Geertz, Clifford

Religion as a cultural system

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Geertz, Clifford, Religion as a cultural system. In: The interpretation of cultures: selected essays, Geertz, Clifford,
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Chapter 4/Religion
As a Cultural System
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particularlanguage is not more hopeless than the attempt to havea religion that shall be no religion in particular. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has amarked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special
and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries
it propounds are another world to live in; and anotherworld to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly
over into it or no—is what we mean by having a religion.
SANTAYANA, Reason in ReligionI

Two characteristics of anthropological work on religion accomplishedsince the second world war strike me as curious when such work isplaced against that carried out just before and just after the first. One isthat it has made no theoretical advances of major importance. It is living off the conceptual capital of its ancestors, adding very little, save acertain empirical enrichment, to it. The second is that it draws what
concepts it does use from a very narrowly defined intellectual tradition.
There is Durkheim, Weber, Freud, or Malinowski, and in any particular
work the approach of one or two of these transcendent figures is followed, with but a few marginal corrections necessitated by the naturaltendency to excess of seminal minds or by the expanded body of reliable descriptive data. But virtually no one even thinks of looking
elsewhere—to philosophy, history, law, literature, or the "harder"

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sciences—as these men themselves looked, for analytical ideas. And it
occurs to me, also, that these two curious characteristics are not unrelated.
If the anthropological study of religion is in fact in a state of general
stagnation, I doubt that it will be set going again by producing moreminor variations on classical theoretical themes. Yet one more meticulous case in point for such well-established propositions as that ancestor
worship supports the jural authority of elders, that initiation rites aremeans for the establishment of sexual identity and adult status, that ritual groupings reflect political oppositions, or that myths provide charters for social institutions and rationalizations of social privilege, may
well finally convince a great many people, both inside the profession
and out, that anthropologists are, like theologians, firmly dedicated toproving the indubitable. In art, this solemn reduplication of the achievements of accepted masters is called academicism; and I think this is theproper name for our malady also. Only if we abandon, in a phrase of
Leo Steinberg's, that sweet sense of accomplishment which comes fromparading habitual skills and address ourselves to problems sufficiently
unclarified as to make discovery possible, can we hope to achieve work
which will not just reincarnate that of the great men of the first quarterof this century, but match it. 1
The way to do this is not to abandon the established traditions of social anthropology in this field, but to widen them. At least four of thecontributions of the men who, as I say, dominate our thought to thepoint of parochializing it—Durkheim's discussion of the nature of thesacred, Weber's Verstehenden methodology, Freud's parallel between
personal rituals and collective ones, and Malinowski's exploration of the
distinction between religion and common sense—seem to me inevitable
starting-points for any useful anthropological theory of religion. But
they are starting-points only. To move beyond them we must place themin a much broader context of contemporary thought than they, in and ofthemselves, encompass. The dangers of such a procedure are obvious:
arbitrary eclecticism, superficial theory-mongering, and sheer intellectual confusion. But I, at least, can see no other road of escape from
what, referring to anthropology more generally, Janowitz has called thedead hand of competence.2
1
L. Steinberg, "The Eye Is Part of the Mind," Partisan Review 70 (1953):
194-212.
2
M. Janowitz. "Anthropology and the Social Sciences," Current Anthropology
4(I963):I39, 146-154.

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89

In working toward such an expansion of the conceptual envelope inwhich our studies take place, one can, of course, move in a great number of directions; and perhaps the most important initial problem is to
avoid setting out, like Stephen Leacock's mounted policeman, in all ofthem at once. For my pan, I shall confine my effort to developing what,
following Parsons and Shils, I refer to as the cultural dimension of religious analysis.3 The term "culture" has by now acquired a certain auraof ill-repute in social anthropological circles because of the multiplicity
of its referents and the studied vagueness with which it has all too often
been invoked. (Though why it should suffer more for these reasons than"social structure" or "personality" is something I do not entirely understand.) In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither
multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms bymeans of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop theirknowledge about and attitudes toward life. Of course, terms such as"meaning," "symbol," and "conception" cry out for explication. Butthat is precisely where the widening, the broadening, and the expanding
come in. If Langer is right that "the concept of meaning, in all its varieties, is the dominant philosophical concept of our time," that "sign,
symbol, denotation, signification, communication . . . are our (intellectual] stock in trade," it is perhaps time that social anthropology, andparticularly that part of it concerned with the study of religion, becameaware of the fact.4

II

As we are to deal with meaning, let us begin with a paradigm: viz., thatsacred symbols function to synthesize a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things insheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In religious belief and practice a group's ethos is rendered intellectually rea3
T. Parsons and E. Shils. Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge,
Mass., 1951).
4
S. Langer, Philosophical Sketches (Baltimore, 1962).

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

sonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to theactual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view isrendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an
actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a
way of life. This confrontation and mutual confirmation has two fundamental effects. On the one hand, it objectivizes moral and aesthetic
preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit
in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given theunalterable shape of reality. On the other, it supports these received beliefs about the world's body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic
sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth. Religious symbols
formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a
specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain
each with the borrowed authority of the other.
Phrasing aside, this much may perhaps be granted. The notion that
religion tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects
images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience is hardly
novel. But it is hardly investigated either, so that we have very little
idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is accomplished.
We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people
almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature todemonstrate it. But the theoretical framework which would enable us toprovide an analytic account of it, an account of the son we can provide
for lineage segmentation, political succession, labor exchange, or the socialization of the child, does not exist.
Let us, therefore, reduce our paradigm to a definition, for, although it
is notorious that definitions establish nothing, in themselves they do, if
they are carefully enough constructed, provide a useful orientation, or
reorientation, of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them canbe an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of inquiry. They have the useful virtue of cxplicitness: they commit themselves in a way discursive prose, which, in this field especially, is always
liable to substitute rhetoric for argument, does not. Without further ado,
then, a religion is:(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, andlong-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptionsof a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with suchan aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

Religion As a Cultural System91

a system of symbols which acts to . . .
Such a tremendous weight is being put on the term "symbol" herethat our first move must be to decide with some precision what we aregoing to mean by it. This is no easy task, for, rather like "culture,""symbol" has been used to refer to a great variety of things, often anumber of them at the same time.
In some hands it is used for anything which signifies something else
to someone: dark clouds are the symbolic precursors of an on-coming
rain. In others it is used only for explicitly conventional signs of one
sort or another: a red flag is a symbol of danger, a white of surrender.
In others it is confined to something which expresses in an oblique andfigurative manner that which cannot be stated in a direct and literal one,so that there are symbols in poetry but not in science, and symbolic
logic is misnamed. In yet others, however, it is used for any object, act,
event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle .for a conception—
the conception is the symbol's "meaning"—and that is the approach I
shall follow here.5 The number 6, written, imagined, laid out as a row
of stones, or even punched into the program tapes of a computer, is asymbol. But so also is the Cross, talked about, visualized, shaped worriedly in air or fondly fingered at the neck, the expanse of painted canvas called "Guernica" or the bit of painted stone called a churinga, theword "reality," or even the morpheme "-ing." They are all symbols, orat least symbolic elements, because they are tangible formulations ofnotions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs.
To undertake the study of cultural activity—activity in which symbolism forms the positive content—is thus not to abandon social analysis
for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander
there forever in a haze of "Cognitions," "Affections," "Conations," andother elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, andutilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they areas public as marriage and as observable as agriculture.
They are not, however, exactly the same thing; or, more precisely,
the symbolic dimension of social events is, like the psychological, itself
theoretically abstractable from those events as empirical totalities.
There is still, to paraphrase a remark of Kenneth Burke's, a difference5

S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 4th ed. (Cambridge. Mass., I960).

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES
between building a house and drawing up a plan for building a house,
and reading a poem about having children by marriage is not quite thesame thing as having children by marriage.6 Even though the buildingof the house may proceed under the guidance of the plan or—a lesslikely occurrence—the having of children may be motivated by a reading of the poem, there is something to be said for not confusing ourtraffic with symbols with our traffic with objects or human beings, forthese latter are not in themselves symbols, however often they may
function as such.7 No matter how deeply interfused the cultural, the social, and the psychological may be in the everyday life of houses, farms,
poems, and marriages, it is useful to distinguish them in analysis, and,so doing, to isolate the generic traits of each against the normalized
background of the other two.
So far as culture patterns, that is, systems or complexes of symbols,
are concerned, the generic trait which is of first importance for us hereis that they are extrinsic sources of information. By "extrinsic," I mean
only that—unlike genes, for example—they lie outside the boundariesof the individual organism as such in that intersubjective world of common understandings into which all human individuals are born, in
which they pursue their separate careers, and which they leave persisting behind them after they die. By "sources of information," I mean
only that—like genes—they provide a blueprint or template in terms ofwhich processes external to themselves can be given a definite form. As
the order of bases in a strand of DNA forms a coded program, a set of
instructions, or a recipe, for the synthesis of the structurally complex
proteins which shape organic functioning, so culture patterns provide
such programs for the institution of the social and psychological processes which shape public behavior. Though the sort of information andthe mode of its transmission are vastly different in the two cases, thiscomparison of gene and symbol is more than a strained analogy of thefamiliar "social heredity" sort. It is actually a substantial relationship,
for it is precisely because of the fact that genetically programmed processes are so highly generalized in men, as compared with lower ani6
K. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 1941), p. 9.
7The reverse mistake, especially common among neo-Kantians such as Cassirer, of taking symbols to be identical with, or "constitutive of," their referents isequally pernicious. (Cf. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (NewHaven: 1953-1957), 3 vols.) "One can point to the moon with one's finger,"some, probably well-invented, Zen Master is supposed to have said, "but to takeone's finger f or the moon is to be a fool."Religion As a Cultural System

93

mals, that culturally programmed ones are so important; only because
human behavior is so loosely determined by intrinsic sources of information that extrinsic sources are so vital. To build a dam a beaver
needs only an appropriate site and the proper materials—his mode ofprocedure is shaped by his physiology. But man, whose genes are silent
on the building trades, needs also a conception of what it is to build adam, a conception he can get only from some symbolic source—a blueprint, a textbook, or a string of speech by someone who already knows
how dams are built—or, of course, from manipulating graphic or linguistic elements in such a way as to attain for himself a conception ofwhat dams are and how they are built.
This point is sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural
patterns are "models," that they are sets of symbols whose relations to
one another "model" relations among entities, processes or what-haveyou in physical, organic, social, or psychological systems by "paralleling," "imitating," or "simulating" them.8 The term "model" has, however, two senses—an "of" sense and a "for" sense—and though theseare but aspects of the same basic concept they are very much worth distinguishing for analytic purposes. In the first, what is stressed is the manipulation of symbol structures so as to bring them, more or lessclosely, into parallel with the pre-established nonsymbolic system, as
when we grasp how dams work by developing a theory of hydraulics orconstructing a flow chart. The theory or chart models physical relationships in such a way—that is, by expressing their structure in synoptic
form—as to render them apprehensible; it is a model of "reality." In
the second, what is stressed is the manipulation of the nonsymbolic systems in terms of the relationships expressed in the symbolic, as when
we construct a dam according to the specifications implied in an hydraulic theory or the conclusions drawn from a flow chart. Here, thetheory is a model under whose guidance physical relationships are organized: it is a model for "reality." For psychological and social systems,
and for cultural models that we would not ordinarily refer to as "theories," but rather as "doctrines," "melodies," or "rites," the case is in noway different. Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information
sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns havean intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.
8

K. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge, 1952).

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It is, in fact, this double aspect which sets true symbols off fromother sorts of significative forms. Models for are found, as the gene example suggests, through the whole order of nature; for wherever there is
a communication of pattern, such programs are, in simple logic, required. Among animals, imprint learning is perhaps the most striking
example, because what such learning involves is the automatic presentation of an appropriate sequence of behavior by a model animal in thepresence of a learning animal which serves, equally automatically, tocall out and stabilize a certain set of responses genetically built into thelearning animal.9 The communicative dance of two bees, one of which
has found nectar and the other of which seeks it, is another, somewhat
different, more complexly coded, example.10 Craik has even suggested
that the thin trickle of water which first finds its way down from amountain spring to the sea and smooths a little channel for the greater
volume of water that follows after it plays a sort of model for function.11 But models of—linguistic, graphic, mechanical, natural, etc.,
processes which function not to provide sources of information in termsof which other processes can be patterned, but to represent those patterned processes as such, to express their structure in an alternative
medium—are much rarer and may perhaps be confined, among living
animals, to man. The perception of the structural congruence between
one set of processes, activities, relations, entities, and so on, and another set for which it acts as a program, so that the program can betaken as a representation, or conception—a symbol—of the programmed, is the essence of human thought. The intertransposability ofmodels for and models of which symbolic formulation makes possible isthe distinctive characteristic of our mentality.
. . . to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods
and motivations in men by . . .
So far as religious symbols and symbol systems are concerned this intertransposability is clear. The endurance, courage, independence, perseverance, and passionate willfulness in which the vision quest practices
the Plains Indian are the same flamboyant virtues by which he attempts
9

K. Lorenz, King Salomon's Ring (London. 1952).
K. von Frisch, "Dialects in the Language of the Bees," Scientific American.
August 1962.
11
Craik, Nature of Explanation.
10

Religion As a Cultural System95

to live: while achieving a sense of revelation he stabilizes a sense of
direction.12 The consciousness of defaulted obligation, secreted guilt,
and, when a confession is obtained, public shame in which Manus' seance rehearses him are the same sentiments that underlie the sort of
duty ethic by which his property-conscious society is maintained: thegaining of an absolution involves the forging of a conscience.l3 And thesame self-discipline which rewards a Javanese mystic staring fixedly
into the flame of a lamp with what he takes to be an intimation of divinity drills him in that rigorous control of emotional expression which
is necessary to a man who would follow a quietistic style of life.14
Whether one sees the conception of a personal guardian spirit, a familytutelary, or an immanent God as synoptic formulations of the characterof reality or as templates for producing reality with such a character
seems largely arbitrary, a matter of which aspect, the model of or model
for, one wants for the moment to bring into focus. The concrete symbols involved—one or another mythological figure materializing in thewilderness, the skull of the deceased household head hanging censoriously in the rafters, or a disembodied "voice in the stillness" soundlessly chanting enigmatic classical poetry—point in either direction.
They both express the world's climate and shape it.
They shape it by inducing in the worshipper a certain distinctive setof dispositions (tendencies, capacities, propensities, skills, habits, liabilities, pronenesses) which lend a chronic character to the flow of his activity and the quality of his experience. A disposition describes not an
activity or an occurrence but a probability of an activity being performed or an occurrence occurring in certain circumstances: "When a
cow is said to be a ruminant, or a man is said to be a cigarette-smoker,
it is not being said that the cow is ruminating now or that the man issmoking a cigarette now. To be a ruminant is to tend to ruminate fromtime to time, and to be a cigarette-smoker is to be in the habit of smoking cigarettes." 15 Similarly, to be pious is not to be performing something we would call an act of piety, but to be liable to perform suchacts. So, too, with the Plains Indian's bravura, the Manus' compunctiousness, or the Javanese's quietism, which, in their contexts, form thesubstance of piety. The virtue of this sort of view of what are usually12

R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New York, 1924).
R. F. Fortune. Manus Religion (Philadelphia, 1935).
C. Geertz. The Religion of Java (Glencoe,111., I960).
15
G. Ryle. The Concept of Mind (London and New York. 1949).
13

14

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

called "mental traits" or, if the Cartesianism is unavowed, "psychological forces" (both unobjectionable enough terms in themselves) is that itgets them out of any dim and inaccessible realm of private sensation
into that same well-lit world of observables in which reside the brittleness of glass, the inflammability of paper, and, to return to the metaphor, the dampness of England.
So far as religious activities are concerned (and learning a myth byheart is as much a religious activity as detaching one's finger at the
knuckle), two somewhat different sorts of disposition are induced bythem: moods and motivations.
A motivation is a persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in certain sorts of situations, the "sorts" being commonly very heterogenous
and rather ill-defined classes in all three cases:
On hearing that a man is vain [i.e.. motivated by vanity] we expect him tobehave in certain ways, namely to talk a lot about himself, to cleave to thesociety of the eminent, to reject criticisms, to seek the footlights and to disengage himself from conversations about (he merits of others. We expect
him to indulge in roseate daydreams about his own successes, to avoid recalling past failures and to plan for his own advancement. To be vain is totend to act in these and innumerable other kindred ways. Certainly we also
expect the vain man to feel certain pangs and flutters in certain situations;
we expect him to have an acute sinking feeling when an eminent person forgets his name, and to feel buoyant of heart and light of toe on hearing of
the misfortunes of his rivals. But feelings of pique and buoyancy are notmore directly indicative of vanity than are public acts of boasting or private
acts of daydreaming. 16

Similarly for any motivations. As a motive, "flamboyant courage" consists in such enduring propensities as to fast in the wilderness, to conduct solitary raids on enemy camps, and to thrill to the thought ofcounting coup. "Moral circumspection" consists in such ingrained tendencies as to honor onerous promises, to confess secret sins in the faceof severe public disapproval, and to feel guilty when vague and generalized accusations are made at seances. And "dispassionate tranquility"
consists in such persistent inclinations as to maintain one's poise comehell or high water, to experience distaste in the presence of even moderate emotional displays, and to indulge in contentless contemplations offeatureless objects. Motives are thus neither acts (that is, intentional be16
Ibid., p. 86. Quoted by permission of Barnes & Noble Books and Hutchinson
Publishing Group Ltd.

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97

haviors) nor feelings, but liabilities to perform particular classes of act
or have particular classes of feeling. And when we say that a man is religious, that is, motivated by religion, this is at least pan—though only
part—of what we mean.
Another part of what we mean is that he has, when properly stimulated, a susceptibility to fall into certain moods, moods we sometimes
lump together under such covering terms as "reverential," "solemn," or"worshipful." Such generalized rubrics actually conceal, however, theenormous empirical variousness of the dispositions involved, and, infact, tend to assimilate them to the unusually grave tone of most of ourown religious life. The moods that sacred symbols induce, at different
times and in different places, range from exultation to melancholy, fromself-confidence to self-pity, from an incorrigible playfulness to a bland
listlessness—to say nothing of the erogenous power of so many of theworld's myths and rituals. No more than there is a single sort of motivation one can call piety is there a single sort of mood one can call worshipful.
The major difference between moods and motivations is that where
the latter are, so to speak, vectorial qualities, the former are merely scalar. Motives have a directional cast, they describe a certain overall
course, gravitate toward certain, usually temporary, consummations. But
moods vary only as to intensity: they go nowhere. They spring fromcertain circumstances but they are responsive to no ends. Like fogs,
they just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When present
they are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems dreary;
if one is gay, everything and everybody seems splendid. Thus, though aman can be vain, brave, willful, and independent at the same time, he
can't very well be playful and listless, or exultant and melancholy, atthe same time. 17 Further, where motives persist for more or less extended periods of time, moods merely recur with greater or lesser frequency, coming and going for what are often quite unfathomable reasons. But perhaps the most important difference, so far as we areconcerned, between moods and motivations is that motivations are"made meaningful" with reference to the ends toward which they areconceived to conduce, whereas moods are "made meaningful" with reference to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring. We
interpret motives in terms of their consummations, but we interpretmoods in terms of their sources. We say that a person is industrious be17

Ibid., p. 99.

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cause he wishes to succeed; we say that a person is worried because heis conscious of the hanging threat of nuclear holocaust. And this is noless the case when the interpretations are ultimate. Charity becomes
Christian charity when it is enclosed in a conception of God's purposes;
optimism is Christian optimism when it is grounded in a particular conception of God's nature. The assiduity of the Navaho finds its rationale
in a belief that, since "reality" operates mechanically, it is coercible;
their chronic fearfulness finds its rationale in a conviction that, however"reality" operates, it is both enormously powerful and terribly dangerous.18. . . by formulating conceptions of a general orderof existence and . . .
That the symbols or symbol systems which induce and define dispositions we set off as religious and those which place those dispositions ina cosmic framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise. For what else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of
awe is religious and not secular, except that it springs from entertaining
a conception of all-pervading vitality like mana and not from a visit to
the Grand Canyon? Or that a particular case of asceticism is an example of a religious motivation, except that it is directed toward theachievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and not a conditioned
one like weight-reduction? If sacred symbols did not at one and thesame time induce dispositions in human beings and formulate, however
obliquely, inarticulately, or unsystematically, general ideas of order,
then the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience would not exist. A man can indeed be said to be "religious" about
golf, but not merely if he pursues it with passion and plays it on Sundays: he must also see it as symbolic of some transcendent truths. And
the pubescent boy gazing soulfully into the eyes of the pubescent girl in
a William Steig cartoon and murmuring, "There is something about
you, Ethel, which gives me a sort of religious feeling," is, like most adolescents, confused. What any particular religion affirms about the fundamental nature of reality may be obscure, shallow, or, all too often,
perverse; but it must, if it is not to consist of the mere collection of re18
C. Kluckhohn. 'The Philosophy of the Navaho Indians," in Ideological Differences and World Order, ed. F. S. C. Northrop (New Haven, 1949), pp.
356-384.

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99

ceived practices and conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism, affirm something. If one were to essay a minimal definition ofreligion today, it would perhaps not be Tylor's famous "belief in spiritual beings," to which Goody, wearied of theoretical subtleties, haslately urged us to return, but rather what Salvador de Madariaga has
called "the relatively modest dogma that God is not mad." 19
Usually, of course, religions affirm very much more than this: we believe, as James remarked, all that we can and would believe everything
if we only could.20 The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a threat toour powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create, grasp,
and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be
more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man's innate (that is, genetically programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, notmerely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kindof formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of selfcontrol, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as
to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity
to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with
one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort ofanxiety:[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can copewith; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function andhighest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot
construe—the "uncanny," as it is popularly called. It need not be a new object; we do meet new things, and "understand" them promptly, if tentatively, by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but
under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly disorganized and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets arealways the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung andLebensanschauung. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., aswell as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal moraleand recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe
19
J. Goody, "Religion and Ritual: The Definition Problem," British Journal of
Piychology 12 (196I):143-I64.
20
W. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York. 1904).

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the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees,to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts.21

There are at least three points where chaos—a tumult of events
which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to
break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limitsof his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. Bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if
they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical challenges to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by
taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it—challenges withwhich any religion, however "primitive," which hopes to persist must
attempt somehow to cope.
Of the three issues, it is the first which has been least investigated bymodern social anthropologists (though Evans-Pritchard's classic discussion of why granaries fall on some Azande and not on others, is a notable exception).22 Even to consider people's religious beliefs as attempts
to bring anomalous events or experiences—death, dreams, mental
fugues, volcanic eruptions, or marital infidelity—within the circle of theat least potentially explicable seems to smack of Tyloreanism or worse.
But it does appear to be a fact that at least some men—in all probability, most men—are unable to leave unclarified problems of analysis
merely unclarified, just to look at the stranger features of the world's
landscape in dumb astonishment or bland apathy without trying to develop, however fantastic, inconsistent, or simple-minded, some notions
as to how such features might be reconciled with the more ordinary deliverances of experience. Any chronic failure of one's explanatory apparatus, the complex of received culture patterns (common sense, science,philosophical speculation, myth) one has for mapping the empiricalworld, to explain things which cry out for explanation tends to lead to a
deep disquiet—a tendency rather more widespread and a disquiet
rather deeper than we have sometimes supposed since the pseudoscience
view of religious belief was, quite rightfully, deposed. After all, eventhat high priest of heroic atheism. Lord Russell, once remarked that although the problem of the existence of God had never bothered him,
the ambiguity of certain mathematical axioms had threatened to unhinge
his mind. And Einstein's profound dissatisfaction with quantum me21

Langer. Philosophy in a New Key, p. 287. Italics in original.
E. Evans-Pritchard. Wlichraft. Oracles and Magic Among the Azonde (Oxford, 1937).
22

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101

chanics was based on a—surely religious—inability to believe that, as
he put it, God plays dice with the universe.
But this quest for lucidity and the rush of metaphysical anxiety that
occurs when empirical phenomena threaten to remain intransigently
opaque is found on much humbler intellectual levels. Certainly, I was
struck in my own work, much more than I had at all expected to be, by
the degree to which my more animistically inclined informants behaved
like true Tyloreans. They seemed to be constantly using their beliefs to"explain" phenomena: or, more accurately, to convince themselves thatthe phenomena were explainable within the accepted scheme of things,
for they commonly had only a minimal attachment to the particular soulpossession, emotional disequilibrium, taboo infringement, or bewitchment hypothesis they advanced and were all too ready to abandon it forsome other, in the same genre, which struck them as more plausible
given the facts of the case. What they were not ready to do was abandon it for no other hypothesis at all; to leave events to themselves.
And what is more, they adopted this nervous cognitive stance withrespect to phenomena which had no immediate practical bearing on
their own lives, or for that matter on anyone's. When a peculiarly
shaped, rather large toadstool grew up in a carpenter's house in the
short space of a few days (or, some said, a few hours), people camefrom miles around to see it, and everyone had some sort of explanation—some animist, some animatist, some not quite either—for it. Yet it
would be hard to argue that the toadstool had any social value in Radcliffe-Brown's sense, or was connected in any way with anything which
did and for which it could have been standing proxy, like the Andaman
cicada.23 Toadstools play about the same role in Javanese life as they doin ours, and in the ordinary course of things Javanese have about asmuch interest in them as we do. It was just that this one was "odd,""strange," "uncanny"—aneh. And the odd, strange, and uncanny simply must be accounted for—or, again, the conviction that it could be
accounted for sustained. One does not shrug off a toadstool which
grows five times as fast as a toadstool has any right to grow. In the
broadest sense the "strange" toadstool did have implications, and critical ones, for those who heard about it. It threatened their most generalability to understand the world, raised the uncomfortable question ofwhether the beliefs which they held about nature were workable, thestandards of truth they used valid.
23
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe,. III., 1952).

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

Nor is this to argue that it is only, or even mainly, sudden eruptionsof extraordinary events which engender in man the disquieting sensethat his cognitive resources may prove unavailing or that this intuition
appears only in its acute form. More commonly it is a persistent, constantly re-experienced difficulty in grasping certain aspects of nature,self, and society, in bringing certain elusive phenomena within thesphere of culturally formulatable fact, which renders man chronicallyuneasy and toward which a more equable flow of diagnostic symbols isconsequently directed. It is what lies beyond a relatively fixed frontierof accredited knowledge that, looming as. a constant background to thedaily round of practical life, sets ordinary human experience in a permanent context of metaphysical concern and raises the dim, back-ofthe-mind suspicions that one may be adrift in an absurd world:
Another subject which is matter for this characteristic intellectual enquiry[among the latmul] is the nature of ripples and waves on the surface ofwater. It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in theworld—are only patterns of waves. Indeed there seems to be some agreement about this, although it perhaps conflicts with the theory of reincarnation, according to which the ghost of the dead is blown as a mist by theEast Wind up the river and into the womb of the deceased's son's wife. Be
that as it may—there is still the question of how ripples and waves arecaused. The clan which claims the East Wind as a totem is clear enoughabout this: the Wind with her mosquito fan causes the waves. But otherclans have personified the waves and say that they are a person (Konlummali) independent of the wind. Other clans, again, have other theories. On
one occasion I took some latmul natives down to the coast and found oneof them silting by himself gazing with rapt attention at the sea. It was awindless day, but a slow swell was breaking on the beach. Among the totemic ancestors of his clan he counted a personified slit gong who had
floated down the river to the sea and who was believed to cause the waves.
He was gazing at the waves which were heaving and breaking when no wind
was blowing, demonstrating the truth of his clan myth.24
24
G. Bateson. Naven, 2nd ed. (Stanford, 1958). That the chronic and acuteforms of this sort of cognitive concern are closely interrelated, and that responses
to the more unusual occasion of it are patterned on responses established in coping with the more usual is also clear from Bateson's description, however, as hegoes on to say: "On another occasion I invited one of my informants to writness
the development of photographic plates. I first desensitized the plates and thendeveloped them in an open dish in moderate light, so that my informant was able
to see the gradual appearance of the images. He was much interested, and thendays later made me promise never to show this process to members of otherclans. Kontum-mali was one of his ancestors, and he saw in the process of photographic development the actual embodiment of ripples into images, and regarded
this as a demonstration of the clan's secret."Religion As a Cultural System

103

The second experiential challenge in whose face the meaningfulnessof a particular pattern of life threatens to dissolve into a chaos of thingless names and nameless things—the problem of suffering—has beenrather more investigated, or at least described, mainly because of thegreat amount of attention given in works on tribal religion to what areperhaps its two main loci: illness and mourning. Yet for all the fascinated interest in the emotional aura that surrounds these extreme situations, there has been, with a few exceptions such as Lienhardt's recent
discussion of Dinka divining, little conceptual advance over the sort ofcrude confidence-type theory set forth by Malinowski: viz., that religion
helps one to endure "situations of emotional stress" by "open [ing] up
escapes from such situations and such impasses as offer no empiricalway out except by ritual and belief into the domain of thesupernatural."25 The inadequacy of this "theology of optimism," asNadel rather dryly called it, is, of course, radical.26 Over its career religion has probably disturbed men as much as it has cheered them; forced
them into a head-on, unblinking confrontation of the fact that they areborn to trouble as often as it has enabled them to avoid such a confrontation by projecting them into sort of infantile fairy-tale worlds where—Malinowski again—"hope cannot fail nor desire deceive." 27 With
the possible exception of Christian Science, there are few if any religious traditions, "great" or "little," in which the proposition that life
hurts is not strenuously affirmed, and in some it is virtually glorified:
She was an old [Ba-lia] woman of a family with a long genealogy. Leza,"the Besetting One", stretched out his hand against the family. He slew her
mother and father while she was yet a child, and in the course of years allconnected with her perished. She said to herself, "Surely I shall keep those
who sit on my thighs." But no, even they, the children of her children, weretaken from her. . . . Then came into her heart a desperate resolution to find
God and to ask the meaning of it all. . . . So she began to travel, going
through country after country, always with the thought in her mind: "I shallcome to where the earth ends and there I shall find a road to God and I
shall ask him: 'What have I done to thee that thou afflictest me in thismanner?' " She never found where the earth ends, but though disappointed
she did not give up her search, and as she passed through the different
countries (hey asked her. "What have you come for. old woman?" And the25
G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience (Oxford, 1961), p. 151ff; B. Malinowski. Magic. Science and Religion (Boston, 1948), p. 67.
26
S. F. Nadel, "Malinowski on Mafic and Religion," in Man and Culture, ed.
R. 27
Firth (London, 1957). pp. 189-208.
Malinowski, Magic. Science and Religion (Boston, 1948), p. 67.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

answer would be. "I am seeking Leu." "Seeking Leza! For what?" "My
brothers, you ask me! Here in the nations is there one who suffers as I havesuffered?" And they would ask again, "How have you suffered?" "In thisway. I am alone. As you see me, a solitary old woman; that is how I am!"
And they answered. "Yes. we see. That is how you are! Bereaved of friends
and husband? In what do you differ from others? The Besetting-One sits on
the back of every one of us and we cannot shake him off." She never obtained her desire; she died of a broken heart.28

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically,
not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physicalpain, personal loss, wordly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable. It was in this effort that the Ba-Ila woman—perhaps necessarily, perhaps not—failed and, literally not knowing how to feel about
what had happened to her, how to suffer, perished in confusion and despair. Where the more intellective aspects of what Weber called the
Problem of Meaning are a matter affirming the ultimate explicability ofexperience, the more affective aspects are a matter of affirming its ultimate sufferableness. As religion on one side anchors the power of oursymbolic resources for formulating analytic ideas in an authoritative
conception of the overall shape of reality, so on another side it anchors
the power of our, also symbolic, resources for expressing emotions—moods, sentiments, passions, affections, feelings—in a similar conception of its pervasive tenor, its inherent tone and temper. For those able
to embrace them, and for so long as they are able to embrace them, religious symbols provide a cosmic guarantee not only for their ability tocomprehend the world, but also, comprehending it, to give a precision
to their feeling, a definition to their emotions which enables them, morosely or joyfully, grimly or cavalierly, to endure it.
Consider in this light the well-known Navaho curing rites usually referred to as "sings." 29 A sing—the Navaho have about sixty different
ones for different purposes, but virtually all of them are dedicated to removing some sort of physical or mental illness—is a kind of religious
psychodrama in which there are three main actors: the "singer" orcurer, the patient, and, as a kind of antiphonal chorus, the patient's
family and friends. The structure of all the sings, the drama's plot, is
28
C. W. Smith and A. M. Dale, The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (London. 1920). p. I97ff.; quoted in P. Radin, Primitive Man as a Philosopher (New York. 1957), pp. 100-101.
29
C. Kluckhohn and D. Leighton. The Navaho (Cambridge. Mass., 1946);
C. Reichard. Navaho Religion. 2 vols. (New York. 1950).

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105

quite similar. There are three main acts: a purification of the patientand audience; a statement, by means of repetitive chants and ritual manipulations, of the wish to restore well-being ("harmony") in the patient; an identification of the patient with the Holy People and his consequent "cure." The purification rites involve forced sweating, induced
vomiting, and so on, to expel the sickness from the patient physically.
The chants, which are numberless, consist mainly of simple optative
phrases ("may the patient be well," "I am getting better all over," etc.).
And, finally, the identification of the patient with the Holy People, andthus with cosmic order generally, is accomplished through the agency ofa sand painting depicting the Holy People in one-or another appropriate
mythic setting. The singer places the patient on the painting, touching
the feet, hands, knees, shoulders, breast, back, and head of the divine
figures and then the corresponding parts of the patient, performing thus
what is essentially a bodily identification of the human and the divine.30
This is the climax of the sing: the whole curing process may be likened,
Reichard says, to a spiritual osmosis in which the illness in man and thepower of the deity penetrate the ceremonial membrane in both directions, the former being neutralized by the latter. Sickness seeps out inthe sweat, vomit, and other purification rites; health seeps in as the Navaho patient touches, through the medium of the singer, the sacred sandpainting. Clearly, the symbolism of the sing focuses upon the problemof human suffering and attempts to cope with it by placing it in a meaningful context, providing a mode of action through which it can be expressed, being expressed understood, and being understood, endured.
The sustaining effect of the sing (and since the commonest disease istuberculosis, it can in most cases be only sustaining), rests ultimately on
its ability to give the stricken person a vocabulary in terms of which tograsp the nature of his distress and relate it to the wider world. Like acalvary, a recitation of Buddha's emergence from his father's palace, ora performance of Oedipus Tyrannos in other religious traditions, a singis mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete
image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough toresist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the existenceof intense and unremovable brute pain.
The problem of suffering passes easily into the problem of evil, for if
suffering is severe enough it usually, though not always, seems morally
undeserved as well, at least to the sufferer. But they are not, however,exactly the same thing—a fact I think Weber, too influenced by the30

Reichard, Navaho Religion.

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biases of a monotheistic tradition in which, as the various aspects ofhuman experience must be conceived to proceed from a single, voluntaristic source, man's pain reflects directly on God's goodness, did not
fully recognize in his generalization of the dilemmas of Christian theodicy Eastward. For where the problem of suffering is concerned withthreats to our ability to put our "undisciplined squads of emotion" intosome sort of soldierly order, the problem of evil is concerned withthreats to our ability to make sound moral judgments. What is involvedin the problem of evil is not the adequacy of our symbolic resources togovern our affective life, but the adequacy of those resources to provide
a workable set of ethical criteria, normative guides to govern our action.
The vexation here is the gap between things as they are and as theyought to be if our conceptions of right and wrong make sense, the gap
between what we deem various individuals deserve and what we see thatthey get—a phenomenon summed up in that profound quatrain:
The rain falls on the justAnd on the unjust fella;
But mainly upon the just.
Because the unjust has the just's umbrella.

Or if this seems too flippant an expression of an issue that, in somewhat different form, animates the Book of Job and the Baghavad Gita,
the following classical Javanese poem, known, sung, and repeatedly
quoted in Java by virtually everyone over the age of six, puts the point—the discrepancy between moral prescriptions and material rewards,
the seeming inconsistency of "is" and "ought":—rather more elegantly:
We have lived to see a time without order
In which everyone is confused in his mind.
One cannot bear to join in the madness,
But if he does not do so
He will not share in the spoils,
And will starve as a result.
Yes, God; wrong is wrong:
Happy are those who forget.
Happier yet those who remember and have deep insight.

Nor is it necessary to be theologically self-conscious to be religiously
sophisticated. The concern with intractable ethical paradox, the disquieting sense that one's moral insight is inadequate to one's moral experience, is as alive on the level of so-called primitive religion as it ison that of the so-called civilized. The set of notions about "division in
the world" that Lienhardt describes for the Dinka is a useful case inReligion As a Cultural System

107

31

point. Like so many peoples, the Dinka believe that the sky, where"Divinity" is located, and earth, where man dwells, were at one time
contiguous, the sky lying just above the earth and being connected to it
by a rope, so that men could move at will between the two realms.
There was no death and the first man and woman were permitted but asingle grain of millet a day, which was all that they at that time required. One day, the woman—of course—decided, out of greed, toplant more than the permitted grain of millet, and in her avid haste andindustry accidentally struck Divinity with the handle of the hoe. Offended, he severed the rope, withdrew into the distant sky of today, andleft man to labor for his food, to suffer sickness and death, and to experience separation from the source of his being, his Creator. Yet themeaning of this strangely familiar story to the Dinka is, as indeed is
Genesis to Jews and Christians, not homiletic but descriptive:
Those [Dinka] who have commented on these stories have sometimes madeit clear that their sympathies lie with Man in his plight, and draw attention
to the smallness of the fault for which Divinity withdrew the benefits of his
closeness. The image of striking Divinity with a hoe . . . often evokes acertain amusement, almost as though the story were indulgently being
treated as too childish to explain the consequences attributed to the event.
But it is clear that the point of the story of Divinity's withdrawal from men
is not to suggest an improving moral judgment on human behaviour. It is torepresent a total situation known to the Dinka today. Men now are—as thefirst man and woman then became—active, self-assertive, inquiring, acquisitive. Yet they are also subject to suffering and death, ineffective, ignorantand poor. Life is insecure; human calculations often prove erroneous, andmen must often learn by experience that the consequences of their acts arequite other than they may have anticipated or consider equitable. Divinity's
withdrawal from Man as the result of a comparatively trifling offence, byhuman standards, presents the contrast between equitable human judgments
and the action of the Power which are held ultimately to control what happens in Dinka life. . . . To the Dinka, the moral order is ultimately constituted according to principles which often elude men. which experience andtradition in part reveal, and which human action cannot change. . . . The
myth of Divinity's withdrawal then reflects the facts of existence as they are
known. The Dinka are in a universe which is largely beyond their control,
and where events may contradict the most reasonable human expectations.32
Thus the problem of evil, or perhaps one should say the problem
about evil, is in essence the same sort of problem of or about bafflement
and the problem of or about suffering. The strange opacity of certain
31
32

Ibid., pp. 28-55.
Ibid.

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empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain,
and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man's life in theworld, has no genuine order at all—no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols,of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will accountfor, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniable—that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon
the just—but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life isunendurable, and that justice is a mirage. The principles which constitute the moral order may indeed often elude men, as Lienhardt puts it,in the same way as fully satisfactory explanations of anomalous eventsor effective forms for the expression of feeling often elude them. Whatis important, to a religious man at least, is that this elusiveness be accounted for, that it be not the result of the fact that there are no suchprinciples, explanations, or forms, that life is absurd and the attempt tomake moral, intellectual, or emotional sense out of experience is bootless. The Dinka can admit, in fact insist upon, the moral ambiguities
and contradictions of life as they live it because these ambiguities andcontradictions are seen not as ultimate, but as the "rational," "natural,""logical" (one may choose one's own adjective here, for none of them istruly adequate) outcome of the moral structure of reality which themyth of the withdrawn "Divinity" depicts, or as Lienhardt says, "images."
The Problem of Meaning in each of its intergrading aspects (howthese aspects in fact intergrade in each particular case, what sort of interplay there is between the sense of analytic, emotional, and moral impotence, seems to me one of the outstanding, and except for Weber untouched, problems for comparative research in this whole field) it amatter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously
denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as awhole. And it is in terms of religious symbolism, a symbolism relating
man's sphere of existence to a wider sphere within which it is conceived
to rest, that both the affirmation and the denial are made.33
33
This is not, however, to say that everyone in every society does this; for as
the immortal Don Marquis once remarked, you don't have to have a soul unlessReligion As a Cultural System

109. . . and clothing those conceptions with such an aura offactuality that. . .
There arises here, however, a more profound question: how is it that
this denial comes to be believed? How is it that the religious man
moves from a troubled perception of experienced disorder to a more orless settled conviction of fundamental order? Just what does "belief
mean in a religious context? Of all the problems surrounding attempts
to conduct anthropological analysis of religion this is the one that hasperhaps been most troublesome and therefore the most often avoided,usually by relegating it to psychology, that raffish outcast discipline towhich social anthropologists are forever consigning phenomena they areunable to deal with within the framework of a denatured Durkheimianism. But the problem will not go away, it is not "merely" psychological(nothing social is), and no anthropological theory of religion which fails
to attack it is worthy of the name. We have been trying to stage Hamlet
without the Prince quite long enough.
It seems to me that it is best to begin any approach to this issue withfrank recognition that religious belief involves not a Baconian induction
from everyday experience—for then we should all be agnostics—butrather a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that experience.
The existence of bafflement, pain, and moral paradox—of The Problemof Meaning—is one of the things that drives men toward belief in gods,
devils, spirits, totemic principles, or the spiritual efficacy of cannibalism(an enfolding sense of beauty or a dazzling perception of power areothers), but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs rest, but rather
their most important field of application:
We point to the state of the world as illustrative of doctrine, but never as
evidence for it. So Belsen illustrates a world of original sin, but original sin
is not an hypothesis to account for happenings like Belsen. We justify a particular religious belief by showing its place in the total religious conception;
we justify a religious belief as a whole by referring to authority. We accept
authority because we discover it at some point in the world at which we
you really want one. The oft-heard generalization that religion is a human universal embodies a confusion between the probably true (though on present evidence improvable) proposition that there is no human society in which cultural
patterns that we can, under the present definition or one like it, call religious aretotally lacking, and the surely untrue proposition that all men in all societies are,in any meaningful sense of the term, religious. But if the anthropological study ofreligious commitment is underdeveloped, the anthropological study of religious
noncommitment is nonexistent. The anthropology of religion will have come ofage when some more subtle Malinowski writes a book called "Belief and Unbelief (or even "Faith and Hypocrisy") in a Savage Society."

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worship, at which we accept the lordship of something not ourselves. We do
not worship authority, but we accept authority at defining the worshipful.
So someone may discover the possibility of worship in the life of the Reformed Churches and accept the Bible as authoritative; or in the Roman
Church and accept papal authority.34
This is, of course, a Christian statement of the matter; but it is not to
be despised on that account. In tribal religions authority lies in the persuasive power of traditional imagery; in mystical ones in the apodictic
force of supersensible experience; in charismatic ones in the hypnotic
attraction of an extraordinary personality. But the priority of the acceptance of an authoritative criterion in religious matters over the revelation which is conceived to flow from that acceptance is not less complete than in scriptural or hieratic ones. The basic axiom underlying
what we may perhaps call "the religious perspective" is everywhere thesame: he who would know must first believe.
But to speak of "the religious perspective" is, by implication, to
speak of one perspective among others. A perspective is a mode ofseeing, in that extended sense of "see" in which it means "discern,""apprehend," "understand," or "grasp." It is a particular way of looking at life, a particular manner of construing the world, as when we
speak of an historical perspective, a scientific perspective, an aesthetic
perspective, a common-sense perspective, or even the bizarre perspective embodied in dreams and in hallucinations.35 The question thencomes down to, first, what is "the religious perspective" generically considered, as differentiated from other perspectives; and second, how do
men come to adopt it.
34
A. Maclntyre. The Logical Status of Religious Belief," in Metaphysical Beliefs. ed. A. Maclntyre (London. 1957), pp. 167-211.
35
The term "attitude'' at in "aesthetic attitude'' or "natural attitude" it another, perhapt more common term for what I have here called "perspective."[For the first, tee C. Bell, Art. London, 1914; for the second, though the phrase
it originally Husserl's, see A. Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, vol. I of
Collected Papers (The Hague, 1962).] But I have avoided it because of its strong
subjectivist connotations, its tendency to place the stress upon a supposed innerstate of an actor rather than on a certain sort of relation—a symbolically mediated one—between an actor and a situation. This is not to say, of course, thata phenomenological analysis of religious experience, if cast in intersubjective,
nontrantcendental, genuinely scientific terms (e.g., W. Percy, "Symbol, Consciousness and Intersubjectivity," Journal of Philosophy 15 (I958):631-64l). is
not essential to a full understanding of religious belief, but merely that that is not
the focus of my concern here. "Outlook." "frame of reference," "frame of mind,""orientation," "stance." "mental set," and so on, are other terms sometimes employed, depending upon whether the analyst wishes to stress the social, psychological, or cultural aspects of the matter.

Religion As a Cultural System111

If we place the religious perspective against the background of threeof the other major perspectives in terms of which men construe theworld—the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic—its special character emerges more sharply. What distinguishes common sense
as a mode of "seeing" is, as Schutz has pointed out, a simple acceptanceof the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they seemto be—what is sometimes called naive realism—and the pragmatic motive, the wish to act upon that world so as to bend it to one's practical
purposes, to master it, or so far as that proves impossible, to adjust to
it.36 The world of everyday life, itself, of course, a cultural product,
for it is framed in terms of the symbolic conceptions of "stubborn fact"
handed down from generation to generation, is the established scene
and given object of our actions. Like Mt. Everest it is just there, andthe thing to do with it, if one feels the need to do anything with it at all,is to climb it. In the scientific perspective it is precisely this givenness
which disappears.37 Deliberate doubt and systematic inquiry, the suspension of the pragmatic motive in favor of disinterested observation,
the attempt to analyze the world in terms of formal concepts whose relationship to the informal conceptions of common sense become increasingly problematic—there are the hallmarks of the attempt to grasp
the world scientifically. And as for the aesthetic perspective, which
under the rubric of "the aesthetic attitude" has been perhaps most exquisitely examined, it involves a different sort of suspension of naive
realism and practical interest, in that instead of questioning the credentials of everyday experience, one merely ignores that experience infavor of an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces, an absorption in things, as we say, "in themselves": "The function of artistic illusion is not 'make-believe'. . . but the very opposite,
disengagement from belief—the contemplation of sensory qualities
without their usual meanings of 'here's that chair', 'that's mytelephone'. . . etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its
appearance as such." 38 And like the common sensical and the scientific (or the historical, the philosophical, and the artistic), this perspective, this "way of seeing" is not the product of some mysterious Cartesian chemistry, but is induced, mediated, and in fact created by means
36
37
38

Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality.
Ibid.
S. Lamer. Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), p. 49.

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of curious quasi objects—poems, dramas, sculptures, symphonies—
which, dissociating themselves from the solid world of common sense,take on the special sort of eloquence only sheer appearances canachieve.
The religious perspective differs from the common-sensical in that, as
already pointed out, it moves beyond the realities of everyday life towider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is
not action upon those wider realities but acceptance of them, faith inthem. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions therealities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized scepticism which
dissolves the world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic hypotheses,
but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths. Rather
than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis,
encounter. And it differs from art in that instead of effecting a disengagement from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing an air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact
and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the"really real" upon which the religious perspective rests and which thesymbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to producing, intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by thediscordant revelations of secular experience. It is, again, the imbuing ofa certain specific complex of symbols—of the metaphysic they formulate and the style of life they recommend—with a persuasive authority
which, from an analytic point of view, is the essence of religious action.
Which brings us, at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual—that is, consecrated behavior—that this conviction that religious conceptions areveridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated.
It is in some sort of ceremonial form—even if that form be hardly
more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or thedecoration of a grave—that the moods and motivations which sacredsymbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate for men meet and reinforce one another. In
a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under theagency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world,
producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of reality
to which Santayana refers in my epigraph. Whatever role divine intervention may or may not play in the creation of faith—and it is not thebusiness of the scientist to pronounce upon such matters one way or theother—it is, primarily at least, out of the context of concrete acts of re-Religion As a Cultural System

113

ligious observance that religious conviction emerges on the humanplane.
However, though any religious ritual, no matter how apparently automatic or conventional (if it is truly automatic or merely conventional it
is not religious), involves this symbolic fusion of ethos and world view,
it is mainly certain more elaborate and usually more public ones, onesin which a broad range of moods and motivations on the one hand andof metaphysical conceptions on the other are caught up, which shape
the spiritual consciousness of a people. Employing a useful term introduced by Singer, we may call these full-blown ceremonies "cultural
performances" and note that they represent not only the point at which
the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life converge forthe believer, but also the point at which the interaction between themcan be most readily examined by the detached observer:
Whenever Madrasi Brahmans (and non-Brahmans, too, for that matter)
wished to exhibit to me some feature of Hinduism, they always referred to,or invited me to see, a particular rite or ceremony in the life cycle, in atemple festival, or in the general sphere of religious and cultural performances. Reflecting on this in the course of my interviews and observations I
found that the more abstract generalizations about Hinduism (my own aswell as those I heard) could generally be checked, directly or indirectly,
against these observable performances.39
Of course, ail cultural performances are not religious performances,and the line between those that are and artistic, or even political, ones isoften not so easy to draw in practice, for, like social forms, symbolic
forms can serve multiple purposes. But the point is that, paraphrasingslightly, Indians—"and perhaps all peoples"—seem to think of theirreligion "as encapsulated in these discrete performances which they[can] exhibit to visitors and to themselves." 40 The mode of exhibition is however radically different for the two sorts of witness, a factseemingly overlooked by those who would argue that "religion is a formof human art." 41 Where for "visitors" religious performances can, inthe nature of the case, only be presentations of a particular religious
perspective, and thus aesthetically appreciated or scientifically dissected,
39
M. Singer, 'The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilization," Far Eastern Quarterly 15(19J5):23-26.
40
M. Singer, "The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras," inTraditional
India, ed. M. Singer (Philadelphia, 1958). pp. 140-182.
41
R. Firth, Etements of Social Organization (London and New York, 1951), p.

250.

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for participants they are in addition enactments, materializations, realizations of it—not only models of what they believe, but also models forthe believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they
portray it.
As a case in point, let me take a spectacularly theatrical cultural performance from Bali—that in which a terrible witch called Rangda engages in a ritual combat with an endearing monster called Barong.42
Usually, but not inevitably presented on the occasion of a death temple
celebration, the drama consists of a masked dance in which the witch—depicted as a wasted old widow, prostitute, and eater of infants—
comes to spread plague and death upon the land and is opposed by themonster—depicted as a kind of cross between a clumsy bear, a silly
puppy, and a strutting Chinese dragon. Rangda, danced by a single
male, is a hideous figure. Her eyes bulge from her forehead like swollen
boils. Her teeth become tusks curving up over her cheeks and fangs
protruding down over her chin. Her yellowed hair falls down aroundher in a matted tangle. Her breasts are dry and pendulous dugs edged
with hair, between which hang, like so many sausages, strings of colored entrails. Her long red tongue is a stream of fire. And as she dances
she splays her dead-white hands, from which protrude ten-inch clawlike fingernails, out in front of her and utters unnerving shrieks of metallic laughter. Barong, danced by two men fore-and-aft in vaudevillehorse fashion, is another matter. His shaggy sheepdog coat is hung withgold and mica ornaments that glitter in the half-light. He is adorned
with flowers, sashes, feathers, mirrors, and a comical beard made fromhuman hair. And though a demon too, his eyes also pop and he snaps
his fanged jaws with seemly fierceness when faced with Rangda or otheraffronts to his dignity; the cluster of tinkling bells which hang from hisabsurdly arching tail somehow contrives to take most of the edge off his
fearfulness. If Rangda is a satanic image, Barong is a farcical one, andtheir clash is a clash (an inconclusive one) between the malignant andthe ludicrous.
42
The Rangda-Barong complex has been extensively described and analyzed
by a series of unusually gifted ethnographers and I shall make no attempt to present it here in more than schematic form. (See, for example, J. Belo, Bali:
Rangda and Barong (New York, 1949); J. Belo, Trance in Bali (New York,1960); B. DeZoete and W. Spies, Dance and Drama in Bali (London, 1938); G.
Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character (New York, 1942); M. Covarrubias,
The Island of Bali (New York, 1937).) Much of my interpretation of the complex
rests on personal observations made in Bali during 1957-1958.

Religion As a Cultural System

115

This odd counterpoint of implacable malice and low comedy pervades the whole performance. Rangda, clutching her magical whitecloth, moves around in a slow stagger, now pausing immobile inthought or uncertainty, now lurching suddenly forward. The moment ofher entry (one sees those terrible long-nailed hands first as she emerges
through the split gateway at the top of a short flight of stone stairs) is
one of terrific tension when it seems, to a "visitor" at least, that everyone is about to break and run in panic. She herself seems insane withfear and hatred as she screams deprecations at Barong amid the wildclanging of the gamelan. She may in fact go amok. I have myself seen
Rangdas hurl themselves headlong into the gamelan or run frantically
about in total confusion, being subdued and reoriented only by the combined force of a half-dozen spectators; and one hears many tales ofamok Rangdas holding a whole village in terror for hours and of impersonators becoming permanently deranged by their experiences. But Barong, though he is charged with the same mana-like sacred power (sakti
in Balinese) as Rangda, and his impersonators are also entranced, seems
to have very great difficulty in being serious. He frolics with his retinueof demons (who add to the gaiety by indelicate pranks of their own),lies down on a metallaphone while it is being played or beats on a drumwith his legs, moves in one direction in his front half and another in hisrear or bends his segmented body into foolish contortions, brushes flies
from his body or sniffs aromas in the air, and generally prances about
in paroxysms of narcissistic vanity. The contrast is not absolute, for
Rangda is sometimes momentarily comic as when she pretends to polishthe mirrors on Barong's coat, and Barong becomes rather more serious
after Rangda appears, nervously clacking his jaws at her and ultimately
attacking her directly. Nor are the humorous and the horrible always
kept rigidly separated, as in that strange scene in one section of thecycle in which several minor witches (disciples of Rangda) toss thecorpse of a stillborn child around to the wild amusement of the audience; or another, no less strange, in which the sight of a pregnant
woman alternating hysterically between tears and laughter while being
knocked about by a group of gravediggers, seems for some reason excruciatingly funny. The twin themes of horror and hilarity find theirpurest expression in the two protagonists and their endless, indecisive
struggle for dominance, but they are woven with deliberate intricacy
through the whole texture of the drama. They—or rather the relations
between them—are what it is about.

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

It is unnecessary to attempt a thoroughgoing description of a
Rangda-Barong performance here. Such performances vary widely indetail, consist of several not too closely integrated parts, and in any caseare so complex in structure as to defy easy summary. For our purposes,
the main point to be stressed is that the drama is, for the Balinese, notmerely a spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted. There is noaesthetic distance here separating actors from audience and placing the
depicted events in an unenterable world of illusion, and by the time afull-scale Rangda-Barong encounter has been concluded a majority,often nearly all, of the members of the group sponsoring it will have become caught up in it not just imaginatively but bodily. In one of Belo's
examples I count upwards of seventy-Ave people—men, women, andchildren—taking part in the activity at some point or other, and thirty
to forty participants is in no way unusual. As a performance, the drama
is like a high mass, not like a presentation of Murder in the Cathedral:
it is a drawing near, not a standing back.
In part, this entry into the body of the ritual takes place through theagency of the various supporting roles contained in it—minor witches,demons, various sorts of legendary and mythical figures—which selected villagers enact. But mostly it takes place through the agency of an
extraordinarily developed capacity for psychological dissociation on thepart of a very large segment of the population. A Rangda-Barong struggle is inevitably marked by anywhere from three or four to several
dozen spectators becoming possessed by one or another demon, falling
into violent trances "like firecrackers going off one after the other," 43
and, snatching up krisses, rushing to join the fray. Mass trance, spreading like a panic, projects the individual Balinese out of the commonplace world in which he usually lives into that most uncommonplace
one in which Rangda and Barong live. To become entranced is, for theBalinese, to cross a threshold into another order of existence—the word
for trance is nadi, from dadi, often translated "to become" but whichmight be even more simply rendered as "to be." And even those who,
for whatever reasons, do not make this spiritual crossing are caught up
in the proceedings, for it is they who must keep the frenzied activitiesof the entranced from getting out of hand by the application of physicalrestraint if they are ordinary men, by the sprinkling of holy water andthe chanting of spells if they are priests. At its height a Rangda-Barongrite hovers, or at least seems to hover, on the brink of mass amok with
43
Belo. Trance in Bali.

Religion As a Cultural System117

the diminishing band of the unentranced striving desperately (and, it
teems, almost always successfully) to control the growing band of theentranced.
In its standard form—if it can be said to have a standard form—theperformance begins with an appearance of Barong, prancing and preening, as a general prophylactic against what is to follow. Then may comevarious mythic scenes relating the story—not always precisely the sameones—upon which the performance is based, until finally Barong andthen Rangda appear. Their battle begins. Barong drives Rangda backtoward the gate of the death temple. But he has not the power to expel
her completely, and he is in turn driven back toward the village. At
length, when it seems as though Rangda will finally prevail, a numberof entranced men rise, krisses in hand, and rush to support Barong. But
as they approach Rangda (who has turned her back in meditation), shewheels upon them and, waving her sakti white cloth, leaves them comatose on the ground. Rangda then hastily retires (or is carried) to thetemple, where she herself collapses, hidden from the aroused crowd
which, my informants said, would kill her were it to see her in a helpless state. The Barong moves among the kris dancers and wakens themby snapping his jaws at them or nuzzling them with his beard. As they
return, still entranced, to "consciousness," they are enraged by the disappearance of Rangda, and unable to attack her they turn their krisses(harmlessly because they are entranced) against their own chests in frustration. Usually sheer pandemonium breaks out at this point with members of the crowd, of both sexes, falling into trance all around the courtyard and rushing out to stab themselves, wrestle with one another,devour live chicks or excrement, wallow convulsively in the mud, andso on, while the nonentranced attempt to relieve them of their krisses
and keep them at least minimally in order. In time, the trancers sink,one by one, into coma, from which they are aroused by the priests' holywater and the great battle is over—once more a complete stand-off.
Rangda has not been conquered, but neither has she conquered.
One place to search for the meaning of this ritual is in the collectionof myths, tales, and explicit beliefs which it supposedly enacts. However, not only are these various and variable—for some people Rangda
is an incarnation of Durga, Siva's malignant consort; for others she isQueen Mahendradatta, a figure from a court legend set in eleventh
century Java; for yet others, the spiritual leader of witches as the Brahmana Priest is the spiritual leader of men. Notions of who (or "what")

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Barong is are equally diverse and even vaguer—but they seem to play
only a secondary role in the Balinese' perception of the drama. It isin the direct encounter with the two figures in the context of the actual performance that the villager comes to know them as, so far as heis concerned, genuine realities. They are, then, not representations ofanything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they
become—nadi—themselves part of the realm in which those presences
exist. To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether hethinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy.
The acceptance of authority that underlies the religious perspectivethat the ritual embodies thus flows from the enactment of the ritual itself. By inducing a set of moods and motivations—an ethos—and defining an image of cosmic order—a world view—by means of a single
set of symbols, the performance makes the model for and model of aspects of religious belief mere transpositions of one another. Rangda
evokes fear (as well as hatred, disgust, cruelty, horror, and, though I
have not been able to treat the sexual aspects of the performance here,lust); but she also depicts it:
The fascination which the figure of the Witch holds for the Balinese imagination can only be explained when it is recognized that the Witch is not
only a fear inspiring figure, but that she is Fear. Her hands with their longmenacing finger-nails do not clutch and claw at her victims, although children who play at being witches do curl their hands in such gestures. But the
Witch herself spreads her arms with palms out and her finger flexed backward, in the gesture the Balinese call kapar. a term which they apply to thesudden startled reaction of a man who falls from a tree. . . . Only when we
sec the Witch as herself afraid, as well as frightening, is it possible to explain her appeal, and the pathos which surrounds her as she dances, hairy,
forbidding, tusked and alone, giving her occasional high eerie laugh. 44

And on his side Barong not only induces laughter, he incarnates the Balinese version of the comic spirit—a distinctive combination of playfulness, exhibitionism, and extravagant love of elegance, which, along withfear, is perhaps the dominant motive in their life. The constantly recurring struggle of Rangda and Barong to an inevitable draw is thus—for
the believing Balinese—both the formulation of a general religious conception and the authoritative experience which justifies, even compels,
its acceptance.
44

G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character, p. 36.

Religion As a Cultural System

119. . . that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic
But no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts
is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality in human experience—paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly
rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question (however much
we may question certain portions of it), and from whose pressures andrequirements we can least escape.45 A man, even large groups of men,
may be aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and unequipped to pursue formal scientific analysis, but he cannot be completely lacking in common sense and survive. The dispositions which religious rituals induce thus have their most important impact—from ahuman point of view—outside the boundaries of the ritual itself as theyreflect back to color the individual's conception of the established worldof bare fact. The peculiar tone that marks the Plains vision quest, theManus confession, or the Javanese mystical exercise pervades areas ofthe life of these peoples far beyond the immediately religious, impressing upon them a distinctive style in the sense both of a dominant moodand a characteristic movement. The interweaving of the malignant andthe comic, which the Rangda-Barong combat depicts, animates a very
wide range of everyday Balinese behavior, much of which, like the ritual itself, has an air of candid fear narrowly contained by obsessive
playfulness. Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar
positivism would have it, it describes the social order (which, in so far
as it does, it does not only very obliquely but very incompletely), but
because, like environment, political power, wealth, jural obligation, personal affection, and a sense of beauty, it shapes it.
The movement back and forth between the religious perspective andthe common-sense perspective is actually one of the more obvious empirical occurrences on the social scene, though, again, one of the mostneglected by social anthropologists, virtually all of whom have seen it
happen countless times. Religious belief has usually been presented as ahomogeneous characteristic of an individual, like his place of residence,
his occupational role, his kinship position, and so on. But religious belief in the midst of ritual, where it engulfs the total person, transporting
45

Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, p. 226ff.

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him, so far as he is concerned, into another mode of existence, and religious belief as the pale, remembered reflection of that experience in the
midst of everyday life are not precisely the same thing, and the failure
to realize this has led to some confusion, most especially in connection
with the so-called primitive-mentality problem. Much of the difficulty
between Lévy-Bruhl and Malinowski on the nature of "native thought,"
for example, arises from a lack of full recognition of this distinction;
for where the French philosopher was concerned with the view of reality savages adopted when taking a specifically religious perspective, thePolish-English ethnographer was concerned with that which they
adopted when taking a strictly common-sense one.46 Both perhaps
vaguely sensed that they were not talking about exactly the same thing,
but where they went astray was in failing to give a specific accountingof the way in which these two forms of "thought"—or, as I would
rather say, these two modes of symbolic formulations—interacted, sothat where Lévy-Bruhl's savages tended to live, despite his postludial
disclaimers, in a world composed entirely of mystical encounters, Malinowski's tended to live, despite his stress on the functional importanceof religion, in a world composed entirely of practical actions. They became reductionists (an idealist is as much of a reductionist as a materialist) in spite of themselves because they failed to see man as moving
more or less easily, and very frequently, between radically contrasting
ways of looking at the world, ways which are not continuous with one
another but separated by cultural gaps across which Kierkegaardian
leaps must be made in both directions:
There are as many innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there
are different finite provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the accent of reality. Some instances are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap
into the world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the curtainin the theatre rises as the transition to the world of the stageplay; the radical
change in our attitude if. before a painting, we permit our visual field to belimited by what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world;
our quandary relaxing into laughter, if. in listening to a joke, we are for ashort time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality in relation to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of foolishness; the child's turning toward his toy as the transition into the play-world;and so on. But also the religious experiences in all their varieties—for instance. Kierkegaard's experience of the "instant" as the leap into the religious sphere—are examples of such a shock, as well as the decision of the46
Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion; L. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives
Think (New York. 1926).

Religion As a Cultural System121

scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of "this world"by a disinterested [analytical] altitude.47
The recognition and exploration of the qualitative difference—anempirical, not a transcendental difference—between religion pure andreligion applied, between an encounter with the supposedly "really real"
and a viewing of ordinary experience in light of what that encounter
seems to reveal, will, therefore, take us further toward an understandingof what a Bororo means when he says "I am a parakeet," or a Christianwhen he says "1 am a sinner," than either a theory of primitive mysticism in which the commonplace world disappears into a cloud of curious ideas or of a primitive pragmatism in which religion disintegrates
into a collection of useful fictions. The parakeet example, which I takefrom Percy, is a good one.48 For, as he points out, it is unsatisfactory to
say either that the Bororo thinks he is literally a parakeet (for he does
not try to mate with other parakeets), that his statement is false or nonsense (for, clearly, he is not offering—or at least not only offering—
the sort of class-membership argument which can be confirmed or refuted as, say, "1 am a Bororo" can be confirmed or refuted), or yet
again that it is false scientifically but true mythically (because that leads
immediately to the pragmatic fiction notion which, as it denies the accolade of truth to "myth" in the very act of bestowing it, is internallyself-contradictory). More coherently it would seem to be necessary to
see the sentence as having a different sense in the context of the "finite
province of meaning" which makes up the religious perspective and ofthat which makes up the common-sensical. In the religious, our Bororo
is "really" a "parakeet," and given the proper ritual context might well"mate" with other "parakeets"—with metaphysical ones like himself,
not commonplace ones such as those which fly bodily about in ordinary
trees. In the common-sensical perspective he is a parakeet in the sense—I assume—that he belongs to a clan whose members regard the parakeet as their totem, a membership from which, given the fundamental
nature of reality as the religious perspective reveals it, certain moral
and practical consequences flow. A man who says he is a parakeet is, if
he says it in normal conversation, saying that, as myth and ritual demonstrate, he is shot through with parakeetness and that this religious
fact has some crucial social implications—we parakeets must stick to47

Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, p. 231.
W. Percy, "The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process," Psychiatry 24(1961): 39-52.
48

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THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

gether, not marry one another, not eat mundane parakeets, and so on,
for to do otherwise is to act against the grain of the whole universe. It
is this placing of proximate acts in ultimate contexts that makes religion, frequently at least, socially so powerful. It alters, often radically,
the whole landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a waythat the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seemthemselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given
the way things "really" are.
Having ritually "lept" (the image is perhaps a bit too athletic for theactual facts—"slipped" might be more accurate) into the framework of
meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended, returned again to the common-sense world, a man is—unless, as sometimes happens, the experience fails to register—changed. And as he ischanged, so also is the common-sense world, for it is now seen as but
the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it.
But this correction and completion is not, as some students of "comparative religion" would have it, everywhere the same in content. The
nature of the bias religion gives to ordinary life varies with the religion
involved, with the particular dispositions induced in the believer by the
specific conceptions of cosmic order he has come to accept. On the levelof the "great" religions, organic distinctiveness is usually recognized, attimes insisted upon to the point of zealotry. But even at its simplest folk
and tribal levels—where the individuality of religious traditions has so
often been dissolved into such desiccated types as "animism," "animalism," "totemism," "shamanism," "ancestor worship," and all the otherinsipid categories by means of which ethnographers of religion devitalize their data—the idiosyncratic character of how various groups ofmen behave because of what they believe they have experienced isclear. A tranquil Javanese would be no more at home in guilt-ridden
Manus than an activist Crow would be in passionless Java. And for all
the witches and ritual clowns in the world, Rangda and Barong are notgeneralized but thoroughly singular figurations of fear and gaiety. Whatmen believe is as various as what they are—a proposition that holdswith equal force when it is inverted.
It is this particularity of the impact of religious systems upon social
systems (and upon personality systems) which renders general assessments of the value of religion in either moral or functional terms impossible. The sorts of moods and motivations which characterize a man
who has just come from an Aztec human sacrifice are rather different

123

Religion As a Cultural Systemfrom those of one who has just put off his Kachina mask. Even within
the same society, what one "learns" about the essential pattern of life
from a sorcery rite and from a commensal meal will have rather diverse
effects on social and psychological functioning. One of the main methodological problems in writing about religion scientifically is to put aside
at once the tone of the village atheist and that of the village preacher, as
well as their more sophisticated equivalents, so that the social and psychological implications of particular religious beliefs can emerge in aclear and neutral light. And when that is done, overall questions about
whether religion is "good" or "bad," "functional" or "dysfunctional,""ego strengthening" or "anxiety producing," disappear like the chimeras
they are, and one is left with particular evaluations, assessments, anddiagnoses in particular cases. There remains, of course, the hardly unimportant questions of whether this or that religious assertion is true,
this or that religious experience genuine, or whether true religious assertions and genuine religious experiences are possible at all. But suchquestions cannot even be asked, much less answered, within the self-imposed limitations of the scientific perspective.

III

For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity toserve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between
them, on the one hand—its model of aspect—and of rooted, no lessdistinctive "mental" dispositions—its model for aspect—on the other.
From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychologicalones.
Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide
range of experience—intellectual, emotional, moral—can be given
meaningful form. The Christian sees the Nazi movement against thebackground of The Fall which, though it does not, in a causal sense, explain it, places it in a moral, a cognitive, even an affective sense. An
Azande sees the collapse of a granary upon a friend or relative against
the background of a concrete and rather special notion of witchcraft andl24

THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES

thus avoids the philosophical dilemmas as well as the psychologicalstress of indeterminism. A Javanese finds in the borrowed and reworked
concept of rasa ("sense-taste-feeling-meaning") a means by which to"see" choreographic, gustatory, emotional, and political phenomena in a
new light. A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is also
a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and psychological events. It renders .them graspablc.
But more than gloss, such beliefs are also a template. They do not
merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms—in
which case they would be philosophical, not religious—but they shapethem. In the doctrine of original sin is embedded also a recommended
attitude toward life, a recurring mood, and a persisting set of motivations. The Azande learns from witchcraft conceptions not just to understand apparent "accidents" as not accidents at all, but to react to these
spurious accidents with hatred for the agent who caused them and toproceed against him with appropriate resolution. Rasa, in addition to
being a concept of truth, beauty, and goodness, is also a preferred modeof experiencing, a kind of affectless detachment, a variety of bland
aloofness, an unshakable calm. The moods and motivations a religious
orientation produces cast a derivative, lunar light over the solid featuresof a people's secular life.
The tracing of the social and psychological role of religion is thus not
so much a matter of finding correlations between specific ritual acts andspecific secular social ties—though these correlations do, of course,
exist and are very worth continued investigation, especially if we cancontrive something novel to say about them. More, it is a matter of understanding how it is that men's notions, however implicit, of the"really real" and the dispositions these notions induce in them, color
their sense of the reasonable, the practical, the humane, and the moral.
How far they do so (for in many societies religion's effects seem quite
circumscribed, in others completely pervasive), how deeply they do so(for some men, and groups of men, seem to wear their religion lightly
so far as the secular world goes, while others seem to apply their faith
to each occasion, no matter how trivial), and how effectively they do so(for the width of the gap between what religion recommends and what
people actually do is most variable cross-culturally)—all these are crucial issues in the comparative sociology and psychology of religion.
Even the degree to which religious systems themselves are developed
seems to vary extremely widely, and not merely on a simple evolution-

Religion As a Cultural System125

ary basis. In one society, the level of elaboration of symbolic formulations of ultimate actuality may reach extraordinary degrees of complexity and systematic articulation; in another, no less developed socially,such formulations may remain primitive in the true sense, hardly morethan congeries of fragmentary by-beliefs and isolated images, of sacredreflexes and spiritual pictographs. One need only think of the Australians and the Bushmen, the Toradja and the Alorese, the Hopi and theApache, the Hindus and the Romans, or even the Italians and thePoles, to see that degree of religious articulateness is not a constant evenas between societies of similar complexity.
The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation: first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating ofthese systems to social-structural and psychological processes. My dissatisfaction with so much of contemporary social anthropological workin religion is not that it concerns itself with the second stage, but that itneglects the first, and in so doing takes for granted what most needs tobe elucidated. To discuss the role of ancestor worship in regulating political succession, of sacrificial feasts in defining kinship obligations, ofspirit worship in scheduling agricultural practices, of divination in reinforcing social control, or of initiation rites in propelling personality
maturation, are in no sense unimportant endeavors, and I am not recommending they be abandoned for the kind of jejune cabalism into which
symbolic analysis of exotic faiths can so easily fall. But to attempt themwith but the most general, common-sense view of what ancestor worship, animal sacrifice, spirit worship, divination, or initiation rites are
as religious patterns seems to me not particularly promising. Only when
we have a theoretical analysis of symbolic action comparable in sophistication to that we now have for social and psychological action, will webe able to cope effectively with those aspects of social and psychological life in which religion (or art, or science, or ideology) plays a determinant role.