Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

SIX. Meaning: Religion in the Global South

* c h a p t e r s i x Meaning Religion in the Global South time, place, preservation, tourism, memory, spirituality, horror movies and Halloween, retirement homes, commemorations, reenactments , community legends, Sigmund Freud and William Faulkner, funerals , cemeteries, monuments: the members of this list share a focus on the past. “The past is not past,” proclaimed both Faulkner and Freud. (Faulkner’s character was thinking of society and its remembering; Freud was thinking of the individual and how repressed memories determine behavior.) Not surprisingly, as globalization presses and change happens, a countermovement seeks past as well as place, a way of connecting to something larger and older than immediate circumstance. My first three hypotheses all address specific changes—in social relationships locally and globally, in sense of place—and how these changes 137 138 Meaning and Action redefine identities. Identities are immediate, involving who we are as persons or as groups, but identity is not the deepest or largest category of existence. According to theory and commonsense observation, identities are framed by larger questions: What is existence? What are the purposes of life and death? Who I am or who we are is only an element of a wider reality, a wider “Being.” Individual identity is a part of that whole. Identities are immediate, but meaning is ultimate. Meaning is found by locating parts in a whole, by placing oneself within a framework that articulates significance for one’s life. A woman parked a van with a New York license plate. She and two teenagers got out and examined a map. “Are you looking for something?” I asked. “Yes, we are. What are we looking for?” she asked her son. A young woman drives a Jaguar with a North Carolina license plate that reads “ATAKLIFE.” Quests and attacks (on the “inexpressible”) imply meaning. Place and globalization seemingly clash, but both are species of space; the one is localized space, the other, global space. Meaning transcends both. Meaning entails a framework that is metaphysical rather than physical, a conceptual framework in terms of which physical entities , such as spaces, make sense. What moves us to get up in the morning and go through the day, to live life and do work, to “ataklife”? The answers may vary, from Nike’s “Just do it” to a religious treatise on why we are sent to pursue a calling, serve God, or make a difference. Even “Just do it” presumes a certain value system of activism that has its roots in religious and other values and beliefs. In each case, some framework of meaning is operative. Meaning drives action, as we discover when some action seems meaningless and we question why we should do it. Yet meaning is difficult to articulate. Meaning is everywhere and every-when, yet nowhere and no place. For believers, meaning may flow from God and end in Heaven or Hell, which are imagined in place and time as having physical reality. Whether or not such images and categories matter to us, meaning is the total world in which we exist experientially and is a framework for making sense of that world conceptually and for motivating ourselves to act behaviorally. Meaning 139 Meaning entails not only the world—the global world—but the “otherworld ” as well, the cosmos, the metaphysical world. Challenges of Globalization: Rationalization, Relativism, and Decontextualization Meaning clashes with and is challenged by globalization in many aspects. Two key ones are rationalization and relativism; a third is decontextualization . First, globalization entails rationalization and specialization— making tallow into candles and men into money, as Max Weber put it.1 One becomes obsessed with rationalizing life to make it serve specialized goals, such as profit, the bottom line. Such narrowing threatens those frames of meaning that define the whole, those large metaphysical visions not reducible to the rationalization of means in the interest of specialized ends that drive models of business, government, education, science, and technology, which spread globally, threatening older values. So globalization challenges meaning, and meaning must seek a way to encompass and make sense of globalization. Globalism also brings with it many varieties of meanings and values, challenging meaning with relativism. Why believe or choose one rather than the other? Where one guiding faith or perspective has reigned, now many vie for acceptance. What seemed absolute is now relative—one option to be evaluated according to need and...