Materiality

views updated

MATERIALITY

MATERIALITY . The concept of materiality of religion has largely been developed within the discipline of the history of religions and follows the work of Charles H. Long (b. 1926) and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). Both of these scholars have been concerned with the origin of religion. In the case of Eliade the origin of religion is associated with the human connection to the material world. For Long the origin of religion emerges through intercultural contact, a term that refers not just to interhuman contact but to contact between distinctive orientations to material life, or a cosmology of relationships. Of dramatic significance for the origins of religion has been modernity, which followed the "Age of Discovery."

One of the defining features of modernity has been the often catastrophic encounters between Western expansionism and empirical "others" (i.e., people locally and indigenously organized). In this world of cultural contact religion has played an important, yet ambiguous role. The expansionist powers of Europe held together their empires by intellectualist means: the use of books and military hardware were combined with religious, scholarly, economic, and political institutions to forge a sense of the superiority of the West. Ironically, however, the West (as we have come to know it) has been, and continues to be, radically transformed in its encounters with others. In large part the way the West defines itself is due to the influences of its dominated peoples from throughout the world. These influences have been rigorously and fastidiously denied and ignored by academics, even though the material and bodily aspects of our "global culture" are propped up by a staggering degree of cultural diversity.

Disjunction between ideological and material constructions of the West reveals a profound ambiguity embedded within modern understandings of religion. It is the task of the history of religions to work through the diverse meanings embedded within these occasions of cultural contact. The history of religions is involved with a self-conscious interrogation of religion with respect to other cultures and their perceived understandings of the world.

Through the history of religions, contact with empirical others, however, must be situated in a context of the sacred. While not a necessary condition for the historian of religions, an understanding of the various interpretations of the sacred has profoundly influenced the discipline. Contact with the sacred Other has been conceived as awe-inspiring and an engagement with absolute power, or a manifestation of the sacred (i.e., hierophany). For Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Eliade, archaic people (i.e., people who are primarily concerned with archetypal meanings embedded in material life) meaningfully evaluate their world with reference to negotiating various manifestations of a powerful Other—the hierophany. Ultimate and absolute power, the sacred, is opaque to direct human interpretations because human life is understood as being wholly contingent on the sacred Other. The hierophany, a presentation of absolute and therefore sacred power, is the experience that organizes or founds the world. A meaningful orientation to the material world is only understood with reference to this wholly significant Other.

Contact with empirical others during the modern period is the anthropological analog of a history of religions formulation of contact with the sacred Other. It is the fiction of transparency of empirical others that determines the character of the modern world. For while they are rendered variously as noble savages or wild men, empirical others are rarely understood to be intimately involved in cultural exchanges with civilization. Empirical others are discussed, examined, sympathized with, and so on, but rarely are they understood to be actively engaged in the formation of modernity. Empirical others have been seen as religious but have not gained the same status as the sacred Other—an opaque reality that constitutes our modern phenomenal existence. Instead, according to Long, empirical others have been "signified" as transparent and peripheral to modernity. Many of the issues that have traditionally emerged in the history of religions with reference to the Other have tremendous potential in the current, postmodern climate for the critical evaluation of the otherness embedded in modernity.

Materiality and the Place of Religion

Another defining feature of modernity has been mobility—the freedom of movement. But this freedom from the European perspective deprived other cultures of their own freedom when they butted against conquistadors, merchants, and explorers. The consequence of European movement into territories not traditionally their own was the radical disruption, and often extermination, of indigenous people's traditions and practices—or what has been called cultural genocide. Simultaneous with the development of the freedom of movement for European people was the loss of freedom for indigenous people to remain in their place. This is reflective of colliding materialities.

The consequences of contact between once disparate people have been enormous. The Age of Discovery pushed cultures into situations of negotiation in intimate proximity with other cultures that were once seen as remote and radically "other." Europeans developed elaborate interpretive strategies in order to camouflage deep and abiding relationships with others. These strategies constituted an important mythic corpus that included ultimate authority of the book, objectivity or omniscience, a "primitive/civilized" classificatory schema (as well as other schemas), and religious justifications for colonialism, warfare, enslavement, consumerism, and so on. These mythic themes have all manner of tragedies attached to them, and it is their materialization that defines the modern age.

It is the disruption of meaningful places that makes the history of religions possible and necessary. Although the devastation of places has had a long history in the European and Mediterranean worlds, it becomes particularly endemic and reified during the modern era. Central to the imperial projects of European kingdoms was the development of strategies for occupying what were seen as "new" worlds. Conceptual tools were required in order to leave home and occupy other people's homes. The inevitable consequence was a contentious intimacy with indigenous peoples upon whose lives the survival of colonial people depended. With the loss of home the essential nature of one's cultural self-definition is forever transformed. The prevailing emotion of the Age of Discovery and the Enlightenment was the headiness and lightness of disorientation that arises from a peripatetic philosophy embracing the virtues of freedom in movement. (For an examination of the consequences of colonialism, see works by Todorov and Dussel in the bibliography.)

From various perspectives the modern era epitomizes a shift in the human material orientation from locative to utopian (i.e., "no place"). This shift is not new in human history but was rigorously endorsed and promoted by modernity. Europeans had to justify far-flung imperial projects by emphasizing the ultimate significance of "placelessness." Indigenous people underwent extermination from discoverers, colonists, and merchants; to survive they likewise had to radically transform their traditional practices in order to maintain their locative orientations. The structure of modernity is generated by the fictive (utopian, placeless) status of formulations of meaning. The ultimate meanings of people's lives are determined by others—books, institutions, intellectuals—or on the whole modalities removed from an immediate living reality and context. Material referents for the creative impulses of the modern era are rigorously signified by abstract symbols like the Bible or heaven. Abstraction of material existence swept a larger universe (or empire) under its influence and obscured the nature of power.

The consequences of modernity for colonized people has been catastrophic. Without minimizing the "American holocaust," however, it is also the task of the history of religions to reflect on the consequences of modernity on the culture of the colonizer, which in various ways is articulated as the modern university. This move completes the hermeneutical circle—a return to the self in light of the approximation of the other. But it is also an attempt to regain a critical interpretive location in the context of an experience of modernity.

History of Religions and Materiality

The history of religions has hit upon a way of short-circuiting the dangers of articulating others within the academy. In its recent past the discipline was dominated by the quest for understanding the "sacred" in all of its manifestations. This was an encyclopedic enterprise inspired by assumptions about the possibility of such knowledge. While such an enterprise is not probable now because of an almost universal affirmation of the cultural embeddedness of our understandings, an important feature of this work was its grammatical thrust—expressed as a morphology of the sacred. Apart from the essentialist nature of the discipline, a morphology can move toward articulating the other as a radical critique of the self.

Material elements such as water, stones, mountains, and trees are the referents for religious activity throughout the world. More importantly they also serve as referents for interhuman contact. The key feature of this, however, is that the meanings of these material referents (say, a plot of land in Jerusalem) are opposed to one another. The history of religions has the faculties to discuss a morphology of contact rooted in a phenomenology in which ultimate meanings of the world are at stake. Various understandings of the world are mediated by material life. Taking seriously the development of the history of religions as a search for the meanings of the sacred Other, recent disciplinary emphasis has been on the embeddedness of the academic examination of empirical others, which is negotiated through the materiality of human existence. The religious meanings of material life has always been a feature of indigenous religions all over the world. Historians of religions, intrigued by its origins, have explored the rituals of a wide variety of indigenous religions. They have recorded insights on how material life is a constant source of reflection and revelation into the reality of the sacred Other. It is though the ritual process that the meaning of material life is actively engaged. The materiality of religion, therefore, is both the point of origin for religion as well as the discipline of the History of Religions.

Nearly from its inception the history of religions has been populated by those who have been deemed "other" by the Western university. To the standard list of atheist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist are also added Africans, African Americans, Europeans, European Americans, Asians, Asian Americans, Chicanos, Latin Americans, Native Americans, and ongoing permutations of these categorical distinctions. This is not an exhaustive list of groups from which historians of religions originate, but simply an illustration of the diversity of interpretive locations that have constituted the discipline. Methodologies of the history of religions have been constructed in such a way as to give as authentic a voice as possible to others who have moved into the academy. Others proximate to, yet excluded from, the creation of modernity can actively participate in the vitality of the discipline by engaging in methodological discussions through their orientations to their material worlds. It is no longer simply the case that scholars of religions pass judgment about "other" religions, but rather they are actively engaged in a more subtle and risky venture of exploring how the "other" has been materially involved with the "self." From the start and up until the recent past, therefore, methodological discussions have been seen as critical in the formation of the discipline.

In the late twentieth century there was often perceived to be a struggle for the heart and soul of the university. Various strategies were adopted to include underrepresented groups in university organization. Some scholars have lamented that these struggles amount to a loss of the central organizing principle of the Western intellectual tradition. Others maintain that a politics of domination has been justified and instigated by the university, and thus the inclusion of those seen as peripheral to its development is an important corrective measure. To these debates regarding the future of the university, the history of religions could add something important. First, the West was never constructed out of whole cloth, but arose from the ambiguous material situations that grew out of world subjugating enterprises. Empirical others have always been proximate, and therefore there is no Western self-sufficient self-definition. Intellectual moves to reify an authentic "self" within the university were always implemented with reference to what was perceived as a dangerous "other" either in its midst or just outside its walls. The more proximate the "other," the more dangerous it is. It is the universities' esteemed push toward clarity that obfuscates a morphology of contact.

Second, and more importantly, if there is to be a future for the university it must find modalities for discussion across all sorts of cultural, gendered, racial, and ethnic lines—however arbitrary the history of the development of those lines may be. This strategy of organization is in contrast to the move toward entrenchment of area studies programs that see the survival of themselves, as "others" within the university (women, African Americans, Native Americans, etc.), as necessarily adopting the citadel mentality of the West. In contrast, the history of religions has developed, and continues to develop, interpretive strategies for interrogating the meanings of the modern world by engaging human creativity at its deepest level. Seriously navigating the worlds of marginalized people is the future of the university. Moving these worlds into theoretical and methodological reflection is the means by which conversation can occur. This is the future of the university and will require that it reframe its intellectual activity away from the citadel to an exploration of radical material diversity. This is a risky business in which living by one's wits takes on a new energy because everything—competing cosmologies—is at stake. At the very least, if intense interaction of peoples characterizes the modern world, that interaction must be adequately reflected in the university. It seems also to be the case that others can offer powerful criticisms of, interpretations of, and alternatives to modernity.

The pressure exerted by an approximation of other meaningful orientations to material life (or other materialities ) generates a critical faculty within the history of religions. It is not simply an authentic reduplication of another's voice, but rather a rigorous amplification and directing of that voice. The other cannot, in the final analysis, be completely relegated to an interpreter's grammar. It is not a self-appointed other whose existence is simply an extension of the writer's imaginative labors. Rather, the other operates on the historian of religions and exerts sometimes enormous pressure to be known, and in doing so transforms. While this may happen in large measure within the imaginative and creative confines of the scholar's work, it nonetheless unmasks the intimate other—a critical voice—and thus unleashes new possibilities for understanding the world. The materiality of the present situation is a mythic construction of the past. This past was constituted out of sustained cultural contact between a wide variety of "others" who, together, have worked to create the present world. From a history of religion perspective, the material world is not so much a factual reality as a mythic reality, one that requires constant creative engagement of concern.

Bibliography

For an understanding of a history of religions approach to materiality read: Davíd Carrasco, ed. The Imagination of Matter: Religion and Ecology in Mesoamerican Traditions (Oxford, 1989); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "The Other" and the Myth of Modernity, translated by Michael D. Barber (New York, 1995); Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia, 1986); Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, translated by Willard R. Trask (New York, 1954; rev. ed., 1965), and Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed (New York, 1958); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, translated by John W. Harvey (London, 1923; 2d ed., 1950); Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden, 1978); Tzvetan Todorov, La conquête de l'Amérique: la question de l'autre, translation by Richard Howard published as The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York, 1984); and Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, translated by J. E. Turner (London, 1938).