Academics often employ coherence to evaluate the quality of a proposed explanation (Fogelin 2007c). That is, any explanation should be internally consistent, and specific elements of the argument should not lead to contradictory results. While I recognize the value of coherence—that an incoherent argument should raise concerns—I believe that, by itself, coherence is not necessarily the best way to evaluate a potential explanation. An excessive reliance on coherence can lead to two distinct problems. The first problem is that an excessive reliance on coherence leads to artificially narrow investigations. There is no doubt that a study employing only the concept of solidarity and only investigating those aspects of human life related to solidarity will be more coherent than a study that combines theories of solidarity with agency to investigate wider cultural practices. In a sense, narrow studies promote false coherence by ignoring confusing or contradictory elements.
The second problem with an over-reliance on coherency is that it is only valuable if anthropologists assume that the cultural phenomena are themselves coherent. Yet, if there is one thing anthropologists have learned in the last fifty years, it is that cultures are incoherent, dysfunctional, and infused with power inequalities (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1993; Fogelin 2011; Foucault 1972 [1969]; Geertz 1957; Ortner 1984).
[A] central aspect of the concept of culture has been the claim of relative coherence and internal consistency—a “system of symbols,” a “structure of relations.” But an intriguing line of discussion in contemporary critical theory has now posed a major alternative view: culture as multiple discourses, occasionally coming together in large systemic configuration, but more often coexisting
Within dynamic fields of interaction and conflict. (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994:3-4)
The older anthropological understandings of homeostasis, balance, and feedback have been replaced by discussions of contestation, negotiation, rupture, and collapse. Since culture is not coherent, since cultures are infused with intractable, irresolvable social contradictions and disjunc-tures, we should be suspicious of coherent explanations of human culture. Rather than theories that seek to resolve apparent social contradictions and disjunctures, we need theories that explain the persistence and social impact of contradictions and disjunctures.
Social contradictions occur when people encounter a situation in which two or more social rules demand opposite courses of action (Giddens 1979:141). A disjuncture, as I use it, is a lesser form of contradiction. Disjunctures create confusion about the proper course of action, though the different social rules may not entirely contradict each other. If consciously experienced, social contradictions and disjunctures force people to examine their implicit beliefs, laying bare the precarious foundations on which people base their actions. For this reason, social contradictions seem to demand some form of resolution; they seem to demand the rejection, replacement, or synthesis of the contradictory beliefs. As such, the experience of social contradiction is intimately tied to questions of power, defined here as the transformative capacity of agents to alter or preserve the material or social order (Giddens 1984:14-16). Where different agents have different views on the best way to transform the social order—different views on how best to resolve contradiction—moments of social contradiction can become a source for persistent social disjunctures. This point can be best explained through a review of an old debate in anthropology.
In 1957, Clifford Geertz published his second article, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example.” In it, he challenged the functionalist notions of religion advocated by Bronislaw Malinowski and proposed a new interpretation that anticipated symbolic anthropology and later anthropological insights on power. In Magic, Science and Religion, Malinowski ([1925] 1948) had argued that Trobriand Islanders took every practical step to protect themselves from harm, but certain activities were inherently unpredictable and dangerous. For example, Trobriand Islanders were excellent sailors and were careful about the construction and care of their boats, but even the best sailors would occasionally die at sea despite their precautions. For this reason, Trobriand Islanders engaged in protective magic before fishing in open water. Trobriand Islanders used magic to cope with the remaining uncertainty once practical options were exhausted. Extrapolating from his observations in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski argued that the primary function of religion was to reduce people’s anxiety about death.
In “Ritual and Social Change,” Geertz (1957) used an extended case study of a failed funeral in a small town in Java to critique Malinowski’s functionalism. In most villages in Java prior to the twentieth century, religion was highly syncretic, combining local animistic practices with Hindu and Islamic elements. Funerals were expedient affairs, with a quick cleansing of the body and a few Islamic chants, followed quickly by burial. They were simple affairs that discouraged overt signs of emotional distress. As stated by Geertz (1957:40), “the whole momentum of the Javanese ritual system is supposed to carry one through grief without severe emotional disturbance.”
By the 1950s, however, many former village-dwellers lived in urban areas, and new political parties centered on religious affiliation were forming. Some political parties dominated by Muslims advocated for a more strict application of Islamic law in Indonesia, while other political parties considered Islam a foreign religion that needed to be expunged from Javanese ritual practice. Newly urban villagers who formerly practiced syncretic religions began dividing themselves along political/religious lines. In the context of these competing political/religious factions, one local official banned local Islamic religious figures (modin) from saying Islamic chants at the funerals of non-Muslim people. It is in this context in which a ten-year-old boy in a non-Muslim family died.
Upon hearing of the boy’s death, the men from nearby households began assembling at the boy’s house to prepare the body for burial. When the local modin arrived and realized the family was non-Muslim, he refused to lead the ceremony or perform the required Islamic chants. Hours of inaction followed, as those assembled for the funeral divided themselves into rival political/religious groups. Eventually the female relatives of the boy began openly weeping and prostrating themselves over the boy’s body, contrary to the accepted practices of a Javanese funeral. Finally, through a variety of negotiations, a hasty ad hoc funeral was performed. Rather than easing the family’s grief, the funeral “brought on an extended period of pronounced social strain and severe psychological tension” (Geertz 1957:35).
For Geertz, the breakdown of the funeral was the product of migration from rural, homogenous villages to more urban, heterogeneous settings. Where previously people living in close proximity within a village would have shared a common system of religious beliefs, immediate neighbors in urban areas often had opposing political/religious affiliations. The continued desire to perform traditional village ceremonies was contradicted by the newly urban lifestyle of the participants in the ceremony. Without any way to reconcile contradictory beliefs, the participants in the funeral became paralyzed, unable to resolve their grief. Based on his experience with this failed funeral, and contrary to Malinowski, Geertz (1957:48) argued that
As a matter of fact, it is around religious beliefs and practices—[funerals], holidays, curing, sorcery, cult groups and so on—that the most seriously disruptive events seem to cluster. Religion here is somehow the center and source for stress, not merely the reflection of stress elsewhere in society.
More broadly, Geertz argued that functionalism tended to “stress the harmonizing, integrating, and psychologically supportive aspects of religious patterns rather than the disruptive, disintegrative, and psychologically disturbing aspects” (Geertz 1957:32). Geertz argued that the disruptive elements of politics and religion could inform an understanding of religious change that functionalism failed to address.
While both Geertz and Malinowski recognized that uncertainty can cause significant social stress, each had a different conception of the source. For Malinowski, the stress of uncertainty is derived from the fear of injury or death, the unavoidable and unpredictable danger that people periodically face in their lives. In a sense, religion and magic ameliorate the stress of uncertainty by making the unknown, known. While Geertz clearly demonstrates that this view of religion and magic is not always correct, it would be a mistake to say it never is. Religion can salve the fears of those approaching death, even while it creates and heightens anxieties of others.
Geertz’s conception of uncertainty is somewhat different. For Geertz, uncertainty occurs when people hold two or more beliefs that demand contradictory courses of action. Rather than too little information, the participants in the failed Indonesian funeral knew too much. Geertz does not discuss how people ameliorate the stresses of social contradictions. Rather, Geertz makes productive use of the ways these contradictions play out in cultural conflict and negotiation. This insight—that culture is shot through with contradictions and disjunctures—has become the basis of much of the best anthropological research of the last fifty years.
The new emphasis on social contradictions and disjuncture is, perhaps, most clearly shown in the work of Michel Foucault. Beginning with The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault became progressively more interested in the role of discontinuity and rupture in European history.
Foucault’s subsequent histories of prisons (1977) and sexuality (1990a, 1990b, 1990c) focused on the transformative potential of, and contestations over, social contradictions and disjuncture. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault (Foucault 1972:10) argued that a focus on discontinuity was the fundamental distinction between traditional history and what Foucault called “new history.”
One of the most essential features of the new history is probably this displacement of the discontinuous: its transference from the obstacle to the work itself; its integration into the discourse of the historian, where it no longer plays the role of an external condition that must be reduced, but that of a working concept; and therefore the inversion of signs by which it is no longer the negative of the historical reading (its underside, its failure, the limit of its power), but the positive element that determines its object and validates its analysis.
Since Foucault, anthropologists and scholars working in related disciplines have identified numerous instances where social contradictions concerning race, class, citizenship, and sexuality are implicated in persistent struggles over domination and resistance. Drawing from Geertz’s and Foucault’s insights on the critical importance of social contradictions, historical ruptures, and disjuncture, anthropologists have come to recognize that religion, like any other domain of cultural experience, is incoherent.
[T]here is a growing tendency to move culture out of the realm of the exotic custom, the festival, the ritual, etc., and into the center of the historical problematic, or rather to recognize that the rituals and festivals are sites in which larger and more dynamic fields of discourse, larger and more powerful hegemonies, are being constituted, contested, and transformed. (Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994:6)
But one question lingers in all of this recent research on religion. If religion does not ameliorate the psychological stresses caused by uncertainty, what, if anything, does? This question leads to a theoretical path not taken. What was lost in Geertz’s critique is that, at times, people do need to ameliorate their fears and anxiety about uncertainty—the failed funeral Geertz described shows just how destructive and debilitating uncertainty can be. There is another way that people can address social contradictions and disjunctures, one that avoids transformative changes to the social order or the creation of social fissures. People can ignore them.
Ignoring Social Contradictions and Disjunctures
I propose that people often ignore social contradictions that cannot be solved, suppressed, or synthesized (Fogelin 2011). But ignoring the problem is not a simple process, particularly when the contradiction is constantly refreshed or represented to members of the community. Ignorance may be bliss, but it requires strategies and effort to achieve. Moreover, these strategies cannot require constant vigilance, as the act of vigilance would serve to remind people anew of the problem. There are, however, communal strategies for ignoring intractable social contradictions that permeate culture. These strategies do nothing to resolve contradictions; they only serve to hide them so that communities can go about their lives without the constant reminder of them. As such, ignoring the problem is a conservative act. Ignorance helps preserve the status quo by allowing people to ignore problematic contradictions inherent to the status quo. That said, the mechanisms of ignorance are not always beneficial to one group more than others. Where no ready solution can be found and no real advantage gained, ignorance can, in some instances, serve the interests of all involved. In other instances, the selection of what contradictions should be ignored and the methods used to ignore them can be contested. Like legitimations, attempts to ignore a contradiction or dis-juncture can fail.
People can ignore social contradictions by avoiding or preventing situations where contradictory beliefs are brought into sharp relief—people can reduce the perception of contradictions through the spatial and temporal separation of contradictory acts. Among the more straightforward ways to separate the experience of social contradiction is to literally separate the experience of the two halves of the contradiction temporally, spatially, or both. Temporalizing contradiction entails doing contradictory acts at different times. Spatializing contradiction entails doing contradictory acts in different places, though it also has an important temporal element since one person cannot be in two places at once. Either strategy can foster a degree of beneficial ignorance by limiting the simultaneous experience of two halves of a social contradiction. In this light, the problem with the funeral described by Geertz was that contradictions in the political/religious life of newly urban villagers were encountered simultaneously during the practice of the funeral. Had participants in the funeral chosen to engage in their contradictory political and religious activities at different times or in different places, the trauma of the funeral could have been ameliorated for all involved.
To some extent, my perspective was anticipated by a brief discussion of contradictions by Giddens (1979:141-145). In a larger work that examined historical materialism, Giddens (1979:144-145) argued that
The tendency of contradiction to involve conflict is weakened to the degree to which contradictions are kept separate from one another. Conversely, the more there is fusion or ‘overlap’ of contradictions, the greater the likelihood of conflict, and greater likelihood that the conflict will be intense.
Phrased more crudely, Giddens suggested that we should expect more conflict over contradictions in those cases where agents are most cognizant of the contradictions. Giddens used the degree of separation as an analytical tool to predict the likelihood that conflict would arise over a given social contradiction. In contrast to Giddens, I see separation as a creative strategy that agents employ to reduce the conflict and trauma of social contradictions. Agents can employ their transformative capacity to separate the experience of contradictory beliefs, thereby preserving the existing social order while reducing the conflict and trauma that social contradictions can engender.
Fifty years ago Geertz rightly critiqued Malinowski’s idea that religion reduced anxieties about death and uncertainty. But something important was lost in Geertz’s critique. Religion may create as many social contradictions as it resolves, but the experience of contradiction can often be traumatic for those forced to experience it. While many social contradictions are contested, synthesized, negotiated, and exploited—sometimes it is better to simply ignore them. The methods used to paper over cracks in the social order are no less complex than those used to exploit or resolve them, and the investigations of intentional ignorance no less valid.
Archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have long recognized that certain activities are performed in discreet places or at discreet times. Explanations for the separation of these activities include efficiency, exclusivity, secrecy, marginalization, liminality, pollution, or even simple convenience. To these I add ignorance—the amelioration of the anxieties generated by social contradictions through the temporal and spatial separation of contradictory acts and beliefs. While used here to examine the long-term development of Indian Buddhism, this analytical framework is potentially applicable to the study of contradictory beliefs in many societies. Whatever the context, the study of ignorance employs the age-old maxim—out of sight, out of mind.