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CHAPTER 2 Redescribing 'Religion' as Social Formation: Toward a Social Theory of Religion A society can neither create nor recreate itself without creating some kind of ideal by the same stroke. This creation is not a sort of optional extra step by which society, being already made, merely adds finishing touches; it is the act by which society makes itself, and remakes itself, periodically.... A society is not constituted simply by the mass of individuals who comprise it, the ground they occupy, the things they use, or the movements they make, but above all by the idea it has of itself. -Emile Durkheim (1995 [1912]: 425) As should by now be clear, I identify with a growing group of scholars who are open to scrutinizing the history of their categories, the theories that ground them, and the social contexts in which scholarship takes place-they have rediscovered the need to engage issues of definition and category formation. Such a change in attitude is important, for it signals that what a previous generation of scholars took for transparent self-evidencies are now recognized as tools developed over time, tools with a history that come with theoretical, even political, baggage, tools that are used to classify, sort, and analyze human behavior. Once, the vast majority of scholars followed such influential writers as Max Weber, when, in a suitably inductivist vein, the first sentence of his influential Sociology of Religion (1922) states: "To define 'religion,' to say what it is, is not possible at the start of a presentation such as this. Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study" (1993: 1). Contrary to Weber, take Brian K. Smith's opening to his study of Vedic ritual, where, after noting Weber's view, he suggests just the opposite: To define is not to finish, but to start. To define is not to confine but to create something and ... and eventually redefine. To define, finally, is not to destroy but to construct for the purpose of useful reflec21 22 REDESCRIBING RELIGION AS SOMETHING ORDINARY tion. . . . In fact, we have definitions, hazy and inarticulate as they might be, for every object about which we know something.... Let us, then, define our concept of definition as a tentative classification of a phenomenon which allows us to begin an analysis of the phenomenon so defined" (1989: 4-5). Unfortunately, not all of our colleagues agree, for a number of them continue to employ categories that have questionable analytic use. For instance, we still find courses and monographs on primitive religion, cult experts populate daytime TV and news telecasts whenever marginalized social movements get into the newspapers, and social movements that call themselves "world religions" are continually portrayed as socially autonomous (i.e., sui generis) systems of 'faith' and 'salvation'. What fuels the continued use of such terms is the general confusion of phenomenological description with social scientific analysis ; for the descriptive value that most of our categories possess is largely the result of their being derived from, and fully inscribed within, the vocabularies and belief systems of the groups we study rather than the analytic vocabularies of scholarship. Sadly, the study of religion has yet to shake off its largely Protestant theological roots. Moreover, conflating these two domains of inquiry-or failing to see any role for analysis in the first place-is evidence of the theoretical bankruptcy of the modern study of religion, a bankruptcy that comes with a political price to be explored in subsequent chapters. When seen as an end in itself, phenomenologically based description confuses data with colleagues-which is one reason why, in some of the later chapters, I find it so attractive to make this sort of confused scholarship my own datum. So-called scholarship on religion ought to be our subject of study when it fails to posit emic claims and behaviors as data, data that becomes meaningful to a scholarly discourse once it has been redescribed by means of theoretically driven etic categories (on the distinctions between description and explanation, see Carter 1998; McCutcheon 1998b). To appeal to Marvin Harris, writing nearly twenty years ago, "[rJather than employ concepts that are necessarily real, meaningful , and appropriate from the native point of view, the observer is free to use alien categories and rules derived from the data language of science " (1979: 32). That this point is not widely accepted by scholars of religion is troubling indeed. So, right off the bat, let me say...

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