Terminology

Until fairly recently, the comparative lack of a critical engagement with the terms religion, ritual, and ideology in archaeology has meant that discussion and exploration of these concepts has resulted in a number of variable understandings and treatments. It is therefore worthwhile to briefly explore the archaeological appropriation of these oftentimes problematic concepts.

Religion

Religion is not a term that is extensively employed in the archaeological literature. Indeed, it is somewhat avoided, particularly by prehistorians who have eschewed this term in favor of ritual (see below), or avoided it altogether. Its origins as a term within Christian dialogue, its very definition and analysis from the situated perspective of secular modernity, and its position within the typological evolutionary constructs of anthropological scholarship have all served to make religion somewhat problematic for archaeologists (see Biblical Archaeology). In particular, its historical definitions have served both to misleadingly demarcate religion as a particular sort of practice separate from other categories of past activities and, to contrast ‘traditional’ or small-scale belief systems with large-scale practices initially emerging in the later second and early first millenniums BC. ‘Religion’ has been far more visible in archaeological analyses of practices found among the literate world religions of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism, among which can be found powerful deities, universal membership, world renunciation beliefs, and concerns with salvation and the transcendence of death. The developmental precursors to these early ‘world religions’, as well as the range of past activities having a spiritual or belief component, have been less analyzed as evidence of ‘religious’ practices, though a strong syncretist argument has been made by Timothy Insoll that elements of similarity persist between all of them, upon which less categorical understandings of religion may be based.

To add to this, within the literature generally, ‘religion’ has not been consistently defined. A myriad of simple and more complex definitions have been forwarded by scholars concerned with either the social role, meaning content, representational attributes, communicative, and/or reflective nature of religious practice. A number of scholars including Insoll have recently argued that we should avoid attempting to define religion, since its subject matter is so all encompassing and, moreover, ever present in all aspects of human life (see below). Indefinable then, religion exists as a complex system or merely a set of practices that includes both intangible or unclassifiable attributes such as individual or social beliefs, thoughts, and concepts as well as tangible ones like practices, actions, material culture, and space. Although such concepts and practices often involve notions of the holy, the sacred, or the intangible, and are often concerned with realities of the human condition, observational evidence in and out of archaeology indicates that religion appears to have far reaching importance as a pivotal, structuring force within ‘all’ aspects of social life and technical performance. A move away then from definitive definitions of what religion is toward more elemental analyses sensitive to the historical and contextual variability and role of religious practices characterizes the emerging discourse on this subject.

Ritual

The precise nature of what is meant by ritual, its relation to religion, and its status as a particular practice informing the creation of the archaeological record is complex and variable. As an ‘element’ of religion and form of social practice, ritual has been historically misunderstood and compartmentalized by being associated with nontechnical symbolic behavior and communication. Its very definition, therefore, has created and perpetuated categorical distinctions between religious and more rational, effective or technical components of human societies. Identifying the origins of such a problematic dichotomy in a Western, or post-enlightenment worldview, some archaeologists have sought to avoid the term altogether, arguing that it compartmentalizes the study of the past into autonomous spheres of practice that, further, had no real existence for actors. Yet ritual remains as an important anthropological and archaeological concept, based upon the general recognition that it shapes the human experience of the world, and plays an important role in the perpetuation of knowledge and society. This observation requires that archaeologists confront it critically even as they seek to adopt it as a heuristic concept informing their inquiries. Scholars of ritual have emphasized a variety of related features of ritual practice that are particularly conducive to archaeological inquiry and appropriation. Gilbert Lewis has commented on the alerting quality of ritual, which highlights its practice for observers as somehow out of the ordinary, and therefore significant. This quality has been further defined by Catherine Bell as relating to ‘ritualization’ - strategies that differentiate one sort of activity from another through practices which distinguish and privilege what is being done in certain settings or circumstances. Such practices, through not exclusive to ritual, include the presence of overt rules which guide or inform action, a concern with sequences or temporality, and performative elements involving movement, directionality, and spatial orientation. Further, the manipulation of the body, bodily relations, and the manipulations of objects, as well as the creation and alteration of particular places and spaces, are often found in ritual practice, as is the use of sensual stimuli such as light, sound, color, texture, size, or smell. Many of the aforementioned elements are archaeologically recoverable from multiple contexts of practice. Further, the performative nature of ritual both public and private, and the experimental, flexible, fluid, or open-ended nature of practice encourages an attention to the particular contexts of ritual practice in the past.

It has been particularly noted that although ritual is often concerned with ephemeral concepts, it is grounded in the everyday, human world. What most scholars now agree upon, is that for the purposes of study, ritual should not be clearly demarcated from other kinds of practice. This is to say that ritual, like religion, is not a kind of strange ‘irrational’ merely symbolic action that is distinct from some ‘rational’ technical, or craft activity, but instead cross-cuts all aspects of human existence The implications of this understanding have meant that archaeologists have increasingly sought to appreciate and explore the dialectic between ritual and daily life - looking both beyond particular kinds of behavior in the past in the search for the material traces of ritual and religion, and also, more deeply into what appears to be an uncomplicated, straightforward archaeological record.

Ideology

Ideology has had a far more extensive and critical treatment within the archaeological literature than either of the aforementioned terms. Its perceived role as a powerful structuring force in past societies has meant that many investigations of religious practice have been predominated by analyses of ideology and its operation. A useful link between religion and ideology for the purposes of this discussion takes as its starting point Talal Asad’s assertion that the identity, truth, authority, and strength of religious representations must be understood as relating to contextually and historically distinct disciplines, or social discourses. Couched within an argument for rethinking the nature and definition of religion in anthropology, Asad’s focus upon the ‘formation of religious subjects’ stresses the social and political aspects of religious practice. In Anglo-American archaeology, the relationship between religion, ritual, and ideology has been extensively explored within Marxist, or Marxist-inspired perspectives such as structural Marxism or neo-Marxism (see Marxist Archaeology). Within these approaches, ideology has largely been constructed as an instrumentalist phenomenon - that is, as something which serves the interests of a dominant class or group. From an archaeological perspective therefore, the relationship between ideology and religion has largely rested upon the understanding that ideological aspects of religious practice serve to mask or naturalize the real relations of power in ways that benefit hegemonic groups. Such a narrow conception of the role of ideology (termed the ‘dominant ideology thesis’), however, fails to appreciate its multiple functions in the negotiation and perpetuation of social relations. Alternative approaches to the role of ideology in religious or ritual practice have sought to define ideology broadly, as the totality of forms of social consciousness - perceptions of reality that arise from social relations of power. Such perceptions may be mystifying, in that they forward particular appearances of reality for multiple groups. In this construction, ideology is an important structuring force involved in the relationship between consciousness and power, and serves the interests of both dominant and subordinate sectors of society. Additionally, depending upon historical context, the ideological dimensions of material culture, space, or the body, for example, may be of greater or lesser significance, and the analysis of this variability constitutes an important avenue of current exploration.