MacGregor’s Religion: on Museums and Book-Museums
The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford is a museum like no other. This is because the interest of this collection of objects from archaic cultures lies at least as much, if not more, in the way the objects have been arranged as in the objects themselves. The principle of that arrangement, if not the arrangement itself, has apparently been preserved from the time of Pitt-Rivers himself. It orders the artefacts according to function, and with complete disregard for their provenance. The effect of this is to build a picture of humankind as defined by the common challenges we have faced throughout history. For Pitt-Rivers, these seem to have been, above all, the technological challenges posed by the physical environment to which humankind is shown as having responded in ever more sophisticated ways.
If there is a tendency to materialist reductivism in Pitt-River’s approach, this is certainly not the case with a number of what can only be described as ‘museums in book form’ that have recently set out to delineate humankind through its characteristic practices. Here the emphasis has been, not on technological progress, but on religion and sociality. It all began with the remake of Kenneth Clark’s TV series Civilization. The latest in the genre is MacGregor’s Living with the Gods – a kind of glorified exhibition catalogue of a museum consisting originally in a sequence of TV or radio presentations centred on cultural or religious objects. A museum without walls, in fact.
The Concept of the Book-Museum
The most obvious analogy with Pitt-Rivers’ conception is the arrangement of ‘exhibits’ in total disregard of provenance. For example, a seal-gut vestment fabricated by Alaskan hunter-gatherers juxtaposed with depictions of the ancient Egyptian rites of Osiris. Underlying this, however, is another common feature: the characterization of humankind through characteristic practices.
Yet the practices, in MacGregor’s case, relate not just to the technological manipulation of the physical environment but to the socio-political and – yes – religious challenges of living together. And the world that defines us is not just the external one of material challenge but the collective imaginative world that we sustain through community and religion.
Whatever the analogies, MacGregor has, in fact, set himself a far more difficult task. Pitt-Rivers’ characterization of humankind depends on an emergent ordering of artefacts exhibiting an instructive story of incremental progress in our response to physical challenge. In MacGregor’s case there is no story, just a kind of typology. This presents far more of a challenge on various levels.
First and foremost, with a phenomenon as ill-defined and as strongly contested as religious and social practice, it is far harder than in the case of Pitt-Rivers’ collection to lay to rest the suspicion that this apparently emergent ordering is not, in reality, the imposition of some intrusive authorial intent.
So, I want to stress, on the positive side, what seems to me the genuinely exploratory nature of MacGregor’s project, and the extent to which the ordering of exhibits appears to me determined by affinities between the things themselves. It is as though MacGregor had ‘post-holed’ the religious phenomenon in two hundred and fifty arbitrary spots, and then allowed the extracted material to determine the conditions of our engagement with it. How can I be so sure? Well, it’s partly prior acquaintance with the material he discusses. But, beyond that, largely the apparent absence of unjustified emphases and of the tell-tale signs of material having been dragooned into their service. The organization of subject-matter within chapters and sections reflects the most general and un-overt kind of thematic categorization into topics such as cosmology, phases of the human life-course, sacred places, and divine images. Only the final two of the six sections of the book – monotheism vs. polytheism; religion vs. state – betray some small concession to historical narrative to the extent that their content relates to comparatively late religious developments. The surprising thing is that this farrago of miscellaneous ingredients doesn’t fall apart. What sustains it are, first, the affinities that nevertheless seem to emerge, but, most importantly, the overarching demonstration of the social nature of religious phenomena and the religious nature of sociality.
Where that overarching intention is concerned, my own acquaintance with this and similar material over many years of reading assures me that it is no fabrication of the author. Indeed, so obvious is it on even the most cursory perusal of ethnographic literature, it is hard to comprehend why it is surprising to so many people. It has to be the result of either our unfamiliarity with non-Western cultures, or else the distorting influence of the Enlightenment distinction of society and religion.
Giving Religious Practice its Due
The great achievement of MacGregor’s book is to lift this ideological veil. What enables it to do so is the determination of its author to approach the religious phenomenon from the angle of practice and function rather than philosophical truth. Religious difference, seen in this way, presents itself, not as logical incompatibility (occasioning the secularist dismissal of religious phenomena), but in terms of diverse approaches to the achievement of common practical ends. MacGregor rarely states a theoretical position. But on the fundamental methodological issue of privileging the practice over the propositional content of faith, he effectively articulates a theoretical position towards the end of the book through an engagement with the atheist A.C. Grayling. What emerges, as it were, in counter-point to Grayling’s position, is MacGregor’s claim to be attempting a fuller account of human experience than that of atheists fixated on understanding the human phenomenon in terms of arguments about philosophical truth. The supposed ‘contradictions’ of religion – as, for example, between tolerance and intolerance, many gods or one – turn out to be antinomies.
In fact, MacGregor’s pursuit of paradoxically opposed but mutually dependent ‘antinomic’ relations constitutes one of the main ways he structures the relationship of successive chapters, or successive episodes within a single chapter. As, for example, in chapter 25, where religious toleration in Mughal India (illustrated with a picture of Akbar in dialogue with Jesuit missionaries) leads to the generous and egalitarian idealism of the Guru Nanak (represented in a silver token from Amritsar), and from there, via the Golden Temple (also illustrated), to the defiant stand of Jarmail Bhindranwale against the Indian government, and the levelling to the ground of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya. Or, in Chapter 24, where the embattled nationalism of Shakespeare’s Henry V (illustrated by Laurence Olivier as the English king) leads to the invocation of St George by the Ethiopians battling at Adwa against the invading Italians, and thence, via the defeated and exiled Haile Selassie, to the Rastafarian notion of Ethiopia as ‘a homeland of the suffering spirit’, where the oppressed of all the earth will find ‘God on their side’. In both cases we see a kind of religious ideal (toleration or embattled identity) transformed over the course of a series of historical realizations from itself into its opposite and back again.
From the Christian perspective of this blog, this argument for religion is an important one. Why? Because the chief obstacle to Christian belief for many today is a loss of appreciation for the phenomena of religion, rather than anything specific to Christianity. If we can get people to the point where they see the construction of meaning and community (to which this book points) as a civilizational good, then a regret for its loss in our own secular culture might set them on the road to the recovery of their own Christian heritage. So, yes – give this book to those of your non-believing friends tempted by the militant secularism of the likes of A.C. Grayling. At all events, it will do no harm. Unlike with many of the books treated in this blog, there is no cynicism and no implicit anti-Christian, or even anti-monotheistic, bias. In fact, it manages to be remarkably even-handed.
The Museum as Secularist Ideology?
So much for the positive. On the negative side, there are other difficulties implicit in McGregor’s extension of the concept of characteristic human practices from the technological to socio-religious domain. These difficulties are almost as interesting as the book itself.
With the loss of the straightforwardly didactic motivation of a museum like the Pitt-Rivers, we are brought up starkly against that other motivation of the museum – which is celebratory. Pitt-Rivers’ physical museum of technological practice both retells and celebrates. It’s all about ‘How humans (especially we Europeans) got to be the formidable technological innovators of today’. With MacGregor’s book-museum of religious practice, any idea of narrative – let alone evolutionary development – becomes highly problematic. We are left with a rather weak typological exercise, hardly systematic or serious enough to warrant the choice of this particular mode of presentation. There being no ‘grand narrative’, the celebratory focus inherent in concept of the book-museum inevitably falls upon diversity itself as a cultural good. This is highly problematic because it invests the exhibits with a value that is almost certainly distinct from whatever value they would have had for the original culture.
Most importantly, the various religious worlds that we access through these exhibits were, for their original inhabitants, invariably totalizing and holistic. In other words, these worlds did not see themselves (as the book-museum encourages us to see them) as occupying a particular niche in some universal religious ecology. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this respect, there is a constant danger, implicit in the book-museum approach, of the indigenous viewpoint being assimilated to the viewpoint of the curator. We can see how this plays out in MacGregor’s discussion of Roman polytheism (as illustrated by the diverse religious objects assembled in the Felmington hoard).
MacGregor encourages us to see such religion as relatively accommodating by comparison with monotheism discussed in the following chapter. Now, it is true, of course, that Roman polytheism had throughout its history integrated foreign local deities into its expansive pantheon. But it is not the case that the Roman religious viewpoint ceased to be totalizing. There’s little in Roman attitudes that resembled the contemporary ethics of ‘respect’ – let alone the museological enterprise of garnering up the scattered fragments of human heritage. The manner in which such foreign elements were incorporated reflected the power relations existing between conqueror and conquered. And it was not the cultural identity of the conqueror that was threatened with absorption. I would suggest that in this respect polytheistic practice may not have diverged as sharply from monotheism as the natural instincts of the curator would lead us to suppose.
Hardly surprisingly, the totalizing and holistic aspect of the religious systems discussed by the book is largely concealed by the fragmentary way in which they are treated. Partly, because the briefness of this treatment precludes the kind of ethnographic developments necessary to conveying a sense of the comprehensiveness of each worldview. (Here, ethnographic studies represent a telling contrast.) Partly, because the juxtaposition of one religious system with another encourages us to see them as exhibits in some broader totality called ‘religion’.
And, of course, it doesn’t suit MacGregor’s purpose to focus on this totalizing and holistic aspect in any case. If religious worldviews are totalizing, they are also incompatible. And to emphasize this incompatibility is, in some measure, to concede something to perspective of those like A.C. Grayling who would argue that if all religions are different, they cannot all be ‘true’.
This raises the question whether there might be any way of maintaining MacGregor’s inclusive emphasis on the practices of religion without, at the same time, seeking to confine its systems of motivating belief within the cosy limits of what our museum of world faiths can comfortably accommodate. One option definitively excluded here – and for obvious reasons – is to equate the incompatibilities of religious systems with a differential access to divine, or scientific, ‘truth’. But another, less provocative, option would be to allow the possibility of some kind of evolutionary or teleological development in the religious domain that would equate different religious practices with varied forms of socio-political community. An evolution, for example, from types of religious practice associated with archaic micro-polities to those more characteristic of large urbanized communities, or from practices associated with state cults to confessional religions. With some historical justification, one might discern a socio-religious evolution here towards systems of greater universality. This would supply a socio-political teleology independent of religious truth claims, and would combine well with an emphasis on religious practices. Temporal ordering through an evolutionary narrative of this kind would provide some means of situating the various totalizing religious systems within a putative whole of ‘human experience’ (albeit a temporal rather than a spatial one), without arguing the superior truth-claims of one over the other.
Needless to say, this is not an avenue MacGregor chooses go down. Quite the contrary, exhibits from archaic micro-polities find themselves thrown together with those from world empires or confessional religions. Indeed, it is almost as though MacGregor had set out deliberately to confuse any evidence of teleological development. This, of course, is a very fashionable stance. But the attempt to put all religions ‘on a par’ in this way is not necessarily free of certain ideological implications – as I have been arguing. What it inevitably tends to assert at the level of the putative totality of the museum is higher supra-religious perspective from which secularist ‘values’ of diversity and tolerance rule supreme. But, as we have seen, this sits very uneasily with the motivation to understand the view point of any individual religion.
This brings us finally to the question of where the culture of the author/curator and his readers sits in relation to the religious phenomena featured in his exhibits – his definition of religion, and its problematic relationship to modernity. How far is it still ourselves we are characterizing and not some bygone version of ourselves?
There is no answer to this, because I think MacGregor contrives to remain resolutely on the fence. On the one hand, Western non-religious or anti-religious exhibits enter the book-museum – which seem to places ‘us’ on the same level as the ‘religions’. On the other, the whole idea of the book-museum pre-supposes some enveloping point of advantage from which the ‘religions’ of the world are descried as ‘other’. Of course, the secular exhibits are as fragmentary and as denuded of any totalizing pretension as the religious ones – and, in their case, at least, this might not imply any falsification of their original value. However, what would be really interesting would be a thoroughly secular exhibit that somehow embodied a tendency to the same holistic and totalizing pretension that we have identified in the exhibits from religious cultures. Not, howevever, something from an avowedly atheist state, such as the old Soviet Union or revolutionary France. But something from closer to home – from the kind of pluralist, tolerant societies with which we most identify. Something totalizing, and yet pluralist. Is that even conceivable? Or is it a contradiction in terms? My hunch is that it is not– and I even have a suggestion for an exhibit that would, partially and imperfectly, embody that possibility:
JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE
DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
STEVEN PINKER: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW!
TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE
JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM
REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY
JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF COMMON SENSE
