The Conventional Wisdom Within Western Culture and Among the Intellectual Layers of Non Western Cultures, It Is Widely Believed That Religion Is a Cultural Universal
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INTRODUCTION In this book, my object of study is the western culture or, at least, one element influential in its formation, viz., religion. Today, in anthropological theorizing any way, it is commonplace to note that the anthropologist describes other cultures using concepts native to his/her culture. Truths in truisms often hide problems and the above is no exception either. How does the culture of the describer reflect itself in his/her descriptions of other cultures? The present essay is a partial answer to this question. By looking at the way members of western culture have described religions in India, I try to decipher what such portrayals tell us about western culture, western religions, and religion itself. That is, I attempt to specify how much of what the West says about India is rooted in the western culture, why it is so, and so forth. Such a large and ambitious programme, however, is carried out by focusing on one facet of this culture: religion. Even here, as a guiding thread to this work, one theme is picked out. It is the claim that religion is a cultural universal. I shall argue that both this and other ideas related to it (we shall come across some of them during this book) have more to do with the western culture than with what human cultures are. The Conventional Wisdom Within western culture and among the intellectual layers of non western cultures, it is widely believed that religion is a cultural universal. While accepting this is to entertain a truism, the com mon-sense wisdom of the contemporary West further assures us, it is equally indubitable that many people in different parts of the world are also irreligious. Atheism, agnosticism and ignorance of religious matters are widespread among the various cultures that constitute the humanity of today. Consequently, the claim about the universality of religion merely implies that native to each culture is some or another religion: Christianity for Europe; Islam for the Middle East; Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism to India; Shintoism to Japan; Taoism to China; Buddhism - both due to its antiquity and the modifications undergone - to South and South-east Asia . and so on. 2 INTRODUCTION Perhaps, we are nearer co describing this common-sense idea if we reformulate it thus: characteristic to cultures and characterizing their differences from each other is their religion. Therefore, to some extent, differences between cultures can be explicated by speaking about the differences in their religion. Because religion is not merely a part of human cultures but also one of their constitu tive moments, it makes sense to describe (though not exhaustively) cultural differences along the lines of religious differences. Religion is a cultural universal in the sense that some religion or another lends identity to a culture. None of the above prevents one from acknowledging differences between religions. It appears to me that two types of differences are acknowledged in both common-sense talk and the intellectual par lance in the West. First, there is the kind of difference that exists among the Semitic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) themselves. The difference between a Muslim and a Christian (e.g. believing that Muhammad is the prophet or that Jesus is the Son of God) is felt to be analogous to that between a Christian and a Hindu. The Hindu's belief in the incarnations of Vishnu parallels the beliefs of the Christian. More abstractly speaking, different doctrines and practices distinguish religions from each other. Partly overlapping with this idea but also partly differing from it is the recognition of a second type of difference. This allows one to speak of different kinds of religion. In one religion, say Christianity, holy books and churches play an important role. In another, say the American-Indian religion, both may be absent. Buddhism does not merely appear different from Islam because it is another religion. It also seems co be another kind of religion in so far as it denies the existence of gods. However, it is not always clear what makes some thing not merely a different religion (in comparison with some reli gion or another) but also into a different kind of religion. Be this as it may, I do not think that I am far off the mark in summarizing the common-sense wisdom in the following way: not only are dif ferent religions present in human cultures, but also different kinds of religion. The Theoretical Edifice This common-sense wisdom appears to rest on the results of gener ations of anthropological fieldwork: after all, have not centuries of ethnography proved indisputably that 'Religion' favours no single .