Eight theories of religion second edition

Whatever these differences, Islamic Indonesia and Morocco have in recent times had to cope with two common major problems: colonial rule and the challenge of modernization. In both countries, says Geertz, the high point of colonial domination fell roughly in the century between 1820 and 1920. And in both, this experience made people much more aware that they were Muslim while their Christian masters were not. Islamic religion became identified with protest, nationalism, and the hope of independence. In the process, however, the faith itself began to change. The classical styles— Indonesian illuminationism and Moroccan maraboutism—found themselves now under challenge from a powerful new movement which claimed to be recovering something very old. This was “scripturalist” Islam.

In the case of Indonesia, this scripturalist revolt took shape in the 1800s, at the high point of Dutch control and at a time when national sentiment turned

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Scripturalist Islam in both Indonesia and Morocco thus provides a background to the struggle for national independence that engaged both countries throughout the middle years of the twentieth century. This struggle can be followed in the careers of the two national leaders at the time, Sultan Muhammad V in Morocco and President Sukarno in Indonesia. Muhammad V rode to power on the strength of the nationalism inspired by the scripturalist revolution in his country. Personally devout as he was, Muhammad V found himself nonetheless uneasy with the fundamentalism of the scripturalists. He preferred the older-style maraboutist Islam, which recognized the sultan as the chief holy man of the country. When, in the course of the 1950s, the French took a number of unpopular measures, Muhammad V refused to be their puppet and resisted. He was deposed and exiled, but two years later managed to return in triumph as head of the new, independent Moroccan state. In Muslim eyes, his defiance and devotion were clear proof of divine favor; he had shown the same baraka as Lyusi, and he measured up fully to the prized maraboutist ideal of the warrior-saint. Nonetheless, says Geertz, it is hard to see his success in uniting the old religious ideals with the new postcolonial age as anything more than a holding action against the running tide of scripturalist fervor.

Sukarno’s story in Indonesia is a less happy one, since it ends with his overthrow by the military in 1965. Yet in the long struggle that he led from the 1920s to the year of independence in 1949 and then as president of the new nation, we can see a similar mix of religious and political concerns. Sensitive to the religious diversity of his people and resisting both communism on the

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In the last analysis, both Sukarno and Muhammad V knew well the power of religion in their societies; both sought to harness it constructively to the national cause. Significantly, both decided that an Islam of the classic rather than scripturalist style offered the best hope of success. Just as significantly, neither was completely successful. Although Muhammad V achieved more than Sukarno, Geertz claims that in neither case could the older forms of faith survive unchanged in the modern circumstance.

What, then, is the significance of the parallel Islamic histories that can be traced in Indonesia and Morocco? That question can be answered by recalling the central point of “Religion as a Cultural System”: religion consists of a world view and an ethos that combine to reinforce each other. A set of beliefs people have about what is real, what gods exist, and so forth (their world view) supports a set of moral values and emotions (their ethos), which guides them as they live and thereby confirms the beliefs. In both of these cultures up to at least the year 1800, world view and ethos supported each other in this natural way and met people’s religious needs. In Morocco, Islamic belief gave support to the ethos of maraboutism, which “projects a style of life celebrating moral passion,” and this ethos, in turn, reinforced the Muslim creed.¹⁷ In Indonesia, the same balance seems to have held; the world view of blended Islam and Hinduism supported the gentle, meditative mysticism of figures like Kalidjaga, while the ideal of conduct and emotion he provided gave support to the world view. During the last century, however, and in both lands, the arrival of nationalism and the protests of scripturalism have brought serious challenges. Doubts of the world view and changes in ethos have appeared in ways that leave people uncertain about each and dimly aware that the one is often at odds with the other.

With regard to world view, the root problem is a clash of ideas. In both lands, secular attitudes have entered the scene with the spread of science in industry, the universities, and professional classes. At the opposite extreme, the determined “ideologization” of religion in the hands of the scripturalists, who either isolate the Koran from all other knowledge or claim that all knowledge

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The effect of modern developments on the ethos component of religion in both countries has also been significant. To prevent misunderstanding, Geertz notes that a distinction must first be made between the force a religion may have and the scope of its influence in any given culture. Moroccan Muslims regard the encounter with God as an extremely intense, all-consuming experience; yet for them, most of ordinary life in the market, cafe, or village square seems decidedly unreligious. Conversely, in Indonesia, few religious experiences are as intense, as full of force, as those that are prized in Morocco, but the range of religiosity is far wider. There is scarcely a single aspect of life that is not in some way tinged with a sense of the supernatural. Still, despite these differences, it is clear that in both countries a significant erosion of ethos is under way. In small, quiet ways, the hold of religious moods and motivations on both cultures has begun to weaken. People may still be “religious-minded,” wishing to keep their sacred symbols, but they are less immediately religious. They are moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feeling that they would somehow like their gods to be present. More and more, we could almost say, theirs is becoming a religion one step removed from a direct encounter with the Reality it claims to worship.

Second, there is the characteristic stress on meaning, the “thick description” of a religion in terms of what is significant to those who live it. The Islam of Morocco and Indonesia is governed by the same formal theology in both places, but within that common system, the ideas that are emphasized and the attitudes and emotions that are treasured differ in marked degree. In Morocco, the stress on the holy man, on moral passion, and on intensity of experience creates a pattern of meaning and values distinctively different from the more passive, tolerant, widely diffused sense of the supernatural found in Indonesia. Thus, although both nations are Muslim and both encounter the

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identical challenges of nationalism and scripturalism, each responds in its own way, and with varying degrees of success in the outcome. Morocco’s Muhammad V succeeded in preserving a style of classical Islam in the new age of nationalism; Indonesia’s Sukarno did not.

We can best measure Geertz’s achievement as an interpreter of religion by noticing two things: (1) where he stands among the theorists we have considered in this book and (2) what he represents as a leading recent spokesman for interpretive anthropology.

Geertz’s program is best seen as an effort to blend the sociological theory of Weber with the fieldwork analysis of Evans-Pritchard. He clearly shares their misgivings, and those of Eliade, about functionalist reductionism—rejecting it not only as an explanation of religion but as an account of any human cultural system. Contrary to Marx, Durkheim, and Freud, Geertz insists that a general reduction of all religion to the product of hidden neurosis, social need, or economic conflict can claim no more credibility than any other grand theory—which is to say, very little. To explain a religion without trying to grasp the system of meanings it conveys is not unlike trying to explain a computer without mentioning a program, or a book without referring to words. It cannot be done.

While Geertz may share their suspicions of reductionism, he harbors doubts of another kind that set him apart from Evans-Pritchard and Eliade. We noticed, for example, that Evans-Pritchard cherishes the thought of one day framing a general science of religion whose theories can be built up from the small, specific studies that ethnographers in the present and in the future still need to complete. Geertz thinks that time spent in pursuit of such a dream is wasted, for what it imagines will simply never happen. Eliade’s program

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In assessing Geertz the anthropologist, we need to recall again the two sides of his intellectual career. He has been from the beginning both an ethnographer and a theorist: on one side, a careful student of quite specific cultures in Indonesia and Morocco; on the other, an innovative conceptual thinker, intrigued by the broad issue of how to understand and explain human behavior. His ethnography, though not of first interest to us here, is widely praised and admired. Ordinary readers and most professional scholars applaud the sensitivity, insight, analytical skill, and intricate style of his essays on Balinese religion and field studies like The Religion of Java, as well as the other works. They feature the trademarks of his craft: original observations, inventive comparisons, important ideas, and connections drawn from seemingly insignificant details.

Ethnography of such high quality is interesting in its own right, but in Geertz’s case it also supports—in an indirect way—the central point of his interpretive theory. Most scholars of any kind—not just theorists of religion, anthropologists, and social scientists—make an effort to know one or a few things in great depth, so that from this foundation they can move to more universal claims. Freud’s psychoanalysis started with single patients and led in time to a theory of all human personality. From the specific case of Australian totemism, Durkheim produced an account of religion in all societies. In Geertz’s case, however, this relationship between the specific and the general is different. Except in certain very limited ways, he does not, like Durkheim or Freud, move from the specifics of religion in Bali or Morocco to general pronouncements on religion in all or even most other places. On the contrary, he as much as states that his ethnography—and that of others as well— cannot and should not be made into a general theory. The point of his method is to celebrate the opposite: particularity. In the interpretive approach, no two instances of humanly created meaning can ever be fitted under one iron rule. We might almost say that the better the ethnography, the worse its chance of becoming science, at least in the traditional sense of that term. Geertz produces his finely etched accounts of Bali’s rituals and Java’s feasts much as a

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Clifford Geertz’s stature in American social science may not be beyond criticism, but it is imposing enough. Critics are well outnumbered by admirers. Questions have occasionally been raised about his literary style—sometimes so adorned with metaphors, allusions, and artful sentence structure as to occasionally obscure what would otherwise be clear and distinct. But that is a relatively minor matter. On a more substantive level, there are two issues that call for some attention: one centers on some of Geertz’s rather puzzling claims about anthropology as a science; the other, on the apparent clash between his principles and practice as applied to the enterprise of interpretation.

In promoting his program of interpretive anthropology, Geertz insists that he has no intention of abandoning the belief that his discipline is a science. Yet, as a number of anthropological critics have noticed, that appears to be what in fact he is doing. For example, in “Thick Description,” the very same essay that states his commitment to science, he just as forthrightly declares that his form of cultural analysis is “not an experimental science in search of a law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”¹⁸ This is, to say the least, a puzzling statement. Paul Shankman, one of Geertz’s sternest professional critics, finds it to be mere gamesmanship with words.¹⁹ Shankman and others contend that if interpretive anthropology is only looking for “meanings,” whatever those are, and not striving to develop scientific theories to explain what

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it finds, then Geertz’s ideas may be interesting, but they certainly are not the products of a science.²⁰ Theoretical laws, after all, are what science is all about. So, say what he may, Geertz the interpreter of meanings is not practicing science; he is abandoning it, at least as a useful method in anthropology.

Understanding that there can be two kinds of science, then, clears up some of the confusion. But even so, anthropologists who cherish the natural sciences as their model of study still have their misgivings. They note that a further problem of the interpretive approach is its disabling effect on our motivation to explain. Another critic of the interpretive approach, Richard Franke, observes that, in one of his articles, Geertz reports how tens of thousands of Balinese peasants were massacred after the fall of President Sukarno in 1965. In seeking to account for this atrocity, Geertz refers it to a deep contradiction in the Balinese sensibility, a combination of a love for high art and a darker love of extreme cruelty. But in the process, says Franke, he never really tries to find out

who was killing whom, who benefited from the massacre…. Instead of asking
about the possible roles of … foreign business elements, the United States CIA,
wealthy Indonesian military officers and their business allies … [and others],
Geertz offers the “goal [of] understanding how it is that every people gets the
politics it imagines.”²¹

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In the case of matters more specifically religious, we must keep in mind Geertz’s central idea: that religion is always both a world view and an ethos. It consists of ideas and beliefs about the world and an inclination to feel and behave in accord with those ideas. Its peculiar chemistry comes from the support that each of these two elements gives to the other. Although Geertz throughout his discussions reminds us often of this point, it is not very clear, at least on the face of it, why such a statement should be regarded as particularly new, or freshly illuminating. It seems almost to be a kind of truism. How could religion be anything but a set of beliefs and behaviors that relate to each other? It is hard to imagine a religion that announces to its followers, “God exists” as part of its world view but then recommends that they live as if there were no God, or makes no recommendation on a pattern of life. Similarly, an ancient Chinese sage who might have said, “The Tao holds the secret of life,” but then recommended that people live as if no such thing as the Tao existed seems just as impossible to conceive. Geertz’s well-phrased formulas at times appear to cloak the obvious.

In this same connection it is interesting to observe that when Geertz actually does seek to interpret religious behavior, only one of the two elements he thinks central to it ever gets detailed and thorough scrutiny. He tends to say a great deal about ethos—about conduct, values, attitudes, aesthetics, temperament, and emotions—but very little about world view. Henry Munson, Jr., a recent critic, has perceptively noted this fact in the discussion of the dramatic Balinese spectacle of Rangda and Barong. Geertz writes eloquently and at length about the Balinese ethos, the combined emotions of horror and hilarity that are on display, the moods of dark fear and playful comedy that ebb and flow through the entire performance.²³ But the narrative passes over almost entirely the native myths upon which the story is based. When it is said, for example, that the audience fears the witch Rangda, what is it precisely that they are afraid of? Her ugliness? Her threat to children, whom she is known to eat? Death in general, which she symbolizes? Or something horrible that happens after death? Is it perhaps just one of these or several? Or could it be all? From

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In Islam Observed, the same thing tends to happen. While tracing very closely the relationship between social context and religious life in both Indonesia and Morocco, Geertz writes at length about differences in ethos: the divergent values, moods, and temperaments that appear in the contrast between the activist self-assertion of the Moroccans and the inward self-effacement of Indonesia. But in all of this we are told almost nothing about the Islamic world view: its belief in Allah, the five pillars of Muslim practice, the doctrines of fate and the last judgment, and so on. And that omission leaves behind it a substantial trail of questions: Without any reference to world view, how do we know that the “temperaments” are even religious? Political revolutionaries are often self-assertive, while addicts of certain drugs can be quite inward and self-effacing. We would also like to know if the different social contexts that have had such a strong impact on ethos have made any similar impression on world view. Are there some things Moroccan Muslims believe which Indonesians do not? Or are the basic Islamic beliefs about God and the world still the same? If they are in fact the same, then is there not a serious problem to be addressed? If world view and ethos reflect and “reinforce” each other, and if the Moroccan ethos differs sharply from the Indonesian one, why are the world views not different as well?

All of these questions point to a rather curious feature of Geertz’s interpretive approach, particularly in the case of religion. Though in theory he continually asserts that the hallmark of his method is the way it addresses “meanings,” the way it attends to the social symbols that carry ideas, he often seems to be quite surprisingly uninterested in these ideas. In practice, he seems much more excited about actions and feelings—feelings unattached to the beliefs that would seem to be necessary to inspire and shape them.²⁴ What is especially puzzling about this stress on emotion and ethos—especially if we recall Geertz’s American anthropological background—is that in some ways it brings his view of culture back to the subjective notion of a “group personality” found in the theory of Ruth Benedict—a theory that, under the influence of his teacher Parsons, he would seem to have rejected. Even in his much praised ethnographic writings, for all their attention to detail, there seems a noticeable hesitance on Geertz’s part to track down the inner relationships between the specific beliefs in Islamic or Balinese theology. A comparison here with Evans-Pritchard’s meticulous reconstruction of Nuer theology is instructive. If we truly wish to look at a religion in terms of its meanings and want to avoid the vagueness of concepts like the “group personality,” then an attention to such particular beliefs, a tracking of their minute connections and

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None of these questions is likely to tarnish the sheen on any of the numerous personal tributes paid to Geertz by his colleagues in modern anthropology and the wider circle of the social sciences, as well as by sundry admirers and observers from other fields of study. His success in establishing the “interpretive turn” in anthropological research, and in pointing that path out to students of religion as well, has left his reputation quite secure. The doubts do suggest, however, that other and future theorists who see promise in his approach would be quite mistaken to suppose that there is no need still to assess, revise, and improve it.