Symbolic Anthropology of Traditional Religion: A Favor of the Irrational Appetite for Relative Meaning over the Rational Inquiry for Objective Truths

Introduction

Robin Horton’s Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (1993) offers a comparative study of two thought systems, one being the western scientific thought and the other being the African traditional religious thought. Horton’s assessment of religion from an objectivist and realist stance is describable as the intellectualist approach that stresses universal rationality in the human mind to deduce from empirical observations and act in productive behaviours accordingly in pursuit of ends. He holds the continuity thesis where modern science builds upon traditional religious thought such that both explain the observable world by positing unobservable entities (ch.3). And in the case of traditional religion, the intellectualists understand the spiritual entities and their uses in terms of their face value in explanation, prediction, and control.

One such effort of cross-cultural analysis has also been sought by anthropologists on the principle of conceptual relativism where religious entities should be independently assessed within the particular cultural contexts they belong to. However, Horton argues that the anthropologists mistakenly employed an ideological embargo on irrationality (132), where a continuous reading between traditional religion and western scientific framework would result in the former being “markedly inferior” (7). Therefore, for Horton, the anthropologists avoided charges of ethnocentrism that favored the Western scientific thought and opted for the expressive and metaphoric understanding of traditional religion instead of the literal and instrumental one aimed at causal explanations, where spiritual beliefs are postulated as “symbols or images which are satisfying in their own right” (Horton 109). According to these symbolists, religious beliefs are used figuratively to represent “various going-ons in the everyday world” (Horton 110) instead of literally held, while “the true referents of which are to be found in the social order” (Skorupski 24). In doing so, symbolic anthropology steers clear of intellectualists’ “immoral wish to prove that ‘primitives’ are prone to stupid and childish mistakes” (96) and avoids imputing irrationality or primitive mentality to traditional cultures.

In Chapter 4 of the book, “Back to Frazer”, Horton defends the intellectualist approach by examining how rationality is defined and why traditional religions are easily read as irrational by the symbolists.  Comparing Horton’s own definition against which he made for the symbolists, both consider rationality to be when the practical uses of ritual beliefs are adequate to achieve the ends, but Horton’s definition elaborates on an emphasis on the range of evidence and a universal criterion of falsification available to both the users and the anthropologist. In this essay, I examine Horton’s definition of rationality and how it serves as a tool of critique in his intellectualist framework against the symbolists, where the latter is argued to be mistaken in their fear of recognizing irrationality in traditional religious thought. I argue that Horton’s redefined rationality is not successful in winning the debate, for firstly, it undermines the symbolists’ emphasis on their internal perspective in ethnographical research, and it also assumes an ultimately justifiable objective reality that anthropologists are skeptical of. In other words, I argue that the symbolists not only recognize irrationality as a characterizing human trait but also consider it an unavoidable appetite for symbolic meaning in traditional religious thought because objective truths can never be reflected in ideas without interpretative meaning. Overall, the symbolist interpretation complements and does not replace the intellectualist interpretation, such that causal and symbolic uses of beliefs are intermingled in any conceptual scheme.

Intellectualist vs. Symbolist Approaches to Traditional Religion

The intellectualists take statements of religious entities at face value as attempts at causal explanation and prediction of the natural environment that eventually seeks to control it. They are called “neo-tylorians” (Horton 53) pejoratively by symbolic anthropologists, for this tradition originates from E.B. Tylor’s animism, where belief in spiritual beings rests on the human capacity to generalize souls in surroundings to construct a schema of unobservable entities that aims to control reality (Tylor). The difference between animistic and scientific worldviews for Tylor is that the members of the former culture have a “childish mentality” (Horton 62), giving reasons for the symbolists to consider the intellectualists ethnocentric. While this verdict of primitive cognition alienates the symbolists from the neo-tylorian intellectualists, Horton also thinks that it is the personal terms used in explanatory beliefs of these traditional thought systems that propelled the positivist symbolists to conclude on irrationality (Horton 60). But such fear of irrationality for Horton is unnecessary because it only infers opportunities for investigation, and wrong or irrational theories overturned after examination have been the normal course of scientific progress, aligning with his continuous reading from religion to science.

For the symbolists, spiritual entities are “the primary objects of reference” which are unobservable and other-worldly and are figuratively connected to secondary objects that are this-worldly, not easily conceptualized in literal language, but with features that “call to mind” the primary entities (Horton 110). Thus, the symbolist approach to religion differs from the literal intellectualist approach under which “sense and reference have been established over the years by community consensus” in “conventional linguistic signs” with no further need to survey the underlying social and cultural environment for objects of reference (Horton 111). For the symbolists, a blend of instrumental and expressive modes of thought is permitted in all cultures, but Horton considers them to be compensating for the Western overemphasis on instrumental thinking by exaggerating the expressive meanings in religion. Instead of seeking an instrumental reading of the causal effects, they lean toward interpreting the contextualized meanings. For example, the symbolist Edmund Leach considers Gods to denote harmonious relationships of honour and respect and witches to denote unfavorable relationships of malice (Political Systems of Highland Burma 182), and the symbolist John Beatie interprets the Azande magical and witchcraft beliefs to be “a mode of adjustment to the strains and frustrations of everyday life” instead of “a set of weird and irrational delusion about occult forces” (Beatie 67).

For Horton, contextual evidence has suggested that ritual actions have been witnessed to exercise practical control of daily lives that comes with serious anticipation of the outcomes of these magical principles (114). He considers all the evidence to suggest that mystical entities are talked about in language literally and realistically as everyday objects where the users of religious discourse “put his money where his mouth is” by seriously intending the religious actions to achieve certain ends and defending their belief in their conventional and literal sense against the figurative sense (115-117). However, there is some contextual evidence where magical or religious thought is used in conjunction with scientific thought, so the former alone is argued to be insufficient in terms of causal power (124). When the Azande experience misfortunes, such as when knocked on the foot by a stump of wood, they use witchcraft to account for this coincidental encounter with this stump of wood, with a clear understanding of the source of pain stemming from the physical hit (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 21). But Horton reads the evidence as suggesting the supplementary causal efficacy of religions in addition to science. With regards to the objection that traditional religious thought is not being continually tested for falsification like Western science is (125), Horton suggested that users eagerly search for explanations in the face of adverse results or contradictions (126). An example may be when the Azande fabricate a man who is accused of being a witch to be a bastard so that they save the other men in the family from the same accusation under the patrilineal transmission of witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 3). Therefore, Horton concludes that the symbolists are wrong in claiming religious thinking to be merely superfluous and indifferent to practical outcomes without proper support from contextual evidence.

Divergence in the Cognitive Base of Rationality

According to Horton, other than the lack of contextual evidence that supports the symbolist view, their acclaimed anti-ethnocentric position is also invalid. Horton argues that the symbolists are committing ethnocentrism in an effort to avoid it in the first place when the face-value irrationality arising from alien thoughts appearing to be instrumentally inadequate is deemed ideologically egregious. Accordingly, all use of ritual actions “must be reclassified as expressive and hence as concerned with the production and appreciation of symbols for their own sakes” (128). Horton describes the symbolists’ attitudes as taking religious entities as obviously causally ineffective to the modern positivistic mind. Therefore, any practice that employs such means would be defective as a result and fails to profess instrumental uses (128). This leads to the face-value irrationality that symbolists are not content to rest with and thus invokes symbolic reasons beyond causal rationality.

Horton thinks that the symbolists are guilty of their own Western appraisals of cognitive standards and overlook the local context, and therefore presupposed ethnocentrism in an effort to abstain from it by prohibiting face-value irrationality. To refute the symbolists, Horton attempted to define rationality, first from the symbolist perspective, then revised it as his own, in part of the goal to see if a less ethnocentric definition of rationality would circumvent the overriding of context. Here is how he defines rationality on behalf of the symbolists:

'Rational', it seems, means a style of thought and action which is instrumental in the sense that it has an ulterior practical end, and in which the means chosen for the pursuit of that end are, by the standards of the anthropologist, adequate to the purpose. (Horton 182)

This definition stresses that the judgment of rationality is being made by the standards of the anthropologist, which immediately sounded the alarm for me. First and foremost, the symbolists and the discipline of modern anthropology overall function on a key distinction of EMIC versus ETIC perspectives of interpretation. The former approaches the cultural analysis from the internally understood environment of that particular social group examined (Hunt and Callan 3) and interprets the “attitudes, motives and interests of social factors within the context of their cultural world” (Mostowlansky and Rota 3), and the latter relies on a general system of meaning devised external to the culture studied by the researcher prior to the study (Mostowlansky and Rota 3). Horton’s definition assumes that the symbolist interpretation is purely ETIC under a modern scientific lens of causal relations by confining the ultimate judge of rationality within the anthropologists’ own Western standards. However, the symbolists pride themselves in functioning within the EMIC perspective, meaning that the criterion of truth and falsity and the success of ritual actions are to be assessed by the local framework. In other words, rationality is context-dependent and not solely judged by the anthropologists. Nevertheless, I give Horton the benefit of the doubt on his word choice of anthropologists’ standards, for he could mean that the ultimate evaluator of rationality has to be the anthropologist in any third-person recounting of a given culture. Because it is inevitable that the anthropologist has to make the last call and be the translator in any cross-cultural studies, this final adjudication presupposes the interpretation to be filtered through the anthropologist’s decision to employ the EMIC or the ETIC perspective. However, later in the chapter, Horton gives his revised definition of rationality, which demonstrates a fusion of the anthropological use of EMIC and ETIC methods:

Let us define a pattern of theory and practice as rational in relation to a particular end when, in the light of the range of evidence available to the users and of certain elementary but universal criteria of verification and falsification shared by themselves and the anthropologist, it strikes the latter as a plausible means to the achievement of that end. (Horton 129)

This definition is similar to the last one, where both describe rationality to be based on the adequacy or plausibility of a certain theory or practice when used as a means to profess certain ends. The second one is appended with an emphasis that such criteria of rationality are conditional on evidence shared by both the users and the anthropologist, and a universal method of verification. By comparing the two definitions, I think Horton’s intention in his own definition is to highlight how the symbolists failed to consider sufficient evidence common to all stakeholders and are dictators in choosing the verification method. His own definition demonstrates a blending of the EMIC and the ETIC perspectives so that both the evidence and the testifying methods are universally understood by the users and the anthropologists, which I think coincides precisely with the anthropological framework of interpretation. Rather, the first definition he made on behalf of the symbolists seems incomplete and at risk of undermining their EMIC vs. ETIC principles of ethnographical research. Thus, I think his definitional project fails to clarify the possible reasons behind symbolists’ imputation of face-value irrationality.

Nevertheless, under this new definition, Horton thinks the symbolists were hastened to conclude on a preliminary irrationality, for she could have judged so due to an excess or a lack of evidence that was not commonly available to all parties. However, I think the deciding factor of irrationality for the symbolists was never the amount of evidence or methods of verification, but a different underlying cognitive base. At the core of Horton’s argument lies a cognitive foundation where all thought systems are equally rational at their core (Horton 132), at least in terms of the primary theory of material objects in empirical reality that guarantees the survival of a social group and is uniformly cross-cultural (Horton 12). The divergences are revealed through secondary theories of diverse cultures that posit varied unobservable entities that reference the observable primary objects and order phenomena in their complex yet regular pattern. However, for the symbolists, the cognitive foundation hinges upon a core of equal irrationality (Leach, “Social Anthropology” 97), where all cultures inseparably make use of metaphoric and instrumental thinking. It is our capacity for errors and mistakes that make us distinctively human, such that human behaviors cannot be predicted like that of natural laws, for we tell lies and have unconscious drives that are hard to detect through empirical methods of verification (Leach, “Social Anthropology” 98). Even within the cultures bathed in Western scientific thinking, our physical interactions with the world are not free of meaningful reasons for beliefs in addition to knowledge of the causal laws on the primary level. The simple act of approaching and petting your neighbor’s dog for the first time requires not only the spatial and temporal causal knowledge between me and the dog, but also my belief that domesticated dogs are harmless, and this act of affection is acceptable, for it symbolizes an amicable social interaction. For all human behaviors, reasons and causes are intertwined; while causal theories can be speculated and tested in terms of their rationality, reasons can only be interpreted within a particular context, which cannot be articulated in terms of universal rationality but rather is motivated by an irrational appetite. With that being said, Horton and the symbolists have diverging starting points of analysis, where the former approaches religion to look for natural laws with an assumption of fundamental rationality, and the latter approaches religion to explain human behaviors in terms of meaning with an assumption of fundamental irrationality. This polarizing contrast nullifies Horton’s attempts to counter the symbolists because his assumption of a uniformly rational core in cognition was never permitted in the symbolists’ foundational admission of irrationality in all systems of thought to begin with.

Divergence in the Understanding of Objectivity

Aside from the rudimentary difference in our cognitive foundation, Horton’s definition of rationality also assumes an objective reality-in-itself for any secondary theories to be measured against, and the degree of rationality of a given theory is therefore dependent on its technological effectiveness in attesting to the objective reality. For intellectualists like Horton, facts are facts, and cultures of different secondary theories are assessed in relation to this objective reality in terms of their adequacies that gauge a level of rationality. However, the symbolists remain skeptical of the efficacy of our ideas to reflect reality completely. They gravitate towards conceptual relativism, where each system of thought constitutes a coherent whole and discloses partialities of the thing-in-itself, where no universal rationality can be invoked to evaluate it. This divergence in objectivity is the greatest contributing factor behind symbolists’ pessimistic stance on cross-cultural rationality and the turn towards expressive and figurative uses of secondary theories such as traditional religion.

For Horton, the objective reality is independent of our particular culture and the language we use to conceptualize it, and consists of objective facts and some basic but universal criteria of verification. In this realist definition of objectivity, the rationality of a thought is assessed on the truth value of the belief content of the theory in terms of its agreement with reality. In the case of African religion, the true value of the practice of ritual actions would be determined with respect to the causal efficacy posited by certain spiritual entities with a universal method of verification. However, Horton’s evaluation of instrumental rationality in second theories might not seem so straightforward when examined contextually. In his example of an African villager who exhausted all his material and spiritual means to be faithful to his belief in a deity so that the health of his family can be restored, the objective reality consists of facts such as the health status of the villager’s families and his physical conduct including his propitiatory offerings and chastened behaviors (Horton 115). Horton considers such a case to be an example of religious thought being literally intended, for it is used instrumentally, where his belief in the deity is rational and taken seriously to heal his family successfully in the end. Here, the truth value of his belief would be assessed on how accurately the belief in the deity restoring the family’s health reflects the objective reality. Now, there are several indeterminable questions in this upcoming evaluation. When gathering the objective facts, is there a range of data that is more appropriate to select? Should the offerings be given more consideration than changes in his moral behaviors, for the latter is harder to scale? The recovery process of different family members might not be a strictly linear progression; should each phase of reversion in the health status be assessed in conjunction with simultaneous instances of ritual behaviors? If different family members recovered at different paces and eventually returned to heterogeneous strength levels, how do we evaluate the total instrumental value of his ritual belief? Should we use a weighted average calculation or a sum total calculation? It seems that both the gathering of objective facts and the coming up of a universal method of verification in Horton’s definition of rationality are vague and uncertain, where both aspects rely on the cultural context and the anthropologists’ subjective views. Thus, the truth value of objective reality is very difficult to calculate, for our experienced reality is limited by contexts that do not embody the thing-in-itself completely.

On the other hand, the symbolists, while similarly admitting the existence of an external reality-in-itself, are doubtful that we could ever truthfully reflect that reality in our second theories, such as religious ideas. This conceptual relativistic framework is practiced internally among the Azande, who selectively interpret the results of a hierarchical system of oracles and do not generalize observations when medicine is considered unsuccessful because “the beliefs are not all present at the same time but function in different situations” (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 202). In terms of the testing of causal efficacies, the Azande even follows an implicit rule of not asking the oracle questions to which answers can be verified easily in empirical experience to avoid the oracle being unambiguously proved wrong, in which case they allow empirical errors to be explained by mystical interference (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 160-161). In this instance, there is an indeterminate relativism already within the EMIC understanding of a given theory, where the users are haphazardly selecting suitable objective facts and arbitrarily determining the need for verification. When a third-person view attempts to interpret the truth value of a religious belief, the possibility of reaching a consensus on appropriate evidence and a suitable method of testing between the users and the anthropologist seems even more grim. Without a determinate method that measures the truth value of relevant evidence that constitutes causal relations in the objective reality, a universal calculation of rationality would be impossible to obtain. For relativists, there are no neutral criteria for rationality, for all our concepts of reality are bound by empirical experience of a given culture and language (Winch 15). The truth value of reality is separate from the meaning of our experienced reality, and the first does not provide the whole sense of reality because the truth alone does not determine how thought systems are used in practice. For example, the chemical compounds of a pharmaceutical drug can be articulated in statements that have a clear criterion for their truth and falsity. However, our understanding of that drug is not solely formulated in the truth-value of the statement that pronounces the chemical reactions elicited by the drug. Our sense of reality, in this example, is made up of a compound of truth and meaning, where our perceptions of the drug from its marketing and experienced somatic effect complete our belief of the drug to be useful or not. This distinction of truth and meaning is what results in a context-dependent rationality and an omnipresent irrationality due to the irrevocably entangled sense of reasons supported by expressive meanings and causes supported by verifiable truth.

Correspondingly, in religion, the necessity for expressive interpretations emerges and is fulfilled by the symbolist who stresses the important social and psychological needs in addition to this-worldly preoccupations of explanation and control satisfied by traditional religion (Geertz 99-102). Symbolists such as Clifford Geertz openly accept the intellectualist accounts of religion but consider it incomplete without a wider account of religion’s expressive functions that establish a sense of order in the social world (Levine 538). For symbolists, religion, as a secondary theory, is distinctive from science, for its focal point is not truth but meaning. Horton’s intellectualist approach considers objective reality to be representable in all second theories, but in his examples of contextual evidence, the ritual actions in practice are far more involuted and complex for an instrumental rationality to be correctly calibrated. That is why the symbolists do not seem to seriously engage in resolving the burden of proof of their over-emphasis of symbolic meaning in spiritual belief by gathering the contextual evidence deemed so lacking by Horton, for all evidence is “polluted” with the irrationality inescapable in our intrinsic search for expressive meaning in addition to causal truth as social animals, alluding to a prima facie requisite for contextualized interpretations. Maybe “in a perfectly rational world, perhaps there would be no anthropologists” (Luntley 213). However, our existential reality is filled with the ineluctable irrationality in human cognition that creates metaphoric explanations in terms of our social environment. Hence, for the symbolists, the religious perspective that originates not out of the scientific scepticism, deals with wider non-hypothetical truths, and “rather than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis, its encounter” (Geertz 112).

Horton might object to the symbolists’ thesis of an overarching irrationality and an ultimately subjective sense of reality that confuses the objective reality with meaning by voicing his distinction between primary vs. secondary theories. For Horton, on a primary level, our ideas in relation to objective reality must be rationally similar cross-culturally for social groups to survive through cooperative endeavors. These homogenous ideas, irrespective of language and context, include “our everyday Western conception of material objects which exist and persist independently of ourselves” and other culturally indistinguishable notions on spatiality, temporality, humanness, causality, contradictions, truth, falsity, and agreement with reality (Horton 141). From the varied secondary theories that exhibit culturally specific meanings, perhaps universality can be revealed through reverse conceptual engineering from the local context back to a primary theory. To this line of objection, I think this assumption of rudimentary and intercultural concepts that align without translation can be challenged. For example, the Azande, when informed by the oracles that sickness lies ahead of them, seem unconcerned with inquiring further on the name of the witch that would cause the deterioration of their future health, so that they can counter the witchcraft by having water blown on them. They merely wait for a few days and confirm their future health status with the oracle again, for they think the evil influence in the future might be resolved in the present on a different timeline. It seems that the Azande have different temporal concepts of future and present, which overlap with one another, such that the future is already present and can be exposed and altered through oracles (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 161-162). Unlike the linear understanding of time commonly held in the West, the Azande’s temporal notion presupposed the future to exist within the current state, and the Azande seem content with this belief without a full theoretical explanation. This is a case in point where a priori concepts such as time are understood and used differently across cultures. When these practical concepts lack a consistent theoretical rapport in local cultures, hoping for a perfect translation back to the primary level and deducing its truth value seems a bit unrealistic. Instead, I’d like to think that cross-cultural analysis is possible not on the basis of primary theories of concepts with universal contents, but on a categorical conceptual schema that classifies concepts of different contents similarly. For example, all thought systems contain a particular attitude towards contradiction. However, in science, this attitude is arguably more cautious and rigorous than that in religion, for the Azande demonstrate multiple contradictory religious beliefs facing a single event and utilize the most convenient in the practical decision (Evans-Pritchard and Gilles 221). We can compare these two systems of thought not because both attempt to avoid contradictions in the same manner, but because the categorical concept of contradiction exists in both. Similarly, non-metaphysical concepts such as rationalism and romanticism exist cross-culturally but entail manifold meanings. When Horton argues that the symbolists’ prioritization of expressive thought is ethnocentric as it is influenced by the rise of romanticism in reaction to the Western scientific revolution, he ignores the fact that romantic vs. rationalist perspectives are only a natural product of human thought across cultures. For example, Confucianism and Daoism in the 3-4 century AD are Chinese correlates of Western rationalism and romanticism even though covering intricately differing details (Feng 22). It is not the symbolists’ Western bias that produced the aesthetic need for expression. In fact, a diametrically opposed schema of thought exists necessarily in any intellectual program. Overall, I argue that patterns of thought should be understood in their respective contexts, for an objective reality of causal truths is unlikely to be reflected fully in any belief system comprised of the irrational appetite for meaning that suits us. Moreover, conversion to a universal primary theory might just be a naïve and unfulfilling wish, for the survival of cultures is guaranteed not by a list of universally aligned concepts but by a universal categorical scheme of concepts with situationally complex contents.

Conclusion

In this essay, I overviewed Horton’s intellectualist account in comparison with the symbolist account of African traditional religion when the former stresses the instrumental use of literal religious beliefs for explanation, prediction, and control, and the latter complements the instrumental perspective with an elaboration of religion’s expressive and metaphoric function that refers to this-worldly objects and social relations. Horton considers the symbolists to be committing ethnocentrism on their own terms by comfortably conceding to face-value irrationality but then ideologically dismissing it by re-centering the nature of religion as expressive. Horton gave his definition of rationality that underscores shared evidence and a universal method of verification to illustrate the symbolists’ shortcomings. I argued against Horton’s definition of rationality for it not only misinterprets the symbolists on its disciplinary principle of EMIC vs. ETIC perspectives but also assumes a cognitive core of rationality assessed on the basis of the truth value of an ultimately describable objective reality, which is fundamentally in a clash with the anthropological view of an omnipresent irrational nature of human on the basis of meaning due to our impossible gauge to the independent reality-in-itself.  I argue that the truth value of religious beliefs is difficult to assess in terms of its agreement with objective reality, for all evidence and methods of testing are context-dependent. Instead, I argued for the symbolists’ focus on the relative meaning of ritual beliefs that are culturally specific because the supplement of social reasons, in addition to causal truths, is necessary for any society to establish a sense of order. Lastly, regarding the possibility of reaching universal truths through reverse engineering from cross-cultural metaphysical concepts of the same content in secondary theories back to the primary theory, I argue that the assumption of consistent uses of basic metaphysical and non-metaphysical concepts is unverified. Rather, cross-cultural analysis sustains itself not because of the same essential concepts on the primary level but because of a uniformly categorical scheme of concepts that allows comparison through the classification of concepts that correlate to context-specific meanings.

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