Stewart Guthrie - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org "nobody seems to know what [religion] is." Nadel (1954), Eister (1974), and Machalek (1977), among others, doubt the possibility of a definition. Eister (1974:2), for example, says that religion has defied social scientific consensus and may "not be definable in general terms." Of theories themselves, Evans-Pritchard wrote in 1965 that to date "either singly or taken together, [they do not] give us much more than common-sense guesses, which for the most part miss the mark [and] of the many attempts [none] is wholly satisfactory" (1965: 120-21). Geertz said the following year that the anthropology of religion was in a "general state of stagnation" and that there was no "theoretical framework. .. to provide an analytic account of religion" (1966:1-4). Despite Geertz's contribution and others, there is some consensus that anthropological theory of religion has "lagged" (Saliba 1976: 189) and that there still is no theory for "normal" research in the science of religion (Buchdahl 1977). I shall not review present theories here (Saliba 1976 gives a recent short review), but shall mention relevant aspects of several major ones. I agree with Tylor, Durkheim, and Freudotherwise sharply divergent on religion-that it anthropomorphizes the world in some significant way; with Geertz (1966), Bellah (1964), and Spiro (1966) that the use of symbols, characteristically human, is especially characteristic of religion; and with Horton (1960,1967, 1973a) and Spiro (1966) that belief in the human-like beings of religion is based in experience. I disagree with Malinowski (1948) that religion is primarily wish fulfillment. Tylor, who defined religion substantively as the "belief in Spiritual Beings" (1979 [18731:10), was in my view right to define it as a kind of conception of the world. He was also right to say that religious conceptions may be reasonable attempts to understand the world at large and that they attribute humanlike features such as language and ethics to nonhuman natural phenomena. Tylor's weakness is not so much his intellectualism or even individualism as his overestimation of two phenomena (dreams and death) as topics for human thought and therefore as sources of religious notions. His "spiritual beings" are composed of the ideas of the "phantom" and the "life force" that respectively arise from each person's experience of dreams and of death. Tylor's critics have noted that beings so abstractly conceived seem to lack the emotional force of religious conceptions. Nor are dreams and death apparently central (although they may be partial) concerns of all religions. Durkheim, Freud, and many ethnographers suggest instead the reverse: that the stuff of religious conceptions comes more from waking experience of oneself and other living humans than from dreams and death. Durkheim (1976 [1912]), rejecting Tylor's theory, says that the real topic of religious thought is human social relations and that its distinctive feature is not belief in spirit beings (since these are illusions and therefore could not be the basis of anything so universal as religion), but a distinction of "sacred" and "profane." He points out that conceptions of the world are developed not by lone individuals but by members of society and that conceptions of the universe as a kind of society result from their social preoccupations. Still, he agrees with Tylor that religion is largely cognitive and practical (not, e.g., neurotic or expressive) and that it grapples with the world as a whole rather than (as he occasionally-but influentially-claims) with human society alone. Indeed, he says (in passages emphasized by Horton 1973a) that religion and science have the same aims (to interpret and influence the universe), the same topics (nature, man, and society), and the same logic. The difference between them is the greater perfection of scientific methods of inquiry. He also holds, but mistakenly I think, that since gods and spirits do not exist, the real object of religious thought can only be human society and that gods are simply society personified. In my opinion, it is more accurate to say that the object of religious thought is reality in general and that gods are con-I I do not refer to Totem and Taboo, probably the best-known of Freud's other writings on religion, because it seems to me entirely without basis and because it has already been well dismantled by Kroeber (1920, 1939). 182 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Guthrie: A COGNITIVE THEORY OF RELIGION models of and for the world. Humans must make models, and do so constantly. Here are welcome echoes of the rationalism of Tylor and Durkheim (humans must construct a reasonable world), of the psychology of Freud (they do not know how they do so), and of the psychological pragmatism of Malinowski (if they do not construct a reassuring universe, they will be too anxious to do anything at all). But Geertz fails to distinguish religious models from other models. Although religions generally do what his definition says, so do philosophies, ideologies, and science (Kuhn 1970; Harris 1975:546-47). The feature missing from Geertz's discussion, in my view, is the apparently universal anthropomorphism of religion, a feature not characteristic of (though it may be present in) philosophy, ideology, or science. A further problem in Geertz's definition is that it implies that religious symbols are really directed not, as religious believers think, reciprocally between human and nonhuman (e.g., "divine") communicants, but only between humans: they are devised by men and "serve to produce. .. motivations in men" (p. 4). Geertz may be right and the believers wrong about what they actually communicate, and to whom. But what they believe (that they are addressing and being addressed by gods or spirits, or at least by deceased humans, not ordinary ones) must be mentioned in any attempt to define their activity, since intent is part of the meaning of action. Geertz's definition, then, although a good description, is neither a sound definition nor part of a complete theory, as it neither isolates the phenomenon it seeks to explain nor identifies the characteristic cognitive situation. Another well-known functionalist definition, Bellah's (1970: 21) "set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate condition of his existence," uses Tillich's notion of "ultimacy" to identify religion. As this definition draws on an idea (indeed a claim) familiar in several major religions, it draws, to a degree, on common usage and "common sense." It is, however, as overly general and as ambiguous as Geertz's. First, use of the term "ultimate" as a criterion poses, as does any superlative, a difficult further question (i.e., what in fact is the ultimate condition?). Since the term can be defined only tautologically, its use to define anything else risks circularity. Moreover, this definition, like Geertz's, seems to make sets of symbols such as philosophy also "religion," depending on whose ultimate condition is in question. It, too, fails to circumscribe its topic.6 I turn last to two substantive definitions, much closer to my own. The first is Spiro's (1966:96) "institution consisting of culturally postulated interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings." The problem here, I think, is the term "superhuman," which Spiro says describes "any beings believed to possess power greater than man, who can work good and/or evil, and whose relationships with man can, to some degree, be influenced by [ritual or symbolic actions]" (p. 98). Many religious systems (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism) include beings (e.g., demons) whose powers, though in some ways greater than those of men, are in other ways less and which are as well called "infrahuman" as "superhuman." Such beings may be reviled, tricked, or threatened-not treatment befitting superhuman beings. On the other hand, some humans (e.g., witches, magicians, and presidents) at least have greater power than ordinary men, yet are distinct from deities and often are nonreligious figures, so extraordinary power alone does not make an entity specifically religious. It might be better to say of the beings who are religious objects only that they are "nonhuman." Yet they are at the same time human-like. They may, for example, be quite human ancestors and still human in principle if not in form. Their humanity is implied by Spiro's specification (not made in his definition itself, which would seem to admit such completely nonhuman, though in some way superhuman, beings as atoms or volcanos) that they can be influenced by symbolic action. This means that they do not include atoms, volcanos, or the universe as impersonally conceived, "superhuman" though these may be in respect of energy, mass, or extension. They include only beings that use and respond to symbols. The beings that Spiro thinks "religion" postulates are humanlike in their capacity for symbolism-in my view, too, their most human-like attribute. But why should believers in them postulate such hybrid beings? Instead of supposing that they may be thoroughly plausible or "good to think," Spiro says, as does Freud, that (although he grants them superficial plausibility) they are postulated because with them believers are...