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SHIFTING AIMS, MOVING TARGETS: ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION*

2005; Wiley; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-9655.2005.00223.x

1467-9655

Clifford Geertz,

African history and culture analysis

For an anthropologist pushing 80 and feeling it push back, there seems little else to do on a ceremonial occasion of this sort [the 2004 Sir James Frazer Lecture], dedicated as it is to commemorating a marmoreal figure whom most people remember, so far as they remember him at all, as a cloistered Edwardian don who devoted his life to a Causabon-like compilation of the world's exotica, but to reflect upon one's own, rather different, but hardly less transient, career in a related line of work and try to suggest what time and change have done to it. Not that this will avail against what time and change have done, and will continue to do, to it. There is nothing so dead as a dead academic, and any Ozymandian dreams one might entertain will be quickly dissolved by the simple device of looking up the Collected Frazer Lectures, 1922-32 on the Amazon web-site bestseller list and finding them placed at 2,467,068. I want, I hope without undue self-reference or illusions of permanence, simply to put into the record a particular encounter with a particular time. And a particular subject: the anthropology of religion. Why I have spent so much of my time and energy since wandering into anthropology from the Humanities studying (in heavy quotation marks, here and throughout) 'religion'– in Southeast Asia, in North Africa, in the past, in the present, increasingly in the world at large – is not entirely clear to me, particularly as I have myself no particular religious background or – so far anyway, and as I say, it's getting late – commitment. Some of it, this concern, not to say obsession, with faith, worship, belief, sanctity, mystery, world-view, sorcery, propitiation, and the adoration of trees (on which, you will remember, Frazer has no less than five separate chapters) certainly has to do with that Humanities background: literature and philosophy do incline the mind to recherché subjects. But far more, I think, it is due to the continuing centrality of the description and analysis of myth, magic, rite, and spiritual tonality in anthropology from E.B. Tylor [1889], William Robertson Smith [1889], R.R. Marrett [1917], and Frazer [1890] forward through Bronislaw Malinowski [1948], Raymond Firth [1967], E.E. Evans-Pritchard [1956], Godfrey Lienhardt [1961], Victor Turner [1968], and Mary Douglas [1966], to essay only a local – Oxbridge, London, and Manchester – genealogy. (My own, of course, is American: Ruth Benedict [1927], Gladys Reichard [1923], Robert Redfield [1953], Clyde Kluckhohn [1962].) Along with kinship, with which, via totemic classification and the incest taboo, it was directly linked from the beginning, religion has been so much at the centre of anthropological thought that anyone concerned, as I was and am, with the emblems and insignia of the human way of being in the world would be immediately drawn toward it as a field of research. And so, when the powers at Harvard, having organized a group of graduate students to go to Indonesia on a team project to study kinship, village life, peasant marketing, the Chinese shopkeeper minority, and local government, found themselves in need of someone to 'do' religion, I jumped at the chance and wrote my doctoral thesis and my first book on the interplay of Islamic, Hindu-Buddhist, and Malayo-Polynesian currents in the spiritual life of the Javanese, and have been worrying over the complexities and puzzlements encountered – theoretical ones, empirical ones, philosophical ones, sectarian ones, perhaps most important, practical ones – ever since. Thinking back, not to that particular project, or to my work there as such, both of which are by now more or less archival, but to the whole period – the immediate post-World War II, incipient Cold War 1950s – it seems clear that there was around that time a major shift in both the aims and the objects of the anthropological study of religion: what it was looking at, and what it was looking for. Virtually all of the previous forays had been into tribal or archaic beliefs and ceremonies (Australia, the Ancient Semites, Native America, the Trobriands, the Nilotes, the Chuckchee), with the assumption, implied or open, that rudiments and foreshadowings of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and the other so-called 'High Religions' could be seen there and thus the elementary forms of the religious life, in Émile Durkheim's famous slogan, could be defined, classified, and reduced to rule. Now, however, an effort got under way to address the 'High Religions' directly and in their immediate and contemporary, emotionalistic forms, less to ferret out their common features than to place them within the social and historical – dare I say, in this venue, 'cultural?'– contexts within which they emerged and upon which they acted. What had been comparative folklore in search of parallels and prefigurations – shamans as priests, cockfights as sacraments, regicide as redemption (what Frazer called 'our debt to the savage') – became a comparative ethnography in search of consequence: import, impact, significance, weight. How, precisely, and how much, does 'religion' matter in the ongoing course of things? Wherein lies its appeal and force? Its reach? Its persistence? What, as we came soon to put it, is it – the imagery, the discipline, the fervour, the theatrics, the obsessiveness, the story-telling – all about? This 'turn', or 'move', or 'paradigm shift' was, of course, but part, and a minor part at that, of a general shift in anthropological attention away from deserts, jungles, and arctic wastes, to what came to be known as The New Nations, The Developing Countries, The Third World, The Emerging Powers, or The Non-aligned States [Geertz 1963]. Someone setting out to study India, Iran, Nigeria, Egypt, China, or Brazil, or, as I was, Indonesia, found themselves faced not with an ant-hill assemblage of myths, spirits, and psychical practices to label and sort out, but with massive, deeply historical, and conceptually elaborated social and cultural formations, complete with officials, texts, economies, and ratified names. Complex societies, 'civilizations' if you wish, some of them as large as subcontinents, with multicultural populations, bundles of languages, and spiritual connections across half the world, presented those of us who, trained on benge and Blessing Way, came to be engaged with them not just with a new object of study, but with a revised conception of how to study it – what it was we wanted to find out. With regard to Java, that anthology of the world's best imperialisms, poised to become the nucleus of a rambling and precarious, conceptually ill-defined political entity, this meant two things: first, a recognition, forced upon one by the merest contact with local life, of adversative, religiously phrased divisions within a single, many-minded society; and, second, the realization that these divisions and this many-mindedness did not preclude, but in fact produced, a distinct and particular sort of spiritual temper – a bent, a humour, a stamp, a moral climate. If the 'function' of religion was, as we were still taught to say in those days, 'the tuning up of ultimate value attitudes of the society', the tuning here was various, contrastive, and contrapuntal, and so were the attitudes. What Denys Lombard [1990: vol. III, pp. 89 ff.], the Braudellian historian of 'le cas javanais', called 'le carrafour des réseaux asiatiques', precariously balanced between 'le fanatisme' and 'la tolérance', between 'les frictions de la concurrence' and 'la volonté d'harmonie', turned out to be an excellent site on which, first, to take apart the very idea of 'religion' and then to try, somehow, to put it back together again. The conceptual equipment available for performing this sleight of hand – separating out clashing and discontinuous spiritual currents and then reconnecting them in the muddled, composite flow of everyday life – was sparse and cursory. 'Pluralism', 'syncretism', 'communalism', 'denominationalism', 'sectarianism', the received terms for describing competing traditions animating common situations, all seemed inadequate to the tumbling intricacy and intensity of things. The suspicions and jealousies, along with the headlong aspirations to national unity, that drove the early Republic, and before long came within inches (or hours) of destroying it, were far wider and more all-embracing than even the metaphorically or analogically 'religious'. And yet they were, those suspicions and jealousies, and the aspirations as well, coloured and reinforced at almost every point by world-view variations centuries in the making. It was not so much the ingredient traditions as such – Hinduism (or 'Hindu-Buddhism'), which had been there from the ninth century; Islam, which entered in the fourteenth and fifteenth; Christianity, propagated by European missionaries and plantation managers in the eighteenth and nineteenth; and the Austronesian undercurrent, which remained visible in the witchery and spiritism of popular observance – that most challenged description and explication. They were recognizable, familiar, and not all that distinctive: the usual grist for the ethnographical mill. It was the way in which those traditions, and the mentalities they generated, were stretched taut across the deepest and most divisive fissures of social, political, and economic life, and, in fact, defined and constructed those fissures – shaped them, sustained them, drove them on – that demanded a methodological change of plan. The details of how all this worked out 'in reality' are again on the record: the progressive polarization of these closed and hardened casts of mind as the passions of the Cold War intruded upon the local scene and attached themselves, like ideological parasites, to one or the other of them; the foundering of electoral politics and parliamentary government as the polarization advanced to all-out culture-war; the eruption of mass violence – hundreds of thousands dead – when factional killing broke out along these lines across the whole of the island. The causes of all this, and of the forced and artificial reintegration which followed it and kept the country in a state of political and intellectual suspension, a sort of cultural time-warp, for thirty-five years, were, of course, various. But that the crash and clatter of religious dispositions was prominent among them is quite clear. As I say, this sort of difficult intricacy, the interplay of local traditions and world religions, confronted not just myself and my Java-project colleagues thrown into the middle of a forming country; it confronted the whole generation of anthropologists who turned, in the 1950s and 1960s, to the study of old societies trying to become new (or, anyway, newer) states. India, with the communalist division of its nationalist movement and the agonies of Partition, was perhaps the most spectacular case. But Nigeria, with its Islamico-Christian sectionalism and its ethno-evangelical civil war; Sri Lanka with its Sinhalese-Buddhist vs Tamil-Hindu violence; intra-religion discordances, suspicions, and moral distancings in Landino-Indian Meso-America; Sunni-Shi'i sectarianism of small differences in Iraq and Pakistan, Orthodox-Roman ones in Serbo-Croatia; Muslims, Christians, and Jews tumbled together across the Middle East and North Africa; lowland Buddhism and up-country Christianity glowering at one another in Burma; Spanish Catholicism, American Evangelism, and Islamic Revivalism jammed together and set apart in the island Philippines – all these presented anyone concerned to explore their spiritual constitution with a rather different sort of task than that which had faced Reo Fortune and his sorcerers in Dobu, Max Gluckman and his chiefs in Swaziland, or Claude Lévi-Strauss and his jaguar stories among the Bororo. The first question it raised, and the one most productive of abstract debate, is one that was, of course, tacitly there from the beginning, but which could, now that such variousness, multiplicity, rivalry, and clamour were involved, no longer be silently and unreflectively answered by the simple device of training our attention on cults and customs that seem at least generally analogous to ones considered in our own society to have something to do with the divine, the supernatural, the holy, the sacred, the numinous, or the transcendent – namely, 'What Is Religion?' What is to be included under this rubric? Where are its borders? What are its marks? What, when you get down to it, is'belief', or 'worship', or 'observance', or 'faith'? My dissertation was called 'Religions in Java', the book that emerged from it, cut, polished, and renamed for public consumption, The Religion of Java [Geertz 1960]. It had sections on everything from shadow plays, the hajj, yoga, and speech styles to possession, quranic schools, funeral feasts, and political parties. It is still not clear what its subject was. The issue here, how we are to name and classify cultural formations in other societies that are at once broadly similar to ones in our own and oddly sui generis, strange and different, is quite general in anthropology: a recurrent crux. Whether it is 'the family', or 'the market', or 'the state', or 'law', or 'art', or 'politics', or 'status', deciding just what goes into the category, as we say, cross-culturally, and why it does so, is an essentially contested matter, a circular discussion that stirs polemic, never ends, and only marginally, and then rather diagonally, advances. The usual tack is to begin with our own, more or less unexamined, everyday sense of what 'the family', 'the state', or, in the case at hand, 'religion' comes to, what counts for us as kinship, or government, or faith, and what, family-resemblance style, looks … well … resemblant, amongst those whose life-ways we are trying to portray. This hardly results in determinate species-and-genera taxa, a Linnaean catalogue of cultural kinds. What it results in is a persistent issue over which endlessly to argue – The Definition Problem: 'What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Religion?' In good part, surely, what we talk about is 'meaning'. If there is any general, immediate, and (at least until it is looked into more carefully) perspicuous category, direct and intuitive, apparently coherent, under which the cabbages-and-kings material of ethnographic accounts of 'religion' in today's potpourri 'new state' societies can be comparatively subsumed, it is that. The oblique, family-resemblance connections between the sorts of phenomena – beliefs, practices, attitudes, imaginings – that we group, casually and unreflectively, 'ordinary language-wise', under the commonsense designation 'religion' for ourselves, and those that we so group, hardly more deliberatively, in connection with societies we see as at least somewhat distant and unlike to our own – as 'Other'– are essentially ones we regard, in either case, as having something critically to do with the overall 'purpose', 'point', 'sense', 'significance', or 'design' of things: with, broadly and momentously, often enough parabolically, 'the meaning of life'. Put that way, it might seem that all we have succeeded in doing is replacing one obscurity with another; the indefinite with the indistinct. But there is, or so it seemed to me as I struggled to determine what it was I had in fact been trying to bring to integral description in the Javanese case, one advantage of re-focusing matters in such a way: namely, that a large and expanding set of precise and powerful speculative instruments – conceptions, theories, perspectives, modes of discourse, frames of analysis – has been emerging in the human sciences which can be mobilized to sort the unsortable, connect the unconnected; to define researchable questions and devise ways to research them. Putting anthropology, and most especially the anthropology of religion, into the conceptually more complex and self- conscious context of contemporary linguistics, literary criticism, semiotics, psychology, sociology, and, most especially, philosophy is not to obscure what it has to say with imported abstractions or pump it up with concocted jargon. It is, in Charles Peirce's famous advisement, to try to make our ideas clear. Not least to ourselves. In the flood of work that has appeared since – shall we say, Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, Gottlob Frege, and Roman Jakobson (who seem to me to have, in their several ways, started most of it off) – with respect to the analysis of what, simply to have a covering term, we can call 'meaning systems', or, as I came to prefer, 'cultural systems', three lines of thought seem to me of particular value in connection with focusing and ordering our comparative understanding of religion. The first of these is what has been called 'the autonomy of meaning' thesis. (The phrase is due to the American philosopher Donald Davidson [1984], but the locus classicus formulation is Wittgenstein's – no first name needed there – private language argument [Wittgenstein 1953; cf. Colebrook 2002: 70 ff.].) Meaning is not a subjective matter, private, personal, 'in the head'. It is a public and social one, something constructed in the flow of life. We traffic in signs en plein air, out in the world where the action is; and it is in that trafficking that meaning is made. We must, as Stanley Cavell, another American philosopher with Wittgensteinian tendencies, has, with appropriate paradox, put it, 'mean what we say', because it is only by 'saying' (or otherwise behaving, acting, proceeding, conducting ourselves, in an intelligible manner) that we can 'mean' at all [Cavell 1969]. The second thought-line, implicate in the first, is that meaning is materially embodied, that it is (and here one searches for the appropriate term) formed, conveyed, realized, emblematized, expressed, communicated, via ponderable, perceptible, construable signs; symbolical devices, like passage rites or passion plays, differential equations or impossibility proofs, which are its vehicles. (What makes a device 'religious' is not its structure but its use: Pythagoreans, we are told, worshipped right triangles and the square-root of two.) Despite the difficulty of formulating it in a simple, straightforward way, something due to the haunting of our language by the ghosts of departed epistemologies, this is a more or less obvious idea, once those ghosts, Platonic or Cartesian, Comtean or Christian, are properly exorcized. That culture (language, art, science, law, religion, marriage, politics, merriment, common sense – the whole kit and caboodle) consists not of bodiless ideas suspended in impalpable mental states, delicate motions of the soul and spirit, but of what the American action theorist, social critic, and all-round man of letters Kenneth Burke [1941] has called 'equipment for living', equipment that is substantial, at hand, usable, and used, ought not by now to be so difficult a notion. And finally, connecting all this more directly with religion and worship, there has been the development, important in the human sciences since Max Weber's Religionssoziologie, but which has a long and serpentine history in apologetical speculation of all shapes and varieties and in certain branches of recent theology, of the conception of 'limit', or 'ultimate', or 'existential' problems of meaning: the notion that it is at the point at which our cultural resources fail, or begin to fail, where our equipment for living creaks and threatens to break down in the face of the radically inexplicable, the radically unbearable, or the radically unjustifiable – irresolvable confusion, ineluctable pain, invincible evil, the primitive surds of finitude – that the sort of concern, often enough itself referred to as 'ultimate', that we recognize as religious comes into play [Jaspers 1971; Tillich 1952; Weber 1965]. To cite, as I have done more than once elsewhere, a passage by Suzanne Langer, another unclassifiable, freelance American social theorist: Man can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. [Our] most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung and Lebenanschauung … [In] a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making … because the need of reasserting the tribal morale and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe, the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees, to enact, if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts [1959: 287]. Equipped, then, with these three general notions, that meaning is autonomous, that it is conveyed in signs or symbols, and that religious meanings so conveyed are directed toward points at which impasse looms, I tried, just about forty years ago now and, curiously enough, here in Cambridge at a famous hands-across-the-sea ecumenical conference designed to gather younger British 'social' and younger American 'cultural' anthropologists into a common discourse community (little hope, apparently, was held out for the elders, most of whom avoided the event), to set forth a brief, general account of 'Religion as a Cultural [or, again, 'meaning'] System', by means of which I hoped I could identify and locate the centre of gravity, so far as there was one, in my dispersed and ad-hocish, engage it first, interpret it later, approach to things [Banton 1966: 1-46; Geertz 1973]. This involved, in the first instance, a tentative, rather awkward, rather diffuse, effort to construct a definition, not, as I thought I quite explicitly and insistently, even repetitiously, stated, to isolate 'an ontological', 'universalist', 'trans-historical''essence of religion for now and for always', but to control, guide, and render more explicit, an, at that time anyway, still rather angular and unfamiliar line of argument.1 This road-map, tour d'horizon'definition' (it was really more of a provocation than anything else, directed toward upending the complacencies at once of structuralism and functionalism, then the reigning paradigms in ethnological research) was mainly concerned with stressing the way in which a people's, a group's, or an individual's most comprehensive ideas of order, their world-view, and the pervading tone and temper of their lived life, their ethos, are made to complete and reinforce one another in religious practice: in ritual, in myth, in spiritual discipline, in the reflexive pieties of everyday life. 'Religion', to quote myself, 'tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience' [Geertz 1973: 90; for an earlier, less technical, statement, see Geertz 1958]. It gives, as the epigraph I took from George Santayana's neglected Reason and Religion put it, a particular and idiosyncratic 'bias to life', constructs (a believer might say, I suppose, 'discovers') 'another world to live in'. And 'another world to live in – whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not – is what we mean by having a religion' [Geertz 1973: 90]. In any case, having thus collected my thoughts as best I could manage for the moment and set them out for the powers to contemplate, I rather quickly tired of position-taking and polemical exchange, the here-we-are and there-we-are of programmatical discourse in scholastical places, and wanted to return to the mine-face, where, once again, the action is after all, to see if all this came to anything useful in understanding, as we say, 'the real world'– the one which people live in, but anthropologists only visit. Accordingly, I began yet another long-term, up-close encounter with another historically old, politically new, or anyway renovated, religiously emphatic society (Java at that time was fully in the throes of the pandemic violence I mentioned earlier) – namely, Morocco. Like Java (or Indonesia – but let us leave that problem aside), Morocco, is, of course, nominally, publicly, and at least semi-officially 'Islamic', has been so for the whole of its written history, and seems highly unlikely soon to change. But, unlike Java, it is Arabo-Berber, rather than Malayo-Polynesian, in its ground-bass infra-culture; and, unlike Java, it has been largely – not entirely, but largely – free of direct involvements with and intensive influences from other 'high', 'world', 'organized', 'doctrinal', or 'scriptural' religions. (There was, for a very long time, an enclave Jewish presence and, for a much shorter period, a supervenient Christian one, but neither had much effect on the overall drift and tenor of things.) As a result, instead of the diffuseness and conglomeration, the sense of eclecticism, dispersion, and continuous position-taking which marks Java, Morocco presents a much severer, much more focused and concentrated spiritual picture: 'Islam'sans phrase. Against Java's delicate carrefour balance between 'les frictions de la concurrence' and 'la volonté d'harmonie', Morocco seems (in its temper, at least – its social structure is another matter) direct, uncluttered, spare, and monophonic. To bring this contrast out, to unpack it, and to demonstrate the usefulness of the meaning system approach in focusing issues, I gave a series of rather brief, schematical, and in some ways reductive lectures after returning from North Africa in the late 1960s, in which, rather than offering an encyclopaedic survey of whatever seemed to have something or other to do locally with 'religion,' as I had for Java, I attempted to trace how a single, long-established, highly codified, extraordinarily self-conscious, not to say self-absorbed 'world religion', Islam, had worked itself out in quite different ways with quite different effects in quite different settings: the farthest Maghreb, the most distant Indies. Published later as Islam Observed [Geertz 1968] (which was supposed to be a pun, though I don't know that anyone noticed), my discussion was organized around the construction in each of the two societies of what I called their 'classical styles' of religious expression: in Java, a hierarchical, syncretistic, and rather diffuse, experience-seeking intuitionism; in Morocco, a strenuous, confrontational, and rather puristic, world-correcting moralism. The validity of these capsule characterizations aside (it is not possible in such matters to describe without misdescribing; exception and contradiction are so deeply built-in), my concern was to show how comprehensive, overall ideas of order, some of them derived from Islamic texts and traditions, some of them not, and particular, locally developed, locally accented social practices played into one another, dialectically if you like that sort of language, reciprocally if you don't, to produce concrete and particular trains de vie– distinctive ways-of-being-in-the-world. But a funny thing happened on the way to the argument. In both countries (and, it all too soon became apparent, in the world at large) the closeness of the tie between large views and local circumstances began to grow drawn and attenuated, transformed to a plane of abstract defensiveness and identity panic, even as I watched. What had been a fairly direct and immediate interplay between the everyday experiences of life among others and deep-laid notions of significance and collective purpose became, at least for large and growing segments of the two populations, though again in characteristically contrastive ways, a much more elusive, intricate, unsteady, and uncertain matter. To name this phenomenon, and in part to characterize it, though its force and scale, as well as its staying power, remained quite unclear, I coined, for the nonce, the nonce-phrase 'religious mindedness'. In the course of their separate social histories, the Moroccans and the [Javanese] created, partly out of Islamic traditions, partly out of others, images of ultimate reality in terms of which they both saw life and sought to live it. Like all religious conceptions, these images carried within them their own justification; the symbols (rites, doctrines, objects, events) through which they were expressed were, for those responsive to them, intrinsically coercive, immediately persuasive – they glowed with their own authority. It is this quality that they seem gradually to be losing, at least for a small but growing minority. What is believed to be true has not changed for these people, or not changed much. What has changed is the way in which it is believed [Geertz 1963: 17]. Whatever you want to call it (and, as I say, 'religious mindedness' does not seem to be quite the right term, for it suggests a certain superficiality and falling away from genuineness which I don't think was the case), there seemed in both countries to be a change, then still limited but rapidly accelerating, in the way in which religious convictions were brought together with the workings of everyday life. The relations between the two were less simple, less immediate, and less direct – more in need of explicit, conscious, organized support. The forms which this took in both countries – back-to-the-Quran reformist movements, political-party organization of religious interests, the efflorescence of propaganda, apology, and doctrinal argument – brought nothing so much to mind as another line from Santayana, this one about persons (he called them 'fanatics', but that too is not quite right) who, having lost sight of their aim, redouble their effort. A great deal has happened, both in Indonesia and Morocco particularly and in the Islamic world generally, since those lectures were delivered in what turned out to be the après nous le déluge year: 1967. Indonesia has had five presidents