Eight theories of religion second edition

1. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.

2. There is, to my knowledge, no biography of Geertz or full-dress critical study of his life and work, though there are, of course, many shorter, critical essays on his interpretive anthropology. Some particulars of his career can be found in Adam and Jessica Kuper, eds., The Social Science Encyclopedia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), under “Geertz, Clifford.”

3. This was a criticism made by Talcott Parsons, which Geertz cites with approval in an essay entitled “After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,” in Interpretation, pp. 249–50.

4. See, for example, Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (January 1984): 126–66, especially 128–32.

5. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 12.

6. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 17.

7. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 20.

8. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 23.

9. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 5.

10. “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation, p. 90.

11. “Religion as a Cultural System,” p. 116.

12. Geertz’s summary of Weber’s theory appears in “‘Internal Conversion’ in Contemporary Bali,” in Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 171–75; the full article covers pp. 170–89.

13. “‘Internal Conversion,’” p. 189.

14. Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. v.

15. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 16.

16. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 54.

17. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 98.

18. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 5.

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20. Others who argue that Geertz’s approach represents an unwise departure from scientific ideals include Richard Newbold Adams, “An Interpretation of Geertz,” Reviews in Anthropology 1, no. 4 (November 1974): 582–88; William Roseberry, “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology,” Social Research 49 (Winter 1982): 1013–28; and Robert A. Segal, “Interpreting and Explaining Religion: Geertz and Durkheim,” and “Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger on Religion: Their Differing and Changing Views,” in Segal, Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 77–101, 103–22.

21. Richard W. Franke, “More on Geertz’s Interpretive Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 25 (1984): 692–93.

22. See Paul Rabinow, “Humanism as Nihilism: The Bracketing of Truth and Seriousness in American Cultural Anthropology,” in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Norma Haan et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 73.

23. Henry Munson, Jr., “Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice,” Religion 16 (January 1986): 19–25. A very instructive collection of studies is to be found in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 71 no. 1 (Spring 1988), where the entire number, with contributions from Ralph V. Norman, William G. Doty, Bradd Shore, Robert A. Segal, Stephen Karatheodoris, Ruel W. Tyson, Jr., and Walter B. Gulick, is addressed to Geertz and his work, including his views on religion.

24. Munson, “Geertz on Religion,” p. 24.

Asad, Talal. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz.” Man, n.s. 18, no. 2 (June 1983): 237–59. An unconventional discussion of Geertz, which is obscure in places, but focuses critically on his assumptions about the nature of religion and religious symbolism.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Geertz, Clifford. Islam Observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Geertz, Clifford. The Religion of Java. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960.

“Geertz, Religion, and Cultural System.” Special issue of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 71, no. 1 (Spring 1988). A set of essays by seven authors from different fields addressing Geertz’s research, methods, and theories as well as his views on religion and other topics.

Kuper, Adam, and Jessica Kuper, eds. The Social Science Encyclopedia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Under “Geertz, Clifford.” A brief account of Geertz’s career. For Geertz, as for Evans-Pritchard, there is at present no fulllength biography or critical study.

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Munson, Henry, Jr. “Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice.” Religion 16 (January 1986): 19–25. A thoughtful analysis, with persuasive criticisms of Geertz’s actual practice as different from the principles of his interpretive approach.

Rabinow, Paul, and William Sullivan. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Essays by various scholars assessing the movement in anthropology for which Geertz is the foremost spokesman.

Rice, Kenneth A. Geertz and Culture. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1980. A first step in the direction of a full-scale study of Geertz and his program, though it relies heavily on summaries of Geertz’s works and extended quotations.

Roseberry, William. “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology.” Social Research 49 (Winter 1982): 1013–28. An analysis of Geertz against the background of the opposing approach to anthropology taken by the school of “cultural materialism.”

Segal, Robert A. “Interpreting and Explaining Religion: Geertz and Durkheim,” and “Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger on Religion: Their Differing and Changing Views.” In Robert A. Segal, Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue, pp. 77–122. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Terse, analytical, and critical essays on Geertz which shed light on his view of religion through comparisons of his approach with those of other leading social theorists.

Shankman, Paul. “Gourmet Anthropology: The Interpretive Menu,” Reviews in Anthropology 12 (Summer 1985): 241–48. A stringent critique of Geertz by a younger professional in the field.

Shankman, Paul. “The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Perspective of Clifford Geertz.” Current Anthropology 25 (June 1984): 261–79. Another aggressive critique of Geertz’s interpretive approach, with responses from other anthropologists.

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It may be helpful to look back on the previous pages of this book as a kind of panel discussion. The invitees are an impressive group, to say the least. Each has had his fair opportunity to speak, and the sequence of the presentations is not unimportant. Some are best understood after we have heard the others: We need a grasp of armchair anthropology to see the point of fieldwork anthropology; we need to see the questions left behind by Tylor and Frazer to appreciate certain answers proposed by Freud and by Durkheim; only when we consider the nature of the reductionist functionalism urged by Freud, Durkheim, and Marx can we follow the reasoning that led Weber, Eliade, and others to depart from it. Sequence, however, is not the same thing as succession. It would be a mistake to conclude from a review of the kind just completed here that the theories at the end of the sequence have solved all the problems discovered in those at the beginning. If so, we could effortlessly conclude that Clifford Geertz has “won the debate” merely because he is placed in the final chapter. It is true that he is the only theorist still living, but that does not mean his ideas are the only ones still standing. Theoretical constructs have a certain timeless quality, like the theorems of geometry. Their value lies in calling certain key questions continuously to mind for reflection and reconsideration. That being so, we can make best use of this final chapter in two ways: first, by looking beyond the classic formulations to the newer interpretive efforts undertaken by theorists of more recent decades; second, by taking a final measure of our eight theorists, and implicitly all theorists, with a set of general questions that enable us to compare their strategies and appraise their efforts.

Currently, the modern research university is the home of most efforts to frame explanations or interpretations of religion. It is an endeavor carried out

mainly by academic specialists pursuing programs of research that are highly diverse and individualized. Even so, their work can be seen to cluster around certain shared general patterns, or paradigms, of explanation. Through much of the past century the dominant paradigms were those offered by Freud and Marx. Durkheim claimed a significant set of disciples among professional sociologists. Despite the difficulty in accessing his work, Max Weber had also drawn a following in a few select places, and through the 1960s, discussion in America came increasingly to be influenced by the disciples of Mircea Eliade. Throughout most of the century, however, the figures of Freud and Marx towered above all others. No theory of religion could hope to be taken seriously if it did not engage the aggressive reductionist explanations they had advanced and their disciples had refined. It was in the 1980s and ’90s that this circumstance at length began to change. The achievements of both Freud and Marx came under severe challenge—the former from critics who questioned both the ideas and methods of psychoanalysis and the latter from the stunning popular revolts in East Europe and Russia against the oppressive regimes of Marxist socialism.¹

Today, it is fair to say, no single theory exercises an influence comparable to that of the leading perspectives half a century ago. There are instead various competing patterns of interpretation that build upon the classic theories we have examined in this book even as they refine and apply them in different ways. We can perhaps best describe them as centers of theoretical interest— as programs that give to certain kinds of explanation a kind of first conceptual priority, or as paths of inquiry that from the start find explanations of certain types more compelling than others. Among these, we can distinguish the following five as the leading patterns, or dominant agendas: 1) humanistic, 2) psychological, 3) sociological, 4) politico-economic, and 5) anthropological. In each case, the adjective defines the kind of guiding axiom, or orientation, that directs the inquiries of those who work within its loose framework. In each case also, “industry” may be a better word than “inquiry” to describe these enterprises as they currently proceed. A century ago, scholars who attempted to theorize about religion formed a tiny guild of learned, solitary craftsmen; Chips from a German Workshop was actually the title Max Müller gave to a collection of his essays. Today, in the academies of the English-speaking world alone, a scholar working from one of these orientations is likely to think of herself as part of a technical team at a multi-site production facility, conversing with dozens or scores of others in different locations, each with a complementary specialty or competing method that promises the best design and assembly. What follows is an effort to penetrate that complexity by offering a brief outline of these main approaches, attended by some examples that illustrate how the classic theories have left their imprint on current work.

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Theorists who give priority to issues of human psychology and personality have long been divided about the legacy of Freud. His pathbreaking importance is readily acknowledged, but in the last two decades especially, most social scientific psychologists have moved quite decisively away from the methods of psychoanalysis toward “hard science” models of data collection, correlation, and analysis. For this kind of research, Freudian theory is regarded as fundamentally unusable.

Elsewhere in the field, judgments on Freud are quite mixed. Practicing psychoanalysts naturally remain closer to his founding principles, and some, certainly, continue to share Freud’s dim view of religion as a tissue of illusion rooted in a dysfunctional personality. But there have been important countertrends as well. From the very start of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud’s Swiss colleague Carl Jung took a decidedly more positive view of religion. Not long after Freud’s death, Gordon Allport’s The Individual and His Religion(1951) and Abraham Maslow’s Religions, Values, and PeakExperiences(1964) also sought to make constructive reappraisals. Allport saw no need to presume there was some singular form of religious experience that could be traced universally to psychological neurosis. He found that individuals draw on a variety of emotions and sentiments in framing a religious perspective on life, and whatever form it takes, it fosters maturity if it is embraced “intrinsically,” through a willing inward assent, rather than being forced upon the personality from outside. Maslow concurred. He found that across the human race, religious sentiments have arisen naturally within individuals as they respond to peak experiences of a mystical type; to the extent that those experiences are the same, so are the goals of all religions they inspire, regardless of the specific doctrines that arise to define them. Whatever Freud may have claimed, religion in that naturally and universally human form cannot be pathological; it should be seen as normal.

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Theorists working with a sociological orientation have in the main looked to Durkheim (or even Marx) rather than Weber as the main guide for their labors. This is not surprising if we recall the distinctive elements of their work. Durkheim sought quite self-consciously to create a “school” of inquiry committed to the axiom of sociological interpretation; in The Elementary Forms he even offered a kind of template for future inquiries. By way of the Verstehen method and the appeal to ideal-types, Weber too searched for some kind of general theory that could be applied, in a manner resembling that of natural science, to all future work. But as we have seen, his feeling for cultural complexity, his vast command of evidence, and his keen appreciation of what is unique to each historical instance have made it difficult for others to draw on his work as a model for their own. Accordingly, though some theorists of humanist orientation have found ideas and themes from Weber that they can use, committed social scientists for the most part have not.

Durkheim’s legacy can be observed in Milton Yinger’s Scientific Study of Religion (1970), a major summation of the state of social science published two-thirds of the way through the past century. Like Durkheim, Yinger defines religion functionally, arguing among other things that it serves to control private passions for the good of the whole. Yinger also strongly endorses Durkheim’s claim that however it may change over time, religion is too well integrated into the patterns of social life ever to suppose, as Freud and Marx do, that it will someday disappear. It is as eternal as society. Paradoxically, a recent and a current theorist, both also working in the tradition of

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This “secularization” thesis is not new. It had been anticipated in Peter Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967), a work that blends some of Durkheim’s emphases with others from Weber. For Berger, people living in a social community frame ideas and project them outward; those ideas then become objectified as truth outside of the self and society, only to be internalized again as programs of future action and belief. Modernization, however, tends to break up these connections, and so religion as an external belief system begins to lose its strength. The same theme was quite differently explored in The Invisible Religion (1967), a work by Berger’s sometime associate Thomas Luckmann, who disagreed with the secularization thesis and insisted on the power of religion to adapt and survive. Over time, it was Berger who ultimately changed his view, adding most recently his own critique of the secularization thesis in The Desecularization of the World (1999). The ongoing vitality of these discussions, which are cited here as illustrative rather than definitive, suggests just how durable Durkheim’s legacy has been, even apart from its impact on anthropological theorists, whom we have yet to consider.

Recent and current theorists who appeal primarily to socio-economic conditions work in the long shadow of Karl Marx, regardless of whether they approve of his reductionist verdict that religion is an illusion born of injustice—the self-alienating opium of the masses. Until the great political collapse of socialism in 1989, it could be said that Communism had brought to Western civilization the greatest revolution in thought and society since the arrival of Christianity overturned the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. For many, Marx and Engels had unmasked the great fraud of religious

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belief—that it comforts the rich while feeding illusions to the poor. The truth of the Marxist idea was further reinforced by the political success of the movement it guided. Through much of the twentieth century, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Communism was indeed “on the march.” It had captured Russia and China, two of the world’s major nations; it was spreading in Asia; it gained an American outpost in Cuba; and even in Europe and the United States, strong socialist movements and political parties supported the goals of Communism, if not its violent methods. Marxist theory thus made a strong claim upon the assent of intellectuals, artists, journalists, academics, and politicians in nearly all of the Western nations. Within the Soviet and socialist states, of course, it was a different matter; disillusionment arrived quickly under the rule of Stalin and became chronic thereafter. But outside the Eastern bloc, this was not the case. Neither reports of purges nor tales of famine and murderous atrocities could shake the faith of true Marxist believers. In some measure, this has remained true to the present day, even after the collapse of 1989. Current spokesmen for the Marxist cause adamantly insist that the crimes of the socialist past were corruptions of practice, not principle; they can be dismissed as the perversion, not the truth, of the Communist ideal.

“Postcolonial theory” is one of the terms often used to denote this program of critical suspicion focused on the affluent, imperialistic cultures of the modern West, but it circulates under many labels in college classrooms and university offices. Terms such as “cultural criticism,” “critical theory,” “postmodernism,” “anti-hegemonism,” “transgressive discourse,” “subversive discourse,” “alterity,” and “subaltern studies” identify just some of the initiatives associated, in varying degrees of course, with this general posture of criticism. Marxist theory of this sort counts among its modern apostles and evangelists many of the most influential critics, scholars, and public intellectuals of twentieth-century Europe and America, among them Herbert

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Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Jurgen Habermas. Similar themes recur in the work of the most famous Frenchspeaking celebrity intellectuals of the postwar era, among them Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. The most influential, if not the most profound, of all these figures may well be the Algerian French writer Frantz Fanon, whose animated protest work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), has in some ways furnished the movement with both its bible and catechism.

Foucault’s comments on knowledge as a means of oppression find a parallel in the recent work of Gayatri Spivak. In such studies as In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988) and A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), she adds both an Asian and a feminist turn to the conventional critique of the West, bringing

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women as well as the poor and outcast into the growing army of those offering resistance to power. Feminist theory is certainly not the same as postcolonial theory, but Spivak’s work illustrates how feminist literature also explores themes of protest registered from a place of social weakness. In Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973), theologian Mary Daly does the same, pursuing a strident complaint against patriarchal domination by male authority figures in Christianity, while Marsha Aileen Hewitt’s Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis (1995) moves beyond Western culture, making the point across the spectrum of world religions. Again, these works have been chosen merely to illustrate patterns; the complete literature on these themes reaches to scores and even hundreds of volumes produced by scholars, critics, and independent writers at work in a wide array of academic fields and professional vocations.