Responses

Tnhl Asad

Responses 207

Critique, though indispensable, can occupy only a small part of a life that is lived sanely. It is nevertheless possible to be alert to the tension between the unconditional openness required by an th t~~ologica l inquiry and the decisiveness demanded by ethical and life. The two al- ways go together but not easily. In my view, anthropological inquiry and political commitment should not be confused. It is not o d y that we do not know for certain what the Iong-term future will be. More importandy, we do not know which aspects of the past it will be reasonable (and vital) to restore or invoke when we get to the future. So we do not know what the past will be. In my view. anthropological inquiry is therefore an un- ending labor of revision and reconsideration, while political commitment requires decisive action (even calculated waiting is an action) regardless of how ignorant we are--and regardless of the fact that sometimes we may only be moving in time from one social distribution of pain and cruelty

1 am grateful to the authors of these essays. All of them-and no1

least those who have taken strong issue with my arguments-have con1 Response to Casanova pelled me to think again about what I said. I11 Fornrations of thr Srculai: I tried to extend certain ideas that I touched on in Genralogies ofRr1igion. I I I In the first few pages of chapter 6 in Fornrations, I tried to address some ways, the former was harder to write than the latter. It is much molt Casanova's broad argument because it seemed to me-and still does-of exploratory, and I am not satisfied with everything 1 said in it. This is wily considerable interest. In particular, I regard his disaggregation of the three it has been valuable for me to elaborate some of the ideas that were inco111 lnain elemellts in the secularization thesis and his comments on them as pletely or inadequately stated. Whether in doing so I have responded S:II a11 obvious advance in the debate. However, in the final analysis, his at- isfactorily to each ofthe authors 1 don't know. tclnpt to save the "core of the theory" did not seem to me successful. Ca-

The only point I want to stress at the outset is that for me a n t h r ~ ~ ~nnova complains that I have misrepresented his attempt at teformulation, pology is a continuous exploration of received ideas about the way giv1.11 nlrlnough he proposes that in our intellectu~l endeavors we are both in modes of life hang together. More precisely: What is included or exclu<l fl~ndamental agreement. I plead that my concern in that chapter was not ed in the concepts that help to organize our collective lives? How? W l l ~ i 1.0 write a review essay on Public Religions in the Modern World; it was to With what probable consequences For behavior and experience? Such ,111 conduct a series of skeptical inquiries about secularism, beginlli~lg with a inquiry requires that one be ready to break out of the coercive constrail~~a 11k at his reformnlation of the thesis. I cannot pick up every disclaimer of Sociological Truth-the axiom that the social is the ground of bei~il:. 11sa11ova has made in his own defense, but I stand by my reading. Here I The results, however provisional, can be uncomfortable, and they I ~ I . I ~ ill confine myself to restating my objections to the basic argument of his sometimes point to politically incorrect conclusions. What we eventu:~ll~. IIOL. Finally, although I admire his erudition and hurnaniry, I am not per- do with them is another matter, because we are not abstract intellec[~l;~l,. tuudcd that our projects are quite the same. All of us live in particular forms of life that constantly demand decis i~t~~*. In Casanova's view, the core of the theory of secularization is the claim and that in general presuppose a variety of committnents. And we all I ~ ; I I , I tl1111 innoder~n society is characterized by "the differenriation of the secular

particular me11101-ies, fears, and hol~cs.

spheres from each other and from religious institutions and norms." This claim he regards in his book as "srill defensible." Now, as I see it, the first problem is that the characterization virtually equates secularization with modernity, as many sociologists have defined it, and I'm not sure how dif- ferent this makes it from "the ce[eological theory of religious development" that Casanova rightly disparages. Secondly, it doesn't help us to identify the different kinds of secular life and the political reasoning on which they are based. For example, in the United States the population is largely religious and rhe federal government is conscicucio~lally required to be neutral, and yet Christian movements have historically been able to mobilize effectively in support of important policies (antislavery, Prohibition, anti-abortion, pro-Israel, etc.). Conversely, the federal courts are fi-equently required to decide whether particular forms of public behavior deserve to be protected under the principle of fi-eedom of religion; in this way, the legal appara- tus of rhe state lnusr continually define what is truly religion. In France, where the populal-ion is mostly nonreligious, the aggressively antireligious state owns all church property built before 1908, except in Alsace and Lor- raine (which were at that time a pal-t of Germany), where allcliurcli prop- erty is now stal-e property and where priests, ministers, and rabbis are statr employees. A state that maintains the basic conditions for the practice ol' religion in society is itself religious. Thus in these two societies the sratc tesponds very differenl-ly LO religious institutions and nonns, although i l l

neither case are stal-e and religion completely separate. Right through thr nineteenth and twentieth centuries, American religiosity fed into feder:~l policy-making in ways quite ullparalleled in France; the French state, ,711

the other hand, controls religious property in ways unl-hinliahle in Amcr ica. And yer both the United States and France are in theory and practii,. secular states. I'm sure Casanova is aware of these facts, but my point i r

that his core theoly of secularization impedes their full investigation hc

cause it avoids exa~nining the complicated prejudgments on which relit tions between religion and state appear to rest in constiturional law.

This brings me to my final difficulty with Casanova's thesis: if ' ' I I I I . deprivatization of religion" is compatible with "modernity," doesn'l- t l ~ i r

jeopardize the "core of the theory of secularization," according to w h i ~ l ~ the structural differentiation of modern society requires that distinctive 51)

cia1 activities belong to appropriate social spaces? I think Casanova sell\<.,.

Responses 2 o 9

the paradox here, which is why he says that "in the modern secular world, the boundaries between the religious and the secular are so fluid that one ought to be very cautious when drawing such analytical distinctions." I only wish he had explored the implications of this statement for his ar- gument. The point I would sttess here is not merely that religion and the secular interpenetrate, but that (a) both are 11istoricalI~ constituted, (b) rhis happens through accidental processes bringing together a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities, and (c) in modern society rhe law is crncially involved in defining and defending the distinctiveness of social spaces-especially the legitimate space for religion. In Formations of the

Secular I ended the chapter that began with Casanova's reformulated the- sis by saying that in modern society the law finds itseIfcontinually having to redefine the space that religion may properly occupy because the repro- duction ofsecular life ceaselessly disturbs the clarityofits boundaries. I ob- served that "the unceasing pursuit of the new in productive effort, aesthet- ic experience, and claims ro knowledge, as well as the unending struggle to extend individual self-creation, undermines the stability of established boundaries." The point that interests me, therefore, is not that we need to be careful in drawing analytical distinctions-I take that for granted as a general requirement for clear thinking. My concern is with the process by which houndaries are established and by which they come to be defined RS modern. Thus in the United Srates the courts have a tendency to define "religion" in terms of systems of belief in order to determine whether some local administrarive constrainr substantially burdens the "free exercise of religion." In France i t appears that rhe state is primarily concerned with "the ostentatious display of religious symbols in public schools" regardless of belief. I simplify, of course, but what kinds of authorized memory and pesentiment go into these contrasting definitions of religion in "secular" at~cietiesl My impressior~ is that such questions do not interest Casanova.

I endorse Casanova's call to scholars "to abandon the eurocenttic vicw that modern Western Eutopean developments, including the secu- larization of European Christianity, are general universal processes." but I

curious as to why the kind of global developments to which he I-efers nplvovingly in contemporary non-Christian religions seem largely to be linked (for good or for ill) to Western Iiberal conceptions of person and ~~'lirics. Liberalism is of course a complex tradirion: Locke is not Constant 111111 C011stant is not Mill and Mill is not Rawk, rhe history of liberalism

in North America is not the same as rhat in Eutope-or, for that matter, in parts of theThird World, where it can be said to have a substantial pur- chase. But as a value-space, liberalism today provides its advocates with a common political and moral language (whose ambiguities and aporias al- low i t to evolve) in which to identify problems and with which to dispute. Such ideas as individual sovereignty, freedom, limitation of state power, toleration, airdsecukzrism are central to that space, not least when they are debated, In referring to religion as liberal, I refer to its adjustmellt to these (often incompatible) ideas, but unfortunately this quest io~~ is one that Ca- sanova does not investigate.

More generally, I tried 7706 to describe l~istorical development here in terms of a lineal- sequence of ideas, as Casanova and other sociologisis often do ("Protesrant Reformatio~i' as a cause and "secular modemi ty" as an effect), because a gellealogical investigation presupposes a more com- plicated web of connections and recursivities than the notion of a causal chain does. When I referred to the Renaissance doctrine of humanism, thi. Enlightenment concept of nature, and Hegel's philosophy of history, I wah

talking not about causes but about doctrinal cle~nents that are part of thr genealogy of seculatism. It's odd rhat Casanova should represent my re11 erence to them as "triumphalist." because that implies I have an essential- ist view- of secularism. I wish that he had not confined himself to the onc chapter of Formatiol7s i n \r~llich I ~nention his book hut instead had real it all, because then I think he would have been better able to understancl what my genealogical efforts were aimed at.

Response to Caton

Caton is an excellent ethnographer and a fine linguist, so I find i t .I

matter of regret that he hasn't grasped the basic point of Genefilogies of HI. ligion. The chapter in which I deal with Geertz is followed by a number ( 1 1 studies that are integral to its argument, yet Caton ignores them. Had 111

read the entire book, he might have realized that it was not a critique 01 Geertz (although I am critical of his influential approach to religion) h o ~ an attempt, through an engagement with an essentialist definition of rrli gion, to create a conceptual space in which "the construction of religio~l .I , .

an anthropological category" (the title of my first chapter) can be avoidccl

Respo17ses 211

I do not have space here to deal with every one of Caton's cou~~tercriticis~ns in defence of Geertz, so 1 will confine myself to the larger argument.

To begiu with, chapter I of Gel7ealogics is not about how a religion acquires its authority in a particular society. It is about how religion is con- structed as an anthropological category. My argument is that the vely pro- cess of offering definitions of religion as a universal category has roots in a Christian history, a modern Christian history in which "belief" is given a unique place, and which is at the same time a history of comparative reli- gion as an intellecrual subject. It is in this context that I speak of "autho- rizing discourses" in the first chapter-the ways in which various elements are included or excluded historically to create the concept of religion. My concern is with the conditions of possibility of "religion" rather than with its substance. I refer primarily to a col7stitutiue process (that which makes the concept "religion") and secondarily to a r e p l t i t ~ c one (that which en-

o be properly "religious"). There is a complicated relation- e rwo that certainly involves coercive force, but not always

Caton's Yemeni ethnography (his analysis of rain prayers) is intended prove that my notion of religious authority is an impoverished one be-

use it is "external": the question Caton asked his informants-"Whose ords (or what text) authorized these prayers?"-could not be answered ecause no utterance or text did. Caton wants to say that the authority of IC prayers he describes derived not from an external, textual source but 'om the semantic structure of the language of the rain prayer itself. The nrhority of that discourse, he tells us, depends on the recursive character

self-citation. Caton is right to seek an inrritrsic structuration, but the lgualism he defends in Geertz is precisely what prevents him from seeing c embodied character of authoritative discourse, its articulation of the ~rsorium. I n accounting for authority in terms of a determining linguis- c structure, Caton ~rproduces Grertz's questionable assumption about te :lutonomy of signs. It will be recalled that according to the latter's defi-

iun of religion as a irrltural system, it is precisely the given character of a letn of symbols rhat determines observable "religious" behavior, a sys- 1 that the anthropoIogist is asked to specify and interpret. The idea that

s dcrects in Geertz-the self-authorization of religious symbols-is pre- I#cly a reflectiou of the latter's textualism.