Approaching Religion Part I Edited by Tore Ahlbäck SCRIPTA INSTITUTI DONNERIANI ABOENSIS XVII: 1 APPROACHING RELIGION Part I Based on Papers Read at the Symposium on Methodology in the Study of Religions Held at Åbo, Finland, on the 4th-7th August 1997 Edited by Tore Ahlbäck Distributed by ALMQVIST & WIKSELL INTERNATIONAL STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Approaching Religion Part I Approaching Religion Part I Based on Papers Read at the Symposium on Methodology in the Study of Religions Held at Åbo, Finland, on the 4th-7th August 1997 Edited by Tore Ahlbäck Published by The Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History Åbo, Finland Distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell International Stockholm, Sweden ISSN 0582-3226 ISBN 952-12-0368-4 Printed in Finland by Åbo Akademi University Printing Press Turku 1999 Contents Editorial Note 7 VEIKKO ANTTONEN Does the Sacred Make a Difference? Category Formation in Comparative Religion 9 DZIEDZORM REUBEN Asafo Challenges in the Study of Religious Values 25 PASCAL BOYER Cognitive Aspects of Religious Ontologies: How Brain Processes Constrain Religious Concepts 53 ARMIN W. GEERTZ Ethnohermeneutics in a Postmodern World 73 REND GOTHÓNI Misreading and Re-Reading. Interpretation in Comparative Religion 87 PETER JACKSON Tracks on the Road-Myth. Indo-European religions beyond Georges Dumezil's moyen d'analyser 99 MORNY JOY Beyond the Given and the All-Giving: Extraneous Speculations on Women and the Gift 109 MATTI KAMPPINEN From Cultural Domains to Cognitive Models. Inference and Explanation in Cognitive Anthropology 127 E. THOMAS LAWSON Keeping Religion in Mind 139 THOMAS LUCKMANN Remarks on the Description and Interpretation of Dialogue 151 WILLIAM E. PADEN Sacrality and Worldmaking: New Categorial Perspectives 165 JØRGEN PODEMANN SØRENSEN On Divination. An Exercise in Comparative Method 181 MICHAEL PYE Methodological Integration in the Study of Religions 189 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN & KIMMO KETOLA Rethinking 'God'. The Concept of 'God' as a Category in Comparative Religion 207 HEIKKI RÄISÄNEN Tradition, Experience, Interpretation. A Dialectical Model for Describing the Development of Religious Thought 215 TOM SJÖBLOM "Bringing it All Back Home. Mentalities, Models and the Historical Study of Religions 227 EINAR THOMASSEN Is Philology Relevant? 243 DONALD WIEBE Appropriating Religion. Understanding Religion as an Object of Science 253 JANE WILLAIMS-HOGAN Discovering the Two Faces of Religious Charismatic Action - Traditional and Modern: A Model 273 Biographical Notes 305 Information for Authors Editorial Note From the 4th to the 7th of August 1997 the Donner Institute and the Finnish Society for the Study of Comparative Religion arranged an IAHR Regional Symposium in Turku/Åbo, Finland. The topic of the symposium was "Methodology of the Study of Religions". I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the Nordic Organizing Committee, Jan Bergman (Uppsala), Jeppe Sinding Jensen (Aarhus), and Einar Thomassen (Bergen), and to the members of the Board of the Finnish Association for the Study of Comparative Religion, Veikko Anttonen (Turku), Eila Helander (Helsinki), Helena Helve (Helsinki), Nils G. Holm (Turku), Ilkka Pyysignen (Helsinki), and Martti Junnonaho (Turku). The practical arrangements were taken care of by Tuija Hovi and Anne Puuronen from the Department of Comparative Religion at Turku University and by Monica Sir6n and Bjorn Dahla from the Donner Institute in Turku. I would like to ex- press my thanks to them. In 1973, little less than a quarter of a century earlier, the Depart- ment of Folklore and Comparative Religion at Turku University had organized an IAHR Study Conference titled "Methodology of the Sci- ence of Religion". Certainly you should not arrange conferences on methodology at too short intervals. However, we were of the firm opinion that four conferences in a century is the correct amount. The main difference between these two conferences is that the lat- ter focused on the Nordic countries whereas the former was genu- inely international. As a consequence, comparisons between the two conferences are difficult to make. The conference publication from the 1973 conference Science of Re- ligion: Studies in Methodology. Ed. by Lauri Honko. The Hague: Mouton, 1979. (Religion and Reason, 13) includes the commentaries of the co-referents and the discussion among the audience. The pres- ent publication is more "traditional!' which means that no commen- taries or discussions have been included. We invited seven key-note speakers to the conference: Pascal Boyer (Lyon), Rosalind I. J. Hackett (Kentucky), Lauri Honko (Turku), Thomas Lawson (Kalamazoo), Thomas Luckmann (Konstanz), Wil- liam E. Paden (Burlington), and Donald Wiebe (Toronto). They repre- sent various subjects and approaches, such as cognitive analysis, the history of religions, epic studies, the sociology of religion, and the philosophy of religion. Since it was a regional IAHR-conference we circulated a call for papers in all of the Nordic countries. "Methodology of the study of religions" as a conference topic is vague. In the call for papers covering letter we tried to limit the theme to the science of religion, including the history, phenomenol- ogy, anthropology, sociology and psychology of religions. Neverthe- less, the theme remains extensive if you want to produce a coherent and well integrated conference publication. To elucidate the problem I cite from my Editorial Note in an earlier volume of this series, Dance, Music, Art, and Religion (Åbo 1996): The organizers of a symposium such as this seem to face a problem that is impossible to solve: either they choose a very specific and regional theme, in which case they end up with a comprehensive and homogeneous volume but the specific theme excludes far too many from delivering a paper and attending the symposium, or they choose a very broad and woolly theme that results in a disparate, heterogeneous volume but gives almost every historian of religion in the Nordic countries a chance to deliver a relevant paper". We can at least say that the theme of this conference was "broad enough by all standards". What can be done to minimize the disadvantages of a broad topic when it comes to a publication? We have proceeded in the following way: The 37 papers — all of them relevant to the topic but very het- erogeneous — have been formed into two main groups. The first group consists of papers dealing with method in an abstract or purely theo- retical way. In the second group papers discussing method in a prac- tical or applied way are included. These two groups complement each other: the papers in the first group are reflections on methods as tools for doing research whereas the papers in the second group can be considered demonstrations of how to use methods as tools in "real life". We have decided to publish the papers in two parts — the papers concerned with theory in part 1 and the case studies in part 2. Both volumes will be published during 1999. I am grateful to Ann-Mari Dahlstrom for having prepared this manuscript. Without her effort there would be no conference publi- cation whatsoever from the 1997 IAHR Regional Conference in Turku. For more information on Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis or to view a complete listing of contents, please visit us at our World Wide Web site at: http://www.abo.fi/instut/di/scripta.htm. Tore Ahlbäck VEIKKO ANTTONEN Does the Sacred Make a Difference? Category Formation in Comparative Religion 1. Interrelatedness of 'sacred' and religion When taken at face value, the sacred seems to be an unproblematic concept. Times, places, persons, animals and objects are classified as `sacred', because they have or have had a religious or spiritual sig- nificance for people in specific historical and social contexts. Relig- ious traditions and their systems of signification are taken to explain why people have set aside specific things and considered them quali- tatively different from other things. Deeming something as sacred means that it is disconnected from the category in social life in which similar things are classified and bestowed with special meaning and value. Sacredness of an object means that it stands in direct relation- ship to specific power-laden super-human entity by which members in a given culture mirror their self-consciousness or some aspects of it. A sanctuary for instance is a place that is set apart from the rest of the social space, because it is valued as a point of contact between man and the super-human agent worshipped by the local community. The category of experience has had a prominent role in explaining the sacrality things, times and places. They are consecrated because they represent and commemorate special events and experiences of personages sanctified by the religious tradition. It is generally thought that experience constitutes the sacred or the holy because religious experience transforms the cultural schema by which — as William Paden has put it — the world and its processes of categorial selection are shaped (Paden 1992: 7; for the 'reference to experience' see Dawson 1996). There has been an insistent tendency among scholars of compara- tive religion to approach religion with the help of the category of the sacred and treat it as a dependent variable of religious experience. But which explains which? Does religion explain sacrality or does 10 VEIKKO ANTTONEN sacrality explain religion? Is the boundary that is set up to draw lines of demarcation between sacred things and non-sacred things a mini- mum criterion for the religious, as Emile Durkheim suggested? If so, then we have to know what is distinctive in the social and cognitive processes by which sacred things are perceived and represented in relation to the perception and cultural representation of non-sacred things. Are there universal attributes and properties in human cog- nition and behavior which govern the representation of sacred things? If so, what are they: devoutness, solemnity, awe-inspiring- ness, compellingness of the norm of non-violation, a perception of an entirely different order and perhaps a sensation of 'a power or force quite different from the forces of nature (see e.g.