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“Religion” after Religion, “Ritual” after Ritual

(In press - Routledge Companion to Anthropology)

Jon Bialecki, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: This chapter observes that importance in anthropology of recent claims both

questioning religion as having a universal form, and also of arguments that cast doubt on

religion as a human universal tout court; it notes similar tendencies in the anthropology of

ritual, where the term’s specificity is being undone as it is increasingly used to refer to any

densely patterned human activity, rather than to a specific and sharply delineated set of

practices used in relation to either religious institutions or to supernatural others. These

moves have not hindered the anthropological study of religion and ritual, however; rather

they have cleared conceptual space, resulting in a proliferation of approaches to the

anthropology of religion and ritual, as well as expanding what are seen as fitting topics for

the sub-field. It closes by asking whether this proliferation is a vindication of the arguments

challenging religion and ritual as categories, or whether the wealth of different ways of

framing religion suggests a more potent but occluded immanent process which generates

‘religion’ and ‘ritual,’ a process that may be characterized by a striking degree of creativity

and a boundless capacity to be differentiated.

Keywords: Belief, Çatalhöyük, Critique of Religion, Critique of Ritual, Embodiment, Ethics,

Essentialism in Anthropological Theory, Language and Language Ideology, Media, Nominalism

in Anthropological Theory, Pedagogy, Pilgrimage, Power, Religion, Ritual, Rupture, Secularism,

Singularity, Syncretism, Talal Asad, Time and Temporality

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Secular Distant Pasts, Religious Far Futures?

I’d like to start off this essay with two chronologically disparate scenes. The two moments I’ve

selected, though, should not be taken to stand as either a point of origin or the potential

realization of a human telos. Rather, they are merely effective temporal horizons different

enough from one another in their subject matter to give us a certain parallax on our actual object,

the current state of the anthropology of religion and ritual.

The first moment that I am thinking of is the neolithic Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük, a

site often invoked as a sort of shorthand for the initial moments of Levantine agriculture, animal

husbandry, and permanent settlements; the second is ‘the singularity,’ another shorthand used by

some for a future moment when human-born technology surpasses human understanding, and

possibly also human control. Let us start, then, with Çatalhöyük. Inhabited for roughly 1,400

years (7400-6000 B.C.E.), covering about 34 acres, and having a population that ranged from

3,500-8,000 souls, this site stands as one of the largest and best-documented records of the start

of agricultural practice and long-duration settlement (Hodder 2006, 2010: 2). Since its initial

excavation in late 1958, it has also stood as a privileged locale for thinking through the role

played by religion in creating human settlements. People turn to Çatalhöyük when considering

this question in part because of the wealth of material that seems, at least from the perspective of

archeology, obviously religious: ritual human burial underneath the floors of crowded houses,

often with bodies carefully decapitated after death; skulls plastered over and covered with ochre

pigments to mimic flesh; evidence of large, ritualistic sacrificial hunts of large wild bulls, with

the remains embedded in the walls of houses; adornments made from the claws and beaks of

raptors and great cats, such as leopards; crane wings, possibly worn as clothing during special

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events; figurines of what appear to be rather voluptuous female figures, often seated on what is

described as thrones (Hodder and Meskell 2010).

That this surplus of somewhat ambiguous but compelling material should lead to different

interpretations is not surprising; the most heated debates between archeologists seems to center

on whether or not Çatalhöyük could be characterized as a religiously-motivated matriarchy or

not (the current evidence seems to suggest that the answer is “no” [Hodder 2006]). Rather, the

surprise lies in the fact that to contemporary socio-cultural anthropological eyes, there was no

religion in Çatalhöyük at all. In a recent 2010 edited volume that grew out of a multi-year

collaboration between the current archeological team overseeing the excavation and some

leading anthropologists of religion, there was a great reluctance on the part of the anthropologists

to use the term religion without couching the term such that it was obvious that ‘religion’ used

here should not be taken to mean what it is commonly understood to mean; three of the four

anthropologists who contributed to the volume used the term with only the greatest degree of

hesitation, and one of the cultural anthropologists that was consulted, Maurice Bloch, even went

as far as to say that he was confident “that there was no religion in Çatalhöyük” (2010:161).1

That is not to say that there were not evocative elements that might remind one of religion, plays

of presences and absences in the way that these items were either displayed or secreted (Keane

2010; Pels 2010), of social hierarchies made transcendent so that they could outlast the specific

humans that constituted them (Bloch 2010). However, even these religion-like phenomena

should be treated suspiciously, as elements potentially on the wane during the longue durée at

1 It should be noted that the one anthropologist who would use the term religion without

being self conscious was not a cultural anthropologist, but rather orientated towards a cognitive science approach (Whitehouse and Hodder 2010). Predicated for the most part on assumption that the biological commonality of the human species is determining in the last instance,

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Çatalhöyük. Another of the anthropologists who was consulted, Peter Pels, suggests that these

elements were slowly being eclipsed as individual housing settlements became more autonomous

in self-sustenance as agricultural techniques improved; Pels even speaks of a kind of

‘secularizing’ as the inhabitants increasing technological mastery foregrounded their own agency

(Pels 2010:263). Secularism, then, in early Anatolia, even if it is not the secularism of the current

day. But religion, without scare quotes? No.

Second, ‘the singularity.’ Taken from a mathematical sense of the word, where it denotes the

point where a function’s value reaches the infinite, the term was brought into speculative

Anglophone futurism in 1993 by Verner Vinge, a professor of mathematics, computer scientists,

and sometimes science fiction author.2 In a talk sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center,

Vinge anticipated a time when exponential increases in technology would lead to human-crafted

artificial intelligences that would surpass their makers in speed and capacities. This would be the

moment, Vinge warned, where inhuman speed and intelligence would start bootstrapping itself,

leaving homo sapiens behind; human cognitive powers to foresee, or even comprehend and

compete, would be permanently eclipsed, and humans would “enter a regime as radically

different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.” (Vinge 1993: 89).

While this was originally posited as an existential threat to the species, in the hands of futurists

and proponents of life-extension such as the technology entrepreneur and popular author Ray

Kurzweil (2005) this became instead an opportunity; those humans who managed to live long

enough would have the possibility of uploading their consciousness, transferring what was

cognitive anthropologists such as Whitehouse (1995, 2004) and Boyer (1994, 2002) have taken a decidedly different tack from socio-cultural anthropology (for more, see Dulin 2011).

2 Though, as the philosopher David Chalmers has observed, the idea of humans being outstripped by their technological progeny has a long, and somewhat academically neglected, intellectual pre-history (Bostrom 2005; Chalmers 2010).

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effectively their very selves from the ‘wetware’ of the human brain to the presumably near-

infinite new artificial intelligences. Indeed, some singularitians hold out the prospect that with

the growth of computational capacity and nanotechnology, all matter will become thinking

matter, and transforming the universe itself into a kind of superconsciousness. These thoughts

have become the kernel around which numerous conferences, panels, websites, chatrooms, email

list-serves, and eventually seminars, organizations and institutes, have crystalized; these in term

have been the medium through which a small community has assembled itself.

However, as observed by anthropologist Abou Farman (2010a), this is not a community

without divisions or disagreements. Debates about the relative ‘abruptness’ of the singularity,

and even its actual possibility, are not uncommon. Even more telling is the fact that the later

utopian vision has never quite succeeded in uprooting the initial dread that accompanied the

singularity’s earlier formulation. For Farman, this mixture of futures leaves the singularity’s

proponents in the affective space of the sublime, suspended between wonder and terror. Given

this tonality of this affective state, and the tenor of the overarching speculative meta-history that

the singularity’s proponents are putting forward, it makes sense that Farman sees this (possibly

pseudo) science as taking up the sort of existential questions that over the last few hundred years

have usually been ceded to religion (Farman 2010a), an attempt to make “a quasi-transcendent

purpose to human toil in the hitherto indifferent universe” (Farman 2010b:90). At once

eschatological and soteriological, the singularity seems akin to a religion in itself—it is no

accident that it is sometimes referred to as the ‘rapture of the nerds.’

The point here in the discussion of the singularity is not to claim that this technological

romance is in some way a unique marriage of the scientific and the magico-religious, because it

is not. Other technologies that have the patina of futurity have been marked by what one is

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tempted to term ritualistic, magical, or religious thought (see e.g. Weibel and Swanson 2006,

Weibel n.d. on manned space flight) or have been made more explicable by being analytically

juxtaposed with religious categories (see e.g. Vidal 2007 on robotics, possession and divination).

There are also self-consciously ‘religious’ groups that have replaced the supernatural with the

alien in order to create a spiritual narrative that is, at least in their view, more in harmony with a

scientific world view (Bataglia 2005), and preexisting religious groups (such as mid-twentieth-

century liberal Protestants) that have attempted to think through already extant aspects of their

religious practice in light of then-new technologies and scientific speculation in order to create a

more ‘modernist’ form of religion (Klassen 2007). Even anthropology itself, in both foundational

(Pels 2003) and contemporary (E. Turner 2003) stages, has at times entertained the possibility

that the supernatural might be a valid ontological as well as cultural-analytic category (though

this usually involves bridging some rather serious epistemological fault lines). Given all this, it

would be hard to say that finding an element of the religious in the technocratic speculation of

the ‘singularity’ is unique.

Nor is the point to take the narrative of ‘the return of the religious’ and blow it up to the scale

of all of human history, with a primordial secularism of Çatalhöyük juxtaposed against a futurist

techno-spiritualism, a new animism in which all matter will be made intelligent. The nineteenth

and twentieth century social science prediction of a growing global secularism, where

technology, education and modernity would see to fulfilling needs that were usually covered by

religion, has proven to be spectacularly incorrect, especially when applied to areas other than

Western Europe. As this essay will show, the current historical moment is marked by a

proliferation of what we will call the religious. But to see this as part of a large-scale master

narrative that could cover all of our species is at best overreaching.

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Rather, we start with a ‘secular’ Çatalhöyük and the rapture of the nerds to suggest that it is

the reluctance to pronounce the former as unproblematically an instance of religion that allows

religion to come to the forefront in the latter. The current moment in anthropology, as opposed to

world history, is characterized not by the proliferation of religion, but by the erasure of religion

as a category; or rather, to be more precise, by an erasure of religion as a category that has

concomitantly allowed various forms of religiosity to come into view. Alongside with this there

has been an uncoupling of religion and ritual which has worked such that the latter has also been

enabled to thrive as a concept, even if it loses some of its particular grounding and analytic

specificity. The current moment in the anthropology of religion, then, is dominated in a sense by

the undoing of religion as a category; and this has resulted not in an impasse, but rather in the

proliferation of the religious.

Religion Erased, Ritual Uncoupled

What does it mean to say that a category such as religion has been put under erasure in

anthropology, and how is it that something so fundamental to the history of the discipline be

struck out? The initial step to answering this question is to realize that ‘religion’ is not the first

anthropological category of thought to be removed. One of the most recurrent moves made in the

history of the discipline is to either question the validity of a category, or to suggest that the

category is a non-essential social artifact that helps create (and, at times, to regulate) the very

object that it innocently claims to name. In fact, many of the categories that were foundational to

the establishment of anthropology (kinship, totemism, society) have been placed under suspicion,

interrogated as to whether they were either projections or constructions of a social science too

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influenced by its own presumptions and cultural blinders (see, e.g. Latour 2008; Lévi-Strauss

1963; Schneider 1980, Strathern 1990).

Given the ubiquity of this type of turn, it should be no surprise that religion has been through

the process as well. Despite the repeated insistence that not only was it possible to produce a

cross-cultural definition of religion, but that it was essential as well (Donovan 2003; Spiro

1994;), there have been several attempts to unmask any definition with universal pretensions; or,

if not producing complete unmaskings, at least attempts to de-essentialize the category by

emphasizing, say, the historical contingency of the term or the variegated and disparate nature of

what it is that the term has been used historically to signify (Masuzawa 2005; Nongbri 2013;

Saler 1987; Saler 2000). By far the most influential of these in the field of anthropology, though,

has been authored by Talal Asad. In a series of essays written during the early- and mid-1980s,

and published collectively as Genealogies of Religion (1993), Asad has argued forcefully that, as

historically used in anthropology, religion as an autonomous category was in effect merely a de-

theologized variant of post-reformation Christian thought, and therefore mirrors a historical

moment marked by at once both a transition of disciplinary and policing powers from the Church

to the State, and an attempt to postulate a human universalism in the wake of increasing

exchange with a plethora of non-European populations.

Asad’s signal essay in this department, “The Construction of Religion as an anthropological

category,” presents what is a proximate critique of a definition of religion offered by Clifford

Geertz (1973); the true target of the essay, though, is any attempt to produce an overarching

definition of religion. Asad does this by showing that Geertz’s definition assumes the primacy of

a special category of religious symbols, which in turn give rise to inner affective states (or in

Geertz’s parlance, “moods and motivations”) that lend a sense of reality to overarching religious

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postulates (what Geertz calls “a general order of existence”[Geertz 1973: 90]). In short,

according to Asad, this seemingly innocent causal chain is not one that can be attributed to

‘religion’ writ large, as shown by Asad’s counterexample of medieval Christendom. In the

medieval church, it was not individual adherence to a domain of self-evidently religious symbols

which was primary, but rather a set of institutional, authorized discourses and disciplines that not

only regulated how one interacted with ‘religious’ symbols, but even demarcated what was to be

included and excluded from the space of ‘religion.’ Under this dispensation, it was submission to

authority, rather than the communicative load delivered by the symbol, which made the religious

subject. It was only later, as the Church lost the capacity to define and compel the state and

actors in the public arena, that religion became a matter of internal adherence; what occurred was

not so much that authorizing discourses on what was to count as religion disappeared, but rather

that such discourses fell under the powers of secular authorities who were more concerned with

creating an autonomy from religion than an autonomy for religion. Asad’s point is not that this

places Geertz’s particular definition under question; others have questioned how well Geertz’s

account of religion holds together (for a full review and partial defense of Geertz, see Schilbrack

2005). Instead, Asad’s point is that any definition of religion must include the authorizing

discourses and disciplines that parse what is and what is not religion in the case at hand—but

since that parsing is always an empirical question, and particular to each circumstance, any

definitional fixing in advance is outside of the question. We must therefore eschew talking about

religion as any kind of a universality.

Asad’s own particularization of religion has been well received; as just an example, in the

Çatalhöyük essays both Keane and Pels invoke Asad in their reluctance to use the term religion,

and while Bloch does not invoke Asad by name, his argument against the term seems to share

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some of the same sensibilities (in a similar spirit, see also Bloch 2008). Asad’s critique certainly

was an intervention that resonated with the moment in the discipline when it occurred. The 1980s

were a time when earlier anthropological concerns with symbols, social and symbolic structures,

and various functionalisms was on the wane, and new interests in power differentials and a

practice-orientated anti-foundationalism was on the rise (Ortner 1984); strands of both of these

lines of thought were easy to identify in Asad. The same anti-foundationalism that created an

interest in practice was more generally leading to a nominalist turn; nominalism is a poisiton that

“that rejects the existence of abstract objects, of universals, or of both of them altogether”

(Bialecki 2013: 302), and in anthropology is usually takes the form of a denial of the existence of

any large-scale abstract entities such as ‘culture’ or ‘society’ (Bunzel 2008; Rabinow 1988;

Zenner 1994). While Asad denied that his view constituted any kind of ‘simple nominalism’

(1994:29)—Asad affirmed the existence of intangible social forces, even if they were crafted by

techno-rational means—his tendency to present religion as being without essence certainly was

amenable to a nominalist mode of thought.

Though it did not receive as strong a reception as his claims about religion, Asad’s critique

also encompassed another classical anthropological concept in a later essay, “Towards a

Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” (1994: 55-82). Asad’s observation here is that according to

the word’s original, pre-anthropological definition, a rite or ritual meant an instruction book for

how to engage in a religious ceremony or services; in short, it directed how one was to engage in

a process, but not what meaning might be attributed to the process. Later definitions liberated the

word from its specifically Christian context (rites and ritual referring originally to Christian

religious manuals) by expanding what was indicated from the instructions for how to perform

such practices, to now include the practices themselves. The shift from book to performance did

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not mean that ritual lost its referential edge; rather, the rituals themselves were taken to be

representational, to mean something that had to be interpreted by the anthropologist. Asad traces

this shift to a larger change in the Western conception of the person, from an earlier medieval

understanding where a virtue was achieved by the outward imitation of its signs, to the reversal

of that template in the early modern era, so that one’s outward signs were indices, and not the

causes, of individual character, and one had to learn to read them to understand others (or

simulate them yourself, if you wished to dissemble). It was this particularized, post-Reformation

Christian logic that anthropology had adopted in its insistence that there was something legible in

the ritual. The logic implicit in other configurations of ritual had been bypassed by the discipline,

such as the medieval one where ritual (to be anachronistic) served as a kind of moral training and

pedagogy, where adherence rather than an underlying meaning was what was important.

This aspect of Asad’s work has not had the same effect as his writing on the category of

religion, and there is some reason to think that he didn’t wish it to have—Asad notes that his

project was more along the lines of “a historical inquiry into the conditions that makes ritual in

its contemporary sense visible to and theorizable by modern anthropology” than he was in in

attempting to “criticize anthropological theories of ritual” (1994:55). Again, though, Asad’s

contribution was still a timely one, running roughly thematically parallel to other work. As

already noted, theories predicated on direct action in the world, such as practice theory, were

increasingly becoming salient in anthropology. Most notable in this was the work of Catherine

Bell, who emphasized moments of practice that consisted of ‘ritualization,’ and questioned

whether ‘ritual’ as an abstract category was even capable of being given an internally coherent,

commonly acceptable definition (Bell 1992). Bell’s interest in ritual as a form of practice was

concurrent with an interest in the experience generated by and implicit to ritual that was also

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coming to the fore (see, for instance, Jackson 1983; Csordas 1990, 1997a, 1997b); and Bell’s

questioning of the boundaries of ritual was joined by linguistic anthropology, which thought of

ritual as being a degree of emergent formalization rather than an autonomous entity (see, e.g.,

Goffmann 1967; Silverstein 2004). Even in those cases where the concept of ritual has not been

placed as much in question, some of the more basic associations with ‘ritual’ have been argued

against: The idea of ritual as having a particular relationship, either at the level of the imaginary

or the actual-historical, with something called ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’ has been argued as

unnecessary, if not ideological (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993). The idea that ritual’s

effectiveness lies in setting up a separate sacred spatio-temporal sphere and linguistic practice

that stands in opposition to the quotidian has been criticized as well; under this reading, it is not

so much that ritual is set-apart from the everyday, as much as ritual provides training for how to

comport oneself in the everyday (Mahmood 2001, 2005). Given this tendency to see ritual as not

customary, as not set-apart, and as measured in incremental increases instead of binary absence-

or-presence, it should not be surprising that ritual has been emancipated from religion almost

completely, and people can speak of “ritual” when discussing any densely patterned semiotic

activity (Basso and Senft 2009); it is even now possible to speak of ritual merely as recursive

patterning, apart from context or representation entirely (see Handelman and Lindquist 2005, and

especially Handelman 2005).3

One might imagine that these various critiques of the idea of ‘religion’ and ‘ritual,’

exemplified in this essay by Asad, would be crippling to the anthropology of religion. After all,

what can be more devastating than to discover that one has been studying an object that may not

3 This conception of ritual as a recursive complex patterning, though, has had the unexpected

result of allowing for discussions of ‘ritual’ among groups, such as Pentecostal and Charismatic

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exist, such as the aether or phlogiston? However, as Joel Robbins has observed, the kind of

“object-dissolving critiques” that have been launched against both religion and ritual often “lead

to an efflorescence of creative work focused on the very object they would banish,” especially

when addressing a field that already has been the object of a great deal of attention (Robbins

2003: 193). That certainly has been the case with the fields of religion and ritual. As Simon

Coleman has noted, as a subdiscipline the anthropology of religion is thriving (Coleman 2010:

103); the health of the anthropology of religion as a topic is also vouchsafed by the fact that in

recent years other religion-concerned social-science disciplines are increasingly turning to

ethnography, the methodological approach that is almost synonymous with anthropology

(Bender 2011). As for ritual, emancipated from religion or not, it is as hale as it has ever been,

with thousands of articles and book-chapters published on the subject over the last 20 years, and

on average about one article per issue on ritual appearing in American Anthropologist and

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Stasch 2011: 160). Even sacrifice, the form of

ritual that has suffered the most from accusations that it is a Eurocentric, Christian-derived

projection, is receiving renewed ethnographic attention (Mayblin and Course 2013).

Knowing that ritual and religion is thriving, though, does not tell us how it is thriving, nor

does it tell us in what way this was either a fruit of, or a rebuttal to, the broad critiques offered of

ritual and religion by Asad and others. Nor does it address another, related question: what are we

to make of work done prior to the de-essentialization of religion and the uncoupling of ritual?

Unless one believes without doubt in a triumphalist version of the intellectual history of the

discipline, it would stand to reason that whatever merits there are in the critiques of religion and

ritual that came out in the eighties and nineties, there must be aspects of prior thought on religion

Christians, that deny that they engage in ritual, and see ritual as in fact opposed to their forms of

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and ritual that would have a use for us now that would exceed the mere historical or

genealogical? For the remainder of this essay, we’ll turn to these questions, dealing first with the

possibilities opened up, and then with the question of what is to be made of prior material in the

current day.

“Religion” after Religion, “Ritual” after Ritual

The first thing to observe is that this crossing-out of any definition of religion has meant not that

people have stopped interrogating religion, but that they have begun to take on religion from

different angles. Specifically, to take on religion from angles other than as a kind of belief. As

Asad noted in his critique, in the modern West religion has been thought of most often in terms

of belief; in anthropology this probably goes back to the famous definition of religion as the

“belief in Spiritual Beings” put forward by the Victorian Anthropologist Edward Tylor, (1874:

424). Prior to the current moment, of course, the primacy of belief had been questioned by some

anthropologists as analytically incoherent, as incapable of evidentiary support, as historically

variable, and/or as not a universal category (Needham 1973; Ruel 1982), but these were often

lonely voices in the anthropological discussion. Contrast that with the contemporary moment,

where a major special issue of a well received anthropological journal can collect a full set of

authors to take up the argument that belief is something that is best written ‘against’ rather than

‘with’ (Lindquist and Coleman 2008). Even those who wish to foreground ‘belief’ in their

ethnographic description and analysis of their informants are at pains to note how this category

functions differently than the forms of ‘belief’ borrowed from Latin Christendom, and taken as a

default in an earlier anthropological dispensation (see, e.g., Kirsch 2004).

religious practice; see Lindhardt 2011.

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If anthropology is “against” belief, can one ask what it is “for”? The answer is bodies,

pedagogies, power, ethics, media, and language. In one sense, though, it is the body that is first,

at least conceptually, for all these categories in the contemporary moment—even for that of

language. This interest in bodies could be seen as in part a result of the already mentioned

nominalism in the field. Another catalyst of this turn to the body is an earlier generation of

feminist critique of anthropology, which has given birth to a greater attention to the dynamics of

gender; the ethnography of religion has found that paying attention to the way that gender is

inscribed on religious bodies is a particularly fruitful way of thinking through this question (see

Boddy 1989; Austen-Broos 1997). Just as important is the already-noted interest in

phenomenological accounts of religion; if one is denying the primacy of beliefs, then both the

experiential and the engine of the experiential—the body’s interactions with and embedding in

the world—becomes the obvious site of inquiry. Related to this has been an interest in affect, a

word used to indicate culturally conditioned, embodied states; affect is similar to emotion, but

most people working in affect decline to use the word emotion, because they wish to emphasize

the communal, intersubjective, kinesthetic and circulating nature of this experience, which is

imagined as a sort of subliminal prior moment occurring before the kind of individual

psychologizing that is associated with the word emotion (see for instance Bialecki 2010; O’Neill

2013; Richards and Rudnkyj 2009; Rudnkyj 2011). For those interested in affect, it is the forms

of subjectification that these quickly-moving states produce that are of interest.

This interest in bodies and their related subjectivities (phenomenological, gendered, or

affective) is often allied with another concern for the anthropology of religion: power. Now, this

is much more along the lines of a change in the mode through which an anthropology of religion

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expressed its concern for power, than it was the inauguration of a concern for power, since an

eye for how religion can be used to promote, regulate, or inaugurate social regimes goes back to

the founding moments of the discipline. This can be seen in the work of Durkheim, for whom

religion and ritual was the trans-human aspect of the social, concretized in the force of the

sacred; a similar concern for religion as a legitimating and regulating force in social life can be

seen in the works of structural functionalist such as Radcliffe-Brown (1922, 1957). Structural

functionalism was a view of religion that, while conservative to the extent that it envisioned

religion as sustaining a preexisting social order, was relatively benign (or at least as benign as the

social order it was upholding in any particular case). Not all anthropological conceptions of

religion saw it as so innocent. In the earlier works of Maurice Bloch, there was a turn to framing

religion and its constiuative rituals as a form of ideology,in as much as they functioned as a

block to thought and argumentation; for him, the fixity in religious and ritual thought gave ritual

and religion a cognitive poverty that made it the ideal engine of traditional authority (Bloch

1974).

What stands apart in the current moment, then, is not this interest in religion as a modality of

sociality-shaping power, but in how this power is imagined to function, and the suspicion with

which it is treated. An example of this is in the marriage of religion as ideology to a more overtly

late Marxian account of colonial theory and the state in the works of John and Jean Comaroff,

who (building on the work of Max Gluckman) specialize in the relationship between economy,

statecraft and religion in Africa (Comaroff 1985, Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). The

resonance with the contemporary moment in the anthropology of religion lies in how they

concern themselves with how capital flows and colonialism work, through the guise of religion,

on the body, shaping it in furtherance of a particular political-economic regime.

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This interest in the body as a site where religion does formative work on the body to make

pliant subjects is often articulated using the language of the French intellectual historian, Michel

Foucault (who was, unsurprisingly, an inspiration for Asad as well). In the anthropology of

religion, Foucault-influenced accounts of religion as a disciplinary exercise usually focus on

religion as an institutional authority that individuals submit themselves to, and which they are in

turn crafted by; accounts organized by this logic can be found addressing such diverse entities as

New York Hasidic girls schools (Fader 2009), Neo-Pentecostal megachurches (O’Neill 2010),

and Islamic-themed worker-productivity and self-development training seminars in Indonesia

(Rudnyckyj 2010).

The focus in this type of analysis is on how the techniques that are deployed in these sites

make subjects who are agreeable with the demands placed on them by the larger institutions that

they are embedded in; they see this formative work as a kind of power separate and apart from

other means of effectivity, such as outright coercion or violence. Other Foucauldian-influenced

works frame the question slightly askance, asking rather how it is that people take techniques

that are found in their religious milieus, and use these techniques to reform their own selves in

ways that they aspire to; following Foucualt’s usage in his later work (1986a, 1986b, 1997), this

attempt to make oneself into a vision of the good through a series of reflexive exercises on the

self is seen as a form of ethics. Accounts of Islamic (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005) and

Christian (Faubion 2001; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2010) prayer, devotion, and penitential practices

have proven quite agreeable to an articulation that emphasizes the subject’s role in her own self-

fashioning; beyond monotheism, this line of thought has also shown itself amenable to accounts

of religions centered around ascetic practices, such as Jainism (Laidlaw 1995), and to spiritual

18

practices oriented around ritualistic forms of spirit possession in Madagascar (Lambek 2002; see

generally Faubion 2011, Laidlaw 2013, Lambek 2010).

Not unrelated to this take on anthropology of religion as an anthropology of ethics is a

parallel interest in the pedagogy of religion (see, e.g, Berliner and Sarró 2007; Brahinsky 2013;

Fader 2009; Lester 2005). Oftentimes the anthropology of religious pedagogy, rather than

focusing on how institutions form certain subjects, or how subjects learn to remake themselves

into the sort of ethical person they yearn to be, takes instead as its focus how it is that religious

practitioners learn to sense the world around them as being filled with the kind of supernatural

agents that stand as the central of many forms of religion. Of particular note here is the work of

Tanya Luhrmann, who has documented how both middle-class English pagan witches (1991)

and American Neo-Charismatics (2004, 2007, 2012) learn to train their sense, increase their

imaginative capacities, and reconfigure their evidentiary standards in such a way that personal

encounters with ancient Gods on one hand, or the Holy Spirit on another, have a patina of both

plausibility and realism that they otherwise might lack.

The idea of a pedagogy suggests, of course, a prior uneducated state; extending our focus

more to our overarching theme, the idea that there is no universal definition of what we call

religion, and hence no ‘essence’ to it, suggests as well that what we call religion is contingent,

and subject to change. If “religion” has no center, then transformations, sometimes of a radical

nature, should be expected. Sometimes this change is at the level of the individual, or of small

collectives. Amira Mittermaier’s Dreams that Matter (2011), for instances, has documented how

practices of Islamic dream interpretation in Cairo leaves their adherents open to a divine alterity;

depending on the way that nocturnal visions interact with interpretive hermeneutics derived from

sources such as Sufi dream manuals and Freudian psychoanalysis, lives can be redirected in

19

ways that might not comport with the received stereotype of reformist Islam. More often, though,

this interest in the possibility of religious transformation has been turned to larger scale

institutions. For this reason the anthropology of religion has been very much an anthropology of

cultural and social change as well—or at least in its best moments it aspires to be. Part of this has

taken the form of an interest in religious “becomings,” religion not as a state, but as an aspiration

that people struggle to achieve – and often fall short of (Elisha 2011, Khan 2012). A similar

interest in religious change has led some anthropologists to revisit the old issue of syncretism, a

topic which goes back to both nineteenth-century diffusionist theories of anthropology as well as

early Boasian anthropologists of creole cultures such as Melville Herskovits. This new interest in

the syncretic can be differentiated from this earlier literature by the careful way it attends not

only to when various forms of religiosity choose to highlight or deny any constitutive

heterogeneity in their origins, but also in asking when such internal heterogeneity is something

that anthropologists have to be mindful of at the level of theoretical analysis as well as

ethnographic description (Hoskins 2013); at the same time, it has led several of these same

scholars to consider with a degree of suspicion the fact that syncretism itself, by suggesting a

practice that can be identified as ‘mixed,’ is a backdoor way of suggesting a form of essentialism

in religious practice, albeit an essentialism where that essence is always located at some other,

prior scene (see generally Stewart and Shaw 1994).

Such concerns with backdoor essentialism have lead anthropologists such as Joel Robbins

(2007) to emphasize the importance of rupture in moments of religious change, and particularly

in moments of conversion. Such a stress on discontinuity is necessary because despite the

theoretical waning of conceptions of religion as somehow autonomous, there is a countervailing

tendency to see new religious practices as continuations of previous religious practices under a

20

different name, especially if the new religious practice is drawn from a “world religion.” This

has been a particular problem in the ethnography of recently Christian populations, Robbins has

argued, owing in part to the unconscious assumption that Christian practice is too much like the

forms of religiosity found in the North American/European metropole to be of interest

ethnographically. This situation, according to Robbins, has caused some anthropologists to

underemphasize not only the historical fact of rupture, but also an internal logic of rupture

common to many Christian religious imaginaries. Robbins’s claim has been challenged, at least

as far as Melanesian ethnography goes, by Mark Mosko (2010), who has claimed that a common

Melanesian conception of partible personhood, often called “dividuals,” (Strathern 1990), can be

found in post-conversion Melanesian Christian practices; Liana Chua (2012), drawing on

fieldwork with Bidayhu Dayak Christians in Borneo, has also argued that Christian forms may in

some circumstances create narratives centered around claims of cultural continuity rather than

sharp breaks (also see Scott 2005). Maya Mayblin’s (2010) work on Catholic peasants in Brazil

also suggest a different economy of rupture and continuity, and of religious adherence and

religious disavowal, as does the literature on Orthodox Christianity (see Boylston 2013; Hann

and Goltz 2010). Despite these challenges and exceptions, there have been many anthropologists

of religion who have taken up conversion and temporality as a problem, focusing in large part on

the new forms of sociality and understanding that come both during and in the wake of religious

change (see, e.g., Engelke 2004; Hefner 1993; Meyer 1999; Robbins 2004; Vilaça 2010) or

intensification (Webster 2013; on Christianity and anthropology generally see Bialecki, Haynes

and Robbins 2008). 4

4 Though published to late to be fully taken account of in this particular essay, Matt Tomlinson’s (2014) recent article on Christian time in Fiji as an impossible, compulsive repetition promises to further expand this particular conversation.

21

The possibility of change also suggests the possibility of absence as well (even though at

some abstract level it is hard to articulate in a language of the universal what it would mean to

have an absence of something that has no essence through which it could be identified). This is

addressed mostly by the anthropology of religion not through religion’s removal, but through

secularism, that is moments where religion has been scaled back from social prominence and lost

its taken-for-granted nature. While numerous non-anthropological thinkers from philosophy,

political science, and sociology have considerable influence in anthropological discussions on

the nature, history, and extent of secularism (see, e.g., Cassanova 1994; Connolly 1999; Martin

2005; Taylor 2007), the leading anthropological voice on this topic is again Talal Asad (2003),

who has insisted on secularism not as the overcoming of religion or the sacred, nor as religion’s

anti-type, but merely as a divergent historical trajectory, albeit one that has been influential on

the global stage owing to its historical co-mingling with other important global forces such as the

nation-state and capitalism. This attention to secularism and secularization not as fate but as

contingent, socio-cultural formations has allowed for ethnographic accounts of the contents and

clashes between local ‘secularizing’ forces and religious ones, both within and outside of Europe

(Bowen 2008; Engelke 2009, 2011, 2013; Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; see generally

Cannell 2010).

Taken in concert, these trends in anthropology sketch a variegated landscape, a global

patchwork where various forms of religiosity are being transmitted to (or at times, seized by)

convert cultures, while at the same time diverse secular logics struggle to carefully demarcate the

role played by these religions in an often newly emergent ‘public sphere;’ this has lead to a series

of complex religious identities, unlikely importations of spiritual practices, and dispersed

personal and institutional networks consisting of nodes that are often as marked by a similarity

22

in, say, doxa or practice, but which still results in wild divergence due to the differing contexts in

which they are played out (see e.g., Coleman 2000, Coleman and Collins 2004; Csordas 2009).

The scale and breadth of this new religious landscape has also called for a revisitation of older

anthropology of religion objects such as pilgrimage. This new interest in pilgrimage differs in

that it focuses not so much on the site of pilgrimage as a sacred space apart from the quotidian,

as had been done in the past (Turner and Turner 1995), but rather as nodes in flows of people,

flows that are very much embedded in day-to-day social and cultural arenas (Coleman and Eade

2004; Kaell 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014). This denaturing of an older anthropological sharp divide

between the sacred and the secular has also meant a blurring of boundaries between pilgrimage

and other modes of travel that are typically understood as secular, and not ‘religious’ or

‘cosmological’ in nature, bringing out the spiritual often lying hidden in tourism and the

consumption often present in pilgrimage (Badone and Roseman 2004).

The more complex and dispersed religious geographies implicit in discussions of

globalization and pilgrimage also raise the question of communication within and between

various religiously inflected social spaces. Influenced in large part by latter observations made

by the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida (1996) and by a prominent interdisciplinary

collection of essays edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (2001), this discussion has led to

a movement that has focused on the particular manner with which the materiality of religious

objects engender particular forms of religiosity; examples here might be the way that the

portability, ease of copying, and sonority of mosque sermons have played a role in the

Islamization of Cairo (Hirshkind 2006), or the effect of Nollywood-style made-for-video

productions have had in shaping what might be called a Ghanian public sphere that is informed

by a Pentecostal visual vocabulary of the miraculous (Meyer 2006). Irrevocably bound to

23

sensation and the aesthetic (Meyer 2008), mediatization is religion to many who follow this line

of thought (see Engelke 2010), a spectacular play of simultaneous presence and absence which

cannot but help index else-wheres owing to their representational nature.

This claim mirrors a parallel one made regarding religion and language. Anthropologists of

religion (and particularly anthropologists of Christianity—see Bialecki and Hoenes 2011) have

gone as far as to see the acquisition of religious language as effectively leading to religious

conversion (Harding 1987), and to understanding the internal aesthetics of religiously inflected

language as being constitutive of religious thought (Crapanzano 2000; Robbins 2001, Scheifflin

2002, 2007; Tomlinson 2009). The logic behind many of these claims (when they are not simply

relying on the impressive ordering power of language per se) is that religious language, in

dealing with the particular problem of communication with invisible and silent divine others,

plays with what might be thought of as the Janus face of language. In this double-sided

conception of religious language, the immaterial aspect of spoken communication is implied by

both the private thoughts and transient sounds that it produces, which plays against the

materiality of the physical substrate, bodies and things, necessary to sustain this immateriality.

This leads to numerous choices for the religious practitioner: The question for those who prefer

to think of the divine as by nature corporeal and co-present, then, is how to give religious “mere

words” a sense of material force in the here and now. For those who frame the divine as

intangible, the problem is how to engage in modes of speech that keep this necessary physicality

as far from consciousness as possible. Concomitant with these decisions are where to situate

agency: In the human who speaks? In the divinity who may have originally fashioned the words?

In the material items used to bridge the human-divine divide (see Keane 1997a, 1997b, 2007)?

24

These decisions regarding which aspects of communication to privilege and which to deny,

where agency lies and where it does not, coalesce to form collective normative judgments about

how communication works. These judgments are called ‘semiotic ideologies’ (after the

linguistic-anthropology concept of ‘language ideology’—see Woolard 1997) in the

anthropological literature; and the idea of ‘language ideology’ has been successful not only in

working out the contours of Christian-Eastern Indonesian contact situations, where the term was

first fashioned by Webb Keane, but also in forms of Christianity that reject the Bible as being too

material for a supposedly spiritual religion (Engelke 2007). Beyond Christianity, the concept has

been used to think through Islamic responses to the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed

(Mahmood 2009) and to chart changes in Tibetan religion, politics, and gender (Makley 2007).

Conclusion: Making Peace between “Religion” and Religion

If the idea of a ‘semiotic ideology’ is familiar, it is because this is not the first time that we have

encountered it; it was a similar play of presence and absence, although then suggesting a concern

with alternatively foregrounding and occulting particular aspects of Neolithic life, that Webb

Keane also identified in his discussion of Çatalhöyük. But recall as well that this play was not to

be considered by Keane to be “religion.” As previously stated, to consider Çatalhöyük to be

‘religious’ was ahistorical, as Asad has shown us that religion is an idea with a particular

pedigree. But the problem with using the term ‘religion’ goes beyond this, as we can also see

that the idea of some aspects and objects of speech being stressed at the expense of others is not

anything particular to religion. Keane would say that us moderns, in stressing our own agency,

sincerity, and spontaneity in speech, engage in similar obfuscation and emphasis as well, and if

there is one thing that is certain about the moment called modernity, it is that it is one in which

25

there is always at least a possibility of leaving religion by the wayside. Religion and areligion are

but different modes of presentation and concealment, similar processes working to different

ends, with different intensities.

But this is not particular to the analytic category of religion alone. Similar things can be said

of ritual as well—recall from our previous discussion that if there is no hard and fast line

between ritual and non-ritual, but increasing layers of repetition, complexity, and formality that

are measured in increasing qualitative intensities, as we saw in our discussion of ritual, then the

figure of ritual is implicit in any action or event that can be said to in some way be patterned. But

this also, in an odd way, brings us back to our other opening case, that of the singularity. If plays

of presence and absence, emphasis and disavowal are present in any semiotic system, it is the

way that they play out in realms not conventionally thought of as ‘religious’ that allows us to see

a certain background ‘religiosity’ even in these near-future technological imaginings. In his

account of the productive engine behind religion and morality, the nineteenth century

philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that it was a very similar play of presences and absences,

tied to a concomitant dialectic of openness and closure, that allowed humans to engage in the

what he called “the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of

gods” (Bergson 1935: 275; compare Bialecki 2011); if this is not a literal description of the

dreams of singulitarians, attempting to open themselves to potential new ways of being in the

world, then what is?

But we should note this as well. Remember it was the erasure of religion as a category what

allowed us to dissolve the border between ‘religion’ and ‘technology,’ and allowed us to see the

religious aspects of the singulitarian moment in a technological/scientific community without

26

subsuming it; however this meant that religion still thrived underneath the ban. That is, we could

only recognize singularity as religious because, despite the anti-essentialist work done by Asad,

we still had an idea of religion, even though we do not have the category. This spectral

continuity of the religious suggests that there are three futures to the anthropology of religion.

First, we could continue to root out the idea of religion; this is something that is being done more

and more in anthropology today, though owing to the sub rosa nature of this move, it is not easy

to see the fruit of this work (how does one identify a true, that is, a completely unmarked,

absence?). This is taking Asad’s critique further than Asad perhaps intended—rather than

removing a set of socio-culturally fashioned blinders, we are trading then for another, a hard

functionalism that does not reduce religion to the social work it does, but obliterates it entirely

from the record. The second option is a retrograde one, to acknowledge the inevitability of our

thinking religion, and returning to essentialist framings of it—something, for instance, we see in

the cognitive sciences.5 This also seems to be a mistake, an attempt to rebut Asad by ignoring

him. The third option is to attempt to revisit the vast wealth of thought on religion crafted from

previous dispensations of anthropology, but from the standpoint that sees them as numerous

directions, as different ‘lines of flight,’ as various discussions of particular manifestations of

religious imaginaries. Here, both the thought of anthropologists of religion, and those practices

where anthropologist can sense a religiosity, might be seen as various solutions to some

underlying problematic, one that may bear little resemblance to all the differential solutions that

in engenders (Bialecki 2012; Deleuze 1994). True, this material would sometimes be best

thought of as concerning the societies that were documented, and sometimes as unconscious

fictions of the anthropologists themselves, but nonetheless they would all be human imaginings,

5 See footnote one.

27

and therefore they would fall under the anthropological mandate. Given that many of the

nominalist readings made of realist anthropologies during the 1980s and 1990s essentially

ignored much of the pliability present in the earlier works they were critiquing (see Brightman

1995), we may find that, as in the cases of secular Çatalhöyük and a futurist quasi-religious

singularity, our presumptive temporal indexes are all mixed up. These previous generations of

scholars may perhaps therefore be more our contemporaries and our futures then we imagine—

but that is another essay, regarding at once an anthropology that was past and may be future.

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44

Author Biography

Jon Bialecki (Born 1969, JD 1997, PhD 2009) is a lecturer in anthropology at the

University of Edinburgh. His academic interests include the anthropology of religion,

anthropology of the subject, ontology and temporality, and religious language ideology.

He is currently completing a manuscript on the miraculous and modes of differentiation

at the individual and institutional level in the Vineyard church-planting movement, with a

focus on how this process is expressed in ethics, politics, language and in economic

practices. His work has been published in several edited volumes and in academic

journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethnologist, Anthropological

Theory and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; he was also recently a co-

editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused on Christian Language

Ideology.