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A review by aegagrus
How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others by T. M. Luhrmann
2.75
My central critique of this book is that T. M. Luhrmann spins a relatively specific intervention in the fields of anthropology and ethnography into an excessively general discourse on the phenomenology of religion.
The initial intervention runs as follows. For many years, anthropologists and others wrote about non-western religiosity in terms of irrationality; what were the cultural factors that caused people to (wrongly) believe non-rational things about the world? A new generation of anthropologists endeavored to take non-western peoples' beliefs more seriously, leading to an ontological turn in which these beliefs were considered to be a "real" and functional part of their cultural environments. The problem, Luhrmann notes, is that some have overcorrected and now claim that, "belief" as such being a Western concept, there is no distinction in other cultures between what someone "knows" about the material world and what they "believe" about the spiritual world. Luhrmann persuasively argues that this type of rhetoric flattens the way in which non-western people are said to understand the world, denying their capacity to build "flexible ontologies" and failing to account for the observed fact that people everywhere in the world interact with and account for spiritual entities differently than they interact with material ones.
This argument is well-taken. From here, Luhrmann moves into a discussion of the ways in which people make their relationships with invisible others feel Real (which, she notes, is inherently something that takes work). Her comparison with play is instructive; children are able to track parallel realities in great detail, substituting a bit of play-dough for a doll's nighttime snack (Luhrmann's example), but they are not actually surprised when the play-dough remains uneaten come morning. Luhrmann describes various elements of religious life such as prayer, confession, and "inward cultivation" in terms of people of faith practicing being attentive to mystical experiences, learning how to narrativize their lives, and building compelling and dynamic relationships with their God or gods.
The strength of Luhrmann's analysis here is the personal experiences on which she is able to draw. She has been many places and talked to many people, and is able to compellingly relate stories of her interactions with evangelical Christians on three continents, practitioners of Santeria and Western Occultism, newly-observant Hasidim, and others.
However, there are in my opinion several issues with the broader scope of Luhrmann's work. First, although her qualitative experiences are illuminating, many of her methods seem likely to uncover what she starts out expecting to uncover. Second, the general discussions of religious phenomenology seem somewhat basic in that field, while the specific discussion of the faultiness of the ontological turn in ethnography somewhat falls by the wayside, as Luhrmann has not done the right fieldwork to truly expand upon her insight there. The last chapter in particular, in which Luhrmann reflects upon the interactive nature of spiritual relationships, seems somewhat unoriginal in the field of comparative religion. Finally, Luhrmann's comparison of "bodily" religious responses among Charismatic Christians in the US, India, and Ghana, raises some eyebrows by the loose way in which Luhrmann uses insights about "cultural differences" from earlier literature (despite criticizing the impressionistic nature of some of that very literature earlier).
The initial intervention runs as follows. For many years, anthropologists and others wrote about non-western religiosity in terms of irrationality; what were the cultural factors that caused people to (wrongly) believe non-rational things about the world? A new generation of anthropologists endeavored to take non-western peoples' beliefs more seriously, leading to an ontological turn in which these beliefs were considered to be a "real" and functional part of their cultural environments. The problem, Luhrmann notes, is that some have overcorrected and now claim that, "belief" as such being a Western concept, there is no distinction in other cultures between what someone "knows" about the material world and what they "believe" about the spiritual world. Luhrmann persuasively argues that this type of rhetoric flattens the way in which non-western people are said to understand the world, denying their capacity to build "flexible ontologies" and failing to account for the observed fact that people everywhere in the world interact with and account for spiritual entities differently than they interact with material ones.
This argument is well-taken. From here, Luhrmann moves into a discussion of the ways in which people make their relationships with invisible others feel Real (which, she notes, is inherently something that takes work). Her comparison with play is instructive; children are able to track parallel realities in great detail, substituting a bit of play-dough for a doll's nighttime snack (Luhrmann's example), but they are not actually surprised when the play-dough remains uneaten come morning. Luhrmann describes various elements of religious life such as prayer, confession, and "inward cultivation" in terms of people of faith practicing being attentive to mystical experiences, learning how to narrativize their lives, and building compelling and dynamic relationships with their God or gods.
The strength of Luhrmann's analysis here is the personal experiences on which she is able to draw. She has been many places and talked to many people, and is able to compellingly relate stories of her interactions with evangelical Christians on three continents, practitioners of Santeria and Western Occultism, newly-observant Hasidim, and others.
However, there are in my opinion several issues with the broader scope of Luhrmann's work. First, although her qualitative experiences are illuminating, many of her methods seem likely to uncover what she starts out expecting to uncover. Second, the general discussions of religious phenomenology seem somewhat basic in that field, while the specific discussion of the faultiness of the ontological turn in ethnography somewhat falls by the wayside, as Luhrmann has not done the right fieldwork to truly expand upon her insight there. The last chapter in particular, in which Luhrmann reflects upon the interactive nature of spiritual relationships, seems somewhat unoriginal in the field of comparative religion. Finally, Luhrmann's comparison of "bodily" religious responses among Charismatic Christians in the US, India, and Ghana, raises some eyebrows by the loose way in which Luhrmann uses insights about "cultural differences" from earlier literature (despite criticizing the impressionistic nature of some of that very literature earlier).