Manufacturing religion: the discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia 9780195166637, 9780195105032, 9780195355680

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction: The Manufacture of "Religion" (page 3)
1. Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia (page 27)
2. Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege (page 51)
3. The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade (page 74)
4. The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom (page 101)
5. The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship (page 127)
6. The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Religion (page 158)
7. Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory (page 192)
Notes (page 215)
References (page 227)
Index (page 245)

Citation preview

Manufacturing Religion

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Manufacturing Religion The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

Russell T. McCutcheon

OXFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai

Dares Salaam Delhi HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Mumbai Nairobi San Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright © 1997 by Russell T. McCutcheon , First published in 1997 by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2003 www.oup.com

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCutcheon, Russell T., 1961—

Manufacturing religion : the discourse on sui generis religion and the politics of nostalgia / Russell T. McCutcheon.

, p. cm.

Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral) — University of Toronto, 1995. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510503-6; 0-19-516663-9 (pbk). 1. Religion—Study and teaching—Methodology. I. Title. BL41.M35 1997 200'.72——dc20 96-22755

13579 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated to my mother Claire (1925-1996), and my brother Elliot (1949-1996), both of whom left us far too soon and too suddenly.

It is also dedicated to the woman who continually fills my life with happiness, my wife, friend, and love, Marcia, “all curled up beneath your blanket.”

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Preface The frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. —Michel Foucault

Where do books such as this come from? Can we trace their path and find their origin? Can we fully acknowledge our debts? Foucault helps us to answer these questions—but only a little—for his answer is that they come from such a vast network of associations, both intentional and accidental, material and immaterial, as to make them virtually impossible to trace with any accuracy. But this should not lead us to conclude that there are not at least a few well-trod paths that we can discern when we turn around. They are not the whole, that’s most certain, but they are important parts nonetheless. What follows are just some of the paths that have conspired to lead me to the position I argue in the following pages. The first issue of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion contained an article

that had a formative influence on the present work: Neil McMullin’s critique (1989a) of the ideological nature of the Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987). Al-

though it makes an important individual scholarly contribution, for me the main influence of McMullin’s critique is directly linked to the way in which it became part of a relatively minor, but a no less important, controversy in the field. In other words, I was struck by the form of the debate even more than its content, for in the following issue the editors published Gary Ebersole’s letter (1989), which took issue with the “content and tone” of McMullin’s article. Ebersole was bothered by the way in which McMullin engaged in “Eliade ‘bashing’” rather than

making what was, in his opinion, “any substantial contribution in terms of a new method or approach to the study of religion” (238). He was also troubled by the way Eliade was lumped together “with two amorphous (faceless and nameless) groups—his ‘fellow religionists’...and the ‘well-known “Chicago School” of Religious Studies’ and/or his ‘co-religionists’” (238). Ebersole concludes that McMullin’s article “has little place in a serious journal and unfortunately has

vill Preface marred your initial issue. I trust that with the proper editorial control future issues will raise the level of intellectual discourse” (240). Upon first reading this exchange—and it is an exchange that deserves to be read in full, including McMullin’s reply as well as Robert Segal’s (1989a, 1989c) own article to which Ebersole was also replying—I was immediately struck by how Ebersole’s letter, calling for “serious” and “substantial” scholarship and tighter editorial control, brought to mind a passage of Noam Chomsky’s that I had recently read and underlined: “The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to the right of deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms [i.e., calls for exclusion/silencing through higher academic standards]”’ (1991: 9). Reading Ebersole’s letter, through the critical apparatus provided by Chomsky, suggested that indeed a sociopolitical and discursive consensus—even hegemony—currently operates by means of ideological strategies in the study of religion. Most of all, it was McMullin’s reply to Ebersole that struck a chord with me: The production of new methods and approaches in the study of ‘religion’ has been a major industry for a long time now, but much of that energy has been expended in the generation of methods and approaches that are based on widely accepted but highly problematic notions of what constitutes ‘religion.’ If Professor Ebersole is calling for yet more methods and approaches of that species, then I would ask,

to what avail? (1989b: 250)

It is clear to me now that this book is in large part an effort, whether conscious or not, to further substantiate and elaborate on what I find to be McMullin’s insightful criticism—a criticism that extends far beyond what has commonly been termed the Chicago school. In at least this one light, then, my work can be read as an extended effort first to delineate clearly the lines of the regnant discourse, to name the ideological processes that function to establish and perpetuate it, and, in so doing, to identify some of the “names and faces” that constitute its various sites. Simply put, it is an effort to answer the following three questions: “what is the shape of the regnant Religious Studies discourse, why does it have the shape that it does, and what/whom is being served by it?” (McMullin 1989b: 244). In developing answers to these questions, this book has been further influenced by such works as Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion (1982) and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988). Indeed, my very title will no doubt be evidence of my debt to these two sources. Following Smith,

I contend that the category of religion is a conceptual tool and ought not to be confused with an ontological category actually existing in reality. In other words, our use of the scholarly category of religion is theoretically based, a model not to be confused with reality—whatever that may or may not be. However, Smith’s title does not suggest the practical and material uses of such categorial creations.

Preface ix Herman and Chomsky’s critical study of the role media plays not simply in reflecting public opinion but in actually constructing it in such a way so as to be consistent with the policies and interests of the powerful provides the necessary corrective to the idealist connotations of Smith’s title. However, in terms of Herman and Chomsky’s methodology, I do not employ their propaganda model, because such a model presumes that observable and documented similarities among, in their case, the mass media, the corporate sector, the military, and government policy are evidence of an intentional alliance. As I argue in chapter 6, although speculations on the possible reasons for the similarities between, for example, mass media and scholarly representations of Vietnamese self-immolations of the early 1960s are largely beyond this book, to depict and understand the relations in terms

of propaganda alone is far too simplistic. The propaganda model overlooks the diverse ways in which members of a hegemonic system participate in the definition, coordination, articulation, and experience of dominance. It was my readings of such works as Ivan Strenski’s Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History (1987), Sam Preus’s Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (1987), and Michel Foucault’s Archaeclogy of Knowledge

(1989) that brought the general outline of this project into focus for me. Only in hindsight, after returning to Strenski’s book, but this time as a resource in one of

my own courses, did I realize the extent to which it had influenced my own thought. For instance, even though I did not have his work consciously in my mind at the time of conceiving of my title, the relations between, for example, my

own title and thesis, on the one hand, and the quotation from his introduction

which begins my own, on the other hand, should indicate that portions of Strenski’s work were highly influential in my thinking. Although I do not, as he did, attempt to recover the intentions of the actors whose scholarship I critique, I do attempt to link material and social implications to what might otherwise be considered abstract, disembodied philosophical work; in this regard I owe much to his earlier efforts. The influence of Preus’s recovery of a coherent, alternative tradition in the study of religion, what he terms the naturalistic paradigm, can be seen throughout this book. By naturalism, I read Preus as meaning the effort to study religion as a part of human culture and history. Naturalists simply presume that “religion could be understood without the benefit of clergy” and without needing “commitments about its causes different from the assumptions one might use to understand and explain other realms of culture” (Preus 1987: x). Because I attempt to avoid questions concerning the truth of religious claims, as the wonderful quotation from Thomas Huxley that opens this book should make clear, the harsher understanding of naturalism as “repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation” (Danto

1967: 448) is not put forward here. Nor is my use of the term “naturalism” to be equated with the ideological strategy of naturalization, that is, making ontological

x Preface | claims as to what is or is not natural, normative, and acceptable. Instead, due to the constraints—discursive rules, if you will—that characterize the teaching, debate, and research that takes place in the context of public universities, accepting naturalism implies recognizing that because some questions may lie outside the competencies of the university (e.g., Is there meaning to life? Does an intelligent mind control our destiny? What is the Good?), pursuing answers to them would better take place in other sorts of contexts and institutions. Two of the specific tenets of naturalism that are perhaps most relevant to this book are (1) the assumption that scholars carry out their work in the sociohistorical world, and (2) the assumption that the categories and concepts scholars routinely employ to describe and account for the world are equally natural products with not only a history but also material implications. Although I have opted to understand the assorted ways of talking about and constructing religion as discourses rather than as Kuhnian paradigms, as does Preus, the history he outlines implicitly provided me with many of the tools without which my own critique would not be possible. It is probably accurate to say that it was only in the late 1980s, while reading Preus’s history in Donald Wiebe’s seminar at the University of Toronto, that I first became aware not only of the highly charged nature of theoretical debates within the field but also of the largely marginalized place of naturalist, explanatory theorizing in the modern study of religion, as well as some of the material and political issues at stake in this debate. There may be no better way to summarize what constitutes the naturalist position that Preus documents—an approach he describes as “inchoately present but departmentally fragmented in the contemporary university” (1987: ix)—than to refer to Daniel Dennett’s rather apt images of skyhooks and cranes (1995: 7380; see also Rorty 1995). Skyhooks are immaterial or imaginary devices used for attaching objects to the sky, whereas cranes are materially based and seemingly mundane mechanical devices. Where the former is more akin to the deus ex machina of Greek dramas, the latter builds from the ground up using preexisting or simply given materials. Applied to theories, theoretical skyhooks posit the existence

and role for one or more forces completely external to the historical realm (e.g., Plato’s realm of the Forms for an example, any Creator in any cosmogony, or the anthropomorphic images of an intentional, conscious Mother Nature/Gaia). Theoretical cranes, on the other hand, are products of, and therefore inextricably part of, the historical world that is to be explained (for Dennett there is no better example than Darwin’s theory of natural selection). In other words, we make cranes for specific jobs and purposes, whereas skyhooks are simply presumed to be just out there, waiting to help or to be invoked. Naturalism, as I understand it, sees our efforts to know the world around us as the work of cranes. Naturalist efforts to study religion, we could say, take as their datum the intriguing fact that some humans, from time to time, invoke skyhooks. This is not to say that skyhooks are not in fact out there or in here somewhere, but it is to say that in the discourse

Preface x1 of the university, where our claims to knowledge are not privileged but open to _ debate and scrutiny, all we have are cranes. Apart from these influences, overall, it was Foucault’s efforts to identify the conditions and rules that make particular knowledges and discourses possible in the first place (i.e., a crane for constructing knowledge) that caused me to shift my critical attention from, for example, the history of the isolated term “sacred,” or simply the biography of Eliade, as if they were autonomous objects. Instead, these are but instances, or arbitrarily isolated sites, of far wider mental, material, and institutional practices. It was Foucault’s work that assisted me in making the shift from examining seemingly stable objects to dynamic, constructive processes, by drawing attention to the widely operating, but normally transparent, rules and strategies that construct a discursive space at countless sites. Given the influence of these works, to manufacture religion suggests that the scholarly category is not simply the product of certain intellectual processes but may also result from, and be useful in terms of, certain specific material interests as well. Hence, my naturalism is aligned with material analysis. Because the implications of these representations involve reinstating and promoting certain organizations and values ostensibly rooted in some idealized and romantic past era (interpreted as if they were self-evidently authoritative for the present and the future), I also make use of Armin Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen’s highly appropriate term, “the politics of nostalgia.” The book, then, is largely an attempt to persuade readers that the widespread scholarly assumption, operative at least in North American scholarship, that religion is best conceptualized as sui generis, autonomous, of its own kind, strictly personal, essential, unique, prior to, and ultimately distinct from, all other facets of human life and interaction, is a highly useful discursive as well as political strategy. Accordingly, the self-evidence of religion as a unified, personal, and socially autonomous phenomenon needs to be held up to critical examination, for “[a]s soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidency; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse” (Foucault 1989: 23). Furthermore, as I argue in chapter 7, this claim to the inherent autonomy of the datum, which has so far provided one of the primary ways of legitimizing the autonomy of modern departments of religion, Is, ironically, in part responsible for their ongoing lack of institutional identity. Although the sui generis claim makes possible an autonomous discourse, complete with the benefits and the authority of its practitioners—complete with the privilege of their sociopolitical claims— it does so in a noncriticizable, nonpublic, nontestable fashion, thereby ensuring that the standards of evidence and falsification that operate in much of the university have little bearing on the study of religion. In other words, the sui generis claim effectively not only excludes the datum and the researcher from critical scrutiny but isolates and excludes the study of religion as well from developing a coherent institutional identity. The future of the field, therefore, may have more to do with developing our skills for natural-

xii Preface istic and explanatory theorizing than many scholars of religion have so far realized,

Apart from the books I’ve mentioned, I owe a great deal to a number of people who have assisted me in countless ways throughout the process of writing this book. The main impetus for this study lies in a series of conversations, beginning in 1990, with Neil McMullin and Donald Wiebe, both members of my Ph.D. advisory committee and at that time the director and associate director, respectively, of the University of Toronto’s cross-disciplinary Centre for the Study of Religion. I know that I can speak on behalf of a number of former students at Toronto in saying that we were very lucky to have experienced the creative atmosphere that Neil and Don brought with them to the study of religion. With regard to my own work, their support, not only in the form of their critical and insightful readings of drafts of chapters but their continued enthusiasm for the project— whether or not they always agreed with the substance or the implications of the argument—has always been extremely important and helpful. Specifically, I thank Neil for introducing me to the kind of critical theorizing that forms the background of my entire critique, and I thank Don not only for tirelessly driving home the need for naturalistic theorizing in the study of religion but, perhaps more importantly, for always treating his conversation partners as equals in an ongoing debate. Along the way, I was also influenced by conversations with, and various contributions by, a number of colleagues and good friends. Where some graciously read one or more drafts of chapters, offering very helpful assessments, others were willing (and sometimes unknowing) partners in helping me develop my ideas. Of these people, I must mention: Bruce Alton, Ann Baranowski, Rakesh Bhatt, Willi Braun, Michel Desjardins, Tim Fitzgerald, Armin Geertz, Rosalind Hackett, Ed Hamel, Stephen Heathorn, Mark Hulsether, Darlene Juschka, Tom Lawson, Gary Lease, Bruce Lincoln, Bruce MacKay, Brian Malley, Arthur McCalla, Luther Martin, Tim Murphy, Bill Paden, Sam Preus, Joan Riedl, and Muna Salloum. To all these

people I express my sincere thanks and appreciation. The members of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where I taught between 1993 and 1996, must also be acknowledged for their helpful responses to

portions of my work presented to them in the fall of 1994 and for providing computing and copying facilities. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Department of Religious Studies at Southwest Missouri State University. I must mention also both the students in my courses on the study of myths and rituals

. as well as the assorted members of the method and theory Internet list, Andere-L, centered at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Because classrooms and computer bulletin boards are such excellent places to experiment and play with new ideas, I am grateful for the students’ and subscribers’ ever-helpful—and sometimes spirited—replies to various parts of my project that we have discussed over

the past few years. I must also thank all those at Oxford University Press who

Preface xiil made this book possible. Specifically, I would like to thank Cynthia Read, Robert Dilworth, Peter Ohlin, Jessica Ryan, and my copy editor, Carol Roberts. I would like to close by expressing a debt of gratitude to my parents, Claire and Russell; my sisters, Ingrid and Sylvia; and my brother, Elliot, for their ongoing support and continued interest in my work over the past years. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Marcia. For your encouragement while I was researching and writing, for listening to me endlessly repeating my ideas, working them out in my own

head by talking about them to you, for all the driving you have done so that I _ could be near to campus resources, for uprooting and moving south, for putting up with my grumbling about this and that over the past ten years, and, through it all, for being a person of such great and natural kindness that it couldn’t help but rub off on me, I offer my thanks and my love.

Springfield, Missouri R. McC. February 1997

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Acknowledgments

This book is based on my doctoral dissertation written for the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Study of Religion. Since defending that work in early January of 1995, I have rewritten the manuscript and added two new chapters (chapters 5 and 7). Chapter 5 is a revised and enlarged version of an essay that was originally

published in the periodical Numen and appears here with the kind permission of its publisher, E. J. Brill. In places, I have also relied on reviews, essays, and critiques

that I have written and published over the past few years. For the permission to reprint portions of these works, I thank the journals, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Zygon. The critique of ethnocentrism that appears in chapter 5 relies, in part, on work that I delivered at the Seventeenth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religion, in Mexico City, 1995. Finally, the photograph of Thich Quang Duc that appears in chapter 6 is reprinted with the permission of the Associated Press/Wide World Photos.

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Contents

Introduction: The Manufacture of “Religion” 3 1. Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 27 2. Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 51

3. The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 74 4. The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 101 5. The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 127

6. The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Religion 158 7. Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 192

Notes 215 References 227

Index 243

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Manufacturing Religion

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated,

under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible, I shall avoid the expression of any opinion as to the objective truth or falsehood of the systems of theological speculation of which I may find occasion to speak. From my present point of view, theology is regarded as a natural product of the operations of the human mind, under the conditions of its existence, just as any other branch of science, or the arts of architecture, or music, or painting are such products. Like them, theology has a history. . . . It is not my object to interfere, even in the slightest degree, with beliefs which anybody holds sacred; or to alter the conviction of any one who is of opinion that, in dealing with theology, we ought to be guided by considerations different from those which would be thought appropriate if the problem lay in the province of chemistry or of mineralogy. And if people of these ways of thinking choose to read beyond the present paragraph, the responsibility for meeting with anything they may dislike rests with them and not with me. —Thomas H. Huxley, “The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study”

It is well known that no groups love an “informer,” especially perhaps when the transgressor or traitor can claim to share their own highest values. The same people who would not hesitate to acclaim the work of objectification as “courageous” or “lucid” if it is applied to alien, hostile groups will be likely to question the credentials of the special lucidity claimed by anyone who seeks to analyze his own group. The sorcerer’s apprentice who takes the risk of looking into native sorcery and its fe-

tishes, instead of departing to seek in tropical climes the comforting charms of exotic magic, must expect to see turned against him the violence he has unleashed. — Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus

Introduction: The Manufacture of “Religion” Thus, instead of there being a real thing, myth, there is a thriving industry, manufacturing and marketing what is called ‘myth’. ‘Myth’ is an ‘illusion’—an appearance conjured or ‘construct’ created by artists and intellectuals toiling in the workshops of the myth industry. Masquerading as an ‘importer’ of the exotic and archaic, the myth industry in fact fabricates one of the most sought-after ‘exports’ from the human sciences and humanities. In its myriad confusing forms, that ‘export’ supports the modern literature on ‘myth’. —Ivan Strenski

The Myth of Religious Uniqueness This book is an adaptation and application of some methods of analysis developed by such critical theorists as Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault to the analysis of the often made scholarly claim that religion is sui generis. It is a study of the social and political implications of certain practices and habits of representation in the modern study of religion, for the common assertion that religion per se or private religious experience in particular, is sui generis, unique, and sociohistorically autonomous, is itself a scholarly representation that operates within, and assists in maintaining, a very specific set of discursive practices along with the institutions in which these discourses are articulated and reproduced. Insomuch as this discourse is institutionalized, it can

be further identified by such related aspects as the need for distinct or unique methods for the interpretation of religious data and scholarly calls for the institutional autonomy of the scholarly study of religion. Accordingly, not only do these assorted claims arise from within, and assist in maintaining, this specific discourse on religion but the smooth functioning of the discourse has material and sociopolitical—even geopolitical—implications concerning such issues as individual expertise, social power, and politico-economic privilege. Simply put, the discourse on sui generis religion deemphasizes difference, history, and sociopolitical context in favor of abstract essences and homogeneity. When it comes to taking 3

4 Manufacturing Religion account of the possibly messy overlap between issues of power and spirituality, it is a powerful “bracketing device” (a term borrowed from Rosalind Shaw [1995:

68]). In the broadest possible perspective, then, this discourse on religion, grounded in the scholarly privilege afforded by the sui generis claim, participates in a general liberal discourse that deemphasizes material difference for the sake of immaterial and abstract sameness.

Because this claim concerning religion’s autonomy operates within and grounds much of the modern academic discourse on religion'—although, as I will argue, It is by no means the only modern discourse on religion—the data for this book arises from a wide variety of sources. They vary from the work of nineteenthand twentieth-century scholars of religion, assorted instances drawn from various periodicals, comparative religion textbooks, media reports, contemporary theoretical works, and contributions to the Encyclopedia of Religion. However, because of the great volume of potential sources and the sheer complexity of analyzing an entire academic discourse whose existence spans more than one hundred years and bridges several continents, the book concentrates mainly on the discourse on religion as it has developed in North America and devotes its initial discursive and political analyses to two primary areas where the discourse on sui generis religion is most evident: the work of, as well as the secondary scholarship surrounding the life and work of, the foremost twentieth-century scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade. This book, then, addresses one way in which the category of religion is portrayed, understood, and represented—in a word, manufactured—throughout an academic discourse as sociopolitically autonomous, critiques the assumptions or rules that make such a representation possible and normative, and, in the end, identifies the ways in which such representations sanction and sustain sociopolitical

and material agendas. In this regard, Shaw is quite right to conclude that “by making it [sui generis religion] central to their discourse, scholars in the history of religions are effectively insulated from uncomfortable questions about standpoint and privilege” (1995: 70); like their Christian theological predecessors who claimed the Christian message to be equally autonomous and unique, they are effectively insulated from political and historical analyses. Accordingly, a study needs to be written that would, in a way, parallel one already in print, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness (Hick and Knitter 1987).? This new book, however, would not be directed toward an audience of practicing theologians nor be concerned with promoting religious pluralism. Instead, it could bear the title The Myth of Religious Uniqueness and would reverse the current scholastic, institutional, and political insulation enjoyed by scholars of religion. It would be related to the work of such critics as David Carroll (1995), who finds links between assertions regarding autonomy— in Carroll’s case, the autonomy of the category of literature—and political action. For example, as applied to the work of Paul de Man, Carroll argues that the “literary concepts and critical strategies on which de Man relied in his newspaper articles [in the World War II collaborationist

Introduction 5 Belgian paper Le Soir] to defend the autonomy of literature and art... served rather than countered the extremist nationalist and fascist politics he also defended in these articles” (15). When first coming across such critical claims, largely in the work of the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, I was amazed by the degree to which such criticisms in the field of literary studies could be applied to the study of religion. I found that, as in the quotation from Carroll, one could just as easily substitute the category of religion for literature. Whether it is Christian, literary, religious, or even ethnic and nationalist uniqueness, all such claims of intellectual and sociocultural autonomy carry with them, and move within, political implications and relations. Like the category of myth, as critiqued by Strenski in the opening quotation and much the same as literature is examined by Carroll, sui generis religion is a constructed, analytical tool with an occluded manufacturing history and disguised material implications. It is for this reason that the simple and possibly misleading title of The Myth of Religious Uniqueness fails to communicate the full scope of the criticism needed to dispel the long-standing assumption that matters of religiosity

and spirituality inhabit a privileged, unblemished realm. Such a criticism must address not only the beliefs of those who assume religion to be unique but also the material, social, and political practices that are associated with, entrenched through, and supportive of, such assertions. Therefore, it is not so much a myth that concerns us (however one wishes to define this slippery term) but an ideological posture insomuch as the trace of the concept religion’s construction is overlooked, ignored, or possibly disguised; sui generis religion is to that degree an ideological construct whose authority is based on its supposedly autonomous existence. Having identified a number of the strategies that bring about such occlu-

sion and found them to be operating in numerous sites within the discourse on religion, I identify some ways in which an alternative, oppositional discourse on religion—constructing religion as but one aspect of the study of human history and culture—also operates within academia. Advocating such naturalistic approaches, my conclusions firmly support Arthur McCalla’s conclusion that the “dream of a unified, autonomous study of religion must be dropped in favor of an interdisciplinary model” (1994: 435).

In detailing what he sees as the misplaced efforts of Talal Asad’s critique of Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion (which is examined in greater detail in chapter 5), Benson Saler has unknowingly summed up the aims of this book: Asad’s essay ... can be read as an outline for developing trenchant criticisms of the views of persons who do maintain that religious symbols, if not precisely sui generis themselves, nevertheless symbolically represent that which, in their opinion,

is sui generis....I have in mind Mircea Eliade and like-minded others. Those students of religion maintain that religion indicates irreducibly religious sensitivities, such as consciousness of “the sacred” or “the transcendent.” Religion, they claim, is universally distinguished from all else by its references to, and represen-

6 Manufacturing Religion tations of that irreducibly religious element. Asad’s essay, read with those people in mind, raises issues and makes points that could be incorporated into a major criticism of the idea that religion is “autonomous.” (1993: 102)

Although I came across Asad’s and Saler’s work near the end of my own research, my hope is that this book makes a contribution to such a major criticism.

Getting Our Hands Dirty Having said what this book is, I must clarify what it is not. First, it is not aimed at making a substantive contribution to our knowledge about religion in general or about specific religions. Although I may discuss examples drawn from what many identify as religions, or what are generally considered to be aspects of them (e.g., myths or rituals) from time to time, these are not my focus. Second, this is not an attempt to develop a theory of religion. As important as such work is— and I see the development of testable, naturalist theories as extremely important to the future of this discourse—this book does not develop such a theory. It should be clear, then, that this book is not about describing, understanding, or even explaining religion, religious beliefs, religious practices, or religious experiences. — Instead, it is a critical work in methodological, theoretical, and political analysis, as applied to a particular way of talking about, conceptualizing, and constructing religion as a discursive object in the context of the modern public university. It is metatheoretical in focus, aiming to work toward such a major criticism as outlined by Saler, so as eventually to contribute to constructing a discursive and institutional

environment where naturalist theorizing can take place. If anything, then, it is a theoretical critique of “religion.” For some scholars of religion, such a metatheoretical focus will no doubt be troubling or possibly even perplexing. I say this because, on a number of occasions, I have been asked by colleagues, “But where do you get your hands dirty?” I take

it that they are asking me what historical religion, which specific myth, or what particular ritual do I study. No doubt after coming clean as to what the book is concerned to address, some readers will still be asking what I simply refer to as the “dirty hands” question. “All this is fine and good, but what has it got to do with religion?” Another form of the question revolves around talk of hard data: Where is your hard data? Have you been in the field? Where is your ethnographic evidence? The prominence of this sort of questioning in the discourse has direct relevance for the critique I develop, for it presumes that religions, myths, and rituals are simply and self-evidently “out there,” unique and easily identified, like ripe fruit on a tree just waiting to be picked. For scholars intrigued by the ways in which implicit and nontestable theories, commitments, and contexts shape and construct our questions, our methods, and even the data we study, these questions are difficult to answer in a way that makes

Introduction 7 sense to one’s curious colleague who takes religion as a self-evidently real and distinct part of all human experience or consciousness. To answer such questions truthfully, I would have to say that, like all scholars, I do my fieldwork in a number of sites. For instance, it can be done at department meetings where colleagues are debating whether, for some particular student, to stretch the requirements of the major in the study of religion, or when they question whether this or that course

ought to be required of students (in both instances, we are explicitly contesting differing conceptions of religion and what should count as a religious studies degree). Because I study the ways scholars construct religion, I do fieldwork in publications and at national and international conferences on religion, where the methodological and theoretical hegemony in the field is often most evident. So, to the question, “Where do you get your hands dirty?” I can honestly answer that I do it as a participant-observer-analyst of the scholarly profession of constructing and studying religion in North America. Making the discourse on religion one’s data, as it were, as opposed to religion itself, is generally not received very well by some scholars, however, for it often entails questioning and examining apparent self-evidencies and seeing methodological and theoretical consensus not simply as natural but as something that develops over time, is continually encouraged and contested, and may at times even be manufactured, all in the context of historical, social, and political factors. Much like historians or philosophers of science, at least for a time, suspend their participation in the scientific enterprise and become scholars of scientists and the sci-

entific method, those with metatheoretical interests in the study of religion are historians, philosophers, and critics of the study of religion—which, of course, must

| be distinguished from historians, philosophers, and critics of religion (not to mention religious devotees and practitioners themselves). For the former, it is precisely these latter scholars, their work, and their institutional practices, that deserve our

attention. It is for this reason that I can, at least in part, identify with Thomas Kuhn when he described the “drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to more philosophical concerns” (1970: v).

So, my readers might ask, what has all this got to do with religion? It has everything to do with it, for it is an attempt to demonstrate why religion is what it is for us as scholars, what is at stake for keeping religion and its study that way, and what might be gained by changing it.

The Scale Makes the Phenomenon In the often-quoted foreword to his Patterns in Comparative Religion, Mircea Eliade states that “it is the scale that makes the phenomenon” (1958: xiii). Without knowledge of the context in which this statement is made, its meaning is not immediately clear, because it suggests associations with contemporary social constructionist the-

8 Manufacturing Religion ories. However, given his repeated assertions of the irreducibility of the religious datum, it is reasonable to interpret his statement concerning scale as a critique of those methods that fail to take account of this irreducibility. This is what Eliade seems to have meant when he wrote of studying religion seriously or when he argued, circularly, that something essential would be lost if the religious datum were not studied as something irreducibly religious in nature. It appears incorrect, then, to interpret Eliade’s assertion as suggesting that the observer's scale—the methods and theories employed to conduct research and generate hypotheses—actually creates or constructs the phenomenon itself. After all, the very term “phenomenon” suggests the influence of the traditional essence/ manifestation division of classical phenomenology of religion, a division based on the assumption that the historically and socially relative characteristics of a manifestation are not ultimately identical with the essence. Given these considerations,

the use of the term “makes” suggests that the observer’s viewpoint can either constrain and distort or accurately interpret the phenomenon under study. In other words, there is a judgment concerning the suitability of just what is made. It is somewhat similar to the idiomatic use of “made” in the phrase, “You made my day”; this does not imply that someone constructed a measurable unit of time but rather that the day was somehow qualitatively different and better. In spite of the fact that Eliade almost surely did not mean to imply that the

| religious phenomenon could actually be constructed by such factors as the observer's theoretical stance (but rather that some important aspect of its nature may be overlooked or minimalized due to certain insufficiencies in the observer’s position), the semantic ambiguity of the “made” statement presents an opportunity to explore some of the unarticulated assumptions and implications of what has generally come to be known as the antireductionist position in the modern study of religion.» To read the quoted phrase as implying an antireductionist stance necessitates that the reader successfully negotiate a series of unarticulated associations to decipher such clues as the nuanced meaning of “makes” and the implications of “phenomenon.” However, if one does not share certain aspects of this one discursive context, then the phrase could easily be interpreted as implying something entirely different. For example, if, contrary to the dominant interpretation, one reads Eliade’s assertion as indicating the socially constructed nature of human cognitive categories and experience, then not only the phenomenon one studies (e.g., religion, religious experiences, myths, rituals) but the phenomenon of the study itself (e.g., the science of religion, Religionswissenschaft, even scholars of religion as humans authorized to make certain judgments) could, to whatever degree, be said to be the result of one’s scale, point of view, theory, or method. This alternative reading, then, maintains that both the datum under study as well as the datum of the study itself are to some extent dependent on whether one employs or refrains from employing certain theoretical frameworks. Traditionally, scholars of religion have investigated this one aspect of human behavior in terms

Introduction 9 derived largely from within religious communities and contexts themselves, such as soteriology, sin, the Holy, and the like, and the datum examined by such scholars has generally been conceived as a unique and separate aspect of human experience. However, on the basis of the alternative reading presented above, the specific datum such scholars study is understood as legitimized by, and perhaps even derived from, their very investigative categories. In other words, the assumption that, in essence, religion is socially and historically isolated is further entrenched by the choice of certain investigative tools, such as the phenomenological method (which, through empathic description based on religious insider accounts, constitutes an attempt to determine an ahistorical essence based on an analysis of historical manifestations or instances) and the comparative method, which abstracts a posited sameness from instances of material difference. A useful example of this is Roger Schmidt’s introductory textbook, Exploring Religion (1988). The chapters of this text are divided among such topics as the holy, the quest, symbolism, sacred stories, Scripture, God, evil and human destiny, holy communities, patterns and varieties of faith, salvation, and features and types of holy rites. Schmidt’s phenomenological and descriptive approach is evident in these categories insomuch as they presume, for example, that it is useful to conceive of certain forms of human organization and behavior as distinctively holy. By selecting just these categories, the text introduces the student to religion conceived as a unique human experience possibly related to, but certainly not caused by or reducible to, other aspects of human life.

| Such an understanding of religion is evident in Schmidt’s opening chapter, in which religion is defined as “a human seeking and responding to what is experienced as holy. It is a set of beliefs, practices, and social structures grounded in a people’s experience of what they regard as ultimately real and that accommodate their emotional, intellectual, and social needs” (25). According to Schmidt, then, religion is based on interior experiences, possibly characteristic of groups of people, characterized by a seeking and responding that accommodates, rather than originates from, emotional, intellectual, and social needs. Accordingly, his choice of phenomenological description and analysis, based on such ill-defined categories as the holy, faith, and sacred stories, predetermines that his introduction to the study

of religion precludes studying religion as but one facet of human culture intimately , linked to other aspects of culture and history. His theoretical stance and methodological tools predetermine that the “religious perspective” is essentially free of social, economic, and political interference. Citing Clifford Geertz, Schmidt concludes that the specifically religious perspective is the view that the “values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality” (25). Whatever this inherent structure might be, it certainly does not appear to be derived from historical factors.

Schmidt’s analysis presumes that talk about the “ultimately real” or an “inherent structure of reality” is self-evidently meaningful and precludes from the

10 Manufacturing Religion outset all inquiries into how such metaphysical claims may in fact originate from, or how they function in relation to, social and historical contexts. In other words, his essentialist definition and his use of the epoché (or the act of bracketing and excluding one’s own judgments and biases in the effort to generate a neutral description of an event) serve to exclude questions of social, political, and historical

import and to construct his religious datum in a very specific manner. As an example of this, consider the way Schmidt’s analysis evades a more critical reading of the statement made by Geertz; in the original passage, Geertz is actually advocating a study of religion that is very different from Schmidt’s phenomenologically based study. The entire paragraph quoted by Schmidt reads as follows: The heart of this way of looking at the world, that is, of the religious perspective,

is, so I would argue, not the theory that beyond the visible world there lies an invisible one (though most religious men have indeed held, with differing degrees of sophistication, to some such theory); not the doctrine that a divine presence broods over the world (though, in an extraordinary variety of forms, from animism to monotheism, that too has been a rather popular idea); not even the more

diffident opinion that there are things in heaven and earth undreamt of in our philosophies. Rather, it is the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable inner connection. What sacred symbols do for those to whom they are sacred is to formulate an image of the world’s construction and a program for human conduct that are mere reflexes of one another. (C. Geertz 1968: 97)

Where Schmidt reads Geertz’s statement to imply that religions, in constructing an image of the inherent structure of reality, assist humans in “transcend[ing] the unsatisfactory character of human existence” (25), it is entirely possible to interpret

Geertz as making a statement not about the existential function of religions but about their practical and sociopolitical function. The study of religion, according to Geertz, should not focus on such issues as devotee speculations on the other world, divine beings, or even mysteries. Rather it should focus on the ways in which “sacred symbols” (which, he asserts, are sacred only insomuch as people make them sacred) are employed to facilitate slippage from the descriptive is to the normative and prescriptive ought. In this text, Geertz is not concerned with whether or not there is an “unbreakable inner connection” between the way religious people live and the way all people ought to live. Instead, the question of interest revolves around the ways in which the former is portrayed as the latter, just why and how this supposedly unbreakable inner connection is constructed and maintained by a group of people. In other words, Geertz is not advocating a comparative and phenomenological study of religious things, for example, the holy and the quest, as found in Schmidt’s analysis. Rather, he is advocating the study of the mechanisms whereby normative sociopolitical judgments (e.g., the program

Introduction 11 for human conduct he mentions) arise from what otherwise are simply descriptive claims about the state of the world. For Geertz, then, “sacred” does not designate a shared religious experience, as it does for many historians of religions; rather, in

this case, it denotes those symbols that are powerful enough to carry out and simultaneously cloak ideological slippage. Because Schmidt’s understanding of religion purports to accord, to a significant degree, with the devotee’s own self-understanding (e.g., religious feelings are

wholly different from other sorts of feelings), and because alternative theories to explain these feelings, beliefs, and organizations are excluded from the outset, Schmidt’s particular interpretation of religion is easily understood by his readers as authoritative and normative. By glossing over such issues as the highly abstract and metaphysical nature of much of his terminology and the explicit sociopolitical role religion plays, Schmidt’s introduction to the study of religion not only normativizes one particular interpretation of religion but creates the impression that the study of religion is concerned simply with interpreting a mysterious phenom-

enon rather than explaining one aspect of human culture in relation to other aspects. His undefended theoretical assumption of the utter uniqueness of all religious experience, then, is entrenched in, and elaborated by, his methods. The scale, then, does indeed create the phenomenon.

The Hegemony of Scale Among the variety of possible scales and theoretical positions available to the researcher who examines human beliefs and communities are those that investigate the material and sociohistorical location of the persons and communities under study. The ambiguity of Eliade’s claim concerning scale—a claim that has come to be exclusively interpreted by, and associated with, only one side of the reductionism debate—constitutes one opening into social constructionist critiques of the discourse on sui generis religion. Moreover, Schmidt’s use of an essentialist definition and phenomenological methods to generate a historically and socially isolated zone of human religious experience indicates the need to question the legitimacy and implications of portraying religion exclusively as a private and privileged affair.

Before proceeding, I must make clear that it is not the purpose of this book to deny that the behaviors and articulated beliefs of certain people are indeed understood by them to be religious—whatever that folk term may mean in any given context. However, to limit a priori the scale by which one studies these religious things to the emic, devotee’s self-interpretation or to what a researcher considers to exemplify the presumed religious essence or core of the datum is to fail to understand individual and social religious life, religious associations, religious experiences, and their academic study as well as inherently the practices and engagements of historical and contextualized human beings. Being part of the

12 Manufacturing Religion spectrum of human practices, whatever else these acts and beliefs may or may not be, makes this assorted collection of symbols, systems, and organizations historical data subject to investigation by historical methods. Accordingly, I am in full agreement with Zwi Werblowsky when he describes the “basic minimum conditions”

for the study of religion: |

The common ground on which students of religion qua students of religion meet is the realization that the awareness of the numinous or the experience of transcendence (where these happen to exist in religions) are—whatever else they may be—undoubtedly empirical facts of human existence and history, to be studied like all human facts, by the appropriate methods. (quoted in Schimmel 1960: 236)

Or, in the words of the literary critic Terry Eagleton, “any body of theory concerned with human meaning, value, language, feeling, and experience will inevitably engage with broader, deeper beliefs about the nature of human individuals, and societies, problems of power and sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions of the present, and hopes for the future” (1989: 195). The study of religion constitutes one such body of historically grounded theory. If, prior to one’s engagement with a collection of human data, one refuses to utilize investigative tools other than those of the phenomenologist or perhaps the

hermeneut, then on what grounds or evidence has one decided what constitutes the proper method of study? For example, in spite of Eliade’s frequent assertions that, above all, religious phenomena are human, and therefore historical, social, and the like, phenomena, his method (morphologically based cross-cultural comparison) suggests that historical and empirical methods are necessary only insofar as the study of the historically conditioned religious manifestations, inherently limited as they are, are the only means available for studying an ahistorical essence. In the same foreword quoted at the outset, he phrases it in the following manner: Obviously there can be no purely religious phenomenon; no phenomenon can be solely and exclusively religious. Because religion is human it must for that reason be something social, something linguistic, something economic—you cannot think

of man apart from language and society. But it would be hopeless to try and explain religion in terms of any one of those basic functions which are really no — more than another way of saying that man is. (1958: xii)

On first reading, this passage one might conclude that Eliade was firmly asserting that the study of religion relies on such historical methods as linguistics and sociology. However, as seen earlier, the use of “phenomenon” suggests that, despite the fact that every religious manifestation is inevitably also a human manifestation, behind such instances there is a form or essence that rightly attracts scholarly curiosity. On the scale of manifestation, then, the study of religion as practiced by such scholars as Eliade, along with the more notable examples of Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, is concerned with issues of

Introduction 13 function, society, and history. But such analyses of historical manifestations are simply a means to study that which informs this history and constitutes its meaning.

In the specific case of Eliade, his texts are filled with historical data: his important works in the history of yoga and the study of shamanism as well as his three-volume magnum opus, A History of Religious Ideas, are evidence of this. In spite of this fact, these texts suggest that there exists a fine distinction between the study of religion in itself and the study of religion as it is expressed in human history. When one reads that the study of religion carried out in the manner of sociologists or linguists is none other than the study of humans, Eliade’s text sets up an implicit distinction between the study of religious aspects of human life and the study of that which is expressed in these varied forms, the study of the sacred conceived as an ahistorical agent that operates outside and through the natural world. This is what one gathers from the assertion that the explanation of religion cannot simply be derived from the explanation of humans, for religion is necessarily something more. Therefore, this dichotomy between, in van der Leeuw’s terms, “religion in essence and manifestation” seems to rely on an unarticulated and undefended assumption concerning the ahistorical or suprahuman nature of religious experience and expression. By excluding or significantly limiting a number of other scales and with them various methods and theories, such as the sociological, the political, the psychological, the feminist, and the economic, scholars such as those already named use this assumption as the basis for denying that their datum (human practices and beliefs) has any historical specificity. Further, the absence of historically based methods has certain political implications. It is not simply a matter of studying texts out of context, which is undoubtedly a problem in itself, but rather it is the study of human beings as if they simply were believing, disembodied minds. Human beings undoubtedly have very complex belief systems. But they also divide themselves (and thereby reap certain material benefits or suffer from certain limitations) on the basis of class, gender, geography, age, and so on. By overlooking the importance of these additional aspects of human existence, by decontextualizing human beings in this manner, one avoids confronting the relations between material, cultural productions (e.g., a myth one studies) and the concrete political and economic conflicts and inequities of the people under study. By avoiding the study of such relations, scholars may not necessarily be promoting these imbalanced distributions of wealth or influence, but they certainly minimalize the significance of such factors. Further, by proclaiming themselves as the sole interpreters of this supposedly autonomous aspect of human life, scholars claim for themselves and their methods a similar autonomy from historical flux and conflict. Accordingly, the privilege of the datum, “properly” or “seriously” understood, simultaneously constitutes the privilege of the observer. Given their self-imposed methodological strictures and this self-generated authority, then, the object scholars study (religion an sich, re-

14 Manufacturing Religion ligious people, the sacred, religious manifestations and symbols, etc.) in this es_ sentialist manner is manufactured in a highly specific way, to fit precise limitations, expectations, and uses. Likewise, the expertise and authority of those scholars, suited to the adequate interpretation of this supposedly unique aspect of human life, are manufactured within equally precise parameters. If, then, it is the scale that makes the phenomenon, then those who decide on the scale are implicated, to whatever degree, as the active manufacturers, rather than simply as the idle observers and interpreters, of the phenomenon. Insomuch as the specificity of the datum is intertwined with the specificity of researchers and their tools, furthermore, such scholars are entangled in their own manufacture as ahistorical interpretive specialists.

Whatever else such methods accomplish, then, they manufacture an aspect of human life and action as if it is distinct from the usually unpredictable contingencies of historical and material existence. To put it mildly, one can follow Brian Morris in asserting that, “by denying that religion can be understood from other perspectives,” scholars like Eliade present an unnecessarily narrow representation of their data (1988: 177). Interpreting in a more critical light, one can follow Wayne Proudfoot in asserting that the scholarly emphasis on understanding religion as autonomous and essentially an issue of interior and private experiences “‘is defended in order to preclude inquiry and to stave off demands for justification from some perspective outside of that life” (1985: xv). Pushing beyond these two readings, one generates the interesting and, unfortunately all too often overlooked, question: What are the material implications of such a viewpoint? If indeed the scale, in this case essentialist and isolationist, creates the phenomenon, then what kind of phenomenon are scholars creating by excluding from their studies other potentially useful methods and scales?

The Meaning and End of Sui Generis Religion Prior to answering these questions, | must specify how this work differs from one other investigation that touches on the nature and adequacy of research methods and theories: Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Meaning and End of Religion (1991). Although it has been extremely influential, especially in its critique of the scholarly reification of religion coupled with his preferred terminology of “religious tradition” and “faith,” his book is, nevertheless, concerned with practicing some of the very strategies that this book criticizes (a point I explicitly develop in chapter 5). For example, his distinction between the “cumulative tradition” and “personal faith in transcendence” is yet another move to prioritize internal, intuitive, and essentially ahistorical categories over interpersonally available and historical cate-

gories. |

Therefore, Smith’s project to protect and isolate religious faith ought not to be confused with my project. For him, somewhat like Rudolf Otto, the meaning

Introduction 15 of religion (when conceived simply as the outward, cumulative tradition) is that it is the inevitable, though by definition inadequate, interpersonal statement and institutionalization of a prior feeling or faith. Of course this is probably not how Otto would have phrased it. However, what is useful is to recognize the similarity in their approaches. In The Idea of the Holy (1950), Otto repeatedly emphasized that “profounder religion” resides in the irrational experience or feeling of awefulness termed the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and that orthodox expressions, doctrines, and the like, are limited, rational expressions of this essentially unique and private feeling. On this account Otto’s, Smith’s, and Eliade’s texts would no doubt agree: the interior, interpersonally unavailable feeling, faith or consciousness (all three betraying the continuing influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher) is primary and underivable. Therefore, to study its manifestations—religious institutions, myths, symbols, and so on—is not to study the thing an sich. Accordingly, for Smith, the end of religion, implying the end of talking solely of the externals (the cumulative tradition), is brought about by no longer using partial and limiting categories as if they were adequately expressive of this ahistorical, personal experience. Although his critique of reification bears some resemblance to the social constructionist position, in the final analysis, Smith’s project has little in common with

mine; Smith maintains that the historical, cumulative tradition is by definition socially determined, heterogeneous, and secondary, as opposed to faith, which is free, homogeneous, and original. By prevaluing the latter over the former, his texts construct this homogenous, privileged, reified, and inaccessible region not in the

head, as Otto might have done with his Kantian religious a priori, but this time in the heart. Although such valuations may promise much for those interested in speculating on the essential unity of religious experience (e.g., a theology of religious pluralism), in the words of Benson Saler, “Smith’s vague presentation of “the transcendent,’ and his emphasis on its universal ‘impingement’ on persons of faith, are very unlikely to appeal to cultural anthropologists” —and, we might add, social scientists in general (1993: 64). Therefore, to employ Smith’s own categories, but

in a manner suitable for this book, the meaning of the category of religion is intimately linked to the social and material interests of the institutionalized observer-interpreter who defines, circumscribes, and creates this cognitive category, and the end of religion indicates the end of referring to this one portion of historical, human existence as if it were a self-evidently and ontologically distinct, unique, and autonomous portion of life and action, exempt from sociopolitical analysis and critique. Thus, the end is simply the recognition of this meaning.

Can We Critique Sui Generis Religion as a Religious Claim? W. C. Smith’s critique notwithstanding, this is not the first time this reified approach to the study of religion has been criticized for its exclusive reliance on what

16 Manufacturing Religion can be termed the sui generis scale of analysis. A number of recent writers, including Robert D. Baird, Ninian Smart, Hans Penner, Kurt Rudolph, Robert Segal, Donald Wiebe, E. Thomas Lawson, and Ivan Strenski, have suggested that this normative claim is one of the central problems in the study of religion as a whole. For example, according to Strenski, such critics “have played a laudable role in calling attention to the often-hidden theologizing going on under the cover of religious studies” (1993a: 3). Jacques Waardenburg (1973, vol. 1: 59) qualifies as a member of such a group of critics when, in commenting on Otto’s category “the holy,” he notes that such a theme “gave to [Otto’s] work, which in the last analysis is of a theological nature, an apologetic tendency.”

As profitable as such critiques of what some writers term the neo- or cryptotheology characteristic of much academic research on religion may appear to be, It is important to recognize that the scale of analysis such writers employ in their own critique of the discourse on sui generis religion implicitly revolves around the place of an essentially theological, or cryptotheological, discourse in the modern academic study of religion. It is presumed that the strength of this type of critique relies on the self-evident institutional division between committed “god-talk” and scholarly talk about the gods, or, more properly, talk about people who talk about gods. As important as such a critique is, and I do not mean to suggest that it is unimportant, it does not include the sociopolitical scale in its analysis. Rather, it still presumes that theological discourse is somehow unique and fundamentally different from other types of human discourse, which, according to some critics, makes theology ineligible for inclusion in social scientific discourses in general and in publicly funded educational settings in particular. Generally, then, such critics,

along with members of the discourse on sui generis religion, draw a clear and seemingly essential distinction between scientific and theological pursuits. On this one level, they therefore appear to agree with each other: religious discourse is

somehow a special or unique case. But by labeling aspects of the discourse on religion as being in some way essentially theological, critics may in fact perpetuate the division of scholars of religion inasmuch as one group purports to study es-

sentially religious data. In other words, much effort has been expended on critiquing the sui generis claim as if it were an essentially religious claim, but not much energy has been exerted in critiquing it as a sociopolitical claim. To put it another way, and with particular reference to Waardenburg’s comment, perhaps specifically religious apologetics are not the only implications of sui generis religion. Thus, few critics have questioned the political implications of exclusively (and

in circular fashion) understanding the sui generis status of religious phenomena as an essentially religious claim. The fact that this claim either surpasses, supersedes, or fails to qualify as a historically based claim is acknowledged by both parties in this debate between theology and religious studies and constitutes their common discursive ground. The parties simply disagree as to whether such claims

Introduction , 17 ought to be allowed within the modern academic discourse on religion. Perhaps something would be gained in this debate if the scale of the analysis were altered

and the ground were shifted. In other words, in spite of the promise of such critiques of theological premises, they do not fully operate on a naturalist, historical scale. Rather, for the sake of intellectual and institutional demarcation, they function to isolate further, and thereby perpetuate the perception of, the essential au-

tonomy of the religious phenomenon. What must be made clear at the outset is the need for a different kind of reading of the material. In the words of Tim Murphy, another critic who finds some limitations to the traditional terms of the reductionist/antireductionist opposition, “I do not necessarily disagree with their criticisms. My aim is to offer a different kind of criticism” and to suggest a different kind of reading of the discourse on sui generis religion (1994b: 122).

This observation of the rather limited nature of the reductionism debate as it has taken shape in the study of religion is meant not so much as a criticism but as an indication that there is yet room for more voices.* On the one side, reductionists have not applied their theorizing systematically but have allowed the debate

to be limited to issues of religion and theology versus science and theory. In actuality, however, it is not a matter of theory or religion but theories of religion. On the other side, antireductionists have irresponsibly portrayed reductionism as something preposterous, akin, in Daniel Dennett’s fitting examples, to such studies as “A Comparison of Keats and Shelley from the Molecular Point of View” and “The Role of Oxygen Atoms in Supply-Side Economics.” Dennett goes on to say that it is more than likely that because “nobody is a reductionist in the preposterous sense... the ‘charge’ of reductionism is too vague to merit a response.” In large part, such charges are too vague simply because scholarship on human beings is by definition reductionistic, if by this we mean taking insider accounts and either interpreting or explaining such reports in another theoretical context. Otherwise we are left as a collection of scholars making autobiographical statements. As Dennett concludes, “If somebody says to you, “But that’s so reductionistic!’ you would do well to respond, “That’s such a quaint, old-fashioned complaint! What on Earth did you have in mind?’ ” (1995: 81). This book is unapologetically reductionistic, for it advocates a naturalist, historical scale, where all human events and conceptual

or textual productions—in a word, discourses—are understood to have socioeconomic and political origins and implications.° In this context, the conceptual tools used by scholars of religion (e.g., the sacred, religion an sich, faith, power, the holy) are rather interesting constructions with far-reaching and significant discursive and sociopolitical implications. Accordingly, this datum, sui generis religion, manufactured and deployed throughout an entire discourse, can be examined on a number of scales.

Again, it must be made clear that I do not claim that religious actions and beliefs are merely wrong, mythical (in whatever sense of that term one wishes to use), wishful, or even deluded thinking. Whatever these rites, beliefs, and institu-

18 Manufacturing Religion tions really are (if, in fact, they really are anything other than historical, human productions) is a question beyond the historically and empirically determined scales of the naturalistic scholar who wishes to make a contribution to intersubjectively available research. As Wiebe (1984a) has suggested, to assert that religion is false thinking and nothing else, for example, involves the researcher in a reduction that ultimately rests on a similarly unsure footing as such metaphysically based statements concerning the truth of one or more religions or the essential religious

unity of humankind. Again, to refer to Dennett’s categories mentioned in the preface, naturalism is productively reductionistic, because it relies on cranes, theories “designed and built, from everyday parts already on hand... [that are] lo-

cated on a firm base of existing ground.” What Wiebe terms metaphysical reductions can be likened to Dennett’s skyhooks: “miraculous lifters, unsupported and insupportable” (75). Skyhooks are not acceptable within the academic study of religion conceived as a social science. What this book maintains is that when read in a discursive as well as a naturalist context, scholars’ theories, methods, and

texts can be seen to function in, and contribute to, the maintenance of certain socially and politically charged associations. Whatever else these scholarly texts and the human social situations to which they make reference may be, they are at least

part of the distribution of power and privilege that contributes to the conceptual and material construction of various relationships within societies and nations.

The Scales of Analysis The first scale on which such scholarship can be examined is the intellectual. On that scale, by using a number of strategies of exclusion, scholars of religion manufacture a historically isolated and impenetrable datum known variously as power, religion an sich, the sacred, and so on. The primary strategy deployed in this case is the claim that religious data are sui generis, commonly understood as meaning distinct, unique, and self-caused. In this study, Eliade’s texts are one, but not the only, example of this type of approach. Other related methodological strategies employed on the intellectualist scale to privilege this datum by excluding it from the wider class of historically influenced data are generalization (avoiding concrete particulars), dehistoricization (studying abstractly atemporal structures or patterns), universalization (applying findings from one area to another, regardless of differences in history, geography, etc.), essentialization (reducing plurality to unity), and naturalization (presenting a relative viewpoint as self-evident). The question posed on this level of analysis has to do with the intellectual implications of these strategies and techniques. First, such methodological strategies construct what can be a most useful taxonomic distinction between one topic of scholarly investigation and another, for example, a distinction between the religious character of some curious human action and its political or sociological character.

At this level, the researcher can appeal to any number of useful definitions of

Introduction , 19 religion to assist in the research, just as a variety of definitions of political or social life can often assist research. On the taxonomic level, then, operational definitions of religion are flexible analytical tools employed to investigate an aspect of human

history and culture. _

However, religion understood not simply as a useful heuristic, taxonomic, or analytical tool for demarcating and studying a certain aspect of human beings and communities but as an ontologically distinct category, an irreducible aspect of human experience or consciousness, privileges one group of human data over all others. As I have suggested, the taxonomic category of religion is useful insomuch as it is but one conceptual apparatus employed to investigate an aspect of historical human behavior and beliefs from the vantage point of one theoretical position. To presume, however, that the category “religion” signifies something fundamentally different from all other aspects of human life and experience, that such experiences and behaviors necessarily possess a reality that somehow transcends, predates, or founds the historical person making the claim or doing the religious action, generates a surplus value for the taxonomic term “religion” that is not defensible in historical terms. It is not defensible, because: it presumes that one theoretical position is completely adequate and makes other contributions, based on different

positions and frames of reference, redundant. Such a position would be metaphysically reductive and of little use to a naturalistic study of religion. Such a metaphysically loaded use of religion accomplishes a very effective seclusion of what one group of researchers believes to be—which of course can be neither verified nor falsified—the essential unity and stability that underlie the normally unpredictable contingencies of historical, social, political, gendered, and generational flux. Therefore, the ontological and dogmatic use of the category “religion” is a powerful means for minimalizing the importance of historical relations between humans, in much the same way as the sacred (conceived as the absolute, the meaningful, the unchanging) is valued over the profane (the relative, the meaningless, the contingent). Along with the development of this ontological sense of the term, there occurs the development of methodologies specially designed to access what has been referred to as the deep structures or deep meanings of these autonomous phenomena. As Peter Harrison has put it, “The appearance of ‘religion’ as a natural object coincided with the development of Religionswissenschaft which both defined its object and explicated it. In other words, the intellectual construct ‘religion’ is to a

large measure constituted by the methods which are supposed to elucidate it” (1990: 14). Harrison nicely draws attention to an intriguing circularity. The undefended presumption of the unique status of the object necessitates developing and using unique interpretive methods, as is evidenced by the widespread discussions of hermeneutics in the study of religion. However, the interpretive methods themselves serve to sanction the sui generis assumption in the first place. Interpretive specialists are thereby able to make this isolated and obtuse datum their

20 Manufacturing Religion , singular and privileged domain. Because much modern intellectual life is institutionalized within universities, creating an academic specialty produces a group of specialists centered in an institutional context. Therefore, institutionalizing this domain involves these specialists in establishing a space for themselves within the sphere of the modern university or research institute. At this early stage in the study, we can perhaps find no better example of the institutional implication of sui generis religion than the one provided by A. Roy Eckardt (1957) in his presidential address at the 1956 annual meeting of the National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI)—the precursor to the American Academy of Religion (AAR).° Coming several years before the development of autonomous North American departments for the study of religion, the context of this

address is clear: what is the future place of the study of religion in the public university? In developing what he terms a “defensible education policy” that affirms a “positive relation between religion and university education” (3), Eckardt presumes from the outset that religion is indeed strange—meaning that it has a unique character making it not completely compatible with the other topics routinely taught in the public university. For our purposes, it is his conclusion which is most relevant. He writes, “[T]he question of religion within the contemporary curriculum involves certain issues of a sui generis kind. We do not get very far when we assume that problems in the teaching of religion no more than reproduce problems in teaching other subjects. The uniqueness of the problem of religion overshadows superficial similarities” (11). This asserted, yet undefended, unique character of religion and religious commitment necessitates that any kind of institutional setting be itself unique and autonomous, lest the methods for teaching and studying other topics interfere and distort the study of religion. The trouble is that for proponents of autonomy, such as Eckardt, to negotiate such value judgments as to what counts as a merely superficial similarity as opposed to an essential difference, they must rely on prior, privileged knowledge and criteria that cannot be defended nor even delineated within the constraints on knowledge that are constitutive of the modern public university. As identified by Harrison, and as confirmed by Eckardt’s thoughts on the topic, the autonomy of the object of study is in fact the result, to whatever extent, of the very commitments, theories, and methods themselves—the scale makes the phenomenon. Accordingly, not only the autonomy of the object of study but the autonomy of the institutionalized location of the study are the results of certain choices by researchers. And because human beings make such choices from within

social, economic, and the like—in a word, historical—contexts, it will be relevant to inquire into what may have affected, or what will be the implications of, such choices.

Along with the institutionalization of what may have begun as a merely intellectual exercise comes a second scale of analysis. On the social scale, one can see how, as the solitary occupants of this newly authorized space, these specialists are

Introduction | 21 concerned not only with studying their isolated datum but also with defending their academic terrain from their inquisitive neighbors and potential competitors, the anthropologists and sociologists, to name only two. The supposedly improper methods of these two groups are interpreted by some scholars of religion as reductive in that they share with other sciences naturalistic assumptions whose origins can be traced at least to the Enlightenment. When viewed in the light of the dominance of naturalist assumptions and research programs in the wider academic community, the nonreductive school in the study of religion—known throughout

this book as the discourse on sui generis religion—and the terrain these practitioners understand themselves to be defending are easily interpreted as being under siege. The utter irony, then, is that, whereas nonreductionist scholars can be interpreted as being an isolated and embattled party in the larger academic discourse in the human and social sciences, in the more specific discourse on religion itself, they form the dominant and privileged group. Accordingly, naturalist scholars in the discourse on religion, although sharing much with members of other academic fields, are isolated within the boundaries of their own discourse. Understandably, then, calls for the use of multiple and cross-disciplinary methods and the development of decentralized and nondepartmental institutional locales for the study of religion are often generated by naturalists, or reductionists, in the field.

Given the financial, social, and political realities of the modern university, the choice appears to be between a departmentally based study of religion structured as a traditional academic discipline or closing relatively young departments of religion and redistributing the study of religion among other more securely established departments. Sadly, and for a variety of reasons, developing crossdisciplinary fields of inquiry appears not to be a viable option for administrators. The extension of my position is that one reason why such cross-disciplinary programs are not attractive is that they presuppose and necessitate a radical critique of religion as it is presently conceived by the majority of scholars. Although the critique of sui generis religion might hasten the death of the academic discipline variously known in English as religious studies, history of religions, and comparative religion, it might simultaneously open the way for a cross-disciplinary, decentered study of this intriguing aspect of human communities. If the critique of sui generis religion is directly linked to the potential demise of the disciplinary study of religion, then a number of economic implications accompany this declared territorial imperative. The material as well as social benefits that accompany the disciplinary study vary widely: secure and tenured university positions, endowed chairs, accessibility to government grants, access to a variety

of archives and information, interviews in the popular media, and the general participation in producing and managing cultural capital. So far, then, the implications of these exclusionary strategies have been mostly personal and social. As a result of removing the religious datum from all historical, causal relations and influences, the scholar of religion has something to work on,

22 Manufacturing Religion a unique way of studying it, an institutionalized space in which to work, and muchcoveted, though meager, funding and status to assist in the study. But to limit the analysis to these scales, the intellectual, social, and economic, would tell only part

of the story, because human beings not only act and live in isolated worlds as individuals and in localized social arrangements but, as members of larger associations involved in a dynamic matrix of power relationships commonly known as politics. As Terry Eagleton defines it, politics comprises the many ways in which human beings arrange, negotiate, benefit from, and suffer from various social interactions and relationships (1989: 194). Indeed, it would be a gross oversight not to examine the political, along with the social, personal, economic, and intellectual, implications of these exclusionary strategies. On the political scale, the dominance of what are philosophically idealist theories and methods developed from the strategies just referred to plays a supportive role in a much larger and complex system of international power and privilege. Whatever else these exclusionary practices achieve, they participate in a subtle but effective process whereby not only the objects of study (who are, after all, human

beings) but the subjects who themselves do the studying are gradually reified through a series of strategies and methods that idealize and historically minimalize what are otherwise complex lives and relationships. In the end, both groups, the disembodied believer and the apparently apolitical hermeneut, are abstracted from their socioeconomic and historical particularity and turned into generic, disembodied minds, more easily quantified, defined, and—on the geopolitical scale at least—governed.

Although it would be foolish, unfair, and outright wrong to claim that the discourse on sui generis religion in general, or individual scholars in particular, are primarily or directly responsible for such events as the rise and maintenance of the current world capitalist hegemony, it is not incorrect or excessive to assert that, when examined on the geopolitical scale, the implications of exclusively con_ structing religion in this one manner, among many other mechanisms of control, effectively segments people from their complex sociopolitical and historical relationships and contributes to manufacturing a cultural context conducive to such segmentation. Although it is possible, even probable, that a significant number of scholars of religion find the poverty suffered by large segments of the global population and the tremendous wealth of others to be reprehensible, the consequence of one of their primary suppositions (that certain aspects of human life are free from the taint of sociopolitical interactions) shares in a strategic marginalization of historical humans. The historical minimalization characteristic of the discourse on sui generis religion constitutes the redefinition, reconstruction, and representation of human beings not as social, economic, and political beings with certain basic material needs and relations but as essentially believers of creeds. It is precisely for this reason that the exclusive reliance on sui generis religion as a theoretical category of research implicates scholars of religion in the politics of repre-

Introduction 23 sentation. It is part of the process of alienation: the human subject constricted and estranged from historical interrelations, manufactured into a subject informed only by beliefs and limited by interpretations that are not in the least concerned with investigating the material relations of these human subjects. _ It is all the more ironic, then, when one considers that the emphasis on the irreducible element of religious experience, understood here as a potent means for excluding significant aspects of historical existence, has often been presented by

some scholars as an attempt to protect what they understand as an essentially human characteristic from a mechanistic reduction at the hand of the antihuman _ social sciences. For example, Eliade’s call for the establishment of a new humanism ostensibly proclaims the radical equality of all human religious experience. However, such talk of abstract sameness can effectively overlook the differences that most often define actual lived experience. No doubt some aspects of the discourse on sui generis religion may be commendable, but the social scientific analysis that today confronts religious experiences and behaviors does not seek to dissolve such states into monocausal origins, as was characteristic of earlier analyses, but to understand better and explain human behaviors and beliefs utilizing multiple points of view, theories, and scales. To continue to promote the analytical usefulness of autonomous religious experience, as opposed to the polymethodic approach, fails to identify the complexity of human actions entrenched in their contexts. Therefore, sui generis human beings, people isolated not only from each other but possibly from their own material lives as well, are the geopolitical result of this dehistoricizing, decontextualized, intellectualist process. Georg Lukacs’s comments

on the basis of the commodity structure of the modern capitalist state are equally descriptive of the process of objectification at work in the sui generis strategy employed by some scholars of religion; through the use of this strategy, “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems too strictly rational and all embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (1988: 83). What Lukacs’s words describe is the ideological process whereby discursive objects, which are themselves taxonomic and manufactured, are routinely portrayed as, or interpreted to be, ontological and utterly distinct—in a word, commodified. Scholars of religion have used “the sacred,” “the numinous,” “power,” and a host of other terms to name and thereby clothe historical abstractions, lending this “phantom objectivity” an apparent autonomy from the very human relations from which they originally arose. This process is ideological not inasmuch as, for vulgar Marxism, it demarcates false from true consciousness (itself entailing unfounded and undefendable value judgments) but insomuch as the trace of the productive history of such abstractions is obscured, ignored, disguised, or lost. When read politically, then, this seemingly innocuous claim concerning the irreducibility and utter uniqueness of religious phenomena and experiences can be

24 Manufacturing Religion understood as one of a number of potent strategies for domination. The more able one is to depict—or manufacture—populations as collections of disembodied believing minds, utilizing these essentialist methods in a host of other locales and situations, the better equipped one is to produce disembodied subjects (in the fullest political and subjugated sense of the term) from historical human beings.

Sites of the Discourse Finally, then, what this book addresses are the various modes and sites of conceptual production in creating and reproducing the discourse on sui generis religion and their relations to the social production of humans as political subjects. It names and challenges the hegemony of scale that operates in the modern study of religion, which defines and manufactures religion as an essentially ahistorical human intuition clothed in certain historically accessible categories, such as myth, symbol, and ritual. It identifies the various intellectual, institutional, social, and geopolitical implications that arise from this isolationist and idealist approach to the study of religion.

To begin this critique, chapters 1 and 2 examine the scholarship of Mircea Eliade to identify the discursive strategies that privilege ahistorical essences over contextually embedded practices—strategies that operate throughout the discourse on sui generis religion to privilege the study of private, interior religious expertences over the analysis of sociopolitical practices. Specifically, these chapters examine the association of three claims that circulate throughout his texts, claims that, when taken together, constitute discursive rules in the Foucauldian sense: religion is sui generis; scholars’ interpretive methods are unique; and such scholarship on religion must operate in an autonomous and therefore privileged institutional setting. The existence of this dominant discourse on sui generis religion depends on the smoothly operating relations among these three claims. From there, I move to an examination of the body of secondary literature that has developed around Eliade’s life and work. This analysis of the controversy that has surrounded scholarly representations of Eliade’s writings and life is designed to identify these same strategies that are also employed at this discursive site to construct a politically neutral and acceptable portrait of Eliade and his contribution to the study of religion. It should be clear, then, that the initial chapters anticipate the analysis of the debate over the proper representation of the role context plays in the scholar’s academic work; at both discursive sites, one finds the same issues and strategies that construct an autonomous aspect of human life and interaction.

Instead of concentrating on the intentional relations within, for example, Eliade’s intellectual biography, these chapters are limited to a discursive and a political analysis or reading of his methods and theories, as well as such an analysis of a body of secondary literature, to demonstrate how the exclusionary strategy—

the claim that religious experience is autonomous—functions to create a unique

Introduction 25 datum for study (the discursive object, the sacred) and simultaneously sanctions calls for the institutional autonomy of the discourse on sui generis religion. Chapter 4 applies the discursive and political reading techniques to the analysis

of a rather different site where this discourse is reproduced: the university classroom and the textbooks that often serve as the primary resources for instructors of introductory courses in comparative or world religions. In that chapter, I demonstrate that the dominant style of textbook currently available participates in this discourse by promoting intuitive and subjective research based on the assumption that religion is not only ahistorical but also a fundamentally shared or essentially human characteristic. I also demonstrate that this last assumption (that as a researcher or devotee, as an outsider or an insider, one is necessarily and essentially Homo religiosus) links contemporary work in comparative religion carried out within this discourse to prior attempts at the comparative enterprise that date from the nineteenth century. This survey of comparative religions books constitutes strong evidence that the discourse on sui generis religion is indeed the regnant discourse in the modern study of religion. Although the study does not examine these other sources of data, such databases as trends in scholarly periodicals, conference proceedings and paper abstracts, encyclopedia and dictionary editorships and entries, appearances of scholars and their work in the popular press, as well as internal and external funding patterns would also be potentially useful in demonstrating this discursive dominance. In an attempt to widen the analysis even more, chapter 5 examines a number of current scholarly works that either sanction or challenge the discourse on sui generis religion inasmuch as they either support or oppose constructing religion and religious experiences as essentially autonomous. Despite the dominance of this one discourse, a discourse that I suggest extends beyond North America, chapter 5 documents a contemporary and coherent oppositional discourse on religion that is currently present within the academy. Simply put, the chapter draws into sharper focus the confrontation between two ways of constructing religion as a scholarly category.

Chapter 6 argues that the exclusionary strategies identified throughout the book can finally be examined through the geopolitical scale. It is on this level that the essentialist discourse may be linked to what Edward Said (1993) has termed the “imperialist dynamic.” The aim of that chapter is to identify the geopolitical implications of what others choose to understand solely on the intellectualist scale.

Therefore, it is on this final scale of analysis that Wayne Proudfoot’s assertion regarding the “apologetic purposes” of protective and constructive strategies of representation (1985: xv) can be interpreted in the widest possible historical and political context.

Chapter 7 concludes with a call for increased naturalistic theorizing in the study of religion as one means for securing the institutional well-being of the academic study of religion. The chapter argues that the undefended claims con-

26 Manufacturing Religion cerning the autonomy of religion that characterized a previous generation of scholarship not only have proved insufficient for grounding the discourse on religion within the academy but may have actually undermined it. Accordingly, a natural history of the discourse on sui generis religion will have to take into account not simply its pre-twentieth-century origins but also its inevitable demise—possibly in _ the near future. In its place, chapter 7 suggests that interdisciplinary models might offer a more productive grounding for the study of religion conceived as one aspect of the study of human behavior and culture.

. This book, then, is an attempt to persuade readers that the study of religion is more than what Gregory Alles, like J. Z. Smith before him, characterized as an ©

imaginative act. As correct as this may be—and I do not disagree with Alles’s assessment—it is something more than simply an imaginative act whereby we as scholars “sustain our confidence that the world in which we live coheres, is tolerable, and will persist” (Alles 1994: 158). Such world construction necessitates that

we negotiate relationships of power and control. This is why I believe there is something at stake for the imagery and language we use when conveying our thoughts on the manner in which scholars have invented “religion.” More than simply imagining it, we have actively manufactured it and in failing to acknowledge this we continue to obscure the theoretical and methodological modes of its pro-

duction. Accordingly, I will argue that the widespread and virtually normative scholarly assumption that religion is sui generis, autonomous, strictly personal, essential, unique, prior to, and ultimately distinct from, all other facets of human life and interaction, is a highly useful discursive as well as political strategy. It makes possible an autonomous discourse, complete with the benefits and the authority of its practitioners, and privileges political claims. In other words, the sui generis: claim effectively brackets not only the datum but the researcher as well from critical scrutiny and provides a suspect basis for the academic study of

religion. | ,

l. Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia

realities. ,

Concepts, of course, are not part of free-floating philosophical discourse, but socially, historically, and locally rooted, and must be explained in terms of these —Eric Hobsbawm

This chapter and chapter 2 open this discursive and political reading of the function and implications of exclusionary practices within the study of religion by examining the politically charged nature of Eliade’s scholarly writings and theories and their status as representative of much of the modern discourse. This analysis assists in identifying the sometimes intimate, yet often occluded, relations between theoretical assumptions and politics, and how such relations can evade detection. In general, I follow Armin Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen (1991) in terming this ideological position the politics of nostalgia. Chapter 3 departs from an analysis of Eliade’s work and instead surveys the literature on his political past and its possible connections to his later academic work. The purpose of this chapter is to identify

and critique the related exclusionary strategies employed by scholars to defend both Eliade himself and, by extension, the wider academic discourse on religion from participation in a complex web of contextual factors. Accordingly, these opening chapters suggest that the work of Eliade as well as his contemporary defenders

constitute just two of a number of discursive sites in need of critique. Therefore, the topic that occupies the general focus of this book is not an analysis of Eliade’s work but the role played by the category of sui generis religion in excluding sociopolitical analysis from much scholarship on religion. As I demonstrate in the first half of the book, not only is such an exclusionary practice the claim that authorizes Eliade’s totalized political program (known as the new humanism) but it is also the cornerstone for a body of literature devoted to highly sympathetic representations of Eliade’s supposedly apolitical life and scholarship. What is more, this portion of the book provides the opening for identifying in subsequent chapters the way in which a dominant aspect of the modern discourse 27

28 Manufacturing Religion on religion is itself constructed, initially legitimized, and finally authorized through

a field of related exclusionary claims that range from the autonomy of religious phenomena to the proclaimed autonomy of the methods, practitioners, and discipline itself. This wide-ranging discursive field is established and maintained by such ideological and rhetorical strategies as dehistoricization, universalization, and decontextualization, all of which generate and guarantee the autonomy, integrity, and priority of not simply the phenomenon of religion but also the profession of interpreting it. The autonomy of religious experience, then, provides the foundational rationale for what I have come to term the discourse on sui generis religion, a discourse known by some in North America as the history of religions but which is by no means coterminous with, nor simply limited to, this one discipline. The dual character of the sui generis claim as a discursive as well as a political strategy suggests that this discourse on sui generis religion, like all categories and discourses,

is intimately linked to issues of politics and power, a topic I explicitly return to nearer the end of the book. Before we proceed, however, three points must be made clear. First, some scholars refer to the discourse I critique as a distinct academic discipline because of its presumably unique methods and unique object of study. In the words of Raffaele Pettazzoni, it is the “peculiar nature, the very character of religious facts as such [that] give them the right to form the subject of a special science. That science is the science of religion in the proper sense of the word; the essential character of religious facts is the necessary and sufficient reason for its existence.” Simply put, “the unity of the science [is] founded on the unity of its subject” (1967: 215, 217). When referring to such a conception of this academic pursuit, the terminology of discipline is employed. However, because one of the founding assumptions of this book is that human behavior, associations, institutions, and belief

systems are multifaceted, multifunctional sociocultural events, no one academic and intellectual system of abstraction or theory can be employed as definitive and absolutely primary. Instead, I maintain that although the study of human behavior is the business of a variety of methodologies and theories that are commonly—or conveniently—arranged in separate institutional settings, none of them is ultimately distinct and unique. As Hans Penner has phrased it, “the study of religion is an aspect of the study of man [or, better put, the study of human practices and culture], and this means that we have no need for unique theories, methods, or intuitions” (1975: 60). This description of a research field, rather than an autonomous discipline, with the latter’s attendant connotations of control and absolute demarcation, entails a more. cooperative understanding of the work of scholars. Thus, when referring to the study of religion conceived and practiced as a polymethodic exercise, the terminology of field, rather than discipline, is employed. Second, I do not presume that, for example, political conservatism or philosophical idealism are by definition problematic political and philosophical positions

nor that they are necessarily related. Nor do I presume that socially entrenched

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 29 knowledge always supports either dominant or oppositional power structures. Indeed, the relations between knowledge and power can, and indeed routinely do, operate in any number and shades of dominant and oppositional contexts. However, in the case of the discourse on sui generis religion, antimodernist and politically conservative claims and judgments about the state of affairs in the modern European/Western world can be demonstrated to be based on interpretations of supposedly archaic religious symbols understood exclusively in an idealist (e.g., as essentially religious) rather than, for example, a materialist (e.g., as economic, gendered, political) manner. In other words, in spite of some interpreters’ claims to the contrary, when read in terms of their sociopolitical implications, the idealist methods and presuppositions of research in this field constitute a powerful means for authorizing and normativizing what turn out to be conservative political claims about the state of the world that support dominant power structures insomuch as they marginalize the contextual specificity of their data. The key to naturalist analysis is the fact that it contextualizes philosophical positions that are routinely portrayed as, and are authorized in terms of their being,

decontextualized. The power of such a critique, then, is that it can situate one brand of philosophical idealism squarely in historical dispositions and values. Because much of the authority of many claims made within the academy rests on their proclaimed autonomy from the mundane world of commerce and society, materialistic and naturalistic critiques not only contextualize such idealism but, in the very act of contextualizing it, simultaneously deauthorize and challenge it. Third, and finally, by “ideology,” I do not imply the harsher Marxist use of the term that denotes false consciousness or deluded thinking. Such judgments are dramatically weak, because they presume that the researcher is somehow able to determine precisely what constitutes true consciousness. Instead, as already sug-

gested, I presume that all human thoughts and actions are contextualized and continually open to the practices of representation and interpretation—on the part of the insider-informant as well as the outside observer-analyst. Therefore, in this book, ideology denotes a process for authorizing particular representations whose trace, history, or context is obscured (whether intentionally or not). In other words, given that within the naturalist context all human thoughts and actions studied within the academy are conceived as historically and socially contextualized (a contextualization that of course extends to the very act of scholarship itself), representations of these thoughts and actions are ideological insomuch as their authority and legitimacy are maintained through obscured or disguised contexts and

: histories.

In his engaging history of the category “ideology,” the literary critic Terry Eagleton has noted that ideologies, oppositional as well as dominant, often perform a variety of functions, all in the service of a political agenda: unification, action orientation, rationalization, legitimation, universalization, and naturalization (1991: 45).'! Through each of these strategies, ideologies minimalize and homogenize var-

30 Manufacturing Religion ious social and historical differences (or, more accurately, construct a facade of homogeneity). For example, in the case of constructing national identities, the coherent group that is constructed includes such otherwise diverse groups as material and intellectual elites and those marginalized by the very economic and political systems that also constitute the nation. In the case of Eliade and Romanian nationalism, he maintained that it was primarily the intellectual elites and the peasants who constituted the essence of the nation, the former due to their ability to create culture (e.g., novels and music) and the latter due to their ability to manifest archaic values in modern times. Mac Linscott Ricketts quotes Eliade’s early statement that the “creative elite of modern [ie., pre-Second World War] Romania are the only ones who have the right of succession to the peasant class. Romania could dispense with every other social element save the peasantry and the creative elite” (1988: 914).2 However, this purportedly unified and ethnically pure grouping does not simply and organically come about but is actively constructed over time at the expense of linguistic, economic, cultural, and ethnic minorities, by minimalizing such divisions as class and by glossing over material and social differences between the peasants and the elites.*> One result of these strategies is a highly idealized and romanticized picture of peasant life that is far removed from the material experiences of actual peasants. By way of such an ideological process of idealization, one can posit a shared essence that unites peasants and elites in spite of their material disparities. One instance of the ideological dangers of studying anything simply “on its own terms” (itself one common way of translating sui generis) arises from the Romanian example. David Cave, whose highly sympathetic work on Eliade’s new humanism I examine in chapter 3, finds nothing problematic with such a portrayal of the essential qualities shared by the peasants and the elites. According to Cave, Eliade aimed “to preserve an undefiled autochthonous base” so as to maintain “that which is most closely primal [and] most closely attuned to the impulses of nature” (1993: 135). Whether or not Eliade’s portrayal of these peasants as an “autochthonous base” was accurate and true to their own experiences seems not to be the issue, because the strategy of idealization, so apparent in the previous quotation, goes undetected by Cave. That the type of life lived by Romanian peasants in the early part of this century was largely due to a complex set of economic, political, geographic, and historical factors—constraints that in large part were set by ruling elites—is not relevant, because the lives of peasants are simply and selfevidently “attuned to the impulses of nature.” Such a judgment, however, is wholly unjustified and unsupported, as is the manner in which issues of historical and material import are excluded. Just as with the case of nationalism, then, in the case of the discourse on sui generis religion, the coherent and universal conceptual construct, religion or the sacred (as opposed to the nation) is one primary vehicle that enables a group of writers to develop an autonomous social identity that contributes to their consol-

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 31 idation of social position and power. If one calls into question the homogenizing strategies that contribute to defining this discourse as autonomous, or questions the coherence of the sacred as a descriptive and explanatory tool, then the debate over the autonomy of religion and its irreducibility can be interpreted as political disputes over the social status and privilege of a group of academics. Accordingly, the category of sui generis religion functions as an ideological construct that deflects attention from the ways in which it maintains social privilege. Therefore, an initial naturalist critique of the sui generis claim is simply that scholars of religions often take as their data abstract, socially and historically disembodied ideas and internal experiences rather than examining how these ideas are related to, originate from, and lead to changes in the historical context in which human action takes place. Jonathan Z. Smith lays the grounds for such a critique when he describes Eliade’s methodology as “Romantic, Neoplatonic Idealism [in] its philosophical presuppositions,” going on to conclude that “it is designed to exclude the historical” (1982: 25). However, simply to identify a philosophy as idealist or romantic is only to begin such a critique. What is of particular importance are the ways in which idealist interpretation and representation are portrayed as authoritative and natural, thereby normativizing and legitimizing the subsequent politically relevant judgments. In the case of the discourse on sui generis religion in general, and Eliade’s texts in particular, the strategies employed to accomplish this legitimization are properly termed ideological insomuch as they portray complex heterogeneous human situations and modes of communication as if they were self-evidently and intrinsically meaningful, sociohistorically decontextualized monoliths, all of which entails distinct political implications.

What must be specified at the outset is that this and the next chapter are not concerned with detailing Eliade’s intellectual biography nor with outlining the development, evolution, or history of ideas and themes in his extensive textual corpus (for a critical survey of this biography, see McCutcheon 1993). Although both types of research may be needed in contemporary Eliade scholarship, this book does not constitute a chronological analysis of changes and developments in Eliade’s use of

methods, theories, assumptions, and discursive strategies. Instead, I assume that, whether intended or not, it is accurate to characterize Eliade’s textual productions as a coherent corpus largely because in practice they are routinely treated in this way by his many readers and by those who use him as an authoritative reference for their own research. The fact that a critical and extensive intellectual biography on Eliade has yet to be published constitutes strong evidence that Eliade’s texts are treated by readers as an authoritative whole. From the viewpoint of intellectual historians and biographers, Eliade’s texts may very well develop or emphasize assorted themes over certain periods of time. To be sure, inconsistencies and variations are to be found in any one text, let alone a collection of texts. Furthermore, __ there may also be some benefit to interpreting Eliade’s work in light of various stages or phases in his scholarly career, for example, the early, middle, and late

32 Manufacturing Religion periods, or developments that took place as a result of his various trips abroad (most notably, his early trip to India, his time in London and Lisbon, and his eventual career in the United States). Such interpretive divisions have already been suggested by Eliade’s two-volume autobiography (roughly divided between pre— and post—Second World War eras), his journals (divided into decades), and Mac Linscott Ricketts’s detailed biography of Eliade’s pre-Second World War Romanian years.

Because I am concerned here with the discursive and political implications of the authoritative strategies found operating in Eliade’s texts, understood as part of a wider discourse, and not with their origin or their possible meaning for him, it is fair to assume that examples drawn from throughout his textual corpus constitute the data for this chapter and chapter 2. Although the origins and developments within a discourse are topics deserving critical attention, such an analysis must await future research, for it is the very existence of this discourse and its political implications that must first be demonstrated. Accordingly, this analysis does not claim to exhaust all possible avenues for research on these texts, nor does it claim to be the definitive word on Eliade scholarship. As should be clear, representative practices are open to a number of criticisms. Using examples drawn from a variety of Eliade’s texts, this chapter and chapter 2 consistently deploy a critical, political reading of the effects of his discourse on religion. And inasmuch as the following chapters identify the same discursive practices and political implications at a number of other sites, the assumption that Eliade’s texts constitute a useful instance of, and opening to, this discourse is warranted.

The Politics of Nostalgia In their introductory essay to a volume that explores the relations between social anthropology and the history of religions, Armin Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen observe: [S]ome historians of religion have advocated a personal and existentially relevant attitude to the world’s religious traditions. Foremost among these is Mircea Eliade who presented modern man’s estrangement from tradition as fundamentally detrimental to individual and social balance, hence the politics of nostalgia which seeks, on the basis of a universalist interpretation of religions, to restore Man as a complete and inherently spiritual being. (1991: 13)

Geertz and Jensen conclude that claims made about such matters as the primacy of archaic traditions and myths over modern behaviors actually constitute “worldview construction” whereby the modern is understood, judged, and found lacking exclusively in terms of the archaic. This move from description to normative judgment is, in part, the result of an essentialization of historical data. In Eliade’s words,

“starting from any stylistically and historically conditioned creation of the spirit

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 33 one can regain the vision of the archetype” (1991: 174). That practices or traditions in one historic, geographic, and cultural setting differ from those in another is not a problematic matter given the power of essentialism. However, as suggested by Geertz and Jensen, significant epistemological and methodological problems arise once one asserts that one set of practices are “creations of the spirit” and therefore ought to be employed as a norm against which all other practices are to be judged.

As a further example, Geertz and Jensen maintain that a similar politics of nostalgia informs Charles Long’s book, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986). In this collection of essays, Long proposes

that traditional forms of religious thinking and practices are a potent ground for a radical critique of the hegemony of the modern, white West. For Long, religion, as “an authentic mode of human existence” is accordingly the “locus for a meaning that carried an archaic form; it was a root meaning and could thus become the basis for radical critical thought.” Long’s own choice of terms for such a position is that it is nothing more than an “archaic critique” (8, 9). Because of the vague and subjective nature of such categories as “traditional” and “authentic mode of human existence,” there appear to be no self-evident reasons why such “root meanings,” whatever they might be, would necessarily critique rather than, for example, support white, North American hegemony. From the outset, it must be clearly stated that Long’s judgment that African-Americans have suffered tremendously is not in any need of debate. The empirical data that grounds the analysis of racism (e.g., measures of poverty, educational standards, unemployment levels) are powerful and must be acknowledged. What is in need of debate, however, are the ways in which Long’s a priori valuation of the rediscovered religious experiences and their relation to “things archaic’ prevent him from recognizing the possibility that roots are a complex issue (e.g., they can easily be constructed with the benefit of hindsight) that can be complicit in dominant power structures as well as combative of them—possibly simultaneously. Without specific criteria to determine the status of these supposedly archaic values, the issue cannot be decided, and the basis of his normative judgment is lost. Differing from Eliade and Long, Geertz and Jensen maintain that scholars of religion must be prepared to entertain the possibility that, for example, adherent accounts of origins as found in such things as cosmogonic myths are not simply self-evidently meaningful, archaic insights but can actually serve as potent justifications for contemporary social arrangements. For example, Geertz and Jensen maintain that scholars of religion must be prepared to acknowledge that “myths about the rule of parrots at the beginning of time do not reflect historical events but legitimate the order in which the world now finds itself” (1991: 13). The fact that many scholars of religions have often overlooked or outright excluded this reading of such foundational accounts is the first piece of evidence to suggest that their interpretive strategies may support specific political agendas. The politics of nostalgia, therefore, denotes an ideological position in which, for example, things

34 Manufacturing Religion purportedly archaic are unilaterally prevalued as essential and beneficial, becoming

the norm against which other social arrangements and forms of human behavior are judged and found wanting. The scope of this politics ranges from the disproportionate attention scholars pay to decontextualized myths, rituals, and symbols in general, and cosmogonic myths in particular, to what one could broadly term , the epistemological traditionalism that dominates many interpretive efforts in the field, that is, the position that to know is to remember the forms of the past, and to remember is to reexperience an authoritative past in the present. What is at stake in this debate over the politics of nostalgia is the unquestioned value and, more specifically, authority of some conceptions of the past (a past that is apparently without particular distributions of power and influence) to shape and judge the present. In apparent agreement with Geertz and Jensen’s critique is Carl Olson, who finds the related term “theology of nostalgia” particularly useful for describing what he considers to be Eliade’s theological position (1989, 1992). In support of his assertion that in Eliade’s scholarship there is a theological agenda, Olson recalls the often-cited passage from Eliade’s journal (8 November 1959): “I wonder if the secret message of the book [Patterns in Comparative Religion] has been understood,

the ‘theology’ implied in the history of religions as I decipher and interpret it.” On many accounts, Olson and Geertz and Jensen would no doubt agree concerning the characteristics and possible basis of this nostalgia, however, where Olson interprets the import of this nostalgia as primarily (or exclusively) of theological significance, Geertz and Jensen opt for a historical and sociopolitical reading. In spite of the apparent agreement, the difference between these two readings is indeed great and representative of the discursive clash at the heart of the modern study of religion; in understanding Eliade’s position as essentially theological, Olson may very well obscure and reproduce its highly political nature. The politics of nostalgia as found within the discourse on sui generis religion is reproduced by a variety of techniques that facilitate the move from descriptive generalization to normative judgment: stressing myths as possessing normative value for the present; relying on essentialism and idealism to interpret symbols and understand history; emphasizing the decontextualized character of religious phenomena; and naturalizing and universalizing what are local values and beliefs. “The politics of nostalgia” is therefore a very useful term, because it makes explicit that each of these strategies contributes to an overall normative judgment of certain social practices and relationships in the modern world, all of which are based on

what is considered an ideal type of a past historical era. Whatever else they may be, such judgments are properly termed political, because they entail the assumption, realized in a social program, that human beings ought to interact with one another in a certain manner from within certain social arrangements. What these strategies have in common is the assumption that certain portions of human culture and experience are somehow distinct from historical pressures

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 35 | and influences. The primary vehicle for articulating this assumption is the longheld claim that religious experiences are sui generis, that they are their own cause and belong to their own unique category. However, the political aspect of this theoretical claim has gone undetected by those scholars who have uncritically accepted the use of the sui generis strategy. Hence, appeals within this discourse to the authority and normativity of such categories as “the archaic,” “experience,” and “tradition” have all gone unchallenged, because they were privileged and protected by a scholarly consensus on the ahistorical status (and therefore the self-

evident value) of religious data. Simply put, scholarly judgments concerning religious data and their relevance for contemporary people have been privileged because they were, and continue to be, believed to arise from historically and politically independent insights. To appeal to the example of Pettazzoni once again, he maintained that the meaning of religious phenomena could be understood only by studying their shared underlying structure “independently of their position in time and space and of their attachment to a given cultural environment” (1967: 217). Because the findings of such scholars arise from an undefendable assertion regarding a fundamentally distinct and socially autonomous aspect of human experience (namely, religious experience), the judgments and claims they make benefit from an authority that is the direct result of a series of ideological strategies

that portray, to employ Eliade’s own terminology but in a novel manner, the provincial as if it were universal.

The Ahistoricity of the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion At the very heart of the discourse on sui generis religion lies the assumption that certain aspects of human experience can be, and are, divorced from the interactions and negotiations of people embedded within historical, social situations characterized by power imbalances—in a word, the world of politics. On the basis of this assumption, as already articulated by Pettazzoni, scholars have developed specific hermeneutical tools designed to access what they consider to be the “deep meaning” of these purportedly apolitical events and symbols, developing interpretations that are themselves considered to be free from the complications of politics and history. For example, because Eliade asserted that religious phenomena, which he generally termed hierophanies or manifestations of the sacred, essentially were the valorized historical artifacts of the interaction between the atemporal, universal sacred and certain distinct elements of the profane world, then to study the sacred meant to describe, catalog, and contrast its varied manifestations. This discourse on religion thus comprises the study of the temporal manifestations of an ahistorical, atemporal, and apolitical sacred. Therefore, one of the very titles by which it is best known in North America, the history of religions, seems to imply an oxymoron, because the study purports to establish the history of a datum (i.e., the sacred) that is essentially ahistorical. In the words of J. Z. Smith, “[flor a student

36 Manufacturing Religion of religion such as myself to accept willingly the designation ‘historian of religion’ is to submit to a lifelong sentence of ambiguity. I cannot think of two more difficult terms than ‘history’ and ‘religion.’ Their conjunction, as may be witnessed by every _ programmatic statement from this putative discipline that I am familiar with, serves only to further the confusion” (1982: 20). As McCalla has succinctly put it, “History is not history when it is the history of religions” (1994: 435). Such criticism notwithstanding, Eliade maintained that the history of religions, because of its unique interpretive categories, could access, collect, and represent archetypical meanings of the human condition understood as a coherent whole. Therefore, only this discipline was in the position to contribute to the revalorization of a modern, Western culture devoid of sacredness and therefore meaning. In his words, this revalorization arises from the “correct analyses of myths and of mythical thought, of symbols and primordial images, especially the religious creations that emerge from Oriental and ‘primitive’ cultures [that] are, in my opinion,

the only way to open the Western mind and to introduce a new, planetary humanism”’ (1989a: xii). Writing in his journal in 1962, Eliade elaborates on this point considerably: The history of religions gathers and preserves the mythico-religious traditions, currently disappearing throughout the world, already understood with difficulty— or understood the wrong way—even by those who still have them. This mysterious and absurd discipline which is the “History of Religions” could have a royal function: the “scientific” publications constitute a reservoir where all the values and traditional religious models could be camouflaged. That is why I always make an effort to put forward the meaning of religious facts. The meaning is no longer obvious; it must be established by exegesis and comparison. And if our generation does not record (in the “scientific” publications) the meaning of religious phe-

nomena, this operation will become almost impossible for future generations. (1989a: 162-163)

Such “correct analyses,” which arise from recording, pooling, and preserving these historically disparate yet purportedly universal values, are brought about through the “intelligent sympathy of the hermeneut” who is willing to interpret religion as religious as opposed to conceptualizing it, for example, as economic or political. And so, in these two passages, one finds a useful summary of Eliade’s position on the soteriological value of studying religion: its ability to save the Western world. This salvific ability depends on a variety of interconnected factors: its political and institutional autonomy that results in its status as an academic discipline; the purportedly universal value of the religious symbols of the “Orient”; the universal applicability of the discipline’s findings; and the need for sympathetic, intuitivebased scholarship, all of which presuppose that the debate over correct methods for interpreting the meaning, function, and therefore value of these apparently selfevident religious facts has been settled once and for all. Only by prevaluing what

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 37 can only be termed the inherent worth of these “things archaic” could such a judgment be made against the supposedly desacralized West. In other words, without a knowledge of the myriad ways in which archaic people correctly quenched the supposedly inherent thirst for origins and meaning, Eliade’s diagnosis of, and

prescription for, the West is empty and unfounded. To question the veracity of this knowledge (i.e., to suggest that Eliade’s knowledge of “archaic man” or the “West” and the “Orient” may itself be flawed and, at least in part, based on a particular sociopolitical context) is to question the normativity of not only the methods and theories that generated this knowledge but the entire scholarly enterprise. It is to this task that we must now turn.

The Study of Religion as Spiritual Technique Eliade’s numerous academic texts in the study of religion have provided what can be understood as a complete theoretical framework. He termed this framework a “total hermeneutic,” whose aim was to “decipher and explicate every kind of en-

counter of man with the sacred, from prehistory to our day” (1984: 58). This hermeneutic provides a system that allows the researcher to translate all human experiences, expressed in thought, word, and deed, of both past and present, in what are termed primitive and modern societies, as contributing to the understanding of humans as essentially religious creatures. The ideal or, in Eliade’s terms, total human, then, becomes Homo Religiosus, and and to study this requires a total discipline that is virtually unlimited in its application. Accordingly, Eliade calls scholars to “become aware of their unlimited possibilities” (1984: 59). For example,

see the intriguing yet, in terms of its closing androcentric images and totalized tenor, rather troubling journal entry from 20 November 1978, where he harshly criticizes his “adversaries’’ and “so-called historians of religions... [who] refuse to admit the importance, and above all the scope, of our discipline (at least, such as I conceive it). They would be satisfied with the smallest parcel. Indeed, what’s the use of having a whole woman? An arm is enough, or a breast, or a knee... In short, their dream is the little ‘specialty’ ” (1989b: 329). In what is perhaps his most concise statement of the potential for this particular discourse on religion, his essay “A New Humanism” (first published in 1961), Eliade elaborates on the relations between “total man” and the need for a total synthetic discipline (1984: 8). In his corpus, “total man” functions much the same as the term “the sacred,” as an essentializing, reductionistic, totalized trope, capable of glossing over concrete and contextual differences—including, most explicitly, differences of gender—in favor of those features the researcher believes to be universal. Eliade’s theory of symbolism is likewise reductionistic: all symbols are reducible to religious symbols insomuch as all symbols are meaningful because of their correspondence with an absolute referent (the sacred). In Eliade’s words, a religious act comprises “every act with a meaning” (1958: 156). Because all myths,

38 Manufacturing Religion , symbols, and rituals are, for him, concerned with generating this type of a stable meaning in what might otherwise appear to be a semantically and morally ambig-

uous universe, ultimately all symbols and symbolic behavior are oriented or grounded in terms of the sacred or that which is considered to be the absolute ontological benchmark for adherents. This is the fundamental philosophical theme of his book The Myth of the Eternal Return: the many ways in which the sacred, through participation with profane reality, infuses absolute Being, and therefore unambiguous meaning, into a world otherwise characterized only by contingency and Becoming. Homo religiosus, then, is not only a particular aspect of humanity

but ultimately the maker or interpreter of all meaning, and therefore is “total man.” Accordingly, to study Homo religiosus is to study humanity in its essence. Through what might be termed a religious reductionism, Eliade’s work virtually

ensures that this one discourse on religion regain the title formerly applied to theology in the classical European university: Queen of the Sciences. In citing van der Leeuw’s assertion, “nothing human is foreign to me” (homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto) (1963: 675), Tim Murphy has correctly identified the concrete

social and political implications of this ultimate interpretive authority gained through the deployment of the essentialist “total man”; through its use, “the foreign, the alien, the other is elided, effaced, and subsumed into the ego, the absolute subject ... The desire to find only ‘purely self-recognition in absolute otherness’, is, ultimately, the desire for the absolute nothingness of otherness” (1994b: 141—

142).

For the scholar of sui generis religion, however, the study of this supposed human essence leads to the recovery and the rearticulation of formerly lost values, Eliade asserts that new “cultural values” are recreated by this hermeneutic, because researchers inevitably interiorize the archetypical values of their subject (notably, the study of archaic myths), change personally from such an encounter, then effect

changes in their own culture. What exactly Eliade meant by “cultural values” is never made clear, although it seems likely that he meant certain dispositions and attitudes relevant to, for example, archaic cyclical time rather than the linear time of moderns, which would in turn be reflected in an acceptance of the paradigmatic importance of tradition and the past. Clearly, then, his findings that myths communicate Being is not strictly limited to phenomenological description (e.g., “My informants report that myths narrate what they consider to be authoritative, archetypical events of the distant past”) but constitutes advocacy of a normative interpretation of these human essences and narratives. Simply put, myths do not only narrate what informants consider to be archetypical meaning, but as Eliade himself asserts, they actually contain fundamentally beneficial archetypical meaning that ought to be of worth to contemporary people—otherwise he could not go on to advocate researchers’ personal transformations from incorporating such archaic cultural values into their lives. Much like Paul de Man argued that “literature and

art, because of their autonomous histories, were deepest expressions of the true

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 39 identity and interiority first, of an author, and then, by extension, of a people or nation” (Carroll 1995: 251), so, too, Eliade asserted that “[j]ust as all religious phenomena are hierophantic . . . literary creation unveils the universal and exemplary meanings hidden in men and in the most commonplace events” (1989b: 284). In a suitably totalized fashion, Eliade, like de Man, maintained that religious symbolism (including myths) and literature conveyed ahistorical and fundamental cultural values that could be recovered and reexpressed. According to Eliade, “given the nature of the documents with which he works, the historian of religions is aware that his exegesis can eventually stimulate, through

a curious anamnesis, the creative faculties of all those who passionately wish to know what the human spirit is capable of” (1989b: 262). Accordingly, in the end, “the creative hermeneutic changes man; it is more than instruction, it is also a spiritual technique susceptible of modifying the quality of existence itself....A good history of religions book ought to produce in the reader an action of awakening’ (1984: 62). Although on one scale of analysis we can read the new humanism as something akin to shamanism or yoga (insomuch as they are all spiritual tech-

niques designed to save people), on another level it constitutes a top-down, romantic, and idealist political theory of social change: an interior experience of supposedly ahistorical, archaic roots results in a change of the interpretive stance that leads to a change in perception of the cultured elites who alone have access to such documents. In turn, this leads first to a personal awakening and then to a subsequent creation of new cultural and social values, all of which brings modern social relations into alignment with the ancient exemplars. Although it would be foolish to outright describe such a political philosophy as fascist, it is fair to conclude that such a position is conducive with fascist politics inasmuch as it is an-

timodernist; can serve extremist, nationalist politics by ultimately sanctioning claims to indigenous, archaic purity (notably, on the basis of an understanding of the peasants, the village, or the tribe as the “only source of inspiration and spiritual creativity” [Eliade 1989b: 253]); and generally contributes to constructing a cultural environment that attempts to alter current social realities by appeals to an idealized, supposedly autonomous past era. What ended as the normative, creative hermeneutic begins as a synthesis of three distinct methods: phenomenology, hermeneutics, and structuralism. As already suggested, Eliade’s synthetic method revolves around the sympathetic study of the many symbolic manifestations of what he termed the atemporal sacred (what J. Z. Smith has renamed the “ontic primordium” [{1982: 42]), in the historical world of the profane. The methods of the discourse on sui generis religion, according to

Eliade’s articulation of it, are defined by its posited object, the sacred, which is considered to be the ultimate referent for all hierophanies. On the basis of the structuralist aspect to his method, all hierophanies, once

they are phenomenologically described and accurately interpreted, can be mapped into a larger totality that finds complete expression in each isolated his-

40 Manufacturing Religion torical instantiation. It is precisely this belief, that “every significant fragment reproduces the whole,” that is indebted to a strategy of universalization, grounding such assertions as the unimportance of differentiating between historical conditions and social/economic classes (Eliade 1958: 269). From metaphors to rituals, texts, beliefs, and social organizations of all human societies—the entire range of these can be loosely homogenized as symbols. To understand what he posited as the complex yet universal religious history of humankind, Eliade attempted to construct an elaborate structure first by describing and interpreting what he understood to be the essentially religious quality of the symbolic expressions of one particular religion, and then comparing and interrelating the symbols of diverse religions. This two-step method can be termed diachronic-synchronic* insomuch as a horizontal or diachronic level of description, comparison, and interpretation of any two phenomena (e.g., medieval Judaism and Vedic Hinduism) always im-

plies a third term, a vertical, synchronic comparison to an abstract, ideal religious type, for example, universal religion an sich, or what Eliade termed cosmic

religion. Evidence of this synchronic aspect can be found at the very heart of Eliade’s magnum opus, the uncompleted History of Religious Ideas, in which he

argues for the “fundamental unity of all religious phenomena” (1978: xv). In other words, this approach to the subject is dependent on a genus-species view according to which the genus “religion” is composed of various species: world religions, primitive religions, mystical religions, modern secular religions, spiri-

tual techniques, and so on.° | One critique of the use of such an ahistorical, phenomenologically based method can be made from a feminist point of view. Take, for example, Eliade’s work on the symbolism of stones as applied to fertility rites (1958: 220-222). In this text, Eliade cites a series of instances in which stones are utilized to ensure female fertility. According to him, the implicit idea behind such things as a stone that may resemble a pregnant woman, and therefore named the “woman-stone, ” is that, for example, “certain stones have power to make sterile women fruitful because of the spirits of the ancestors that dwell in them” (221). What is most intriguing about this section of Patterns in Comparative Religion is that, in suitably androcentric fashion, infertility is presumed to be a female problem authorized by the spirits. In other words, this phenomenologically based scholarly commentary on fertility symbolism reproduces rather than identifies—and by identifying, also challenging—androcentric assumptions concerning infertility and obscures the relations between male virility and social power. By simply describing the essentially religious symbolism of such stones, this text glosses over the possibly socially repressive functions they serve. For the contemporary feminist scholar, then, stories

of women kneeling and crossing themselves when coming upon a pile of stones (222) are not simply stories of “religious fear,” as they are for Eliade, but may also constitute concrete examples of just one specific site where social control is exercised, normalized, and, reproduced. It is on the basis of its decontextualized nature

, Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 41 that Rosalind Shaw can conclude that “[t]he sui generis concept... stands in a contradictory relationship to the premises of feminist scholarship” (1995: 70). After citing Eliade’s use of empirical examples, an important point to note is that the discourse on sui generis religion appears to qualify as empirical insomuch as it contains this diachronic component that studies the particular, empirical data

of religious traditions, for example, instances of stone symbolism. As Joachim Wach phrases it, “the task of the history of religions is to study and to describe the empirical religions. It is a descriptive and interpretive science, not a normative one” (1988b: 49). Presumably, it was a similar emphasis on the empirical nature of religious data that enabled Eliade (as well as Joseph Kitagawa) to sign the Marburg Declaration at the tenth International Congress of the History of Religions, in 1960, a declaration that, as previously noted, stated emphatically that the “common ground” which unites students of religion is that experiences of transcendence “whatever else they may be [are] undoubtedly empirical facts of human existence and history” (see Schimmel 1960; and Werblowsky 1960). Such a position more than likely also enabled Wach to distance his methods from philosophy and theology. However, the synchronic nature of their study, represented by Eliade’s struc-

turalism and Wach’s elaboration of the myriad ways in which “spirit (Geist) becomes conscious of itself” (1988b: 201), has been identified by a number of critics

_ for many years. This, in part, may be what J. Z. Smith meant when he wrote that postulations of such things as an “ontic substratum” denigrate the anthropological dimension of the field (1982: 42).

As a result of this postulated common ground, Eliade maintained that all religious symbolism, when correctly interpreted, is basically a re-presentation of origins, whose study provides access to a deeper understanding of past and contemporary reality. Because of his assertions concerning the multivalency of all sym-

bolic expressions, Eliade’s hermeneutic is not limited simply to symbols traditionally associated with religious beliefs and practices. For him, the dreams, advertising images, films, novels, myths, and metaphoric language of what he termed modern, desacralized society can likewise be homologized into the larger interpretation of religious symbolism. Much the same as the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner once judged some non-Christians to be deserving of salvation because they were, in his words, “anonymous Christians,” so too, Eliade often referred to supposedly secular societies and their symbolic expressions as being intrinsically religious—at least in a camouflaged way—because they, too, demonstrated a nostalgia for origins and meaning, as is evidenced in such symbolic forms as the modern novel and film. In other words, because he maintained that all myths (one particular type of symbolic expression) narrate or convey the symbolic significance of origins (the exemplar of all myth being cosmogony [1984: 75; also a position applied consistently throughout Eliade 1974 and 1963]), Eliade as-

serted that symbolic expressions of all kinds reveal the autonomous and deep aspects of reality. Because this common symbolic ground is essentially concerned

42 Manufacturing Religion with meaning and origins—in a word, religion—the study of these expressions is reserved for the historian of religions, for the study of such symbols defies all other forms of knowledge. The ground, therefore, for this synthesis of description, interpretation, and comparison, all of which contribute to the production of religion as an object of scholarly discourse, is found in the assumption that the same essence, the same deep reality—in a word, the sacred (a term never adequately defined by Eliade) — lies behind, or is prior to, and motivates the practices and conceptions of all people and their communities. The dialectics of the sacred, then, designates the ways in which this supposedly unified and ultimately meaningful object constantly moves from the ahistorical to the historical sphere—for example, the fact that the sacred breaks through, and is expressed in, hierophanies that occur in the realm of the profane and that its manifestations provide centers for human existential orientation and motivate ostensibly authentic action. One of the more useful examples of how such essentialist assumptions ground not only the comparative method but also the specific devaluation of concrete historical and sociopolitical particularity can be found in Eliade’s study of the complex structure associated with moon and fertility symbolism (1958: 163-178). Within a very few pages, such diverse images or events as the phases of moon, the Earth Mother, oxen horns, neolithic idols, lightning strikes, snails retracting, bears hibernating, frogs swelling and diving, snakes shedding, and women menstruating are all homogenized into one coherent, systematic whole insomuch as they confirm the researcher’s valuation of certain three-stage transitional events. However, as important as such transition motifs may be (such motifs were of great importance in the work of Joseph Campbell and Victor Turner), the expense paid to generate such a complex structure as the basis for explaining why, in myths, menstruation may be associated with snakes shedding their skin is that the cultural and historical (in a word, contextual) particularities are lost. In Eliade’s examples, the particularities of Chinese, Australian, Indian, Neolithic, Eskimo, Greek, Roman, German, French, Portuguese, Persian, African, and so on, peoples are lost in favor of the posited ahistorical essence the researcher believes to unite the many artistic and natrative instances of transition symbolism. Such a method has little regard for the ways in which diverse groups of people employ imagery for differing sociopolitical, cultural ends. Instead, on the basis of the motif of transition that is read into these socially distinct images and events, all particularity is subsumed and marginalized.

The Case of Cosmogonies: Pillars or Sledgehammers? Of all the sites in Eliade’s corpus where this homogenizing strategy is deployed, the cosmogonic events are presented as the ultimate narration of the hierophanic incursion that, through the myths and rituals associated with it, provides a center

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 43 and orientation for all present and future action. It is only through telling and acting out such stories of origins that Homo religiosus satisfies “his thirst for the real and his terror of ‘losing’ himself by letting himself be overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of profane existence” (1974: 92). Because of the importance of the cosmogonic myth in Eliade’s overall theory of how ahistorical meaning is communicated to the profane world, it will be worthwhile to examine a very different reading of the significance of this type of narrative, so as to sketch the outlines of the two discourses currently operative in the study of religion.® A number of scholars disagree with Eliade’s rather decontextualized and ostensibly apolitical interpretation of cosmogonic myths. J. Z. Smith closely examines some of the rituals and myths used by Eliade as evidence for his theory that one of the predominant strategies used to convey the purely cosmogonic function of myths and rituals is the imagery of the center (which is manifested in such things as a central shrine, tree, mountain, tent pole) as a place of order against the chaos of the profane that surrounds it. According to Eliade, the cosmogonic myth “sets the exemplary model for human behavior and activity. . . . [It] explains and justifies

the actual human situation as well as man’s relations with the world and with supernatural beings” (1960: 351-352). Although the political uses and implications

of myth seem to be acknowledged in the quotation, that is, that such symbolic expressions promote certain social arrangements, Eliade rules out interpreting sto-

ries of the origins of the universe as themselves arising from sociopolitical and historical contexts. It is important to recognize that, for Eliade, these “exemplary models” are simply expressed or manifested in social and historical contexts; they do not arise from them. In other words, although he is prepared to interpret human actions as justified and explained by such narratives, unlike Geertz and Jensen’s interpretation at the outset of this chapter, Eliade fails to consider that these same narratives may justify, or be explained by, human actions and organ-

izations. ,

Echoing Geertz and Jensen’s critique, J. Z. Smith comments that actually “language of the ‘center’ is primarily political and only secondarily cosmological. It is

a vocabulary that stems, primarily, from archaic ideologies of kingship and the royal function” (1987: 17). Such an interpretation has also been proposed by Stephen Yale (1983), who draws attention to the fact that Eliade overlooked both the degree to which social institutions are actually reinforced by ritual as well as the fact that cosmogonies are most often associated with the installation of a new king, no doubt a politically charged event (1983: 78). Yale concludes that, contrary to Eliade’s almost exclusive emphasis on the religious or existential meaning, causes,

and uses for the symbolism of the center, the “reasons why a man believes that his village is the center of the world are also economic, political, and social, as well as religious” (167). An interesting example of the complex manner in which the phenomenologically based comparative method can gloss over the links between human narratives

44 Manufacturing Religion | and practices, on the one hand, and the legitimization of distributions of wealth and privilege, on the other, arises in Eliade’s work on sun worship, in Patterns in Comparative Religion. Concluding a chapter in which he traces the many instances of sun symbolism throughout the world, he writes: But it is worth underlining the close connection between solar theology and the élite—whether of kings, initiates, heroes or philosophers. Unlike other nature hier-

ophanies, sun hierophanies tend to become the privilege of a closed circle, of a minority of the elect. The result is the hastening of the process of rationalization. In the Graeco-Roman world the sun, having become the “fire of intelligence,” ended by becoming a “cosmic principle”; from a hierophany it turned into an idea by a process rather similar to that undergone by various of the sky gods (Iho, Brahman, etc.)....The philosophers, last among the “elect,” thus at last completed the secularization of what was one of the mightiest of all the cosmic hierophanies. (1958: 150-151)

This passage is intriguing for the way in which it simultaneously acknowledges and marginalizes sociopolitical context in the study of mythology. Intuitively assuming that hierophanies are symbols of a common, universal essence, Eliade suggests that only this one type of hierophany—images of the sun specifically—is liable to being used by distinct subgroups within society for their own material ends. Yet while acknowledging this link, the text simultaneously and quite effectively minimalizes it insomuch as this intimate association between elites and such narratives is described as a virtual anomaly (e.g., “Unlike other nature hierophanies . . .”), which

only, in his words, “tends” to happen. The presumption is that, normally hierophanies, as symbolic expressions or manifestations of an ultimately distinct and autonomous essence, are naturally neutral when it comes to issues of sociopolitical contestation and, because of this, are consensually shared among a homogeneous population. Furthermore, through the remarks on the process of rationalization, a process whereby human beings clothe and interpret religious experiences in rational and secular terms, the text entrenches the assumption that, in their essence, all religious experiences—or hierophanies—are fundamentally alien to such secular and historical issues as politics and economics. Although their form may change and may be employed in support of dominant elites within a society (such as the appropriation of an archaic myth by the ruling elites), in essence, they are cosmic,

distinct, and disconnected from all local issues of power and privilege. In other words, Eliade’s description is firmly rooted within a context that privileges certain

types of human narratives only insomuch as they conform to preoperative and undefended commitments on the sui generis nature of religion. _ J. Z. Smith’s and Yale’s characterization of this “ideology of the ‘sacred center” (J. Z. Smith 1987: 122 n. 3) as but one of the architectural or geographical strategies employed by ruling elites to explain and legitimize their reign differs markedly from Eliade’s interpretation just presented. Whereas Eliade portrayed

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 45 such myths primarily as providing sociopolitically neutral meaning and order for human existence through geographic and temporal symbolizations of ancient and authoritative cosmological events, they read such stories as possible contemporary justifications for specific historical, political, even economic arrangements. In other words, Smith avoids questions of meaning and instead offers a naturalistic reading to account for the use and longevity of such symbolizations. It is important to note that Eliade’s methodology is reductionistic inasmuch as it does propose to inform religious insiders of symbolic associations they are

unaware of. According to Eliade, the data of the study of religion (“mythicoreligious traditions”) may presently be “understood with difficulty—or understood the wrong way—even by those who still have them” (1989a: 162). Although his method does formulate interpretations (rather than, for example, naturalistic explanations based on causal analysis) of symbols and rituals in a manner not wholly in keeping with the devotee’s own interpretation, Eliade’s hermeneutic does not question the devotee’s claim to have had a genuinely unique personal experience of the sacred. In this manner, Eliade’s reductive method greatly differs from what I call the naturalistic discourse on religion, because the latter accounts for religious behavior and experiences in terms of any number of historically based theoretical categories, namely, social, psychological, or political causes. Recently, Robert Segal has been criticized for ascribing to Eliade a religious insider's perspective. In his contribution to a collection of essays on reductionism in the study of religion, Thomas Idinopulos (1994) castigates Segal for interpreting Eliade to have said that religion must be understood exclusively as believers themselves interpret it. Idinopulos is correct if Segal meant by this that Eliade maintained that religion was essentially, for example, the experience of Jesus’ healing

power, the release into nirvana, as well as doing one’s dharma. However, such devotee interpretations, each relevant to very different religious communities, are clearly at odds with one another. Therefore, it is insufficient for one to characterize Eliade as advocating such final interpretive authority to all religious devotees. Eliade resolves the potential contradictions between such accounts by a reduction to what

he posits to be the shared experience of the sacred that underlies each of these ‘seemingly divergent statements. It is therefore more than likely that by asserting that Eliade’s theories limit the discourse to the insider’s perspective, Segal implies that, although Eliade does in fact reinterpret the symbols, assertions, and so on,

of devotees, he nowhere attempts to question the nonreligious origins of their experiences (the possibility that, for example, other social or psychological influences were at their root). If this is the case, Eliade’s repeated call for scholars to study such experiences “on their own plane of references” is highly misleading, for it would mean approaching religion in a multitude of ways, each according to potentially conflicting devotee accounts. Accordingly, this authoritative plane of reference (the fundamentally shared experience of the sacred) turns out to be the interpreter’s own construction.

46 Manufacturing Religion Another researcher who significantly differs from Eliade’s reading of the function of cosmogonic myths is Graeme MacQueen (1988). In an article that specifi-

cally critiques the depoliticized nature of much research on myth, MacQueen singles out Eliade’s work as typical of this dominant trend in the modern discourse.’ Suggesting that elements of social and political coercion, and not simply naturally arising social consensus, may actually help to construct individual and social identity, MacQueen criticizes Eliade’s work for the way in which his interpretations of myths deemphasize and even ignore issues of power, dominance, and oppression. For MacQueen, narratives of origins can be a very effective means by which one group in society legitimizes its social and material privileges by appealing to authoritative narratives of origins that are either of their own creation or conducive to a particular political agenda. Using as his example the Purusha _ myth’s account: of how the four varnas were created, MacQueen asserts, “that it is a myth of the brahmana—intoned, transmitted, and put forth as a charter by this group—is ... clear, as is the fact that what is legitimized is not merely ‘order’ but a particular order, which entails the dominance of this stratum and the graduated

subordination of the other three.” On this basis, he concludes that it is “quite misleading to call [the purusha-sikta] simply an Indian myth or a Hindu myth or a myth of vedic society: in each case the fact that it is a myth of the brahmanas is obscured” (148). MacQueen’s conclusion, then, is that if scholars fail to address issues of social

dominance in the myths they study, they not only miss studying one possible function of such narratives but, more important, lend “support and legitimacy to

the structures of authority that they study” (144). Applied to the work of Eliade in particular, MacQueen’s critique is biting. After citing Eliade’s interpretation of the creation myths of the Ngaju Dayak of Borneo, which, according to Eliade, “articulate themselves into a sacred history which is continuously recovered in the life of the community as well as in the existence of every individual” (1984: 77; reprinted in Dundes 1984: 142), MacQueen draws attention to the fact that Eliade’s use of such terms as “sacred history” and “community” disregard and gloss over a variety of sociopolitical distinctions in societies. MacQueen asks, “does the myth disclose cosmic and social principles for everyone in Dayak society or would it be more accurate to speak of it as enforcing them for some segments of the community?” In other words, when Eliade asserts that through “the cosmogonic myth ... the Dayak progressively unveils the structures of reality and [the structures] of his own proper mode of being” (77), is he speaking descriptively (e.g., “At a purely descriptive level of analysis, this is what some respondents report to be authentic, proper, etc.”), or is he speaking normatively (e.g., “This in fact is the proper ‘mode of being’ ’’)? If the former, then his subsequent analysis can examine the valueladen and theoretically charged nature of such terms as “reality” and “proper” and speculate on their relations to various portions of society at large. If the latter, then issues of society, politics, economics, and the like, are excluded from the start.

Ideological Strategies and the Pclitics of Nostalgia 47 To make his point, MacQueen offers the case, chronicled by Th. P. van Baaren,

of placing of a Dayak slave (thereby noting that Dayak society is indeed highly stratified) in the hole intended for the main pillar of a building and stamping him to death in the process of raising the building. What would, for Eliade, undoubtedly be a significant example of the coincidence of opposites (birth/death) often found in the symbolism of the recreated center becomes, for MacQueen, a graphic example of a highly segmented social system, in which the dominance exhibited in, and entrenched by, stories and rituals has its material rewards. MacQueen asks: “What does it mean to find yourself pounded to death with the pillar of the world? It means that it is not the pillar of your world at all, but the sledgehammer, the destroyer of your world. In the re-creation of the dominant’s world, you are annihilated” (151).

Perhaps an even better example of the depoliticized nature of such readings of myths and rituals can be found in the work of Joseph Campbell. In particular, I refer to his interview with the journalist Bill Moyers entitled “Sacrifice and Bliss,” which is part of the longer series of interviews done by Moyers in 1985 and 1986, originally broadcast on PBS, and now widely available both as a videotape series

and published transcript. In that interview, Campbell recounts and interprets a particular male rite-of-passage ceremony. There is a ritual association with the men’s society in New Guinea that actually enacts the planting-society myth of death, resurrection, and cannibalistic consumption. There is a sacred field with drums going, and chants going, and then pauses. This goes on for four or five days, on and on. Rituals are boring, you know, they just wear you out, and then you break through to something else. At last comes the great moment. There has been a celebration of real sexual orgy, the breaking of all the rules. The young boys who are being initiated into manhood are now to have their first sexual experience. There is a great shed of enormous logs supported by two uprights. A young woman comes in ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roof. The boys, six or so, with the drums going and chanting going, one after another, have their first experience of intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female again, as they were in the beginning, before the separation took place. There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing. Then the couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening. The ritual is the repetition of the original act of the killing of a god followed by the coming of food from the dead savior. In the sacrifice of the Mass, you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. You take it to you, and you turn inward, and there he works within you. (1988: 132)

We find here an excellent example of the tremendous degree to which normative and depoliticized interpretations are intertwined with what might otherwise appear

48 , Manufacturing Religion to be dispassionate ethnographic description. According to Campbell, these ritualized practices concretely symbolize both the ever-present coincidence of opposites (e.g., male/female, life/death) and the original internalization of, and identification with, the deity. Because such abstract insights are difficult to attain in everyday life, or so the argument goes, they must take place in a ritualized context, in his words, to assist the participants to “break through to something else.” It is clear that Campbell’s interest lies with abstract meanings, the symbolic “something else,” and is not concerned with the concrete ways in which this particular human practice is involved in creating and maintaining divisions of power within a society— both generational and gendered power. Instead, the human historical realm, much like hierophanies, is simply the only means available for attaining this “something else”; it is important only insomuch as it is the means to an ahistorical end. This is precisely what I mean by an idealist and completely dehistoricized, depoliticized interpretation that fails to treat ritual and mythic behavior as historical and human actions.

That other theorists would find Campbell’s example, as well as his assessment of it, intriguing precisely because both are examples of how women are continually treated as sexual objects and as mere tools in male institutions and ceremonies, should be more than obvious. With regards to the young woman “ornamented as a deity,” it may indeed be true that on one abstract level she symbolizes a deity, but solely examining this level, and solely authorizing this reading, fails to take account of the explicit contradictions of such a valuation that arise on other levels of social, political, and, most important, gendered, analysis. In other words, the “idealization and iconization of the feminine does not entail that women as sociohistorical entities, who are always only approximations of the ideal, partake in the status of the latter” (Neumaier-Dargyay 1995: 3). Simply put, labeling someone as a god does not necessarily lead to equal pay for equal work. Instead of celebrating abstract readings of such events, we as scholars should be intrigued by the apparent gap between such symbolizations and people’s daily, lived social reality. Can we account for the dissonance and contradictions that attend such cultural symbolizations?

Before we proceed, it must be made clear that to read myths and rituals as political legitimations does not necessitate that all such stories and behaviors are necessarily oppressive. Nor does it necessitate that Eliade’s and Campbell’s readings

are wrong. But it does suggest that they are insufficient and, when portrayed as the ultimately authoritative and definitive readings, outright dangerous. Although Bruce Lincoln has observed that “myth has been used more often and more effectively by those who seek to mystify and preserve exploitative patterns of social relations than it has by those who would reform or radically restructure such relations,” he acknowledges that “this does not mean that other groups are without their discourses and without their myths, nor that they are incapable of appropriating the myths and discourse of the dominant class” (1989: 49). The point at issue

Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 49 here is not whether, for example, myths are the possession solely of dominant or oppositional groups in a society but simply that narrative accounts of origins, as well as end-times, are intimately related not only to legitimizing but also to contesting present distributions of social, economic, and political privilege. Lincoln provides a concrete example in the second chapter of his book, Discourse and the Construction of Society (1989), where he identifies the ways in which the leaders of the late-1970s Iranian revolution employed the foundational story of *Ali’s assassination and the death of his own son (the prophet’s grandson) to their own political benefit. Where this narrative once served as a means for constructing national and religious identity in Iran over against the dominant Sunnis and most other Arabs, in the hands of the revolutionary leadership, it was turned against the shah, portraying his leadership of modern Iran as part of the alien rule that began

when the prophet’s own blood line was denied the leadership of the ummah. In Opposition to this, Lincoln notes that those associated with the shah attempted to create symbolic parallels between his rule and that of the far earlier Achaemenian empire and the authority of such rulers as Cyrus the Great, all of which constituted powerful justifications for continuing his own imperial rule. Lincoln concludes that in “Iran of the 1970s two rival parties thus employed different moments from the past in their discourse as they struggled to construct very different kinds of society in the present” (36). It is precisely these complex relationships among symbols, stories, rituals, and organizations based on divine or some type of intuitive authority, on the one hand, and concrete sociopolitical change—ranging from revolution to the perpetuation of the status quo—on the other, that is the topic of such scholars as J. Z. Smith, Yale, MacQueen, and Lincoln. Participating in this discourse allows one to argue that simply to discuss the cross-cultural occurrences of, for example, the symbolism

of the center as found in various stories, architecture, and rituals without also discussing how such architectural or narrative details support or challenge social norms is to overlook a significant aspect of cultural productions and to risk uncritically propagating the social patterns to which these products once contributed.

It must be made clear that these scholars do not reduce myths of creation simply to their sociopolitical function. All these writers suggest that these narratives are multifunctional but stress that to avoid examining the role they play in main-

taining the position of the dominants in a social situation may itself help to the represent these highly specific narratives as if they were universal, normal, and monolithic. As suggested earlier, such a normative portrayal is based on a variety of ideological strategies, working in concert to produce the impression of a homogeneous and purely consensual society in which events and stories are selfevidently meaningful in precisely the same manner for the entire population, regardless of class, gender, age, and so on. Roland Barthes’s treatment of mythology (1973) is a useful reference point for this oppositional stance concerning the function of myth. For Barthes, myths are collective and socially constructed narratives

50 Manufacturing Religion that disguise the history of their social and material production. Because their historical origins are concealed and portrayed as natural, and along with them the social classes and genders they support and legitimize are likewise obscured, myths are all the more powerful ideological tools. Simply put, for Barthes, myths carry out the ideological work of normativization and naturalization by turning culture

into nature. Contrary to the discourse on sui generis religion, and given the insights just noted, one must acknowledge that not only in terms of the uses of the myths by devotees themselves but also in terms of the scholarly debates about the interpretation and study of such authoritative narratives, “struggles about stories of the past may also be struggles over the proper shape of society in the present” (Lincoln 1989: 32). Generally speaking, this is one of the central points in Ivan Strenski’s study of myth theorists (1987), that is, the contemporary sociopolitical uses not simply of the myths themselves but of the very study of mythic narratives as well. The type of normativization, authorized by the decontextualized study of myths, all of which contributes to the construction of a proper shape for society in the present, is precisely where ideological strategizing comes into play. What this comparison of myth and ritual scholarship indicates is the importance of the category of sui generis religion and the role the presumed autonomy of religion, myths, and rituals play in two very different discourses on religion. Eliade, well known for his calls for the development and use of nonreductionistic methods, relates all myths and rituals to an atemporal sacred manifested in a politically and socially homogeneous profane world of history, whereas Smith, Yale, MacQueen, and Lincoln attempt to interpret and subsequently explain the possible origins and

functions of these stories and actions in light of a multifaceted historical world. The primary distinction that separates these two discourses is that, in the discourse on sui generis religion, these stories represent manifestations of an ultimately and essentially unique, unified, and privileged type. To elaborate this difference further, and to make the political implications of such exclusionary practices more apparent, we need to turn to a specific examination of just how the sui generis strategy operates in this discourse.

2. Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege The unity of the object is as illusory as the unity of the method. —tTerry Eagleton

An Autonomous Universe with Its Own Laws and Structures Within Eliade’s texts, the sacred/profane dichotomy is not, as it was for Durkheim, a strictly descriptive tool, useful for interpreting certain judgments and relationships that devotees consciously or unconsciously consider important or particularly valuable (on the very different uses of the technical term “sacred,” see Paden 1991; see also Anttonen 1995 for an attempt to rehabilitate it, but this time on the basis

of cognitive theorizing). For Eliade, the dichotomy is based on an ontological distinction between the sacred, understood by him as representative of order, the ultimately meaningful, and real, and the profane, which comprises chaos, contingency, and nonreality. This harsh distinction is generated and guaranteed by a very particular conception of religion. Unfortunately, Eliade never offered or defended a systematic definition of religion, noting instead, in the preface to his book The Quest, that it

“is unfortunate that we do not have at our disposal a more precise word than religion to denote the experience of the sacred.” His failure to define religion systematically may have originated from what he described as his distrust of a priori definitions that, in his opinion, limit the phenomena from the outset (1958: xili-xiv). Unfortunately, he failed to investigate the methodological problems that result from such an assertion: for example, without a preoperative definition, how does one know which aspects of human behavior are religious, or, to employ three of his own terminological distinctions, how does one know which symbols are hierophanies (experiences of the sacred or the holy) as opposed to kratophanies (experiences of power) or theophanies (experiences of deities)? Simply put, there must be some sort of publicly accessible criteria whereby a group of researchers can at least debate whether some aspect of human behavior is religious. Although 51

«52 Manufacturing Religion Eliade would write about things that were “obviously sacred” (1958: 158), his criteria

were obscure and remain undisclosed. The closest Eliade came to defining the term “religion” can be found in Patterns in Comparative Religion, where it is described exclusively in terms of interpersonally unavailable human experiences. Religion, he wrote, is “the experience of kratophanies, hierophanies, and theophanies” (1958: 126). In other words, religion is the personal experience of the sacred in one of any number of its manifestations in the profane world, for example, as a powerful force of nature, as a deity, as a special location. Although acknowledging that all religious experiences and phenomena are human phenomena, capable of being described through a variety of methods (the psychological, geographical, sociological, etc.), Eliade maintained that such experiences could not be adequately or fully understood simply by way of analyses based exclusively on such empirical methods. In other words, ultimately the synchronic aspect of these experiences had to be identified and interpreted. An example of such an assertion is found in Shamanism, where he wrote that although the historical conditions are extremely important in a religious phenomenon (for every human datum is in the last analysis a historical datum), they do

not wholly exhaust it.... All these dreams, myths, and nostalgias ... cannot be exhausted by a psychological explanation; there is always a kernel that remains refractory to explanation, and this indefinable, irreducible element perhaps reveals the situation of man in the cosmos, a situation that, we shall never tire of repeating, is not solely ‘historical.’ (1964: xiv)

And elsewhere he commented that for “the historian of religions the fact that a myth or a ritual is always historically conditioned does not explain the very existence of such a myth or ritual. In other words, the historicity of a religious experience does not tell us what a religious experience ultimately is” (1984: 53). What

it is has a great deal to do with what Eliade often asserted the intended object of

such experiences to be: the sacred conceived as sui generis, absolutely unique, separate, and thereby its own cause. Therefore, the “religious datum reveals its deeper meaning when it is considered on its plane of reference, and not when it is reduced to one of its secondary aspects or its context” (1984: 61-62). Other references in Eliade’s corpus to the sui generis character, sociohistorical autonomy, and utterly unique nature of the religious symbols, rites, myths, and, generally, all

experiences of the sacred are far too numerous to cite.’ Suffice it to say that sui generis religion grounds this entire approach to religion and can be found in one manner or another in virtually every book and article he published on religion. Such a generalization concerning this theme of sociohistorico-political autonomy that runs throughout his work has been recognized by a number of scholars. In the words of just one of Eliade’s more sympathetic commentators, loan Couliano, writing in the opening to their co-authored volume, The Eliade Guide to

_ Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 53 World Religions, for Eliade religion is an “autonomous system.” It is a system insomuch as all the phenomena pertaining to it are integrated into a complex whole, and it is autonomous insomuch as “religion in its origin and function is not the by-product of other systems (i.e., economy or society), does not depend on them, and does not generate them” (Eliade and Couliano 1991: 1-2). This serves as an apt characterization of the way the Latin phrase sui generis is used by scholars of religion. Even if we grant that Eliade was correct in asserting that human beliefs

and actions contain a kernel of some sort that is not fully disclosed to social scientific analysis, in no way does this necessarily constitute evidence that the action or belief can only be fully understood if interpreted as originating in, or referring to, an extrahistorical or supramundane context. It could be that a historical method

of investigation has not yet been developed that can access this aspect of human action, in which case further social scientific research should be encouraged. After all, Eliade welcomed Freud’s groundbreaking work on unconscious motivations. The psychoanalytic method, then, is itself an example of a methodology developed at a precise historical moment that allowed researchers to investigate formerly puzzling and perhaps even mysterious aspects of human behavior. In spite of this, Eliade often reminded his readers that human inquiry can have no access to the absolute sacred totally removed, as it is, from history, because

the sacred is, by definition, known to humans only through its profane instantiations; hence the importance of the dialectic of the sacred and the profane.’ As has been shown, for the essence of the religious datum to be understood properly, so Eliade maintained, it must be studied and explained on its own terms or, as already noted, on its own plane of reference; it must be studied as something religious. Like the American New Criticism movement, which maintained that such works of art as the poem existed as self-enclosed objects, mysteriously unique and removed from paraphrasing, Eliade attributed to religion a character all its own, understandable only on its own terms. Although his texts generally do not refer to literary critics by name, Eliade seems indebted to this movement because, on numerous occasions, he draws striking analogies between religion and literature as both inhabiting an “autonomous universe with its own laws and structures” (1984: 5).

Perhaps the most representative argument on this point can be found in the preface to Patterns in Comparative Religion, where Eliade asserts that truly great literature somehow transcends the historical conditions of its context and author. He maintains that it would be futile to think that one could, for example, “explain Madame Bovary by a list of social, economic, and political facts; however true, they

do not affect it as a work of literature.” In spite of what some may think to be the case in modern literary theory, few theorists would deny that, on one scale, such works as Madam Bovary constitute literature or even art. However, to exclude

outright the equally legitimate understanding of a text as having, in Fredric Jameson’s words (1988b), a political unconscious is wholly unwarranted and possibly

54 Manufacturing Religion counterintuitive. As the product of a historically embedded human being (the techniques of writing and painting are themselves historical products that have often been used as explicit political tools), literature is equally a product of the material world. It is all the more ironic, then, that naturalistic and materialistic approaches to art and literature have often been marginalized and silenced by highly abstract theories of literature’s social and political autonomy. As early as the late 1970s, Guilford Dudley speculated that the New Critics influenced Eliade’s understanding of aesthetic works as essentially apolitical (1977: 45). But apolitical art and literature is not the only product of such reading strategies. According to Terry Eagleton, such detached interpreters as the New Critics can be characterized as being disinterested not simply in a poem’s historical context

_ but, by extension, in changing the wider political life as well. Eagleton suggests

| that “New Criticism’s view of the poem as a delicate equipoise of contending attitudes, a disinterested reconciliation of opposing impulses, proved deeply attractive to skeptical liberal intellectuals disoriented by the clashing dogmas of the Cold War.” In the case of literature in general, and the poem in particular, such interpreters found what they maintained to be a sociohistorically detached and autonomous zone of human creativity and aesthetic sense, whose adequate interpretation had little, if anything, to do with either the contexts of its composition, its composer, or its reader. In other words, reading literature as a disinterested New Critic meant “committing yourself to nothing at all” (1989: 50). Eagleton concludes that New Criticism was a “recipe for political inertia and thus for submission to the political status quo” (50). Just how far can one link the discourse on sui generis religion to the political inertia, even conservatism, of which Eagleton speaks? According to Eagleton, New Criticism constituted a virtual aestheticization of politics and can be characterized as being “at root a full-blooded irrationalism, one closely associated with religious dogma... and with the right-wing ‘blood and soil’ politics of the Agrarian movement” (49). Much as Eliade’s texts maintain that the unattached and disinterested study of sui generis religion is the means by which to cure the ills of modernity, New Criticism was an interpretive stance that asserted that the work of art was “a solution to social problems not part of them” (49). As just indicated, one of the primary features of the New Critical movement was its attempt to privilege the poem by severing the critic’s interpretations from matters of the poem’s, and even its author’s, historical context. The term “privilege” is appropriate in this case, because this group maintained that the message or meaning of a poem has no

necessary relations to issues of history, such as class, gender, and politics. Therefore, the ability to interpret properly entails a social and cultural privilege for both the work of art and, more important, the critic. Only critics who are properly trained have access to the actual meaning of a poem, a meaning not necessarily known to the audience nor even to the author. For our purposes, then, it is important to note, following Eagleton, that the

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 55 privilege of the poem easily becomes the privilege of the critic/interpreter. To employ Jameson’s terminology (1988a: 17), ideological slippage occurs whereby a

taxonomic division (e.g., the division of written products into genres) is understood as an absolute or normative distinction that in turn is the basis for authorizing social divisions in either the academy or society (e.g., the privileged critic versus the ill-informed general reader). In other words, to assert that one is the sole, authorized interpreter of a statement or image implies that the interpreter possesses a sociocultural privilege, and the more a group or society values these supposedly cryptic statements or images, then the more valued, authoritative, and privileged these interpreters can become. Both the New Criticism and the new humanism answer to such a description. Furthermore, like aesthetic works in general, and literature in particular, religious symbolism (in the form of, for example, mythology or ritual) has, for whatever reason, a peculiarly significant value to a number of people. Therefore, to be able correctly and definitively to interpret such images entails great cultural and social advantage. A telling example of a strategy to ensure this type of privilege

is found early on in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Much like the New Critics on poetry, Eliade argues in the preface that religion must be examined “as religion and not as a mirror of something else” (1987: vol.1, xi). But this comparison to the New Critics should not end with the work of Eliade. On this point, Daniel Pals’s judgment is valid: Eliade’s work is not an isolated case, but this sui generis assumption “has been virtually enshrined in the distinguished History of Religions program at the University of Chicago” (1986: 19). Gregory Alles agrees with Pals’s assessment, noting that the approach of the Chicago school “insists upon religious meaning as a unique, nonreducible dimension of human life, a sort of meaning that invites us to comprehend it in its uniqueness and its totality” (1989: 108). And Frank Reynolds supports such a defining characteristic for scholars at large: scholars of religion he maintains, “are non-reductive in that they reject the primacy of categories of interpretation or modes of explanation that investigate or account for religion simply as an epiphenomenon of a non-religious aspect of human existence’’ (1982: 129). As already suggested, then, the emphasis on religion’s and religious experience’s essential autonomy from historical influences and causes constitutes the distinctive character of much of the modern discourse on religion. Around this sui generis position orbits an elaborate web of undisclosed claims and judgments that hold religion and the essence of all religious experience to be distinctive, irreducible, independent, autochthonous, ahistorical, generically distinctive, self-evident, unevolvable, an a priori category of the mind, original and underivable, unique, primary, necessary, universal, a fundamental structure of the human psyche, an archetypical element, and autonomous from sociopolitical influences. According to J. Z. Smith (1990), such claims to autonomy oscillate between two meanings: the taxonomic and the ontological. Whereas the former usage implies that a religious datum has no necessary advantage over other data, just

56 Manufacturing Religion that it is distinctive in terms of certain theoretically relevant descriptive aspects (e.g., talk of culturally posited gods as opposed to talk of economies or the weather)

and in some capacity worthy of study on its own, the latter usage betrays what Smith believes to be an apologetic that attempts not only to isolate but to privilege one aspect of a phenomenon over all others. Ivan Strenski echoes these remarks

when he writes that the merely taxonomic autonomy of religion “lets us define and focus on domains of life that might get missed otherwise.” However, he warns that “we must of course not insist on a priori absolute autonomy. We could use a relative autonomy—one which recognizes that all disciplinary divisions are somewhat provisional and strategic, that the lines drawn between phenomena are done primarily for the sake of convenience” (1993b: 106—107). In his effort to defend the autonomy of religion, Daniel Pals has attempted to portray the sui generis claim as just such a taxonomic category (1986, 1987, 19904, 1990b). Responding to Robert Segal’s provocative call for the exclusive use of reductionistic and naturalistic explanatory schemes in the study of religion (1983),

Pals asserts that the assumption that religion is sui generis must be maintained simply as a “disciplinary axiom” of the modern study of religion, because “reducing faith solely to the interaction of psyche and society ... might bring the demise of Religionswissenschaft” (1986: 25). For Pals, then, the “curiously modest” axiomatic autonomy of the religious datum is inextricably linked to the “rightful autonomy of the discipline” that studies it (1987: 277, 278). On the surface, Pals’s proposal sounds very much like Smith’s and Strenski’s proposed taxonomic autonomy, because Pals goes on to assert that the “declaration of religious studies’ independence would seem no less essential than in other disciplines—and just as productive” (1986: 26). However, in their joint response to Pals, Segal and Wiebe (1989) detect some confusion in his essays over what they term axiomatic and dogmatic nonreductionism (which correspond to what is here termed the taxonomic and the ontological use of the sui generis strategy). Specifically, Segal and Wiebe draw attention to this confusion when examining Pals’s

assertion that axiomatists, like all scientists, hold the primacy of their approach only tentatively, whereas dogmatists hold their datum autonomous in all cases. Even though Pals maintains that nonreductionists, insomuch as they employ their criteria taxonomically simply to create a place for the study of religion within the academy, are prepared to abandon their view of religion as sui generis if an alternative theory proves compelling (1987: 272), Segal and Wiebe suggest that Pals fails to specify exactly what constitutes such compelling counterevidence. After outlining several strategies whereby the axiomatist could conceivably maintain working

nonreductionist theories in spite of counterevidence (e.g., by simply altering the definition of religion), Segal and Wiebe rightly conclude that by “leaving unspecified the criterion of ‘working,’ Pals fails to differentiate an axiomatic approach from a dogmatic one” (594). Because Pals is unable to describe conditions under which the axiomatist’s theory can be falsified, Segal and Wiebe conclude that Pals’s

| Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 57 axiomatist and the dogmatist share the undefendable belief that the subject of religion is irreducibly religious rather than, for example, economic or political. Accordingly, Pals’s attempt to defend sui generis religion as simply a taxonomic category fails.

Much like Segal and Wiebe, J. Z. Smith suggests that it is the ontologically loaded use of the sui generis strategy that has grounded much, if not all, of the academic study of religion. In Drudgery Divine (1990), Smith develops this thesis by examining scholarship that compares early Christianities to the religions of late antiquity. He concludes that a Protestant antipapal polemic lies at the heart of a variety of scholarly attempts to rediscover some essential gospel-behind-thegospels, wholly independent from its historical context (i.e., the ecclesiastical tradition). Although Smith’s conclusions are specific to the study of Christian origins, his insight into the covert role that the sui generis claim plays in privileging one interpretation over another has much wider application. Moreover, by naming a historically situated group as the beneficiary of this privilege (in this case, Protestant polemicists), Smith contributes much to developing a method capable of determining the material interests, such as power and status, that are camouflaged or encoded within apparently descriptive claims to singleness and self-generation.? Employing this privileging strategy, scholars can assert that the core of a religious symbol is itself inaccessible and can be examined only in terms of religious experiences generated by an inner personalistic (hence publicly inaccessible) feeling, a position apparently indebted to a long history of German Protestant scholarship. Accordingly, such researchers proceed to examine the artifacts or traces of the dialectics of the sacred, which are believed to be composed of, in the words of Eliade, “important ideas, beliefs, rituals, myths, symbols and persons that have played a role in the universal history of religion” (1987: I, xi). On the basis of the presumed normativity of such value judgments (e.g., important ideas), Eliade scrutinizes a whole universe of seemingly unproblematic facts united by way of their specifically or essentially religious character and value. The danger of this method is that it fails to acknowledge the socially entrenched judgment of the researcher concerning what is and what is not religious—a judgment that remains unarticulated and therefore undefended because of the presumably self-evident authority of sui generis religion.

Sui Generis Religion in Historical Perspective Although this critique opened with the work of Eliade, it should be kept in mind that the discourse on sui generis religion predates, and extends far beyond, Eliade as well as what Pals, Alles, and Reynolds characterize as the modern Chicago school or even the history of religions in general. In one or another form, it has persisted

throughout the history of the scholarly study of religion as a foundational assumption that continues to define the discourse. What is more, as already suggested

58 Manufacturing Religion by Pals, the very future of Religionswissenschaft is also intimately linked to such claims of autonomy. Therefore, in isolating the work of Eliade, we must recognize

that although he is certainly influential, he is not so much the founder of the modern discourse on sui generis religion but, instead, is its foremost product or representative in the mid-twentieth century. To make the error of depicting Eliade

as the founder of this discourse accomplishes little, for it further abstracts him from his social and discursive context, thereby representing him as a transcendental subject, a disembodied Great Man—a wholly counterproductive move for a discursive analysis of the field. That the significance of Eliade’s work resides largely in how it articulates the dominant views of the field is a position held by Robert Segal. Responding to Gary

Ebersole’s comments that, as a teacher, Eliade never imposed his views on his students and colleagues, Segal writes that “he did not have to do so: his fellow religionists already shared them and continue to share them. Eliade did not turn reductionists into nonreductionists. Rather, he ably articulated nonreductionism for his fellow nonreductionists. Far from dictating the views of members of the AAR, he evinced them” (1989c: 241~242).* To fail to recognize that Eliade articulated

rather than generated these views is to risk ignoring the great degree to which Eliade himself is simply a representative of a larger discursive consensus. Eliade’s use of the sui generis claim in the study of religion therefore echoes, to varying degrees, the opinions of many scholars of religion. For instance, William James also represents this discourse when, in commenting on religion, he observes that “any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique” (1985: 10). A variety of other scholars come to mind as well. F. Max Miiller, in his 1873 work, Introduction to the Science of Religion, indicated that religion is a sacred subject rooted in a human intuition, or faculty of faith, which is a historically and socially independent, almost Kantian, category. He termed this specifically religious sense Vernunft, a term more often understood as denoting common sense. As in Eliade’s work, a certain “terror of history” can be identified in Miiller’s work because, according to Miiller, the ahistorical essence of religion deteriorates when exposed to historical influence. Therefore, the comparative study of religions highlights the “inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed”: religion suffers from “its contact with the world,

as the purest air suffers from the mere fact of its being breathed” (xxiii). Thus, for Miiller, the comparative study of religion, insofar as it studies historical religion (living or dead), is necessarily concerned with studying impure religious phenomena. Only through the study of the origins, “the return to religion’s fountain-head,” can the study come to grips with religion per se (1870). Of particular interest is that Miiller, like Eliade after him, was instrumental in

establishing and promoting the “independent yet reverent study of the ancient religions.” It is commonly acknowledged that it was Miiller who was, according to Jacques Waardenburg, the “first scholar who lucidly and imperatively envisaged

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 59 and proclaimed an autonomous ‘science of religion’ ’’ (1973: 14). For Miiller, like Eliade and Pals, such independence, both methodological and institutional, wholly depends on establishing the independence of the phenomenon. Although in many respects Miiller’s work on religion differs significantly from that of Eliade, most

| notably when the former’s novel use of the comparative method is understood in the context of the dominance of normative Christian scholarship in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century European university, for both scholars the initial establishment as well as the future well-being of the institutionalized study of religion was intimately linked to the autonomy and priority of its datum. It was on this basis that the study of religion arose in the late—nineteenth century, and it was on this basis that it was reborn in North America in the early 1960s. However, as chapter 7 will argue, it is not likely that the field will continue to finds its justification in such undefendable claims. Much like Miller, his contemporary, Cornelius P. Tiele, considered religion to be “entirely independent of such [historical] form; that forms may change and vary without sacrificing the eternal ideas and the immortal aspirations which constitute the essence of religion” (1897: 222, 296-297). Tiele, then, also made a distinction between the ahistorical essence and the historical form of religion. In his view, one must distinguish all forms of religion “carefully from religion itself’’ (9). The division of labor in Tiele’s two-volume work is built on this basic assumption: the morphological (1897) studies the historical development or evolution of religion, whereas the ontological (1899) examines its origin, nature, and essence. This

structure aptly represents his underlying assumption: “the evolution of religion rests on the conviction of the unity and independence of the religious life throughout all changes of form” (1897: 31).5 Like the sovereignty of the Church in the domain of conscience and religious conviction (1897: 143), Tiele also called for the establishment of an autonomous science of religion, autonomous not only from the Church but also from other social sciences, for “the science of religion has the right to rank as independent, and not merely as one of a group” (1897: 5, 15). Generally speaking, the nineteenth-century founders of what we now consider to be the academic study of religion all seem to presume the distinct status of the religious datum. First published in 1905, Louis Jordan’s history of comparative religion nicely represents this dominant trend: There is ‘a sense in which every man’s Religion is unique, separate, and sui generis.

As it is certainly not identical with any other, so it is unlike every other. Certain factors enter into it which belong to the very texture of each man’s inmost being. At the same time, in every man, Religion in its essence is one and the same thing. Exceedingly varied as may be the forms which it assumes, it does not itself vary or undergo change. In a word, Religion underlies, and is answerable for, the various divergent Religions. Religion is the genus, of which the many Religions of the world are so many different species. Religion is the root of the tree, of which the multiplied Faiths of man are the larger or smaller branches. As soon as one

60 Manufacturing Religion has laid firm hold of this fact, he discerns how a great number of other facts (seemingly isolated) are in truth most clearly articulated. (1986: 19)

Here, not only is religion considered to be utterly unique but we find a related aspect of the discourse on sui generis religion apparent at least as early as Schleiermacher: religion constitutes a private, interiorized dimension of experience that, although manifested outwardly in varying forms, is shared across all religions regardless of their historical differences. Despite Jordan’s repeated emphasis that comparative religion is a science, this quotation should demonstrate that aspects of the nineteenth-century field can also be understood in light of the discourse on sui generis religion. This is not to say, however, that the field as it was originally practiced was completely homogeneous with the discourse on sui generis religion as it is articulated today. This is a topic I will return to.

One of the most influential theologians in the modern academic study of religion is Rudolf Otto. Prior to his influential Idea of the Holy (originally published in 1917), he published Naturalism and Religion (1907), in which he sets the stage

for his later theoretical work. In that earlier book, in the words of its English translator, J. W. Harvey, Otto argues for “the autonomy of the human spirit and the insufficiency of a naturalistic science to explain or comprehend spiritual experience” (1950: ix). In the later work, Otto penned what has become the classic statement of the nonreductionist camp: religious sensibility is portrayed as a nonevolved, purely a priori category that is an original, irreducible, absolutely primary, and elementary aspect of human experience that is independent of all perception— which one can assume to mean that it is unaffected by its historical environment. In Otto’s words, “if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life” (4); it is “a content of feeling that is qualitatively sui generis’ (44). In the 1930s, and in much the same vein as Otto, the early phenomenologist of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw, wrote, [W]hoever is confronted with potency [“power’” being van der Leeuw’s chosen theoretical term for describing the essence of religious experience] clearly recognizes that he is in the presence of some quality with which in his previous experience he was never familiar, and which cannot be evoked from something else but which, sui generis and sui juris, can be designated only by religious terms such as ‘sacred’ and ‘numinous.’ (1963: 47—48)

Because van der Leeuw understands sui generis to imply that something is completely different and absolutely distinct, he can virtually anticipate Paul Tillich by maintaining that “[rJeligion...is an ultimate experience that evades our observation, a revelation which in its very essence is, and remains, concealed.” As he notes on the same page, this inner experience that is completely removed from third-party scrutiny, is ever “elusive and hidden” (683). Further, he pays his dues

Autonomy, Discourses, and Soctal Privilege 61 to the German Protestant tradition when he appreciatively notes how Schleiermacher destroyed the power of the Enlightenment’s hold on religion by attempting to develop methods “to comprehend religion solely and simply as religion,” that

is, nonreductively (692). That the discourse on sui generis religion is implicitly involved in a political and intellectual clash with the descendants of the Enlightenment should be more than obvious. Similar statements concerning the essential autonomy of religion and religious experience from all historical influences, thereby necessitating the development of unique interpretive methods, can be found throughout the mid-twentieth century in the writings of Joachim Wach,° W. Brede Kristensen,’ C. J. Bleeker,’ and, as previously cited, Raffaele Pettazzoni. Of course, read on other levels or in other theoretical contexts, this collection of scholars, from Miiller to Eliade and even Pals, does not constitute a seamless, homogeneous, and monolithic research tradition. Even Wach and Eliade, whose works are closely identified with one another, by no means espouse identical approaches to the study of religion. For example, Wach is known for his emphasis of the sociological method (1971), and Eliade is known for his efforts to synthesize a variety of methods. But the claim I am making

here is not that this group of researchers employ precisely the same methods, theories, and textual strategies in their studies of religion for the same reasons. Whereas some are phenomenologists, others may be hermeneuts, comparativists, structuralists, or even social-evolutionists. However, in spite of their apparent differences, these scholars all share an emphasis on the personal, unique, and autonomous nature of religion—it grounds each of their methods and, most important, their calls for disciplinary autonomy. Although the individual differences between their approaches may well be worth examination, in our case it is this one shared trait and its discursive, institutional, and political functions that are of particular interest.

Contours of the Naturalistic Discourse on Religion The writers just mentioned, and the methods and theories they developed based — on the presumed autonomy of their datum, differ significantly from those methods and theories of religion advanced by such scholars as David Hume (1957), Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1947; see also their collected essays [1976]), Sigmund Freud (1950; 1961), Emile Durkheim (1965), E. P. Thompson (1991), and, most recently, Stewart Guthrie (1993), and Pascal Boyer (1994), and Walter Burkert (1996). For example, E. P. Thompson, in his Making of the English Working Class, is a good example of a materialist historian who studies religion in terms of social and economic factors. Especially relevant is his treatment of the relations between English Methodism (conceived, in part, as an emotional release of workers), the growing needs of the newly established factories for methodical workers, and how both of these contributed to the dawning Industrial Revolution. By linking the rise

62 Manufacturing Religion and popularity of Methodism to its ability to express/entrench social, class, and industrial pressures, Thompson provides a useful example of an explanatory scheme that does not rely on the sui generis strategy. Guthrie, in Faces in the Clouds, develops a long-standing naturalistic explanation of religion: the hypothesis of superhuman agents is an anthropomorphic tendency of human beings, wagering

that the universe has order, intentionality, and meaning. Although such a thesis appears to have much in common with theories proposed by Hume and Feuerbach, for example, Guthrie’s contribution is in conceiving of religion as simply one among a variety of areas in human life where the need to posit order is based on self-perception and projection.? Because animals routinely seem to project intentionality as well (territorial dogs chase cars, stalking cats attack leaves), Guthrie goes so far as to explain this universal tendency to anthropomorphize as but one among a variety of ways that sentient creatures speculate about the workings of the world at large. As useful examples of the naturalistic tradition, Thompson’s and Guthrie’s studies are aimed at examining aspects of interpersonally available human behavior rather than speculating on the characteristics of a transhistorical yet personal, sacred experience. These naturalist theorists have often been classified as reduction-

ists, because their goal is to explain, to reduce—or, according to Wach, to atomize—the apparent totality and unity of religion, for example, to demonstrate

that religion is a delusion, neurosis, projection, or “the sigh of the oppressed creature.” According to naturalists, however, the discourse on sui generis religion excludes the material, political, and social roots and influences of the highly abstract theoretical term “religion.” In an a priori and totalized fashion, such scholars as Wach, Bleeker, Kristensen, and Eliade exclude from their analyses statements that pertain to the fundamental role that environment has played in creating and sustaining religion, by focusing their research on religion’s or the sacred’s atemporal essence. If the success of a theory is, at least in part, demonstrated by its scope and applicability, then naturalist theories should command our attention, for scholarly assertions on the intentionality or exteriority of the sacred can themselves be ex-

plained by naturalist theories. For instance, given Guthrie’s theory, appeals to | something sacred that “manifests itself’ would no doubt constitute yet another instance of the universal tendency of humans (phenomenologists and hermeneuts included!) to anthropomorphize the universe around them, that is, positing external, objective, immaterial, and intentional agents. For Durkheim, possibly anticipating the discursive analysis of Michel Foucault to some extent, these assertions concerning exterior or interior agents and experiences would serve as an effective means for projecting and for grounding social, even institutional identity, much as a Foucault’s discursive object is the construction of those involved in the discourse itself, whereas the discourse constitutes and sets the limits for what counts as subjects in the first place. Given the fact that naturalistic theories are capable

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 63 of explaining not only the data of religion but also the type of scholarship carried - out within the discourse on sui generis religion, it is not necessarily accurate to conceive of the sui generis and the naturalist approaches to the study of religion as complementary or, properly speaking, even competing theoretical systems. In other words, the act of positing a transhistorical and sociopolitically autonomous agent or an essentially shared and unique personal experience both constitute data in need of explanation. It should be clear, then, that among the variety of theoretical and methodological similarities that unite these self-proclaimed antireductionistic scholars, it is precisely this one strategy or presupposition, the sui generis quality of religion, that is most important. It is precisely this assumption that must be in place for there to be a methodologically and institutionally distinct discourse on religion in the academy—at least as it has so far developed. Without the presumption of sui generis religion, the distinctions between the study of religion per se, on the one hand, and the overlapping studies of culture, society, psychology, politics, economics, and so on, on the other, would hardly be self-evident. As was previously sug-

gested by Strenski, when employed in a purely taxonomic sense, this claim of autonomy brings about, as Pierre Bourdieu has observed, the type of “separation which is the hidden condition of all academic activity” (1982: vii). In other words,

the precondition of all scholarly investigation is that the object of study can, to whatever degree, be tentatively constructed and abstracted from certain of its supporting network of relations so as to be studied. In the case of the naturalistic study of religion, it may be a useful research assumption that, for example, some human behaviors can be described as being religious insomuch as people ascribe motivations or goals to their actions and beliefs that take into account, for instance, nonempirical beings or states of existence. Of course what counts as religious is not necessarily limited to beliefs and practices relative to such things as deities. This type of monothetic definition— that religions primarily involve belief in, and actions directed toward, deities—is reminiscent of the definitions of such early anthropologists as E. B. Tylor, and seems to have regained some favor recently, as we saw in the case of Guthrie. Take, for example, Hans Penner’s definition of religion: “Religion is a verbal and nonverbal structure of interaction with superhuman being(s)” (1989: 7). In their cog-

nitivist approach to the study of ritual action, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley (1990: 61) also employ the criterion of superhuman agents to distinguish religious conceptual schemes and rituals from other sorts of human concepts and activities.'° It should be noted, however, that these theorists employ the terminology of gods and religion in a strictly taxonomic, rather than ontological, sense— as a first step in developing a naturalistic explanatory theory and as a vocabulary useful in describing what adherents report rather than what might actually exist. On a descriptive level at least, people make references to such beings and experi-

ences, and any theoretical study of such persons and their societies will clearly

64 Manufacturing Religion benefit from the descriptive use of these categories in constructing religion as an object of research. Therefore, in the words of Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne, religion, variously defined, may turn out to be a useful theoretical category insomuch as it is “a provisional, useful way of demarcating a subject of study” (1993: 205). However, the usefulness of this category will depend not on intuitions but on how productive it is in providing theoretically sophisticated, novel, and defensible knowledge on human behaviors, beliefs, and institutions.

Strategies and Tactics, Places and Spaces Depending on how naturalists define the term religion, various aspects of human behavior and history will be encompassed or excluded. Therefore, depending on one’s theoretical framework, the same set of behaviors can be described in a number of different ways. Because human actions and beliefs are multifaceted and multifunctional, they could be understood, for example, psychologically as well as politically. To argue that one theoretically grounded taxonomy in the study of human actions is superior to all others or that all are subsumed under one metatheory of human behavior is as fruitless as arguing for the psychological basis of sociology or, conversely, the sociological basis of psychology. In the case of the most recent theoretical perspective to be applied to the study of religion, cognitive science, it is becoming increasingly clear that certain aspects of complex structure

and order (e.g., a religious tradition, a government) cannot be accounted for strictly in terms of such cognitive factors as the systems by which the human brain

processes and organizes sensory data. Brian Malley argues that as powerful as cognitive theories appear to be in explaining the fact of order in religious systems, they are limited in their ability to explain the vast array of different forms of order assumed by these systems. He concludes that as explanatorily powerful as cognitive theories are, they must be coupled with newly developed theories that address the properties of emergent systems to produce what can be termed a sociocognitive approach (1995). Malley’s suggestion supports the conclusion that human behavior

is indeed perplexing and complex and that the adequate study of this behavior requires a polymethodic approach, capable of examining a vast array of historical factors and the relations between them and their context, whether that context is in the area of the human cognitive process itself or the sociopolitical relations between groups of humans. Although always present, since naturalistic scholarship cannot, by definition, study the whole picture and the entire context, the dangers of decontextualization are felt most when an investigator employs a taxonomic and relative distinction as ontological and absolute. At such a time, the power to separate, order, and distinguish—the very task of scholarship according to Bourdieu—brings with it direct implications for social and political power, especially when the conceptual tool used to demarcate is understood not as a model by which reality is studied but as

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 65 perfectly representative of reality. According to the Foucauldian philosopher and historiographer Michel de Certeau (1988), the claim of absolute distinctness and autonomy is the mark of a strategy that imposes a definition in order to create unique discursive and institutional places from which scholars exert power and control. The strategy’s first task is to make such privileged zones possible, by demarcating, delimiting, and defining an ostensibly proper sphere of action and authority in relation to the previously existing and defined places of others. Thus, this self-created authority of the scholar has a place in which to act and a place from which to exert its exteriority over what is now considered external and foreign. What all these strategies have in common, according to Certeau, is that they function to exclude other voices and interests from a newly manufactured field by the very act of constituting that field in the first place (or, in our case, constituting a discourse that is formalized within an institutional setting, e.g., an academic discipline). As a result of this exclusionary practice, the newly constituted field and those who articulate it create focus, and subsequently extend social power, to be exercised by those who function as the sole legitimate judge over what qualifies as the foreign and the exotic. For Certeau, opposed to strategies are tactics, the actions of people in socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged positions that subvert the place and order of the powerful, thereby creating new spaces (to follow Certeau’s own terminology [1988: 117]). A good example suggested by Certeau are the paved grids of walkways found in public parks designed by an authorized civil planner that are subsequently reworked, ignored, and recreated by the casual stroller, as is evidenced by muddy lanes that cut at new angles through the trees, avoiding and rewriting the interlocking paving-stone pathways. It is therefore understandable that for Certeau the term “popularization” is a pejorative term that passes judgment on, and ridicules from the strategic vantage of the elites, the tactics of the marginalized. Accordingly, to follow Certeau, by “strategies” one denotes the assorted means whereby the powerful create, legitimate, and perpetuate their social, political, and institutional advantage. Following Certeau’s reading and—contrary to strategic representations of the discourse on sui generis religion as a unified discourse precisely because it deploys unified methodologies to interpret a unified object (the sacred)—a tactical or oppositional reading of this discourse would focus instead on the analysis of the methods of inquiry, the series of discursive practices, and ideological strategies that construct the ostensibly unified object in the first place. In other words, “the unity

of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object [such as the sacred] as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed” (Foucault 1989: 32)—a space, as already suggested by Certeau, that is itself the result of preoperative sets of rules and practices that are continually reentrenched with the creation of every new object. For example, Foucault’s history of madness (1988) is not a history of a stable, objectively existing

66 Manufacturing Religion fact, as if madness were a disease or stable ontological phenomenon, but a study of the assorted ways by which a collection of assorted claims, assumptions, texts, institutions, practices, and so on, came to constitute madness as a seemingly stable object of discourse. As practically useful as it may be, the taxonomic distinction between “mad” and “sane” is studied by Foucault as a social construct or artifact that results from an assortment of strategies and discursive acts. Therefore, to study the discourse on madness is to examine “the action that divides madness” (ix) from the continuum of acts understood as sanity in the first place, not to examine madness as a stable category. As outlined by Bourdieu, and as already suggested by the earlier discussion of the taxonomic/ontological distinction, troubles arise precisely when such a distinction (e.g., mad/sane, profane/sacred, irreligion/religion) is understood as normative, self-evident, and naturally privileged rather than as strategically, intellectually, and socially useful (1982: 1). The sui generis claim is, accordingly, a discursive strategy of containment and

exclusion. It is constituted by the deployment of taxonomies as ontologies in the service not only of intellectual demarcation but, invariably, of social modification and control. Moreover, for autonomy to be gained, the sui generis strategy cannot, by definition, have a history, a trace. It is an artifact that cannot account for, and must be alienated from, its own history. Furthermore, it is ideological. Although discourses, in the usual Foucauldian sense, cannot themselves be ideological—for the Marxist notion of ideology usually implies a stable norm against which other systems of thought can be judged—it is important to recognize that there is some utility to examining discourses in terms of ideology as it is defined here. Ideological discourses are those that, as noted, actively work to disguise their trace, whereas nonideological discourses are those that, to varying degrees, acknowledge the playful, tactical, constructed nature of human meaning, conventions, and institutions. Simply put, there is something materially and socially at stake for continually asserting one’s autonomy from historical processes. What is at stake is the authority and ability strategically to define and construct places and privileges. Once the discursive place has been gained (e.g., the creation of a separate scholarly area of study and separate departments for this study, the institution of publications and academic journals on the topic, and the creation of endowed lectureships and avenues to advise government policy decisions), the presumed but undefended ontological significance of the datum (e.g., the sacred, religious experience) extends this constructed and privileged discursive zone to include the social judgments and public actions that originate from within the discourse. The manner in which this discursive strategy functions as a protective strategy for claims concerning the appropriateness of certain forms of social and political organization, while disguising its own history, qualifies it as ideological. If religion is not considered simply an analytical category, pragmatically useful for describing and abstracting certain types of human actions, institutions, and beliefs from others, a theoretically justified point of departure for the study of one

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 67 aspect of the complex known as human practices, then there exists a danger that the presumed autonomy of the datum will necessarily entail the autonomy of researchers and their claims to knowledge. Whether or not religion is to be promoted or combated, described and interpreted or explained away, to deploy the concepts of religion, religious experience, the sacred, Homo religiosus, and the like,

ontologically presumes the self-evidency of the sui generis character of this one portion of human experience and action and suggests a disregard for political, economic, and sociological (namely, historical and material) factors.

The Characteristics of the Regnant Discourse Sui generis religion, the basis of this one discourse, thus creates and preserves a privileged zone of human experience, namely, an irreducibly religious zone, accessible in descriptive terms only to the trained hermeneut. What this claim to autonomy produces is a unified object, the sacred, manifested in individual and

| social experiences, all of which are referred to as religious, the interpretation of which is confined to a member of a specific academic group utilizing a specialized

method. This is not to suggest that the claim that religion is sui generis solely causes the discourse to come about. In suitably dialectical fashion, the very presence of, for example, the object of the discourse (i.e., the sacred), as it is found in many scholarly studies and monographs, as well as the methods developed to study it (e.g., phenomenology and hermeneutics) further sanction and support the credibility and authority of the claim of autonomy. Until the assumptions and claims that form the very basis of this discourse are questioned and critiqued, a form of circular logic, or what could be termed a feedback loop, ensures that the discourse continues functioning. For example, the phenomenological method assumes that a transhistorical essence ultimately is the object of the study, and the fact that it

is presumed that such an object exists in turn sanctions the phenomenological method. Applying the discursive analysis of Foucault and Certeau to this issue, the claim that certain types of experiences necessarily are sui generis constitutes a rule of discursive formation for much of the modern study of religion and, ultimately, is the basis for scholarly appeals to intellectual and social authority. It is a consen_ sual yet unarticulated rule that does not simply influence all work carried out in this field but is the very precondition of the field, without which there would be no scholarly discourse on religious experiences. In Foucault’s words, “the rules of formation operate not only in the mind or consciousness of individuals, but in the discourse itself; they operate therefore, according to a sort of uniform anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to speak in the discursive field” (1989: 63). Certeau offers a similar analysis of both the psychoanalytical and the phenomenological models of interpretation and displacement: in both cases, the expert is authorized to rewrite the subject in terms of the dominant discourse. This dis-

68 Manufacturing Religion course establishes a priori which questions are acceptable and which are to be excluded from the thinkable conditions. The very future of the study of religion as it has come to be conceived in many institutional settings, as an autonomous discipline, and the authority of its experts appear largely dependent on the existence of religion as a domain all of its own, as an autonomous and essentially religious core to certain human actions and beliefs whose secrets can be revealed only by the techniques of the trained scholar or hermeneut. _ Therefore, not only does the sui generis claim function effectively to exclude a discourse from critical scrutiny (a point already suggested by Proudfoot [1985], in relation to the emphasis of this research tradition on interior, private experiences) but it denotes what is properly termed “a shorthand for a whole project of hegemony” (Eagleton 1990: 42).!! The field—its methods and its theories, not sim-

ply its unified object of study—made possible and identified by the sui generis strategy, denotes a series of related practices that together constitute a regnant discourse that is intimately connected with disguising all issues of sociopolitics. In this case, it is a very precise and dominant discourse on religion that differs from the naturalistic tradition, because the latter does not employ the sui generis strategy ontologically or dogmatically. In other words, for the naturalistic tradition, religious experiences and behaviors constitute just a portion of the spectrum of human practices, all of which are found to be explicitly and fundamentally embedded in a historical context. This is not to say that the naturalistic tradition in the study of religion is itself free of sociopolitical pressures and implications. The unity of this oppositional discourse, as should be expected, is also based on certain rhetorical and textual strategies. But an analysis and critique of those strategies as they are employed in this oppositional discourse on religion is not the goal of this book.’ The series of associated claims, then, that combine to constitute the discourse on sui generis religion can best be described as constituting a discursive field or discursive formation because it is a nexus of interrelated beliefs and practices. Just as in Foucault’s studies on the discourse on madness, the study of the discourse on sui generis religion does not simply trace, for example, the history of the usage of the term “sacred,” because the very discourse itself is not just formed by, but is also formative of, such theoretical terms. This discourse is formed by “the interplay of the rules that make possible the appearance of objects, during a given period of time: objects that are shaped by measures of discrimination and repression” (Foucault 1989: 33). Therefore, it will be far more profitable to examine the discourse by tracing the use of the strategies that create and maintain it. This follows a basic naturalist assumption: human beings in concrete historical situations employ strategies designed to achieve certain social ends by creating and manipulating abstract categories. To begin with the study of reified objects (e.g., religion an sich, myths, the sacred, Scripture) would ignore this insight by overlooking the material practices and interests that constructed such theoretical objects

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 69 in the first place. It would be to overlook their status and history as constructed taxonomies and to perpetuate their ideological authority. The call for the autonomy of religious experiences and phenomena, therefore, is never far from the call for autonomous and unique methods and the independent disciplinary location of the history of religions—Dudley suggested as much nearly twenty years ago (1977: 46). Such contemporary writers as E. Thomas Lawson, Ivan Strenski, and Hans Penner have reiterated the suggestion that these three claims are all related. In a review essay entitled “The Illusions of Autonomy,” Lawson examines two posthumously published collections of Wach’s essays (Wach 1988a; 1988b) and concludes that a “special niche” has been created, in Wach’s no less than Eliade’s writings, through its self-proclaimed unique knowledge of a singular theoretical topic. Taking seriously the implications of such calls for disciplinary autonomy, Lawson determines that Wach’s essays constitute a “manifesto... about the nature and role of [the] discipline in the academy” (1989: 486). Strenski draws attention to the same claims: “It is because Eliade holds to the autonomy of religion and the value of describing this phenomenon that it makes good sense to see him within the academic tradition of an autonomous study of religion” (1987: 110). And Penner rightly identifies the important role sui generis religion plays in

grounding both the distinct methodology and the disciplinary autonomy of the study of religion. However, these writers do not elaborate on the ideological and sociopolitical potential of this strategy and its related set of claims. Such an elaboration would outline not only the role played by autonomy in defining the dis-

course and establishing separate departments of religion but also its role in consolidating and promoting personal and social power and privilege. In the case of the study of religion, then, the discursive field is constituted by the following interrelated set of rules, all dependent on strategies of exclusion and isolation: 1. religion is sui generis; 2. unique descriptive and interpretive methods are necessary for its study; 3. these methods must be used within an autonomous disciplinary or institutional location.

Robert Brown summarizes these claims nicely when he writes that the “appeal to

the sui generis nature of the sacred... gives the History of Religions a certain autonomy of procedure as a discipline because the special nature of its object calls for distinctive methods for its identification and analysis.”” Brown goes on to suggest that the sui generis claim is instrumental in preventing the “dissolution of the discipline by erecting a barrier to social scientific efforts to “explain away’ religion as merely a natural and cultural phenomenon” (1981: 438).

Such a barrier not only protects the discipline, as observed by writers from Dudley to Brown, but also empowers certain judgments made by those who operate from within the discipline. On the basis of this added advantage of the ex-

70 , Manufacturing Religion clusionary strategy, the discourse on sui generis religion has been thought to provide the basis for privileged assertions concerning contemporary social life. Because its methods lead to privileged knowledge about the supposedly deep structures and meanings of human life, only certain groups of scholars are authorized

to make privileged judgments concerning how humans ought to live their lives. Accordingly, the seemingly defensive exclusionary strategy (to defend the supposed integrity of religious experiences from reduction at the hands of social scientists)

simultaneously has offensive implications (to privilege normative sociopolitical claims). Therefore, the discursive field possesses three additional aspects: 4. scholars of religions have access to previously lost meanings and values;

5. they can apply these values and make social judgments based on them; 6. they therefore possess privileged insights.

Of particular interest are the fifth and sixth claims, for this is precisely where the sociopolitical agenda of the discourse is betrayed: the practical application of such esoteric knowledge. As Eliade maintains, symbolic interpretation provides access to certain basal and universal aspects of human nature. Because of this, “the study of symbolism is not a work of pure and simple erudition, but one that concerns, at least indirectly, the knowledge of man himself: in short, that it has something to say to anyone who is speaking of a new humanism or a new anthropology (1991: 20). In providing “knowledge of man himself,” the interpretation of symbols as carried out by scholars of sui generis religion necessarily becomes an active, constructive process or a creative hermeneutic (Wach’s equivalent could be his ill-

defined notion of integral understanding [1970: 29]). The academic study of religious symbolism, then, can be the basis for a reconstruction of an alienated modern society, cut off as it is from “the deeper reality of life and from [its] own soul” (Eliade 1991: 20). Gregory Alles summarizes the general view within this discourse succinctly when he writes that it is “only insofar as he succeeds, through hermeneutics, in transmuting his materials into spiritual messages that the histo-

rian of religions will fulfil his role in contemporary culture” (1989: n. 13). This is precisely where this discourse is ideological; namely, the explicit sociocultural function for scholars of religion, outlined in what Lawson earlier termed a manifesto, is a political program based on privileged access to supposedly ahistorical values hidden in their data. For example, the value of the findings of the new humanism is debatable only to a point, because the sociopolitical and historical autonomy of religious experience functions as a protective strategy for social _ judgments. The autonomy from contextual influences that characterizes sui generis religious experiences also characterizes and privileges the judgments of the scholar/ hermeneut. The claim that religious experiences and religious phenomena are sui generis is, then, a potent and effective protective strategy, which privileges certain sorts of judgments made by the scholar of religion and simultaneously excludes the use of all other competing methodologies. That these judgments are explicitly

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 71 political suggests that the sui generis assumption is itself a useful means for camouflaging political statements as if they were neutral, factual, and purely descriptive statements of supposedly self-evident meaning and value.

The New Humanism and Its Necessary Illusions The new humanism is therefore idealist insofar as it proposes that social change occurs from the inside out; that is, beliefs are altered first through the interpreter’s contact with a text or ritual, and only then can social values change and lead to the creation of new social arrangements (Eliade 1984: 62-63). It is also elitist and romantic insofar as it proposes that social change occurs from the top down and that the peasants and cultural elites share essential similarities that transcend their class and economic disparities. And insofar as religious symbolism, as represented in the myths and rituals of a people, is interpreted a priori to repeat and reinforce traditions and the paradigms of the past, then this deep knowledge gained by the scholar of religion will necessarily be conservative (i.e., reinforcing a real or constructed past). It is ironic, then, that Adrian Marino interprets Eliade’s creative hermeneutics as militant because it provides for altering so-called spiritual states and values (1982). Marino fails to entertain the possibility that there may in fact be nothing militant about representing the narratives of sociopolitical elites as generic and representative of all social groups in a society, let alone the spiritualization of material difference and historical context. In fact, such representations could more accurately be termed conservative, meaning no more than that the symbols are interpreted to conserve past social arrangements and distributions of power. The following definition of conservatism, from The Dictionary of Modern Political Ideologies (Riff 1987: 67) is remarkably applicable to this approach to the study of religion: Conservatism is not clearly embodied in a set of doctrines; it is a political attitude

rather than a philosophy or a movement. The term implies fear of sudden and violent change, respect for established institutions and rulers, support for elites and hierarchies and a general mistrust of theory as opposed to empirical deductions. Conservatism, strictly speaking, enshrines this spirit in a definite political standpoint.

Such a definition encompasses the nostalgia for past patterns of order as well as the theory that the significance of myths is to be found in their concern with the eternal return. Moreover, the emphasis on textual analysis and the philosophies and biographies of spiritual masters betrays the reliance on the experiences and stories of the elites in constructing an ostensibly generic, archaic, and normative panhuman experience. Finally, such a characterization also encompasses the distrust of theorizing and the preference for “hard data” found in this discourse. To talk of a generic past, therefore, as Eliade does when discussing the eternal

72 Manufacturing Religion return of the same, is highly misleading. As MacQueen proposes, one must be explicit about just whose and which past is the subject of study. Scholars are talking not only about the rituals, thoughts, and beliefs of some generic, totalized past but

the encoded distributions of power indicative of only certain parts of complex social systems. In fact, what scholars are talking about are highly specific and selective representations of social and political arrangements. Therefore, the uncritical reliance on myths of the eternal return of the same, dependent as it is on the return of a very specific image or construction of the past, does not question the politics and assumptions dominant in the past; indeed, it uncritically reinforces

them. Nor are the criteria by which these images are selected from the many possible pasts made explicit. Moreover, because knowledge of the archetypical past becomes knowledge of the future (i.e., was becomes ought), this slippage is again ideological. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson once again, the assumption that myths

are based on an intrinsic and natural human nostalgia for the past is “subtly converted into a prophetic affirmation that [such nostalgia and such a past are] good”; accordingly, such a theory of nostalgia, a longing for the past, the times of origins, “becomes at length, through a process of inner momentum, ideology” (1988a: 17). Therefore, the politics of nostalgia is no less political than the very nineteenth-century scientific and cultural imperialism Eliade so often claimed to be criticizing from his privileged position as a scholar of “total man.” This observation, of course, does not invalidate Eliade’s critique of cultural imperialism or his clearly important criticisms of the ontologically reductive theories of some early social scientists. What it does accomplish, however, is a significant weakening of

his prescriptive authority; the new humanism can no longer be interpreted as merely an aesthetic or cultural project that operates free of ideological pressures and implications; the “total man” is not only androcentric but socially, economically, and politically skewed. There are, accordingly, a number of possible political criticisms of the discourse on sui generis religion. It is founded on an idealist discourse that prioritizes the sacred over the profane, mind over matter, and ideas over practices and devotes a disproportionate amount of time to studying the isolated, contemplative individual who is preoccupied with questions and techniques of soteriology (e.g., the yogi, shaman, priest, mystic, intellectual elite). In doing so, this discourse participates in, and reproduces, what Noam Chomsky has termed a “necessary illusion” of the modern democratic West: that, in some radical Cartesian manner, thoughts and actions can be, and ought to be, separated. According to Chomsky, unlike the brute force that causes personal and social conformity in totalitarian states, “in a democratic political order, there is always the danger that independent thought might be translated into political action, so it is important to eliminate the threat at its root,” by separating thought from action (1991: 48). This discourse further entrenches and benefits from this separation insomuch as it is presented as simple thought, imagination, value, and culture rather than, as Lawson suggests, a political manifesto.

Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 73 The discourse on sui generis religion is a strategy for reinterpreting and circumscribing novelty within repetition, of controlling the present by housing it in patterns from the past, and judging the present on the basis of past standards. It is conservative, elite, romantic, hegemonic, regressive, ahistorical, and domesticating. In the words of Edward Said, through such a project, the threat of the present to the values of the past “is muted, familiar values impose themselves, and in the end the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodating things to itself as either ‘original’ or ‘repetitive’ ” (1979: 59). Eliade’s attack on what he perceived to

be the provincialism of the modern world (Western mind) is thus all the more ironic given the extremely provincial (conservative and contextualized) nature of this segmentation of knowledge. This chapter has argued that not only theological and philosophical but political and social factors lie behind some scholars’ reluctance to explain religion as a product of human desires, actions, and associations. The assertion of academic authority based on disciplinary demarcation betrays a rigid territorial imperative that I have identified as ideological. To quote Barbara Johnson, writing in her introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, this critique of the sui generis strategy, much like the de-

constructive method itself, “reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows them, and that the starting point is not a given but a construct, usually blind to itself” (Derrida 1981: xv). Although the sui generis strategy has often been characterized as protecting a theological agenda concerning the normative status of the sacred as an explanatory category with ontological status, I have argued that such an exclusionary strategy actually betrays a political philosophy that is open to a naturalist critique. Further, I proposed that this exclusionary strategy is a shorthand for a discursive field that allows a group of writers and teachers effectively and covertly to exert control over the manufacture and study of religion. The a priori exclusion of naturalistic explanations of religion serves as the basis for a series of related claims regarding the autonomy, privilege, and sociopolitical relevance of not only the discourse on sui generis religion but its practitioners as well.

To demonstrate further the extent of this discourse and how it contributes to, and conditions, the creation of a particular type of future scholar of religion, the following chapters survey a number of discursive sites, starting with chapter 3’s assessment of the secondary literature on Eliade’s work and life—the discourse on Eliade—and then moving on to chapter 4’s examination of the methodological and theoretical positions of a number of texts used in one of the more important sites within the discourse. The classroom constitutes one such discursive site in-

asmuch as it is precisely here that new students are introduced to the study of religion and the majority of future scholars of religion are first exposed to the tools of the scholarly study of religion.

3. The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade Foucault did not attack the choices of others, but the rationalizations that they

_ added to their choices. —Paul Veyne

Because this project has to do, in part, with applying tools from literary critical studies, ideology critique, and the sociology of knowledge to the modern academic study of religion, it is fitting to shift our attention from Eliade’s work to a wider, related site in the discourse on sui generis religion: scholarship on Eliade. Regardless of what this debate contributes to current and accurate knowledge of Eliade’s actual allegiances and motivations, it is precisely here that one can best witness the contemporary clash between two divergent approaches to the role played by the wider social and political world in the works of scholars of religion. This chapter is not concerned primarily with scrutinizing Eliade’s theoretical writings in the light of his early political involvement or in the light of whatever his mature political inclinations may have been. Instead, it is concerned with examining both the representations of Eliade and his scholarship as yet another instance of the political implications of a scholarly discourse that is based on the construction of religion as a sui generis phenomenon. Generally, the current debate on the politics of Eliade and his texts has focused on the ways in which his early Romanian context is or is not manifested in his later scholarly writings. Such research is often characterized by a high degree of speculation, on both sides of the debate, concerning his motivations and intentions—topics that cannot be determined with any accuracy. Regardless of what Eliade’s conscious or unconscious intentions and choices may have been, what can be determined are the implications

of, and contemporary uses for, assorted representations and aspects of his texts that continue to be widely read both by scholars and students of religion as well as the interested reading public throughout the world. (Indeed, possibly only Joseph Campbell rivals Eliade in terms of popular appeal.) The purpose of surveying and assessing this debate is to demonstrate that the strategies of representation used to defend Eliade and his texts from such criticisms are themselves suspect. Accordingly, through an examination of this debate, this chapter argues not only 74

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 75 that all scholarly speculations concerning Eliade’s intentionality are weak but also, and more important, that through a critical analysis of the defenses of Eliade one can identify the dubious strategies used by his defenders to construct a representation of Eliade as essentially an autonomous, apolitical scholar.

Extreme Politics and the Terrors of History Since his death in 1986, shortly before the publication of the Encyclopedia of Religion, a number of differing, even conflicting, assessments of Eliade’s contribution to the academic study of religion have been published. Just prior to this, Ingvild Szlid Gilhus had suggested that there were two dominant types of secondary literature on Eliade: one that criticized his work on the basis of what was perceived as his nonempirical methods (the example she provides is Edmund Leach’s nowinfamous review of Eliade’s works in the New York Review of Books, which I address

later in this chapter), and another that finds in Eliade’s work “the fulfillment of the hermeneutic hope for the history of religions” (1984: 33). Even though Gilhus appears to have overlooked the more moderate and somewhat mediating works of such writers as Douglas Allen (1972, 1978, 1938, 1995) and Guilford Dudley (1976, 1977), her two broad categories have merit in that even though Allen, Dudley, and others acknowledge the rather biting criticisms that have been directed at Eliade’s work, they nonetheless devote much of their efforts to developing some form of a

revised and, in their view, stronger Eliadean method. Lamenting the absence of “critically sensitive and intelligent revision of [Eliade’s] work,’ Norman Girardot confirms this judgment by concluding that Allen and Dudley, among others, are “the first substantial efforts in this direction” (1982: 15 n. 40). In recent years three additional categories of secondary literature have appeared. One is a feminist critique of the androcentric bias in Eliade’s work (Christ 1987, 1991; Saiving 1976; and the assorted essays in King 1995); another attempts to

assess Eliade’s overall contribution to the field (Smart 1978; and Rudolph 1989); and yet another, related to both of these, investigates the relationship between the political interests of Eliade and his academic, and even his fictional and autobiographical, writings. Relying on assumptions similar to feminist critiques concerning the influences that contextual factors play in shaping scholarly methods and findings, this last category employs methods related to the sociology of knowledge. Because miuch work has been done on the first two categories of research into Eliade’s work, I explore instead the recent contributions to the last aspect of scholarship on Eliade as an example of the political strategies of representation that operate throughout this academic discourse. The very shape of this debate on Eliade and politics is itself representative of the dehistoricizing methods ‘and strategies that are dominant in the study of religion. Take, for example, the following passage:

76 Manufacturing Religion It has been very difficult to dissociate Heidegger and deconstructionism from the legacy of fascism. Heidegger’s work is essentially anti-modernist in my view, and his writings on technology show all the signs of a massive conservative reaction to democracy and modernization. However brilliant Heidegger’s philosophy may be, there are some genuine political problems in this legacy, which has been further illustrated by the case of Paul de Man. There is guilt by association which is not easy to throw off. (Turner 1994: 7)

So writes Bryan Turner in the opening chapter to his excellent study of the intersection between oriental critiques and defenses, the rise of the self-consciously ironic moves of postmodernism, and the effects of globalization—or, in his terms, the “McDonaldsization”—of culture. As indicated in the quotation, for scholars who are currently employing any of a number of postmodernist critical theories— and there are a great number of them—in the study of human behavior, beliefs, and productions, the troubling political pasts of such writers as Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man must be addressed.' Ironically, it is these writers, Heidegger and de Man, whose scholarly works have provided contemporary scholars with some of the more powerful critical and interpretive tools for the study of culture. Precisely because of the central role Heidegger’s and de Man’s writings play in their respective fields of inquiry, reassessments of their work and their influences throughout the humanities have been widespread. Simply put, for good or ill it has become virtually impossible to cite the work of either scholar without taking into account, implicitly or explicitly, the Nazi past of the one and the 1940s antiSemitic newspaper columns of the other. Justifiably, then, Turner can mention both scholars in the same paragraph, for their names have virtually become synonymous with the late-twentieth-century emphasis on the sociopolitical and historical contextuality of human knowledge. What is intriguing, however, is that in the quoted passage the name of Mircea Eliade does not occur. To make such an observation, however, is not to critique Turner’s fine scholarly work?—a work that does not aim to assess Eliade’s particular understanding of, for example, Islam or the Orient—but to point out a general

lacuna that exists in contemporary scholarship. What is intriguing is that in a passage on Heidegger, Turner, a professor of sociology whose work is conversant with scholarship on religion in general, should cite the related problems surrounding the work of de Man but not of Eliade. It is intriguing precisely because considerable evidence has mounted concerning Eliade’s profascist Romanian past as well as the totalitarian politics of his scholarship on religion and myths. Eliade’s absence from such critique, coupled with his continued and largely unquestioned authority in contemporary scholarship in religion, where his work continues to be cited uncritically, suggests a lacuna worth investigating. Where the Heidegger and de Man affairs have each caused widespread reactions, scholarly attacks, and spirited defenses by the most prominent philosophers and literary critics,’ each reinvigorating their respective fields of scholarship, in the case of the Eliade affair only

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 77 a rather small and seemingly marginalized group of critics have written periodical articles, book reviews, and the occasional chapters in essay collections. And where these charges are acknowledged, they are often simply dismissed. The problem is simply this: why (or better, how) have scholars of religion been able so successfully to withstand, and recuperate after, the critical assessments of both Eliade’s past and his associated work in the study of religion in a way that philosophy and literary criticism have not?‘ How has the discourse on sui generis religion withstood a decade’s worth of criticisms and historical findings that might otherwise have discredited one of its leading intellectuals? Unless one is willing to

entertain that scholars of religion have outright ignored these findings, one is forced to consider the mechanisms whereby this field has seemingly become immune to political and ideological criticism and analysis. The answer is to be found in the widely operating theoretical and methodological strategies already documented in the work of a number of scholars. The fact that these dehistoricizing strategies operate so widely in the study of religion as to be virtually transparent is the key to understanding the way this field has withstood the charge of extreme politics. Take, for example, the case of deconstructionism. Although deconstructionist methods have thrived at some sites within the modern university, this critical technique still constitutes an oppositional discourse. Linking extreme politics to deconstructionism has therefore provided the most potent opportunity for the regnant discourse in philosophy and the study of literature to discredit it. The case of the discourse on sui generis religion, however, is rather different, for it is itself the regnant discourse, the one that is credited with having made the study of religion possible in North America in the first place. For practitioners of this discourse to address the Eliade affair and claims of extreme politics systematically would entail a far greater and sustained effort, for the very strategies of exclusion and protection that deserve critique are, ironically perhaps,

the very mechanisms that have enabled the modern study of religion to withstand—to reword Eliade’s well-known phrase—the terrors of its own history.

The Text-in-Context Critique Before documenting the exclusionary and rhetorical strategies employed to exempt Eliade’s work from the taint of history, it is worthwhile to recount the substance of the more noteworthy critiques that are concerned with the politics of Eliade and Eliadean scholarship. Ivan Strenski’s (1987) reconstruction of the social milieu of such myth theorists as Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, and Malinowski is one of

the more ambitious and important contributions to the ever-growing body of literature that suspends the privilege of sociopolitical autonomy and questions the relations between the personal political views of scholars and the values latent in their academic productions. In the words of one of his reviewers, Strenski’s argument has three components: that “theories of myth must be deciphered in terms

78 Manufacturing Religion of their theorists, that the theorists must be deciphered in their historical contexts, and that those contexts must be deciphered externally as well as internally” (Segal 1990: 537). By external context, Strenski means larger cultural and social projects, whereas the internal context refers solely to professional academic debates (Strenski

1987: 11). ,

Strenski correctly considers Eliade (who he suggests may be the Sir James Frazer of our time®) to be among the leading myth theorists of this century, all of

whom, he asserts, have successfully hidden (whether consciously or unconsciously),

within apparently descriptive language, a whole series of prescriptions based on preexisting cultural and political values. Accordingly, Strenski maintains that one cannot understand Eliade’s contribution to the study of religion without also understanding his sociopolitical context (e.g., the history of his homeland, Romania in the first few decades of this century) and the manner in which his, and others’, scholarship contributed to setting a “cultural tone in which real policies deadly to Jews were brought closer to reality even though these figures themselves may not have participated in promulgating them” (1995). According to Strenski, who was the first to demonstrate the critical potential of this text-in-context research program as applied to the study of religion, Eliade, as not only a member but also a leader of Romania’s young generation* (i.e., those who were children or adolescents during the First World War), seems to have invested much in the hope of a Romanian renaissance after the war ended. However, according to Strenski, “[w]ith the ruinous events of the 1930s, Eliade and the rest of the young generation became casualties of History” (1987: 78). In Strenski’s

estimation, then, Eliade was deeply affected by the political coups and countercoups of 1930s Romania, when its citizens had to come to terms with the competing visions of monarchism, French liberalism, a newly empowered bolshevism, and a German- and Italian-inspired fascism (Strenski 1982: 392). He reads Eliade’s sub-

sequent academic and literary careers in the light of this cultural and political instability, going so far as to speculate that these later pursuits had a therapeutic value by “singlehandedly generating a literary oeuvre with, as it happens, a distinctly Romanian character” (1987: 80).

. Although Strenski’s critique is, at times, rather speculative with regard to Eliade’s unconscious or conscious motivations and goals, his conclusion, that Eliade’s corpus has a therapeutic value, is echoed in the judgment of a more sympathetic commentator, Matei Calinescu. Calinescu also speculates that Eliade : qua scholar and fiction writer was involved in a lifelong fight to preserve, against the ravages of time, both his personal identity as well as those things he considered to have great cultural and virtual transcendent value. Commenting on Eliade’s four volumes of published journals, Calinescu notes that they comprise assorted transcribed “sensations, insights, random reflections, intuitions, impressions and illu-

minations, in a word, all those things which nourish and strengthen personal memory in its fight against oblivion” (1977: 313). In fact, Eliade himself character-

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 79 ized the art of journal writing as saving or freezing “fragments of concrete time” (1990b: 42). It appears, then, paradoxical that even though Eliade wrote that the function of myth and ritual was primarily to transcend history by returning the devotee to the foundational time of origins (hence his interest in stressing that cosmogonic myths are the examples of myth par excellence), some commentators interpret Eliade’s own academic and literary work as an extended effort to entrench either the author or the reader deeper in the historical present. For example, commenting, in March of 1946, on receiving books he had previously stored in London, Eliade writes, “These books are, for me, concentrated time, history” (1990b: 15). Just as for the early Pythagoreans, whose memory exercises took on a soteriological

tone, according to such scholars as Strenski and Calinescu, for Eliade, memory and the meaning lodged within the written word may very well constitute salvation against the ravages of historical flux. As a result of his attempts to overcome not only the terrors of his Romanian

youth but also the terrors and upheavals of the modern era in general, Eliade is thought by some commentators to have longed to return to a golden era and, accordingly, produced works that were informed by, and expressed, a conservative political agenda that recovered the meaning implicit in such premodern survivals as archaic mentalities, symbols, myths, and so on. Therefore, Eliade’s appeal to an

authoritative, archaic past can be interpreted as conservative insomuch as it attempts to reestablish and thereby entrench certain dominant distributions of power constitutive of a past era in response to the upheavals of modernity.

A New Myth of Romanianism To a degree, such a view is echoed in a recent article by the Romanian expatriate Norman Manea (1991; revised in 1992: 91-123), although Manea’s ambiguous stand in assessing the implications of Eliade’s politics indicates the complexity of this issue. What begins as a review of Eliade’s published journals (spanning the years 1945-1985) and his two volume Autobiography, turns out to be an extended examination of the origins and context of what Manea contends to have been Eliade’s early fascist associations and attitudes, how these views continually arose throughout his literary career, and the role to be played by Eliade-the-intellectual in the modern reconstruction of postcommunist Romanian identity. The significance of the article’s title, “Happy Guilt,” can be found in a reference Eliade makes in his journal for 10 October 1984: I kept thinking of what I would have suffered had I remained in my homeland (during and after the Second World War rather than travel to England, Lisbon, and eventually Paris and the United States] as professor and writer. If it hadn’t been for that felix culpa: my adoration for Nae Ionescu [1890—1940, the Romanian philosopher who is also generally considered to have been the chief ideologist for

80 Manufacturing Religion the Romanian fascist movement] and all the baleful consequences (in 1935—1940)

of that relationship. (1990c: 104) ,

This passage could certainly be read as one of the few pieces of evidence of Eliade’s

acknowledgment that it was precisely his association (to whatever extent) with Ionescu (who acted as mentor to the young Eliade) and the Romanian fascist organization, the Iron Guard, that, ironically, may have saved his life. It was that association that led directly to what he would come to refer to as his life in exile— his second autobiographic volume is subtitled, Exile’s Return (1988). Such an exile prevented him from returning to Romania after the close of the war to experience almost certain persecution, and possibly death, under the newly established communist rule. Manea asserts that in the same way that the recent discovery of Paul de Man’s anti-Semitic wartime journalism has sparked scrutiny of de Man’s mature critical works, so too, Eliade’s works “deserve the same cold scrutiny” and should be seen

in the light of such things as his early support for Mussolini and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899-1938), the captain of the Romanian Iron Guard (1991: 28). As I

noted at the outset of this chapter, a consensus has yet to be reached on the significance of scholars who once held extreme political views. For example, in the case of Paul de Man, judgments range from the literary critic Frank Lenntrichia’s

view (1985) that his entire corpus of deconstructivist readings can be seen as an extended attempt to disavow all responsibility for the beliefs he once held, (1985) to Christopher Norris’s more sympathetic opinion that the very attitude that informed the writing of the young de Man was precisely the aesthetic ideology de Man was so preoccupied with rebutting in his subsequent critical writings. Norris proposes, then, that de Man’s later work “grew out of an agonized reflection on his wartime experience, and can best be read as a protracted attempt to make amends (albeit indirectly) in the form of an ideological auto-critique”’ (1988: 190).’

Whether or not such writers are in fact guilty of something, or can be held individually accountable for the politics of either their youth or their texts, it is certain that, like de Man, Eliade did not take the opportunity to rebut explicitly the accusations while he was living, thus opening the door to much posthumous speculation. With this in mind, Manea concludes that “unfortunately, [his autobiography and journals] do not in any way excuse or de-mystify Eliade’s ideological and political history during the fascist period [in Romania]” (1991: 27). If anything, such charges are continually dismissed in his published journals, as in his passing

(1990¢: 67). |

reference from the summer of 1982 regarding “the old matter of my ‘fascism’ ” Unlike Strenski’s critique, however, Manea’s falls short of its full potential. Manea employs a privileging technique in his critical analysis in that he distinguishes among three genres of Eliade’s mature writings, submitting each to different styles of critical scrutiny: scholarly, fictional, and personal (the latter comprised

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 81 of journals and an autobiography). For instance, Manea writes that it is “certainly true that the work of the writer and scholar exist in a separate domain from that of the militant reactionary journalist of the interwar period” (33). Having distinguished the three categories, Manea proceeds to submit each to different critical criteria: “‘[l]iterature must meet primarily aesthetic criteria, not moral ones, just as scholarly work must meet scholarly standards. But journals, memoirs, autobiography: such strictly personal reckonings cannot avoid the ethical test’’ (34). It is the last type of texts Manea is primarily concerned with in his review essay. It should be apparent that Manea’s segmentation and isolation of genres, as well as his distinction among aesthetic, scholarly, and moral criteria, are themselves highly suspicious and even counterproductive, because they encourage the privileging of what has traditionally been conceived of as the neutral and valuefree space of the scholar and scholarly representations and the essentially artistic realm of the writer, over against the value-laden reflections of personal opinion. According to Fredric Jameson, to delineate such distinct genres is to “attempt to

devise a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable responses to a given literary utterance.’’ Contrary to this position, Jameson constructs genres more taxonomically, as “essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (1988b: 106-107). Jameson’s use of the terms “undesirable” and “proper” suggests that to question such traditional textual divisions by definition entails a simultaneous critique of the established authority that ensures that various sorts of readings are systematically excluded. Therefore, Manea’s harsh distinction between Eliade’s later scholarship and his earlier and entrenched personal and journalistic texts suggest a limitation of political readings to only the latter, thereby privileging scholarship as sociopolitically autonomous. In Manea’s words, “To draw a connection between [Eliade’s] scholarship and his ‘fascist’ period, to cast an inquisitional eye on ‘suspect’ details in his many learned studies, would be to provide a perfect example of totalitarian methodology,” and such a methodology is labeled by Manea as “abusive and fanatical simplification” (1991: 33-34). However, Manea is only partly correct on this point. It is true that to draw a necessary connection between Eliade’s early and later textual productions, as well as between his journal writing and scholarship would surely be totalitarian; however, to segment Eliade qua intellectual from the influences and implications of politics in such an a priori fashion is equally suspect. Such segmentation effectively precludes from the outset any political readings of either the origins or the implications of scholarly texts, methods, and theories, for, as Manea asserts, only scholarly criteria are relevant to the study of scholarly materials. Much as the discourse on sui generis religion ensures that religion can be studied only as something religious, Manea constructs an autonomous scholarly zone that is

_ subject only to scholarly criteria of analysis. To appeal once again to Jameson,

82 Manufacturing Religion Manea’s distinctions between scholarship and journalism, on the one hand, and scholarly standards and ethical or moral criteria, on the other, are mechanisms whereby undesirable responses to, and readings of, Eliade’s work on religion are automatically excluded. This constitutes a specific instance in which the privilege afforded by exclusionary practices relies on mechanisms also operative in the wider discourse on sui generis religion. Manea’s highly selective reading of the relations between Eliade’s early politics and his later scholarship has direct political implications for the future use of Eliade

qua nationalist role model in the reconstruction of Romanian identity after the -communist government's sudden fall from power. Manea seems concerned that with the recent discovery of Eliade’s youthful fascist interests—and their possible presence in his later work—the role Eliade might play in reestablishing relations between Romania and the noncommunist world is questionable at best. Manea wonders what effects this loss will have for the present intellectual and political challenges in Eastern Europe: “In the context of the recent political changes in Eastern Europe...the portrait of Eliade that we now possess is especially regrettable” (1991: 28). He laments that the newly discovered evidence of the possible gap between Eliade-the-myth and Eliade-the-man could have been avoided if only there had been an “honest and critical analysis of the significance of Eliade’s life,” a clear analysis, which he believes was prevented by the former communist regime. Although it is likely that such an examination would have affected Eliade’s academic position and his stature both in Romania and the United States, this does not appear to be Manea’s primary concern. Rather, he is concerned to fill the void left after the fall of communism, a void that is all too evident in the ongoing social, ethnic, political, and economic problems of Eastern Europe. Accordingly, Manea can assert that a more open study of Eliade’s life “would have been important to the whole Romanian culture” (35). The consequence of Manea’s representation of Eliade is the creation of yet another myth of Romanianism through the use of a newly reconstructed representation of Eliade. Free from the sociopolitical implications of his published journals and autobiography, Eliade becomes useful to Manea as an intellectual (through his scholarly works) and cultural (through his novels) exemplar. Manea plainly reveals the political implications for such a newly reconstituted Eliade when he writes, Romania means more than just Ceausescu or Codreanu, ... more than the greenshirted terrorists of the Legion or the members of the Securitate. There still lives in Romania, or so we must hope, a legacy of democratic thought. It was stifled for many decades by right-wing and left-wing dictatorships, but it retains a deep relationship with European culture. A new generation has a deep thirst for freedom and prosperity. There is hope for Romania, but it can be nourished only by a clear commitment to democracy and an unambiguous transition to a civil society. (36)

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 83 This new Romanianism is all too evident in the postscript to the revised version of this review essay that appears in Manea’s collection of essays, On Clowns: “Perhaps it is still appropriate to hope, even to fantasize, that were Eliade alive [today] and aware of these events [the contemporary “ugly events . . . that reveal the lasting legacies of Romania’s nationalist, fascist, and communist past’], he would now side with the angels and commit himself to a true civil society” (1992: 122-123). Given the name of the Romanian fascist organization with which Eliade was once associated, the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Manea’s choice of angelic imagery is

hardly cause for optimism. Under the influence of Manea, then, the insights into Eliade’s troubled political past and its relations to his later scholarly texts are minimalized and protected from influencing the value of Eliade as an intellectual and cultural model for modern Romanian nationalism. It is but another instance of the sui generis strategy deployed at yet another discursive site.

The Debate on Eliade’s Diplomatic Career A final critique of Eliade’s political background and its relations to his academic writings comes from his former research assistant, Adriana Berger. Readers of Eliade’s last journal (1990c) will recall that Berger was hired by Eliade in 1984 to help put his personal library in order. However, soon after she began, it quickly became apparent that Eliade was in fact not planning on such an extensive rearrangement of his papers and books. Within days of Berger’s arrival, he wrote in his journal of his despair over the whole episode (20 January 1984). The dispersion of his library, partly due to his donations of books, brought on the “melancholy” sO prominent in the journal entries of his last years. Significantly, on 31 March 1984, he wrote that he saw “the breaking up of my library and, especially, the

. rearrangement of the manuscripts and the classification of the correspondence was a very big mistake. Perhaps the most serious error of the last twenty-five years!” (81). Finally, to save himself from “exploding” when learning of the extent of Berger's work, which, he reports, involved opening two steel filing cabinets and rearranging the contents, he wrote on 6 April 1984 that he retired to his home, to escape her work of “rearranging,” “reorganizing,” and “ransacking.” He lamented that he had “been laid low by a series of misfortunes” (82).° In her review essay on both: the second volume of Eliade’s Autobiography and Mac Linscott Ricketts’s extensive but highly sympathetic biography of Eliade’s ‘Romanian roots’ (a work one reviewer described as a “labor of love” [Allen 1992: 174]), Berger takes exception to the manner in which both texts, in her estimation, consistently deemphasize the importance of contextual analysis. Citing a variety of sources, from Eliade’s own early newspaper articles to World War II British Foreign Office correspondence concerning his questionable status as an official Romanian diplomat, Berger provides an account of how Eliade’s political involvement with the fascist and increasingly anti-Semitic Iron Guard was intentional and extensive

84 Manufacturing Religion rather than, as Ricketts and Eliade have suggested, simply marginal and inspired purely by intellectual or spiritual interest. For example, in the second volume of his Autobiography, Eliade is represented as not actively involved in politics (1988: 10), an example of which is found in the story of how he once declined to sign a declaration dissociating himself from the Iron Guard. Such an action, he maintains, would surely have constituted a political act (63). That not signing could be perceived as just such an act is apparently lost on him. Reflecting on these years, Eliade writes, “I was entirely ignorant of the domestic and international political situation” (1990a[1981]: 135).

As an increasingly well-known Romanian author and journalist who had spent

time studying in India, traveled in Europe, and wrote explicitly in support of Mussolini’s government, such defenses appear rather weak. And Ricketts, in Bergers opinion, presents his readers with an equally weak defense: “[Ricketts] portrays a naive, apolitical Eliade, who believed in the purely religious message of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of the Iron Guard” (1989: 462).' Berger finds little credence in this image of “a naive thirty-year old who was ignorant” of antiSemitism in the Guard (461).° Of course, to be fair to Eliade, one must note, as does Berger, that the explicit physical violence the Iron Guard directed against the Jewish community occurred after 1940, by which time Eliade had left Romania for England. This fact notwithstanding, at the hand of Berger, the portrait of the young Eliade as an essentially apolitical intellectual retains little credibility. Much like

Strenski, then, in her analysis Berger suspends the supposed autonomy of the author/scholar and bases her representation of Eliade not simply on intellectual, cultural, or spiritual issues but on sociopolitical factors as well. A reply to Berger’s account of Eliade’s questionable diplomatic career in England during the Second World War has come from Bryan Rennie (1992, 1995). Rennie accepts the challenge presented by Berger’s interpretation of Eliade’s wartime activities so as to prevent what he considers to be her prejudiced work from forming the basis of future Eliade scholarship. Like portions of Berger’s critique, the bulk of Rennie’s defense relies on evidence from the archives of the British Foreign Office. However, unlike Berger, Rennie finds no direct evidence to support

the claims that Eliade was either an anti-Semite or a sympathizer with the Iron Guard. He concludes that the Foreign Office documents “do not give hard evidence either way about Eliade’s connection with the Guardist movement”’ (1992: 387). As

grounds for his accusation of the biased nature of Berger’s scholarship, Rennie notes that not all of Berger’s sources are extant (and therefore cannot be verified) and that she selectively quotes from archival materials to create the impression of factual evidence where Rennie himself reads only rumor, innuendo, and suspicion. Finally, he writes, “[Berger] has failed to recognize even the possibility that Eliade’s

actions could be more easily accounted for by his loyalty to the country of his birth than by any malice against anyone” (387). Unfortunately, it is not simply a , case of either loyalty to one’s country or malice against someone. Here Rennie

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 85 overlooks the subtle and pervasive ways in which nationalism arises precisely through the objectification and devaluation of others. The manner in which Rennie conceives of “loyalty to one’s country” as an essentially innocent or natural commitment is a topic I will return to. It must be pointed out that Rennie is correct to criticize Berger’s somewhat uncritical use of British government documents. In need of confirmation concerning what she reads as Eliade’s early political biases, Berger seems to have overlooked the fact that the British reports on his so-called diplomatic activities and status are themselves productions of wartime propaganda generated in the interest of Britain’s own national security. One should no more rely exclusively on such documents than uncritically utilize Eliade’s autobiographical writings as completely trustworthy evidence of his beliefs and motivations. Indeed, the assumption that one can access Eliade’s beliefs and intentions from a close reading of such documents is highly problematic. And the fact that little or no concrete evidence exists that could confirm that Eliade was a fascist suggests that the debate on the politics

of Eliade as constructed so far will not be settled any time soon. Rather than attempt to determine whether Eliade was, for example, an official Romanian diplomat—the debate between Berger and Rennie—one ought to examine the strat-

egies of representation employed by the critics and defenders involved in the debate. Such an examination, much like a trial in which there is no physical but only circumstantial evidence, will have to focus on the rhetorical and ideological strategies necessary for each side to make its case. Although such an analysis will surely not decide the “facts of the case,” it will instead identify the suspect representational strategies necessary for defending actors as if they somehow rise above influences and circumstances normally determinative of historical existence. Therefore, as much as Berger’s account may be colored by undisclosed personal feelings or possibly even animosity, as is suggested by Rennie, his own reading of these events is also far from unbiased. Rennie seems to excuse the wartime nationalist and xenophobic activities of certain elements of the Romanian popu-

lation by painting a sympathetic picture of their historical lot as an oppressed people continually striving to deal with the burden of foreign domination. With its annexation of Transylvania, which contributed to the doubling of Romania’s size after the First World War, the Romanians, according to Rennie, were finally “free from foreign domination ... [and] were determined not to cede Romanian self-determination to internal foreign influences” (376). That the apparently contradictory notion of internal yet foreign influences begs questions of ethnic and nationalistic purity seems wholly lost on Rennie. It is unlikely, as well, that one could find a better example of the relations between nationalism and the devaluation of others than in Rennie’s comments on the Transylvanian annexation: with that annexation in mind, we can see that Rennie’s comment on Romanians finally being “free of foreign domination” takes on an ironic tone. His description sounds remarkably like a rationalization for the later ethnic and religious oppression and

86 Manufacturing Religion victimization in Romania. Simply put, one can assume that the Transylvanians who awoke to find themselves part of Romania were not as pleased with the new geographic realities as were the newly “liberated” Romanians. Rennie also excuses Eliade from lending his explicit support to the cause of the Romanian fascist movement on the grounds of ethnic purity; that is, because, according to Rennie, the Archangel movement was “at least genuinely Romanian” (emphasis added) as opposed to the new Romanian king’s Italian- and Germaninfluenced policies. According to Rennie’s interpretation, then, Eliade’s stand at this time is not so much political as ethnic and cultural. However, at no time does Rennie question just what is genuine about one’s ethnic status and why such a status implies a privilege of some sort. Nor does he question the intimate connections between the maintenance of social, ethnic, and political boundaries and identities. To separate such factors, much as Manea separated moral from artistic and scholarly criterta, is arbitrary, dubious, and politically suspect. Furthermore, Rennie explains away the eventual violent anti-Semitism of the Iron Guard to such attitudes as simply being “blind nationalism” and “fanatical nationalism” (386, 387), both of which are akin to what he later characterizes as “virulent nationalism,” all of which is implicitly contrasted with Eliade’s own motivations, termed by Rennie “essential humanism” (388). Through such dichotomies, Rennie effectively isolates Eliade from all accusations of fanaticism or nationalism and portrays his ambitions as somehow nonvirulent and insightful rather than dangerous and blind. The adjectives “blind,” “fanatical,” and “virulent” are evidence of a normative judgment that ensures that the actions of some people are held at the margins, far from the cultural, spiritual, and apolitical center. Accordingly, the representation of Eliade, and its possible uses, benefits tremendously from Rennie’s implicit and unquestioned construction of a margin far from what we must simply accept as self-evidently and purely cultural and apolitical commitments. As Rennie implies, one appears to be held accountable for one’s actions and beliefs only at the margin. Although it may be highly questionable to what extent one can determine Eliade’s intentions and motivations concerning his early associations with the Iron Guard and how such associations affected his later work on religion, what is of particular interest are the ways in which both Manea and Rennie have constructed their replies to such criticisms. Instead of discounting such criticisms as being based

on amateur psychologizing and utter speculation, both Manea and Rennie construct elaborate and suspect interpretive schemes that function to privilege and isolate a portion of Eliade’s work, thereby ensuring that the image of Eliade qua intellectual remains aloof from the taint of political life. For example, even though Manea fully accepts the fact of Eliade’s suspect political past, both he and Rennie effectively invoke the phenomenological epoché to segment, isolate, and thereby protect either certain aspects of Eliade’s academic work or his early allegiances and motivations from further critical scrutiny. Rather than defend Eliade and his work

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 87 from the criticisms of Strenski and Berger, the work of Manea and Rennie minimalizes such charges, thereby qualifying as but two more instances of the regnant discourse on sui generis religion. Because of such features as the strategically useful

distinctions between scholarship and journalism, politics and culture/spirit, and the suspect limitations placed on sociopolitical influences, this type of representation invites further scrutiny. Other than Rennie’s essay on Eliade’s diplomatic career,'° few explicit responses to the accusations of such writers as Strenski and Berger have come from among Eliade’s supporters and followers. Eliade himself seems to have followed the practice of not responding in print to his critics. As he wrote in his journal on 15 September 1985: From the articles which Ioan Couliano has dedicated to me, I understand that in recent years the ‘methodological’ criticisms brought against my conception of the history of religions have increased. The fault is, in part, mine; I’ve never replied to such criticisms, although I ought to have done so. I told myself that someday, ‘when I’m free from works in progress,’ I'll write a short theoretical monograph and explain the ‘confusions and errors’ for which I am reproached. I’m afraid [ll never have time to write it.” (1990c: 143)

Indeed, Eliade did not write any systematic defense of his methods. But to be fair, it must be noted that the most explicit accusations and critiques all arose after his death. It may well be idle speculation to account for the timing of such critiques, but it certainly is possible that the more explicit criticisms of his political past had to await his death. Edmund Leach’s biting review of Eliade’s work in the New York Review of Books (1966) comes to mind as an early example of how Eliade failed to address criticisms in print. Leach’s critical comments arise from his assessment of what he considers to be Eliade’s sloppy anthropological methods and are therefore not explicitly related to the debate on the political nature of his scholarly work. Instead, Leach levels a series of theoretical, methodological, and even personal criticisms at Eliade, in the end virtually accusing Eliade of continually plagiarizing his own earlier works. Leach’s overall tone is apparent in the following two quotations: “One may suspect that harsh objectivity is not one of Eliade’s outstanding virtues,” and “All in all a comprehensive study of Eliade quickly reaches the limits of marginal utility.” Leach’s comments belong to a subgroup of Gilhus’s two categories of secondary literature on Eliade, namely, his critical reception by, in this case, the anthro-

pological community.'! Terry Alliband’s review (1980) of the first volume of Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas (1978) provides an example of those points on which anthropologists critical of Eliade’s methods agree with Leach’s judgments. Concerning Eliade’s “pedantic and essentially arrogant approach,” Alliband writes that “the anthropological reader will soon tire of reading elaborate details of ob-

88 Manufacturing Religion scure religious rituals without a full understanding of the contexts (social, cultural, economic, political) of these practices and ideas. Eliade is guilty of extracting data from their setting and then assembling them in a pattern which supports his conclusions” (251). The highly selective nature of Eliade’s evidence is likewise prob-

lematic for other anthropological reviewers.'2 Of particular importance is the insight that the practices of decontextualization and dehistoricization are essential to Eliade’s methodology—points developed in chapters 1 and 2. On the occasion of Leach’s attack, it was Ricketts, who later was to labor for nineteen years in producing his two-volume, 1,450—page biography on Eliade’s years in Romania (1988), who took up the gauntlet. Ricketts devotes a considerable portion of his essay, “In Defence of Eliade” (1973), to the challenge of rebutting Leach and other anthropologists who were critical of Eliade’s theories or methods. From the outset, Ricketts’s opinion of Leach’s comments is clear: “Leach’s essay is a bellicose, vicious, ad hominen attack on Eliade and is shot through with errors and half-truths” (20). Ricketts’s article exonerates Eliade from Leach’s accusations

that he is nothing more than a “dilettante.” However, Leach’s critique, and therefore Ricketts’s early defense, come long before the contemporary questions that revolve around the political nature of Eliade’s work. Therefore, it is to other writers that one must turn to find any possible exoneration from Strenski’s and Berger’s charges.

Obscurantism and the Case of Nonpolitical Nationalism Two writers who have attempted explicitly to respond to these criticisms of Eliade’s politics are Carl Olson (1989, 1992) and David Cave (1993). In a collection of essays on Eliade’s theology and philosophy, Olson explicitly addresses Strenski’s appraisal of Eliade’s work. The very title of Olson’s book, The Theology and Philosophy of

_ Mircea Eliade (1992) is perplexing if one considers that, according to Ricketts’s early assessment, “Eliade has never expressed himself in writing, nor to my knowl-

edge in public orally, concerning his inner faith or philosophy. As a historian of religions, Eliade scrupulously avoids (insofar as it is humanly possible) interjecting his religious beliefs into his ‘scientific’? works” (Ricketts 1973: 27~28). This clash of interpretations over the role theology plays in Eliade’s work, especially among those

sympathetic to it, simply demonstrates how far scholarship on his work has come in the past twenty years. Where his defenders once sought academic or institutional legitimacy in claiming that Eliade’s work was indeed neutral and objectively scientific, some now emphasize and celebrate what could be referred to as his coun-

terscientific, normative stance and, along with it, the religious aspects and ramifications of his writings and theories. In his opening chapter, while briefly reviewing the positions of a number of Eliade’s critics, Olson minimalizes Strenski’s critique by characterizing him as simply the most “recent accuser” (1992: 4), thereby dismissing the link Strenski forges

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 89 between Eliade’s personal political beliefs and his academic productions. With this link between personal politics and scholarship in mind, Olson asks, Should Eliade be condemned for his involvement with the Iron Guard whether or not he was a member of the movement? Should he be criticized for associating with others closely associated with the movement? Should he be censured for the violent activities of others? Although he is not entirely clear in his Autobiography about his status in the Iron Guard, he does say that he was a non-political person and that he made some errors while a young man. It is a pernicious characteristic of some academics to be unforgiving of someone who did not have the correct ideology throughout his/her life. (44-45)

There are many problems with this passage. In response to Olson’s opening series of rhetorical questions, no better answer is supplied than that of Neil McMullin:

“If we are not to be characterized (judged?) on the basis of the nature of the groups that we are willing to be part of and to serve... then what measures are left?” (1989b: 250). Clearly, guilt by association is a flimsy basis for a political critique, but if determining guilt or innocence is the aim, then, as McMullin notes, our personal and social relationships must be considered relevant. Moreover, for Olson to trust an autobiographical fragment to decide such a weighty matter as this is indeed problematic. For example, at no point is Olson intrigued about why Eliade “is not entirely clear” on this matter. Douglas Allen, reviewing Ricketts’s biography, has tried to account for this by suggesting that Eliade’s later silence and obscurity on these and other matters could be explained by his embarrassment. Allen writes, “Perhaps Eliade realized that some of what might appear in a personal column, an autobiographical novel, or a literary work of the fantastic would be inappropriate, even embarrassing, if it were included in a rigorous scholarly study” (1992: 177). Such a separation and privileging of genres, as noted earlier, is indicative of a representative strategy that excludes, and possibly privileges, the “rigorous” and supposedly apolitical over the “fantastical” or “personal” and political. Surely such a defense would carry little weight in either the de Man or Heidegger debates. Accordingly, it should have little credibility in the case of Eliade." Finally, to return to Olson, the point of such investigations into Eliade’s work is not to forgive him nor to determine guilt or innocence, as Olson suggests, but to understand how scholars’ actions and writings can be informed by a particular political and social context and can carry with them sociopolitical implications. _ The task, then, is to demonstrate that indeed Eliade’s texts do contain a particular political ideology and that their continued use may further support the propagation and establishment of certain aspects of that politics. In apparently accepting that Eliade was informed by an ideology, while refusing to acknowledge the link between private beliefs and scholarly writing, Olson vacillates on a very central point, thereby significantly weakening his defense. Further, Olson does not explain what

he means by the term “ideology.” As noted by a number of writers in the field,

90 Manufacturing Religion ideology can have a variety of meanings, ranging from the more critical notion of systematic and widespread false consciousness to those uses of the term that simply denote the contextualized nature of all human thought. Like Eliade’s own use of the term, Olson appears to imply not the more critical Marxist sense but rather a worldview or philosophic bias and commitment. If this is the sense in which he uses the word, then his point that Eliade indeed possessed an ideology has little in common with my use of the term and, in fact, says little, for no doubt all human thought is contextualized in this manner. Olson continues,

| Even if Eliade was a hard-core Fascist throughout his life, for which I have not found any evidence, this political ideology did not affect his scholarship to any sinister extent, and it is unjust to taint someone and to judge them guilty by association. How can we come to grips with Eliade’s prewar association with the Iron Guard? Before and after the war, it can be concluded, by reading his Autobiography, that he was a patriot and a Rumanian nationalist concerned with his nation’s historical past, present dictatorial bondage, and uncertain future; he was also concerned with preserving its culture during its period of diaspora for its artists and intellectuals after the Second World War. Eliade’s patriotic fervor is evident in his notion of “Romanianism,’ a non-political nationalism that embodied a messianic sense of the divinely-chosen nature of the Rumanian nation with a special mission to fulfil in the world. (1992: 44-45)"

Olson’s text is filled with such dogmatic assertions, all of which lack any form of evidence or justification. It is gratuitous, to say the least, to assert that Eliade’s scholarly works remain unaffected, or at least unaffected to any “sinister extent,” by political ideologies. Just as in the case of other interpreters of Eliade’s time in Romania, Olson attempts to limit his political involvements to his early or youthful years, thereby also excluding his later scholarly works from exposure to any sinister indictment. Olson’s understanding of the relations between patriotism and nationalism is also problematic because, according to him, only the latter seems to be related to political motives or intentions. In terms of how dominant ethnic, social, and political groups use these concepts, patriotism (e.g., British or American patriotism) is understood as essentially positive, inspiring, and as affirming a neutral cultural heritage, whereas nationalism (e.g., Quebecois or Serbian nationalism) is interpreted as threatening, politically and militarily loaded, and therefore dangerous. To accept these arbitrary divisions is to fail to ask such questions as whose interests are threatened by movements labeled as nationalist, or, in the opposite case, who benefits from patriotism understood as the celebration of that which is self-evident and natural. Earlier, we encountered a similarly arbitrary dichotomy that favors patriotism over nationalism, namely, Rennie’s division of blind nationalism from Eliade’s essential humanism. Furthermore, it is astounding that Olson could interpret such profoundly political assertions as those regarding the mystical

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 91 and messianic mission of a divinely chosen nation as being in any way apolitical or merely patriotic. It virtually amounts to reading the divine right of monarchs as a purely spiritual or cultural claim! Surely few modern scholars of religion would fail to recognize the political nature of such claims if, for example, they were made in an ancient Hebrew text or a contemporary Muslim document. Therefore, Olson’s exclusion of Eliade’s potent political message from critical examination is itself a highly suspicious strategy and borders on obscurantism. Moreover, Olson, recalling some of Eliade’s early newspaper columns cited by Berger, glosses over the relationship between what he asserts to be a homogeneous Romanian culture in toto and the cultures of its many different ethnic groups (i.e., the “internal foreigners” of Rennie’s essay). Olson’s interpretation takes on a totally different light when read in terms of Eliade’s early writings on the place of “the Jewish element” in Romanian life. Adriana Berger quotes one of Eliade’s Romanian newspaper columns: We stayed passively and watched how the Jewish element became stronger in Transylvanian cities, how Deva became completely Hungarian, . .. how colonies of Jewish ploughmen were established in Maramures, how the forests of Maramures and Bucovina passed into Jewish and Hungarian hands, etc., etc. .. . Instead of cruelly eliminating the Bulgarian element from the entire Dobrogea, we have colonized it with Bulgarian gardeners. (1989: 458)

In this appeal to preserve national and ethnic culture (the “we” of his passage), and in a variety of other passages cited by Berger (see Berger 1994 as well), one can find what appears to be, in the words of Christopher Norris commenting on Paul de Man’s anti-Semitic newspaper columns, “the all-too-familiar ideology of language, genius, and organic national culture” (1988: 187). Note also that even Ricketts, normally sympathetic to Eliade’s work, remarks that this particular article that is quoted by Berger, and which was originally published in September of 1937 during a period when Eliade was openly writing in support of the Iron Guard, is “long and bitter” and is marked by its “strong xenophobic stance” (1988: 911-912). And last, Olson’s uncritical use of Eliade’s Autobiography in both of the quoted passages betrays an important aspect of the discourse on sui generis religion: the ways in which scholars, presuming that religion is an essentially personalistic experience, routinely grant actors first-person interpretive authority when it comes to accounting for details of their experiences and lives (on the complexities of this issue, see Godlove [1994]). This is not to say that scholars must always suspend the informant’s right to interpret his or her own actions and beliefs, but that they

must carefully devise defensible criteria to determine when they do or do not suspend such interpretive authority. The way Olson seems to find no good reason to read the Autobiography as datum rather than as an authoritative document is evidence of the general suspicion of theorizing that abounds in the regnant discourse. Indeed, the journals and the autobiography provide important points of

92 Manufacturing Religion access into this debate, but surely they are not to be taken as self-evidently authoritative. Such a prioritizing of the emic at the expense of the etic is characteristic of an undefended scholarly intuition regarding what we can only term an essential experience that apparently grounds all behavior; such an intuitive basis for the field

leads the way for scholars simply to become interpreters of essences rather than critics of culture. Olson’s dismissal, therefore, of contextualist criticism is unwarranted insomuch as it is based on such suspect distinctions as the one between culture and politics and the unfounded priority of informant accounts. If anything, Olson’s weak arguments and assertions cause one to question just what is at stake for scholars to work so diligently at ignoring, denying, or glossing over what to others is all too apparent. Like Manea and Rennie, it constitutes simply another instance of the regnant discourse.

Essentialization and Eliade the Great Man An even better example of the workings of the discourse on sui generis religion in this debate on Eliade is found in David Cave’s Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism (1993). Cave’s book is a detailed defense and elaboration of what he considers to be the center to Eliade’s oeuvre: the cultural program Eliade termed

the new humanism. As previously indicated, this program is an agenda for the renaissance of the Western world based on the reappropriation by the culturally provincial West of what Eliade contended to be certain fundamentally human, archaic values lost in the secular and scientific West. In Eliade’s words, “by attempting to understand the existential situations expressed by the documents he is studying, the historian of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such knowledge that a new humanism, on a worldwide scale, could develop” (1984: 3). According to Eliade, and in a suitably normative fashion, the spiritually barren consciousness of the West would in this way be awakened to truly authentic modes of living.

Cave’s description of the new humanism is detailed, drawing not only on Eliade’s scholarly works on religion but on his fiction and autobiography as well. Unfortunately, at no point does Cave see in it a potent and explicit political manifesto. Although he acknowledges that the new humanism does indeed possess radical sociopolitical implications, he, like Eliade, maintains that it is essentially an

apolitical program of cultural renewal. For both Eliade and Cave, as seen in the work of the other defenders, this distinction between culture and politics is maintained by the presence of the traditional idealist dualism of essence/manifestation: the new humanism is simply a spiritual and cultural program that, although in essence and origin divorced from the external influences of history and politics, is realized or manifested within history. Only on this basis can Cave conclude that

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 93 Eliade’s new humanism is simply a hermeneutical program, something Cave terms “participatory morphology.” Beyond the specific ways in which Cave’s analysis echoes many of the difficulties found in Olson’s, the primary issue is simply that Cave maintains that it is sufficient to exclusively prioritize the insider’s perspective and that it is possible to treat his data (in this case Eliade’s theories rather than specifically religious symbolism) on its “own plane of reference.” Perhaps there exists no better example

of the presumed irreducibility of the datum than the following quotation from Cave: “I am largely sympathetic to Eliade’s cultural and pluralistic vision and I consider informative, insightful, and valid many of his interpretations of religious experience. I have tried to read Eliade as much as possible on his own terms and to place him within the framework of reference he himself was trying to construct, which I contend is the new humanism” (12). Agreement with the views of one’s

subject is not necessarily troublesome; what is problematic is the position that Eliade and his theories are somehow sui generis, to be studied only on their own terms. All connections and associations with larger issues of context, politics, and power are thereby effectively severed. Apparently, what is of interest to Cave is some essence to Eliade himself and his program. This constitutes yet another example of the hegemony of scale that operates in the modern discourse on religion. Cave’s essentialist approach is also evident in his assertion that establishing a genesis of Eliade’s ideas is impossible, because “Eliade’s thought and life unfolded more than they evolved” (21). By suggesting that Eliade’s genius somehow gradually manifested itself in history, Cave repeats uncritically the questionable separation

of culture (internal and spiritual) from politics (external and historical), which itself betrays all the markings of an idealist and politically conservative cultural theory. In the hands of Cave, material practices and interests are thereby dislocated and excluded from the purer realm of cultural expressions that manifest an inner essence that “unfolds,” that constitutes, in the case of Cave’s very title, Eliade’s vision as opposed to his practice. Simply put, Cave propagates what Terry Eagleton has extensively critiqued as the ideology of the aesthetic (Eagleton 1990), whereby art and culture, as well as those who participate in, produce, fund, and have the luxury to appreciate them, are somehow privileged over history, social practices, and those who are unable to rise above it all.

Finally, what is perhaps most problematic about Cave’s representation of Eliade’s life and work is how he excuses what he terms Eliade’s paradoxical status as a worldly man of letters who is also known to have at one time been a nationalistic xenophobe. As Seymour Cain worded it, “How odd that this man who as

a scholar was open to all cultures and faiths took such a chauvinistic and xenophobic attitude!” (1989: 30).'© Cave writes, “Not surprisingly, Eliade has been labeled many things: an agnostic, a cryptotheologian, an Orthodox believer, ‘the most influential student of religion today,’ a right wing xenophobic, a defender of the Jews, the leading spokesman for women, a male chauvinist, and other labels. Eliade,

94 Manufacturing Religion in a way, is all of these’’ (21). In part, Cave leaves the impression that because of the clearly contradictory nature of some of these labels, they might not actually refer to Eliade but be characteristic of the interests of his interpreters and readers. And because Cave’s reading advocates the use of a traditional essence/manifestation division, it appears that the attribution of such labels to Eliade’s by his interpreters (who, after all, address only the issue of Eliade’s personae or his historical and textual manifestations) might in some way preserve or save the essence of Eliade (which in due course, appears to be Cave’s own interest, i.e., Eliade read “on his own terms’) from all forms of critique. By going on to insist that the whole of Eliade’s work is greater than the sum of the parts, Cave effectively minimalizes the significance of such parts as anti-Semitism and androcentrism, while celebrating a supposed whole, for example, Eliade’s “many-sidedness” and his “radical pluralism.” Cave’s justification for doing this is extremely weak: in the case of Eliade, “fertility for fertility’s sake sprouted the wheat along with the tares” (21). According to this view, one must take the bad along with the good, or accept the inconveniences of xenophobia to benefit from the products of genius. After all, Cave notes how aesthetic and religious experiences take a variety of forms, all of which, however, are “only pretexts, infinite in number, for arriving at a single plane” (21).!” As pragmatic as such advice may seem, it also constitutes political obscurantism insomuch as it grossly oversimplifies and relativizes Eliade’s possible early involvements with explicitly violent political groups and other issues, such as the gender bias of his later research. It suggests that such less-than-ideal aspects of both his life and his theoretical work were simply indiscretions along the road to the making of a Great Man. (A second example of such political obscurantism is found in Cave’s differentiation between, for example, Hitler’s symbolic universe and his political program [24]). As useful as such a distinction might be, it all too often obscures the political and historical behind a veil of essentially neutral, symbolic meanings. Accordingly, such a romantic and idealized picture of Eliade’s genius and the identification of xenophobia and androcentrism with “tares” effectively dismisses, rather than addresses, any criticisms of Eliade and his work on religion. Thus, like Olson’s, Cave’s representation relies on an essentialistic, antihistorical foundation and not only glosses over and minimalizes the charges against Eliade rather than answering them but employs suspect distinctions to defend Eliade’s essential message over its sociopolitical nature and the concrete implications it may entail. Olson’s and Cave’s arguments notwithstanding, a further investigation into the characteristics and political implications of the discourse on sui generis religion is warranted. Those who have chosen to defend Eliade against his “recent accusers” have failed to present convincing counterarguments, for they have minimalized and dismissed the charges of his critics. If anything, through their suspect use of such terms as “nationalism” and “apolitical,” their highly sympathetic reading of Eliade, and their use of the arbitrary distinctions between culture/politics, on the

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 95 one hand, and spirit/history, on the other, such defenses are themselves in need of explanation, for they constitute but another site of the discourse on sui generis religion. Just as Eliade and others often employed isolationist strategies in relation to religious experience, Manea, Rennie, Olson, and Cave have all employed similar

strategies as the basis for their apolitical representations of his life and work. Therefore, the plausibility of Strenski’s and Berger’s arguments hinges on the rather dismissive manner in which their respondents have minimalized and evaded their

criticisms by appealing to the autonomy of culture from politics; spirit from history; patriotism from nationalism; genius, intuition, and wisdom from pedestrian knowledge; and, finally, Eliade-the-intellectual from Eliade-the-sociopoliticallycontextualized-person. All this having been said, however, I must repeat that whether or not Eliade actually was a member of the Romanian fascist movement is largely a question of historical speculation. Even if a membership card, for example, were to be discovered, it is not altogether clear what this would actually prove. As in the case of the young de Man, it is not altogether unimaginable that, as a journalist in occupied Belgium, de Man saw no other option than to feed himself by writing what would eventually be printed in the controlled media. Therefore, as useful as Strenski’s and Berger’s speculations may be in shedding some light on this obscure chapter in the history of the study of religion, they are nonetheless problematic, because they attempt to determine, at least in part, Eliade’s early motivations and intentions and their subsequent influence on his later scholarly writing. The problem is simply that ultimately there are no solid grounds for deciding between, on the one hand, Eliade’s and Ricketts’s sympathetic portrayal of a politically naive young man and, on the other, Strenski’s and Berger’s more critical portraits of a calculating nationalist. As noted by Seymour Cain, writing on Eliade’s apparent anti-Semitism, it “may well be, as Ricketts maintains, that Eliade strongly sympathized with a movement of national regeneration, but not with its’ [sic] rabid anti-Semitism, that he took it [ie., anti-Semitism] realistically as a constituent of the social reality of his time and place” However, along with Cain, we must admit that Eliade “never came clean about these words and associations” (1989: 31). The final answers to these questions of allegiance, belief, motivation, and intention, therefore, elude the methods of social scientific inquiry. To place the young Eliade in his own particular social space and time, as suggested by Cain, is not so much an excuse for the content of Eliade’s early newspaper columns as it is an acknowledgment that such columns may be no more anti-Semitic than a vast number of other literary and journalistic products from the early and middle part of this century. In his analysis of the ways nationalism and anti-Semitism were expressed and entrenched in the wartime French literary tradition, David Carroll (1995) argues repeatedly against demonizing and thereby marginalizing fascist and anti-Semitic writers and literature of this period by representing them as an aberration and “not like us”; for “the all-too-frequent

96 Manufacturing Religion denial or de-emphasis of the roots of fascism within the history of European philosophy, culture, and politics has made it easier to consider fascist leaders and

| intellectuals as deranged or evil” and thereby allows one to avoid addressing the systemic nature of the problem (3). By attributing extreme politics to such factors as irrationality and delusion, we simultaneously seclude ourselves as well as various writers and their literature within an arbitrary safe zone, distanced from extremists. However, in recognizing that Eliade, like countless others, probably espoused views that we would today term fascist (the use of the new or total Man as foun-

| dational metaphor, aligning culture with an essential spiritual force, aestheticizing politics, romantic representations of the peasant class, calls to restore past, archaic values, etc.) and anti-Semitic is not to contain him or his work within the category

of abnormal or extreme, but, rather, it acknowledges that such views, for large numbers of people at different times in history, have in fact constituted the norm. The issue that ought to occupy us, then, is not that writers and scholars in European history have been fascist or anti-Semitic but that their fascism and antiSemitism were in many cases entirely accepted and transparent to large segments of intellectually sophisticated and cultured members of society, and by no means anomalous to their context. In the case of such charges of anti-Semitism, then, recognizing that Eliade may have had such views is most certainly important and well worth documentation, but equally important is acknowledging that this would make Eliade simply one among many and a product of his context. This acknowledgment is of no small significance, given the romantic and largely untarnished manner in which some of Eliade’s defenders portray him and his scholarship. As in the case of Cave, who apparently investigates the essential Eliade capable of wearing the many seemingly contradictory labels his readers place on him, far too many interpreters have not been willing to view his life and work and the lives and works of other writers from this period in their own historical and sociopolitical contexts.

| The Full Scope of Contextualist Critiques Before I conclude this chapter, however, some aspects of the text-in-context method should be examined in greater detail. I have already suggested that Strenski’s critique, although promising in many respects and most obviously influential of this book, is itself speculative and therefore problematic. Commenting on the potential dangers of Strenski’s text-in-context method, Thomas Ryba has asked, “What is to prevent some other historian of ideas from arguing that Strenski’s own contextualization ...is motivated by an agendum which has little or nothing to do with the disinterested pursuit of truth?” (1989: 132). On one level, Ryba’s question is concerned with the self-reflexive or self-referential nature of Strenski’s critique. On another level, however, Ryba’s question is evidence of the pervasiveness of philosophical idealism. To presume that it is productive to speak of the

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 97 “disinterested pursuit of truth” demonstrates that not all scholars have altogether understood the implications of a text-in-context critique. Far from disinterested, this approach presumes that all such pursuits of truth are fundamentally interested. The question, however, is whether Strenski fully understands these very implications of his method. Strenski’s reply to the first level of Ryba’s question is not to be found in his response to Ryba (1989) but implicitly lies in the final pages of Four Theories of Myth, where he suggests that his approach functions so well on Eliade and others, simply because they are unusual examples of scholars who have lived through particularly stressful historical events. Accordingly, “their external contexts may be more relevant to an understanding of their theories than would be the case for thinkers safely insulated from the world by a profession” (1987: 197). Strenski’s response seems clear: thinkers practicing what one could term normal science are in some way insulated from historical events by their profession itself. They are also, one would presume, insulated from the types of criticism wielded by such writers as Strenski. By arguing in this fashion, Strenski fails to understand that the power of his critique is greatly weakened when he relies on a positivist understanding of normal,

value-free knowledge (determined by internal and pure scholarly criteria, as opposed to the tainted, external social criteria), a position that is at odds with his contextualist project. Strenski must be examined more closely on this point. He explains: One hopes the history of the first half of the twentieth century, with all its displacements and shattering of lives, will not be repeated. Yet, perhaps because we may live in less catastrophic times, we may not see such theorists again. If the social stability of the industrialized West translates into stability within the professional academic realm, then we may expect the professions to be able to maintain boundaries and even (with the help of demographics) to reinforce them. Such stability would mitigate against the appearance of theorists such as ours, who at crucial points in their lives found themselves unable—doubtless against their wills—to act as professionals. In all four cases, we are dealing with disrupted academic careers, with men who, for significant periods, were forced to deviate from the normal course of career development. (1987: 198)

In quoting a portion of the this passage, Cave asserts that it “is naive and unrealistic of [Strenski] . . . to think that theory will cease and scholarship be purified of grand theorists once ‘catastrophic times’ are past’ (1993: 114). In part, Cave’s criticism is

valid, although Strenski is by no means predicting the end of grand theorists, simply the end to theorists conditioned by the contingencies of history to the degree of, for example, Eliade or Cassirer. What is problematic with the passage is the presence of several rhetorical strategies that contain, protect, and exclude in a

manner similar to those operating in the more sympathetic representations of

98 , Manufacturing Religion Eliade examined in this chapter. First, Strenski constructs a distance—geographic, temporal, political, economic, and professional—between disinterested scholars

and those who are affected by external factors, thereby creating an other wholly unlike the former, whose theories and methods are subject to a contextualist critique. Such scholars as Strenski are involved in the construction of a normal space that is well-bounded and reinforced by its differentiation from a space that literally is of no place (“displaced” is Strenski’s term) and that contains and isolates the abnormal and the deviant. According to Strenski, whereas Westerners are industrialized, peaceful, stable, and concerned with the present, Eastern Europeans are not (or at least were not) industrialized, live in a militarized zone, are disrupted, and live in the past. All of this culminates in a rhetoric of professionalism whereby the “professional” is pre-

sumed to be a distanced, objective, neutral observer who is, by definition, free from the terrors of history because of some sort of natural isolating function of the profession itself. Strenski’s understanding of the profession, then, appears to be not all that different from earlier scholars of religion who practiced their craft under the protection (or illusion) of the phenomenological epoché. In fact, Strenski paints a suspect picture of optimism in the industrialized West

and the stability that spreads in its wake. In the passage quoted, there is an apparently natural and unquestioned relation between industry and the academy. It seems that when industry profits, so does the academy. Although this may be a correct observation in the capitalistic countries, it is a relation that is far from neutral and unproblematic. In the case of Strenski, therefore, the terrors of history, or one’s social, cultural,

economic, and political context, can be escaped—if not escaped, then possibly ignored and minimalized. It is for this reason that Strenski’s own method can be

| described as conservative. Like the attempts to dismiss Eliade’s nationalistic or xenophobic journalistic writings as somehow unique or separate from his mature and scholarly writings, Strenski’s appeal to different categories of scholars (the normal and the abnormal) utilizes strategies of exclusion and containment to privilege and isolate one group over another. And it is precisely at this point that his attempt to construct a defensible, privileged position is most open to critique. His discourse on abnormal writers exists solely at the expense of an arbitrarily created and denigrated category of historically disenfranchised grand theorists. There are also problems with Strenski’s imagery and metaphors, such as their obvious Eurocentrism. Suffice it to say that the second half of the twentieth century has been the stage for a number of horrific human tragedies, many of which were the direct result of the West’s wielding of power. Many of these have gone unnoticed, perhaps because until very recently they have all occurred outside the privileged zone of European and North American professionals. This provides more evidence of how practically successful objectivization and the construction of social and intellectual boundaries can be. Several years after Strenski’s book was

The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 99 published, the violence returned to Europe (e.g., the ethnic and nationalistic violence associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union) and to North America (e.g., the Los Angeles riots as well as the more recent World Trade Center, Oklahoma City, and passenger jet bombings). One wonders what strategies might be employed to segment these events from the ostensibly normal operations of the academy?

Through metaphors of space and stability, Strenski ensures that his readers interpret Cassirer, Malinowski, Eliade, and Lévi-Strauss as abnormal scholars, as people made to act against their natural inclinations (i.e., their “wills”), an activity that, in turn, made them unprofessional. The reader comes away with the impression that such scholars as Strenski himself, writing from the privileged position of the North American industrialized professional, are not to be associated with this group whatsoever, for they are leftovers from a previous age. Accordingly, Strenski can conclude that “these four theorists and the theories they created are ‘artifacts —historically specific to and bounded by the peculiar conditions that prevailed in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe and made normal professional life impossible” (1987: 198-199). Apparently, science influenced by ide-

ological pressures, such as those identified by Strenski in the cases of his four theorists, is essentially bad science. But, and in spite of his declared method, Stren-

ski fails to appreciate that contexts are never just or simply external but are inextricably part of the very practice of study itself—that the external/internal dichotomy is itself contextual. Thomas Ryba’s question, then, is answered in full, and in so doing, Strenski demonstrates that, despite his seemingly contextualist methodology, he ultimately relies On a positivistic understanding of the production and use of knowledge. So-

called normal professional life, according to Strenski, does not succumb to the pressures of history in any degree similar to these four scholars. They are peculiar. They are historically and spatially isolated. Unfortunately, Strenski does not justify such dogmatic claims and defensive strategies. Therefore, his contributions to a social constructivist theory—which are significant indeed—are weakened.

Oddly, then, as useful as much of Strenski’s method is for this book, his understanding of the insulating qualities of professionalism coupled with his somewhat positivistic notions of science provide one possible starting point for an effective critique of an academic discourse that runs counter to the discourse on sui generis religion, one that maintains that truly objective knowledge about religion and culture is indeed possible if only certain ideological and social influences are excluded by means of such correctives as professionalism, peer critique, and review. Although a more sustained critical analysis of this alternative discourse falls outside the parameters of this book, the preceding remarks should suffice to demonstrate that indeed Ryba was correct in identifying the power of the self-referential nature of contextualist critiques. Just as deconstructionists, as characterized by many crit-

ics, pull the rug out from under their own feet in the process of critiquing the texts of other writers, Strenski’s text-in-context methodology by no means falls

100 Manufacturing Religion outside the scope of its own critique. The very hope that there is an escape, that institutional insulation may in some way offset the effects of sociopolitical contexts,

is evidence of a failure to understand fully the radically contextualized nature of all human thought and practice. So far, I have examined the privileging and exclusionary strategies employed in just two discursive sites: Eliade’s scholarship and one aspect of the secondary literature that has grown around it. To ensure that one does not mistake this study for a critique simply of Eliade and Eliadean scholarship, what is needed now is evidence that: (1) the discourse on sui generis religion as described extends far beyond these two sites; and (2) sui generis religion is not the only construct, or analytical tool, available for scholars of religion. These are the tasks, in this order, of chapters 4 and 5.

4.

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom Let us never forget that there exists no other religious reality than the faith of the believer. If we really want to understand religion, we must refer exclusively to the believer’s testimony. —W. B. Kristensen

[N]o statement about religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believers.

—W. Cantwell Smith

In spite of some significant theoretical developments since European scholars first attempted the dispassionate analysis of “other people’s” religions, many contemporary comparative religions textbooks continue to presume that the fundamental issue to be addressed in the classroom is the problem of religious plurality. This assumption is constitutive of the discourse on sui generis religion insomuch as an ahistorical religious essence, presumed to define human beings as fundamentally Homo religiosus is presumed to be shared by all human beings, whether religious insider or scholarly outsider. Despite the fact that since, and even before, F. Max Miiller first proposed a

comparative study of religions, a number of naturalistic theories have been developed, these various theoretical perspectives are largely absent from the introductory course. Through their almost exclusive use of a sympathetic hermeneutical and phenomenological approach to the data that prioritizes the insider’s perspective, intuitivism, and the sociopolitical autonomy of religious phenomena, such introductory textbooks constitute further evidence of the ways in which the discourse on sui ge- | neris religion dominates the modern study of religion. This chapter applies some of the criticisms generated in the previous chapters from narrower discursive analyses of other aspects of the modern field to a wider analysis of the genre of textbooks designed for introductory courses in world religions.'

The Classroom as Discursive Site As is the case of most academic pursuits, scholars of religion can generally be divided into researchers and teachers. Although some small number of our col101

102 Manufacturing Religion leagues do only one or the other, the majority divide their time between both activities: teaching any number of different introductory and _ specialized undergraduate and graduate courses while also carrying out research for the next review, essay, or book. But the disparity between the level of theoretical sophistication required of one’s own research and that which is presumed in the classroom can be tremendous. If one teaches an upper-level specialized seminar, then the

entirely. |

disparity may be minimal, but the introductory course is often another matter

The specific site of the introductory class in world religions is one location _ where this conflict manifests itself most plainly, especially if we take into account that often the instructors of such general courses are relatively inexperienced graduate teaching assistants and instructors who, in their own research, may be grap-

pling with some of the latest theoretical approaches to the study of religion. Whether the students enrolled in these courses are in their first or last year of undergraduate education, the majority of them have no previous background in the methods and theories of the modern academic study of religion. Generally speaking, world religions courses have more than their share of students from other departments fulfilling breadth requirements. The situation is further complicated by the fact that introductory-level courses are largely populated by students who consider themselves to be religious and who have rarely reflected critically on their own, or anyone else’s, working definition of religion. Although students may think that they can easily ascertain if, for example, this or that news story is primarily of religious or political relevance, they have not yet developed a critical apparatus whereby they can articulate and subsequently defend their implicit definitions of, and views on, religion. In this respect, scholars of religion have a similar challenge in introductory courses to that of their colleagues in linguistics who must teach the analysis of language to a room full of proficient language users. In both cases, instructors must facilitate the leap from the student’s preexisting folk understand-

_ ing to scholarly analysis.

In North America, depending on such factors as the geographic and demographic context of the college or university, the religious orientations of these students can vary from being exclusively Christian to a class constituted by a plurality of religious backgrounds. Because of the religious context of their students, instructors are often challenged to present material that might otherwise be considered strange, exotic, or possibly even sinful and dangerous in such a manner that these students may not only learn a variety of facts relevant to the religions covered by the syllabus (e.g., What is karma? Do Jews believe in Satan? Why are these Jain monks naked?) but may come to think critically about the diversity of ways in which human beings have organized their individual lives and their communal relations.”

For introductory students, the presumed norm of religious behavior is very often—though clearly not always—“belief in God as manifested in the life and

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 103 teachings of Jesus Christ, my personal lord and savior.” Depending on the context

of the classroom, the norm could just as easily consist in either following the example of the Prophet’s life as related in the Qur’an and hadiths, the abiding love of the God of Abraham as expressed in the history of the people of Israel, or doing

one’s duty (be it Hindu dharma or ancient Greek eusebia) in relation to one’s social position and occupation. In all of these cases, the instructor who teaches an introduction to the religions of the world to a class of religious devotees may be forced to assume the position of an early comparativist, such as F. Max Miller, in order to convince the students that not only their own tradition but those of others

may hold some interest for them. The goal for such instructors, then, and the methods they employ to attain it, is to teach the students “to recognize, if possible, even in the lowest and crudest forms of religious belief, not the work of demonical agencies, but something that indicates a divine guidance, something that makes us

perceive, with St. Peter, ‘that God is no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him’ ” _ (Miller 1893: 23). Furthermore, the introductory class is of primary importance not simply for

its possible contributions to the course requirements of other departments but because the modern discourse on religion, articulated within an institutional locale,

is continually reconstituted in such courses. In other words, the odds are rather high that if a student ever takes a course in the study of religion—whether the student majors in the field or not—it will be an introduction to world religions, a course characterized by James Lewis as “a fast-moving survey that leaves the student with a shallow and often confused impression of everything from sacred cows to shamanic trances” (1990: 312).> The energy that goes into teaching these courses, and writing and assembling the textual resources that instructors use, ought to be great indeed, for the image a great number of students—and the general public as well—have of the academic study of religion will largely come from the methods and theoretical assumptions of instructors as well as methods and theories of the texts they employ in teaching these demanding courses. Furthermore, the institutional setting and status of the field, including the funding it receives, will be, at least in part, determined by the number of students who attend such courses, for, to be honest, many departments rely on the large enrollments in such courses to offset the smaller enrollments in higher-level seminars. Simply

put, many departments of religion count on the elective-driven nature of their introductory courses, for we generally legitimize our existence within the university

in terms of being a service department. If the future of the modern, institution- : alized discourse on religion is in any way dependent on the number and training of general students as well as future specialists—and I conjecture that the health of the discourse is intimately related to both of these factors—then the world religions introductory course and the textbooks aimed at this particular market are one of the primary sites where the discourse is continually recreated and where

104 Manufacturing Religion future scholars are initially manufactured. Therefore, it is valid to ask what sorts of future students and scholars of religion are being created. But there is a potential contradiction here. Although the health of the institutionalized study of religion may in large part depend the number of students in its courses, the theoretical approach to religion that will attract such enrollments is not necessarily the most productive, contemporary, critical, or sophisticated. Therefore, the theoretical approach that best suits the production of young scholars of religion is potentially at odds with the practical requirements of administrators. As theoretically sophisticated as a department may try to be, if it cannot demonstrate relevance via enrollment and credit-hour statistics, administrators may have little choice but to redistribute an institution’s meager resources. So, to rephrase the above question, how does one produce methodologically and theoretically developed graduates given the practical constraints of the modern university?

“God May Be One but Religions Are Many”’ Regardless of the name changes that have swept most departments of religion in North America as well as their course offerings (e.g., few departments are now known by the name Comparative Religion’), the introductory course in world religions remains appealing to students precisely because it is yet a general introduction that compares what are presented as relatively coherent and strictly au-

tonomous religions. Whether this is due to the theoretical assumptions of the instructors and departments or the practical constraints of teaching in a quarter or semester system, many courses are still sympathetic introductions to the world— or as a colleague once said sarcastically, the “world class’’—religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And even where new and previously

underrepresented religions are added to the syllabus, such as Native American religions and New Age religions, the approach of the course does not change significantly: it remains a generalized introduction to the beliefs, histories, and practices of a largely autonomous religious community. Accordingly, the course is implicitly, if not explicitly, concerned with examining and comparing these autonomous bodies on the basis of such theoretical categories as myth, ritual, and sym-

bol. It is for this reason that the methods and theories of nineteenth-century comparative religions continue to dominate in the classroom. In the opening pages to his widely read introduction to the history of comparative religion, Eric Sharpe speculates that it “might perhaps be claimed that the first ‘comparative religionist’ was the first worshipper of a god or gods who asked himself, having first discovered the facts of the case, why his neighbor should be a worshipper of some other god or gods” (1986: 1). Sharpe aptly sums up one of the major characteristics shared by many late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts at producing works in comparative religion. Over this period of time the dominant and virtually unaltered presupposition has been that not only the datum

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 105 but the researcher as well has a religion, or is religious, as is made evident in the following quotation from Gandhi’s essay “I Am But a Seeker after Truth” that appears in Roger Eastman’s new edition (1993) of his primary-source reader, The Ways of Religion (originally published 1975): A curriculum of religious instruction should include a study of tenets of faiths other than one’s own. ... This, if properly done, would help to give [students] a spiritual assurance and a better appreciation of their own religion. There is one rule, however, which should always be kept in mind while studying all great religions, and that is that one should study them only through the writings of known votaries of the respective religions. (Gandhi 1993: 54)

In other words, it is normally presumed that scholars of religion, like the people they study, are also worshippers who are on their own spiritual quest. Karen Armstrong expresses this dominant view in the introduction to her 1993 best-selling History of God: “my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became

recognizably human” (1993: xix).° Few students in the contemporary classroom come to the course as an avowed atheist or an agnostic. Therefore, the effort both to generate comparative studies in the first place and to attend lectures in such a course seem to originate from, as Sharpe conjectures, a “curiosity... about the religious practices and beliefs of the “‘barbarians”’ that eventually led to much “theological and philosophical speculation about the problem of religious plurality” (1986: 2). According to Sharpe, then, and implicitly the issue behind Armstrong’s book,

the foremost concern of the comparative study of religion as it has developed within the confines of the discourse on sui generis religion is the problem of religious pluralism. As Krister Stendahl phrased it in his foreword to the National Geographic Society’s Great Religions of the World (1971: 7), “Given the global one-

ness, our pluralism is not a liability but an asset. God may be one, but religions are many” (quoted in Young 1992: 119). According to this viewpoint, a view that is deeply indebted to the efforts of such scholars as Otto and Eliade to situate religiosity as a fundamental element of all human experience or consciousness, from the outset all people are considered, to whatever degree, to be religious, and the problem for the comparativist simply is to document and assess the great diversity of beliefs and rituals: from high gods to no gods, comparative religion addresses it all. In the case of Armstrong, her history of “God” not only chronicles the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam but finds the common experience of “transcendent reality” in Hinduism and Buddhism as well. Sadly, and despite its popularity with the general reading audience, comparative religion practiced in this manner is more akin to a theology of religious pluralism than the academic study of religion.‘

106 Manufacturing Religion Comparative religion as a practical form of religious pluralism and dialogue is evident in a number of modern textbooks. For instance, in attempting to describe the context of programs in the study of religion to his readers, Warren Matthews phrases it in the introduction to his textbook, World Religions, as follows: “in a single classroom at almost any college or university, students from two or more religions can be found explaining their beliefs to each other and exploring those faiths not represented among the students of the class—many that may be present

elsewhere on campus” (1991: 3). In spite of the fact that he later writes that “Tijnstruction in religious studies does not assume that the student is a member of a particular religion or of any religion” (4), Matthews’s description of departments of religion makes them more concerned with promoting ecumenism than with pursuing religiously detached description followed by theoretical analysis. In their text, Ways to the Center, Denise and John Carmody’s understanding of the field is similar to Matthews’s: “[c]learly we are sisters and brothers to religious Indians and medieval Europeans. Clearly, their snakes and saviors relate to our own” (1993: 6). After all, they assert, “all human beings desire to know and love ultimately” (12). (This also constitutes one of the many locations in which the Carmodys, like Theodore Ludwig who, in his The Sacred Paths, describes the sacred as “the ground of ultimate vitality, value, and meaning” [1989: 4], take refuge in the definitional vagaries of such terms as “ultimate vision,” “ultimate meaning,” “Gnner experiences,” “the human spirit,” “mystery,” “deepest perceptions and convictions,” and “deep structures.”) Because we all share in this self-evidently religious life, the Carmodys’ understanding of the comparative endeavor appears to

have more in common with a spiritual technique than it does with a rational analysis of human behavior and culture. They write, “We urge you to get inside the religious’ experiences and values and to compare them with your own. In fact, we very much hope that your study will enrich your appreciation of nature, will increase your wonder about life’s meaning, and will increase your resources for resisting evil” (7). Katherine Young therefore seems correct when, after surveying the use of such categories as “great religions,” “living religions,” and “world religions” in a variety of early- to mid-twentieth-century textbooks, she concludes that in each case, “no matter what the nomenclature... the idea of encounter or dialogue is to the foreground” (1992: 125). However, during the same period when comparative religion was developing this ecumenically based approach to the study of religions, other theorists brought some very different assumptions and methods to their study of religion—Samuel Preus (1987) has traced its roots at least as far back as Jean Bodin (1530-1596). For scholars who constitute this naturalistic discourse on religion, the problem the study of religion is concerned with is not so much religious plurality but the fact of religion itself. As Hume states it in his introduction to The Natural History of Religion (originally published 1757), precisely because of the fact of religious plurality and the diversity of religious sentiments, not to mention the ab-

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 107 sence of religion in some cases, “religious principles” must be considered secondary

and the effect of historical accidents rather than the product of an original and unified religious instinct (1992: 107). Therefore, research on religion ought to look elsewhere for answers to questions of causality. In this oppositional discourse, religion is not presumed to be an essential and irreducible aspect of humanity (as exemplified by Armstrong) but is examined in the context of a variety of differing, and sometimes competing, theoretical contexts as but one aspect of human culture. Be it the result of the psychological, sociological, political, cognitive, or economic constraints that condition all aspects of human life and experience, these scholars all agree that religion is something to

be explained in light of other empirical characteristics of human individuals or communities. Furthermore, according to the naturalistic research tradition, religious sentiments or religious worldviews are not necessarily shared by the researcher. Although researchers will no doubt share in the same sorts of fears, insecurities, economic hardships, and so on, of the people they study, they will not necessarily cope with, or respond to, these through the use of religious ritual, stories, symbols, or institutions. In light of Guthrie’s analysis of the pervasive anthropomorphic tendencies in human beings, one might say that, although we all

| see faces in the clouds, not all of us believe them to be gods. Given this division | between researcher and datum, one of the goals of this alternate approach to the academic study of religion, then, is not simply to describe the similarities and differences between, for example, the Catholic mass and zazen (and subsequently to understand why some people are attracted to one over the other, and what originary essence they share) but to explain why people employ either of these devices in their daily lives in the first place. As I have suggested, what is intriguing is that the latter, naturalistic discourse occupies such a marginal place in the modern study of religion and that the discourse on sui generis religion—preoccupied with the problem of religious plurality—has come to dominate the field as a whole, including the classroom textbook. Whether or not instructors elect to stand in front of their students, as Miller once

stood in front of his largely Christian audiences in the 1870s, and proclaim, “I believe that a comparative study of the religions of the world will teach us many a useful lesson in the study of our own: that it will teach us, at all events, to be charitable both abroad and at home” (1893: 127), many of the textbooks used by modern instructors do take this position. Perhaps there is no better example than Huston Smith’s widely selling introductory text The World’s Religions (1991), originally published in 1958 under the title The Religions of Man and which is now also available as a coffee-table picture book with accompanying text derived from the 1991 edition (1994). Because he presumes that religiosity is indeed shared by researchers, their readers, and the people they study, Smith asserts that “the ultimate

, benefit that may accrue from a book such as this is to help in ordering the reader’s own life” (1991: 3). The study of religion, insomuch as it focuses on what Smith

108 Manufacturing Religion takes to be a fundamentally distinct and beneficial characteristic of all humans, then, is ultimately about understanding others so as to help to understand ourselves, But he does point out that because “we” are of a different religious mind, such endeavors are ultimately doomed to failure: “being ourselves of a different cast of mind, we shall never quite understand the religions that are not our own. But if we take those religions seriously, we need not fail miserably” (1991: 11). After

reading Smith’s text, it would seem that what we understand about ourselves as , persons of faith in confrontation with the faithful other is our own religious nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that early on Wilfred Cantwell Smith heartily endorsed The Religions of Man as “a luminous example of the treatment of religion as the faith of persons” (1959: 38 n. 15). What is intriguing about Huston Smith’s text is that, in spite of the proclaimed absence of the comparative method (rather, it is a study of the “ideas and values” and not the histories of the “great religions” that does not seek to “compare their

worth” [1958: 5; 1991: 5]), a number of implicit and loaded comparisons run through the entire text (a topic I address in greater detail in chapter 6). What is perhaps most surprising is that such comparisons and undefended value judgments yet exist in the revised edition of 1991. One of the more important changes that has occurred, and the one that is brought to the reader’s attention in the second

line of the 1991 preface, is that the text and the book’s title are now genderinclusive. But a careful reading of some portions of Smith’s revised text demonstrates that androcentrism by any other name still smells the same.

Take, for example, his thoughts on the social or, as Smith refers to it, the tribal context of pre-Confucian China. In attempting to describe the worldview of these people for his “modern” readers, Smith writes, Modern life has moved so far from the tradition-bound life of tribal societies as to make it difficult for us to realize how completely it is possible for mores to be in control. There are not many areas in which custom continues to reach into our lives to dictate our behavior, but dress and attire remains one of them. Guidelines are weakening even here, but it 1s still pretty much the case that if a corporation executive were to forget his necktie, he would have trouble getting through the day. ... His associates would regard him out of the corner of their eyes as—well, different. And this is not a comfortable way to be seen, which is what gives custom its power. Someone has ventured to say that in a woman’s certitude that she is wearing precisely the right thing for the occasion, there is a peace that religion can neither give nor take away. ...If we generalize to all areas of life this power of tradition, which we now seldom feel outside matters of attire, we shall have a

picture of the tradition-oriented life of tribal societies. (1991: 161) , Even without a detailed political or deconstructive reading of the us/them rhetoric

in this text—a reading that I develop in chapter 6—it should be apparent that Smith’s consistent but groundless emphasis on the normative status of modern (in

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 109 the context of the related terms “individualism,” “reason,” “custom,” and “we’’)

as opposed to, and compared with, tribal (in the context of its related terms, “group consciousness,” “unthinking solidarity,” “tradition,” and “they’”) has much to do with his later remarks concerning the social evolution of China toward what he characterizes as “contagious” individualism and the demise of unreflective solidarity (163). More specifically, given the clearly operating androcentric assumptions regarding the very different male and female views on the relations between their personal identity and their attire—assumptions that solidly place Smith’s text in its original 1950s social context—Smith’s emphasis on reason and individualism is, ironically, undone by his own, perhaps unconscious, participation in the “unthinking solidarity” of the male sociopolitical dominance of his era. In the words

of Talal Asad, who subjects Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion to a related critique, such statements are disqualified from their universalist aspirations, because under scrutiny they betray the fact that they are themselves derived from a specific and situated set of historical, political, and discursive practices (1993: 29).

Apart from the many other problems that can be found in this text (such as the evolutionarily based justification of the modern/tribal dichotomy and his implicit polemic in favor of supposedly infectious freedom and democracy), it should be clear that in terms of gender exclusivity, simply correcting the predominance of male pronouns, changing a book’s title, and eliminating the generalized usage of the term “man” for all human beings amount only to cosmetic changes and do not begin to address the deeper issues and assumptions that fuel as well as signal engendered power imbalances. In spite of its bestseller status (over 1,500,000 copies sold, according to the latest softcover version), then, Smith’s book is more useful as one instance of where the discourse stood forty years ago than it is as an example

of where the discourse might be heading. Why it continues to be the book of choice for many instructors is indeed worth investigating. One possible reason is that Smith reproduces the discourse on sui generis religion through his presumption of religion’s autonomy and personalist basis.

The Study of Religion and Thick-skinned Mammals “Taking religion seriously,” is often repeated in the regnant discourse on religion. Most often it is a code phrase for the irreducibility of religion. In other words, to take religion seriously means such things as studying it on its own terms, as something that is essentially religious, not as “primarily a matter of facts [but as]... a matter of meanings” (H. Smith 1991: 10).”? In the words of Jan de Vries, com-

menting on the shortcomings of the alternative discourse mentioned above, “‘{[w]hat no one had ever dared to do with poetry or music—except in some circles of historical materialism—was done to the summum bonum of men; religion was divested of its autonomy in human life and regarded as a mental illusion or as the

} product of social conditions. There was no respect for religious phenomena” (1967:

110 Manufacturing Religion 221). Without defending his theoretical insight on the autonomous and rather privileged character of religion, let alone just why it is deserving of “respect,” de Vries goes on to comment that the “agnostic who does not sense what goes on beyond living and death can judge religion only as a blind man judges a rainbow” (1967: 221). Like Rudolf Otto’s well-known injunction, in the opening pages of The

Idea of the Holy, against having people read his work who have never known feelings of “intrinsically” and “deeply-felt religious experience” (1950: 8) or the classic story, favored by religious pluralists, of the blind men feeling the elephant and only getting part of the big picture, de Vries’s words suggest that only those with a special religious sense can study religion as a sui generis whole. As boldly asserted by de Vries and Otto, then, the study of religion is limited to religious people studying other religious people to come to grips with the problem of religious plurality. Catherine Albanese provides an excellent example of how the story of the blind

men and the elephant is often used to communicate to students that the study of religion is about examining aspects of such a big picture in light of our many seemingly conflicting perceptions of it. After telling the story to open her textbook on American religion, she concludes that the “moral of the story, of course, goes beyond the elephants to the secrets of the universe. Each individual tries to fathom these secrets from a place of personal darkness. Each describes the portion experienced, and none can speak about the whole. . .. Nobody ever will know the whole story because the vastness that surrounds us far exceeds our sense or our ability to understand” (1981: 1-2). Albanese’s point is well taken: in fact, one would suspect

that such a point concerning our own situatedness as scholars would lead to a multiplicity of methods and theories in the study of religion, interpretative as well as explanatory; who are we to say from the outset, as Albanese somewhat surprisingly goes on to assert, that religion has an intrinsic nature and, for “special reasons,” eludes definition (3)? The problem with the story of the blind men, when employed in the context of the classroom, is that the level of the narrative open to the listener is characterized by privileged access to the fact that there is indeed an elephant beyond the individual perceptions of the blind men. In spite of Albanese’s conclusion quoted above, the story works only because, from the outset, we as listeners see the big

picture; we know that the men are blind, deluded, partial, or whatever else the | metaphor of blindness communicates to us. We know the secret and so we “get it”: “Aha, it’s really an elephant and they don’t know it!” However, when this tale is transferred to the lives and scholarship of students of religion, where they are forced to identify with the blind men all groping for a piece of the puzzle, they no longer have privileged access to the big picture. They may not even know whether their piece is in fact a piece of a larger whole. Simply put, unless they appeal to a priori knowledge, intuition, or indefensible speculation (akin to lifting the blindfold at a surprise party or carrying the privileged information from one

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 111 narrative level to the other), they have no idea whether they are perceiving a great tree or an elephant’s leg! Therefore, the lessons taught on one level concerning the big picture fail to translate to the other. It is a story for religious pluralists but not for scholars of religion. If the study of religion were truly founded on historically based theories rather than speculations and intuitions, then it would be more accurate for the listener to identify with the blind men all along for, throughout the story, they have no idea what is, or whether there even is, a big picture. Unlike the narrator, they cannot lift their blindfolds and sneak a peek. Accordingly, whether there is a huge, almost hairless, thick-skinned mammal with a large flexible snout in front of them, the concept of elephant—much like the concept of a meaning to the universe—has no relevance for them. In other words, for scholars of religion, as opposed to the religious devotees who originally told, and continue to tell, this story, its lesson

does not concern the secrets of the universe being beyond our perception but rather that we are all culturally, historically, linguistically, theoretically, and so on, entrenched human beings who, on recognizing this, must be willing to entertain that there may not even be any secrets to begin with. To acknowledge this is to be willing to entertain that naturalistically based studies of religion also have an important contribution to make.

“Cynicism about Religion Is Giving Way to a Search for Spirituality” _ As in the case of the works of comparative religion that date from the nineteenth century, many mid- and late-twentieth-century studies fail to take into account the naturalistic discourse outlined by Preus; in some cases, it is as if this oppositional discourse had never exerted any considerable influence whatsoever in modern theorizing in the study of religion. Scholars do not study religion to determine, for example, how human beings cope with guilt or to discover more about how individuals construct group identities. Instead, according to Matthews, speaking on behalf of a number of his fellow textbook authors, religion is a worthwhile object of study because (1) we wish to learn about our own religious nature, (2) the world is an increasingly small place necessitating contact with, and therefore knowledge of, “foreign visitors,” and (3) in a world of changing political and economic alleglances, we want to know “[wlho are these people who have invaded our market?” (1991: 2). Much like one of Huston Smith’s proposed rationales for studying other

people’s religions (because one day “we” might have to invade and conquer “them” [1958: 7—8], see chapter 6 for a more detailed critique), Matthews’s last reason is by far the most illuminating—in this age of international commerce and declining European and North American economic hegemony, capitalists need to know who has stolen their market. Accordingly, a glaring and undefendable lacuna exists when it comes to the place of naturalistic approaches to the study of religion in the introductory class.

112 Manufacturing Religion Even when such theorists as Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud are addressed in these books, the tone of the author is more often than not dismissive or critical. In the case of Mary Pat Fisher’s textbook, Living Religions (1994), which advocates “a more religiously sympathetic worldview,” Marx and Freud are characterized as having made “vigorous anti-religious statements”—as if this judgment has something to do with determining their theoretical usefulness. Concluding her brief description of nineteenth-century reductionist theorists, she stacks the deck in favor of noncritical interpretations, by commenting that for such scholars as Freud and Marx “[r]eligious concepts were not honored as they had been in all previous times and all places, for they seemed irrational.... Cynicism about religion is [now] giving way to a search for spirituality” (11). To be fair, however, the late Lewis Hopfe’s edited and reissued text, Religions of the World (1994), devotes a considerable portion of its thirteen page overview to a useful introductory discussion of various theories on the origin of religion. There one finds comments on Tylor and animism, Codrington and mana, Miiller and “diseases of language,” Schmidt and high gods, Frazer on magic, and of course Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx on projection theories. What is most helpful about Hopfe’s treatment of these theorists is that, unlike Fisher, for example, he does not preclude their usefulness; instead, he presents these differing theoretical frameworks as a “few of the more outstanding and enduring” theories that arose from nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century research. Apart from the introduction, Hopfe’s text is itself a traditional, sympathetically descriptive overview of a number of autonomous religions. That such descriptions are themselves far from neutral is evidenced in James Lewis’s (1990: 313-314) critical

reading of Hopfe’s chapter on African religions, a chapter that Lewis rightly interprets as entrenching imperial and colonial assumptions. Although the latest edition of this text seems to have addressed one of Lewis’s critical comments by replacing the term “primitive” with “basic,” and going so far as to assert that “the word primitive carries with it the connotations of backward, simple, even childlike” (Hopfe 1994: 18), the evolutionist assumptions Lewis identifies in a number of these textbooks yet remain in the currently more-favorable categories of basic, archaic,

primal, and traditional. Furthermore, a passage from the third edition that Lewis finds particularly problematic nonetheless introduces the sixth edition’s section on African religions. In that passage, now slightly modified, Hopfe links the need to acquire knowledge on African religions and cultures to the control that the former colonies exercise over natural resources so important to industrialized Europe (54). Much like Matthews and Smith, Hopfe implicitly demonstrates the intimate connections among knowledge, the ownership of material resources, sociopolitical power, and economic clout. Lewis’s insightful and important criticisms notwithstanding, from the outset the reader of Hopfe’s text is at least aware that ostensibly neutral description takes place in a complex theoretical, even political, environment and the instructor has grounds for addressing these issues at the course’s opening.

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 113 And in this case, the text itself can become a resource for students to grapple with the political biases and theoretical assumptions of the author. One volume that places an even greater emphasis on explicit theoretical reflection than Hopfe’s brief introduction is the collaborative work The World’s Religions (Sutherland et al. 1988). This British book is a collection of fifty-eight essays by an international group of contributors that covers a number of topics in such conventional areas as the religions of Asia, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, traditional religions, and new religious movements. However, what is most interesting about this encyclopedic book is that it opens with four introductory essays that are concerned with general theoretical topics of importance to all scholars in the field: Peter Byrne’s “Religion and the Religions” (which addresses definitional problems), Stewart Sutherland’s “The Study of Religion and Religions” (concerned with the issue of knowledge versus understanding), and Anders Jeffner’s two essays, “Religion and Ideology,” and “Atheism and Agnosticism.” In spite of the fact that the contributors generally approach their data phenomenologically rather than naturalistically, Sutherland’s introduction opens with the following strong statement: “This book is offered as an aid to the disinterested study of religion. It is offered, that is to say, to those who are certainly interested in religion

| and religions, but whose first aim is to seek knowledge and understanding” (ix).

| Although he goes on to acknowledge—rather than promote the fact—that it “may well be that the reader’s ultimate aim is to discover or formulate beliefs” and even goes so far as to employ the vague term “religious impulse” to characterize that which is “deeply embedded in the individual human soul and in human society,” Sutherland’s initial point, which is reemphasized and elaborated in Byrne’s following discussion on definitions of religion, is well taken: the study of religion is not itself a religious exercise and is undertaken in the “spirit of [religious] detachment.” Hopfe’s and Sutherland’s contributions notwithstanding, there is a general absence of explicit theoretical reflection in the world religions textbook. The reasons for this one-sided portrayal of naturalist theories in particular, and theory in general, are surely complex. Theodore Ludwig explicitly states that because the purpose of his text is “to help students become conversant with basic religious issues and with the major world religions, discussion of more technical topics has been minimized, for example, the history of the academic study of religion, the various scholarly approaches to studying religions and scholarly reconstructions of prehistoric and ancient religions” (1989: vi). And in his introduction to Eliade’s posthumously published guide to the world’s religions, Ioan Couliano opens by asking, What is religion? Why do rational, practical people still buy into it? Why do all religions of humankind, at all times, show striking similarities with each other? Why do genetically unrelated myths and rituals have similar narrative plots or ritual sequences?

114 Manufacturing Religion All these seem naive questions, and therefore no serious scholar, after a long training in some philologies and the history of religions, would ever dare to ask them. And yet, they are the basic questions of the discipline, those questions— still unanswered—that practically called the discipline of the history of religions

into being. (Eliade and Couliano 1991: 1)

In fact, such questions, asked in various forms by Hume, Tylor, Freud, Marx, and others, actually did call this field into being, in spite of the fact that many contemporary scholars would agree with Couliano’s answer to these questions: they are naive questions and not worth the attention of so-called serious scholars. Furthermore, it is more than likely that renewed investigation into these same questions will breathe new life into the field—I am thinking specifically of the work of Lawson and McCauley (1990, 1993) as well as Boyer (1994). Although Couliano, somewhat generously, compares Eliade’s own approach to the study of religion to that of Claude Lévi-Strauss (in that the former was concerned with the macro- rather than the microlevel of cognition), his opening clearly articulates the dominant assumptions of the field: theoretical analysis, in this case seemingly compared to the nineteenth-century speculative quest for origins, is unrelated to the descriptive task of the good historian or philologist. But for Couliano, it would seem that Eliade constitutes one bold instance of a “serious” scholar not afraid to confront these difficult and possibly messy theoretical questions. However, insomuch as Eliade’s approach characterized religion as an autonomous system—by which he meant, according to Couliano, “that religion in its origin and function is not the by-product of other systems (i.e., economy or society), does not depend on them, and does not generate them” (Eliade and Couliano 1991; 1-2)—it is clear that “serious” theoretical analysis strictly ex-

cludes naturalistic theories. ,

As is the case in many departments’ curricula, Ludwig and Couliano seem to presume that theoretical issues in general (not to mention naturalistic approaches) are one specialized area among others in the study of religion and that they are not necessarily relevant to work in other areas, such as the introduction to world religions. Instead, theory is inessential and just seems to “get in the way” of studying what we might as well refer to as the real stuff or the hard data of religion. The reasons for this deemphasis on the implicit role of theory and social context in all observation and description may include such practical matters as showing respect for the belief systems of first-time students or employing a theoretical stance that is sympathetic to religions so as to attract students who are themselves religious. However, there may be other reasons why this active and theoretically productive discourse is almost wholly absent from the classroom. If one does find theorists cited in these books, more often than not they will be Otto and Eliade, as is evidenced in Ludwig’s text, which is largely influenced by Eliade’s use of the term “the sacred,” as well as his studies of myths, rituals, and assorted symbols. Before moving on to outline some reasons for this absence, a further survey of the

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 115 theoretical positions of a few recent additions (and reissues) to the long list of available classroom resources for the course in world religions will be of great use to confirm the suspicions already outlined.

Intuition and the Authority to Interpret Private Experiences The work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith seems to have influenced the contributors of Our Religions (Sharma 1993), a collection of essays on seven of the world’s religions

aimed more for the general reading audience than for use in the classroom. By its very title, it is clear that the volume is written from a religious insider’s position. Not only is the volume dedicated to Cantwell Smith, but its opening bears a quotation from W. B. Kristensen that establishes Cantwell Smith’s well-known methodological rule concerning the interpretive and descriptive authority of the insider: Let us never forget that there exists no other religious reality than the faith of the believer. If we really want to understand religion, we must refer exclusively to the believer’s testimony. What we believe, from our point of view, about the nature or value of other religions, is a reliable testimony to our own faith, or to our own understanding of religious faith; but if our opinion about another religion differs from the opinion and evaluation of the believers, then we are no longer talking about their religion. We have turned aside from historical reality, and are concerned only with ourselves.

In Cantwell Smith’s often quoted words, “no statement about religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believers” (1959: 42). This methodological rule also grounds the second edition of Fisher’s Living Religions. In this work, “the emphasis throughout is on the personal consciousness of believers and their account of themselves, their religion, and reality at large” (1994: 7). In part, Fisher accomplishes this personalistic perspective through the use of sidebars that present personal interviews with various religious devotees. Taking a related ap-

proach, but one much more in line with Smith’s rule, Arvind Sharma’s volume : relies on scholars who simultaneously consider themselves to be religious insiders: Masao Abe writes on Buddhism, Jacob Neusner on Judaism, Harvey Cox on Chris-

tianity, Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Islam, and Sharma himself on Hinduism. No doubt, then, in both of these books, this exclusive reliance on the reports of insiders guarantees the “spiritual validity” of the research (8). Given what he describes as

the fundamentally shared nature of “human religiosity,” Sharma’s collection of essays echoes the sentiments of some of his nineteenth-century predecessors: “there

is something charming rather than alarming about religious plurality” (533). It would seem, then, that the problem of religious plurality is not so much a problem but something to be celebrated. The textbook Jacob Neusner edited, World Religions in America (1994) fits this

religious-pluralist mold rather well. Like the contributors to Sharma’s volume,

116 Manufacturing Religion Neusner’s contributors are concerned only with descriptions and interpretations of how insiders identify themselves and not with any form of etic analysis of such reports. As stated in Neusner’s introduction, “Americans say they are religious. . .. The believe in God. They pray. They practice a religion. They explain what happens in their lives by appeal to God’s will and word and work” (1). But surely insider reports are not simply to be redescribed and repeated (for this simply amounts to autobiography) but problematized and examined. In spite of the fact that the methodological approach of the volume is explicitly distinguished from a pluralist per-

spective (which maintains that “[e]very religion has something true to tell us”), its empathetic approach falls far short of methodological agnosticism, since it amounts to little more than a religious-pluralist perspective: “The way taken in the pages of this book concerns not whether religions are true (which in the end is for God to decide) but how all religions are interesting and important. We maintain here that every religion has something to teach us about what it means

to be human” (7). What is one to make of such a reference to God as a final arbiter concerning the truth of a religion? Does not such a remark undermine much of scholarly efforts to recognize ourselves and our theories as historically based? Does it not beg the very question that scholars of religion ought to be concerned with in the first place: why some human beings, at specific points in time, make reference to and invoke nonempirical, transcendent beings? Like Neusner, both Sharma’s and Fisher’s texts make clear the authors’ intuition that all people are religious, that such religiosity refers to a greater unity of some sort, and—much like the positions of Olson and Cave, referred to in chapter 3—their assumption that the reports of devotees/informants ought to be taken as authoritative and ultimately reliable. In all these cases, however, such positions are undefended; they are simply asserted. Regarding the first assumption, Fisher defines religion as “something behind the surface of life—a greater reality which lies be-

yond, or invisibly infuses, the world that we can perceive with our five senses” (1994: 9). That her definition is itself exclusively based on intuition or a kind of

insight not necessarily shared by other researchers (but which, properly speaking, | ought to be the datum of other researchers) goes undefended; intuition, the reader is told, “transcends the data of the senses and the manipulations of the mind to perceive truths that seem to lie beyond reason” (22). This is related to the Carmodys’ use of intuition: “One does not get to the center of a religious tradition by methods (controlled ways of approach) strictly so called. One works more by intuition or a sense of where the different weights of a tradition come to rest” (1993: 15).

7 The question that needs to be explored is this: do religions even have “centers”? Presuming, along with the Carmodys, that they do, then how does one hone one’s intuitive skills? According to the Carmodys it is through Platonic contemplation on the highest good and through what they label as mystagogical attune-

ment, which is a cultivated sensitivity to the mystery of existence, defined as

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 117 fullness and perplexing character, ultimate reality, and God (15). As for Fisher, her example of a useful application of intuition is as follows: everything, she bluntly asserts, is permeated with meaningfulness. Unfortunately, the “invisibility” of this

reality or meaningfulness begs the question of just how she and her informants know so much about it and how any of their claims can be confirmed. But because her book is written with the presumed reality and normativity of religious experience in mind—itself a very problematic theoretical concept that yet dominates the literature—there is, of course, no need to defend or confirm such statements. That some devotees can confirm them (possibly the introductory students or readers themselves) is sufficient. After all, because the goal appears to be a theology of religious pluralism, the task at hand is not to develop a testable theory capable of explaining. A vocabulary generalized enough to unify apparent religious diversity is sufficient (hence the continued popularity of theoretically suspect terms, such as “the sacred” and “the holy,” in contemporary textbooks. In Fisher’s case, this vocabulary consists of such terms as “true selves,” the human desire for “‘perfection,” “original beauty,” “transcendent reality,” “perfect love,” and “eternal truth.” However, these all are vague, personalistic, and sufficiently generalized as to be confirmed by virtually all of her examples plus many more that, on the surface, would appear to have nothing to do with her subject matter.

Fisher’s and the Carmodys’ reliance on intuition and insight in their work accords with the importance of the second assumption just mentioned: the reliability of first-person authority. The emphasis on studying religious autobiographies, as seen in Gary Comstock’s textbook, Religious Autobiographies (1995), can be evidence of the presumed authority of insider’s self-interpretations, which often leads

to calls for empathic interpretation and appreciation on the part of the outsider. Only if agents can adequately interpret and then explain their own actions (ie., which virtually amounts to taking religion seriously) can the scholar aim to appreciate not only the autobiography of a devotee but, further, that person’s personal consciousness as well, an ambitious task that many social scientists would _ claim to be fruitless, on the basis of the assumption that actors are not always fully

aware of their own intentions and motivations. (However, texts such as Comstock’s, when understood as providing students with religious insiders’s reports in need of etic interpretation and explanation, can be powerful teaching resources.) Further, the very reliance on the category of religious experience is evidence of the widespread presumption that actors have sole authority for conveying what they take to be the meanings of stories and behaviors and the interpretation of évents. Otherwise, speculations on just what is distinctive about religious experience would be met with the same critical gaze as currently meets nineteenth-century speculations on the origins of religion per se. In the case of the debate on the origins of religion, however, such speculation

is automatically ruled out. As Richard Bush writes in The Religious World, “[{h]owever interesting it may be to wonder how it all began, such discussion

118 Manufacturing Religion inevitably tends to speculation, which goes considerably beyond our intention of studying particular religions” (1993: 3). But surely attempts to identify, isolate, or distinguish, let alone accurately interpret, someone else’s experiences are just as _ speculative, in spite of the fact that many historians of religion, including Bush, yet maintain that distinctive methodologies can access this distinctive experience

“that eludes the kind of study we apply to other fields and that can never be understood solely on the basis of factual data alone” (10). Yet this category that somehow transcends communication and is therefore not to be considered “factual data” continues to dominate these textbooks. Why does this subjective category continue to dominate research? As I mentioned at the outset, Wayne Proudfoot’s examination (1985) of this very topic offers an attractive theory: nontestable and nonfalsifiable discourses on religious experience are popular precisely because they are efficient and powerful means for cloaking other theoretical and political concerns.

One cannot address the theoretical dominance of religious experience as a tool without mentioning Ninian Smart’s widely popular text (first issued in 1969), reissued under the gender-inclusive title, The Religious Experience (1991). In that book, Smart employs the traditional phenomenological approach of studying ex-

ternals as one means for accessing internals (i.e., experiences), where the former _ constitutes behaviors, narratives, the arts, and so on, and the latter constitutes their meaning and significance. The study of these meaningful experiences, then, “must

... penetrate into the hearts and minds of those who have been involved in that [religious] history” (3). Accordingly, those doing this penetrating need to have a “sensitive and artistic heart” (4). Smart’s methodology, then, is not that dissimilar to Fisher’s and the Carmodys’.

When judged in its original historical context, however, Smart’s book is a useful example of the early attempt to establish scholarly, objective, dispassionate, and neutral descriptions of religious life, beliefs, and institutions—one of many such attempts at establishing the study of religion in the modern research university. In light of the recent critical assessments of neutrality in the sciences and the critiques of the phenomenological method in general, Smart’s theoretical presuppositions are rather problematic. This could possibly be one of the reasons that a second text by Smart recently appeared, The World’s Religions (1989). Although it repeats, in summarized form, his breakdown of the various dimensions of religion as found in the earlier textbook, part of its novelty lies in the fact that its sections are arranged geographically and historically, and not, like most books in the field, on the basis of apparently monolithic religious traditions. This move to geographic designations, such as religion in South Asia, the Pacific, the ancient Near East, and so on, is also indicative of the way in which some religious studies departments have reorganized their course offerings. Such designations group together histori-

cally and contextually related events rather than treating them as isolated and historically free-floating insights. In Smart’s case, the student confronts the Indo-

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 119 Europeans, Vedic Hinduism, philosophical Hinduism, the early years of Buddhism and its development into Mahayana, as well as the movement of Islam, and later European colonialism and Indian political autonomy, in the Indian subcontinent as interconnected historical events that need to be addressed in light of each other.

And such a historically sensitive structure is conducive to Smart’s well-known emphasis on incorporating the study of worldviews (e.g., Marxism) and nationalism into the work of the scholar of religion. Of course, the practical limitations of such introductory courses limits the detail of such intercontextual study, but the move toward geographic and historical presentations does add much to the otherwise numerous ahistorical and idealist presentations that presume that the essential core of Hinduism, Buddhism, or religion an sich can be presented to the student. Many of the theoretical benefits of Smart’s newer text are shared by the collection edited by Byron Earhart, Religious Traditions of the World (1993). However,

in this case, the tremendous size of the complete volume (1,205 pages) is not a problem, because each individual portion was previously published, and is still available, in paperback. Although many of the portions of this collections are based on traditions (e.g., Judaism by Michael Fishbane and Islam by Frederick Denny) rather than geographic regions (although the collection includes Africa by E. Thomas Lawson, Mesoamerica by David Carrasco, and Native North American religions by Ake Hultkrantz), the majority of the contributors are sensitive to historical, political, and economic issues in their presentation of the material. Of particular importance is Earhart’s opening advice that “it is essential to recognize the differ-

ence between experiencing one’s own personal faith or practice of religion and exploring one or more religious tradition other than one’s own” [if in fact one has such experiences—a point added by Earhart later] (3). In spite of the fact that Earhart apparently presumes that we all have religions, an assumption that may realistically reflect that of the student found in religious studies introductory courses, his distinction effectively terminates the projection of “personal experience” as a viable theoretical category for the study of human culture. In spite of some scholars’ proclaimed sympathies for the insiders’ and the actors authority to interpret their own experiences, words, and actions, these writers, like Cantwell Smith himself, ultimately fail to do justice to the devotees’ authority. After all, there are more than one group of religious devotees (in differing communities or within the same community) who rely on such exclusive definitions so as to rule out the participation of the majority of the earth’s population in the bliss or insight their religion affords them—thereby effectively ruling out all comparative methods and attempts to generate inclusive, descriptive terminology and interpretations. For example, to cope with such seemingly inconsistent expressions of the common “ultimate reality” that Fisher takes to inform all these living religions, she resorts to a well-worn method, metaphoric interpretation. She writes that when “we encounter the symbols of unfamiliar religions we may find

120 Manufacturing Religion them strange or unpleasant unless we can enter into the mystical truths they embody, empathize with those who believe in them, or develop an intellectual understanding of their metaphorical content” (1994: 26). That not all devotees would agree as to the mystical and philosophical truth or the metaphoric meaning of a symbol, myth, or act, is obvious. However, just how a researcher is to decide which insider’s report is valid is not as obvious. For example, a certain brahmanic sacrifice was, according to her, “metaphorically linked with the original personal sacrifice by which the universe was created, namely the dismemberment of the Purusha,

the primal being” (67). It is highly unlikely that the majority, possibly even a significant minority, of her insider-reporters would ascribe a simple metaphoric value to such practices, unless, of course, they were religious or intellectual elites— the group that clearly dominates as informants. But in this case, it is not altogether clear why their interpretation ought to be read as normative and authoritative over other insiders who would assert that such beings as Shiva, Jesus, or Amida were

quite real and deserving of devotion and respect. Indeed, it would appear that Cantwell Smith’s methodological rule applies rather loosely.

The Case of the Purusha Myth A comparison of how various textbooks address the well-known Hindu creation myth is a useful place to sum up how the discourse on sui generis religion has dominated recent work in comparative religion. The story is a familiar one found in both the Rig-Veda (10.90.11-12) and the laws of Manu (1.87—93): a cosmic progenitor of the human race named Purusha, sometimes understood as the first king, is dismembered or sacrificed and from the pieces that remain, various portions of the created world arise. From this sacrifice come the mountains, rivers, earth, and

all living things. Generically, this myth could be considered an instance of the pervasive cosmogony. However, following a line of critical interpretation related to the work of MacQueen (1988), Bruce Lincoln refines this typology by terming it a sociogony and a regiogony, for the story is, in large part, concerned with the creation of the four-fold social order known as the varna system, with issues of social hierarchy and, insomuch as it is structurally and thematically related to other Indo-European myths, with the legitimation of kingship (1986: 162). From the head of the dismembered Purusha comes the priestly class, from the upper torso comes the warrior class, from the lower torso and genitals the commoners or merchant class and, in a later addition not in keeping with other Indo-European tales of this sort, the socially excluded shudras or servants arise from its lowest portions or feet.

The parallels to Plato’s own foundational civic myth and his description of the tripartite soul, both of which are found in the Republic, are striking and do not escape Lincoln’s critical analysis. After a detailed examination of such myths, Lincoln concludes that the IndoEuropean discourse on society and their discourse on the cosmos, their ideology,

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 121 and their revelation, “were alloforms of one another” (171). To state it more explicitly, he asserts that such stories and the rituals associated with them “provided ideological legitimation for an exploitative and oppressive—and exceedingly stable—social hierarchy” (169). Contrary to this socially and politically sensitive interpretation, the Nosses, in their History of the World’s Religion (1994), find the myth important only insofar

as it is an explanation of the origins of the four separate castes that is based in a unified reality: “At this point we need only observe that, even in this earliest reference, the four groups are pictured [by whom they do not say] as separate creations in the original cosmic order” (90). Neither are the social implications and possible origins of such a story an issue in Nigosian’s World Faiths (1994: 82), nor are they of relevance to Ludwig, who finds more importance in the fact that the formerly powerful warrior varna is eventually demoted to the second position (1989: 255). And neither does A. L. Basham (Zaehner 1967: 226) see any need to theorize on the sociopolitical implications of, and uses for, such a story. Instead, the story of Purusha’s sacrifice is recounted by the majority of textbooks in a purely

narrative and descriptive mode. Fisher goes so far as to invert Lincoln’s and MacQueen’s analyses, thereby ensuring that the prioritized insider’s perspective virtually eliminates any attempt at critical scholarship. Contrary to Lincoln’s and MacQueen’s hypothesis that such a story was an effective means whereby the priestly class legitimized their current social role and power, Fisher states that “{e]arthly sacrifices were designed to mirror the original cosmic sacrifice of Purusha and thus keep the world in order” (1994: 68). Questions on the historical Origins and sociopolitical functions of the “original cosmic sacrifice” are thereby eliminated. In light of Lincoln’s and MacQueen’s analyses, talk of generic order turns out to be somewhat meaningless. And the Carmodys go so far as to suggest that “India did not think of its social structure as designed, worked out, by human beings who

might well have fashioned things quite differently. ...India thought of varna as part of the divinely ordered cosmos—part of the heavenly scheme of things” (1993:

79). Although it might go without saying, the insider’s perspective is indeed of great importance, but, as in the case of both Fisher and the Carmodys, to end the analysis there surely accomplishes little. That “India” thought of the myth as an accurate account of the origin of its social system— itself a rather problematic way

of stating things (as if “India,” a modern, nationalist concept in the first place, were a monolithic, intentional whole)—may or may not be true. What is of more theoretical interest is how such an account privileged certain human beings and how it maintained certain distributions of power within the society, regardless of what the adherents themselves may have thought. In the case of the Nielsen’s Religions of the World, the question of the origin of the caste system is answered by means of an insider’s perspective, exclusively in terms of the Purusha myth, as if—in suitably intellectualist terms—the myth constituted an adequate explanation

122 Manufacturing Religion of the origins of these social divisions. In this case, however, it is commendable that the reader’s attention is drawn to the ways in which the addition of the fourth category (shudras) to the originally tripartite myth “may have been a way to justify the Aryas’ control of an indigenous serf population” (1993: 104). And Friedhelm Hardy (Sutherland et al. 1988: 580) goes so far as to acknowledge that “[i]t goes without saying that [the identification of brahman with Purusha] must have added enormously to the prestige of the priests and of their sacrifices where brahman was located in a very special way.” One of the more interesting and sophisticated treatments of this myth is provided by David Knipe (Earhart 1993: 743-745). Knipe provides the reader with a useful comparison of the divisions within, and various functions of, the human and the body politic, along lines similar to Lincoln’s work. Although Knipe’s treatment is not as critically based as Lincoln’s and MacQueen’s, the reader does learn | about the myth in the context of the social body and in the context of the complex division of labor that characterized the societies that first told such stories. One thing, however, that the reader must keep in mind is that comparing the textbook treatments of this myth to the work of more-sophisticated theorists like

Lincoln and MacQueen is not intended as a disservice to the textbooks. Clearly, their goal is not to present the reader with a nuanced reading of myths and rituals. However, by their general silence on the sociopsychological functions of, in this case, creation myths, these authors betray their theoretically undefended preference

for sympathetic and descriptive insiders’ accounts, all of which constitutes one aspect of the discourse on sui generis religion.

Are We Even Talking about Religion? What is most troubling is that such a discourse constitutes the norm in introductory texts. If such volumes were understood to constitute theological research into religious pluralism, then one’s complaints would certainly have to be lessened. Into this category of explicitly theological reflections on world religions one might place

some of Cantwell Smith’s work, the research of John Hick, and, most recently, Ross Reat and Edmund Perry’s book, A World Theology (1991). The last example provides a useful reference point for this discussion of the seemingly theological context of many world religions textbooks. Based on the textbook genre, Reat and Perry's chapters move from atheism, to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and examine each in light of what they presume to be “the central spiritual reality of humankind” (chap. 1). They maintain that because of the abundant evidence provided by the world’s various religions, the conclusion that “ultimate reality is a non-material reality ...is unavoidable for any thinking human being with sufficient opportunity to ponder human existence” (1). Much like Cantwell Smith (1981), Hick (1989), and a host of contemporary world religions textbooks, Reat and Perry argue that all religions house diverse expressions of the same

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 123 experience of ultimate reality. However, unlike many scholarly books that share this theological assumption, Reat and Perry’s contribution does not masquerade as the academic study of religion. Although their research may utilize the work of the comparativist, it seems clear to them that the development of a world theology necessitates a different sort of research and entails claims that are made outside _ the context and the confines of interpersonal testability. Whether they, along with Cantwell Smith and Hick, are right about the immaterial oneness of the universe is for philosophers and theologians to decide. To return to Kristensen’s quotation that opened Sharma’s Our Religions, perhaps it is the case that “we are no longer talking about religion” if we, as researchers, employ a variety of theoretical tools not just to describe but subsequently to explain the reports and actions of people whose self-descriptions entail references to religions, myths, rituals, salvation, release, gods, and so on. Given the utter

difficulties entailed in attempting to define religion’s essence and in examining purely religious experiences, perhaps the naturalist scholar of religion involved in analysis is in fact not talking about religion at all but about human beings and communities that ascribe certain sorts of motivations and implications to their thoughts, words, deeds, and institutions. These human beings, then, are studied in terms of their psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and so on. Any scholar who yet maintains that talk of the gods, or any other suitable definition of religion, is in some respect distinct, autonomous, or nonreducible to the categories by which scholars usually study human thoughts and actions is left with a task best left to theologians: the discernment of invisible realities. Ironically, then, Kristensen may be correct: naturalists and social scientists are not talking about religion if by this one implies a sui generis aspect of life that corresponds to deities, essentially private feelings, or intuitive insights and knowledge. Rather, they are talking about human beings who authorize their actions and beliefs in terms of certain ideological, normative discourses that make reference to immaterial forces inaccessible to interpersonally testable research. What this sug-

gests, is that either the very term “religion” is itself problematic for the social scientist, or, more likely, the dominant yet uncritical and theoretically undefendable conception of religion as sui generis effectively precludes other more sociopolitically and historically sensitive methods and theories. In other words, one group of scholars does not have exclusive rights to defining what is actually a taxonomic term, useful in analyzing the ways in which human beliefs, actions, and institutions are authorized.

What is troubling is how the label “academic study of religion” comes to stand for uncritical and theoretically suspect research into essences and invisible realities. For example, Armstrong’s history of “God” utilizes the theoretical work of such scholars as Eliade and Otto in support of her investigation of the diverse ways humans have conceptualized transcendent reality. And after describing how all the contributors to Our Religions are proponents for their own religious tra-

124 Manufacturing Religion dition, Sharma maintains that they also are qualified to speak “from within the arena of the academic study of religion as it has evolved in the West” (1993: xi). Presuming that the experientially based discourse of Schleiermacher through Otto and eventually to Wach and Eliade is normative, Sharma’s characterization of the field excludes the naturalistic research tradition. Had he not excluded this powerful

aspect of the field, then his work, along with that of Armstrong, would be disqualified from making a contribution to the academic study of religion. Unfortunately, Our Religions and A History of God are simply the latest contributions in a long tradition of attempting to interpret an essentially unique datum in light of its many manifestations. Intellectually sophisticated and nuanced insiders are by

no means excluded from the right to speak on behalf of and for their religious tradition. Some of the most exciting work in the academic study of religion may result from the scholarly analysis of just such reporting. However, the hermeneutic of suspicion that governs much research in the academy asserts that reporters are not always consciously aware of their motivations. Furthermore, in light of the absence of rationally defensible findings concerning religion’s fundamental goodness and usefulness, the naturalistic tradition is prepared to entertain that devotees, although conscious of religion’s beneficial aspects, may actually be involved in a complex ideological system. Although such critical hypotheses may prove to be unproductive and possibly false, they must at least be entertained and refuted on

| rational grounds for the research to qualify as the academic study of religion. So what characterizes the discourse on sui generis religion as found in contemporary comparative religion texts? Judging by the classroom textbooks surveyed in this chapter, it generally consists in the use of vaguely defined and subjective comparative categories (e.g., the ultimate, the sacred, feelings, mystery; a methodology that can be characterized as sympathetic, or descriptive, hermeneutical intuitivism; an emphasis on the study of the personalistic and nonfalsifiable contents of religious experiences; a prioritized insider’s perspective—all of which contributes to an ecumenical theology of religious pluralism. It is a perspective that privileges religious phenomena by removing them from the realm of theoretical and materialist analysis. And in large part it is a perspective that has not changed appreciably

since the nineteenth century. Although it may be psychologically comforting to presume that “we” all have religions and that “they” are all one, such a nonempirical assertion cannot be the basis or the goal for a science of religion. With this in mind, it is possible to characterize these approaches to the data of world religions as the culmination of the nineteenth-century comparative study of religion. As important as such a nineteenth-century ecumenical perspective may have

been in its time, and as important as it may be to introduce some contemporary students to the study of religion in a sensitive manner, it is no longer defensible to treat religion as a privileged aspect either of human experience or of the university curriculum. Just as the recent theoretical discussions that have challenged

The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 125 the methods and curricula of many English departments across North America and in England arose in large part from conflicts among a variety of new and powerful theoretical perspectives (e.g., deconstruction, psychoanalytic theories, feminism, Marxism) and traditional understandings of the content of, and methods of study relevant to, the established literary canon, religion departments now need to begin reflecting on what it means to study religion conceived as but one aspect of the continuum of human sociopolitical, economic, gendered, cognitive events. As might be expected, current introductory course textbooks lag behind this and other theoretical developments that have taken place in the past twenty-five years. To my knowledge, there has yet to appear a book that consistently employs any one of the many naturalistic perspectives, instead of such widely used categories

as the sacred, ritual, myth, symbol, and so on, as the basis of the comparative enterprise. Of course such a text would have to employ a degree of phenomenological description, but the goal would not be simply the neutral description of data but an attempt at explanation based on one of a number of theoretical perspectives.

Because of the theoretical changes in the academic study of religion, there is a need for an introductory comparative textbook that critically examines religion

not simply as a sui generis phenomenon but, based on clearly articulated and rationally defensible theoretical assumptions, as one among many means whereby human beings interact with their environment and construct personal and social identity. Because the introductory textbook market is so large, there surely must be a niche for such additions to the literature. Or, perhaps, such a theoretically sophisticated introductory book would not employ the world religions motif at all, for, as Timothy Fitzgerald already suggested (1990, 1995), and in opposition to Young’s optimism for the future usefulness of this universalist category (1992: 127), the very concept of a world religion betrays unarticulated theological agendas. According to Fitzgerald, the category is evidence of the early evangelical Christian efforts to missionize to the ungodly as well as the later liberal attempt to dialogue with what was eventually considered to be the foreign equivalents to Christianity’s message of salvation (1990: 104). In other words, he considers world religions and their many equivalents (e.g., wisdom traditions, world faiths) to be products of liberal and religious efforts to categorize us along with them. Accordingly, this Christian theological implication—what this chapter has addressed as an ecumenical project—can also be described in political terms as but one specific instance of the liberal effort to domesticate and homogenize diversity. As I stated near the outset, something might be gained if descriptions of “religious” events were to employ the language of sociology, political sciences, and so on. What is gained is a limitation of the kind of privilege usually accorded to specifically religious and autonomous events, beliefs, and institutions. In this same fashion, then, the homogenization brought about by the very term “world religions” becomes all the more evident when it is linked to political rather than simply religious implications.

126 Manufacturing Religion Such textbooks constitute another site where the dominant discourse on sui generis religion continues to define the field and set the standard for creating future

scholars. As I have argued throughout, in terms of the representative practices evident in such divergent areas as scholarship on Eliade, his texts, and his life, as well as classroom textbooks, this discourse on sui generis religion dehistoricizes, marginalizes, and plays a role in larger issues of power and privilege. Chapter 5 will press this issue further by examining a number of contemporary works that address the category of religion to detail the discursive conflict that continues to define the field. Apart from further documenting the regnant status of sui generis religion, that chapter will help delineate the oppositional discourse that, as I argue

in chapter 7, offers a more-secure foundation and justification for the future of the institutionalized study of religion.

). The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship [T]he current debate about the concept of religion is not as innocent as it may seem.

—Jacques Waardenburg

The implicit questions posed throughout this critique are relatively simple ones: what counts as religion? who gets to decide? what theoretical commitments are entailed in such decisions? and, most important, what are the material implications of our categorial choices? As suggested throughout chapters 1 through 4, and argued in detail in chapter 6, there is much more than purely intellectual, even social and institutional, issues at stake in the long-standing debate over whether religion is sociopolitically autonomous or simply a scholarly, analytical category useful in studying one aspect of what are otherwise complex human, historical practices. Although one could describe portions of this effort as constituting an analysis of definitions of religion, it is much more than this. By examining how our scholarly categories, methods, and theories together construct and legitimize sociopolitically relevant discourses, my analysis goes well beyond seemingly innocent debates about definition of religion. Recently, a number of scholarly works have, if not explicitly, then implicitly

addressed the categorial status of religion, further demonstrating not simply the hegemony of the discourse on sui generis religion but also, in a more detailed fashion, the contours of the oppositional or naturalistic discourse. This chapter _ examines some of these contributions in light of their place in this ongoing debate over the place of sui generis religion. Having moved from an analysis of Eliade’s discourse on religion to discourses both on Eliade himself and world religions, this chapter turns to current scholarship on the category “religion” as a scholarly tool.

Should We Abandon “Religion’’? As noted in the introduction, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s thirty-year-old work, The Meaning and End of Religion, has, until recently, constituted one of the most impor127

128 Manufacturing Religion tant critiques of the concept “religion” as it is used by scholars. Cantwell Smith’s thesis is by now familiar: to examine what he understood to be the externals of religion (what he termed the cumulative tradition) as the sum total of religious experience reifies subjective human experiences by overlooking the more important internal ele-

ment of personal faith in transcendence. In a nutshell, he advised against taking a part for the whole. Because this process of reification is so deeply entrenched in the modern study of religion, Cantwell Smith recommended that scholars no longer employ the category “religion” whatsoever. He maintained that research ought instead more accurately to reflect this double nature of religious organizations and experiences—namely, their outer institution with its observable and quantifiable aspects (tradition, myths, ritual, etc.) and their inner piety. Although Cantwell Smith’s work is by no means completely representative of the major trend in recent scholarship on religion (especially in light of his methodological rule concerning the authority and priority of the insider perspective over against other forms of hermeneutical inquiry), it is important to note that Cantwell Smith, like the many other participants in the discourse on sui generis religion, prioritizes interior and generally inaccessible personal experiences and religious convictions at the expense of observable, documentable data. (That such scholarship usually yields results with which few, if any, devotees would actually agree is another problem of course.) In other words, from the outset Cantwell Smith excluded the possibility that a nonreligious, naturalistic explanation could better account for the data as reported by devotees and adherents. For Cantwell Smith, like Otto before him and for all “sensitive men,” religion is essentially an a priori mystery, “an open element, unknown and undominated” (1991: 1). Given Cantwell Smith’s a priori emphasis on the interiority and mystery of religion, his critique of the category of religion is most easily read as a critique of the naturalistic approach. Although his recommendation against using the category of religion in such a totalized and reified fashion has had considerable influence, not all contemporary critiques of the ways in which the folk term “religion” has become a scholarly category are necessarily concerned with defending the sui generis or private and interiorized nature of religious acts and systems. Even though we now seem to be in the midst of a minor renaissance of works that critically examine the history, implications, and continued usefulness of the theoretical category of religion, there is a mixture of perspectives in this debate that is charac-

teristic of the two different discourses on religion. On the one hand, there are members of this new generation of scholars who have critical concerns that are significantly different from those of Cantwell Smith. For example, applying the critical reading methods gained from postmodern and postcolonial theorizing, Tim Murphy (1994b) argues that such universalized categories as religion—defined as essence or manifestation—are part of the intellectual baggage of Occidental hu-

manism. And even though a number of recent contributors to this debate agree with Cantwell Smith in suggesting that the very category of religion ought to be

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 129 dropped, they do so for significantly different reasons. For example, Armin Geertz (1990; 1994b: 11 n. 21; 1995: 19) and Jeppe Sinding Jensen (1993a; 1993b: 367, 374 n.

21) have both noted that, given the difficulties with the very term “religion,” there may be some use for the alternative term “ethnohermeneutics,”! “where the indigenous interpretations and models of thought and action (i.e., culture) are the objects of study” (Jensen 1993a: 120). Even more recently, Tim Fitzgerald (1995 and forthcoming) has argued that because scholarly definitions of religion are so hopelessly ambiguous and contradictory, what scholars ought to be studying are dif-

ferent institutionalized values (such as, in the case of his examples drawn from Japan, the junior/senior relationship, reciprocity, deference). Simply put, Fitzgerald suggests that “the adoption of a concept of cultural studies, based on the notion that values and their institutionalization are the real field of study” (1995: 8) would ensure that the study of this aspect of culture could be distinguished from “religious studies as a branch of theology.” What these most recent critiques of the category of religion seem to have in common are their efforts to identify religion as an analytical category useful in firstorder, descriptive research but not at the level of second-order interpretive or explanatory analysis—a point I made earlier when discussing the reductionism debate. For example, Murphy, Geertz, Jensen, and Fitzgerald all replace the term “religion” when their scholarship moves from description to analysis, a move that is based on their own prior theoretical commitments concerned with either interpreting or explaining this aspect of human behavior. Whether their second-order language of analysis is grounded in politics, culture, economics, or whatever, all these critics would no doubt agree that the category of religion is itself part of the problem to be analyzed and is not itself a tool in its own analysis. Therefore, their efforts can be distinguished from Cantwell Smith’s insomuch as they are concerned with accounting for religion and discourses on religion in terms of nonreligious factors, whereas Cantwell Smith’s work is representative of those who reinscribe religion within unexplainable, personalistic issues of faith. With Plato’s Euthyphro in mind, we can characterize these two groups as taking very different sides in a long-standing debate: as asked by Socrates, is a pious act pious because the gods recognize it to be so, or is it pious simply because the gods treat it in a certain manner? Despite the fact that a number of contemporary scholars of religion would no

doubt choose the second, social-constructionist option—an option that surely Plato himself would not have sanctioned—a number of other scholars continue to perpetuate the discourse on sui generis religion by echoing Cantwell Smith’s assertion that religion, in part, identifies an essential, ahistorical element shared by the great diversity of private human experiences. Perhaps there is no better current example than John Cumpsty’s (1991) position that the category of religion refers to a person’s sense of belonging to what he has somewhat problematically referred to simply as “the ultimately real.”? Clearly, then, the divide already documented in a wide variety of discursive sites continues to plague this field—it cannot be

130 Manufacturing Religion argued away, minimalized, or banished to some earlier stage in the field’s historical development.

To one degree or another, it is fair to assume that scholars on both sides of this divide would generally agree with Eric Sharpe, who writes that the term “religion” “is an intellectual construction, a device through which the rationalist passion for classifying and pigeonholing expresses itself” (1983: 46). After all, Cantwell Smith as well as A. Geertz, Jensen, and Fitzgerald all seem to recognize that assorted

criteria will decide whether this analytical category has any future usefulness for scholars (and here I side with Wiebe [1994a: 845] in maintaining that “students of religion have no need to abandon their use of the term ‘religion’ ”’—they simply need to be explicit about what they mean by the term). But given the somewhat pejorative connotations of Sharpe’s choice of terms (e.g., “passion” and “pigeonholing’’), one is justified in inquiring whether or not researchers are warranted .in maintaining that the methods and theories of the academic study of religion can somehow surpass or transcend the human “passion” for analysis that comes about through generalizing, comparing, and even “pigeonholing.” In other words, and this is where the divide is evident, members of the naturalist discourse on religion argue that although religion may not be the most useful analytical category for research—indeed, they have suggested using others—all scholarship, possibly even cognition itself, is a form of pigeonholing. But analytical study is not arbitrary, for when it is done properly, it is based on theoretical premises and a rationale that can be delineated systematically, argued, tested, and defended. Scholarship carried out from within the discourse on sui generis religion does not fulfill these criteria.

Although postmodernism seems to have provided a variety of discourses (among them the theological discourse) with a new basis for claiming authority within the public context of the university, acknowledging, along with Derrida, that il n’y a pas de hors-text (“there is nothing outside of the text’’) means not simply a relativity of acceptable discourses but, more important, the intrinsically and inescapably taxonomic, practical, and even tactical nature of all human language, knowledge, and “passions.” In other words, knowledge of, and access to, historically and linguistically entrenched humans making claims and performing actions is all we’ve got—regardless of the fact that some of them routinely claim

to transcend (or have information that transcends) their historical contexts. If anything, postmodernist destabilizations of authority should further construct the discourse on religion in a naturalistic or anthropological fashion: at its base, the study of religion is not about studying sui generis religion but is one heuristic used to study an aspect of human behavior and culture.

The Antiessentialism of Saler, Oberoi, and Asad Recently, there have appeared three useful examples of studies that conceptualize religion not as an essential, ahistorical category but as a historical aspect of cul-

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 131 ture. The first would be Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories (1993), which, unlike Cantwell Smith’s essentialist focus, proposes a multifactoral approach for developing open-ended definitions of religion, definitions Saler believes will be of greater use to anthropological observers.* By breaking down the “hard-andfast boundary between ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion,’” such a multifactoral approach is “ineluctably comparativist, for... it renders religion an affair of more or less rather than, as in the digitized constructs employed by essentialists, a categorical matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’” (25). So even though the category “religion” is a tool employed by “us” to study “them,” such an open-ended category defined roughly in terms of family resemblances, can help, in Saler’s opinion, to overcome the inevitably entrenched nature of scholarship. Thus, from the start, both observers and informants are separated by a gulf, each inside their own cultural and historical context, making neither position ultimately authoritative or normative.

Regardless of the gap in respective starting points, however, it is clear from Saler’s work that this initial gulf can be bridged to some extent and that some convergence of understanding is desirable; developing transcultural understanding and addressing the limitations brought on through scholarly ethnocentrism are the goals of his anthropology. Although it is uncertain whether this gulf will ever be completely overcome, Saler’s effort to diminish “our” and “their” situatedness is a three-fold task. First, it is incumbent on scholars to acknowledge the culturally entrenched, and hence partial and limited, nature of their own observational starting point, that is, recognizing the entrenched nature of our idealized, prototypical notions of just what constitutes “religion”’—and for that matter, what constitutes and counts as race, kinship, nation, gender, society, and all other folk categories that we as scholars translate into analytical, comparative categories. Second, because of this perspective-bound nature of our starting prototypes, we must always hold them tentatively, as exemplars instead of norms. Accordingly, we must be thoroughly familiar with their history, implications, limitations, and various uses. This is accomplished by conceiving of them as

“unbounded categories,” whose members are to be distinguished in terms of loose sets of family resemblances that are always open to being revised. Third, because of the variety not only of behaviors and beliefs but also of folk and scholarly categories that can be grouped together and compared through shared family traits, Saler calls for scholars to explore the use of other people’s folk categories as possible scholarly, analytical categories. Although the other may or may not study us through what we can only hope are equally open-ended cate-

gories, we can venture to explore, using their categories as our own starting points. And as a starting point for transcultural dialogue, regardless of where or when, if ever, such dialogue ends, Saler maintains that such unbounded categories as religion serve as the best possible bridges; from the outset, they exclude

132 Manufacturing Religion no one from the dialogue and the bridge-building game. In other words, since they are unbounded categories, we never know where they will lead us nor who will join in the conversation. In large part, Saler’s work will help us in the effort to incorporate the best aspects of the postmodernist challenge and construct a naturalistic discourse on cul-

ture in general, and religion in particular, that can maintain the analytically productive demarcation between subject and object without the ontological, essentialist, and normative loadings of former efforts at demarcation. In this regard, Saler must be commended. But in his recommendation to employ indigenous terms on the path toward increased understanding, Saler’s work may create more problems than it solves. Because Saler’s recommendations are related to those of Ninian Smart, to be examined later in this chapter, I will delay addressing the issue of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is a topic that needs to be addressed, because it is intimately (and rightfully) related to a number of critiques of former attempts at generating naturalist theorizing in the study of other people’s cultures. But merely because it has been linked to past reductionist theorizing—a link based on the mistaken but widespread assumption that to compare and reduce is implicitly to judge—does not mean that the relationship is a necessary or even desirable one. Like Saler, Harjot Oberoi, in his Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (1994), makes a strong case for just

such an antiessentialist study of human identity through the construction and maintenance of socially relevant boundaries. In his interesting and provocative book, he presumes from the outset that religion in general is “a social and cultural process; not something given, but an activity embedded in everyday life, a part of human agency”’ (23). I have termed Oberoi’s book provocative not only because such an explicitly stated theoretical approach would be problematic to many scholars but because, in the study of some particular religions, Sikhism being one, such a theoretical approach is even more problematic to devotees. Clearly, this is not

the place to enter such a debate, but suffice it to say that Oberoi’s work should be of great interest to scholars who are not willing simply to reproduce informant accounts—regardless of the sociopolitical investments insiders may have in such accounts.

Regarding the insider/outsider distinction, Oberoi comes down squarely in support of developing etic, theoretical generalizations: “Historians are at fault when they simply reproduce these [insider] value judgments and employ categories in-

vented by a section of the Sikh elites to discredit specific beliefs and rituals” of other members of the Sikh community (32). In stressing the development of nonreligious accounts of the construction of social identity, Oberoi’s method entertains the position that insider accounts are not self-contained and autonomous, simply in need of scholarly systematization and interpretation, but that they may be powerful social, political, even ideological tools.

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 133 Related to Saler’s and Oberoi’s antiessentialist thesis is Talal Asad’s collection of eight essays whose Foucauldian influence is evident in its very title: Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993). From the outset, Asad demonstrates that the presumed sui generis status of religion and the popular “theoretical search for an essence of religion invites us to separate it conceptually from the domain of power” (29). Having successfully segmented issues of power, domination, and opposition from the realm of religion through the use of the sui generis strategy, scholars and insiders proceed to create a “distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other” (27).

One can think here of the current protective effect of appeals to the essentially religious, cultural, or ethnic nature of an issue or debate. For good or ill, claims to sociopolitical autonomy bring with them powerful means for protecting and camouflaging all sorts of other claims and programs. For those naturalistic reductionists in our field, however, who might at first welcome Asad’s strong critique of the political implications of the nonreductionist program, his postmodernist stance is equally critical of the imperializing that commonly passes for social scientific research.> In this regard, especially relevant

is his first essay, “Religion as an Anthropological Category” (27-54), in which Asad, in a manner related to Murphy’s critical focus already noted, critiques what he considers to be the problems of Clifford Geertz’s widely influential but nonetheless universalist definition of religion. If a search for the essence of religion is theoretically and politically problematic, so the reasoning goes, then universalist definitions must be as well. According to Asad, by offering a universal, monothetic definition in the first place, Geertz’s category of religion yet excludes how the authoritative status of religious myths, rituals, institutions, texts, and the like, are “products of historically distinct disciplines [in the Foucauldian sense of disciplinarian associations, discourses, presuppositions, etc.] and forces” (54).

In place of such universal definitions, Asad recommends that students of particular religions should unpack such “comprehensive concepts” as “religion” and “culture” into their heterogeneous and historically specific elements, each of which reflects a variety of power relations in local situations. Although this respect for local details is most important, one cannot help but think that Asad’s recommendation lands the researcher in a bit of a problem. As important as it is to avoid universal generalizations that effectively ignore local details, it is equally problematic to generalize about “particular religions.” For example, when we say Buddhism do we mean Hinayana or Mahayana? And when we say Mahayana, which variety do we mean? And do we distinguish varieties of local details by appealing to yet other abstract generalizations, such as nations (e.g., Vietnamese Buddhism) or more complex national/ethnic categories (e.g., African-American religion)? Simply put, what counts as local? Related to this, Asad’s recommendation all but rules out generating widely applicable, cross-cultural theories about certain sorts of human

134 Manufacturing Religion actions—in this case, actions and beliefs that involve gods or transcendent, nonempirical states. So it would appear that, depending on one’s prior interests (e.g., to explain why people populate the heavens with gods in the first place, to account

for the great diversity of gods, or to counteract hegemony in the form of mission- | izing), what counts as local will vary dramatically. Hence, Asad’s well-intentioned

, advice turns out to be not so easy to follow, but at least it does draw our attention to two important and related issues that I will return to: (1) the need for a clearly articulated theoretical rationale to justify one’s decision regarding what counts as locale and of scholarly interest; and (2) the relations between ethnocentrism and scholarly generalizations and reductionism.°

Autonomy in the Classroom and the Autonomy of Conscience For many, the reductionism debate can be considered the foremost indicator of the discursive divide in the field. For this reason, the volume edited by Thomas Idinopulos and Edward Yonan, Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (1994), is of utmost

importance. Most of the major contributors to the debate as it has taken shape over the past decade in various scholarly journals (Robert Segal and Daniel Pals come immediately to mind) are represented in this volume. Some of the essays were originally presented at a conference held in the United States in 1990, but the volume has been supplemented with a number of invited or reprinted contributions—amounting to sixteen essays in total. A number of the essays explore just what “reductionism” means (see especially Arvind Sharma’s and Ivan Strenski’s useful individual surveys of types of reductionism and the detailed essay by Thomas Ryba on reductionism in the natural sciences), some revisit Segal’s and Eliade’s contributions to the debate, while others investigate specific issues (for example, William Paden’s study of the category of the sacred in Durkheim’s work clearly

distinguishes one use of the term from what must be considered the dominant Eliadean usage).

The reductionism debate has occupied us earlier in this book, and we need not return to it in the same manner. However, George Weckman’s contribution, “Reductionism in the Classroom” (1994) is worth mentioning, for it places this debate in a context directly relevant to chapter 4, investigating how the non- or antireductionist agenda (i.e., the discourse on sui generis religion) makes more sense when understood as not only a strategy for gaining much-needed intellectual and institutional turf in the 1950s and 1960s but, more important, as a pedagogical tool in the undergraduate classroom. It was with the former functions in mind that previous chapters were able to offer reasons for the popularity of Eliade’s methodology, which arrived on the North American scene just when issues of institutional autonomy and methodological demarcation were arising. Eliade’s efforts to distinguish essential differences, something that we now find in his own

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 135 early nationalist writings, were easily applied to the problem of institutional identity. Elsewhere I have suggested that, at this early stage of institutional and discursive formation in North America, “Eliade’s nationalist strategies seem to have been very useful for his fellow scholars, intent upon differentiating themselves not from Transylvanians or the French but from anthropologists and other social scientists” (1993: 662).

Regarding the latter, pedagogical function of sui generis religion, it is indeed clear that the voices of religious people ought not to go unheard—which of us will forget that our students and many of our colleagues are more than likely religious people. As I argued in chapter 4, this realization does necessitate a careful teaching technique at times. As Weckman words it, in such a “setting more

tolerance of other options, even those which one considers to be flawed, is necessary and expected” (1994: 213). But the over-zealous application of nonreductionist positions—something Weckman acknowledges to have occurred— leading to the virtual a priori exclusion of reductive studies, often results simply in reporting dehistoricized details, sometimes even to the celebration of the diversity of insider perspectives. As a corrective to what some consider to be the image of reductionists as the “cultured despisers of religion,” it must be recalled, as Robert Segal has repeatedly pointed out, that far from silencing religious accounts, proper social scientific method requires scholars to listen intently to insider reports, for such reports are the basis for all social scientific work. It is just that the social scientist’s theoretically grounded questions do not provide these emic accounts with final explanatory authority. As he puts it, “To refuse to accept the believer’s reason for being religious as the ultimate account of the believer’s religiosity is not to disregard it” (1992: 5). Accordingly, social scientific theorizing is not competing with insider accounts but offering explanations from specific nonreligious, rational, theoretical frameworks. (Despite Segal’s use of the term, social scientific explanations and frameworks are not to be confused with

“ultimate” or final explanations and frameworks. I return to this point in chapter 7.) If the devotee wishes to ignore all such theorizing because it has somehow missed what they consider to be the essential, private element of faith (a move made not only by devotees but also by members of the discourse on sui generis religion), that is most certainly their prerogative. But such a rejection

should have no bearing on the continued effort to generate theoretically grounded explanations and generalizations by naturalistic scholars and teachers. Therefore, using sui generis religion as a classroom teaching technique may have its understandable advantages, but in terms of its a priori exclusion of explanatory accounts, it has severe limitations as well. Finally, given the distinctions we generally make between form and content, what is most interesting about Religion and Reductionism is not the content or arguments of each individual essay but the form of the debate, that is, the fact that the contributors represent such varied positions in this debate as to provide an

136 Manufacturing Religion excellent example, in one volume, of the divide within the discourse as a whole. There are essays by those most associated with the naturalist side as well as essays that maintain the traditional and—if the critique offered here has any weight— rather weak argument, as does Wayne Elzey’s unsupported assertion that reductionistic theories “missed the irreducibly religious, that is, the maturely and authentically human essence of religion as it existed in non-Western cultures” (85). On one level, then, the volume serves an extremely important function, because it provides a succinct picture of the clash that has traditionally defined our field. On another level, however, it perpetuates a crucial oversight that, in turn, contributes to the inevitable clash: that reductionists and antireductionists, or the naturalist as opposed to the sui generis discourse, are addressing the same issues and have a common discursive ground. On the contrary, these two discourses are addressing different objects; where one studies essentially disembodied experiences and states of being, the other studies human actors in complex cultural contexts.’ Related to the naturalist critique of normative and ahistorical scholarship is Bryan Turner’s collection of essays, Orientalism, Postmodernism, and Globalism (1994). Turner is the author of Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978), published the same year as Edward Said’s influential study of Orientalism. The connection between work on Orientalism, postmodernism, and the category of religion should be clear from my discussion of Asad: one of the primary strategies identified by Said and others in the process of Orientalization is that of minimalizing or dehistoricizing the other—in this specific case, the Muslim other. When applied to the study of religion, essentialized constructs (be they the supposedly monolithic Orient or the sacred) can function to minimalize historical human agents and camouflage sociopolitical agendas. With such a critique in mind, it is Turner’s fourth essay, “Conscience in the Construction of Religion” (53-66), that is of particular interest. There, Turner provides a useful critique of the late University of Chicago Islamicist Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s attempts to redress what he took to be the shortcomings of traditional work on Islam, published as The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (1974). Although Turner acknowledges the value of Hodgson’s attempts to give “full consideration to the variety of ways in which Islam was determined or influenced by sociological, economic, and geographical factors,” he contends that because of presuppositions that grounded his research, in the end, “Hodgson’s approach still fails to extricate itself fully from the asociological pitfalls of traditional Orientalism” (53-54). In a vein explicitly indebted to Cantwell Smith, Hodgson emphasizes the primary causal role played by private and individual “conscience,” which in turn, he maintains, led to various external, cultural or social manifestations. Much as in the case of those who employ sui generis religion, Hodgson employs the category of conscience as a “creative, irreducible activity in [the] history of private individuals” (Turner 1994: 54). And, just as for a number of scholars of religion who currently advocate the social autonomy of religious experiences

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 137 rather than public, political acts, Hodgson allows historical categories into his analysis only insomuch as social, political, and economic factors provided simple environmental conditioning for a noncontextual faith—merely, in Hodgson’s own words, setting the “limits of what is possible.” (This reminds one of Eliade’s assertions that even though all religious manifestations are by definition historical, the task of scholarship is to determine the abstract, atemporal essence that informed each historical manifestation or hierophany.) Turner rightly identifies the suspect nature of this sort of scholarship that employs religion, for whatever reason, as a means for constructing a private, privileged zone, exempt from critical scholarly scrutiny. Similar to Oberoi, then, Turner strongly supports taxonomic uses of the con-

struct “religion” over the interiorized, politically autonomous notions of sui generis religion, which continue to define our field. In critiquing the personalistic approach of Hodgson, he explicitly supports the use of a naturalistic discourse on religion as part of culture: “all social beliefs, indeed all beliefs as such, are determined. There is no residual category of beliefs which are not causally determined”’ (65). Simply put, scholarship is not finished once we employ such categories as “conscience,” “faith,” or “meaning”; in fact, it has only just begun, for social scientific research can then offer explanatory accounts of these very categories.

Lifting the Thick Veil over the Reality of Religion? As I have suggested throughout, and as identified in Turner’s critique, categorial autonomy can sanction or construct sociopolitical privilege for either the insider or the interpretive scholar. With this in mind, it is worthwhile mentioning some aspects of Religion in History (Despland and Vallée 1992), a collection of eighteen essays from a Canadian conference on the history of the category “religion” which took place in 1989.° Specifically, this conference brought together three scholars who have all published important studies on this topic—Cantwell Smith (1991), Michel Despland (1979), and Ernst Feil (1982)—-and presented them with the opportunity to reconsider and enlarge on their original positions and to interact with a small group of invited participants. Apart from the retrospective essays that were written by one of the three main contributors, there are essays on such varied topics as the seventeenth-century’s tendencies toward intellectual reification (J. Samuel Preus), Troeltsch’s and van der Leeuw’s use of the category “religion” (Jean Richard and Richard Plantinga, respectively), the roots of a “theoretically reflective study of religion” in Asia (Michael Pye), the already-cited survey article on the development of the category “world religion” in assorted textbooks and introductory surveys of religions (Katherine Young), and Jacques Waardenburg’s defense of an “open” concept of religion. Specifically, Waardenburg’s thoughts on the ideological uses of scholarly research, quoted at the outset of this chapter, bear closer scrutiny, because they

138 Manufacturing Religion , shed some light on the deeper reasons for the continued interest in who gets to decide what counts as religion and on the potential dangers of our categories: If knowledge leads to power, at least certain kinds of power, knowledge of religion and religions brings this power in its own way, if not to the scholars, then to those who use their knowledge either for better or worse. Consequently, the current debate about the concept of religion is not as innocent as it may seem; knowledge and insight about religions and religion may serve the human quest for truth, but they also veil truth when used ideologically. (1992: 226)

As I have suggested, the debates on religion may have more to do with theoretical and political issues relevant to scholars of religion and their institutional settings— and possibly to devotees as well—than with attempting to obtain an accurate oneto-one correspondence between the concept and reality.

As useful as Waardenburg’s comments are in shedding some light on the renewed interest in this debate on category formation, his reliance on a somewhat problematic positivistic stance undermines his own comments on ideology. As he

phrases it later on the ‘same page, “the reason why I stress so much the risk of ideological manipulation of religious matters is precisely that ideologies destroy the very ability to observe and interpret correctly what people ‘outside’ the ‘ideological circle’ mean when they express themselves.” Simply put, Waardenburg yet presumes that the right conception of religion (used in identifying what really are “religious matters”) can be employed to identify when ideological manipulation is _ taking place. But surely any critic of Marxist notions of false consciousness, a term

not explicitly used by Waardenburg but surely implied at this point, would be quick to point out that supposedly correct interpretations are correct only insomuch as they satisfy rules internal to the discourse itself. Therefore, Waardenburg’s appeal to correct interpretations may be as groundless as the very ideological manipulations that he warns his readers about. Of related interest is Gérard Vallée’s introduction to this collection of essays, which concludes with the following assertion: “Any academic step that might con-

tribute to lifting the thick veil over the reality of religion and to giving back to religion its droit de cité will have to be considered a positive step amidst the uses and abuses of religion in our world” (6). In spite of his comments about the practical uses for knowledge, Waardenburg ultimately seems to agree with Vallée’s

normative statement: just as for other members of the discourse on sui generis religion, there appears to be a proper reality to religion that needs to be recovered and restored. Presumably, it falls to the scholar of religion first to discover and subsequently to reinstate this category. Sadly, and indeed this is ultimately the undoing of such normative approaches, just how to access this mystery behind the veil—and then confirm that indeed you have hold of the right mystery—is never, nor, I may add, can it be, made clear. Thus, such a socially redemptive role for

scholars of religion is ill fated at best.

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 139 The Encyclopedia of Religion as Site of Contestation Vallée’s proposal that scholars must engage in “lifting the thick veil” that currently covers, and undoubtedly obscures, the actual “reality of religion” draws into sharp focus the undefendable ontological assumptions that operate in the discourse on

sui generis religion. That such restorative efforts are not the explicit concern of such scholars as Saler, Oberoi, Asad, and Turner should be more than evident. This conflict within the academic discourse on religion—a conflict Burton Mack (1989) has aptly summed up in terms of scholars being either caretakers or critics of religion—is most evident in the scholarly reception of the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987). That much of the ER itself constitutes but one more instance of the sui generis discourse is not in need of further debate, for it has already been argued quite persuasively (among others, see McMullin 1989a and 1993). Rather than assess the ER, then, my intent here is to look at some of the representative assessments themselves as further evidence of the rather sharply drawn discursive lines. Opinions of the ER vary from excitement and enthusiasm for such a massive

publishing project (sixteen volumes in all) to mild suspicion and even outright denunciation. The reviewers of this work fall into three general categories: those who unquestionably approve of the work represented by the encyclopedia and its various editors and contributors; those who disagree with minor aspects of it, for example, on matters of presentation, arrangement, or content; and finally those who call the entire project into question, that is, those who question underlying structural, theoretical, and political issues. In spite of the apparent differences within the first two groups, both operate within the same discourse and are simply arguing over just what should take priority within the consensually agreed on bounds of the acceptable. It is for this reason that they can be characterized together as representative of the official reception of the encyclopedia. (Of particular importance is that several of the official reviewers are themselves contributors to the encyclopedia. Of the thirty-seven reviews that appeared in journals in the study of religion, eleven were written by contributors.) The third group is clearly representative of a far smaller proportion of the reviewers—and of the field itself— and constitutes the oppositional stance to this regnant discourse, one that questions

its implications in a manner not available to the official critics. Although both groups undoubtedly utilize various rhetorical strategies to support their case, the purpose of these strategies differ significantly. It is for this reason that one could utilize de Certeau’s strategy/tactic distinction to suggest the oppositional or tactical nature of some of these reviews, as opposed to the manner in which many other assessments strategically authorize and reproduce the discourse on sui generis religion. To put it succinctly, the notable discrepancies in the assessments of the ER are not simply the result of the idiosyncrasies of their authors or merely differences

in opinion. Rather, they constitute further evidence of the fracture within the discourse.

| 140 Manufacturing Religion As might be expected, the ER received extensive reviewing, not only in individual survey articles but in the form of review symposia or collections of reviews that all appeared in one issue of a specific journal. Single review essays appeared in Religion, Parabola, the Journal of Dharma, Expository Times,’ and The Christian Century. Multiple reviews, each treating a specific aspect of the text (e.g., the religions of India or theorists and methods), appeared in Religious Studies, Method e& Theory in the Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature’s annual Critical Reviews of Books in Religion, the Journal of Religion, Religious Studies News, and Annals of Scholarship. In total, over thirty reviews appeared, occupying a considerable portion of the space these pe_ rlodicals usually devote to original papers on various research topics.

As but one example of the divergence of opinion on the ER, take Ninian Smart’s and Dewey Wallace’s reviews, which appear together in the same issue of Religious Studies Review. Smart’s relation to the regnant discourse is ambiguous. Although he is not to be explicitly associated with the Eliadean project, his recent writings, more than ever, suggest that for him the distance between a naturalistic and a sui generis discourse is not as great as one might suspect. However, Smart—

even though he contributed articles to the ER on the comparative-historical method and on soteriology—has some biting criticisms of the text. In it he finds embedded ethnocentric, Americentric, and Orientalist attitudes (e.g., where new religious movements are covered only for white and “honorary white” countries [i.e., Japan]). He complains, too, that the text shies away from viewing religion “on the ground” and that it is “rather conservative”: It keeps to the traditional ways of thinking of philosophy and the social sciences, and does not integrate the multi-disciplinary approach into a genuinely polymethodic one. It is heavily dependent on older concepts and ways of dividing religions and the world and does not venture into the wider analysis of worldviews beyond the “religions.” In some respects it is still ethnocentric. It tends to stress the interests of Eliade: and these are not necessarily determinative of the field. (1988: 197)

Although he disagrees with the stance the text takes on such movements as Marxism (like the religions, it qualifies as yet another worldview for Smart) and complains of the outmoded data and theoretical tools used by its contributors, Smart's criticisms only provide the opening for a truly oppositional stance. His complaint that, for example, the anthropology articles often depict small-scale societies and their religions as if they were in a “dreamtime” (198) is very close to criticizing the ahistorical and idealist nature of the discourse. Unfortunately, Smart’s concern is not to deconstruct the traditional conception of sui generis religion but to widen it to include what was formerly thought only to have been specifically political or social movements. For example, his comments on the “terrible tragedies which small-scale societies have been undergoing” is relevant to the study of religion only

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 141 inasmuch as it may shed light on the vaguely conceived “spiritual significance” of such societies (198).

In spite of the fact that Wallace—who also contributed two articles (on free will and predestination, and theocracy)—believes himself able to examine the work with some neutrality, he has little but glowing comments for the text. The ER, he observes, “impressively caps the many achievements of Eliade, and is as well a magnificent new reference work. It is up-to-date, comprehensive, readable, and destined for wide use both by scholars and the educated public” (1988: 199). Concerning his ostensibly neutral position, he writes, Let me clarify my relation to ER and my attitude to the work of the editor in chief. As the author of two middle-sized entries in ER I think that I look at it with neither the possible animus of one not invited to contribute nor the vested interest of a major contributor. With regard to Mircea Eliade and his work, I am neither a disciple nor opponent: I regard him as a creative and seminal shaper of the field of religion but I remain sympathetically skeptical both about many of his detailed interpretations as well as much of his larger framework of interpretation. (200)

With his opinion of Eliade in mind, as well as his reference to disagreements with some of Eliade’s detailed interpretations, it appears that Wallace’s assessment accurately reflects the discourse on sui generis religion’s restriction concerning explanatory and reductive accounts, a restriction explicitly made in Eliade’s preface to the work. Eliade writes, “Wishing particularly to avoid reductionism and Western cultural bias, we have given far greater space to the religions of non-Western areas than have earlier reference books on religion” (Eliade 1987: vol. 1, xi). (Unfortunately, there as elsewhere, Eliade is not at all clear as to what exactly reductionism as a methodological option has to do with the Christian and Eurocentric biases of previous reference works. If anything, this appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to discredit reductionist theorizing. Surely the well-known work of Hendrik Kraemer would qualify as but one example of a nonreductionist, descriptive approach that is, nonetheless, highly suspect for its overt Christian and European biases. )

Unlike Smart’s more systemic criticisms, Wallace’s critique is limited to differences over interpretive issues rather than differences over the role that interpretation ought to play in the field. And when he does touch on a foundational issue, his comments are defused. For example, as accurate as he is to point out that the “ER is downright polemical when it comes to evolutionary-reductionistic schemes,” his observation is minimalized when he proceeds to suggest that the “ER is more interested in what can be found in or done with religious data than in the exact details of its origin and provenance. This probably accounts for what sometimes seems the less ‘historical-critical’ spirit of the newer work” (205). The -

| observation of the polemical nature of the entire text is minimalized not only by

142 Manufacturing Religion Wallace’s use of such qualifiers as “probably,” “sometimes,” “seems,” “less historical-critical,” and so on, but also by his taking it for granted that religious data can simply be presented, neutrally and objectively, to the researcher. Overlooking both the editor-in-chief’s exclusion of all reductionist theorizing and the general lack of methodological and theoretical coherence and identity evident in the modern field, Wallace is representative of the official reception of the ER when he concludes that it represents an era in which Religious Studies has come into its own as a discipline, approaching religious phenomena as a whole and possessing considerable selfconsciousness about methodology and theory. ... All of this suggests a discipline come of age and will no doubt also have importance in the further shaping of a sense of disciplinary coherence, always a concern of the editor in chief. (201)

A significantly different, oppositional, reading of the encyclopedia comes out of the collection of reviews published in Annals of Scholarship. According to Robert Segal, who introduces the collection, what was “most surprising is the severity of the criticisms by some of the reviewers. They fault the Encyclopedia either for the quality of the scholarship or the theological underpinnings of the project’’ (1988: 230). Perhaps Donald Wiebe’s review best sums up these criticisms. Disagreeing dramatically with assessments like Wallace’s, Wiebe concludes; This new encyclopedia... does not, it seems to me, advance the field in any essential or significant fashion. Indeed, in important aspects it blocks new development, for it espouses, consciously and determinedly, the very assumptions that lie half-hidden in the structures of its predecessors—and this despite the claim to have moved beyond them. Consequently, though new it is also old; it is already dated. (1988: 268)

Such an assessment is echoed by E. Thomas Lawson, who notes the conservative nature of the text: “The Encyclopedia of Religion is sometimes authoritative, but is rarely progressive. It is in fact largely a rearguard action on behalf of a view of religion that has dwindled in importance” (1988: 242). Specifically, Lawson recognizes that many of the difficulties with the encyclopedia are grounded in its contributors’ and editor’s conception of the field as an autonomous discipline. He writes; “Part of the problem here is the view current among many historians of religions that, because they have a distinct subject matter, therefore they also have, or ought to have a method distinct from the other disciplines in the university. That such a view can still be held onto when many of the other disciplines are

eagerly reaching out to each other...is most disturbing” (244). Lawson, like Wiebe, is representative of the oppositional, naturalistic discourse on religion when

he concludes by unequivocally stating that the “idea of complete autonomy of either subject or method is quite dead.” Writing in the same journal, Ivan Strenski describes the ER in the following, more animated, manner:

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 143 I regret to say that the Encyclopedia, which will henceforth represent the study of religion, is a good deal duller and less acute than the field itself. It represents in the end an attempt to enshrine and immortalize the Eliade era of the history of religions, just when that program, though laudable in many ways, has run its course of vitality. ...[H]ere everything is under the control of the dead hand of academic politics: no unruly dissenters from the reigning paradigm—only the suave consensus of patrons and their eager clients. (259-260)’°

Contrary to these highly critical opinions, James O. Duke, like Wallace, represents those scholars who have little or no difficulty with the particular discourse represented by the ER. If anything, the ER is portrayed as polymethodic and as a virtual caretaker of religion. For example, near the opening of his review, Duke writes;

The very thought of Christianity-in-and-of-itself is now known to be only one thought among many, each a function of the thinking of some thinker(s) rather than others. Thinking of many different sorts goes on within the study of religion; ER honors them all by thinking that the study of religion is pluralistic and that religion, including the Christian religion, is a topic upon which every discipline, approach, and method may cast some light. The appeal of this thinking goes without saying. There is hardly a scholar of religion anywhere whose life of teaching, research, and conventioneering has not been enriched by it. And recent scholarship has shed much light—and much of it new—on religion, the religious, and the religions, including Christianity. ER collects and then trains so many rays of light on the Christian religion and from so many angles, that the picture which comes into view is uncommonly radiant. Staring at it long and hard, one suspects that it is even a trifle over-exposed, for if there were such a thing as Christianity-in-and-of-itself, it would likely be some-

how or something less than what here meets the eye. (1989: 41—42)

Given this description, it is difficult to understand the scholar of religion as anything but a detached, free-floating mind, concerned with essences and in no way interested in sociopolitical theorizing. But on the basis of ER’s complete exclusion of naturalist theorizing, it turns out to be entirely false to maintain that the ER “honors” all approaches to the study of religion. The kind of methodological and theoretical pluralism Duke describes, then, implies an abundance of thinking, description, and understanding, but nothing else. The “many-splendored thing,” therefore, which the study of religion has become—in Duke’s, if not Wiebe’s, Lawson’s, and Strenski’s opinions—totally and unapologetically overlooks the relations between thinking and acting, in other words, all forms of naturalistic explanation. Although Duke may be correct in claiming that there is “hardly a scholar . . . whose life... has not been enriched by [this thinking],” the ER’s pool of scholars certainly is limited from the outset. The trained rays of light include “every discipline, approach, and method” except, of course, materialistic, naturalistic analysis. Only in this way can one ensure that the

144 Manufacturing Religion interpretation of Christianity—repeatedly referred to by Duke, in suitably nineteenth-century fashion, as being one among a generic class of religions—as distinct historical phenomenon not only comes into “view” but is “radiant” as well. Duke’s review, then, illustrates how the ban on reductionism is not so much a restriction

within which the contributors worked but rather—to many practitioners in this discourse at least—an unquestioned, undefended, and axiomatic assumption. It constitutes the regnant discourse in the contemporary academic study of religion, rationalized by the sui generis claim, exemplified in the work of countless scholars,

promoted by an institutionalized school of thought, and disseminated and celebrated in an authoritative text, the ER. It is but one instance of a discourse on power and privilege, with explicit political implications camouflaged within appeals to self-evidency, neutrality, classification, and academic honesty. The various naturalistic options in the modern field are not absent from representations of the discourse at large, such as the ER, because of ineffectual plan-

ning but rather because of the very requirements of the discourse on sui generis religion. That reviewers can differ so dramatically over the contribution of the ER suggests that there is more than initially meets the eye in this minor controversy in the modern field. In a manner of speaking, whereas one group concentrates on minor issues of content, scholars of the oppositional, tactical discourse critique the very form taken by the document and the unspoken conditions of its production. In other words, the oppositional discourse critiques not the details of religious experiences and how they ought to be described and compared but the very use and construction of religion as a private domain."!

The Status of Religion in the IAHR I will draw this examination of recent skirmishes in the debate on the usefulness of the category of sui generis religion to a close by looking in detail at a timely collection of essays, The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research. Edited by the late Ugo Bianchi (1994), the volume contains fifteen invited and ninety selected papers from the most recent quinquennial meeting of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), held in Rome in 1990. Appropriately enough, the theme of this gathering drew specific attention to “the varying national and factual implications of the use of the term ‘religion’”’ (ix). The volume is international in character, representing only a portion of the research presented at the IAHR meeting by scholars from thirty-four different countries—though over seventy percent of the participants represented Italy, Germany (what was then West and East), America, Canada, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. This volume is of particular interest for, unlike the AAR, which welcomes theologically based methodologies that often amount not simply to a mere description but also a celebration of religion and religious perspectives, the IAHR has a long tradition of emphasizing historically and empirically based methodologies. (For an extensive

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 145 survey of the IAHR’s ongoing contribution to methodology and theory in the study of religion, see McCutcheon 1995b.) In other words, as representative of an explicitly historically grounded association of international scope, this volume pro-

vides us with an excellent opportunity to see just how far the conflict over sui generis religion extends. The ninety selected papers that make up this collection are grouped into assorted categories that are based on religious traditions (e.g., Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity), geographic areas (Oceania, Africa, America, and Mesoamerica, East Asia and India, Iran and Egypt), and methodological or theoretical themes (anthropology, methodology of comparative research, and phenomenology). Un-

derstandably perhaps, there are a number of papers on such topics as whether Yoga, Zen, or the New Age are religions, whether there is such a thing as implicit and even anonymous religion, and the use of the category “religion” in assorted contexts in which there is no equivalent indigenous term. The difficulty in critiquing such a diverse collection of essays should be ob-

vious. From the outset, then, let the reader beware that my analysis makes no claim to be in any way an exhaustive account of this interesting book. Precisely because the postmodernists inform us that we all see through lenses of varying shades and thicknesses, the lens through which I have chosen to examine the discursive conflicts evident in this book is as follows. Because of the popularity of,

or, better put, what almost amounts to a preoccupation with, reflecting on the pitfalls of the past and the promises of the future of the study of religion (recall the number of essays published in the past twenty-five years bearing the title “Retrospect and Prospect’’!), the concluding session of the IAHR Congress, “The History of Religions: Retrospect and Prospect,” constitutes a concise picture of the field and a useful place to assess how the category of religion is used by five very different international scholars positioned at the opening of the 1990s. Sung-Hae Kim (Seoul), Ninian Smart (Santa Barbara), Donald Wiebe (Toronto), Giulia Sfameni Gasparro (Messina), and Ugo Bianchi (Rome) all addressed the Congress on what they considered to be the issues most pressing for the field as it enters the late—twentieth century. Although this is an admittedly small group of scholars, the issues that arise in their comments confirm for us the significant discursive divide that has already been identified in a number of other sites. Moreover, even though

much of this book has been devoted to North American scholarship, the IAHR volume shows that the discourse on sui generis religion is clearly not limited by national and geographic boundaries.

To Safeguard the Integrity of Humanity Uppermost for Sung-Hae Kim (1994), as it is for Smart, is the issue of inadequate international representation at such congresses. As the only non-European or non— North American member of this panel, Sung-Hae’s very presence is an indication

146 Manufacturing Religion of the need for what Michael Pye, former secretary-general of the IAHR, terms regional diversification. That the long-standing European dominance in the field is viewed as a problem that needs to be addressed is clear from much of Pye’s

, opening report in the IAHR collection as well as from the location for the successful 1995 meeting in Mexico City. However, Sung-Hae goes so far as to suggest that an indication of the field’s coming of age will be when it “outgrow[s] its initial stage as a western learning” (897). Although few scholars of religion would deny the need for organizations like the IAHR (since it is international) to represent the widely differing scholarly needs, research interests, institutional structures, and indigenous languages of all its members, outgrowing certain aspects of what some might label the field’s “Western history” threatens to alter the very foundation of the field itself.

For example, for Sung-Hae the study of religions has a role to play, in cooperation with other fields in the humanities, “to testify [to] the authenticity of faith statements in the actual history of religious communities” (897). Although a precise reading of this statement is not possible, it certainly appears to recommend that the academic study of religion has a role to play in making normative judgments concerning just what constitutes true religion and “authentic faith.” After identifying what are no doubt the inherent limitations of such scholarly polarities as sacred/profane when applied in cross-cultural and comparative work, Sung-Hae

goes on to recommend that scholars “should have freedom and sensitivity to choose categories and methods that fit and enhance the true understanding of a religious tradition” (898). Calls to avoid methodological and theoretical orthodoxy are one issue Sung-Hae undoubtedly shares with most scholars who favor crossdisciplinarity, but the concern with enhancing the true understanding of religions is entirely another issue and recalls an era when scholars of religion were preoccupied with constructing and defending disciplinary boundaries, engaging in what amounts to tactical skirmishes over academic and institutional turf. And, reminiscent of the creative hermeneutics, not only is the “religious value” at times intimately involved with “safeguarding the integrity of humanity itself” but the study of religion as well, according to Sung-Hae, “has paramount importance not only in the understanding of what human is, but in subsisting the preservation of humanity itself” (898). Amidst Sung-Hae’s call for scholars to respect differences between religious traditions, the references to religion’s “unique character,” “function of its own,” and “ultimate reference,” and the need for scholars of religion to “safeguard the integrity of humanity,” one detects not simply a clash between West and East, as some would describe it, but the clash between the discourse on sui generis religion and the naturalistic discourse on religion. It amounts to a clash between empirically testable claims and those that are themselves part and parcel of the datum scholars of religion purport to be studying, interpreting, understanding, and, ultimately, explaining. In other words, the clash Sung-Hae outlines is not between cultures

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 147 but between two divergent conceptions of the field, based on two significantly different theoretical perspectives. To characterize this difference as one of culture is indeed confusing and misleading, for the separation of nonreligious scholarship from religious scholarship

that is intent on saving humanity is evident within any number of cultural, historical, and academic contexts. One need only think of the Christian theologian John Hick’s extremely well-attended address at the 1994 AAR meeting to find that the willingness for many North American and European-based scholars to entertain and devise religious interpretations and explanations of religion continues to dominate the academy. Responses from scholars who practice nonreligious, or naturalistic, methods of interpretation and, more important, explanation have little in common with such religious hermeneutics. As already indicated, to assert that they do amounts to a virtual confusion of each discourse’s rules of formation.

An instance of just this sort of confusion can be found in Peter Clarke and Peter Byrne’s recent book, Religion Defined and Explained (1993), in which, along with very useful chapters devoted to surveying philosophical, socioeconomic, sociological, and psychological theories, there appears a chapter on religious theories (rather than, in the case of Hick’s own title, interpretations) of religion. The confusion mentioned above is evident in this chapter, which is largely a commentary

on Hick’s work in the area of religious pluralism, in how the term “theory” is used. Theories have much to do not only with hypotheses and predictions that can be tested but—if one follows Karl Popper’s influential conception of science— ultimately, with attempts at explanation that conceivably can be falsified. But surely one of the criteria that distinguishes religious from scientific discourses is that only the latter are falsifiable. Simply put, I know of no way to disconfirm such statements as “Jesus loves me,” “Muhammad is the prophet of Allah,” “Mahavira was the twenty-fourth Tirthankara,” and, in the case of Hick’s own work, “all religions worship the same transcendently real focus.” Accordingly, insider accounts for such issues as how the world came to be (cosmogonies in general and creationism in particular are excellent examples), claims concerning the common sacred essence to all religion (religious pluralism), and explanations of why people are religious in the first place (e.g., because a deity bestowed something upon people, or possibly because the sages of old simply heard something) are not, strictly speaking, theories and labeling them as such glosses over a very important distinction. What is missed in the confusion is that religious accounts are the data for scholars who develop sociological, psychological, socioeconomic, and so on, theories of religion. Accordingly, religious accounts are not competing theoretical accounts.

If Sung-Hae’s use of the construct “culture” and his call for the increased representation of non-European scholars of religion at such gatherings as the IAHR

is linked to his call for promoting, practicing, and advocating the very datum scholars ought to be engaged in studying, then scholarship of this nature is already more than adequately represented in the academy. Finally, Sung-Hae’s prescription

148 Manufacturing Religion for the field ends in a contradiction: on the one hand, there is the acknowledgment

that the study of religions is by no means unique and that other students of the humanities are needed in our studies, but on the other hand, there is the common assertion that religious experience is itself unique. Given Sung-Hae’s reliance on,

and promotion of, sui generis religion, the future of the field is not all that dissimilar to its past.

Internationalization and the Problem of Ethnocentrism Like Sung-Hae, Ninian Smart (1994) is very much concerned with increased international representation in academic organizations, for “the days of mutually

| isolated cultures is [sic] over” (901). Smart opens his remarks by noting the progress that has occurred in the field. He recalls that at the previous IAHR Congress, held in Rome (1955), he counted only “seventeen scholars . . . teaching all religions other than Christianity in the universities of Britain” (901). But given Smart’s past writings (his recent proposals for a World Academy of Religion [1990: 305] notwithstanding'*) and his long-recognized interest in methodological and theoretical issues, it seems evident that the kind of changes advocated by Sung-Hae are not what Smart would necessarily call progress. Smart observes that, in spite of the many theoretical shortcomings of such scholars as Pettazzoni, Heiler, and Zaehner, they nonetheless made hypotheses that fellow scholars in the field could test and critique. Like Popper, who he approvingly quotes to close his paper, Smart seems

to care little for where our hypotheses about religion come from; even though Eliade was, in Smart’s estimation, “in a disguised form, a preacher” (901), Smart acknowledges that he fueled the field with innumerable hypotheses, all of which have been applied by countless scholars and are now being thoroughly criticized. No doubt, Smart would maintain that the progress in the field is not simply to be measured in terms of a greater number of scholars teaching and researching in religions outside of Christianity. More than this, progress in any scientific pursuit is evidenced by the number of discarded theoretical perspectives. Far from burying the work of Eliade because it is outmoded or biased, for example, those who are now engaged in critiquing his unique blend of morphology, comparativism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and intuitionism are advancing the discourse in the only way possible: through testing hypotheses regardless of their origins. What is unclear, however, is just what Smart means by observing that scholars of religion have made little progress “in absorbing values from East and South to

compliment the terminology of our profession, which is so largely drawn from Northern, that is to say Western cultures” (902). Like Sung-Hae and, as previously mentioned, Saler as well, Smart criticizes the fact that the categories of research in our field reflect not simply its European but also its Christian origins. As part of “absorbing values,’ Smart seems to be implying that our vocabulary—which is itself representative of our discourse, theories, and methods—must become more

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 149 international: “bhakti and li as well as devotion and ritual’ ought to be useful scholarly tools.

It is true that the field has not rushed to rid itself of folk categories that are entrenched within a Christian and even European context. One need only think of the number of introductory religion textbooks that yet employ “sin,” “savior,” or “God” as if they were useful, cross-cultural, analytical categories. For example, the problems of employing the term “God,” as opposed to “gods,” “deities,” “su-

perhuman agents,” or even Smart’s own term “focus,” as a cross-cultural comparative category should strike us all immediately, given the clearly English and Christian context in which the folk term “God” is most often imbued with patriarchal, monotheistic, and moralistic meanings. Although on one descriptive level, it may make sense to observe that “Muslims worship God,” given the clear and important distinctions between a Muslim and Christian, not to mention a Jewish, conception of a monotheistic deity (e.g., for insiders, Allah has no son, and God the Father does), it would be more accurate to employ a multiplicity of such indigenous terms (ranging from “Allah” to “God the Father,” as required by each individual context), at least at the descriptive level of our research. (On the relations between folk, religious categories and scholarly, analytical categories, see McCutcheon 1990). The question to be pressed is whether such categories as “religion,” “ritual,”

“myth,” “institution,” and the like, are themselves so entrenched in a particular worldview (to use Smart’s own terminology) as to make them inadmissible when used in cross-cultural, comparative research. If they are and if, as Smart recommends, transnationalizing the field means ending our efforts to generate crossculturally useful theoretical terminologies and comparative vocabularies in favor of using a multiplicity of local, indigenous, and emic terms (e.g., “using marga and shari’ah as well as religion and law”), then the goal of developing widely applicable explanatory theories, rather than detailed scholarly description, is all but ruled out, and along with it, we will lose the naturalistic discourse on religion. I say that the naturalistic discourse will also be lost because the academic study of religion is not simply about accurate description and faithful understandings: it

is also about developing scholarly generalizations about certain types of human behavior and beliefs—otherwise, the widely used generalizations “culture” and “human” would have no meaning and no use whatsoever for us. Although we may be able to purge our terminologies of their explicitly religious connotations (e.g., one no longer employs the centrality of Jesus in Christianity as the model for constructing Islam as “Muhammadanism”), I would suggest that we will not

be able to purge them totally of their cultural contexts, for the very effort to develop cross-cultural understandings, generalizations, and explanations of human behavior is, in part at least, a specifically Western endeavor. So, because all discourses are sociohistorically entrenched, it should not be a matter of, as Saler has recommended, taming ethnocentrism but of distinguishing which types are part

150 Manufacturing Religion of which discourses. If discourses are concerned with dividing up and managing what might otherwise be termed the continuum of human perceptions, the question should not be whether we can minimalize or eliminate situatedness and dis-

courses but which vocabularies and assumptions are appropriate to which discourses. Therefore, Sung-Hae, Smart, and Saler may all be misguided to talk of diminishing ethnocentrism by degrees; perhaps it is instead a question of which

type of ethnocentrism we use.'* | At this point, I need to introduce a clarification: when we talk of ethnocentrism, it is important that we make an explicit distinction. Although ethnocentrism involves not simply describing but also judging others in terms of one’s own local categories, ethnocentrism does not denote the inevitable situatedness of scholarly work. Confusing these two aspects of scholarship is a grave mistake that leads to unnecessary critiques and defenses. For example, returning to Saler’s work, he writes, “In pursuing their ethnographic research, anthropologists must also work out from their conventions, discourses, and language-games. What they do cannot be entirely ‘open-textured,’ and in significant measure it can be accounted ‘ethnocentric’ ” (1993: 260). Having conventions, using theories as models, and operating from within discourses, much

like having a culture and a sociohistorical context, are not in and of themselves conditions of culpability. However, mistaking such tactical, relative, and contingent contexts for necessary and normative centers and then moving from these centers

to form judgments is indeed such a condition. To put it another way, failing to recognize the theoretical basis of one’s efforts to describe, understand, or explain is in part at least what constitutes scholarly ethnocentrism. Like ideology, it is a matter of overlooking or possibly disguising one’s trace, one’s context and situatedness. Demonstrating the culturally specific nature of our endeavors and tools and

arguing that these tools and goals should not be taken as essentially normative (thereby, I would say, avoiding the traps of ideology and ethnocentrism) are indeed worthwhile contributions. But attempting to limit, correct, or compensate for that

same culture-specificity on route to generating transcultural understandings that are transparent both to research and subject alike, by employing insider categories seems to me to miss the point that we are inextricably stuck with asking just our questions and using just our tools in posing those questions. As scholars of religion with a specific European intellectual and social heritage (which constitutes our own insider context), we have specific questions that make sense given our specific theoretical, political, and social contexts and histories. They are our’s and may very well be no one else’s. (Note the very significant difference between stating this and

1981). | , | ,

the normative statement that they are in fact no one else’s.) Hence, the ethnographies we construct are, in the very least, specifically our creations (see Wagner

Simply put, and to return to Smart’s specific recommendation, as soon as

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 151 “bhakti” and “puja” come from our mouths and pens, they become something entirely different than what they once might have been, for they have become part of an analytic, comparative vocabulary, whether used to understand or explain, rather than a way of life. Therefore, to presume that what for us becomes an analytical, comparative category used to understand the other was, for the other, such a category as well is perhaps the most problematic issue of all. It is based on the assumption that all humans are equally concerned with developing a convergence of transcultural understandings and generalizations about human behavior. As David Hoy has phrased it, “the difficulty with ethnocentrism is not so much that we see the world through our own self-understanding, but instead that we expect every other self-understanding to converge with ours” (1991: 175). As insightful as Sung-Hae’s, Smart’s, and Saler’s analyses of the culture-bound

nature of all human discourse are—and, indeed, I do not mean to diminish their contributions—I do not agree with their conception of the study of religion as a vehicle for increased cultural dialogue, convergence, and translation, and this point of disagreement demarcates the bounds between the naturalistic and sui generis discourses. To think that we can somehow truly understand the other and that they are equally interested in understanding us strikes me as itself a rather ethnocentric assumption. Why? Because it overlooks the many ways in which imperial powers are the ones most often interested in doing the understanding and, more important, in doing the conceptual and material appropriating that seems to come along with such efforts to understand. The appropriation and subsequent domestication of their means (in this case, intellectual categories) for our ends (in this case, increased cross-cultural understanding) bears disturbing resemblances to earlier instances of economic colonialism, where the colonies’ natural resources became the colonizer’s finished products, profits, and eventually, meanings. Although I most certainly do not mean to suggest that such proposals are part and parcel of these earlier instances of colonialism, I find the recommendation that “their” means will be useful in serving “our” ends problematic. Moreover, as Hoy suggests, it is troublesome to equate our specific ends with everyone’s. Stated simply, eth-

nocentrism is not the fact of having a culture but the assumption that one’s own culture—as well as the goals relevant to one’s own culture—is by definition everyone’s goal. We as European-based scholars have this particular goal; others may or may not share it. As Roy Wagner has noted, “the study of culture is in fact our culture” (1981: 16). However, having made this acknowledgment does not make it an illegitimate goal; it is simply to recognize that its legitimacy is to be found in its own theoretical context and practical implications. Although many of us eat apples, oranges, pears, and grapes, it may well be only a relatively small group of us who wish to develop and use the analytical category of fruit to compare them all.’ To recognize the relativity of such analytical interests means that we must ask, is the intellectual capital of the other worthwhile in its own theoretical and historical contexts, working toward its own goals, or must it continually find its

152 Manufacturing Religion place and define its worth only in terms of being translated and domesticated by our own epistemological and sociocultural goals? In the final analysis, Smart’s proposals, somewhat like Sung-Hae’s, Saler’s, and possibly even Asad’s, appear to be rather problematic if we aim to continue practicing the naturalistic discourse on religion. After recommending that transnationalizing the field means employing a multiplicity of terminologies (a move that, I acknowledge, effectively challenges the hegemony of European theories and concepts but that also, ironically perhaps, may have ethnocentric implications), Smart calls for scholars of religion (a unifying concept that itself leaves a trace of this selfsame hegemony) to “blow our own trumpet more” when dealing with public issues and the media. The problem is that without such shared comparative and taxonomic—yet admittedly situated, partial, and limiting—categories as “religion,” “ritual,” and the like, there is no we to do any trumpet blowing. In other words, it must be determined how to constitute a we when, for all we know, we might not even be talking about the same thing.

Institutional Legitimacy and the Problem of Demarcation True to form, Donald Wiebe’s contribution to this panel (1994b) is concerned with how the retrospect (in not only the sense of the past but, one infers, possibly in the sense of the term “retrograde,” or the present moving backward) influences the prospect of the field. As readers of his widely cited earlier essay on the failure of nerve in the academic study of religion (1984b)!” will recall, Wiebe’s thesis is concerned with how the hard-won nineteenth-century intellectual and institutional demarcation of the naturalistic discourse on religion from confessional theology has slowly eroded to the point where contemporary scholars routinely exclude naturalistic theorizing from their studies based on an a priori “concern with the welfare of religion” and an undefended knowledge that religion “is essential to the continued welfare of humanity” (1994b: 909). Contrary to this modern trend, whose high point may well have been the Encyclopedia of Religion, the academic study of religion actually arose, according to Wiebe, “as a result of a conscious and deliberate transcendence of theological assumptions and religious commitments that had informed the broader more traditional study of religions” (906). According to Wiebe’s position, the institutional legitimacy the field now enjoys (which is currently a tentative status in many present-day North American institutions—a topic I return to in chapter 7) is directly proportional to the distance of the field from confessional agendas, interpretations, and vocabularies. Wiebe finds it ironic, however, that in spite of this relationship between nonreligious scholarship and slowly increasing institutional credibility, religious categories of research and seemingly sectarian agendas are yet rampant in the field. Citing Sharpe’s history of comparative religion, Wiebe even suggests that, practi-

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 153 cally speaking, the field never really was detheologized, in spite of the overt efforts of such associations as the IAHR to avoid including confessional studies and even philosophic methodology in their organizations.'® Practically speaking, then, and if Wiebe is correct, in spite of what F. Max Miiller’s and C. P. Tiele’s intentions may have been, the study of religion has turned into a twentieth-century effort to develop an inclusive world theology in which each religion is fairly and sympathetically represented, as opposed to a scholarly and theoretical pursuit to scrutinize

religion, religious people, beliefs, and institutions, as empirical data in need of explanation. The finding of the previous survey of world religions textbooks suggests that indeed Wiebe’s assessment, now over a decade old, is still correct. The central problem, then, of much of the modern study of religion is not the problem of religion itself but the problem of religious pluralism. It is for this reason that Wiebe ends his essay with his often-heard call for increased theorizing in the field as but one means for recovering its original academic agenda. No doubt Wiebe would agree with Luther Martin (1993a) in citing the current closings of some North American religion departments as evidence that the future institutional security of the field may well depend on the ability of its practitioners to convince budget-conscious administrators that the nonconfessional, naturalistic study of religion ought to continue as part of the rational, public discourse of the academy.'? However, given the recent successes of research that question the utility of such harshly interpreted emic/etic divisions (specifically, see Karen McCarthy Brown 1991 and Rita Gross 1993), such demarcation within institutions may not

only be difficult to maintain but continue to be an unpopular methodological option for individual scholars who continue to privilege purely descriptive accounts and intuitively based methodologies over theoretically defensible generalizations and explanations. Surely, some scholars will criticize Wiebe’s position (perhaps along with that

of Waardenburg) insomuch as it seems based on an outdated positivism. What many now see to be the limitations of rigid, dichotomous thinking may well be understood as the limitations of Wiebe’s apparently harsh demarcation between insiders and outsiders, between religious accounts and naturalistic accounts. Concerning this demarcation thesis, Ursula King has already all but dismissed it by referring to it simply as Wiebe’s “well-known hobby horse” (1991: 146). However, when viewed in the light of Sung-Hae’s and even Smart’s assessment of the field or, for that matter, in light of the Catholic historian Paul Gen Aoyama’s contribution to the 1990 IAHR Congress, entitled “Religion Is the Work of God Shared in a Human Community,” Wiebe’s comments on the need for practitioners in the field continually to confront what it means to study religion naturalistically and nonconfessionally rather than what it means to practice and interpret religion ecumenically are entirely relevant and well worth repeating. He has drawn our at-

tention not only to the very different rules of formation that have historically constituted two sociohistorically entrenched discourses but.also to the fact that

154 Manufacturing Religion only one—the rational, naturalistic—is suited to the conditions that operate within nonsectarian, public education and dialogue.

: Holistic Methods and a God’s-eye View Unlike Wiebe, and very much related to Sung-Hae’s analysis of the field, Giulia S. Gasparro’s (1994) understanding of the task, and consequently the meaning, of the study of religion is very much in keeping with the discourse on sui generis religion: the field is a “historico-religious discipline” that employs diverse methodologies (notably the comparative method) to determine the “specific quality of the religious phenomenon” (915). Just what this “specific quality” is or how researchers know of it in advance of their study is, sadly, not an issue. In spite of the fact that she discourages the use of “intuitionist hermeneutics,” Gasparro offers no systematic explanation concerning just what constitutes the rightful object of the scholar’s gaze—nor does she suggest that this ought to occupy our attention, for, after all, she also advises against devoting ourselves to “abstract theories.” All the reader is

told is that the term “religion,” in spite of its somewhat dubious Eurocentric origins, is a useful “reference parameter” or, I would presume, taxonomy, that can “characterize a certain kind of experience detectable—in various forms—in the most diverse civilizations” (917). That religion is itself a scholarly tool is beyond debate of course, but Gasparro appears to suggest that the real objects it refers to, the assorted culturally diverse experiences, are in fact unified with one another, in spite of the fact that they change forms. This, of course, constitutes one of the classic problems of the discourse on sui generis religion already identified in Eliade’s refusal to offer an explicit definition of religion. In attempting to get at the real thing in a manner unavailable to those

who employ naturalistic theories and methodologies, some scholars fail to acknowledge or possibly fail to recognize their own theoretical commitments. Simply put, if the specifically religious aspect of a datum (a story, some form of behavior,

or a piece of art) changes forms across cultures, then how is one to recognize it without already having predetermined just what it is? In other words, how do we know we are not supposed to be studying cultural aspect X rather than Y, for example, behaviors termed rituals rather than habits, myths rather than short stories? To phrase it another way, the problem for this approach is that, in attempting to gain much-needed academic legitimacy and an institutional place by stating that its methods are historically grounded (though the methods are never simply that but are always historico-religious, socioreligious, etc.), scholars of religion often undermine the hard-won methodological and institutional legitimacy by failing to acknowledge their own preobservational theories and beliefs. Gasparro, like so many others, is interested in studying the facts of religion, its “specific quality,” and its “complexity,” eventually to determine “correct” observations and, one would imagine, proper interpretations. But at no time does she suggest the

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 155 criteria by which researchers are able, first, to distinguish just what properly separates these specifically religious facts and qualities from nonreligious ones, and she fails to identify on what basis one is able to separate the better from the worse interpretations.

Like many scholars before her, and on the basis of the a priori belief that there in fact is a whole picture that transcends all of the social sciences’ limited perspectives, Gasparro advocates combining the findings of the other sciences (although, admittedly, the social sciences are held in a somewhat higher regard than in the case of some of her colleagues) to understand what can only be termed the “big picture”: [W]ith the contribution of the methods and achievements of the other sciences that legitimately investigate the phenomenon in question from their respective spheres of study (anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, theology), it should be possible to give shape to a sui generis historical discipline capable of confronting the manifold problems posed by the object of its investigation and then solving them in compliance with all the rules of positive-inductive research. (916)

The problem is that nowhere in the discourse on sui generis religion do we find a legitimate defense of its conception of the whole picture or what it means to be a sui generis discipline. Without a predetermined recipe, how does one know how much anthropology or theology ought to go into the final mix, let alone which anthropology or why theology? As members of a historically grounded discipline, how can scholars of religion credibly talk about defining their study as sui generis and somehow synthesizing and thereby surpassing the other historically constrained sciences (theology notwithstanding)? Important questions lie behind such issues: are naturalistic accounts aimed at generating final or ultimate explanations? and if so, how might one decide which explanation counts as final? As it is for Cantwell Smith, is the devotee’s point of view somehow authoritative in determining the ultimate adequacy of interpretations and explanations perhaps? Because the devotee fails to acknowledge the adequacy of, for example, the role played by guilt and aggression in a particular sacrificial act, is this a sufficient ground to begin talking about the partial and therefore inadequate nature of the psychological theory? Surely not, for if this were the case then many supposedly nonreductionistic scholars would likewise label their own research reductive, partial, and inadequate, for few devotees report that they are communing with, or experiencing, the sacred, the holy, power, or even religion itself. Perhaps, then, talk of synthesizing methods in the service of interpreting the whole picture, or religion’s essence, are themselves instances of totalizing, religious discourses and therefore deserve the critical attention—rather than the advocacy—of naturalistic scholars of religion. If one accepts even a portion of Clifford Geertz’s complex definition of religion, then religions—among other sym-

156 Manufacturing Religion bol systems, to be sure—are systems that effectively enable human communities to make the ideological slippage from descriptive is to prescriptive ought, thereby normativizing current practices associated with one gender, class, ethnic group, nation, and so on. As already quoted in the introduction of this book, the religious perspective “is the conviction that ... between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there is an unbreakable inner connection” (1968: 97). Possibly, then, the ultimate synthesis of methods and theories characteristic of the work of some of our colleagues might itself be understood as part of the social scientist’s data. On this matter we would be well advised to heed Richard Rorty’s sound advice concerning such totalizing, final theories: “we must be content... not to seek a God’s-eye view” (1991: 7).”°

What should be clear is that, as a retrospective, Gasparro’s paper succinctly embodies many of the unaddressed theoretical problems that plague the discourse on sui generis religion. In spite of her warnings to the contrary, her paper offers no alternative to the ever-present intuitionism that constitutes the very core of this discourse. Some of these same problems also arise in Bianchi’s brief closing remarks, where he advocates a “holistic treatment of the object” (1994: 920),7! And despite Bianchi’s closing words concerning the need for the field to be characterized by “an evaluation open to hypothesis but opposite to a priori, unfalsifiable selection,” in the end, the discourse remains normative and nonfalsifiable. Otherwise, participants in the discourse on sui generis religion would

have to entertain seriously the fact that there may be no whole picture, that their “holistic” methods were as partial and limiting as those of their academic associates in the university's other departments, and that not only religion but

man beings. ,

the sacred and religious experience as well are all taxonomic categories some human beings use to talk not about otherworldly experiences but about other hu-

The Problem of Method and the Scope of Theory In the end, and contrary to Bianchi’s suggestions, there is only one way out of the apparent impasse (that definitions and concepts require prior theories which themselves presume certain definitions and concepts): it is for scholars of religion to

discard the conception of their discourse as the synthetic Queen of the Human Sciences and to dispel the assumptions that it is sensible to talk about studying “total man” or the big picture. Like all the human exercises, the discourse on sui generis religion is inextricably entrenched in a sociohistorical and theoretical framework and, therefore, answers only the questions it poses, having little recourse

to defending only its questions as normative. To overlook the gap between its particular methods and theories and representations of them as normative is not to study but to dabble in what C. Geertz has termed the religious perspective.

The Category Religion in Recent Scholarship 157 When viewed from the naturalistic perspective, the impasse is hardly a problem to

be overcome but is an accurate assessment of what it is to be a historically entrenched human investigator. In the opening lines to his 1990 IAHR paper, Armin Geertz aptly summarizes

the issue: the “problem of the definition [or, the very construct] of religion is nothing less than the problem of method and the scope of theory in the study of religion” (1994a: 661). Indeed, differences and clashes over discourses on religion are most evident in the differing discursive rules: the theoretical, institutional, and

political parameters and the methods to which they lead, many of which pass undefended. That many scholars fail to understand this suggests that Robert D. Baird’s somewhat harsh words from twenty years ago still ring true: when scholars

of religions “do discuss the matter [of defining religion] they show an almost complete lack of philosophic [and, I might add, theoretical] sophistication regarding the meaning or significance of a definition” (1971: 10).?2 The fundamental dis-

cursive differences—detectable in terms of theoretical and methodological disputes—examined in this chapter carry the message that debates on the adequacy of the category “religion” and just how one constructs it will be productive only when scholars become self-critically aware of the theoretical assumptions and tactical agendas that they carry within their studies. As identified recently by Michael Pye (1994), and as seen in the ongoing debates over the future place (and in some budget-conscious universities, the debates are on the very existence) of the institutionalized discourse on religion, our continued reflection on definitions and theories of religion, far from being abstract obsessions and examples of navel gazing, have concrete implications for the future of the institutionalized status of the study of religion. Indeed, Waardenburg is correct: “the current debate about the concept of religion is not as innocent as it may seem.”

Having identified the discursive lines that constitute the clash now so apparent in a number of sites within the study of religion, chapter 6 returns to scrutinize more closely the sociopolitical implications of the essentialist discourse on sui generis religion. Although I have often asserted that this discourse, like all others, is firmly entrenched in local and global issues of power and history, so far I have offered few concrete examples to persuade the reader of the geopolitical relevance of this discourse. Accordingly, chapter 6 examines the politics of nostalgia not simply as a scholarly disposition that acts locally within intellectual and institutional settings but as a material and geopolitical force in modern society. Only after firmly es-

tablishing this can we complete the study by returning to the very issues that occupied the close of this chapter. Given the critique made throughout this book, I conclude with the question, if scholarly theories, methods, categories, and the institutional locale in which they are deployed are representative and constitutive of this highly problematic discourse, then what will be one possible shape of a more successful discourse on religion?

6. The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Religion | Although it is certainly true that the media is far better equipped to deal with caricature and sensation than with the slower processes of culture and society, the deeper reason for these misconceptions is the imperial dynamic and above all its separating, essentializing, dominating, and reactive tendencies. —Edward Said

Historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe have begun to recount how the constitution of the modern state required the forcible redefinition of religion as belief, and of religious belief, sentiment, and identity as personal matters that belong to the newly emerging space of private (as opposed to public) life. —Talal Asad

| Critique Unmasks Cultural Artifacts The double function of the sui generis claim in this discourse should now be apparent. The sui generis claim not only founds this autonomous discourse on religion but is also the mechanism whereby assertions on the importance of “archaic man” are transformed into authoritative and normative judgments. With regard to this second function, the sui generis claim not only makes possible but simultaneously camouflages the ideological slippage from description to normative claim. Without this privileging strategy, the dominant discourse on religion loses its authority and turns out to be only one among a variety of theoretically based approaches to the study of human behavior and belief. The discourse on sui generis religion, then, can be understood as a romantic, redemptive project, a political program for constructing a modern social reality on the basis of the presumed difference between tradition, understood as influential, original, and real, and modernity, understood as devolution, repetition, and unreal. According to Eliade, authentic human life is continually con-

scious of living in relation to things that are sacred, whereas fallen creatures, | notably those living in the modern, secular “West,” thirst for a reality that is absent from their lives. It is to the scholar of religion that the responsibility falls to 158

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 159 study and interpret these symbols and to pronounce normative judgments and cures. However, if religion is not autonomous (perhaps is not even an actual thing), it would be studied by historians, economists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and so on, as a branch of culture, and its symbolism would be of little political use (since it possesses no necessarily exemplary status) for modeling a future world. Although he was speaking of literature and literary theory, at this point Terry Eagleton’s words can be applied to the study of religion: “The point is whether it is possible to speak of ‘literary theory’ [or, for example, a distinct study of religion] without perpetuating the illusion that literature [the sacred or religion per se] exists as a distinct, bounded object of knowledge” (1989: 204-205). This is not to suggest

that scholars ought to do away with the category of religion. As noted earlier, people generally make reference to religious aspects of their lives and experiences. As a descriptive and taxonomic category in the study of human behavior and belief systems, religion might be productively employed to differentiate, for scholarly and theoretical purposes, among an assortment of human behaviors. Therefore, as Eagleton goes on to write, “it is most useful to see ‘literature’ [or ‘religion’] as a name

which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing [or behaviors and belief systems] within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called ‘discursive practices’ and that if anything is to be an object of

study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled as ‘literature’ [and ‘religion’]}” (205). , To suggest, as a number of scholars have, that a writer like Eliade is being theologically motivated when he employs religion as an ontological category or when his texts call for the sole use of nonreductionistic explanations may miss the mark entirely, because such a judgment yet perpetuates the assumption that there is a purely religious sphere. Such judgments are based on the mistake of employing the descriptive and taxonomic construct of religion as an explanation. To paraphrase Eagleton, the uncritical use of the folk category “religion” might prevent one from recognizing that it in fact does not exist as a self-evident and distinct aspect of human life and cognition but is one concept among many employed by human beings in the effort to order and authorize experiences, behaviors, belief systems, and organizations. The repercussions of such an assertion are great indeed, some of which will be discussed in chapter 7. Suffice it to say for the time being that, just as Eagleton has recommended that the death of literary studies and autonomous English departments in general is in fact the birth of a new study of what he terms “social ideologies’ (204-205), so, too, the demise of the discourse on sui generis religion as an autonomous academic discipline may open a new field, rich in relationships among previously segmented and fragmented academic fields, all concerned with examining the complexities of human culture. What is born is a cross-disciplinary study of individual and sociocultural practices that attempts at every turn to de-

160 , Manufacturing Religion termine the relationships between ideas and material practices without examining beliefs to the exclusion of actions and institutions. Such a cross-disciplinary, polymethodological field should not be confused with Eliade’s often-repeated call for interdisciplinary studies, because his assumption, expressed in the foreword to Shamanism, was that the history of religions, being a “total discipline,” synthesized the work of all other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology (1964: xiii). Such a total discipline integrates findings and arrives at an image of the comprehensive whole, a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts studied by other areas of scholarship. Like the spiritual technique of yoga that he studied early in his career, Eliade maintained that the study of religion’s goal is to reintegrate and to unify that which otherwise appeared

to be a fragmented world. Because of this, he could write in his journal, on 2 March 1967, that the “History of Religions, as I understand it, is a ‘saving’ discipline.”” However, this soteriological hope for the study of religion does not con-

stitute a tenable understanding of the meaning of “cross-disciplinary.” The presumed role of the study of religion as an ultimate synthesizer is more akin to. a metadiscipline than an interdisciplinary study. The belief that the study of religion is somehow an utterly comprehensive, or total, study of human behavior once again relies on the presumably essential autonomy and unique status of religious life and experience as well as the privilege of those specially suited to its study. It is a useful example of the potential dangers of metaphysical reductionism. It is insufficient, therefore, simply to critique and dismiss the sui generis assumption as an essentially theological claim. This is not to suggest that it is simply wrong to identify claims concerning such issues as the autonomy of religious experience as being themselves religious—they might well be, depending, of course, on what one means by religious. However, in light of the long-standing theoretical difficulties entailed in defining just what constitutes the religious aspect of an act, thought, or, in this case, theoretical assumption, such criticisms do not hold much promise. In a way, then, the arguments of these critics are circular; they amount : to asserting that to presume religious experience somehow to be uniquely religious (itself a circular argument) is itself a religious belief. This is hardly a profitable form of argumentation. As suggested earlier, instead of deauthorizing assumptions of the utter uniqueness of religious experiences and symbols, these circular criticisms actually perpetuate the presumably autonomous nature of religion by being framed exclusively in terms of religious beliefs. In spite of his being an ardent critic of theological agendas, Ivan Strenski makes a rather similar observation: “What is unfortunate . . . is that otherwise thoughtful critics of anti-reductionism . . . fall into the theological trap of anti-reductionists, and perpetuate their wrongheaded intellectual agendas” (1993a: 95). The theological trap Strenski speaks of is limiting the

debate on reductionism in the study of religion exclusively to issues of the truth of religious claims, issues concerning the epistemological status of the believer's viewpoint, and whether this viewpoint accords with the scholar’s own. However,

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 161 applied to the topic at hand, to criticize scholars for holding a theological bias yet presumes that some investments are essentially theological as opposed to political or engendered. As applied in chapter 4, comparative religion textbooks that seem based on an ecumenical religious position ought to be read as participating in a wider political discourse whereby sameness is entrenched at the price of marginalizing difference. Ironically, then, theological criticism allows those who maintain the sensibility

of asserting that certain aspects of human history, culture, and experience are autonomous, a priori, or sui generis to continue to set the agenda in the academic study of religion. Only by identifying the discursive, social, and political aspects and implications of such things as the sui generis claim can this circle be broken. In this way, not only will “wrongheaded intellectual agendas” become apparent but occluded sociopolitical agendas will come to light. In Fredric Jameson’s words, what is required is a critique capable of “unmasking . . . cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts” (1988b: 20). My primary goal has, therefore, been accomplished. It is no longer productive simply to portray the discourse on sui generis religion as a theological or merely intellectual pursuit. What remains to be done, however, is to suggest the possible

relations that exist between decontextualization/idealization, made possible through the use of this protective strategy, and the larger sociopolitical world. Just as Marx and Engels attempted to contextualize the Young Hegelians’ philosophy in the German middle class, and just as J. Z. Smith located the Christian-origins debate in a Protestant antipapal polemic, any attempt at a sociopolitical critique of this discourse must address potential linkages with other concrete sociopolitical issues and events.

From the outset, it must be made clear that by no means will the efforts of this chapter be exhaustive. It is enough to have been able to argue that this discourse on sui generis religion is not simply cultural and religious but political in nature and implication. What remains is the need to identify some productive directions for future research into the politics of the academic study of religion.

To Be Dominated by the Foreigner within and Without In 1959, echoing a passage quoted earlier, Eliade confirmed Michel de Certeau’s estimation of the strategic use of exclusion to sanction an authoritative space, when he asserted that only the history of religions could be the reservoir for what he considered the soon-to-be-lost archaic spiritual values (the formation of such a reservoir constituting the first step in his proposed new humanism). In his journal entry for 22 October of that year, Eliade wrote, I see the history of religions as a total discipline. I understand now that the encounters, facilitated by depth psychology, with the stranger within, with that which

162 Manufacturing Religion is foreign, exotic, archaic in ourselves, on the one hand—and, on the other, the appearance of Asia and of the exotic or “primitive” groups in history—are cultural moments which find their ultimate meaning only from the perspective of the history of religions. The hermeneutic necessary for the revelation of the meanings and the messages hidden in myths, rites, symbols, will also help us to understand both depth psychology and the historical age into which we are entering and in which we will be not only surrounded but also dominated by the ‘foreigner,’ the non-Occidentals. It will be possible to decipher the ‘Unconscious,’ as well as the ‘Non-Western World,’ through the hermeneutic of the history of religions. (1989a: 69-70)

This is indeed a most intriguing passage that rather nicely summarizes much of Eliade’s project. Read on one level, it presents a powerful program for a hermeneutic of the recovery of meaning, and it is on this level that many commentators (such as Ricketts, Rennie, Manea, and Cave) focus their interpretive efforts. However, if one problematizes the self-evidency of this meaning, the usefulness of the hermeneutic adequate to its specialized interpretation, the implications of writing on such generalities as “Asia” and the exotic in general, and the universal applicability of such findings, then such comments can be read in very different ways as well.

Reading such passages in this alternate, tactical fashion, we find an explicit example of the potential power of this discourse exerted over the other, in this case, the other of one’s own unconscious, accessible thanks to Freud, and the Oriental, accessible thanks to nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists and missionaries. The foreigner within (the exotic unconscious) as well as the foreigner outside (the exotic non-Occidentals) are the primary subjects of interest. They are of interest for a variety of possible reasons: they are exotic, foreign, archaic, and unknown, but most of all they deserve interpretation and understanding because they both threaten to “dominate” us. (Through the use of the Oriental/ Occidental dichotomy, one can only presume that “we” means Europeans and North Americans.) By their participation in this discourse, some scholars of religions conceive of themselves as being in the vanguard of saving the Occident from domination, by deploying certain finely crafted hermeneutical devices that not only reveal the otherwise occluded inner workings of their exotic datum (thereby domesticating it and making it safe and normal) but also, through these same interpretive efforts, allow or enable their datum to attain its ultimate meaning. Therefore, scholars of religion exercise the power to define and to create their data as ultimately meaningful phenomena. Without such scholars, it would seem, the unconscious and the Orient would remain insignificant and misunderstood. Because of this ultimately privileged position of scholars of religion as the only specialists capable of adequately interpreting and controlling the symbols associated

with the foreign, they are in the best position to benefit from a monopoly in this

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 163 one field. Their exclusive interpretive access, then, relies on their ability to exert control over the data to be interpreted. To “decipher” is to control the deconstruction and decontextualization of a thing, its idealization and normalization. On the basis of the authority acquired by deploying the sui generis claim, the study of religion is intimately related to sociopolitical issues of control and domination, as is evident in the quotation. Writing during the Cold War, during the early rise of “Asia” (itself a gross generalization), which represented a potential political and economic threat to the military and industrial interests of Europe and North America, Eliade’s rhetoric of control and normalization places his work squarely within the realm of Cold War politics, if not in terms of its origins, then certainly in terms of its implications. In other words, the long-recognized associations between nineteenth-century colonial efforts to control distant lands and peoples, on the one hand, and early intellectualist efforts to understand the primitives as forerunners of Europeans (of which Religionswissenschaft played a significant role), on the other,

may turn out to have much in common with the reemergence of the discourse on sui generis religion in North America in the 1960s and the contemporaneous rise of American economic and political hegemony in the world.'

Manufacturing Productive Capital through Idealization Edward Said’s comments at the outset of this chapter, concerning the place of modern media caricaturizations in what he terms the “imperial dynamic’’—here in the specific context of U.S. involvement in the 1991 war with Iraq—are speculative but defensible. His point is that the media’s portrayal of people and groups is not simply to be understood as essentially conditioned only by the necessary or inevitable limitations of the media itself but rather that such strategies as essentialization and decontextualization share much with a larger imperialist system of cultural, geographic, political, and economic domination. In order for the European, and later North American, centers of trade and political decision making to govern more effectively and thereby control and determine not only their own populations but also the inhabitants and economies of distant lands, they developed a complex system of associated strategies that minimalize and control these people and their representation in order to ensure that, above all, the inhabitants of such distant lands were not confronted or portrayed as human beings embedded within complexly integrated sociohistorical-intellectual contexts. One able apologist for such dehistoricizing strategies is John Stuart Mill, who is quoted by Said as writing, These [outlying colonial possessions of ours] are hardly to be looked upon as countries, ... but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community [namely, our own]. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their _

164 Manufacturing Religion own... {but are rather] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities. (1993: 51, quoting from the collected works of Mill [1965: 693])

In order for one to conceive of colonial possessions as substantially different from oneself, one must unfailingly represent them, and thereby treat them, in a different and utilitarian manner. Mill’s language is surprisingly forthright: they are colonies, not countries. We use them at our will, as long as it is “convenient.” They provide raw materials, not to be conceived of as “productive capital,” which we manufacture into finished, perfected, and therefore valuable commodities that can be sold back to them. Capitalism, a la Mill, is therefore not so much the act of accruing capital—intellectual and material—as it is first and foremost the rhetorical process whereby potential capital is created through the strategies of abstraction and commodification, and manufactured from raw materials in the first place. As long as such rhetoric goes unchallenged either by members of the possessed society or members of the imperial nation, the control of capital and intellectual production, and therefore the benefits and powers that result from such production, remain in the hands of those who do the possessing, which is to say those who do much of the consuming. It is toward this point that the previous chapters have been slowly moving. Like the media in Said’s example, in the spirit of Mill’s decontextualizing capitalist rhetoric, and following the style of much scholarship on religion examined in the

previous chapters, the discourse on sui generis religion shares in this legacy of imperialist rhetoric by manufacturing religion simply and exclusively as an interior, private, intellectualist, and essentially unique belief system related to history and

context only tangentially and contingently. Take, for example, the view of Max Stackhouse, commenting in the Encyclopedia of Religion on what he takes to be the self-evidently treasurable and true early Christian missionary efforts: issues of politics and economics (i.e., history) are but the “earthen vessels” and the unessential “accoutrements” that are necessary if only to make manifest “the message” (Eliade

1987: vol. 9, 565). In the hands of the numerous members of this authoritative discourse in the study of religion, then, religious devotees—whether it be those others or us—are idealized and isolated from issues of material import. However, the result of such strategies is not only a subject that is minimalized and, insomuch as its relations with the wider sociopolitical world are excluded, more easily described. Understood exclusively on an intellectualist scale, this would no doubt be one important result of these strategies. However, when viewed in the widest possible geopolitical context, such strategies also produce the image of subjects in the fullest political sense of the word: human beings more easily categorized, defined, and, possibly, ruled. People then become possessions to be understood as disembodied and monolithic minds of little or no social or historical consequence. Although they once conceived of their methods as restoring the dig-

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 165 nity to the human subject that had been previously taken away by nineteenthcentury evolutionary theories and early social scientific studies, many scholars of religion (intentionally or not) participate in the historical minimalization of human subjects, a process that can itself contribute to the economic and political minimalization of these same people.

In a journal entry for 19 January 1961, Eliade happens to have specifically addressed the issue of idealization that is significant to my critique: The principal objection made against me: I “idealize” the primitives, I exaggerate the importance of their myths, instead of “de-mystifying” them and emphasizing

their dependence on historical events (colonialism, aculturalization, paganChristian syncretism, etc.). But I have never affirmed the insignificance of historical situations, their usefulness for understanding religious creations. If I haven’t emphasized this problem, it is precisely because it has been emphasized too much

and because what seems to me essential is thus neglected: the hermeneutic of religious creations. (1989a: 121)

(It is in the light of such a passage that one can better understand an intriguing comment made by Ugo Bianchi, that Eliade makes an “avalanche contribution of fresh blood for the vague spectral figure to which the frequently necroscopic anatomy of religious scientists have reduced religion itself’’ [1975: 190].) Eliade goes on to suggest that the chief difficulty with exclusively studying the historical situations of myths, for example, is that in the future, once indigenous elites enter the academic debate, Western ethnologists will be accused of protecting and promoting the supremacy of Western culture, “because their [Western ethnologists’] work is limited, ultimately, to showing the origin and sociopolitical character of primitive mythologies.” He argues that by treating primitive data differently from, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy, insomuch as the latter has been studied in terms of its “ ‘beauty’ and ‘eternal values’” rather than simply as the work of a political exile, Western scholars implicitly devalue the beauty and eternal values of other people’s myths. Given such logic, Eliade’s effort to idealize is not to be understood as potentially contemptible but as a necessary corrective to the one-sided work of previous scholars. Indeed, this is a. complex argument that in some ways predicts the contem-

porary sociopolitical critiques of modern scholarship. By taking other people’s myths and rituals seriously (which is to say that they ought to be read exclusively as religious documents, which is, of course, just another way of asserting but not defending the sui generis claim), Eliade, like Miller and so many others before him, seems to have been addressing the long-standing imbalance between scholars’ uncritical appreciation of European society and religion over critical assessments

of so-called primitive and tribal life. It cannot be denied that to this day and in certain circles outside the academy, such as the conservative and evangelical Christian communities in North America, such scholarly work remains highly contro-

166 Manufacturing Religion versial insomuch as it virtually amounts to a demotion of the Christian message. At the hands of Eliade, then, the privilege previously enjoyed by European culture and the Christian religion is indeed relativized. No doubt, Eliade’s early appeal among liberal scholars was very closely tied to his revalorization of things primitive.

Such a revalorization, however, cannot simply be taken at face value. If it were, then such early efforts as those of the intellectualists in anthropology (the work of Miiller or Tylor, for example) would today be celebrated for treating socalled primitives not as simpletons, as in the case of previous scholarship, but as sharing the same cognitive capabilities and processes as modern people. Seen on this level, Tylor’s “noble savage philosopher” is indeed a bold step toward understanding all human beings as sharing in essentially the same cognitive world. However, the theories of much nineteenth-century scholarship have also been read on a number of other, more-critical, levels, such as the ways in which such theories are implicitly based on an undefended social Darwinism and on a projection of certain concerns, motivations, and, assumptions not necessarily relevant to people who do not share a nineteenth-century European intellectual and social context. Implicitly, then, as novel as such theorizing may seem, it is yet another instance of European objectification and minimalization, whereby the foreign and exotic is normalized by being reduced to what appears to a researcher to be its essential aspect. To return to the defense of idealization found in Eliade’s journal entry, the prediction for the future of humanistic and social scientific scholarship was not altogether correct. Rather than extending the same type of essentially aesthetic

| privilege of European art, literature, and myth to the tales of the other people (as conjectured in his text), much late-twentieth-century scholarship, especially in literary criticism, has done just the opposite: that is, it has extended the sociopolitical

analysis of “them” to “us,” thereby radically relativizing the former primitive/ modern dichotomy in a wholly unforeseen manner. Just as the German textual criticism of the Hebrew Scriptures eventually was turned on first-century Christian texts, so, too, the work of the early social scientists “in the field” made its way into the analysis of our habits, cultures, beliefs, and religion. In both cases, insiders,

after initially studying an other, turn their critical methods on themselves. By failing to contextualize his data, thereby idealizing it, Eliade merely elevated the other to share in the unquestioned privilege of some aspects of European culture and Christianity. Therefore, this relativized but nonetheless perpetuated autonomy and privilege continue to obscure such issues as the historical, social, and political causes and implications of his data. The difficulty with the quoted passage by Eliade is that it fails to address the presupposition that, for example, culture and literature can transcend sociopolitical influences. As much as the quoted journal entry may defend the idealist methods from a political critique, it is apparent that what may be judged essential about cultures is not necessarily free from political agendas and implications. Through such tex-

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 167 tual instances, then, the authority and privilege enjoyed by some European crea-

tions, creators, and consumers of high culture were extended to what some European intellectual elites deemed meaningful and valuable in other cultures, a process that simply solidified the power of a collection of intellectual elites to define and judge value and essence both at home and abroad. In the words of J. Z. Smith,

through their “romantic preoccupation” with such categories as “primitive” and “archaic,” the work of such scholars of religion have provided for their authors a “license for ultimate acts of imperialism, the removal of all rights to interpretation from the native, and the arrogation of all such rights to themselves” (1982: 43). Ironically, then, what some might take to be a framework capable of critiquing elite Western dispositions and restoring value can actually be read as fortifying such imbalanced distributions of power by extending previously localized idealist strategies to new cultural and geographic areas. No longer was only Dante impervious to sociopolitical inquiries, but now mystics, poets, and prophets from around the globe as well as their texts, their followers, and their organizations benefited from such protection and privilege. All these aspects of human communities could now be studied and gleaned in light of their shared essence and the common structure of their experiences and symbols regardless of historical context. The reservoir of information gained from this process was in the service of, as already highlighted, saving Western culture from its impending decline. This idealization, then, manifested in the accumulated volumes of cultural, mythic, and ritualistic fact, provides the raw data from which the phoenix of elite Western culture was eventually to emerge. This is precisely what constitutes ethnocentrism.

Representing Vietnamese “Self-Immolations” The often-occluded relations among power, imperial politics, and the specific por-

trayals of religious issues is perhaps no more apparent than in the case of the interpretations American media and intellectuals gave to the much-publicized actions of several Vietnamese Buddhists who, beginning in mid-June of 1963, died by publicly setting themselves on fire. The first of these deaths occurred at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon, on 1 June 1963, and was widely reported in American newspapers the following day, although the New York Times, along with many other newspapers, declined to print Malcolm Browne’s famous, or rather infamous, photograph of the lone monk burning (Moeller 1989: 404). The monk, seventy-three-year-old Thich Quang Duc, sat at a busy downtown intersection and had gasoline poured over him by two fellow monks. As a large crowd of Buddhists

and reporters watched, he lit a match and, over the course of a few moments, burned to death while he remained seated in the lotus position. In the words of David Halberstam, who was at that time filing daily reports on the war with the New York Times,

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The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 169 marized and updated on page five the next day and then was moved to the lead story, on page one on 14 June 1963, accompanied by the following headline: “U.S. Warns South Vietnam on Demands of Buddhists: [South Vietnamese President] Diem is told he faces censure if he fails to satisfy religious grievances, many of which are called just.” The story, no longer simply involving the actions of a lone Buddhist monk but now concerned with the official U.S. reaction, remained on page one for the following days, was reported in greater detail by Halberstam in the Sunday edition (16 June 1963), and was mentioned for the first time in an editorial column on 17 June 1963, one week after it occurred. By the autumn of that year, the images of either protesting or burning monks had appeared in a number of popular magazines, most notably Life Magazine (June, August, September, and November issues). In spite of the wide coverage this event received in newspapers and the popular presses, it seems puzzling that it received relatively little or no treatment by scholars

of religion. Apart from a few brief descriptions of these events in an assortment of books on world religions in general (such as Ninian Smart’s World’s Religions, where it is interpreted as an “ethical” act [1989: 447]) or on Buddhism in Southeast Asia, only one detailed article was published at that time, in History of Religions, written by Jan Yiin-Hua (1965). This article was concerned with examining the medieval Chinese Buddhist precedents for Quang Duc’s death, a death that quickly

came to be interpreted in the media as an instance of self-immolation, or selfsacrifice, to protest religious persecution of the Buddhists in South Vietnam by the politically and militarily powerful Vietnamese Roman Catholics. According to such

accounts, the origin of the protests and, eventually, Quang Duc’s death, was a previous demonstration, on 8 May 1963, in which government troops aggressively

broke up a Buddhist gathering in the old imperial city of Hue that was demonstrating for, among other things, the right to fly the Buddhist flag along with the national flag. The government, however, took no responsibility for the nine Buddhists who died in the ensuing violence at that time, blaming their deaths instead on Communists. Accordingly, outrage for what the Buddhists considered to be the

unusually violent actions of the government troops at Hue was fueled over the following weeks, culminating, according to this interpretation, in Quang Duc’s sacrificial death. Given that the event was generally acknowledged by most interpreters to be a sacrifice, an essentially religious issue, it is no surprise that the central concern of Jan was to determine how such actions could be considered Buddhist, given their usually strict rules against killing in general, and suicide in particular. In his own words, these actions “posed a serious problem of academic interest, namely, what is the place of religious suicide in religious history and what is its justification?”

(243). The reader is told that the monks’ motivations were “spiritual” and that their self-inflicted deaths were “religious suicides,” because “‘self-immolation signifies something deeper than merely the legal concept of suicide or the physical

170 Manufacturing Religion action of self-destruction” (243). Given that the event is self-evidently religious (an interpretation that is based on an assumption that is undefended), the question of greatest interest has little to do with the possible political origins or overtones of

the event but rather “whether such a violent action is justifiable according to religious doctrine” (243). It seems clear that for this historian of religions, the action can only be properly understood—and eventually justified—once it is placed in the context of texts written by Chinese Buddhist specialists from the fifth century C.E. onward (e.g., the Biographies of Eminent Monks by Hui-chiao [497554 C.E.] and the Sung Collection of Biographies of Eminent Monks by Tsan-ning {919-1001 C.E.|). Jan’s concern, then, is to determine whether these actions were justifiable (something not properly the concern of scholars of religion) exclusively

on the basis of devotee accounts, some of which were written over one thousand | years before the Vietnam War. After a survey of these texts, the article concludes that these actions are indeed justifiable. Basing his argument on changing Chinese Buddhist interpretations of self-inflicted suffering and death, Jan finds a “more concrete emphasis upon the practical action needed to actualize the spiritual aim” (265). Accordingly, these actions largely result from the desire of elite devotees, inspired by scriptures (255), to demonstrate great acts of selflessness (acts whose paradigms are to be found in stories of the unbounded compassion and mercy of assorted bodhisattvas). The

closest Jan comes to offering a political interpretation of any of these reported deaths is that the “politico-religious reasons” for some scriptural instances of selfimmolation are “protest against the political oppression and persecution of their religion” (252). In terms of the dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion, this article constitutes a fine example of how an interpretive framework can effectively manage and control an event. Relying exclusively on authoritative Chinese Buddhist texts and, through the use of these texts, interpreting such acts exclusively in terms of doctrines and beliefs (e.g., self-immolation, much like an extreme renunciant might

abstain from food until dying, could be an example of disdain for the body in favor of the life of the mind and wisdom) rather than in terms of their sociopolitical and historical context, the article allows its readers to interpret these deaths as acts that refer only to a distinct set of beliefs that happen to be foreign to the non-Buddhist. And when politics is acknowledged to be a factor, it is portrayed as essentially oppressive to a self-evidently pure realm of religious motivation and action. In other words, religion is the victim of politics, because the former is a priori known to be pure. And precisely because the action and belief systems were foreign and exotic to the vast majority of Americans, these actions needed to be mediated by trained textual specialists who could utilize the authoritative texts of elite devotees to interpret such actions. The message of such an article, then, is that this act on the part of a monk can be fully understood only if it is placed within the context of ancient Buddhist documents and precedents rather than in

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 171 the context of contemporary geopolitical debates. (And further, that the ancient occurrences of such deaths can themselves be fully understood only from the point of view of the intellectual devotees [i.e., Buddhist historians].) That the changing geopolitical landscape of South Asia in the early 1960s might assist in this interpretation is not entertained. It is but another instance of the general proscription against reductionism. Such an idealist and conservative interpretation is also offered by several contributors to the Encyclopedia of Religion. Marilyn Harran, writing the article on suicide (Eliade 1987: vol. 14, 125-131), agrees with Jan’s emphasis on the need to interpret these events in light of doctrine and in the light of spiritual elites. She writes that although religiously motivated suicide (an ill-defined category that prejudges the act) “may be appropriate for the person who is an arhat, one who has attained enlightenment, it is still very much the exception to the rule” (129). And Carl-Martin Edsman, writing the article on fire (Eliade 1987: vol. 5, 340-346), main-

tains that although death by fire can be associated with “moral, devotional, or political reasons,” it can also be “regarded as promoting rebirth into a higher existence as a bodhisattva, an incipient Buddha, or admittance to ‘the paradise’ of the Buddha Amitabha” (344). In a fashion similar to the exclusive emphasis on the insider’s perspective, and having isolated such acts in the purer realm of religious doctrine and belief, Edsman immediately goes on to assert that the “Buddhist suicides in Vietnam in the 1960s were enacted against a similar background; for this reason—unlike the suicides of their Western imitators—they do not constitute purely political protest actions” (344). The “similar background” of which he writes is the set of beliefs in a pure land, compassion, selflessness, and so on, all of which enable Edsman to isolate the Vietnamese deaths from issues of power and politics. Because similar deaths in the United States took place* without the benefit of, for example, a cyclical worldview and notions of rebirth, and the like, he is able to

conclude that the U.S. deaths by fire may have been political. For Edsman, the doctrinal system of Buddhism provides a useful mechanism for interpreting these acts as essentially ahistorical and religious. Some will no doubt argue that, if indeed the discourse on sui generis religion was at one time dominant, it no longer is. Even if one at least acknowledges that the study of supposedly disembodied ideas and beliefs is interconnected with material issues or power and privilege, it is easy to banish and isolate such involvements to the field’s prehistory, its European, colonial past, in an attempt to protect the contemporary field from such charges (recall Strenski’s attempt to isolate interwar European scholarship as a means of protecting the modern profession). To rebut such isolationist arguments, one need look no further than Charles Orzech’s 1994 article, “Provoked Suicide,” to find this discourse in its contemporary form— a form virtually unchanged since Jan’s article was published some thirty years ago. Like Jan, Orzech attempts to overcome the “huge cultural gulf that separated the

observer from those involved” (155) by placing Quang Duc’s action in a long

172 | Manufacturing Religion tradition of what Orzech terms the “self-immolation paradigms” (149) as well as the many other stories of selfless action one finds throughout the mythic history of Buddhism (e.g., from the Jataka tales, the story of the bodhisattva who willingly gives up his life to feed the hungry tigress). Also like Jan, Orzech is concerned to answer one of the questions often asked about these apparently puzzling Vietnamese Buddhists’ actions: “whether ‘religious suicide’ was not a violation of Buddhist precepts condemning violence” (145). Using René Girard’s theory of sacrificial violence, Orzech answers this question by recovering a distinction he believes to be

often lost in the study of Buddhism: its sacred violence as well as its muchemphasized nonviolent aspect (for a modern example of the latter emphasis, see the essays collected by Kraft [1992]).

For our purpose, what is most important to observe about both Jan’s and Orzech’s reading of Quang Duc’s action is that in neither case are historical and political context of any relevance. In both cases, it is as if the burning monk is situated in an almost Eliadean ritual time, removed from the terrors of historical, linear time—a place of no place, where the symbolism of fire is far more profound than the heat of the fire itself. For example, in his interpretation of the early selfimmolation tales, Orzech explicitly acknowledges that “/a]lthough little context information is available to us, it is clear that in each case the sacrifice is performed as a remedy for an intolerable situation” (154, emphasis added)—clearly, social and political contexts are of little relevance for authoritatively interpreting timeless ritual or religious actions. Several lines later, when he addresses Quang Duc’s death directly, Orzech effectively secludes and packages this particular event within its insider, doctrinal, and mythic context, by noting that the “politics are complex, and I will not comment on them now” (154). At no point in his article does he return in any detail to the geopolitics of mid-twentieth-century Vietnam; instead, Quang Duc’s actions are exclusively understood as “sanctioned by myth and example in Buddhist history” and as reworked, reenacted Vedic sacrificial patterns (156). Assuming that mythic history communicated through elite insider documents provides the necessary context for ultimately interpreting such actions, Orzech is able to draw a conclusion concerning the actor’s motivations and intentions: “Quang Duc was seeking to preach the Dharma to enlighten both Diem and his followers and John Kennedy and the American people” (156); “As an actualization of mythic patterns of sacrifice it [the self-immolation] was meant as a creative, constructive and salvific act, an act which intended to remake the world for the

better of everyone in it’ (158). Simply put, Quang Duc’s death is an issue of soteriology.

In both Jan’s and Orzech’s readings, as well as those of Harran and Edsman cited earlier, the death of Quang Duc has nothing necessarily to do with contem-

porary politics. In fact, it appears from the scholarship examined here that to understand this death fully requires no information from outside of elite Buddhist doctrine whatsoever. In all four cases—much as in the case of the comparative

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 173 religion textbooks examined earlier—the discourse on sui generis religion effectively operates to seclude so-called religious events within a mythic, symbolic world all their own, where their adequate interpretation needs “little contextual infor-

mation.” For example, in all these studies, Quang Duc is never identified as a citizen of South Vietnam but is understood only as a Buddhist monk, a choice of designation that already suggests the discursive conflict I have documented. In other words, from the outset, the parameters of the interpretive frame of reference are narrowly restricted. Quang Duc is hardly a man acting in a complex sociopolitical world, in which intentions, implications, and interpretations often fly past each other. Instead, he is exclusively conceptualized as a transhistorical, purely religious agent, virtually homologous with his specifically religious forebears and ancestors. It is almost as if Thich Quang Duc—the historical agent who died on 11 June 1963, by setting himself on fire at a busy downtown intersection in Saigon— has, through the strategies deployed by scholars of sui generis religion, been transformed into a hierophany that is of scholarly interest only insomuch as his actions can be understood as historical instances of timeless origin and meaning. However, it is just as conceivable that for other scholars, the death of Thich Quang Duc constitutes not simply “spiritually inspired engagement” but a graphic example of an overtly political act directed not simply against politically dominant Roman Catholics in his country but also at the American-sponsored government of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. This alternative framework, one that recognizes the power implicit in efforts to represent human actions, is best captured by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins: Coming to political consciousness through the period of the Vietnam War, we were acutely aware of the power of photographic images to evoke both ethnocentric recoil and agonizing identification. Malcolm Browne’s famous photo of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Saigon was profoundly disturbing to Western viewers, who could not fathom the communicative intent of such an act. (1993: 4)

According to Paul Siegel, this event constituted an act of protest against the Vietnamese government “which was carrying on a war of which they [the Buddhists] were profoundly weary” (1986: 162). The distance between these two readings is great indeed. On the one hand, one finds representations varying from the Diem government's own press release that, according to the New York Times, maintained that the event was an example of “extremist and truth-concealing propaganda that sowed doubt about the goodwill of the Government” (12 June 1963), to the Times’ and Orzech’s (1994: 154) portrayal of the protest as being against the specifically religious persecution of the Buddhists by the powerful Roman Catholics. On the other hand, however, one can question the relations between the presence of Christianity in South Vietnam and European political, cultural, military, and economic imperialism in the first place as well as question the relations between Diem’s

174 Manufacturing Religion government and his U.S. economic and military backers. To concentrate only on the specifically religious nature and origins of this protest, then, serves either to

ignore or, in the least, to minimalize a number of material and social factors evident from other points of view using other scales of analysis.

Concerning the links between Christianity and European imperialism in Southeast Asia, it should be clear that much is at stake depending on how one portrays the associations among European cultures, politics, religion, and the everincreasing search for new trading markets. For example, one can obscure the issue by simply discussing an almost generic “encounter with the West,” where “the West”’ stands in place of essentially religious systems, such as Judaism and Christianity (for an example, see Eller 1992). Or one can place these belief and practice systems within their historical, social, and political contexts—a move that admittedly complicates but also improves one’s analysis. For instance, in practice, the presence of Christianity was often indistinguishable from European culture and

trade. This point is made by Thich Nhat Hanh, in his attempt to communicate the significance of Quang Duc’s death for his American readers.* Much of his small book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (1967), is concerned with contextualizing this event by placing it not simply in a religious but also in its wider historical, social, and political framework.> Accordingly, of great importance for him is not simply to identify elements of Buddhist doctrine for his reader but to clarify early on that,

since its first appearance in Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Roman Catholicism has always been “closely associated with white explorers, with merchants, and ruling classes” —specifically with the explorers, traders, and cultural and political elites of France between the years 1860 and 1945 (1967: 15). Whether intentional or not, the exportation of Christianity throughout the world brought with it new people, new architecture, new languages, new legal and ethical systems, new styles of dress, new economic arrangements, new trading goods, and so on, all based on the standards of large, powerful, and distant European countries. Because of these interrelated issues, it is inaccurate and misleading to understand Christian missionaries exclusively in terms of what may very well have been their good intentions. Such missionaries were part of a complex and interrelated system or bloc of power relations, all of which presupposed that the other was in desperate need of European-style education, economies, technologies, trade, wisdom, and, ultimately, salvation. To understand missionaries as somehow removed from this system of power would be to inscribe and protect them by means of the sui generis strategy. Without the benefit of such a protective strategy, however, it is easily understood how, at least in the case of Vietnam, the popular belief arose that Christianity was the religion of the West and “was introduced by them to facilitate their conquest of Vietnam.” As Thich Nhat goes on to conclude, this belief “is a political fact of the greatest importance, even though [it] may be based on suspicion alone” (20). It is completely understandable, therefore, that Thich Nhat takes issue with

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 175 circumscribing these provocative actions that took place in Vietnam in the early 1960s as essentially sacrificial, suicidal, and religious. In his words, I wouldn’t want to describe these acts as suicide or even as sacrifice. Maybe they [i.e., the actors themselves] didn’t think of it as a sacrifice. Maybe they did. They may have thought of their act as a very natural thing to do, like breathing. The problem [however,] is to understand the situation and the context in which they acted. (Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hanh 1975: 61)

The context of which Thich Nhat writes is not simply the context of mythic selfimmolation paradigms so important to other scholars but the context of Vietnamese meeting Euro-American history over the past several centuries. Emphasizing

this context, Thich Nhat’s remarks make it plain that insomuch as sui generis religion plays a powerful role in dehistoricizing and decontextualizing human events, the very label by which we commonly distinguish just these deaths from countless others that took place during the Vietnam War—for example, “religious suicide” —is itself implicated in the aestheticization and depoliticization of human actions. What is perhaps most astounding about Thich Nhat’s comments is that, despite the discourse on sui generis religion’s tendency to limit scholarship to the terms set by religious insiders (recall Cantwell Smith’s methodological rule), Thich Nhat—most obviously himself an insider to Vietnamese Buddhism—is the only scholar surveyed in this chapter whose remarks take into account the utter complexity of human action as well as the many scales of analysis on which participants and nonparticipants describe, interpret, understand, and explain these actions. That the death of Quang Duc had a powerful influence on the events of 1963

in South Vietnam is not in need of debate. It has been reported that Browne’s photograph of Quang Duc burning, which ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 12 June 1963, was on President Kennedy's desk the next morning (Moeller 1989: 355).

And virtually all commentators acknowledge that the imminent fall of the Diem government was in many ways linked to the Buddhist protests and their popular support among the South Vietnamese. In the least, most commentators would agree that the deaths had what they might term unforeseen or indirect political implications. The question to be asked, however, is just what is at stake for secluding politics to the margins of these otherwise self-evidently religious events. As should be evident, depending on how one portrays this historical event, one thing that is at stake is whether it could be construed as having possible causes or direct implications for American political and military involvement in the escalating war or whether, as many commentators seem to assume, it was: (1) a localized Vietnamese issue, of (2) an essentially religious nature, which (3), due in large part to the Diem government’s mishandling of the protest and its unwillingness to reach a compromise with the Buddhists, only eventually grew from a local religious incident into an international political issue. The event is thereby domesticated and managed. As the children’s literary critic Herbert Kohl has con-

176 Manufacturing Religion vincingly demonstrated, in the case of the surprisingly homogeneous and depoliticized school textbook representations of the events surrounding the 19551956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, the story is truncated, presented completely out of context, and portrayed as the single act of a person who was tired and angry. Intelligent and passionate Opposition to racism is simply not part of the story. [In fact, often] there is no mention of racism at all. Instead the problem is unfairness, a more generic and softer form of abuse that avoids dealing with the fact that the great majority of White people in Montgomery were racist and capable of being violent and cruel to maintain segregation. Thus [in the dominant textbook account of this event] we have an adequate picture of neither the courage of Rosa Parks nor the intelligence and resolve of the African American community in the face of racism. (1995: 35)°

The very act of representation, in both the cases of the Buddhist death and the bus boycott, acts to defuse what might otherwise be understood as the tremendous

sociopolitical power of the events and acts in question. In the case of the selfimmolations, the image of the monk burning has by now become so decontextualized that it has been commodified; it is now a consumer item in popular culture. For example, the photograph appears on the cover of a compact disk for the alternative rock music group Rage Against the Machine.’ Although both the example of the Montgomery bus boycott and the Vietnamese deaths arise from dramatically different historical and social contexts, both actions are clearly part of an oppositional discourse that is today communicated

to us through, and therefore managed by, the means of dominant discourses— school textbooks in one case, and as a mechanism for selling both scholarly privilege and expertise as well as a Sony Music product in another. Therefore, it should

not be surprising that, in both cases, we find strategies that effectively package these actions in a decontextualized and delimited fashion. It is in this precise manner that the strategies of representation that constitute the discourse on sui generis religion are complicit with such larger issues of cultural, economic, and political power and privilege. One way to support this thesis further would be to examine carefully media, government, and scholarly interpretations of other specific historical episodes and demonstrate the ways in which it may have been economically, socially, or politically beneficial for a specifiable group to portray events as essentially and exclusively religious rather than, say, political or military.

The example of what was widely termed the self-immolation—a term that from the outset does much to isolate the event as being exclusively concerned with issues of religious sacrifice—of Vietnamese Buddhists is a particularly useful example, because it seems that there was, and may yet be, a great deal at stake, economically, politically, and militarily, in the interpretation and representation of these events.

Another example well worth study would be the interpretations given to the

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 177 practice of suttee or, the practice of a woman following her deceased husband to his funeral pyre, for only within an interpretive system founded on sui generis religion and which privileges the insider’s account could such a practice evade contemporary feminist analysis. As van den Bosch has recently argued, the “question whether the custom [of suttee] should be regarded as religious depends upon the definition of religion within this context’ (1990: 193 n. 76). In other words, one of the primary differences between the frameworks that represent this practice as, on the one hand, an example of pious female religious duty that embodies lofty motives (as suggested by Tikku 1967: 108) and, on the other, an instance of institutionalized misogyny is primarily the assumption of the autonomy of religious life from social and, in this case, specifically gendered ideology (van den Bosch 1990: 185). As already suggested, the deaths of the Buddhists could be seen as a statement either against American-backed imperialism and war or simply against the localized persecution of one religious group by another, all depending on the scale of the analysis. If the former, then the repercussions of the event strike deeply not only in Vietnam but in the United States as well. If only the latter, then the problem is isolated, it remains in Saigon, and it is up to the decision makers in Washington simply to distance themselves from Diem’s mishandling of the episode. Washington’s decisions are then based on reasons varying from declining public opinion in the United States, once the images reach the popular media, to the realization that in fact Diem did not represent the majority of South Vietnamese and therefore was the wrong leader to back in the war against the North (this is the dominant theme of the Times editorial on 17 June 1963). Clearly, there are practical and political advantages and disadvantages depending on which of the two above intellectual interpretations is favored. Furthermore, it is intriguing that there exists a general correspondence between the interpretations offered in the New York Times and those offered by scholars of religion. Although differing in many ways, it appears that both are part of a complex system of power and control, specializing in the deployment of interpretive strategies—the politics of representation.

The Rhetoric of Traditionalism There are a vast number of other examples in the study of religion of how such protective strategies are deployed by dominant powers to ensure their continued influence over others. One such example, introduced in chapter 5, is provided by Huston Smith, in his book The World’s Religions (1991). It will be worthwhile to return to a more-detailed political reading of a portion of that book for the way in which it entrenches androcentric assumptions and practices. In the chapter on Confucianism, Smith not only elaborates on what seems to be apparent gender differences but also provides the reader with an example of the significant role tradition plays in earlier Confucian lives and how this differs from that of the

178 Manufacturing Religion reader's life. Specifically, his use of the category “tradition” deserves closer scrutiny.

Let me repeat the opening of this quotation as it appeared earlier in my investigation: Modern life has moved so far from the tradition-bound life of tribal societies as to make it difficult for us to realize how completely it is possible for mores to be in control. There are not many areas in which custom continues to reach into our lives to dictate our behavior, but dress and attire remains one of them. Guidelines are weakening even here, but it is still pretty much the case that if a corporation executive were to forget his necktie, he would have trouble getting through the day. ... His associates would regard him out of the corners of their eyes as—well, different. And this is not a comfortable way to be seen, which is what gives custom its power. Someone has ventured that in a woman’s certitude that she is wearing precisely the right thing for the occasion, there is a peace that religion can neither give nor take away. (161)

Although their behavior is, in his words, dictated by what Smith earlier characterized as nonrational traditions,’ the modern lives of his readers conform merely to such apparently minor customs or guidelines as fashion and beauty—precisely where a feminist critique would begin. Smith concludes, If we generalize to all areas of life this power of tradition, which we now seldom feel outside matters of attire, we shall have a picture of the tradition-oriented life

of tribal societies....[In the case of Confucianism,] China had reached a new point in its social evolution, a point marked by the large number of individuals in the full sense of the word. Self-conscious rather than group-conscious, these individuals had ceased to think of themselves primarily in the first person plural and were thinking in the first person singular. Reason was replacing social convention, and self-interest outdistancing the expectations of the group. . . . Individualism and self-consciousness are contagious. Once they appear, they spread like epidemic or wildfire. Unreflective solidarity is a thing of the past. (162-163)

Smith’s text sets up a number of polarities, all of which assist the Chinese irresistibly to progress toward the liberal ideal of individual freedom, rationality, and _ self-consciousness. In all this, and in spite of his efforts to convince his reader that the first-person singular is the most important pronoun, Smith’s text is concerned

to portray a them in opposition to an us. He constructs an object very different and exotic that is determined by mysterious and nonrational forces that his readers can only just begin to fathom. The reader is free, whereas they are controlled, and it is the reader’s duty not only to understand what controls them but to witness their social evolution and to ensure that the contagion of freedom spreads. Much of the work in Smith’s text is carried out by his specific use of the term “tradition.” However, according to Emile Boonzaier and John Sharp (1988), such a limiting usage of tradition is ideological and fits a long-established pattern of how this politically loaded term has been used:

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 179 The term ‘traditional’ has long been used as a euphemism for the labels ‘uncivilized,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘pre-literate,’ ‘tribal,’ or ‘non-Western.’ In fact, until recently many anthropologists world-wide spent most of their time studying ‘traditional’ societies and describing the ‘traditions,’ ‘culture,’ or ‘customs’ (in this context these three terms are used interchangeably) which were assumed to control the behavior of people in this category. In the social sciences in general, ‘tradition’ has been contrasted to the notions of ‘reason,’ ‘rationality,’ and ‘science.’ Thus the lives of ‘traditional’ people are seen as “bound by the cultural horizons set by [their] tradition,” in contradistinction to ‘modern’ people who are conceived as “culturally dynamic, oriented to change and innovation.” (41-42)

As they go on to conclude, in the case of the study of African societies, but equally so in Smith’s usage, the term “traditional” “serves to mystify the crucial political and economic processes.” It is used to label an entire category of people whose behavior and thinking are portrayed negatively. They are seen as “conservative, ‘backward,’ ‘pre-rational,’ and therefore fundamentally unable to compare with ‘modern,’ ‘progressive,’ or ‘developed’ peo-

ple. This usage is entirely compatible with discriminatory ideas which refer to racial differences and inferiority. “Traditionality,’ however, has the advantage of being ostensibly neutral and thus more acceptable. . . . It is therefore important to realize that when practices are termed ‘traditional’ this is never simply a statement of objective historical fact. (56)

Huston Smith’s rhetoric and ideology of traditionalism effectively manufactures a stereotyped native who is distinct from, and less than, the modern rational and individualistic Western human being, who is representative of the intended audience of his book. To whatever degree, then, the implicit minimalization and iso-

lation of these people prepares the way first for their domestication and subsequently for their domination, all of which is conceived/camouflaged as their natural evolution to become like us. This rhetoric of progress is not simply part of a minor trend in the study of religion but is a particularly apt example of the intimate relations between political power and academic discourse that are made possible when the study of religion _ is presumed to be isolated from issues of power and privilege. In the preface to an earlier edition of his book, Smith betrays these relations quite candidly in his remarks on the motivations for understanding other religions: The motives that impel us toward world understanding may be several. Recently I was taxied by bomber to the Air Command and Staff College at the Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery, Alabama, to lecture to a thousand selected officers on the religions of other peoples. I have never had students more eager to learn. What was their motivation? Individually I am sure it went beyond this in many cases, but as a unit they were concerned because someday they were likely to be dealing with the peoples they were studying as allies, antagonists, or subjects

180 Manufacturing Religion of military occupation. Under such circumstances it would be crucial for them to predict their behavior, conquer them if worse came to worst, and control them during the aftermath or reconstruction. This is one reason for coming to know people. It may be a necessary reason; certainly we have no right to disdain it as long as we ask the military to do the job we set before it. (1958: 7—8)°

The imperial dynamic identified by Said is evident once again: American society is “impelled” to understand so that, when it is necessary, it might occupy, conquer, and control more effectively. According to this passage, the world is divided into allies and antagonists, those who possess and those who are possessed.'° The knowledge brought about through the comparative study of religions (for example, the distinctions between the tradition-bound tribe and modernity) is therefore an effective tool to ensure that one group remain the possessors. Such an imperialist discourse, with its totalizing rhetoric, gives new meaning to the passage that im- | mediately precedes the one quoted, in which Smith remarks, in a rather Eliadean fashion, that in the future the “classic ruts between native and foreign, barbarian and Greek, East and West, will be softened if not effaced. Instead of crude and boastful contrasts there will be borrowings and exchange, mutual help, crossfertilization that leads sometimes to good strong hybrids but for the most part simply enriches the species in question and continues its vigor” (1991: 7). It seems apparent, however, that such cross-fertilization comes at the expense of the cultural, economic, and political autonomy of the other. The themes of mutual cooperation and the development of a global culture are undermined by Smith’s ever-present imperial and ideological discourse. If anything, these examples lend much momentum to deepening these seemingly minuscule ruts, to use Smith’s term, that have led to the domination of entire societies. Such expressions as “world understanding” and references to such abstract constructions as “global” or “universalizing cultures” can therefore function as euphemisms for domination—a domination that is ultimately blameless, for we are passive, having been “impelled” to take such courses of action. In spite of their professed sympathies for the symbols and myths of other peoples, both Smith’s and Eliade’s projects—inasmuch as they are part of the larger discourse on sui generis religion—have much in common with the work of many of their anthropological and missiological predecessors who described

and delimited the non-European, non-Christian world in preparation for the subsequent triumph of Western culture. The encyclopedic cataloging, describing, and eventual understanding of these others were not, as might be maintained, merely an intellectual endeavor. If the revalorization of the previously privileged West, which was to result from this research, was simply of spiritual and cultural value, then it certainly was to come at the expense of a number of cultures and peoples who did not fare well in the face of the worldwide spread of European culture, economies, and politics. On this point, recall that the East India Com-

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 181 pany, one of the primary arms of British economic imperialism, financed the original publication of Miiller’s immense four-volume translation of the RigVeda (Sharpe 1986: 36), and that Napoleon invaded Egypt not only with his military troops but with an army of curious scholars who eventually produced the extensive, twenty-four volume Description de VEgypte (1809-1828). Knowledge and power are never far from one another.

Unification through Essentialization In his examination of the modern discourse on race, David Goldberg (1993) finds the very category of race to be the product of a precise set of modern discursive practices replicated, incorporated, and constituted in human behavior. Race is one such discursive production that mediates, if not cements, the production of human beings as fundamentally divided along racial lines (2). Of particular interest is that Goldberg finds the pervasiveness of racial discourse in modern liberal democracies all the more ironic because one assumption on which liberalism is based is the belief in individualism, roughly translated as the basic equality of human beings. However, as Goldberg interprets it, this liberal presumption of equality is abstract and ahistorical; it is “concerned with broad identities which it insists unite persons on moral grounds, rather than with those identities [or differences] which divide politically, culturally, geographically, or temporally” (5). In spite of the liberal commitment to the principle of human equality, which usually takes the form of individual moral freedoms, Goldberg concludes that racial and racist discourses are able to multiply in the modern liberal democracies precisely because conceptions of moral and philosophical equality do not necessarily overlap with socioeconomic, material, gendered, and racial equality. Simply put, sameness on one abstract, idealist level does not preclude radical difference on another more-practical, material level. It was precisely this lack of convergence that prompted Raymond Williams to conclude that liberalism referred to a “mixture of liberating and limiting ideas” (1976: 150). According to Goldberg, then, it is in the space between these two types of ideas that such concepts as “race” and certain forms of behavior grounded on

such concepts are deployed and can thrive in spite of, or possibly because of, liberalism.

The dominance of ahistorical and essentialist methods and theories in the modern study of religion parallels the discourse on race as examined by Goldberg.

To some, it might appear perplexing how scholars of religion could emphasize such themes as a new humanism and the unity of humankind while idealizing their subjects and deemphasizing or ignoring the theoretical value of such historical tools and categories as “gender,” “‘politics,” “race,” “economics,” and so on— those categories that are routinely and effectively employed as one mechanism of, and rationale for, dividing and deprivileging human beings. Indeed, it seems con-

tradictory for one to emphasize abstract and universal sameness at the expense

182 Manufacturing Religion of material and local differences. However, when understood as part of a much larger and more-complex liberal discourse, the contradiction between these two sets of issues (egalitarian values and purportedly common experiences, on the one hand, and isolationist and ahistorical methods and theories, on the other) can be understood as part of the larger dissonance. On closer historical analysis, the universality promised by liberalism turns out to be highly particularistic. In the words of anthropologist James Clifford, “the privilege of standing above cultural [and, I might add, religious, ethnic, historical, and political] particularism, of aspiring to the universalist power that speaks for humanity, for the universal experience of love, work, death, and so on, is a privilege invented by a totalizing Western liberalism” (1988: 263). As part of this liberal discourse, assertions concerning a new and truly universal world culture arise from the very provincialism so often condemned by scholars of religions. In other words, assertions concerning the religious unity of the world do not necessarily entail the political, economic, gender, | racial, and so on, unity and equality of all its inhabitants. This case of liberal dissonance is ideological precisely because, in order for such systems of ideas and practices to function effectively, this contradiction must remain unnoticed and go unchallenged.

By now it should be clear that the contradictions so apparent in the work of such writers as Eliade and H. Smith are not historical accidents of a bygone era. Nor can we account for the politically loaded nature of their scholarship simply as an aberration and remove it to the field’s prehistory. The modern study of religion yet houses these contradictions, and their effects continue to exert largely unnoticed influences. Take, for example, Judith Berling’s address given at 1992's annual meeting of the AAR (1993). Berling elaborates on a common theme in the field: the cultural significance of the scholar of religion. Simply put, and to rely again on Burton Mack’s imagery, she asks whether we as scholars of religion are to be caretakers or critics. Insofar as Berling pays no attention to the explanatory effort in our field, instead limiting the study of religion to descriptive and interpretive approaches, because she finds the division of the discourse between schol-

arship on religion and religious scholarship to be “an incredibly misleading dichotomy,” and because she understands religion to be essentially concerned with wisdom, devotion, and insight that orients us in the present world (3), it should be clear that she considers the role to be that of caretakers." Only if religion is constructed as an ahistorical, essential phenomenon, much as race functions in liberal discourses, can it be presumed to unite human beings, regardless of their own material and social differences. Indeed, this is precisely how the concept “religion” functions for Berling: [T]here is something peculiar about religion that makes us think that we have to be religious to understand it. I don’t think we have a hang up about somebody who’s never ever danced at all studying ballet or what not. But we need to think

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 183 hard about the assumptions we’re making when we get so worried about that issue here [in the study of religion] and not somewhere else.” (1992: 30)!

On one level, I concur completely: we need to think hard about the assumptions we're making. Simply to assert unilaterally that religion is peculiar will certainly not do. But precisely because the autonomy of religion cannot be defended rationally, but only intuited and asserted a priori, such hard thinking will surely not help the discourse on sui generis religion to defend or define itself any better. On the basis of such a conception of autonomous religion, Berling suggests that our role is to develop, along with theologians, “a more sophisticated cultural sense of how to seek truth amidst diversity” (1993: 11). In the capacity of caretakers, we are to act as translators between religious communities in the service of religious

unity and totality. We ought to find “common ground for negotiating religious difference” so as to avoid, among other things, “corrosive relativism and dangerous fragmentation” (13, 11). In other words, scholars of religion are handmaids to what we can only understand as the self-evidently beneficial, universalizing power of religion and religious experiences. Therefore, it falls to such scholars to work in distinguishing, through nuanced phenomenological description and the compara-

tive method, the essence in the midst of the oftentimes apparently conflicting _ manifestations—imagery that Berling herself invokes (13). Berling’s call can be characterized not simply as a theological speculation con-

cerning the utter unity of reality’? but also as a potent political message against diversity, or what she judges to be “corrosive relativism and dangerous fragmentation.” It is an instance where the gap between the part and some posited whole has been glossed over, so that one particular instance of order is portrayed as the norm and diversity is understood not as order of another type but as disorder or even chaos. As critics, however, we must ask questions about the unmentioned standard by which fragmentation and diversity can be judged to be so corrosive and dangerous. To appeal to Goldberg once again, in Berling’s view, the academic, hermeneutical efforts of scholars, directed toward the interpretation of the posited but undefended essence behind the diverse manifestations, are capable of diffusing and mediating “the differences and tensions between particular social subjects in the domains of market and morality, polity and legality” (Goldberg 1993: 2). The implications of Berling’s recommendation, then, is that such material divisions as political, economic, racial, and gender inequities are to be minmalized so as to rectify an abstract and seemingly monolithic culture that is, in her estimation, being torn apart by relativism and fragmentation. Accordingly, sociohistorical and material issues are not to be studied but are problems to be overcome, diffused, and minimalized for the sake of an abstract, ahistorical unity. The study of religion conceived in this manner is the mediation of religious difference; it is a form or religious pluralism; it is the discourse on sui generis yet again. There may be no better example of the power of essentialist thinking to min-

184 Manufacturing Religion imalize and ignore material and social division than what seems to have been a casual remark in Jacob Neusner’s introduction to his World Religions in America (1994: 4). In this case, it is a form of nationalist as well as religious essentialism. Trying to describe for his readers the particular importance of specifically studying religion in America, he writes, Other countries have difficulty dealing with more than a single skin color, or with more than a single religion or ethnic group, and nations today break apart because

of ethnic and religious difference. But America holds together because of the American ideal that anyone, of any race, creed, color, language, religion, gender, sexual preference, or country of origin, can become a good American under this nation’s Constitution and Bill of Rights, its political institutions, and social ideals. And while religions separate people from one another, shared religious attitudes, such as a belief in God, unite people as well.

Reading these lines compels one to question whose America we are talking about— much like MacQueen forces us to historicize our scholarship by asking just whose

myths. Portraying the nation as a homogeneous, ideal whole that, in practice, somehow transcends such historical boundaries as color or class has very little, if indeed anything, in common with a vast number of recent events in the history of the United States: the civil rights movement; the Equal Rights Amendment; the Los Angeles riots; the health care debate; ongoing efforts to strip homosexuals of their civil rights; the numerous sites of the long-standing class and culture wars; the utter contempt, sometimes expressed in explicit violence, felt by many citizens for the federal government; and, most recently, the Million Man March and the extreme polarity between blacks and whites regarding whether justice was served in the infamous O. J. Simpson trials. In light of the severe racial, gendered, political, and economic gaps that continue to characterize and define American society, it would seem that the United States continues as a national construct for reasons

other than its self-evident unity. Neusner fails to see that, at least in part, an economic, political, and even racial hegemony characterizes this nation like any other, a hegemony that his essentializing, dehistoricizing strategies assist in maintaining. Only by positing such things as a transcendent American ideal housed or manifested in sacred documents and religious attitudes that somehow transcend historical religions could one maintain, as he does, that “America is different.” The unity Berling hopes for and Neusner describes is no doubt important. Numerous armed conflicts in the world attest to the need for scholarly analysis of the assorted actions and discourses that sanction and propel such violence—socalled religious discourses and behaviors included. But this can hardly be the only, or possibly even the primary, scale on which scholars of religion’s contribution can be made. If it is our only role and sole scale, then we have somehow already— and the interesting question is how!—decided a very complex issue: the issue being whether, as Rudolf Otto wrote in the foreword to Schleiermacher’s On Religion,

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 185 religion was indeed “something that belonged to truly cultured, authentic, and well-rounded human beings [and] .. . that without religion the intellectual life of mankind would deprive itself of its noblest ingredient” (Otto 1958: ix). The price that is paid when solely promoting such views on the essential, ahistorical, and beneficial religious or nationalist unity of humans is far too high given the material and social disparities that persist between human beings and the ways in which such discourses can be complicit with larger and more-complex sociopolitical hegemonies. Such a cultural role of caretaker and translator completely overlooks how religious practices and symbols—and by extension, their translators as well—like any other cultural production, can be complicit with both dominant and oppositional power structures. The proposed role of translator can be understood, accordingly, as little more than what Chomsky might label as ideological manager—implementing and legit-

imizing the guise of liberal unity in the face of evidence to the contrary. The supposedly dangerous forces of relativism—especially conceived as a sharing of political and economic power with nontraditional groups—threaten to disclose the fact that the egalitarian values of the liberal discourse actually promote and protect the concrete and historical dominance enjoyed by an advantaged, elite group/culture. By positing a monolithic culture/society complex, talk of the “challenge of religious pluralism in the fabric of society” (Berling 1993: 19) avoids addressing the

challenge of material disparity embedded within modern cultural, political and other forms of pluralism. Stated another way, such pluralism is a challenge or a problem precisely only for those who yet propagate the myth that the fabric of society is indeed unified to begin with, egalitarian and homogeneous in all respects,

and that all its citizens are cut from the same cloth. What is encouraging is that not all scholars of religion are so concerned with implementing such a program of unification through essentialization. In a letter to the editor of the Religious Studies News, Gary Lease (1993), then president of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR),' observed that in spite of what some might interpret as the radical equality of human beings in this postmodern world, new evidence accumulates daily that suggests that now, more than ever, the way has been cleared for those who wish unilaterally to assert privileges over others. To maintain that the days of divisions are past—in this case, Lease is specifically addressing the issue of the division between theology and the study of religion, but the point applies with equal force to social, gender, ethnic, and political divisions, to name only four—is, according to Lease, evidence of a cumulative blindness to the ways in which ever-increasing numbers of human subjects continue to suffer physically, emotionally, and psychologically under dom-

inant regimes, sociopolitical systems, and entrenched habits of behavior around the world. Advocates of the liberal program would no doubt, in the words of Lease, assert that “the world to which we are bravely marching, is realizing ever more intimate and shared identity, an identity that erases old and finally destructive

186 Manufacturing Religion distinctions such as those between theology and religion” (16). His reply to such a position is that the post-modern world we already inhabit, and with which we will continue to struggle, is not, and will not be one of utopian unity. There is absolutely no indication, short of groundless and at times pious hope, that such will be the case. On the contrary, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, from the economic,

political, and foreign relations spheres, to the areas of cultural and civic life, points in a radically different direction. The “po-mo” world...has been, since the Weimar 1920s, a source of fundamental dispersion, distinction, and division. I find no evidence that this state of affairs will change; indeed, all my readings of

the contemporary world point toward a strengthening and deepening of these conditions. (16)

To act simply as translators. of essentially religious discourses ignores the need for

scholars of religion, among others, to document, examine, and critique the deployment of divisive as well as unifying practices, strategies, and discourses within humans and human communities. The practices of which Lease speaks—distinction and division—appear, at least from this juncture, to be inevitable products of

the ways in which human beings understand and order their world and arrange themselves socially—making religious distinction and division, not to mention unity, just a few instances of such organization. Problems arise when such divisions

as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and so on, are employed—even developed in the first place—as rationalizations for first defining and then excluding some people from access to resources, services, and rights available to others. Until such a time when issues of race and gender, just to name two examples, have no bearing on one’s political or social status or, more concretely, one’s likelihood of acquiring employment or having enough food to eat, it is imperative that these and other such historical categories of difference inform

our research so as to ensure that we as scholars do not fail to test our theories and analyze our observations in relation to the categories of power and subjugation.

Identifying such internal contradictions and dissonances, as well as the mech-

| anisms by which they often go undetected, is an act of resistance that is an important part of all critique: to examine how beliefs are linked to, or separated from, action. According to the literary critic Frank Lenntrichia, “it is the function of the intellectual as critical rhetor to uncover, bring into the light, and probe all [socialrhetorical] alignments. That is part of the work of ideological analysis” (1985: 149). Such analysis is the first step in identifying and subsequently deconstructing the many categories commonly used to bring about privileges on the basis of social divisions. As I argued earlier, cognitive and social divisions and abstractions may well be necessary taxonomic mechanisms by which we as human beings construct

our individual and social identities, but when material privilege is linked to, or

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 187 defended by, ontological categories taken as self-evident, there is need to investigate the nature of this alignment.!°

To return to the comments made in my introduction, on the hegemony of scale, the presumed normative status of the essentialist scale in the study of religion, a scale that, by definition, subordinates all other, can ultimately be understood as perspective that functions to abstract historical, social, gendered, and so on, human

beings from their context and relationships, all of which participates in a liberal ideology whereby the analysis of historical and material differences is replaced by the study of abstract and ideal types. To be sure, the essentialist scale does provide one way of understanding human beings, but it is hardly the only, exhaustive, or inherently proper way, as is suggested by the discourse on sui generis religion. Therefore, when read on other scales, the very act of isolating and privileging a transcendental subject (e.g., religion an sich, the sacred, or Homo religiosus) that occurs through the use of sui generis religion obscures and endangers the significance of historical persons.

“There Is No Single, Privileged Narrative” One cannot help but read the texts of American-based scholars, especially those written in the late 1950s and 1960s, in light of such events as the war in Korea, the war in Vietnam, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the increasing economic power of the United States overseas. Whether consciously intended or not, Eliade’s and H. Smith’s writings, for example, reinforce that these others, who were supposedly reentering our history, must not dominate us. In other words, one must keep in mind that such ruts, to employ H. Smith’s metaphor once again, can be smoothed over not only by mutual cooperation but also by imperial domination, economic exploitation, and ideological homogenization. One must also keep in mind that the connections between the normalization and the domination of a populace and its depiction by scholarly writers are by no means direct. As Said has remarked, it is naive to suggest that such things as novels motivate people to go right out and colonize: “Carlyle did not drive Rhodes directly, and he certainly cannot be ‘blamed’ for the problems in today’s southern Africa” (1993: 82). What is intriguing, however, is how the great body of humanistic

cultural artifacts, from novels to anthropological records and the academic study of religion, that have originated in various European and North American societies have coexisted so comfortably with the sociopolitical and economic aggression indicative of the age of racial, sociopolitical, and economic imperialism. Said identifies, for example, how plantations in Antigua are employed by Jane Austin in her novel Mansfield Park as a seemingly simple narrative device to allow one of her characters, an absentee owner, to move from one plotline to another. However, as identified by Said, such a device is effective only because a series of associations and presuppositions were, and continue to be, accessible to her readers. These

188 Manufacturing Religion associations range from the presumably normal business interests that an Englishman would have in this distant land, to the slave trade, economic monopolies, and the creation of a dependent underclass of indigenous workers. The story, then, not only does nothing to oppose the foreign rule and exploitation of such places and markets but it presupposes that for the reader imperialism and its implications are absolutely ordinary, acceptable, perhaps even inevitable.

According to Said, then, the problem is not simply that the writer/scholar portrays people and lands in an idiosyncratic or incorrect manner but that in this representation the other is essentialized and portrayed as transparent to the advances of the white European, that the other’s essence and unconscious motivations await the trained hermeneut and theoretician whose interpretation will completely

bridge the gap. Further, this highly abstract image of the native and the devotee is but a part of a complex system of representations that, as a whole, is taken as normative and authoritative by a community of readers and writers. “The crucial aspect of what I have been calling the novel’s consolidation of power,” Said writes, “is not simply connected to the functioning of social power and governance, but

made to appear normative and sovereign, that is, self-validating in the course of the narrative’ (77). There may well be no more-potent example of the practical outcome of this complex system of representations—surveyed in this study and ranging from textbooks to the media and the products of academia—than in the comments made by the American General William Westmoreland, the former commander of Amer-

ican operations in Vietnam. At the close of the 1974 Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds,’* Westmoreland comments that the “Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. .. . As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” Given the practical uses to which such undefended generalizations about, and interpretations of, the actions of others can be put (as has been suggested in the case of the Vietnamese Buddhist deaths), the question for future scholars of religion to address is, what are the relations between such politically and militarily useful generalizations and decontextualizations and the work of those scholars whose primary job is the study, classification, and understanding of, in this particular case, other people’s philosophies and religions? This chapter has simply attempted to suggest that, just as in the case of the significant relationship that existed between nineteenth-century missionary and anthropologist work, on the one hand, and European colonialism on the other, the mid-twentieth-century discourse on sui generis religion and the rise of new forms of political, economic, and military hegemony are intimately related. As Eliade writes, the history of religions constituted itself [as] an autonomous discipline shortly after the beginnings of Orientalism, in some respects relying on the researches of the Orientalists, and it has profited enormously from the progress in anthropology.

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 189 In other words, the two principal documentary sources for the history of religions have been, and still are, the cultures of Asia and the peoples whom one calls (for lack of a more adequate term) ‘primitive.’ (1984: 57)

Although Eliade more than likely understood Orientalism as the dispassionate accumulation of facts and descriptions pertaining to a static object (the Orient), given Said’s conclusions concerning the geopolitical implications of such endeavors as nineteenth-century Orientalism, these explicit links between Orientalism and the discourse on sui generis religion should warrant further critical investigation. If these two scholarly fields are in fact as related as this quotation implies, and I have argued that indeed they are, then the ideological strategies identified in the previous chapters will be seen to play a significant role not only in decontextualizing and isolating empirical data but in manufacturing the image of discrete and more easily controlled human beings who exist largely within their own heads and not in the contested world at large. As has been suggested already, Said’s earlier work on Orientalism, which he has subsequently extended to the European novel as a whole, provides one example of the potential scope of such a critical research program. That the writings of Said and other contemporary literary critics are often overlooked by scholars of religion may be due to the fact that many critics destabilize certainties and ontologies and examine the linkages between issues of power and supposed literariness. However, Said’s work is not without its own critics. For example, his method is based on the assumption that it is sufficient for a critique of the strategies of representation to focus exclusively on the practices of economically and politically powerful nations while overlooking the surprising degree of complicity that is often shown by those who otherwise might be understood as victims. This point is made by James Clifford (1988), David Pollack (1992), and Ernest Gellner (1993). As successful

as Said is in identifying the ways in which “we first ‘produce’ and then ‘manage’ our alien culture” (Pollack 1992: 20), nonetheless, Pollack maintains, Said fails to

understand that representation is not a unidirectional process but is inherently dialectical. In other words, in the case of the Orientalist discourse examined by Said, it is overly simplified to portray European scholars as monolithic imperial oppressors and Muslim people as powerless, misrepresented, and oppressed victims. It would seem that precisely because it overlooks this dialectical aspect of representation, Gellner labels Said’s critical method as an “unsustained, facile inverse colonialism” (3). In other words, Said’s method “sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks” (Clifford 1988: 262). As Clifford goes on to write, although Said’s critique is concerned with how such categories as “the Orient” and “Asia” are constructed and to whose sociopolitical benefit such construc-

tions are, “it is unclear why Said does not also convict Marx of subsuming individuals under the ‘artificial entities’ ‘class’ and ‘history’ (270).

Indeed, these criticisms are powerful, but they must not be misunderstood.

190 Manufacturing Religion Clifford and Pollack both agree that Said’s critical study has much merit. Unlike Gellner, who asserts that there are indeed objective standards by which to judge truth (e.g., in his review of Culture and Imperialism, he writes that “truth is not linked to political virtue” [1993: 4]), they are in full agreement that all forms of cultural description involve one in an inescapable web of power and knowledge. What Clifford and Pollack find lacking in Said’s analysis, however, are the interrelated natures of power, knowledge, and the construction of self- and social identity. In the case of his study of the Japanese novel, Pollack notes that “Japan and we [the gaijin, or literally, the persons outside] are actually in complicity, locked in the embrace of mutual self-definition, just as are Europeans and Arab peoples, the Israelis and Palestinians, the English and the Irish, and so on in terrible twos all around the globe” (20). Simply put, “[e]ven as we shamelessly manipulate that other to validate of [sic] our own identity, it is quickly brought home to us in that very act that the other has somehow contrived to construct itself as a subject— our subject, and at our expense” (20). As insightful as these criticisms may be, it is not initially clear to what extent

they are applicable to the discourse examined in this book. Unlike the others examined by the Orientalist discourse Said analyzes, the others of the study of religion are often long-dead cultures and societies accessible only through the reconstructive efforts of the hermeneut. Although it is true that, regardless of the physical presence of an author, the interpreter only has access to a text (and so in all interpretive efforts there is a large and possibly insurmountable gulf between reader and author), in the case of archaic religions, accessible only through, for example, recorded myths, there literally may not be a living other who can be associated with a text or who can possibly be in complicity with the cultural observer and interpreter. The power relationship in such cases is dramatically in favor of the outside observer-interpreter. Therefore, this silent other may account for the prominence of such ancient myths in the data of our field. As in the example of the Vietnamese monks addressed earlier in this chapter, however, when the texts, doctrines, and images of others are linked with living human beings, it is not always clear who is using whom. For example, those who, on the one hand, reported on the apparently serene death of Quang Duc, steadfastly seated in the lotus position, were the ones who, on the other, also noted that the event was clearly planned and organized with the American press in mind (the reporters and photographers who covered the event were tipped off in advance that something significant was about to take place at this particular intersection)

and that throughout this episode a fellow monk repeatedly announced over a : loudspeaker that a Buddhist martyr was dying. In other words, even though the media and scholars essentialized and idealized the death of Quang Duc, nevertheless, the sociopolitically abstracted image of his burning body was still a tremendously powerful sociopolitical force. Furthermore, the abstract images and descriptions themselves can become po-

The Imperial Dynamic and Discourse 191 tent symbols for indigenous nationalist movements. As Talal Asad notes, the “acquisition of new forms of language from the modern West—whether by forcible imposition, insidious insertion, or voluntary borrowing—is part of what makes for new possibilities of action in non-Western societies” (1993: 13). Morton Fried, for example, has persuasively argued that the concept of tribe, as it is applied to native North Americans, is actually a conceptual tool developed by the colonial powers that functioned to formalize what had previously been only casual and local social divisions (1975). In spite of the fact that “tribe” as a formal concept may have developed as a tool for isolating and handling indigenous populations, today it is effectively used as an organizational tool by members of these same indigenous populations in their efforts to regain control of what they consider their rightful ancestral territories.!’7 Therefore, strategies of essentialization and generalization are not, as Said’s critique might have suggested, by definition the tools of the oppressors. As suggested by Clifford, “we-they distinctions... are also useful to anti-imperialism and national liberation movements” (1988: 261). Or, as I argue throughout this book, the essentialized “artificial entities” (in Clifford’s words) of history, gender, politics, and even religion do have a central role to play in the study of human beliefs and practices. Problems arise, however, when one essentialized theoretical scale that generates any one of the meanings that these constructs can have is held to be normative to the exclusion of all others. Unlike Said’s emphasis on the victimized nature of the Oriental other, I have not attempted to make claims concerning what constitutes a definitively proper representation of the other; as Asad has asserted, “[t]here is no single, privileged

narrative of the modern world” (1993: 9). What this book has been primarily concerned to investigate are the ways in which one normative, rhetorical, and textual strategy (the sui generis claim) functions to disallow the scholarly use of all other theoretical categories, thereby privileging not only one theoretical construct and the scholars who employ it but also an entire discourse—the interrelated ways of talking, thinking, writing, communicating, and acting. It is not so much that a historical and sociopolitical analysis of human beings involved in what they might term religious actions is a more adequate or accurate representation of these people than one that employs the sui generis assumption, for ““more accurate” is a value judgment based on prior and undefended commitments. Rather, because the sui generis status of religion is not argued or defended, but must simply and intuitively be asserted by scholars, then this one construct is no more authoritative than any of the other theoretical or “artificial entities” scholars routinely employ to study and characterize human actions and beliefs. There is no “right of way”

for sui generis religion. Therefore, I have not attempted to demonstrate that the use of research methods based on sui generis religion are theoretically or morally wrong, but have simply demonstrated that such methods and theories are entrenched in unrecognized issues of discursive demarcation, power, and control, and that sociopolitical implications follow their use.

/.

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory

That we construct “religion” and “science” is not the main problem; that we forget that we have constructed them in our own image—that is a problem. —Catherine Bell

Theory is just a practice forced into a new form of self-reflectiveness on account of certain grievous problems it has encountered. Like small lumps on the neck, it is a symptom that all is not well. —tTerry Eagleton

[T]he antidote to ideology is not simply science but critique. —Dominick La Capra

Theorizing as Indulgence? So far, I have been largely critical of not only the theoretical foundations and methodologies of the dominant discourse in the study of religion but also its unacknowledged, even disguised, sociopolitical implications. Moving outward from

the work of Mircea Eliade, I have critically examined the ideological nature of some common representational strategies that scholars of religion employ in a wide range of discursive sites—strategies that constructed a place for the study of religion by institutionalizing a language of essences that simultaneously disguised its own historical trace. In each case, we found not only the same suspect strategies

that serve to isolate and privilege the scholarly as well as the sociopolitical and cultural authority of the scholar of sui generis religion but also a clearly delineated, if marginalized, oppositional discourse. Given this critique of some of the past methods and theories in the field, it is now time to turn our attention briefly to its future and suggest the significance of

| 192

| the oppositional, or naturalist, discourse for the future of the study of religion. If the past construction of the discourse was so intimately bound to the theories, definitions, and methods that scholars generate and employ, then it seems sensible

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 193 to presume that the future well-being of the study of religion will be equally determined by methods and theories. Given that the long-identified, ambiguous, institutional identity of religious studies has, in recent years, become so acute as to lead to some closings and restructuring of several North American departments, there is indeed more than meets the eye in these debates on definitions, concepts, and theories. This chapter argues that explicit and testable theories of religion are necessary for the future well-being of the field. By testable theories of religion, I simply mean

naturalist theories or, in Dennett’s terms, cranes rather than the implicit and undefendable skyhook theorizing documented in the previous chapters. What must be made clear, however, is that I do not mean to imply a return to the particular type of theorizing characteristic of earlier efforts to generate naturalistic accounts of religion. Here I have in mind the ontologically reductive, naturalistic accounts that dominated much nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship. If this were indeed the only alternative to the discourse on sui generis religion, then perhaps we could sympathize more with those scholars who constructed elaborate facades to protect religion from being explained away at the hands of social scientists. Surely the ultimate and final theories of early social scientific scholarship were problematic precisely because they presumed the existence of skyhooks as much

as any theory might. Not understanding that theoretical activity, like all human activity, takes place within a particular intellectual, social, and political context, earlier naturalistic scholarship on religion was authorized by its appeals to notions of value-free science and objectivity (skyhooks if ever there were any) that are simply no longer tenable in academic discourses. Given the role played by postmodern and social constructionist critiques in situating scientific discourses within their own historical and discursive contexts, a naturalistic approach to the study of religion can no longer aim to produce a final theory, just as the study of religion can no longer find its justification in absolute autonomy—be that the autonomy of the discourse on sui generis religion or the absolute objectivity of the science of religion. As the philosopher Helen Longino has noted, much like the discourse on sui generis religion I have examined, the “idea of a value-free science presupposes that the object of inquiry is given in and by nature.” As opposed to such a conception of science, she advocates a contextualist approach that presumes that these “things,” inasmuch as they are objects of scholarly discourse, are constituted not only by our theories but also “by social needs and interests that become encoded in the assumptions of research programs (1990: 191). Her recommendation is simply to conceive of science as a social and multidisciplinary practice, where competing values engage in self-critical practices. So the alternative naturalistic discourse on religion devises historically embedded explanatory cranes rather than searching for intuitive skyhooks. It acknowledges the situated and constructed nature of human discourses and recognizes that

194 Manufacturing Religion whatever progress will be made—to what ultimate end we are not sure—will come as a result of self-criticism, testability, predictability, and falsifiability. It finds issues of description and interpretation to be important, as well as issues of explanation. And it differs from the discourse on sui generis religion, as well as the more harshly

conceived objective science of religion, in that it no longer strives for special, privileged knowledge. The naturalist discourse on religion attempts at every turn to make explicit and then defend or critique the implicit theories that, until now, have largely constituted the study of religion. It is truly a tactical, oppositional discourse.

As should by now be clear, for a number of contemporary scholars, explicit theoretical analysis in general, and naturalistic theories of religion in particular, are considered either unimportant or secondary to the work of description and interpretation. As carried out in the discourse on sui generis religion, the scrutiny of one’s methods and theories is most often left to seasoned descriptivists who are able to look back over their career from the vantage point of what seems to be detached hindsight. Theoreticians and methodologists in the study of religion have routinely either developed from their own prior descriptivist or even normative theological incarnations or have had to gain legitimacy in the field first by downplaying their actual interests and then by establishing themselves as experts in one of the recognized subspecialties of the field. In other words, the dominant presumption is that theories grow organically from one’s immersion in the data—or the hard facts—rather than the other way around. Theory is, to quote Gary Lease, understood by many scholars of religion to be “an indulgence at best, a depravity

at worst” (1994: 455). | The Study of Religion Is the Study of Theories and Methodologies

Given the reigning view that theories of religion are unnecessary indulgences, it is

understandable that students of religion may lag behind their peers in terms of critical, theoretical skills. Undergraduate and graduate students alike often have little opportunity to learn about the contributions of such scholars as Miller, Tiele, Robertson Smith, van der Leeuw, and others, let alone learn about the important role played by implicit and explicit theories of religion in directing scholarly research. As I demonstrated in my examination of comparative religion textbooks, when it comes to issues of theory, the modern classroom in the study of religion has in some ways not developed appreciably in the last one hundred years. Take, for example, the case of James G. Frazer’s 1918 essay, “The Fall of Man,” now widely available to students in Alan Dundes’s classroom resource on myth, — entitled Sacred Narrative (1984: 72-97). In that article, Frazer reconstructs what he

considers to have been the original version of the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. After surveying a number of related stories from around the world, he | concludes that the story of the Fall was originally an effort to explain why snakes

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 195 are immortal (as can be seen from the worldwide symbolism of skin shedding) and why humans are mortal. In the original story, he speculates, the snake was a messenger from the deity to Adam and Eve, who were neither mortal nor immortal

at the time, for they had yet to eat either of the tree of life or the tree of death (for the sake of consistency, this must have been the original name by which the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was known, Frazer asserts). The cunning snake, however, corrupts the message of the benevolent and well-intentioned deity and suggests to Eve that the tree of death would be a better source of food, thereby reserving the fruit from the tree of life for itself. In the hands of Frazer, then, the

original form of what he understands to be an evolutionarily early attempt at explaining events in the natural world (e.g., why do we die? why are snakes immortal?) conforms to the criteria of all good explanations: it is simple, clear, and consistent (77). In his reworked version, Frazer eliminates much of what he understands to be the imprecise and vague aspects of the story as it has come down to us—never making his criteria for exclusion especially explicit. The central importance of the tree of life, which plays an innocuous role in the Genesis story, is recovered; the motives of the snake for deceiving Eve are determined; and it “sets the character

of the Creator in a far more amiable light” (77). Frazer concludes that in this “savage myth,” as it was originally told, “the primitive philosopher has inferred that in the beginning a perpetual renewal of youth either was appointed by a benevolent being for the human species or was actually enjoyed by them, and that but for a crime, an accident, or a blunder it would have been enjoyed by them forever” (96). Without a critical appreciation of the role played by explicit, implicit, and often undefended (possibly unconscious) theoretical commitments, Frazer’s essay is probably of little use in the contemporary classroom, other than as an example of the European imperialist attitude at its intellectual nadir. In fact, Frazer’s essay is probably offensive to many of today’s students precisely because it presumes that both our and their texts are mythological (possibly offensive to religiously conservative students) and it employs social evolutionist assumptions (possibly offensive to politically liberal students). Due to the general lack of theoretical thinking skills required of students in many of their university courses, they have great difficulty developing a critical appreciation of such essays and instead react viscerally to such nineteenth-century scholarship. However, Frazer’s essay is very useful as a concrete example of how methods and the results they generate are the products of prior, sometimes hidden, theoretical commitments in general and, specif-

ically, theories of religion. It provides an opportunity for students to come to understand that it “is only theories and concepts that convert facts into data, that render them significant as examples of larger intellectual issues” (J. Z. Smith 1995b: 413).

To be more precise, Frazer’s choice of method to investigate this account of

196 Manufacturing Religion the Fall—the comparative method—is based on his prior commitment to a theory

of unilinear social evolution: because they are us at an earlier historical stage, our , misplaced survivals can finally and fully be understood in the context of their stories. Furthermore, on the basis of the widely shared intellectualist assumptions |

of his era, Frazer presumed myths to be cognitively simplistic attempts to explain | natural phenomena. In turn, these intellectualist commitments drive his three criteria for strong explanations—criteria that guide his reconstructive efforts. All explanations must be clear, simple, and consistent. (The Genesis tale is none of these, so, he reasons, it must be a survival.) Then, through a “hunting-gathering” process of surveying countless missionaries’ and explorers’ accounts of, for example, snake imagery and stories of perverted messages, he was able to devise a simple and consistent “original” version of the story that made much more sense as an explanation of why people die than did the version of the tale handed down to us in Genesis. As should be clear, then, Frazer’s reconstructed “original” story is not so much the result of accurate and nuanced scholarly, comparative work as it is the result of his theoretical presuppositions concerning (1) social and cognitive evolution, (2) myths that function as explanations, and (3) theological assumptions concerning the proper characteristics of a benevolent, monotheistic deity. Far from being an indulgence, the relevance of theory in our field is that it enables students to go beyond blind acceptance or visceral rejection of the findings of a person like Frazer. Instead, they are able to understand his reasoning process, to find the criteria whereby he was able to select his data, and to critique not only his findings but his preobservational choices as well, all in a much more sophisticated and defensible manner. They discover that Frazer’s results are not to be judged simply on the basis of whether he accurately and faithfully described the

myths (i.e., the hard data) he uses as the basis for his comparison but, more important, on the adequacy of the comparative method itself and the defensibility of the theoretical commitments that support this choice of method. Furthermore, such critical insights can then be applied to all other work in the field. Therefore, training in critical thinking about explicit and implicit theories enables students to discover that the comparative study of religion is not sui generis but, like all human intellectual efforts, is just as much the comparative study of scholarly theories and methodologies.

| Institutional Legitimacy and Sui Generis Religion Although one should not overreact and predict the demise of the academic study of religion solely on the grounds that some departments have recently had to be retrenched or restructured, surely one would be foolish not to recognize a pattern in these recent developments.! Among the many complex and probably diverse causes for the current institutional insecurity in the field, not least of which would be economic and political factors indicative of late-twentieth-century capitalism

_ Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 197 (concerning the impact of late capitalism on the university—in particular, the academic job market—see Nelson 1995), are the general absence of theorizing and the field’s lack of institutional coherence. One basis for academic identity can be found in a framework that comprises clearly articulated and testable theories; sadly, such a framework has yet to take hold in the modern discourse on religion. Ironically, then, the ongoing institutional insecurity of the study of religion is largely the result of the very way in which the recent generation of scholars attempted to

legitimize their work and establish their place in the modern public university. Concerned to distinguish their research from explicitly confessional, largely Christian scholarship—for both epistemological and, in light of the 1963 Abington v. Schempp U.S. Supreme Court decision, legal reasons—on the one hand, and to separate it from seemingly atheistic and religiously antagonistic social scientists, on the other, scholars of religion provided a rationale for their place within the university that was based on the presumably and self-evidently sui generis nature of their data. A suitable example of this strategy to attain legitimacy earlier in the century (1924) is provided by Joachim Wach, who is concerned with bringing about the “emancipation of the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft) from the domi-

nation of the other humanistic studies,” a liberation that will occur through the “inner consolidation of the discipline [of the history of religions]” (1988b: 7). After asserting that the religious world is a “unique configuration of life, with laws and

principles of its own,” which occupies “an autonomous realm... within human cultural life,” Wach delimits the hermeneutical strategies necessary for an adequate understanding of this “specifically religious” aspect of human life. He maintains that these interpretive practices can best be carried out only once they are liberated from the domination of other disciplines that use and manipulate the research of

the historian of religions for such purposes as legitimizing a literary theory, a theology, or a philosophy rather than what can only be interpreted as the effort simply and truly to understand the religious other. Forty years later, we find what could be considered a classic example of this attempt to defend the institutional legitimacy of the reemerging North American field on the basis of sui generis religion. Contributing to the Stony Brook Conference on Religion as an Academic Discipline, J. Alfred Martin, former professor at Union Theological Seminary, writes, Our task, then, is first to note the fact that religion is a fact. And then we must ask what we should do about that fact if we are faithfully to discharge our responsibilities as institutions of higher education. We cannot and should not wait until we have formulated a mutually acceptable definition of religion, or arrived at a full and careful characterization of the phenomenon involved, to raise that question. After all, we do not wait upon definitions of art or of history before engaging in the study of art or history and providing appropriate academic

structures for such study. Let us simply note that there are scholars who are |

198 Manufacturing Religion concerned about, and who devote their special critical attention to, religious thought, religious institutions, and religious practices. In the course of their inquiry, as in the course of many other inquiries, peculiar constellations of method and emphasis have emerged from the inquiry itself. The phenomena tend to set the scale. (1967: 4)

Here one finds the perplexing circularity and self-evidential nature of the assertions

made throughout the discourse on sui generis religion. Like art, here no doubt conceived along exclusively aesthetic lines, religion is self-evident in the world around us and in no need of definition, let alone theorizing. But Martin mistakenly conceives of history as likewise a self-evident pursuit in no need of definition or theory. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that a methodology somehow and almost

organically “emerges” from the data instead of being derived from preexisting theories. Surely, history departments are organized not around some naturally occurring or essential value of historical data but around an explicitly articulated methodology for studying an aspect of human culture. A more contemporary example is provided by Ugo Bianchi, in his essay “Method, Theory, and the Subject Matter” (1993), in which his understanding of the roles played by methods and theories accords with Martin’s—both of which are virtually the exact opposite of what I am proposing here. Bianchi writes, Method concentrates on the accurate description of the facts, as well as on their historical and structural contextualization and, from this basis, on their comparison and interpretation. Theory, in turn, is an interpretive endeavor. ... The modus operandi of method is positive and inductive, deriving its authority from a study aiming at discovering genetic (i.e., historical) processes and typologicalhistorical affinities on the basis of an integral, culture-historical scrutiny of the data. Theory, on the contrary, comes from on high, highlighting and informing subject-matter in a kind of deductive, Platonic operation not always open to falsification, especially in the case of theories based on a priori reductionism. (349)

Bianchi fails to recognize that his use of such terms as “accurate,” “facts,” “context,” and “comparison” presupposes complex but unacknowledged commitments that ground such judgments concerning just what counts as context and what is worthy of being isolated from this complex context and being compared with something else that is equally decontextualized. Simply put, for Bianchi, theories do not drive methods and scholarship (i.e., methods are procedures for achieving theoretically determined agendas and goals), but rather methods arise from an accurate scrutiny of the apparently objective facts and theories are later additions to the scholarly pursuit. Only in this way can he conclude that the issue of the specificity of religion is not a matter of theoretical presuppositions but rather an issue of descriptivists carrying out pre- or even nontheoretical, “sound comparative, cultural-historical research” (351). To phrase it another way, the data demands that the researcher intuitively recognize its inherent specificity. Unfortunately, such

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 199 an intuitivist claim has not been sufficient to legitimize a scholarly field in the modern university. What may be one of the best recent examples of this can be found in E. Ann

Matter’s account (1995) of the events that surrounded the near closing of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Religious Studies. Matter’s analysis of

the current institutional woes being experienced in the study of religion in the United States builds on the thesis argued in Stephen Carter’s widely read book, The Culture of Disbelief (1993): “religion is embarrassing to contemporary American

intelligentsia. ...[L]iberals and intellectuals of our society have generally refused to take religion seriously or to understand it as a real cultural force” (Matter 1995: 387). Carter’s book is a potent example of the discourse on sui generis religion, written for the popular market and applied to securing the legal autonomy and public authority of organized religion in America. “What does it mean,” he asks, “to say that religious groups should be autonomous? It means, foremost, that they should not be beholden to the secular world, that they should exist neither by the forbearance of, nor to do the bidding of, the society outside of themselves” (3435). Or, as Carter asserts a little later, “[rJeligions are in effect independent centers of power”; religion is an “independent moral force” and, “at its heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world; it is a way of saying to fellow human beings and to the state those fellow human beings have erected, ‘No, I will not accede to your will’ ” (35, 39, 41). Of interest is that Carter, a Yale University law professor, employs the same strategies to “take religion seriously” that scholars of sui generis religion use to distinguish their privileged study from other forms of scholarship. For example, religion is exclusively understood as an issue of faith, as “sources of moral understanding,” and as a matter of insider “belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs” (36, 25). Because of this intriguing similarity to the discourse on sui generis religion, and because of its remarkably positive reception among the politically powerful in the United States, The Culture of Disbelief is a book that deserves the critical attention of scholars of religion, for it convincingly demonstrates that this discourse is not limited to academia. Whether or not Carter and Matter are correct in their understanding of elite culture’s disdain for religious claims—an analysis of this would entail a completely separate inquiry—what must be pointed out is that their thesis refers only to the supposedly antagonistic reception of religious practices and religious beliefs not the reception of their study by humanistic or social scientific scholars. However, Matter quickly conflates these two different enterprises by moving on to assert that “many academics think that the study of religion deserves to be starved out, demoted, or

disposed of somehow” (387). This confusion of religious practice with the study of religion then becomes the basis for her entire apology for the religious studies at Penn. For example, framed in terms of the religious history of Penn (early on, Matter surveys the role played by Benjamin Franklin’s friend, the Christian evangelist

200 Manufacturing Religion George Whitefield, in helping to establish the university in 1740), Matter’s account

attempts to explain the institutional troubles of her department in light of this

| belief that “power structures are uncomfortable” with the message of the study of religion. What is its message? Nothing other than the message of religion itself: “T think religion poses a threat to contemporary American power structures because the deepest shared insight of all religious traditions is that there is more to existence than meets the eye. Religious insight tells us that this world is not all there is, that this world is a broken place, and that the powers and potentates of this world have had a hand in breaking it” (391). Or, as she maintains earlier on the same page, “The establishment of departments of religious studies is a significant way a university can serve as a place where scholars explore some of the most important issues confronting us, colleagues in other disciplines are reminded of this powerful force in the real world, and young people learn hew to reflect on the deepest issues that concern them” (emphasis added). In the midst of conceptualizing this virtual missions agenda for the institutionalized study of religion, Matter fails to see that to study human culture in terms of the heuristic religion is not to be equated with actually making and promoting value judgments concerning such “religious insights” as the self-evidently important, powerful, and deep aspects of the real world. Whether or not the world is broken, the academic study of religion concerns the study of human beings and communities that may think it is. Unfortunately, Matter’s conception of the field is more akin to the nineteenth-century model surveyed in a previous chapter: the comparative study of religions appears to be a subdivision of a world theology that is intent on determining the deep commonalities, and therefore truths, of diverse religious traditions. Matter’s undefended insight that “[rJeligion exists in the center of things, and at the margin bearing witness to the corruption of the center” (392) coupled with her confusing its practice with its study fuel her conception of the academic study of religion as a personally and socially salvific enterprise. What has this all to do with the failed attempts at legitimizing this one scholarly field in the modern university? The institutional autonomy for the study of religion that Matter continually defends in her essay is justified exclusively in terms of the supposed self-evidencies and value judgments noted above. But if one does not necessarily share a belief in these foundational, virtually metaphysical claams—

and if, on top of this, one happens to be an administrator looking for rational, potentially refutable argumentation rather than assertions concerning the essential human value of a discipline—it is not altogether clear that Matter’s insights con-

cerning the “importance of the study of religion, on its own terms, as its own discipline” (388) will carry any weight whatsoever in the long run. In fact, Matter’s analysis of the field’s institutional insecurity itself ought to be of interest to scholars of religion, for her application of Carter’s thesis concerning liberal culture’s dismissive attitude about religion is evidence of a profound and fundamental lack of

theoretical nuance in distinguishing certain human practices from their analysis

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 201 on the basis of “the methodological canons of the humanistic and social sciences” (Wiebe 1995: 366, n. 11).? In fact, such an absence of theory confirms the position argued throughout this chapter, for by explaining the ongoing institutional insecurity of the field as essentially a matter of religious persecution at the hands of the secular, liberal elite, Matter’s essay provides a perfect example of how the discourse on sui generis essentializes and obscures the issues. Simply put, irreducible religion fuels her analysis and prevents any discussion of the kind of theoretical and sociopolitical issues that may actually be behind the ongoing crisis in the field.

A Natural History of the Study of Religion As a result of such intuitivist methods in the study of religion, the field has never attained a secure identity; simply put, largely because of such undefended, implicit theories, no one really knows precisely what the study of religion is, what constitutes its data, and what are its goals. For example, ambiguous classifications and circular definitions for the field’s data abound without receiving sufficient critical treatment. In no other field could such a dubious term as the mysterium tremendum be so widely accepted as if it actually possessed analytical usefulness—and despite biting critiques of such a categorial tool, scholars of religion continue to employ the category of mystery. As the field has traditionally been conceived, such definitions and classifications are generally not open to public debate and scrutiny, because, according to those who actively pursue the discourse on sui generis reli- gion, to question such things as the basis for an intuitivist definition and the status of religion is to fall victim to reductionist temptations. But in attempting to avoid reductionism by appealing to essences, mysteries, private experiences, the field as it has developed in North America has lost much of the self-definition it might have once had during its formative years in the late—nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries when assorted theories of religion—which, admittedly, were highly speculative, imperialist, and thoroughly inadequate by contemporary standards—constituted an explicit and arguable basis for comparative studies. As Pascal Boyer reminds us in the opening lines of his own effort to generate a theory of religion, such “hypotheses, however unsatisfactory, were at least a springboard for more refined speculation” (1994: vii). But if, as has been the case, the field continues to count such undebatable assertions as Otto’s, Wach’s, Tillich’s, Eliade’s, and others’, among its foundational narratives, how is one to determine not just what counts as data but what constitutes progress in the field? The study of religion in North

America as conceived and finally legitimized in the mid-twentieth century, therefore, constitutes an ill-defined legacy that dooms contemporary scholars to continued methodological, theoretical, and institutional ambiguity. Today, the dubious theoretical basis of the field seems to have much to do with its ongoing institutional insecurity. When the topic of this book was first conceived, in the early 1990s, the current troubles in some departments of religion

202 Manufacturing Religion were part of the unforeseen future. At that time it was perhaps not so apparent that the suspect nature of the discourse on sui generis religion was so intimately related to the well-being of departments and programs in the study of religion. However, the critique of the discourse that has developed in the previous chapters provides us with a timely diagnosis of the field’s long-standing malaise. As I have argued throughout, it is the presumed autonomy of religion that dictates the development of unique interpretive methods and the establishment of scholars who employ these methods in a distinct and separate disciplinary location within the university. Simply put, the discourse on sui generis religion has been conceived— and its very existence continually defended—not as an analytically and pragmatically useful designation for studying but one aspect of complex human beings and communities but as an ontologically separate inquiry into a privileged, dehistoricized, human essence, Homo religiosus. That such an ill-defined and poorly articulated concept provides a rather poor foundation for a scholarly field should come as no surprise. That the institutionalized study of religion, as founded on sui generis religion, may itself come to an end should also come as no surprise. Although he is discussing the characteristics, and predicting the eventual dissolution, of religious systems themselves, and not the academic study of religious systems, Lease arrives at a provocative conclusion: This daring enterprise [the development of historical religions] to be totally inclusive of all paradoxes by establishing exclusive meanings, must lead eventually to dissonances, the conflict among paradoxes. The intolerable friction generated by

this tension—a society cannot live without them, nor can it live with them— builds eventually to a white-hot heat: the societal systems break down, and the “structures” which allowed such a paradoxical mutuality dissolve. (1994: 475; see also Lease 1995a)

For Lease, religious systems are identified by their supposed ability to contain paradoxes through a variety of authorizing strategies, not least of which is their status as self-evident metasystems of explanation that, by definition, exclude all competing explanatory frameworks. Because the meaning and social identities constructed for humans by their religious systems must make sense of the contingen-

cies of historical, human existence, Lease concludes that it is inevitable that at some point in their “natural history” the contradictions and paradoxes that religious systems house will lead to an internal failure of the system as a whole: “ ‘religion,’ as evolved and defined in a wide variety of human cultures, finally produces the very conditions it was designed to protect against [the dissolution of identity]. Instead of ‘salvation’ or preservation of integral consciousness, it brings about the dismemberment of that very consciousness itself. ‘Religion,’ in other words, is ultimately programmed suicide” (1994: 479). Lease concludes that a nat-

ural history of religions will have to take into account not simply their rise but their eventual—and that their dissolution is inevitable is his main point—demise. @

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 203 As we have seen, through its emphasis on discerning coherent meaning from what may well be heterogeneous data, its reliance on intuitively grounded methodologies, and its phenomenological acceptance, rather than its critical examination, of the paradoxes and contradictions housed within religious systems, the discourse on sui generis religion, much like the religious systems Lease examines, might inevitably dissolve.* In large part, then, the present study can be read as an extended diagnostic effort that constitutes one part of such a natural history. If scholars are to avoid the confusion that resulted from attempts to legitimize the

study of religion on sui generis grounds, and if they aim to avoid the possible demise of the field, they must recognize the need for developing coherent definitions and defensible theories of religion. As Sam Gill has observed, when “the academic study of religion fails to understand and to accept the demands of being a member of the academic community, which it does routinely, it embraces vagueness; it invites its own dissolution” (1994: 966—967).

Theories, Definitions, and Self-Definition In his closing comments to a recent collection of case studies on the state of the field in six North American public institutions, Jonathan Z. Smith comments that, because the study of religion arose in the academic boom years of the 1960s and 19708, it should come as “no surprise that it becomes particularly vulnerable when that boom goes bust” (i995b: 409). As accurate as Smith’s observation is, the current threats to some departments of religion cannot be adequately explained simply by citing social and economic issues specific to the late 1980s and early 1990s. As important as these two factors are, citing them as the primary or exclusive

reasons why the study of religion now finds itself threatened minimalizes and overlooks systemic and on-going issues of method, theory, and the institutional identity. This point is not lost on Smith, for he immediately goes on to identify two additional reasons for the current threats to the study of religion’s institutional autonomy: “By and large, religious studies lacks a constituency. .. . [T]his lack has its origin in the nature of the teaching enterprise and in the self-definition of the

field.” |

First, the study of religion functions as a service department in most instances, meaning that its fortunes depend to a very large extent on the course and elective

requirements of other departments, for example, introductory, or “bread-andbutter,” courses are well attended more than likely because they satisfy breadth requirements for larger, better established departments within the university. And as a service department, two related problems arise: (1) the number of religious studies majors will inevitably be few (as Smith observes, there is a disturbing circularity present here: “If there are few majors, then each course is, to a large degree, an introductory course making them unattractive to potential majors”); and related

, to this, (2) any defense of a service department’s productivity that is based on the

204 Manufacturing Religion number of students (more likely than not being elective enrollments) means that at some point in the future low enrollments can just as easily justify retrenchments (again, according to Smith, “the inherent weakness of enrollment statistics is compounded when Newton’s law begins to make itself felt, that which goes up must eventually come down. Demographics are two-edged weapons, as many programs have come to learn’). But the service-department model consciously adopted by many departments tells only part of the story, for, as also identified by Smith, there is yet another reason for the current lack of identity and coherence in the field: it has no widely accepted and intellectually defensible self-definition. As an analogy, Smith points to the example of teaching languages and linguistics in the university: Most individuals interested in particular languages or families of languages find their homes in area programs (whether geographically or linguistically named). Most individuals interested in language-itself (regardless of their competence in particular languages) find their home in linguistics departments. Each may find the status of the other a provocative issue for theoretical (and political) discourse. But, the division of labor is clear, even if blurred (through joint appointments and the like) in practice. (412)

The point is a very important one. Because the modern discourse on religion has been built on a phenomenological emphasis of localized description and interpretation, it has forsaken the explicit theorizing necessary for grounding the kind of generalizations that enable scholars to talk about religion in much the same manner as linguists theorize about language without being bogged down in the study of this or that particular language. This does not mean that the study of particular languages, or religions, rituals, myths, texts, and so on, is somehow auxiliary to either field; what it does suggest, however, is that relying exclusively on local description and interpretation can lead to problems in the wider field, where scholars are left with no theoretical tools to construct a discursive community. Discourses are constructed, in part, by widely operating generalizations that constitute the discursive coin of their practitioners. Without defensible theories and the kinds of generalizations they make possible, the study of religion literally deconstructs itself into unrelated area studies that may in fact differ little from any number of other fields already well entrenched within the university. As Smith asks, “If the adjective (a particular religious tradition) rather than the noun (religion) has priority in your studies, if your prime competence is certified by another

department, what is it that you do that you cannot do in another location? If the | constituent parts of religious studies are area studies, why should the amalgam not

be disassembled and the parts returned to their respective wholes?” (412). The coherence of the discourse on religion, as opposed to discourses on the religions, then, is not to be found in an external, utterly unique object (e.g., the sacred) but in the theories about human behavior that scholars use to posit religion as a datum

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 205 of research in the first place. Hans Drijvers said as much over twenty years ago: “a theory is required to mark off a field of research, [to] state what may be found there and which aspects thereof are essential. Armed with such a theory the researcher goes to work” (1973: 63). And, as Donald Wiebe concluded a decade later,

without a theory of religion to unite the constituent parts, “the scholarly or academic study of religion is simply not complete” (1983: 295) nor, we can now add, _

is it even possible. | The two issues of relevance here—and this is worth repeating as well as elaborating—are (1) the datum’s lack of definition (i.e., what counts as religion), which is due to a lack of defensible theorizing in the field—after all, “definitions are only as good as the theories that inspire them” (Lawson and McCauley 1993: 217)—and (2) that the institutional implication of such definitional and theoretical ambiguity is a lack of institutional identity for the field as a whole (in Smith’s terms, its selfdefinition). Both of these shortcomings, then, are intimately related to the wide-

spread injunction against theorizing that is indicative of the discourse on sui generis religion.*

The implicit relations among definitional clarity, theoretical work, and institutional identity were apparent to Hans Penner and Edward Yonan in their oftencited essay, “Is a Science of Religion Possible?” (1972). This article is an attempt to examine the theoretical issues involved in efforts to define, reduce, explain, and understand. After highlighting the way in which many scholars gloss over the importance of explicit definitions of religion, they conclude, we are convinced that the constant debate over the “field” of religion and its proper sub-divisions is an exercise in wasted energy unless it is preceded by, and directed toward, a careful consideration of the definitional task. To argue that the “field” of religion is, or is not, constituted by the history, psychology, sociology, . ecology, phenomenology, and theology of religion is in itself dependent upon some common agreement as to the exact nature of religion. Without this agreement, we will continue to have constant bickering over what discipline are workers in the “field” and who among them is sovereign. (109)

Their recommendation? “What is needed is a serious concern for explicit theories of religion that can be discussed and tested” (131). Sadly, to a large extent members of the field have resisted such efforts and, as a result, the field as we know it is the product of sanctions against theoretically derived generalizations and explanations. In attempting to be all things to all people, the study of religion risks its own demise and becoming nothing whatsoever.

The Polytheoretical, Multidisciplinary Model As Robert Michaelsen concludes in his 1965 survey of the field, “the study of religion has not achieved the degree of precision in methodology and thoroughness

| 206 Manufacturing Religion of scholarship which the subject warrants” (156). It was clear even at such an early

stage that the success of this new field would depend on the degree to which scholars were capable of thinking critically about issues of methodology and, implicitly, theory. That Michaelsen’s comment is just as relevant thirty years after it was first written surely signifies the failure of many members of the past generation of scholars to engage in the kinds of issues that bear directly on the health of the field. (Unfortunately, Michaelsen appears to have concluded that a unifying methodology would be based on religion’s “irreducible element” [8].) Although scholars of religion seem to acknowledge the importance of method and theory (there have been, after all, a number of congresses and publications devoted to issues of theory and methodology’), unfortunately, the widely operating presumption concerning the autonomy of their datum and the rightful autonomy of their methods meant that some of these efforts to provide a rationale for the field would turn out to be some of the very causes of its inevitable downfall. Indeed, some of these essay collections on methodology are limited to elaborating on the narrow consensus of phenomenological and hermeneutical methods and do not attempt to develop a naturalistic theory of religion; instead, religion is presumably a self-evidently important experience, worthy of scholarly attention and government funding, and theory is a luxury not to be indulged in too excessively. So it would seem that in the mid 1990s, we have once again come full circle in terms of providing a rationale for the academic study of religion as a credible scholarly exercise carried out in the public university rather than a confessional or religiously pluralistic endeavor. From Wach in 1924 to Matter in 1995, we have seen little development in this one attempt to establish the public study of religion. However, in his 1971 survey of graduate education, Claude Welch correctly observes that, along with this regnant discourse, there was an alternative institutional model: On the one hand, it is said that religious studies programs have been so much concerned to display their interdisciplinary credentials that they have lost sight of their own primary subject matter. Again, it is alleged that there is in religion no special subject matter or method, but only a convenient collaboration of a groups of scholars with overlapping interests. Against this, there are some who insist that the study of religion must be defined in relation to a unique object, a distinct aspect of human experience called religious, or the sacred or the holy, and that the investigation of this phenomenon requires a method uniquely appropriate to it. (52)

Welch concludes that this debate should not be settled, seeing it instead as an instance of the potential creativity in the field: the “tensions will continue and it is healthy for them to do so.” Such a recommendation for the status quo is perplexing in light of the fact that, in spite of the gains made by the field, by the early 1970s Welch maintained that it remained in a state of identity crisis (18-29), and

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 207 also in light of a number of his overall recommendations that advocate increased interdisciplinary cooperation and a greater concentration on social scientific studies (3-9). The pluralistic model advocated by Welch and many others has been one of the major stumbling blocks in the field over the last two decades, insofar as programs have been built that attempt to hold the otherwise incompatible sui generis and naturalistic discourses in some sort of creative tension. Because these two discourses are fundamentally at odds with one another, programs in the study of religion, relentlessly addressing internal discursive and political controversies, have been frustrated at every step from establishing their own institutional identity.‘

This has contributed to today’s situation in which departments of religion are generally misunderstood and often viewed with suspicion by colleagues in departments of politics, economics, psychology, and the like. But if religion is no more and no less a scholarly construct than are politics, economics, culture, plants, continents, and mammals, and, further, if one agrees

with J. Z. Smith when he argues that “it is the study of religion that invented ‘religion’ ” (1988: 234),” then it, too, would seem to deserve a place within the university, if indeed the university is conceived as a place where the artifacts that many human beings invent and take for granted (e.g., texts, society, the individual, justice) are problematized and studied. We are forced to inquire, then, on what intellectual, theoretical, social, and even political bases we can justify this one scholarly pursuit. How, as we enter the twenty-first century, can we continue to engage in the academic study of religion? What will be the institutional identity of the study of religion if religion is no longer conceived as an autonomous experience of self-evidently numinous power? How will we—or will we even be able to— sanction, manufacture, and articulate the public discourse on religion that differs from committed, insider scholarship insomuch as it takes such scholarship and behavior as its datum? I ask nothing other than the question Welch posed two decades ago: “How can a proper coherence be attained and expressed in religious studies”?

In concentrating on the various scholarly contributions to this debate on institutional identity as it has taken shape in the previous decades, it may appear that there was no alternative model for carrying out research and teaching on religion in the publicly funded university. As should be evident from some of Welch’s comments as well as the many examples of naturalistic scholarship already cited in previous chapters, this could not be further from the truth. Writing in the

same Stony Brook Conference volume as J. Alfred Martin, John F. Wilson, then dean and professor of religion at Princeton University,® defends a coherent model for the field that is not grounded by sui generis religion. He opens his contribution to the conference by informing his readers that “[a]n earlier version of the conference agenda defined my task as justifying the study of religion as a discrete discipline—that is to say, a discipline sui generis. I do not think that it is a discipline —

208 Manufacturing Religion sui generis, but I do think it is a legitimate family of disciplines” (1967: 33). After examining the shortcomings of three models for carrying out the study of religion (i.e., as carried out exclusively in the humanities; as a response to religious pluralism within a society; and as simply a study of the doctrinal theology of a religion), Wilson argues that not only is there “nothing particularly unique about the disciplines which study religion under the auspices of a faculty of arts and science”

but that this study of religion “has no special method” (36). For Wilson, then, religion represents an analytical category that, “[l]ike all other cultural phenomena ... [is] to be studied by those methods which seem to be appropriate.” On the basis of this concept of religion as but one aspect of complex cultural forms, Wilson can propose that although the study of religion deserves no privilege, it, like the other aspects of culture, such as politics, economics, philosophy, and society, can conveniently be studied by scholars in a departmental setting: Although that class of phenomena we label “religious” has nothing inherent in it which requires departmental organization for its study, the class is sufficiently coherent to warrant such organization. Departments within faculties of arts and sciences or liberal arts colleges are primarily matters of convenience, a contemporary administrative device for bringing some order out of the vitalities which abound in the university or college. Accordingly, to organize the study of religion in this way is reasonable, since it leads to methodological self-consciousness as well as to more concision regarding subject matter. .. . Simply as a practical mat-

ter, however, it is important that the study of religion be placed on an equal footing with, shall we say, the study of that class of phenomena we label political or those classes we understand to be essentially literary. Nevertheless, nothing ought to be done within a department of religion which could not equally be done under the auspices of another department. (36)

In maintaining that the study of religion has no special methodology and in arguing for a family of disciplines in the study of religion, we have in this statement early evidence for a nonessentialist, multidisciplinary field. In light of the fact that this model did not win the day and that the question of institutional identity yet haunts the field, Wilson’s closing words take on an almost prophetic tone: “Without clarity regarding the kinds of issues I have discussed, we will produce only confusion out of the current attempt to foster and develop the academic study of religion” (37).

If indeed the current institutional challenge that the study of religion seems to be facing is in part due to the theoretical ambiguity—-some would go so far as to say the theoretical vacuity—of the field, then one important step toward a functional and secure self-identity within the modern teaching and research university will be the development of a number of cross-disciplinary, clearly articulated, and rationally defensible theories of religion that are recognized from the outset as theories, models rather than perfect representations of what is or ought

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 209 to be, that ground definitions and develop methodologies and explanations. I say “clearly articulated and rationally defensible” for a reason; although it is clear that sets of assumptions equally ground explanations as well as interpretations and descriptions, the latter two do not constitute a theory of religion but something more akin to an interpretation of the meaning of a religion for the devotee or the member of another religion. As such, descriptions and interpretations do not provide the entire basis for a naturalistic study of religion. In other words, in spite of the fact that one cannot operate as a scholar—let alone a rational human being— without sets of assumptions and beliefs, not all scholars develop theories that can be held up to public scrutiny and criticism. So the point is not simply to have assumptions—we all have those—but to be able explicitly to propose an intellectually defensible rationale for one’s theory, a rationale that can become part of the public debate of one’s field. The problem is that, in Lawson and McCauley’s words, anthropologists and scholars of religion alike

too often hold their theoretical presumptions unreflectively, which is to say, although they bring biases to their fieldwork experience, they have little understanding of their genesis, rationale, or organization (if any exists). Theories organize inquiry; explicit theories organize inquiry explicitly. The problem is that, all things being equal, it is better to hold positions reflectively rather than unreflectively. (1996: 181)

Because theories must be open to testing and argumentation, their strength and durability will depend on their ability to withstand public debate and criticism. It is true that Karl Popper acknowledged that theories can be based on intuition, but, as he was quick to point out, they cannot be sanctioned and defended by it: “We may admit that our groping is often inspired, but we must be on our guard against the belief, however deeply felt, that our inspiration carries any authority, divine or otherwise” (1985a: 57). Simply put, in the public discourse of the university, asserting something and defending it by saying, “I know!” or “The gods told me” just does not satisfy the evidential rules of the naturalistic discourse. Progress in the field, then, is evidenced by the number of discarded theoretical perspectives. As Popper phrased it, “the formulation of problems, the emergence of new problem situations, competing theories, mutual criticism

by way of argument: all these are indispensable means to scientific growth” (1985b: 73).

Because of the privatized and nontestable nature of the hypotheses that previously grounded the discourse on sui generis religion, thereby limiting its practice to a select group of informed, empathic insiders (a virtual priestly class), the theories that might provide the future study of religion with an identity have been developed within such public and criticizable frameworks as provided by the naturalist discourse. In other words, the future institutional security and identity of

210 Manufacturing Religion the academic study of religion is implicitly tied to recognizing that it is part of a multidisciplinary discourse concerned not simply with developing interpretations, understandings, and appreciations of essentially private, religious data but with proposing and testing explanations for religion, a theoretically demarcated way of talking about causes for certain sets of human beliefs and behaviors.

Like the Pith of the Plantain Tree If the study of religion is in need of rationally defensible and empirically testable theories (in the plural) of religion—rather than one metaphysically reductive metatheory—then a productive and secure institutional model on which the field can be based is the multidisciplinary model. The autonomous field, founded as it was by assertions sanctioned by the sui generis claim, is no longer tenable, because its object of study (e.g., religious experience, the sacred, the numinous) is not intellectually or politically defensible. And because there is no autonomous object, there ‘fs no peculiar and autonomous discipline such as the ‘science of religion’ that somehow hangs suspended between theology and the social/human sciences” (Wiebe 1983: 303). The challenge, then, is either to reconstruct the study of religion without sui generis religion or allow it to dissolve into the various fields from which it originally developed. It must be made very clear that this second option should not be interpreted as advocating an abrupt end to current departments of religion and their curricula. As Wilson already suggested, in the modern research university, departments are convenient administrative units that provide for social cohesion and interaction of scholars interested in similar questions. What it does mean, however, is that efforts on the part of scholars in the field would be best expended not in shoring up an already-crumbling essentialist edifice that, on closer examination (to quote from the tale of Siddhartha’s own enlightenment), is “as unsubstantial as the pith of a plantain tree.” Rather they should invest themselves in developing interdisciplinary connections with their colleagues in the social sciences, investigating the theoretical basis for their scholarly interests, and communicating to their undergraduate and graduate students the situated, polymethodic, and polytheoretical nature of scholarly discourses.”

Furthermore, this should not be interpreted as suggesting that the study of religion is somehow derivative and secondary to some other primary field. Only if

one presumes that a stable, Platonic essence underlies all efforts of humans to know their surroundings would such a conclusion appear to be sensible. The study of religion conceived as a theoretically grounded interdisciplinary exercise is no different from any other scholarly pursuit within the university, because politics, economics, physics, biology, geography, and so on, are all equally analytic, strategic conceptual categories formed by assorted discourses. This is not to say, however, that large numbers of scholars in each of these respective areas are not, at times,

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 211 just as essentialist in their studies as many scholars of religion; due as much to their enthusiasm as their efforts to sanction their own intellectual turf, scholars from across the university often fail to recognize the tactical, manufactured nature of their work and its implicit reliance on a whole arsenal of assumptions, theories, and definitions that do not naturally or implicitly reside in, nor are they spontaneously emitted from, their data. Only if one presumes, for example, that zoology or sociology has a one-to-one fit with reality or that the ideal type known as Homo economicus is an accurate description of how actual human beings behave, would one believe that the study of religion, conceived as an interdisciplinary endeavor, would be somehow less than other scholarly fields.

The Dangers of Theory In spite of the current threats to the field and numerous past recommendations - concerning the need for developing explicit theories of religion (most recently, see

Guthrie 1993: chapter 1, “The Need for a Theory’), a number of scholars seem unwilling to adapt to this new, nonessentialist, interdisciplinary model for studying human practices and beliefs. The reasons are more than likely numerous and complex, but when it comes to the study of religion’s traditional disdain for explicit theorizing, two are immediately likely. First, there is an intellectual and a political rationale for withholding support from interdisciplinary programs. In the current university climate, interdisciplinary work is not valued nearly as much as scholarship and teaching that goes on within the traditional disciplinary divisions, for a great amount of intellectual, social, and economic resources have been invested in the traditional disciplinary divisions that today constitute the modern university. Intellectual turf, and its relations to the varying sized slices of the annual university budget, is well worth protecting. In this regard, the institutional insecurity expe-

rienced by scholars of religion differs little from the insecurity that plagues the many other departments and units in the university. Second, and more important, in the words of the literary critic Thomas McLaughlin, “[t]heory questions . .. assumptions [and] thereby draws unnecessary

attention to a process that [according to some scholars,] ought to be impulsive and emotional,” not to mention natural and self-evident. Simply put, to those who base their research on intuitive methods in search of essences, “‘the very project of theory is unsettling. It brings assumptions into question. It creates more problems than it solves” (1995: 1, 2). In a word, theory—especially naturalistic theorizing—is perceived as dangerous. It is dangerous because interdisciplinary, naturalistic research based on explicit and testable—rather than implicit and covert—theorizing forces one to acknowledge and subsequently address, critique, and defend the par-

ticular, constructed nature of what might otherwise pass as the natural work of interpreting supposedly stable meanings. Simply put, interdisciplinary theorizing destabilizes certainties on a number of levels. Such explicit theorizing brings about

212 , Manufacturing Religion an end to the privilege of sui generis religion, for, on critical examination, such a privilege is indefensible. What the discourse on sui generis religion failed to acknowledge—in fact what it successfully obscured—was the situated nature of all human intercourse. If students of the future study of religion can acknowledge this, recognize the inherent limitations of their work, yet continue to employ the

term “religion” as a theoretically useful heuristic for elaborating on the myriad of | normative discursive practices that sanction forms of individual action and social interaction and organization, then they will have succeeded in negotiating the essentialist trap that snared many of their predecessors. This is not to suggest that as scholars we can become totally aware of the frameworks that we bring to our studies and our teaching—frameworks that manufacture our data in just this or that manner. But what it does suggest is that it is far better to maintain and actively support one aspect of a discourse whose function is to reflect critically on the field’s constructs. Wayne Proudfoot argued this point

over a decade ago: “It is better that these hypotheses be the products of selfconscious reflection than assumptions that are uncritically held. Even if one thinks that the descriptivist task is the most urgent, this does not preclude explanation” (1981: 24). Accurate description and nuanced interpretation are clearly important activities in all scholarly fields that study human beings; so, too, explanation and explicit, critical examinations of current methods and theories are equally necessary if a scholarly field is to survive and prosper. And if indeed, as J. Z. Smith reminded us earlier, “it is the study of religion that invented ‘religion,’ ”’ then the field is in need not simply of scholars who theorize on religion, its origins, functions, and

developments, but also of a collection of metacritics who theorize on the very category “religion” itself. All this can be summarized as the general work of theoretical critique. The general absence of theoreticians in the modern discourse on religion—as well as adequate training in these areas for both contemporary undergraduate and graduate students—does not bode well. But by recovering and then developing the naturalist discourse on religion, and critically examining our manufacture of religion itself, alternate futures can be constructed.

The Fabrication of Dogmatic Idols Having opened this study with a quotation from Thomas Huxley, it is only fitting that we return to him at its close: not in support of Huxley’s sometimes misguided enthusiasm for scientific method and early evolutionary theorizing, nor his em_ phasis on the explanatory power afforded us by the insights of psychology, but in support of his views on the continued need to critique both constructs, such as sui generis religion, that scholars devise and deploy in their work as well as the _ human penchant for confusing theories about reality with reality itself. Although I choose to read “critique” where Huxley writes of “science,” and “critic” where he talks of “men of science,” his words still ring true. Originally published in 1886,

Institutional Identity and the Significance of Theory 213 in a way they anticipate those that open Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious: “Always historicize!” Huxley writes, I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. .. . [T]he philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force,

and ether, [not to mention sui generis religion] and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality....{WJhen such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic ‘idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men’s hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced. (1901: 372)

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Notes

Introduction 1. For a specifically feminist critique of sui generis religion, see Shaw’s excellent article (1995). For another very useful critique—this time from the perspective of a historian—see McCalla’s detailed survey of the history of religions approach to the study of religion (1994), an approach that is often coterminous with, but not necessarily exhaustive of, the discourse on sui generis religion. 2. On this particular occasion, their critics replied with Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered (D’Costa 1990). 3. The contemporary debate on reductionism is far too elaborate to recount here. For a useful introduction to this debate, see, for example, the numerous responses and rejoinders to Robert Segal’s provocative essay, “In Defense of Reductionism” (1983) by Daniel Pals (1986; 1987; 1990a; 1990b), Donald Wiebe (1984a; 1990), Segal and Wiebe (1989), and Lorne

Dawson (1990). More recently, a collection of essays by a number of scholars who have been involved in this current debate has been published: Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (Idinopulos and Yonan 1994). 4. For an example of the degree to which the parameters of the debate on reductionism in the study of religion are problematic, see Tim Fitzgerald’s critical review essay (forthcoming b) on Idinopulos and Yonan’s collection of essays, Religion and Reductionism (1994).

5. As another way of putting the reductionist issue—I thank Ann Baranowski for this rather apt phrasing—I don’t study religion. Rather, I study one particularly intriguing aspect of human behavior, beliefs, and institutions.

6. I am indebted to Donald Wiebe (forthcoming) for bringing to my attention both Eckardt’s essay and the historical relations between the NABI and the AAR.

Chapter 1 1, See Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire (1993) for an excellent example of a book whose chapters are each based on analyses of such strategies. 2. The quotation is translated by Ricketts from a newspaper article dated June 1935. 3. On the construction of national identities, which suggests a number of similarities to the construction of discourses, see Hobsbawm 1992