Defining “Religion” as the Art of the Impossible: A Perspective on Religious Studies and Anthropology

[Friends,

This is a short paper that I am submitting for my anthropology seminar. It is not my best writing, but upon looking at it I realized that it was to blog post as a seminar paper is to journal article, so I decided to put it here. Put 'er there!

Thank God no one is reading,
Vincent]

In the religious studies proseminar –the structural equivalent of ANTH701– Tom Tweed, our department chair, opened our discussion of Mama Lola by saying that it represents sophisticated new trends within the “ethnographic turn” that religious studies has taken since the second World War. Of the several points which could be taken from this off-handed comment, the most important is that religious studies is a thing which can turn towards a discipline, and not a discipline in its own right. Further, I would propose that religious studies -unlike Jewish studies, for instance- is neither a data-set. With this turn the term “religion” came to more prominently designate patterns of life which it had largely neglected; New Religious Movements, religious hybridities, and various social movements which had been left on the far side of a foggy border came to be “religion.” Religious studies, thus, cannot be located by a data-set, but by the ideological proposition of a data-set. Echoing Saussure's call for linguists to define and delimit their field of study, we are those who say that there exists something well designated “religion” and then set out, through the various disciplines that led us to its borders, to examine it. So, in this light, what is an ethnographic turn? Where has post-war cultural anthropology relocated religion? I will wander towards an answer arm-in-arm with three post war theorists, two seminal and one potentially useful, to consider where religion is and where it might be soon.

In “The Structural Study of Myth” Levi Strauss presented religion as a set of “processes which, whatever their apparent differences, belong to the same kind of intellectual operation,” rather than emerging from “inarticulate emotional drives” whence he claimed “Tylor, Frazer, and Durkheim” as psychologizing theorists had traced them.1 Setting aside the fact that all three of these theorists saw the religious impulse as a sort of precursor to science, and a preeminenly logical drive, it is notable the directions in which this conviction brings Levi-Strauss. He is absolutely right, of course, that the analysis of myth as he found it (and perhaps still would find it) lacks significant structures of accountability between various theorists, and that myths can be examined towards nearly any foregone conclusion, but it is questionable whether this is entirely overridden by his para-linguistic reframing,

Given that “myth” functions as a synecdoche for religion in this essay, it is notable that he has relocated its “meaning” not in “the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined.2” That is, a story cannot be identified as a myth merely because it contains ostensibly supernatural elements or characters. It must be “bundled” in the manner characteristic of mythical speech, having curiously weak temporal claims. This allows myth -and thus religion- to be located in any kind of story that bears non-propositional temporality. Though Levi-Strauss seemed content to use this method to study only those stories which are commonly identified as religious, it is the necessary ground for those recent theorists like David Chidester or Gary Laderman who explore the religious implications of Disney's narratives and other mass mediated stories.

Continuing along the same trajectory, Geertz' definition of “religion” again opens the field to new areas of inquiry by considering “religion” best demarcated by arrangements rather than contents. If we figure religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men3” it is neither necessary that ghosts be religious, nor that religion be ghostly. This has, of course, drawn critique from those scholars of religion who do not want “everything” (often meaning specifically sports, advertising and other areas of Roland Barthes' specialization) to become religion. However, I have personally found it a quite useful reframing in that it allows for a more adverbial use of “religion” in the case of videogames and other popular cultural phenomena, allowing that certain elements may operate “religiously” even if their total conjuncture is unlikely to be well received as fully “religious.” Toward this sort of work, Geertz' is a fruitful extension of structualist framings of “religion” in that it does not ask about characteristics of the system of symbols, but about the roles it plays in the lives of those engaged with it.

It is notable that both of these efforts, however, have been applied exclusively towards bringing new elements under the label “religion.” In Levi-Strauss' methodology of including all variants of a myth, this makes some sense, but one would think that Geertz would be well applied towards the claim that some phenomenon that had been labeled “religion” was actually incapable of establishing moods and motivations of the right sort.

Niezen's World Beyond Difference follows this same trajectory. Just as Levi-Strauss had located “religion” in a particular sort of para-linguistic interaction rather than in content traditionally termed religious, and as Geertz had brought this consideration into the particulars of lived life by considering the interaction of elements in life, so Niezen locates the religious in structures of global organization. This is an extension in that it retains the focus on the effects (and affects) that these arrangements have upon their members, but obviates the regional focus visible in Geertz' work. By allowing the identifying features of religion to combine without spacial reference, Geertz' spirit-neutral framing of religion is empowered to explain many movements that could not have been discussed otherwise, not only including patterns of global capitalism and Fundamentalism in the present, but even, for instance, patterns of historical Catholicism. I have designated this a “potentially useful” text, however, because it, like much work in anthropology, expounds its theories of religion without ever demarcating its object clearly.

The most explicit descriptions of “religion” here, however, are groups whose religious nature seems to largely emerge from the fact that their claimed precedents were designated so by Niezen's. The “religious dissension” he describes seems to be only a form of dissent shared among various types of groups, but which is being enjoined here by Muslims.4

But there are glimmerings of a much more useful understanding of “religion” in this work that deserves to be unearthed. Consider his reflections on the strong sense of “Globalization,” the process of accelerating global networking irrespective of whether its specific nature is basic or superstructural: “For some, the rapid pace of change attributed to globalization is a source of almost millenarian hope, an expectation of the end of history... It is almost a secular source of spiritual awe that rules human fate beyond the reach of petition or salvation.5”

My only complaint about this location of religion is Niezen's conservative use of “almost.” There is nothing “almost” about it, particularly if this is only “for some:” In my ethnographic work with the Ordo Templi Orientis in Atlanta, a group who envisions the world as having entered a New Aeon of human interconnection in autonomy in 1904, the internet was positively proof of their apocalypic doctrines; Timothy Leary, in Chaos and Cyber Culture explicitly detailed the net age as the new world which prophecy had been unable to articulate clearly; The Kabbalah Centre, likewise, has framed globalized modernity as the age which is properly prepared for the messiah.

But Niezen's “for some” is by no means insignificant. All of the groups I have detailed are constituted largely by internet culture, the OTO managing their 3000 members and disproportionately large sphere of influence in the New Age movement through podcasting and web archives, Leary's followers continuing to publish his texts online, and the Kabbalah Centre clustering a network of perhaps millions around their own online store. These groups are religious with regard to their discourse on globalization both because they have framed the current configuration “mythically” through Levi-Straussian atemporality -these things were explained by ancient prophecy much as they currently being recounted on the news- and because their members are engaged with them in the ways that Geertz would designate “religious.”

The work that remains to be done in demarcating the bounds of “religion” is precisely that which Niezen may not have realized he was doing by writing “for some.” The bounds of “religion” usefully pushed out by (post)structuralism have in fact come to encompass nearly everything, and are beginning to take on the uncritical possibility which Levi-Strauss had seen in the study of myth. The next task is to ask for whom various arrangements actually act on their constituent members as any given theorist has decided to characterize “religion.” If the term is to encompass groups like the Kabbalah Centre which describes itself as the opposite of a religion, should they behave (as, I argue, the Centre does) “religiously,” the possibility must be left open that some groups commonly so designated may need to be reclassified. This need not mean, of course, that anyone say “Methodism is not a religion.” My best prediction is that a structuralist drive focused on affective and network structures could eventually clarify religious arrangements down into more workable units by emphasizing specific affective and network structures: “Methodism includes sixteen religions.” It is a work worth doing, and one towards which it seems religious studies is turning.

-notes-
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270 (Oct. - Dec., 1955), 428.
2. Levi-Strauss, 431.
3. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 88.
4. Niezen, 65.
5. Niezen, 36.