Coleman

A couple of quotes from the Coleman pieces got me thinking about the similarities between the anthropology project of the kind Coleman criticizes, and the discussion of pluralism. The discourse of pluralism seems to have its own set of frames that guide the discourse along certain lines and which make for certain exclusions. People come to the table with certain assumptions already in place, namely that pluralism is a good, and that it is inherently inclusive. However, in order to have many religions in a particular nation, these religions have to function a certain way. They cannot presume to influence political discourse, and they cannot be interfering in the public sphere. The religious beliefs must be held privately and individually in order to affect this. However, an understanding of religion as something only held privately, and uninvolved in the public sphere is a particular understanding of religion. The problem comes when this position masquerades as a universal understanding of religion. The pluralist understanding of the interaction between the religious and civic spheres are constructing a certain kind of reality as much as they are describing it, and this dynamic was also reflected in the quote describing the effect of anthropological descriptions on reality, “anthropological writings do not merely describe evangelicals, they often compete with them in attempts to define and describe religious and even apparently secular realities” (Coleman 43 Abominations).

The selectivity that pluralism requires to propagate the seamless interaction of religion and the public sphere, means that religions which do not fit into the private sphere will either be seen as a defective form of religiosity or disregarded altogether as inauthentic. Thus while pluralism makes room for many religious traditions, it is making room for many particular forms of religion, namely, ones that fit together without overstepping proscribed boundaries. Pluralism thus operates on a selective basis, giving voice to certain forms of religiosity while silencing others. Likewise, “liberal Christians and anthropologists share a desire to promote pluralism with a certain predilection to seek sources of virtue and identity in the disadvantaged (those who can be deemed to require the voice of a human representative of a privileged class” (84-85). These anthropologists are looking for subjects who have no voice, so that they can have one assigned to them. However the silenced subject is not present everywhere, and must be selected from other kinds of subjects. This is not an inclusionary project, otherwise pluralism as a discourse would not function as effectively. Were some subjects to speak with their own voice, rather than being voiced for by the privileged class, there might be a dissonance. By selecting only those subjects who are voiceless, and then speaking for them, the discourse of pluralism is harmonious, homogeneous and therefore self-authorizing.

Is it possible to conceive of a manner of speaking that doesn’t exclude certain groups? In the case of religion, (or of anthropology) there is a certain dominant discourse that depends to a certain extent on the homogeneity of the influences informing it. In order to say anything general, one must exclude particularities that undermine the general pattern. So, unless we have a discourse that acknowledges all disparateness at once, we run the risk of silencing the anomalies that would throw a cog into our big wheel of generalities. Yet, perhaps on the more specific level, the discourse of pluralism is still useful if we re-learn it. This is to say that it is important to re-learn the assumptions that go into constructing pluralism, and along the same lines, we must re-learn the attitudes that make up the anthropologist project of representing the other. In the anthropologist project, the effort to describe, to represent is tied up with the project of renegotiating reality, and this is a project that works much better when the subject whose reality you are trying to re-create, doesn´t have a voice. Coleman’s experience with the evangelicals undermined the traditional anthropological project by speaking back (with the same discourse, even!) thus causing him to rethink the whole premise. What would it mean for the project of pluralism were the religions neatly categorized as ‘private’ to speak back, and assert themselves as part of the public sphere, with a political agency? Would that description be accepted as an equally valid discourse that could participate in the identity making sphere, or would it be dismissed?