Marking religion's boundaries: Constitutive terms, orienting tropes, and exegetical fussiness

History of Religions

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 252-276

  Tweed, Thomas A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 36749059317     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/429759     Document Type: Review

References (150)

1. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4;
2. Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 121.
3. Of course, other scholars also have suggested that we drop the term "religion" and stop trying to define it, including William Cantwell Smith in his compelling and influential 1962 volume: "Neither religion in general nor any one of the religions, I will contend, is in itself an intelligible entity, a valid object of inquiry, or of concern whether for the scholar or the man of faith.... My own suggestion is that the word, and the concepts, should be dropped." William Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions (1962; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 12, 50.
4. More recently, like Fitzgerald, other scholars have advocated the abandonment of the term "religion." See Daniel Dubuisson, L'Occident et la religion, mythes, science et idéologie (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 1998);
5. and Dario Sabbatucci, La Prospettiva storico-religiosa (Formello: Edizioni SEAM, 2000).
6. J. H. Leuba, "Introduction to a Psychological Study of Religion," Monist 9 (January 1901): 201.
7. Although it has not happened in religious studies, a discipline's constitutive term can change over time. Geography provides a good example. From the founding of the Association of American Geographers through the 1920s, scholars in that field focused on "human ecology" or the interaction between humans and land. Under the influence of Richard Hartshorne's methodological statement of 1939, "The Nature of Geography," "region" was widely accepted as geography's central term from the 1930s through the 1950s. While some professional geographers endorse "place" or "location," most today would suggest that since the 1960s "space" now functions as the discipline's constitutive term. This disciplinary history is traced in Edward J. Taaffe, "The Spatial View in Context," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64 (March 1974): 1-16;
8. Richard Hartshorne, "The Nature of Geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 29, nos. 3-4 (1939): 173-658.
9. That influential work was reprinted and revised in 1946 and 1959, when its vision of the field still enjoyed widespread acceptance. See Richard Hartshorne, Perspective on the Nature of Geography (Chicago: Rand McNally for Association of American Geographers, 1959).
10. John Hollander, The Night Mirror: Poems (New York: Atheneum, 1971);
11. John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 1;
12. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), pp. 32, 42-43.
13. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980);
14. William Harmon, ed., A Handbook to Literature, 8th ed. (Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000);
15. The Oxford Dictionary of Art, ed. Ian Chilvers and Harold Osborne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
16. "Religion, definition of," in The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 893.
17. Philip Alperson, "Introduction," in What Is Music? An Introduction to the Philosophy of Music, ed. Philip Alperson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), pp. 9-10;
18. "Music," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie and exec. ed. John Tyrrell (New York: Grove Dictionaries, 2000);
19. "Art," in The Dictionary of Art Online, ed. Jane Turner, http://www.groveart.com (November 1998 ed.).
20. David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 304 (emphasis mine);
21. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 281-82.
22. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Definition," http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50059528?single=1&query-type=word& queryword=definition&first=1&max-to-show=10.
23. As the philosopher Alexander Mathews notes in A Diagram of Definition, scholars have enumerated many types of definitions.
24. One philosopher distinguishes circular, coordinative, eliminative, explicative, and contextual definitions; another talks about prescriptive, ostensive, verbal, implicit, recursive, nominal, and real definitions. If nonspecialists - and more than a few specialists - find themselves disoriented by definitions, it seems almost impossible to avoid getting completely lost as they machete their way through the thicket of "definitions of definition." But gaining some clarity on this fundamental point can help in the long run, since readers need to know precisely what scholars are claiming for their definitions. How else can they be in a position to offer informed and judicious assessments? Alexander Matthews, A Diagram of Definition: The Defining of Definition (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1998), p. 45.
25. The first list of types of definitions Mathews cites is from Arthur Pap's Semantics and Necessary Truth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958);
26. the second is from Anthony Flew, "Definition, Dictionary of Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), pp. 86-87.
27. For a helpful anthology of philosophers' reflections on definition that ranges from Plato to Rickert, see Juan C. Sager, ed., Essays on Definition (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000).
28. For a collection of more recent essays on definition, see James H. Fetzer, David Shatz, and George N. Schlesinger, eds., Definitions and Definability: Philosophical Perspectives (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer, 1991).
29. Robert D. Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religion, 2d ed. (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), p. 6.
30. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 85. The propositions and definitions are all listed in the "Appendix," pp. 277-86.
31. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 28.
32. James, p. 31.
33. Robert Borofsky, Fredrik Barth, Richard A. Shweder, Lars Rodseth, and Nomi Maya Stolzenberg, "When: A Conversation about Culture," American Anthropologist 103 (June 2001): 434, 443-44.
34. James H. Leuba, "Appendix: Definitions of Religion and Critical Comments," in James Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future (1912; New York: AMS Press, 1969), pp. 339-63.
35. This framing of the third kind is from Kathleen M. Sands, "Tracking Religion: Religion through the Lens of Critical and Cultural Studies," Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 31 (September 2002): 70.
36. Among the scholars who have raised these five objections, or at least some of them, are W. C. Smith and Fitzgerald. See W. C. Smith (n. 1 above), pp. 1-60, 119-92;
37. Fitzgerald (n. 1 above), pp. 3-32.
38. There have been a number of recent attempts to consider the task of defining religion. For example, see J. Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious"; Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson, eds., What is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998);
39. and William E. Arnal, "Definition," in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCuthcheon (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), pp. 21-34.
40. Chris Jenks argues, "Within the academy, 'visual culture' is a term used conventionally to signify painting, sculpture, design, and architecture; it indicates a late-modern broadening of that previously contained within the definition of 'fine art'." And he and his colleagues broaden the term still further to include advertising, photography, film, television, and propaganda. Chris Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 16.
41. See also David Morgan and Sally Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. xiii.
42. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 47 (Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1952).
43. Fitzgerald, pp. 4, xi. For a discussion of some of the problems with "culture," see Robert Brightman, "Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, and Relexification," Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 509-46.
44. In another important piece, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod tries to "disturb the culture concept" since it has "problematic connotations," including "homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness." Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, N. Mex.: School of American Research Press, 1991), pp. 143, 154, 157.
45. For a critique in cultural geography, see Don Mitchell, "There's No Such Thing as Culture: Towards a Reconceptualization of the Idea of Culture in Geography," Transactions of the Institute of British Geography, n.s., 20 (1995): 102-16.
46. Other scholars who favor abandoning "religion" have also proposed alternative terms, e.g., Dubuisson's "formations cosmographiques." See Dubuisson (n. 1 above).
47. For a cross-cultural study of "religion" and allegedly analogous concepts, see Hans-Michael Haußig, Der Religionsbegriff in den religionen: Studien zum selbst-und religionsverständnis in Hinduismus, Buddhismus, Judentum und Islam (Berlin and Bodenheim bei Mainz: Philo, 1999).
48. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Politics," http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50182868/50182868se4?single=1&query- type=word&queryword=politics&first=1&max-to-show=10&hilite= 5018286se4.
49. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "Ritual," http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50207377?single=1&query-type=word& queryword=ritual&first=1&max-to-show=10;
50. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3, 1, 24.
51. "Soteriology," in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
52. Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 124-27.
53. Melford E. Spiro, "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation," in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock, 1966), p. 88.
54. Max Weber used "ideal types" in a variety of ways in his works. For a helpful theoretical discussion, see Max Weber, "'Objectivity' in the Social Sciences and Social Policy," in Methodology in the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), pp. 49-112.
55. See also Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:4-7, 20-22. Of course, if a category illumines nothing that interests an interpreter, the term will be judged of little use. But this is a matter of degree, and a term will rarely offer no interpretive benefits at all.
56. J. Z. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious" (n. 8 above), p. 281
57. and The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (n. 6 above), p. 893.
58. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
59. David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religions in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), quotation on p. 259;
60. Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (University of Chicago Press, 1998);
61. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and the Mystic East (New York: Routledge, 1999).
62. The British theologian Graham Ward, who also acknowledges the colonialist and capitalist origins of "religion," and its recent commodification, offers a genealogy of the social production of "religion." Yet he resists definition (and use) of the term and - unlike Asad, Chidester, Lopez, and King-predicts and champions a theological turn. "The turn to theology offers the only possible future for faith traditions," Ward has suggested, although those traditions will need to avoid fetishizing their faith as they do battle in the ever more widespread and ferocious "culture wars" that will follow. Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. vii-5.
63. "Religion, definition of" (n. 6 above).
64. Peter Gay, "Introduction," The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. xiii.
65. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 62, 55, 56.
66. Freud, pp. 55, 42.
67. This is not to say that tropic analysis is not useful in the sciences too. Consider the work of Gerald Holton, the scholar of physics and historian of science, who wrote the influential Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
68. In a more recent piece, Holton proposed that "in studying major scientists, I have repeatedly found the same courageous tendency to place one's bets early on a few non-testable but highly motivating presuppositions, which I refer to as themata." Holton goes on to note how certain tropes (or "themata") - including symmetry and unity - functioned in the work of Albert Einstein. Gerald Holton, "Einstein and the Cultural Roots of Modern Science," in Science in Culture, ed. Peter Galison, Stephen R. Graubard, and Everett Mendelsohn (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), p. 24.
69. James W. Fernandez, "Introduction: Confluents of Inquiry," in Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. James W. Fernandez (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 6, 7.
70. See also Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn's earlier, interdisciplinary volume, which explored the role of metaphor and metonymy in constructing "cultural models" that organize cultural knowledge: Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
71. A very helpful account of the major approaches to the theory of metaphor, especially in the humanities, chronicles four stages from the publication of I. A. Richards's Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1936
72. to the appearance of John Searle's Expression and Meaning in 1979:
73. Wendell V. Harris, "Metaphor," in Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1992), pp. 222-31.
74. See Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), pp. 245-64.
75. Richard Rorty, "Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor," in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 162-72;
76. and Nancy K. Frankenberry, "Religion as a 'Mobile Army of Metaphors,'" in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy K. Frankenberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 171-87.
77. Paul Friedrich, "Polytropy," in Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor, pp. 17-55.
78. Quinn provides the useful example of the indirect metaphor from Eliot's poem. Edward Quinn, "Metaphor," in A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms (New York: Facts on File, 1999), pp. 192-93.
79. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), pp. 6, 4; Freud, p. 55.
80. G. W. F. Hegel, The Christian Religion: The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Part III, The Revelatory, Consummate, Absolute Religion, ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979), p. 2;
81. F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religions of India (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879), p. 1;
82. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 11;
83. Peter A. Angeles, "Definition," in Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1981), pp. 56-59.
84. Davidson, p. 261;
85. Harris, "Metaphor," p. 224;
86. Max Black, "Metaphor," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 55 (1954-55): 288;
87. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 67.
88. My own view of tropes, and metaphor in particular, has been shaped to some extent by the Davidsonian tradition's emphasis on metaphor's uses. However, I also have profited from the "interactionist" theory of I. A. Richards, Max Black, Nelson Goodman, and others, as well as from Robert J. Fogelin's reflections on figures, esp. his defense of metaphor as "elliptical similes," and Eva Feder Kittay's refinement of the interactionist theory and proposal of a "perspectival" theory of metaphor. Robert J. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988);
89. Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
90. Empirical and theoretical studies in cognitive science also offer interesting angles of vision on metaphor. On metaphors as "class-inclusion assertions" see Sam Gluckberg and Boaz Keysar, "Understanding Metaphorical Comparisons: Beyond Similarity," Psychological Review 97, no. 1 (1990): 3-18.
91. For an introduction and overview, see Matthew S. McGlone, "Metaphor," in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed. Lynn Nadel, vol. 3 (New York and Tokyo: Nature Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 15-18;
92. and Dedre Gentner and Brian Bowdle, "Metaphor Processing, Psychology of," in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 3:18-21.
93. For a summary of research and theory on analogy more broadly, including metaphor, see Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, eds., The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2001).
94. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), pp. 71-73;
95. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 29.
96. Turner endorses the "interaction view" of I. A. Richards and Max Black (pp. 29-33). (Black, "Metaphor"; I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric [New York: Oxford University Press, 1936]).
97. I have reservations about Black's talk about "filters" and Goodman's talk about "schemes" for a variety of reasons, esp. because I am persuaded by Donald Davidson's critique of the usual notions about divergent "conceptual schemes" and Terry Godlove's challenge to the strong version of the "framework model" of religious belief. See Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Davidson, Inquiries, pp. 183-98;
98. and Terry F. Godlove, Jr., Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
99. Fernandez, "Introduction," in Beyond Metaphor, p. 5;
100. Sherry Ortner, "On Key Symbols," American Anthropologist 75 (1973): 1338-46;
101. James W. Fernandez, "The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture," Current Anthropology 15 (1974): 119-45;
102. Turner, pp. 25-26. As Turner notes, he borrowed the term "root metaphor" from Stephen Pepper: Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942), pp. 91-92.
103. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1 (1871 London: John Murray, 1920), p. 424;
104. James Martineau, A Study of Religion: Its Sources and Contents, 2 vols., rev. American ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1888), p. 1;
105. Cornelis Petrus Tiele, Elements of a Science of Religion: Morphological and Ontological, vol. 1 (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1897), pp. 4-6;
106. Robert Crawford, What Is Religion? (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 201;
107. Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 178;
108. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
109. Atran actually uses the term "commitment," not belief: "Roughly, religion is (1) a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception." For examples of cognitive approaches, see E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
110. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001);
111. Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
112. and Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
113. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 142;
114. Rappaport (n. 17 above), p. 3;
115. Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 98, 104;
116. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, vol. 1 (1821-22; New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 12-18;
117. Otto, p. 12;
118. David Hume, Dialogues and Natural History of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 140.
119. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), (gefühl and anschauung) pp. 44-45, (emfingunsweise) p. 241.
120. John Oman translates the latter as "type of feeling" but the term might be better rendered as "type of experience," to distinguish it from the other two words that Schleiermacher uses most often to mark the essential nature of religion: feeling and intuition. Otto, p. 5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), pp. 8-18;
121. Müller, pp. 20-21
122. Frank Byron Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1896), pp. 9-10.
123. Hume, p. 159
124. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 7-8;
125. George M. Stratten, The Psychology of the Religious Life (London: G. Allen, 1911), p. 343;
126. H. Bosanquet, quoted in Leuba, Psychological Study (n. 14 above), p. 353;
127. J. Smith, "Religion, Religions, Religious" (n. 8 above), p. 280.
128. Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religion (1901; Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981), p. 171;
129. James (n. 11 above), p. 31;
130. Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of a Science of Religion, vol. 2 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1899), p. 14;
131. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 44.
132. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 280;
133. Tylor, Primitive Culture;
134. Müller, Origin and Growth.
135. Freud (n. 24 above), pp. 55-56;
136. Durkheim, p. 44
137. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 90;
138. Gerald James Larson, "Prolegomenon to a Theory of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46 (December 1978): 443.
139. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 3-25;
140. Ninian Smart, The World's Religions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 9;
141. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 11;
142. Larson, p. 443. Wittgenstein did not employ "form of life" to describe religion in Philosophical Investigations, but others, including Larson, have applied that phrase in their accounts of religion. Wittgenstein did talk a good deal about religion in terms of pictures, however: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 55, 59, 63, 66-68, 71-72.
143. See also Hillary Putnam's insightful analysis of Wittgenstein's use of "picture" as an orienting metaphor for understanding religion: Hillary Putnam, "Wittgenstein on Religious Belief," in On Community, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), pp. 56-75.
144. Hegel (n. 31 above), pp. 33, 35-36.
145. As the translator Peter C. Hodgson notes, vorstellung "produces synthetic images based on sense perception" (p. xxv). It is in this sense that it can be understood as "pictorial thinking" or "representation." Van. A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 229-80.
146. In an extremely useful typology, Harvey distinguishes "beam" projection theories and "grid" projection theories. I have borrowed the first term but not the second, though not because I don't think both provide insights. Many interpreters whom Harvey classifies as grid theorists I have classified in other ways, although I see his point. While some of his grid theorists (e.g., Berger, Geertz, or Marx) do appeal to the indirect metaphor of a grid, I classify them here by noting what I take to be the direct metaphor that orients their definition: for instance, worldview, system, or narcotic. Of course, as I have noted, multiple tropes are usually at work in the most complex and satisfying definitions. Durkheim, p. 44; Spiro (n. 19 above), p. 96;
147. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986; Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 1995);
148. Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 36-37, 70, 432;
149. G. Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 2 vols. (1933; New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 2:393-402; Eliade, pp. 20-65.
150. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Meridian, 1960), p. 16; Turner, p. 25.