Religion and Society – Advances in Research 'Portraits'

Religion and Society – Advances in Research ‘Portraits’ - Special Virtual Issue Table of Contents Volume 1, 2010 Portrait: Maurice Bloch Bloch on Bloch on ‘Religion’ Maurice Bloch Why Maurice Bloch’s Work on ‘Religion’ Is Nothing Special but Is Central Laurent Berger Maurice Bloch, or How to Think Persistence in Religion? David Berliner Is Ritual Really Like a Hat? Or, The Category Formerly Known as ‘Religion’ Fenella Cannell The Cognitive Turn and the Materiality of Social Life-On Bloch on Religion Webb Keane Volume 2, 2011 Portrait: José Casanova Deprivatization, the Public Sphere, and Popular Religion Hubert Knoblauch Public and Private in the Study of Religion Imaginative Approaches Grace Davie Casanova, Asad, and the Public Debate on Religion in Modern Societies Kim Knibbe Toward a Post-Weberian Sociology of Global Religions Manuel A. Vásquez From Modernization to Secularization to Globalization: An Autobiographical Self-Reflection José Casanova Volume 3, 2012 Portrait: Jean Comaroff Religion, Society, Theory Jean Comaroff Religion’s ‘Others’Jean Comaroff on Religion and Society Peter Geschiere Thoughts on Jean Comaroff’s Political Economy of Zombies Kamari M. Clarke Religion, Society, and the Everyday Adeline Masquelier Volume 4, 2013 Portrait: Bruce Kapferer Ritual Practice and Anthropological Theory Bruce Kapferer Creating Creativity Bruce Kapferer at Adelaide University Andrew Lattas The Politics of Virtuality Rohan Bastin Bruce Kapferer, Deleuzian Virtuality, and the Makings of a Ritual Masterstroke Don Handelman Berghahn Journals www.journals.berghahnbooks.com/air-rs I PORTRAIT Bloch on Bloch on ‘Religion’ Maurice Bloch Th e refl ections presented here demonstrate the coherence and continuity of the part of my work that can be labeled as dealing with religion and ritual. Th is of course does not mean that everything I have written on the subject is coherent and continuous. Indeed as time has passed I have learned many things from my readings and experiences, from interacting with colleagues and friends, and from working with others, including the people I have studied and, above all, the PhD students I have supervised. As a result I have had to modify what I thought. Looking back I believe there is an ongoing line of argument in what I have published and this is what I attempt to clarify in what follows. Th e necessary starting point of a consideration of my work on ‘religion’ is to emphasize that I do not believe there can be theory about religion. Th eory has to be a contribution to the general understanding of what kind of animals human beings are. It need not make general claims about human universals but it needs to make claims that can be related to general claims about human beings. A theory of religion cannot do that because, as has been argued, ‘religion’ is a word that can only refer to a series of historically created situations which, although continually changing, have unique and specifi c genealogies closely linked to the Abrahamic religions (e.g., Asad 1993; Bloch 2008). Th is history can be traced to the various places and times when, and where, ‘religion’ has manifested itself. In these places and times its phenomenology can be described and interpreted but one cannot glide or slither toward theory from such descriptions. Religion cannot be theorized anymore than there can be a theory about 14 November 1704. In other words religion is not a natural kind, by which I mean a category that has a basis other than that given by an arbitrary defi nition. Assuming that religion is a natural kind and that there can therefore be a theory of religion, or believing that using the word loosely will do, leads to misunderstanding. An archae- ologist who tries to reconstruct the past in a particular place by looking for signs of religion in a pre–Bronze Age site is already on the wrong path (Bloch 2010). Recently, I was asked to comment on what could be guessed about the ‘religion’ of the people who, about ten thou- sand years ago, lived at the fascinating early Neolithic site of Catalhuyuk in central Turkey. My response was that as soon as we approach the question in this way we are begging the question. Looking for religion in such a place is rather like looking for traces of their parlia- ment building. An anthropologist who ‘seeks’ religion when trying to understand a place where the Abrahamic religions have not been present will only mislead. Th is is what Evans- Pritchard did when he wrote Nuer Religion (see Needham 1972 for a discussion of this point as it relates to Nuer ‘belief’). Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1 (2010): 4–28 © Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/arrs.2010.010102 Bloch on Bloch on ‘Religion’ Ⅲ 5 Th e dangers of ‘religion’ are all the greater in the common contemporary situations where contact between non-Abrahamic traditions and the Abrahamic religions is present. In From Blessing to Violence (1986) and in a 2002 article criticizing the idea that religion could be characterized by minimally counterintuitive beliefs, I illustrated this point by referring to the quandary of the nineteenth-century British Christian missionaries in Madagascar who saw their task not only as the introduction of true religion and belief but also as the eradication of false religion and belief. Th eir problem, like that of Christian missionaries in China before them, was that they were not sure what was that ‘religion’ they were to destroy. Th ey therefore settled on certain apparently ‘religious’ cults concerning what they named ‘idols’, which had the characteristic counterintuitive feel of modern European Christianity, at the same time quite arbitrarily ignoring other practices and beliefs, such as those dealing with ancestors. Th is decision, or misunderstanding, was to have great signifi cance for subsequent Malagasy Christianity and led to the creation of the local and now very powerful idea of ‘Malagasy traditional religion’. Th e use of the word ‘religion’, as a quasi-analytical term, also creates major misunderstand- ings in those other common situations where quite diff erent systems, which the discipline ‘religious studies’ has long considered as within its fi eld, are being recreated along Abrahamic lines. Th is was the case when Hinduism became Abrahamized as it was re-represented in India and elsewhere as an ‘alternative’ to Islam. It was also so in Sri Lanka, where a form of Buddhism has become ‘protestant’ as infl uential European converts, much more molded by Christianity than they were themselves aware, saw Buddhism as an ‘alternative religion’ to that in which they had been brought up and, as a result, modifi ed local Buddhism to make it fi t as an example of ‘religion’. My work has consisted in an attempt to outfl ank ‘religion’ as an analytic tool; though, as time has passed, I have become clearer as to the implications of the terminological problem. We must free ourselves of ‘religion’ in much the way Lévi-Strauss freed the anthropological discussion of totemism by outfl anking it. He did not deny that authors who had written about ‘totemism’ had been talking about important things, nor that these phenomena oft en had some aspects in common, but he showed that these common features were arbitrarily selected. Th ey were merely eclectic manifestations of a genuinely human characteristic; that is the use of a system of classifi cation, which had been developed to apply to a particular part of the cognized world to understand another. By this move he moved the topic to a theoreti- cal level. Th e criticism of theorizing ‘religion’ has two sides. It is not simply that arbitrarily defi ning religion and then studying what the phenomena so described can have in common leads to the kind of tautology that Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life so spectacularly illustrates. It is also that it stops us from considering centrally signifi cant aspects that spill over between what has been labeled as religious and that which has not. In my 2008 article I argue that one of the most unfortunate eff ects of attempts to theorize religion has been to im- plicitly represent the nonreligious in a naive way. Th is mistake has a long history. Traditional anthropologists had by and large assumed that they could defi ne religion (or religion and magic) as that which relates to the supernatural (Tylor, Frazer, Goody). In a very similar way Geertz defi ned ‘religion’ as the nonfactual that seems uniquely realistic. Th ese authors have been followed by more recent writers who use diff erent words but who similarly characterize religion as beliefs having a distinguishing element of the counterintuitive (Sperber, Boyer). It seems to follow from these defi nitions that the nonreligious is about the straightforwardly ‘natural’, the ‘normally factual’, or the ‘fully intuitive’. However, when we think of phenomena such as social roles or imagined communities, it becomes obvious that such characteriza- 6 Ⅲ Maurice Bloch tion is completely misleading. Normal social life in many of its aspects is also supernatural, nonfactual, and partially counterintuitive. Th is is why I have attempted to dissolve the notion of ‘religion’ into a much more inclusive one for which I previously used the word ‘ideology’ but which, as my work has evolved, I have called the ‘transcendental’ for reasons explained below. In the 1950s Leach moved from the LSE to Cambridge to take up a readership. A result of this move was that he was exposed to both the transactionalism dominant in one institution and the social structuralism dominant in the other. Th ese he combined in his book Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954) where, aft er criticizing the misplaced realism of such ‘social structural’ phenomena as descent groups and legal/political normative representations, he stressed their relevance not as cogs in some sort of social machine as they had been represented, but as ideals which aff ected actual choices in a partial way.

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