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Category: Harvey Whitehouse's blog
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Published on Monday, 25 January 2010 23:00
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Written by Harvey Whitehouse
Shrine at Qixian Monastery, China (photo Harvey Whitehouse)
Over dinner the other evening, it struck me that religion is rather like ratatouille. People disagree about the ingredients of both but in fact there is no such thing as the one true recipe for either. The concepts ‘religion’ and ‘ratatouille’ are elastic and contested, and will almost certainly undergo further modification in the future. Foody fundamentalists tell us that real ratatouille is an Occitan dish originating in France but are divided into factions claiming descent from Provence (Provença ratatolha) and Nice (Niça ratatolha). According to Wikipedia (which apparently is rude to consult at the dinner table), there are four main kinds of ratatouille. Let us count the main types of religion.
Type 1 Religion is best understood as a kind of sacred party. What matters to most of the party-goers are not the ostensible reasons for celebrating but the dancing, singing, and dressing up, and the collective effervescence thereby produced. The bells and smells, the sensory pageantry and the collective euphoria conspire to bind participants together even if most revellers have only a fuzzy idea of why the party was organized in the first place.
Type 2 Religion is more like therapy. Patients present with maladies of the body, heart, and soul, stories of disease, ruination, and sexual jealousy, and (for a suitable fee) the therapist dispenses cures: sorcery, surgery, strokes, and sympathy. Some of these cures can be administered on a do-it-yourself basis. Aside from professional therapists (whose livelihood depends upon convincing displays of expertise) nobody is very curious about the history and meaning of particular ritual procedures and artefacts, but all take a keen interest in whether they work.
Type 3 Religion is more like a quest, an act of exploration into the mysteries of what lies beyond our familiar experience and immediate environment. This way of being religious prizes unusual or especially salient experiences, moments of insight or revelation, and the discovery of esoteric mysteries. Quests of this kind tend to prompt (and are prompted by) a passionate concern with the intentions, emotions, and judgments of supernatural agents. Rituals are a means of enmeshing the mystic into complex webs of relations with other-worldly beings, in contrast with the quasi-technical procedures of therapists and healers.
Type 4 Religion is more like a school. What matters most is the teaching of an authoritative creed, such that everybody sings literally and metaphorically from the same hymn sheet. Adherents are like pupils, endlessly lectured and tested. In performing rituals, what matters above all is what (by the lights of orthodox canon) they mean, express, and accomplish.
Four types of religion. Four types of ratatouille.... A coincidence? Alas, I have pushed the analogy too far. Too much table wine perhaps. If there really are only four varieties of ratatouille (and it doesn’t exactly claim this on Wikipedia – sorry) this would no doubt be an accident of history (including classificatory conventions), probably unique and certainly transient. Unlike a recipe which consists of potentially unbounded variations on a general theme by cultural diffusion, the four types of religion seem to have been independently invented many times over, forever coalescing into just one of four types, or only one of a limited number of combinations of the four types. Why is that? Answers please on a serviette...
We all agree I believe that there is no natural kind, let alone a natural kind with an essence, that would correspond to what anthropologists are talking about when they talk of religion. Rather we all see ‘religion’ as a polythetic or family-resemblance category that may be useful to point at a range of phenomena and issues each of which is linked to many of the others in the category in a variety of ways. I see no reason to doubt Harvey when he state that he is part of such an agreement, as Maurice seems to be doing. This is not the end of the story however. There is still room for substantial disagreement. Even family-resemblance categories have greater or lesser coherence and relevance; some of them are quite useful, others are likely to put us on a wrong track and should be dropped altogether. Harvey’s suggestion that there are four types of religion implies that the family-resemblance category of religion has enough coherence to have relevant sub-(family-resemblance)-categories. Maurice is clearly of a different opinion, as he has expressed in his Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B article. What he seems to be assuming is, on the one hand, that the proper category under which to investigate all the issues approached in anthropology under ‘religion’ is not that of religion at all and should be an even wider one, and, on the other hand, that there is a narrower category of ‘religion’ that points at religious institutions like churches and so on, which in the public discussion of religion in the last few years have been wrongly taken to be paradigmatic of religion in general. I think that Maurice suggestions are worth taking very seriously, and for this, to begin with, he should go on developing them (and put online a freely available copy of his PTRSB article).
Let me add something else that I discern in the background of this particular discussion. It is true that anthropological and cognitive research on religion is currently benefitting from public interest in religion, in particular in the US, and from funding spawned by this interest, in particular from the very generous Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation clearly and openly promotes work that is likely to contribute to the respectability of religion — as epitomized in Christian churches — in academic and scientific environments. It should be stressed however that it is very broad in the topics and people it subsidizes — including, I imagine, all the participants in this particular discussion —and that it does not attempt to influence let alone dictate the content of their work. Still, it would make sense to have an open debate on the social, political, and cultural role of research on religion, the part played by institution funding our research and in particular by the Templeton Foundation, and the temptation there may be as a result to put our work in terms that may please, or at least do not displease people and institutions whose agenda is religious before being scientific. This is of course a different debate than the one about the coherence of the category ‘religion’, but they may not be as orthogonal as one might wish. Maurice seems to believe his view is less likely to “comfort advocates of a soft religiosity.” There is nothing a priori wrong however with holding views more likely to please religious people as long as one does not bend such views so as to render them even more pleasing.
Anthropologists have used words such as Totemism, religion, sacrifice, and marriage and have wasted incredible amounts of time trying to define these terms as a preliminary to analyzing these “things”… and always reaching grand conclusions about them which turn out to be nothing else than repetitions of the original definition (See the discussions by Levi-Strauss, Leach, Sperber, Asad about each of these terms) .
Escaping the traps which these weasel words create has been hard (it is terribly hard to make our students understand the point) but we are by now familiar with what needs to be done. The first step is the recognition that these terms cannot be given general meanings. These words have to be explained historically not theoretically. Levi-Strauss did this for totemism, Leach for marriage, Sperber for sacrifice and several other writers, such as Talal Asad and myself, among many others, have attempted this for religion. The second step was not simply to trace the social/lexicographic genealogy of the words but to free our study so that we can use perspectives which escape the apparent boundaries which they create. I pointed out how Levi-Strauss swept aside the study of totemism to replace it, in both senses of the term, with the study of classification. The point was that the difficulty for anthropology lay in the idea of the enterprise: “explaining totemism”. This was what blocked the discovery of a framework for the scientific study of the rag bag of phenomena that the English word often indicated.
The same apples for the word religion. “Religion” can only be explained historically not scientifically. Apparently the other contributors seem to agree with this point. If that is so I would like to know what they think they are doing writing scientific studies about “religion”. Of course we will find regularities in the phenomena that we label religion… otherwise we would not have dreamed of calling them religion in the first place. The question is whether these regularities are regularities “of religion”. This is simply not discussed in these studies because the framework “explaining religion” has already begged the question.
I refer above to Leach’s discussion about the inappropriateness of developing theories about “marriage”. When this appeared as long ago as 1955 it only annoyed a few other anthropologists. When much later he repeated the point in his BBC Reith lectures British national newspapers ran front page headlines such as “Anthropologist undermines the family”. Such reaction shows what is at stake in such a discussion. The reason why a religious inspired foundation such as the Templeton foundation so freely encourages any and every scientific study of religion, without as Dan writes, any limitation is because it perfectly well knows that, as soon as there are programmes with titles such as “explaining religion”, these already imply the proposition that religion is a natural, indeed inevitable, aspect of our species.
Bloch has been thinking for a long time about the matters that he addresses in his postings. But perhaps he was a bit more open to accomodation in yesteryear. Take, for instance, this passage from Prey Into Hunter (1992:25): \"The phenomena which have been called by names such as totemism or sacrifice are not so varied as to make the words useless as general indicators of linked manifestations. On the other hand these manifestations are so loosely connected that it would be totally pointless to look for an explanation of sacrifice as such.\"
In any case, and if you will excuse a sentimental outburst, I was much taken by Bloch\'s use of the expression \"weasel words.\" I don\'t think that I have heard that phrase recently. Bloch\'s invocation of it stimulated me to nostalgia, for it was a favorite expression of one of my teachers, the late A. I. Hallowell. Hallowell used it frequently, and he (so to speak) compiled quite a vocabulary of weasel words. But he did not allow such words to derail his efforts to understand the world. He took the problems posed by various terms (e.g., \"supernatural\") into account, and while he deemed them possible and sometimes actualized traps, he did not allow them to overpower or otherwise inhibit his reasoning.
One of the problems posed by weasel words is that they may so distract us that we fail to reason as clearly as we might. Take Asad, whom Bloch mentions with apparent approval. In his much cited 1983 essay (eventually incorporated into a book), Asad \"argues\" as follows: (1) In his famous 1966 paper, Clifford Geertz confronts us with a privatized, \"Christian\" conception of religion, a conception that is unsuited for the furthering of cross-cultural research. (2) Many anthropologists operate with similar conceptions, and they would do well to abandon those conceptions in light of the criticisms made of Geertz. (3) Instead of addressing the sorts of questions about meaning that Geertz favored in 1966, we should focus on this question: How does power create religion? But there is a severe disconnect between Asad\'s first two points and his third. That is, if we purge ourselves of Geertz-like conceptions of religion, don\'t we need some other conception of religion if we are to study how power creates religion? Asad, however, fails to supply us with anything in the way of a substitute concept.
We all laugh at poor old don Quixote, who tilted at windmills that he apperceived as something else. But at least the windmills had a certain reality to them.