Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 4 - January 1985 - ARTICLE - The Contribution of Anthropology: A Response to Mary Douglas and Edmund Perry

428 - The Contribution of Anthropology: A Response to Mary Douglas and Edmund Perry

The Contribution of Anthropology:
A Response to Mary Douglas and Edmund Perry
By Jacob Neusner

THE principal contribution of anthropology to the study of religion in our day centers on the question: how does a given religious tradition relate to the social group which that tradition addresses?

Anthropology insists upon asking questions about the humanity of religion-its relationship to the problems of people, its work in joining and bonding a group and imparting meaning to its collective life. Accordingly, it made possible, first, a fresh reading of the religious dimension of social life and culture. A second and corollary contribution is its insistence that a given society does form a coherent whole, a system, and that religious components of that system serve and express its concerns. When, therefore, we study a religion, we find our way to the center and the heart of the larger social systems at hand. Anthropology has taught us to see things whole and in proportion and balance. As a final contribution, anthropology has insisted on treating each society in its own terms, and so has taught us to take seriously the specificities of religion. Just as religion forms the center and heart of the social world in which it is found, so a given detail of a religion may point us toward the center and soul of the religion at hand. In these three ways, anthropologists--and foremost among them, Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas-have reshaped our understanding of what we do when we claim to study a religion, or religion.

But when we acknowledge the gifts at hand-the lessons of seeing things in their larger context, of seeing things whole, and of seeing the whole in diverse details-we have also to point to the other side of things. Our power is our pathos; where we are strong, there too is our weakness. Anthropology teaches us about religions, not about religion. But we

Jacob Neusner is a noted scholar, prolific writer, and a leading authority on Judaism. He is currently University Professor and Ungerleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. His most recent work is Messiah in Context: Israel's History and Destiny in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). The remarks published here were presented originally as a response to the paper by Mary Douglas and Edmund Perry at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, December 19, 1983.

429 - The Contribution of Anthropology: A Response to Mary Douglas and Edmund Perry

claim, in our field, to want to define and explain religion, not merely religions. Accordingly, when we read the writings of field anthropology, we sometimes find ourselves knowing more than we ever wanted or needed, unable indeed to grasp and assimilate it all. In the stress upon the local and the detailed, anthropologists tend to omit an important middle step in reasoning. They move from their tribe (Douglas' "Bongo") to the entire tribe of humanity, without making those intermediate stops along the way that draw tribe together with tribe, region to region. Accordingly, generalization without overgeneralization tends to fall from sight. It follows that the Bongo stand for everyone, rather than for no one but themselves.

But, in my view, just as we recognize the specificity of a given group, and the whole and integrated character of religion as the centerpiece and point of insistence of that group, so we do have to move- beyond, yet only step by step. One group, after all, does relate to the next, and the several groups do constitute a larger and in some ways integrated unit. Yet in what ways, and how do culture and society join together to another culture and another society? And they always do, no tribe being an island unless it is on so remote an island that it has never been "discovered." Anthropology moves therefore from a culture, a society, a religion, to culture, society, and religion.

An example drawn from an effort to write world history is Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California, 1982), in which a single thesis on the interconnectedness of nations, cultures, societies, proposes to join the smallest to the largest categories. The single thesis, as it happens, has to do with means of production and the labor theory of value. It leads us through masses of detail about cocoa here and cotton there. A middle ground of inquiry, the relationship between the detail and the large thesis at hand does not emerge, it is merely announced at the end. So, too, with anthropology when it addresses religion.

III

And yet, in defense of Edmund Leach, the impatience with generalization at that middle range surely enjoys some fair justification. For in seeking to generalize, not on the basis of the one but on the basis of the many, religion-scholars do not do much better than anthropologists. Thus, they leap into that middle ground between small detail and large-scale theorem. But having landed, they see pretty much the same thing when there are many things. Accordingly, in that middle range what we find here, there, and everywhere, not to say, hither and yon-everything from everywhere tells us the same thing anywhere. Why should Leach not have lost patience! So, as I said, instead of moving from the one to the many, as do anthropologists, religionscholars have tended to move from the little that they know to the much that they assume. In both cases the search for the unities of humankind leads not to banality but mere over-simplification and contortional

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inaccuracy. To state matters in my own framework, I can scarcely make sense of the "Judaism" that I read about in the books of comparative religion.

The solution, however, lies not in giving up that inquiry into the common humanity constituted by us all. On the contrary, when we insist that each group is unique and beyond comparison with any other, we abandon that search, in the intellectual and rational framework, for the explanation of the obvious facts of our existence. I mean that we give up the recognition that, after all, we really do tend to look like one another, constituting a common genus; societies do have to take up a singular agendum and to endure (and by definition they do endure), do solve a common set of problems everywhere. Generalization and definition prove plausible.

So if we deny that we all really are the same, and- if we affirm that from the Bongo you do not move out in one leap to all humanity, we do not then abandon the task. We only redefine it. What we have to do, who specialize before and beyond generalization, is so to frame our inquiry that, in due course, we shall produce results useful to turn outward and address people who know not what we know but something else. That is something I do not find common in my reading in anthropology, which tends to drown me in uninterpreted detail, or in my reading in the study of religions, which tends to leap too quickly for me to follow over landscapes perceived at too great distance. Specialists must learn to talk to others, and to do so with respect for the knowledge and inquiry of others. Since that sort of discourse seems to me uncommon in most other fields of the humanities and social sciences, it might as well start here.