Asad echoes these themes in his 1979 article on the analysis of ideology as well as in his 1983 piece responding to Geertz' conceptions of religion. Anthropologists should approach religions and their ritual practices as disciplines taught and learned, as well as created and experienced, in conditions imposed by power (1983:243). Were one to adopt this perspective, it would substantially alter the interpretation of texts dealing not only with religious or ritual systems but their "virtuosos" and the symbolism they rely on for maintaining and reproducing the authority of their institution. Works on witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, the evil eye and similar rituals of "affliction" (such as Simmons' 1974 study on the Senegalese; see also Maloney 1976 ) would be seen as centering around those individuals who have the most to gain by maintaining the system of practices and their accompanying symbolic or ideological representations. Likewise, so-called "magical" practices and customs could be seen not merely as rational or pragmatic "techniques" (in Malinowski's sense of the term) but as described by Geoffrey Lienhart below:
The practice called thuic involves knotting a tuft of grass to indicate that the one who makes the knot hopes and intends to contrive some sort of constriction or delay...A man tying knots of grass has produced an external, physical representation of a well-formed mental intention. He has produced a model of his desires and hopes upon which to base renewed practical endeavor. The ritual actions do not change the events, but they do change and regulate the Dinka's experience of those events. (1961: 291)
We come then to a necessity for understanding the politics of ideology as they apply to religious and ritual processes of empowerment.
Ideology
Just as this paper now turns to a discussion of the literature related to ideology, one could imagine beginning a field statement on the "anthropology of ideology" and end up discussing theories of religion and ritual practices. The essential element linking these two analytical concepts is perhaps best outlined by Geertz in his 1964 article "Ideology as a Cultural System" where he states:
...Ideology refers to that part of culture which is actively concerned with the establishment and defence of patterns of belief and value, patterns which may be those of a socially subordinate group, as well as those of a socially dominant one... (p. 83)
In thinking of religious practices in this way, one is reminded of Durkheim's ideas concerning "social facts" which correspond to something socially real but are basically imaginary. Marx had earlier forwarded the notion that religion and ideology have a social basis and that they act in varying degrees of autonomy, but Durkheim rejected the materialistic approach of early Marxist theory. However, it can still be said that Marxism provided a powerful tool for tracing a political doctrine to its economic roots, as in the example of European fascism (Williams 1988: 118). But as a political movement disseminated among working class poor and fueling their revolutions in the Soviet Union, Central America, China, and elsewhere, Roger Lancaster makes an explicit case for seeing Marxism as an ideology identical in structure with mainstream religion. By establishing a sense of the sacred and profane, positing the presence of a will in history, and encouraging social criticism based on a limited number of "approved" texts, Marxism proceeds as a mass ideology that reappropriates and, in the case of Nicaragua at least, actually began as a movement of reason and ended as a subcult of liberation theology (Lancaster 1988:183; see also Acton [1958] for a general critique of Marxist theory, or Kirk [1989] for the situation in Cuba).
It is Max Weber who probably came closest in providing a conceptual framework still relevant for contemporary analyses, as in his well-known metaphor of a "switchman" of predominant ideas controlling the "tracks" along which material interests are directed (1958:280) . His entire body of writings dealing with "rationality" ("an iron cage") could be seen as a systematic attempt to uncover the dynamics and interconnections of the dominant ideology of Western civilization, but to take a perspective such as this strays from the working definition provided by Geertz since it would render ideology synonomous with rational (some would say "practical" ) thought and limit the category's analytical usefulness (Bocock and Thompson 1985: 5; see also Sahlins [1976]).
Strict functional interpretations of ideology, such as Machiavelli provided, limit it to a weapon and unnecessarily constrict its use to a realism of tactics and strategy. For Geertz, ideology bridges the emotional gap between "things as they are and as one would have them" and operates as a safety-valve, as a morale-builder, as enhancing solidarity, and as advocating reform or retrenchment (1964: 78). Any number of ethnographic studies of religious and secular ritual practices--festivals, funerals, or rites of passage--would meet this criteria, yet have as a subtext the justificatory focus of ideology as a "map of problematic social realities, and a matrice for the creation of collective social conscience" (Geertz 1964: 82).
In the book Grief and Mourning (1976), the editors establish from the outset this very orientation. "To maintain social solidarity (after a death)," they write, "potentially disruptive dispositions may have to be channeled in less disruptive directions and limited in intensity" (Rosenblatt et. al. 1976:8), with the task falling to ritual specialists for suppressing anger and aggression. Another work dealing with death and, specifically, burial in the Greek polis of the 8th century BC, also orients its entire discussion around the assertion that since burial ritual is meaningfully constructed, the anthropologist or archaeologist's cross-cultural generalizations must take into account the ideational and ideological nature of the rituals (Morris 1987:39; see also Kligman 1988). Or, to quote Maurice Bloch (1982: 227), "ideology feeds on the horror of death by first emphasizing it, then replacing it by itself."[4] But this seems to say that ideology can only authorize further ritual action in the same manner, without itself determining people's structures of thought (see Asad 1979: 621).
One need only look at Jean Comaroff's study of Zionist cults in South Africa (1985) or Aihwa Ong's portrayal of Islamic revitalization in Malaysia (1987) to see how religious ideologies and doctrines are often made to serve entirely new institutions which reproduce separate, competing versions of the principal cultural assumptions and values shared by all (see Laitin's 1987 reworking of Gramsci). A classic study in this same vein, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe by Jack Goody (1983), shows how the early Catholic church--in order to achieve political, religious and economic domination-- encouraged its own forms of social relations in opposition to those of the regions into which the developing religion was spreading. To this ostensibly political purpose, it developed an ideology of "spiritual kin" (relying entirely on the Church for definition and creation), redefined marriage, marriageable partners, and the legitimacy of offspring (as well as a number of other institutions). The State provided the enforcement of these regulative concepts but the ideology was, as Goody writes, provided entirely by the Church (Goody 1983: 218).
One of the areas of most contemporary relevance to the study of religion and ideology are what Wallace terms "revitalization" movements (Wallace 1956) which involve attempts to restore or reconstruct ways of life that have been radically disrupted or threatened. Wuthnow (1980:60) categorizes these movements into those of a) reformation b) religious militancy c) counter-reform d) religious accommodation and e) sectarianism, but instead of showing their interconnections via the formation of specific dynamics of ideology, he creates a reified "world order" of a single global economy and reduces each movement to their competing materialistic interests. Of much greater use is the edited volume, Studies in Religious Fundamentalism by Lionel Caplan (1987) , which adopts a position of defining both fundamentalism and ideology in an "idiomatic" manner (p. 97). To understand an ideology, if we can return to Geertz' definition for a moment, one must understand the symbiotic relationship between the "establishment" and "defense" of an ideology's beliefs and practices with the significant "other" that an ideology constantly engages as its "conceptual adversary." (Webber, cited in Caplan 1987:97). Just as the authors represented in this book call for abandoning the rigid dualism thought to separate fundamentalism from modernity, so can we think of similarly permeable boundaries between the ideology of a society and that which it seeks to definite itself in opposition to (see also J.B. Thompson's 1984 work Studies in the Theory of Ideology ).
Coming at this same issue from a philosophical angle, Paul Ricoeur claims that ideology is linked to the necessity for a social group to provide an image of itself and to keep this image alive. The group's act of self-realization--such as that of the American Revolution or the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Sandanistas in Nicaragua--can never be repeated, so it is up to symbolic ritual representations to maintain the group's awareness of its status, separateness, or origins. This, for Ricoeur, is the same function myth held for earlier societies, a process of romanticization and idealization of the past in order to retain a present-day cohesion of the group (Ricoeur, cited in Williams 1988: 111).
The classic example of an ideology of origins is, of course, the Bible, which is full of stories whereby the authority of a group, individual, or action (and the dominant ideology they embody--namely, those supporting the bible's themes) is legitimated and maintained. Harris' 1984 study Sex, Ideology and Religion (see also Parrinder 1980 on this theme) makes a powerful case against the long historical career of biblical ideologies of gender in western civilization not because the ideas have any power of their own but because the ideology has been continuously available and widely disseminated in a multitude of forms, including stained-glass windows for those unable to read. Harris asserts that the hegemony of biblical codes and ideas permeates just about every aspect of our Western way of life, from codes of behavior and law, to morality, as well as to the way our passage of time is structured around religious holidays (Harris 1984: 8).
Fulfilling the same kind of role in society that religion did in pre-modern periods, ideology becomes inescapable and forces us to "think from it rather than about it" (Williams 1988: 112). The connections with Geertz' "webs of significance", Laitin's reworking of Gramsci's notion of "hegemony", Weber's "iron cage of rationality", or hermeneutic philosophers' (such as Gadamer) use of "tradition" all resonate with Ricoeur's model. To summarize then, borrowing the ideas of Michael Walzer, a scholar of the radical politics of 16th and 17th century Calvinism:
The power of a theology is in its capacity to offer a knowledge of God and make possible an escape from a corrupted earth; the power of a philosophy lies in its capacity to explain the world and society as they are and must be and thus help its followers win freedom; but the power of an ideology lies in its description of contemporary existence as unacceptable and its capacity to activate its adherents to generate organization and cooperative activity to change the world (Walzer 1965: 27).
Empowerment and Social Change
Ethnographic examples of specific groups empowered by the sustaining doctrines of religious ideology range from cargo cults to ghost dancers, from Jonestown to Rajneeshpuram, from the new religions of Japan (a post-war explosion of faith that, according to Earhart [1989] is unprecedented in terms of the numbers of actual converts) to the New Religious Right of the United States, to Islamic revitalization or Sikh / Armenian / Serbian / Uzbeki / Hungarian catholic / or Basque assertions for autonomy. Stewart Mews' 1989 compilation of the involvement of religious groups in the internal political affairs of every nation on earth is ample testament of the importance and breadth of this field.
Yet it would be a mistake to convert every manifestation of ritual practices sustaining religiously ideological symbol systems into sectarian politics. While this is frequently the case, it is just as likely that the underlying "moods and motivations" (to use Geertz' famous definition of religion [Geertz 1973: 90]) "defend" the individual not from the threat of an ideological rival but from those threats posed by the existence of evil, death, illness, and suffering. Religious healing, in the sense that it conforms to a certain way of constructing health and illness in relation to a society's cosmology, is part and parcel of the preceding discussion on ideology. But, as Loring Danforth shows in his recent book on Firewalking and Religious Healing (1989) , just as ideologies are constructed not with the view of understanding the world but with living in it successfully (see Williams 1988: 116), so is religious ritual often concerned with the problems of human suffering by "placing it in contexts in which it can be expressed, understood, and either eased or endured" (Danforth 1989: 54).
As Weber showed, every human society requires an interpretation of the suffering and injustice its individual members undergo. "Almost always," he writes, "some kind of theodicy of suffering has originated from the hope for salvation" (1958:273), and with it, one might add, a plethora of specialists and ceremonial techniques for mediating the suffering. Hubert and Mauss, approaching the problem from the aspect of sacrificial offerings, say that it is through "the consecration of a victim that the religious act of sacrifice modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes the act..." (1964: 13), a definition suitably broad to encompass most if not all psychological and physical afflictions. Other writers--such as Aberle (1966) looking at peyote religion among the Navaho and Myerhoff (1974) among the Huichul, Needleman and Baker (1978) or Zaretsky and Leone's edited volumes on new religious movements in the U.S. (1974), Stepher's survey of sorcery in Melanesia (1987), Evans-Pritchard on the Azande (1937) or Nuer (1958), June Nash (1979) on Bolivian tin miners, Moerman (1979) on symbolic healing, and de Certeau (1984) on the practice of "everyday life"--are but a minuscule representation of the literature which embodies a view of religion as a primarily explanative vehicle for affliction.
Victor Turner was one of the first to delve into ethnomedicine and the symbolic systems through which it operated in his Forest of Symbols (1967). His essential conclusion was that by making hidden afflictions "visible" through the use of an elaborate system of symbolic objects and colors, the problem could be rendered accessible to a doctor's therapeutic control and treatment. Another sustained attempt trying to firmly ground these theodicies of suffering in social circumstances rather than ideologies of evil, retribution, witchcraft, or the like, was Lewis' book Ecstatic Religion (1970). In trying to understand the dynamics of spirit possession, trance, exorcism, and healing--both from the perspectives of the afflicted and the healer--Lewis echoed Weber's notion of all religions as "cults of affliction" (Lewis 1970: 70). But, through the mediating power and discipline of an ideology of "ecstasy" --with its goals of empowerment and indoctrination of weak and marginal individuals into a cult--an affliction that was originally involuntary and uncontrolled becomes voluntary and controlled in a religious context (93).
One could examine a variety of studies--such as Eric Wolf's on the downtrodden masses of Europe (1982), Herberg (1958), Glazer (1972), or Pranger and Chelkowski (1988) on Jewish theodicy, Comaroff (1985) on Zionist cults of South Africa, McGuire (1988) on ritual healing in suburban America, Firth (1973) on Tikopia semiotics, Kerr and Crow's study of the occult in America (1983), or the Turner's (1978) analysis of religious pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon requiring resolution--for a random sampling of the variety of religious expressions to what Geertz has called "the discordant revelations of secular experience" (1973:112).
Loring Danforth's study of the Anastenaria firewalkers of rural Greece mentioned earlier is a fine example of a case which locates the cause of people's problems in a sacred domain whereby spirit possession (leading individuals to trust in the power of a saint to lead them over hot coals and thus empower them) is a metaphor for, but external to, people's social, psychological, and physiological conditions (Danforth 1989: 55, 60). Consonant with not only Lewis' earlier study but with the research of Crapanzano et. al., who asserted that people "learn to be possessed" (1977: 15), Danforth describes a similar process of first defining possession in a negative way, then transforming the relationship between the possessed and the possessing spirit (greatly aided by a charismatic leader), with the final result being an access to the supernatural power of the now "positive" possessing spirit (1989: 62). A model of illness is transformed into a model of health thanks largely to the subtle but powerful dynamics of an ideology of "healing".
Secularization and the Place of Religion in a Post-Modern World
But is this kind of transformative healing possible only in a religious context based upon a tradition, texts, and spiritual leaders? In other words, to paraphrase Mary Douglas, has religion become optional or is it still compulsory (as in the way politics or economics receive differing emphases but are unavoidable)? For sociologists somewhat more than anthropologists (if one is to judge by the literature) the study of the place of religion in modern society is synonymous with the study of "secularization." The common theory (found first in the works of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) holds that modernity is intrinsically and irreversibly antagonistic to religion (see Nicholls' 1987 edited volume). According to Douglas, the effects of modernity on religion are fourfold: first, the prestige and authority of science has reduced the explanatory appeal of religion; second, our lives no longer follow prescribed religious customs; third, bureaucracy has regulated our lives in overt and subtle ways; and fourth, our separation from nature is so profound that it no longer sustains religious inspiration (1983: 32). One can find this perspective elaborated in a number of studies by writers as varied as Bell (1960), Berger (1977), Dumont (1971), Troelsch (1960), and Brian Turner (1983) . Jack Goody (1983) would concur but include, as a secularizing effect on religion in Europe, the weakening of the Church's power to accumulate property and the reduction of its influence in areas of domestic life such as choosing marriage partners (as in marrying a deceased wife's sister), the legalisation of adoption, or the increasing ease of divorce (1983: 220).
While it may be true that religious institutions have become disengaged from political life as well as aesthetics (so that art can follow its own impulses instead of bending to moral norms)[5] there is no necessarily determinate shrinkage in the character and extent of religious beliefs. In urban Japan, for example, department store employees selling religious statuary report they constantly find offerings of coins and flowers in front of the displays, while 94% of the citizens of "secular" American society (if one can trust a Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek magazine in March 1989) believe God exists and 77% anticipate getting into heaven. Similarly, it is very difficult to look at Eastern Europe or the Third World today and believe that modernization leads inevitably to a diminished role for religion, such are the overtones of most nationalistic or socialistic movements.
Peter Berger (1983:15) explains the seemingly paradoxical persistence of religious values by returning to a Weberian notion of a theodicy of suffering. While there has been a crises of religion in the modern world, there is currently a crisis of secularity's "myth of progress" as well--the private suffering and injustice of individuals simply cannot be consoled by secular ideals (such as the triumph of natural science, the success of economic, revolutionary, or other political struggles). The openness of a pluralistic society, brought about by the retreat of religious institutions to influence a single ideology, encourages skepticism and openness but, according to Berger, is at odds with historical human tendencies for certainty and faith (20).
Another approach to understanding secularization is the way the boundaries between the "sacred and the profane" have been defined over the years via situations which usually originate in the demands of religious sects to clarify the limits of political authority but which paradoxically result in limiting the scope of the "sacred" to particular institutions and areas of social life (Fenn 1978: 78). Fenn takes Bellah's classic argument concerning "civil religion" (Bellah 1970 [1967]) and finds in it a sense of history that suggests it is a fiction to speak of America as a "society". What is problematic for Fenn is the tendency of the State to rely upon symbols rendered ambiguous and problematic by the processes of secularization (i.e. the withdrawal of religious sanctions for State enterprises). Secularization "undermines confidence in our belief that a social whole exists" and thus co-opts the authority of those dependent on their right to speak for or about that social whole (Fenn 1978: xiii). The long term effect, Fenn believes, is that secularization will not only heighten the anxiety of individuals identifying with abstract, and distant entities like the nation in times of crises but will subvert the metaphysical and religious supports for the very notion of "society." (op. cit.) [6] Dostoevsky's question posed for religious institutions during the height of modernization, "Can civilized men believe?" has become, in Fenn, Bellah, and Berger's eyes, "Can unbelieving men be civilized?" (Smith 1987: xiii).
As mentioned earlier in the discussion relating to ideology, a number of religiously-inspired movements, groups, and individuals are quite actively going about trying to reverse this trend in ways less compromising than their secular counterparts. Secure in the assumption that their knowledge is not relative, all are attempts at empowering the individual, at seeking a direct correspondence between human action and a meaningful context for its expression (often in the embrace of a sanctioned institution), and at providing a sense of community, support, and guidance. In a North American context, Steve Bruce's study of the Moral Majority (1987), Anderson (1983) on the origin and spread of nationalistic communities, Bordewich (1988) on Colorado's cults, Burrows (1986) or Danforth (1989) on New Age movements, Hadden and Swann (1981) on "prime time preachers", and Stewart Hoover's 1988 analysis of the electronic church all point to an ongoing engagement with reconciling ideologies between "life as it as and as it ought to be." The other realm of widespread revitalization movements is of course in the Muslim world, and is the object of study by writers such as Naipaul's searing Among the Believers (1983), Gellner's work on Muslim society (1981), Nagata (1981) and Ong's (1987) interpretation of the revival of Islam in Malaysia, Pranger and Chelkowski's or Halliday and Alavi's 1988 edited volumes on ideology, the state, and power in the middle east, and Salehi on insurgency through religion (1988).
In a model provided by Eric Sharpe (1983), the above fundamentalist movements are the last phase in a three-part dialectical process. Beginning with a rejection of existing authority, a group's leaders adapt "old" traditions, texts, or ideologies to the "new" situation, resulting in a reaction by the group to reject the "modern" position and reestablish what Sharpe calls "traditional ultimacies" (10). Ong's 1987 book, for example, nicely parallels this process among the lives of young women factory workers in Malaysia as they try to reestablish status and identity through Islamic fundamentalism because of "bad press" created by their new economic empowerment and independence.
At the same time, there are notable exceptions to this model, especially if one thinks of the case of Jewish experience in relation to modernity. Caplan (1983:10) points out that the increasing assimilation (and power) of Jews into the cultural mainstream of the countries where they have settled has come about not because of religious beliefs and institutions but rather through a range of social and cultural associations which preserve group solidarity and ethnically define Jewish identity. Those appearing to resist assimilation and remain committed to a traditional definition of Judaism are the ones labeled "fundamentalist"--providing a tension between the two groups that Caplan believes is at the very root of contemporary Jewish society (11). Certainly, what the right-wing coalition compromising the present government of Israel could use is an anthropologist sensitive to ideology and revitalization movements, one who could advise them of the likelihood of war in trying to assert a Judaic religious fundamentalism in opposition to that of a Palestinian Islamic fundamentalism. As many of the studies noted above would concur, only by moving towards a more pluralistic, secular society can the destructive tendencies of these two opposing views be preempted and accommodated.
Towards a Methodology
While it may seem obvious that books dealing with religious phenomena would willingly propose a way to study religious authority, institutions, and systems of meaning, very few do. One infrequently finds, buried in the criticisms of other authors' approaches, a prescriptive generality ("We must not attempt to identify religion as separate from its institutions and the symbols they are founded upon" [Firth 1972]) but rarely are these very helpful about confronting the complexity of social systems' religious activities when one is in the field. As a means to distill the theoretical approaches that have surfaced in this paper, Ole Riis' (1988) questions below provide a useful orientation for addressing what I feel are the important issues a fieldworker must account for. Briefly, and with some additions (as indicated), here are ten of these concerns:
1. What is considered to be respected, disgusting, or taboo? What is held in awe? (Riis)
2. What are the centers of the "city-scape" ? (Riis)
3. What are the sources legitimating the authority of religious and secular leaders?
4. Which persons or public positions are regarded as charismatically empowered?
5. What is the world-view of that society? Its symbolic universe? How do these support everyday life?
6. How do media news programs serve as regulatory agencies of this world-view? Which stories and events are portrayed (via the subtexts of their delivery) as presenting threats to the established order? (Riis)
7. What is the principle value system? With what others does it compete? What kinds of fetishism receives "religious" veneration as a part of the principle value system?
8. Is the dominant reference group prescribed or selected? (Riis)
9. How do the functional options of religious or ritual life change within their structural contexts? (Riis)
10. To what extent are the members of that society allowed to define for themselves a holistic view of their ultimate concerns? Are these views then harmonized within a common framework having its expression in the community and if so, what kinds of rituals support and reconfirm the shared consensus? (Riis)
By attempting to answer a range of questions such as these, the fieldworker could address the crucial issues of ideology, empowerment, ritual processes and social structure, all of which, as I have tried to show, overlap and intermingle. The researcher could say he has approximated the dynamics which fuel and structure the ongoing process of human orientation to the world as it has been observed in one place and time, but (like this field statement) it is only a beginning--a signpost he places along the route of his understandings, that he might know how far or how wide from the mark his journey demands he travel.
Bibliography