What is Religion? Sociology of Religion Lecture April 6, 2017 Today 1. Definition of Religion 2. Edward Said and Orientalism 3. Is “Wokism” a Religion? 4. Is Yoga a Religion or Religious? 5. Religion, Religions, Religious 6. Conclusion Themes Coherence/Unity vs. Contradiction Race and Ethnicity -different ways to think about prayer Individual and Communal Belief and Practice -prayer connecting and distinguishing differing communities within and outside of Islam Transformation and Continuity -changes in prayer over time and remarkable similarity Durkheim: …"a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden -beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.” Definitions of Religion Feurbach: "Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, being out of ourselves.” Tillich: "Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life.” Riesebrodt: “a complex of practices that are based on the premise of the existence of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, that are generally invisible” http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Definitions.htm What kind of social thing is Islam? • Is it a religion? • Is it a worldview (Weltanschauung)? • Is it a “value sphere”? • Is it an ideology? • Is it a cultural system? • Is it a “way of life”? • And how do these things overlap? What’s the point of this kind of question? • Why and how do we classify? • What kind of work does categorizing Islam do? • Why call Islam a religion, for example? • What do certain categorizations make legible or illegible? Edward Said • 1935-2003 • Born in Jerusalem in Palestine (when it was a British Mandate), he was a lifelong advocate for Palestinian autonomy and the Palestinian people. • Helped develop postcolonial studies • Orientalism (1978) • Written in 1978 • One of the most important books of the twentieth century. Orientalism • Orientalism was historically considered alongside anthropology and sociology/political science: anthropology studied “the peoples without history”; sociology and political science studies the West and its settler colonies (the US/Canada/Mexico, etc.); and Orientalism studied peoples with a literary history, basically the “civilizations” of Asia Orientalism • Yet one of the challenges of Orientalism was the way that it froze history: European scholars would emphasize their capacity with various Asian languages (usually specializing in a region like South Asia, East Asia, or the Middle East) and then believe that learning the classical texts was all they needed. • This is a process called “essentializing” • Think about what it would mean if someone felt they could talk about the current French elections by having carefully studied many of the texts in 9th century France. Yet this still happens about Islam! • People use this phrase a lot less often now and are more likely to talk about “Near Eastern Language and Civilizations” (though note that near east still refers to Europe. Near to whom? That’s why you more often now say East Asia instead of the Far East) • And in many ways, Said’s book helped to totally reorient the field. The phrase “Orientalist” What does Said mean by Orientalism • “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” [East] and (most of the time) “the Occident” [West] (2). • Ontological: Question of being. What kind of thing is something? • Epistemological: Question of knowing. How do we know something? • Said is interested in how we know the Orient and how that kind of knowing changes what the Orient is. So what does this have to do with religion and Islam? • Thinking about Said’s critique of Orientalism helps us to rethink the kind of work the category of “religion” or “Muslim” is doing. • What happens when you call something religious or Muslim? • What does it mean when someone is a “radical Muslim”? • What does it mean when someone’s politics are “dogmatic” “ritualistic” or “puritanical”? • Said helps us to think about the relationship between classification, knowledge, and power. A current example • Is being “woke” a religion as many conservatives now argue? • And what kind of assumptions about both religion and human life itself are embedded in this claim? A few distinctions and questions • Native category (Emic) vs. Analytical Category (Etic) • Functional definition vs. substantial definition • Orthodox vs. Orthoprax • Normative vs. Descriptive • Religion, Religions, Religious • Methodological atheism So let’s talk about yoga. Yoga is something I do, by which I mean to say yoga is something I think it would be nice for me to do and I sometimes imagine myself doing. Let’s look at some data • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_SE2gQwXoo • Look at what’s religious here. • Hindus angry at yoga studio? http://www.aljazeera.com/video/americas/2011/03/201139200 24262826.html • What if Gandhi took a yoga class? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBMc9s8oDWE • Is yoga Hindu? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Saf-z1rY-CA Jonathan Z. Smith • Historian of religion • Professor at the University of Chicago • From Wikipedia: • As of June 2, 2008, Smith had never used a computer. He continues to type or hand-write all of his papers. Furthermore, he despises the telephone and thinks the cellphone is "an absolute abomination.” Early European colonists on religion (1) “Religion” is not a native category. (2) Implicit universality, making “its alleged absence noteworthy.” (3) its characteristics are those that appear natural to “the other” (4) anthropological not a theological category. Etymology of Religion • Roman and early Christian, religio was a “cultic term referring primarily to the careful performance of ritual obligations” • When Hernan Cortes wrote about the Aztecs, he said “This great city contains many mosques…or houses for idols…The principal ones house persons of their religious orders…All these monks dress in black…from the time they enter their order” (270) Religion as ritual • Religion-as-ritual became the means of cross-cultural comparison. • This is fundamentally Catholic, and you see a shift as Protestantism takes over. • Suddenly you have the term “belief” or “faith” as being a synonym of religion, which was simply unimaginable before. Religions • It is the question of the plural religions (both Christian and non-Christian) that forced a new interest in the singular generic religion. • There then became an interest in the seventeenth century in “natural religion” • So what is natural religion? Natural Religion • “The essentially anthropological project of describing natural religion privileged similarity, often expressed by claims of universality or innateness”(272). • What does it mean to say that religion or a “religious sensibility” is natural? What does this accomplish? Natural Religion • This is an old idea that goes back to some of the founders of social science, but it’s still quite popular, both among certain kinds of religious believers (including various Muslims) and among evolutionary psychologists. Where do “religions” come from? • Are the diverse ”religions” species of a generic “religion”? Is “religion” the unique beginner…or is best conceived as a subordinate cultural taxon? (275) • This shows up because of a massive amount of data in the colonial era. • So this raises the question: how do you classify religions? Classifying Religion • First it’s just our/their (religion/magic, religion/superstition, religion/paganism) • But it can also be some similar religions (Abrahamic faiths) against others. • Smith quotes Mirabaud (1770) in showing how people at first worshipped nature then gradually worshipped God, and people often used these sense of religious evolution and temporal development. Abrahamic vs. Natural/Spiritual • “Whitney [1881] makes clear the dilemma posed by the study of the ”religions” from the perspective of the spiritual. The older fourfold enumeration of of the three “Abrahamic religions” plus “Idolatry” required revision. Judaism was to be demoted in that from a Christian apologetic perspective, it was the very type of a “fleshly religion”; Buddhism was to be promoted because in the two-century history of the Western imagination of Buddhism, it had become the the very type of “spiritual religion.”” Protestant Divisions • “Fairbairn [1876] adjusted his model such that the ultimate duality was between "spontaneous or natural religions" and "instituted religions," with the latter having two classes, each characterized by the same powerfully positive Protestant term: "Reformed Natural" (including the archaic religion of Israel ["Mosaism"]' Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Taoism), and "Reformed Spiritual," limited only to the new triad (Buddhism, "Mohammedanism," and Christianity). All other "religions" fell into one of three classes of "natural," the replacement for the older category, "idolatry.”” (278) Smith on World Religions • “It is impossible to escape the suspicion that a world religion is simply a religion like ours, and that it is, above all, a tradition that has achieved sufficient power and numbers to enter our history to form it, interact with it, or thwart it…All "primitives," by way of contrast, may be lumped together, as may the "minor religions," because they do not confront our history in any direct fashion. From the point of view of power, they are invisible” (280). So what is religion? • Smith doesn’t like Tillich’s “ultimate concern” (28081) • "Religion" is not a native term; it is a term created bv scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define. It is a second order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as "language" plays in linguistics or "culture" plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon.” (281-82) Conclusion 1. Definition of Religion 2. Edward Said and Orientalism 3. Is “Wokism” a Religion? 4. Is Yoga a Religion or Religious? 5. Religion, Religions, Religious 6. Conclusion 7. There’s no easy answer! For Thursday • Think about the difference between theology, Islamic studies, and religious studies • Think about *why* and *how* someone might compare religions
