- LITERALLY A BIRD
- Sep 27, 2008
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I knew you were trouble
when you flew in
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Hello witchcraft thread. Here is an excerpt from an article that belongs inside you.
Reconstructing "Religion" from the Bottom Up, Wouter J. Hanegraaff 2016
Reconstructing "Religion" from the Bottom Up posted:
Abstract
This article claims to uncover the core problematics that have made the debate on defining and conceptualizing "religion" so difficult and argues that this makes it possible to move beyond radical deconstruction towards reconstructing the concept for scholarly purposes. The argument has four main steps. Step 1 consists of establishing the nature of the entity "religion" as a reified imaginative formation. Step 2 consists of identifying the basic dilemma with which scholars have been struggling: the fact that, on the one hand, definitions and conceptualizations do not seem to work unless they stay sufficiently close to commonly held prototypes, while yet, on the other hand, those prototypes are grounded in monotheistic, more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant, theological biases about "true" religion. The first line of argument leads to crypto-theological definitions and conceptualizations, the second to a radical deconstruction of the very concept of "religion." Step 3 resolves the dilemma by identifying an unexamined assumption, or problematic "blind spot," that the two lines of argument have in common: they both think that "religion" stands against "the secular." However, the historical record shows that these two defined themselves not just against one another but, simultaneously, against a third domain (referred to by such terms as "magic" or "superstition"). The structure is therefore not dualistic but triadic. Step 4 consists of replacing common assumptions about how "religion" emerged in the early modern period by an interpretation that explains not just its emergence but its logical necessity, at that time, for dealing with the crisis of comparison caused by colonialist expansion. "Religion" emerged as the tertium comparationis — or, in technically more precise language, the "pre-comparative tertium" — that enabled comparison between familiar (monotheist, Christian, Protestant) forms of belief and modes of worship and unfamiliar ones (associated with "pagan" superstition or magic). If we restore the term to its original function, this allows us to reconstruct "religion" as a scholarly concept that not just avoids but prevents any slippage back to Christian theology or ethnocentric bias.
This is long. You probably don't care about all of it. This is the part that made me think of you.
quote:
Step 3: The Blind Spot in the Debate
I will be arguing that this core of the problem lies in a serious and almost universal "blind spot" that invalidates the very foundations on which the current debate is built. Once we have located it and have learned to see what we have been overlooking, we should be able to redescribe "religion" in such a manner that its monotheist/Christian/Protestant connotations are avoided. As will be argued in the final section, we can do so by restoring it to its original and basic function, that of a tertium comparationis enabling historical and cross-cultural comparison.5
All participants in the debate seem to take for granted that the domain of "religion" stands against that of "the secular." For good reasons, those two are seen as inextricably bound together: neither "religion" nor "the secular" is capable of defining and maintaining its own identity otherwise than by means of contrast with it negative counterpart. This is why deconstructionists like to speak provocatively of a "simultaneous birth of religion and secularism" (Nongbri 2013: 4).
However, the basic assumption is incorrect. The historical record shows conclusively that "religion" was not defined against "the secular" alone, or the reverse. What actually happened during the early modern period is that "religion" and "the secular" were defining their identities on two fronts simultaneously: not just against each other, but also against a whole range of traditional non-secular beliefs and practices that were just as distasteful to Christian orthodox thinkers as they were to their secular critics. This third domain that they both rejected has been referred to by different names, but the most well-known are superstition and magic (Hanegraaff 2012, esp. 156-177). Contrary to the received wisdom taken for granted in current debates about the concept of "religion," then, we are not dealing with a simple opposition of religion versus the secular: instead, we are dealing with a triad. This means that those famous prototypes of "religion" that have claimed so much attention and caused so much trouble in the definition debate are not adequately described as stand-ins for "monotheism, more specifically Christianity, more specifically Protestantism." They stand for those three imagined minus their so-called "superstitious" or "magical" dimension.
This simple fact (for that is really what it is) should have far-reaching implications for the entire current debate on conceptualizing and defining "religion." How completely it has been overlooked by almost all participants in that debate can easily be checked by just going through the indices and tables of contents of their major publications, where relevant terms such as "magic," "paganism, "superstition," or "idolatry" turn out to be virtually absent. Again, this phenomenon can be explained by the remarkable power of reification as a semi-automatic mental process. As scholars, we know that defining "magic" is a topic every bit as complicated as that of defining "religion" — but we usually assume that it is a separate debate. Why do we make that assumption? Because, without ever realizing it, we have already reified "magic" as something different from "religion"! Hence, we find ourselves trapped in a vicious circle of our own making, attempting to define something that we have already defined in terms that distinguish it from something else (Hanegraaff 2012: 167-168). This circle exists nowhere but in our imagination. How did we get trapped in it? That question cannot be answered on the level of theory but only by revisiting the historical origins and development of the relevant terms.
Historicizing the Blind Spot
The terms "superstition" and "magic" both began their career as neutral or positive terms. Superstitio is Latin for the Greek deisidaimonia, in which deisi could mean "fear" but also "awe" or "respect," while daimones could be gods, goddesses, semi-divinities, or any other kind of superhuman being, regardless of their good or evil intentions (Hanegraaff 2012: 159; cf. Martin 2004).
Hence, we have, potentially at least, the complete spectrum ranging from what we might now perceive as a "superstitious" fear of demons to a "religious" respect for divinity or a "god-fearing" attitude: for instance, when the apostle Paul addressed the Athenians as deisidaimones (Acts 17.22), this was still meant as an expression of respect, not as an accusation. As for mageia, it derives from the Old Persian magu, which seems to have referred to a sacrificial priest or a similar functionary. Having been imported into Greek no later than the sixth century BCE, a positive understanding of mageia as "worship of the gods" (Plato Alcibiades 1.122A) survived at least as late as Apuleius in the second century CE and was revived during the Renaissance (De Jong 1997: 387-394; Otto 2011: 143-272).
Parallel to their positive or neutral usage, both terms acquired negative connotations as well. Since the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosophical elite began to use deisidaimonia as a term of disdain for popular and irrational beliefs about harmful deities, and for cultic practices that reflected a misguided fear of the gods. As for the Latin superstitio, it originally referred to practices such as soothsaying, divination, or prophecy, which were perfectly acceptable in the Roman Empire. However, from the first century CE on, the term became associated with the "depraved, strange, spooky and dishonorable" practices of foreign peoples such as the Egyptians, the Druids, or the Chaldaeans (Martin 2004: 132-133). In short, it was associated with threatening "others" whose presence might pose a danger to social and political stability. Something similar happened to mageia. Already by the fifth century BCE it began to acquire negative connotations reminiscent of the term goes, whence the term goeteia (De Jong 1997: 388; Otto 2011: 156). In the Roman Empire, the term magia came to refer to the suspicious rituals and practices of private practitioners unsanctioned by the state-sponsored cult.
For our concerns, it is essential to see that the conceptual boundaries between superstitio and religio (and their Greek equivalents, deisidaimonia and threskeia) were so fluid that the phenomena to which they were meant to refer simply cannot be kept apart except in terms of normative valuation. In other words, they referred to the same domain of beliefs and practices.
Religio meant an attitude of "scruple" or "reverence," based upon feelings of awe, anxiety, doubt, or fear "aroused in the mind by something that cannot be explained" (e.g., Casadio 2010: 305-308, with quotation from W. Warde Fowler). Likewise, deisidaimonia referred to attitudes of "awe" or "respect" towards the presence of gods; and as demonstrated by Dieter Harmening (1979: 16-17), its Latin equivalent superstitio was understood in a perfectly equivalent positive sense by authors such as Seneca, Junianus Justinus, Vergilius, or Cicero - not to mention the apostle Paul, as mentioned above.
After the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century, the two terms drifted apart according to a simple logic of normative disjunction: pious worship of the true Christian God versus idolatrous worship directed to the false gods of the pagans. In this process, superstitio and magia came to be imagined as broadly equivalent terms, with "idolatry" as their common denominator (Harmening 1979; Hanegraaff 2012: 169-177). The long and extremely involved history of these terms and concepts need not be summarized here even in its barest outlines (see references in Hanegraaff 2012: 158 n. 13, 169 n. 65): the essential point for us to notice is their enormous impact on scholarly theorizing about "religion." For this we need to move on to the birth of "comparative religion" in the colonialist era.
The Vanishing Trick: How "False Religion" Becomes "No Religion"
The strange practices and beliefs that Western explorers or missionaries encountered far from home could be interpreted by them in two different ways: either as a depraved travesty of what "true" religion was all about (because it fell short of Christian or monotheist models), or as wholly undeserving of the label "religion" (on the assumption that only true religion deserves that label). In other words, they could either be presented as marginal forms of "religion" proper or could be excluded from that category altogether.
This distinction is important but has not always been applied with sufficient clarity and precision. To demonstrate this point, I will discuss the example of David Chidester's critically acclaimed monograph Savage Systems (1996). One of its most central claims is that, according to the standard pattern of "frontier comparative religion" in situations of colonial conquest, indigenous people were originally perceived as having no religion. Chidester's thesis has been broadly accepted, but if we look closely at his evidence, we discover that "absence of religion" could mean two very different things. Sometimes it meant quite literally that "idols, temples, religious worship or ceremonies were unknown to [indigenous peoples], and they neither believed in the true and only God, nor adored false deities" (1996: 11); but in the overwhelming majority of cases, it meant that they had "no religion, 'only superstitions...'" (1996:12, cf. 15, 60, 65, 76-78, 85, 98, 178-180, 182, 234-235). Instead of being conflated, these two meanings should be sharply distinguished, for they make all the difference.
For instance, Chidester claims that in the eighteenth century, "fetishism emerged as a new term for the absence of religion... Without religion, Africans were unable to evaluate objects... This alleged inability to assess the value of material objects became the defining feature of African ignorance, childishness, capriciousness, and lack of any organized religion" (1996: 15). Note that several unexamined assumptions have now tacitly slipped in: apparently "no religion" means no organized religion, and the claim that fetishism is not religion means that it is not considered true religion. These are transparent examples of the monotheist, more specifically Christian, more specifically Protestant prototype at work: that of religion minus its so-called "superstitious," "magical," "pagan," or "idolatrous" dimension (not properly organized like a church, not "truly" religious). Chidester claims that colonial comparativism initially saw indigenous cultures as marked by an "absence of religion," but his evidence shows otherwise: they usually saw such cultures as marked by "superstitious" practices and beliefs such as magic or pagan idolatry. That colonialists did not emically see such practices and beliefs as "religion" does not mean that as scholars we should agree with them by tacitly adopting their prejudice in our etic language.
As the new model of "world religions" emerged during the nineteenth century (Masuzawa 2005), henceforth it comprised only those recently reified cultural complexes ("Hinduism, "Buddhism," "Taoism," etc.) that could be presented as sufficiently close to monotheistic models to escape the taint of association with the "third category" of magic, superstition, paganism, idolatry, and so on. As a result, that category was marginalized even more thoroughly and systematically than before: its relevance to "religion" could not be wholly ignored, but it could not be seriously included in that category, either. On a global scale, the vague and ill-defined domain of "everything other than the world religions" came to be associated with non-scriptural, indigenous, or tribal cultures; with dubious "folk" practices next to the supposedly more "sophisticated" practices of the cultural elites; or with "occult" or "esoteric" currents in the margins of dominant religions in Western culture.6
While the current debate on definition and conceptualization is based on the dualistic assumption that "religion" must be defined against "the secular," this dualism therefore masks a triadic structure. Because this fact goes unrecognized, what usually happens is that the third term is tacitly removed from the equation instead of being included under the umbrella of "religion." The deep irony is that by thus treating the third term as largely irrelevant to the concept of "religion," thereby rendering it invisible, even contemporary deconstructionists end up perpetuating the very same Christian-Protestant ideologies whose legacy they are trying so hard to deconstruct! If the triadic perspective continues to make intuitive sense to us even today, this is because our intellectual culture has inherited the profound disdain for "pagan/ idolatrous/magical/superstitious" beliefs and practices that has always been typical of orthodox (and most particularly Protestant) Christians. Secular thinkers who embrace the values of rationality and science have unwittingly adopted the same normativities from their Protestant forebears. In short, as I have argued elsewhere, both Christianity and secular modernity define their very identity against this "Other" (Hanegraaff 2012: 3, 369, 373-379).
This deeply normative and ideological separation of "magic" from "religion" cannot be maintained either empirically or historically (Styers 2004; Otto 2011). It is revealing that even the chief modern pioneer in this regard, E. B. Tylor, reached that same conclusion already during his lifetime: while his foundational classic Primitive Culture (1871) was built upon the "Magic — Religion — Science" triad and did much to popularize it, Tylor himself deconstructed it just twelve years later, in his entry on "Magic" for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1883) (Hanegraaff 1998: 262-265). But this shift escaped everybody's attention, and the combined cognitive forces of prototype thinking and reification proved much stronger than those of critical analysis and historical evidence. As a result, throughout the twentieth century and forward into the twenty-first, the triad has reigned supreme in scholarly as well as popular assumptions about both "religion" and "magic" and continues to do so up to the present (Otto 2011: 1-4; cf. Hanegraaff 2014: 114). Its effects reach much further than commonly realized. To give just one example, in his extremely influential standard translation of the Greek "magical" (1) papyri, Karl Preisendanz kept arbitrarily adding the prefix "Zauber-" and interpreting everything as "magical" by default: for instance, any reference to praxis and pragmateia (act, acting) was turned into a "magical act (Zauberhandlung)," botanai (plants) became "magical plants" charakteras (signs) became "magical signs," epaoidais (songs) became "magical songs," and onomai (names) became "magical names" (Otto 2011: 385). This is a particularly clear example of how the power of prototypes can trick scholars into actually creating "magic" (in order to keep it apart from "religion") while making them believe that they are discovering it in their materials. In this manner, scholars have been creating "magic" all over the world, excepting only those practices that were protected by the "world religions" label. By the same token, of course, they have been preserving, protecting, and reinforcing monotheist, more specifically Christian, more specifically Protestant prototypes of "religion."
A Tale of Three Brothers
Having identified the blind spot in current debates about conceptualizing and defining "religion," how can we proceed forward? Can we escape from the vicious circle of reification that has kept us trapped in monotheist, more specifically Christian, and even more specifically Protestant prototypes? Perhaps we cannot, but then again, perhaps we do not need to. Reification means that concepts that exist only in our imagination are misunderstood as somehow existing in the world "out there." In this sense, they are not real but imaginary, and the circle that keeps us trapped is ultimately no more than a mental illusion: there is nothing to escape from. However, the power of reification is very real indeed; as I argued above, it would be misguided to jump from the imaginary nature of "religion" to the conclusion that it does not exist. It is in this sense that the circle keeps us trapped.
As scholars, we may have to accept the fact that, for the foreseeable future at least, "religion" will keep playing an important role in the collective imagination on a worldwide scale, along with other reified concepts such as "magic," "superstition," "paganism," "the occult," and so on, all of them dependent on monotheist, more specifically Christian, more specifically Protestant prototypes. All this ideologically loaded language, no matter how ethnocentric or otherwise problematic it may be, just happens to be part of the emic discourse that we should study and try to understand.
Initially, one might want to agree with the deconstructionists that this deep ethnocentricity of the term "religion" renders it unsuitable as a general umbrella or second-order etic concept. However, I have argued that the historical analyses on which their argument depends are structurally incomplete. Ironically, in assuming that "religion" is the structural counterpart of "the secular," these analyses remain dependent on (and hence subservient to) the very same ideologies of exclusion that they intend to criticize. I began this section by quoting Nongbri's statement about the "simultaneous birth of religion and secularism" during the early modern period (2013: 4); but we have now seen that, contrary to common assumptions, those twins were not born alone — rather, we are dealing with triplets! To continue the metaphor, one might say that the two hostile brothers made a tacit pact. They would fight one another as worthy opponents but agreed to ignore their brother as if he had no right to exist. He was below their contempt and deserved no recognition as a legitimate member of the family. This strategy has been so singularly successful that even the most critical and perceptive of modern critics have been taken in: they have been concentrating on the tale of the twins and their lifelong battle ("religion versus the secular"), while ignoring their brother as an illegitimate bastard son at best. His existence could not be wholly ignored, but he should not appear on family pictures or expect to be invited to family parties. He became the invisible brother.
The direction of my argument should now be clear. As scholars, we cannot afford to remain complicit in the twins' normative strategy of rejecting their third brother and seeking to suppress his existence. He just happens to be part of the family and must receive equal treatment and recognition. How does this change the parameters of our problem?
 How indeed
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theres a bit about how they are being swiped to be redistributed
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Jan 4, 2024 20:57
