Fabricating Religion

Fanfare for the Common e.g.

Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783110676709
• eBook ISBN: 9783110559507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

1The Category “Religion” in Recent Publications: Twenty Years Later

Note: As described in the opening of this chapter, this was originally a follow-up to a review essay published twenty years before this chapter originally appeared in print in the same journal. Implicitly, this marks – at least to my way of thinking – how much more seriously we have come to take those who study the discourse on religion, i.e., the category religion itself as well as its social effects. Given the rather marginal role played by such work in the early to mid-1990s, that this subfield is now populated by a variety of works worth commenting on in the following essays indicates that studies of the discourse on religion have gained considerable momentum (something also evident in the work of those who wish to limit the scope of such work).

“[R]eligion” is not the inevitable outcome of an encounter between different peoples; the concept does not automatically generate itself as an anthropological abstraction.
(Josephson 2012: 71)

Over twenty years have passed since I first wrote a review essay assessing the place of the category “religion” in recent work (McCutcheon 1995; a revised version of that earlier essay was included as a chapter in McCutcheon 1997). Of course, it was not the first academic paper to focus on the category religion,1 but I think that it was among an early group of publications that attempted to talk about a set of shared assumptions and techniques that we now call the discourse on religion, focusing attention not on debates concerning either the adequacy or inadequacy of this or that definition (as if there was some stable thing in the world against which the adequacy of definitions could be measured),2 but, instead, on the very fact that some of us think and act as if there is such a distinct thing in the world prior to our naming it, a pre-existent and universally recognizable domain in social life, that requires naming and study, either to be appreciated, disparaged, or explained.3

That essay – which looked at ten different volumes (monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings, etc.), mostly published in the early 1990s – concluded as follows:

The fundamental theoretical and methodological differences among the approaches to “religion” examined in this survey carries the message that debates on the adequacy of “religion,” and just how one constructs it, will only be productive when scholars become self-critically aware of the theoretical assumptions and tactical agendas that they carry within their studies … [O]ur continued reflection on definitions and theories of religion, far from being abstract obsessions and examples of navel-gazing, have concrete implications for the future of the institutionalized status of the study of religion. Indeed, Waardenburg is correct: “the current debate about the concept of religion is not as innocent as it may seem” [citing Waardenburg 1992: 226]. (306)

Despite the common way that many scholars now talk about criticisms of the category religion – not dissimilar to the manner in which the terms “method & theory” (once provocatively alien, perhaps even dangerous terms) now routinely appear on C.V.s and in job ads – the question is whether much has changed in the past two decades, other than obligatory references to these critiques. Although discourse analysis has become so commonplace as to seem passé to some, and while many of us claim to be self-reflexive in our use of categories, the world religions textbook market shows no signs of slowing down, the “religion and …” rubric continues to grow, the turn toward material and embodied religion sounds suspiciously like a reborn form of phenomenology of religion, and the increasing number of studies on secularism seem intent merely to contextualize “the secular” while presuming that the religious (variously known by such other terms as spirituality, faith, belief, etc.) is somehow natural, ancient, panhuman and thus was merely corralled, privatized, and thereby controlled (appropriately so or not, all depends on your own views, of course) by the 17th and 18th centuries’ early inventions of this thing we’ve come to know (at least in English) as secularism.

That is, as I’ve written on other occasions, we see here a strategically partial approach to the study of binary systems – if, that is, one agrees that such sets as sacred/profane, religious/secular as well as the various attendant pairs of belief/practice, experience/expression, private/public, and original/derivative are, as with all binary pairs, necessarily co-constitutive, with neither appearing first nor one exclusively anchoring the other. This was a position argued by Bill Arnal and myself in an earlier essay collection we co-authored, The Sacred is the Profane (2013). As we phrased it in the introduction:

It is just this sort of shallow historicization that occurs when historians of the secular naturalize one part of what is supposedly a binary – as if prior to the invention of cooking, we all somehow just knew that our food was raw. When it comes to recent studies of religion and not-religion, what we therefore often find is simply a repackaged version of the old, old story of how the primitive world was once homogenously religious and, with the advent of modernity, was sadly disenchanted – we could go so far as calling this story’s rebirth the new secularization thesis. (13)

Despite his influence over many who now write on this topic, I see such a problem in Talal Asad’s work which, as most recently described by David Chidester, argued that “this notion of religion as an autonomous cultural system converged with the contemporary interests of secular liberals in confining religion and liberal Christians in defending religion within modern societies. Asad’s critique, therefore, was not merely about the validity of Geertz’s definition; it was also about the politics of defining religion as an autonomous cultural system” (2014: 308). Religion and secularism, in this approach, seem not to be parasites of each other (as Tim Fitzgerald phrases it [2011: 4]) but, rather, the problem, according to that approach, is in confining religion to a seemingly apolitical, interior domain when, somehow, we all seem to know that religion (or whatever else we call it) is not only real but extends to the whole person, the whole of society, defying the management attempts of what is portrayed as the recently invented secular state.

So it is with this particular set of somewhat suspicious eyes – eyes that have seen their share of critiques of the category that nonetheless employ the adjective as if it still names something distinctive (some authentic, ethereal quality that avoids the much lamented reifications of the noun) – that I looked over a variety of recent works on the category religion. That is, works on the social and political effects of classifying some things as religious, the implications of grouping them together as sharing a common, core trait (e.g., although these practices are Hindu and those beliefs are Christian, they’re all religious), and then seeing them as being in substantive distinction from all things not categorized in this manner.

As a first example, consider Alicia Turner’s paper, published in the inaugural issue of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions’ open-access journal, entitled “Religion, the Study of Religion and other Products of Transnational and Colonial Imaginings” (Turner 2014). Despite opening by paying specific attention to the practical uses for and effects of the category religion – for both colonizers and those who were once colonized – it soon becomes clear that her own ability to select certain things in the world as Buddhist as well as the assumption that these so-named people and practices are directly relevant to the expertise of the scholar of religion, are not considered further evidence of the category religion’s utility and effects. For instance, there is her disagreement with Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous (but for some, perhaps Turner among them, now infamous) statement, “… while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expression that might be characterized as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study” (Smith 1982: xi). To Smith’s claim, she replies:

I am here to tell you that Smith was flat wrong. ‘Religion,’ that is the category of religion, is not the invention of the scholar’s pen. If only it were – because we scholars of religion do not have that much power and impact in the world. Our books are read by our colleagues, but they tend not to build great bridges or great empires. To claim that the power to imagine and construct the category of religion was contained in the scholar’s pen was a bit of academic hubris on Smith’s part. (Turner 2014: 14)

Apart from noting that such a reading fails to exhibit much hermeneutic generosity (inasmuch as the intended audience for Smith’s 1982 essay collection was surely his fellow scholars, inviting them to be cognizant of the effects of their classificatory labors), I think that she fails to understand that, being a scholar, her own work itself constitutes but one more example of “the scholar’s study” mentioned by Smith – a wonderfully ambiguous phrase, inasmuch as it signifies both our work and the space in which we do it.4 That is to say, while we can discuss further how many people, both inside and outside the academy, now use this surprisingly successful Latin-based classifier to go about the business of making their worlds sensible (perhaps drawing into question Smith’s reliance on the qualifier “solely”), it does not take away from the fact that (a) scholars, along with bureaucrats and administrators, deployed this term on the frontier, in situations of contact (as argued by Smith [1998: 275], with regard to the “explosion of data” associated with the colonial era, nicely demonstrated in detail by Chidester [1996]), in an effort to understand what was for them the new, the strange, and the dangerous; but also that (b) her very classification of Buddhism in Burma as something that a scholar of religion has expertise in discussing is itself an instance of precisely what I read Smith to have been examining in that classic quotation. Curiously, scholars of religion who resist the sort of self-consciousness he recommends a few lines lower in that influential introduction assume that their own work is somehow exempt, that they aren’t the ones whom Smith was addressing. For it is the very fact that (and thus the practical effects of) these assorted items are all defined and collected together as Buddhist and then understood as religious, as distinct from other affinities and allegiances, and thus as meaningful and in need of interpretation, that attracts the attention of a scholar of this category, not simply how an already and obviously constituted group of Buddhists use the category to achieve their own counter-colonial effects (interesting as studying that may be).

I see a similar problem to a recent critique of Smith’s well-known claim, this time coming in Kathryn Lofton’s untitled article on pedagogy – an article oddly classified by the editors of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as a review essay of Chris Lehrich’s edited collection of Smith’s writings on pedagogy and the liberal arts, On Teaching Religion (2013). “I would not be the first person to observe,” she writes after quoting the section in question from Imagining Religion, “that there is something dazzlingly absurd about such a claim” (536). But I would counter that it can be judged as “dazzlingly absurd” only if we first presume that this thing we now call religion is somehow already there prior to it becoming a discursive object for us or, for that matter, for anyone else, at the moment the term is used, as noted above, to collect and identity just this and not that as religious, for whatever desired effect. For if, along with Lofton, we presume that, in critiquing the position represented by Smith, “the thing itself” is somehow lost in his call for rigorous self-consciousness, resulting in “a coldness that often leads readers of Smith to feel he is explaining well the abstract reason behind a ritual, myth, or a community decision, but that he is not capturing anything like their anthropological or psychological reality” (2014: 537), then, of course, the attention to scholarly self-consciousness that he recommends will indeed seem absurd (perhaps even dazzlingly so). In that case, we all just seem to know that (not unlike that proverbial lonely tree falling in the forest) it is there long before we started talking about it. But what if, instead of being concerned in our analysis to convey back to readers the anthropological and psychological reality some of them might presume their practices to have,5 our attention was directed toward the way in which some scholars are confident that the thing they call religion is indeed really in the so-called believer’s mind? Then, much as Jean-François Bayart (2005) recommends studying not identity but the prior identification practices that made this thing called identity appear so anthropologically and psychologically real in the first place, we would then study the continual constitution and reconstitution of just this part of the world as religious, as real, as authoritative, in the very act of using the term. This would be true whether used by scholars or anyone else, for that matter – also recognizing full well that many of the things that count for us as religion, that are taught in our classes and included in our books, arise from the actions of people for whom the term continues to be an alien import. In this way, we would be examining the discursive formation of that so-called reality (and the social formation that coalesces with it) rather than lamenting its supposed loss in analytic studies.

What’s more, even to those for whom the category religion has become a familiar element of their folk lexicon, I would wager that (akin to what I consider to be the late Frits Staal’s still classic study of ritual) it is highly unlikely that, in the midst of being religious, a person perceives themselves as being religious – at least as their actions might be defined by the observer, armed with some definition of the term, or perhaps even by the participants themselves but from a hindsight vantage point, reflecting back on the act, for a particular purpose or in response to a specific query from a researcher. Instead, despite our best efforts to just carefully watch and listen and then infer (as Tanya Luhrmann, who is equally concerned with conveying the anthropological and psychological reality of the object for the people we study, describes her skill as an anthropologist [2012: xx]), in the seemingly authentic moment, there’s presumably little self-consciousness present or meaning-making taking place. Like all actors immersed in social situations, they’re l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: On Fabricating Religion
• 1 The Category “Religion” in Recent Publications: Twenty Years Later
• 2 “It’s (Not) Easy if You Try:” The Challenge to Imagine No Religion
• 3 A Question (Still) Worth Asking about The Religions of Man
• 4 “Man is the Measure of All Things:” On The Fabrication of Oriental Religions by European History of Religions
• 5 Identifying the Meaning and End of Scholarship: What’s at Stake in Muslim Identities
• 6 Of Concepts and Entities: Varieties of Critical Scholarship
• 7 Historicizing the Elephant in the Room
• 8 The Magic of the Melancholy: Shifting Gears in the Study of Religion
• 9 Fanfare for the Common e.g.: On the Strategic Use of the Mundane
• Author Index
• Subject Index