Contents
CATHERINE BELL
"Culture: What Does One Do with it Now?" / 315
GREGORY D. ALLES
The So-Called Cognitive Optimum and the Cost of Religious Concepts
/ 325
THEODORE VIAL
"How Does the Cognitive Science of Religion Stack Up as a Big Theory,
 La Hume?" / 351
ROBERT A. YELLE
To Perform, or Not to Perform? A Theory of Ritual Performance
Versus Cognitive Theories of Religious Transmission / 372
TIM FITZGERALD
Bruce Lincoln's "Theses on Method": Antitheses / 392
JOEL MORT & D. JASON SLONE
Considering the Rationality of Ritual Behavior / 424
A Call for Papers
Is religion rational? New theoretical and empirical resources for considering
an old question / 440
volume 18-4 (2006)
volume18-4(2006)
ISSN 0943-3058 (paper version)
ISSN 1570-0682 (online version)
MTSR 18,4_colophon 10/2/06 4:06 PM Page i
METHOD & THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION
Journal of the North American Association for the Study of Religion
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Method & Theory in the Study of Religion publishes articles, essays, notes, book reviews, and
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study of religion. In order to provide a forum for scholars to present their ideas to the
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Editor
Jeffrey C. Ruff, Marshall University
Editorial Assistant
Christine Scott, Georgia State University
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Ann Baranowski
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 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
Also available online ­ www.brill.nl 18, 315-324
1 This paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the North American
Association for the Study of Religion, November 2004, San Antonio.
2 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.
"CULTURE: WHAT DOES ONE DO WITH IT NOW?"
Catherine Bell
With so many sleek and exciting methodologies about today, to speak
to the strengths--and weaknesses--of the cultural method appears to
have a particular subtext: is it possible to give any legitimacy to this
old jalopy?1 And there may be another possible subtext, that only a
member of an older generation would or could try to do this. However,
no generational is intended, I am sure; rather, the youngest scholars
on the scene simply have little sense of the cultural method as a method.
The cultural method appears so ubiquitous and thus so ill-defined that
to be methodological self-aware today seems to require that one react
against it in some way.
To address this situation, I would like to take a circuitous route,
beginning with the observation that the description for this panel
employed a rather gentle version of a familiar discursive trope--after
being told that "the era of big theory was over," the emergence of two
new ones (cognitive science and economic theory) has sown confusion
among graduate students who were advised to forget the big picture,
focus on whaťs at hand, and put together a more efficient theoretical
toolbox targeted for specific needs. So now there is confusion not simply
about the new big theories, but also about such unperceptive advice
from the older generation of teachers (not me! big theory is always out
and about). You recognize this trope: the darkness that has descended
on the field might lift only if we are bold in taking a fresh start. This
is, one suspects, Harold Bloom's old theory of the "anxiety of influence,"
which many have observed that Americans play out to the death,
Oedipal style.2 Even when our German and Japanese colleagues are
out trolling for the next "big" thing, they assume they will contextualize
it in order to minimize the implication that they themselves invented
it whole cloth, and therefore comes without vetting, sponsorship, or
approval from above.
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316 catherine bell
3 Mark C. Taylor, "Defining Religion," The Chronicle of Higher Education. November
5, 2004, p. B4.
4 See Clifford Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,"
American Scholar 49 (1980): 165-179; and Vincent L. Wimbush, "Scripture: Fathoming
a Complex Social-Cultural Phenomenon," Claremont Graduate University, Institute
for Signifying Scriptures, February 27, 2004. Forthcoming, p. 4.
The trope of disarray-needing-a-new-answer, however, dismisses everything
that came before; the new answer that is pulled like a rabbit
from a hat is presented as fresh if not original, certainly not tied to
any predecessors. In a small piece for a recent issue of The Chronicle of
Higher Education, a column entitled "The Short List: Misunderstood
Concepts," Mark C. Taylor contributed the following: "The field of
religious studies--if it is a field--is in a perpetual state of crisis because
it can neither define its object of study nor agree on distinctive methods
or strategies of interpretation."3 I have heard this hundreds of times,
but for relative newcomers to the field--if there is a field--this public
statement might well sow unnecessary confusion, doubt, and perhaps
even panic, which could result in undue attraction to the very modest
answer that Taylor proposes, or any answer that looks like a safe bet
in the horse race of ideas.
It is worthwhile I think to make two points about the subtle and not
so subtle uses of this trope. First, although the tendency to downplay
intellectual lineages may be linked to the greater diversity and openness
of the American academy, an unquestioned good, it can also be
a silly disservice and obvious theoretical weakness. Second, and more
substantively, it is not hard to see that the field, if we are a field, would
not make any progress should a particular definition of religion be
accepted by all. That is a perfect recipe for stagnation. Indeed, if a
clear and accepted definition is necessary for the existence of a field,
then there are very few fields at all in the modern academy. The modern
"field of study" is a very loosely organized conversation in which
the parameters are always ill-defined; it is not centered on any one
clear definition, or definer, although efforts at definition play a useful
part. A field is a "blurred" arena for immediately countering, tweaking,
or "riffing" (to play with Clifford Geertz and Vincent Wimbush
in the same sentence) on every point that emerges for attention, no
matter how temporary or enduring.4
In a field in its usual state of semi-confusion, the issue of methodological
choices always comes steeped with anxiety. People may stake
all on embracing or repudiating the new. Reputations are readily made
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"culture: what does one do with it now?" 317
5 For example, in their first book, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley,
make many remarks about the utter newness of their approach, such as their claim
to generate not simply a better interpretation of religion, but a new explanative
theory intent upon replacing and even eliminating current conceptual schemes. This
is a revolution, they suggest, in the science of religion. Rethinking Religion: Connecting
Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
and unmade--at least until the next book. In terms of clarity and confusion,
definitions and deconstructions, I think the study of religion
today is not much different than it was 25 years ago when I joined it.
It is a significantly larger field today, yet its health and feistiness can be
seen, in part, in the many new conversation partners who have joined
in the dialogues. Sometimes with quite different training, and therefore
poorly read in both the religious studies classics and recent books of
interest, some new members have entered with expectations of sweeping
everything else aside, providing a whole new way of thinking.5 There
may be a fair amount of posturing in this, of course. We are a large
audience and competition for attention is intense; we demand a real
performance. Yet for us, these new conversations also mean, as you all
know, many more books and journals to read in addition to the publications
of the various subfields in which we try to stay abreast of
things. Who can keep up? No one, really--unless you focus just on
methodology, the only good argument I know for doing so. So the field
of religious studies may be healthy, but I believe that everyone in it is
stressed by the pace. If someone should sweep it all away with a single
new way of thinking, might we not all be grateful?
As a field, we bear our history like a shadow institutionally attached
to our feet lest we fail to recognize it and let it drift away. Historically,
the study of religion pulled free of theology (in part with the help of
the best of Protestant theological scholarship) in a period when the lure
of a science-like paradigm helped generate many new fields of study.
But the 1960s saw growing fears of scientific claims to be the ultimate
arbiter of truth in the academy as well as the cold war. In letting go
of the "soft" science model, there was little heady excitement about
pushing into new realms and a lot more nostalgia for the old confidence
of common assumptions last known only in the early, semi-theological
days of religion as sui generis. Now I have just implied a relatively neat
historical succession of approaches--and there was nothing neat about
it, of course. Some scholars are still doing religionswissenschaft today; while
others, like me, found the sui generis model of religion to be over, done,
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318 catherine bell
out, kaput, but respectfully so, when I arrived in Chicago in 1975 to
study with Eliade.
It was possible to lay aside the sui generis model because the study of
religion was learning that cultural theories (the least scientific of those
in anthropology) need not to be feared, although they were no remedy
for nostalgia. Logically, these early understandings of religion as a cultural
phenomenon led to the post-modernist realization that we have
cultural understandings of cultures--and that is all we can have. There is
no solid ground in that direction. Before long there was also the
nervous fear that all and any explanations can now proliferate without
any disciplinary criteria to establish a consensus of validity--and that
became a reason for some to go back a few steps and follow other
lines of analysis. But most of us thought such fears about theory manageable--it
was only theory, after all--although these theories were
curiously oblivious to how it is actually practiced. So it was fun to
romp in French for a good decade and more. Now some are alarmed
by the rise of terribly self-confident economic and cognitive theories, a
new naturalism, which they say is a mere reaction to insecurities of
post-modernism. I myself think it may be another British-French thing--
which has a long history in this area. Yet if cognitive theories are a
solution to post-modern angst for some, for others they fill what is a
vacuum; and perhaps the pause in the wake of post-modernism is finally
allowing some other approaches to be heard.
If there is indeed a predicament among graduate students who are
lost, without even a trail of breadcrumbs in this threatening forest--
then nothing has changed since my day. But I don't think this is a
very good description of the current theoretical options, even if it captures
something of the frustration we have all felt.
When asked about the "cultural method," I must say I was surprised
to hear it enumerated as just one theoretical option alongside the others
suggested; so I wondered how it looked to younger scholars. I have
undoubtedly become a bit complacent about a method that is, for me,
the story of my years studying religion--and one that is fully wrapped
up in a very American version of the contemporaneous as well as often
contemptuous coexistence with primitive religions, be they Huron, Inuit,
Irish Catholics or Polish Jews. But I know it is not old hat, that it is
still being freshly experienced and tried out in unexpected and nonmarginal
places. For example, at a recent conference of archeologists
sponsored by the Department of Archeology at UCLA, a terribly learned
and excited group of scholars were just beginning to take seriously the
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"culture: what does one do with it now?" 319
6 The Archeology of Ritual, Third Cotsen Advanced Seminar, University of California
at Los Angeles, January 8-9, 2004. My concluding response to the presentations
was entitled, "Defining the Need for a Definition" (in press).
implications of the method and wander with anticipation in the rooms
it seemed to be opening up.6 In fact, I tried to caution them a bit!
A Cross-Theoretical Contribution
It may be very useful to demonstrate that the "models" on display need
be neither outmoded nor so extreme and total as to sweep away all
else in their paths. In other words, we can demonstrate that there really
are options, and non-exclusive ones at that.
Let me start on the cultural approach by noting that it has been
done a big favor by the more radical and reductive sounding theoretical
newcomers, something that it could not quite do for itself. It is
interesting to me that the radical newcomers have contributed to the
comfort and confidence of scholars in explicitly addressing how the
belief systems of religion are simply beliefs, they are not real in any
experienced way; the new naturalist style suggests that the soft cultural
way of being "in the closet" on this basic issue has probably discouraged
better analyses of how religion gets off the ground, what is that
ground, and how it is floated and maintained. The attempt to find a
purely natural explanation of religion, which I think displays many
problems, still has done the great service of making us "get real" about
what we think we are talking about and comparing from one culture
to another. We were comfortable with all the great social theories and
the vague, over-written cultural naturalism, but biological or psychological
alternatives that sought no middle ground are very unusual. And
current openness to theoreticians who roundly assume an unequivocal
atheism distresses some in this academy: very few atheists began graduate
school in the study of religion. However, this frankness is long
overdue. We can be religious and held to another new level of argument,
or we can be atheists and not forced to sound obtusely empathic.
When we are all comfortable with this, we may even see forms of less
arrogant reductionism emerge.
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320 catherine bell
Using Cultural Theory Today
As this opening tribute to its competitors suggest, I have what is probably
a rather idiosyncratic appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of
cultural approaches to the study of religion today. To begin with, there
is the big tent conundrum. A cultural approach has helped generate a
big tent that can include not just the very sensible presentations given
by my colleagues here today, but also some less-than sensible ones--
and there always have to be some people willing to push ideas farther
than we may want to end up. But the benign big tent role begins to
falter if I try to pin down the nature of the tent more precisely: do
cultural approaches subsume the theories we have been discussing?
Those colleagues might disagree. And I might not want to have a cultural
theory that is so broad and accommodating that it cannot be gotten
out from under. The tent should be an "institutional" phenomenon
even if theories have a real role in creating it. A theory that can accommodate
everyone and everything is no longer analytically very useful.
It has taken on so much that it becomes a wallpaper assumption--on
which the graffiti will eventually take its toll.
So the broadness of cultural theory today is a weakness and strength;
it is often depicted in hyphenated forms to identify more analytically
precise formulations, such as cultural-performance or cultural-practice
theory, terms used perfectly correctly in talking to me about my work
and remarks here today. But the sense of being stretched too far does
not mean that cultural theory really is or wants to be everything, even
as an unvoiced assumption. When analyzed in its historical developments
and engagements, cultural theory has a number of specific features--
represented more in some theorists, less in others--that define it rather
precisely. Let me enumerate what I see as some characteristics of a
cultural theory approach that define its particularity, rather than its
generality.
First, cultural theory tries to catch its own tail. Usually it never does
so very successfully and it could become a neurotic form of behavior
(I think they give dogs Prozac if they are unable to stop running after
their tails), but it sees catching it as a theoretical possibility. In other
words, cultural theory tries to account not only for the phenomenon
that is its immediate focus, but also for the conditions that have led
some people in one type of institution to ask such questions in studying
other people in a different type. For example, I can use cultural
theory to explain how it is that I, in the 21st century and a member
of various secularized institutions ascribing to many of the frayed
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"culture: what does one do with it now?" 321
7 When this question was asked of Robert McCauley at a panel at the AAR in
Atlanta 1994, it provoked lively discussion particularly from the audience.
principles of the Enlightenment, am researching Chinese ancestral rites
on the village level in the pre-modern period, for example--using the
same theory for the observer as for the observed.7 This is a strength:
it undermines a bit of the power hierarchy imposed by the analytical
relationship. Still, in so far as we can account for our analysis of them,
we have acknowledged the loop relationship, but we have not escaped
it. In other words, we have not met them on any sort of reciprocal
footing. Perhaps we may not be listening seriously to how they are analyzing
us, and this may be impossible in historical situations. Yet we
are able to acknowledge the sort of relationship we are creating. As
the tent that is the study of religion gets broadened by post-modern
realizations of the circle we created when we saw through our simplistic
polarizations (me in pith helmet, you in loincloth to put it in cartoon
terms), we are hearing very new voices, speaking in the manner they
have had to adopt to be allowed into the tent to talk at all. It is an
improvement.
Second, cultural theory tends to assume individuals as much as groupings.
Today, culture does not exist off somewhere like a great Jungian
collective unconscious. It resides in the activities of people, which in
turn constitute the learned "unsystematic system" from which people
generate creative activity. They generate ideas, stories, material objects,
social organizations, traditions, and events like war, baseball, and ancestral
rites--all continuing to constitute, for individuals, the resources for
producing more individualized cultural activity. There are regularities
across cultures that tantalize some of us, and stark differences that
attract the attention of others. We might generate theories of personal
agency, transmission by memory practices, or the special roles of oral,
textual, or artistic media, etc. The recognition of individual activities
in cultural theory today is much of what makes Durkheimian sociology
inadequate, although I would not say he has been proven wrong.
Likewise, the symbol-meaning approach of Turner and Geertz, which
has been so important to this field for so long, has proven inadequate
for uncovering or appreciating the individual.
But if cultural theory is broad, it builds on what has come before;
actually, it hyphenates and subsumes. As its tail passes through the
early social anthropology of Durkheim and the symbolic-cultural anthropology
of Turner, we do not cut it off. It gets heavy to carry around
and quite ponderous to teach--adding to the reification of theory as
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322 catherine bell
8 See Tomoko Masuzawa's critique of Jonathan Z. Smith's "koanic" statement:
"Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's
analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion
has no independent existence apart from the academy" (Smith, Imagining Religion:
From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. p. xi) in "The
Production of `Religion' and the Task of the Scholar: Russell McCutcheon Among
the Smiths," Review Symposium, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 1:1
(April/May 2000), 123-130, quoting page 126.
a thing in itself, as well as the attraction of those theories that are one
stop, more tool than extended intellectual family history. Yet, the history
of theory makes us remember history in general. I can say more
about the historical in cultural theory, as a separate point, which has
been an on-again off-again problem until historians became cultural
and cultural anthropologists did history. But that is a story a bit better
known and perhaps there is no need to retell it here.
There is a fourth point that I want to try to articulate as smoothly
as I can. Cultural approaches are still analyses, which mean that even
if the theory is able to account for the theoretician and the theorized,
it does not mix them up at any one time. Religion is not, to be explicit,
the study of religion. The academy's discourse on religion has had an
effect on the seminaries and the pulpits, as well as the popular press,
but not as much effect as we have been apt to see.8 We did not create
the modern practices of religion. Our fixation on the power of our theories
can risk ignoring, by taking too much credit for it, what our surrounding
culture is doing and how it is affecting us in our studies.
There are many arguments around today that make their central theme
by playing with the ambiguity that can be given the term religion--
whose religion and whose notion of religion can be quite unclear. We
can do better than that. My point is that cultural analysis distinguishes
without creating a privileged gulf. It does bear more analysis, I think,
to consider how the requirements of any one act of theorizing may
demand the imposition of distinctions that we say are problematic when
discussing the nature of theorizing.
Finally, the cultural method was introduced at the turn of the century,
some argue by Franz Boas as much as anyone else, although some
studies trace it back to the Victorians. Louis Menanďs provocative
book, The Metaphysical Club, finds its roots in 19th century arguments
about race. My point is simple--since its introduction, the cultural
method has, despite its spongy ability to absorb and hyphenate, been
a clear enemy of any ideology that comes under its radar as totalitarian,
racist, imperial, or ideological. Maybe it has found these tendencies in
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"culture: what does one do with it now?" 323
its own workings; and maybe we are a bit too quick to get nervous
about the apparent reductiveness of a theory that does not do what a
cultural theory does, or evokes something of the old self-confidence of
a "natural" science (although that does not automatically make it fascist!).
Some of the more threatening emphases may be a way to get
heard outside of an academy built on the assumptions of cultural theory.
Still, some nervousness in our reaction is not a bad way to force
new methods to respond to more general ideas about what makes for
a better theory.
Conclusion
"Big theory" has been pronounced dead and then resurrected several
times in my short career alone. In so far as we have choices, that is,
real choices, there are no big theories--just people attempting to explain
everything without recourse to any other identifiable method. Yet it is
the relationship between the theory and the phenomenon of interest
that we should look at, without worrying for the moment at least, about
claims for irreducible "facts" that validate such an approach. How big
does a theory have to be to explore such topics as the significance of
geographical and historical variation in worshipping the dead in one
cultural province in China; or the similar gender rules that define the
role of masks and secret societies in totally unrelated tribal societies; or
the theological principles being stressed in Christian communities across
Africa? The size of the theory will have to fit the size and complexity
of the phenomenon. "Religion in general," the topic that Taylor was
addressing, will need a pretty big theory, one that inevitably collapses
a lot of ground while being able to hold its own when some particulars
are raised. The same is true for explanations of how the academy
created, or destroyed, or reinvented religion. Some of us are more fastidious
in what we bite off and chew; others are apt to be less careful
when drawn to the larger pictures. I have found that the variety of
personalities and styles is not only an inevitable principle behind our
choices, but it makes for the intellectual fun, frustration, and humanity
of the field.
I am sure that graduate students today do not feel like they have a
big theory ready at hand or even anything so neat as a tool box of
discrete theories from which to choose. Of course, their theoretical tools
will develop as their problem unfolds--and the problem unfolds as they
find or develop a theoretical language for identifying it. It is a mutual
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324 catherine bell
9 "Performance," in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998, 205-24.
process to a great extent, rarely well-paced, often lopsided, with deadlines
apt to make a lot of difference for either direction. Still a good
fit will demonstrate that theory is not just a tool to open a can of data. It
is the gestalt against which data emerges, with the ability to illuminate
something of the value of the methodological principles informing the
context. In a piece on performance theory I tried to demonstrate how
the phenomenon and the theory reveal each other, or perhaps it is
more accurate to say "construct" each other; any one project is just
one of many ways of exploring both.9 The particular and practical goals
of a project, the questions being asked, and the amount of data mobilized
for review, are the determining factors for the size of the frame--
is this a dissertation that has to be careful and defendable, or an article
to provoke? Is the focus on how the ancestors reflect attitudes toward
the dead or is the focus on how established ritual patterns can limit
the influence of new ideas about the dead?
If the goal is to determine which theory of religion is best, we would
have to ask best for what? To validate a field, to show that it does
indeed exist, to attempt to define religion either in order to have control
over the so-called field or the very instances of what people have
taken as religion--we have undoubtedly used our theories in every way
possible. One likes to think we use them most successfully when we
are exploring rather than confirming, inquiring rather than claiming,
dialoging rather than pronouncing. Then again, this may be the idealism
of a cultural theorist and I should not make too many such
assumptions. A tendency towards cynical idealism and the appearance
of compulsive self-questioning are, of course, two more characteristics
of cultural theory that can be taken to arrogant proportions, but they
may be the best things about it.
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA 95053
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