Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

1 The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category

THE C O N S T R U C T I O N OF R E L I G I O N AS AN A N T H R O P O L O G I C A L CATEGORY In much nineteenth-century evolutionary thought, religion was considered to be an early human condition from which modern law, science, and politics emerged and became detached.1 In this century most anthropologists have abandoned Victorian evolutionary ideas, and many have challenged the rationalist notion that religion is simply a primitive and therefore outmoded form of the institutions we now encounter in truer form (law, politics, science) in modern life. For these twentieth-century anthropologists, religion is not an archaic mode of scientific thinking, nor of any other secular endeavor we value today; it is, on the contrary, a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other. From this it seems to follow that the essence of religion is not to be confused with, say, the essence of politics, although in many societies the two may overlap and be intertwined. In a characteristically subtle passage, Louis Dumont has told us that medieval Christendom was one such composite society: I shall take it for granted that a change in relations entails a change in whatever is related. If throughout our history religion has developed (to a large extent, with some other influences at play) a revolution in social values and has given birth by scissiparity, as it were, to an autonomous world of political institutions and speculations, then surely religion itself will have changed in the process. Of some important i. Thus, Fustel de Coulanges 1873. Originally published in French in 1864, this was an influential work in the history of several overlapping disciplines—anthropology, biblical studies, and classics. 27 I 28 and visible changes we are all aware, but, I submit, we are not aware of the change in the very nature of religion as lived by any given individual, saya Catholic. Everyone knows that religion was formerly a matter of the group and has become a matter of the individual (in principle, and in practice at least in many environments and situations ). But ifwe go on to assert that this change iscorrelated with the birth of the modern State, the proposition is not such a commonplace as the previous one. Let us go a little further: medieval religion was agreat cloak—I am thinking of the Mantle of Our Lady of Mercy. Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracingcapacity and became one among other apparently equal considerations, of which the political wasthe first born. Eachindividual may,ofcourse, and perhaps even will, recognise religion (or philosophy), as the same all-embracing consideration asit used to be socially. Yeton the levelof social consensus or ideology, the same person will switch to a different configuration of values in which autonomous values (religious, political, etc.) are seemingly juxtaposed, much asindividuals arejuxtaposed in society. (1971, 32; emphasisin original) According to this view, medieval religion, pervading or encompassing other categories, is nevertheless analytically identifiable. It is this fact that makes it possible to saythat religion has the same essence today as it had in the Middle Ages, although its social extension and function were different in the two epochs. Yet the insistence that religion has an autonomous essence—not to be confused with the essence of science , or of politics, or of common sense—invites us to define religion (like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand in our time that it be kept quite separate from politics, law, and science—spaces in which varieties of power and reason articulate our distinctively modern life. This definition is at once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the defense of religion. Yet this separation of religion from power is a modern Western norm, the product of a unique post-Reformation history. The attempt to understand Muslim traditions byinsisting that in them religion and politics (twoessences modern society tries to keep conceptually and practically apart) are coupled must, in my view, lead to failure. At its most dubious, such attempts encourage us to take up an a priori posiGENEALOGIES Religion as an Anthropological Category 29 tion in which religious discourse...