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respectivelor 2014 de către Fundația Wenner-Gren pentru Cercetare Antropologică. Toate drepturile rezervate. 0011-3204/2014/55S10-0016 $10.00. DOI:
10.1086/678290
logica este modelată de diferite cauzalități și urmează individuale, nu este concepută pentru includerea acelor dimensiuni
diferite temporalities. Fiecare oferă propriile sale tipuri sociologice și semiotice ale religiei care le dau efectul istoric pe care
aș dori să îl păstrez în centrul proiectului. Și această chestiune
de prețuri pe care ar putea atrage noi instituții, practici suplimentară ca întreg izvorăște din viziunea diferită a lui Joel Robbins
și idei. 3 asupra comparației sub forma unei antropologii a cre știnătă ții (a se
Interacțiunile acestora sunt provocate parțial de vedea
tipurile distincte de probleme pe care materialitatea le
ridică pentru organi sociali - zații, practici curente,
cuvinte vorbite și scrise, per - emoții sonale și idei. 4
Deoarece instituțiile, practicile populare și scripturile sunt
mediate semiotic în diferite moduri, acestea sunt de
asemenea predispuse să dezvolte ideologii semiotice
divergente. Acestea sunt for țele majore „interne” pentru
religie (pentru a pune acest lucru în scurt metraj brut)
care conferă o formă distinctivă istoriei sale. Acestea sunt
complicate și mai mult atunci când sunt confruntate cu
forțele care se definesc ca fiind „externe” sau chiar op -
reprezentate de religie, cum ar fi sus ținătorii bol șevici ai
materialismului ateist discutați mai jos. Dar este
important să ținem cont de faptul că, la fel ca în lumea
socială în general, conflictul și contra - dicția sunt părți
inevitabile ale oricărei religii, indiferent cât de
hegemonice ar putea părea, și acestea nu se limitează la
situații noi introduse doar de străini.
Pentru a recunoaște o astfel de temporalities
distinctă, logică,
iar causalitățile, antropologii trebuie să fie etnografice. Dar nu
ne putem opri din a fi doar etnografici: trebuie să ne
gândim și cu alte observații decât cele particulare. Așa cum
am argumentat în altă parte, cele mai puternice detalii ale
noastre nu cresc nici de la perioada de timp a
lucrătorului pe teren, nici de la privirea îndepărtată a
teroriștilor, ci de la deplasarea noastră constantă între
acești poli (Keane 2003a). În opinia mea, aceasta
înseamnă că trebuie să reinventăm efortul de
comunicare - parativ pentru a învăța unul de la celălalt.
Pentru ca o - tropologie să fie comparată, antropologii
trebuie să poată lucra cu etnografiile celuilalt. 5 Cu un
astfel de
you really hold the position, then, that all peasants, the most eloquent preachers of the truth and the life-
think the same, [peasants] who have not read Professor giving nature of our holy Orthodox faith” (Greene
Golubin- skii, or the Sinaksarist of Nicodemus? . . . 2010:34).
The majority of the faithful (that is, primarily the And yet, however otherworldly the stance expected of
peasantry) understand relics as uncorrupted bodies, not the faithful, the immediate materiality of the saint’s body
as the remains of bones. No one would have believed in in this world still mattered. Here, I think the
bones, no matter how many of them there were. You commissar, crude though his theology (and sociology)
cannot persuade some na¨ıve peasant woman to worship may have been, was re- sponding to a real tension
bones and expect a “miracle” from them. No one calls within the church’s position. As one visitor to a shrine
bones relics. It is in vain that you turn to philology wrote around 1900, “The tangibility, so to speak, of the
for help. (Greene 2010:18–19) relics makes a very powerful impression on those who
pray to them and touch them. Everything is up front
And so tumultuous revolution, following on the heels and straight-forward here, and there is no room for
of devastating world war, instigated an earnest argument flights of fancy. See and believe” (Greene 2010:39). The
about materiality, belief, and religious practice. Running pow- erful effects of real, material relics, which could
through this debate are the threads of three contending compel un- believers and heretics to accept Orthodoxy,
stances toward the materiality of religious things: those were widely re- ported in popular writings. In this
of the atheist revo- lutionaries, those of the learned respect, perhaps, the commissar was not so far off: the
clergy, and those of the peas- antry, present here only as materiality of the relic was essential to its persuasiveness
shadowy figures imagined by these writers. The (and not only to the uneducated and the rural people who
revolutionaries’ attack on the relic clearly man- ifests an were often the focus of the critics).7 If the commissar
explicit ideology of modernity and materialism. Yet the similarly counted on that very materiality— revealed, in
iconoclasm of the Bolsheviks converges with the defense of this case, to be the decayed state of the body— to
the relics in some important respects. Both appeal to persuade the viewer of the untruth of religion, the point
rea- son. Both insist on a distinction between material remained that the evidence of the senses was a powerful
things and something else, an agency or meaning that is and, it would seem, direct effect of concrete
not material. Both consider the peasant, in contrast to experience.8
those who have reason, to be ignorant. That ignorance is Like the accusation of fetishism launched in the
manifested in prac- tices that reveal the peasant to Protestant
misconstrue the true nature of material things. In different West against Roman Catholics and the colonial
ways, moreover, each sees that ignorance as posing a real missions against non-Christians, the imputation of
threat. In the bishop’s view, peasant misunderstanding ignorance about the true nature of material things by
brings harm to the church.6 The commis- sar, for his part, those who take them to have “magical” powers—one
exemplifies the position of the revolutionaries: common manifestation of a clash between semiotic ideologies—
superstitions make workers and peasants susceptible to the contains an intriguing hint of anxiety (Keane 2007). By
depredations of the church as it enriches itself at their semiotic ideology, I mean people’s as- sumptions,
expense. Here too, misguided understanding of materiality either tacit or explicit, that guide how they do or do not
leads to social harm. perceive or seek out signs in the world and respond to
Greene remarks that the commissar was “better skilled them. Those assumptions help shape people’s expectations
in dialectics than in doctrine,” because the official about what is likely to be good evidence for a causal
position of the church since the seventeenth century chain to be tracked down, an intention to be construed,
or a code to be deciphered. Given one semiotic ideology,
had been to de- emphasize incorruption; the real proof
a bolt of light- ning is a candidate for being a sign of
of a relic was that it had effected miracles (Greene
divine intentions and thus requires a serious ritual
2010:19–20). Moreover, by the nineteenth century, as the
response; given another, it man- ifests nothing more than
church increased its efforts to en- lighten and educate the
atmospheric conditions, warranting no further attention
laity, it emphasized what we could call the more
beyond, perhaps, installing a lightning rod. Note, then,
representational stance toward relics. That is, relics are
that semiotic ideology is hardly a peculiarity of any
best understood as teaching the faithful about their
particular historical moment (such as modernity) or
spiritual salvation rather than bringing worldly benefits.
social world (such as the Protestant West).
Even when relics are miraculously preserved, their primary
The word “ideology” is fraught with ambiguity (see
value was as evidence of something else, their
Ea- gleton 1991). I want to be clear that I am not using
pedagogical or de- monstrative function to inculcate it in the
doctrine or invigorate faith. Thus, one priest wrote in
1896, “by their silence, [they] are 7. With little apparent sense of irony, in later years the Soviet
state came to appreciate the persuasive power of the incorruptible
6. More than a century later, in the religiously pluralistic Volga body in its own terms, as a product of modern science, when it
region republic of Marii El, Orthodox clergy tended to avoid embalmed Lenin for eternity (nor was this an isolated case of
polemics with other faiths, focusing instead on the “struggle of the socialist and postsocialist states appropriating the powerful
‘teaching of the Holy Fathers’ against the ‘teaching of the presence of bodies for political and ideological ends; see Verdery
grandmothers’” (Luehrmann 2010:69). 1999; for a striking comparison in a post- socialist Buddhist
context, see Bernstein 2011).
8. The uncorrupted condition of the relic also has a more
specific doctrinal function in Orthodoxy, prefiguring the bodily
resurrection of the flesh on Judgment Day (Greene 2010:33).
Keane Materiality and Its Ethical Affordances S315
common sense of “false consciousness” or “deception” or Bolshevik atheists were former clerics (Peris 1995). Others hailed from
that of an explicit doctrine or program. Yet the debates clerical backgrounds, notably P. A. Kra-
over se- miotic ideology, between Calvinists and ancestral
ritualists, or Orthodox bishops and commissars, often do
turn on explicit doctrines and accusations of false
consciousness. Doctrines and delusions are part of the
story, just not the whole story. In order to sort them
out, we need to attend to the sociality and politics that
enter into distinctive responses to signs and to other
people’s purported misreading of signs.9
The bishop, the commissar, and the peasant do not
simply represent three distinct positions. They represent
articulated responses to one another, each position the
outcome of imag- ining the other’s position, the other’s
accusations, and thus, how one appears in the eyes of
the other. Here’s where the bishop and the commissar
share some common ground. Liv- ing in a world of
debates and doctrines, newspapers and books, schools
and ministries, and mandated to correct the errors of
others, the bishop and commissar are constantly
articulating their semiotic ideologies in explicit verbal
terms. They are engaged in and committed to projects
of objectifi- cation and are quite self-conscious about the
surrounding presence of people who (they assume) do
not objectify or take a reflective distance on things in
quite the same way.
The real differences among semiotic ideologies in this
case may lie less along the doctrinal divides between East
and West, or pre- and post-Reformation, or even pre-
and post-revo- lution, than those between the explicit
concepts of clerical (and revolutionary) high theory on
the one hand and the largely unspoken, or at least
unheard, implications of practices (whether humble or
elite) on the other. I will return to this shortly. What I
want to stress here is that the bishop, the commissar,
and the peasant, in certain broad respects, all inhabit the
same social world and speak the same language. Most of
all, their actions and reactions to one another play out
as they navigate a shared landscape of cities and rural
districts, educated elites and illiterate masses, churches
and state institutions, icons and propaganda posters,
rituals and political theater. Like the inhabitants of the
heteroglossic world depicted by Bakhtin (1981), they may
be moving within more or less carefully patrolled social
boundaries, facing dif- ferent life chances and legal
restrictions, thinking and speaking in quite distinct registers
and dialects—but for all that, they are not strangers to
one another.
In fact, as I will argue below, we cannot understand
their explicit claims without considering the context in
which each remains at least a virtual participant in
dialogue and debate with the other.10 As Sonja
Luehrmann remarks of interde-