Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has been making the case for the role of the imagination in religion. She has posted several articles in the NY Times about this position and explicates it much further in her book, When God Talks Back - much more successful than her initial book on Witchcraft in England where she argues for the "interpretive drift", something that is noticeably absent in her work on Evangelicals in the U.S.
In a recent NY Times article she talks a bit more of the place of fiction here and the role that C.S. Lewis has taken as a medium of theology. I've noticed that many students here in the UK, at least those who are theologically inclined with a firm belief in a Christian God, has taken favorably to C.S. Lewis. I tend to chuckle a bit when I remember the context between J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis. If my memory serves correctly, despite their friendship, Tolkien didn't think Lewis was a very good fantasy writer. Tickles me to think that perhaps the Godfather of fantasy who, in a way, has provided the blueprint for fantasy writing didn't like the world of Narnia - something that has become, in some circles, theologically significant apparently, perhaps moreso for the lay person, but then again I'm not entirely sure how seriously scholarly theologians consider Lewis in comparison to say Barth or Aquinas.
At any rate, Luhrmann talks about how big Lewis is with his "Evangelical Rock Star" and the significance of Aslan, the great and noble lion of the Narnia series, which symbolizes the transcendence and immanence of God. By focusing on the imagination, Luhrmann is talking about meaning-making within the context of the sociology of knowledge. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann has spoken about this quite extensively in terms of construction and projection. Not without criticism (see Ninian Smart's The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge) but it certainly has a place within that history - as seen in a previous post that marked the top 10 books of the century from the International Sociological Association. While I would not particularly disagree with Luhrmann's focus on the place of the imagination, it might serve her well to read up on that context of meaning-making in the sociology of knowledge.
What is actually missing from this account is the position Terrence Deacon and many in the Evolutionary Psychology camp have advocated. That is, the natural occuring concept of God. Apart from the argument that religion is a by-product, the idea that everything can be tied together under a unifying concept is not new. Many in the past have discussed how formulating a concept of God is a natural phenomena (Boyer, Atran, Barrett, etc.). Not to say that not forming a concept of God is unnatural but that putting pieces together into a form of coherence and giving meaning and significance to causal factors is not an irrational phenomena as so many would have it. Studies have been done in developmental psychology that discusses the folk physics of infants and the attribution of agency. Babies can sense when something is amiss in terms of expectations of what physical objects do. One billiard ball hitting another and continuing in that trajectory, or an object falling down, are expected results. When these things do not occur, there is perplexity. Attributing meaning to these observances to a concept of God does not advocate any particular position on the existence of God but rather it emphasizes that we have biological and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to create meaning and have an imagination.
While to some degree the biological, cognitive, and evolutionary argument levels the playing field of religion and science in terms of systems of meaning and making sense of the world around us, there are qualitative differences as well as differences of verifiability in science as opposed to the methods of religion. Here I would argue the importance of method, the fallability and perpetual state of correction, reproducability, and the importance of peer-review in the domains of science. Anthropology becomes somewhat problematic in the area of reproducability. Given the scenario of two independent anthropologists going to the same region and reporting dramatically different representations of the same region. Much controversy has come from Napoleon Chagnon - not to say that all anthropologists fit in this ilk - and the research done on the Yanomamo. This is just one example. There have been problems with ethnographies on Native Americans and other cultures as well. However, it is important to say that none of this really dismisses anthropology. It is one type of mistake that must be learned from. Sociology, with its heavy emphasis on statistics, is also wrought with its own issues. The lack of qualitative sensability and the possibility of misinterpreting quantitative data and making causal inferences carries its own concerns. Psychology also has its issues. In my opinion too many focus on psychoanalytic theory, which I think is too metaphorical and at times quite bogus. It is useful for making money and helping people feel good or bad about themselves, but I don't see a whole lot of scientific merit and testability in what it proposes. Although to be fair, Freud has inspired a search for the unconscious and defense mechanisms that have actually gained merit in neurologically oriented sciences. Other fields of psychology have fared better. Neuropsychology and cognitive psychology have taken a reductionist approach and have focused specifically on the brain and the potential phenomenology that stems from it. This grounds these areas in something that can be measured. But as I mentioned, these areas if not careful can lead to mistaken conclusions and misintrepretation. Social psychology and developmental psychology have constructed measures and hypotheses that can be tested from social observation as well as neuroimaging techniques. One of the major things that have come out of this is our Theory of Mind capabilities, which is the idea that we can place ourselves in the state of others. The study of junior mints is a good example. But like any other budding form of science, the social sciences are still maturing, testing, and investigating theories and methodology. A science of religion is far from stable. Chemistry, physics, and biology have been around much longer and the systems of method they have employed have gone through paradigm shifts that have stood the test of time and rigor.
At one point, Luhrmann will have to deal with the place of imagination, meaning-making, and why religion's use of the imagination makes it religious or spiritual or mystical. There are also issues of how the imagination translates into behavior as well as imagination in relation to the discussion about belief. Furthermore, the place of the imagination will have to be placed into the context of formulating conviction, and how this all configures in the place of embodiment. There are a slew of further questions that arise from imagination and its place in religion as opposed to other areas. Focusing on imagination isn't particularly new. While I enjoy Luhrmann's work and find parts of it insightful and fascinating, to me a further step needs to be taken. It seems problematic to focus too much on the imagination. In a way, this is a return to the question of meaning and how biological and social systems contribute.
No comments:
Post a Comment