1 Anthropology and the Limits of Secular Reason
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Notes 1 Anthropology and the Limits of Secular Reason 1 . See also Claude L é vi-Strauss. 1952. “Kinship Systems of Three Chittagong Hill Tribes (Pakistan),” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8 (1): 40–51; Claude L é vi-Strauss. 1952. “Le syncretisme r é ligieux d’un village mɔ g du Territoire de Chittagong,” Revue de l’Histoire des R é ligions 141: 202–237. 2 . As Slavoj Ži ž ek asks, does the general principle of tolerating the construals of others mean that we are required also to tolerate intolerance? See Slavoj Ži ž ek. 2008. “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” Critical Inquiry 34: 660–682. 3 . Recalling this rather negative response on that day in Burma, later on in the book he went on to observe that there is in fact no real gap between Buddhism and Western science and philosophy, writing that: “Between that form of [Buddhist] worship and myself there was no misunderstanding to get in the way. It was not a question of bowing down to idols, or of adoring a supposedly supernatural order of things, but simply of paying homage to decisive reflections which had been formed twenty-five centuries earlier . To those reflections my civilization could only contribute by confirming them . For what, after all, have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have investigated, and that very Science in which the West takes such pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two which, if laid end to end, could reconstitute the meditations of the Sage at the foot of his tree” (Claude L é vi-Strauss. 1974. Tristes Tropiques , trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum, 394). I will return to this alternative strategy for dealing with such encounters below. 4 . There are majority Muslim populations in Indonesia and Malaysia, sig- nificant Muslim minorities in Singapore, the Philippines and Thailand, and smaller minorities in Vietnam and Cambodia. Among these Muslim populations and groups, there are immigrants and their descendants from South Asia and the Middle East—but the largest part are Austronesian- language-speaking peoples of Southeast Asia who have styled themselves as “indigenous” groups like the Malays, Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, Acehnese, Moro, and Cham. For a study of the dynamics of religious, eth- nic, indigenous, national (and cosmopolitan) identities and sensibilities in insular and peninsular Southeast Asia, see Joel S. Kahn. 2006. Other Malays: 158 NOTES Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World . Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Singapore University Press (Singapore) and NIAS Press (Copenhagen) (published in the United States by University of Hawaii Press). 5 . K h a t a m a n - N a b i y y i n ( A r a b i c : ҲҫҮӄ ҫӃӅҬӉӉӅ , kh ā tam an-nab ī y ī n; or Kh ā tim an-Nabī y ī n), usually translated as Seal of the Prophets, is a title used in the Qur’an to designate the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It is syn- onymous with the term “Kh ā tam al-Anbiy ā ’” (Arabic: ҲҫҮӄ ҫӃҧӅҬӉҫҥ ; or Kh ā tim al-Anbiy ā ’). With the exception of Ahmadi Muslims, it is regarded by Muslims to mean that Muhammad was the last of the prophets sent by God. 6 . My use of the term is derived from Charles Taylor’s discussion of the phe- nomenology of belief (and unbelief). See Charles Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard. 7 . In his critique of phenomenology Derrida argues, for example, that: “in phenomenology there is never a constitution of horizon [after experience], but [only] horizons of constitution” (Jacques Derrida. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 120). In this view, phenomenology (although it is arguable whether Husserl was indeed guilty of this) posits as primordial something that is inevitably grounded in something else, which it cannot itself question or talk about (Derrida, Writing and Difference , 157–159). 8. For example, as Anthony Steinbock has argued, most phenomenologists accept only one kind of givenness, that which Husserl calls “presentation.” Although horizontality may be expanded in post-Husserlian phenomenology to include that which cannot be experienced, Steinbock’s argument is that experience/ nonexperience may take place on an altogether different—vertical—plane, and that this is the case particularly with what is typically labeled mystical experience (see Anthony J. Steinbock. 2007. Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience . Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press). For a good discussion of the requirements of a phenomenology of religious experience, see also Jeffrey Wattles. 2006. “Husserl and the Phenomenology of Religious Experience,” in Eric Chelsom (ed.), Being Amongst Others: Phenomenological Reflections of the Life-World . Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. 9 . The other person; the infinite (which can be experienced only through a sense of the “overflowing of experience”); see Emmanuel L é vinas 1998. “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers , trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press; and Michael L. Morgan. 2007. Discovering Levinas . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 88–94); and, of course, for believers in the divine. This cri- tique of experience was shared with interwar crisis theologians like Barth and Rosenzweig, a connection to be explored later on. See Samuel Moyn. 2005. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; and Benjamin Lazier. 2008. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World War . Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press . NOTES 159 10 . Unlike many anthropologists, Riesebrodt is not especially concerned with defending this definition against the criticism that the distinction between nat- ural and supernatural is a Western one, and makes little sense in other cultural contexts. For a critique of exactly such unproblematic dichotomizing presented by an earlier anthropologist, see Melford E. Spiro. 2004. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation,” in Michael Banton (ed.), Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion . London and New York: Routledge, 85–126. I will set this objection to one side for the moment, returning to it later on. 11 . Neither is Riesebrodt especially concerned with the argument that religion may not be a universal category, a criticism one might expect from those of a genea- logical bent; for an author who develops this theme, see Daniel Dubuisson. 2003. The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology , trans. William Sayers. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. I will also set this objection to one side for the moment to focus on the form of scholarly engagement to which Riesebrodt’s approach gives rise. 12 . I am referring here to the reductionist tendencies in ontology, psychoanaly- sis, theories of embodiment, linguistics, cultural anthropology, historicism, Gramcian-Foucauldian theory, and the neurosciences respectively. The term “brainhood” is borrowed from Fernando Vidal’s perceptive critique of the indi- vidualist ontology that underpins much of the contemporary neurosciences (Fernando Vidal. 2009. “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity.” History of the Human Sciences 22(1): 5–36). 13 . See, for example, Moyn, Origins of the Other ; Lazier, God Interrupted . 14 . See Dubuisson, Western Construction of Religion . He develops, without refer- ring to them, some of the arguments previously advanced by Talal Asad on the Christian roots of the concept of religion (Talal Asad. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). 15 . See: http://aphelis.net/luis-bunuels-aphorism-god-im-atheist/ . Accessed July 24, 2015 . 16 . These shortcomings are identified, for example, in the recent “genealogi- cal” critique of secularity, in which the possibility of a secular public sphere from which all religious values, construals, and identities have been ban- ished has been questioned. See, for example, Asad Formations of the Secular ; Judith Butler et al. 2011 The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere . New York: Columbia University Press; Saba Mahmood. 2006. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation.” Public Culture 18(2): 323– 347; and Armando Salvatore. 2007. “The Exit from a Westphalian Framing of Political Space and the Emergence of a Transnational Islamic Public.” Theory, Culture & Society 24(4): 45–52, among others. 2 Gnosticism and the Pursuit of the Sacred 1 . The memoir was not published at the time, but appeared later in Erwin Schr ö dinger 1961. My View of the World , translated from the original German version of 1960 by Cecily Hastings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 160 NOTES Schr ödinger’s main source was George Thibaut’s version of the Ś ankara which was published in Max M ü ller’s 50-volume collection, The Sacred Books of the East , published between 1879 and 1910 (pp. 782–820). 2. See Alexander Maitland, “An Undeceived Eye: The Adventurous Life of Alexandra David-Neel (1868–1969).” Public lecture given at The Buddhist Society, London. Wednesday, November 6, 2013. Available at: http://www. thebuddhistsociety.org/event/an-undeceived-eye/ . Accessed April 7, 2014. 3. Apart from quoted sources, my discussion of modern Gnosticism here also draws on an unpublished paper (“Anthropology’s Gnostic Heritage” by Francesco Formosa and Joel S. Kahn) . 4 . See B. L. Chakoo. 1981. Aldous Huxley and Eastern Wisdom . Delhi: Atma Ram and Dana Sawyer. 2002. Aldous Huxley: A Biography . New York: Crossroad. 5 . Many other prominent Western scholars and intellectuals, artists, writers, and musi- cians clearly fall under the heading, some of whom are discussed more or less exten- sively, for example, in Mark Sedgwick’s highly critical history of “Traditionalism” Mark Sedgwick. 2004. Against the Modern World . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press; and Harry Oldmeadow’s rather more sympathetic account (Harry Oldmeadow.