While most modern theorists of religion accept that a dialectic exists between ritual and religion, recently Talal Asad has questioned the utility, if not the existence, of the very concept of religion. Like almost all scholars who preceded him, Asad begins his analysis by noting the impossibility of defining religion in terms of Durkheim’s dichotomy of the sacred and the profane (2003:30-37). Asad, however, adds an important twist to the standard argument. Drawing heavily from Said’s Orientalism (1978), Asad (2003:31) argues that the concept of religion is derived from nineteenth-century European understandings of secularism.
It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and
Heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to
Be the object of universal experience called “religious.”
For Asad, the conceptual category of religion emerged in the nineteenth century as the foil to the concept of secularism. By this view, religion was artificially marginalized as the province of irrational personal belief, existing in contrast to the rationality and secularism of modern Western states. By creating a category of human experience called religion, Asad argues, anthropologists made two fundamental mistakes. First, they removed power and contestation from the analysis of religion; religion became a disembodied structural phenomena. Second, anthropologists universalized this problematic category onto all societies in the world. In so doing, they ascribed a problematic category for understanding Western religion into contexts in which the concept of religion, or often even the word “religion,” was completely lacking.
The value of Asad’s critique is that it provides an underlying mechanism to explain the peculiar intellectual history of the study of non-Western religions. Before studying non-Western religions, colonial scholars first attempted to identify the religious elements of non-Western societies. In the case of Buddhism, this consisted of identifying the primary, or canonical, texts from the bewildering quantity and diversity of early Buddhist texts. Drawing on the Western notion that religion was primarily of the mind and esoteric, early colonial scholars of Buddhism identified a limited number of the most scholastic texts in Buddhism—those texts with the most philosophical or esoteric elements—as the canonical texts of ancient Buddhism (Lopez 2001). It is no surprise then, that the subsequent histories derived from these texts were highly scholastic. Often ignored or marginalized in this early research were the full range of scholastic texts (sutras), the subsequent commentaries on these texts (abhidharma), and mundane texts concerning monastic law (vinayas). Colonial scholarship on Buddhism created a canon of the Buddhist religion that excluded the true diversity of political and doctrinal debates contained within the full range of Buddhist literature.
Recently, Severin Fowles (2013) has used Asad’s insights to reinterpret the Pueblo religion in the southwestern United States. Fowles argues that the concept of religion has harmed archaeological, historical, and ethnographic studies of Pueblo life. Rather than religion, Fowles (2013:240 italics in original) uses “doings,” a term that Pueblo people use to describe what both they and others call religion.
Pueblo doings are altogether different. At Taos, they simply are the wider social framework within which Christian and non-Christian religions are tolerated.
Pueblo doings, in other words, are the very warp and weft of Pueblo society, not one patch among many within some other and more encompassing institutional patchwork. Doings are less a matter of individual choice than of obligation and duty, a necessary consequence of having been born in a particular landscape and a particular community.
By relying on doings rather than more universal considerations of religion, Fowles is able to untangle more localized actions and to see Pueblo doings as using place as a substitute (or proxy for) time. As such, Fowles’s interpretation is highly—and intentionally—particularistic.
Archaeology of Religion and Ritual
In contrast to Fowles’s rejection of the concept of religion, some archaeologists following a more structural perspective do the opposite; they expand the concept of religion to include almost everything (Bruck 1999; Insoll 2004). By rejecting the Durkheimian (1915 [1995]) distinction between the sacred and the profane, they begin to equate religion and culture. This perspective is clearly articulated in Insoll’s recent discussions of religion (Insoll 2004:22):
The more we look, the more we can see religion as a critical element in many areas of life above and beyond those usually considered—technology, diet, refuse patterning, housing. All can be influenced by religion; they are today, why not in the past? Religion can be of primary importance in structuring life into which secular concerns are fitted, the reverse of the often-posited framework.
There is clearly an element of truth to this argument. Simply because some action is economically rational does not necessarily mean that it is not also religiously motivated. However, from this perspective, religion seems to be everywhere and all pervasive in non-Western societies. The problem with this perspective is the growing recognition (noted by Insoll 2004:17) that some societies, even “traditional” societies, have only a limited interest in things religious (Asad 2003; Barth 1961; Fowles 2013; Kemp 1995). The separation of church and state may be a modern, Western notion, but it is a mistake to assume that people in other societies were, or are, necessarily ruled by their religious beliefs any more, or less, then Europeans or Americans. Following Asad, the centrality of religion in human society is highly variable and assumptions of its universal importance highly suspect.
Other archaeologists who are interested in domestic or other small-scale rituals celebrate the idea that religious and secular rituals are not distinct or clearly identifiable (Bradley 2005; Walker 1999). Rather than seeing this as a problem, these archaeologists are interested in the process whereby a seemingly ordinary action becomes ritualized (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994). Rather than seeing rituals as either religious or secular, archaeologists of this sort view the gray area between religion, ritual, and everyday life as worthy of study.
Once we reject the idea that the only function of ritual is to communicate religious beliefs, it becomes unnecessary to separate this kind of activity from the patterns of daily life. In fact, ritual extends from the local, informal and ephemeral to the public and highly organized, and their social contexts vary accordingly. (Bradley 2005:33)
In a detailed study of ritual in prehistoric Europe, Bradley (2005) examines the role of a type of earthen enclosure (Vierekschanze) in Neolithic Central Europe. These structures blend ritual, domestic, and even industrial characteristics in ways that have frustrated attempts at understanding them. One of these structures, Msecke Zehrovice in Bohemia, blends ritual structures and metalworking (Bradley 2005:21-23; Venclova 1998). Relying on ethnographic accounts of metalworking, Bradley argues that the transformative practices of metalworking typically rely on magic, ritual, and restricted knowledge (see Dobres 2000; Schmidt and Mapunda 1997). Traditionally, metalworking was a ritual act, even if it resulted in the production of utilitarian objects. Thus, the question “is it religious?” is viewed as fundamentally flawed. Metalworking is both sacred and profane. Sacredness does not adhere to any object or phenomena in particular, but is created through an object’s use or performance in specific contexts (Appadurai 1986; Walker 1998, 1999, 2002), often tied metaphorically to an object’s mundane or domestic role (Bradley 2005; see also Ortman 2000; Tilley 1999; Plunket 2002).
While seemingly contradictory, I see value in all of these different modern perspectives on what religion is or is not. While Asad may be right that local spiritual practices should not be subsumed within a larger category of religion, it is also a mistake to say that every local practice is entirely unique. Many Pueblo doings, for example, look a whole lot like Christian, Buddhist, or other religious doings. Pueblo initiations like the vision quest do seem to exhibit the classic tripartite division of rites of passage. It would be a mistake to completely reject anthropological advances concerning religion, even if these advances are tied to the peculiar history of
European secularism. On the other hand, Western academic understanding of religion should never be applied uncritically. The application of any anthropological theory to a new context requires a demonstration that the theory is applicable to that context, and if so, what modifications are required to the theory to make it appropriate for that context. We should always be wary of anthropologists who employ any single theory “to explain just about everything.” It is not just that this tends to be boring; it also tends to be wrong.
World History
