Genealogies of Religion, Twenty Years On: An Interview with

Talal Asad
Posted on March 12, 2014 by mattsheedy

The following is part of an interview conducted by Craig Martin with Talal Asad, which
appears in the February issue of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 1
(2014). To read the full interview, please follow the link to order a copy of the journal or
to read it on-line.
Craig Martin: Last fall, realizing that 2013 marked the twentieth anniversary of Talal
Asads Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and
Islam, I interviewed Talal AsadDistinguished Professor of Anthropology at The City
University of New Yorkon the book and its reception and influence on the
field.Genealogies of Religion influenced me early in my graduate studiesparticularly
the first chapter on The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, in
which Asad argues that the concept of religion is, in many contemporary contexts,
fundamentally shaped by Protestant assumptions. This was one of the first books I was
exposed to that argued there is normative work accomplished by the very term
religion, and all of my writings since have taken this idea as a central starting point. I
want to thank Asad for taking the time to answer the questions I posed to him.
Craig Martin: Can you discuss what you most hoped to accomplish with Genealogies
of Religion? Do you think the book was received in the way you hoped it would be?
Talal Asad: As far as I can tell, most people have understood that I was trying to think
about religion as practice, language, and sensibility set in social relationships rather
than as systems of meaning. In that book and much of my subsequent work I have tried
to think through small pieces of Christian and Islamic history to enlarge my own
understanding of what and how people live when they use the vocabulary of religion. I
certainly did not want to claim that as a historical construct religion was a reference to
an absence, a mere ideology expressing dominant power. It was precisely because I was
dissatisfied with the classical Marxist notion of ideology that I turned my attention to
religion. I was gradually coming to understand that the question I needed to think about
was how learning a particular language game was articulated with a particular form of
life, as Wittgenstein would say. The business of defining religion is part of that larger
question of the infinite ways language enters life. I wanted to get away from arguments
that draw on or offer essential definitions: Religion is a response to a human need,
Religion may be a comfort to people in distress but it asserts things that arent true,
Religion is essentially about the sacred, Religion gives meaning to life, Religion and
science are compatible/incompatible, Religion is responsible for great evil, So is
science and religion is also a source of much good, No, science is not a source of evil,
as religion often is; it is technology and politics that are the problemthe social use to
which science is put.
I argued that to define religion is to circumscribe certain things (times, spaces,
powers, knowledges, beliefs, behaviors, texts, songs, images) as essential to religion,
and other things as accidental. This identifying work of what belongs to a definition isnt
done as a consequence of the same experiencethe things themselves are diverse, and
the way people react to them or use them is very different. Put it this way: when they are
identified by the concept religion, it is because they are seen to be significantly similar;
what makes them similar is not a singular experience common to all the things the
concept brings together (sacrality, divinity, spirituality, transcendence, etc.); what
makes them similar is the definition itself that persuades us, through what Wittgenstein
called a captivating picture, that there is an essence underlying them allin all
instances of religion.
The things regarded as hanging together according to one conception of religion come
together very differently in another. Thats why the translation of one religious
concept into another is always problematic. But Genealogies doesnt argue that the
definition of religion is merely a matter of linguistic representation. Religious
languagelike all languageis interwoven with life itself. To define religion is
therefore in a sense to try and grasp an ungraspable totality. And yet I nowhere say that
these definitions are abstract propositions. I stress that definitions of religion are
embedded in dialogs, activities, relationships, and institutions that are lovingly or
casually maintainedor betrayed or simply abandoned. They are passionately fought
over and pronounced upon by the authoritative law of the state.
Definitions of religion are not single, completed definitive acts; they extend over time
and work themselves through practices. They are modified and elaborated with
continuous use. To the extent that defining religion is a religious act, whether carried
out by believers or nonbelievers, it may also be an attempt at attacking or reinforcing
an existing religious tradition, at reforming it or initiating a new one.
My problem with universal definitions of religion, therefore, has been that by insisting
on a universal essence they divert us from asking questions about what the definition
includes and what it excludes, how, by whom, for what purpose; about what
social/linguistic context it makes good sense to propound a given definition and when it
doesnt.
Trying to construct genealogies of concepts is one way of getting at such questions. For
me the most important concern in all my writing has been, What, in this matter, is the
right question? So in Genealogies of Religion I did not try to provide a better definition
of religion, still less to undermine the very concept of religion. I was looking for ways
of formulating the most fruitful questions about how people enact, declare, commit to
or repudiatethings when they talk about religion. Thus in Chapter 4, in my
exploration of Hugh of St. Victors account of the sacraments, and of Bernard of
Clairvauxs monastic sermons, I tried to get away from notions like inculcation, a
passive reception of dominating power, and to move towards something more complex.
Thus I wrote, Bernard is not manipulating desires (in the sense that his monks did not
know what was happening to them) but instead creating a new moral space for the
operation of a distinctive motivation. What interested me was how such subjective
processes related to embodiment and disciplineor put differently, how objective
conditions in which subjects find themselves enable them to decide what one must
think, how one can live, and how one is able to live. This was the project I was engaged
in when I wrote the essays making upGenealogies, and this is what Im still engaged in. I
dont think of that book in isolation from my other work.
Many readers have understood what I was trying to do and sympathized (even if
guardedly) with my effort. Some havent. It has even been alleged by the latter, to my
surprise, that I am hostile to religion, and especially to the Christian religion, and that
I developed my hostility during my childhood when I was supposedly humiliated at
boarding school run by missionaries (in India)because I once referred to that period in
my early schooldays as the time when I learnt to argue, to be combative, with my
Christian schoolmates! I was never humiliated by Christian missionaries and never
said I was. More important: anyone who has read Genealogies of Religion with some
attention surely cant make sense of that claim. In fact Ive learnt much about the
complexity of religion by reading Christian writers belonging to different historical
periods. I certainly dont think that when people use a religious vocabulary they are
really talking about mere constructionsabout ideological formations whose role is to
provide justification for social domination. Of course something is constructed, and
reconstructed, but this construction is not teleological (made and completed for a
specific purpose), and it is not properly described as essentially social. That kind of
functionalism is precisely what I wanted to get away from in Genealogies.
CM: Could you comment on the different reactions to your work by other disciplines or
sub-disciplines? Im familiar with how religious studies scholars have reacted to
your work, but do you feel that this work has made the impact you hoped it would in, for
example, anthropology, political sciences, sociology, as well as the diverse areas of
religious studies?
TA: I really dont know what impact Genealogies has had in the social sciences
generally. I know that a number of talented young anthropologists have taken up the
idea of embodiment, of sensibilities, of tradition, and of virtue ethics in their
ethnography of Islam. They have recently been criticized by some people for
exaggerating the importance of formal religiosity at the expense of ordinary spiritual
beliefs and I have been blamed for having started this bad tendencyand then carried
it on into a reactionary view of secularism. This is not the place to engage with their
complaints, especially because they largely concern the anthropology of Islamand so
they are focused more on an earlier essay of mine as well as on Formations of the
Secular. I gather that many sociologists and anthropologists studying Muslim
immigrants in Europe feel that my work is perversely normative, that it deliberately
ignores the reality of the social experience of Muslims and their religious responsein
short, that it overlooks their modern predicament in secular liberal countries. Thats one
kind of reaction to my work, I suppose. But I am curious as to why they feel so strongly
that my work threatens their truth. When I was an anthropology student we used to joke
about senior ethnographers who responded to theoretical arguments in seminars by
interrupting, But in my tribe people believed . . . This kind of empiricism is still,
unfortunately, with us. Many ethnographers think that they have a proper
understanding of their informants experience (and therefore of their religious belief or
disbelief) by virtue of the fact that they have spent some (limited) time with them in
their form of lifeas if the experience of their informants was homogeneous, complete
and consistent, as if their form of life (shared briefly by the ethnographer) could be
summed up in a representation reflecting an indisputable reality and was not itself an
internally ambiguous interpretation, and as if their ordinary language was more
authentic than the language of their theological texts.
At any rate, there has been greater interest in Formations than Genealogies of
Religionamong political scientists, although I see the former book as closely connected
to the latter and its questions about secularism more developed than they are
in Genealogies. This interest is, I suppose, due to questions of pain, violence, and
suffering that I share with some of them. They already know that things are not as
simple as some versions of liberal ideology claim they are.