The ethics of suspicion in the study of religions

In this essay I outline some beliefs and practices among lowland christianised peoples in the Philippines relating primarily to the existence of spirits which are believed to be responsible for causing illness, attending to their imbrication with Catholicism and local cultural notions and practices and post-colonial questions of identity. I sketch three interpretative frameworks that have been brought to bear on these religious beliefs and practices: an anthropological analysis that seeks to explain such beliefs and practices in terms of a cultural logic, a socio-historical account in which resonances are highlighted between such beliefs and the post-colonial question of Filipino identity, and a rationalist account in which the utility of such beliefs is assessed, at all times highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these different interpretative frameworks vis-à-vis a phenomenological approach. I use the empirical material to demonstrate that the phenomenological commitment to religion as a sui generis phenomenon cannot reasonably be said to constitute a satisfactory theory of context and I argue Page 1 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht that the phenomenological epochē is an inadequate response to the problem of representation. INTRODUCTION Theoretical debates in the study of religions conventionally revolve around arguments about how ‘religion’, as a category or object of critical analysis, is to be defined and, in consequence, how it should be studied. Paul Ricoeur’s contrast between “psychoanalytic interpretation...conceived as the unmasking, demystification or reduction of illusions” with “interpretation conceived as the recollection or restoration of meaning”<2> sets up an opposition between a hermeneutics of suspicion on the one hand, and a hermeneutics of restoration on the other. Phenomenologists of religion, practitioners of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of restoration who draw from Husserl’s search for a philosophy without presuppositions, have commonly asserted that religion is a sui generis phenomenon that must be studied on its own terms. Religion is assumed to be an autonomous and distinct sphere of human belief and practice concerned with relating human beings to a transcendent supernatural or sacred reality. For example, Rudolf Otto claimed to be conducting an analysis of a “mental state [that] is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other”<3> while the ‘numinous’ “states of the soul” to which Otto directed his attention were analysed to discover what was “unique in them” rather than what they had “in common with other similar states”. <4> Similarly, Mircea Eliade claimed that “to try to grasp the essence of such a [religious] phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred”. <5> In other words, both Otto and Eliade attempted to render religion as a unique area of enquiry that necessitated the deployment of very specific and limited methodological tools. Ninian Smart’s position was somewhat more nuanced: while advocating the phenomenological epochē as a means of entering into the worldview of the believer, Smart also argued that the study of religions was a field of enquiry open to interrogation by a variety of disciplines and methodologies. <6> Indeed, the recent spate of publications devoted to re-thinking phenomenology, such as those produced by Flood and Cox point to the importance of a theory of context to the study of religions though others, notably Twiss and Conser, have remained committed to the defence of the phenomenology of religion traditionally conceived. <7> In this essay I will show that through the contextualisation of religious beliefs and practices in culture and history, description and analysis is enriched and deepened, and that the charge of reductionism often levelled Page 2 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht at social scientific approaches is specious. Although scholars in the study of religions frequently claim to have ‘moved on’ from phenomenology, certain key phenomenological assumptions continue to play a vital role in structuring enquiry about religions, in particular the idea of value-neutrality embodied in the notion of the phenomenological epochē. A related problem, then, with the phenomenology of religion concerns its invocation of the Husserlian epochē as a means to avoid or rather bracket out values and judgements as to the truth or falsity of particular religious beliefs. This strategy is aimed at preserving the integrity of a putative believer’s point of view, which in turn is to be accessed or re-experienced through intuitive or empathic liaison. In the essay ‘Guilt, Ethics, and Religion’, Ricoeur outlines a phenomenological-hermeneutical method with the emphasis placed firmly upon sympathy, empathy and imagination. In order not to judge or evaluate that which the phenomenologist seeks to describe and understand, the phenomenologist must place him or herself in suspense: “My point of departure is in a phenomenology of confession or avowal. Here I understand by phenomenology a description of meanings implied in experience in general...a phenomenology of confession is therefore a description of meanings and of signified intentions, present in a certain activity of language, namely, confession. Our task, in the framework of such a phenomenology is to re-enact in ourselves the confession of evil, in order to uncover its aims. By sympathy and through imagination, the philosopher adopts the motivations and intentions of the confessing consciousness; he does not “feel” but “experiences” in a neutral manner, in the manner of “as if,” that which has been lived in the confessing consciousness.” <8> Even though Ricoeur is here concerned with understanding confession, the methodological steps he outlines are generalisable to the phenomenology of religion as a whole. As such, Ricoeur’s emphasis on description, re-enactment, sympathy, imagination and neutrality constitute the distinctive features of the phenomenological method. Yet, if carefully reflected on, the epochē renders phenomenology a strange kind of positivism: a guarantee of objectivity in which some facts are to be separated from some values. It is argued that given the irreducibility of religion and therefore of the believer’s point of view, the scholar of religion ought to be, usually in some vague and unspecified sense, an ‘insider’ or at least in sympathy with the insider in order to properly represent the interiority of ‘the’ religious commitment. Religions are as such constituted as ‘worldviews’ that demand a special hermeneutics, a special hermeneutics that is, at the same time, supposed to guarantee faithful or accurate representation of particular Page 3 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht phenomena and the meanings those phenomena allegedly carry for certain people. Significantly, the so-called insider-outsider debate in religious studies I have alluded to straddles both phenomenology and anthropology. <9> In the phenomenology of religion this is a debate about the objectivity, neutrality and impartiality of the scholar of religion, and also a debate about writing and the role of writing in evoking, within a putative reader, an ‘experience’ of a particular religious practice or belief and the possibility of seeing the world from another point of view. For instance, Otto self-consciously informed his reader that he would be using “analogy and contrast” as well as “metaphor and symbolic expressions” in order “to make the states of mind [i.e. the states of the religious consciousness]...ring out...of themselves”. <10> Similarly, Eliade suggested that “a considerable enrichment of consciousness results from the hermeneutical effort of deciphering the meaning of myths, symbols, and other traditional religious structures; in a certain sense, one can even speak of the inner transformation of the researcher and, hopefully, of the sympathetic reader. What is called the phenomenology and history of religions can be considered among the very few humanistic disciplines that are at the same time propadeutic and spiritual techniques”. <11> In anthropology, on the other hand, this has led to debates about ethnographic authority, about the imposition of Western categories on nonWestern ‘others’ and about the very possibility of re-presenting itself. <12> Yet, the phenomenology of religion as an allegedly restorative approach to the study of religion is conventionally contrasted with so-called ‘suspicious’ approaches that allegedly seek to situate religions within, reduce religions to or define them in terms of particular social, cultural and historical contexts. <13> This kind of suspicion is typically associated with sociology and social or cultural anthropology. It is an axiomatic assumption of these latter disciplines that human beings are born or thrown into languages, cultures, societies and historical moments not of their choosing and that, moreover, their immersion in cultures, societies, languages and histories necessitates a mode of analysis that seeks to go beyond the point of view of any putative believer to the structures and systemic features that condition and set the limits and parameters to being human in any time or place. Importantly, post-modern epistemological critiques do not challenge this basic assumption – such critiques encourage rather the acknowledgement and explication of the fact that disciplines such as sociology and social or cultural anthropology are themselves products of particular historical and cultural Page 4 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht circumstances and that enquiry or questioning also has a context. Only recently has this kind of reflexivity become a feature of debate in the study of religions. <14> In this essay, I will proceed in the following manner: firstly, I will sketch some religious beliefs and practices common among lowland christianised peoples in the Philippines relating to the existence of spirits which are commonly believed to be responsible for causing certain categories of illness. I will address their imbrication with Catholicism, local cultural notions and practices, healing and ritual practices of penitence, sacrifice, pilgrimage and practices directed towards the accumulation of spiritual power and potency. This material comes both from the extant historical and ethnographic literature on religion in the christianised, lowland Philippines and from field work that I conducted in the Tagálog speaking provinces of Quezon and Laguna south of Manila in 1999-2000 and 2003. The texts selected for analysis and comparison were chosen as broadly representative of particular strategies for interpreting not only religion in the Philippine context but religions wherever they are located temporally or spatially. Secondly, I will sketch three different frameworks of interpretation that have been brought to bear to understand religious beliefs and practices in the Philippines. I will juxtapose an anthropological account in which such beliefs and practices are contextualised in terms of the local culture, a sociohistorical account in which they are framed in terms of their resonance with the post-colonial question of identity and a rationalist account in which their utility is assessed, at all times highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of these different interpretative frameworks vis-à-vis a phenomenological approach to religion. Thirdly, I will argue that a phenomenological approach to religion cannot account for the clear inter-penetration of religion with cultural phenomena and historical experiences because of its commitment to the idea that religion is a sui generis phenomenon. Furthermore, this approach cannot bring itself to critique beliefs that are evidently false because of its commitment to preserving the believer’s or insider’s point of view even to the extent that that point of view may endanger the believer him or herself or may be dangerous to others. In other words, this paper is ideologically motivated in that the intention is to provide clear evidence for the interpretative superiority of approaches to religion that take context seriously and have engaged in sustained, reflexive theorising over the problem of representation. CON-TEXT Any visitor to the Philippines willing to spend a little time each day to watch local television, read newspapers and comics, catch a movie or live with a family will soon come to be aware of stories about sorcery and witchcraft (kulam), of blood-sucking flying bats (aswáng and manananggal), Page 5 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht dwarves and elves (duwende), spirits that enchant the unwary such as the engkanto and tikbalang, ancestral spirits (anito), as well as the pervasive use of creolised prayers that combine Tagálog, Spanish and Latin (orasyón) and amulets (antíng-antíng) through which to guard against the mischief or possible malevolence of these alleged super-natural agents or for the accumulation of spiritual power and potency (kapangyarihan). These kinds of beliefs and associated practices sit beside popular christianised practices of healing and pilgrimage as well as more ‘exotic’ practices such as self-flagellation and crucifixion. I have conducted field research in and around an extinct volcano called Mount Banahaw, widely believed by many Filipinos to be a source of spiritual power and potency. It is a place frequently mentioned in accounts of the 1896 Philippine revolution against Spain as a site of organised resistance – resistance led by local religious leaders. <15> Today, it is home to a number of religio-nationalist movements that venerate or worship the national hero José Rizal.<16> It is a place of pilgrimage particularly during Easter when tens of thousands come to visit the various shrines on the lower slopes of the mountain and to collect allegedly powerful antíng-antíng. In and around Mount Banahaw, stories about spirits and about the special abilities that certain powerful amulets are said to bestow are commonplace. As such, the problem of the interpretation of beliefs and practices strange and alien to my own was one I needed to address. This was done in the first instance by documenting how such beliefs and practices had been interpreted by others, through problematising such accounts and through comparing them both to one another and to a putative phenomenological account. RELIGION IN CULTURE The emphasis in social and cultural anthropology is on societies and cultures as organised if permeable and shifting structures of meaning and exchange. The approaches taken by Zialcita and Cannell to popular religion in the lowland Philippines work on the assumption that Philippine culture is structured in terms of a socio-cultural-logic of debt, pity, reciprocity and exchange, relationships expressed locally in terms of utang na loób or ‘debt from the inside’ and hiyâ or ‘shame’. Note that for the strict phenomenologist of religion this kind of interpretation is inadmissible on the grounds that it refuses to treat religion as a sui generis phenomenon. In her analysis of peniténsiyá in the Philippines, Zialcita argues that Filipino flagellants engage in peniténsiyá during Holy Week as a means of re-ordering their relations with their kin or as the fulfilment of a promise or vow made to God usually vis-à-vis the health of a relative. Interestingly, such vows and promises are transferable between or among relatives. In other words, the motivations for engaging in these different practices are as much cultural as religious. Page 6 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht As such, Zialcita argues that these rituals should be analysed not merely in terms of their religious content, but also in terms of their cultural context, particularly “the social and moral orders of a society, the principles underlying a society’s organisation, the kinds of corporate grouping available, and the norms and values inherent in structural relationships...Thus utang na loob or a moral debt of gratitude, concern for the welfare of the immediate family, and loyalty to the peer group are key organizing principles of lowland Philippine society. These are reenacted and indeed reinforced by the Lenten rituals.” <17> Similarly, Cannell’s analysis of healing in the lowland province of Bicol begins by noting the syncretism of healing practices. Such practices involve medium-ship, trance and possession as well as prayer and devotional practices associated with Catholic saints, icons and shrines. In her analysis of women healers and their complex relationships with the spirits that ‘possess’ them for the purposes of healing, Cannell notes the similarity in the rhetoric used with everyday talk about marital relationships. <18> Cannell also argues – drawing on the writings of Scott and Rafael – that the relations between healer, spirit and client and the practice of healing itself is understood in terms of local notions of debt, pity and reciprocity whereby persons are, as it were, continually re-made and re-defined in terms of their dealings with persons and entities of higher or lower status or that have greater or lesser access to sources of power. <19> Indeed, Cannell argues that social relationships among lowland Bicolaños (and as such lowland Filipinos more generally) are “dynamic engagements” defined by attempts to “establish and negotiate relationships with various figures of power” where “persons are potentially changed in every interaction with others”. <20> According to Cannell, then, Bicolaño conceptions of self focus on process, mutability, and transformation through contact with persons, objects, places, or entities of a greater or lesser potency or power. Cannell’s analysis of healing therefore rests on culturally specific conceptions and practices of personhood and power as a basis for understanding popular religious beliefs and practices in the Philippines. Critically, when the strategy of interpretation adopted by Zialcita and Cannell is compared to a traditional phenomenological analysis, the weakness of the latter is brought sharply into focus. Zialcita and Cannell demonstrate the interpenetration of culturally specific norms, values, practices and discourses with christianised religious beliefs and practices, an interpenetration that a phenomenological account must deny due to its insistence that religion is a phenomenon sui generis and is as such an autonomous and distinct realm of human belief and practice irreducible to any economic, psychological, linguistic, historical, or cultural Page 7 of 16 DISKUS 28/07/2010 mhtml:http://oro.open.ac.uk/22449/1/DISKUS.mht