Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on October 27, 2008
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2008 76(4):934-969; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfn087
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What Cultural Theorists of Religion Have to Learn from Wittgenstein; Or, How to Read Geertz as a Practice Theorist
Jason A. Springs, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
E-mail: jspring1{at}nd.edu
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Abstract |
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Amid the debates over the meaning and usefulness of the word "culture" during the 1980s and 1990s, practice theory emerged as a framework for analysis and criticism in cultural anthropology. Although theorists have gradually begun to explore practice-oriented frameworks as promising vistas in cultural anthropology and the study of religion, these remain relatively recent developments that stand to be historically explicated and conceptually refined. This article assesses several ways that practice theory has been articulated by some of its chief expositors and critics, and places these developments in conversation with comparable accounts of "social practices" by recent pragmatist philosophers. My aim in generating such a conversation is to illuminate the ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work provides important resources for cultural analysis that are already implicit in practice theory, yet either frequently overlooked or dismissed by practice theorists. I demonstrate how a Wittgensteinian understanding of practice theory coheres with, and illuminates, Clifford Geertz's account of meaning, thick description, and religious practices. Reading Geertz as a practice theorist, I argue, helps alleviate the apparent opposition between assessing meaning and analyzing power in the study of religious practices and institutions, and unsettles dichotomous accounts of belief and intentional action.
I presented a much earlier version of this paper to the Religion and Public Life Colloquium at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion. I am grateful to all who contributed to that discussion, for Martin Kavka's response to the paper, concerns raised by Larry Stratton, Josh Dubler, Heather White, and Atalia Omer, and for the instructive criticisms that I received from the JAAR referees for this article.