religion_and_economy
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- | # Religion and Economy # | ||
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- | Ryan Schram | ||
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- | A revised version will appear in the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology: | ||
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- | 27 November 2015 | ||
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- | ## The sacred society and the sacred self ## | ||
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- | The interaction of religious ideas and economic practices raise critical questions for anyone wishing to understand either. In classical social theories, religion and economy appear as distinct domains of social behavior and organization. Yet although these theories attribute different kinds of logic to them, throughout the world, one regularly encounters situations in which people bring together spiritual, cosmological and material concerns in unexpected ways, challenging the theoretical conception of religion and economy as social domains. | ||
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- | In the Durkheimian tradition, society is a thing sui generis and a total system, a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Religion in its most elementary sense, practices which are oriented to the sacred, is central to Durkheim' | ||
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- | Yet because Durkheimian social anthropology ironically makes a particular conception of religion so central to society, it dissolves the category altogether. Because the sacred-profane dichotomy was taken as fundamental to social order itself, scholars assumed that for most so-called primitive societies, religious, moral and ritual behavior were functionally part of social order writ large, and thus did not need to be examined as a distinct domain within society. Anything which had a normative regularity was itself moral in Durkheimian thinking. All collective representations, | ||
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- | Moreover, in this framework, properly economic behavior in the sense of rational means-ends calculation was seen as being contrary to the essence of society as totality. We see this most clearly in the work of Marcel Mauss, one of Durkheim' | ||
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- | Durkheim and Mauss were, like all Western social theorists, ultimately interested in the emergence of modernity, and in particular a economic system based on markets. They did not, however, see this as a process of individual liberation from the traditional rules of the group, but as the progressive specialization of the social division of labor, and in Durkheim' | ||
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- | The legacy of Durkheimian sociology in social studies of the economy can be seen in the work of Karl Polanyi, a historian interested in political economy. Influenced by Marx yet reluctant to embrace his dialectical materialism, | ||
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- | If Durkheimian sociology opposes religion and economy as collective and individual tendencies, the work of Max Weber, who approaches social analysis quite differently, | ||
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- | While renunciation of the mundane was a minor religious form in Christian cultures from very early on, Weber credits the Protestant reformation, | ||
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- | This signal concept of modernity, especially as a telos of world history, though, has become a lightning rod. Every aspect of Weber' | ||
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- | Indeed, the basic categories from which Weber builds a model of history as a process of rationalization have themselves come to be questioned. Take for instance a steel factory in Indonesia, now faced with a liberal global market in which it must compete (Rudnyckyj 2009). To train its workers in Franklin' | ||
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- | Others have argued the implicit secularism of Western social science itself leaves it incapable of understanding global Pentecostalism. In places as far flung as southern California, Sweden, Ghana and Zambia, for instance, Pentecostal Christians offer alms, seek deliverance from desire, pray for prosperity, and generally look for the presence of the Holy Spirit and the Devil in their economic conditions (Bialecki 2008; Coleman 2004; Meyer 1998; Haynes 2012). Both Weberian and Durkheimian approaches reduce the relationship to the sacred to an acquired mental state. By emphasizing the motivation derived from belief, Weberian and Durkheimian sociologies cannot comprehend these Pentecostal religious worlds, seeing them only as distortions of Western cultural forms by a magical form of religious thinking. Yet, as many have pointed out, this not only ignores Pentecostalism' | ||
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- | Given this, social scientists have started to move away from a singular, essential conception of religion itself and approach religion through its interfaces with the material world, and especially through the economic life of the religious subject. In other words, although agents may wish to see their own morality in abstract terms, independently of particular situations and material conditions, these conditions themselves provide them with a symbolic language for their morality. For instance, in Japan, many consumers now seek out sleek, Scandanavian cabinets for storing memorial objects of deceased loved ones, called gendai butsudan (modern shrines) (Rambelli 2010; Nelson 2008). The owner of one such manufacturer hopes to sell his modernist shrines abroad, and make the Buddhist concept of kami (ancestor spirit) as well-known as sushi and sumo. The Malaysian government has for years promoted the Islamic banking sector, expressing both its commitment to an Islamic modernity and cementing ties to Middle Eastern states (Rudnyckyj 2014). Islamic financial practices are governed by Islamic legal theory, which determines whether forms of lending and investment exclude the earning of riba (interest), which is prohibited. Yet proponents see themselves not so much as restricting their individual gain as helping to create an alternative economy based on the productivity of labor and tangible assets, rather than speculation. In other words, Islamic finance is not simply finance as practiced by Muslims in compliance with Islamic law. Rather, practicing finance in compliance with Islamic law, among anyone, facilitates the dissemination of Islamic ethics. Increasingly, | ||
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- | Arguably this approach is nothing more than a return to the Durkheimian concept of the sacred, which as an elementary form of religion, is basic to all societies. As such, one may wonder if the interface of religion and economy offers any special insight at all. In pursuing religion at the margins, and in the marketplace as opposed to the temple, one could say that we have simply gotten rid of religion as a category altogether. Yet this would be missing a crucial aspect of these contemporary examples and many others like them. People' | ||
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- | ## References ## | ||
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- | Asad, Talal. 1983. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz.” Man 18 (2): 237–59. doi: | ||
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- | Bialecki, Jon. 2008. “Between Stewardship and Sacrifice: Agency and Economy in a Southern California Charismatic Church.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2): 372–90. doi: | ||
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- | Brenner, Suzanne. 1996. “Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and ‘the Veil.’” American Ethnologist 23 (4): 673–97. doi: | ||
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- | Coleman, S. 2004. “The Charismatic Gift.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10 (2): 421–42. doi: | ||
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- | Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. Reprint edition. New York: Free Press. | ||
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- | Franklin, Benjamin. 1737. “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” AMDOCS: Documents for the Study of American History. http:// | ||
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- | ———. 1748. “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One.” In The American Instructor: Or Young Man’s Best Companion, edited by Benjamin Franklin and D. Hall, 375–77. Philadelphia: | ||
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- | Geertz, Clifford. 1976. The Religion of Java. University of Chicago Press. | ||
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- | Haynes, Naomi. 2012. “Pentecostalism and the Morality of Money: Prosperity, Inequality, and Religious Sociality on the Zambian Copperbelt.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (1): 123–39. doi: | ||
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- | Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject [New in Paper]. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. | ||
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- | Mauss, Marcel. 2000. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [abridged]. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. | ||
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- | Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana.” Development and Change 29 (4): 751–76. doi: | ||
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- | ———. 2004. “‘Praise the Lord’: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere.” American Ethnologist 31 (1): 92–110. doi: | ||
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- | Nelson, John. 2008. “Household Altars in Contemporary Japan: Rectifying Buddhist‘ Ancestor Worship’ with Home Décor and Consumer Choice.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 35 (2): 305–30. | ||
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- | Polanyi, Karl. 1947. “Our Obsolete Market Mentality.” Commentary, February. | ||
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- | ———. 1957. “The Economy as an Instituted Process.” In Trade and Markets in Early Empires, edited by Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson, 243–70. New York: Free Press. | ||
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- | Rambelli, Fabio. 2010. “Home Buddhas: Historical Processes and Modes of Representation of the Sacred in the Japanese Buddhist Family Altar (butsudan).” Japanese Religion 35 (1-2): 63–86. | ||
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- | Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2009. “Market Islam in Indonesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: S183–201. doi: | ||
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- | ———. 2014. “Economy in Practice: Islamic Finance and the Problem of Market Reason.” American Ethnologist 41 (1): 110–27. doi: | ||
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- | Weber, Max. 1905. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Allen and Unwin. https:// | ||
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- | ———. 1946. “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 323–59. New York: Oxford University Press. | ||
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religion_and_economy.txt · Last modified: 2021/07/08 00:28 by Ryan Schram (admin)