Semiotics of Religion

Signs of the Sacred in History

Robert A. Yelle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441172372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Following the heyday of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in the light of religious data. Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book. Among the topics addressed are: - ritual repetition and the poetics of ritual performance
- magic and the belief in a natural (iconic) language
- Protestant literalism and iconoclasm
- disenchantment and secularization
- Holiness, arbitrariness, and agency
Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to a new generation and charts a course for future research.

CHAPTER ONE

Semiotics beyond structuralism

Why a semiotics of religion?

Why a semiotics of religion? Why now? What can we learn from semiotics about religion, and vice versa? Any book such as this must provide persuasive answers to these questions, in response to the not unjustified skepticism lingering from prior attempts. At this time when reconstruction is badly needed in the study of religion, I aim to show that semiotics has much to offer to our understanding of both the structural and historical dimensions of religion, beyond and, in some cases, in opposition to the lessons learned from structuralism and poststructuralism a generation or two ago. Equally important is the contribution that a focus on religious phenomena can bring to reinvigorating the field of semiotics.

Semiotics is the discipline devoted to the systematic study of signs, symbols, and communication; it overlaps in its method and subject most directly with linguistics and rhetoric. A semiotic approach can contribute to the elucidation of many religious phenomena, including: the belief in a magical language; the types of signs used in magic; the prevalence of poetic devices in spells, chants, and other forms of ritual language; the law of talion (“an eye for an eye”) and other symbolic or ritualized punishments based on analogy; trials by ordeal, which often invoke the intervention of supernatural forces; the taxonomies or systems of classification deployed in the cosmologies of many religious traditions; ritual purity laws, including dietary prohibitions; not to mention myth. It is obvious that many of the phenomena traditionally grouped together under the category of religion have semiotic dimensions, even leaving aside the fact that they are forms of human expression, incorporating words, images, and symbolic actions. If communication requires, at minimum, an addresser and an addressee—one who sends the message and one who receives it—then many prototypical religious actions would appear to conform to, or rather to attempt to construct, such a relation. Both prayer and sacrifice are largely efforts to communicate with the gods, either through words and gestures or through the destruction and translation of some object to the heavenly realm.¹ In the repeated refrain of Leviticus (King James Version), the burnt offering becomes “a sweet savour unto the Lord” as the smoke is conveyed upward. Like magic, sacrifice may depend on a certain dissimulation: although the god may be the one to whom the sacrifice is nominally addressed, the fact that the benefit of the sacrifice is distributed to the priests or congregants shows that the circuit of communication is implicitly located elsewhere. The same could be said of the rhetorical devices in many prayers, which, even if they never reach the ears of the gods to whom they are addressed, reinforce their own efficacy in the ears of the speaker and other listeners.

The very distinction between ordinary and ritual behaviors has sometimes been founded on the distinction between technical and expressive actions.² Although every cultural performance is to some degree symbolic—meaning not reducible to the purely utilitarian—in ritual behaviors the symbolism arguably predominates, to the extent that such behaviors may appear to serve no pragmatic objective. Our inability to ascribe a practical purpose to some behavior or artifact may lead to the inference that it is “ritualistic,” an epithet frequently invoked by archeologists in lieu of a better explanation. In this regard, religious objects or behaviors appear closer to the artistic or the aesthetic, with which domain they are often closely linked. Indeed, the point of some rituals—as Viktor Shklovsky claimed of literature—is to convey a sense of “estrangement,” of awe and wonder, to give pause, and to provoke reflection.³ However, unlike purely aesthetic performances, magical rituals do have a practical objective. The problem then becomes one of accounting for how magic promotes, from an insider’s perspective, the belief in its own efficacy. This is why, in Chapter Two, I present an argument for the rhetorical function of repetition and other poetic devices in such rituals.

These examples reinforce the conviction that many religious phenomena are best viewed as a form of communication or rhetoric. Although many of these phenomena have been analyzed previously as modes of semiosis or signifying processes, a number of newer theoretical approaches promise to alter substantially our understanding of these phenomena, to integrate them under a more comprehensive explanatory framework, and, above all, to introduce dimensions of nuance in keeping with our recognition of cultural and historical differences in modes of semiosis. Indeed, perhaps the most promising new direction in the semiotics of religion bears on the question of the nature of the secular that has been recognized increasingly as crucial for religious studies and related disciplines.⁴ Many religious phenomena, including myth, magic, and ritual, have arguably declined in a disenchanted modernity. Some of the greatest debates in the history of religions concerned precisely the communicative power of modes of ritual such as prayer and sacrifice. Broadly speaking, as detailed in later chapters of this book, secular modernity has rejected or severely qualified this communicative power by, among other things, devaluing the symbol, denying the efficacy of symbolic magic, and limiting poetic repetition in certain genres of discourse. Yet the prevailing structuralist approaches to such phenomena, inasmuch as they invoke ostensibly universal principles, have proved unable to account for or even, in some cases, to acknowledge such historical differences. Counterbalancing this neglect is a recent emphasis on the need to attend to the specificities of the “linguistic” or “semiotic ideologies” of different cultures—including our own—and the ways in which these ideologies mediate semiotic practices.⁵ It is not possible to appreciate fully the communicative and rhetorical dimensions of the religious data of different cultures by applying a one-size-fits-all theory: it is necessary also to consider the philosophies and cosmologies of the sign that shape religious practices and narratives in their indigenous contexts of performance.

A quarter century ago, two distinguished scholars described the challenge confronting a prospective semiotics of religion:

The ideal text on semiotics and religious studies would use a general and crossculturally valid theory of semiosis to compare systematically distinct religious traditions in terms of their respective perception of the nature of religious semiosis. But there is, as of this writing, no theory that would permit a group of scholars to compare widely diverse traditions against one another.⁶

This description of the goals of a semiotics of religion expresses a problematic that is endemic to any science of culture. On the one hand, there needs to be a common set of principles, in terms of which we may compare and contrast different traditions so as to illuminate what is universally human and what is culturally specific. On the other hand, there must be recognition also of the way in which the “perception” of semiosis or, as it is now more commonly termed, the “semiotic ideology” of a particular culture informs, mediates, and structures its practices of communication. It is impossible to account for semiotic systems without incorporating also the dimensions of consciousness and of poiesis or meaning-making. Given this fact, it is still the case that there is no single accepted semiotic theory that can “square the circle” and mediate between the particular and the general. In lieu of such a theory, and as a step toward establishing a more adequate typology of semiotic systems, the present work focuses on some basic distinctions between the modes of semiosis that characterize many traditional religions and those that characterize secular modernity.

A number of features of the semiotic ideology of modernity, at least in certain European cultures and other cultures affected by them, have been influenced by earlier Christian theologies, particularly as these were transformed during and after the Protestant Reformation. The Puritan critique of “vain repetitions” in prayer, efforts to explain pagan idolatry and polytheism as an error of language, and a deepened critique of the symbolic dimensions of the Jewish ceremonial laws were all associated with the movement that we standardly call Protestant literalism, which represented much more than an effort to read the Bible in a certain way. Protestants depicted the Crucifixion as a semiotic event that ushered in a mode of “plain speech”⁷ that replaced the figurative ceremonies of the Mosaic law and silenced the pagan oracles and their obscure pronouncements. Such mythemes contributed to the modern idea of disenchantment, meaning the banishment of miracles, mystery, and magic from the world.⁸ Disenchantment had linguistic dimensions. Poetic form was displaced in some cases, particularly but not only in prayer or liturgy, by more simplified, less ornamented forms, signaling a shift of emphasis from form to content; while the performative or magical function of discourse was subordinated in keeping with a privileging of semantics over pragmatics. These aspects of the Reformation influenced not merely those discourses we regard as religious, but also the ostensibly rational discourses of science and law, which were established in opposition to poetry, rhetoric, and myth.

Recent scholarship in religious studies and allied disciplines, much of it deeply influenced by poststructuralism, has called into question the validity of the categories of religion and the secular.⁹ While appreciating the contribution that such arguments have made to deepening the interrogation of both of these categories, and remaining skeptical in particular of our ability to distinguish the secular from earlier theological modes of thought, I do not agree fully with such critiques. A semiotic approach can contribute to defining both many of the phenomena traditionally gathered under the rubric of religion, and the category of the secular itself, understood as a particular semiotic ideology.

For example, as detailed in Chapter Two below, many spells represent an extreme form of the poetic function involving such devices as extensive repetition, rhyme, alliteration, and palindromes.¹⁰ Such performances announce themselves as acts of communication. To this extent, they depend on what we might call “semiotic recognition.” The very same features also enable the second-order definition of such semiotic events as rituals. By the same token, the relative exclusion of poetic and figurative language from certain genres of discourse, under the influence of Protestant literalism, also serves to characterize the secular as a particular semiotic ideology and mode of praxis. Unfortunately, the argument that both “religion” and the “secular” are categories without content has too often been used as an excuse to avoid the difficult work of accounting for such regularities in the structure and history of religions.

Among the semiotic dimensions of the historical process known as secularization or disenchantment are the following:

•The decline or sequestration in particular genres of densely symbolic discourses such as myth, ritual, and magic.

•The decline of a symbolic, allegorical, or typological view of the world, and the gradual ascendancy of realism, literalism, or a prosaic view of the world.

•The shift away from a conviction in the natural or nonarbitrary status of signs, or from a “magical” theory of language, and the ascendancy of the idea that the sign is arbitrary and bears no essential connection to that which it represents.

•The rise of scientific projects for the purification of language from errors, and the substitution of a perfect, rational, or universal language, as associated in particular with the Baconian movement in seventeenth-century England and its descendants.

•The decline of many modes of oral performance and the rise of a culture of the printed book, especially after the development and widespread application of movable type in European culture beginning in the fifteenth century, and subsequently around the globe.

Although it would clearly be impossible to address all of the above developments in the present essay, an effort is made to address a number of them in different chapters, and to grasp them as part of an overall transformation in semiotic ideology. The burden of this book is to demonstrate that any adequate account of the structural and historical dimensions of both religion and the secular must confront the challenge of defining both of these categories in semiotic terms. The centrality of semiosis to the self-definition of religion and the secular is evidence of the preeminently cultural status of both of these categories. However, this fact has been obscured as a result of the secular bias against symbolism and poetic performance, which has hindered inquiry into the semiotics of religion.

There are additional reasons why such historical differences in semiosis have not been investigated sufficiently. First, the insistence on the arbitrary nature of the sign, which is basic to modern semiotics, marks a break with many earlier semiotic ideologies that affirmed the naturalness of certain signs, and that consequently have been categorized as naïve and as untrustworthy guides to a science of signs. The semiotic theories of earlier cultures have been ignored except as historical curiosities. Second, the typologies of signs developed within both structuralist semiology and Peircean semiotic themselves contain no reference to the historical dimensions of signification. Whether Roman Jakobson’s dyad of “metaphor and metonymy” is in question,¹¹ or Charles Sanders Peirce’s triad of “icon, index, and symbol,”¹² these categories of relation between signifier and signified are regarded not only as exhausting the logical range of possibilities, but as ever-present alternatives for communication. The representation of such typologies as the keys to an atemporal, one-size-fits-all science of semiotics obscures the fact that different modes of sign relation have been emphasized within different cultures, and that there have been, within this overall variety, some larger trends that allow us to characterize the semiotic ideology of modernity as distinct in some important respects from many of those that have obtained in earlier historical periods. Third, the otherwise valuable impulse of semiotics to establish itself on a scientific basis and thereby to secure recognition of its legitimacy as an independent academic discipline has led in many cases to a scientism or bias against historical and cultural approaches that has, instead of strengthening the discipline, limited its explanatory power and appeal.

The view of the semiotics of religion proposed in this book is quite different. It recognizes that any valid semiotics must attend to both the structural and historical dimensions of culture and, rather than perpetually reconfirming some predetermined theoretical model, it aims to develop a flexible theory capable of accounting for differences in semiosis. If this goal can be met, then in my view, semiotics offers the prospect of connecting the historical and anthropological sciences, while recognizing the prerogatives of each of these areas of enquiry.

A brief critical survey of some semiotic theories of religion

Over the past century and more, numerous schools of thought that embrace the label of “semiotics” or “semiology” have announced themselves, including structuralism, whether that of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), or others; poststructuralism, including that of Michel Foucault (1926–84) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004); and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and the American school of pragmatism that he helped to found. The late Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001) worked tirelessly to organize the various branches of semiotics under a single institutional rubric, and this work has been continued by others.

My own brand of semiotics draws on a number of different traditions: in particular, Jakobson’s studies of the “poetic function” of language;¹³ the synthesis between such approaches and Peircean semiotics developed by Jakobson’s student, the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, who emphasizes the pragmatic function of poetic form;¹⁴ and Webb Keane’s recent studies of the semiotic ideology of secular modernity, as revealed in the colonial encounter between Dutch Protestants and native Indonesians.¹⁵ Other influences on my approach are classical rhetoric and philosophy, and my studies of the semiotic ideologies of Hinduism and British Protestantism, in particular as these two traditions interacted in colonial India. Rather than endorsing any particular school of semiotics, I prefer an approach that draws on different schools and concepts as these prove useful. A description of each of the different semiotic schools is omitted as unnecessary and redundant; for such a description, the interested reader may turn to several valuable works already available.¹⁶ My comments in this section do not present a comprehensive account of the different theories addressed, but are intended only to indicate some of the important differences between s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1 Semiotics beyond structuralism
• 2 The poetics of ritual performance
• 3 Natural, arbitrary, and divine languages
• 4 Literalism, iconoclasm, and the question of the secular
• 5 Transformations in poetic performance: the coordination of Protestant literalism and print culture
• 6 Arbitrariness, anomaly, and agency: a critique of Mary Douglas’s structuralist idea of the Holy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index