*Countdown Reflections 4: On belief

I would not have selected the topic of 'belief' if I did not think, as Weber did, that beliefs and values were, in a way, real material forces that impact the world. All of the world's religions, the various political ideologies, and the goals, values, morals, and meanings of persons have consequence. The practice of fumi-e by the Japanese to root out Christians was connected, on one hand, to the authorities who wished to eradicate Christianity, and on the other, to beliefs of the sacred in early Japanese Christians. The refusal to participate in ancestral rites by early Korean scholars who adopted Christianity and the king's subsequent anger, and persecution of Christians, can also make these connections between convictions and practice. We can look to the rhetoric supporting U.S. foreign policy; the religious justifications for slavery; the rhetoric from political leaders, dictators, kings and what have you; the convictions of contemporary white supremacists; black panthers; and religious extremists like ISIS and the 969 movement. Their actions and thoughts are not simply born out of habituated practice; the failure to articulate a reason for one's actions does not entail a lack or dispossession of belief nor is an outright denial of having belief entail the same either. The relationship between belief and practice is a complicated one; something I hope to have developed in my dissertation.

One of the complications with belief, as anthropologist Rodney Needham notes, is its invisibility. It's not something that can be immediately measured. This raises an issue with the beginning foundations of science, empiricism, and positivism and consequently a major concern for the scientific and social scientific study of religion. While behaviour can be observed, beliefs as well as values and meanings cannot. However, when we are discussing the relationship between individual and society, we cannot dismiss the social relations that comprise our networks (noting Beattie) constitutive of what we could abstractly call "society" (noting Leach). And even still, social relations would not make much sense outside of our expectations we have of one another, our intentions, ideas, and beliefs as "historically situated actors." In this sense, these "things" of the mind are no less material than behaviour. Inductively, cognition and the "life of the mind" - to borrow Hannah Arendt's phrase - are a critical component of, what Radcliffe-Brown argued, the web of social relations and referred to as "social structure."

While structuralists like Levi-Strauss was concerned with the parallels of what was social and psychological in their aim to unveil the underlying logic of social and symbolic systems (a project that has been shaped by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, and continued by Joel Robbins through a Dumontian project of values and philosopher John Searle with his notion of "status functions"), structural-functionalist sought to situate beliefs and values in terms of their function within social systems and their role in social relations. In this sense, 'culture' and 'religion' - a cultural system - were aimed towards being developed as an analytic concept that could capture this sense of an "ordered system." Anthropologist Clifford Geertz would argue that not only do cultural meanings and values construct a view of the world but provide a set of morals for action. He would go on to give his famous definition of 'religion' as:

(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic"

What should be applauded in this definition is the integration of emotions/moods within the framework of meaning. However, the definition - in many ways - falls too much on the side of 'myth' as opposed to 'ritual'; a binary that shaped the landscape of the study of religion (Tylor v. Robertson Smith). In other words, it gives primacy to meaning over practice. The definition makes no mention of rituals or behaviour and thereby only really captures part of the picture - if we stay within a broader structural framework. This defintion would become skewered by Talal Asad by arguing that religious practitioners do not necessarily hold a systematic structural account of their religious beliefs. Many do things without knowing a particular reason why other than that it's tradition. The assumption that persons do have a coherent systematic account of their religious beliefs is a relatively modern phenomena, which was derived from a Christian monkish discipline (I'm guessing prior to the emergence of the western academy), and that particular attention should also be paid to the historical dynamics of power and how they have shaped religion. In this regard, there is a criticism of the discursive practices within the broader historical trajectory in the anthropology and study of religion. Much like the follies of the earlier psychologists of religion, the anthropology of religion constructed models of 'religion' based on its own understandings of Christianity. This creates potential problems for the project of describing and constructing religion as a coherent cultural system. One of the dangers in conducting a study of a non-Christian religion, and attempting to describe its social structures and its system of symbols, is the susceptibility of reconstructing the religion in terms of a Christian framework and thereby presenting a distorted picture.  

Quite correctly, many scholars have noted the discrepancies between systems of meaning that seemed to construct an overview of a culture or a society (one example of which is Lienhardt's classic text on the Dinka) and the uncertainty of whether the persons within that society do indeed have those beliefs. In this regard, the politics of representation looms over the construction and abstraction of "culture" and "society." And yet, I do not think this is necessarily a motive for dismissing the constructive project. Robert Bellah's Civil Religion draws on the rhetoric of U.S. presidents and their employment of religious language to construct a view of "civil religion" - one that does not imply that they are indeed personally held beliefs but instead give insight into the trends of religion and politics in the U.S. This in itself is a valuable endeavour in discursive analysis and how an institution, like government, can be viewed as a source that continues to produce and reproduce a fragrance that titillates the people.   

Nevertheless, the criticism stands. How are we to investigate the beliefs and values that are constitutive of the "lived experience" of persons in social relations and broader social structures? In this regard, the investigation of belief as a connector between persons of social relations and onto the broader network of social structures, as well as persons and institutions, in the discussion on (in)dividual and society continues to be relevant. Not simply in terms of its function within social relations but also in terms of meaning and power (which I do not think are exclusive categories). Granted that these are situated within historical contexts and subject to discursive practices, as Asad aptly and incisively point out, the psychological/social phenomena of belief still configure within "historically situated" bio-historical persons within the social structures compelling the movement of cultural histories.