- Email: [email protected]
Postmodernism and the Social Scientific Study of Religion
Religion (1997) 27, 139–149
Postmodernism and the Social Scientific Study of Religion R A. S* In Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (hereafter PSS) Pauline Rosenau seeks merely to present, not to evaluate, the implications for the social sciences of the chief tenets of postmodernism. Beginning with a glossary of postmodernist jargon, she describes the social scientific consequences of such grandiose postmodernist themes as the death of the author; the death of the subject; the end of history; the rejection of ordinary notions of time and space; the rejection of representation; and the rejection of truth, objectivity, reason, logic and scientific method. Rosenau groups postmodernists into two main camps: the tamer ‘affirmatives’ and the more radical ‘skeptics’, with whom she begins. The skeptics, who are to be found above all on the Continent, are uncompromising pessimists: They argue that the destructive character of modernity makes the post-modern age one of ‘radical, unsurpassable uncertainty’, characterized by all that is grim, cruel, alienating, hopeless, tired, and ambiguous. In this period no social or political ‘project’ is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (PSS, p. 15)
The affirmatives, who are primarily Anglo-American, do not contest the skeptical critique of modernity, but they offer an alternative to it: They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. Most affirmatives seek a philosophical and ontological intellectual practice that is nondogmatic, tentative, and nonideological. These post-modernists do not, however, shy away from affirming an ethic, making normative choices, and striving to build issue-specific political coalitions. (PSS, pp. 15–6)
Rosenau acknowledges that postmodernist views constitute a spectrum rather than any clearcut divide, but she proposes her division in order to keep separate what would otherwise be contradictory views espoused by postmodernists taken as a whole. Rosenau is especially helpful in showing the impact on social scientists of tenets originally formulated by literary critics and philosophers. For example, she translates the postmodernist trinity of author, text and reader into the social scientific one of agent, P M R, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992, xvi + 229 pp., $35.00, £33.50 (hardback) ISBN 0 691 08619 2, $12.95, £12.25 (paperback) ISBN 0 691 02347 6. E G, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London and New York, Routledge, 1992, ix + 108 pp., $13.95, £9.99 (paperback) ISBN 0 415 08024 X. 0048–721X/97/020139 + 11 $25.00/0/rl970073
? 1997 Academic Press Limited
140 R. Segal event and observer: ‘Each term, author, text and reader has its counterpart in the social sciences. Besides the most obvious equivalent, the author may be, among other things, an agent. The text can be understood as, for example, any event. A reader is an actor-receiver, a participant observer, and an observing participant all at once’ (PSS, p. 26). Here the social scientist corresponds to the reader, but the social scientist can alternatively correspond to the author, who is castigated by postmodernists for presuming to have authority over the reader: ‘For example, in anthropology the ethnographer, the author-writer, has been accused of holding a monopoly of authority and deliberately distancing himself/herself from the reader. Some post-modern ethnographers propose to correct this situation by sharing the power of the author, authorial responsibility, with those being studied and at the same time leaving everything open to a more active reading’ (PSS, pp. 27–8). The social scientific analogue to the author can even be the legislator, whose claim to know what is best for society — the reader — is likewise spurned by postmodernists. Skeptical postmodernists dismiss altogether the authority of the author. Affirmative postmodernists simply temper it. Skeptics replace the author with the reader. Affirmatives merely grant the author no more authority than the reader, who ultimately decides whether to accept the author’s point of view. The consequences of the ‘death of the author’ for the social sciences are revolutionary. A text is no longer perused to discover the meaning intended by its author. The text has no determinate meaning. It means whatever a reader takes it to mean. Because intent no longer matters, agents in events, like authors of texts, cease to be responsible for their actions: Because no single human being can be held accountable for a situation in the sense of having causal input, no one ‘authors’ a text-event as such. For the social sciences the death of the author results in removing responsibility from human subjects. I am not responsible for how my children turn out; I did not author their lives, author(ize) their efforts, have author(ity) over their choices. Policy makers do not author decisions, so they cannot be held accountable in any specific sense for policy outcomes (texts). (PSS, p. 33)
Before postmodernism, social scientists wrote to convey as clearly as possible their intended meanings. They strove to persuade their readers to agree with their point of view. By contrast, the postmodernist social scientist strives to write an open text and seeks to compose it so ambiguously, with such an equivocal and enigmatic style, as to encourage an infinity of post-modern interpretations. S/he is dedicated to expanding and enlarging the space available to the reader, to encouraging a plurality of meanings, and to inventing a text that is exposed, unsettled, undefined — a text that embraces and encourages many interpretations. (PSS, p. 34)
For Rosenau, the most fundamental challenge posed by postmodernism is epistemological. The bedrock plank of postmodernism is the rejection of all truth claims and of the means associated with securing them: reason, logic and method. As Rosenau sums up the view, ‘Almost all post-modernists reject truth even as a goal or ideal because it is the very epitome of modernity. Truth is an Enlightenment value and subject to dismissal on these grounds alone. Truth makes reference to order, rules, and values; depends on logic, rationality, and reason, all of which the post-modernists question’ (PSS, p. 77). Skeptics reject truth altogether as arbitrary, rhetorical and oppressive. Affirmatives reject universal, objective truth but allow for local truths, which hold for specific times, places and communities.
Social Scientific Study 141 As truth goes, so goes theory. Skeptics dismiss theory outright as based on the claims to universal truth which they dismiss: ‘Theory is assumed [by moderns] to operate without variation in every context, and this too is dubious in an ever changing post-modern world. The data and formal laws on which theory depend [sic] are not independent and objective; they are at best contextually relative and at worst totally arbitrary and constructed’ (PSS, p. 81). Affirmatives demote theory, like truth, from a universal and absolute status to a local and relative one. For them, theory is ‘unsystematic, heterological, de-centered, ever changing, and local. Nonrepresentational, it is personal in character and community-specific in focus. . . . It does not require the object-subject distinction of modern social science. It is ‘‘true’’ only in terms of its own discourse’ (PSS, p. 83). Localized theory often takes the form of a story. For example, postmodernist anthropologists, in abandoning truth and theory partly or wholly, thereby cede the authority of the ethnographer. The validity of an ethnographic account now depends not on the evidence amassed by the ethnographer but on the response of the reader. Rather than seeking to persuade the reader, the postmodernist ethnographer wishes only to engage in dialogue with the reader. Skeptical postmodernists reject objectivity for relativism, which Rosenau should more accurately label nihilism.1 Affirmative postmodernists, eager to tout their own convictions while scorning modern appeals to objectivity, seek a middle ground between objectivity and relativism. Skeptical postmodernists reject method altogether. Affirmative postmodernists are inclined to ‘look to feelings, personal experience, empathy, emotion, intuition, subjective judgment, imagination, as well as diverse forms of creativity and play’ (PSS, p. 117). Skeptics spurn even these mediums because ‘we can never really know anything, not even our own feelings and emotions’ (PSS, pp. 117–8). At the same time, skeptics as well as affirmatives employ their own, professedly reliable methods of interpretation and deconstruction. Postmodernists of both camps denounce above all the modern appeal to reason. The invocation of reason ‘assumes universalism, unifying integration, the view that the same rules apply everywhere. Reasoned argument is assumed to be basically the same from country to country, culture to culture, and across historical periods. Post-modernism, on the contrary, argues that each situation is different and calls for special understanding’ (PSS, p. 128). Reason ‘is the product of the Enlightenment, modern science, and Western society, and as such for the post-modernists, it is guilty by association of all the errors attributed to them’ (PSS, p. 128). Furthermore, reason has been used to legitimate oppression. Finally, reason is ‘inconsistent with post-modern confidence in emotion, feeling, introspection and intuition, autonomy, creativity, imagination, fantasy, and contemplation’ (PSS, p. 129). As with other intellectual tools, so with reason, affirmatives qualify its authority rather than, like skeptics, reject it out of hand. Rosenau strives only to present, not to assess, postmodernism and its social scientific ramifications, but her elucidation of the radical consequences of postmodernism for the social sciences in itself constitutes a severe challenge to its credibility. Rosenau cannot resist noting the many contradictions that affirmative as well as skeptical postmoderns face in trying to do social science in a postmodernists vein: First, post-modernism devalues any pretensions to theory building. But an anti-theory position is itself a theoretical stand. . . . Second, although stressing the importance of the irrational and expressing grave doubts about the Enlightenment’s intellectual tools of reason, logic, and rationality, post-modernists employ these latter instruments in their own analysis. . . . Third, post-modernists neither judge nor evaluate interpretations as good or bad. But does their suggestion that social science focus on the excluded, the neglected, the marginal, and the silenced, not indicate an internal
142 R. Segal value structure implicitly favoring certain groups or certain perspectives over others? . . . Fourth, post-modernists emphasize intertextuality, but many of its versions, especially those inspired by Derrida, treat the text in isolation. Fifth, many post-modernists reject modern criteria for assessing theory. But if post-modernists draw conclusions of any sort, such as the undecidability of questions modern social science seeks to answer, they cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judging. . . . Sixth, although warning of modernity’s inconsistencies, they reject being held to consistency norms themselves. . . . Seventh, post-modernists contend that anything they say or write is [at best] only a local narrative, relevant only for its own constituency. But very few post-modernists entirely relinquish the truth claims of what they write, and this also makes for self-contradiction. (PSS, pp. 176–7)
Because affirmatives commit themselves to ‘new projects such as post-modern science, post-modern politics, and post-modern religious movements’ (PSS, p. 175), they confront the additional contradiction of justifying their values in the face of their rejection of all value judgments. As telling as Rosenau’s criticisms of postmodernism are, they are jarring because they appear so unexpectedly in a work otherwise committed to explicating rather than evaluating the postmodernist platform. By contrast to Rosenau, Ernest Gellner writes to condemn postmodernism. So contemptuous of postmodernism is he that he can barely manage even to describe it. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (hereafter PRR) he not only contrasts postmodernism to modernism, or ‘reason’, but also contrasts both of them to religion. Even though he associates religion with fundamentalism, his real target is postmodernism, which he despises as faddish and fallacious. Gellner defines fundamentalism as the conviction that one’s own religion is true and that all other religions are false. Fundamentalism is intolerant and uncompromising. Modernism for Gellner can take various forms, including religious forms. Despite Gellner’s association of religion with fundamentalism, he allows for modern religion. For him, moderns include both Soren Kierkegaard, for whom commitment to a belief counts more than the cogency of the belief and therefore for whom commitment can be to any belief, and Emile Durkheim, for whom commitment to the community likewise counts more than the cogency of the belief. Where fundamentalism is incompatible with seculardom, modern religion is wholly compatible with it: ‘Generally speaking, the doctrines and moral demands of the [modern] faith are then turned into something which, properly interpreted, is in astonishingly little conflict with the secular wisdom of the age, or indeed with anything’ (PRR, p. 4). Modern religion is compatible with seculardom because it is watered down religion. Modern religion means less religion. Religion at its fullest is fundamentalism. As the epitome of fundamentalism, Gellner takes Islam, which he pits against modernity: ‘But there is one very real, dramatic and conspicuous exception to all this [modern trend]: Islam. To say that secularization prevails in Islam is not contentious. It is simply false. Islam is as strong now as it was a century ago. In some ways, it is probably much stronger’ (PRR, p. 5). Doctrine remains as important as practice, doctrine is taken literally, and all aspects of life are prescribed by law. Gellner argues that Islam provides so staunch a foil to modernity because of its distinctive response to secularization. Neither surrendering to the secular world nor idealizing folk Islam, Islam instead disseminates to the populace an austere, rigorous, elitist High Islam: It is this vision which has now conquered the Muslim world. As an ideology of self-rectification, of purification, of recovery, it has a number of very considerable and striking advantages. It does not appeal to an alien model; it appeals to a model which has unquestionable, deep, genuine local roots. It may or may not really be identical with the real practice of the first generations of Muslims; but
Social Scientific Study 143 it does correspond to what so to speak normative, respected individuals and classes had preached and practised for a very long time. . . . At the same time, whilst it is truly local, and genuinely resonates throughout the whole of society, this reformist ideal is also severely demanding, and unambiguously condemns and reprobates that folk culture which can, with some show of plausibility, be blamed for ‘backwardness’, and for the humiliation imposed by the West. (PRR, pp. 20–1)2
Gellner pits fundamentalism against not only modernity but also postmodernity. No stance could be more alien to the absolutism of fundamentalism than the relativism of postmodernism. For Gellner, relativism is the central tenet of postmodernism and the tenet that most tightly connects it to other twentieth-century movements like the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein: ‘the postmodernist movement, which is an ephemeral cultural fashion, is of interest as a living and contemporary specimen of relativism, which as such is of some importance and will remain with us for a long time’ (PRR, p. 24).3 Gellner even uses Islamic fundamentalism, for which he harbors far more respect, to ‘refute’ postmodernism by asking rhetorically how postmodernism can accept nonjudgmentally — relativistically — a religion which itself is so judgmental. Gellner notes the link between relativism and another prime plank of the postmodernist credo: the obsession with meanings. According to Gellner, postmodernism maintains that human behaviour is spurred entirely by meanings, or ideas, and not at all by causes, or physical forces. Postmodernism then stresses that meanings vary from culture to culture: the same action has different meanings for different cultures, and the same meaning is expressed differently in different cultures. Relativism enters when postmodernists assert that the meanings of other cultures cannot be deciphered by social scientists, for social scientists cannot escape the meanings — the ‘expectations, interests, prejudices, blind spots’ (PRR, p. 26) — of their own culture. Meanings come between persons as well as between peoples. They mystify rather than clarify behaviour. They are like collective representations for Durkheim, only they are individual as well as collective. Because postmodernists maintain that social scientists never get outside their own meanings, those meanings become the true subject of postmodernist social science. Postmodernist social scientists consequently study themselves, not others: Positivism in this sense is challenged all along this line: facts are inseparable from the observer who claims to discern them, and the culture which supplied the categories in terms of which they are described. This being so, he had better tell us about himself. He had better confess his culture. Real, self or culture-independent facts in any case being neither available nor accessible, there is not much else he can tell us. (PRR, p. 25)
Postmodernist social anthropology ‘degenerates from having been a study of a society into a study of the reaction of the anthropologist to his own reactions to his observations of the society, assuming that he had ever got as far as to have made any’ (PRR, p. 23). While Gellner, as a philosopher, emphasizes the solipsism of postmodernism, he does mention the psychological equivalent: narcissism. The third and final main plank of postmodernism for Gellner is the link between knowledge and power. Postmodernists maintain that claims to objectivity are sheer tactics for imposing a colonialist ideology on the colonized, who internalize as objective what in actuality are merely the vested interest of the colonizers: Positivism is a form of imperialism, or perhaps the other way round, or both. Lucidly presented and (putatively) independent facts were the tool and expression of colonial domination; by contrast,
144 R. Segal subjectivism signifies intercultural equality and respect. The world as it truly is (if indeed it may ever truly be said to be anything) is made up of tremulous subjectivities; objective facts and generalizations are the expressions and tools of domination! (PRR, p. 26)
Political and epistemological liberation go hand in hand: ‘Descartes had simply prepared the ground for Kipling. Descartes, ergo Kipling. No Kipling, so no Descartes. . . . The negation of Kipling also requires the repudiation of Descartes’ (PRR, p. 30).4 Gellner’s objection to postmodernist relativism is the denial of the universality of science. Indeed, he invokes the acceptance of science worldwide as the keenest refutation of relativism, at least of conceptual relativism: ‘I am absolutely certain that we do indeed possess knowledge beyond both culture and morality. . . . The fact that we do so is the central and by far the most important point about our shared social condition: any system which denies it, such as ‘interpretive anthropology’, is an appalling travesty of our real situation’ (PRR, p. 54). Gellner asserts that the ‘propositions and claims [of science] are translatable without loss of efficacy into any culture and any milieu’. Applied science ‘has totally transformed the human social condition, and the terms of reference under which mankind lives’ (PRR, p. 58). Gellner’s objection to the postmodernist obsession with meanings is the denial of any place for the physical causes of human behavior: ‘hermeneutists do not seem to be very interested in political and economic structures: it is domination by symbols and discourse which really secures and retains their attention. They are enormously sensitive to the manner in which concepts constrain, and less attentive to other, and perhaps more important, forms of coercion’ (PRR, p. 63). As Gellner says elsewhere, ‘I can think of various recent Western intellectual trends which, starting from the premiss that human actions and institutions are concept-saturated, end up with the absurd conclusion that therefore conceptual constraints are somehow more important than physical ones’ (Gellner 1988b, p. 12). Gellner never denies that concepts constrain behavior. He denies that concepts alone do so. Gellner’s objection to the postmodernist linkage of knowledge to power is comparable with his objection to the postmodernist obsession with meanings. For Gellner, power stems from more than knowledge, from more than ideas. Conversely, some knowledge, above all scientific knowledge, is an end in itself and not merely a means to power. Gellner’s Wittgensteinian nemesis is Peter Winch (1958). His postmodernist nemesis is Clifford Geertz (1973; 1984; 1988; 1995).5 He castigates both on the same grounds: first for their relativism and second for their indifference to physical causes. Indeed, it is hard to see what for Gellner distinguishes Geertz from Winch, for it is hard to see what for Gellner distinguishes postmodernism from Wittgensteinian fideism. To be sure, he rightly never associates Wittgensteinian fideism with the third, political plank of postmodernism: the linkage of knowledge to imperialism. Certainly postmodernism for him is in general more extreme than Wittgensteinian fideism. While acknowledging that Geertz claims to be only an ‘anti-relativist’ and not an outright relativist (see Geertz 1984), Gellner dismisses the distinction: ‘Let there not be the slightest doubt about whether Geertz is indeed a relativist, and not merely an ‘anti-anti-relativist’ (PRR, p. 53). Gellner’s preoccupation with Geertz as relativist par excellence is matched by that of his anti-relativist American counterpart, Melford Spiro. Geertz’s relativism, which is intended to counter provincialism (see Geertz 1984, p. 265), is attributed by Gellner to exactly Geertz’s Americanness. Pervaded by its own conviction about the self-evident propriety of its own values — ‘We hold these truths
Social Scientific Study 145 to be self-evident,’ proclaims the preamble to the Declaration of Independence — American culture is shocked by the discovery that other cultures do not share them: ‘There are parts of the world — e.g., Levantine ports — where every street peddler is at home in a number of languages, and is familiar with the idiosyncrasies of a number of cultures; in such an audience, the relativist message could only produce a yawn. But in Middle America it can still come as a revelation’ (PRR, pp. 52–3). That revelation produces the outright abandonment of all criteria rather than merely the reconsideration of Americans’ own, previously unquestioned convictions. Geertz’s relativism thus proves to be ‘a marked expression of that very provincialism which it would wish to combat. The provincial absolutist, having tumbled to the discovery that his culture is simply a culture, amongst others, and not simply a natural, self-evident reflection of the Nature of Things, becomes intoxicated with the idea of plurality of visions’ (PRR, p. 60). Gellner implies that not only Geertz’s postmodernism but postmodernism itself is distinctly American in its origin and its appeal — a notion that Rosenau’s division of postmodernism into a tamer, Anglo-American version and a bolder, Continental one belies.6 In any case Gellner’s preoccupation with Geertz seems odd for many reasons. First, it is not only postmodernist anthropologists who are incontestable relativists. Most anthropologists are. Furthermore, twentieth-century nonrelativistic anthropologists are invariably universalists rather than absolutists: they maintain that cultures are the same, not that one is superior to the others. Second, Geertz’s relativism, or ‘anti-relativism’, is likely only conceptual. In stressing religion and other cultural systems as attempts to make experience meaningful, he is saying that the cultural systems of each society are differing responses to the same kinds of inexplicable, unendurable or unjustifiable experiences. In describing those cultural systems, Geertz does present the differing concepts of person, time and social behavior that shape, not merely reflect, each people’s experiences. Perhaps, then, he is a perceptual as well as a conceptual relativist. But he is certainly no moral relativist: he is content with understanding, not assessing, alien values. Gellner’s castigation of Geertz for failing to see that relativism entails nihilism is therefore unjustified. Indeed, Geertz explicitly denies that relativism spells nihilism (see Geertz 1984, p. 263). Third, the position that Geertz opposes is less the ethnocentric claim that any one culture is best and more the universalist claim that all cultures are at heart the same: [T]he notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this people or that is a prejudice we are not necessarily obliged to share. Is it in grasping such general facts — that man has everywhere some sort of ‘religion’ — or in grasping the richness of this religious phenomenon or that — Balinese trance or Indian ritualism, Aztec human sacrifice or Zuni rain-dancing — that we grasp him? (Geertz 1973, p. 43)
Geertz here is more particularist than relativist. He deems the differences among cultures more significant than the similarities. This issue is different from that of the worth of one culture vis-a`-vis another. Fourth, Geertz, for all his particularism, simultaneously seeks a middle ground between it and universalism. He shies away from claiming that the essence of human nature lies entirely in the distinctiveness of each culture. The middle ground he seeks is ‘one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the
146 R. Segal governing principle of the field, ‘‘the basic unity of mankind’’, would not be turned into an empty phrase’ (Geertz 1973, p. 36). Fifth, Geertz also seeks a middle ground on the other postmodernist plank that Gellner decries: the focus on meanings as the sole source of human action. Geertz is not oblivious to political, social and economic forces. On the contrary, he insists that ‘cultural analysis’ not ‘lose touch with the hard surfaces of life — with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained — and with the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest’ (Geertz 1973, p. 30). Sixth, even in Works and Lives, where Geertz seems so postmodernist in his emphasis on how the literary styles of four famous anthropologists express and shape their messages, he does not reduce their ethnography to mere rhetoric. Rather, he shows how the four anthropologists use rhetorical strategies to convey their views. For Geertz, doing anthropology is akin to doing literary criticism, but there is more to anthropology than literary criticism. In Works and Lives he may focus on anthropologists as authors, but his subjects are still writing about others, not solipsistically writing about themselves. Gellner notes Geertz’s linkage of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s confident style to British imperialist confidence, but for Geertz Evans-Pritchard is still describing the Nuer, however slanted his view of them. Even in his autobiographical After the Fact, where Geertz seems so lopsidedly postmodernist in his skepticism toward ‘facts’, he is not dismissing facts but instead encompassing them in something broader, which for him means an ‘interpretation’ rather than an ‘explanation’. Geertz is as wary of postmodernists as of positivists. He acknowledges postmodernist concerns without conceding them: If one is not simply to surrender to these [postmodernist] anxieties and declare anthropology impossible or, worse, oppressive (and some, indeed, have done just that), it is insufficient just to press on regardless. . . . There is a need for extensive revisions of our notions as to what anthropology is, what its aims should be, what it can reasonably hope to accomplish; why it is anyone should pursue it. (Geertz 1995, p. 130)
Seventh and last, Geertz is regularly disavowed by postmodernist anthropologists like Paul Rabinow, Vincent Crapanzano, James Clifford, George Marcus, Michael Fischer and Talad Asad as insufficiently radical. Gellner himself repeatedly notes this disavowal yet refuses to heed it. Gellner sees Geertz as at least the inspiration for anthropological postmodernism, even if not quite postmodernist himself: ‘Geertz has encouraged a whole generation of anthropologists to parade their real or invented inner qualms and paralysis . . . They agonize so much about their inability to know themselves and the Other, at any level of regress, that they no longer need to trouble too much about the Other’ (PRR, p. 45). But insofar as Geertz himself, for all his self-conscious wavering, assumes his ability to decipher the Other, blaming him for the solipsism of his successors seems misplaced. Gellner’s skewed targeting of Geertz as his paradigmatic postmodernist weakens his overall brief against postmodernism. Even if Gellner’s target in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion is postmodernism rather than religion, he ties the two together as joint enemies of reason. By religion he means fundamentalism, which, again, is for him religion at its fullest. Insofar as religion bases its truth claims on revelation, it severs itself from science and thereby from modernity. Insofar as each religion vaunts its own truth claims, religion entails particularism rather than universalism and is likewise anti-modern. In its denial of science and of universal truths, postmodernism for Gellner is really not much different from religion. But
Social Scientific Study 147 postmodernism is far more culpable because postmodernism repudiates modernity rather than, like religion, antedates it. Postmodernism denies that anything has changed and sees the modern West as merely one more culture with its own idiosyncratic methods and truths. For Gellner, everything has changed, and the modern West is superior to all other cultures. That superiority is not moral. It is conceptual. Science has discovered the true explanation of the world. As Gellner puts it elsewhere, ‘in the world as we know it, cultures are extremely unequal in cognitive power. . . . No one, least of all those are who deprived of it, has any doubts about the superior cognitive effectiveness of the ‘‘scientific outlook’’. Similarly, no one really has any doubts about the cognitive inferiority of the pre-scientific outlook’ (Gellner 1983, pp. 68–9). To deny that ‘we do indeed possess knowledge beyond both culture and morality . . . is an appalling travesty of our real situation. The existence of trans-cultural and amoral knowledge is the fact of our lives’ (PRR, p. 54). For Gellner, science does not transcend culture in its emergence. Far from the product of sheer thinking, a la Descartes, science is the product of a unique, almost fortuitous set of material and intellectual circumstances. The ‘project’ of Max Weber, to whom Gellner is most beholden, was the explication of those circumstances.7 Science, however, transcends its origins and applies universally. Gellner never contends that all or even much of modern Western culture is universal. He is a cognitive absolutist but not a moral or cultural one. It is science, theoretical and applied alike, which for him either alone or above all transcends culture — in Descartes’ phrase, transcends ‘custom and example’.3 The key divide for Gellner is not, then, between modernity and postmodernity but between pre-modernity and modernity. Gellner denounces those who, like Geertz, deny that divide, that discontinuity, that ‘Big Ditch’: ‘The important intellectual contrast to the relativism defended by Geertz . . . is of course the doctrine of the Big Ditch, the idea that a great discontinuity has occurred in the life of mankind, the view that a form of knowledge exists which surpasses all others . . .’ (PRR, p. 50). Far from avant-garde, postmodernism for Gellner is atavistic. It rejects the universality of modern science for the particularity of traditional culture: What Descartes and his [modern] successors said, in effect, was that there are an awful lot of meanings and opinions about, that they cannot all be right, and that we’d better find, and justify, a yardstick which will sort out the sheep from the goats. For Descartes, the yardstick involved the exclusive use of clear and distinct meanings, so clear and distinct as to impose their authority on all minds sober and determined enough to heed them, irrespective of their culture. The path to truth lay through voluntary cultural exile. (PRR, p. 38)
The postmodernist approach is the opposite: to subsume science under one culture and to demote that culture to the same plane as all others. In his advocacy of a society in which science rules supreme in the cognitive sphere but in which relativism, even nihilism, is granted free reign in the cultural one, Gellner offers his own partial reconciliation of the approaches he contrasts.
Notes 1 Rosenau considers relativism so radical a position that only extreme postmodernists embrace it (see PSS, p. 114, n. 8), but relativism hardly means the rejection of truth, theory or objectivity, only of universal truth, theory or objectivity. 2 On Islamic fundamentalism see Gellner 1994, ch. 3.
148 R. Segal 3 On relativism see Gellner 1973, chs. 2–5, 12, 14; 1974a, ch. 13; 1974b, ch. 11; 1974c, pp. 47–50, 142–46; 1979, pp. 77–80 and chs. 7, 10, 11; 1985a, chs. 3, 7. 4 On the postmodernist linkage of knowledge to imperialism see Gellner 1988c, pp. 26–9; 1993. 5 On Winch see Gellner 1973, chs. 2–5 and pp. 201–2; 1979, pp. 68–70; 1985a, pp. 121–2. On Geertz see Gellner 1988c. 6 On postmodernism as particularly American see Gellner 1988c, pp. 22–4. 7 On Weber on the modern West see Gellner 1974c, pp. 188–95, 201, 206–7; 1979, pp. 260–1, 286; 1983, pp. 19–21ff.; 1987a, pp. 153–6; 1988a, pp. 127–8; 1988b, pp. 153–4; 1992, chs. 2, 7–9. 8 On the disjunction of truth from culture see Gellner 1979, ch. 8; 1992, passim.
Bibliography Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books 1973. Geertz, Clifford, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist 86 (1984), pp. 263–78. Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1988. Geertz, Clifford, After the Fact, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 1995. Gellner, Ernest, Words and Things, London, Victor Gollancz 1959. Gellner, Ernest, Thought and Change, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson; Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1964. Gellner, Ernest, Saints of the Atlas, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1969. Gellner, Ernest, Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973. Gellner, Ernest, Contemporary Thought and Politics, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974 [cited as 1974a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Devil in Modern Philosophy, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974 [cited as 1974b]. Gellner, Ernest, Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1974 [cited as 1974c]. Gellner, Ernest, Spectacles and Predicaments, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1979. Gellner, Ernest (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology, London, Duckworth 1980. Gellner, Ernest, Muslim Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1981. Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell 1983. Gellner, Ernest, Relativism and the Social Sciences, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985 [cited as 1985a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Psychoanalytic Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985. 2nd ed. London, Fontana 1993. Gellner, Ernest (ed.), Islamic Dilemmas, Berlin, Mouton 1985. Gellner, Ernest, Culture, Identity, and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1987 [cited as 1987a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays on Anthropological Method and Explanation, Oxford and New York, Blackwell 1987 [reprint, with new introduction, of Gellner 1973]. Gellner, Ernest, Plough, Sword, and Book, Chicago, University of Chicago Press; London, Collins Harvill 1988 [cited as 1988a]. Gellner, Ernest, State and Society in Soviet Thought, Oxford and New York, Blackwell 1988 [cited as 1988b]. Gellner, Ernest, ‘The Stakes in Anthropology’, American Scholar 57 (1988), pp. 17–30 [cited as 1988c]. Gellner, Ernest, Reason and Culture, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell 1992. Gellner, Ernest, review of Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, TLS, No. 4690 (February 19, 1993), 3–4. Gellner, Ernest, Conditions of Liberty, London, Hamish Hamilton 1994. Gellner, Ernest, and Charles Micaud (eds), Arabs and Berbers, London, Duckworth 1973. Gellner, Ernest, and John Waterbury (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, London, Duckworth 1977. Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York, Humanities Press 1958. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International 1990.
Social Scientific Study 149 ROBERT A. SEGAL is Reader in Theory of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University. He is the author of The Poimandres as Myth (Mouton de Gruyter 1986), Joseph Campbell (Garland 1987, revised edition New American Library/ Penguin 1990), Religion and the Social Sciences (Scholars Press 1989), and Explaining and Interpreting Religion (Peter Lang 1992). He is the editor of In Quest of the Hero (Princeton University Press 1990), The Gnostic Jung (Princeton University Press and Routledge 1992), The Allure of Gnosticism (Open Court 1995), Jung on Myth (Princeton University Press forthcoming 1997), and The Myth and Ritual Theory (Blackwell forthcoming 1997). Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YG, U.K.
Postmodernism and the Social Scientific Study of Religion R A. S* In Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (hereafter PSS) Pauline Rosenau seeks merely to present, not to evaluate, the implications for the social sciences of the chief tenets of postmodernism. Beginning with a glossary of postmodernist jargon, she describes the social scientific consequences of such grandiose postmodernist themes as the death of the author; the death of the subject; the end of history; the rejection of ordinary notions of time and space; the rejection of representation; and the rejection of truth, objectivity, reason, logic and scientific method. Rosenau groups postmodernists into two main camps: the tamer ‘affirmatives’ and the more radical ‘skeptics’, with whom she begins. The skeptics, who are to be found above all on the Continent, are uncompromising pessimists: They argue that the destructive character of modernity makes the post-modern age one of ‘radical, unsurpassable uncertainty’, characterized by all that is grim, cruel, alienating, hopeless, tired, and ambiguous. In this period no social or political ‘project’ is worthy of commitment. Ahead lies overpopulation, genocide, atomic destruction, the apocalypse, environmental devastation, the explosion of the sun and the end of the solar system in 4.5 billion years, the death of the universe through entropy. (PSS, p. 15)
The affirmatives, who are primarily Anglo-American, do not contest the skeptical critique of modernity, but they offer an alternative to it: They are either open to positive political action (struggle and resistance) or content with the recognition of visionary, celebratory personal nondogmatic projects that range from New Age religion to New Wave life-styles and include a whole spectrum of post-modern social movements. Most affirmatives seek a philosophical and ontological intellectual practice that is nondogmatic, tentative, and nonideological. These post-modernists do not, however, shy away from affirming an ethic, making normative choices, and striving to build issue-specific political coalitions. (PSS, pp. 15–6)
Rosenau acknowledges that postmodernist views constitute a spectrum rather than any clearcut divide, but she proposes her division in order to keep separate what would otherwise be contradictory views espoused by postmodernists taken as a whole. Rosenau is especially helpful in showing the impact on social scientists of tenets originally formulated by literary critics and philosophers. For example, she translates the postmodernist trinity of author, text and reader into the social scientific one of agent, P M R, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1992, xvi + 229 pp., $35.00, £33.50 (hardback) ISBN 0 691 08619 2, $12.95, £12.25 (paperback) ISBN 0 691 02347 6. E G, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London and New York, Routledge, 1992, ix + 108 pp., $13.95, £9.99 (paperback) ISBN 0 415 08024 X. 0048–721X/97/020139 + 11 $25.00/0/rl970073
? 1997 Academic Press Limited
140 R. Segal event and observer: ‘Each term, author, text and reader has its counterpart in the social sciences. Besides the most obvious equivalent, the author may be, among other things, an agent. The text can be understood as, for example, any event. A reader is an actor-receiver, a participant observer, and an observing participant all at once’ (PSS, p. 26). Here the social scientist corresponds to the reader, but the social scientist can alternatively correspond to the author, who is castigated by postmodernists for presuming to have authority over the reader: ‘For example, in anthropology the ethnographer, the author-writer, has been accused of holding a monopoly of authority and deliberately distancing himself/herself from the reader. Some post-modern ethnographers propose to correct this situation by sharing the power of the author, authorial responsibility, with those being studied and at the same time leaving everything open to a more active reading’ (PSS, pp. 27–8). The social scientific analogue to the author can even be the legislator, whose claim to know what is best for society — the reader — is likewise spurned by postmodernists. Skeptical postmodernists dismiss altogether the authority of the author. Affirmative postmodernists simply temper it. Skeptics replace the author with the reader. Affirmatives merely grant the author no more authority than the reader, who ultimately decides whether to accept the author’s point of view. The consequences of the ‘death of the author’ for the social sciences are revolutionary. A text is no longer perused to discover the meaning intended by its author. The text has no determinate meaning. It means whatever a reader takes it to mean. Because intent no longer matters, agents in events, like authors of texts, cease to be responsible for their actions: Because no single human being can be held accountable for a situation in the sense of having causal input, no one ‘authors’ a text-event as such. For the social sciences the death of the author results in removing responsibility from human subjects. I am not responsible for how my children turn out; I did not author their lives, author(ize) their efforts, have author(ity) over their choices. Policy makers do not author decisions, so they cannot be held accountable in any specific sense for policy outcomes (texts). (PSS, p. 33)
Before postmodernism, social scientists wrote to convey as clearly as possible their intended meanings. They strove to persuade their readers to agree with their point of view. By contrast, the postmodernist social scientist strives to write an open text and seeks to compose it so ambiguously, with such an equivocal and enigmatic style, as to encourage an infinity of post-modern interpretations. S/he is dedicated to expanding and enlarging the space available to the reader, to encouraging a plurality of meanings, and to inventing a text that is exposed, unsettled, undefined — a text that embraces and encourages many interpretations. (PSS, p. 34)
For Rosenau, the most fundamental challenge posed by postmodernism is epistemological. The bedrock plank of postmodernism is the rejection of all truth claims and of the means associated with securing them: reason, logic and method. As Rosenau sums up the view, ‘Almost all post-modernists reject truth even as a goal or ideal because it is the very epitome of modernity. Truth is an Enlightenment value and subject to dismissal on these grounds alone. Truth makes reference to order, rules, and values; depends on logic, rationality, and reason, all of which the post-modernists question’ (PSS, p. 77). Skeptics reject truth altogether as arbitrary, rhetorical and oppressive. Affirmatives reject universal, objective truth but allow for local truths, which hold for specific times, places and communities.
Social Scientific Study 141 As truth goes, so goes theory. Skeptics dismiss theory outright as based on the claims to universal truth which they dismiss: ‘Theory is assumed [by moderns] to operate without variation in every context, and this too is dubious in an ever changing post-modern world. The data and formal laws on which theory depend [sic] are not independent and objective; they are at best contextually relative and at worst totally arbitrary and constructed’ (PSS, p. 81). Affirmatives demote theory, like truth, from a universal and absolute status to a local and relative one. For them, theory is ‘unsystematic, heterological, de-centered, ever changing, and local. Nonrepresentational, it is personal in character and community-specific in focus. . . . It does not require the object-subject distinction of modern social science. It is ‘‘true’’ only in terms of its own discourse’ (PSS, p. 83). Localized theory often takes the form of a story. For example, postmodernist anthropologists, in abandoning truth and theory partly or wholly, thereby cede the authority of the ethnographer. The validity of an ethnographic account now depends not on the evidence amassed by the ethnographer but on the response of the reader. Rather than seeking to persuade the reader, the postmodernist ethnographer wishes only to engage in dialogue with the reader. Skeptical postmodernists reject objectivity for relativism, which Rosenau should more accurately label nihilism.1 Affirmative postmodernists, eager to tout their own convictions while scorning modern appeals to objectivity, seek a middle ground between objectivity and relativism. Skeptical postmodernists reject method altogether. Affirmative postmodernists are inclined to ‘look to feelings, personal experience, empathy, emotion, intuition, subjective judgment, imagination, as well as diverse forms of creativity and play’ (PSS, p. 117). Skeptics spurn even these mediums because ‘we can never really know anything, not even our own feelings and emotions’ (PSS, pp. 117–8). At the same time, skeptics as well as affirmatives employ their own, professedly reliable methods of interpretation and deconstruction. Postmodernists of both camps denounce above all the modern appeal to reason. The invocation of reason ‘assumes universalism, unifying integration, the view that the same rules apply everywhere. Reasoned argument is assumed to be basically the same from country to country, culture to culture, and across historical periods. Post-modernism, on the contrary, argues that each situation is different and calls for special understanding’ (PSS, p. 128). Reason ‘is the product of the Enlightenment, modern science, and Western society, and as such for the post-modernists, it is guilty by association of all the errors attributed to them’ (PSS, p. 128). Furthermore, reason has been used to legitimate oppression. Finally, reason is ‘inconsistent with post-modern confidence in emotion, feeling, introspection and intuition, autonomy, creativity, imagination, fantasy, and contemplation’ (PSS, p. 129). As with other intellectual tools, so with reason, affirmatives qualify its authority rather than, like skeptics, reject it out of hand. Rosenau strives only to present, not to assess, postmodernism and its social scientific ramifications, but her elucidation of the radical consequences of postmodernism for the social sciences in itself constitutes a severe challenge to its credibility. Rosenau cannot resist noting the many contradictions that affirmative as well as skeptical postmoderns face in trying to do social science in a postmodernists vein: First, post-modernism devalues any pretensions to theory building. But an anti-theory position is itself a theoretical stand. . . . Second, although stressing the importance of the irrational and expressing grave doubts about the Enlightenment’s intellectual tools of reason, logic, and rationality, post-modernists employ these latter instruments in their own analysis. . . . Third, post-modernists neither judge nor evaluate interpretations as good or bad. But does their suggestion that social science focus on the excluded, the neglected, the marginal, and the silenced, not indicate an internal
142 R. Segal value structure implicitly favoring certain groups or certain perspectives over others? . . . Fourth, post-modernists emphasize intertextuality, but many of its versions, especially those inspired by Derrida, treat the text in isolation. Fifth, many post-modernists reject modern criteria for assessing theory. But if post-modernists draw conclusions of any sort, such as the undecidability of questions modern social science seeks to answer, they cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judging. . . . Sixth, although warning of modernity’s inconsistencies, they reject being held to consistency norms themselves. . . . Seventh, post-modernists contend that anything they say or write is [at best] only a local narrative, relevant only for its own constituency. But very few post-modernists entirely relinquish the truth claims of what they write, and this also makes for self-contradiction. (PSS, pp. 176–7)
Because affirmatives commit themselves to ‘new projects such as post-modern science, post-modern politics, and post-modern religious movements’ (PSS, p. 175), they confront the additional contradiction of justifying their values in the face of their rejection of all value judgments. As telling as Rosenau’s criticisms of postmodernism are, they are jarring because they appear so unexpectedly in a work otherwise committed to explicating rather than evaluating the postmodernist platform. By contrast to Rosenau, Ernest Gellner writes to condemn postmodernism. So contemptuous of postmodernism is he that he can barely manage even to describe it. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (hereafter PRR) he not only contrasts postmodernism to modernism, or ‘reason’, but also contrasts both of them to religion. Even though he associates religion with fundamentalism, his real target is postmodernism, which he despises as faddish and fallacious. Gellner defines fundamentalism as the conviction that one’s own religion is true and that all other religions are false. Fundamentalism is intolerant and uncompromising. Modernism for Gellner can take various forms, including religious forms. Despite Gellner’s association of religion with fundamentalism, he allows for modern religion. For him, moderns include both Soren Kierkegaard, for whom commitment to a belief counts more than the cogency of the belief and therefore for whom commitment can be to any belief, and Emile Durkheim, for whom commitment to the community likewise counts more than the cogency of the belief. Where fundamentalism is incompatible with seculardom, modern religion is wholly compatible with it: ‘Generally speaking, the doctrines and moral demands of the [modern] faith are then turned into something which, properly interpreted, is in astonishingly little conflict with the secular wisdom of the age, or indeed with anything’ (PRR, p. 4). Modern religion is compatible with seculardom because it is watered down religion. Modern religion means less religion. Religion at its fullest is fundamentalism. As the epitome of fundamentalism, Gellner takes Islam, which he pits against modernity: ‘But there is one very real, dramatic and conspicuous exception to all this [modern trend]: Islam. To say that secularization prevails in Islam is not contentious. It is simply false. Islam is as strong now as it was a century ago. In some ways, it is probably much stronger’ (PRR, p. 5). Doctrine remains as important as practice, doctrine is taken literally, and all aspects of life are prescribed by law. Gellner argues that Islam provides so staunch a foil to modernity because of its distinctive response to secularization. Neither surrendering to the secular world nor idealizing folk Islam, Islam instead disseminates to the populace an austere, rigorous, elitist High Islam: It is this vision which has now conquered the Muslim world. As an ideology of self-rectification, of purification, of recovery, it has a number of very considerable and striking advantages. It does not appeal to an alien model; it appeals to a model which has unquestionable, deep, genuine local roots. It may or may not really be identical with the real practice of the first generations of Muslims; but
Social Scientific Study 143 it does correspond to what so to speak normative, respected individuals and classes had preached and practised for a very long time. . . . At the same time, whilst it is truly local, and genuinely resonates throughout the whole of society, this reformist ideal is also severely demanding, and unambiguously condemns and reprobates that folk culture which can, with some show of plausibility, be blamed for ‘backwardness’, and for the humiliation imposed by the West. (PRR, pp. 20–1)2
Gellner pits fundamentalism against not only modernity but also postmodernity. No stance could be more alien to the absolutism of fundamentalism than the relativism of postmodernism. For Gellner, relativism is the central tenet of postmodernism and the tenet that most tightly connects it to other twentieth-century movements like the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein: ‘the postmodernist movement, which is an ephemeral cultural fashion, is of interest as a living and contemporary specimen of relativism, which as such is of some importance and will remain with us for a long time’ (PRR, p. 24).3 Gellner even uses Islamic fundamentalism, for which he harbors far more respect, to ‘refute’ postmodernism by asking rhetorically how postmodernism can accept nonjudgmentally — relativistically — a religion which itself is so judgmental. Gellner notes the link between relativism and another prime plank of the postmodernist credo: the obsession with meanings. According to Gellner, postmodernism maintains that human behaviour is spurred entirely by meanings, or ideas, and not at all by causes, or physical forces. Postmodernism then stresses that meanings vary from culture to culture: the same action has different meanings for different cultures, and the same meaning is expressed differently in different cultures. Relativism enters when postmodernists assert that the meanings of other cultures cannot be deciphered by social scientists, for social scientists cannot escape the meanings — the ‘expectations, interests, prejudices, blind spots’ (PRR, p. 26) — of their own culture. Meanings come between persons as well as between peoples. They mystify rather than clarify behaviour. They are like collective representations for Durkheim, only they are individual as well as collective. Because postmodernists maintain that social scientists never get outside their own meanings, those meanings become the true subject of postmodernist social science. Postmodernist social scientists consequently study themselves, not others: Positivism in this sense is challenged all along this line: facts are inseparable from the observer who claims to discern them, and the culture which supplied the categories in terms of which they are described. This being so, he had better tell us about himself. He had better confess his culture. Real, self or culture-independent facts in any case being neither available nor accessible, there is not much else he can tell us. (PRR, p. 25)
Postmodernist social anthropology ‘degenerates from having been a study of a society into a study of the reaction of the anthropologist to his own reactions to his observations of the society, assuming that he had ever got as far as to have made any’ (PRR, p. 23). While Gellner, as a philosopher, emphasizes the solipsism of postmodernism, he does mention the psychological equivalent: narcissism. The third and final main plank of postmodernism for Gellner is the link between knowledge and power. Postmodernists maintain that claims to objectivity are sheer tactics for imposing a colonialist ideology on the colonized, who internalize as objective what in actuality are merely the vested interest of the colonizers: Positivism is a form of imperialism, or perhaps the other way round, or both. Lucidly presented and (putatively) independent facts were the tool and expression of colonial domination; by contrast,
144 R. Segal subjectivism signifies intercultural equality and respect. The world as it truly is (if indeed it may ever truly be said to be anything) is made up of tremulous subjectivities; objective facts and generalizations are the expressions and tools of domination! (PRR, p. 26)
Political and epistemological liberation go hand in hand: ‘Descartes had simply prepared the ground for Kipling. Descartes, ergo Kipling. No Kipling, so no Descartes. . . . The negation of Kipling also requires the repudiation of Descartes’ (PRR, p. 30).4 Gellner’s objection to postmodernist relativism is the denial of the universality of science. Indeed, he invokes the acceptance of science worldwide as the keenest refutation of relativism, at least of conceptual relativism: ‘I am absolutely certain that we do indeed possess knowledge beyond both culture and morality. . . . The fact that we do so is the central and by far the most important point about our shared social condition: any system which denies it, such as ‘interpretive anthropology’, is an appalling travesty of our real situation’ (PRR, p. 54). Gellner asserts that the ‘propositions and claims [of science] are translatable without loss of efficacy into any culture and any milieu’. Applied science ‘has totally transformed the human social condition, and the terms of reference under which mankind lives’ (PRR, p. 58). Gellner’s objection to the postmodernist obsession with meanings is the denial of any place for the physical causes of human behavior: ‘hermeneutists do not seem to be very interested in political and economic structures: it is domination by symbols and discourse which really secures and retains their attention. They are enormously sensitive to the manner in which concepts constrain, and less attentive to other, and perhaps more important, forms of coercion’ (PRR, p. 63). As Gellner says elsewhere, ‘I can think of various recent Western intellectual trends which, starting from the premiss that human actions and institutions are concept-saturated, end up with the absurd conclusion that therefore conceptual constraints are somehow more important than physical ones’ (Gellner 1988b, p. 12). Gellner never denies that concepts constrain behavior. He denies that concepts alone do so. Gellner’s objection to the postmodernist linkage of knowledge to power is comparable with his objection to the postmodernist obsession with meanings. For Gellner, power stems from more than knowledge, from more than ideas. Conversely, some knowledge, above all scientific knowledge, is an end in itself and not merely a means to power. Gellner’s Wittgensteinian nemesis is Peter Winch (1958). His postmodernist nemesis is Clifford Geertz (1973; 1984; 1988; 1995).5 He castigates both on the same grounds: first for their relativism and second for their indifference to physical causes. Indeed, it is hard to see what for Gellner distinguishes Geertz from Winch, for it is hard to see what for Gellner distinguishes postmodernism from Wittgensteinian fideism. To be sure, he rightly never associates Wittgensteinian fideism with the third, political plank of postmodernism: the linkage of knowledge to imperialism. Certainly postmodernism for him is in general more extreme than Wittgensteinian fideism. While acknowledging that Geertz claims to be only an ‘anti-relativist’ and not an outright relativist (see Geertz 1984), Gellner dismisses the distinction: ‘Let there not be the slightest doubt about whether Geertz is indeed a relativist, and not merely an ‘anti-anti-relativist’ (PRR, p. 53). Gellner’s preoccupation with Geertz as relativist par excellence is matched by that of his anti-relativist American counterpart, Melford Spiro. Geertz’s relativism, which is intended to counter provincialism (see Geertz 1984, p. 265), is attributed by Gellner to exactly Geertz’s Americanness. Pervaded by its own conviction about the self-evident propriety of its own values — ‘We hold these truths
Social Scientific Study 145 to be self-evident,’ proclaims the preamble to the Declaration of Independence — American culture is shocked by the discovery that other cultures do not share them: ‘There are parts of the world — e.g., Levantine ports — where every street peddler is at home in a number of languages, and is familiar with the idiosyncrasies of a number of cultures; in such an audience, the relativist message could only produce a yawn. But in Middle America it can still come as a revelation’ (PRR, pp. 52–3). That revelation produces the outright abandonment of all criteria rather than merely the reconsideration of Americans’ own, previously unquestioned convictions. Geertz’s relativism thus proves to be ‘a marked expression of that very provincialism which it would wish to combat. The provincial absolutist, having tumbled to the discovery that his culture is simply a culture, amongst others, and not simply a natural, self-evident reflection of the Nature of Things, becomes intoxicated with the idea of plurality of visions’ (PRR, p. 60). Gellner implies that not only Geertz’s postmodernism but postmodernism itself is distinctly American in its origin and its appeal — a notion that Rosenau’s division of postmodernism into a tamer, Anglo-American version and a bolder, Continental one belies.6 In any case Gellner’s preoccupation with Geertz seems odd for many reasons. First, it is not only postmodernist anthropologists who are incontestable relativists. Most anthropologists are. Furthermore, twentieth-century nonrelativistic anthropologists are invariably universalists rather than absolutists: they maintain that cultures are the same, not that one is superior to the others. Second, Geertz’s relativism, or ‘anti-relativism’, is likely only conceptual. In stressing religion and other cultural systems as attempts to make experience meaningful, he is saying that the cultural systems of each society are differing responses to the same kinds of inexplicable, unendurable or unjustifiable experiences. In describing those cultural systems, Geertz does present the differing concepts of person, time and social behavior that shape, not merely reflect, each people’s experiences. Perhaps, then, he is a perceptual as well as a conceptual relativist. But he is certainly no moral relativist: he is content with understanding, not assessing, alien values. Gellner’s castigation of Geertz for failing to see that relativism entails nihilism is therefore unjustified. Indeed, Geertz explicitly denies that relativism spells nihilism (see Geertz 1984, p. 263). Third, the position that Geertz opposes is less the ethnocentric claim that any one culture is best and more the universalist claim that all cultures are at heart the same: [T]he notion that the essence of what it means to be human is most clearly revealed in those features of human culture that are universal rather than in those that are distinctive to this people or that is a prejudice we are not necessarily obliged to share. Is it in grasping such general facts — that man has everywhere some sort of ‘religion’ — or in grasping the richness of this religious phenomenon or that — Balinese trance or Indian ritualism, Aztec human sacrifice or Zuni rain-dancing — that we grasp him? (Geertz 1973, p. 43)
Geertz here is more particularist than relativist. He deems the differences among cultures more significant than the similarities. This issue is different from that of the worth of one culture vis-a`-vis another. Fourth, Geertz, for all his particularism, simultaneously seeks a middle ground between it and universalism. He shies away from claiming that the essence of human nature lies entirely in the distinctiveness of each culture. The middle ground he seeks is ‘one in which culture, and the variability of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the
146 R. Segal governing principle of the field, ‘‘the basic unity of mankind’’, would not be turned into an empty phrase’ (Geertz 1973, p. 36). Fifth, Geertz also seeks a middle ground on the other postmodernist plank that Gellner decries: the focus on meanings as the sole source of human action. Geertz is not oblivious to political, social and economic forces. On the contrary, he insists that ‘cultural analysis’ not ‘lose touch with the hard surfaces of life — with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained — and with the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest’ (Geertz 1973, p. 30). Sixth, even in Works and Lives, where Geertz seems so postmodernist in his emphasis on how the literary styles of four famous anthropologists express and shape their messages, he does not reduce their ethnography to mere rhetoric. Rather, he shows how the four anthropologists use rhetorical strategies to convey their views. For Geertz, doing anthropology is akin to doing literary criticism, but there is more to anthropology than literary criticism. In Works and Lives he may focus on anthropologists as authors, but his subjects are still writing about others, not solipsistically writing about themselves. Gellner notes Geertz’s linkage of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s confident style to British imperialist confidence, but for Geertz Evans-Pritchard is still describing the Nuer, however slanted his view of them. Even in his autobiographical After the Fact, where Geertz seems so lopsidedly postmodernist in his skepticism toward ‘facts’, he is not dismissing facts but instead encompassing them in something broader, which for him means an ‘interpretation’ rather than an ‘explanation’. Geertz is as wary of postmodernists as of positivists. He acknowledges postmodernist concerns without conceding them: If one is not simply to surrender to these [postmodernist] anxieties and declare anthropology impossible or, worse, oppressive (and some, indeed, have done just that), it is insufficient just to press on regardless. . . . There is a need for extensive revisions of our notions as to what anthropology is, what its aims should be, what it can reasonably hope to accomplish; why it is anyone should pursue it. (Geertz 1995, p. 130)
Seventh and last, Geertz is regularly disavowed by postmodernist anthropologists like Paul Rabinow, Vincent Crapanzano, James Clifford, George Marcus, Michael Fischer and Talad Asad as insufficiently radical. Gellner himself repeatedly notes this disavowal yet refuses to heed it. Gellner sees Geertz as at least the inspiration for anthropological postmodernism, even if not quite postmodernist himself: ‘Geertz has encouraged a whole generation of anthropologists to parade their real or invented inner qualms and paralysis . . . They agonize so much about their inability to know themselves and the Other, at any level of regress, that they no longer need to trouble too much about the Other’ (PRR, p. 45). But insofar as Geertz himself, for all his self-conscious wavering, assumes his ability to decipher the Other, blaming him for the solipsism of his successors seems misplaced. Gellner’s skewed targeting of Geertz as his paradigmatic postmodernist weakens his overall brief against postmodernism. Even if Gellner’s target in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion is postmodernism rather than religion, he ties the two together as joint enemies of reason. By religion he means fundamentalism, which, again, is for him religion at its fullest. Insofar as religion bases its truth claims on revelation, it severs itself from science and thereby from modernity. Insofar as each religion vaunts its own truth claims, religion entails particularism rather than universalism and is likewise anti-modern. In its denial of science and of universal truths, postmodernism for Gellner is really not much different from religion. But
Social Scientific Study 147 postmodernism is far more culpable because postmodernism repudiates modernity rather than, like religion, antedates it. Postmodernism denies that anything has changed and sees the modern West as merely one more culture with its own idiosyncratic methods and truths. For Gellner, everything has changed, and the modern West is superior to all other cultures. That superiority is not moral. It is conceptual. Science has discovered the true explanation of the world. As Gellner puts it elsewhere, ‘in the world as we know it, cultures are extremely unequal in cognitive power. . . . No one, least of all those are who deprived of it, has any doubts about the superior cognitive effectiveness of the ‘‘scientific outlook’’. Similarly, no one really has any doubts about the cognitive inferiority of the pre-scientific outlook’ (Gellner 1983, pp. 68–9). To deny that ‘we do indeed possess knowledge beyond both culture and morality . . . is an appalling travesty of our real situation. The existence of trans-cultural and amoral knowledge is the fact of our lives’ (PRR, p. 54). For Gellner, science does not transcend culture in its emergence. Far from the product of sheer thinking, a la Descartes, science is the product of a unique, almost fortuitous set of material and intellectual circumstances. The ‘project’ of Max Weber, to whom Gellner is most beholden, was the explication of those circumstances.7 Science, however, transcends its origins and applies universally. Gellner never contends that all or even much of modern Western culture is universal. He is a cognitive absolutist but not a moral or cultural one. It is science, theoretical and applied alike, which for him either alone or above all transcends culture — in Descartes’ phrase, transcends ‘custom and example’.3 The key divide for Gellner is not, then, between modernity and postmodernity but between pre-modernity and modernity. Gellner denounces those who, like Geertz, deny that divide, that discontinuity, that ‘Big Ditch’: ‘The important intellectual contrast to the relativism defended by Geertz . . . is of course the doctrine of the Big Ditch, the idea that a great discontinuity has occurred in the life of mankind, the view that a form of knowledge exists which surpasses all others . . .’ (PRR, p. 50). Far from avant-garde, postmodernism for Gellner is atavistic. It rejects the universality of modern science for the particularity of traditional culture: What Descartes and his [modern] successors said, in effect, was that there are an awful lot of meanings and opinions about, that they cannot all be right, and that we’d better find, and justify, a yardstick which will sort out the sheep from the goats. For Descartes, the yardstick involved the exclusive use of clear and distinct meanings, so clear and distinct as to impose their authority on all minds sober and determined enough to heed them, irrespective of their culture. The path to truth lay through voluntary cultural exile. (PRR, p. 38)
The postmodernist approach is the opposite: to subsume science under one culture and to demote that culture to the same plane as all others. In his advocacy of a society in which science rules supreme in the cognitive sphere but in which relativism, even nihilism, is granted free reign in the cultural one, Gellner offers his own partial reconciliation of the approaches he contrasts.
Notes 1 Rosenau considers relativism so radical a position that only extreme postmodernists embrace it (see PSS, p. 114, n. 8), but relativism hardly means the rejection of truth, theory or objectivity, only of universal truth, theory or objectivity. 2 On Islamic fundamentalism see Gellner 1994, ch. 3.
148 R. Segal 3 On relativism see Gellner 1973, chs. 2–5, 12, 14; 1974a, ch. 13; 1974b, ch. 11; 1974c, pp. 47–50, 142–46; 1979, pp. 77–80 and chs. 7, 10, 11; 1985a, chs. 3, 7. 4 On the postmodernist linkage of knowledge to imperialism see Gellner 1988c, pp. 26–9; 1993. 5 On Winch see Gellner 1973, chs. 2–5 and pp. 201–2; 1979, pp. 68–70; 1985a, pp. 121–2. On Geertz see Gellner 1988c. 6 On postmodernism as particularly American see Gellner 1988c, pp. 22–4. 7 On Weber on the modern West see Gellner 1974c, pp. 188–95, 201, 206–7; 1979, pp. 260–1, 286; 1983, pp. 19–21ff.; 1987a, pp. 153–6; 1988a, pp. 127–8; 1988b, pp. 153–4; 1992, chs. 2, 7–9. 8 On the disjunction of truth from culture see Gellner 1979, ch. 8; 1992, passim.
Bibliography Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, Basic Books 1973. Geertz, Clifford, ‘Anti Anti-Relativism’, American Anthropologist 86 (1984), pp. 263–78. Geertz, Clifford, Works and Lives, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1988. Geertz, Clifford, After the Fact, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press 1995. Gellner, Ernest, Words and Things, London, Victor Gollancz 1959. Gellner, Ernest, Thought and Change, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson; Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1964. Gellner, Ernest, Saints of the Atlas, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1969. Gellner, Ernest, Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973. Gellner, Ernest, Contemporary Thought and Politics, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974 [cited as 1974a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Devil in Modern Philosophy, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), London and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1974 [cited as 1974b]. Gellner, Ernest, Legitimation of Belief, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1974 [cited as 1974c]. Gellner, Ernest, Spectacles and Predicaments, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1979. Gellner, Ernest (ed.), Soviet and Western Anthropology, London, Duckworth 1980. Gellner, Ernest, Muslim Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1981. Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell 1983. Gellner, Ernest, Relativism and the Social Sciences, I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi (eds), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985 [cited as 1985a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Psychoanalytic Movement, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1985. 2nd ed. London, Fontana 1993. Gellner, Ernest (ed.), Islamic Dilemmas, Berlin, Mouton 1985. Gellner, Ernest, Culture, Identity, and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1987 [cited as 1987a]. Gellner, Ernest, The Concept of Kinship and Other Essays on Anthropological Method and Explanation, Oxford and New York, Blackwell 1987 [reprint, with new introduction, of Gellner 1973]. Gellner, Ernest, Plough, Sword, and Book, Chicago, University of Chicago Press; London, Collins Harvill 1988 [cited as 1988a]. Gellner, Ernest, State and Society in Soviet Thought, Oxford and New York, Blackwell 1988 [cited as 1988b]. Gellner, Ernest, ‘The Stakes in Anthropology’, American Scholar 57 (1988), pp. 17–30 [cited as 1988c]. Gellner, Ernest, Reason and Culture, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell 1992. Gellner, Ernest, review of Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, TLS, No. 4690 (February 19, 1993), 3–4. Gellner, Ernest, Conditions of Liberty, London, Hamish Hamilton 1994. Gellner, Ernest, and Charles Micaud (eds), Arabs and Berbers, London, Duckworth 1973. Gellner, Ernest, and John Waterbury (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, London, Duckworth 1977. Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York, Humanities Press 1958. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International 1990.
Social Scientific Study 149 ROBERT A. SEGAL is Reader in Theory of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University. He is the author of The Poimandres as Myth (Mouton de Gruyter 1986), Joseph Campbell (Garland 1987, revised edition New American Library/ Penguin 1990), Religion and the Social Sciences (Scholars Press 1989), and Explaining and Interpreting Religion (Peter Lang 1992). He is the editor of In Quest of the Hero (Princeton University Press 1990), The Gnostic Jung (Princeton University Press and Routledge 1992), The Allure of Gnosticism (Open Court 1995), Jung on Myth (Princeton University Press forthcoming 1997), and The Myth and Ritual Theory (Blackwell forthcoming 1997). Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YG, U.K.