The Limits of Meaning

Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity

Matthew Engelke, Matt Tomlinson, Matthew Engelke, Matt Tomlinson

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857457097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.

1

MEANING, ANTHROPOLOGY, CHRISTIANITY

Matt Tomlinson & Matthew Engelke

The Uses of Meaning

As Stanley Tambiah once said, “the various ways ‘meaning’ is conceived in anthropology are a deadly source of confusion” (1985: 138). There is certainly no end, however, to the ways in which anthropologists claim to unearth meaning through ethnographic work. There have been disagreements over why Bororo call themselves red macaws, arguments over the subjectivity of Captain Cook, and thick descriptions of Balinese cocks.¹ All of these discussions have focused in one way or another on meaning. Indeed, for an anthropologist to say that an event is “meaningful” might well sound banal. Yet to deny the importance of this claim, we contend, is to surrender one of anthropology's signal contributions to the human sciences. At the same time, it poses questions that should be crucial for anthropologists. If words and things can be meaningful, can they also be not meaningful, or even meaningless? Moreover, is “meaning” always a necessary or even productive analytical category in anthropological work?

The essays in this volume address questions of meaning through studies of Christianity, an area of inquiry that has produced some of the deadly confusion to which Tambiah alluded. Our interest in focusing on Christianity is twofold. First, the fact that Christians often express a concern with meaning provides us with a productive set of ethnographic issues to explore. Second, debates within the anthropology of religion have raised questions about the extent to which a focus on meaning is itself an approach informed by the history of Christian thought (Asad 1993). To focus on Christianity is therefore to address issues that are of central ethnographic and theoretical concern within the anthropology of religion.

The central premise of this book is that anthropologists need to address those cases in their research that challenge “meaning's” fruition to understand when and how it is a relevant, useful term. It is through the limits of meaning, then, that the contributors here seek to discern its analytical and experiential relevance. Rather than taking meaning as a given, the authors reflect on cases in their research where the production of meaningful attitudes is uncertain. In various ways, the cases in this collection address “failure”—sometimes from the point of view of anthropological subjects, sometimes anthropological observers, and sometimes both. The cases include preachers whose sermons fall flat; prophets who are marginal; members of an audience who become bored and fall asleep; congregants who cannot recite the basic tenets of their faith; and born-again Christians who decry their old beliefs as “meaningless.” While not a major theme of anthropological work, failure is not a new theme in anthropology, either. The classic invocation of failure is in the critique of functionalism's inability to account for social change through ritual action (Geertz 1973d).² In this volume we turn to “failure” to show that just as it has been used to point out the limits of functionalism, so too can it be used to point to the limits of meaning. By analyzing moments of failure, we argue, scholars can approach meaning not as a function or a product to be uncovered, but as a process and potential fraught with uncertainty and contestation.

Religion, Ritual, and the Problem of Meaning

The problem of meaning animates the anthropology of religion. Before beginning the main body of this introduction it will therefore be helpful to outline some of the key debates over the problem of meaning, particularly as they relate to definitions of “religion” and “ritual” informing many of the chapters collected here.

For anthropology, Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz have been two of the most important interpreters of Max Weber's interest in the problem of meaning. The problem of meaning concerns the compulsion to create coherent explanations of “bafflement, pain, and moral paradox” (Geertz 1973c: 109). It is the process of interpretation writ large: How can humans tolerate chaos, accept the unexplainable, and endure physical and moral torment, without seeking a reason? For Geertz “it does indeed appear to be a fact that at least some men—in all probability most men—are unable to leave unclarified problems of analysis merely unclarified” (1973c: 100; see also Parsons 1963). In “Religion as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966, he suggested that the “quest for lucidity” (1973c: 101) in religion necessitates an analytical focus on meaning; following Suzanne Langer, he forwarded the claim that meaning is “the dominant philosophical concept of our time” (Langer in Geertz 1973c: 89). Geertz criticized anthropologists for neglecting what he considered to be the necessary first step in any investigation of religion: “an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper” (1973c: 125). Indeed, anthropology on the whole is “not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973a: 5). Over the past several decades this has become a routine position, particularly within cultural anthropology.

Meaning, however, is not an uncontested “dominant concept.” In his critique of Geertz's definition of religion, for example, Talal Asad highlights several problems with the problem. First, Asad argues, religious symbols are not “embodied” with meaning; religion does not have “an autonomous essence” (1993: 28). It follows from this that “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive practices” (1993: 29). In Asad's estimation, Geertz's definition of religion as humanity's attempt to generate ultimate symbolic meanings is, in this sense, “a view that has a specific Christian history” (1993: 42). He argues that what makes it Christian is how Geertz “insists on the primacy of meaning without regard to the processes by which meanings are constructed” (1993: 43). Asad traces this perspective to modern Christian hermeneutics, claiming that the attempt to construct a universal definition of religion ought “to be seen in the context of Christian attempts to achieve a coherence in doctrine and practices, rules and regulations” (1993: 29). What is more, Asad wants to highlight the differences between medieval and modern Christianity, the former of which was driven not by these problems of meaning, but discipline. Prior to the Reformation, “coercion was a condition for the realization of truth, and discipline central to its maintenance” (1993: 34).

According to Asad, then, one of Geertz's chief shortcomings is that he does not address questions of power and history. Asad writes that after Geertz many anthropologists of religion have become—like theologians—preoccupied “with establishing as authoritatively as possible the meanings of representations” even as this takes one beyond “indigenous discourses” (1993: 60). Asad's concern with authority is twofold. When it comes to recognizing the role of authority in legitimizing meaning within a given religious discourse, Geertz says too little. When it comes to the authority of the anthropologist to document how “religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order” (1993: 42), Geertz says too much. In the wake of the interpretive turn, anthropologists have carried on with “the history of Christian exegesis” (1993: 60). As another critic puts it, anthropologists seem driven by “the will to meaning” (Argyrou 2002), sometimes irrespective of its ethnographic relevance. With such an approach, interpretation can become an end in itself: “Lurking behind our concern for correct interpretation,” Vincent Crapanzano warns, “is the fear of a total loss of meaning” (2000: 24).

Not all anthropologists read Geertz's definition as compromised by a Christian history, or as leading into the hermeneut's hall of mirrors. James Faubion still sees Geertz's definition as the most useful, and he recognizes its universalism—which Asad finds so problematic—as “very much…strategic” (2003 : 73). Indeed, there is a noteworthy disconnect between Geertz-in-theory and Geertz-in-practice. His definition might appear to place the meaning of religion “external to social conditions” (Asad 1993: 32), but his ethnographic work is not, we think, insensitive to context and history (see, e.g., Geertz 1980). Asad himself points out that he is not addressing Geertz's ethnographies. “I stress,” he writes, “that this [discussion] is not primarily a critical view of Geertz's ideas on religion—if that had been my aim I would have addressed myself to the entire corpus of his writings on Indonesia and Morocco. My intention…is to try to identify some of the historical shifts that have produced our concept of religion as the concept of transhistorical essence” (1993: 29).

A point well taken; we need always to challenge our concepts. But within anthropology, what are concepts without ethnography? Offering a definition of religion is always only a point of departure, shaped and reshaped through ethnographic investigation. Indeed, one of the warrants of the current volume is that the study of such terms as “meaning” and “religion” needs that anthropological grounding. We find it difficult to accept the claim that Geertz is committed to transhistorical essences. As Diana Fuss puts it, when we talk about an “essence” we need to consider “who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated” (1989: 20). Geertz's essay on religion should be read as a strategic essentialism, not a transhistorical one; it is important to acknowledge that in offering a definition of religion Geertz promises nothing more than a “useful orientation” because “definitions establish nothing” (1973c: 90).

Charles Keyes is not convinced by Asad's claims, either. Keyes questions the charge that the problem of meaning is a Christian (and therefore anthropological) particularity. Citing recent work on religion in Asia (Keyes et al. 1994) and the anthropology of violence (Kleinman et al. 1997), Keyes argues that “problems of meaning continue to impel people in modern societies towards religion” (2002: 243). For Keyes (a scholar of Buddhism) this is not an exclusively Christian concern; nor is it a theoretical anachronism. Keyes finds no evidence for Asad's assertion that religious problems of meaning are not central to modernity “in any but the most vacuous sense” (Asad 1993: 49, n. 33).

We will return to a discussion of Asad's work later in this chapter, and it is also taken up by several of the volume's contributors. But to clarify our focus on the limits of meaning, further examples of religion's disciplinary dimensions might help. In an early essay on ritual and religious language, Maurice Bloch (1989) makes the case against religion being something that is used to make sense of the world. He makes a case, in other words, against Weber, Geertz, and the interpretive genealogy. Bloch does not propose that meaning should play no role in anthropological analysis,³ but that studies of religious rituals “represent attempts to grasp what, in the end, it is impossible to grasp: what rituals mean to the participants and onlookers. This type of search for meaning, although not pointless, has no end” (Bloch 1986: 11). Moreover, Bloch says there is a disjunction between religious ritual and everyday life, such that we cannot use the former to understand the latter. “It is therefore misguided to argue,” he writes, “as so many anthropologists have done, that religion is an explanation, a speculation about such things as man's place in the world” (Bloch 1989: 37; cf. Asad 1993: 33). It is, instead, about authority: Religion is “a special strategy of leadership, the use of form for power” (Bloch 1989: 45).

Asad and Bloch share a concern with Michel Foucault, whose writings on power have inspired a more widespread turn against meaning. “The Foucault move was to insist on looking at cultural forms and practices not in terms of their ‘meanings’ (which, in this poststructuralist moment, had become a suspect term in any event) but in terms of their ‘effects,’ both on those to whom they are addressed and on the worlds in which they circulate” (Ortner 1999:138). Marshall Sahlins calls the Foucauldian approach a “postmodern terrorism” in which “the only safe essentialism…is that there is no order to culture” (2002: 48). One of his concerns here is with the end of anthropology as a comparative project—a concern we revisit in the second part of this chapter. What we want to highlight for now, based on the strength of evidence in the essays for this volume, is that the concern with discipline or power is not incommensurable with the concern for religion as a “cultural system,” in which meaning plays a central role. Both perspectives need to be taken seriously, and in our focus on the limits of meaning we work to show how they are, in fact, parts of the same whole, and not antithetical stances. Just as the limits of meaning can be traced and produced in moments of failure, so too—as Asad, Bloch, and Foucault each suggest—can they be traced and produced through attention to discipline, authority, and power.

Ritual Performance

Like definitions of “religion,” definitions of “ritual” have been the subject of much debate within anthropology (Goody 1963; Scott 1994). Given this fact, we will not rehearse them at length. But a few remarks are in order, since many of the contributors here draw their case studies from ritual action. Indeed, because ritual has been one of the most contentious testing grounds for the concept of meaning, it is vital to engage with the limits of meaning in such arenas. At the same time, we think it important to acknowledge that ritual is not the only arena in which the problem of meaning is present or relevant. Some of this volume's contributors (Gershon, Rutherford, Faubion) have accordingly drawn from cases in their research that are not organized primarily around the dynamics of ritual life and ritual action. Taken together, then, the contributions here aim to present a variety of cases in which the limits of meaning emerge.

One of the classic arguments on rituals—although not the final word (see, e.g., Bell 1997; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Keane 1997c)—is that they “make visible, audible, and tangible beliefs, ideas, values and psychological dispositions that cannot directly be perceived” (Turner 1967a: 50). A ritual “makes explicit the social structure” (Leach 1964: 15). As Asad and Bloch have argued, these classic understandings of ritual, like our understandings of religion, are problematic. For Asad in particular they are situated within an anthropological canon that draws implicitly upon arguments about coherence and order in Christian thought. The historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith has outlined these traditions in some detail, tracing changes in attitudes toward ritual action through the Reformation. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers saw ritual as “surface rather than depth” (1987: 100); ritual had little to do with meaning. As Smith goes on to argue, today, “[r]itual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest. It is the recognition of this fundamental characteristic of ritual that most sharply distinguishes our understanding from that of the Reformers, with their all too easy equation of ritual with blind and thoughtless habit” (1987: 103).

The manner in which contemporary anthropological and theological discussions of ritual intersect can indeed be notable. One theologian defines ritual as “a medium or vehicle for communicating or sustaining a particular culture's root metaphor…A people's ritual is a code for understanding their interpretation of life” (Worgul in Asad 1993: 78). This is very similar to the foundational arguments of symbolic anthropologists (Ortner 1973; Turner 1967a, 1967b, 1986; cf. Pepper 1942).⁴ Such readings of ritual will continue to be challenged by some anthropologists, even as many others will continue to assert ritual's performative and significative potentials in social life. A main emphasis in this volume is indeed on those performative and significative potentials;⁵ here, our point is simply to suggest that within debates over problems of meaning, Christian rituals provide us with a fruitful set of problematics to explore, particularly when such rituals explicitly raise questions of meaningfulness and the contested, partial ways in which meanings can emerge in interaction.

In Christian rituals, the perceived efficacy of performance often depends heavily on the manipulation of words. Determining what a phrase means—whether a Biblical passage, glossolalic pronouncement, or prophetic utterance—is often central to Christian ritual practices and their effects. Moreover, Christian emphases on translation of sacred texts (as we outline in the second part of this chapter) have been a notable tool of evangelization, not least in the colonial and postcolonial world (Sanneh 1989). Recent ethnographic investigations of Christianity have highlighted the ways in which Christians often see their religion as “a religion of talk” (Robbins 2001a: 905; see also Coleman 2000; Harding 2000; Placido 2001 for similar observations). Different kinds of Christianity have, of course, come to radically different conclusions about the power of words. For example, Gebusi (Papua New Guinea) Seventh-day Adventis...