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Ústav
religionistiky
Talal Asad: The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological
Category, in: Talal Asad. Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and
Reason of Power in Christianity and Islam, The Hopknis University
Press: London ­ Baltimore 1993, pp. 27 ­ 55
FRVŠ 1890/2005
Téma: Pojem náboženství jako příklad selektivní klasifikace
In much nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, religion was considered to be an early
human condition from which modern law, science, and politics emerged and became detached.
In this century most anthropologists have abandoned Victorian evolutionary ideas, and many
have challenged the rationalist notion that religion is simply a primitive and therefore outmoded
form of the institutions we now encounter in truer form (law, politics, science) in modern life.
For these twentieth-century anthropologists, religion is not an archaic mode of scientific
thinking, nor of any other secular endeavor we value today; it is, on the contrary, a distinctive
space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other. From this it seems to
follow that the essence of religion is not to be confused with, say, the essence of politics,
although in many societies the two may overlap and be intertwined.
In a characteristically subtle passage, Louis Dumont has told us that medieval Christendom
was one such composite society:
I shall take it for granted that a change in relations entails a change in whatever is related. If
throughout our history religion has developed (to a large extent, with some other influences
at play) a revolution in social values and has given birth by scissiparity, as it were, to an autonomous
world of political institutions and speculations, then surely religion itself will have
changed in the process. Of some important and visible changes we arc all aware, but, I
submit, we. are not aware of the change in the very nature of religion as lived by any given
individual, say a Catholic. Everyone knows that religion was formerly a matter of the group
and has become a matter of the individual (in principle, and in practice at least in many
environments and situations). But if we go on to assert that this change is correlated with the
birth of the modern State, the proposition is not such a commonplace as the previous one.
Let us go a little further: medieval religion was a great cloak-I am thinking of the Mantle of
Our Lady of Mercy. Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacity
and became one among other apparently equal considerations, of which the political was the
first born. Each individual may, of course, and perhaps even will, recognise religion (or
philosophy), as the same all-embracing consideration as it used to be socially. Yet on the
level of social consensus or ideology, the same person will switch to a different
configuration of values in which autonomous values (religious,. political, etc.) are seemingly
juxtaposed, much as individuals are juxtaposed in society. (1971,32; emphasis in original)
According to this view, medieval religion, pervading or encompassing other categories, is
nevertheless analytically identifiable. It is this fact that makes it possible to say that religion has
the same essence today as it had in the Middle Ages, although its social extension and function
were different in the two 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 phenomenon. It may be a
happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand in our
time that it be kept quite separate from politics, law, and science-spaces in which varieties of
power and reason articulate our distinctively modern life. This definition is at once part of a
strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the defense of
religion.
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(Yet this separation of religion from power is a modern Western norm, the product of a
unique post-Reformation history. The attempt to understand Muslim traditions by insisting that
in them religion and politics (two essences modern society tries to keep conceptually and
practically apart) are coupled must, in my view, lead to failure. At its most dubious, such
attempts encourage us to take up an a priori position in which religious discourse in the political
arena is seen as a disguise for political power.
In what follows I want to examine the ways in which the theoretical search for an essence of
religion invites us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power. I shall do this by
exploring a universalist definition of religion offered by an eminent anthropologist: Clifford
Geertz's "Religion as a Cultural System." I stress that this is not primarily a critical review of
Geertz's ideas on religion-if that had been my aim I would have addressed myself to the entire
corpus of his writings on religion in Indonesia and Morocco. My intention in this chapter is to
try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produced our concept of religion as the
concept of a transhistorical essence-and Geertz's article is merely my starting point.
It is part of my basic argument that socially identifiable forms, preconditions, and effects of
what was regarded as religion in the medieval Christian epoch were quite different from those so
considered in modern society. I want to get at this well-known fact while trying to avoid a
simple nominalism. What we call religious power was differently distributed and had a different
thrust. There were different ways in which it created and worked through legal institutions,
different selves that it shaped and responded to, and different categories of knowledge which it
authorized and made available. Nevertheless, what the anthropologist is confronted with, as a
consequence, is not merely an arbitrary collection of elements and processes that we happen to
call "religion." For the entire phenomenon is to be seen in large measure in the context of
Christian attempts to achieve a coherence in doctrines and practices, rules and regulations, even
if that was a state never fully attained. My argument is that there cannot be a universal definition
of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific,
but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.
A universal (i.e., anthropological) definition is, however, precisely what Geertz aims at: A
religion he proposes, is " a system of symbols which act to establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of
existence and ) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and
motivations seem uniquely realistic" (90). In what follows I shall examine this definition, not
only in order to test its interlinked assertions, but also to flesh out the counterclaim that a
transhistorical definition of religion is not viable.
The 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 conception-the conception is the symboľs 'meaning'". But
this simple, clear statement-in which symbol (any object, etc.) is differentiated from but linked to
conception (its meaning)-is later supplemented by others not entirely consistent with it, for it
turns out that the symbol is not an object that serves as a vehicle for a conception, it is itself the
conception. Thus, in the statement "The number 6, written, imagined, laid out as a row of stones,
or even punched into the program tapes of a computer, is a symbol" what constitutes all these
diverse representations as versions of the same symbol ("the number 6") is of course a
conception. Furthermore, Geertz sometimes seems to suggest that even as a conception a symbol
has an intrinsic connection with empirical events from which it is merely "theoretically"
separable: "the symbolic dimension of social events is, like the psychological, itself theoretically
abstractable from these events as empirical totalities". At other times, however, he stresses the
importance of keeping symbols and empirical objects quite separate: "there is something to be
said for not confusing our traffic with symbols with our traffic with objects or human beings, for
these latter are not in themselves symbols, however often they may function as such". Thus,
"symbol" is sometimes an aspect of reality, sometimes of its representation.
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These divergencies are symptoms of the fact that cognitive quest appropriate production of
other representations/discourses; the two are intrinsically and not just temporally connected.
Systems of symbols, says Geertz, are also culture patterns) and they constitute "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 all human
individuals are born" (92). And sources of information in the sense that "they provide a blueprint
or template in terms of which processes external to themselves can be given a definite form" .
Thus, culture patterns, we are told, may be though t of as "models of' reality" as well as "models
of reality."
This part of the discussion does open up possibilities by speaking of modeling: that is, it
allows for the possibility of conceptualizing discourses 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; "they give meaning, that is
objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it
and by shaping it to themselves" (1973, 93). 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 the idea of mirror images as such but with the assumption
that there are two separate levels-the cultural, on the one side (consisting of symbols) and the
social and psychological, on the other-which interact. This resort to Parsonian theory creates a
logical space for defining the essence of religion. By adopting it, Geertz moves away from a
notion of symbols that are intrinsic to signifying and organizing practices, and back to a notion
of symbols as meaning-carrying objects external to social conditions and states of the self ("
social 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 to ritual, he states that religious symbols act "by
inducing in the worshipper 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 the
"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? The answer to both questions must surely be no. The reason, of course, is that it is not
simply worship but social, political, and economic institutions in general, within which
individual biographies are lived out, that lend a stable character to the flow of a Christian's
activity and to the quality of her experience ..
Religious symbols, Geertz elaborates, produce two kinds of dispositions, moods and
motivations: "motivations are 'made meaningfuľ with reference to the ends towards which they
are conceived to conduce, whereas moods are 'made meaningfuľ with reference to the conditions
from which they are conceived to spring" (97). Now, a Christian might say that this is not their
essence, because religious symbols, even when failing to produce moods and motivations, are
still religious (i.e., true) symbols-that religious symbols possess a truth independent of their
effectiveness. Yet surely even a committed Christian cannot be unconcerned at the existence of
truthful symbols that appear to be largely powerless in modern society. He will rightly want to
ask: What are the conditions in which religious symbols can actually produce religious
dispositions? Or, as a non-believer would put it: How does (religious) power create (religious)
truth?
The relation between power and truth is an ancient theme, and no one has dealt with it
more impressively in Christian thought than St. Augustine. Augustine developed his views on
the creative religious function of power after his experience with the Donatist heresy, insisting
that coercion was a condition for the realization of truth, and discipline essential to its
maintenance.
For a Donatist, Augustine's attitude to coercion was a blatant denial of Christian teaching:
God had made men free to choose good or evil; a policy which forced this choice was plainly
irreligious. The Donatist writers quoted the same passages from the Bible in favour of free will,
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as Pelagius would later quote. In his reply, Augustine already gave them the same answer as he
would give to the Pelagians: the final, individual act of choice must be spontaneous; but this act
of choice could be prepared by a long process, which men did not necessarily choose for
themselves, but which was often imposed on them, against their will, by God. This was a
corrective process of "teaching," eruditio, and ,vaming, admonitio, which might even include
fear, constraint, and external inconveniences: "Let constraint be found outside; it is inside 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 thought of this disciplina, not as many of his more
traditional Roman contemporaries did, as the static preservation of a "Roman way of life."
For him it was an essentially active process of corrective punishment, "a softening-up
process," a "teaching by inconveniences" -a per molestias eruditio. In the Old Testament,
God had taught his wayward Chosen People through just such a process of disciplina,
checking and punishing their evil tendencies by a whole series of divinely-ordained disasters.
The persecution of the Donatists was another "controlled catastrophe" imposed by God,
mediated, on this occasion, by the laws of the Christian Emperors ....
Augustine's view of the Fall of mankind determined his attitude to society. Fallen men had
come to need restraint. Even man's greatest achievements had been made possible only by a
"straight-jacket" of unremitting harshness. Augustine was a great intellect, with a healthy
respect for the achievements of human reason. Yet he was obsessed by the difficulties of
thought, and by the long, coercive processes, reaching back into the horrors of his own
schooldays, that had made this intellectual activity possible; so "ready to lie down" was the
fallen human mind. He said he would rather die than become a child again. Nonetheless, the
terrors of that time had been strictly necessary; for they were part of the awesome discipline
of God, "from the schoolmasters' canes to the agonies of the martyrs," by which human
beings were recalled, by suffering, from their own disastrous inclinations. (Brown 1967, 236-
38)
Isn't Geertz's formula too simple to accommodate the force of this religious symbolism?
Note that here it is not mere symbols that implant true Christian dispositions, but power-ranging
all the way from laws (imperial and ecclesiastical) and other sanctions (hellfire, death, salvation,
good repute, peace) to the disciplinary activities of social institutions (family, school, city,
church) and of human bodies (fasting, prayer, obedience, penance). Augustine was quite clear
that power, the effect of an entire network of motivated practices, assumes a religious form
because of the end to which it is directed, for human events are the instruments of God. It was
not the mind that moved spontaneously to religious truth, but power that created the conditions
for experiencing that truth. Particular discourses and practices were to be systematically
excluded, forbidden, denounced-made as much as possible unthinkable; others were to be
included, allowed, praised, and drawn into the narrative of sacred truth. The configurations of
power in this sense have, of course, varied profoundly in Christendom from one epoch to
another-from Augustine's time, through the Middle Ages, to the industrial capitalist West of
today. The patterns of 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 eternal, the means for securing human access to it were not.
From Reading Symbols to Analyzing Practices
One consequence of assuming a symbolic system separate from practices is that important
distinctions are sometimes obscured, or even explicitly denied. "That the symbols or symbol
systems which induce and define dispositions we set off as religious and those which place these
dispositions in a cosmic framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise" (Geertz,
98). But it does surprise! Let us grant that religious dispositions are crucially dependent on
certain religious symbols, that such symbols operate in a way integral to religious motivation and
religious mood. Even so, the symbolic process by which the concepts of religious motivation and
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mood are placed within "a cosmic framework" is surely quite a different operation, and therefore
the signs involved are quite different. Put another way, theological discourse is not identical with
either moral attitudes or liturgical discourses-of which, among other things, theology speaks.
Thoughtful Christians will concede that, although theology has an essential function, theological
discourse does not necessarily induce religious dispositions, and that, conversely, having
religious dispositions does not necessarily depend on a clear-cut conception of the cosmic
framework on the part of a religious actor. Discourse involved in 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 that knowledge.
Geertz's reason for merging the two kinds of discursive process seems to spring from a wish
to distinguish in general between religious and secular dispositions. The statement quoted above
is elaborated as follows: "For what else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of awe is
religious and not secular, except that it springs from entertaining a conception of all-pervading
vitality like mana and not from a visit to the Grand Canyon? Or that a particular case of
asceticism is an example of a religious motivation except that it is directed toward the
achievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and not a conditioned one like weightreduction?
If sacred symbols did not at one and the same time induce dispositions in human
beings and formulate ... general ideas of order, then the empirical differentia of religious activity
or religious experience would not exist" (98). The argument that a particular disposition is
religious partly because it occupies a conceptual place within a cosmic framework appears
plausible, but only because it presupposes a question that must be made explicit: how do
authorizing processes represent practices, utterances, or dispositions so that they can be
discursively related to general (cosmic) ideas of order? In short, the question pertains to the
authorizing process by which "religion" is created.
The ways in which authorizing discourses, presupposing and expounding a cosmology,
systematically redefined religious spaces have been of profound importance in the history of
Western society. In the Middle Ages, such discourses ranged over an enormous domain, defining
and creating religion: rejecting "pagan" practices or accepting them; authenticating particular
miracles and relics (the two confirmed each other); authorizing shrines; 16 compiling saints'
lives, both as a model of and as a model for the Truth; requiring the regular telling of sinful
thoughts, words, and deeds to a priestly confessor and giving absolution to a penitent;
regularizing popular social movements into Rule-following Orders (for example, the Franciscans),
or denouncing them for heresy or for verging on the heretical (for example, the
Beguines). The medieval Church did not attempt to establish absolute uniformity of practice; on
the contrary, its authoritative discourse was always concerned to specify differences, gradations,
exceptions. What it sought was the subjection of all practice to a unified authority, to a single
authentic source that could tell truth from falsehood. It was the early Christian Fathers who
established the principle that only a single Church could become the source of authenticating
discourse. They knew that the "symbols" embodied in the practice of self-confessed Christians
are not always identical with the theory of the "one true Church," that religion requires
authorized practice and authorizing doctrine, and that there is always a tension between themsometimes
breaking into heresy, the subversion of Truth-which underlines the creative role of
institutional power.
The medieval Church was always clear about why there was a continuous need to distinguish
knowledge from falsehood (religion from what 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, not the convictions of the practitioner,
were the final test. Several times before the Reformation, the boundary between the religious and
the secular was redrawn, but always the formal authority of the Church remained preeminent. In
later centuries, with the triumphant rise of modern science, modern production, and the modern
state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distinguish the religious from the
secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion more and more on to the moods and
motivations of the individual believer. Discipline (intellectual an<;i social) would, in this period,
gradually abandon religious space, letting "belief," "conscience," and "sensibility" take its place.
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But theory would still be needed to define religion.
It was in the seventeenth century, following the fragmentation of the unity and authority
of the Roman church and the consequent wars of religion, which tore European principalities
apart, that the earliest systematic attempts at producing a universal definition of religion were
made. Herberťs De ve1itate was a significant step in this definitional history. "Lord Herbert,"
writes Willey,
differs from such men as Baxter, Cromwell, or Jeremy Taylor mainly in that, not content
with reducing the creed to the minimum number possible of fundamentals, he goes behind
Christianity itself, and tries to formulate a belief which shall command the universal assent
of all men as men. It must be remembered that the old simple situation, in which
Christendom pictured itself as the world, with only the foul panic outside and the semitolerated
Jews within the gates, had passed away for ever. Exploration and commerce had
widened the horizon, and in many writers of the century one can see that the religions of the
East, however imperfectly known, were beginning to press upon the European
consciousness. It was a pioneer-interest in these religions, together with the customary
preoccupation of Renaissance scholars with the mythologies of classical antiquity, which led
Lord Herbert to seek a common denominator for all religions, and thus to provide, as he
hoped, the much-needed eirenicon for seventeenth-century disputes. (1934, 114)
Thus, Herbert produced a substantive definition of what later came to be formulated as Natural
Religion-in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (its ordered worship), and ethics
(a code of conduct based on rewards and punishments after this life)-said to exist in all societies.
This emphasis on belief meant that henceforth religion could be conceived as a set of
propositions to which believers gave assent, and which could therefore be judged and compared
as between different religions and as against natural science (Harrison 1990 ).
The idea of scripture (a divinely produced/interpreted text) was not essential to this "common
denominator" of religions partly because Christians had become more familiar, through trade and
colonization, with societies that lacked writing. But a more important reason lies in the shift in
attention that occurred in the seventeenth century from Goďs words to Goďs works. "Nature"
became the real space of divine writing, and eventually the indisputable authority for the truth of
all sacred texts written in merely human language (the Old Testament and the New). Thus:
Locke's The Reasollableness of Christianity popularized a new version of Christianity by
reducing its doctrine to the lowest common denominator of belief in Jesus as the Messiah,
whose advent had been foretold in the prophecies of the Old Testament. Even this reduced
creed was to be measured against the background of Natural Religion and of the Religion of
Natural Science, so that Revelation in addition to being required to justify itself by Locke's
standard, had to present itself as a republication of Natural Religion. For a time indeed the
Word of God assumed a secondary position to his works as set forth in the 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 moreover to distant events
which had occurred in remote times and in places far removed from the centres of learning
and civilization. (Sykes 1975, 195-96)
In this way, Natural Religion not only became a universal phenomenon but began to be
demarcated from, and was also supportive of, a newly emerging domain of natural science. I
want to emphasize that the idea of Natural Religion was a crucial step in the formation of the
modern concept of religious belief, experience, and practice, and that it was an idea developed in
response to problems specific to Christian theology at a particular historical juncture.
By 1795, Kant was able to produce a fully essentialized idea of religion which could be
counterposed to its phenomenal forms: "There may certainly be different historical confessions)"
he wrote, although these have nothing to do with religion itself but only with changes in the
means used to further religion, and are thus the province of historical research. And there may be
just as many religious books (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.). But there can only be
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one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus the different confessions can
scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion; these are fortuitous, and may vary with
differences in time or place. (Kant 1991,114)
From here, the classification of historical confessions into lower and higher religions became an
increasingly popular option for philosophers, theologians, missionaries, and anthropologists in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As to whether any particular tribe has existed without
any form of religion whatever was often raised as a question, but this was recognized as an
empirical matter not affecting the essence of religion itself.
Thus, what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident, namely that religion is essentially
a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order (expressed through either or both
rite and doctrine), that it has generic functions/features, and that it must not be confused with
any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view that has a specific Christian
history. From being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and
knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalized. In this movement we have not
merely an increase in religious toleration, certainly not merely a new scientific discovery, but the
mutation of a concept and a range of social practices which is itself part of a wider change in the
modern landscape of power and knowledge. That change included a new kind of state, a new
kind of science, a new kind of legal and moral subject. To understand this mutation it is essential
to keep clearly distinct that which theology tends to obscure: the occurrence of events
(utterances, practices, dispositions) and the authorizing processes that give those events meaning
and embody that meaning in concrete institutions.
Religion as Meaning and Religious Meanings
The equation between two levels of discourse (symbols that induce dispositions and those
that place the idea of those dispositions discursively in a cosmic framework) is not the only
problematic thing in this part of Geertz's discussion. He also appears, inadvertently, to be taking
up the standpoint of theology. This happens when he insists on the primacy of meaning without
regard to the processes by which meanings are constructed. "What any particular religion affirms
about the fundamental nature of reality may be obscure, shallow, or, all too often, perverse," he
writes, "but it must, if it is not to consist of the mere collection of received practices and
conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism, affirm something" (98-99).
The requirement of affirmation is apparently innocent and logical, but through it the entire field
of evangelism was historically opened up, in particular the work of European missionaries in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The demand that the received practices must affirm something
about the fundamental nature of reality, that it should therefore always be possible to state
meanings for them which are not plain nonsense, is the first condition for determining whether
they belong to "religion." The unevangelized come to be seen typically either as those who have
practices but affirm nothing, in which case meaning can be attributed to their practices (thus
making them vulnerable), or as those who do affirm something (probably "obscure, shallow, or
perverse"), an affirmation that can therefore be dismissed. In the one case, religious theory
becomes necessary for a correct reading of the mute ritual hieroglyphics of others, for reducing
their practices to texts; in the other, it is essential for judging the validity of their cosmological
utterances. But always, there must be something that exists beyond the observed practices, the
heard utterances, the written words, and it is the function of religious theory to reach into, and to
bring out, that background by giving them meaning.
Geertz is thus right to make a connection between religious theory and practice, but wrong
to see it as essentially cognitive, as a means by which a disembodied mind can identify religion
from an Archimedean point. The connection between religious theory and practice is
fundamentally a matter of intervention-of constructing religion in the world (not in the mind)
through definitional discourses, interpreting true meanings, excluding some utterances and
practices and including others. Hence my repeated question: how does theoretical discourse
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actually define religion? What are the historical conditions in which it can act effectively as a
demand for the imitation, or the prohibition, or the authentication of truthful utterances and
practices? How does power create religion?
What kinds of affirmation, of meaning, must be identified with practice in order for it to
qualify as religion? According to Geertz, it is because all human beings have a profound need for
a general order of existence that religious symbols function to fulfill that need. It follows that
human beings have a deep dread of disorder. "There are at least three points where chaos-a
tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but inte1'pretability-threatens to break in
upon man: at the limits of his analytic capabilities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and
at the limits of his moral insight" (100). It is the function of religious symbols to meet perceived
threats to order at each of these points (intellectual, physical, and moral): "The Problem of
Meaning in each of its intergrading aspects ... is a matter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the
inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously
denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole. And it is in terms of
religious symbolism, a symbolism relating man's sphere of existence to a wider sphere within
which it is conceived to rest, that both the affirmation and the denial are made" (108).
Notice how the reasoning seems now to have shifted its ground from the claim that religion
must affirm something specific about the nature of reality (however obscure, shallow, or
perverse) to the bland suggestion that religion is ultimately a matter of having a positive attitude
toward the problem of disorder, of affirming simply that in some sense or other the world as a
whole is explicable, justifiable, bearable. This modest view of religion (which would have
horrified the early Christian Fathers or medieval churchmen) is a product of the only legitimate
space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to individual belief the
human condition is full of ignorance, pain, and injustice, and religious symbols are a means of
coming positively to terms with that condition. One consequence is that this view would in
principle render any philosophy that performs such a function into religion (to the annoyance of
the nineteenth century rationalist), or alternatively, make it possible to think of religion as a more
primitive, a less adult mode of coming to terms with the human condition (to the annoyance of
the modern Christian). In either case, the suggestion that religion has a universal function in
belief is one indication of how marginal religion has become in modern industrial society as the
site for producing disciplined knowledge and personal discipline. As such it comes to resemble
the conception Marx had of religion as ideology-that is, as a mode of consciousness which is
other than consciousness of reality, external to the relations of production, producing no
knowledge, but expressing at once the anguish of the oppressed and a spurious consolation.
Geertz has much more to say, however, on the elusive question of religious meaning: not
only do religious symbols formulate conceptions of a general order of existence, they also clothe
those conceptions with an aura of factuality. 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, and moral paradox-of the Problem of Meaningis
one of the things that drives men toward belief in gods, devils, spirits, totemic principles, or
the spiritual efficacy of cannibalism, ... but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs rest, but
rather their most important field of application" (109). This seems to imply that religious belief
stands independently of the worldly conditions that produce bafflement, pain, and moral
paradox, although that belief is primarily a way of coming to terms with them. But surely this is
mistaken, on logical grounds as well 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 specific forms of bafflement
and moral paradox that are a part of that world. What the Christian believes today about God,
life after death, the universe, is not what he believed a millennium ago-nor is the way he
responds to ignorance, pain, and injustice the same now as it was then. The medieval
valorization of pain as the mode of participating in Chrisťs suffering contrasts sharply with the
modern Catholic perception of pain as an evil to be fought against and overcome as Christ the
Healer did. That difference is clearly related to the post-Enlightenment secularization of
Western society and to the moral language which that society now authorizes.
9
Geertz's treatment of religious belief, which lies at the core of his conception of religion, is a
modern, privatized Christian one because and to the extent that it emphasizes the priority of
belief as a state of mind rather than 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 must first believe" (no). In modern society, where knowledge is rooted either in an
a-Christian everyday life or in an a-religious science, the Christian apologist tends not to regard
belief as the conclusion to a knowledge process but as its precondition. However, the knowledge,
that he promises will not pass (nor, in fairness, does he claim that it will pass) for knowledge of
social life, still less for the systematic knowledge of objects that natural science provides. Her
claim is to a particular state of mind, a sense of conviction, not to a corpus of practical
knowledge. But the reversal of belief and knowledge she demands was not a basic axiom to, say,
pious learned Christians of the twelfth century, for whom knowledge and belief were not so
clearly at odds. On the contrary, Christian belief would then have been built on knowledgeknowledge
of theological doctrine, of canon law and Church courts, of the details of clerical
liberties, of the powers of ecclesiastical office (over souls, bodies, properties), of the
preconditions and effects of confession, of the rules of religious orders, of the locations and
virtues of shrines, of the lives of the saints, and so forth. Familiarity with all such (religious)
knowledge was a precondition for normal social life, and belief (embodied 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. Because of this, the form and texture and function of their beliefs
would have been different from the form and texture and function of contemporary belief-and so
too of their doubts and their disbelief.
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 belief is nowhere a distinct mode of consciousness, nor a necessary institution for
the conduct of social life. Southwold (1979) takes an almost diametrically opposed view,
asserting that questions of belief do relate to distinctive mental states and that they are relevant
in any and every society, since "to believe" always designates a relation between a believer and
a proposition and through it to reality. Harre (1981, 82), in a criticism of Needham, makes the
more persuasive case that "belief is a mental state, a grounded disposition, but it is confined to
people who have 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 1tot everywhere the same. It is preeminently the
Christian church that has occupied itself with identifying, cultivating, and testing belief as a
verbalizable inner condition of true religion.
Religion as a Perspective
The phenomenological vocabulary that Geertz employs raises two interesting questions, one
regarding its coherence and the other concerning its adequacy to a modern cognitivist notion of
religion. I want to suggest that although this vocabulary is theoretically incoherent, it is socially
quite compatible with the privatized idea of religion in modern society.
Thus, "the religious perspective," we are told, is one among several-common-sense, scientific,
aesthetic-and it differs from these as follows. It differs from the common-sense perspective,
because it "moves beyond the realities of everyday life to wider ones which correct and
complete them, and [because] its defining concern is not action upon those wider realities but
acceptance of them, faith in them." It is unlike the scientific perspective, because "it questions the
realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized scepticism which dissolves the worlďs
given ness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses, but in terms of what it takes to be wider, non
hypothetical truths." And it is distinguished from the aesthetic perspective, because "instead of
effecting a disengagement from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing an
air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of utter
actuality". In other words, although the religious perspective is not exactly rational, it is not
irrational either.
10
It would not be difficult to state one's disagreement with this summary of what common
sense, science, and aesthetics are about. But my point is that the optional flavor conveyed by the
term perspective is surely misleading when it is applied equally to science and to religion in
modern society: religion is indeed now optional in a way that science is not. Scientific practices,
techniques, knowledges, permeate and create the very fibers of social life in ways that religion
no longer does. In that sense, religion 'today is a perspective (or an "attitude," as Geertz
sometimes calls it), but science is not. In that sense, too, science is not to be found in every
society, past and present. We shall see in a moment the difficulties that Geertz's perspectivism
gets him into, but before that I need to examine his analysis of the mechanics of reality
maintenance at work in religion.
Consistent with previous arguments about the functions of religious symbols is Geertz's
remark that "it is in ritual-that is, consecrated behavior-that this conviction that religious
conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated" (112).
The long passage from which this is taken swings back and forth between arbitrary speculations
about what goes on in the consciousness of officiants and unfounded assertions about ritual as
imprinting. At first sight, this seems a curious combination of introspectionist psychology with a
behaviorist one-but as Vygotsky (1978, 58-59) argued long ago, the two are by no means
inconsistent, insofar as both assume that psychological phenomena consist essentially in the
consequence of various stimulating environments.
Geertz postulates the function of rituals in generating religious conviction ("In these plastic
dramas men attain their faith as they portray it") but how or why this happens is nowhere
explained. Indeed, he concedes that such a religious state is not always achieved in religious
ritual: "Of course, all cultural performances are not religious performances, and the line between
those that are, and artistic, or even political, ones is often not so easy to draw in practice, for,
like social forms, symbolic forms can serve multiple purposes". But the question remains: What
is it that ensures the participanťs taking the symbolic forms in the way that leads to faith if the
line between religious and nonreligious perspectives is that so easy to draw? Mustn't the ability
and the will to adopt a religious standpoint be present prior to the ritual performance? That is
precisely why a simple stimulus response model of how ritual works will not do. And if that is
the case, then ritual in the sense of a sacred performance cannot be the place where religious
faith is attained, but the manner in which it is (literally) played out. If we are to understand how
this happens, we must examine not only the sacred performance itself but also the entire range of
available disciplinary activities, of institutional forms of know 1edge and practice, within which
dispositions are formed and sustained and through which the possibilities of attaining the truth
are marked out-as Augustine clearly saw.
I have noted more than once Geertz's concern to define religious symbols according to
universal, cognitive criteria, to distinguish the religious perspective clearly from nonreligious
ones. The separation of religion from science, common sense, aesthetics, politics, and so on,
allows him to defend it against charges of irrationality. If religion has a distinctive perspective
(its own truth, as Durkheim would have said) and performs an indispensable function, it does
not in essence compete with others and cannot, therefore, be accused of generating false
consciousness. Yet in a way this defense is equivocal. Religious symbols create dispositions,
Geertz observes, which seem uniquely realistic. Is this the point of view of a reasonably
confident agent (who must always operate within the denseness of historically given probabilities)
or that of a skeptical observer (who can see through the representations of reality to the
reality itself)? It is never clear. And it is never clear because this kind of phenomenological
approach doesn't make it easy to examine whether, and if so to what extent and in what ways,
religious experience relates to something in the real world that believers inhabit. This is partly
because religious symbols are treated, in circular fashion, as the precondition for religious
experience (which, like any experience, must, by definition, be genuine), rather than as one
condition for engaging with life.
Toward the end of his essay, Geertz attempts to connect, instead of separating, the religious
perspective and the common-sense one and the result reveals an ambiguity basic to his entire
11
approach. First, invoking Schutz, Geertz states that the everyday world of commonsense objects
and practical acts is common to all human beings because their survival depends on it: "A man,
even large groups of men, may be aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and
unequipped to pursue formal scientific analysis, but he cannot be completely lacking in common
sense and survive" (119). Next, he informs us that individuals move "back and forth between the
religious perspective and the common-sense perspective" (119). These perspectives are so
utterly different, he declares, that only "Kierkegaardian leaps" (120) can cover the cultural gaps
that separate them. Then, the phenomenological conclusion: "Having ritually 'leapť ... into the
framework of meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended, returned again
to the common-sense world, a man is-unless, as sometimes happens, the experience fails to
register-changed. And as he is changed so also is the common-sense World) for it is now seen as but
the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it" (122; emphasis added).
This curious account of shifting perspectives and changing worlds is puzzling-as indeed it is
in Schutz himself. It is not clear, for example, whether the religious framework and the
common-sense world, between which the individual moves, are independent of him or not.
Most of what Geertz has said at the beginning of his essay would imply that they are
independent (cf. 92), and his remark about common sense being vital to every man's survival
also enforces this reading. Yet it is also suggested that as the believer changes his perspective, so
he himself changes; and that as he changes, so too is his common-sense world changed and
corrected. So the latter, at any rate, is not independent of his moves. But it would appear from
the account that the religious world is independent, since it is the source of distinctive experience
for the believer, and through that experience, a source of change in the common-sense world:
there is no suggestion anywhere that the religious world (or perspective) is ever affected by
experience in the common-sense world.
This last point is consistent with the phenomenological approach in which religious symbols
are sui generis, marking out an independent religious domain. But in the present context it
presents the reader with a paradox: the world of common sense is always common to all human
beings, and quite distinct from the religious world, which in turn differs from one group to
another, as one culture differs from another; but experience of the religious world affects the
commonsense world, and so the distinctiveness of the two kinds of world is modified, and the
common-sense world comes to differ, from one group to another, as one culture differs from
another. The paradox results from an ambiguous phenomenology in which reality is at once the
distance of an agenťs social perspective from the truth, measurable only by the privileged
observer, and also the substantive knowledge of a socially constructed world available to both
agent and observer, but to the latter only through the former.
Perhaps we can learn something from this paradox which will help us evaluate Geertz's
confident conclusion: "The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation:
first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion
proper; and, second, the relating of these systems to social-structural and psychological
processes"; emphasis added). How sensible this sounds, yet how mistaken, surely, it is. If
religious symbols are understood, on the analogy with words, as vehicles for meaning, can such
meanings be established independently of the form of life in which they are used? If religious
symbols are to be taken as the signatures of a sacred text, can we know what they mean without
regard to the social disciplines by which their correct reading is secured? If religious symbols
are to be thought of as the concepts by which experiences are organized, can we say much about
them without considering how they come to be authorized? Even if it be claimed that what is
experienced through religious symbols is not, in essence, the social world but the spiritual, is it
possible to assert that conditions in the social world have nothing to do with making that kind of
experience accessible? Is the concept of religious training entirely vacuous?
The two stages that Geertz proposes are, I would suggest, one. Religious symbols-whether
one thinks of them in terms of communication or of cognition, of guiding action or of
expressing emotion cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with
nonreligious symbols or of their articulations in and of social life, in which work and power
12
are always crucial. My argument, I must stress, is not just that religious symbols are
intimately linked to social life (and so change with it), or that they usually support dominant
political power (and occasionally oppose it). It is that different kinds of practice and
discourse are intrinsic to the field in which religious representations (like any representation)
acquire their identity and their truth fulness. From this it does not follow that the meanings
of religious practices and utterances are to be sought in social phenomena, but only that their
possibility and their authoritative status are to be explained as products of historically
distinctive disciplines and forces. The anthropological student of particu/a1' religions should
therefore begin from this point, in a sense unpacking the comprehensive concept which he or
she translates as "religion" into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character.
A final word of caution. Hasty readers might conclude that my discussion of the Christian
religion is skewed towards an authoritarian, centralized, elite perspective, and that consequently
it fails to take into account the religions of heterodox believers, of resistant peasan tries, of all
those who cannot be completely controlled by the orthodox church. Or, worse still, that my
discussion has no bearing on non-disciplinarian, voluntaristic, localized cults of non-centralized
religions such as Hinduism. But that conclusion would be a misunderstanding of this chapter,
seeing in it an attempt to advocate a better anthropological definition of religion than Geertz has
done. Nothing could be farther from my in tention. If my effort reads in large part like a brief
sketch of transmutations in Christianity from the Middle Ages until today, then that is not
because I have arbitrarily confined my ethnographic 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 power (including a particular understanding of our
legitimate past and future) out of which the modern world has been constructed.