“A Summary of Religion as a Cultural System” Clifford Geertz (1965)

The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category- Talal Asaad: Review

Disagreements occur and recur all the time. Anything can generate a difference of opinion: politics, sports, norms of social or emotional engagement, and, of course, religion. The anthropology of religion has been marked by many debates, but perhaps none so defining for the contemporary period as the debates over religion and belief, which have been key terms in the field since its inception.

In “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category” from Genealogies of Religion and Asaad's paper “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Asaad opposes Geertz’s universalist definition of religion in which Geertz states, “Religion is a system of symbols which act to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Geertz goes on to clarify systems of symbols as “cultural patterns” that constitute “extrinsic sources of information.” These symbols then create in the worshiper a set of “dispositions which lend a chronic character to the flow of his activity and the quality of his experience.” As Asaad questions, “Can we predict a distinctive set of dispositions for a Christian worshiper in modern industrial society? Or conversely, can we use this set of dispositions to determine that this worshiper is not a Christian? Responses to these questions are “no.” Asaad defends his position that the response here is “no” because it is not just worshiped but the social, historical, political, and economic institutions in which the believer lives out his belief.

Asaad brought a shift in anthropology from interpretive to post-structural anthropology. Asaad criticizes Clifford Geertz’s universalistic concept of religion. The universal notion or essentialist notion of religion makes it nearly impossible to speak across religious practices as diverse as those throughout the world today. As any writer can explain, the use of abstract terms like “mood” or “disposition” defies concrete definition and only adds to the problems when discursive traditions “clash”.

The reason that religion is not universal is not that religious phenomenon is infinitely varied, it’s that defining religion is a historic act and when the definition is deployed it does different things in different times and circumstances and responds to different questions and needs. To define is to repudiate some things and endorse others. Defining what is religion is not merely an abstract intellectual, the act of defining religion is embedded in passionate disputes connected with anxieties and satisfactions affected by changing conceptions of knowledge and interest related to institutional discipline.