Talal Asad: As far as I can tell, most people have
understood that I was trying to think about religion as practice,
language, and sensibility set in social relationships rather than as
systems of meaning. In that book and much of my subsequent work I have
tried to think through small pieces of Christian and Islamic history to
enlarge my own understanding of what and how people live when they use
the vocabulary of “religion.” I certainly did not want to claim that as a
historical construct “religion” was a reference to an absence, a mere
ideology expressing dominant power. It was precisely because I was
dissatisfied with the classical Marxist notion of ideology that I turned
my attention to religion. I was gradually coming to understand that the
question I needed to think about was how learning a particular language
game was articulated with a particular form of life, as Wittgenstein
would say. The business of defining religion is part of that larger
question of the infinite ways language enters life. I wanted to get away
from arguments that draw on or offer essential definitions: “Religion
is a response to a human need,” “Religion may be a comfort to people in
distress but it asserts things that aren’t true,” “Religion is
essentially about the sacred,” “Religion gives meaning to life,”
“Religion and science are compatible/incompatible,” “Religion is
responsible for great evil,” “So is science —and religion is also a
source of much good,” “No, science is not a source of evil, as religion
often is; it is technology and politics that are the problem—the social
use to which science is put.”
I argued that to define “religion”
is to circumscribe certain things (times, spaces, powers, knowledges,
beliefs, behaviors, texts, songs, images) as essential to “religion,”
and other things as accidental. This identifying work of what belongs to
a definition isn’t done as a consequence of the same experience—the
things themselves are diverse, and the way people react to them or use
them is very different. Put it this way: when they are identified by the
concept “religion,” it is because they are seen to be significantly
similar; what makes them similar is not a singular experience common to
all the things the concept brings together (sacrality, divinity,
spirituality, transcendence, etc.); what makes them similar is the
definition itself that persuades us, through what Wittgenstein called a
“captivating picture,” that there is an essence underlying them all—in
all instances of “religion.”
The things regarded as hanging
together according to one conception of religion come together very
differently in another. That’s why the translation of one “religious”
concept into another is always problematic. But Genealogies
doesn’t argue that the definition of religion is merely a matter of
linguistic representation. Religious language—like all language—is
interwoven with life itself. To define “religion” is therefore in a
sense to try and grasp an ungraspable totality. And yet I nowhere say
that these definitions are abstract propositions. I stress that
definitions of religion are embedded in dialogs, activities,
relationships, and institutions that are lovingly or casually
maintained—or betrayed or simply abandoned. They are passionately fought
over and pronounced upon by the authoritative law of the state.
Definitions
of religion are not single, completed definitive acts; they extend over
time and work themselves through practices. They are modified and
elaborated with continuous use. To the extent that defining religion is a
religious act, whether carried out by “believers” or “nonbelievers,” it
may also be an attempt at attacking or reinforcing an existing
religious tradition, at reforming it or initiating a new one.
My
problem with “universal definitions of religion,” therefore, has been
that by insisting on a universal essence they divert us from asking
questions about what the definition includes and what it excludes, how,
by whom, for what purpose; about what social/linguistic context it makes
good sense to propound a given definition and when it doesn’t.
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