Religious Transformations and Socio-Political Change (Eastern Europe and Latin America) ||...

Ε. Thomas Lawson

Methodological conceits and theoretical opportunities: Reflections on the level of analysis appropriate for explaining socio-cultural phenomena

One of the persistent conceits prevalent in the human sciences consists in the assumption that basic notions such as "society", "culture" and "religion" as well as derivative notions such as "religious transforma-tions" and "socio-political change" are well established referential terms capable of individuating phenomena of scientific interest. Scholars in the human sciences too often simply presuppose their ready availability for a productive analysis of human behavior. They tend to treat such terms as viable intellectual currency capable of purchasing important insights into problematic features of human thought and action. One of the consequences of such presumption is the unwarranted view that any theoretical work which challenges the power of these terms to illuminate our understanding of human behavior consists of supererog-atory intellectual activity deflecting us from the real task at hand, namely, accounting for problems such as religious transformation and socio-political change with the categories securely in hand.

There is also, however, a further conceit current within the human sciences (held by the special few who have sniffed out the prevailing conceit) which holds that it is worthless to bother either about justifying the employment of such categories or about developing interesting theories to support or supplant them because the real purpose of the human sciences is not explanatory at all but interpretive. In this ap-proach "thick description", "participant observation", "intersubjective

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442 Ε. Thomas Lawson

dialogue" and the like provide the coin to procure the leverage necessary to interpret social and cultural systems. Explanatory theorizing, from this perspective, is best left to the hard sciences; interpretation in the human "sciences" requires reading "texts," or engaging in discourse, dialogue and deconstruction. This hermeneutic strategy involves not only the reading of texts but the treating of social and cultural phe-nomena in overtly literary ways. Literary criticism becomes the over-arching methodological model. So whole societies and cultures become stand-ins for literary works, and are treated as if they possess an inherent systematicity which requires only the discovery of their internal logics.

Coupled with this hermeneutic strategy we often find the recom-mendation that scholars in the human sciences eschew scientific theo-rizing altogether, at least if the project of the human sciences is an attempt to increase our knowledge about human subjects. The point here seems to be that not only do the human sciences deal with knowers in search of something to know, but that knowledge is a reflexive activity in which the very act of inquiry itself prevents us from operating at a level of objectivity supposedly characteristic of the hard sciences. Subjectivity, therefore, rules the day.

This hermeneutic dance transmogrifies the "science" in human sci-ence into a purely interpretive endeavor in search of the "meaning" of "texts" which are often not texts at all, and subtexts which are more likely to be pretexts for various ideological agendas. This approach consigns science (as the activity in search of an explanatory understand-ing of the world focusing upon principles and processes) either to the "natural" sciences (while scholars in the human sciences get on with the "real" work) or else to irrelevant speculation inappropriate when dealing with things human.

Fortunately scholars in the human sciences are not obliged to settle for either of these conceits. Scientific studies of human thought and action (including religious thought and action) is are alive and well (even if under siege) in unexpected places in the academic market place, especially in cooperative interdisciplinary ventures among scholars in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and comparative re-



Methodological conceits and theoretical opportunities 4 4 3

ligion, and particularly in cognitive theorizing that has become asso-ciated with these disciplines. The goal of such an interdisciplinary scientific study, especially when it takes a cognitive turn, is to provide tractable accounts of what happens in societies by theorizing about what goes on in human minds and in the interaction among them.

Reading through the manuscripts in this volume forced me to realize once again how important it is for scholars in the human sciences (particularly those interested in religion) to commence their inquiries into social and cultural phenomena (such as the relative stability of certain religious forms through long periods of time and the equally impressive transformations which religious forms sometimes undergo in very short historical periods) by recognizing that referential terms such as those alluded to above derive whatever sense and explanatory power they may possess from the theories in which they are embedded. Even the hermeneutically inclined, precipitously bolting from theoret-ical work, lug with them undeclared theoretical baggage not always expertly concealed from inquiring eyes.

The cognitive revolution, now in full swing as a genuinely interdis-ciplinary scientific enterprise, represents a fundamental intellectual chal-lenge to all scholars in the human sciences because it promises a deeper understanding of how fundamental cognitive structures inform and constrain human social and cultural behavior. This revolution requires all scholars engaged in plumbing the depths of social and cultural phenomena to advert to the kind of sophisticated psychological theo-rizing now in the process of development.

Cognitive approaches to human thought and action not only provide new methods and categories for their analysis, but also ground them in empirically tractable theories capable of producing fruitful insights about social and cultural phenomena such as the acquisition and trans-mission of knowledge, the novelty and repetitiveness of acts, and the structures of human interaction.

Until the emergence of radically new cognitive models those scholars in the human sciences who had courageously resisted hermeneutic adventurism had, nevertheless, acted as if emotivist, intellectualist,




symbolist, structuralist and ideological theories were the only games in town. While we applaud this resistance movement for attempting to remain faithful to the "science" in human science, we suggest that faithfulness to inadequate theories, and flawed methods will not do. More is required.

Some of the papers in this volume seem to be aware of the necessity for breaking new ground, a necessity because of the crisis in the human sciences reflected in the conflict of conceits alluded to above. Many others seem at least to acknowledge that something significant is afoot that requires new approaches to social and cultural phenomena. In fact many of the papers in this volume exude a kind of intellectual unease (whether they are by Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Latin Americans, or North Americans) with standard approaches to the role that religion plays in society. This unease bodes well for future inquiries into religious behavior.

A few of the papers move beyond suspicion by explicitly recognizing such a crisis. For example, Armin Geertz commences his paper by highlighting Pascal Boyer's critique of mainline anthropology (Boyer 1990). Boyer sees anthropologists as either ignoring psychological issues altogether or else as employing a very simplistic outdated psychology in their attempt to account for the acquisition and transmission of cultural knowledge, and cultural interaction. For example, anthropol-ogists only too often seem content to lump together diverse institutions and then to treat them as unified phenomena without demonstrating what scientifically relevant properties such putative unities might have. Terms like "socio-political change" would be a case in point. Boyer warns us that there can be "no theory of what happens in cultural interaction without some strong hypotheses about what is happening in the actor's minds". This is clearly a voice from the center of the cognitive revolution (Boyer 1992). We also see stirrings of unease in Versnel's paper when faced with problematic data from Hellenistic religion. But unfortunately Versnel does not appeal to the cognitive revolution for new insights into old problems. Instead he rather des-perately attempts to resurrect the outworn Feuerbachian notion of



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projection. This is certainly a step backwards which ignores the avail-ability of far more relevant contemporary theoretical models. [Ed.: But see H. S. Versnel. Ter unus. Isis, Dionysos, Hermes. Three studies in henotheism (Leiden 1990): 1—35.]

Nor is such awareness of the inadequacy of the standard approaches to issues in the human sciences absent from the work of our Eastern European colleagues. Here too there seems to be a quest for new approaches. Szmyd, for example, acknowledges that "there is little significant knowledge about the complicated mechanisms and condi-tions of this process [which show the essential dependence between national history, culture and religiousness]." Smolyakov talks about the "breaking of ideological chains" and Zotz talks about "the liberation of consciousness." Refreshing breezes seem to be blowing across the cross-cultural intellectual landscape. The question is whether these breezes are strong enough to bring better weather.

When we turn to the scholarly voices from Latin America we see further evidence of dissatisfaction with standard approaches to the study of religious thought and behavior and a search for new categories. Masferrer, for example, shows how the fluidity of religious thought and behavior in Latin America strains conventional analyses of religion and change in that part of the world. However, he suggests only the development of new typologies capable of characterizing the various and variegated forms that religion takes in Latin America. For such typologies to be relevant they will have to be grounded in new theo-retical work. Marcos is also unhappy with prevailing approaches; in her discussion of indigenous eroticism she argues that contemporary approaches in the human sciences fail to provide the categories capable of explaining the conflict that arose in the period of contact between Europe and the New World. And Pablo Wright flirts with hermeneutics by exploring the intricacies of intersubjectivity which he recommends to ethnographers who find themselves trapped in the hermeneutic circle all the while seeking to ground it both by creating a situation of discourse and by acknowledging that the subjects studied in ethno-




graphic work are quite capable of representing to themselves the world in which they act.

From my point of view, however, neither acknowledging that some-thing is amiss (as all the scholars I have mentioned seem willing to do), nor hoping for novel theories to come along will be sufficient for increasing or substantiating our knowledge about topics such as "relig-ious transformation" and "socio-political change." Even though many of the papers in this volume resist standard scientific and hermeneutic approaches to these topics and appeal for the recognition of historical and sociological complexity they tend only too often either to employ or presuppose the very kind of simplistic psychology that Boyer has warned us about. In large measure these papers are symptomatic of the fact that the human sciences even in their disarray remain enthralled by Durkheim's views about the autonomy of social (and cultural) facts. They simply seem to presuppose that all significant and productive explanation lies at the socio-cultural level and with socio-cultural cat-egories.

Despite the pervasive influence of Dürkheim on generations of scholars in the human sciences, it has become increasingly apparent to a new generation that what goes on in a society and its various cultural forms simply cannot be understood apart from "what goes on in human minds" because cognitive processes constrain both the range and or-ganization of cultural representations as well as their transmission and transformation from generation to generation. I am grateful therefore that Armin Geertz has fired a warning shot across the bow of the human sciences by highlighting Boyer's critique of the antipsychological tendency of anthropologists (and other scholars in the human sciences). For too long they have conspired to maintain the illusion that social and cultural phenomena automatically and autonomously possesses systematic properties which are then regarded as sufficient to account for human behavior.

We ought seriously to question the common assumption that all the significant variables requisite for the interpretation and explanation of phenomena such as religious transformations and socio-political change




(and especially their connections with each other) reside mainly or only at the socio-cultural level of analysis requiring only empty (or cogni-tively impoverished) minds as the transmitting agents.

One of the papers in this volume flirts with the transition from a culturological to a cognitively constrained approach, the intriguing paper by Ivan Strenski. His argument that ritual sacrificial — and civic sacrificial — domains share a common structure has many strengths, and its comparative approach is most welcome. But it lacks, or fails to entertain, or even to hint at the possibility that a cognitive theory capable of identifying the psychological mechanisms required to explain the commonality in question might be possible. Thus, despite recog-nizing common structures (what is their theoretical status?), Strenski opts for an unexplicated notion of "culture" which he seems to think can carry all the necessary interpretive and explanatory weight for accounting for the presence, persistence and use of concepts and prac-tices such as "sacrifice" in human groups.

Strenski not only seems to ignore the work of scholars in the cognitive sciences but the long-standing critique by philosophers of social science of "culture theory." They have repeatedly shown that concepts such as "culture" are simply incapable of bearing the explan-atory weight required to account for the acquisition and transmission of either ideas or practices in human groups for the reason that such "theory" has never been able to specify the mechanisms capable of accounting for the processes involved. So why continue to assume that it does? This is not to deny the possibility of social and cultural forces, but only to demand that their explication not be achieved by vicious circularity.

In fact one "cultural" science which took such critique to heart was the science of linguistics. Linguistics only began to make progress in explaining the basis, structure, and transmission of language (a cultural phenomenon par excellence) when linguists recognized that cultural categories were incapable of producing systematic and empirically trac-table theories capable of producing new knowledge about human languages. The study of language from that point on took a decidedly




psychological turn by focusing upon the mental mechanisms that con-strain cultural form.

Continuing to account for religious behavior by appealing to exclu-sively cultural categories requires that we place our trust in the unfal-sifiable intuitions and circular reasoning of scholars in the human sciences who "know their history" and can "think deep thoughts." I think that it is time to look more closely at the results being produced at the cognitive level of analysis, results which are empirically tractable, noncircular, and capable of producing theoretically supported cross-cultural generalizations that promise genuine insights into human thought and action. These results point to psychological structures that require only being triggered by social and cultural factors in order to develop in significant ways in human situations.

Even if it is a fact that human beings in certain socio-cultural situations both talk about sacrifice and engage in sacrificial acts we still need an independent account for such behavior. It is not enough either to call our attention to cross-cultural similarities or worse yet simply to posit cultural forces without further explication. Given the immense variability in the organization of human societies, and the very complex relationships that individuals and groups of individuals have to each other, why ignore the possibility that both the variability and the similarity might require a psychological explanation (in the cognitive and not the affective sense of psychology)? One thing is certain; neither emotivist nor ideological theories have delivered an adequate and interesting account of such behavior largely because they fail to locate and describe the social and cultural variables sufficient to explain the facts.

What we should conclude from this is that "culture" and cultural phenomena such as "religious transformation" and "socio-political change" rather than being explanatory are themselves in need of expla-nation. There certainly are commonalities and recurrences in human behavior, but purely social and cultural categories do not explain them. They only notice them.




Even noticing them, of course, is an achievement. One of the theoretically grounded facts about human beings that has emerged in the cognitive sciences is that people are excellent at pattern recognition (including seeing patterns in the range of cultural phenomena!). People are even good at finding patterns that are not there.

Considerable theoretical attention in the cognitive sciences has been devoted to identifying the psychological mechanisms (and their neural bases) that ground this pattern recognition ability. One of the theories proposed in the cognitive sciences involves explaining such pattern recognition abilities not merely as a representational device adverting to, or cognitively structuring, what is "out there," but as an instance of theorizing where "theorizing" is a complex interaction of interpretive and explanatory techniques grounded in the way the mind-brain is organized.

This complex cognitive ability depends upon deeply embedded struc-tures not all of which are acquired at the same time and in the same way in the process of cognitive development. Some structures, and the categories they ground, seem to be in place in very early infancy, others take longer to emerge in the process of cognitive development. Notions such as "agent," "object" and "action" not only appear very early (as demonstrated by very sophisticated experiments) but seem to have systematic relations with each other such that they are capable of being syntactically represented (Lawson-McCauley 1990: ch. 5). Examining the products of the syntactic principles which generate judgments about social and cultural forms discloses universal features in the representa-tion of ritual action. It is my view that ritual behavior (including such notions as "sacrifice") finds an interesting and adequate account as extensions of the cognitive ability of human beings to discover and represent the social and cultural surround in a principled manner. The complex conceptual schemes available to human beings in different social and cultural situations provide the semantic content but not the causal factors necessary to explain the acquisition and transmission of cultural information. The causal factors seem to lie at the psychological level and constrain the recurrence and transmission of ideas and the



450 Ε. Thomas Law son

practices associated with them. The picture that is emerging as the result of such cognitive analyses is of a highly structured psychology with many relatively independent mechanisms requiring diverse social and cultural cues for their operation.

All of this raises questions about connecting cognition and culture. One conservative view is that mind is the mirror of culture where "culture" refers to a system identifiable by an analyses of cognitive principles and products. In this view whatever goes on in a society is mirrored in psychological structure. A more radical view sees "culture" not as one thing but as an aggregate of diverse and not necessarily integrated phenomena all of which are products of mind. Whichever view one adopts, both views explain cultural phenomena (including whatever systematicity resides at the cultural level) by paying attention to noncultural phenomena. The problem here is to find the most appropriate level of systematicity capable of providing productive anal-yses.

One theoretically interesting phenomenon has to do with the fact that people demonstrate systematic capabilities even when they are presented with fragmentary evidence. This is clearly evident in the way children learn language, customs, and ritual forms. Another seemingly obvious fact which requires explanation is that not everything that human minds produce is automatically transmitted from generation to generation. There are selective (and other) processes at work. At present we are learning more about these processes and their results. Dealing with issues of transformation and change requires us to pay attention to the nature of these processes.

For those scholars in the human sciences who insist upon avoiding causal explanations at all, whether by employing standard approaches or by investigating cognitive alternatives, the interpretive venture, unconstrained by explanatory concerns, will continue to be an ad hoc game played out in an academic field with neither lines, goal posts nor teams of players. Their invitations to a new generation of students to come and play with them may not amount to much more than making the game up as they go along. And for those scholars in the human




sciences who insist upon the autonomy of social and cultural analyses, their explanatory excursions will continue to take place in unnecessarily restricted territory.

Bibliography

Boyer, Pascal 1990 Tradition as truth and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press. 1992 "Explaining religious ideas: Elements of a cognitive approach",

Numen 29: 2 7 - 5 7 . Lawson, E. Thomas and Robert N. McCauley

1990 Rethinking religion: Connecting cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.



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