A Phenomenology of Indigenous Religions

Theory and Practice

James L. Cox

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350250741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book compiles James L. Cox's most important writings on a phenomenology of Indigenous Religions into one volume, with a new introduction and conclusion by the author. Cox has consistently exemplified phenomenological methods by applying them to his own field studies among Indigenous Religions, principally in Zimbabwe and Alaska, but also in Australia and New Zealand. Included in this collection are his articles in which he defines what he means by the category 'religion' and how this informs his precise meaning of the classification 'Indigenous Religions'. These theoretical considerations are always illustrated clearly and concisely by specific studies of Indigenous Religions and their dynamic interaction with contemporary political and social circumstances. This collection demonstrates the continued relevance of the phenomenological method in the study of religions by presenting the method as dynamic and adaptable to contemporary social contexts and as responsive to intellectual critiques of the method.

Part I

PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION: THEORY, METHOD AND APPLICATION

Chapter 1

METHODOLOGICAL VIEWS ON AFRICAN RELIGIONS

When I first began lecturing in the University of Zimbabwe in 1989, I noticed after a few classes that students had warmed to a method of studying African Traditional Religions that drew on concepts derived from the phenomenology of religion. In fact, my students became so enamoured with the phenomenological method in the study of religion that often they wrote in their essays that phenomenology is the way, some said the only way, to study religions, particularly African religions. I now explain this overwhelmingly positive response by Zimbabwean students to the phenomenological method by the fact that many had been pupils in mission schools, or at least were active Christians, who had been taught that the Indigenous religion of their ancestors was demonic and that they should have nothing to do with traditional rituals. When they began to see that for academic reasons they should suspend such judgements, even if they maintained them personally, and should employ empathetic techniques to gain an understanding of any religion they were studying, it was as if a veil had been removed from their eyes, and they could view their own religious and cultural practices in a new light.

I refer at the outset to my Zimbabwean students because their experience of studying their own cultures using a basic understanding of phenomenological principles underscores at a deeper level two inter-related methodological questions I wish to consider: (1) What, if anything, can the phenomenological method, which has been much maligned in scholarly writings over the past thirty years, offer to contemporary understandings of African religions? (2) In light of the phenomenological method in the study of religion, as ‘insiders’ to their own cultures, do African scholars have an inherent advantage over non-African researchers of African religions? The first question focuses on the phenomenology of religion in general and the second considers a phenomenological interpretation of the relative value of ‘insider’ discourse. These questions relate to the study of all African religions, but I have chosen to exemplify my responses in the latter part of this article largely in terms of Indigenous beliefs and practices. Before I turn to these considerations, I need to outline the key principles underlying the phenomenology of religion and respond to some of the most persistent criticisms levelled at it by scholars of religion (see Cox 2010: 48–72; 151–64).

The phenomenology of religion

The three most important concepts found within the phenomenology of religion are epoché, empathetic interpolation and the eidetic intuition. Derived from the philosophy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the term epoché was used by Husserl to suspend all judgements associated with what he called the natural attitude (which naively assumes that what is observed tells us all there is to know about the world) such as material objects, science, other humans, and the sequence and order of events. All the things we take for granted about what we perceive as real, to use a term Husserl borrowed from mathematics, must be ‘put into brackets’. In solving algebraic equations, for example, the mathematician places the various components of the formula into brackets and works on solving each problem placed in brackets one at a time so that, at the conclusion, each limited solution can be applied to resolving the problem of the entire equation. In a similar way, although Husserl did not use the epoché to doubt the existence of the external world, he suspended judgements about it so that, like a mathematician, attention could be focused on another part of the equation, in this case, on an analysis of the phenomena of perception as they appear in the individual’s consciousness. The effect of this method, according to Husserl, was to establish a new mode of consciousness in which the natural standpoint is put out of play or, as Husserl (1931: 111) put it, performing epoché ‘bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence’. By placing in brackets previously held beliefs or assumptions derived from the natural standpoint, the observer allows pure phenomena to speak for themselves.

Following Husserl, phenomenologists of religion advocated a method of bracketing out or suspending a researcher’s previous ideas, thoughts or beliefs about the truth, value or meaning of any religion under study. Phenomenologists wanted to observe the phenomena of religion as they appear, rather than as they are understood through opinions formed prior to their being observed. This means suspending personal beliefs and withholding judgements on academic theories about religion. A leading advocate of the method was the Dutch phenomenologist Gerardus van der Leeuw, who followed closely Husserl’s philosophical rejection of the natural attitude. Van der Leeuw (1938: 646) described epoché as a tool to ensure ‘that no judgment is expressed concerning the objective world, which is thus placed “between brackets”’. He explained that this requires the scholar to observe ‘restraint’ by allowing only the phenomena that appear to manifest themselves, rather than the observer relying on presuppositions about what lies ‘behind’ appearances (Van der Leeuw 1938: 675). In Van der Leeuw’s understanding, performing epoché should not be regarded as an effort to remove the observer from interacting creatively with the phenomena. The mind in its bracketed consciousness is not a blank tablet but, based on Husserl’s rendering of the term intentionality, is employed precisely to enable the observer to interpret the phenomena as they appear, liberated from naïve or unchallenged assumptions. Because it eliminated potentially distorting biases, for Van der Leeuw, epoché enabled the observer to attain understanding of the subjective nature of religion (its internal structure) and its objective meaning (its broader connections).

Another important phenomenologist of religion was W. Brede Kristensen, under whom Van der Leeuw studied in Leiden University. Although his major work in English on theory and method in the study of religion, The Meaning of Religion, was not published until 1960, seven years after his death, his influence within the study of religions during the first half of the twentieth century was considerable. Despite the fact that he did not employ the term epoché in The Meaning of Religion, Kristensen began by insisting that the scholar must call into question any interpretation of religion that is potentially offensive to believers. He argued that a genuinely scientific understanding occurs only when the scholar is able to see through the viewpoint or perspective of adherents, since believers understand their own religion better than anyone from the outside ever could. In order to gain an insider’s perspective, the scholar needs to suspend widely accepted presuppositions about the origin and meaning of religion. Kristensen believed that evolutionary theories in particular predisposed the scholar to evaluate religions from the outside and thus, in the words of Eric Sharpe (1986: 228), ‘to have been responsible for inducing scholars to pass premature judgement on material they had learned to understand only in part’. By applying evolutionary assumptions to religion, the outside researcher produces an entirely biased interpretation to which believers could never accede. Kristensen (1960: 13) concluded: ‘All evolutionary views and theories … mislead us from the start.’ Van der Leeuw later used Husserl’s term epoché to reinforce Kristensen’s emphasis on the authority of believers to interpret their own religion.

A second key concept in the phenomenological method is what Van der Leeuw (1938: 675) called ‘sympathetic interpolation’, which he defined as the ‘primitively human art of the actor which is indispensable to all arts, but to the sciences of the mind also’, adding that ‘only the persistent and strenuous application of intense sympathy … qualifies the phenomenologist to interpret appearances’. The British phenomenologist of religion, Ninian Smart (1973a: 54), preferred the term “empathy” to sympathy, which he explained, following Husserl’s notion of intentionality, enabled the observer to recognize ‘a framework of intentions’ among the believers. Intentionality, for Smart, not only required the active involvement of the researcher but also included the acts of a believing community (what it intends by its myths, rituals and symbols), which must be apprehended by the observer if genuine understanding is to be achieved. The twin processes of using empathy and interpolating what is experienced into terms the researcher can comprehend defined for Smart how intentionality operates in a dual manner: first, by enabling the scholar to access the meaning of the religious life and practices for adherents and then by making sense of them intentionally in terms of the researcher’s own culture.

The Canadian scholar of comparative religions, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, argued forcefully for this approach. In his popular book, The Faith of Other Men (1972), subsequently reprinted under the title Patterns of Faith around the World (1998), Smith provided examples of empathetic interpolation by selecting key symbols which he used to help interpret to outsiders the meaning of faith for adherents within four different religious and cultural traditions: Hindus, Buddhists, the Chinese and Muslims. For Hindus, Smith (1998: 35–48) identified the central symbol as the Sanskrit expression ‘tat tvam asi’, which he translated into English as ‘that thou art’. This terse statement points towards a deep religious truth affirming the identity of the individual soul (Atman) with the universal world spirit (Brahman). Smith (1998: 37–8) explained that for Hindus ‘the individual self is the world soul’ and thus ‘each one of you reading this book’ is ‘in some final, cosmic sense, the total and transcendent truth that underlies all being’. Smith interpolated this difficult and seemingly contradictory idea for the Western mind by suggesting that in the areas of art, morality and theology people in European cultures, steeped as they are in Greek thought, seek a correspondence between what they appreciate aesthetically, do morally or believe ultimately and what really is Beautiful, Good and True. The unity sought between what the individual experiences and what is universal is familiar to the Western mind and thus interpolates empathetically what has often appeared enigmatic for Westerners within the Hindu tradition. Smith (1998: 49–62) does the same in the Buddhist tradition by describing a boys’ initiation rite practised in Burma called the Shin Byu ceremony, within the Chinese tradition by exploring the significance of the Yin-Yang symbols of opposition and complementarity (Smith 1998: 77–90), and for Muslims by explaining the Shahadah or testimony of faith, ‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’ (Smith 1998: 63–76). In each case, Smith draws from the everyday experiences common in Western culture to help Westerners gain an appreciation for and an understanding of what otherwise might appear incomprehensible, strange or even wrong in other religious traditions.

Ninian Smart (1984b: 264) exemplified this process when he asked his reader to consider the life and behaviour of Adolf Hitler, who for most people represents a historical figure with whom it would appear impossible to empathize or to cultivate a feeling for. Smart (1984b: 264) asks, ‘Does it mean that I need to be a Hitler-lover to understand him?’ In one sense, Smart (1984b: 264) answers this question affirmatively: ‘If we are indeed to get into his soul we have to drop our preconceptions, and treat Hitler as a human being who had his own thought world.’ This involves following him ‘through his Austrian childhood and relationship to his father and dear mother; through his scholastic failures and outcast status in Vienna; through his years in the trenches fighting in France’. In other words, Smart calls on us to treat Adolf Hitler as a human being, but, he adds, ‘All this is strictly empathy, “getting the feel of”’ (Smart 1984b: 264). Empathy, he argues, does not require a person to condone Hitler’s actions or approve ‘in any way the rightness of his creed’ (Smart 1984b: 264). Smart (1984b: 264) concludes: ‘So we can still deplore his deeds once we have understood them.’ This example shows that for phenomenologists of religion it is always possible to cultivate a feeling for anything human in order to induce understanding. Under the procedure of epoché, it is irrelevant whether or not scholars of religion are able to endorse the beliefs and practices of the communities they are seeking to understand.

A third key component in the phenomenological method is at the same time probably the most controversial: the eidetic intuition. Again, this idea is obtained from Husserl, who used the phrase, which he derived from the Greek eidos meaning form, idea or essence, to see into the meaning of the phenomena encountered while in the state of bracketed consciousness or epoché. By the eidetic intuition Husserl meant that the observer is able to apprehend not just particular entities or even universal classes of entities but their essential meanings as entities and classes of entities. This can occur only when one’s preconceived notions are suspended, thereby enabling the observer to intuit the meaning of what actually manifests itself in the world. Husserl (1969 [1929]: 246) explains:

The multiplicity of possible perceptions, memories, and, indeed, intentional processes of whatever sort, that relate, or can relate, ‘harmoniously’ to one and the same physical thing has (in all its tremendous complication) a quite definite essential style.

For Husserl, the combination of epoché and the eidetic intuition was required for the building up of an objective picture of the phenomena of existence. Epoché allows the observer to suspend theories of the world built on naturalistic assumptions, what Husserl calls the ‘fact world’, in order that consciousness, which forms the basis for all knowledge, can be analysed rigorously. In this way, the observer perceives the world as it comes fresh from the phenomena and is able thereby to intuit new realities or at least achieve a more complete understanding of reality than had been attained previously.

An important and influential figure in the academic study of religions throughout the latter third of the twentieth century was Mircea Eliade, who occupied the Chair of the History of Religions in the University of Chicago from 1958 until his death in 1986. Eliade’s writings cover a wide range of topics from Shamanism to Australian Aboriginal Religions, but his chief contribution to theory and method resulted from his hermeneutical approach to the study of religions, an approach I have argued elsewhere is fully consistent with the phenomenology of religion (Cox 2006: 183–7). I am calling Eliade’s interpretation of the meaning of religion a prime example of the eidetic intuition, although Eliade did not explicitly use the term, nor did he directly rely on Husserl in his writings, although clearly he was aware of Husserl’s understanding of the eidos (Eliade 1969: 36). Nonetheless, Eliade constructed a general theory of religion which he believed applied in all cultural and social contexts, and thus can be regarded as providing a statement about the universal essence of religion.

For Eliade, the keyword that helps the scholar unlock the meaning of religion is the ‘hierophany’, the manifestation of the sacred, which locates for the religious person (homo religiosus) points of orientation around sacred centres. Eliade (1987: 9–13) contended that the sacred is unknown and unknowable in itself, but is revealed through manifestations in profane space and time. Hence, hierophanies are mundane, worldly objects which become the avenues for making known to humans what otherwise would remain utterly incomprehensible. As such, these manifestations, the hierophanies, constitute the subject matter of the history of religions. In his important book, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Eliade (1996: 29) explained that hierophanies reveal a ‘paradoxical coming together of sacred and profane, being and non-being, absolute and relative, the eternal and the becoming’.

In what is arguably his most influential book outlining his theory of religion, The Sacred and the Profane (which significantly carries the sub-title, ‘The Nature of Religion’), Eliade (1987: 20–4) asks his reader to imagine a time when there were no hierophanies, no sacred intrusions in space and time. He called this the chaos created by a profane homogeneity, where everything is the same, where no points of orientation can be located (Eliade 1987: 29–32). This is equivalent to being lost, where a person cannot identify any familiar landmarks and experiences utter despair and hopelessness as a result. In like manner, for the religious person, homogeneity, the inability to detect sacred points of orientation, results in a sense of absolute meaninglessness and total chaos. In the mythic beginnings of history, when space and time were undifferentiated, for religious people, the sacred manifested itself creating meaningful points of orientation. Stories about these primordial hierophanies are told within different religious traditions in their cosmogonic myths, which in turn are re-enacted in rituals.

Because religion primarily is about orientation, certain symbols recur in various forms throughout the world and across history. These primarily have to do with cosmic centres, which connect the layers of the world, the upper levels reaching to the heavens and hence to the gods and the lower levels extending to the foundations of the earth. As such, stories about the sacred are often associated with the sky and are symbolized by mountains, trees, birds, the sun and the moon. Ritual attention frequently is focused on the symbols, which are transmitted in the myths, and thus rituals transport the religious community repeatedly into a time of beginning when the world was ‘founded’. This explains why for Eliade hierophanies, as told in myths and re-enacted in rituals, provide the key concept for interpreting religion universally (Eliade 1987: 63–4; see also Eliade 1975: 5–12).

It should now be evident from my description of the key elements in the phenomenology of religion that, as a method, it aims to promote understanding of religions in particular and of religion in general. Its techniques also attempt to bridge the gap between the subject and the object of religion, the observer and those that are observed, by drawing on common human ways of thinking which can be translated into multiple cultural contexts and individual inter-subjective experiences. The phenomenology of religion also seeks to alert the scholar to potentially distorting biases and unexamined assumptions (both personal and academic) in order that these do not predetermine the outcomes of research.

Criticisms of the phenomenological method and a rebuttal

During the period from around 1950 to 1980, the phenomenology of religion, including its application to historical studies in Eliadean terms, was probably the dominant method employed by scholars of religion. Since 1980 a mounting critique of the method has occurred, which has undermined its influence and, in the view of many contemporary writers, has made it irrelevant to contemporary studies of religion. If this consensus holds, of course, the questions with which I began this chapter investigating the application of the method within African religions are anachronistic. I want to counter this position by arguing that the declaration of the death of phenomenology is premature and that it provides still a cutting-edge approach to the study of religions with implications for new understandings of African religions. Before discussing the African context, I must rehearse some of the principal objections to the phenomenology of religion and respond to them briefly.

One of the main criticisms of phenomenology centres on its claim that by using empathy it can enter into specific religious contexts in order to gain a universal understanding of religious typologies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• INTRODUCTION. BACKGROUND, CONTEXT AND CLARIFICATIONS
• Part I: PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION: THEORY, METHOD AND APPLICATION
• Part II: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SUBJECT AND OBJECT OF STUDY
• Part III: CLASSIFICATIONS AND DEFINITIONS: ON DELIMITING THE FIELD OF INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS
• Part IV: INDIGENOUS RELIGIONS IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS
• Part V: AFFIRMING INDIGENOUS AGENCY
• CONCLUSION. PHENOMENOLOGY AT THE CUTTING EDGE: AFFIRMING LOCAL AGENCY
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint