" (109). This seems to imply that religious belief stands independently of the worldly conditions that produce bafflement, pain, andmoral paradox, although that belief is primarily a way of coming toterms with them. But surely this is mistaken, on logical grounds aswell as historical, for changes in the object of belief change that belief;and as the world changes, so do the objects of belief and the specificorms of bafflement and moral paradox that are a part of that world.

What the Christian believes today about God, life after death, ther UnIverse, is no t what he e leve 0 nor is the wa heres onds to ignorance, pain, and injustice the same now as it was then.The v onzatlon 0 am as e m ' n C h r i ~ t ' s

sufferin contrasts sharply with the modern Catholic erce t i o n ~of 'pain as an evil to e ou t a am overcome as Christ the He ~did. That difference is dearly related to the post-Enlightenment secu

" " - - . . : ,

, \ ~ r \ {" .\ ,',lr-I.' r - ~ " \


larization of Western society an d to the moral language which that, society now authorizes. 30 '

" Geertz's treatment of religious belief, which lies at the core of his,conception of religion, is a modern, privatized Christian on e because, and to the extent th at it emphasizes the prio rity of belief as a state of

,. m ind r ~ t h e rthan as constituting activity in the world: "The basic,,', axiom underlying what we may perhaps call 'the religious perspective'

is everywhere the same: he who would know mus t first believe"

~ r u e s ,or me powers or ecpeslasucaI orIlce (over sm ) 1$, I ) Q g l e ~ -

,er . s of the reconditio d effects of confession, of the rules 0

: ~ r e l i.ous orders, of the locations and VIrtues 0 s rines 0 , . o f

. t ~ a n ~ ; ; : ! : . amtliarity wit h all such (religious) knowledge was a pre . . for normal social life, and belief (embodi ed in

, - practice and discourse) an orientation for effective activity in it-whether" on the part of the religious clergy, the secular clergy, or the laity. Be

cause of this, the form and texture and functio n of their beliefs would::: have been different from the form and texture and function of con:temporary belief-and so too of their doubts and th eir disbelief.

.. ' ,30. As a contemporary Catholic theologian puts it: "The secularistic challenge, even though separating many aspects of life from the religious field, brings with it a more sound, interpretative equilibrium: the natural phenomena, even though sometimes difficult to understand, have their cause and roots in processes that can and must be recog

, nized. It is man's job, therefore, to en ter into this cognitive analysis ofthe meaning of suffering, in order to be able to affront and conquer it. The contempo rary condition of

,'man, of the believer on the threshold of the third millennium, is undoubtedly more':..adultand more mature and allows a new approach to the problem of human suffering",,(Autiero 1987,124).

L",...4...

f··{ /l;e1/iL-l

"I.S

f " ~.""i .; ..·

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comes.1o

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/t~tions.9f

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/comes.1o

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/t~tions.9f



+8 G E N E A L O G I E S

The assumption that belief is a distinctive mental state characteristic of all religions has been the subject of discussion by contemporary scholars. Thus, Needham (1972) has interestingly argued that beliefis nowhere a distinct mode of consciousness, no r a necessary institu

tion for the conduct of social life. Southwold (1979) takes an almostdiametrically oppo sed view, asserting that questions of belief do relateto distinctive mental states and that they are relevant in any and everysociety, since "t o believe" always designates a relation between a believer and a proposition and t hrou gh i t to reality. Harre (1981, 82), in acriticism of Needham, makes the more persuasive case that "beliefis a'mental state, a grounded disp osition, bu t it is confined to people whohave certain social institutions and practices."

At any rate, I think it is not too unreasonable to maintain that"the basic axiom" underlying what Geertz calls "the religious perspective" is twteverywhere the same. Itis preeminently the Christianchurch t h ~ b a soccupied i ~ ; l f w j t bideotjf¥ing. cultjvatiog, an d test,:ingbelief as a v ~ a l i z a b l einner condition of true religion. 31

Religion as a Perspective

The phenomenological vocabulary that Geertz employs raises t wointeresting questions, one regarding its coherence and the other concerning its adequacy to a modern cognitivist notion of religion. I wan tto suggest that although this vocabulary is theoretically incoherent, itis socially quite compatible with the privatized idea of religion in modern society.

Thus, "the religious perspective," we are told, is one among sev-eral-common-sense, scientific, aesthetic-and it differs from these asfollows. It differs from the common-senseperspective, because it "movesbeyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct andcomplete them, and [because] its defming concern is no t action uponthose wider realities bu t acceptance of them, faith in them." I t isunlike the scientific perspective, because "i t questions the realities ofeveryday life not ou t of an in stitutionalized scepticism which dissolvesthe world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, bu t interms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypo thetical truths." And it is

distinguished from the aesthetic perspective, because "instead of ef

31. I have attempted a description of one aspect of this pr ocess in Asad 1986b.

ReligWn asan Anthropological Category +9

~ c t i n ga disengagement from the whole qu estion of factuality, delib. ~ a t e l ymanufacturing an air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the

ibncern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality" (U2).6ther words, although the religious perspective is no t exactly ra

. it is no t irrational either.I t would no t be difficult to state one's disagreement with this

of what common sense, science, and aesthetics are about . 32

But my point is that the optional flavor conveyed by the term perspecewe:is surely misleading when it is applied equally to science and to

.) .Ii.,.,,,,o in modern society: religion is indeed now optional i n apractices, ~ < : C h O l q u e s ,k n o w l e a g e s , _ p _ e ~

sense, too, sCience IS no t to be tound in every society, past a nd pres

',eht .. We shall see in a moment the difficulties that Geertz's perspec' t ! ~ i s r ngets him into, bu t before that I need to examine his analysis of

"tp.e mechanics of reality maintenance at work in religion.Consistent with previous arguments about the functions of reli-

Philosophical attempts to define science have not reached a firm consensus. In·,:the.AIiglo-Saxon world, recent arguments have been formulated in and around the

of Popper, Kuhn , Lakatos, Feyerabend, Hacking, and others; in France, those ofand Canguilhem. One important tendency has been to abandon the attempt

solving what is known in the literature as the demareation problem, which is based on·:tlje·assumption that there must be a single, essential, scientific method. The idea that

he scien tist" dissolves the world 's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses" is(questionable as the complementary suggestion that in religion there is no scope for

perimentation. On this latter point, there is massive evidence of experiment, even if",vent no farther than the history of Christian asceticism. Equally, the suggestion

art is a matter of "effecting a disengagement from the whole qu estion offactuality,Q ~ l I o e r a t e l ymanufacturing an air of semblance and illusion" woul d no t be taken as self

writers and artists. For example, when the art critic John Berger argues, inessay ,"The Momen t of Cubism," that cubism "changed the nature ofthe

'relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing expressed a new~ I a t i o n s h i pbetween man and reality" (1972, I+S), we learn somethin g about cubism's

. c < > ! : ~ c e r nto redefine visual factuality.~.. :33, In case some readers are tempted to think that what I am talking about is not

sCience (theory) but technology (practical application), whereas Geertz is concerned~ ; :C1nly with the former, I would stress that any attempt to make a sharp distinction be.:: tW,een the two is based on an oversimplified view of the historical practice of both (cf.. Musson and Robins on 1969). My point is that science and technology together are basic,t(:),'thestructure of mod ern lives, individual and collective, and that religion, in any but. th,e most vacuous sense, is not,



50 51E N E A L O G I E S

gious symbols is Geertz's remark that " it is in ritual-that is, consecrated behavior-that this conviction that religious conceptions areveridical an d that religious directives are sound is somehow generated"

(lI2). Th e long passage from which this is taken swings back an d forth

between arbitrary speculations about what goes on in the consciousness o f officiants and unfounded assertions about ritual as imprinting.

At first sight, this seems a curious combination o f introspectionist

psychology with a behaviorist one -bu t as Vygotsky (1978, 58-59) argued long ago, the tw o are by no means inconsistent, insofar as both

assume that psychological phenomena consist essentially in th e conse- ,quence of various stimulating environments.

Geertz postulates the function o f rituals in generating religiousconviction ("In these plastic dramas me n attain their faith as they

portray it " [U4J), bu t how or wh y this happens is nowhere explained.Indeed, he concedes that such a religious state is no t always achieved in

religious ritual: "O f course, all cultural performances are no t religiousperformances, and the line between those that are, an d artistic, oreven political, ones is often no t so easy to draw in practice, for, likesocial forms, symbolic forms can serve multiple purposes" (U3). Bu t

the question remains: What is i t that ensures th e participant's taking

the symbolic forms in the way that leads to faith if the line between

religious an d nonreligious perspectives is not so easy to draw? Mustn'tthe ability and the will to adopt a religious standpoint be present priorto the ritual performance? That is precisely wh y a simple stimulus

response model of how ritual works will not do. And i f that is th e case,, then ritual in the sense o f a sacred performancc"cannot be th e place

Where relIgious faidi is attained, bu t th e manner in whIch It is (literaJM played out. we are to un er an 0 thiS a ens we mustexamine no t on l . e bu t also the entire .range of available disciplin;uy activities, ofinstitytional forms o f k n o ~ ~ -

eage and practice, within which dispositions are formed an d sustained

:ind through which the possibilities o f attaining th e truth are markea

ou t as Aug usti ne clearly saw. 'I have noted more than onte Geertz's concern to define religious

symbols according to universal, cognitive criteria, to distinguish th e

religious perspective clearly from nonreligious ones. Th e separation of

religion from science,common

sense, aesthetics, politics, an dso

on ,allows hi m to defend it against charges o f irrationality. I f religion has adistinctive perspective (its ow n truth, as Durkheim would have said)

Religion as an AnthropologiCll-1Category

:.and performs an indispensable function, it does no t in essence com",pete with others an d cannot, therefore, be accused o f generating false

.;,.,consciousness. y ~ ~ . ) , ~a way this defense is eq,yiy0c:&. Religious sym' : ~ f

"

bois create disposition s, Geertz observes, which seem uniquely realC

istic. Is thi$ the point o f view o f a reasonably confident agent (who·.'!D-ust always operate within the denseness o f historically given proba

':':bilities) or that o f a skeptical observer (who can see through the repre

sentations o f reality to the reality itself)? I t is never clear. And it isnever clear because th is kind o f phenomenological approach doesn'tmake it easy to examine whether, an d i f so to what extent and in what

,:ways, religious experie.p.ce relates to something in th e real world that

ievers inhabit. This is partly because religious symbols are treated,

circular fashion, as th e precondition for religious experience (w hich,like any experience , must, by definition, be genuine), rather than asone condition for engaging with life.

" Toward the en d o f his essay, Geertz attempts to connect, instead,o f separating, th e religious perspective an d the common-sense o n e -

and th e result reveals an ambiguity basic to his entire approach. First,

invoking Schutz, Geertz states that the everyday world of common' : ~ n s eobjects an d practica l acts is common to all human beings because, their survival depends on it: "A man, even large groups o f men, ma y

aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and unequipped

;to pursue formal scientific analysis, bu t he cannot be completely lack, : : , ~ ' i ~ gin common sense an d survive" (u9). Next, he informs us that

"f',:individuals move "back and forth between the religious perspective. ,- . the common-sense perspective" (Il9). These perspectives are so

S;"'11'1'-:rly different, he declares, that only "Kierkegaardian leaps" (120) , .....

cover the cultural gaps that separate them. Then, the phenomeno

"LUj:;1Calconclusion: "Having ritually' leapt' . . into the framework of meaning which religious conceptions define, and th e ritual ended,

,returned again to th e common -sense world, a ma n is-unless, as some

:times happens, th e experience fails to register-changed. An d as he is "changed> so also is the common-sense world) for it is no w seen as bu t the ';partial form o f a wider reality which corrects an d completes it " (122;

" ~ p 1 p h a s i sadded). ...-

. This curious account o f shifting perspectives an d changing worlds

is,puzzling-asindeed it is in

Schutzhimself. It is no t clear,

forexam\ j i le , whether the religious framework and the common-sense world,

{; ~ between which the individual moves, are independent of hi m or not.

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/experie.p.ce

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/experie.p.ce



54- G E N E A L O G I E S

r fulness. From this it does not follow that the meanings of religiousI practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, bu tI ool.y that t h e i L P . o s s i b i l i ~ a ~ t h i l i~ u ~ ! ! £ r ~ t a t i v ~ ~ t . u s__~ ~ : ~. . ! ? ~ ~ : -i plamed as products of h C1 h Q C : , ~ ~ c ~

'FIfeant ropological

studentof particular religions should thereTOfebegin from this point, in a sense unpacking the comprehensive con

cept which he or she translates as "religion" into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character.

A final word o f caution. Hasty readers might conclude that mydiscussion of the Christian religion is skewed towards an authoritarian, centralized, elite perspective, and that consequently it fails totake in to account the religions of heterodox believers, of resistant peasantries, of all those who c annot be completely controlled by the orthodox church. Or, worse still, that my discussion has no bearing onnondisciplinarian, voluntaristic, localized cults of noncentralized

religions ~ u c has Hinduism. But that conclusion would be a misunderstanding of this chapter, seeing in it an attempt to advocate a betteranthropological definicion of religion than G eertz has done. Nothingcould be farther from my intention . If my effort read sin large part likea brief sketch of transmutations in Ch ristianity from the Middle Agesuntil today, then that is no t because I have arbitrarily confined myethnographic examples to one religion. My aim has been to problematize the idea of an anthropological definition of religion by assigning that endeavor to a particular history of knowledge and p ower(including a particular understanding of our legitimate past and future)ou t of which the modern world has been constructed. 36

36. Such endeavors are unceasing. As a recent, engaging study by Tambiah (1990, 6)puts it in the first chapter: "In'our discussion hereafter I shall try to argue that from ageneral anthropological stand point the distinctive feature of religion as a generic con

cept lies not in the domain of belief and its 'ration al accounting' of the workings of theuniverse, but in a special awareness of the transcendent, and the acts of symbolic communication th at attempt to realize that awareness and live by its promptings."

.2 ~ TO WA R D A G E N E A L O G Y

OF T H E C O N C E P T O F

R I T U A L

What the symbolicaction is intended tocontrol isprimarily a set of mental and moraldispositions.

-Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience

.,' Every ethnograp her will probably recognize a ritual whe n he or, s ~ esees one, because ritual is (is it not?) symbolic activity as opposedto .the instrumental behavior of everyday life. There may be some

' ; n n ' ~ t ' r t : t i ; ' t vand disagreement over matters of explanation, bu t no t inthe phenomenon as such (Skorupski 1976). Bu t was this

the case? When did we, as anthropologists, begin to speak of"? And why did we decide to speak ofit in the way we do now?

..~ ~ h i schapter, I tr y to answer these questions in an ex ploratory way'-c"wnthe hope tha t this will help identify some conceptual preconditio ns

our contemporar y analyses of religion. I must stress that my pri""':"iharyconcern here is no t to criticize anthropological theories of rit

pat; still less to propose or endorse alternatives. It is to tr y and dis\cover what historical shifts might have made ou r contemporary concept

' ~ i t u a lplausible. ..•1 begin by examining some general statements on the subject which

be found in old encyclopedias, because they provide us with duesthe shifts that are wor th investigating. I then enlarge, tentatively,

• .polnts that emerge from this examination by discussing medievalearly modern developments. Finally, I comment briefly on modanthropological writings. My general suggestion is that changes in

{institutional struct ures and in organizations of the se lf make possible,or worse, the concept of ritual as a universal category.

I emphasize again tha t the following notes are no more than prelim9'explorations across a large terrain. They are intended as first steps

asad geneologies of religion

Documents