Are We Stealing the Elgin Marbles?
China. North Africa. Navajo country. Each has a different historical-cultural tradition and each provides different tools for the sociology of religions. There are other places we could visit, had we the time and had I the skill to guide us. For example: the Nigerian sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo explored indigenous Yoruba concepts that he hoped could contribute to a new African sociology. Others joined his conversation, though only M. W. Paye sought to extend it to the sociology of religion. Otto Maduro similarly applied the Nahuatl concept of texcoatlaxope to understand what he called “latina/o religious agency,” both in colonial times and in the present. Roberto Rodriquez explored “maíz-based knowledge” as a way of understanding resistance to oppression on the part of Mexican and Mexican American peoples. If I knew enough about these traditions, I might be able to use them to help us understand even more aspects of religious life that Western sociology has overlooked. Yet I cannot. Three new traditions are enough for any scholar. I am sure that there are ideas from other cultures and civilizations that can expand Western sociology’s view of the world. I shall not be the one to find them.1
I can, however, address an issue that I have so far ignored. It is not about Confucianism’s relational sense of the sacred, nor about al ‘așabiyyah, nor about the Navajo approach to ritual. Nor is it about the specific ways that I have used these ideas to help us understand religions that are closer to home. Nor is it about this book’s root idea: that different historical-cultural traditions see certain aspects of religion more clearly than they see others.
This issue confronts any attempt to use non-Western people’s cultural resources to improve a discipline that has contributed to Western societies’ dominance of the world order. The problem is both political and ethical. As scholars dedicated to expanding human knowledge, we cannot ignore the context in which that knowledge is generated. Nor can we ignore how it is put to use. We need to bring our current historical-cultural context into the conversation.
It is a commonplace to say that we live in a globalized world. That globalization, however, is not just a matter of the technology that lets us telephone friends across multiple time zones or the trade networks that bring bananas, coffee, and tea to our breakfast tables. It is the fact that our current global system is shaped by power relations, specifically by centuries of Euro-American colonialism. Simply put, Europe and North America, plus Japan, Australia, and a few others, have much more influence than do other places. This makes every intellectual act different than would be the case if these particular power relations did not exist. This book cannot help being shaped by such inequalities.
In this chapter, we will explore some consequences of the fact that contemporary intellectual life is embedded in a world order that revolves around the West. We will begin with the issue of cultural appropriation. By what right do powerful people such as ourselves take resources, artifacts, and ideas from those less powerful than they, using them to their benefit, not to the benefit of their creators? We will then briefly explore some aspects of post-colonial theory—a movement among non-Western intellectuals that pushes back against the ways that Western ideas have been used to maintain Western political and economic domination. Some of these scholars criticize all efforts to use any society’s concepts beyond its own borders. They think that these efforts are inherently imperialist, whether or not they are so intended. We need to take this idea seriously, as it challenges this book’s entire project.
Finally, we will compare this book’s intent to Raewyn Connell’s effort to develop what she calls “Southern theory.” As was noted at the end of Chapter One, Southern theory is an attempt to bring non-Western voices into the sociological canon; it particularly focuses on non-Western ways of understanding Western hegemony. Both of our projects put non-Western intellectual resources to sociological use. What do these projects have to say to one another?
In short, it is important to locate this book in relationship to the grossly unequal political and economic order in which we currently live. I have repeatedly argued that different historical-cultural contexts lead us to see the world in fundamentally different ways. How is this book’s own proposed way of seeing located in our current historical-cultural situation?
You see, we sociologists of religion are no longer living in 19th-century France, even though we still too often see the world through its lenses. Nor are we living in ancient China, in 14th-century North Africa, or in Navajo country. We are living at the end of a colonial era, which is becoming a global one, and we are just beginning to be able to see past that colonial horizon. Among other things, this book is an attempt to envision what lies beyond.
Cultural Appropriation
What exactly is ‘cultural appropriation’? We will start with an archetypal case: the early-19th-century ‘purchase’ of the Parthenon sculptures by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. Originally a frieze and ornamental statuary in the Temple to Athena in Athens, Greece, the ‘Elgin Marbles’ are now in a special gallery in London’s British Museum. There’s a story about how they got there.
Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th century. At that time, the Ottomans ruled Athens and most of Greece, which they had conquered in 1458. Like many educated Englishmen, Elgin admired Greece as the cradle of Western civilization. He particularly admired ancient sculpture. The Parthenon had been a Greek temple, then a Christian church, then a mosque, and finally a warehouse for storing gunpowder. In 1801 it stood in ruins, having been blown up during the 1687 Venetian siege. Roof gone, marble strewn everywhere, more than half its original sculptures were missing. Elgin feared that the rest would be lost to posterity, so he arranged to have them removed and sent to London. He was not the first to try to take them. The Venetian siege commander looted the temple, destroying some of the most important statues in the process. Elgin was doing the same thing, just more peacefully and with Ottoman cooperation.
The Greeks were not happy with this, but there was little they could do at the time. Two decades later, they won their independence after a joint British, French, and Russian fleet defeated the Ottomans at the battle of Navarino. Various Greek governments have since tried to get the sculptures returned, with the most recent campaign starting in the 1980s. The British have so far refused. The sculptures are, write museum officials, “a part of the world’s shared heritage and transcend political boundaries.” The museum points out that nearly half the extent Parthenon sculptures remain in Greece.
The Trustees are convinced that the current division allows different and complementary stories to be told about the surviving sculptures, highlighting their significance within world culture and affirming the place of Ancient Greece among the great cultures of the world.2
Elgin claimed to have obtained Ottoman permission for the sculptures’ removal. He must have had some local cooperation, as the Ottomans used the Parthenon and the surrounding Acropolis as a fort. One does not just waltz into a military camp and start carting off artwork. Moreover, the excavations took place over eleven years, from 1801 through 1812. Clearly, local officials knew what was going on. Elgin did not, however, have the written authorizations with him when he testified before the House of Commons about his right of ownership.3 He had left the documents in Athens, he said, with the Ottoman authorities. The British government nearly refused to buy the sculptures, but the last-minute arrival of an Italian translation of the missing document convinced them otherwise. The Marbles have been on public display ever since.
The Greeks are not impressed. The Greek government has argued that the Ottomans, as an invading power, had no right to sell off a Greek heritage. The British had no right to buy it. Even if the Italian document was not a forgery, it spoke, as did Elgin himself, primarily of drawing and copying the sculptures rather than removing them; only two passages mentioned “taking away any pieces of stone.” In short, the Greeks accuse Elgin of having bribed Turkish officials and the British of having received stolen loot. They want the sculptures back.4
There is more to the story, but these basics will do. The Greeks were as powerless to stop the sculptures’ removal then as they are powerless to force their return today. Had Elgin happened along two decades later, or the Greek independence revolt happened two decades earlier, the sculptures would still be in Athens. This is clearly a case in which power mattered.5
Cultural appropriation is not always so grand. Popular culture is full of cases. Here are three, taken nearly at random from recent news stories.
Number One: Aaminah Shakur is a Native American woman doula (lay birth attendant) who wrote a web article about White American birth counselors appropriating, then selling non-Western birthing practices as their own ‘discoveries’. She noted that these White women lead workshops
with exotic-sounding names like “Mexican Rebozo Use” and “African Belly Binding” to get their fellow white ladies interested. I am not suggesting that white women should not practice belly support/binding and babywearing. . . . What I am uncomfortable with is white women who write articles in which they say they “discovered” these techniques and speak as authorities without ever giving credit to the history and cultural truth of these techniques. Giving credit means much more than using a “foreign” word and pretty “ethnic” print on your website and flyers. It also means . . . a proper understanding of the history and cultural significance of such practices in non-white communities.6
Shakur pointed out that in the U.S. today, only White women have enough social power to use ‘traditional’ birthing practices. They can afford $200 baby wraps, $300 baby carriers, and to have their births at home (home births are typically not covered by insurance). Women of color who use home births, baby wrapping, and so on as part of their cultural heritage are at high risk of being labeled ‘bad parents’ and having their children taken away from them.7 Power determines who gets to use which ‘natural’ birthing techniques and who gets to claim to own them. Shakur argues that this cultural appropriation supports White hegemony. She wants it to stop.
Number Two: ethnic food trucks have become quite common in many American cities. In 2012, a controversy arose in Washington, D.C., about food truck workers who were required to dress up in fake mustaches and turbans and speak to customers in fake South Asian accents while selling them a mashup of Indian/Pakistani and Ethiopian cuisine. Two local activists started a petition against the truck owners, complaining that they were engaged in cultural stereotyping and mockery. Washington Post reporter Tim Carmen quoted a Columbia University scholar as saying, “It is harkening back to a colonial period when it was okay to exoticize” other cultures. Is it, Carmen asked, the minstrel-show quality that people find offensive? Or is it the appropriation of non-Western foods by Western entrepreneurs?8
The U.S. has a long tradition of domesticating ethnic foods for White consumption. Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are among the most anglified, but there are many others. McDonald’s now sells tortilla wraps, and salsa has passed ketchup as the most popular American condiment. Ethnic food seems to be just another commodity. Is this innocent? Or does it let powerful White Americans feel good about their cosmopolitan tastes while they remain oblivious to the relative powerlessness of their ethnic neighbors?
For White Americans, ‘ethnic food’ symbolizes food from far away, mainly from poorer places. It has to be cheap; no one thinks of French cooking as ‘ethnic’. It has to be from other countries; no one stands in line to eat scrapple.9 Ethnic food means folk fare, at once ordinary and exotic. By appropriating that fare, professional-class White Americans position themselves as consumers of world culture, but they also position themselves above that culture. Not only do they have wide choice (‘Which food truck will we visit today?’) but they get to engage in what amounts to cheap tourism. Symbolically, the world is theirs for the eating. This is a position of power.
Revolutionaries recognize this. When asked in the 1980s if the Miskito people would accept special status as a Nicaraguan ethnic group, Miskito spokesman Brooklyn Rivera replied, “Ethnic groups run restaurants. We are a people. We have an army. We want self-determination.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, which picked up this quote from a Karen National Union bulletin, gets right to the underlying problem: “States define nation peoples as ‘ethnic groups’ and ‘minorities’ as a tactic to annex their identities in order to incorporate their lands and resources.”10 This is out-and-out colonial appropriation. Dressing your food truck workers as mock South Asians recreates this appropriation in cultural form.
Number Three: the Harlem Shake. In early 2013, Jaimie Utt posted an article attacking a series of dance videos claiming to depict the “Harlem Shake.” The videos “begin with a masked individual dancing alone in a group before suddenly cutting to a wild dance party featuring the entire group.”
Though you wouldn’t know it from the [videos], the actual dance known as the Harlem Shake is not where one shakes around as if she or he is having a seizure while humping things and wearing a silly costume. It is part of the rich tradition of dance and the arts in Harlem. Dating back to 1981 and drawing upon an Ethiopian dance called the Eskista, the Harlem Shake has long been a staple of hip-hop dance in this predominantly African American section of New York.11
Utt’s objection was not that the videos are performed by White people, though he notes that they originated in and are spread through White-dominated friendship networks. His problem was that this is yet another White appropriation of an African American art form. Jazz is one example, though not an unambiguous one. Originally an amalgam of southern Black folk music, African rhythms, and American pop, it has spread worldwide, shifting and changing as it absorbed various musical traditions and styles. The appropriation came in early on, when African American performers were locked out of the mainstream music industry. Whites like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and others headed jazz bands; Blacks were only gradually admitted as sidemen before reclaiming a spot in what had by then become an international musical movement.12
Rock ‘n’ roll is a clearer case. Also a Black musical genre, it was famously marketed to Whites as a music epitomizing teen rebellion.
“It started out as rhythm and blues,” says Little Richard, the flamboyant rock pioneer who saw such tumultuous songs of his as Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally taken to the charts in white-bread “cover” versions by the likes of Pat Boone. “There wasn’t nobody playing it at the time but black people—myself, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry. White kids started paying more attention to this music, white girls were going over to this music, they needed somebody to come in there—like Elvis.”13
Elvis was key. Despite the myth, Sam Phillips, the man who ‘discovered’ him, probably never said: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”14 Yet Elvis did take the rhythm-and-blues sound into the White mainstream, mixed with his own take on working-class country pop. He did not make the cultural appropriation; music industry executives did that. Later integration does not change the fact that most people now think of rock ‘n’ roll as a White art form.
The power, here, did not rest with the musicians. It rested with a White-dominated music industry and a White-dominated music market. Breaking into that market was a matter of hard work and chance. Having one’s own art form appropriated by others did not improve one’s odds of success. As Utt put it,
The reason that White cultural appropriation is so insidious is that it is not an intentionally racist, but it plays into a system of racism where White people believe that everything is ours, everything is in-bounds to us, so we can take whatever we want, and in doing so, divorce it from its history and meaning.15
There are other examples, some of them perhaps more egregious than these. We could talk about White New Age entrepreneurs appropriating and marketing Native American religious practices to rich White folks: ‘Spirit Journeys’, ‘Shamanic Immersions’, and ‘Spiritual Warrior’ retreats. We could explore the world of fake Aboriginal art. We could examine White entrepreneurs selling ‘genuine’ Native American woven rugs that are actually made by child labor in India. We could look at chain stores like Cost Plus World Market that sell ‘traditional’ furniture and crafts from around the world to middle-class Americans, pocketing most of the profits. Each of these cases involves powerful people capitalizing on weaker people’s religions, crafts, or decorative styles. Imagine a world in which Euro-American Christians were an oppressed minority, reduced to selling hand-made crosses as jewelry to rich Muslims, and you’ll see the problem.16
Not every borrowing is a cultural appropriation. There’s nothing wrong with liking burritos, eating ‘Asian fusion’ cuisine, or attending a performance of La Traviata. Nor do Euro-American men appropriate 16th-century Croatian military ‘culture’ by wearing neckties. Nor, arguably, are we complaining about the Ghanaian government’s appropriation of a Caribbean holiday, Emancipation Day, marketing it as a time for African diaspora tourists to return to ‘the homeland’ to celebrate their ethnic roots. Though each of these cases exists in the context of national, ethnic, class, gender, and other power differentials, none of them is a matter of a powerful minority appropriating for its own benefit a less powerful group’s cultural property.17 As the Nigerian American writer Jarune Uwujaren put it,
Westerners are used to pressing their own culture onto others and taking what they want in return. We tend to think of this as cultural exchange when really, it’s no more an exchange than pressuring your neighbors to adopt your ideals while stealing their family heirlooms. . . . Cultural appropriation is itself a real issue because it demonstrates the imbalance of power that still remains between cultures that have been colonized and the ex-colonizers.18
Taking other peoples’ resources, practices, and cultural property is not ‘exchange’ unless those people are equally free to take our own—and if neither taking involves treating the other party to the exchange as somehow less important.
The question is whether this book involves such an unequal taking. Does applying Chinese, Muslim, and Navajo ideas outside their cultural contexts constitute an unwarranted appropriation? If so, then this book’s effort is implicitly a colonial one. It appropriates weaker people’s ideas and uses them for its own purposes. Such appropriation raises ethical concerns, particularly for a civilization (the West) that prides itself on its support of liberté, egalité, et fraternité.
Orientalism
Here is a related concern: one commonly called “Orientalism.” This is the condescending attitude, famously decried by Edward Said, of Western scholars toward Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies.19 Said described what he called a pervasive Western approach to these societies that portrayed them as static, tradition-bound, and undeveloped. The West, on the other hand, was seen as dynamic, flexible, and able to harness knowledge to improve social life. According to Said, this view justified colonialism because it put dynamic, knowledgeable people in charge of static, tradition-bound ones. ‘Orientalist’ scholars generated knowledge that aided colonial rule. This rule, in turn, made Eastern societies more static than they would otherwise have been, precisely because their colonial masters resisted popular change. Said showed how scholars, artists, and literary figures shaped and perpetuated global inequality.
We could focus this discussion on any one of a number of fronts. Anthropologists have been sensitive to this issue at least since the appearance of Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History. That book exposed the ways that pre-capitalist European expansion transformed the various subject peoples that sent tribute to the colonial powers in silver, cotton, indigo, and slaves. Clifford Geertz’s Works and Lives described the roles that early anthropologists played in helping colonial authorities rule their new subjects. E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of Nuer political dynamics, for example, made British rule over these stateless people possible—despite the fact the Evans-Pritchard himself did not see that as his chief aim. The backlash has caused an anthropological rethinking of cultural relativism—an idea with a long and complex history.20
Alternately, we could follow historian Michael Latham in showing how the specific form of modernization theory that was developed in the United States in the 1950s provided the rationale for President John Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. That program tried to modernize Latin American societies to save them from communism. While it improved education, health, and adult literacy, it also undercut Latin American democracy. By the end of the 1960s thirteen of that region’s constitutional governments had been overthrown by military coups. Here, American sociological orthodoxy proposed ‘solutions’ for Latin American problems that deeply misunderstood the situation and caused considerable harm.21
We shall, however, take a different tack. Western intellectual domination has understandably produced a backlash, and the most interesting backlash has appeared under the banner of “post-colonial theory.” This movement has been and continues to have considerable influence. It is, at core, an attempt on the part of writers and intellectuals from Europe’s former colonies to reclaim, even celebrate, their civilizational identities while criticizing the works of their former conquerors. Authors like Said, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Homi Bhabha, Aimé Césaire, Gayatri Spivak, and Minh-ha Trinh have explored how colonialism has shaped both the colonized and the colonizer. They have deconstructed the ways in which science and literature, in particular, have been used to justify Euro-American hegemony by portraying colonized peoples as intellectually, morally, and spiritually inferior. They have also shown how the colonizers’ knowledge—including social scientific knowledge—has served imperial interests, even after the end of formal colonial rule.22
Edward Said, for example, showed how European scholars’ portrayals of the Middle East and Asia in literature, history, and social science reinforced European colonial control by creating an image of ‘the Orient’ that both needed and deserved to be ruled by outsiders. To take one of his literary examples,
Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.”23
Said pointed here to a double domination. Not only did the Europeans dominate the Middle East and Asia (and other places) politically and economically; their intellectual products dominated the portrayal of these regions, both for the colonizers but also for the colonized themselves. The former controlled the terms of debate; the latter were forced to express themselves in European terms or remain silent. The title of Gayatri Spivak’s famous article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” asked more than whether colonized peoples are allowed to talk about their condition. She asked about the concepts they have to use, if they want to be treated as legitimate conversation partners. She pointed out that having to use the colonizers’ ideas limits what the colonized can say about their own situation. Concepts shape what can be expressed. Having to express oneself in the colonizers’ idiom (both linguistic and philosophical) amounts to an intellectual colonialism that maintains existing power relations.24
The opening chapters of this book showed how Western Christian ideas have dominated the sociology of religion. This volume’s whole project has been to explore what sociology might look like, had it arisen in other cultural settings. Western scholars typically dismiss non-Western ways of thought as unscientific holdovers from an unscientific age, not as insightful tools for understanding core aspects of religions—including our own. The fact that few sociologists have even heard of Confucian relationalism or al ‘așabiyyah, or have thought through the implications of Navajo ceremonial religion is evidence enough that ideas born from the Euro-American experience have so far been able to define the field. The parallel fact that contemporary sociology of religion does not emphasize the creation of community as a religious act, or see the connection between religion and ethnicity as forms of social solidarity, or understand the restorative power of experienced ritual, tells us that we have missed much by not listening to colonized voices on their own terms.
To put this in terms of scholarly privilege: at present, ‘we’ get to study ‘them’, using our culturally derived concepts, but ‘they’ do not get to study ‘us’ using their own culturally derived concepts in turn. To quote Joanne Sharp, the issue is
understanding the power involved in the continued dominance of western ways of knowing. Because of the networks of power through which western forms of representation of the world circulated, this influenced not only how ‘they’ [colonized peoples] were known by ‘us’ [the colonizers], but also how ‘they’ were persuaded to know themselves. Western ways of knowing—whether this be science, philosophy, literature, or even popular Hollywood movies—have become universalized to the extent that they are often seen as the only way to know. Other forms of understanding and expression are then marginalised and seen as superstition, folklore, or mythology.25 [emphasis added]
A key point is that intellectuals from the colonies and former colonies were forced to reject their own societies’ ways of understanding the world. In field after field, Chinese, Indian, African, Arab, Native American, and other forms of knowledge were seen as inferior, less insightful, and above all ‘unscientific’. This was not just in sociology. To take another field I know reasonably well, American university courses in historiography typically have students read Thucydides and not Sima Qian, Tacitus and not Ban Gu, Eusebius and not Kalhana or al-Tabari, Bede and not Gulbadan, Thomas Macaulay and not Romesh Dutt, Frederick Jackson Turner and not Eucledes da Cunha.26 Western authors are deemed to be able to teach us how history is written; those from other parts of the world are not. Post-colonial theorists argue that this is intellectual colonialism. They are right.
This is not to say that the colonial project ignored learning about subject peoples; quite the opposite. Colonial authorities encouraged Westerners to study the colonies, but not in order to let them influence Euro-American ways of thinking. Said quoted Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, who advocated parliamentary support for such work. Curzon argued that
our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history and religion, our capacity to understand what may be called the genius of the East, is the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can be considered undeserving. [emphasis added]
Curzon practiced what he preached. He wrote two well-received books on Eastern peoples: Russia in Central Asia (1889) and Persia and the Persian Question (1982). Both aimed to give the British Foreign Office the information it needed to succeed.27
Encouraged by the colonial project, Western scholars were presumed to have a better grasp of the rest of the world than that world had of the West. As Said put it,
Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.28
This was real knowledge as the Europeans understood that term. ‘Superior’ European knowledge of this Orient both justified and made plausible European colonial rule.
Against Universalism
From all this, one would expect that post-colonial writers would look favorably on this book’s effort. It is, after all, affirming the value of non-Western ideas, not just for understanding religion in non-Western societies but for understanding religion everywhere.
I suspect, however, that I may be criticized by at least some who have written in this vein. Some post-colonial writers censure Western scholarship not just because it has been used to support colonial power, and not just because it has ignored the contributions of people from other parts of the world. They also oppose using one society’s ideas to understand another, saying that there are no “irreducible features of human life and experience that exist beyond the constitutive effects of local cultural conditions.”29 Quoting from Bill Ashcroft’s summary of this approach:
Universalism offers a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values, and expectations of a dominant culture are held to be true for all humanity. For this reason, it is a crucial feature of imperial hegemony, because its assumption (or assertion) of a common humanity—its failure to acknowledge or value cultural difference—underlies the promulgation of imperial discourse for the “advancement” or “improvement” of the colonized, goals that thus mask the extensive and multifaceted exploitation of the colony.30
Yes, the targets here are those academic disciplines that treat Western ideas as universal and non-Western ideas as parochial. Yet the argument goes farther than that. It rejects any attempt to apply ideas across cultural boundaries. It rejects universalism per se. I am arguing precisely that the non-Western ideas that we have been exploring are applicable cross-culturally. Logically, the post-colonial critique of universalism must reject my project as well.
To take just one example of this, the late Peter Park joined a frontal assault on sociological universalism as part of a 1988 symposium on “indigenizing sociology” that was sponsored by the International Sociological Association.31 The whole symposium is worth reading, but Park’s critique is particularly acute. He argued that
sociology conceived of and practised as a universalistic science in the positivist tradition turns people into passive objects suitable for manipulation by centralised bureaucratic apparatuses. Fully indigenous sociology, by contrast, seeks to restore people as creators of knowledge and agents of social change. This conception of sociology returns science to the people and assists them in bringing about a new world that is as different from post-Renaissance Europe as the latter was from the Middle Ages.32
Park argued that the development of universalistic science historically involved two separate intellectual moves. One was the process of “formulating principles at an abstract and general level”; once formulated, such principles were thought to apply to many particular cases. Doing this, however, required a second, more doubtful move. Modern science was only possible by
exorcising the universe of its animistic forces . . . for the Aristotelian world that had existed until then was full of objects and spirits possessing intentions, sentiments, and vitality.33
For example, Aristotle thought that weights fell and hot air rose because they sought their proper levels. Newton’s physics replaced this animate ‘seeking’ with the concept of gravity: an external force in place of an internal compulsion. Denying animism made physics more open to mathematical prediction. This has been one of the hallmarks of universalistic Western science ever since.34
Park pointed out that though the natural sciences are arguably not harmed by this intellectual move, the human sciences cannot exorcise ‘animism’ without seriously misunderstanding their subject matter.
A universalistic social science would succeed only by exorcising the social world of its anima as well, that is by treating social formations, social relations, and human beings as objects devoid of . . . history, teleology, self-reflection, or consciousness.35
Yet human societies are defined by history, teleology, self-reflection, and consciousness. Eliminating these aspects of social life makes it impossible to understand human beings.
For Park, this meant that any universalistic sociology is ideological at its core. It treats people as moveable counters, ready for manipulation. This ideology makes colonial mastery much easier. Universalistic sociology
provides technical solutions derivable from abstractly stated universalistic laws, which are applied by administrators of social policies to ‘target populations’, without the latter’s participation in the policy-making processes. . . . This view of the social world justifies regimentation, management, and moulding—in short, domination of people.
‘Indigenising’ sociology, on the other hand, “return[s] science to the people from whom it arose.” Park’s goal was to craft local sociologies that serve the people whom they are trying to understand. He was not interested in greater inclusion, but in what he called “emancipatory sociology.” His vision was a close-to-the-ground sociology that eschewed abstract theorizing in favor of solving people’s concrete problems.36
Park’s support of locally grown sociologies is entirely consonant with my wish to use those sociologies to understand aspects of religion that Western sociology has previously ignored. I disagree, however, with his claim that the use of one society’s concepts to understand aspects of another society inevitably supports colonial domination. Reducing people to manipulable automata is not a characteristic of sociology that reaches across cultural boundaries; it is characteristic of a poorly thought-out sociology that misunderstands human beings.
To me, the problem is not universalism per se, but a false universalism that presumes that ideas arising from one society’s historical-cultural situation are ‘scientific’ and ideas arising from other societies’ historical-cultural situations are not. The applicability or inapplicability of ideas across cultural boundaries is an empirical matter. I no more expect Confucian or Navajo concepts to explain everything than I expect Western ones to do so. In fact, exploring the applicability of ideas across boundaries reveals patterns to social life that purely indigenous ideas (Western or otherwise) ignore.
In other words, the present hegemony of Western conceptual tools in sociology is a problem, but a correctable one. Like all sciences, social science works by identifying ways that its reigning concepts fail to grasp reality and finding new concepts that do a better job. For Park’s anti-universalism to hold, he would have to demonstrate that all attempts to apply sociological ideas across cultural boundaries produce worse knowledge than do indigenous ideas. The fact that some varieties of ‘universal’ sociology have both misunderstood human beings and been used to support empire does not mean that all transcultural sociologies must do so.
In fact, neither Ashcroft nor Park really attacks universalism. Take a close look at the language that each of them used above. Though both claimed to target ‘universalism’, instead, they attacked Western scholars’ tendency to treat Western culture as superior to others. Ashcroft wrote that “universalism offers a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values, and expectations of a dominant culture are held to be true for all humanity.” Park objected to positivist sociology for “treating social formations, social relations, and human beings as objects devoid of . . . history, teleology, self-reflection, or consciousness.” Both statements criticize ‘universalism’ for imposing particular Western ideas on everyone. Both imply that these ideas misunderstand non-Western people’s realities.37
I agree with this last assessment, but I would further argue that standard Western sociology does not just misunderstand non-Western peoples; it misunderstands Western peoples as well. The previous chapters have shown several aspects of religion that non-Western ideas grasp more clearly than do Western ones. The whole point of this book is that history and culture shape what we see. Accepting this does not mean that social scientific knowledge cannot reach across these historical-cultural boundaries. It actually means that it must do so, if it is to understand the world thoroughly. Further, it must do so in multiple directions. No one or two societies’ ideas capture social life in toto.
In short, Park’s anti-universalist argument is like a call for banning cucumbers because someone once used a cucumber as a blunt weapon. His post-colonial project depends for its rhetorical force on the Enlightenment idea that all people and societies are equal (at least metaphysically); thus all have equal rights to their place in the intellectual sun. I agree, but I want to use that equality to correct sociology’s previous shortsightedness. I do not think this calls for the abandonment of universal sociology altogether.
Southern Theory
Raewyn Connell shares many of the post-colonial thinkers’ concerns. Her writings show that Western theories (she uses the term “Northern”) claim a privileged place in the sociological canon.38 She argues that they arise out of specific Western concerns, which include the maintenance of Euro-American political and intellectual hegemony. She argues that these theories’ claim to universality diverts attention from many important aspects of social life. In short, she, like I, thinks that sociological theories wear blinders. She grounds sociology in colonial power relations, while I ground it in the 19th-century European historical-cultural context, of which those power relations were one part. She looks to other historical-cultural contexts for alternate points of view. I do, too.
In Southern Theory, Connell demonstrated the Western canon’s limits by analyzing three contemporary sociological theories. She first faulted James Coleman’s Foundations of Social Theory for its claim that society is the sum of countless interactions between featureless self-interested individuals.39 Not only is this ahistorical; it also imagines people as genderless, raceless, bodiless players in some imaginary game. The problem, she pointed out, is that the game is real and that it is made up of players who very much have bodies, genders, and races and moreover are either given or denied resources because of them. In her words,
Coleman ignores the whole historical experience of empire and global domination. He never mentions colonies. He treats slavery briefly, in terms of the intellectual problem it creates for an exchange theory of society. . . . Foundations misses or misrepresents vast tracts of human history, and ignores the social experience of the majority world now.40
Connell’s second target was Anthony Giddens’s The Constitution of Society.41 That book outlined an approach to social life that takes individual agency and social structure equally seriously. Neither is independent; each builds on the other. Giddens developed this into an extremely abstract framework for understanding all societies at all levels of complexity. Agents know their social surroundings and act on the basis of social conventions; this knowledge and these actions create the very structures that channel their lives and choices. Giddens thus avoided the problems of Parsonian sociology, with its over-socialized “judgmental dopes” unable to do more than act out the rules society has given them.42 He also avoided the inability of micro-interactionists to comprehend social structures.43
The problem, wrote Connell, is that the result is
so generalized that it covers every episode in the history of the world, yet says almost nothing about them. . . . The relationship that Constitution does not theorise is colonisation; the structuring principle it does not explicitly name is imperialism; and the type of society that never enters its classifications is the colony.44
This ignores the actual world we live in, in her (and my) view.
Giddens sees modernity as an endogenous change within Europe (or “the West”), producing a pattern which is afterwards exported to the rest of the world. . . . Other social orders are passing away not because Europeans with guns came and shattered them but because modernity is irresistible.45 [emphasis in the original]
Though she did not mention Said’s critique of Orientalism in this passage, I think it is fair to say that Connell would see Giddens approach as equally presenting a false image of ‘the Orient’—or the global South, to use her preferred term.
Connell’s third target was Pierre Bourdieu’s Logic of Practice.46 That book also attempted to grasp the universal patterns of structure and agency. Unlike Coleman’s agents, Bourdieu’s agents act in a world that is already formed by structures. Those structures shape the agents’ habitus, or internalized principles of action. Those agents maneuver, wrote Connell, “always within the limits set by the habitus. Thus Bourdieu’s theory of practice becomes, systematically, a theory of social reproduction.”47 He illustrated this with long examples from his fieldwork in Algeria, among Berber-speaking farming communities in Kabylia.
The problem, Connell wrote, was that his Kabylia was idealized, static, and culturally homogenous—in short, Orientalized. This was quite unlike the actual Kabylia at the time of his research. In fact, Algeria was then in the middle of a vicious anti-colonial war. Bourdieu himself was forced to leave the country under the threat of violence. He wrote of this elsewhere, but not in the Logic. This was, Connell argued, because Bourdieu’s
conception of theory . . . makes the anti-colonial struggle irrelevant. To arrive at “something like a subject,” the European conceptual framing is significant. . . . Bourdieu’s own project of creating a universally applicable toolkit gave him no reason to seek out colonial voices, because it made irrelevant the specific history of the societies through which the tools are illustrated. Nor did the toolkit require him to address a liberation struggle as a social process.48
For Connell, Bourdieu’s approach privileges the experiences and intellectuals of the North and erases the experiences and intellectuals of the South. She criticized Northern theory’s claim to universality, its tendency to place itself at the world’s center, its exclusion of Southern voices and its erasure of Southern events. It treats the global South as terra nullius: unoccupied land.
To put this in the terms that have been used in this book’s previous chapters, the sociologists whom Connell criticized tacitly assume that the sociological ideas that arise out of the West’s history and culture can be applied to the rest of the world, unproblematically. Other voices can be ignored because they have nothing sociologically significant to add. In contrast, both I and Connell think that those other voices matter. They have insights, drawn from their own historical-cultural traditions. Those insights have their own universal value. They can teach us a lot about the world that we share.
Moreover, Connell and I agree that our contemporary world is shaped by several hundred years of colonialism and that it continues to be a radically unequal place. This is no longer the 19th-century world of Said’s Orientalists, nor of the Ultramontane Catholicism that shaped sociology’s beginnings. Nor is it even the mid-20th-century world of the modernization theorists, the Cold War, and the armed anti-colonial struggle. It does, however, bear the scars of all these events. Those events continue to have consequences.
Where Connell and I differ is on how to respond to this situation. Connell wrote Southern Theory to explore the work of a series of intellectuals from the global South, among them Paulin Hountondji, Ali Shariati, Veena Das, Ashis Nandy and Raúl Prebisch.49 Each provided a critique of colonial power relations from the point of view of the colonized, not the colonizers. Connell introduced her readers to African, Iranian, Latin American, and Indian thinkers, plus others, showing how each revealed aspects of global inequality that Northern thinkers miss. This is, ironically, an attempt to focus Southern theory on the problem that Connell has decided is the world’s most significant issue: colonial and neo-colonial power relations.
Connell’s project is a worthy one, but I am taking a slightly different approach. I have chosen in this book to cast a narrower net—focusing just on the sociology of religion—in order to cast a wider one. By sticking with religion, I can show in some detail how both individual writers (Ibn Khaldūn) and cultural traditions (Confucian and Navajo) illuminate aspects of religious life that Western (Northern) sociology ignores. Their ability to see these aspects is grounded in their historical-cultural situations just as our inability to see them is grounded in ours. That is this book’s central argument. Every society’s history both limits and enhances its vision. Every society’s culture shapes what it can and cannot see. We can learn to improve our ideas only by listening to those whose ways of seeing are the products of different histories and cultures than our own. We can, in turn, speak to them about what our history and culture let us see clearly. No society can legitimately claim that it alone understands the whole of social life, nor can it claim that other societies’ visions are false or irrelevant.
I agree with Connell that colonial power relations are part of our history and culture, and that they shape what we in the West understand about the world. They are not the whole of our history, but they do radically affect the present. Connell is also right that much Euro-American sociology does not attend to this fact, and that much of what passes for high theory is unable to grasp the forces that have structured the world we live in.
What Connell misses, however, is that she, I, and other contemporary sociologists are also shaped by our historical-cultural situation. That situation is crucially different from the one that faced sociology’s founders because we live in a different world than they. We are, for better as well as for worse, much more connected globally. We are much more apt to interact with people from around the world. Advanced communications technologies, cheap air travel, and global job markets connect people at the top and middle of the economic pyramid. Worldwide flows of refugees, political and economic, connect people at the middle and the bottom. Such transnational connection is one aspect of our world; continued Western political, economic, and intellectual dominance is another. It is no wonder that Connell’s sociological project arose in our era, rather than fifty or a hundred years ago.
With this history, we are forced to see different things than did the sociologists who founded our discipline. We also see different things than did the sociologists of my parents’ generation. That’s what happens when the world changes.
Thinking from Our Own Historical-Cultural Situation
It is time to return to the issues raised at the beginning of this chapter. Does this book’s effort amount to an unfair cultural appropriation, in which I, a relatively powerful Western, White, heterosexual, male scholar go shopping among the world’s intellectual goods, bringing home those that I think might best decorate my walls? Am I a latter-day Orientalist, claiming to know the ‘natives’’ philosophies better than they do themselves—and in the process generating ‘universal’ knowledge that silences those natives’ voices? Does this book’s focus on religion rather than on colonial and neo-colonial power relations amount to an erasure of the structural inequalities that rend our contemporary world? For me, the answer to all three questions is clearly “no,” but that’s not a sufficient defense. What convincing reasons can I give?
The first is the seriousness with which I have treated each of these issues over the last several pages. I have dismissed none of them, nor have I claimed their irrelevance. I have, in fact, pointed out that they all result from a world in which some people have power and others do not. That happens to be the world we live in, so we have to take these arguments seriously. Taking them seriously does not, however, mean that they apply to every project that crosses cultural boundaries.
Cultural appropriation is the copying of other people’s practices, either in order to profit from them (by selling baby wraps, classes on baby-binding, or what have you) or in order to make fun of their former owners (fake South Asian mustaches and accents). Describing the importance and usefulness of ideas that originated in other historical-cultural traditions, while clearly locating them in their cultural milieux, on the other hand, honors those ideas’ creators. It shows their universal relevance.
Edward Said criticized Orientalism for its portrayal of non-Western societies as static, tradition-bound, and undeveloped. He criticized dividing “the West and the Rest” (to use an oft-repeated phrase),50 especially while essentializing the differences between them. What he did not do was criticize the study of non-Western civilizations, particularly when that study was designed to undercut the essentialism that Orientalists practiced. He thus supported the work of the scholars who wrote for the Review of Middle East Studies, because they were applying the critical tools that showed the importance of race, class, and empire in shaping the ‘Oriental’ world.51 Here, too, using non-Western ideas with respect and care is quite the opposite of the Orientalism that Said decried.
Finally, the fact that colonial and neo-colonial power relations still shape our world does not mean that they are the only topic worth studying. One way to overcome colonialism’s legacy is by showing the worth of non-Western ideas. Connell does this, and so do I.
Yet there is a second, stronger argument ready to hand. That stems from the facts that, first, our intellectual lives are shaped by our historical-cultural situations, and second, that our situation has changed over my lifetime. When I grew up it was almost impossible to imagine that the West was not special and that the rest of the world might not need more than just our charity and guidance. That is no longer the only option. Western efforts to improve the world have an obviously checkered career: aid in some places, disaster in others. For every Green Revolution there is a Vietnam War. For every anti-smallpox campaign there is an invasion of Iraq. We Americans, particularly, have had a hard time recognizing our country’s complicity in such matters, but a significant portion of our population now recognizes the problem.
Not everyone does so. Some people find it easier to ignore inequalities than do others. In our world, only men have the privilege of imagining that they lack gender. Only Whites have the privilege of imagining that they lack race. Only heterosexuals have the privilege of ignoring peoples’ varied and complex sexualities. Only those living in the heart of the Empire can imagine that all peoples have equal access to the world’s wealth—or can imagine, to use Thomas Friedman’s rather ideological phrase, that the world is ‘flat’.52 The world is in fact gendered, raced, sexed, and hilly. Opportunity is decidedly not available to everyone. Power divides us wherever we turn.
Yet this, too, shows the importance of historical-cultural context to the ways that people see the world. People at the margins cannot ignore inequalities, and those who listen to them can learn to see them as well. Certain learnings come more easily to those whose social location is far from the center. As bell hooks wrote about growing up on the wrong side of the racial tracks in rural Kentucky,
Living as we did—in the edge—we . . . focused our attention at the center as well as on the margin and we understood both. . . . Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary vital part of the whole.53
I did not grow up on the wrong side of the tracks. I did, however, grow up on the edge of an African American neighborhood and attended its schools at a time of reasonable interracial peace. Even as a kid, I had a pretty good sense of what my Black friends had to put up with. This taught me that the current social system does not benefit everyone. Then, in 1968, I was in Berlin at the time of the Studentenbewegung, in Paris just after the May student/worker strike, and in Prague three weeks before the Soviet invasion. I returned to the U.S. two days before the police riot at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. Martin King and Robert Kennedy were murdered while I was overseas. I joined Vietnam War protests when I returned. All of this changed my way of thinking. I like to joke that I have two undergraduate degrees: one in intellectual history from a rather famous university, the other in “willfully and maliciously blocking a public street or sidewalk” from that university town’s police department.54
With this history and my experiences since, I cannot unsee a world in which arbitrary authorities misuse power, in which powerful nations seek to control weaker ones, in which wealthy people suppress the poor, and in which racism and sexism are so endemic as to be invisible. Nor can I forget the long history of colonial conquest that put Europe and America at the top of the international heap. To take just a single case: the thousand people who were living and picking trash in the Managua, Nicaragua, city dump the last time I visited that country are there as a direct result of the U.S. government policies that brought down the 1980s Sandinista regime and imposed neo-liberal austerity on its successors. My students cried after visiting a program for street children there. So did I.55
Such experiences are common among my generation of scholars. They have changed the way we see the world, in large part by forcing us to question the adequacy of our previous ways of thinking.
This is why I take the three critiques outlined in this chapter so seriously. It is also why I think we can do better. Our historical-cultural situation includes not just lingering colonial power relations but also independence movements. It includes not just gender oppression but also second-wave feminism. In includes not just racism but the American Civil Rights Movement, the American Indian Movement, the struggle against South African apartheid, Black Lives Matter, and other fights against racism. It includes numerous anti-war movements, anti-nuclear movements, anti-sweatshop movements, and—more positively—environmental movements, peace movements, labor movements, and movements for the reconciliation of peoples. These have all shaped contemporary scholarship. They have also brought people together across national and cultural boundaries. We have more resources than before for understanding other societies and cultures respectfully.
Learning about other ways of seeing the world, then using them to enhance our own visions, is neither cultural appropriation nor Orientalism. Nor does it involve forgetting the inequities that still haunt our world.
It is not the equivalent of stealing the Elgin marbles. It is trying to create a better world.
