128 Short reviews and book notes

objections and is in any case an advance on the merelyphenomenological approach of Peter L . Brent's Godmen ofIndia (1972), Marvin H . Harper's Gurus, Swamis and Avataras(1972) and Khushwant Singh's Gurus, Godmen and Good People(1975), and the somewhat simplistic approach of AubreyMenen's The New Mystics and the True Indian Tradition (1974) .

The concluding part of Mangalwadi's book consists ofan evaluation of monism (Chapter 13) and the setting outof the alternative which he himself has come to hold(Chapter 14) . He indicts monism on several counts, eachof them arising from the three-fold criterion suggestedearlier .

The book adds up to an impressive case against elevengurus he examines . The case he makes for the alternative heoffers is not as thoroughly argued . One appreciates thatthere is only so much that can be said within the confinesof one book, but it may have been helpful to have indicatedother books which answer more fully the questions whichhe is aware of and even raises himself . One feels inclinedto agree with Mangalwadi's evaluation of the elevengurus as unreasonably asking intellectual, moral and socialsuicide of us . One agrees that 'blind belief' is hardlyworth having, and one sees that Mangalwadi's own beliefis not blind . However, whether he succeeds in persuadingus to see entirely as he does is perhaps another matter .

Prabhu S . GuptaraMurray Hall, University of Stirling

JOHN SKORUPSKI, Symbol and Theory : a philosophical studyof theories of religion in social anthropology . London,Cambridge University Press, 1976 . xvi + 265 pp . £7 .50.

This important book has three major themes . First thereis an argument, prompted by Robin Horton's work, about therelation between traditional African thought and modernscientific thought, in which whilst severely tested, aversion of Horton's approach is found preferable to aDurkheimian one . Secondly, there are arguments of morestrictly philosophical interest showing the untenabilityof any serious form of relativism that discussion ofdifferences in modes of thinking often raises . (SybilWolfram's incisive arguments in this connexion, in theHorton and Finnegan collection Modes of Thought, mightwell have been brought to bear.) Thirdly, there is a

Short reviews and book notes

129

detailed examination of the general case in terms of thestudy of ritual . This over-extended term is studied inrelation to notions of sign, convention, and rule . Inparticular the author distinguishes formal action fromceremonial, for not all formality (a formal warning, forinstance) has the additional and exemplary embellishmentof being ceremonious . A formal action is taken as anexternal sign of inward state, social order, or changein social order . The sacramental undertone of that lastdefinition is indicative ; the author makes excellent useof examples from Catholicism - especially the rite ofpenance - to bring the method in question to bear upon afamiliar alien mode of thought . If we are to retain theterm ritual, then it is best reserved for the rites involvedin an institutional mode of religious behaviour . It isvital to the case here argued that we do not make themistake of defining religion by its ritual character, forthis would be to fall for the chronic modern propensity tosee what is in fact a religious action, ceremoniouslyperformed, as being a ceremony with an added religious ormystical flavour (p. 167) .

For present purposes, I shall concentrate on thefirst theme . Horton's position is identified as intellec-tualist, or neo-Tylorean - in the sense that it picks up,with greater sensitivity to the religious aspect of thematerials, E .B . Tylor's attempt, 100 years ago, to seereligion and science as patient of comparison because theyboth attempt to explain the world . A key term in thisresearch strategy is 'theory' ; for example, 'anomalouscharacteristics of the spirits in African thought are bestexplained by treating them as theoretical entities whosecharacteristics can then be explained in terms of featuresof the "model-building" process familiar from Westernscientific theory' (p . 219) . The key term of the opposingstrategy, understood as an ideal-type, is 'symbol' . Theseare necessary terms but not happy ones, for much of ourcommon usage pulls us in the direction of thinking thatproponents of symbolism are more likely to talk interestinglyof religion than theorists . It is thus important to stressthat theory is to be understood as (in Raymond Firth'sterms) a system of beliefs elaborated to characterize andexplain experience, but whose domain of reference goesbeyond what is given in experience. The symbolist,rejecting the reasonableness of a comparison between religionand science (which the historian of religion might findinitially attractive given the usual handling of suchissues), is compelled to assume that religious beliefs musttherefore be about something other than what they say they

130 Short reviews and book notes

are . The symbolist will see ritual actions as expressiveof something other than what they overtly or literallyoffer, that is, expressive of the social order ; further,they serve to maintain this order, and the true referentsof ritual and belief are found in the social order .

Skorupski's objection to the symbolist position hastwo leading features . The first, that it is presumablythe case that telling the believer of the true referentof his actions will make a difference to how he acts .That is, in important ways the efficacy of religion reliesupon the failure of its users to see what it symbolizes .Of course, people may often miss the point of what theyare doing, but the symbolist seems compelled to the untenableview that a symbolic action can have a meaning suigeneris which no actor may in any way know it to have . Itmay be possible for some members of the Eranos group tohold such a view of the autonomy of symbols, but that isexactly the kind of position which Durkheimianism isintended to exclude . The author's line of argument hereis close to the old problem of why the religious symbolsof society are religious and not social . Peter Weidkuhn'sarticle in the previous issue of Religion provided foodfor thought in this connexion .

The second feature of Skorupski's objection tosymbolist approaches is that the position arises, specifically,as the fusion of a positivist philosophical stance (in whichknowledge of truths, other than analytically necessary ones,derives from observation, and, more forcefully, that theobservable is the real) with an anthropocentric conceptionof religion . But religions are or can be just as muchcosmocentric, concerned with the relation between God orgods and nature . Thus, a fundamental tension upsets thesymbolist project : it is committed to two propositions :

1 . that ritual language and action, at the literallevel of meaning, is largely cosmocentric and 2 . thatat a more fundamental level its reference is entirelyanthropocentric . The tension is created when thesetwo are combined with a third proposition : 3 . thatritualists are at least consciously and unreflec-tively aware only of the former . The tension isbetween the claimed real meaning of a language andthe meaning which its users are consciously disposedto see in it ; and the symbolist approach as we havestudied it so far does not have enough explanatorysuccesses to call its own for this tension to begenuinely overcome (p . 52) .

At this point, the author might have noted that several forms

Short reviews and book notes

131

of the projectionist account of religion, which is on manypoints the same as the symbolist one, have attempted todistinguish in religion between alienation from nature(cosmocentric) and alienation from other men (anthropo-centric) - the obvious examples are Feuerbach and Marx,although it is also true of Freud in a weaker sense .

None of this means that the author has to eschew theimportance of the social context of religious systems ; farfrom it, taking clues from Lienhardt's study of the Dinka,he gives most persuasive accounts of this (especially onpage 166) .

On the other hand, he finds the fully-fledged intel-lectualist account of the paradoxes of the spirit worldunproven, though he is sympathetic to the general tendencyof this approach . He sketches what he calls a literalistview: that is, religious beliefs are to be taken at facevalue as beliefs about the natural world and are deployedto control and explain it as the intellectualist says, butthis account is not exhaustive ; there are, ab origine, inreligion urgent human needs and concerns which diverge fromsuch pragmatic goals . In this area the comparisons ofcurrent Western religious beliefs and African ones areilluminating . But the way in which the strictly religiousdimension is opened up here is still by way of implicationas a gap in other people's arguments . There are, perhaps,rather too many different things being pursued in the book,and this may make the constructive case look rather moresubstantial than it is .

Thus when he very rightly says, 'The "Levy-Bruhlian"character of religious thought remains unaccounted for byintellectualism : the classic issues of interpretationand explanation it poses remain wide open' (p . 221) onecan applaud, and look forward to seeing him help to fillthe gap . At the same time, one does hope that thesymbolists realize what has happened .

Adrian CunninghamUniversity of Lancaster