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Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology

By Mark Kline Taylor

Macon, Mercer University Press, 1986. 262 Pp. $24.95.

This book, originating as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is a work of first importance by a creative young theologian teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. Taylor combines his thorough mastery of cultural anthropology with his gifts as a constructive theologian to produce an interdisciplinary study whose stated purpose is to show how the discourse of cultural anthropology drives "beyond explanation" to a "religious dimension" of understanding, which may in turn "serve as a focal point around which religionists and social scientists, theologians and anthropologists, may converse." While the basic clue to Taylor's approach derives from Tillich's theology of culture, his use of the latter has been significantly refined and enhanced by recent discussions of hermeneutical theory, notably those deriving from Gadamer, Ricoeur, Lonergan, and Polanyi, and from their application to theology as provided by David Tracy, Langdon Gilkey, and others.

Following an introduction, the book opens with a chapter on "religious traditions and anthropological suspicions." Scientific cultural (or social) anthropology's "hermeneutic of suspicion" is based on its conviction that religions are a form of "folk anthropology," namely bodies of observations, beliefs, myths, and socially sanctioned dogmas that function in precritical, provincial fashion to legitimate practices and values that societies find to be useful. While this critique of religion is valuable, it is also potentially reductive of religious experience, and it almost invariably overlooks the capacity of Christian tradition in particular to transcend folk anthropology. Taylor substantiates this by showing how four major theologians-Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Schleiermacher-display an openness to human discovery and to "the alien, the distant other," despite their sharing of the Christian tradition's "illegitimate prejudices" (its "provincialisms, dogmatisms, and ethnocentrisms"). The chapter concludes by setting forth a model for discerning the "religious dimensions" of a cultural activity. The model focuses on the dialectic of preunderstanding, explanation, and understanding in any human inquiry, and on the "limits" of such inquiry-both "limit-to" experiences, which restrict and provide boundaries to the inquiry, and "limit-of" realities, which emerge as the productive ground or horizon of inquiry precisely in and through its limits.

The three central chapters of the book apply this model to a detailed study of the method of inquiry of cultural anthropology, focusing upon two major figures, one of whom is a structuralist and the other a cultural materialist, namely Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marvin Harris, both of

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whom did extensive field work in Brazil where their procedures and results can be compared. This careful analysis provides the basis for the concluding chapter, "two religious dimensions in anthropology." Taylor concludes that both Lévi-Strauss and Harris are driven beyond scientific explanation to a more-or-less intuitive comprehension of wholes by which chains of partial meaning are unfolded-wholes that are both transcultural and transtemporal, while at the same time being mediated in and through particular situations (personal, cultural, academic, etc.). For Lévi-Strauss, the limit-situation may be described as "loyalty to a whole," based on experiences of compassion and remorse, pointing to a "world of reciprocity" of which human beings are individually and collectively a part. For Harris, the limit-situation is one of "pursuit of order," based on the experienced need for order and justice in human affairs, pointing to "nature" as ultimate reality. Taylor argues that, for both, the limit-situations have a religious character because they function in their respective works in universal and elementary fashion, and because the language employed by both is "limit-language," pressing toward more typically religious expression. This is both surprising and significant, since Lévi-Strauss is avowedly agnostic and Harris is avowedly atheistic. Indeed, we must be careful to distinguish between a "religious dimension," which is present in these anthropologists' work, and "religion," which is not. Religion elaborates symbolically, ritually, and communally the religious dimensions of human experience, while theology "re-presents" this elaboration in more conceptually rigorous form.

Taylor concludes by suggesting that it is possible to re-present in theological discourse the religious dimensions present in Lévi-Strauss and Harris, and that this would be theology's "contribution" to cultural anthropology. However, this possibility is only adumbrated by him, not developed. A number of questions remain unanswered. For example, is it appropriate to evaluate and criticize as well as re-present the religious vision of a Lévi-Strauss or a Harris? On what grounds does one adjudicate between rival claims of a religious character concerning reality, truth, and value, especially when one is engaged in interdisciplinary dialogue? Is it the case that Lévi-Strauss' "triumph of nonbeing over being" and Harris' all-encompassing "naturalism" may offer valuable correctives to the dominant Western theological tradition? The book ends at the beginning of a conversation.

Aside from the caveat that Taylor's Beyond Explanation offers more of a propadeutic to conversation among theologians and anthropologists than the actual conversation itself, I have nothing but praise for this book and its author. Taylor is equally at home in the literature of both disciplines; he demonstrates methodological sophistication, unusual clarity of argument and expression, and impressive constructive talents together with the facility for carefully nuanced, well-balanced judgments. If his work develops in accord with the promise shown here, he will be a leading theologian of the new generation. His book affords a

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model for evaluating religious dimensions in other social and human sciences (psychology, sociology, history, literary criticism, linguistics, philosophy), and perhaps even the natural sciences. Nothing could be more crucial for the survival of theology in the postmodern world.

PETER C. HODGSON

Vanderbilt Divinity School
Nashville, Tennessee