Can one, and if so under what circumstances, distinguish the religious from the political? Answer, drawing on ethnographic material.

Tutorial essay II

Claire McGregor

22/11/2002

tutor: Dr Mundy

Can one, and if so under what circumstances, distinguish the religious from the political? Answer, drawing on ethnographic material.

There is an underlying assumption in this title that the religious and the political are intimately linked, to the extent that one questions whether they can actually be distinguished. In a first stage, this assumption needs to be addressed, by showing the ethnographic basis for its presence in anthropological theory. The contentious question as to whether they can be distinguished stems from an introspection by the anthropologists of Western countries into their won political and religious scenes. They seem clearly distinguished, unlike what is found in the most of the anthropological material, suggesting that conditions do arise under which the religious and the political act separately. The heart of the matter therefore lies in an assessment of the extent to which modern politics actually are ’religion-free’.

In the introduction to Political Anthropology, Myron Aronoff observes that “religion and politics have been inextricably interrelated since the dawn of human culture and civilization” (1984:1). There is indeed a potential for control over individuals inherent in religion which suggest certain affinities with power and the political sphere. There are obvious ways in which this affinity realises itself in a social context. The most obvious one is when power is directly based on religion. This has historically been the case pharaonic Egypt, where the pharaoh guaranteed and maintained the cosmic order, and was himself seen as divine and omnipotent. This was also found in European monarchies, where the King was considered to be the representative of God on earth, in a Christian context. Another example corresponds to the Dalai lama, considered as the reincarnation of Buddha in Tibetan Buddhism and head of the Tibetan people. In such cases, a unique divine link constitutes the source of power.

Religion can also be manipulated in its practice, rather than in its ideology, to legitimise a ruler or ruling elite. In From Blessing to Violence, Bloch analyses the circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. The history of this ritual shows that it was manipulated by the succeeding Merina kings to be made from a ‘basically familial ritual’ into a ‘military and state ritual of the greatest political importance’ (1986:140). By giving themselves authority over the ritual, the royal group was able not only to increase its power and control over the people, but also to legimize its heir during his own circumcision ritual (132). These developments in Merina religion were not only of significance in Imerina, the land of the Merina, but also outside, as it gained importance as an alternative to Christianity, and hence as a sort of opposition to the colonizer (161). This example therefore shows that religion can be made to intervene in power struggles, but also that political issues may give greater momentum to religion.

Hence, religion and politics seem definitely intertwined though both ideology, in struggles of legitimacy and power. Nevertheless, the separation between the religious and the political seems to have been achieved when one looks at the modern industrialised nations of the West. One occasion of this is the French declaration of the separation between the State and the Church, when such distinction was publicly and politically made. In most of the industrialised nations today, religion has become a matter for the individual and the State is secular, deriving its power from the people rather than through religious belief or practice. ...

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Asad’s study of the of the history of the Christian concept of religion, i.e. of the Western concept of religion, sheds light as to the origins of the separation between the religious and the political in the West. He indeed suggests that the “separation of religion from power is a modern Western norm, the product of a unique post-Reformation history” (1993:28). Asad argues that this situation is due to a particular conceptualisation of religion, which he is able to pinpoint by analysing Geertz’s definition of religion, which appears to be the fruit of Europe’s historical discourse on theological issues.

The particularity of this definition lays in the fact that belief has come to constitute the ‘true’ substance of religion, prevailing over practice. This relates to conceptions that religion has a universalised essence and ‘generic functions/features’, common to all religions, even though their expressions may differ; that it consists of abstract ideas rather than ‘practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge’; ‘must affirm something about the fundamental nature of reality’ (42-43). This movement towards a religion focused on belief rather than practice must be closely related to the increased individualism of the West, which lead to a decline in collective fervour and practice. The fact that religion came to be a matter of individual introspection means that it lost its grip over the collectivity and was no longer an adequate power device.

Another significant aspect of the Christian modern conceptualisation of religion has been its reduction from an encompassing notion, pervading in all social domains, to that of a ‘perspective’, distinct, but equal, to the ‘common-sense’, ‘scientific’, or ‘aesthetic’ perspectives (48). With the emergence of modern natural sciences, and modern liberal ideals, inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a process of secularisation has fenced off religion, as defined above, as a specific domain, distinct from politics. This can be placed in the context of a more general observation of the increased segmentation of Western society, in which politics, the economy, science, art, and religion are all conceived as separate social spheres. This contrasts with other social settings in which all these elements seem embedded in a single social fabric.

What this insight first calls into question is the basic anthropological project by probing the validity of our categories of investigation. Asad indeed suggests, as a conclusion to his analysis, that “the anthropological student of particular religions should begin … [by] unpacking the comprehensive concept which he or she translates as ‘religion’ into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character” (54).

What is of further interest in Asad’s analysis is that it suggests that indeed the religious and the political can be separated. The condition for such distinction rests on a particular conceptualisation of religion, fruit of contingent historical developments.

Nevertheless, this also begs to be challenged. Drawing a dichotomy between the non-religious politics of the West and the religious politics of the rest is in itself misleading and ethnocentric. Moreover, the political sphere of the industrialised is far from being as immune to religious influences as one can think.

Wilson Carey Williams, for instance, examines the historical role played by the Bible and its doctrine in the US political tradition. He argues that it has been a strong voice in the debates shaping American political culture, as an alternative to the ‘liberal tradition’ (1984:11), also a foundation of American ideology. In addition, Williams shows that the Bible had a significant part in the very foundation of the American state as the only common text for white America (20), and later on in the cohesion of the people as “the only positive bond between blacks and whites” (20). The extent of Bible’s importance, he argues, can be seen in the fact that increasing unfamiliarity with the Bible makes the Americans unable to relate to American cultural and political life, locked in the extreme individualism shaped by liberal ideology (11). This example is relevant in showing how the political discourse can be heavily influenced by religious doctrines and Scripture.

There is yet another way in which the religious and the political connect in modern industrialised countries. Indeed, one could argue that religious forms, such as rituals, sacred objects or relics, even sacred/profane dichotomies are found in the politics of the supposedly secular moderns states, yet void of religious substance as it is as defined in the Christian tradition. Striking examples of this can be found in Nazi Germany when some the Nuremberg party gatherings were more evocative of a religious ceremony rather than a political rally. The American Declaration of Independence manuscript has itself also become some sort of a sacred relic. Even the English crown jewels can be thought of as having a similar status. An even more evocative example is Lenin’s or Mao’s mausoleums, in which their bodies have been preserved, allowing the people of what is now Russia, and the People’s Republic of China, to come and see the great leaders of the past.

In his study of the 1992 and 1993 riots in Mumbai and the subsequent responses by the government, Hansen shows how the sacred and profane dichotomy is also found in India’s modern conception of the State. He draws on Kantorowicz’s insight that European medieval states, were based on a division relating to the King’s two bodies, the sublime and infallible body of the King, as an institution, and the profane and fallible body of the king, as a person. Hansen argues that the same distinction is applicable to modern conceptualisations of the state in India. In order to make his point, he gives an account of the work of the Srikrishna Commission, set up after the riots with the aim of understanding the events and making justice. Indeed, he argues that this Commission could be seen as ‘state spectacles’ or ‘public displays’, in that it illustrated the split between the sublime and the profane dimensions of the state. Indeed, on the one hand was the “decent High Court judge […] defending the idea of the state as impartial and above society, and committed to a universal form of justice”. On the other were “the administrative machinery, the police employing its own armoury of techniques to delay, obstruct or influence the inquiry, to protect its own ‘secrets’ and cover up its failings, and the political forces governing the state, committed to a majoritarian notion of ‘retributive justice’, and bending and threatening the administration to serve its ends”(2000:48).

The existence of religious forms, even if void of religious content, is, as we have seen, a striking aspect of the modern state, which we had previously acknowledged as having become impermeable to the religious. This is not to be interpreted merely as a legacy of previous political systems in which religion pervaded. Indeed, Anderson suggests that the secularization of western civilization has created an increasing need for an ersatz of religion. This ersatz has been found in a projection of the religious onto the political, thereby creating a new mystical and vertical allegiance to the nation, and a horizontal bond with the national community. Therefore, the presence of religious forms in politics is not an archaic reminiscence of the pervasiveness of religious rituals or beliefs, but a new social construction, in which the object of veneration is no longer God, but the nation.

Anderson indeed contends that the very possibility of imagining a nation only arose with the decline of three fundamental conceptions of the world. First, the idea that a particular script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth was questioned both by the effect of exploration of non-European world and the gradual demotion of Latin as the sacred language. Second, the belief that “society was naturally organized around under high centres – monarchs who were persons apart from the others and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation”, in other words, the legitimacy of sacral monarchy, was challenged during the 17th century and increasingly after the French revolution in 1789. Thirdly, the “conception of temporality in which cosmology and history [are] indistinguishable, the origins of the world and of men identical” was modified with the growth of print capitalism, which, made it possible for people to conceive of themselves and of their relation to others, in profoundly new ways, in other words, to conceive the nation. These combined ideas created a framework of meaning for life and for the fatalities of existence such as death, loss or servitude. The challenge of these certainties was due to general economic changes, to social and scientific discoveries and to improves means of communication. The developments created a cosmological vacuum, consequently triggering a ‘search’ for a new way of “linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together”. The new cosmological order was henceforth found in the concept of nation.

The significance of this analysis resides in the fact that its shows that the religious and the political actually remain inextricably linked in modern nation-states. If one is to see this in functionalist terms, one could say that the political has assumed the religious functions, hence inverting the relationship between the two domains, in comparison to medieval Europe, where the religious encompassed the political function.

What is striking in the relationship between the religious and the political is that nearly every social system (one can clearly not assume this to be universally true) articulates the religious and the political spheres together. They can nevertheless be analytically distinguished, in the context of Western civilization, due to its conception of social domains as separate, hence creating a highly segmented social context. This distinction is a fruitful one for it allows to see the transformation in the nature of Western cosmology.