Csordas 2004 Asymptote of the Ineffable. Embodiment, Alterity, Religion

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004� 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4502-0002$3.00

Asymptote of theIneffable

Embodiment, Alterity, and theTheory of Religion1

by Thomas J. Csordas

Alterity is the phenomenological kernel of religion, and insofaras alterity is part of the structure of being-in-the-world, religionis an inevitable feature of human existence. This essay elabo-rates these ideas by juxtaposing traditional phenomenology of re-ligion with contemporary theorizing about alterity. The argu-ment moves from an opening reflection about the “origin” ofreligion and the presumed interiority of religious experience to acritique that modifies the phenomenologists’ understanding ofreligion’s object as a majestic and wholly “Other” with the no-tion of an intimate alterity grounded in embodiment. The inti-mate alterity of the gendered self as embodied otherness is illus-trated in a series of ethnographic moments that pinpoint theelementary structure of alterity described by the term “ecart.”Applying these insights to contemporary events suggests thatthere is a sense in which political alterity is also a religiousstructure.

t h o m a s j . c s o r d a s is Professor of Anthropology and Reli-gion and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Case West-ern Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106-7125, U.S.A.[[email protected]]). Born in 1952, he was educated at The OhioState University (B.A., 1974) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1980).He was on the research faculty of Harvard Medical School(1984–89) and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee(1989–90) before joining the faculty at Case in 1990. He was a re-cipient of the 1988 Stirling Award for Contributions in Psycho-logical Anthropology and has been a visiting fellow of the Rus-sell Sage Foundation (1996–97). He has served as editor of Ethos:Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology(1996–2001) and as president of the Society for the Anthropologyof Religion (1998–2002). His research interests include anthropo-logical theory, comparative religion, medical and psychologicalanthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globali-zation and social change, and language and culture. Among hispublications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology ofCharismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994), (edited) Embodiment and Experience: The ExistentialGround of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life inthe Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1997; paperback ed. Palgrave 2002), and Body/Mean-ing/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002). The present paper wassubmitted 27 ix 02 and accepted 13 vi 03.

[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of thisissue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago/edu/CA/home.html).]

1. A version of this essay was presented as the Presidential Addressto the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2002. I am grate-

In hitting upon a mathematical metaphor for the title ofthis essay, I surprised myself. I am not typically one tothink in mathematical terms. But it is precisely the ca-pacity to surprise oneself that I want to draw attentionto as an initial indication of my argument’s direction.We can surprise ourselves; indeed, we are always a bitoutside ourselves, outrunning or lagging a bit behind andseldom in perfect accord with ourselves. In making thisobservation I am neither appealing to the unconsciousnor putting forward a description of consciousness. Mypoint is about being-in-the-world, our human conditionof existence not only as beings with experience but asbeings in relation to others. And here also we are inev-itably surprised by others, given the impossibility of per-fectly coinciding with them in thought or feeling, moodor motivation. In this sense, the problem of subjectivityis that we are never completely ourselves, and the prob-lem of intersubjectivity is that we are never completelyin accord with others.

In a moment I will formulate a thesis about religionthat is foreshadowed in this observation about surprise.First, however, we must come to terms with just what isincluded in “religion” as a category of human activity andexperience. In her 2002 distinguished lecture to the So-ciety for the Anthropology of Religion, Edith Turner di-rectly confronted this issue in her title, which includesthe question “What Does This Binding Word ‘Religion’Mean?” With this she alludes to the source of the word“religion” in the Latin religare (from ligare, “to tie orbind”). This etymology has often been disputed; most re-cently, Jacques Derrida (1998), in a reflection on faith andknowledge as sources of religion, invokes the debate aboutwhether the word derives from religare or relegere (fromlegere, “to harvest or gather”). But what or who is beingbound or gathered, by whom, for what purpose, and asprotection against what? When we use the adjective “re-ligious” to qualify reference to institutions, ideas, rituals,experience, or imagination, what is being added that isunique? What is the difference between “the religiousimagination” and imagination toutcourt? For that matter,to borrow Derrida’s words, “All sacredness and all holi-ness are not necessarily, in the strict sense of the term, ifthere is one, religious” (1998:8–9).

Moreover, as Derrida insists, as soon as we adopt theword “religion” to designate our interest “we are alreadyspeaking Latin” (1998:29). This means that we are al-ready laden with a great deal of cultural and historicalbaggage, sedimented through the profound change em-bodied in the succession of the Roman Empire by theHoly Roman Empire, the Roman Church, and the PaxAmericana. Indeed, it is simple enough to relativize theword with a few examples. In Japanese the word thattranslates as “religion” applies only to so-called new re-ligions and not to the established cults of Buddhism orShinto. In Navajo there is no generic word for “religion,”though there are words for “holy” and for “sacredceremony.”

ful to Janis Jenkins, Michael Lambek, Veena Das, and the anony-mous referees for current anthropology.

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If the word “religion” carries too much baggage, neithercan we depend on neologism, as in “numinous,” a coinageof Rudolf Otto (1923) from the Latin numen, self-con-sciously on the model of the derivation of “ominous” from“omen.” Nor does it feel safe simply to add together theentire vocabulary of relevant words—“religion,” “the nu-minous,” “the sacred,” “the holy,” “the supernatural,”“the divine,” “the transcendent,” “the occult,” “mys-tery,” “sacrifice,” “salvation,” “faith”—and declare thattheir sum constitutes our interest. The relations amongthese terms are endlessly nuanced, and we must be mind-ful of the dangers in attempting to construct a universalistdefinition of religion brought to the fore by Talal Asad(1993) in his critique of Clifford Geertz’s (1966) well-known definition. Yet I am in favor of keeping “religion”as part of our conceptual repertoire: Asad’s critique of thecategory was a necessary one, but it no more does awaywith religion as an anthropological category than Wolf’s(1982) critique of “history” or Abu-Lughod’s (1991) cri-tique of “culture” forced scholars to stop using thoseterms. Such critiques do not force us to abandon our con-cepts; rather, they constrain us to use the concepts morewisely.

In this respect, we are less well served by trying tooutline the boundaries of religion as a category than (tak-ing a cue from the cognitivists) by searching for a pro-totype around which what we will provisionally call “re-ligion” has been built up. This prototype would be, in aparticular sense, the origin of religion—its experientialsource, its phenomenological kernel. My thesis concern-ing this problem is that religion is predicated on andelaborated from a primordial sense of “otherness” or al-terity. Furthermore, because of this the religious sensi-bility exists sui generis, that is, is not reducible to anyother category. But let me say this more precisely:

Thesis: Alterity is the phenomenological kernel ofreligion.

Corollary: Insofar as alterity is part of the structure ofbeing-in-the-world—an elementary structure of exis-tence—religion is inevitable, perhaps even necessary.

In the remainder of this essay I will elaborate, qualify,and illustrate this thesis and its corollary. To begin, al-terity is neither objective nor absolute. In the sense inwhich I am using it, alterity is an elementary constituentof subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and this is how itis part of the structure of being-in-the-world. Not onlycan it be elaborated into the monstrous as well as thedivine but it can be transformed into identity, intimacy,or familiarity. Certainly the mystics have discovered thatthe wholly other can be modulated into the wholly oneand that it is equally awesome either way.

Originary Alterity

Let us begin with William Blake, poetic master of alterityand imagination, from “The Marriage of Heaven andHell” (1988:38):

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with

Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names andadorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever theirenlarged and numerous senses could perceive. Andparticularly they studied the genius of each city andcountry, placing it under its mental deity; Till a sys-tem was formed, which some took advantage of, andenslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or ab-stract the mental deities from their objects: thus be-gan Priesthood; Choosing the forms of worship frompoetic tales. And at length they pronounced that theGods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot thatAll deities reside in the Human breast.

Blake’s theory is evidently a theory of primal animism,but it is even more a theory of poetic and corporal bring-ing-to-life made possible by the “enlarged and numeroussenses” of the prelapsarian moment. For Blake the fallis a flight from concreteness to abstraction and the slav-ery of mystification. Forgetting that all deities reside inthe human breast is for Blake equivalent to saying thatthe “binding” achieved by religion is the binding, orbinding off, of the human imagination. Blake’s manifestois thick with meaning, one strand having to do with thealready braided historical-existential origin of religion,another having to do with the apparent “interiority” im-plied by the residence of deities in the human breast,and yet another having to do with the humanism in thepoet’s—and the scholar’s—skeptical stance toward reli-gion. In this section I will discuss origin and interiority,returning to the problem of skepticism later.

The notion of an “origin” of religion can be taken inboth a historical and a phenomenological sense or, inother words, a temporal and an existential sense—justas the word “moment” can mean either a minute portionof time or importance in influence or effect. I want toclarify the sense in which I understand alterity to be thephenomenological “origin” of religion. In looking forhelp on this topic from an anthropological quarter, it willnot do to turn in the most obvious direction toward thecontemporary masters Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz,and Mary Douglas, for, as penetrating as their analysesare, their studies of religion are often means to an endrather than attempts to understand religion in its ownright. Religion offers clear and compelling symbolic per-formances and imperatives for behavior, and these canin turn tell us much about cultures and social life. Forour present purpose, however, we will turn briefly in-stead to two scholars who do make religion as such theirproblem, namely, Weston La Barre and Roy Rappaport.

The first thing one notices about these two otherwiseso different thinkers is that their masterworks on reli-gion share a concern for origins. The subtitle of La Barre’s(1970) Ghost Dance is The Origins of Religion, and Rap-paport’s (1999) posthumous magnum opus is Ritual andReligion in the Making of Humanity. Both are concernedin their own ways with adaptation and evolution andless with the nature of culture and society than with thenature of humanity as discerned through religion. Bothmake explicit reference to Rudolf Otto’s notions of the

csordas Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 165

numinous and the mysterium tremendum, Rappaportmore favorably than La Barre. Most germane to my ar-gument, both look for the origins of religion and the holyin biology. I want to point to a correspondence betweenwhat appears in their work as an appeal to evolutionaryorigin through biology and what I am trying to outlineas an existential origin through embodiment, with thepoint of correspondence being the sense of alterity.

In La Barre’s formulation, religious response isuniquely human and foreign to animals because “thecontext is the universally human nuclear family, thecondition is individual human neoteny” (1970:12). Neo-teny is the human condition of being born immature. Incontrast to other animals, we have an unusually largebrain at birth that keeps growing afterward, generallyinstinctless learning, and prolonged adolescence. In thecontext of “the extravagantly heightened mammaliandependency of the unfinished organism” (p. 94), “humanneoteny not only provides conditions for learning bothof group culture and individual character, but also formsthe experiential matrix for magic and religion, and in-deed for the scientific world-view as well” (p. 87). Inbiological terms, the effective environment for the hu-man baby is not the material environment but that cre-ated by other people. “The biologically infantilized hu-man learns his humanity from infancy onward. Thishumanity arises in the psychological experiences of hisparticular animal milieu. The emotional reality of magicand religion lies precisely in these experiences” (p. 357).For La Barre the feelings of dependency and power orig-inate in experiences of infantile omnipotence and thesubsequent omnipotence of the parents, particularly thefather. His psychoanalytic argument from neoteny is oneway to ground alterity in the body and to assimilate thewholly other of religion to the intimately other of thefather.

Rappaport picks up this theme of infantile dependency,though beginning from Erik Erikson he does so in ref-erence to the infant’s experience of the mother ratherthan the father. He also calls attention to the “pseudo-infancy” evoked in some rituals, suggesting that it mayhave “its ontogenetic origin in the relationship of pre-verbal infants to their mothers” (1999:390). Several pagesearlier he cites Bateson citing Aldous Huxley on under-standing a state of grace or holiness, “the holy” beingfor Rappaport the union of the discursive and nondis-cursive aspects of human experience or, in his terms, theunion of the sacred and the numinous: “the communi-cation and behavior of animals has a naivete, simplicity,which man has lost. Man’s behavior is corrupted by de-ceit—even self-deceit—,by purpose, and by self-con-sciousness. As Aldous saw the matter, man has lost the‘grace’ which animals still have” (p. 384). Now, pseudo-infancy and animal grace are incommensurable, both be-cause one is preverbal and one nonverbal and becausefor the infant there is already a powerful other while forthe animal there is none.

Rappaport strongly suggests that if there was such afall from grace in human evolution it came aboutthrough the evolution of language and the alienation of

parts of the psyche from one another that it causes. Theemergence of language created an originary rupture, aprofound alterity. He frequently calls attention to MartinBuber’s argument that the root of evil is the dual capa-bility of humans to lie and to pose alternatives and em-phasizes that these possibilities were constituted by theemergence of language. At the same time he suggeststhat “the sacred is inconceivable in the absence of lan-guage,” which is unique to humans, but conversely that“language could not have emerged in the absence of re-ligion”—they are coeval (1995:602; 1979:210). Indeed,language and the sacred “emerged together in a processof mutual causation formally similar to, and in all like-lihood concurrent with, that which is said to have or-ganized the interdependent evolution of human intelli-gence and human technology” (1999:418).

In fact, the formal similarity of these two evolutionarypairs is only apparent, for while intelligence and tech-nology developed in complementarity, by Rappaport’s ac-count the sacred and language developed in oppositionor reversibility. In other words, if the emergence of lan-guage introduced alterity into the structure of existence,there was a second level of alterity simultaneously in-troduced within the structure of language, in which oneterm ceaselessly corrects the other. In terms of adapta-tion, which Rappaport understands as the processes bywhich living systems maintain themselves in the faceof perturbations (1999:408), “sanctity has made it pos-sible for associations of organisms to persist in the faceof increasing threats posed to their orderly social life bythe increasing ability of their members to lie” (p. 416).“The innumerable possibilities inherent in words andtheir combinations are constrained, reduced, and orderedby the unquestionable Word enunciated in ritual’s ap-parently invariant canon. Sanctity orders a versatilitythat otherwise might spawn chaos” (p. 418).

To put this slightly differently (as Rappaport does ina way that we will construe as consistent), for Rappaportthere is both a dangerous rupture and potential for chaosin language and a direct connection leading from lan-guage to logos. He understands logos as a virtually pan-cultural conception of a cosmic principle of order thatundergirds the sacred and sanctity, ritual, and the reli-gious foundations of humanity. He refers to the “epochalsignificance of language for the world beyond the speciesin which it appeared. . . . Language has ever more pow-erfully reached out from the species in which it emergedto reorder and subordinate the natural systems in whichpopulations of that species participate” (1995:606–7).This formulation of Rappaport’s almost appears to givelanguage an intentionality of its own, an alterity thatforeshadows its construal in human experience as logos.This formulation reveals the alterity within language,the split that pits sanctity and logos against lies andalternatives. And finally, this analysis introduces a thirdlevel of alterity, showing that in both positive and neg-ative forms, as logos and lie, it appears compellingly onboth sides of the holy—the discursive sacred and thenondiscursive numinous.

We must turn now to the second issue evoked by


Blake’s argument, the apparent “interiority” implied byhis reference to the residence of deities in the humanbreast. William James (1961) based his well-known studyof religion on the most acute and extreme interior, per-sonal, solitary spiritual moments of religious geniuses,seeking the essence of religious experiences in those“which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.”The reverse strategy of seeking the minimal criterion ofreligious experience—the phenomenological kernel thatis the origin of religious symbol, sentiment, and insti-tution—can be just as productive. Instead of examiningthe most religious moments of the most religious man,we want to know about the most marginally religiousmoments of the least religious person.

James’s insights have been addressed by two eminentanthropologists in the William James Lecture on the Va-rieties of Religious Experience at his home institutionof Harvard. The 1998 lecture was delivered by CliffordGeertz, who, as one might surmise, shifts the ground ofdiscussion from the solitary to the public. He suggeststhat our times require “firmer, more determinate, moretranspersonal, extravert” terms than “experience,”terms such as “meaning,” “identity,” and “power” (allspelled with capital letters and placed within scare-quotes) (2000:175). Yet in the end he recognizes thatJames’s sensibility remains relevant to our era of seismicreligious change insofar as it provides “circumstantialaccounts of the personal inflections of religious engage-ment that reach far beyond the personal” and reflects an“openness to the foreign and unfamiliar, the particularand incidental, yes, even the extreme and the brainsick”(p. 185). To foreshadow the implications of my argument,this openness to otherness and the unfamiliar is preciselythe route by which we can and must trace the link be-tween personal experience and, in Geertz’s words, the“conflicts and dilemmas of our age” (p. 185).

In the 1997 William James Lecture Arthur Kleinmantakes the opposite tack by explicitly embracing an an-thropology of experience. For Kleinman the point of con-vergence between an anthropology of experience and thestudy of religion is suffering, not so much in the senseof theodicy as in the sense in which it constitutes “thestuff of experience that summons inquiry” (1997:316).Speaking of the Weberian paradigm represented to somedegree by Geertz, he is led “to speak almost of a tyrannyof meaning” (p. 317) that suppresses the “fragmentary,contradictory, changing, unexpressed, and inexpressible”aspects of sensory conditions, moral and aesthetic sen-sibilities, muscular agency and action, social relationsand memories. Citing Primo Levi and Veena Das, he ob-serves that meaning-making can be inadequate, distort-ing, and inhuman, “a political tool that reworks expe-rience so that it conforms to the demands of power” (p.318). Again to foreshadow my argument, Kleinman sug-gests that the profound otherness of suffering can be un-derstood only insofar as one understands that “experi-ence is both within and without the boundary of thebody-self, crossing back and forth as if that body waspermeable” (p. 326), and that meaning-making is mostconsequential insofar as it is a bridge between cultural

representations and transpersonal processes, on the onehand, and bodily processes and embodied subjectivity,on the other.

The shared theme of otherness in the above reflectionsspeaks directly to my thesis about the phenomenologicalkernel of religion. The most explicit clue to what con-stitutes this kernel, however, comes from the work ofphenomenologists of religion. Here I am thinking not somuch of the more widely read Eliade as of the less fa-miliar Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw. Amonganthropologists, van der Leeuw is virtually unknown,and Otto is often emblematic of anachronistic theoriesof religion. As a student in the 1970s I learned about thestudy of religion from an anthropological standpoint thatacknowledged precursors whose ideas were seminal butwho were now to be understood as quaint and out-moded—among them Sir James George Frazier, MaxMuller, Edward Tylor, Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges,and Rudolf Otto. I recall being surprised at some pointto discover that Otto was relatively quite contemporaryand continued to be read quite seriously in certain quar-ters of religious studies.

For Otto, the object toward which the numinous con-sciousness is directed is a mysterium tremendum et fas-cinans, and he described its central characteristic as fol-lows (1923:26–27):

Taken in the religious sense, that which is “mysteri-ous” is—to give it perhaps the most striking expres-sion—the “wholly other,” that which is quite be-yond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, andthe familiar, which therefore falls quite outside thelimits of the “canny,” and is contrasted with it, fill-ing the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.. . . the essential characteristic . . . lies in a peculiar“moment” of consciousness, to wit, the stupor be-fore something “wholly other” . . .

The invocation of blank wonder, astonishment, and stu-por is striking, but I would call attention instead to thephenomenon of the “wholly other,” pointing as well tothe manner in which Otto cites the “limits of the‘canny’” (an issue to which we will return). Van derLeeuw (1986 (1938):23) had a corresponding observationabout the object of religion:

The first affirmation we can make about the Objectof Religion is that it is a highly exceptional and ex-tremely impressive “Other.” Subjectively, again, theinitial state of man’s mind is amazement; and, asSoderblom has remarked, this is true not only forphilosophy but equally for religion. As yet, it mustfurther be observed, we are in no way concernedwith the supernatural or the transcendent: we canspeak of “God” in a merely figurative sense; butthere arises and persists an experience which con-nects or unites itself to the “Other” that thus ob-trudes. . . . this Object is a departure from all that isusual and familiar; and this again is the consequenceof the Power it generates.


This formulation is somewhat more sober than Otto’s,even in the way it identifies amazement as the initialstate of man’s mind. It also, at least momentarily, speaksof God in a figurative sense and of the supernatural andtranscendent as secondary to the encounter with oth-erness. Then there is power, which van der Leeuw ini-tially elaborates as a sublime potency using familiar eth-nographic examples of mana and orenda. Otto tooevokes the notion of power but in his characteristicallymore dramatic fashion initially elaborates it as an over-powering “aweful majesty” (1923:20).

In looking to these quarters for insight about alterity,it is well worth noting that vehement opposition to thephenomenologists of religion persists. For example, as ifWilliam James had initiated some kind of degenerativeprocess, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben identifiesOtto as the culmination of the psychologization of re-ligious experience. Agamben argues that with Otto’s“concept of the sacred that completely coincides withthe concept of the obscure and the impenetrable, a the-ology that had lost all experience of the revealed wordcelebrated its union with a philosophy that had aban-doned all sobriety in the face of feeling. That the religiousbelongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion,that it essentially has to do with shivers and goosebumps—this is the triviality that the neologism ‘numi-nous’ had to dress up as science” (1995:78). This critiqueindeed captures some of the flavor of Otto’s text, but inits harsh dismissiveness it squanders the embedded jewelof insight. Taking a different critical tack, Donald Wiebe(1999) has identified the work of van der Leeuw as areligio-cultural quest the effect of which is to depreciateand undermine the scientific study of religion. Wiebecites van der Leeuw’s interest in comprehending phe-nomena in accordance with their spiritual content andhis claim that all comprehension is ultimately religiousinsofar as “all significance sooner or later leads to ulti-mate significance” (p. 180). But let us be aware that inreligious studies the stakes in the battle between expla-nation and understanding are even higher than for thesame battle in anthropology. In religious studies the sci-entific account is pitted against theological commit-ment, and to admit that religion has any existence suigeneris implies the theological conclusion (see Allen1996). In anthropology the causal account is pittedagainst the interpretive one, with the issue being therelative merit of hard (I prefer to say “brittle”) and soft(or “flexible”) methods, and the debate over whether re-ligion has a sui generis status is often either sidesteppedor recognized as more a matter of theory than of the-ology.

The problem with these formulations is not just thatthe phenomenologists were inordinately psychologicalin their approach, nor is it simply that they were Chris-tian theologians and therefore both spiritually commit-ted and ethnocentric. The problem is a theoretical oneor, perhaps more accurately, a methodological one thatcomes from reifying alterity—reifying otherness as anobject, rendering it “out there” in such a way that wecan be “in its presence.” If one can suspend this reifi-

cation one finds, as Charles Long has observed, that“Otto is telling us that it is possible to experience apartfrom the categorical schema,” that is, to have “experi-ence of reality as a priori, as a datum that has not yetbecome a structure of the human project” (1976:402)—in short, as simply other. I think that the basic insightcan be given a theoretical grounding that is not theolog-ical but accounts for the possibility and perhaps inevi-tability of religion. My argument is that alterity is a fun-damental aspect of human being—let us say anelementary structure of existence—and that misrecog-nition of this has resulted in both untold misery andboundless creativity in human life. This is no more thanwhat Blake said in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

In sum, the phenomenologists’ error was to make adistinction between the object and the subject of religionwhen the actual object of religion is objectification itself,the rending apart of subject and object that makes ushuman and in the same movement bestows on us—orburdens us with—the inevitability of religion. The “ob-ject” of religion is not the other; it is the existentialaporia of alterity itself. The difficulty in recognizing thisis precisely the difficulty of distinguishing a psycholog-ical from an existential language and moving from a lan-guage of interiority to a language of intersubjectivity.This being said, our task is to rehabilitate the basic in-sight of these writers in the light of anthropological in-terpretation and update it in the light of contemporarytheorizing about alterity.

Intimate Alterity

For Otto, the numinous can be understood only “bymeans of the special way it is reflected in the mind interms of feeling.” Following Schleiermacher, he identi-fies this feeling as a certain kind of dependence (but isit really a feeling of contingency?) the object of which isthe numinous. Curiously, he names this “creature-feel-ing . . . the emotion of a creature, submerged and over-whelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to thatwhich is supreme above all creatures” (1923:10). Is thiscreature the infant or the animal, or the adult in prayer?It has been said that apes cannot swim and indeed oftenpanic and drown because, unlike other mammals in-cluding dogs and horses, which swim instinctually, theyare rational beings and reason tells them that they willdrown if they breathe in water. Humans cannot swiminstinctually, either, but we have the capacity to imaginebeyond reason, and it allows us to transcend ourselves—to surprise ourselves—and figure out how to movearound in the water.

The image of water, of being submerged, the invoca-tion of the creature, of dependence, and most of all ofour attempt to come to grips with alterity suggest therelevance of Georges Bataille’s theory of religion, inwhich animality and water figure heavily. Bataille’s workinvokes a profound alterity by inverting the expectedrelation between immanence and transcendence. In hisview the goal of religion is to recapture the intimacy of


an immanence prior to all alterity, and he shows howvery strange that is. The primary image is that of oneanimal eating another. “What is given when one animaleats another is always the fellow creature of the one thateats” (1989:17), in complete immediacy and withoutthere being between the two any relation of subordina-tion, difference, dependence, transcendence, objectifi-cation, discontinuity, consciousness, or duration. Sincefor the animal nothing is given through time, the de-struction of the eaten is “only a disappearance in a worldwhere nothing is posited beyond the present” (p. 18).Bataille might respond to Otto that this is the originalcreature-feeling as opposed to the feeling of having beencreated that Otto implies. And far more than the feelingof being submerged, far more even than a feeling that is“oceanic,” this ultimate intimate immanence of ani-mality is a mode of being “in the world like water inwater.” (A startling, if not compelling, image that Ba-taille might endorse as evocative of his point about an-imality and watery immanence is included in the elec-tronic edition of this issue on the journal’s web site.)

For Bataille the moment that renders us human is themoment in which we posit an object. The initial objectis the tool, the “nascent form of the non-I” (1989:27),and the moment of alterity and discontinuity constitutedby positing an object is what Bataille calls “transcen-dence.” From this moment he demonstrates an inexo-rable unfolding of a consciousness that reduces the orig-inal immanence of the world to thingness and invents asupreme being that is also a kind of thing considerablyimpoverished from the animal sense of continuity. Dis-continuity multiplies as humans sequentially developsacrifice, festivals, warfare, military order, universal em-pire, and industrial order by means of processes includingdualism, reason, transcendence, mediation, morality,clear consciousness, and sovereign self-consciousness(pp. 56–57):

Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected,that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy. Con-sciousness could not have become clear in thecourse of time if it had not turned away from itsawkward contents, but clear consciousness is itselflooking for what it has itself lost, and what it mustlose again as it draws near to it. Of course, what ithas lost is not outside it; consciousness turns awayfrom the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself.Religion, whose essence is the search for lost inti-macy, comes down to the effort of clear conscious-ness which wants to be a complete self-conscious-ness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness ofintimacy is possible only at a level where conscious-ness is no longer an operation whose outcome im-plies duration, that is, at the level where clarity,which is the effect of the operation, is no longergiven.

Insofar as we are human we are always already in theworld from the stance of alterity so that, paradoxically,it is identity and continuity that are alien to us and hence

frightening and “vertiginously dangerous” (p. 36). It isimmanence and not transcendence that constitutes thetrue otherness of animal oblivion to which our con-sciousness aspires but which, asymptotically, “it mustlose again as it draws near to it” (p. 57).

Put otherwise, “intimacy is the limit of clear con-sciousness” (Bataille 1989:99); consciousness as suchcannot grasp intimacy because intimacy cannot be re-duced to a thing. But consciousness can undo itself, re-verse its reductive operations in order to reduce itself tointimacy, by dissolving and destroying utilitarian “ob-jects as such in the field of consciousness,” thereby re-turning “to the situation of the animal that eats anotheranimal” (p. 103). The sovereign act of destroying objectsis simultaneously the destruction of the subject as anindividual, “but it is insofar as clear consciousness pre-vails that the objects actually destroyed will not destroyhumanity itself” (p. 103). This is a form of violence, butit is necessary—and here I am again reminded of Blake—“for anyone to whom human life is an experience to becarried as far as possible” (p. 110), and it leads directlyto the limit, the impossible. When we search for theexistential structure of this final alterity, we must takeour clue from Bataille’s observation that humanity’s firstobject is the tool and combine it with Marcel Mauss’s(1950) insight that humanity’s first tool is the body. Butthe body is also the site wherein this “internally wrench-ing violence that animates the whole . . . reveals theimpossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears,” and this im-possible is nothing other than “the sovereign self-con-sciousness that, precisely, no longer turns away fromitself” (p. 111).

We have more to do in specifying this embodied oth-erness, but let us pursue it by way of intimacy. The phe-nomenologists of religion had not only a too objectifiedunderstanding of the “wholly other” but one that wastoo grandiose. Instead of the wholly other projected ontocosmic majesty, I want to turn our attention to the in-timately other. The intimate alterity that I will juxtaposeto the wholly other is not the intimacy of animality butone that can only be an intimation of that intimacy,insofar as it begins necessarily from our human con-sciousness. As we have seen, one of the ways that Ottocharacterized the wholly other was that it was outsidethe canny, and, indeed, he equated the uncanny with thenuminous (1923:40). Here we must fold Freud into ouraccount for the manner in which he captures a muchmore intimate alterity in this feeling. In his study ofreligious representations of the monstrous, Tim Bealcompares the two writers’ approaches to the uncanny orunheimlich as follows: “What Otto calls ‘wholly other’Freud would call ‘other’ only insofar as it has been re-pressed. For Freud the unheimlich is only ‘outside thehouse’ (the house of the self, the house of culture, thehouse of the cosmos) insofar as it is hidden within thehouse” (2002:8). Yet the progression from self to cosmoswithin Beal’s parentheses is itself a clue that we neednot choose between the two, for the wholly other andthe intimately other are two sides of the same leaf.

The image of otherness in Freud, insofar as it relates


to our topic, is to be found less in the notion of thesovereign id or the hidden unconscious than in the no-tion of the uncanny. My emphasis is not on the uncannyas frightening but on the uncanny as close to us, as in-timately other. First, there is something uncanny aboutthe word itself: not only can unheimlich refer to boththe wholly other and the intimately other but the rootword heimlich can in certain contexts mean its opposite.Heimlich can mean something that is familiar or agree-able but also something hidden and kept out of sight.Although Freud is unclear about the precise relation be-tween the two meanings, there appears to be a devel-opment along the lines that what is familiar becomesprivate, what is private becomes hidden, and what ishidden becomes spooky. In any case, there is a semanticalterity in this word such that “heimlich is a word themeaning of which develops in the direction of ambiva-lence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, un-heimlich” (1955:226).

Freud’s famous conclusion is that the uncanny even-tuates in the recurrence of something that has been re-pressed, something originally familiar that by means ofthis repression has become alienated and threatening inthe sense that, although we may yearn to return to thewomb, we would be terrified to find ourselves there againor in the sense that the experience of having a double,reassuring at a very young age, becomes a harbinger ofdeath much later. For Freud the factors that turn some-thing merely frightening into something uncanny in-clude the effacement of the distinction between imagi-nation and reality found in animism, magic, and sorcery,the infantile omnipotence of thoughts, the human am-bivalence toward death, involuntary repetition, and thecastration complex (1955:243). Freud qualifies his ac-count as perhaps satisfying psychoanalytic but not aes-thetic interest in the uncanny and differentiates betweenthe uncanny we actually experience and that which isportrayed in art and literature. Although he says nothingexplicitly about religion, he approaches it in summariz-ing the two closely related phenomena that are thesources of the uncanny: “An uncanny experience occurseither when infantile complexes which have been re-pressed are once more revived by some impression, orwhen primitive beliefs [animism] which have been sur-mounted [by reason] seem once more to be confirmed”(p. 249).

Freud too easily discounts, I think, the importance ofa rival’s theory that highlights uncertainty aboutwhether something is living or not—a body ambiguouslydead or alive, an automaton ambiguously animate or in-animate—because it does not quite fit the psychoana-lytic account. It is also curious that among his exampleshe does not mention the feeling of a presence that is notreally there. This would be a feeling that we could con-trast both to the feeling of invisible divine presence inreligious experience and to the feeling of concrete inti-macy in the caress of another person. But includingthese, and with a somewhat broader notion of alteritybuilding on Freud’s intuition, we can see one reason thatreligion can never go away—that it will always return

and return in a myriad of forms. In the language that Ihave been developing here, the return of the repressedis the inevitable betrayal of identity by alterity, the reen-chantment of the world that imposes itself as soon asthe disenchanted world finally becomes so familiar as tobegin to appear strange—that strange interchangebilityor transposability of heimlich and unheimlich that Freudtalks about. At least, such an analysis might make iteasier to understand Eliade’s (1958) notion of hierophanynot as a manifestation of divinity but as an upwelling ofalterity, a spontaneous epoche or lowering of the veil ofcultural taken-for-grantedness that covers the illusion ofself-identity. The point again is that the other is muchcloser than we would be led to believe by the phenom-enologists of religion or at least that there is no under-standing of the wholly other without the intimate other.

Let me specify this sense of intimate alterity with aconcrete ethnographic instance from my studies of Cath-olic Charismatic healing. In what I called “imaginal per-formances,” Jesus or the Virgin Mary would often appearor be evoked in healing prayer that took the form ofvisualization in which one of these divine presenceswould speak and engage the afflicted person in a healingembrace. Although these presences can be understood asinternal transitional objects in a psychoanalytic senseand even as ideal objects or Others to which one canhave a mature, intimate relationship that serves as aprototype for intimacy as an aspect of a sacred self, Iwanted to push the interpretation farther. I suggestedthat this experience is a genuine intimacy with a pri-mordial aspect of the self that is the existential groundfor both its fundamental indeterminacy and the possi-bility of an intersubjective relationship—its own inher-ent otherness. In other words, the imaginal Jesus is thealterity of the self. In this sense, to speak of intimacywith oneself is not to speak metaphorically. It is insteadto say that the capacity for intimacy begins with an ex-istential coming to terms with the alterity of the selfand that the presence of Jesus is an embodied metaphorfor that condition of selfhood. This is the Jesus thatspeaks with a “still, small voice” within and whose pres-ence is an act of imagination (Csordas 1994:57–58).

This intimate alterity appears again in the Charismaticpractice of “resting in the Spirit,” in which a person isoverwhelmed by divine power/presence and falls, typi-cally from a standing position, into a sacred swoon. Al-though again we cannot fail to strike a psychoanalyticchord in noting the “oceanic” passivity before an om-nipotent paternal deity that characterizes this experi-ence, I also suggested that the experience is constitutedin the bodily synthesis of preobjective self processes.This is to say that the coming into being of “divine pres-ence” as a cultural phenomenon is an objectification ofembodiment itself. Consider the heaviness of limbs re-ported by people resting in the Spirit. Quoting Plugge,R. M. Zaner points out that “within the reflective ex-perience of a healthy limb, no matter how silent andweightless it may be in action, there is yet, indetectablyhidden, a certain ‘heft’ ” (1981:56). This thinglike heftof our bodies in conjunction with the spontaneous lift


of customary bodily performances defines our bodies assimultaneously belonging to us and estranged from us,and hence the alterity of self is an embodied otherness.While resting in the Spirit, the heft that is always therefor us indeterminately and preobjectively is made deter-minate and objectified. Its essential alterity becomes anobject of somatic attention within the experiential ge-stalt defined as divine presence. The divine presence isan intimate presence in a way that, because it encom-passes multiple modalities of the body-self, surpasses hu-man companionship. Like the divine presence in ima-ginal performance, resting in the Spirit thus offers botha surrogate source of intimacy for the lonely and a pro-totype for human intimacy (Csordas 1994:246).

This alterity of the self can be taken in at least twosenses. According to Zaner, self-presence and presenceto the other are the two foundational moments of self.Zaner understands self-presence as “situated self-reflex-ivity” and presence to the other as an “urgency . . . toreveal itself to other inwardly realized selves” (1981:153).This is tellingly reminiscent of the urgency or energythat Otto says is an element of religion’s mysterium tre-mendum. Yet on the level of the intimately other ratherthan the wholly other I think it appears more clearly asimagination and desire. The vivid presence of Jesus orMary in Charismatic imaginal performance is a cultur-ally specific way to complete the second foundationalmoment, providing an ideal Other to correspond to themoment of self-presence.

A second sense of the self’s alterity is grounded in ourvery embodiment. Zaner shows that the inescapabilityof our embodied nature and the limitations it imposescontribute to the feeling that our bodies are in a sense“other” than ourselves. Our intimacy with our own bod-ies also implicates us in whatever happens to them, andrealization that we are thus “susceptible to what canhappen to material things in general” corresponds to ex-periencing the “chill” of mortality. In addition, our bod-ies are always “hidden presences” to us, both insofar asautonomic processes typically go on outside of aware-ness (see also Leder 1990) and insofar as the possibilitypersists of seeing ourselves as objects from the perspec-tive of another. Our bodies are thus hidden presences tous at the same time as they are compellingly ours, andaccordingly Zaner argues (1981:54–55):

My body is at once familiar and strange, intimateand alien: “mine” most of all yet “other” most ofall, the ground for both subjective inwardness andobjective outwardness. Whatever I want, wish, orplan for, I irrevocably “grow older,” “become tired,”“feel ill,” “am energetic.” . . . The basis for the oth-erness (and thereby the otherness of everything else)of the embodying organism is its having a life of itsown, even when the person is most “at home” or“at one” with it. . . . The otherness of my own bodythus suffuses its sense of intimacy.

The necessity of this embodied alterity of the self evenwhen one is most “at home” evokes the notion of the

heimlich (homelike) and the unheimlich (uncanny). Za-ner’s discussion shows that the uncanny is grounded notnecessarily in an abstract recognition of mortality butin the concreteness of everyday embodied existence, inwhich the “chill” is present even “at home.”

Elizabeth Grosz carries this line of thinking a step far-ther, not only grounding alterity in embodiment butmaking it the very precondition of embodiment (1994:209):

Bodies themselves, in their materialities, are neverself-present, given things, immediate, certain self-ev-idences because embodiment, corporeality, insist onalterity, both that alterity they carry within them-selves (the heart of the psyche lies in the body; thebody’s principles of functioning are psychologicaland cultural) and that alterity that gives them theirown concreteness and specificity (the alterities con-stituting race, sex, sexualities, ethnic and culturalspecificities). Alterity is the very possibility and pro-cess of embodiment: it conditions but is also a prod-uct of the pliability or plasticity of bodies whichmakes them other than themselves, other than their“nature,” their functions and identities.

Grosz makes these comments about alterity in the con-text of sexual difference, and we will be obliged to returnto this issue as well. In general, the insistence on alterityof which she speaks is a direct consequence of the in-determinate pliability and plasticity that is emphasizedby much contemporary scholarship on embodiment andfor our purpose can be identified with the body’s spon-taneity in contrast with its “natural” (regular and law-governed) functions and cycles.

Embodied Alterity

I must make this notion of alterity of the self as em-bodied otherness more precise, because when Blake saysthat all deities reside within the human breast I want totake him literally and say, yes, the breast and the limbsand the genitals and the head and the manner in whichall are synthesized into the same bodily existence. Mer-leau-Ponty goes to the heart of the matter when he dis-cusses the intertwining or chiasmus between the sen-tient and the sensible within our own bodies: “My hand,while it is felt from within, is also accessible from with-out, itself tangible, for my other hand” (1968:133). Fur-thermore, he observes that one can have the curious sit-uation of one hand’s touching an object and at the sametime being touched by the other hand, such that thereis a crisscrossing and reversibility of the sentient and thesensible (p. 143):

There is a circle of the touched and the touching,the touched takes hold of the touching; there is acircle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is notwithout visible existence; there is even an inscrip-tion of the touching in the visible, of the seeing inthe tangible—and the converse; there is finally a


propagation of these changes to all the bodies of thesame type and of the same style which I see andtouch—and this by virtue of the fundamental fissionor segregation of the sentient and the sensiblewhich, laterally, makes the organs of my body com-municate and founds transitivity from one body toanother.

Merleau-Ponty struggles for metaphors to describe thisintimate alterity of embodiment, trying two leaves orlayers, two halves of a cut orange that fit together per-fectly but are still separate, two lips of the same mouththat touch one another in repose, “two circles, or twovortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naively,and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly de-centered with respect to the other” (p. 138).

Slightly and, I might add, inevitably decentered, this“fundamental fission or segregation” is also overdeter-mined. We can see it in our mirror image, the encounterwith which Lacan (1977) argues is formative of the selfat an early stage of development. We can see it in thebilateral symmetry of our bodies, which is, moreover, animperfect symmetry, as anyone can observe who has at-tempted to grow nicely balanced sideburns on a face withone ear inevitably slightly higher than the other. In an-other sense, the phallus is the other of the male, as thefetus is the other of the female. Certainly both the phal-lus and the pregnant female are images that can be foundthroughout human religion as symbols of the divine. Butthe other on the body’s outside that is the phallus isdifferent from the fetal other within precisely in relationto that profound dependence that Otto labeled creature-feeling and may be one of its sources (the other beinginfantile neoteny as identified by La Barre). In otherwords, when the penis becomes the phallus it is sover-eign, and the man who withdraws his allegiance in amoment of doubt can be punished by the disappearanceof this other, the reversion of the phallus to a mere penis,leaving him to drown in the mirror of abandonment. Inthe case of the fetus, the valence of dependency is re-versed; it is the fetus that is profoundly dependent andcannot exist alone. Thus there are two gendered modesof intimate embodied otherness with different valencesof dependency and therefore different potentials for be-coming vehicles of the divine. From this standpoint, therecurrence of the phallus and the pregnant female in re-ligious symbolism does far more than to signal the ven-eration of potency or fertility.

To describe the kernel of embodied otherness Merleau-Ponty uses the French word ecart, which can be trans-lated as “gap,” “interval,” “distance,” “difference,” or“lapse.” Gail Weiss calls attention to this term in a briefbut important chapter, calling it a “space of non-coin-cidence that resists articulation . . . the unrepresentablespace of differentiation . . . the invisible ‘hinge’ that bothmakes reversibility [between the sensible and the sen-tient] possible and, simultaneously, prevents it from be-ing fully achieved” (1999:120–21). Merleau-Ponty (1968:148) indeed takes pains to emphasize that

it is a reversibility always imminent and never real-ized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge oftouching my right hand touching the things, but Inever reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses atthe moment of realization, and one of two things al-ways occurs: either my right hand really passes overto the rank of touched, but then its hold on theworld is interrupted; or it retains its hold on theworld, but then I do not really touch it—my righthand touching, I palpate with my left hand only itsouter covering.

Weiss observes that “ecart, as the moment of disincor-poration that makes all forms of corporeal differentiationpossible, is also precisely what allows us to establishboundaries between bodies, boundaries that must be re-spected in order to respect the agencies that flow fromthem” (1999:128). Yet it is the ground not only for bound-aries but for intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. Toreiterate, the ecart “founds transitivity from one bodyto another.” Merleau-Ponty says, “If my left hand cantouch my right hand while it palpates the tangibles, cantouch it touching, can turn its palpation back upon it,why, when touching the hand of another, would I nottouch in it that same power to espouse the things thatI have touched on my own?” (1968:141). Here my em-phasis is on this inevitable moment of embodied oth-erness as the kernel of the self’s alterity (an inner re-versibility that corresponds to the reversibility betweenself and other) and hence of the alterity that is ultimatelyelaborated into the religious sentiment in all its multi-tude of forms.

Luce Irigaray, in her sensuously intimate critique ofMerleau-Ponty (she calls him a male solipsist who ul-timately privileges the visual over the tactile and makesthe diagnosis that his version of seeing “remains in anincestuous prenatal situation with the whole” [1993:173]), adds to the stock of images for embodied otherness.She asks how the feeling-felt relation of hand touchinghand differs, with no subject or object and neither passivenor active, if the two hands are joined “palms together,fingers outstretched, constitut[ing] a very particulartouching. A gesture often reserved for women (at leastin the West) and which evokes, doubles, the touching ofthe lips silently applied on one another. A touching moreintimate than that of one hand taking hold of the other”(p. 161). And as for the lips, in women there are two setsof two lips, those above and those below, touching eachother in different ways and existing in relation to oneanother. “And this would be one of the differences be-tween men and women, that these lips do not re-joineach other according to the same economy” (p. 167).

There is a para-theological strain in the interplay be-tween Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, and this is not acci-dental, since they are so close to discovering the originof religion in embodied otherness. In sorting out the va-lences attributed to the interpenetration of vision andtouch Irigaray opens the question of how “God is alwaysentrusted to the look and never sufficiently imagined astactile bliss” (1993:162). Elsewhere she chides Merleau-


Ponty for espousing a form of animism. Indeed, he speaksof a flesh of the world that interpenetrates and is re-versible with bodily flesh as the general description ofthe more specific instances of the “coiling over of thevisible upon the seeing body, of the touching on the tan-gible body” (p. 146) and the “double and crossed situatingof the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in thevisible” (p. 134). This flesh that bridges or, better, enfoldsthe ecart is for Merleau-Ponty an element of being inthe sense that water, air, earth, and fire are elements.When he speaks of language as flesh in its sonorous beingthere is a sense of the ultimate sacred postulate of theBible as being reversed to read “and the flesh was madeword,” and when he ends his essay with an ellipsis thepreceding words are that reversibility “is the ultimatetruth. . . .” Moreover, it is no coincidence that when hewrites, “The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my bodyis not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh appliedto a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is sur-rounded by it” (1968:138), his articulation of the worldas “flesh applied to flesh” is resonant with the way inwhich, for Bataille, an animal’s life is like “water in wa-ter.” Could it be that both are referring to the same in-timacy of immanence, that we are no more aware of fleshthan the fish is of the water in which it swims, and thatthe difference between the animal’s state of grace andour state is the existence of the ecart, or alterity itself,that includes the possibility of becoming aware of theelement in which we move?

I will turn again to an ethnographic instance to capturethis element of embodiment more precisely. A Navajochanter of my acquaintance will declaim at lengthagainst the contemporary travesty of tape recording sa-cred songs as a means of learning how to conduct cer-emonies. Perpetrators go from ceremony to ceremonyconducted by different healers instead of appropriatelylearning from one mentor over an extended period oftime. They begin performing the ceremony without tak-ing the trouble to understand how the songs are supposedto be used. Worse, they use the material without eitherbeing authorized by the chanter from whom they tookit or acknowledging the source. He tells of having caughtpeople in his ceremonies with a tape recorder concealedin a coat or a blanket and expelling them from the pro-ceedings. He says that sometimes a person with a re-corder will be sitting all the way on the other side of thehogan from the healer or standing outside the hogan, andif the chanter is a powerful singer the person may evenbe 100 yards away and still be able to record the song.

My initial understanding of why tape recording is un-acceptable and inauthentic was in terms of the textualityof the songs and their appropriate treatment. It was aviolent taking out of context, an arrachement, both asa tearing out of its setting within a moment of perfor-mance and as a wresting away from its legitimate owner.It was also the imposition of a nontraditional medium,inscribing and preserving sacred material that shouldnever be so fixed and frozen. Then the chanter told mesomething that changed my understanding of his objec-tion. He said that it used to be that the person learning

the songs would sit close enough to the chanter to seehis lips move as he sang. With the invocation of movinglips, the song emanating from the bodily portal, powerpassing by force of breath through the gap of the lips,and the apprentice focusing on the action required tobring the chant into intersubjective being, my under-standing shifted ground from textuality to embodiment.It shifted from context and technological medium tolived spatiality and physical proximity.

Somewhat later I came across the following passagein a book by Gladys Reichard on Navajo religion: “Sincepower is to the Navaho like a wave in a pool, alwayseffective though becoming weaker the farther it radiatesfrom chanter and patient, each person in attendance de-rives benefit from what is done in proportion to his prox-imity to the ritual” (1950:xxxvii). Previously I would nothave taken the image of a wave in a pool quite so literally,but I read this passage in the light of the chanter’s in-vocation of watching moving lips in immediate prox-imity, of recording from across the hogan, of recordingfrom outside, of recording from 100 yards away. Thoughperhaps attenuated, power is still power at 100 yards’remove. But the optimal form of otherness as power ishardly grandiose, taking form in the ecart—the narrowgap between the chanter’s lips and the narrow gap be-tween healer and apprentice. This is the origin of reli-gion, the sacred, the holy: the intimate alterity of poweras a bodily secretion, not the wholly other of abstractmajesty.

Contested Alterity

Let me anticipate several objections that might arise tomy thesis that alterity is the phenomenological kernelof religion. The first is that it is an essentializing move,but this depends on how one construes it. The relevantdichotomy is between the essential and the contingent,and the current theoretical bias is in favor of the con-tingent. The objection to positing an essence is validwhen that essence has a specific content that is abstractand invariant. What I have called attention to, on thecontrary, is an alterity that is experientially concrete buthas no content prior to its elaboration in an ethnographicor historical instance. Alterity is not an essential thingbut an essential displacement, not a center of meaningbut a duplicity (doubleness/deceit) of the kind that isrecognized in the phenomenological epoche. This epo-che, often referred to as a phenomenological reductionor bracketing, is not a mystery but a method. To give arudimentary example, it is the effect produced by utter-ing a word (try it with “egg”) 20 or 30 times withoutstopping. This effect is the bracketing off of the word’ssonorous being from its semantic being. The point is notto wrench the word from its context but to allow it tobecome reduced to a “phenomenon” that can then besubject to precise existential description. The epoche isthen a methodological elaboration of the alterity that isan elementary structure of existence. When alterity iselaborated in and for itself, what results is what we call


religion. From this duplicity, this gap, this ecart theredevelops an uncanny array of religious forms preciselybecause of the inevitable contingency and indeterminacyof existence. If there is an essence involved, it is an es-sence of the particular—that is, it is to be empiricallydescribed where it is found among the “minute partic-ulars” of existence (again to borrow a phrase from Blake).

A second objection is that the alterity I have describedis everywhere and therefore it is nowhere and can ac-count for nothing in particular. Here an evaluation isneeded, because if alterity is everywhere and nowhere,my thesis may on that count be judged either as trivialor as positing something equivalent in the domain ofexistence to the “dark matter” recently discovered byastrophysics in the cosmic domain. Alterity may be con-stituent of a “general atmosphere” pervading existencein a manner similar to sexuality as Merleau-Ponty (1962)described it, a trace or dimension of it being present inall our dealings with the world and others regardless ofwhether they have any explicit sexual reference. Yet ifthis is the case, alterity is hardly specific to religion.Freud framed his essay on the uncanny as a discussionof aesthetics, saying that the uncanny is a province ofaesthetics that has to do with the frightening. If the un-canny is essential to religion and the aesthetic, how canwe distinguish the two? I might want to say, again fol-lowing Blake’s theory of imagination, that I do not wantto distinguish the two—but it is more precise to say thatthey are distinguished in that, though alterity is impor-tant to both, alterity itself is the object of religion. Tostate this point in more general terms, when alterity iselaborated as oppression of the other we are in the do-main of politics; when it is elaborated as striking beautywe are in the domain of art and aesthetics; when it iselaborated as competition we are (perhaps) in the domainof athletics; but when it is elaborated as alterity in andfor itself, we are in the domain of religion. What can begained by this intimation of religion as diffused through-out social reality? It might suggest the need to translateor update van der Leeuw’s and Otto’s notion of poweras divine majesty into Foucault’s notion of power as in-habiting the very interstices and sinews of social life. Itmight suggest as well a reinterpretation of the thesis ofdisenchantment of the world put forward by MarcelGauchet (1985), the last great theorist of religion’s in-evitable decline. For Gauchet, despite the persistence ofbelief, the human-social world was being reconstitutednot only outside religion but independently of the reli-gious logic within which it originated. But it is perhapspossible to interpret Gauchet’s disenchantment as an es-cape of alterity from the domain of the strictly religious,such that the sacred does not disappear but becomes dif-fused through reality, rendering the human world evenmore rather than less a religious phenomenon.

These considerations raise a further question, if notan objection: If religion is inevitable, then how does thequestion of skepticism, the problem of belief and un-belief, enter this argument? Let us address this questionby turning again to William James and another of hisrecent commentators, Charles Taylor. Taylor shows that

for James the choice between agnosticism and belief wasa “forced option” and claims that James’s poignant for-mulation of this sometimes agonizing choice qualifieshim as “our great philosopher of the cusp” (2002:59).James challenged the “agnostic veto” of faith that re-quires skepticism “as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’for religion can be found” (James, quoted in Taylor 2002:48), on the grounds that it is not necessarily more irra-tional to risk erroneous belief than to risk hoping thatwhat we desire to believe may be true. The cusp is pre-cisely the choice of which form of risk to take, and, asTaylor says, the choice must be made on “gut instinct”(p. 58). Yet although this gut instinct may be derived fromoriginary embodied alterity, its content—including notonly theistic principles but also the sense that a choicemust be made and that this choice must be in the formof a commitment—consists of many layers of historicalcontext and cultural meaning sedimented upon the phe-nomenological kernel. To be precise, Taylor observesthat James’s notion of religious experience is predicatedupon the development of a kind of personal religion thatwas made possible by Protestantism and that today hasevolved into a post-Durkheimian expressive individu-alism in which “a host of urban monads hover on theboundary between solipsism and communication” (p. 86)and in which the emphasis of religion has “shifted moreand more toward the strength and genuineness of thefeelings rather than toward the nature of their object”(p. 99). The phenomenological kernel I have identifiedis at the opposite end of this continuum of elaborationfrom James’s notion of religious “experience.” It doesnot have to do exclusively with a personal religion ex-perienced in solitude, for the alterity of self I have dis-cussed is also the ground for intersubjectivity and, byextension, collectivity. It does not have to do with apersonal religion that is an encounter with a personalizeddivinity, for the sense of alterity can be eminently im-personal. If my argument is accepted, one cannot be skep-tical that there is a religious impulse that inevitably be-comes culturally elaborated in a myriad of symbolic,institutional, and experiential forms but must be skep-tical of any particular elaboration as a product of its his-torical and social conditions. In this sense, the thesis Ihave developed here may contribute to the anthropolog-ical theory of religion but offers no help in resolvingtheological questions or dilemmas of faith.

A final objection is that my understanding of alterityis too different from the way it is customarily used inanthropology, as referring to political, racial, ethnic, gen-der, class, religious otherness—the otherness that is theoccasion for identity politics, war, conflict, violence(Corbey and Leerson 1991, Taussig 1993). But the im-plication of my argument is that these forms of alterityare also grounded in embodiment and have a religiousstructure, and I agree with Derrida that “in these times,language and nation form the historical body of all re-ligious passion” (1998:4). Occasionally the religious di-mension of political and ethnic alterity comes to the forein discussions by anthropologists. Here I am thinking ofMichael Taussig’s intuition of “the marked attraction


and repulsion of savagery as a genuinely sacred powerfor whiteness” (1993:150). The colonial contrast betweennoble Indians and degenerate blacks is not only a historyof labor discipline but “a Sacred History too, in whichrace-fantasy takes the place of heavenly fantasy” becauseinsofar as the black phallus becomes a demonic figureof what Durkheim called the impure sacred, race “ac-quires the burden of carrying the emotive charge of menexchanging women across the colorless line of colonialproletarianization” (p. 150). I cite these examples in orderto suggest that if there is something to my thesis thatalterity is the phenomenological kernel of religion, thenthere is a sense in which we will be able to say thatpolitical alterity is a religious structure.

Let me pursue this line of argument in the light ofDerrida’s (1998) account of religion in the contemporaryworld, which is riddled with reverberations of alterity atalmost every level. At the level of meta-discourse heobserves the apparent inevitability of finding not one buttwo sources of religion, an alterity in the form of “di-vision and iterability of the source” (p. 65). In his titlehe identifies these two sources as faith and knowledge,but they reappear as messianism and chora, experienceof belief and experience of the unscathed (the latter iselsewhere called “experience of sacredness” [p. 62]), re-legere and religare, attestation and disenchantment (pp.64–65), immunity and autoimmunity (p. 47), absoluterespect for life and human sacrifice (p. 50), fiduciarityand unscathedness (p. 58), and the works of Kant andBergson (p. 33). These pairs roughly map onto one an-other at different levels of analysis, and I would want toadd to them the intimate alterity of the self and theimposing alterity of the wholly other, but the one thatis of most interest in the moment is the image of im-munity and autoimmunity.

Derrida asks, “Is not the unscathed (l’indemne) thevery matter—the thing itself—of religion?” (1998:23). If“the thing itself” is the same object of religion identifiedby Otto, then the wholly other is precisely the un-scathed. But the most radically other for Derrida goesbeyond the positive Other represented in messianism; itis chora, nothing (no being, nothing present), “the veryplace of an infinite resistance, of an infinitely impassiblepersistence (resistance): an utterly faceless other” (p. 21).Indeed, for Derrida the holy is associated with un-scathedness, indemnity, indemnification, and he linksthese with immune, immunity, immunization, “andabove all, ‘autoimmunity’ ” (p. 70). In the autoimmuneresponse the immune system is not just reacting to itselfbut “protecting itself against its self-protection by de-stroying its own immune system” (this is a unique in-terpretation of immunology, I think). He says that as thisbecomes more prevalent “we feel ourselves authorizedto speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization.It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the re-lations between faith and knowledge, religion and sci-ence, as well as the duplicity of sources in general” (p.73 n. 27). But this is really a general logic of alterity inthe form of an alterity of the self grounded in embodi-ment, that is, corporal immediacy—what I would call

“raw existence” in contrast or confrontation with whatAgamben (1995) calls “bare life.” Reaction to the ma-chine (and, I would add, its uncanny side, that of self asautomaton) is at once immunitary and autoimmune. Itis a fear of self in the context of the dislocation (alien-ation?) produced by what Derrida calls tele-techno-science, which contemporary religion allies itself with(thereby becoming it) and reacts strongly against (therebyreacting against itself) (p. 46).

“Globalatinization” (mondialatinization) is the termhe coins to describe this “strange alliance of Christianity,as the experience of the death of God, and tele-techno-scientific capitalism” (1998:13) or, again, “the strangephenomenon of Latinity and its globalization” (p. 29),where Anglo-American is the direct inheritor of Latinproper. In this cultural regime,

Religion circulates in the world, one might say, likean English word (comme un mot anglais) that hasbeen to Rome and taken a detour to the UnitedStates. Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politico-military figures, a hyper-imperialist appropriationhas been underway now for centuries. It imposes it-self in a particularly palpable manner within theconceptual apparatus of international law and ofglobal political rhetoric. Wherever this apparatusdominates, it articulates itself through a discourseon religion. From here on, the word “religion” iscalmly (and violently) applied to things which havealways been and remain foreign to what this wordnames and arrests in history.

Globalatinization, the cultural dimension of the PaxAmericana, is the language of “religion” pronouncedwith the accent of John Wayne. But I bring in these con-siderations not so much to endorse Derrida’s argumentper se as to recognize in it one way in which religioncan be discussed as a cultural elaboration of alterity onthe level of global society at large and not merely as anelement of individual, interior experience. This goes be-yond saying that specific forms of religion are spreadingglobally or even that religion has taken on global sig-nificance to suggest instead that the very boundary be-tween alterity in its political and alterity in its religioussense is becoming blurred.

In this context, the contemporary return of religion (ofthe repressed?) can be understood as a global upsurge ofalterity that increasingly takes the form of autoimmun-ity. There is no need for a society-as-organism metaphorhere—I follow Rappaport (1999) in identifying the locusof the autoimmune response as an adaptive systemrather than an organism. Yet I want to say that this au-toimmune response “metastasizes” to places like Na-vajoland, where it creates the religious aporia encoun-tered by the chanter discussed above. Should I, asks thechanter, risk the dangerous desecration of committingsacred material to this technological medium of audiotape that is an arm of global culture, or should I risk thedisappearance of that knowledge altogether as the via-bility of my practices is eaten away by the encroachment


of global culture? This autoimmune response is evenmore virulent in those places less insulated from glob-alatinization, more open to the brute presence of tech-noscience and empire. Here the coefficient of hate, thecoefficient of alterity as self-destructiveness, languageitself as wholly other have risen in a demonic logic sinceSeptember 11, 2001. It is now possible, for instance, inthe case of the American government, to reason autoim-munely as follows: “We are at war (in Afghanistan), inthat war we capture prisoners, but they are not prisonersof war.” Or again, “We believe in free trade (e.g., theNorth American Free Trade Agreement): we are free toexport at the price we freely choose and free to importat the price we also freely choose.” And also, “We wantthe Iraqi people (following their military defeat) to takecontrol of their country as soon as possible, but thosemunicipal authorities that have arisen without being in-stalled by us need to step aside.”

To move once more to a concrete illustration fromsocial life, we are in fact living through a profoundlyreligious moment. The transformation of consciousnessand of history that took place on September 11, 2001,was a manifestation of the sacred in an unprecedentedand profoundly unsettling manner. What makes it reli-gious? It is the rending of reality’s veil, the shock ofknowing that the world is not as we thought it was andthat we are not as we thought. Our experience (I use thispronoun with the caveat that the immediacy and rele-vance of this experience vary widely) of the collapse ofthe World Trade Center is raw religious experience, priorto morality, prior to God in the form of the Trinity orAllah or Yahweh, prior even to meaning. The religiouspart of it lies not in why it happened and certainly notin the fact that it was done in the name of God but inour response at the moment we first heard what hadhappened and in the moments when with terrified fas-cination we watched the film clip of the crashes. For justa moment after the second plane had vanished inside thebuilding, just before the smoke and flames began to bil-low, its outline appeared like a perfect silhouette on theshiny glass facade. That was the point of no return forthe modern consciousness, because it was the momentof absolute alterity. Moreover, to reprise our earlier dis-cussion, this image captures an alterity that was simul-taneously intimate and awesome. Impossible and pos-sible collapsed upon each other and touched us at theorigin point of religion itself, that point in our souls atwhich we are never at one with ourselves and everythingis strange.

Alterity in its public religious modality is also evidentin the figure of Osama bin Laden. It is less instructiveto say that bin Laden was demonized than to say thathe became a magnet for images of otherness. This is notto say that demonization has been bypassed: whenGeorge W. Bush referred to bin Laden as The Evil One,the capitalization in his tone of voice made that quiteliteral. Yet there was also, particularly among Europeancommentators, an impulse to cast him as a Franken-stein’s monster created by the excesses of United Statesmilitary diplomacy. As one commentator noted, he also

appears to inhabit the American national consciousnessin the form of the villain in a James Bond movie. Yetanother, the author of a book on al-Qaeda, said that thegroup’s media-conscious desire to put on the biggestshow possible had made its charismatic leader a kind ofMick Jagger of religious excess. When the shifting in-determinacy of this protean otherness became too un-nerving, the target shifted to a more stable state, a morestable face, that of Saddam Hussein. Yet quickly enoughthe unnerving alterity became manifest there as well,and no one could tell if the media images of Hussein orhis recorded voice were “really” his or those of shadowyimpersonators.

The well-publicized video tape of bin Laden’s com-ments on the World Trade Center attacks exhibits thisuncanny otherness in a different way. While most West-ern accounts emphasized its revolting hilarity and bla-tant self-incrimination, too little attention was drawn tothe wonder and astonishment expressed. There is an el-ement of the unimaginable coming to pass that contrastsjarringly with the sense in which the events were uni-maginable for Americans. This unimaginable resides inbin Laden’s assertion that the result was miraculouslybeyond his expectation—that from his experience in theconstruction industry he was optimistic that the topfloors would be destroyed but never thought that bothbuildings would completely collapse. Then there is theincredible invocation of dreams and visions that pre-ceded the attacks, dreams of airplanes and/or tall build-ings recounted by various people within the network.The interpretation of these dreams was that somehowthe plan was percolating in the collective imaginationand bubbling to the surface of consciousness. Because somany were dreaming about it, bin Laden says, at onepoint he told someone not to speak of his dream for fearthat the secret would be revealed.

So a towering edifice of global capitalism implodes andcollapses, and several thousand lives are destroyed. Butnow our subject is Enron, followed by WorldCom, Tyco,and Global Crossing. The real shame of the perpetratorsof such corporate scandals is to have created the occasionto bring a smile to bin Laden’s face. If America’s recentnemesis can boast of any triumph, it is to have renderedit impossible to avoid making a connection betweenthese events. The shadow of the collapsing towers castsa pall of religion, in its most frightening form of other-ness, over the collapsing corporation. Perhaps this showsthat in some sense globalization is fundamentally a re-ligious rather than an economic process, something thatpartakes of a mysterium tremendum that we must strug-gle to understand and control. Perhaps it suggests thatthe destructive potential unleashed by globalization hasboth an inside and an outside, the beast without and thebeast within. Or perhaps there is no “inside” and “out-side,” which renders even more challenging the struggleto understand and control our lives.


Inevitable Alterity

Here I return to my title, which I confess was intendedto be a bit mysterious. The asymptote is the line that isapproached by a parabola but never touched by it. Thereremains a gap, an ecart, no matter how close the curveapproaches. We humans are the asymptote of the inef-fable that never touches us, that “deifines” (this wordappeared—surprised me—as a typographical error, but Iretain it as a contraction of “deify � define”) the alteritythat makes us human and that makes the ineffable in-evitable. Of course, the mathematical metaphor has itsweaknesses. Perhaps the ineffable is the asymptote andwe humans are the curve that approaches it; perhaps thepoint is the reversibility of the two. Then again, thereare non-Euclidean geometers who insist that ulti-mately—in the ultimate—the curve and the line domeet. And there are nuclear physicists who have positedthe existence of asymptopia, “a hypothetical region inwhich the interactions of high-energy particles approachconstant values” or, as Time called it, “the far-out regionon the energy scale where all the complex events insidethe atom . . . come within reach of man’s understanding”(World Book Encyclopedia).

I also confess that the theoretical move I have madeto embrace alterity is not yet so much the presentationand defense of a thesis as the outline of a program ofresearch. My original intent was to bring contemporarythinking about alterity to bear on the rehabilitation ofthe notion of otherness found in Otto and van der Leeuw.My preliminary conclusion is that it is the latter whoprovide insight into the proliferation of theorizing aboutalterity insofar as it coincides with the return of religion,the reenchantment of the world. Does this leave me onthe verge of my own encounter with alterity, on the brinkof a theological position, or at least with the desire tomake what William James called a spiritual judgmentrather than an existential judgment about religion? I cando no better than to quote Karl Jaspers, who said, “Whenthe professor is told by the barbarian that once there wasnothing except a great feathered serpent, unless thelearned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wishit were true, he is no judge of such things at all” (Smart1986:xi). For myself, I feel no need to declare any religion,since from my standpoint we are in the realm of thereligious whenever we encounter otherness in its ownright, whether or not it is impressive, and wheneverimagination sends a spark across the ecart, animatingthe alterity that is the phenomenological kernel of ourexistence.

The theoretical consequences of this approach remainto be elaborated. I have used the phrases “phenomeno-logical kernel” and “elementary structure” interchange-ably in this discussion to describe alterity. I have madeno effort to account for how or why different religiousforms and institutions are elaborated from this point. Yetshould we be surprised that Levi-Strauss (1969; see alsoGeller n.d.) found incest, conceivable as a primordialproblematization of intimate alterity, to be critical to the

elementary structure of kinship? Should we be surprisedthat Durkheim (1995) found totemism, conceivable as aprimordial problematization of collective alterity andidentity, an elementary form of the religious life? Per-haps for now our advance is in the ability to refine thecritique of Durkheim to say that, in arguing that societyis the powerful other whose mystification leads to reli-gion, his error was not one of reductionism, the attemptto explain religion in terms of society (cf. Csordas 1997:265). Instead, it was to mistake the specific instance forthe general case—the alterity of the social for the generalexistential condition of alterity. Such a refinement al-lows religion, as a cultural elaboration of alterity suigeneris, to maintain its status as sui generis vis-a-vissociety without granting it the right to turn the reduc-tionist tables and reduce society to itself or to claim anycontent or meaning save that elaborated in the course ofhuman life. It also allows us the possibility of examiningthe proposition that religion emanates from the core ofexistence in a way that goes far beyond what we typicallylabel as religious. And as long as we leave the possibilitythat we can still surprise ourselves, there is hope for us.

Comments

f iona bowieDepartment of Anthropology, University of Bristol, 12Woodland Rd., Bristol BS8 1UQ, U.K. 14 xi 03

The search for origins has fallen out of favour in an-thropology, which, in its social and cultural forms, hasbecome increasingly the study of human beings in theirlocal context rather than the study of humanity. Csor-das’s article is an exception to this rule. The question ofthe origin of religion, often considered irrelevant in an-thropology and best left to the archaeologists if worthpursuing at all, has been taken up in several recentworks, all of which have approached the question on-tologically rather than temporally. In this sense they arethe successors of Noam Chomsky’s search for a universalgrammar in the structure of the human mind. It is ourbiology, manifest in walking, talking contemporary hu-man beings, that holds the answer to the questions“What is the essence of religion, and how did itoriginate?”

Pascal Boyer, in his recent work Religion Explained:The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001),looks to cognitive psychology to provide a theory of re-ligion, seen to derive from mental templates that are inturn the result of an evolutionary process which favourscertain forms of cultural transmission over others(Dawkins’s memes). Csordas’s argument shares certainfeatures with that of Boyer. It too eschews lengthy dis-cussion of what we mean by religion or a focus on itsparticular manifestations in order to ask more funda-mental questions concerning its nature and origin. Csor-das also makes assumptions regarding the essentially hu-


man origin of what is a priori conceived as a uniquelyhuman cultural phenomenon (other animals do not havelanguage and therefore cannot have religion). Both thephenomenological approach favoured by Csordas and thepsychological one proposed by Boyer reject historical ex-planations of religion (it can never be replaced by science,as Marx or Malinowski might have imagined, or ex-plained away as an epiphenomenon of power and privi-lege, pace Foucault). It is a function of the mind, hard-wired into our brains and reproduced in human infantsas they are socialized into language and culture not be-cause they are told what to believe but because that isthe way we have evolved.

It is a tenet of Arctic shamanism that while appren-ticeship to a more experienced shaman may be desirableit is not essential to a shamanic vocation. The spiritscan call individuals and grant them powers irrespectiveof any previous contact with a shaman or their personalwishes. This is similar to a cognitive or phenomenolog-ical view of religion in its severance of the necessity ofcultural transmission from its ontological core. The formthat a religion (or shamanic practice) takes may be cul-turally determined, but the fact of its existence is not.A key difference between the explanation of a shamaniccalling and the explanation of the origin of religion givenby Boyer or Csordas is a form of anthropocentricism. Theanthropologist, in contrast to the shaman, can conceiveof an explanation of religion in which it is possible tobegin and end with human beings or, more specifically,the human mind (albeit embodied rather than abstract).

Csordas’s elegant and simple explanation for the originof religion (if rather complex in its working-out) is thatit is based on a fundamental embodied alterity. The selfis both subject and object; it contains “hidden presencesto us at the same time that they are compellingly ours.”The asymptote of the title represents this alterity. Thedesire for oneness or unity and identity can never beconsciously achieved. As we approach others or our-selves we become strangers. Religion, in essence, is this“inevitable moment of embodied otherness as the kernelof the self’s alterity.”

While a minority voice in a search for origins, Csordas,with Roy Rappaport and Pascal Boyer, represents at thesame time a conventional materialism in the anthro-pological study of religion. There may well be much tolearn from their explanations, as indeed I think there is,but I am concerned about the image of discrete humanbodies and minds or even groups of humans that theseexplanations conjure. The fascination with the self hasovertaken an understanding of human beings in theworld, with the world as equal partner rather than as acipher for language and culture. The notion that an ex-ternal reality (let alone a metaphysical reality) might ac-tually impose itself upon us or interact with us is sub-ordinated to a dominant and exclusive focus on humanbeings. There is no space in the erudition of Csordas,Rappaport, or Boyer’s language for a Word that does notoriginate from and remain within the structures of thehuman mind and society. To assert that our being-in-theworld is mediated through our embodied experience is

unproblematic, but to see religion as “alterity . . . elab-orated in and for itself” rather than as an intimation thatpermits dialogue with the world is to condemn our spe-cies to a lonely, disengaged, and self-contained exist-ence.1

marie -claude dupr eCRENAM, 6 rue Basse des Rives, 42023 Saint-EtienneCedex 02, France. 7 xi 03

You have experience of charismatic religions, healing andcreativity, phenomenology and sacred self. Now you wantto get a wider view of your academic achievements, andyou pack the lot into three new words, “embodiment,”“alterity,” and “theory-of-religion.” You bait Google withthem and wait for the fish that fall from the net. At thesame time, your prior work enables you to give specialmeaning to the key words. Thus, “embodiment” refers tophenomenology, a philosophical school. “Alterity” re-ceives an interesting bias, meaning the wonder we feel onsensing that we may be something more (or other) thana self: the experience of an inner alterity. “Theory-of-re-ligion” is a critical assessment of previous theories, allissuing from a particular corner of the world, ChristianEurope, and therefore suffering from ethnocentrism and,far worse for a U.S. academic, Eurocentrism. Derrida suc-cessfully surfs on this roaring ocean.

We must keep in mind that Csordas is offering us aprospective essay—unfinished, upsurging, and in need oftrimming. The three key words, whatever their biases,are enough to lead the prospector onto side roads, by-passes, and cul-de-sacs. Thus, the “surprise” metaphorused at the outset disappears in the long run, while the“asymptote” is picked up only at the end and barelysaved from oblivion. We Europeans, old and weary as wemay be, are accustomed to displaying key words in akind of genealogical chart. The main (and new) path ofCsordas’s essay is signalled by the coining of “inner al-terity.” Yet, the fairies gathered around the cradle of thenewborn are not related to each other. Csordas is unableto follow the growth of ideas running to and fro amongphilosophers, historians, and writers who build uponeach other’s work. Coincidences or resemblances do notmake a new line.

Phenomenology, for example, brought to life by Hus-serl (Europe, 1859–1938), full fledged with Merleau-Ponty (Europe, 1908–61) and others not mentioned, andglossed by Irigaray (Europe, still living), intends to graspconsciousness at its very roots and has nothing to dowith Blake’s poetic statement that “All deities reside inthe Human breast.” Certainly, it is academically chal-lenging to mix poets and philosophers in one essay. Theshot misses the mark because deities do not reside inany part of a human body (incidentally, biologicallyminded cognitivists tend to “see” God—that is, the hu-man ability to pray or to meditate—in electrical activi-ties in one corner of the brain). Deities are created by

1. I thank Dimitrios Theodossopoulos for his comments.


human bodily/mental experience of an inner alterity,which can be termed, as Csordas does, embodiment ofthe ineffable; being ineffable, before language, this par-ticular sensual experience is translated into external al-terity, into a relation with an entity other than the selfand (generally) deemed (cognitively) superior. Then cul-tural rules give a name to the phenomenon so that ritesand gods of all sorts help the mind/body to turn the“wholly one” into a “wholly other.” Csordas strives togo the other way round, and I am grateful to him for that,mainly because I have walked a few miles on the samepath (Dupre 2001).

According to academic rules (or should I say religion?),an intuition, which is a kind of bodily/mental experi-ence, has to be clothed with quotations and bibliography.It has to be translated into an “other” by means of ac-ademic language. I agree with Csordas’s intuition butconsider many of his references useless or superfluous(unless he were to knit them all, with many more, to-gether in a very big book). Capturing the inner other isa wonderful experience—disturbing and totally new butnot always awesome. When we call it “awesome,” weturn it upside down or, rather, downside up, and this ishow deities rise from and fly high over the human breast.We remain prisoners of European Christocentrism,which can only think of a deity as superior to man. Trav-eling round the earth as ethnologists do gives one a dif-ferent view of deities. The ineffable can also be voiced(seen, termed, sensed, experienced) as ludicrous, joyful,mean, compassionate, and what-not all at once. Thusthe wholly one, turned into the wholly other, can becaptured by ambivalence and framed as a coincidence ofopposites. Some European philosophers, long beforeFreud, termed this “coincidentia oppositorum,” consid-ering this oxymoron the best way of phrasing God’s re-lations with his creatures. Europe is not entirelyEurocentric.

beatrix hauserInstitut fur Ethnologie, Martin-Luther-UniversitatHalle-Wittenberg, Reichardstr. 11, 06114 Halle,Germany ([email protected]). 5 xii 03

The main purpose of this very stimulating essay is toprovide us with a new approach to theorizing about re-ligion. Csordas proposes to reconsider basic insights ofthe phenomenology of religion (such as Rudolph Otto’sconcept of the wholly other) in the light of contemporarythinking about alterity. Moreover, he aims for an an-thropological theory of religion, but instead of defendinga consistent thesis he wants us to regard his contributionas an outline of a research program.

He argues that religion is based on and elaborated froma “primordial sense of ‘otherness.’ ” Insofar as alterity isan elementary structure of existence, “religion is inev-itable, perhaps even necessary.” Subsequently he elab-orates on “intimate alterity” as a human condition oflife, allowing the self to become surprised, have visionsbeyond reason, and objectify physical stimuli outside the

body. With reference to his previous study on Christiancharismatic healers, Csordas claims that “imaginal per-formances” of Jesus and the Virgin Mary should be re-garded as “embodied metaphors” for that alterity of self-hood. Actors come to feel that heaviness of the limbsthat “is always there for us indeterminately and preob-jectively.” By means of performance its essential alteritybecomes an object of somatic attention. To get it right,according to Csordas, the “object” of religion is not nec-essarily a well-defined other but the “existential aporiaof alterity itself.”

This idea of the intimate otherness of the self is ex-tended by a complementary notion of “embodied alter-ity.” Citing Merleau-Ponty, Csordas shows that humanbeings have no choice but to sense the world throughtheir own bodies and therefore divine alterity ends up inembodiment as well. From both perspectives alterity isgrounded in embodiment. These two sections form thecore of Csordas’s argument and can be regarded as a fur-ther interpretation of his previous works on embodimenttowards a more general thesis on the experience ofalterity.

The next section, however, raises a number of prob-lems. In “Contested Alterity” Csordas tries to outlinehis argument against a number of objections. He admitsthat alterity is elaborated for different purposes in diversecultural domains, such as politics and the arts and aes-thetics. However, it is only the alterity that is elaboratedneither for oppression, glorification, nor competition—that is “in and for itself” and has “no content prior toits elaboration in an ethnographic or historical in-stance”—that serves as the “phenomenological kernel ofreligion.” To me, this specification raises more problemsthan it solves. Alterity strikes me as the basis of all com-munication, including the communication with god(whether male/female, plural, or amorphous). One mightcertainly recognize specific attention to alterity in reli-gious discourse, but I doubt that this embodied alteritysignificantly differs from that in other domains. Besides,how are we to recognize whether the elaboration of al-terity is for its own sake or not? Since religion is notonly belief but social practice, an encounter with alterity“in and for itself” does not seem convincing. Moreover,Csordas himself is not consistent with his definition. Heconsiders, for instance, the general perception of thecrash of New York’s twin towers as a “raw religious ex-perience” in the sense that it created a transformationof conciousness. In my view, this “moment of absolutealterity” is hardly elaborated “in and for itself” and there-fore collapses Csordas’s specification of a religious do-main as well. At the same time, if any embodied oth-erness is regarded as basically religious, then not onlywill religion be inevitable but there will be hardly anyother domains left. Still, I do agree with Csordas that thesignificance of alterity for the experience of religion isnot to be underestimated.

A theory of religion built on the assumption of a pri-mordial sense of otherness seems to reestablish the ob-solete priority of belief against religious practice. Havewe not learned that through repetition (folding the


hands, prostrating oneself, keeping silent, chantinghymns) humans develop a “sense of ritual” (CatherineBell)—that belief follows action rather than vice versa?Is the failure to realize the “imaginal performance” ofJesus and the Virgin Mary merely a matter of “untaughtbodies” (Talal Asad)? Considering alterity as the phe-nomenological kernel of religion, how are we to includethis process of embodiment? After all, it is familiar andrepeated actions (embodied practices) that serve as thebasis for an encounter with alterity. I wish that Csordashad elaborated a bit on this point. In any case, his paperraises a number of thought-provoking issues.

michael lambekDepartment of Anthropology, University of Toronto atScarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON,Canada M1C 1A4 ([email protected]). 22 x 03

Csordas is one of the most original writers in the an-thropology of religion; he continues to surprise us all andnot only himself. He is also one of the few (I would addBruce Kapferer) who is both comfortable and well-readwithin the European tradition of phenomenology. Thisis not a tradition in which I feel at home, and thereforeI find it difficult to respond to this remarkable paper withthe insight it deserves. Csordas anticipates many of mycriticisms and answers them brilliantly—for example,where he asserts that “alterity is not an essential thingbut an essential displacement.” However, I do think thathis move from acknowledging Asad’s skepticism aboutthe existence of religion as a category to trying to “un-derstand religion in its own right” is a bit abrupt. Ratherthan, say, surveying for a family-resemblance (polythetic)approach, Csordas dives straight for religion’s “minimalcriterion or phenomenological kernel.” The ensuing dis-cussion is extremely interesting, but it does not convinceme that (a) intimate alterity is the core or kernel—orspecific object—of religion, (b) religion is necessarily thekind of thing that has a core, or (c) if religion were thekind of thing that had a core, that core should be foundin experience. Csordas cites Rappaport, but Rappaport’stheory is notable not only for balancing the experiential“holy” with the discursive “sacred” but for giving muchgreater attention to the latter.

I remember being intensely irritated reading van deLeeuw as an undergraduate, perceiving his inflated lan-guage as a smokescreen for the underlying theologicalassumptions. Csordas joins van der Leeuw in the as-sumption that “religion has a sui generis status,” but heis brilliant in de-reifying alterity as an external object ofpower and reconceptualizing it as “intimate.” To say that“the actual object of religion is objectification itself” isvery interesting and reminiscent of Durkheim, a com-parison that Csordas reaches at the end of his essay. Heworks hard to distinguish his position from that of Wil-liam James’s personal religion, but he has some way togo now to link alterity with the social and the moral.

roland littlewoodDepartment of Anthropology, University CollegeLondon, London WC1E 6BT, England ([email protected]). 5 xi 03

Whilst welcome as a return to considering the origin andnature of religion in general, Csordas’s particularizationof “religion” as high religion and as a phenomenologicalexperience follows William James in wondering if thiskernel and prototype does not follow the “pattern setters. . . for whom religion exists not as a dull habit but asan acute fever” (James 1958[1902]:24). But, as the firstfunctionalists argued, origin is not continued practice,and the psychology of creation is no guide to the psy-chology of dutiful observance. We cannot assume thatthe followers replicate the founding process (which maybe, as James and La Barre argued, a radically idiosyncraticpsychosis) in any close degree.

One autumn I gaze into my garden orchard laden withapples and dimly perceive some movement at the endwhich, following my experience among my fellows, Icharacterize as some human or semi-human formswhom I later interpret as the pink fairies who have cometo steal my fruit (and this is the origin of the Pink FairyReligion, with its well-known apple sacrifice). I look upat the night sky and wonder about the recurrent cyclesof the planets and decide—again on the basis of everydayhuman experience—that some human or human-likeform is necessarily guiding them, ensuring that eachplanet rises and sets at its appropriate time and that itconforms to its evident course. Now, are my cognitionsin these two cases so very different from my experienceand understanding of normal social life among my fel-lows? Are my assumptions of action and agency in thesemythical creatures so very different from my habitualexperience in perceiving my omnibus turning the cornerand bearing the desired number? On closer examination,they are not, in fact, but until the rise of natural sciencemy pink fairies and planetary angels were not subject tocloser examination.

Or take my daughter (a well brought-up bourgeoisatheist without television), whose pet cat died. Two anda half years old, she had never experienced death beforeor witnessed any mortuary rites. We had just dug a holein the centre of the garden and laid the cat in it whenshe said, “Wait a moment,” and went to fetch the cat’sball and its toy clockwork mouse, which she then putin the grave. Astonished, I asked her why she had donethis, and she just replied that the ball and the mousewere for the cat. An extension of modern British ideasof property ownership rather than an instance of the“naturalness” of grave goods? Perhaps.

Religion is only our normal social world read inslightly different colours. It is hardly so “other.” If re-ligion is some solution to the problem of deceit and lying(Buber and Rappaport), then why do the gods, demons,and jihns of most local religions practice deceit on us?

The Pink Fairy Religion, once established and recog-nized, becomes an idiom subserving other human inter-ests—aesthetic, jural, agricultural, sexual, kin, and so on.


Operating within it, the priest, prophet, or functionarymay well seek to simplify matters and follow Occam’sRazor to reduce the multifarious denizens of our parallelworld to one transcendent and ever less human power.But this is hardly the origin or centre of religion. Farfrom being an origin or prototype, the phenomenologyof high religion is a secondary elaboration by the lonelymystic or ambitious thaumaturge.

The contemporary analogues of religion may lie notin bin Laden and Saddam Hussein but in such phenom-ena as alien abduction and multiple personality disorder.The unknown world is not so unknown, for it is closelymodelled on our own and is not so very far away.

peter van der veerResearch Center Religion and Society, OZAchterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, TheNetherlands. 17 xi 03

So much attention is given to the political significanceof radical religious movements and to their violentclashes with the Other these days that it may come asa relief to turn to religion as “feeling” and as an expe-rience of alterity that does not imply ethnic cleansing.Nevertheless, Csordas’s contribution evokes a strongsense of alterity in me. It reminds me how much Germanromanticism is still foundational to major strands inAmerican cultural anthropology. Writing about the ori-gins of religion—phenomenological or evolutionary—has always made me uncomfortable because its specu-lative mode seems so close to theology. The phenom-enology of religion, whose founders Rudolf Otto and Ger-hardus van der Leeuw Csordas brings back to haunt us,was developed in departments of religious studies withindivinity schools and rejected by anthropologists, whoseinterest lay more in the social production of religiousexperience and the problems of cross-cultural translationof key concepts such as “religion,” “ritual,” and “belief.”The impetus of much anthropological work on religionhas therefore been moving away from theology or the-ology dressed up as philosophy such as the work of Der-rida and Irigaray. I have always found it attractive in theanthropology of religion that it is close to the anthro-pology of labor and ordinary life and that it examinestheology as an object of study without becoming theo-logical itself. It is therefore fair to say that I am not verysympathetic to Csordas’s perspective and see some majordifficulties in it.

The first problem with this kind of universalistic ap-proach is that it is ahistorical. One can, of course, deriveinspiration from William Blake for a theory of interiorityand the self as embodied presence, but I think that muchwould be gained by reading Blake as an antinomian poetwho writes against the established doctrines of theChurch. Blake’s poetry does not simply well up fromdeeply felt emotion but is inflected as a subaltern cri-tique (van der Veer 2001:60–62). To do without a histor-ical contextualization of what is one of the most im-

portant currents in British religious history is to reduceoneself to phenomenology indeed.

The second problem with the body as the origin ofuniversal religion is, again, that the “techniques of thebody,” as Marcel Mauss has taught us, are historical.Mauss (1979), followed by Bourdieu (1977) (who is noteven mentioned in Csordas’s discussion of embodiment),uses the concept of habitus to analyse the ways in whichbodily aptitudes are formed. From this perspective a re-search program that explores ways in which people learnto experience has been developed (van der Veer 1988)which seems more promising than speculation about pri-mal experience. Csordas anticipates these two objec-tions, but his response that one might want to translateOtto’s notion of power as divine majesty into Foucault’snotion of power strikes me as slightly disingenuous. Fou-cault’s perspective has been developed in anthropologyby Talal Asad (1993) precisely to address the problemsthat a universal definition of religion would confront.

As usual, the step from the universal to the particularis quickly taken, and, indeed, one often encounters theuniversal as the universalization of a modern Westernparticularity. Csordas sees the happenings around 9/11as profoundly religious. This may be the case for Osamabin Laden and for apocalyptic Christians in the UnitedStates, but from an analytical point of view it seemspreferable to analyse the impact of the media on theunderstanding of the self and on events that lead to war.To me the impact of the media today is a historical trans-formation that affects the public sphere but also affectsreligious experience (van der Veer and Munshi 2004), andit should be understood historically rather than phe-nomenologically.

otav io velhoDepartamento de Antropologia–Museu Nacional,Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio deJaneiro, Brazil ([email protected]). 6 xi 03

Csordas has always had a stimulating effect on anthro-pological debates. I can testify to this for my own coun-try, where “embodiment” has encountered an affinitywith local practices. Now, 13 years after “Embodimentas a Paradigm for Anthropology” (1990), Csordas againsurprises us. We are once again confronted with a majortheoretical piece that will certainly give rise to muchdiscussion and influence the future of the discipline.Thus a first reaction can only be provisional.

Csordas arms his argument with many writers, an-thropologists and nonanthropologists, inventing, so tospeak, a lineage for himself. This is done in such a waythat the reader himself can suggest other possible mem-bers. Michel de Certeau, for instance, with his passionde l’alterite (De Certeau 1987:xii) may be a candidate,as is Paul Ricoeur, with his notion of ipseite in contrastwith memete (Ricoeur 1995:101–8), not to mention Kier-kegaard and Sartre. We are faced here with an illustriouslineage, and the question arises to what extent it ob-scures and reduces more than it clarifies Csordas’s con-


tribution. Alterity has had its detractors. In spite of acertain boom in the 1990s, it has been the target of muchpostcolonial critique. It has also been seen as creatingdistance in the spirit of modernist anthropology, whichArdener (1985) dates approximately between 1920 and1975. Frequently it has also been seen as an instrumentfor the construction of identity by opposition more thanas the means of access to the other’s reality (and, in away that may be relevant for the issue of religion, onemight add from the experience of constituting a “Bra-zilian culture” that this is not necessarily the case onlyvis-a-vis subalterns). To mention a well-known example,Nicholas Thomas (1991:308–10) considers that ethnog-raphy itself has been compromised precisely because the“fabrication of alterity” is central to its project. One cantherefore say that there are general epistemological andpolitical problems involved with the concept. Althoughat first sight religion is not the main target in these dis-cussions, the homology that exists between the generalquestion of alterity and its application to religion, asCsordas proposes, may not be without consequence. Itis as if one were confronted with the risk of exoticizingGod himself.

Csordas may answer that this is why he ends up with“intimate” alterity. The point is that if the trajectory hehas followed is not misleading, it aligns him with whatone could label the “dualists.” At the same time, theidea of intimacy seems to point in the direction of apromising critique of a supposedly insurmountable dis-tance between object and subject, words and things, etc.,without falling into easy monistic solutions. In my opin-ion this puts him in the company of Bruno Latour, TimIngold, Nicholas Thomas, and others. Were he to choosethis other path I believe he would be able to come backto Merleau-Ponty and the preobjective. He could thenconsider dwelling in the world in very concrete termswhile also widening the world to include artifacts, non-humans, images, and the gods themselves. Kierkegaardwould have to be traded for Spinoza and natura naturata,but he could still have the sacred “everywhere,” al-though in a very immanent, perhaps embodied, way.

In this way, there would be no treatment of differencehinting at an oppositional economy but partial differ-ences in a continuous social process, gaps (even thosebetween words and things) overridden by chains of me-diators, networks, affections, and attachments—inti-macy, so to speak—but no alterity in the sense of theconcept of the alien objectified other and the creation ofuniformity by pushing difference to a boundary that de-mands translation for the artificial reconstitution of thecontinuity of the world (Ingold 1993:227–30). Describingboth Otto’s and Csordas’s concepts in terms of alteritymay create a nominalist illusion. Besides, why cling tothe modern obsession for separating humans and non-humans that is so foreign to the cosmologies of mostpeoples and—as the debates on the nature of the Indiansin the sixteenth century suggest—is at the root of thedivision between “them” and “us”?

I would like to endorse Csordas’s point of not consid-ering religion merely an individual experience, but I

would suggest, following Latour (2000:203–7) to a certainextent, that the global upsurge of alterity could be seenas a lack of recognition of attachments in the name ofa Western ideal of detachment. This is what creates al-terity vis-a-vis those who are not considered detached.It is the alterity of attachments that is not realized. Thisinhibits the recognition of a common world and thechoice between good and bad attachments. Perhaps onecould then say that we are in the realm of the religiouswhenever we recognize attachments in their own right.

Reply

thomas j . csordasCleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. 12 xii 03

These international commentators have done thegreatest possible service to a writer, none of them uni-formly embracing or condemning the arguments I haveput forward but all offering reflections that invite me toclarify my position in a variety of critical ways. I amgrateful to them all.

In Bowie’s reading, I approach the question of religiousorigins ontologically rather than temporally. In fact I con-sistently choose the term “existential” rather than “on-tological,” and reflection on the difference between thetwo is likely to be pivotal for this discussion. Certainlyit is critical insofar as framing the discussion of religionalong the axis ontological/temporal is doubtless whatallows her to juxtapose my argument with the approachto religion taken by Pascal Boyer, a position which, fromwhere I stand, could not be more different from my own.But there is more to Bowie’s point than can be resolvedby simply rejecting (as I must) the assertion that I wouldagree with Boyer that religion is “a function of the mind,hard-wired into our brains.” In fact, what I agree with isthat religion can neither be explained (causally) nor ex-plained away (as an epiphenomenon). For Bowie the prob-lem posed by the approaches she groups together is howto recognize a reality that imposes itself on us or inter-acts with us, and she wants us to see religion as an “in-timation that permits dialogue with the world.” Thephenomenological insight that she perhaps misses is thatwe are always already in the world, and establishing thatis not a burden that need be placed on religion.

Dupre evokes the image of a fish taking a bait andfalling into the net, but I won’t take the bait that sheoffers to engage in a trans-Atlantic culture war of aca-demic styles and Internet phenomenology. I will, how-ever, take exception to her claim that the phenomeno-logical goal of grasping consciousness “at its very roots”and Blake’s assertion that all deities reside “in the Hu-man breast” have nothing to do with one another. Therespective metaphors are quite compatible in any but avery literalist reading. Aside from this, I fully appreciateDupre’s suspicion of a Christocentric understanding ofdeity as necessarily superior to humanity, something


with which I was once profoundly impressed whenwatching a film of women laughing and joking whilegathering important sacred plants. This is immediatelyin accord with what I have discussed with respect to anintimate alterity and with my attempt to domesticatethe melodramatic flights of Otto and van der Leeuwabout the majestically awesome wholly other. Finally, Iam grateful for Dupre’s comment that my intuition de-serves being worked out in a very big book.

Lambek observes that my move from acknowledgingAsad’s critique of religion as a category to registering adesire to retain it is abrupt. I agree. The problem is asmuch with “religion” as a word as it is with religion asa category. It is only as useful as we make it, and we canbe trapped by careless and uncritical uses of the wordjust as we can be trapped by the historical matter fromwhich the category is constructed. But surely this canbe said of any word or category when we try to captureit and harness it for scientific use. This would be theWittgensteinian approach to the critique of the cate-gory—we find the meaning of religion by examining theways in which we use the word. It is one interpretationof the strategy of surveying for polythetic family resem-blance that Lambek identifies as an alternative to mine.But actual religion as it is lived and felt and practiced isnot about the use of words per se, and it is not incom-patible to ask what might be the basis for that familyresemblance. Is there a core of religion? How about ofeconomics? That would be exchange, right? (Or was thatproduction?) And I am not so sure I want to say that thecore is found in experience (since that word too easilytakes on a Jamesian cast). Rappaport does, as Lambekobserves, give more attention to the discursive “sacred”than to the experiential “holy” (Lambek thereby mighthave used the word “overbalanced” rather than “bal-anced” to describe Rappaport’s position, developed froman almost rabbinical sensibility for language while sin-cerely remaining open to the transcendent). But the ex-istential structure of alterity appears on both sides ofRappaport’s equation, for example, in the possibility oflies on the discursive side and the numinous on the ex-periential side. The fact that it can be identified in var-ious domains speaks to Lambek’s observation that al-terity needs to be linked more precisely to the social andmoral. This was the step I began to take by addressingcontemporary events. I am gratified that Lambek rec-ognizes that this is where the argument is going andneeds to go.

I am off on the wrong foot with Littlewood insofar asI can neither figure out how he reads my discussion asreferring to “high” religion nor embrace his descriptionof how I am following James. These characterizations donot go to the point of my attempt to domesticate thephenomenologists like van der Leeuw with the notionof intimate alterity or to marshal the phenomenologistslike Merleau-Ponty in support of embodied alterity, andI am not sure how they could be read from the ethno-graphic instances I evoke. I agree that assumptions aboutaction or agency are no different when comparing thePink Fairy religion with habitual actions such as riding

the bus—but I could say that assumptions about surprisemight be different in the two cases. Where assumptionsabout surprise are the same, however, this could be soeither in the sense that Pink Fairies are taken for grantedas easily as is the appearance of the bus around the corneror in the sense that one is transcendently and prayerfullygrateful at the miracle of the appearance of the correctbus, brought about every day by the most loving andpowerful lord of the universe. And this takes us to Lit-tlewood’s key phrase, “Religion is only our normal socialworld read in slightly different colours,” which I thinkprecisely corresponds to my argument. There is hardlya need to choose between bin Laden and Saddam Husseinon the one hand and alien abduction and multiple per-sonality disorder on the other as privileged sites of al-terity—what I am asking us to consider is the nature ofthe ecart that accounts for Littlewood’s “slightly differ-ent colours.”

When van der Veer responded to this article given asa talk in Amsterdam, he recalled that as a graduate stu-dent he had contracted with a professor to be exemptfrom examination of van der Leeuw on condition thathe would never himself teach about religion. This is per-haps related to his relief that anthropologists have byand large rejected the insights of phenomenologists ofreligion and his feeling of being haunted by ghosts res-urrected in my argument—but thank goodness for hisdefiance of the bargain with his professor and the op-portunity to engage his vigorous critique. Let us beginwith Blake, who was not at all about interiority, self asembodied presence, and deeply felt emotion in the sensethat van der Veer uses these phrases but about imagi-nation. Blake saw visions and ghosts all the time andrefused to be surprised by them or awed by them, becausehis revelry in imagination in all its spontaneity was afull frontal embrace of alterity as the existential core ofbeing. This was the source of his antinomianism, as vander Veer calls it, though I would prefer simply to callhim a political and religious radical, supporter of revo-lutions and enemy of the mystification bred in power.Second, to say that the body is the universal origin ofreligion is not the same as to say that the body is theorigin of universal religion (van der Veer’s reading of me).Van der Veer would have been correct to observe that Ihave not mentioned Bourdieu in my discussion of alter-ity, but he is rather off in saying that Bourdieu does notfigure in my discussion of embodiment or, for that mat-ter, religion, insofar as my work is thoroughly seasonedby Bourdieu and breaded with habitus (Csordas 1990,1994, 1997, 2002). Indeed, the notion of habitus is notthe most obvious tool for getting a grasp on alterity—but if we were to bring habitus into this discussion itwould be in conjunction with the unheimlich, preciselywhere those dispositions inculcated in the body and en-shrined in the symbolic order of the household begin toreverse their sense of familiarity and reappear as down-right spooky. As for the transmutation of Otto’s notionof power into Foucault’s, I would prefer “tenuous” to“disingenuous” as a descriptor, particularly since I agreewith Asad’s use of Foucault to warn against a universal


definition of religion. But I never offer a definition ofreligion as Geertz does, only a thesis about its phenom-enological kernel. Missing this, in referring to my dis-cussion of 9/11 van der Veer also glosses over a largespace between the religious (relevant only to bin Ladenand apocalyptic Christians) and the analytic (where focusshould be on the impact of the media). Are those anon-ymous people who are the actors behind the media reallyany more phenomenologically removed from the eventsthan anyone else within their purview? (And of coursethere are those beyond the reach of media who may stillnot have learned of the collapse of the World Trade Cen-ter.) All of these issues are debatable, but in the end vander Veer lessens the impact of his critique by appearingto assume that history and phenomenology are mutuallyexclusive, diametrically opposed, or theoretically incom-patible rather than complementary moments of analysis.

Velho’s outline of a possible lineage for my argumentperhaps provides a head start toward the big book thatDupre requires to be convinced of my argument. As partof his subtle outline of alternative readings and routesto take in developing this argument he calls attentionto the trickiness of using alterity in a rhetorical climateof scholarly debate that might obscure its usefulness.The notion of exoticizing God himself is particularlyintriguing, because it suggests a discussion in which thealternatives to exoticizing might be reducing, explaining,embracing, identifying with, and so on. Reverting againto Blake, I would have to say that it is religion itselfrather than a theory of alterity that exoticizes God, andthis is part of the phenomenon we are called on to ac-count for. A similar response can be made to Velho’smore specific interrogation of where this argument fallswith respect to dualism and monism. To paraphraseDrew Leder (1990), the possibility of dualistic thinking(for example, the dichotomy between mind and body aswe have inherited it from Descartes) is grounded in theexistential structure of embodiment itself. It is thusagain part of the phenomenon to be accounted for in asynthetic theory of the body, and to adopt it as a theo-retical stance is a form of going native. I do not thinkthat recognizing alterity in the form of the ecart we havediscussed requires “the artificial reconstitution of thecontinuity of the world,” precisely because it is alreadya part of the structure of human worlds, so that yet again,“alterity in the sense of the concept of the alien objec-tified other” is part of the phenomenon we have to ac-count for. This would be the case whether the empiricalinstances in question were describable in terms of op-positional economy or in terms of partial differences ina continuous social process. Finally, I detect a tantalizingbit of Levy-Bruhl in Velho’s notion of the alterity of at-tachments and his suspicion of the way the modernsseparate humans and nonhumans. And where Levy-Bruhl would stand on the notion of alterity as the phe-nomenological kernel of religion is certainly a point forfurther investigation.

Hauser summarizes the first parts of my argument ac-curately and succinctly, then encounters problems pre-cisely at the point where the argument becomes most

problematic and where the most is at stake—the pointat which the theory of religion begins to engage thebroader social domain. She reads me as saying that it isonly the alterity that is elaborated in and of itself andhas no content prior to the elaboration of it that servesas the phenomenological kernel of religion. What I havesaid is that alterity has no content prior to its elaborationin cultural life and that it is only when it is elaboratedin and of itself—as what we can recognize both as thephenomenological kernel and reflexively as the object ofpractice—that we are speaking of religion proper in dis-tinction to other domains such as politics, aesthetics, orathletics, for, as Hauser plainly agrees, alterity is thebasis of all communication. She also has difficulty withmy attributing a religious dimension to the attacks ofSeptember 11, 2001. It is of course the case that thealterity of the final attack on the World Trade Centerwas not elaborated purely “in and for itself,” but I wouldargue that in this case it is quite possible to identify thatphenomenological kernel in the sense of a residue ofalterity that can be accounted for in no other terms ex-cept its own, that is, in terms of what I have called “rawexistence” in contrast to the “bare life” of biopolitics.In other words, the kernel is not eliminated or super-seded by cultural elaboration, political appropriation,historical circumstance, or rhetorical spin but occasion-ally becomes recognizable in and for itself, sui generis.Thus what accepting my position on alterity means isnot that there will be hardly any other domains left asidefrom religion but that those domains contain an elementof the religious and, furthermore, that the salience ofthis element can vary according to historical conditions.Perhaps part of our difference has to do with Hauser’sunderstanding of my thesis in terms of a distinction be-tween belief and practice. What I am saying has nothingto do with belief. Indeed, if I am to be consistent inarguing that there is a valid sense in which religion issui generis, then it must be existentially prior to belief.As for practice, Hauser perhaps introduces another waywe can bring the notion of habitus to bear on this ar-gument. Certainly the kinds of practices and techniquesof the body to which she refers are forms of culturalelaboration that can be said to inculcate dispositions ofdevotion, belief, and allegiance. To observe also that theyare the basis for an encounter with alterity—a processof embodiment in the verbal sense (“to embody some-thing”) attuned to evoke an aspect of embodiment (“em-bodied alterity”) understood as our general existentialcondition—is intriguing and worthy of much morediscussion.

In sum, I acknowledge again that my drawing uponsome of the contemporary literature on alterity in orderto rehabilitate the phenomenologists of religion had tobe evocative rather than definitive and that the same istrue of my ethnographic illustrations of various pointsin the argument. I also acknowledge again that there ismuch to be done along the lines I have sketched out hereto specify the role of alterity and of religion in social,moral, and political life, particularly at this moment inwhich the upsurge of alterity is taking place so broadly.


In recognizing alterity in the sense I have elaborated it,we are recognizing that the grounds for creating distanceare also the grounds for creating intimacy. We are rec-ognizing that one problem for research is to specify thelevel at which political narrative (“secular”) and cos-mological narrative (“religious”) coincide and the role ofalterity as an elementary structure of existence in thatcoincidence. Finally, I do not want to give the appearanceof trying to be prophetic or apocalyptic or melodramatic,but I insist that we must recognize that alterity is anessential structure of our existence and that if we do notembrace it we run the risk of allowing it to destroy us,that is, of destroying ourselves. Blake (maybe Casto-riadis, too) would say that it is a matter of imagination—that human history is the history of imagination and itis our duty to claim that imagination rather than lettingit run away with us. Anthropology and the theory ofreligion can ask for no more and no less.

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Csordas 2004 Asymptote of the Ineffable. Embodiment, Alterity, Religion

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