This essay was part of a final assessment that was submitted on April 28, 2022 for my Theories of Religion course.
Edward Said employs Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse analysis when tackling the history and development of Orientalism in Western society (Said 3), approaching his process of identifying Orientalism in manners similar to Foucault. Much of Foucault’s work revolved around the assertion that knowledge is constituted in a historical process and shaped by power. Given that “there is always a context, place and condition from which a statement emerges” (Carette 11), Foucault aimed to examine these statements in order to unveil the laws that govern our knowledge and suspend possible assumptions. It was important for Foucault to expose the ways in which knowledge is “controlled, limited, and excluded” (Carette 8), emphasizing the temporality and construction of ideas through his understanding of a discourse. “Without examining Orientalism as a discourse,” says Said, “one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (Said 3). Accordingly, Said illustrates the conception of the Orient as one that existed in the imagination of the West, through which racist and demeaning tropes of the Western imagination were imposed onto the realities of the East in order to assert power (Said 6). Moreover, the pervasiveness of Orientalism as a Western structure of power over the East is partially accredited to the fact that the imbalance of power prevented the Orient from countering Western conceptions (Said 7, 21).
Said’s analysis of Orientalism in conjunction with Foucault’s methodology brings to light the overpowering level of control that Western ideology has on the conception of religion, and how religion as a cultural residue of the West has shaped other objects of knowledge. Many turn to Said’s understanding of Orientalism to recognize that much of the prevalent assumptions and knowledge of religion normalizes “western” religious traditions (such as Christianity) which causes a tendency to mystify, exoticize, and caricature religious traditions that are dissimilar. The awareness that religious knowledge is constituted in the historical dominance of the West allows religious scholars to utilize Foucault’s methodology as a means to critically examine religious history and literature.
Talal Asad’s approach to understanding the anthropology of religion takes into consideration the influence of history and power on religious knowledge in ways comparable to Foucault’s methodology. A central argument for Asad is that religion is transhistorical and transcultural, asserting that “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes” (Asad 116). Akin to Foucault’s assertion that “knowledge is reconstituted in different historical periods” (Carette 15), Asad understands that any anthropological work that attempts to essentialize aspects of religion based on historical knowledge is fighting a lost cause. The fact that religion has persisted throughout history despite cultural, ideological and social shifts renders it unable to be properly understood by looking at patterns from history. Similar to Foucault’s understanding that power and knowledge directly imply one another (Carette 19), Asad states that “the authoritative status of representations/discourses is dependent on the appropriate production of other representations/discourses; the two are intrinsically and not just temporally connected” (Asad 117).
Alternative to a classical anthropological approach to studying religion, Asad prefers a poststructuralist approach that deals with how religious objects are formed under the influence of power in politics, law, and science. Related to Foucault’s understanding that power shapes knowledge, Asad acknowledges that religion has both been used as a tool of power and has been shaped by power. In order to illustrate a poststructuralist approach, Asad investigates the shift in religion in early modern Europe. As state formation favored the differentiation between the secular and religious, the Church was no longer perceived as the singular source of authenticating discourse and a variety of new and alternative philosophies, discourses, and ideologies surfaced. While anthropologists consider the plethora of new religious beliefs in order to reach a universal understanding of religion as a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of ideas of general order, Asad contests that this perception is quite specific to Christian history (Asad 122). Alternatively, Asad emphasizes that this expansion of social practices in early modern Europe is “itself part of a wider change in the modern landscape of power and knowledge” (ibid.). By understanding this mutation pertaining to knowledge and power, Asad believes that it brings to light what theology tends to overshadow: the occurrence of events (including utterances, practices, and dispositions) and the authorizing process contribute meaning to these events and the meaning produced is then embodied into concrete institutions (Asad 122-123).
Work Cited
Asad, Talal. "The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category." In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Ed. Michael Lambek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, 114–132.
Carrette, Jeremy R. "Introduction: Approaching Foucault's Work on Religion"; "Outline of Foucault's Work and The Question of Religion." In Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, 1–5, 7–24.
Said, Edward. "Introduction." In Orientalism. 2d edn. New York: Vintage, 1994, 1–28.
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