Religion, Language, and Power

Nile Green, Mary Searle-Chatterjee, Nile Green, Mary Searle-Chatterjee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135892869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religion, Language and Power shows that the language of 'religion' is far from neutral, and that the packaging and naming of what English speakers call 'religious' groups or identities is imbued with the play of power. Religious Studies has all too often served to amplify voices from other centers of power, whether scripturalist or otherwise normative and dominant. This book's de-centering of English classifications goes beyond the remit of most postcolonial studies in that it explores the classifications used in a range of languages — including Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and English — to achieve a comparative survey of the roles of language and power in the making of 'religion'. In contextualizing these uses of language, the ten contributors explore how labels are either imposed or emerge interactively through discursive struggles between dominant and marginal groups. In dealing with the interplay of religion, language and power, there is no other book with the breadth of this volume.

Part I
Exporting ‘Religion’

1
Dialogues on Religion and Violence at the Parliament of the World’s Religions

John Zavos

INTRODUCTION: THE DISCOURSE OF RELIGION

In her account in this volume of the making of religion in modern China, Francesca Tarocco examines the processes through which the neologism zongjiao emerged and became established as a Mandarin translation of European terms for religion. The coming of zongjiao reflects a broader development: the conceptualisation of what is termed ‘the Chinese religious world’ in a context of modernity. Three ‘systems’ of teaching—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—are identified as establishing the contours of this world, and practices identified as extraneous to these systems, or cutting across the boundaries being established between them, are increasingly perceived as marginal. Tarocco goes on to explain how such practices have been understood by the state in contemporary China as mixin—that is, superstition or folk practices. In being identified as such, these practices are precisely produced in relation to the Chinese religious world—as being outside, or specifically not religious. This scenario points up a number of significant issues in relation to the interaction of religion, language, and power. In the first instance, it emphasises the importance of historical contextualisation for an understanding of ‘religion’ and its meanings; secondly, it demonstrates the dynamic role played by language in the shaping of (religious) social realities; thirdly, it provides us with an indication of the impact of global processes—global cultural interactions, global political dynamics—in the shaping of more recent social realities; and fourthly, it points to a specific process of inclusion and exclusion as an important indicator of the relations of power at work in the articulation of religion. These are all issues which will be addressed in the present chapter, in which I will focus on the way religion is articulated in a contemporary environment with a self-image of global importance: the Parliament of the World’s Religions, 2004.

Following the centenary celebration of the original 1893 Parliament, in Chicago in 1993, the Parliament of the World’s Religions now takes place on a rough five yearly cycle. The 2004 session was preoccupied with the issue of political violence, and in particular the incidents of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and the train bombing in Madrid, Spain on March 11, 2004. The perpetrators of these incidents are often characterised as ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘religious extremists’. In this characterisation, intense religious feeling is associated with political violence: an association that was clearly of concern to many at the Parliament. More broadly, we can identify ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘religious extremism’ as what we might call the sharp end of a widely recognised ‘resurgence of religion’ in global politics.¹ Religion is currently recognised as a critical factor in developing global politics. How would the delegates at the Parliament respond to this trend? How would the apparent association between religion and violence be addressed?

Taking a lead from the points identified in Tarocco’s discussion, I want to frame my examination of the dialogues on these issues at the Parliament with the idea of religion as a historically contingent discursive practice. Discourse, Stuart Hall reminds us, is ‘a language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment’.² He draws on the work of Laclau and Mouffe to explain that this representation of knowledge about a particular topic depends on a’systematic set of relations’ that enables language to be meaningful in any particular context. Their example is the kicking of a spherical object, which may only be interpreted as playing football if this physical act is located within a systematic set of relations (including, but not exclusively, linguistic relations) which construct it as such. ‘The [spherical] object is a football only to the extent that it establishes a system of relations with other objects, and these relations are not given by the mere referential materiality of the objects, but are, rather, socially constructed’.³ This, then, is what they called a discourse of football—a socially constructed set of relations between a variety of objects, actions, and ideas.

In a similar way, we can locate a discourse of religion. This is of course not a new idea, but it is worth restating because of the emphasis it places on the role of power in the representation of knowledge as religion.⁴ Michel Foucault’s studies of discourse complexify our understanding of the operation of power. Discursive power, he says, is ‘not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations’.⁵ How can we begin to understand and identify the way in which religion is implicated in this diffuse operation of power in contemporary political and social contexts that are increasingly globalised? In the first instance, we need to remember that as with football, religion-as-discourse may be understood as a socially constructed set of...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Religion
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I Exporting ‘Religion’
• Part II Execrating and Excluding the Other
• Part III Struggling for the Self
• Contributors
• Index