POSTMODERNIST INTERVENTION IN HISTORY

Introduction

— PM is a reaction against modernity

— developed through a long process of critical engagement with modernity and its consequences

— got prominence since the 1970s, ruled the world three decades since then

— dominant in the advanced Western world

— Ideologues criticised and attacked the philosophy, culture and politics which modernity had generated

THE MODERNIST TRADITION

— process of modernity began in the European countries around the time of Renaissance.

— Its centre lay in the origins and growth of modern sciences which established a quest for certainty, truth, exactitude, general principles and universal laws.

— Descartes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Kant & Hegel provided ultimate philosophical justification

— Modernity was said to herald the end of the Middle Ages or Feudalism in Europe, and usher in an era where Reason reigned supreme.

— The philosophers of modernity from Descartes to the post-Enlightenment thinkers to Marx and Weber denounced the medieval values, faiths and beliefs.

— Though some of them, like Marx, were critical of modernity, they upheld most of its values and norms

— social sciences, including history, were integrally related to the making of this modernity.

— Great thinkers like Hobbes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Bacon were both products and producers of this modernity.

— Their theories were used for legitimising and maintaining centralised, bureaucratic states, creating new institutions, and moulding society and economy in new ways.

Modernity consists of various values and beliefs:-

— faith in the usefulness and correctness of modern science and technology;

— belief in Enlightenment principles that the society should follow the path of Reason and that myth and religion should have no role in shaping social values;

— belief in a linear, progressive and transparent course of human history;

— more reliance on universal principles in comparison to particularity;

— faith in the autonomous, self-conscious individual who is master of his destiny;

— belief that modern science and Reason would conquer nature and give rise to affluence, freedom and a life free from fear of mortality

— Modernity generated powerful material forces which gave rise to modern industries, capitalism, and an entirely new set of social relations in Europe by the nineteenth century.

— This new industrial society was marked by urbanisation, bureaucratisation, individualism, commodification, rationalisation and secularisation.

— By the mid-nineteenth century, the process of modernity had almost completely eliminated the economy, society and polity of the Middle Ages in Western Europe and North America.

— Instead, it had given rise to a completely new economic, social and political order.

Modernity created enormous sufferings.

— The peasantry, workers and artisans were all forced to go through terrible misery in the process of being modernised.

— In colonial territories of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia the colonising Europeans eliminated the local people, occupied their lands and drained the economy for their own benefits.

— This imperialist drive led to the death of millions in colonial territories, enormous distortion in their cultures and traditions, and terrible burden on their resources.

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

— Postmodernism and postmodernity are sometimes used interchangeably-but both terms denote different, though related meanings

— Postmodernity –used to characterise the economic and social conditions of existence in contemporary developed societies

— postmodernism denotes the philosophy which has now arisen after and in opposition to the philosophy of modernity

Postmodernity

— postmodernists believe that we have passed beyond modernity and the age we are now living in is a postmodern one

— several thinkers argue emergence of a new society has led to a change in our knowledge-system.

— the term postmodernity, the emphasis is basically on the social and the economic.

— It implies the exhaustion of modernity and stresses the rise of new information and communication technologies leading to globalisation and the enormous growth of consumerism.

Main Concepts

there is no unified theory of postmodernism. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, White, and Rorty are the major ideologues whose works constitute the corpus from which postmodernism is formulated. Their works posed a major challenge to the narratives of modernity and their theories attacked the basic foundations of knowledge created by modernity with Reason at its centre. The targets of their criticism have been capitalism, historicism, humanism, scientism, and rationalism which constituted the modern world.

Ø questiones the claims of the Enlightenment for universal knowledge & criticised the search for foundations of knowledge.

Ø rejects and attacks the Modernity’s grand narratives(overarching theories purporting to explain each and everything within its compass)

Ø debunks the claims of the science to achieve truth. it takes nothing as absolute and leans towards relativism.

Ø rejects the claims of human and social sciences for representing the facts and the world.

Ø there is no truth which is beyond or prior to linguistic intervention.

Ø it is language which constructs the reality and the world for the humans., therefore the search for truth beyond language is futile.

Ø Language is conditioned by the individual and local cultures.

Ø attacks the modernist organisation of world and knowledge in binaries.– science vs. rhetoric, science vs. literature, science vs. narrative in which science was the core common element- here science represented the true knowledge while the other side of the binary belonged to imagination and false consciousness.

Ø other sets of binaries. Fact vs. fiction, truth vs. imagination, science vs. magic, masculine vs. feminine, etc. are the binary oppositions conventionalised by the theorists of modernity. In these binaries, the second term almost always occupies an inferior position.

Ø instead PM emphasises on multiplicities, varieties and differences.

Predecessors

Critics of modernity:-

Ø Romantics

· stood against Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationalism, scientism, universalism and totality. Instead, they defended the archaic, the traditional, the natural, the individual and the exotic. Their rebellion against modernity led the Romantics like Herder, the Grimm brothers, and many others to search for traditional folk cultures.

Ø Friedrich Nietzsche

· the single most important thinker who almost anticipated postmodernity.

· though Nietzsche agreed with the Romantics in their critique of modernity, the Romantic search for peace in nature, tradition and religion did not appeal to him

· made a severe attack on principles of modernity – Reason, scientism, truth, meaning and universality.

· severely criticised the tradition of western rationalism beginning with Plato and its claim to truth. In his opinion, this entire claim to possess truth is nothing but a desire for power and domination.

· believed that human history is not, and should not be, meaningful, purposeful and predictable.

· asserted that uncertainty was the hallmark of human condition.

· also proclaimed the ‘death of God’ and demise of religion and said that morality and truth were impossible to achieve.

Ø Martin Heidegger

— an anti-historicist and denied the conception of history as science

— rejected modernity’s view of progress.

— hostile to reason, science and technology.

— held that modern technology has reduced the humans to absolute slavery

Ø Friedrich Nietzsche & Martin Heidegger radically question the modernist tradition prepared the ground for philosophical postmodernism

IDEOLOGUES OF POSTMODERNISM

Ø Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

· famous for his critiques of various social institutions produced by European modernity (psychiatry, medicine and prisons)

· renowned for his theories concerning power and the relation between power and knowledge & ideas concerning ‘discourse’ in relation to the history of Western thought

Ø Imp works

· Madness and Civilization (1961),

· The Birth of the Clinic (1963),

· The Order of Things (1966)

· The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

· Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison (1975)

· The History of Sexuality (1976-1986).

he discourages the notion of totality and continuity in history. Instead promotes the idea of discontinuity

he rejects the Enlightenment idea that the rule of Reason can be equated with emancipation and progress

the history or the society is not unifocal but is decentred

the discourses constitute the subject; the subject is not the originator of discourses. The discourses instead originate from institutional practices.

knowledge is not neutral or emancipatory but is intricately connected with modes of power and domination.

Ø Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

· Crucial to the development of the postmodern theory, particularly the ‘linguistic turn’

· theory of deconstruction is his basic contribution to the development of the poststructuralist and postmodernist theories

· It views all written texts as product of complex cultural processes.

· these texts can only be defined in relation to other texts and conventions of writing.

· the human knowledge is limited to texts

· there is nothing outside the texts.

· Reality is constituted by language.

· It is language which constitutes our world

· language precedes reality.

· The knowledge of reality is not beyond language and its rules of existence.

· the idea of difference is another point related to deconstruction

· It states that the meaning of anything is ascertained only through difference from other things.

· any text is conceivable only in relation of difference to other texts

· Deconstruction emphasises on the instability and multiplicity of meanings. There is no fixed meaning of anything and no single reading of a text.

Ø Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998):

· made the word postmodern famous through his book, “The Postmodern Condition”

· He defines “postmodern as incredulity towards ‘metanarratives’”.

· theories and discourses of all kinds are ‘concealed narratives’, that is, near-fictional accounts, despite their claims for universal validity

· criticises the modernist theories which tend to totalise and universalise ideas which are basically modern European products

· rejects the foundationalism which bases all knowledge on secure theoretical foundations

· attacks the metatheories, articulated through the masculinist metalanguage which support the domination of various sorts – of one class over another, of men over women, of majority over minority

· Instead, he advocates the ideas of difference and plurality, of radical uncertainty, and possibility of alternatives.

Ø Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

· His ideas have been highly influential in the world of media and arts

· distinguishes between modernity and postmodernity on several counts :

i) modern society was based on production while postmodern society is based on consumption.

ii) modern society was marked by exchange of commodities, whereas symbolic exchange is the hallmark of the postmodern society.

iii) in modern society representation was primary where ideas represent reality and truth, but in postmodern society, the simulation takes precedence where there is no reality and where the meanings dissolve.

· three phenomena that create the postmodern condition -simulation, hyper-reality and implosion

· In the new era of information and communication technologies, the media images replace the real things.

· thus the real and the unreal are eliminated.

Ø Hayden White (b.1928)

· American historian, is considered an important postmodern thinker, particularly in the field of history.

· His book, Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, published in 1973, has been hailed by many as signifying a break in the philosophy of history

· It herald a ‘linguistic turn’ in the writing of history-‘how does history resemble fiction?

· past is presented to us merely in the form of various disjointed chronicles.

· It is the historian who creates out of it a meaningful story. It is not possible to find in the historical events a coherent narrative.

· At the most, they offer elements of a story.

· It is now the historian who prepares a coherent narrative out of the available set of records by suppressing certain events, while highlighting some others.

· This process becomes manifest by the fact that the same set of events may be construed as tragic, ironic or comic depending upon the political or other predilections of the historians.

· It, therefore, becomes clear, that history is not a scientific exercise, but a literary one and the historical narratives are not scientific treatise but ‘verbal fictions’.

· in writing of history all the techniques of novel-writing are employed

· Selection of events, characterisation, change of tone and point of view are the techniques common to both the writing of novels and history.

· In history-writing, as in the creation of novels, imagination plays a great role.

· It is only through imagination that the historian makes sense of the past events and weaves some of them into a credible story.

Ø F.R.Ankersmit

— philosopher of history in the Netherlands

Books:-

— Narrative Logic : A Semantic Analysis of

— the Historian’s Language (1983),

— The Reality Effect in the Writing of History (1990),

— History and Tropology : The Rise and Fall of Mataphor (1994)

— He denies the possibility of any generalisation in history.

— the generalisations about the past do not refer to anything real, but are concepts constructed by historians for the purpose of writing history.

—

— ‘For instance terms like “Renaissance”, “Enlightenment”, “early modern European capitalism” or the “decline of the Church” are in fact names given to the “images” or “pictures” of the past proposed by historians attempting to come to grips with the past.’

— ‘generalizations do not express any truths on the nature of (socio-historical) reality; they only reflect regularities in how we have actually decided to conceptualize reality’.

— the historian’s language creates an opacity which makes the knowledge of the past even more difficult

— ‘The historical narrative is a complex linguistic structure specially built for the purpose of showing part of the past. In other words, the historian’s language is not a transparent, passive medium through which we can see the past as we do perceive what is written in a letter through the glass paperweight lying on top of it…. We do not see past through the historian’s language, but from the vantage point suggested by it.’

— Thus historical writing should be considered as representational painting, which is distinct from the thing it represents.

POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORY-WRITING

PM offers a fundamental critique of the conventional mode of history-writing. It almost becomes anti-history

The main ingredient of history-writing, such as facts, sources, documents, archival records, etc., all come under severe scrutiny under the microscope of postmodernist vision.

The certainty and continuity attached to historical writing are thoroughly debunked,

the inner working of historiography is put under scanner and its proclaimed nearness to ‘truth’ is attacked

history-writing itself is historicised, and its rootedness in the western culture is highlighted by the postmodern thinkers

Postmodernism rejects the ‘objectivist’ tradition of history writing starting with Ranke which strove to recover the past ‘as it actually was’.

It challenges the proclaimed objectivity and neutrality of the historians and claims that the process of interpretation transforms the past in radically different ways.

PM questions the very basis of conventional historiography by locating its origins in the modern Europe’s encounter with the other. It began with the European Renaissance which prompted the Europeans to ‘discover’ other lands and people. In this quest the ‘history’ served as a tool for posing the modern western self in opposition to the other whose history was supposed to be just beginning as a result of its encounter with Europe. Thus the practice of history was employed not just to study the past but to fashion it in terms of the criteria set by modern Europe. History, therefore, evolved a western quest for power over the colonised territories and its desire to appropriate their pasts.

There are basically two types of history in conventional sense:-

One is the grand narrative of history which visualises that the human society is moving in a certain direction, towards an ultimate goal – global capitalist society or a global communist one.

The second one, more modest version of history which claims to rely only on facts and to eschew any ideological orientation. It claims neutrality and objectivity for itself and is the most accepted version of history writing. This is also known as the ‘lower case history’ which is ‘realist, objectivist, documentarist and liberal-pluralist’.

At the centre of professional history writing is the notion of objectivity, of facts, of being able to represent reality, to recover the past. Historical facts are seen to exist independent of and prior to interpretation. Historian’s job is thus said to be able to discover the truth, to be neutral and dispassionate.

Postmodernism rejects all these notions. It not only attacks the attribution of any essence to the past, but also criticises the attempts to study the past for ‘its own sake’.

Both versions of history writing are considered as ideological and situated in particular cultural formation. Both kinds of history is said to be ‘just theories about the past’, without any claim to represent the truth. Both are the products of western modernity and represent the ways in which it ‘conceptualized the past’.

According to postmodernism, there is no historical truth but what the historians make it out to be, no facts except what the historians interpret, no representable past except what the historians construct.

In postmodernist view, the history can be accepted as genuine knowledge only if it sheds its claims to truth and hence to power, and accepts its fragmentary character.

The only history possible is microhistory. The ambiguities and gaps in historical narration are inherent and essential to it and should be retained.

All quests for continuity, coherence and consistency should be dropped.

It should be accepted that all documents and facts are nothing but texts and are ideologically constructed.

There are even more extreme views within postmodernism with regard to historiography.

Keith Jenkins, therefore, declares that ‘we are now at a postmodern moment when we can forget history completely.

his earlier position where he felt the need for anti-modernist ‘reflexive histories’

Now-the history we know is entirely a modern western product which never earlier existed anywhere in the world

This extreme position questions the very existence of any kind of professional history writing

CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM

— postmodernist critique of modernity ranges from total rejection to partial acceptance

— The critiques have pointed out that in some extreme form of postmodern relativism

— However, such a stance may justify the status quo where ‘everything stays’.

— Total relativism and nihilism denies the transformative praxis and does nothing to change the repressive socio-economic and political order

— By segmenting the knowledge and by demarcating the socio-cultural boundaries to extreme micro levels, it makes it impossible to create a broad solidarity of the oppressed.

— the postmodern analysis of society and culture is lop-sided because it emphasises the tendencies towards fragmentation while completely ignoring the equally important movements towards synthesisation and broader organisation

— by conceptualising power as distributed into countless small and big systems, practices and organisations at various levels of society, postmodernism obscures the selective concentration of power, the basic relations of domination and subordination, of repression and resistance.

— It also tends to ignore the roles of state and capital as much more potent tools of domination and repression.

— Some critics also charge postmodernism with being historicist as it accepts the inevitability of the present and its supposedly postmodernist character.

— If the world is now postmodern, it is our fate to be living in it. But such postmodernity which the western world has created now is no more positive than the earlier social formation it is supposed to have superseded.

— Moreover, it is not very sure that whether the modernity has actually come to an end. In fact, large parts of the world in the erstwhile colonial and semi-colonial societies and East European countries are now busy modernising themselves. Even in the west, the chief characteristics of modernity are still there – industrial economy, political parties and factions, markets, unions, state regulations, discipline-based knowledge, etc.

— The concept of postmodernity, therefore, remains mostly at an academic and intellectual level.

— Critics also argue that many postmodernists, deriving from poststructuralism, deny the possibility of knowing facts and reality. As a result, no event can be given any weightage over another. All happenings in the past are of the same value. Thus, theoretically, the

— Holocaust or any brutality of a similar nature can be equated with any other event, whether tragic or comic, because, in postmodernist view, it is the language which creates events and histories for us.

The Postmodernist Challenge to History

Richard J. Evans
Ever since history started to be written, historians have reflected on the theories and methods with which they approach the past, and the possibilities and limitations of acquiring reliable knowledge about it. From the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to historical scholars of the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods such as Edward Gibbon and Leopold von Ranke, they have maintained in different ways a fundamental distinction between history and myth, objective knowledge about the past and poetic reinventions of it, historical fact and historical fiction.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, however, this distinction was challenged by a number of writers and thinkers, mainly from the disciplines of literary and linguistic studies. Taking their cue from French linguistic theories grouped generally under the label of ‘poststructuralism’, these writers have argued that since the human mind understood everything through the medium of language, everything could be regarded, in some sense, as a text. Nothing, indeed, could be shown to exist outside texts. Moreover, the language of which texts were composed bore no demonstrable, direct relation to the concepts of the things to which it referred; it took its meaning from the linguistic context around it. Thus for example chien no more suggested in itself a meat-eating, social, four-legged, barking animal than did dog or Hund—the word in question was only understood to have such a reference because it formed part of a larger system of words, a language. This system of meanings was not fixed, however. On the contrary, it was reinvented every time a text was read. Meaning in a text was thus constituted by the reader, not by the author, whose purposes and intentions in writing it were more or less irrelevant.
The implications of such ideas for the study of history are radical indeed. If meaning is put into a text by the reader, then historical texts—the sources on which all historical scholarship has traditionally depended—have no meaning apart from what the historian puts into them. Thus historians do not discover anything about the past; they simply invent it. One historian’s view is therefore as good as another’s; there are no reliable criteria for assessing which of two opposing historical interpretations of, say, the French Revolution is correct. The point and purpose, and indeed the only possibility, of history as a subject is thus to study historians; about the past itself we can know nothing, since it is gone.
These arguments have proved widely influential in the growing specialist area of historical theory and historiography. They have also had a vaguer but none the less clearly discernible influence on the study of history itself. In an encyclopedia such as this one, for example, far more space is devoted to presenting and discussing changing or rival interpretations of past events than would have been the case in an encyclopedia written half a century ago, when interpretations were presented as unquestionably established facts and arguments as unassailable empirical knowledge.
Moreover, these ideas have encouraged the belief among many historians, especially in the United States, that the concept of historical objectivity is a myth invented by ruling groups or classes in society in order to suppress alternative versions of the past that express the aspirations of oppressed minorities. Women will have a different view of the past from men, African-Americans from White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, gays and lesbians from heterosexuals, and so on; and far from it being the case that one of these views is true and the other false, the fact is that each of them is true according to the perspective from which it is seen: African-Americans have their truth about the American past, for example, just as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have theirs. The only criteria for choosing between these different views are aesthetic and above all political.
Put in this extreme way, however, such views are obviously self-contradictory. To begin with, presumably all poststructuralists believe that their own view of language, history, and truth is true and correct, not just from their own perspective but in a generally valid sense. They maintain, for example, that the view that there is a clear distinction between history and fiction is a false view. In order to maintain this position, they must concede that there are such things as truth and falsehood that are independent of any perspective. Once the principle of truth is conceded, it follows that there must be criteria by which truth can be distinguished from falsehood, in history as in everything else; criteria such as, for example, whether or not a proposition fits the evidence to which it applies.
The evidence would seem to suggest, moreover, that language did not evolve arbitrarily, but in an attempt to describe the real world; and that there are real limits to the possible interpretations that will fit the evidence of the language assembled in a given historical text. Thus, for example, if a text written by some European monarch in the 17th century states that he is not going to do something, a reading of the text that argues that it states that he is going to do it is, to say the least, highly implausible. The documents, in other words, have a kind of right of veto over what the historian can say. They impose the limits within which historical argument and interpretation have to remain if they are not to stray beyond the bounds of historical objectivity. Such limits do not exist in the worlds of poetry and fiction, where authors can write more or less what they like in order to achieve a satisfying aesthetic effect.
Historians do not normally use the evidence of the past simply to shore up the ideas and interpretations they bring to it. On the contrary, the evidence is used to test these ideas and interpretations and to discard them if they do not fit, or amend them and modify them until some kind of defensible fit is achieved, by which time they have often become virtually unrecognizable. If you simply ransack the documentary record left by the past to support a political argument in the present, then what you are writing is not history, but propaganda.
Presumably, in fact, historians writing from, say, an African-American perspective do not simply believe that what they are writing is as valid as what White Anglo-Saxon Protestant historians are writing, but no more so; they believe, on the contrary, that they are right and those whose views they criticize are wrong, and that there are objective criteria by which the issues at stake can be resolved. Moreover, once the floodgates of total relativism are opened, they cannot be closed against ideas we do not like. If everything is true according to the perspective from which it is seen, then how can we refute racist or fascist views of the past? How indeed can we refute the ugly phenomenon of Holocaust denial, the belief that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and that there was no systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during World War II, if not by an appeal to criteria of evidence that transcend perspectives of any kind? In the libel action fought by David Irving, a British historian, against the American academic Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court early in the year 2000 over the latter's accusation that Irving was a Holocaust denier who falsified history, the defence won precisely on the basis of a close examination of Irving's writings that demonstrated he had inserted into quotes from documents words that were not in the original, relied on sources he knew to be forged because they supported his point of view, suppressed passages in texts that were inconvenient for his argument, and in general doctored the historical record in the interests of his political views, which the judge affirmed to be racist and extremist. If we were unable to identify the manipulation and falsification of historical sources in this way, on the grounds that we can read into them whatever we like, then refuting Holocaust deniers would be impossible.
In practice, too, it has often been the case that when challenged, writers of poststructuralist texts have alleged that they are being misunderstood, misinterpreted, or misrepresented. In taking this stance they are in effect stating that authors do have some control over the way their work is read, and that the meaning of the texts they write is put there by themselves rather than by their readers; otherwise they would have no grounds for saying that some readings of their texts are correct and others are not. And if texts of this kind are only susceptible of a limited number of legitimate interpretations, then why not the texts left to us by the past as well?
If the poststructuralist critique of history is so self-contradictory, then why did it become so widespread in the late 20th century? Answers to this question can only be speculative. Poststructuralism places enormous power in the hands of the interpreter, the critic, and the reader, and perhaps this compensates for the loss of real power and influence which academics, and above all left-leaning academics, have experienced over the last quarter of the 20th century. Clearly, too, the spread of poststructuralist ideas has coincided with the decline and fall of Marxism, as the notion of the laws of historical progress towards a socialist future has become steadily more questionable, to be decisively discredited by the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-90.
Here, however, we can also find a stimulating and beneficial aspect of the impact of poststructuralism on historical studies. By emphasizing language, discourse, and textuality, it has successfully challenged the widespread assumption, shared by many non-Marxist historians as well as by Marxists of various kinds, that historical causation worked upwards, as it were, from economy and society through to politics and culture. Instead it has liberated historians to look at causation in a more complex and fruitful way, to take beliefs and ideologies seriously on their own terms, and to treat culture as a causative factor in history in its own right.
It has also led to a mass of exciting new work in cultural history, not least by directing historians’ attention away from the search for the progress of reason in society and towards the attempt to understand the irrational, the marginal, and the strange in the past. It has put a question-mark under the social historian’s obsession with quantities and averages and let back the individual into history, the ordinary individual, that is, the representative, or emblematic, or indeed the eccentric and the peculiar individual, not the “great man” so beloved of the mainstream political historians of the past.
These developments can be seen as part of a broader reorientation of historical studies towards the end of the 20th century. Theories, whether Marxist or non-Marxist (such as modernization theory) which measured everything in the past according to whether it furthered or impeded progress towards economic prosperity, political democracy, and equality of social opportunity, have been sharply challenged as the costs of economic progress have become clearer, from environmental degradation to social alienation. Class, whether based on economic position or social consciousness, has given way to a more complex mode of social cleavage, including gender, religion, national identity, and sexual orientation, none of which can easily be shown to be based purely or even principally on economic factors.
History in this postmodern mode has become a multifaceted discipline in which the old priorities of the political, the economic, and the social no longer obtain. Historians now study a staggering variety of subjects, from love and hate to smell and taste, from health and sickness to madness and fear, from childhood to old age, from water to smoke, from crime and justice to sex and pleasure, from tiny villages to great cities, from obscure individuals to huge collectivities, from seemingly irrational folk-beliefs to constructs of collective memory and forgetting. History has always been a diverse subject, but the sheer range of its concerns at the beginning of the 21st century is surely unprecedented.
All these are positive developments that have been greatly accelerated by the advent of postmodernism, of which poststructuralist theory is merely one among many different aspects. Many historians have greeted the spread of extreme scepticism and relativism about historical knowledge with alarm and even despair, but it too can be turned to good advantage, if it is treated as a challenge to historians to rethink the way they do things and the theories of knowledge on which their work implicitly rests.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ankersmit, Frank, and Kellner, Hans, eds. A New Philosophy of History. London: Reaktion Books, 1995. Collection of papers advocating poststructuralist approaches to the problem of historical knowledge.
Berkhofer, Robert F. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Intelligent exposition of moderate postmodernist position.
Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. New York: W. W. Norton and Sons, 1999. Revised edition of book first published in England in 1997 (pbk, Granta Books, 1998).
Iggers, Georg G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, N. H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Lucid account of the development of historiography in a number of Western countries.
Jenkins, Keith, ed. The Postmodern History Reader. London: Routledge, 1997. Useful collection of extracts and texts on postmodernist theories of history.
Lehman, David. Signs of the Times. Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. London:
André Deutsch, 1991. Highly readable account of poststructuralism and critique of its implications. McCullagh, C. Behan. The Truth of History. London: Routledge, 1998. Reasoned defence of history against extreme postmodernist relativism. Novick,
Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Outstanding accounts of what American historians have thought about historical objectivity. Spitzer,
Alan B. Historical Truth and Lies about the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996. Case-studies in postmodernism and historical objectivity.
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Post Structuralism and Post Modernism

Post Structuralism and Post Modernism

Introduction

It is the intellectual trend in the ontology of ideas and schools of ideas, that they are constantly superceded. The ideas or ideologies that are superceded recede into the history of ideas. The new theories and ideas then occupy centre stage in the national and international sociological and social scientific world views. This cycle further repeats itself and though this fact is often lost sight of in the heyday of a theoretical orientation that has become popular.

In the essay that follows we will first take up post structuralism and then postmodern theory. We will see how there are several overlaps indeed intermeshes between various strands of these two contemporary approaches to the study of society and culture. Thus what we are dealing with are strands of an overall approach. There is no one view on these approaches and both post structuralism and post modernism are blanket terms containing many strands of thought. Let us turn now to post structuralism first. What does the term indicate? As is clear from the word “post structuralism”, these approaches are those that came after ‘structuralism’. These theories and approaches sought to seek insights into society by critiquing and deconstructing social and cultural processes. The post modernism break with structuralism was the fact that structuralism reduced everything into binary oppositions and the interrelations between them. The structuralists held they could analyse any phenomena with the help of their methodology. We must emphasise that post structuralism is a number of approaches and not one monolithic theory. However, these approaches have in common their point of departure a critique of “structuralism”.

Critique of Structuralism

Poststructuralists often point out in their various writings that meaning in language is diverse and open to many different interpretations. Yet to get to the meaning of a text it can be deconstructed and is different from its apparent or surface meaning. That is different meanings can be assigned to a single text depending upon the perspective taken. As would be clear by now that post structuralism proceeds as a critique of structuralism which is itself bounded by its own linguistic boundaries. Structuralism, however, was found to be inadequate as an explanation of social process and phenomena. Thus we find that

· structuralism did not pay heed to historical processes and is a-historical

· applied the rules of linguistics to societal processes which is a questionable procedure

· it is assumed that a work has meaning in itself and this persists even before it is discovered and

· the text is only a conduit between the subject and the structure of rationality.

Thus the structuralists argue that it is language and its structure which itself produces reality and since it is language that is responsible for thought it determines mans perceptions whatever they may be. Further there is the idea that meaning does not come from individuals but the rules of language and the overall ‘system’ which controls individuals. Therefore, the individual is subordinated and superseded by “the structure.” It is the structure which produces meaning not the individual. It is specifically language which is at the base of such domination over the individual.

Post Structural Theories

As can be seen post structural theories do not agree with the ‘structuralists’ in several key areas of analysis and understanding. We will now turn to these and see how the two differ. However, before that let us look briefly at the background to post structuralism. By the 1950’s the influence of structuralism had set in. Saussure (1857-1913) was of the view that ‘meaning’ had to be found in the “structure” of the whole language (Guller, 1976). It could not be discovered in individual words, and had to have an overall linguistic setting – that is the language as a whole. We find that around the 1960’s the structuralist movement tried to amalgamate the ideas of Marx Freud and Saussure. The structuralists were opposed to the existentialist movement which put the individual and life experience at the centre. By contrast the structuralists opined that the individual is everywhere being conditioned by social psychological and linguistic structures which control and direct him, rather than the individual doing the same. As you will have noticed this is an extreme stand and the claim for universality of application of method also drew attention to the fact that such claims of universal application did not necessarily hold true. Also how is it that any two structural analyses of the same field or phenomena would be different?

It was because of the short-comings of the structuralist approach that post structuralism was developed by the intellectuals. This post structuralism is based on a member of basic assumptions/positions. These include: 1) putting all phenomena under one explanation, 2) there is a transcendental reality which overarches all other reality. Post structuralism is also critical of the concept of man as portrayed and developed by Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment view that the individual is separate and whole and that the mind is the area where values evolve on the other hand the poststructuralists felt that the individual was embedded in social interaction. Such symbolic beings are referred to by the word “subject”. We can then say that the subjects are intertwined with society and culture and occupy some place within them, and sociologically based sites. Further subjects are the actors in everyday reality. In fact it is the subjects that make up society and the activities therein, include work and entertainment. We could add here that the subjects meaning and values are embedded in the identities of groups and the activities which lead them to having an identity.

Thus these approaches that we are discussing have often been dubbed “anti-humanist” because post-structuralism is against the divine or transcendental wholeness as was the humanist theories view. However, ‘antihumanist’ is a misnomer and is actually another way of looking at human beings one that is essentially not against individual persons. Further we find that while structuralism presents reality as relations between binary oppositions post-structuralism’s vision of reality is a fragmented one. Social process and cultural relations are not viewed as neat oppositions – on the other hand social and cultural processes are seen in bits and pieces and the nature of reality is not seen as being amenable to total understanding of a whole process. Parts of social process can be focused upon and analysed. Poststructuralists are completely opposed to grand narratives and Meta theory feeling these are equivalent to a fiction and not really apprehending reality. Thus post-structural theories are themselves looking at the specific. Further the physical self (the body) is studied in the context of time and history, and brought out of the closet so to speak. Similarly it is the details of discourse and cultural actions that are now looked into. Further the role of language in building social and cultural reality is also evident in the work of the poststructuralists (Godelier, 1972). Thus the fact that society and the individual are “linguistically bound” with each other and the relationship between the two is complex. This stand clearly negates the earlier assumptions of social scientists that language was easy to comprehend and use and that there were no ambiguities regarding language – use. This the post-structural theories negate as an erroneous assumption. In fact “reality’’ itself is constructed within the social matrix and continues to reproduce itself over time.

Discourse Knowledge and Experience

The world of discourse and knowledge set the limits for our experience – and the subject (ego) can only experience or describe what he has experienced. That is to also say that there are experiences for which there is no language or a language is slowly being pieced together, and certain words and concepts gain ground and usage. This includes the usage of metaphor, metonymy and irony. These usages lead by themselves to a concern with ideology which provides an ingress and insight into relations of power and the world-view of the subjects.

Again another area in which post structural theories focus upon in their analysis on what are known as cultural codes which themselves provide an understanding of our lives and how they work out within various contexts. However, it needs to be pointed out that it is understood by the post structuralists that construction of meaning implies that some aspects of social process and individual life will be emphasised and others will be relatively reduced in importance. In other words “objectivity” as in the case of earlier sociological theory is found to be an illusion. That is the analyses of poststructuralists does not deny its subjective orientation. Yet poststructuralists also hold that meaning in society can be deconstructed to open up new ideas and practices. However, such an exercise leads to an understanding of specifics rather than general constructions. Thus loops of meaning and process of construction reveal more about the specific scaffolding of the subject rather than an understanding of the whole. The world is mediated by discourse, language and ideology all of which structure the experience of the subject. According to post structural thinking it is the text which is the repertoire of meanings and there is no meaning outside the text. Thus meaning resides in the text itself in toto. An understanding resides in social signs and discourses in particular fields of study. Again almost paradoxically, every text exists only in relation to other texts. However, it needs to be pointed out that man’s ability to perceive reality is not at stake. Nonetheless what we know of reality is known through various processes of discourse symbols and language. Yet it must be understood that discourse itself is very varied in content. It is also a fact that discourse is sometimes sketchy and abrupt. It originates through chance and disappears also through unspecified reasons. Thus according to Foucault there is no question of predicting history through grand theories and meta narratives (Foucault, 1969). History is thus viewed by poststructuralists as happening by chance. Thus in history the twists, turns, plots, subplots and important events and happenings cannot be pinned down – that is it happens by chance.

Derrida and Deconstruction

This brief note on structuralism is important for our understanding of the process of “deconstruction” initiated by Derrida. The basics of this structuralism are:

· positing of a centre of power or influence which begins and ends all social processes. This could be ‘mind’ or ‘self’ or even ‘God’.

· all structures are composed of binary pairs or oppositions one of which is more important than the other and often signified thus: +/- . These could be good/evil, god/man and so on.

Thus post structuralism began with Derrida’s critique of structuralism or rather this deconstruction’ of language society and culture. The structuralists felt that man was chained to structures which controlled him. In contrast, however, Derrida feels that language can be reduced to writing which does not control the subjects. According to him all institutions and structures are nothing but writing and incapable of controlling the individual. The structuralists saw order and stability in language, hence in all structures; the poststructuralists on the other hand saw language as essentially changing and quite unstable. This means that the language structure being itself in flux cannot create structures that constrain, restrain, or punish people, because language itself is disorderly, and the underlying laws of language cannot be ‘discovered’. This is what is the process of deconstruction which as the term suggests is a sort of conceptual dissection of the concept or process being studied. Derrida who coined the term deconstruction felt that logo centrism has dominated the Western countries. This way of perceiving has meant that writing has always been suppressed historically speaking. This has also meant that the freedom to analyse and think is taken away in a logocentric system. Derrida wants to dismantle this type of approach as it sets writing free from repression. Under these circumstances what takes place in the art form of traditional theatre is a representation of real life. Such a representation is extremely important, in fact a controlled theological theatre.

Derrida’s chosen alternative stage is one which will not be controlled by texts and authors but fall short of disorder/anarchy. Thus Derrida wants a fundamental change in traditional theatre/life which would mean a great change from the dominance of the writer (God?) on the stage (theatre) or in societal process as well leading closer towards freedom of the individual. Derrida feels thus that traditional theatre needs to be deconstructed. In this mode of suggestion is included a critique of society itself, which is, as mentioned earlier ‘logocentric.’ Derrida feels that in theatre it is the writer who puts together the script, and that this influence is so strong that it is akin to a dictatorship. Similarly in social processes the intellectual ideas and formulations are controlled by the intellectual authorities which create discourse.

Further we may add that post structuralists believe in the process of decentering because when these is no specific authoritarian pressure on society it becomes open ended and available for ‘play and difference’. This process is ongoing reflexive and open (Derrida, 1978 :297). Thus the present alone exists and it is the arena where social activity takes place. Thus we should try to find solutions by harking to the past. The future itself cannot be precisely predicted. However, there is no precise solution that Derrida provides except that in the end there is only writing, acting and play with difference. At this point in our presentation it would be instructive to look briefly at an example of post structural ideas and ideology in the case of Michel Foucault one of the major poststructuralists. One critical difference between Foucault and the structuralists is that while linguistics is the main influence for the former, it did not occur exclusively as the domain of ideas that have to be adopted or modified into a poststructuralist schema. That is post structural thinkers use a variety of ideas and influence and are not reduced to examining the relations between binary terms. This variety of sources in presenting an argument is what puts Foucault into the group of the poststructuralists.

Foucault and the Archaeology of Knowledge

Foucault described his approach/methodology as the “archaeology of knowledge.” Using this approach Foucault studied knowledge and discourse. According to Foucault this approach provides better ingress to understanding society and it is different from history, which he feels is portrayed in a stereotyped linear progression, whereas the reality remains limited and ‘continuous.’

Foucault, however, moved away from this structural type of analysis and began studying the ‘genealogy of power.’ His concern was to find out the facts about governance through knowledge production. The nature of knowledge as power should not be hierarchical and also that the higher the knowledge (e.g. science) the greater the power it wields over the subjects. Thus Foucault studied technique and process in science since this is what exerts power over people through the medium of institutions. This is not to say that the elites are scheming and manipulating power. Again Foucault uses a non linear perception of progress in societies from the stage of barbarism to the present civilisation. Thus history is seen instead as shifting patterns of domination. However, knowledge/power is such that it is always opposed and resisted. Thus Foucault’s post structural view is that while knowledge/ power are ubiquitous they are certainly not omnipotent and total in their domination but their power/authority is always questioned and opposed. A brief introduction to Foucault’s ideas would help us in completing the section on post structuralism (Foucault, 1979). Thus according to Foucault

· the mad have been misunderstood and mistreated over the course of history, and subjected to moral control

· power/knowledge are implicative of each other

· technologies exert power e.g. the Panopticon a prison with the cells around a large observation tower from which every thing that inmates do is visible and observable. Such an institution is metaphoric of total societal control of the prisoners, since it forces even the prisoners or inmates to exercise self-restraint. Thus this is a direct relationship between technology, knowledge and power. Thus the Panopticon is a prototype of societal control and surveillance and the forerunner of intelligence services and satellite observations over geophysical territories.

Post modernism is not the term for a single type of theory, metanarrative, or grand theory. It is rather the term for an overall approach involving many similar strands. There is thus no single position in postmodernism, but all the thinkers in this approach share certain common features that separate it from “modernism.” This has been both a feature that separates it from ‘modernism’ and the approaches all indicate that what they are doing is to present, dissect, construct ideas that will be relevant to the postmodern context. A large number of sociologists still tend to think that post modernism is a passing fancy, however, it is now obvious that postmodernism cannot be ignored both as fact and phenomena. However, it cannot be denied that postmodernism is surrounded by diverse positions within the field itself.

It would be proper at this point to distinguish between some common terms that are often confused with each other although they are quite distinct from one another. Thus “post modernity” is the word used for the historical epoch following the modern era. Further ‘post modernism’ itself refers to cultural products which are different/separate from the modern cultural products (in art, architecture etc.). Again ‘postmodern social theory’ refers to a method of ideating that differs from modern social theory.

From the above it can be said that the post modern covers: 1) a new epoch, 2) new cultural products, 3) new theories about society. Further these new realities are getting strengthened and there is a widespread feeling that the modern era is ending and being superceded by another epoch. This was evident in breaking up of buildings which were modern and complete. However, the post modern theories themselves provide ready made solutions in a general sense. However, it is questionable whether the birth of the post modern era can be precisely dated though it appears to have transited, from the modern in the 1960’s.

Post modernism indicates that in the cultural field postmodern cultural products tend to replace modern products. Again postmodern social theory has emerged from and has differences with modern social theory. Thus postmodern theory rejects the notion of ‘foundationalism’ of the earlier theories but itself tends to be relative, non relational and nihilistic.

Jameson and Late Capitalism

Again the postmodern thinkers reject the nation of a grand narrative or meta narrative. For example Lyotard contrasts modern knowledge which has a grand synthesis e.g. the work of Parsons or Marx such narratives are associated with modern science. Thus as Lyotard identifies modern knowledge with metanarratives, then obviously postmodern approaches demand that such theorising should be negated in its completeness. This is because postmodern scholars such as Lyotard are not afraid to face the differences and challenges of such a viewpoint. Thus post modernism becomes an instrument that welcomes different perspectives under the same broad umbrella. Let us now turn to look at some examples of postmodern theory. A good illustration of the postmodern theory is clearly set out in the work of Fredric Jameson. The point of departure is that modernity and post modernity mark a radical break from each other and are hard to reconcile the two. However, a middle position is taken by Jameson who writes that there are some continuities between the two epochs. According to Jameson capitalism is in its ‘late’ stages, but continues to be the main form of production the world over. However, this ‘late’ stage of capitalism has been ushered in with post modernism. Thus while the cultural logic is altered, the underlying structure remains the same as in the incipient forms of capitalism. This is reflective of the Marxian framework. Jameson sees the postmodern situation as possessing both positive and negative aspects of postmodernism. Thus there is progress and chaos side by side. Thus according to Jameson there are three stages in the progress of capitalism. The first is market capitalism typified by national markets. Following this phase comes the imperialist stage which is backed up by a global capitalist network. Then the third phase is ‘late capitalism’ share capital is used to commodify new areas. The effect of changes in the economic structure automatically create appropriate cultural changes. Thus Jameson points out that we can see that:

· realist culture is associated with market capitalism

· modernist culture is associated with monopoly capitalism

· postmodern culture and multinational capitalism

Jameson’s perspective, works mainly within a base and superstructure model. According to Jameson postmodern society has some characteristics: firstly there is superficiality, in the sense the cultural products keep to superficiality and do not enquire deeply into the situation e.g. the soup cans and portrait of Marolyn Munroe – both of which are simulacra as they are a “copy of a copy.” Both paintings were painted from a copy of the photographs. Thus the pictures are simulacrum – in which one cannot distinguish the original from the copy (Jameson, 1984:86). These paintings are simulacrum and lack in depth, and covers the surface meanings only. Further emotion or emotionality is hardly to be found is the postmodern societies. Thus alienation has been supplanted by fragmentation, which results in the impensonalization of interaction. Again, and thirdly historicity is set aside and it is clear that all that can be known about the past is textual and can spawn intertextuality at the most. What this implies is that the postmodernists do not restrict themselves to a single linear past but pick and choose from among the available styles. That is to say there is a strong element of pastiche. This implies that ‘truth’ about past history, is that we have no way of knowing what happened. The historians then have to be satisfied with a pastiche which in itself may not reflect much of past reality and there is no such thing as linear historical development. Finally postmodernism has a new technology available to it especially the computer and other electronic machines not present earlier. What we can say then is that the post modern societies are in deep flux and great confusion and many symptoms of this have appeared especially with regard to certain kinds of affliction. Thus whole new breeds of psychiatrists are busy trying to undo the stress and tension that post modernism is clearly associated with. Thus there is a problem of chaotic and disturbing trends of late capitalism. It is difficult to cope with multinational economy and the according cultural impact of consumerism. Jameson feels that cognitive maps are needed to deal with postmodern realities. The maps can be put together by artists novelists and working people. Thus Jameson’s schema tries to build bridges between Marxian theory and post-modernism, but ended up antagonising both Marxists and postmodernists. This was to be expected because despite Jameson’s efforts to synthesise it was clear that a grand theory/metanarrative was unlikely to bend backwards, and therefore, Jameson uses mainly its base/ superstructure dichotomy. Jameson’s postmodernism does try to maintain some basic/tenous link with Marxian theory despite the fact that Marxism is a grand narrative. However, in the case of Jean Baudrillard postmodernism is presented as a maverick social theory of contemporary times. Thus Baudrillard journey of ideas commences in the 1960’s, when he started out as a Marxist critique of consumer society he was influenced by both linguistics and semiotics. However, he soon left this orientation behind him and abandoned both Marxism and structuralism.

Baudrillard and Post Modernism

In the 1970’s Baudrillard alleged that Marxists and their detractors both had a similar beorgeoisie orientation which was conservative. He felt that an alternative explanation was necessary. Thus Baudrillard put forward the notion of “symbolic exchange” as an alternative to economic exchange. Symbolic exchange itself involves a continuous process of a gift giving and gift taking. It is clear that symbolic exchange was beyond and opposed to the logic of late capitalism.

Such symbolic exchange implied the creation of a society based on the same, but Baudrillard chose to be a-political. He studied contemporary society, and saw that it is not production but the electronic media that characterizes it e.g. TV, computers, satellites. We have moved from societies under different modes of production to a society that is more involved with the code of production. Exploitation and profit motives have given way to a domination by the signs/systems that produce them. Again signs referred to something else but in postmodern society they become self referential and characterised by “simulations” and ‘simulacra’ which are representations of any aspect of consumption (Baudrillard, 1973).

For Baudrillard the postmodern world is “hyper reality.” Thus media becomes more real than the reality itself, and provides news, views and events in an exaggerated, skewed, and even ideological manner – thus the term hyper reality. This is not without consequences as the real tends to be buried in the hyper real and may ultimately be banished altogether. For Baudrillard culture is undergoing a very deep change which makes the masses more and more passive, rather than increasingly rebellious. Thus the masses encounter these changes with seeming ease absorbing each new cultural idea or artifact. Thus for Baudrillard masses are not seen to be the products of media. Rather it is the media which is observed to provide these wants to the masses (for objects and entertainment). For Baudrillard society is in throes of a ‘death culture.’ Thus it is death anxiety that pushes people to try and lose this anxiety by using and abusing the consumerist culture. There is no revolutionary silver lining to Baudrillard’s theory and the problem is also that symbolic exchange societies may exist but how to bring them about is not addressed to by Baudrillard. All in all Baudrillards brilliant and unusual ideas make it a clear breakaway from the ideas and artifacts of modernism. Baudrillard in deconstructing contemporary society shows just how much sociological theory has moved forward and away from classical thought. Thus we can see post modernism does display certain characteristics and we can see below just what these are.

The first of these characteristics is that in postmodernism that is a multiplicity of views, meanings and so on. Secondly the postmodernists are looking for polysemic and alternative meanings. Thirdly there is a distrust of metanarratives and grand narratives as found in classical sociological theory. It also holds that since there a multiplicity of perspectives there will always be many truths. Thus postmodernists regard concepts ideas as texts which are open to interpretation. They also look for binary oppositions in the text. Further, these binary oppositions are themselves shown to be false or at least not necessarily true. Finally the post modernist identifies texts, groups which are absent or omitted. This is regarded important to any ‘deconstruction.’

Now postmodernism is reflected in almost all areas of life including film, TV, literature etc. which are deeply influenced by postmodern viewpoints. Let us now turn to some postmodern aspects visible in other fields. Thus in language words and forms are used and the concept of ‘play’ is basic to it. Thus ‘play’ implies altering the frame which connects ideas – allowing the troping of a metaphor. Thus the ‘text’ has a meaning which is understood or interpreted by the reader and not the author. This ‘play’ or exercise is the way that the author gains some significance in the consciousness of the reader. The problem with this postmodern view about language is very difficult to understand and is against the basis of communication where the author communicates to the reader in as lucid a manner as possible.

In literature it is found that postmodern works is not so much opposed to modernist literature. Instead it tends to extend it stylistically. Some post modern literatures include David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon both of whom are critical of the vast system building of the Enlightenment modernity. As you would have noticed post structuralism and postmodernism do have an intermeshing quality. Indeed some authors straddle both fields e.g. Francois Lyotard. Further structuralism tries to build models seeking out factor and patterns that are stable, which is anathema to postmodernists and rejected outright as a futile manoeuvre. Thus postmodernism has retained the cultural dimension of structuralism but has rejected the claims to its scientificity. Again post structuralism is a position in philosophy, it is not the name of an era whereas postmodernism is associated with the post modern epoch.

Conclusion

What then has postmodernism achieved? The answer is that postmodernism has turned away the shroud over the analysis and demystified both epistemological and ideological constructs. Further a deep look at ethnography has to led to a reexamination and questioning of ethnography itself. Postmodernism and its adherents point out that sociologist should analyse the role of their own culture in the study of culture, and therefore, increase the sensitivity of the subject. Postmodern approaches have been criticized on several grounds. To begin with postmodernists are against theory. This paradoxical since this is itself a theoretical position taken by the postmodernists. Again the postmodernists emphasise the illogical or nonrational aspects of a culture. Further, the postmodern concentrates on the marginal which is itself evaluative. Then again the stress on intertextuality, but do not always follow their own advice and often treat texts as standing alone. Postmodernists also put away all assessment of theory – but this does not mean that there is no means of assessment. Thus according to postmodernists modernism is inconsistent but they themselves exercise it as and which way they want. Finally the postmodernists are self contradictory when they deny any claims of reality or ‘truth’ in their own writings. Finally there is the issue of postmodernism not having any confidence in the scientific method. But if sociology does follow this position, then it will turn into a study of meanings, rather than causes which influence what it is to be an individual in society.

Further Reading

Baudrillard, Jean 1976, Symbolic Exchange and Death. London : Sage

Derrida, Jaques 1978, Writing and Difference. Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Foucault, Michel 1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. New York : Harper Colophon

Jameson, Frederic 1991 Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Dusham, N.C. : Duke University Press

Methodological Individualism and Methodological Holism

article from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/




This doctrine was introduced as a methodological precept for the social sciences by Max Weber, most importantly in the first chapter of Economy and Society (1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macro” social phenomena must be supplied with “micro” foundations, ones that specify an action-theoretic mechanism (Alexander, 1987).
A contrast is often drawn, following J.W.N. Watkins (1952a), between methodological individualism and methodological holism. This is usually tendentious, since there are very few social scientists who describe themselves as methodological holists. There are, however, forms of social-scientific explanation with more active adherents that methodological individualism precludes or downgrades. These include, most importantly, functionalism, many types of sociobiology, “memetics” or evolutionary cultural explanation, psychoanalytic and “depth hermeneutic” methods, and any form of explanatory generalization grounded in purely statistical analysis.
Defenders of methodological individualism generally claim that it is an innocent doctrine, devoid of any political or ideological content. Weber himself cautioned that “it is a tremendous misunderstanding to think that an ‘individualistic’ method should involve what is in any conceivable sense an individualistic system of values” (Weber 1968: 18). Nevertheless, the doctrine of methodological individualism became embroiled in a number of highly politicized debates during 20th century, largely because it was often invoked as a way of discrediting historical materialism. There were two distinct rounds of controversy on this score. The first occurred primarily during ‘50s, in response to the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper. The second round occurred during the ‘80s, in response to Jon Elster, this time as part of critical debates within the movement known as “analytical Marxism.” During the latter period, methodological individualism became widely associated with what many called “rational choice imperialism.”
1. Weber
The phrase methodische Individualismus was actually coined by Weber's student, Joseph Schumpeter, in his 1908 work Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie. The first use of the term “methodological individualism” in English was again by Schumpeter in his 1909 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper, “On the Concept of Social Value” (see Udehn 2001, 214). However, the theoretical elaboration of the doctrine is due to Weber, and Schumpeter uses the term as a way of referring to the Weberian view.
In Economy and Society, Weber articulates the central precept of methodological individualism in the following way: When discussing social phenomena, we often talk about various “social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual persons”(Weber 1968, 13). Thus we talk about them having plans, performing actions, suffering losses, and so forth. The doctrine of methodological individualism does not take issue with these ordinary ways of speaking, it merely stipulates that “in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action” (Weber 1968, 13).
For Weber, the commitment to methodological individualism is very closely related to the commitment to verstehende (or interpretive) patterns of explanation in sociology. The reason for privileging individual action in sociological explanation is that only action is “subjectively understandable.” Weber reserves the term “action” to refer to the subset of human behavior that is motivated by linguistically formulated or “meaningful” mental states. (Generally speaking: coughing is behavior, apologizing afterwards is action.) Updating the terminology somewhat, we can say that the defining characteristic of an action is that it is motivated by a mental state with propositional content, i.e., an intentional state. The importance of action for Weber is that we have interpretive access to it, by virtue of our capacity to understand the agent's underlying motive. This permits the social scientist to “accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals” (Weber 1968, 15). Action-theoretic explanation is central to social-scientific analysis, therefore, because without knowing why people do what they do, we do not really understand why any of the more large-scale phenomena with which they are embroiled occur.
Thus methodological individualism is a slightly misleading term, since the goal is not to privilege the individual over the collective in social-scientific explanation, but rather to privilege the action-theoretic level of explanation. This privileging of the action-theoretic level is methodological because it is imposed by the structure of interpretive social science, where the goal is to provide an understanding of social phenomena. Actions can be understood in a way that other social phenomena cannot, precisely because they are motivated by intentional states. Yet only individuals possess intentional states, and so the methodological privileging of actions entails the methodological privileging of individuals. Thus the “individualism” in methodological individualism is more a byproduct of its central theoretical commitment than a motivating factor. This is what defenders to the doctrine have tried to communicate, with greater or lesser degrees of success, by claiming that it is politically or ideologically neutral.
It is worth emphasizing the difference between methodological individualism, in Weber's sense, and the older traditions of atomism (or unqualified individualism) in the social sciences. Many writers claim to find the origins of methodological individualism amongst economists of the Austrian School (especially Carl Menger), and doctrines articulated during the Methodenstreit of the 1880s (Udehn 2001). Others trace it back to Thomas Hobbes, and the “resolutive-compositive” method elaborated in the opening sections of the Leviathan (Lukes 1968, 119). Yet the distinctive character of this type of atomism was summed up quite clearly by Hobbes, with his injunction to “consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddainly (like Mushromes) come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other” (1949 [1651], 8:1). The atomistic view is based upon the suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into interaction with one another. Methodological individualism, on the other hand, does not involve a commitment to any particular claim about the content of the intentional states that motivate individuals, and thus remains open to the possibility that human psychology may have an irreducibly social dimension. Thus one way of accentuating the difference between atomism and methodological individualism is to note that the former entails a complete reduction of sociology to psychology, whereas the latter does not.
Finally, it should be noted that Weber's commitment to methodological individualism is closely related to his more well-known methodological doctrine, viz., the theory of ideal types. Historical explanation may make reference to the actual content of the intentional states that motivated particular historical actors, but the sociologist is interested in producing much more abstract explanatory generalizations, and so cannot appeal to the specific motives of particular individuals. Thus sociological theory must be based upon a model of human action. And because of the constraints that interpretation imposes, this model must be a model of rational human action (Weber writes: “it is convenient to treat all irrational, affectually determined elements of behavior as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of rational action” [1968, 6].)
Thus one of the most important consequences of Weber's methodological individualism is that it puts rational action theory at the core of social-scientific inquiry. This is why subsequent generations of social theorists, under Weber's influence, sought to bring about the methodological unification of the social sciences by producing what came to be known as a “general theory of action” – one that would broaden the economic model of action in such a way as to incorporate the central action-theoretic insights of (primarily) sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. The work of Talcott Parsons in the first half of the century was the most important in this regard, with the unification movement reaching its apogee in the collaborative publication in 1951 of Toward a General Theory of Action, co-edited by Parsons and Edward Shils. Yet shortly thereafter, partly due to problems with the unification program, Parsons abandoned his commitment to both methodological individualism and action theory, adopting a purely systems-theoretic view. This led to an overall lapse in the project of producing a general theory of action, until it was revitalized in 1981 by the publication of Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action.
2. Hayek
It has never escaped anyone's attention that the discipline that most clearly satisfies the strictures of methodological individualism is microeconomics (in the tradition of neoclassical marginalism), and that homo economicus is the most clearly articulated model of rational action. Of course, this tradition has not always been in the ascendancy within the economics profession. In particular, there are many who have felt that macroeconomics could be a completely self-standing domain of inquiry (reflected in the fact that the undergraduate economics curriculum is still often divided into “micro” and “macro.”) There have always been those who would like to plot the movements of the business cycle, or of the stock market, in a way that disregards entirely the motives that individual actors may have for doing what they do. Similarly, many have tried to discover correlations between macroeconomic variables, such as unemployment and inflation rates, without feeling the need to speculate as to why a change in one rate might lead to movement in the other. Thus there has always been a very lively debate within the economics profession about the value of the “rational actor” model that is at the heart of general equilibrium theory.
One of the earliest iterations of this debate occurred during the so-called Methodenstreit between members of the Austrian School in Economics and the German Historical School. Most theorists of the Austrian School, however, like Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, were pure atomists. It was only Friedrich von Hayek who explicitly identified himself with the Weberian doctrine of methodological individualism, and defended it through reference to the demands of interpretive social science. The key text is his paper, “Scientism and the Study of Man,” serialized in Economica (1942-44), and later published as the first part of The Counter-Revolution of Science (1955).
In Hayek's view, the desire on the part of social scientists to emulate the physical sciences creates an exaggerated fear of teleological or “purposive” concepts. This leads many economists to eschew any reference to intentional states and to focus purely upon statistical correlations between economic variables. The problem with this focus is that it leaves the economic phenomena unintelligible. Take, for example, the movement of prices. One might notice a constant correlation between the date of the first frost and fluctuations in the price of wheat. But we do not really understand the phenomenon until it has been explained in terms of the rational actions of economic agents: an early frost reduces yields, leading to less intense price competition among suppliers, more among consumers, etc. Thus Hayek insists that, in effect, all macroeconomic analysis is incomplete in the absence of “micro” foundations.
It is important to note, however, that while Hayek has a model of rational action as the centerpiece of his view, his is most emphatically not a form of rationalism. On the contrary, he puts particular emphasis upon the way that various economic phenomena can emerge as the unintended consequences of rational action. Even though the outcomes that people achieve may bear no resemblance to the ones that they intended, it is still important to know what they thought they were doing, when they chose to pursue to course of action that they chose – not least because it is important to know why they persist in pursuing that course of action, despite the fact that it is not producing the intended consequences.
Of course, part of Hayek's motivation for endorsing methodological individualism and demanding that social-scientific explanations specify a mechanism at the action-theoretic level is that he wants to emphasize the limitations of the individual's actor's perspective. It's fine to talk about macroeconomic variables like “the inflation rate,” but it is important to remember that individual actors (generally speaking) do not respond directly to such indicators. All that they can see are changes in the immediate prices that they must pay for production inputs or consumption goods, and this is what they respond to. The large-scale consequences of the choices they make in response to these changes are largely unintended, and so any regularity in these consequences constitutes a spontaneous order. This is a crucial element of Hayek's information-based argument for capitalism: economic actors do not have access to the same information as economic theorists, thus it is only when we see the operations of the economy through their eyes that we can begin to see the advantages of a decentralized system of coordination like the market.
To illustrate the importance of the individual's perspective, Hayek gives the example of the process that leads to the development of a path in the woods. One person works his way through, choosing the route that offers the least local resistance. His passage reduces, ever so slightly, the resistance offered along that route to the next person who walks though, who is therefore, in making the same set of decisions, likely to follow the same route. This increases the chances that the next person will do so, and so on. Thus the net of effect of all these people passing through is that they “make a path,” even though no one has the intention to do so, and no one even plans out its trajectory. It is a product of spontaneous order: “Human movements through the district come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decisions of many people, has yet not been consciously designed by anyone” (Hayek 1942, 289).
The problem with ignoring the agent's perspective, in Hayek's view, is that it can easily lead us to overestimate our powers of rational planning and control, and thus to fall into “rationalism.” By contrast, the central virtue of methodological individualism is that it helps us to see the limitations of our own reason (Hayek 1944, 33). Formulating theories that refer directly to the “interest rate,” or “inflationary pressures,” or “the unemployment rate” can mislead us into thinking that we can manipulate these variables, and thus intervene successfully in the economy. We forget that these concepts are abstractions, used not to guide individual action, but rather to describe the net effect of millions of individual decisions. The key characteristic of methodological individualism is that it “systematically starts from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions and not from the results of their theorizing about their actions”(1942, 286). It therefore encourages, in Hayek's view, greater modesty with respect to social planning.
Hayek does not mention methodological individualism after the 1950s. Indeed, the role that evolutionary explanations come to play in his later work implies a tacit retraction of his commitment to the doctrine.
3. Popper
For many years, the term methodological individualism was associated primarily with the work of Karl Popper. This is due to the extensive debate triggered by Popper's papers, “The Poverty of Historicism” (1944/45), and later his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper, however, although making use of the term, did little to defend his commitment to it. Instead he left this job to his former student, J.W.N. Watkins. It was this debate between Watkins and his critics that (perhaps unfairly) solidified the association in many people's minds between Popper and methodological individualism. (It was also this debate that brought the doctrine to the widespread attention of philosophers.)
Unfortunately, the version of methodological individualism that Popper bequeathed to his student Watkins was considerably more difficult to defend than the one he inherited from Hayek. Since the beginning, the precepts of methodological individualism were thought to have been imposed by the special requirements of the social sciences. For both Weber and Hayek, it was the reflection of a key difference between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. Popper, however, denies that there are any significant methodological differences between the two. Indeed, his initial discussion of methodological individualism in “The Poverty of Historicism,” occurs in a section called “The Unity of Method,” in which he claims that both are simply in the business of “causal explanation, prediction and testing.”(1945, 78). He goes on to deny that “understanding” plays any special role in the social sciences.
The problem that this creates for the doctrine of methodological individualism is relatively immediate. A social science that aims at interpretation, or that uses interpretation as part of the centerpiece of its explanatory strategy, has a very clear methodological reason for privileging explanations that refer to individual actions – since it is precisely the underlying intentional states that serve as the object of interpretation. But if social scientists are merely in the business of providing causal explanations, just like natural scientists, then what is the rationale for privileging individual actions in these explanations? There no longer appears to be any methodological reason for doing so. Thus critics like Leon Goldstein (1958), and later Steven Lukes (1968), would argue that methodological individualism was actually just an oblique way of asserting a commitment to metaphysical or ontological individualism. In other words, Popper's “methodological individualism” was actually a claim about what the world “really” consisted of, little more than a fancy way of saying “there is no such thing as society.” Watkins went on to reinforce this impression by reformulating the thesis as the claim that the “ultimate constituents of the social world are individual people” (1957, 105).
Watkins also provoked doubts about the methodological status of the principle by distinguishing between “unfinished or half-way explanations” of social phenomena, which might not specify an action-theoretic or individualistic mechanism, and so-called “rock-bottom explanations,” which would (1957, 106). Yet in so doing, he grants that these half-way explanations (the example he gives is the relationship between inflation and the unemployment rate), while they may not tell us everything we would like to know, need not be meaningless or false. This creates problems, as Lars Udehn points out, since the mere fact that one can explain social phenomena in terms of individuals “does not imply the methodological rule that they should be explained this way” (2001, 216) – especially not if the “half-way” knowledge obtained is sufficient for our (extra-scientific) purposes.
Finally, it should be noted that Popper introduced a contrast between methodological individualism and “psychologism,” viz., the view that “all laws of social life must be ultimately reducible to the psychological laws of ‘human nature’”(1945, 89). Nevertheless, in Popper's formulation, methodological individualism does appear equivalent to at least some form of psychological reductionism. At very least, his formulation – at later Watkins's – left many commentators confused about how one could affirm the former without committing to the latter (Udehn 2001, 204).
4. Elster
For both Hayek and Popper, the primary motivation for respecting the precepts of methodological individualism was to avoid “grand theory” in the style of Auguste Comte, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Yet the motivation for avoiding this sort of grand theory was not so much that it promoted bad theory, but that it promoted habits of mind, such as “collectivism,” “rationalism,” or “historicism,” that were thought to be conducive to totalitarianism. Thus the sins of “collectivism,” and “collectivist” thought patterns, for both Hayek and Popper, were primarily political. Yet as time wore on, and the dangers of creeping totalitarianism in Western societies became increasingly remote, the fear of collectivism that underlay the debates over methodological individualism became increasingly attenuated.
Thus the concern over methodological individualism began to fade away, and might have disappeared completely had it not been for the sudden explosion of interest in game theory (or “rational choice theory”) among social scientists in the 1980s. The reason for this can be summed up in two words (and an article): the prisoner's dilemma. Social scientists had always been aware that individuals in groups are capable of getting stuck in patterns of collectively self-defeating behavior. Paul Samuelson's “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure” (1954), Garrett Hardin's “The Tragedy of the Commons,” (1968), and Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action (1965), had all provided very clear examples of cases where the mere existence of a common interest among individuals nevertheless failed to provide them with an incentive to perform the actions necessary to realize that interest. What the story of the prisoner's dilemma – and more importantly, the accompanying game matrix – provided was a simple yet powerful model that could be used to represent the structure of all these interactions (see R. Hardin 1982).
This in turn gave renewed impetus to methodological individualism, because it allowed theorists to diagnose with unparalleled precision the errors that social theorists could be (and often were) led into if they ignored the action-theoretic level of analysis. Methodological individualism became important, not as a way of avoiding the political thought-crime of “collectivism,” but rather as a way of avoiding demonstrably fallacious inferences about the dynamics of collective action. For example, the traditional “interest group” theory of democratic politics generally presupposes that groups who share a common interest also have an incentive to promote that interest, by lobbying politicians, funding research, and so on. Olson's major contribution was to have driven home the point that the existence of such a common interest just as often generates a free-rider incentive. Individuals would benefit from acting to promote that interest, but they would benefit even more by sitting back while the other members of the group acted to promote it. As a result, no one may act to promote it. However, Olson confined this observation to large groups. The prisoner's dilemma, on the other hand, demonstrated the ubiquity of this incentive structure.
Jon Elster's contribution to the history of methodological individualism must be understood against this background. He presents the doctrine as part of a friendly yet trenchant critique of the use of functionalist explanations in the Marxist tradition; particularly those that seek to explain events as ones that “serve the interests of capital.” The problem with these explanations, Elster argues, is that they “postulate a purpose without a purposive actor” (1982, 452), and therefore (he claims) entail a commitment to some form of objective teleology. In itself, there is very little new in this criticism. As G.A. Cohen argued, in his response to Elster, there is no reason that the Marxian functionalist cannot provide “elaborations” (Cohen 1982, 131) of these explanations, ones that specifies how the benefit produced evokes the phenomenon, without reference to any objective teleology. This could be done either by appealing an intentional mechanism at the action-theoretic level or else a Darwinian “selection” mechanism (Cohen 1982, 132). In such cases, Elster's critique of functional explanation becomes just another version of Watkins's demand for “rock-bottom” rather than “half-way” explanations.
Thus what made Elster's attack so forceful was not the accusation of objective teleology in Marxist theory, but rather the suggestion that much of Marxian “class analysis” overlooked the potential for collective action problems among the various world-historical actors. Consider, for example, the familiar claim that capitalists retain a “reserve army of the unemployed” in order to depress wages. This means that individual capitalists must stop hiring new workers at a point where marginal benefits still exceed the marginal costs. What is their incentive for doing so? They have an obvious free-rider incentive to keep hiring, since the benefits stemming from depressed wages would largely be enjoyed by rival firms, whereas the benefits of further hiring would flow to the bottom line. In other words, the mere fact that it is in the “interests of capital” to have a reserve army of the unemployed does not mean that individual capitalists have an incentive to take the steps necessary to maintain such a reserve army.
An even more disturbing consequence of the “rational choice” perspective is the observation that the working class faces a major collective action problem when it comes to carrying out the socialist revolution (Elster 1982, 467). Fomenting revolution can be dangerous business, and so absent some other incentive (such as class solidarity), even workers who were convinced that a communist economic order would offer them a superior quality of life might still fail to show up at the barricades. Yet these possibilities were largely overlooked, Elster suggests, because a failure to respect the precepts of methodological individualism, along with the promiscuous use of functional explanation, had led generations of Marxian theorists simply to ignore the actual incentives that individuals face in concrete social interactions.
Beyond the critique of functional explanations, Elster does not advance any original argument in support of methodological individualism. He does, however, return to the earlier Weberian formulation of the position, with its emphasis on intentional action (Elster 1982, 463): “The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action,” he argues. “To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals. This view, often referred to as methodological individualism, is in my view trivially true” (Elster, 1989, 13). Here one must assume that when he says “trivially true,” he is using the term in the vernacular sense of “platitudinous” rather than the philosophical sense of “tautologous,” since he goes on to derive a number of very substantive doctrines from his commitment to methodological individualism. For example, he goes on to claim at various points that methodological individualism commits him to psychologistic reductionism with respect to sociology (although he does not offer an argument for this claim).
Elster does not draw as sharp a distinction as he might have between the commitment to methodological individualism and the commitment to rational choice theory. Indeed, he also assumes that the latter flows directly from the former. The version of rational choice theory that Elster endorses, however, is one that is based upon a traditional instrumental (or homo economicus) conception of rationality, according to which “actions are valued and chosen not for themselves, but as more or less efficient means to the a further end” (Elster 1989, 22). He claims that this conception of rationality is implied by the fact that decision theorists are able to represent the rational actions of any agent possessing a well-behaved preference ordering as the maximization of a utility function. Yet whether utility-maximization implies instrumentalism depends upon the version of expected utility theory that one subscribes to. So-called “world Bayesian” versions of decision theory, such as Richard Jeffrey's (1983) do not impose an instrumental conception of rationality, since they permit agents to have preferences over their own actions. Thus Elster's move from methodological individualism to the instrumental conception of rationality is based upon a non sequitur.
Nevertheless, as a result of Elster's arguments, methodological individualism became synonymous in many quarters with the commitment rational choice theory. Such an equation generally fails to distinguish what were for Weber two distinct methodological issues: the commitment to providing explanations at an action-theoretic level, and the specific model of rational action that one proposes to use at that level (i.e., the ideal type). There are multiple permutations. For instance, there is no reason that one cannot be a methodological individualist while choosing to employ Habermas's theory of communicative action rather than rational choice theory as the model of rational action. In fact, this would make greater sense, since game theory, strictly construed, has never purported to offer a general theory of rational action. The Nash solution concept, which provides the standard definition of a game-theoretic equilibrium, specifically excluded all forms of communication between the players (and the solution does not work in cases where communication does intrude [Heath 2001]). Thus much of the furor over rational choice imperialism has been based upon a failure to appreciate the limitations of that model (in many cases both by its defenders and its critics).
5. Others
In the philosophy of mind, the phrase “methodological individualism” is commonly associated with a claim made by Jerry Fodor concerning the individuation of psychological states (1980, 1987, 42). It is important to emphasize that Fodor's use of the term has nothing in common with its traditional use in the philosophy of social science. Fodor introduces it by way of a distinction between “methodological individualism” and “methodological solipsism.” His goal is to deal with variations on the twin-earth problem, introduced by Hilary Putnam. The question is whether an individual with a belief about water on earth, where water is made up of H2O, has the same belief as an individual with a belief about water in a parallel universe, where water has the same appearance and behavior, but happens to be made up of XYZ. The “externalist” is one who says that they are not the same, whereas an “internalist” like Fodor wants to say that they are – speaking roughly, that the content of beliefs is determined by what is in the agent's head, and not what is in the world.
The issue comes down to one concerning the individuation of mental states. How do we determine what is and is not the “same” belief? Fodor begins by introducing the constraint that he calls “methodological individualism,” viz., “the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers” (1987, 42). This implies, among other things, that if one psychological state is incapable of causing anything different to happen than some other psychological state, then the two must be the same. “Methodological solipsism” is the stronger claim that “psychological states are individuated without respect to the semantic evaluations” (1987, 42). This implies, among other things, that even if one state is “true” in some context and another is “false,” the two may still turn out to be the same. As Fodor goes on to point out, the semantic evaluation of a mental state will typically be relational, e.g. whether certain beliefs about water are true will depend upon how things happen to stand with water in the world; thus methodological solipsism has the consequence of precluding one type of relational property from playing a role in the individuation of mental states. It is therefore “individualistic” in the everyday sense of the term, since it suggests that what's going on in the agent's head does most or all of the work in the individuation of mental states. Methodological individualism, on the other hand, “does not prohibit the relational individuation of mental states; it just says that no property of mental states, relational or otherwise, counts taxonomically unless it affects causal powers”(1987, 42). Thus it is very unclear why Fodor chooses to call this a form of “individualism,” since these relations could also be relations to other speakers, and not just the physical word.
There is considerable infelicity in Fodor's choice of terms. He is able to offer a cogent account of why methodological individualism counts as a methodological constraint. He argues that the desire to align terminological distinctions with objects having different causal powers is “one which follows simply from the scientist's goal of causal explanation and which, therefore, all scientific taxonomies must obey” (1987, 42). Thus it is a methodological precept. (Although one can see clearly here the stark contrast between Fodor's use of the term and that of Weber or Hayek, for whom the ability of the social scientist to provide something beyond merely causal explanation was what imposed the methodological commitment to the action-theoretic level of analysis.) It is simply unclear why Fodor chooses to call it individualism. With methodological solipsism, on the other hand, one can see why he calls it solipsism, but it is unclear what makes it methodological. Indeed, Fodor goes on to state that “solipsism (construed as prohibiting the relational taxonomy of mental states) is unlike individualism in that it couldn't conceivably follow from any general considerations about scientific goals and practices. ‘Methodological solipsism’ is, in fact, an empirical theory about the mind.”(1987, 43). Thus in Fodor's use of the terms, “methodological individualism” is not really individualistic, and “methodological solipsism” is not really methodological.
6. Criticism
Much of the critical discussion of methodological individualism in the philosophy of social science concerns the relationship between what Watkins called “rock-bottom” explanations and “half-way” ones – or those that do and those that do not specify an action theoretic mechanism. In general, there is no question that, given any particular half-way explanation of a social phenomenon, it would always be nice to know what agents are thinking, when they perform the actions that are involved in the production of that phenomenon. The question is whether the explanation is somehow deficient, or unscientific, in the absence of this information. The answer to that question will depend upon one's broader commitments concerning the status and role of the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is worth noting two very common types of social-scientific inquiry that fall short of providing the sort of rock-bottom explanations that methodological individualism demands:
6.1 Statistical analysis
Consider the following example of a social-scientific debate: During the 1990s, there was a precipitous decline in violent crime in the United States. Many social scientists naturally began to apply themselves to the question of why this had occurred, i.e., they set out to explain the phenomenon. A number of different hypotheses were advanced: the hiring of more police, changes in community policing practices, more severe sentencing guidelines for offenders, decreased tolerance for minor infractions, an increase in religiosity, a decline in the popularity of crack, changes in the demographic profile of the population, etc. Since the decline in crime occurred in many different jurisdictions, each using some different combination of strategies under different circumstances, it is possible to build support for different hypotheses through purely statistical analysis. For example, the idea that policing strategies play an important role is contradicted by the fact that New York City and San Francisco adopted very different approaches to policing, and yet experienced a similar decline in the crime rate. Thus a very sophisticated debate broke out, with different social scientists producing different data sets, and crunching the numbers in different ways, in support of their rival hypotheses.
This debate, like almost every debate in criminology, lacks microfoundations. It would certainly be nice to know what is going through people's mind when they commit crimes, and thus how likely various measures are to change their behavior, but the fact is we do not know. Indeed, there is considerable skepticism among criminologists that a “general theory” of crime is possible. Nevertheless, we can easily imagine criminologists deciding that one particular factor, such as a demographic shift in the population (i.e., fewer young men), is the explanation for the late-20th century decline in violent crime in the United States, and ruling out the other hypotheses. And even though this may be a “half-way” explanation, there is no question that it would represent a genuine discovery, one that we could learn something important from.
Furthermore, it is not obvious that the “rock-bottom” explanation – the one that satisfies the precepts of methodological individualism – is going to add anything very interesting to the “half-way” explanation provided by the statistical analysis. In many cases it will even be derived from it. Suppose that we discovered, through statistical analysis, that the crime rate varied as a function of the severity of punishment multiplied by the probability of apprehension. We would then infer from this that criminals were rational utility-maximizers. On the other hand, if studies showed that crime rates were completely unaffected by changes in the severity of punishments or the probability of apprehension, we would infer that something else must be going on at the action-theoretic level.
Results at the action-theoretic level might also prove to be random or uninteresting, from the standpoint of the explanatory variables. Suppose it turns out that the decline in crime can be explained entirely by demographic change. Then it doesn't really matter what the criminals were thinking – what matters is simply that a certain percentage of any given demographic group has the thoughts that lead to criminal behavior, so fewer of those people translates into less crime. The motives remain inside the “black box” – and while it might to nice to know what those motives are, they may not contribute anything to this particular explanation. In the end, it may turn out that each crime is as unique as the criminal. So while there is a concrete explanation in terms of actual people's intentional states, there is nothing that can be said at the level of a general “model” of rational action. (In this context, it is important to remember that methodological individualism in the Weberian sense explains actions in terms of a model of the agent, not the actual motivations of the real people.)
6.2 Subintentional explanations
Consider another social-scientific debate, this time the controversy over the data showing that stepparents have a far greater propensity to kill very young children in their care than biological parents. What would be involved in providing a rock-bottom explanation for this phenomenon, one that satisfied the precepts of methodological individualism? How informative would this be? It does not take much effort to imagine what people are thinking, when they shake a baby or hit a toddler. The motives are all-too familiar – almost everyone experiences episodes of intense frustration or anger when dealing with children. But that clearly does not explain the phenomenon. The question is why one group systematically fails to exercise control over these violent impulses, relative to some other group. Since very few people do it as part of a well-conceived plan, it is not clear that there is going to be an explanation available at the level of intentional states, or even that a complementary account of what is going on at this level will be in the least bit informative. The problem is that the behavior is generated by biases that function almost entirely at a subintentional level (Sperber, 1997). This suggests that an explanation in terms of intentional states is not really “rock bottom,” but that there are deeper layers to be explored.
It is not difficult to imagine how such an explanation might run. People experience a reaction to juvenile (or neotenous) characteristics of the young that is largely involuntary. This reaction is very complex, but one of its central characteristics is the inhibition of aggression. People are also quite poor at articulating the basis of this reaction, other than by repeated references to the fact that the child is “cute.” Of course, the overall strength of this reaction varies from individual to individual, and the particular strength varies with different children. Thus it is possible that biological parents simply find their own children “cuter” than stepparents do, and that this translates into a slightly lower average propensity to commit acts of aggression against them. Because they are unable to articulate the basis of this judgment, any analysis at the intentional level will simply fail to provide much in the way of an explanation for their actions.
Furthermore, it would seem that much “deeper” explanations of these behavioral tendencies are available. Most obviously, there is an evolutionary account available, which explains parental investment in terms of inclusive fitness (and also explains “new mate infanticide” in terms of sexual selection). Because of this, proponents of methodological individualism are open to the charge that they are promoting half-way explanations, and that the evolutionary perspective offers rock-bottom ones. More generally, any theory that purports to explain the origin of our intentional states in terms of deeper underlying causes, or that claims to explain much of human behavior without reference to intentional states (such as Freudianism, which treats many of our beliefs as rationalizations, our desires as sublimations), will be unmoved by the methodological individualist's demand that pride of place be assigned to explanations formulated at the action-theoretic level.
6.3 Fallacies
The primary methodological goal, among social scientists, for adopting a commitment to methodological individualism was to caution against certain fallacies (ones that were quite common in 19th century social science). Perhaps the greatest of these fallacies was the one based on a widespread tendency to ignore the potential for collective action problems in groups, and thus to move far too easily “down” from an identification of a group interest to the ascription of an individual interest. One way of avoiding such fallacies was to force social scientists to look always at interactions from the participant's perspective, to see what sort of preference structure governed his or her decisions.
At the same time, it is worth noting that too much emphasis on the action-theoretic perspective can generate its own fallacies. One of the most powerful resources of sociological inquiry is precisely the capacity to objectivate and aggregate social behavior using large-scale data collection and analysis. Furthermore, the analysis of social phenomena at this level can often generate results that are counterintuitive from an action-theoretic perspective. Too much emphasis on the action-theoretic perspective, because of its proximity to common sense, can generate false assumptions about what must be going on at the aggregate level. As Arthur Stinchcombe observes in his classic work, Constructing Social Theories, constructing “demographic explanations” of social phenomena often requires a break with our everyday interpretive perspective. Too much focus upon individual attitudes can lead us to make illegitimate generalizations about the characteristics of these attitudes in groups (1968, 67). For example, the stability of a belief in a population only very rarely depends upon its stability in individuals. There can be considerable volatility at the individual level, but so long as it runs with equal force both ways, its prevalence in the population will be unchanged (68). If ten per cent of the population loses their faith in God every year, yet ten per cent have a conversion experience, then there will be no change in the overall level of religiosity. This may seem obvious, but as Stinchcombe observes, it is “intuitively difficult for many people” (67), and inattention to it is a common source of fallacious sociological thinking.
It is also worth nothing that the action-theoretic level of analysis, with its focus upon the intentional states of the agent, can generate considerable mischief when combined haphazardly with evolutionary reasoning. The most common fallacy arises when theorists treats the “self-interest” of the individual, defined with respect to his or her preferences, as a stand-in for the “fitness” of a particular behavior (or phenotype), at either the biological or the cultural level, then assumes that there is some selection mechanism in place, again at either the biological or cultural level, that will weed out forms of behavior that fail to advance the individual's self-interest. The problem is that neither biological nor cultural evolution function in this way. It is an elementary consequence of “selfish gene” theory that biological evolution does not advance the interests of the agent (the most conspicuous example being inclusive fitness). For similar reasons, cultural evolution benefits the “meme” rather than the interests of the agent (Stanovich 2004). Thus the evolutionary perspective imposes a much greater break with the rationality-based perspective than many social theorists appreciate. Thus methodological individualism can sometimes impede the sort of radical objectivation of social phenomena that the use of certain sociotheoretic models or tools requires.


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· Schumpeter, Joseph. 1908. Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, Leipzig: Duncker & Humbolt.
· -----. 1909. “On the Concept of Social Value,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23: 213-32.
· Sperber, Dan. 1997. “Individualisme méthodologique et cognitivisme,” in R. Boudon, F. Chazel & A. Bouvier (eds.) Cognition et sciences sociales. Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, pp 123-136.
· Stanovich, Keith. 2004. The Robot's Rebellion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
· Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1968. Constructing Social Theories. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
· Udehn, Lars. 2001. Methodological Individualism. London: Routledge.
· Watkins, J.W.N. 1952a. “Ideal Types and Historical Explanation,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3, 22-43.
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· Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press.








article by Dr.Carl Ratner
http://www.humboldt1.com/~cr2/holism.htm




Methodological Individualism vs. Holism


This entry speaks to the nature of the individual element. Individualism says that the individual element is an independent entity that has self-contained properties, though, of course, it draws on resources around it. An example is the popular idea that the individual is responsible for his/her own fate. Your success and failure depend ultimately on how hard you work.
Holism says that the individual element is inextricably tied to other individuals. Individuals are interdependent, and they are internally related in the sense that each is imbued with, and constituted by, the qualities of others. An example is a child in a family. The child's psychology depends utterly on the way he/she is treated. Any intrinsic tendencies are modulated and mediated by experience. From this perspective, the child is not entirely responsible for his/her behavior.
Holism regards individuals or elements as reciprocally influencing each other. The child affects the family while being affected by it. This dialectical relation of individuals/elements comprises a system, or a whole. The whole is composed of individuals and affected by them. It is not independent of individuals. However, the whole is not simply a sum of independent individuals sequentially summed together, one after the other (see the entry on reductionism). The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
Solomon Asch explains the holistic nature of social interactions in the case of two boys carrying a log. The boys adjust their actions to each other and to the object. The two do not apply force separately. There is a unity of action that embraces the participants and the common object. This performance is a new product, unlike what each participant would do singly and also unlike the sum of their separate exertions. What each contributes is a function of his relation to the other, how the other acts. The other's actions lead to changes in the self's behavior. Self is permeated by other. Larger social units, such as teams and institutions, manifest other kinds of emergent properties.
Emergence is central to holism. It denotes the fact that the whole is different from the sum of the individual constituents. This whole then affects the qualities of the constituents. They are not self-sufficient, independent qualities.
These examples illustrate how the two approaches construe the nature, or existence, of the individual. These ontological perspectives of individualism and holism entail corresponding epistemologies, or ways of acquiring knowledge.
An ontology that construes individual elements as self-contained and self-determining, and as combining arithmetically to form groups, necessarily insists that knowledge of things consists of reducing complexity to simple, separate individual elements --e.g., a group is simply a collection of individuals co-existing. An ontology that construes elements as part of a system of relations that constitute them, insists that knowledge of things requires understanding elements as complex, multifaceted entities that are dialectically related to other things and embody their features.
Individualistic and holistic ontologies and epistemologies also entail distinctive methodologies.


Methodological Individualism

Positivism
Methodological individualism is the hallmark of positivism. Positivism construes phenomena as simple, homogeneous, separate, variables. A variable is defined as qualitatively invariant, and only quantitatively variable. The reason it is qualitatively invariant is because it is separate from other variables. This prevents others from imbuing it with their qualities, altering its quality, and complicating it. Intelligence, depression, aggression, and all other psychological phenomena are construed as separate variables with simple, fixed qualities.. Only their degree varies in different conditions. This ontology leads positivists to concentrate on measuring quantities of variables. They eschew investigating, or theorizing about, their qualities which are taken for granted as obvious, simple, and fixed.
Methodological individualism is also evident in positivistic instruments such as questionnaires. Each item on a questionnaire is a separate (discrete) element that supposedly taps a discrete psychological attribute. Items are randomly presented in order to prevent any association among them that would bias the subject away from responding to each one independently. In addition, each response is treated as a separate element that is accorded equal weight, and can be summed with the others. Sums are indifferent to the order of the elements. 5 + 3 + 1 is the same sum as 1 + 3 + 5. Sums presume that items are independent of each other, and that a 5 at the beginning is the same as a 5 at the end of a sequence. Of course, responses are statistically correlated together (e.g., in factor analysis). However, it is a correlation of separate, independent items.


Qualitative methodology
One might suppose that methodological individualism, or atomism, is the basis of positivistic methodology, while holism is the basis of qualitative methodology. However, this would be a simplification. In fact, individualism is pervasive in qualitative research, along with holism.

Individualism in qualitative methodology takes the form of treating individual subjects as self-contained individuals who create their own meanings and behaviors. Researchers focus on recording and reporting individuals' subjective accounts. They do not attempt to understand an individual's subjectivity as influenced by other people and conditions. (see entry on subjectivism).
This is characteristic of a good deal of discourse analysis. While some analysts relate discourse to cultural values and practices, many emphasize discourse as an invention of the individual speaker. Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter advocate this position.
It appears in Wetherell's analysis of 17-year old boys' sexuality. She analyzes the discourse Aaron had with his friends about a weekend during which he slept with four girls. At one point, his friend Paul wondered whether Aaron had deliberately set out to have lots of sex ("out on the pull") that weekend. Wetherell analyses the conversation as follows:
What I wish to note is Paul's new description of Aaron's activities as "out on the pull". This account seems to be heard [by Aaron] as an uncalled for accusation in relation to the events of Friday night and Aaron and Phil issue denials ä in attempting to reformulate and minimize the actions so described -- `just out as a group of friends'. (Wetherell, 1998, p. 399).
Wetherell construes dialogue as a way that individuals represent themselves to each other and themselves. She focuses on the mechanics of how individuals accomplish this: Paul describes Aaron, Aaron hears the description, he responds. This methodology does not go beyond identifying sequential conversational acts. It does not utilize long patterns of dialogue to interpret statements, code them, organize them, make inferences or deductions from them concerning psychological or cultural issues. This restriction conforms to discourse theory that speech is an invention that expresses the individual, it is not a reflection of cultural or psychological processes. Wetherell is not interested in the nature of Aaron's sexual desire -- i.e., whether it is impersonal, egocentric, loving, considerate, domineering, instrumental, etc. -- and how these sexual qualities might reflect macro cultural factors. She is concerned with how individuals voluntaristically present sex in discourse.

Methodological Holism

Holistic methodology is only found in qualitative methodology. It does not appear in positivism.
One of the most important applications of holism in qualitative methodology is Dilthey's hermeneutics. (see entry on objectivism). The central idea is that the psychological significance of any behavioral expression can only be discerned by relating that response to other
responses. The significance of a response is not transparent in a single behavior. For example, to know whether a remark is a joke or an insult, you must situate it in a context of other comments, the speaker's countenance, and other behaviors. By itself, the comment is ambiguous. The context disambiguates the element.
This relating of behaviors in order to disclose psychological phenomena is known as the hermeneutic circle.
If we want to hermeneutically interpret the psychology of a mother who spanks her child, we must know how the child acted before he was spanked, how the mother behaves toward him in other situations, what she says to him during and after the spanking, how she behaves toward him after the spanking, her facial expression during the spanking, how she explains the spanking to her husband and friends, etc. Only this complex configuration of related behaviors reveals whether her spanking was motivated by concern for the child's well-being, hatred for the child, revenge against the child, or by frustration which was provoked by an event unrelated to the child.
Similarly, the cognitive processes which enable a student to perform well on a math test is only known by observing her extended solution to several math problems in different situations. Test performance may express a number of psychological phenomena. It may reflect the student's ability to memorize material, it may reflect test taking ability, anxiety, or mathematical reasoning. Which of these possibilities is operative is only disclosed by observing the pattern of steps which the pupil takes to solve problems in different situations.
Kurt Goldstein used a hermeneutic analysis to diagnose neurological deficits. He observed the pattern of responses by which patients match a colored stimulus with objects of similar color. Normal and impaired subjects often find the same number of objects that match the hue of the stimulus; however their pattern of responses is quite different. The patient proceeds sequentially by first matching the stimulus to an object that most closely resembles it (O1), then matching another object (O2) to (O1), then matching (O3) to (O2), and so on. In contrast, normal subjects compare each color directly with the stimulus color. The qualitative difference in the behavioral patterns reveals the patient's deficit.
This is a hermeneutical, holistic analysis because it examines patterns of interrelated responses which indicate the quality and significance of each. The fact that O3 is matched to O2 rather than to the stimulus hue makes it a different (impaired) kind of response and indicates it to be a different kind of response. Hermeneutic methodology that elucidates patterns is holistic. In contrast, counting the number of correct matches, and comparing the sums for normals and patients obscures patterns and the qualitative differences of responses within them. As we have mentioned, sums of responses are indifferent to their order and their interrelationship. A sum treats each response as separate and independent. Sums are individualistic forms of methodology, while patterns are holistic.

Cultural hermeneutics
The highest form of methodological holism not only elucidates patterns of behaviors among individuals, it additionally recognizes the internal relationship between psychological phenomena and cultural phenomena. This cultural-hermeneutical interpretation of psychology was actually the crux of nineteenth century German hermeneutics. It has been largely overlooked as hermeneuticists focus on the behaviors of individuals apart from culture. However, Dilthey maintained that the interpretation of meaning belongs to the larger science of history. To understand means to understand historically. It means to understand that psychological phenomena such as self concept, sexuality, motivation, reasoning, memory, emotions, perception, mental illness, and developmental processes are integral components of macro cultural factors such as institutions, artifacts, and cultural concepts, and embody their features. Cultural hermeneutics elucidates this cultural quality of psychological phenomena, as Carl Ratner explains in his writings.

A Synthesis

In their current forms, holism and individualism approach psychological phenomena very differently, and are antithetical. However, a synthesis is possible. This cannot be an eclectic, unprincipled, combining together. For this would combine weaknesses as well as strengths. Nor can the synthesis take the form of a golden mean that is in between the extremes. For that negates the strengths of the positions by watering them down with their opposites.
A workable synthesis requires a reformulation that makes holism and individualism logically consistent through a set of common principles. Lev Vygotsky explained what this involves. He said that an analysis of complex patterns into units is necessary and workable. It requires construing the part as embodying qualities of related parts, patterns, wholes. This reformulates the individualistic concept of an element as an independent entity with a self-contained quality. It makes the unit logically consistent with its holistic existence, internally related to other units.
Vygotsky (1987, p. 46-47) explained this as follows: "A psychology concerned with the study of the complex whole must replace the method of decomposing the whole into its elements with that of partitioning the whole into its unitsä in which the characteristics of the whole are present." "In contrast to the term `element,' the term `unit' designates a product of analysis that possesses all the basic characteristics of the wholeäThe living cell is the real unit of biological analysis because it preserves the basic characteristics of life that are inherent in the living organism."
These units can be studied, counted, and added. The benefits of analysis can thus be integrated into methodological holism. This enables holism to become a precise, rigorous, scientific approach. It loses its pejorative connotation as a mystical, ineffable, impractical methodology.



Additional Readings

Asch, S. (1952). Social psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Goldstein, K. (1948). Language and language disturbance. Grune & Stratton.

Ratner, C. (1997). Cultural psychology and qualitative methodology. New York: Plenum.

Ratner, C. (2002). Cultural psychology: Theory and method. New York: Plenum.

Ratner, C. (2006). Cultural psychology: A perspective on psychological functioning and social reform. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Ratner, C. (2007a). Cultural psychology and qualitative methodology: Scientific and political considerations. Culture and Psychology, 2007, 13,

Ratner, C. (2007b). A macro cultural-psychological theory of emotions. In P. Schultz, & R. Pekrun (Eds.). Emotions in Education (chap. 6). Academic Press.

Ratner, C. (2007c). Contextualism versus Positivism in Cross-Cultural Psychology. In G. Zheng, K. Leung, & J.Adair (Eds), Perspectives and progress in contemporary cross-cultural psychology. Beijing: China Light Industry Press.

Sayers, S. (2007). Individual and society in Marx and Hegel: Beyond the communitarian critique of liberalism. Science and Society, 71, 84-102.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). Collected works, vol. 1. New York: Plenum.

Wetherell, M. (1998). Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and post-structuralism in dialogue. Discourse & Society, 9, 387-412.




further resources


wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism
wayne D.Parker
http://www.socionomics.org/pdf/neoclassicism_institutionalism.pdf

methodological individualism,explanation and invariance-Daniel Steel
http://www.msu.edu/user/steel/MI_and_Ex.pdf

article by Kaushik Basu
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/econ610/basu.pdf

Meanings of Methodological Individualism-Geoffrey M. Hodgson

http://www.geoffrey-hodgson.info/user/image/meanmethind-free.pdf

Pierre Bourdieu and Reflexive Sociology

wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu


Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. He is best known for his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he tried to connect aesthetic judgments to positions in social space. The most notable aspect of Bourdieu's theory is the development of methodologies, combining both theory and empirical data, that attempt to dissolve some of the most troublesome antagonisms in theory and research, trying to reconcile such difficulties as how to understand the subject within objective structures (in the process, trying to reconcile structure and agency).

Bourdieu also pioneered methodological frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu's work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. It builds upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Norbert Elias, among others. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal after whom Bourdieu titled the book Pascalian Meditations.

Biography

Bourdieu was born in Denguin, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France in 1930, where his grandfather was a sharecropper and his father was a postman and later, a postmaster. He married Marie-Claire Brizard in 1962 and had three sons.

Bourdieu studied philosophy in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. After getting his agrégation he worked as a teacher for a year. During the Algerian War of Independence in 1958-1962, and while serving in the French army, he undertook ethnographic research, laying the groundwork for his sociological reputation. From 1964 on, Bourdieu held the position of Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (the future École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), in the VIe section, and from 1981, the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France , in the VIe section (held before him by Raymond Aron, Maurice Halbwachs, and Marcel Mauss). In 1968, he took over the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, the research center that Aron had founded, which he directed until his death. In 1975, with Luc Boltanski, he launched the interdisciplinary journal "Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales", with which he sought to transform the accepted canons of sociological production while buttressing the scientific rigor of sociology. In 1993 he was honored with the "Médaille d'or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (CNRS). In 1996, he received the Goffman Prize from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2002 the Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Influences

Bourdieu's work is influenced by much of traditional sociology, which he undertook to synthesize into his own theory. From Max Weber he retained the importance of domination and symbolic systems in social life, as well as the idea of social orders which would ultimately be transformed by Bourdieu into a theory of fields. From Karl Marx he took the concept of capital, generalized with respect to all forms of social activity, and not merely economics. From Emile Durkheim, finally, he inherited a certain deterministic and, through Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, structuralist style that emphasized the tendency of social structures to reproduce themselves. However, Bourdieu critically diverged from these Durkheimian analyses in emphasizing the role of the social agent in enacting, through the embodiment of social structures, symbolic orders. He furthermore emphasized that the reproduction of social structures does not operate according to a functionalist logic.

One should not neglect Bourdieu's philosophical influences: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, through him, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl played an essential part in the formulation of Bourdieu's focus on the body, action, and practical dispositions (which found their primary manifestation in Bourdieu's theory of habitus).

Bourdieu's work is built upon the attempt to transcend a series of oppositions which characterized the social sciences (subjectivism/objectivism, micro/macro, freedom/determinism). In particular he did this through conceptual innovations. The concepts of habitus, capital or field were conceived, indeed, with the intention to abolish such oppositions.

Work

Bourdieu routinely sought to connect his theoretical ideas with empirical research, grounded in everyday life, and his work can be seen as cultural sociology or as a theory of practice. His contributions to sociology were both empirical and theoretical. His key terms were habitus, field, and symbolic violence. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; he or she is not defined by social class membership, but by the amounts of each kind of capital he or she possesses.

Bourdieu felt uncomfortable in the role of the ivory tower social scientist and intellectual. Although he had no partisan affiliation, he was known for being politically engaged and active. He supported workers against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. Because of his independence, he was even considered an enemy of the French Left; the French Socialist party used to talk disparagingly of "la gauche bourdieusienne" (Bourdieu's Left).

Some examples of his empirical results include:
showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with their social position

showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style — all part of cultural capital — are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher paid, higher status job).

Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, preserve their social privileges across generations despite the myth that contemporary postindustrial society boasts equality of opportunity and high social mobility, achieved through education.

Bourdieu was an extraordinarily prolific author, producing hundreds of articles and three dozen books, nearly all of which are now available in English. His style is dense in English translation, but he was considered an elegant and incisive writer in French-speaking Europe.

Bourdieu's theory of power and practice

At the center of Bourdieu's sociological work is a logic of practice that emphasizes the importance of the body and practices within the social world. Against the intellectualist tradition, Bourdieu stressed that mechanisms of social domination and reproduction were primarily focused on bodily know-how and competent practices in the social world. Bourdieu fiercely opposed Rational Action Theory (Rational Choice Theory) as grounded in a misunderstanding of how social agents operate. Social agents do not, according to Bourdieu, continuously calculate according to explicit rational and economic criteria. Rather, social agents operate according to an implicit practical logic--a practical sense--and bodily dispositions. Social agents act according to their "feel for the game" (the "feel" being, roughly, habitus, and the "game" being the field).

Bourdieu's sociological work was dominated by an analysis of the mechanisms of reproduction of social hierarchies. In opposition to Marxist analyses, Bourdieu criticized the primacy given to the economic factors, and stressed that the capacity of social actors to actively impose and engage their cultural productions and symbolic systems plays an essential role in the reproduction of social structures of domination. What Bourdieu called symbolic violence (the capacity to ensure that the arbitrariness of the social order is ignored—-or misrecognized as natural—-and thus to ensure the legitimacy of social structures) plays an essential part in his sociological analysis.

For Bourdieu, the modern social world is divided into what he calls fields. For him, the differentiation of social activities led to the constitution of various, relativley autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular species of capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis and the dynamics of fields arises out of the struggle of social actors trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. While Bourdieu shares prime elements of conflict theory with the Marxists, he diverges from Marxist analyses in thinking that social struggles are not reduced to the fundamentally economic conflicts between social classes. The conflicts which take place in each social field are largely specific to those fields and are not reducible to each other.

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of habitus, which exerted a considerable influence in the social sciences. This theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies which are adapted to the needs of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious and instead act on the level of a bodily logic.

Field

Bourdieu shared Weber's view, contrary to traditional Marxism, that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.

A field is a system of social positions (e.g. a profession such as law) structured internally in terms of power relationships (e.g. the power differential between judges and lawyers). More specifically, a field is a social arena of struggle over the appropriation of certain species of capital--capital being whatever is taken as significant for social agents (the most obvious example is monetary capital). Fields are organized both vertically and horizontally. This means that fields are not strictly analogous to classes, and are often autonomous, independent spaces of social play. The field of power is peculiar in that it exists 'horizontally' through all of the fields and the struggles within it control the 'exchange rate' of the forms of cultural, symbolic, or physical capital between the fields themselves. A field is constituted by the relational differences in position of social agents, and the boundaries of a field are demarcated by where its effects end. Different fields can be either autonomous or interrelated (e.g. consider the separation of power between judiciary and legislature) and more complex societies are "more differentiated" societies that have more fields.

Fields are constructed according to underlying nomos, fundamental principles of "vision and division" (the division between mind and body for example, or male and female), or organizing "laws" of experience that govern practices and experiences within a field. The nomos underlying one field is often irreducible to those underlying another, as in the noted disparity between the nomos of the aesthetic field that values cultural capital and in some sense discourages economic capital, and that of the economic field which values economic capital. Agents subscribe to a particular field not by way of explicit contract, but by their practical acknowledgement of the stakes, implicit in their very "playing of the game". The acknowledgement of the stakes of the field and the acquiring of interests and investments prescribed by the field is termed illusio.

Habitus

Bourdieu re-elaborated the concept of habitus from Marcel Mauss--although it is also present in the works of Aristotle, Norbert Elias, Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl--and used it, in a more or less systematic way, in an attempt to resolve a prominent antinomy of the human sciences: objectivism and subjectivism. Habitus can be defined as a system of dispositions (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action). The individual agent develops these dispositions in response to the objective conditions they encounter. In this way Bourdieu theorizes the inculcation of objective social structures into the subjective, mental experience of agents. For the objective social field places requirements on its participants for membership, so to speak, within the field. Having thereby absorbed objective social structure into a personal set of cognitive and somatic dispositions, and the subjective structures of action of the agent then being commensurate with the objective structures and extant exigencies of the social field, a doxic relationship emerges.

Doxa

Doxa are the fundamental, deep-founded, unthought beliefs, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. Therefore, the categories of understanding and perception that constitute a habitus, being congruous with the objective organization of the field, tend to reproduce the very structures of the field. Bourdieu thus sees habitus as the key to social reproduction because it is central to generating and regulating the practices that make up social life.

Reconciling the Objective (Field) and the Subjective (Habitus)

As mentioned above, Bourdieu utilized the methodological and theoretical concepts of habitus and field in order to make an epistemological break with the prominent objective-subjective antinomy of the social sciences. He wanted to effectively unite social phenomenology and structuralism. Habitus and field are proposed to do so for they can only exist in relation to each other. While a field is constituted by the various social agents participating in it (and thus their habitus), a habitus, in effect, represents the transposition of objective structures of the field into the subjective structures of action and thought of the agent.

The relationship between habitus and field is a two-way relationship. The field exists only insofar as social agents possess the dispositions and set of perceptual schemata that are necessary to constitute that field and imbue it with meaning. On the other hand, by participating in the field agents incorporate into their habitus the proper know-how that will allow them to constitute the field. Habitus enacts the structures of the field, and the field mediates between habitus and practice.

Therefore, Bourdieu attempts to use the concepts of habitus and field to tear down the division between the subjective and the objective. (Whether or not he successfuly does so is debatable.) Bourdieu asserts that any research must be composed of two "minutes." The first an objective stage of research--where one looks at the relations of the social space and the structures of the field. The second stage must be a subjective analysis of social agents' dispositions to act and their categories of perception and understanding that result from their inhabiting the field. Proper research, he says, cannot do without these two together.

Symbolic capital and symbolic violence

Bourdieu sees symbolic capital (e.g. prestige, honour, the right to be listened to) as a crucial source of power. Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence. We might see this when a daughter brings home a boyfriend considered unsuitable by her parents. She is met with disapproving looks and gestures, symbols which serve to convey the message that she will not be permitted to continue this relationship, but which never make this coercive fact explicit. People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning (culture) as legitimate. Hence the daughter will often feel a duty to obey her parents' unspoken demand, regardless of her suitor's actual merits. She has been made to misunderstand or misrecognize his nature. Moreover, by perceiving her parents' symbolic violence as legitimate, she is complicit in her own subordination - her sense of duty has coerced her more effectively than explicit reprimands could have done.

Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporation of unthought structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The dominated then take their position to be "right." Symbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the vision of the legitimacy of the social order.

In his theoretical writings, Bourdieu employs some terminology of economics to analyze the processes of social and cultural reproduction, of how the various forms of capital tend to transfer from one generation to the next. For Bourdieu, education represents the key example of this process. Educational success, according to Bourdieu, entails a whole range of cultural behaviour, extending to ostensibly non-academic features like gait or accent. Privileged children have learned this behaviour, as have their teachers. Children of unprivileged backgrounds have not. The children of privilege therefore fit the pattern of their teachers' expectations with apparent 'ease'; they are 'docile'. The unprivileged are found to be 'difficult', to present 'challenges'. Yet both behave as their upbringing dictates. Bourdieu regards this 'ease', or 'natural' ability--distinction--as in fact the product of a great social labour, largely on the part of the parents. It equips their children with the dispositions of manner as well as thought which ensure they are able to succeed within the educational system and can then reproduce their parents' class position in the wider social system.

Cultural capital (e.g. competencies, skills, qualifications) can also be a source of misrecognition and symbolic violence. Therefore working class children can come to see the educational success of their middle-class peers as always legitimate, seeing what is often class-based inequality as instead the result of hard work or even 'natural' ability. A key part of this process is the transformation of people's symbolic or economic inheritance (e.g. accent or property) into cultural capital (e.g. university qualifications)- a process which the logic of the cultural fields impedes but cannot prevent.

Reflexivity

Bourdieu insists on the importance of a reflexive sociology in which sociologists must at all times conduct their research with conscious attention to the effects of their own position, their own set of internalized structures, and how these are likely to distort or prejudice their objectivity. The sociologist, according to Bourdieu, must engage in a "sociology of sociology" so as not to unwittingly attribute the object of observation the characteristics of the subject. One must be cognizant of their own social positions within a field and recognize the conditions that both structure and make possible discourses, theories, and observations. A sociologist, therefore, must be aware of his or her own stakes and interests in the academic or sociological field and render explicit the conditions and structures of understanding that are implicitly imbued in his or her practices within those fields. Bourdieu's conception of reflexivity, however, is not singular or narcissistic, but must involve the contribution of the entire sociological field. Sociological reflexivity is a collective endeavor, spanning the entire field and its participants, aimed at exposing the socially conditioned unthought structures that underlay the formulation of theories and perceptions of the social world.

Bourdieu's sociology in general can be characterized as an investigation of the pre-reflexive conditions that generate certain beliefs and practices that are generated in capitalist systems.

Science and objectivity

Bourdieu contended there is transcendental objectivity, only there were certain historical conditions necessary for its emergence. Bourdieu's ideal scientific field is one that persistently designates upon its participants an interest or investment in objectivity. Transcendental objectivity, he argued, requires certain historical and social conditions for its production. The scientific field is precisely that field in which objectivity may be acquired. The structure of the scientific field is such that it becomes increasingly autonomous and its "entrance fee" becomes increasingly strict. Further, the scientific field entails rigorous intersubjective scrutinizing of theory and data. This makes it difficult for those within the field to bring in, for example, political influence. Therefore, the structure of the scientific field imposes upon its participants a habitus that has tacit interest or investment in objectivity.

Language

Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one's relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions, thus, are manifestations, or instantiations, of the participants' respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a right to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and the degrees thereof.

Legacy

In its obituary, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom said Bourdieu "was, for many, the leading intellectual of present-day France... a thinker in the same rank as Foucault, Barthes and Lacan". His works have been translated into two dozen languages and have had an impact on the whole gamut of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Several works of his are considered classics, not only in sociology, but also in anthropology, education, and cultural studies. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was named as one of the 20th century's ten most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. His book Outline of a Theory of Practice is among the most cited in the world. The Rules of Art has impacted sociology, history, literature and aesthetics.

In France, Bourdieu was not seen as an ivory tower academic or cloistered don, but as a passionate activist for those he believed subordinated by society. Again, from The Guardian: "[In 2003] a documentary film about Pierre Bourdieu — Sociology is a Combat Sport — became an unexpected hit in Paris. Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do."
For Bourdieu, sociology was a combatant effort at exposing the unthought structures that underly the somatic and cognitive practices of social agents. He saw sociology as a means of combating symbolic violence and exposing those unseen areas where one could be free.

Bourdieu's work has continued to be influential, and sociologists such as Loïc Wacquant have persisted to apply his theoretical and methodological principles to subjects such as boxing, employing what Bourdieu termed participant objectivization, or what Wacquant calls carnal sociology.

Bibliography
Selected works:
Les héritiers: les étudiants et la culture (1964), engl. The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture, University of Chicago Press 1979
Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World: The Sense of Honour: The Kabyle House of the World Reversed: Essays, Cambridge Univ Press 1979
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (1972), engl. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press 1977
La distinction (1979), engl. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard University Press 1987
Homo Academicus, (French Edition) Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1984. (English Edition) Polity (publisher) 1990
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage, 1990, with Jean-Claude Passeron (in French: La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, Minuit, 1970)
with Luc Boltanski e P. Maldidier, La défense du corps, in Social Science Information, vol. 10, n° 4, pp.45-86, 1971
with Luc Boltanski, Le titre et le poste : rapports entre système de production et système de reproduction, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 2, pp. 95 – 107, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, Le fétichisme de la langue, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 1, n° 4, pp. 2– 32, 1975.
with Luc Boltanski, La production de l'idéologie dominante, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 2, n° 2-3, 1976, pp. 4-73.
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford, 1990
The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, Polity (Publisher) 1991
The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, Stanford University Press 1991
Language & Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press 1991, paperback edition, Polity (publisher) 1992
An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant), University of Chicago Press and Polity (publisher) 1992
with Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, Stanford University Press 1995
(with Luc Boltanski and Robert Castel), Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford University Press 1996
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford University Press 1996
(with Monique De Saint Martin, Jean-Claude Passeron),Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Polity (publisher) 1996
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Stanford University Press 1998
"La domination masculine" (1998), engl. Male Domination, Polity (publisher) 2001
State nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power, Polity (publisher) 1998
Weight of the World. Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity (publisher) 1999
On Television, New Press 1999
Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, New Press 1999
Pascalian Meditations, Polity (publisher) 2000
"Contre-Feux" (1998), engl. Counterfire: Against the Tyranny of the Market, Verso Books 2003
"Science de la science et réflexivité" (2002), engl Science of Science and Reflexivity, Polity (publisher) 2004
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
The Social Structures of the Economy, Polity (publisher) 2005
References
Calhoun, C. et al. (1992) "Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives." University of Chicago Press.
Lane, J.F. (2000) Pierre Bourdieu. A Critical Introduction. Pluto Press.
Wacquant, L. (2005) Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics. Polity Press.
Fowler, Bridget, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London, California and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997).
Jean-Philippe Cazier [edit.],Abécédaire de Pierre Bourdieu, Sils Maria Press, 2007.



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Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and champion of the anti-globalisation movement, whose work spanned a broad range of subjects from ethnography to art, literature, education, language, cultural tastes, and television. Bourdieu's most famous book is Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). It was named one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association.

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." (from Distinction)

Pierre Bourdieu was born in the village of Denguin, in the Pyrénees' district of southwestern France. His father was the village postmaster. At school Bourdieu was a bright student but also gained fame as a star rugby player. He moved to Paris, where he studied at the École normale superiéure - his classmate was the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Bourdieu became interested in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl - Heidegger's Being and Time he had read earlier - and also in the writings of the young Marx for academic reasons. His thesis from 1953 was a translation and commentary of the Animadversiones of Leibniz. After attaining agrégé in philosophy, Bourdieu worked as a teacher for a year and was then drafted into the army. He served for two years in Algeria, where French troops tried to crush the Algerian rebels. In 1959-60 he lectured at the University of Algiers, and studied traditional farming and ethnic Berber culture. "I thought of myself as a philosopher and it took me a very long time to admit to myself that I had become an ethnologist," Bourdieu once said. In 1960 he returned to France as a self-taughtd anthropologist.

Bourdieu married in 1962 Marie-Claire Brisard. He studied anthropology and sociology, and taught at the University of Paris (1960-62) and at the University of Lille (1962-64). In 1964 he joined the faculty of the École pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1968 he became director of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, where with a group of colleagues he embarked on pioneering extensive collective research on problems concerned with the maintenance of a system of power by means of the transmission of a dominant culture. One of the central themes in his works was that culture and education are central in the affirmation of differences between social classes and in the reproduction of those differences. In La Reproduction (1970) Bourdieu argued, that the French educational system reproduces the cultural division of society. He also implied a correspondence between "symbolic violence" of pedagogic actions and the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence.

In 1975 Bourdieu launched the journal Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, devoted to deconsecrating the mechanism by which cultural production helps sustain the dominant structure of society. In 1981 he was appointed to the prestigious chair of sociology at the Collège de France. By the late 1980s Bourdieu had become one of the French social scientists most frequently cited in the United States. For his students he became a guru, Bour-dieu (god), or a terrible example of terrorism in the disguise of sociology. In the mid-1990s Bourdieu participated in a number of activities outside academic circles. He supported striking rail workers, spoke for the homeless, was a guest at television programs, and in 1996 he founded the publishing company Liber/Raisons d'agir. In 1998 he published in the newspaper Le Monde an article, in which he compared the "strong discourse" of neoliberalism with the position of the psychiatric discourse in an asylum. Bourdieu's last publications dealt with such topics as masculine domination, neoliberal newspeak, Edouard Manet's art, and Beethoven. Bourdieu died of cancer in Paris at the Saint-Antoine hospital on January 24, 2002.

"Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism." (from The Logic of Practice, 1980)

Key terms in Bourdieu's sociological thought are social field, capital, and habitus. Habitus is adopted through upbringing and education. The concept means on the individual level "a system of acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment... as well as being the organizing principles of action." Bourdieu argues that the struggle for social distinction is a fundamental dimension of all social life. Thorstein Veblen's (1857-1929) thoughts about conspicuous consumption come near Bourdieu's view, but Bourdieu has corrected that: "la distinction" has another meaning. It refers to social space and is bound up with the system of dispositions (habitus). Social space has a very concrete meaning when Bourdieu presents graphically the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. His diagram in Distinction shows that spatial distances are equivalent to social distances. "The very title Distinction serves as a reminder that what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturelle, "natural refinement"), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties." (from Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 1994)

All human actions take place within social fields, which are arenas for the struggle of the resources. Individuals, institutions, and other agents try to distinguish themselves from others, and acquire capital which is useful or valuable on the arena. In modern societies, there are two distinct systems of social hierarchization. The first is economic, in which position and power are determined by money and property, the capital one commands. The second system is cultural or symbolic. In this one's status is determined by how much cultural or "symbolic capital" one possesses. Culture is also a source of domination, in which intellectuals are in the key role as specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power. In Distinction, based on empirical material gathered in the 1960s, Bourdieu argued that taste, an acquired "cultural competence," is used to legitimise social differences. The habitus of the dominant class can be discerned in the notion that 'taste' is a gift from nature. Taste functions to make social "distinctions".

Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992) examined the work of Flaubert, and how it was shaped by the different currents, movements, schools and authors of the time. It can also be read as a collective biography, a Bildungsroman, presentation of a method, and an examination of Bourdieu's own philosophy. On Television (1996), based on two lectures, was a surprise best seller in France. Bourdieu considered television a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production. Television is degrading journalism because it must attempt to be inoffensive. "Above all, time limits make it highly unlikely that anything can be said. I am undoubtedly expected to say that this television censorship - of guests but also of the true journalists who are its agents - is political. It is true that political intervenes, and that there is political control... It is also true that at a time such as today, when great numbers of people are looking for work and there is so little job security in television and radio, there is a greater tendency toward political conformity. Consciously or unconsciously, people censor themselves - they don't need to be called into line."

For further reading: Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. by Richard Shusterman (1999); Pierre Bourdieu; Language, culture and education - theory into practice, eds. Michael Grenfell, and Michael Kelly (1999); Le savant et la politique. Essai sur le terrorisme sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu by Jeannine Verdès-Leroux (1998); Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory by Bridget Fowler (1997); Pierre Bourdieu: A Bibliography by Joan Nordquist (1997); Culture and Power by David Swartz (1997); Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (1993); Cultural Capital by John Guillory (1993); Pierre Bourdieu by Richard Jenkins (1992); An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu, ed. by Richard Harker, Chellen Mahar, and Chris Wilkes (1990) - For further information: - Pierre Bourdieu link page - Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics by Jonathan Loesberg - The essence of neoliberalism by Pierre Bourdieu - Documentary film: La sociologie est un sport de combat, dir. by Pierre Charles, 146 mininutes (2001)
Selected works:
Leibnitii animadversiones in partem generalem principiorum Cartesianorum, 1953
Sociologie de l'Algérie, 1958 (rev. ed. 1961) - The Algerians
Travail et travailleurs en Algérie, 1963 (with Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, Claude Seibel)
Le déracinement. La crise de l'agriculture traditionelle en Algérie, 1964 (with Abdelmalek Sayad)
Les hérities, 1964 (with Jean-Claude Passeron) - The Inheritors
Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, 1965 (with others) - Photography. A Middle-Brow Art
La reproduction. Elèments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, 1970 - Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (with Jean-Claude Passeron)
Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précéde de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle, 1972 - Outline of a Theory of Practice
La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement, , 1979 - Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Le sens pratique, 1980 - The Logic of Practice
Questions de sociologie, 1980 - Sociology in Question - Sosiologian kysymyksiä
Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques, 1982 - Language and Symbolic Power
Homo academicus, 1984 - Homo Academicus
La Sociologie de Bourdieu. Textes choisis et commentés, 1986 (ed. by Alain Accardo und Philippe Corcuff)
Choses dites, 1987 - In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology
L'ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, 1988 - The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger
La Noblesse d'état. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps, 1989 - The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power
Les régles de l'art, 1992 - The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field
The Field of Cultural Production, 1993 (ed. by Randall Johnson)
Libre-Échange, 1994 - Free Exchange (with Hans Haacke) - Ajatusten vapaa-kauppa
1992 - An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (with Loic Wacquant)
Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l'action, 1994 - Practical Reason
Sur la télévision; suivi de l'emprise du journalisme, 1996 - On Television - Televisiosta
Méditations pascaliennes. Éléments pur une philosophie négative, 1997 - Pascalian Meditations.
Contre-feux. Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion néo-libérale, 1998 - Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time - Vastatulet
La domination masculine, 1998 - Masculine domination
Les structures sociales de l'économie, 2000
Propos sur le champ politique, 2000
Contre-Feux 2. Pour un mouvement social européen, 2001
Science de la science et réflexivité: Cours du Collège de France, 2000-2001, 2001
Langage et pouvoir symbolique, 2001
Interventions politiques (1960-2000). Textes & contextes d’un mode d’intervention politique spécifique, 2002
Science de la science et reflexivité, 2002

Mircea Eliade's Hermeneutics

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Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in this century. Eliade was an intensely prolific author of fiction and non-fiction alike, publishing over 1,300 pieces over 60 years. He earned international fame with LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNAL RETOUR (1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return), an interpretation of religious symbols and imagery. Eliade was much interested in the world of the unconscious. The central theme in his novels was erotic love.
"In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosms. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered - because of inhabited and organized - space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners - in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt." (from Images and Symbols, 1952)
Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest, Romania, as the son of Georghe (Ieremia) Eliade, an army officer. He had changed, according to Eliade, his name from Ieremia to Eliade due to his admiration for the writer Eliade-Radulescu. The family moved from Bucharest to Rimnicu-Sarat and later to Cernavoda. "In my memory," Eliade wrote in his autobiography, "that time spent there between the Danube and the brick-colored calcinated hills, where wild roses and tiny flowers with pale dry petals grew, is always lighted with sunshine." At school he was interested in biology and chemistry, and he had his own small laboratory. He read much, and increased this time reading books by sleeping only five-six hours. While collecting material in Italy for his study on Renaissance philosophers, he read Surendranath Dasgupta's work A History of Indian Philosophy, which impressed him deeply. After graduating in philosophy at Bucharest in 1928, he studied in India under Dasgupta at the University of Calcutta. Eliade was a talented student, but his relationship with Dasgupta became strained when he fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter Maitreya. During this period he wrote the erotic novel ISABEL SI APELE DIAVOLULUI (1930).
His experiences in the Himalayas, at Swami Shivananda's ashram, where he went to meditate, Eliade depicted in the novel MAITREYI (1933), which became a success. Eliade considered his tantric experiments in the Himalayas with the South African Jenny a proof that he had not understood India. "My vocation was culture, not sainthood." After military service Eliade took his doctorate in 1933 - his thesis dealt with the history of yogic techniques. In the same year Eliade was appointed associate professor in the faculty of letters at Bucharest University. In 1934 he married Nina Mares; she died of cancer in 1944. After publishing DOMNISOARA CHRISTINA (1936) Eliade was accused of pornography and dismissed from his office for a short time. The protagonist in the novel, based on Rumanian folk stories, was a strigoi, a ghost or vampire. The story dealt with the meaning of erotic life and death in human life.
In the 1930s and 1940s Eliade published several works of fiction. The unifying element of Eliade's early fiction is a strong, autobiographical bent. Isabel si apele diavolui was a thinly disguised story of a love affair between a European man and an Indian girl. In INTOARCEREA DIN RAI (1934) and HULIGANII (1935) the author went beyond his personal self, and depicted the 20th-century reincarnations of the older 'nihilists'. The 'hooligan' in the title referred to a person, who is guided by his inner visions and youthful energy, and who doesn't approve of the rules or beliefs of the outside world. LUMINA CE SE STINGE (1934) was an experimental novel using a Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique. Eliade's growing interest in the supernatural was seen in Domnisoara Christina, SARPELE (1937) and SECRETUL DOCTORULUI HONIGBERGER (1940, Two Tales of the Occult), which included the tales 'Nopti la Serampore' and 'Secretul doctorului Honigberger'. The title of the book referred to Dr. J.M. Honigberger, writer of the book Thirty-five Years in the East (1952).
In 1938 Nae Ionescu, professor at the faculty of philosophy, was arrested and Eliade was dismissed as his assistent. Ionescu was accused of being member of the Iron Guard, an extreme-right-wing Romanian organization, anti-Semitic, with Nazi sympathies. Soon also Eliade was arrested and he spent a short time in a concentration camp. From 1940 Eliade worked as a Romanian cultural attaché in London and in Lisbon (1941-44). After WW II he did not return to his home country, but held posts at various European universities. He lectured at the Sorbonne and taught for a while at the École des Hautes Ètudes and elsewhere. His friends during this period included Eugène Ionesco, Georges Dumèzil, and Georges Bataille. In 1950 he married Christinel Cotrescu. The Forbidden Forest, which Eliade considered his major novel, appeared in 1954.
Eliade started to write The Myth of the Eternal Return in 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, when Europe was in ruins, and Communism was conquering Eastern European countries. The essay dealt with mankind's experience of history and time, especially the conceptions of being and reality. According to Eliade, in modern times people have lost their contact with natural cycles, known in traditional societies. Eliade saw that for human beings their inner, unhistorical world, and its meanings, were crucial. Behind historical processes are archaic symbols. Belief in a linear progress of history is typical for the Christian world view, which counters the tyranny of history with the idea of God, but in the archaic world of archetypes and repetition the tyranny of history is accepted. Stoics created from the concept of the eternal cycle a theory which embraced the whole universe. Eliade contrasts the Western linear view of time with the Eastern cyclical world view. In the 19th century Nietzsche's criticism of Christian dogmas brought back the idea of the eternal cycle to Western discussion. These ideas were further developed by Oswald Spengler in his study The Decline of the West (1918-1922).
Eliade's major theoretical and scholarly works in the 1940s and 1950s include TRAITE D'HISTOIRE DES RELIGIONS (1949, Patterns of Comparative Religion), Le mythe de l'éternel retrour, and MYTHES, RÉVES ET MYSTÈRES (1957, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries ). HISTOIRE DES CROYANCES ET DES IDÉES RELIGIEUSES (3 vols. 1976-1983, A History of Religious Ideas) has been called the synthesis of Eliade's work as a scholar. "The breadth and depth of Eliade's learning," wrote Roger Corless, "which astonished all who met him, his reverence toward the tradition he studied, and his intense, infectious enthusiasm, were an assurance that, if anyone could find what was religious about religion(s), he could. I believe the record shows that he could not. As a result, we now know a great deal more about religion(s) and we can ask totally new questions about it/them." ('Building on Eliade's Magnificent Failure, in Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, ed. by Bryan S. Rennie, 2000).
In 1956 Eliade joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. Eliade remained in the United States until his death on April 23, 1986. Five years later the Divinity School of the University of Chicago became, dramatically, the scene of Ioan Culianu's death. Culianu - the professor of the history of religion, Eliade's professional heir - was killed in the restroom. He suspected that - allegedly - Eliade had been associated with the Iron Guard. After Eliade's death he started to develop his own theory of history. (see Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu by Ted Anton, 1997)
A central theme in Eliade's works was that the archaic religions made sacred the world in a fashion no longer available. Through the understanding of the relationship between the sacred and the profane it is possible to begin to understand the world of the past. Eliade's creative hermeneutics has received considerable criticism, and it has been said that his "main position is shrouded in ambiguities". Claude-Henri Rocquet has suggested the reader of Eliade is involved in "a hermeneutics without end, since even as we read Eliade, we are interpreting him, just as he is interpreting some Iranian symbol".
Eliade was a Christian and Jungian - he met Carl Jung for the first time in 1950, and two years later he interviewed Jung at the Eranos Conference. "The modern world is desacralized," Jung said in the interview, "that is why it is in a crisis. Modern man must rediscover a deeper source of his own spiritual life." Also Eliade's works, such as Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and ASPECTS DU MYTHE (1963, Myth and Reality), stressed the relevance of ancient religions for contemporary man. However, Jung insisted that the images of archaic man are much closer to the European and American psyche than Eliade admitted. Eliade later stopped using the term "archetype", which is familiar from Jung's works, in order to avoid Jungian and other misinterpretations.
In LE SACRÉ ET LE PROFANE (1959, The Sacred and the Profane) Eliade argued that "the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world." The traditional man, 'homo religiosus', had a strong will to live within the sacred.or near the sacred objects. A sacred place possesses an unique existential value for religious man, but for nonreligious man, space is neutral. Although modern man seems to experience the world completely as profane, ancient myths, taboos, and rituals still nourish life in the West, but in a corrupted form.
According to Eliade, shamanism is "one of the archaic techniques of ecstasy - at once mysticism, magic, and 'religion' in the broadest sense of the term". He wanted to restrict the term 'shaman' to those who went into trances and who would address the tribe through a spirit or would visit the spirit world and return. James Frazer described bluntly the evidence of superhuman powers in The Golden Bough (1890) as spurious, but Eliade himself was convinced that shamanism had a paranormal component. In Shamanism (1968) he argued that epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights. Throughout his life Eliade believed that there are things in life that cannot be explained.
In his novels Eliade used the conventional repertory of fantasy: vampires, serpents, ghosts, time warp, searches for immortality. Most of Eliade's postwar fiction dealt with the hidden world behind everyday reality. Among his masterpieces is FORÊT INTERDITE (1955, The Forbidden Forest), which appeared in English in 1978. PE STRADA MANTULEASA (1968, The Old Man and the Bureaucrats) is an allusive and symbolic novella in which a schoolteacher detained for questioning by Communist authorities beguiles his captors with stories, as the enslaved Sheherazade in The Arabian Nights.
For further reading: Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred by T.J.J. Altizer (1963); Myths & Symbols, ed. by J.K. Kitagawa and C. Long (1969); The Role of Myth in Religion: a Study of Mircea Eliade's Phenomenology of Religion by G.R. Slater (1973); Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred by Thomas J. Altizer (1975); Structure and Creativity in Religion by D. Allen (1977); L'herméneutique de Mircea Eliade by A. Marino (1981); Imagination and Meaning, ed. by N. Girardot and M.L. Ricketts (1982); Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts (1988); Waiting for the Dawn, ed. by David Carrasco and Jane Marie Law (1991); Reading and Responding to Mircea Eliade's History of Religious Ideas by John R. Mason (1993); Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism by David Cave, John David Cave (1995); Reconstructing Eliade by Bryan S. Rennie (1996); Myth and Religion in Mircea Eliade by Douglas Allen (1998); The Politics of Myth by Robert S. Ellwood (1999); Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, ed. by Bryan S. Rennie (2000)


Selected works:
ISABEL SI APELE DIAVOLULUI, 1930
LUMINA CE SE STINGE, 1931
SOLILOQUII, 1932
INTR-O MANASTIRE DIN HIMALAYA, 1932
The Comparative History of Yoga Techniques, 1933 (doctoral thesis)
MAITREYI, 1933
OCEANOGRAFIE, 1934
INTOARCEREA DIN RAI, 1934
INDIA, 1934
LUMINA CE SE STINGE, 1934
ALCHIMIA ASIATICAM 1934
HULIGANII, 1935
YOGA: ESSAI SUIR LES ORIGINES DE LA MYSTIQUE INDIENNE, 1936 - Yoga: Essay on the Origins of Indian Mysticism
DOMNISOARA CHRISTINE, 1936
SARPELE, 1937
COSMOLOGIE SI ALCHIMIE BABILONIANA, 1937
NUNTÁ ÍN CER, 1938
FRAGMENTARIUM, 1939
SECRETUL DOCTORULUI HONIGBERGER, 1940 - Two Tales of the Occult / Two Strange Tales
MITUL REINTEGRARII, 1942
SALAZAR SI REVOLUTIA PORTUGALIA, 1942
COMENTARII LA LEGENDA MESTERULUI MANOLE, 1943
INSULA LUI EUTHANASIUS, 1943
OS ROMENOS, LATINOS, DO ORIENTE, 1943
TECHNIQUES DU YOGA, 1948
LE MYTHE DE L'ÉTERNEL RETOUR, 1949 - The Myth of the Eternal Return - Ikuisen paluun myytti
TRAITÈ D'HISTOIRE DES RELIGIONS, 1949 - Patterns in Comparative Religion
LE CHAMANISME ET LES TECHNOQUES ARCHAÏQUES DE L'EXTASE, 1951 - Shamanism: Archaic Technoque of Ecstacy
IPHIGENIA, 1951
IMAGES ET SYMBOLES, 1952 - Images and Symbols
LE YOGA: IMMORTALITÈ ET LIBERTÈ, 1952 - Yoga, Immortality and Freedom
LA FORÊT INTERDITE, 1954 - The Forbidden Forest
FORGERONS ET ALCHIMISTES, 1956 - The Forge and the Crucible
NUVELE, 1963
MYTHES, RÉVES ET MYSTÈRES, 1957 - Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries
LE SACRÉ ET LE PROFANE, 1959 - The Sacred and the Profane (trans. by Willard Trask) - Pyhä ja profaani (suom. Teuvo Laitila)
NAISSANCES MYSTIQUES, 1959 - Birth and Rebirth
MÉPHISTOPHÉLÈS ET L'ANDROGYNE, 1962 - The Two and the One
PATANJALI ET LA YOGA, 1962 - Patanjali and Yoga
NUVELE, 1963
ASPECTS DU MYTHE, 1963 - Myth and Reality
AMINTIRI: I, MANSARDA (1966)
From Primitives to Zen, 1967
Shamanism, 1968
PE STRADA MANTULEASA, 1968 - La vieil homme et l'officier (1977) - The Old Man and the Bureaucrats
LA TIGÁNAGI, 1969
Fantastic Tales, 1969
The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, 1969
DE ZALMOXIS À GENGIS-KHAN, 1970 - Zalmosis: The Vanishing God
Australian Religions, 1973
FRAGMENTS D'UN JOURNAL, 1973 - No Souvenirs
Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions, 1976
DIE PELERINE, 1976
ed.: HISTOIRE DES CROYANCES ET DES IDÉES RELIGIEUSES, 1976 (vol. 1) - A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1
ed.: HISTOIRE DES CROYANCES ET DES IDÉES RELIGIEUSES, 1978 (vol. 2) - A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 2
NOUASPREZECE TRANDAFIRI, 1980
MÉMOIRES (1907-1937), 1980 - Autobiography: Vol. I
Ordeal by Layrinth, 1982
ed.: HISTOIRE DES CROYANCES ET DES IDÉES RELIGIEUSES, 1983 (vol. 3) - A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 3
Two Strange Tales, 1986
The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 1, 1986
PELERINA, 1988 - Youth without Youth and Other Novellas
Autobiography: 1937-1960, 1988
Journal III: 1970-1978, 1989
Autobiography: 1907-1937, 1990 (paperback)
Journal I: 1945-1955, 1990
Journal IV: 1979-1985, 1990
The Eliade Guiden to World Religions, 1991
Mystic Stories, 1992
Encyclopedia of Religion, Vols. 1 & 2 bound in 1 book, Vol 1, 1993
Bengal Nights, 1994
The Harpercollins Concise Guide to World Religions, 2000 (with Ioan P. Culianu, Hillary S. Wiesner)



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article from Geocities

http://www.geocities.com/mircea_eliade/eliademethods.htm

Mircea Eliade's Methods in the Study of History of Religions

by Octavian Sarbatoare (BA USyd)

The Romanian-born author and scholar of religious studies Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is credited with a substantial contribution to the advancement of the study of history of religions. As Eric J. Sharpe puts it, Eliade 'ranges far and wide over the world of religion.'1 It is our attempt in this paper, to analyse Eliade's methods in the study of history of religions by looking into the relevant textual material found in Eliade's works as well as uncovering some of their critique.
Although there are numerous contributions written about Eliade's hermeneutics, we intend to add more data to the subject by pointing out to other ideas, which suggest an influence upon Eliade's hermeneutics, particularly in relation to his Romanian spiritual roots we share in common. We briefly argue that Eliade's hermeneutics has been decisively influenced by the spiritual milieux of his native Romania, and that his history of religions evolved as scholarly construct of the empirical experience of the sacred he encountered first in his country of birth. Worth mentioning is that Eliade's major works were initially written in Romanian language, that was for him a way of being connected to his origins, a theme prevalent in his hermeneutics (vid. inf.). For the start in our paper, we attempt to analyse Eliade's methods in the study of history of religions by engaging with his major ideas, followed by the exposition of some Romanian influences, then the critique of Eliade's legacy (further down the track in our work).
By comparative methods Eliade attempts to separate elemental and timeless patterns of religious life, in order to arrive at what is constant and beyond the transitory aspects of time. For Eliade, religion is basically the experience of the sacred related to the ideas of "being", "meaning" and "truth" (French: d'être, de signification et de vérité; Romanian: a fi, semnificaţie/ înţeles şi realitate/ adevăr).2 Part of our argument is developed based on these three lines. According to Eliade, the importance of the sacred experience is paramount. The sacred as 'a universal dimension'3 plays a significant role in the history of humanity because 'the beginnings of culture are rooted in religious experiences and beliefs'.4 One idea in Eliade's view of meaning of religion is in relation to "being" (d'être), as notion of existence and key ontological element of his hermeneutics.
The basic archetypes are, according to Eliade, the meaning and value of existence for traditional humanity. Indicative of archetypes and repetition in the history of religions is Eliade's work Le mythe de l'éternal retour: Archétypes et répétition5 in which the idea of patterns of religious experience is prevalent. For Eliade, the evidence for the 'morphology of the sacred' is provided by archaic cultures. For the archaic man, reality is a function of imitating a celestial archetype (archétype céleste).6 Reality is accessed by participation into the 'symbolism of the Centre' (symbolisme du Centre7), in which constructions like temples become real for being assimilated into the 'Centre of the World' (Centre du Monde).8 The profane transmutes into sacred by imitating the ab origine actions of gods, heroes or ancestors.9 As Eliade puts it, 'the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from "natural" realities.'10 In Eliade's view, the basic 'definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane,'11 its act of manifestation being designated by the term hierophany.12 Such hierophanies play a crucial role in the history of religions. Eliade writes that:

the history of religions – from the most primitive to the most highly developed – is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the most elementary hierophany – e.g., manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree – to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act – the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural "profane" world. 13

Thus, according to Eliade, there are two modes of being in the world: the sacred and the profane (German: das Heilige und das Profane French: le sacré et le profane).14 While the profane is just the negation of the sacred, it is the sacred in its qualitative aspects that are regarded to be of paramount importance. First, according to Eliade, a sacred space (l'espace sacré) has to be defined in relation to the making the world sacred. The sacred space is part of 'the only real'15 that can bring 'revelation of the absolute reality.'16 Then, there is the sacred time (le temps sacré) that is reversible for being 'a primordial mythical time made present.'17 The nature plays a key role because 'sacrality is revealed through the very structure of the world'18 (French: la sacralité se révèle à travers les structures même du Monde19). Finally, the aim of the religious experience is to live a sanctified life (vie sanctifiée) 'on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos or the gods.'20 Thus, living the experience of the sacred goes beyond the ordinary perception of life. The entire planet Earth is regarded as terra genetrix, the divine anthropocosmic being, who is the creator and nurturer of great proportions.21 But, whoever is engaged in the religious quest, and wants to go beyond the ordinary perception of life, has to learn the means by which the sacred manifests. Thus, we have the second aspect of religion, which according to Eliade is linked to the idea of "meaning".
In order to construct the sense of the "meaning" (signification) as relevant to the religious experience, Eliade starts from the time of Palaeolithic hunters after the Ice Age, about 8000 BCE, that was a time, he believes, when a religious symbolism emerged as a consequence of a radical change of the climate and landscape.22 According to Eliade, that was the time when archaic religious ideas developed in relation to the mythology of origins like 'origin of the world, of game, of man, of death23 – that is typical of hunting civilisations.'24 With the transition from hunting and gathering type of civilisation to the one based on cultivation of cereals (thus the practice of agriculture, and domestication of animals),25 Eliade continues, the religious symbolism26 became enriched by new magico-religious meanings; the alimentary theologies as new religious myths generated new kinds of behaviour.
For instance, Eliade assumes that the pre-Neolithic people believed that 'edible tubers and fruits (coconut, banana, etc.) were born from an immolated divinity.'27 Expounding further, Eliade describes 'that all responsible activities (puberty ceremonies, animal or human sacrifices, cannibalism, funeral ceremonies, etc.) properly speaking constitute a recalling, a "remembrance," of the primordial murder.'28 'This primordial murder radically changed the human condition, for it introduced sexuality and death29 and first established the religious and social institutions that are still in force.'30 A significant feature of the religious life became 'the mystical solidarity between man and vegetation,'31 but 'religious creativity was stimulated, not by the empirical phenomenon of agriculture, but by the mystery of birth, death, and rebirth identified in the rhythm of vegetation.32 Thus:

The agrarian cultures develop what might be called a cosmic religion, since religious activity is concentrated around the central mystery: the periodical renewal of the world. Like human existence, the cosmic rhythms are expressed in terms drawn from vegetable life. The mystery of cosmic sacrality is symbolised in the World Tree. The universe is conceived as an organism that must be renewed periodically – in other words, each year'.33

Furthermore, Eliade asserts that the human can access the "absolute reality" thus:

"Absolute reality," rejuvenation, immortality are accessible to certain privileged persons through the power residing in a certain fruit or in a spring near a tree. The Cosmic Tree is held to be at the centre of the world, and it unites the three cosmic regions, for it sends roots down into the underworld, and its top touches the sky.34

Full of hermeneutical ideas of the sacred is Eliade's work Patterns in Comparative Religions, perhaps the most complete scholarly construct concerning the structure and morphology of the sacred in Eliade's view.
Here we have the significant ideas of the emergence of the sacred as experience within human communities, and the gradual conscious progression from the profane to the sacred. The hierophanies of multiple aspects emerged in so-called "primitive" religion35 in which the sky and sky gods play an important role for the sacred religious experience. Eliade writes about the sky symbolism thus:

The sacred as manifested by the sky lives on in men's religious experience, after the actual sky god has faded into the background, in the symbolism of "height", "ascension", "centre", and so on.36

Furthermore, Eliade asserts, the mountains as the nearest thing to the sky are endowed with holiness, sharing in the spatial symbolism of transcendence as places of the dwelling of the gods.37 There are, according to Eliade, hierophanies of the Sun in which a "solarisation" of Supreme Beings occurred.38 There is a mystique of the Moon in a symbolism related to waters, vegetation, fertility, and initiation as cosmo-biology and mystical physiology.39 The water symbolism is related to the links between the earth, woman and fertility.40 The vegetation plays a central role for the rites and symbols of regeneration,41 which is regarded as sacred time and part of an eternal renewal. Eliade writes that:

what we may call the "history" of primitive societies consists solely of the mythical events, which took place in illo tempore and have been unceasingly repeated from that day to this.42

In such terms, Eliade takes up the issue of phenomenological structure and historical contingency and poses a solution. Thus, in his hostility to history Eliade asserts that the truly "historic" events are those that present importance as having mythico-historic precedent, for the various symbolic forms related to the sacred are not products of historical circumstances, although they might influence them, but major factors in religious life.43 As Eliade argues, the renewal of the world by repetition of the cosmogony is part of the structure of the myths (la structure des myths). The rites of renewal (rites de renouvellement) aim at a renaissance mystique of the world.44 Such rites, Eliade argues, are to be found among the Australians and a number of North American tribes.45 In Eliade's view, the religious symbolism as a vast hermeneutical theme, he supports by examples, particularly by looking for meanings of various customs of people of today who still belong culturally to archaic cultures. Thus Eliade relies decisively on valorisation of the archaic.
One example is the symbolic meaning of burials among the Kogi Indians, a tribe of natives in Colombia. Eliade writes that:

the Kogi identify the world – womb of the Universal Mother – with each village, each cult house, each habitation, and each grave. When the shaman lifts the corpse nine times, he indicated the return of the body to the foetal state by going through the nine months of gestation in reverse order. And since the grave is assimilated to the world, the funerary offerings acquire a cosmic meaning.46

As a conclusion to the link of religion to the interpretation of "meaning" it can be said that by understanding the symbol a religious person can attain to the highest spirituality, thus living the universal. The sacred as "meaning" (signification) is thus paramount for the understanding of the "truth" as experience of the sacred.
Thus, we have the third aspect of religion according to Eliade as being linked to the idea of "truth" (vérité) in which the homo religiosus has to rest upon. Among all symbols and mysteries the homo religiosus has to find their meaning because 'becoming aware of his own mode of being and assuming his presence in the world together constitute a "religious" experience.'47 The homo religiosus, as model of the human motivated by an irreducible religious intentionality, has to rest upon the idea of the existence of a final truth. Eliade writes:

The homo religiosus represents the "total man"; hence, the science of religions must become a total discipline in the sense that it must use, integrate, and articulate the results obtained by the various methods of approaching a religious phenomenon.48

By practices and behaviour, the religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe thus having a different experience of life 'in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feelings, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world.'49 For the religious man, in his mode of living the experience of the sacred, consecrates own life to 'the sacrality with which man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on) can be charged.'50 For example, once being a participant to a festival as sacred time event, the religious man:

experiences intervals of time that are "sacred," that have no part in the temporal duration that precedes and follows them, that have a wholly different structure and origin, for they are of a primordial time, sanctified by the gods and capable of being made present by the festival.'51

Thus for the homo religiosus the liturgical time has a transhuman quality.52 The nature entirely 'is always fraught with a religious value.'53 for structures of the sacrality of nature represent cosmic hierophanies.54 But, there is more to the existential situation of the homo religiosus, as Eliade writes:

All his behaviour, his understanding of the world, the values he accords to life and to his own existence, arise and become articulated in a "system" on the basis of this belief that his house or his village is situated near the axis mundi.'55

Eliade asserts, in the case of such beliefs, that 'demystification does not serve hermeneutics,'56 as he calls for 'a creative hermeneutics in the perspective of the history of religions.'57 For in the last instance, Eliade's journey into the history of religions is about self-discovery and self-understanding, according to Taylor.58
Olson sees Eliade's creative hermeneutics as an anthropological view upon the history of religions that leads to a change in human beings, and a source for new cultural values.59 It appears to be a farsighted concept, for it has a vision for humanity, although so far there are no signs of happening. For Eliade, the modern societies, the virtual destruction of the sense of the sacred, the attenuation of rituals and the relegation of myth to the subconscious amounts to a new Fall,60 a vision looking almost prophetic that has generated scholarly debates (vid. inf.). As Eliade puts it, this phenomenon of a desacralized world is quite new, for 'the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.'61 By changes in 'spiritual attitudes and behaviour modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence.'62 As Eliade writes,:

it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.63

But, 'the nostalgia for a lost mystical solidarity with nature still haunts Western man'.64 Eliade regards life as mythological in structure, thus his new humanism is spiritual in nature. As David Cave, one of the defenders of Eliade, puts it, Eliade's new humanism has 'a spiritual, humanistic orientation toward totality capable of modifying the quality of human existence itself,'65 for his transhistorical humanism aims at 'escaping profane time, the time of decay and of dualism, and of entering into sacred time.'66 Furthermore Cave argues, 'for Eliade, the principal way in which the profane time acquires meaning as sacred time is when it repeats a cosmogony.'67 that is the reliving of a primordial creative moment. We now attempt to unveil some ideas in relation to Eliade's Romanian spiritual roots, i.e. the Romanian folklore and popular culture, which are regarded as sources of inspiration for his scholarly construct of the history of religions.
A comparative study on Zalmoxis, an ancient god prevalent in the areas of historical Dacia (about the present day Romania), is subject to Eliade's work Zalmoxis the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe.68 Mac Linscott Ricketts, one of the scholars of history of religions who has learned Romanian language and travelled to Romania in order to create a biography of Mircea Eliade, makes a good assessment of Eliade's influence from symbols found in Romanian folklore. The legend of Meşterul Manole (Master Manole) is relevant as an archaic myth of creation through sacrifice.69 The ritualistic use of certain healing plants like mandrake (Romanian: mandragora) for example, is indicative of the power of the gods manifested as essence of a plant. The cult of the mandragora is described as prevalent in Romania70 as part of the practices of so-called Romanian "Shamanism".71 Thus, such concrete elements provided the row material for the construct of a theory on the history of religions in which symbolism appears to play a key role. The formative years of Eliade as the future scholar in the study of history of religions were marked by Romanian folklore inspiration. For the construct of his hermeneutics Eliade used the examples of certain remnant practices of archaic societies still found in Romania today, in a 'very old rural civilization, with its roots in the Neolithic but enriched by later cultural influences.'72 Thus Eliade's cultural roots in native Romania proved to be primary material which inspired him to create a composite scholarly interpretation of the experience of the sacred in relation to the understanding of the religious phenomena. Although Eliade admits that the Indian spirituality helped him 'to understand the structures of Romanian culture,'73 it did not add anything substantial to the basic ideas about the history of religions Eliade formed already while being in Romania. Eliade writes:

The common elements of Indian, Balkan, and Mediterranean folk culture proved to me that it is here that organic universalism exists, that it is the result of a common history (the history of peasant cultures) and not an abstract construct.74

Thus, the major point Eliade wants to make in relation to an organic universalism is that 'the Romanian folk creations were articulated in a much broader perspective'75 pertaining to universalism as vision for history of religions. Basically, Eliade's famous theme of the 'mythe de l'éternal retour' (Romanian: mitul eternei întoarceri) applies not only to the ideas of human societies re-enacting the sacred in one form or another, but also at personal level for an individual. This is precisely what Eliade wants to communicate: societies and individuals again and again re-enact a theme born or acquired at the time and place of their origin.76 For 'la nostalgie des origines' (Romanian: nostalgia originilor) is seen by Eliade as one of the universals for both communities and individuals.
Although Eliade's scholarly construct of hermeneutics was influenced by other authors of similar approaches (particularly the phenomenological) to the study of history of religions, his personal experience of the sacred acquired from his native spiritual roots, from what he calls Romanian folk spirituality (Romanian: spiritualitatea populară românească), played a major role. Eliade asserts for example that his 'efforts to understand the structures of archaic and Oriental thought contributed more genuinely to the decipherment of the values of Romanian folk spirituality' than other sociological interpretations.77 Other authors who studied the Romanian folklore and popular culture show indeed elements that are recognised in Eliade's hermeneutics. There is for instance in Ana Cartianu's Romanian Folk Tales work, there is a tale called "Youth Everlasting and Life without End" (Romanian: Tinereţe fără bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte).78 Here the hero of Romanian folk tales known as Făt-Frumos, who had a miraculous birth by the use of special herbs by his mother, is endowed with magical powers. Făt-Frumos starts a journey in search for a place where there is everlasting youth, thus immortality, a kind of Shambhala (the mythical kingdom of happiness and immortality), which he discovers eventually. In the Tinereţe fără bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte tale we identify the use of magical herbs and the quest for immortality, as ideas that Eliade integrated into his hermeneutics (vid. sup.). Another example we find relevant to our inquiry is in the scholarly research done by Gail Kligman in Romania, and made available to the public in her book The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Kligman discovered in Romania the strange idea of the wedding of the dead (Romanian: Nunta mortului) in which the funerals of an unmarried young person are mixed with marriage ceremonies. The deceased bride or groom, who are dressed in wedding attire,79 are married to a divine being as ideal marriage.80 The divine is symbolically represented by a virgin bride for a dead young man, or by a crown for a deceased girl.81 As Kligman writes, the symbolic marriage ceremony, 'the death-wedding becomes a cosmic marriage.'82 Such elements were later integrated by Eliade in his notion of hierogamy, the sacred marriage, which is basically a form of heaven-earth interaction and union. As Eliade asserts, the findings from the study of comparative folklore and ethnology in Romania were of historico-religious values and much relevant to his hermeneutics.83 We give one more example from the Romanian folk tradition we find relevant for the peasant culture, in which we have personal experience.
There is for instance a folk custom known as paparuda (Pl. paparudele) that hardly could be translated as word, but described as practice only. It is a ritualistic dance performed by one or more virgin girls during a time of drought. Many people assembly at such a ceremony in which chanting is performed to propitiate the coming of rain to save the crop that is in danger of being destroyed. During the chanting, the virgin girl (Romanian: fata virgină) is thoroughly washed with buckets of water as ritualistic mode of sacrifice to the Divine. In other words by the connection between a virgin girl and water, those performing paparuda custom are offering the purity that comes with the involvement of a virgin girl in exchange for water as rain they are asking the Divine to send. This is a relevant example of a surviving archaic custom denoting the practice of the sacred in the Romanian culture that we find to be in tune with Eliade's hermeneutics of the history of religions. On the other hand, Eliade's hermeneutics of history of religions has generated both founded and unfounded criticism.
As far as the modern interpretations of myth are concerned, Eliade places himself within the group of scholars from Max Müller to Claude Lévi-Strauss who advanced the history on the subject.84 Like the case of any other scholar in the study of religion, Eliade's ideas on the history of religions have been criticised from various view angles. Cunningham gives credit of inspiration to Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) for Eliade's hermeneutics85 although not taking into account Eliade's spiritual roots and background (vid. sup.). But Eliade did not intend to construct an entirely new vision on the history of religions, but to build upon other similar ideas, thus enlarging the picture. Eliade admits that 'Otto's analyses have not lost their value,'86 but he (Eliade) adopts a different perspective,87 when he writes:

We propose to present the phenomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only in so far as it is irrational. What will concern us is not the relation between the rational and the nonrational elements of religion but the sacred in its entirety.88

Carl Jung appears to be of inspiration to Eliade. In relation to Eliade's views to express human realities and spiritual values in a cultural language and his originality of ideas, Eric J. Sharpe writes:

Perhaps it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that Jung gave Eliade at least part of the grammar of that language; the comparative study of religion provides the vocabulary; the syntax, however, is Eliade's own.89

On the other hand, Eliade's understanding of hermeneutics has 'been criticised for its antihistorical bias and eclectic use of data drawn from the religions of non-literate peoples,'90 but the evidence of Eliade's hermeneutical enquiry is that it leads from the data of history to the search for their trans-historical meaning and value.91 The trans-cultural validity of hermeneutics of history of religions is part of an ongoing debate.92 Later criticism, after Eliade's death, became more virulent, and connected to the alleged involvement of Eliade into anti-Semitism and the nationalistic movements in Romania before the Second World War, although 'no genuinely damning evidence has been forthcoming.'93 In a rush to denigrate Eliadean legacy, the recent most relevant case of unfounded criticism of Eliade is that of McCutcheon's. As we shall see, McCutcheon's virulent criticism for rejecting Eliade's hermeneutics is mistaken.
In his Chap. 9 "Methods, theories, and the terror of history: Closing the Eliadean era with dignity", McCutcheon considers the "Eliade affair" 'similar to other cases of notable European intellectuals of the inter-war generation whose youthful, political past emerged long after they had established themselves as influential figures in their respective scholarly fields.'94 Furthermore, McCutcheon associates Eliade with the literary critic Paul de Man and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, two scholars suspected of anti-Semitic remarks and association with Nazism.95 Basing himself on the criticism of Eliade by Adriana Berger,96 whose allegations against Eliade were never proven, McCutcheon's assertion of Eliade being a card-carrying Romanian fascist is also unfounded.97 But, McCutcheon's attempt to assess Eliade's scholarly contribution is also a failure. It is utterly nonsense to describe 'Eliade's life and works as political,'98 and his scholarship having a 'politics embedded within it.'99 Labelling Eliade's terminology of his hermeneutics as 'troublesome categories and abstractions,'100 McCutcheon criticises other relevant scholars of religious studies who found meaning in Eliade's works. In McCutcheon views, Cave's sympathetic exegesis of Eliade is 'routine talk',101 Rennie is an apologist of Eliade's concoction of subjectivity,102 while Olson' ideas for defending Eliade pertain to obscurantism.103 At the end of his chapter, McCutcheon calls to 'close the Eliadean era in the study of religion'104 for radical change and reshaping in order to:

make room for a newly invigorated field of study, then it means that we must retool the field from top to bottom – from our curricula, to our public presence, the structures of our scholarly meetings, and our research agendas and publications.105

But, McCutcheon rhetoric does not give any suggestion of how all the above ideas are to be implemented. For, the discovery of history of religions is a work, which is incrementally built upon by various scholars in a greater and more encompassing vision. There are no such things as retooling 'the field from top to bottom' (vid. sup.) in the study of the history of religions. As Eliade created a hermeneutics by taking into account his predecessors in the field (like van der Leeuw, Otto, Jung, Wach, and so on), so also we expect another scholar to create an even larger scholarship view. Thus, McCutcheon's call for 'redescribing how we define, classify, compose, and explain behaviours and institutions in the public university,'106 is simply lacking insight into how things work in social sciences. From the history of religious ideas we know that ideas and concepts are simply reshaped, thus nothing is made new from 'top to bottom' (vid sup.) as McCutcheon suggests in relation to closing the Eliadean era. On the other hand, McCutcheon fails to make an objective scholarly critique of Eliade, for no solid scholarship is built upon allegations and defamatory positions of others (see Adriana Berger). Then, McCutcheon's style of describing Eliade's case makes no sense by considering such comparison as to substitute "the historical Eliade" for "the historical Jesus"107 in an attempt to discredit Eliade in the social formation of history of religions. The entire debate upon Eliade as scholar has indeed generated a crisis in the study of religions.
As Rennie remarks all scholars of religion have a stake in the Eliade affair especially in relation to resolving the identity crisis in the study of religion.108 Worthy to mention is the fact that three of Eliade's main critics lack consensus why Eliade's scholarship has been successful. Ivan Strenski for example, believes that the catastrophic political upheavals in Europe have a dramatic impact on Eliade's theory of religion, thus in less catastrophic times like today a theorist like Eliade would not be successful.109 Russell T. McCutcheon attributes Eliade's success to a new kind of religious studies at U.S. collages, the 'teaching about religions in classes with believers from various religious traditions.'110 We should remind here that Eliade was already successful before coming to the United States by publishing relevant works in the field of religions and other literature in Romanian and French while teaching at the University of Bucharest and at the Sorbonne in Paris. The other critic of Eliade, Steven M. Wasserstrom, in his work Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Erasmos, explains why Eliade and the others, who are mentioned in his work title, had a tremendous impact beyond their academic reputation: it is because 'the three scholars expected a knowledge from religious history that humankind in the modern age urgently needed.'111 According to Wasserstrom, Eliade's sacred/ profane contradiction 'has to do with living in a world torn by rival claims of truth.'112 The above three critiques add nothing new, for Eliade's success like that of his predecessors in the field, is simply attributed to a social need at a certain historical period. It is natural that the Eliadean era in the study of religions be closed eventually, but this call is still premature, for no such era is closed without opening another era. Regrettably some scholars listen to such calls as McCutcheon's, who simply lacks vision calling for demolition without real plans, means and workers to build a better construction.
In our view Eliade's phenomenological approach still holds as one 'd'examples illustres de la tendance à fournir des interprétations uniformisantes, applicables et appliquées à des manifestations religieuses de type et de significations fortement hétérogènes.'113 The community of scholars, although stunned by the allegations against Eliade that came after his death, should consider the rehabilitation of Eliade's reputation and acknowledge the value of his scholarly contributions to the advancement of studies in religions.114 Those callings for nullifying the Eliadean legacy are simply non-realistic. It is hardly unlikely that will ever happen. For Eliade is already part of the history of religions and one of those responsible for its social formation in the fifties and sixties decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, other critiques like that of Seth D. Kunin is genuine and constructive, thus giving a more realistic view upon Eliade's phenomenology of religion.
Kunin argues that Eliade's focus 'on the structures of religion rather that specific elements, is much narrower than that of many other phenomenologists.'115 Eliade's work is essentially ahistorical, 'although he pays lip service to the historical context of the herophanies that he analyses, his primary focus is on the universal qualities of these structures.'116 But, in spite of this ahistorical emphasis in much of his work 'the hierophanies suggest an underlying historical or evolutionary schema.'117 Eliade's essentialist definition of religion 'underlies his rejection of the use of other methodologies in relation to religion.'118 In relation to eating and sexuality, as acts of expressing the ultimate reality for the "primitive people", Kunin identifies Jung's views as inspiration for Eliade believing that 'individuals in primal religions experience the world in a very different way to modern people,'119 when through the enactment of various rites, 'including eating and sex, "primitive" people put themselves out of time and connect to eternity,'120 as 'ritual repetition is a feature of most of Eliade's analyses.'121 In a feminist critique of Eliade's phenomenology of religion, Rosalind Shaw finds Eliade's views partial in spite of its claim of universality, suggesting that the object of empathy was still specifically male.122 In Show's terms, Eliade's views 'reflect the androcentric orientation of power and are essentially views from an entrenched power position'.123 These are some of the critiques of Eliade's hermeneutics of history of religions. As Eliade's scholarly construct is just one view upon the history or religions, particularly one of phenomenological orientation, we are waiting to see the emergence of other views even more encompassing, and from various other angles like the sociological, psychological, feminist, anthropological or functionalist, taken either standalone or as syntheses.
In our view Eliade lost ground in religion academia not only because of false allegations in relation to his past, but also because the trend of desacralization of the world still continues in now the post-modernist era, and academia is no exception to it. The conflict Eliade had with modernity is valid for post-modernity as well, for the post-modern man like the modern man finds increasingly difficult to relate to the sacred experience. Lets also make clear that our defence of Eliade's ideas is not because we came from the same cultural climate thus being of similar vein, but because we find value in Eliade's concept of living the sacred experience. The contribution by Romanians to the defence of Eliade is minimal; those relevant scholars who find value in Eliade's hermeneutics are all westerners (vid. sup. Cave, Rennie, Olson). Thus expounding on various critiques of Eliade's phenomenology of religion, we are now ready to draw a final conclusion.
Basically, Eliade constructs the experience of the sacred in connection to the ideas of "being", "meaning" and "truth" (French: d'être, de signification et de vérité; Romanian: a fi, semnificaţie/ înţeles şi realitate/ adevăr). In establishing his theory upon the history of religions, Mircea Eliade drew inspiration from archaic cultures, which he believes provide the proof of living the sacred life experience in its natural forms. The constant and profound reference to the archetypes is the backbone idea of Eliade's methods in the study of history of religions. The homo religiosus aspiration for the sacred experience allowed him to immerse into the sacred by learning to decipher the meaning of hierophanies relevant to a mythico-historic precedent. As the sacred unfolds, the homo religiosus participates into the experience of the truth that was once at the origin of those hierophanies. Thus, the homo religious has a continuous 'nostalgie des origines' as part of the sacred experience.
Our selection of Eliade's contextual references aimed to construct a broad view of his methods in the study of a history of religions. We provided some significant elements of Eliade's hermeneutics from his major works. Eliade's construct is a vision upon the sacred experience of humanity that in his views was prevalent in archaic communities and is still reflected in those contemporary surviving archaic cultures. Eliade sees the experience of the sacred to be the "real" history of humanity, for in his views it is only the living of the sacred that is real history. We also uncovered some ideas in relation to Eliade's spiritual milieux, the Romanian folk spirituality (Romanian: spiritualitatea populară românească) in his native Romania, which as a popular culture inspired Eliade's hermeneutics in relation to the development of his study of history of religions. It is our hope this paper to be useful as succinct reference to Eliade's phenomenological ideas in the study of history of religions and its critique.
On the other hand, Eliade's phenomenology of religion is far sighted; it has a vision for the future of humanity. It aims at finding a place for the human within the larger context of the celestial realm to which the archaic homo religiosus aspired. Most important, Eliade's vision aims at understanding the connectivity between the earthly and celestial realms. In his view, the disappearance of the earth-sky sacred link raises the question of survival of humanity. Eliade's vision of a new Fall, as result of a desacralized world, appears almost prophetic.
Critique to discredit Eliade has been written especially after his death in 1986. We have shown that some critiques are unfounded allegations, but others are genuine and constructive. It is perhaps the time for scholars in studies in religions to recover from the impact of those false claims of anti-Semitic and fascist past of Eliade, and acknowledge his contribution to the social formation of the modern discipline of history of religions and a particular scholarship in the history of religions.

________________________________

1 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd., 1975), p. 214.
2 Mircea Eliade, La nostalgie des origines: Méthodologie et histoire des religions (Éditions Gallimard, 1971), p. 7.
3 Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969b), p. 9.
4 Ibid.
5 Mircea Eliade, Le mythe de l'éternal retour: Archétypes et répétition (Éditions Gallimard, 1969a).
6 Ibid., p. 16.
7 See Mircea Eliade, Images et symboles: Essais sur le symbolisme magico-religieux (Éditions Gallimard, 1952), Chap. 1, pp. 33-72 for symbolisme du Centre ideas in relation to psychology and history of religion (psychologie et histoire des religions), archetypes (archétypes), image of the world (l'image du monde), symbolism of ascension (symbolisme de l'ascension), and construction of a Centre (construction d'un Centre).
8 Mircea Eliade, (1969a), op. cit., p. 16. For more on symbolisme architectonique see Eliade's work in the French edition Briser le toit de la maison: la créativité et ses symboles (Éditions Gallimard, 1986).
9 Eliade, (1969a), op. cit., p. 16.
10 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), p. 10.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 11.
13 Ibid.
14 See the German and French editions of Mircea Eliade's book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion published as Das Heilige und das Profane (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag GmbH, 1957a), and Le sacré et le profane (Éditions Gallimard, 1965), respectively.
15 Mircea Eliade (1959), op. cit., p. 20.
16 Ibid., p. 21.
17 Ibid., p. 68.
18 Ibid., p. 117.
19 Mircea Eliade (1965), op. cit., p. 100.
20 Eliade (1959), op. cit., p. 167.
21 See Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality (London: Collins, 1972a), especially in Chap. 7 "Mother Earth and Cosmic Hierogamies". French readers should consult Mircea Eliade, Mythes, rêves et mystères (Éditions Gallimard, 1957b). The Italian readers should see, Mircea Eliade, Miti sogni e misteri (Milano: Rusconi, 1976a).
22 Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries Vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1979). p. 29.
23 For mythologies of death, cosmological symbolism of funerary rites and the "creative" aspects of the act of dying see Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976b), Chap. 3, "Mythologies of Death: An Introduction".
24 Mircea Eliade (1979), op. cit., p. 32.
25 Ibid., pp. 32f.
26 For more on religious symbolism see Mircea Eliade, "Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism," in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), passim.
27 Mircea Eliade (1979), op. cit., p. 38.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid. For various myths of the origin of death (Melanesian, Indonesian, Australian, Polynesian) see Mircea Eliade, From primitives to Zen: A Thematic sourcebook of the History of Religions (London: Collins, 1967), Chap 2, Section D "Myths of the Origin of Death". See Kunin's critique (vid. inf.) about Jung's influence upon Eliade's ideas of sexuality as act of ultimate reality for the primal religion.
30 Eliade (1979), op. cit., p. 38.
31 Ibid., p. 40.
32 Ibid., p. 41.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., pp. 41f.
35 See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religions (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1976c), Chap. 1.
36 Ibid., p. 99.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., Chap. 3.
39 Ibid., Chap. 4.
40 Ibid., Chaps. 5 and 7.
41 Ibid., Chap. 8.
42 Ibid., p. 397.
43 Ibid. See more about the ahistorical position of Eliade in Kunin's critique (vid. inf.).
44 See Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (Éditions Gallimard, 1963), Chap. 3 "Mythes et rites de renouvellement".
45 Eliade (1979), op. cit., p. 42.
46 Eliade (1979), op. cit., p. 12.
47 Mircea Eliade (1969b), op. cit., p. 9.
48 Ibid., p. 8.
49 Eliade (1959), op. cit., p. 13.
50 Ibid., p. 14.
51 Ibid., p. 71.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 116.
54 Ibid., p. 155.
55 Eliade (1969b), op. cit., p. 69.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., p. 70.
58 Rodney L. Taylor, "Mircea Eliade: The Self and the Journey," in Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective, edited by David Carrasco and Jane Marie Swanberg. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), p. 134.
59 Carl Olson, The Theology and Philosophy of Mircea Eliade: A Search for the Centre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), p. 38.
60 John Bowker, The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 308.
61 Eliade (1959), op. cit., p. 13.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Mircea. Eliade, "Cultural Fashions and the History of Religions," in The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 34.
65 David Cave, Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 27.
66 David Cave, op. cit., p. 75.
67 Ibid.
68 Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972b). The work was initially published in French under the title De Zalmoxis à Gengis-Khan: Études camparatives sur les religions et le folklore de la Dacie et de l'Europe Orientale (Paris: Payot, 1970).
69 See Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), in Chap. 28 "Symbols in Folklore, Religion, and Literature".
70 See Mircea Eliade (1972b), Chap. 7 "The Cult of the Mandragora in Romania".
71 Ibid., Chap. 6 "Romanian Shamanism?".
72 Mircea Eliade, "Marthe Bibesco and the Meeting of the Eastern and Western Literature," in Mircea Eliade: Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts, edited by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1986), p. 157.
73 Mircea Eliade, Autobiography: Volume I 1907-1937 Journey East, Journey West (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1981), p, 203.
74 Ibid., p, 204.
75 Ibid., p, 203.
76 Mircea Eliade, La nostalgie des origines: Méthodologie et histoire des religions (Éditions Gallimard, 1971), passim.
77 Mircea Eliade, Autobiography: Volume II 1937-1960 Exile's Odyssey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 8, in footnote 2.
78 See Ana Cartianu, Romanian Folk Tales (Bucharest: Minerva Publishing House, 1979), pp. 17-30.
79 Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 220.
80 Ibid., p. 223.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., p. 244.
83 Mircea Eliade (1988), op. cit., p. 9.
84 Mircea Eliade, "The dragon and the shaman," in Man and his salvation: Studies in the memory of S. G. F. Brandon, edited by Eric J. Sharpe and John R. Hinnells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 99.
85 Graham Cunningham, Religion and Magic: Approaches and Theories (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 37f.
86 Eliade (1959), op. cit., p. 10.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd., 1975), p. 217.
90 Ursula King, "Historical and Phenomenological Approaches," in Theory and Method in Religious Studies: Comparative Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Frank Whaling. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), p. 123.
91 Ibid., p. 124.
92 Ibid., p. 127.
93 Bryan Rennie, "The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade," in Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade, edited by Bryan Rennie. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 264.
94 Russell T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2003), 191.
95 Ibid., p. 192.
96 Ibid., p. 193.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid. p. 192.
101 Ibid. p. 195.
102 Ibid. p. 200.
103 Ibid. p. 202.
104 Ibid. p. 209.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid. p. 57.
108 Ibid.; see critical articles by Roger Corless, Russell T. McCutcheon, and Robert A. Segal.
109 Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. ix.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid., p. xi.
112 Ibid. See Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Cobin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), passim.
113 Vittorio Lanternari, "Sciences religieuses et mouvements religieux nouveaux dans l'Occident: Questions de méthode," in Current Progress in the Methodology of the Science of Religions, edited by Witold Tyloch. (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1984), p. 130.
114 See Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H., Long, eds. Myths and Symbols: Studies in the Honour of Mircea Eliade (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), as studies honouring Mircea Eliade. Eliade is also the editor in chief of the monumental work The Encyclopedia of Religions (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987).
115 Seth D. Kunin, Religion: The Modern Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 127.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Ibid., p. 128.
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid.
122 Ibid. p. 139.
123 Ibid.


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_____ La nostalgie des origines: Méthodologie et histoire des religions (Éditions Gallimard, 1971).
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_____ "Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism," in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).
_____ Miti sogni e misteri (Milano: Rusconi, 1976a).
_____ Mythes, rêves et mystères (Éditions Gallimard, 1957b).
_____ Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality (London: Collins, 1972a).
_____ Mythes, rêves et mystères (Éditions Gallimard, 1957b). Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976b).
_____ Patterns in Comparative Religions (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd., 1976c).
_____ "The dragon and the shaman," in Man and his salvation: Studies in the memory of S. G. F. Brandon, edited by Eric J. Sharpe and John R. Hinnells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973).
_____ The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969b).
_____ The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959).
_____ Zalmoxis the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972b).
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Copyright © 2005 and subsequent years by Octavian Sarbatoare - Email - Australia
This article is copyright-protected. The author grants the right to copy and distribute this file, provided it remains unmodified and original authorship and copyright is retained.

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article by Durac Livia(available in pdf format)
http://volgograd2007.goldenideashome.com/2%20Papers/Durac%20Livia%20p%202.pdf


4th International Conference on HUMAN BEING IN CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY
May 28-31 2007, Volgograd
Abstracts of the papers accepted for presentation during the Conference
Durac, Livia
(„Petre Andrei” University, Iasi, Romania)
Mircea Eliade: the hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon
“The only purpose of existence is to find a meaning for existence.”
(Mircea Eliade)
General Considerations
On February 28th, 1907 in the capital of Romania was born the man who
was going to become the worldwide-known scientist and writer whose
Renaissance-like personality has built the background of his becoming.
When we speak of Mircea Eliade we think of the historian of religions,
the Orientalist, the ethnologist, the sociologist, the folklorist, the essay,
short story, novel and memoirs author, the playwright Mircea Eliade, if
we are to stop at enumerating the defining dimensions of his monumental
activity. He became an outstanding specialist in the history of religions in
1925-1926, an obviously early stage of his life for such a bold enterprise;
topics such as orthodoxy, Taoism, Buddhism, Orphism, Tantrism have
been a concern even since before the “Indian experience” that
systematized and deepened his knowledge. For this great Romanian
thinker, the history of religions is a complete discipline, which he places
in the foreground of cultural life; linguistics, literature, etymology,
ethnology, the philosophy of history, esthetics, anthropology, sociology,
psychology, all combine in harmony, synchronically, to complete the
field of the history of religions.
From his concerns with the field of the history of religions could not miss
the “working” coordinates necessary to the specialist in the mentioned
field. Therefore, the historian of religions must recompose, first of all, the
history of religious forms, and only afterwards develop the social,
political and cultural context of each of these forms. Without exaggerated
claims, we can state that the historian of religions is, from certain points
of view, an anticipator in the field, since he observes the results of the
research of Orientalists and ethnographers, as the great Asian religions or
the religions of people without a writing system represent important
sources for the culture of humanity. Religious phenomenology must be
placed outside the sphere of the specialist’s concerns with the history of
religions, and we refer to the phenomenology of the sacred, and
respectively with enlarging the research sphere from the known important
religions to archaic religions.
Another significant specific element that characterizes a historian of
religions is the fact that he has to place the religious phenomenon within
the spiritual field, identifying that “something” that the religious act
denotes as trans-historic. This clearly refers to hermeneutic research that
consists, on the one hand, in the understanding of the message by the
religious person, a witness to the hierophantic experience, and on the
other hand in the message that the religious person transmits to modern
world. Explaining the encounters of man with the sacred, starting from
pre-history until present – as a way of solving the requirements promoted
by contemporary history – the cultural and spiritual invigoration of the
peoples of Australia, Africa and Asia, all are included in the subject field
of the history of religions.
The Hermeneutic Perspective of the Renewal of the Religious Phenomenon
In a work published in Paris in 1971, Mircea Eliade tells us that the
religious phenomenon should use complete hermeneutics. He considers
necessary for the activity of the historian of religions to be based on both
the phenomenological and the hermeneutical approach: “Concerned with,
and often overwhelmed by collecting, publishing and analyzing religious
data, a work without any doubt both urgent an indispensable, scientists
have often forgotten to study their meaning. But this data is the
expression of varied religious experiences; in a final analysis, they
represent positions and situations assumed by man during his history.
Whether he likes it or not, the historian of religions has not completed his
work after having retraced the history of a religious form or after having
determined its sociological, economical or political context. Apart from
all these, he must understand his own meaning – in other words – identify
and clarify the situations and positions that made possible his appearance
or triumph in a specific moment of his history”.i The fact that the author
adopts such explicit positions places him in favor of a unitary approach,
and within this frame, phenomenology fulfills one of the most important
functions.
The author believes in the necessity of renewing the religious
phenomenon from a hermeneutical perspective; although he does not
minimize any of the scientific fields accessory to religion, acknowledging
the applicability of each of them, Eliade states however that, irrespective
of the nature of the information provided by one or another of these fields,
it cannot account for the religious phenomenon as a whole. Therefore, a
hermeneutic of the religious phenomenon would be characterized mainly
by the fact that, by studying the variety of religious aspects, the discipline
of religions must identify the universal religious configurations whose
action frame is represented by unique facts. It is necessary to mention that
Eliade’s attempt to present the morphology of the sacred takes place
beyond the religious phenomenon. Considering the efforts to grasp and
understand meanings, Mircea Eliade’s exegesis intensifies, including the
forms characterized by permanence and constancy, brought “to light”
through myths and symbols. Eliade’s hermeneutics acquires a creative
dimension as it allows speaking of a structure of the forms of religious
expression; this poses the problem of presenting the stages in the
individual’s trans-conscience, which “exhales” forms of religious
expression. Actually, we can speak of a tremendous interest of the author
in seeing and knowing homo religiosus. Starting with the Paleolithic until
nowadays, symbols have offered to the religious person – who has lived
the sacred dimension of his existence during all this time – an openness
towards the trans-historical world, connecting him with the transcendent
dimension. Moreover, Eliade considers that myth is a universal
phenomenon on which reality is structured, detailing – at the same time –
the existence of supernatural creatures.
Eliade faces the individual, as a subject of the religious experience, with
the object of this experience, a context in which he speaks of hierophany
or the manifestation of the sacred. The place of encounter of the religious
person with the sacred is directly determined (conditioned) by the
behavior of the religious persons themselves.
Julien Ries noted that all hierophany is based on three important
elements: the natural object, placed (and mentioned) in its normal
context; the invisible reality that forms the presented contents; the
mediator, which is nothing else but the object consecrated through a new
dimension, the sacred.ii
“1) The sacred is qualitatively different from the profane, however it can
appear anytime anyhow in the profane world, with the power to transform
any cosmic object into a paradox through hierophany (meaning that the
object stops being itself as a cosmic object, but still remains apparently
unchanged);
2) This dialectics of the sacred is valid for all religions, not only for the
so-called “primitive forms”. This dialectics is verified both in the
“worship” of stones and trees and in the scientific view on Indian
metamorphoses or in the supreme mystery of incarnation;
3) Purely elementary hierophanies are impossible to find (...), they are
combined with religious forms considered, from the evolutionary
perspective, superior (Supreme Beings, moral laws, mythologies, etc.);
4) We can find everywhere, even outside these superior religious forms, a
system in which elementary hierophanies are ordered.”iii
Douglas Allen believes that Mircea Eliade’s methodology is
characterized by two essential ideas: “the dialectics of the sacred and the
profane and the dominant character of symbolism or of symbolic
structures.”iv
In his paper Introduction to the phenomenon of religion, the Spanish
author J. Martin Velasco, referring to what is called interpretation, from
the point of view of the analysis of the religious phenomenon, considers
that a structure cannot be conceived if it is not evaluated, interpreted – and
especially – understood from the inside. Therefore, phenomenological
research has, implicitly, a hermeneutic component or dimension.
Together with renown representatives such as J. Wach and G. Van der
Leeuw, Eliade will contribute to enriching this approach: considering
himself both a historian and a phenomenology researcher of religions, we
can speak of a combination of the two perspectives, which defines the
originality of his contribution to a fascinating field such as that of
religions.
The Primordial Dimension of the Sacred in the Becoming of the
Human Being
The approach of religious phenomenology is, in its essence, a meditation
as well as a reference to the idea of the time factor. We will find this
meditation on time specific to Eliade in most of the work of the
Romanian scientist, as the holistic reach o the meanings of the religious
depends on it. Indeed, we can say that the problem of time dominates
Eliade’s creations.
As we will demonstrate later, human objects and actions can represent
hierophanies (ontophanies); what we wish to mention here is that not only
they can acquire such an attribute, but also even space and time receive
the valences of the sacred. For the man in archaic cultures, space is not
homogenous, as it is the case for the space in which the modern scientific
man lives, meaning that certain areas of this space differ from one another
from a qualitative point of view. Sacred spaces exist and, therefore, there
also exist significant non-sacred amorphous spaces, lacking structure and
consistency. Moreover, this lack of spatial homogeneity determines the
religious person to experience an opposition between the sacred, unique,
real space, with a significant existence, and the completing amorphous
ambient around it: “We will see to what extent the discovery, that is, the
revelation of the sacred space has existential value for the religious
person: nothing can start without a prior orientation, and any orientation
implies setting a fixed point. This is why the religious persons strive to set
themselves at «the Center of the world».”v The condition for us to be able
to live in a world must be created, “and no world can be born in the
«chaos» of homogeneity and relativity of the profane space. Discovering
or designing a fixed point - «the Center» - means Creating the World.”vi
The phenomenological premise according to which the sacred is
irreducible characterizes the work of Mircea Eliade, for whom the sacred
imposes itself both as an explanatory principle of religion and as an
absolute concept of a unique ontology, which we can also find in the
religious act, irrespective of its nature: “But it is maybe too late to look for
another word, and «religion» can still be a useful term, with the condition
that we always remember that it does not necessarily imply the belief in a
God or in spirits, but it refers to the experience of the sacred and is
therefore related to the ideas of being, sense and truth.”vii Speaking in
terms of the position of the sacred as an ontological basis, Eliade explains:
“Through the exception of the sacred, the human spirit has apprehended
the difference between what proves to be real, strong, rich and significant,
and what does not have these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous
flow of things, their random and meaningless appearances and
disappearances.”viii
All this leads to the idea that, if in the becoming of the human being, there
is something with a primordial character, that “something” is, without a
doubt, the appearance of the sacred; therefore, the sacred proves to be an
immense force and its act, its manifestation, is included in the term
hierophany. Actually, the evolution of the history of religions – from the
most rudimentary to the most advanced ones – is made up of a large sum
of hierophanies, that is, of manifestations of the sacred reality.
In this entire frame, what would be the role of phenomenology? Julien
Ries offers a possible explanation according to which this role is played in
understanding the religious structures and phenomena, in interpreting the
meaning of each hierophany, as well as in extracting the revealed
meaning and the religious sense.ix Anything that existed or still exists can
be a receiver of the sacred: “After all, we do not know if there is anything
– object, gesture, physiological function or game, etc. – that has never
been transformed into hierophany, somewhere, during the history of
mankind.”x
In the conception of Eliade, religious imaginary is wide open for any
object of the cosmos or of human life, with the necessary and only
condition that, during its evolution, it had been transformed into
hierophany.
The religious person can become, systematically, contemporary with the
gods, through myths and rituals; this occurs if the person is able to update
the primordial Time when the divine works took place. We must
remember that this rhythmical return to the sacred Time of origins does
not represent a refuse of the concrete world, as it is neither an escape from
dreams and imagination but, on the contrary, it is what Mircea Eliade
pointed out as an essential characteristic of man in primitive and archaic
societies, using the phrase ontological obsession.
If we start from the basic idea that everything comes down to an
archetypal model, which appears in different avatars, the natural
consequence is to compare these manifestations of the sacred. Hence we
witness the creation of a structure based on this exact comparison as well
as on the common elements with a repetitive character. For Eliade,
structure is not the final consequence in the analysis of the religious fact;
it is formed based on this comparison and is prior to the meaning that
results from it. The meaning of hierophanies in the world has a transhistorical
character; that is why, for the Romanian scientist, the primary
role is played by meaning, which transcends time and history seen as an
existential level of man, as well as a structure. Therefore, we can say that
everything starts from historic facts, which are manifestations with a
much deeper significance than a simple common apparition. We must
also mention that history does not contradict the idea of reversibility, as
the comparative approach sends us to very different moments from a
chronological perspective. If we were to analyze the “consequences” of
such a fact, we could state that the methodological dimension is actually
manifested in a scenario of a real spiritual adventure. The ability to
decipher a hierophany is beyond history, acquiring – in the case of Mircea
Eliade – connotations that surpass habitual research. We should
remember that the problematic of time is immanently related to the
system of deciphering the meaning of all religious phenomena. In other
words, meaning is – as the author himself explains – beyond time, and not
in the actual historical time. In what concerns the historian of religions,
this is just a starting point, and not a final result.
The aspiration of integration in the origin time is perfectly comparable to
the aspiration of recovering a strong, ideal and ingenuous world, the
world of illo tempore. Therefore, religious imagination is inspired from
the thirst of being, from the ontological dominant of the archaic man,
which determines the latter to sanctify religiously the entire universe,
modeling its structure and symbolic consistency in a strict relation with
the personal ontological need and to a re-dimensioning of space and time.
But man does not ontologically sanctify only the universe, but equally
himself, or some of his fellows.
Myth, a Connection between Present and Primordial Time
A good knowledge of myths and hence an exemplary accomplishment of
rituals places the religious person at the beginning of time. The function
of myth is of enthronement, as it makes a connection between the present
and the primordial time, showing how present behavior should reanimate
the primordial event. As Julien Ries pertinently states, Mircea Eliade “has
truly renewed the study of myth”xi.
Trying to define myth, Eliade says: “From my point of view, the
definition that seems the least imperfect, since it is the broadest, is the
following: myth tells a sacred story; it speaks about an event that took
place in the primordial time, a fabulous time of the «beginning». In other
words, myth tells about how, thanks to the actions of supernatural beings,
a reality was born, either a complete reality, the Cosmos, or mere
fragments: an island, a vegetal species, a human behavior, an institution.
Therefore, it is always the story of a «birth»: we are told how something
was produced, how it started to exist. Myth only tells about what has been
completed. The characters of myths are supernatural beings. They are
known especially because of what they did in the prestigious time of the
«beginning». Consequently, myths present their creative activity and the
sacred (not only «supernatural») character of their work. Actually, myths
describe the various and sometimes dramatic bursts of the sacred (or
supernatural) into the world. This very burst of the sacred is in fact the
basis of the world and makes it what it looks like today. What is more:
precisely as a result of the interventions of supernatural beings, man is
what he is today, a mortal sexed and cultural being.”xii
The universe is compared to an aging organism that loses its vitality and
becomes senile; this is the moment that demands destruction in order to
be able to be born again as a young vigorous world. In this context we can
point out the idea of a cyclic time previously mentioned by Eliade and
related to other aspects that characterize archaic thought.
A significant part is played in this context by the ritual of initiation, which
consists in the experience of death (be it that of the shaman or of the
individual arrived at puberty, an experience followed by that of the rebirth
at a new higher ontological level. For boys (and sometimes even for
girls), puberty rituals presuppose completing an initiating period; this
implies assuming death and requires the presence of signs that indicate
the fact that they are dead: they live inside a forest, which is by definition
a land of death and darkness, they paint their bodies using colors specific
to corpses, or they are not allowed to speak or use their hands to eat, and
in winter time they are willingly forgotten by their friends and families.
Death is followed by rebirth at a new higher level. What is the role of this
complex process, and especially why must the individual tend towards
completing the initiation process, towards its end? Because, during
initiation, the beginner has the chance to discover myths, respectively the
sacred history of the world and of the community he lives in, of the origin
of institutions and behaviors, discovers names of gods, and sometimes his
own secret name.
An important result of the efforts made by the Romanian scientist in the
direction of “perfecting” the field of the history of religions is to be found
at the highest point of his career, between 1976-1983, when the author
published in Paris, in three volumes, the work entitled Histoire des
croyances et des idées religieuses (The History of Religious Beliefs and
Ideas). It represents a synthesis of the main actions of the religious person,
starting from pre-history until present, and its incontestable originality
resides precisely in its approach and in the perspectives it offers.
Dedicated to the analysis of what represents the fundamental unit of
religious phenomena, Mircea Eliade draws the reader’s attention to the
infinite indivisibility of the expressions included in them. The famous
historian of religion suggests a new mentality that explains the message
based on the sacred and perceived through symbols and myths, and
following this “path” he gets to the understanding of the religious person.
Mircea Eliade is the only historian of religions of his predecessors who
wrote a history of religious ideas and beliefs. What differentiates him
from the rest is that he makes a distinction between a history analysis
lacking a generalizing perspective and a history of religious ideas,
although we should remember that he was once criticized for being an
anti-historian. The Romanian scientist, unlike his predecessors in the
field, used a more detailed approach of history and therefore of time, far
from satisfied with their being placed in parentheses and considering that
this way he has fulfilled his complex mission. Eliade considers that it is
not at all normal for the time when religious phenomena appeared to be
ignored; on the contrary, the identification of the structures and meanings
specific to religion requires them to be correctly placed in time and space.
Adrian Marino’s work Hermeneutica lui Mircea Eliade (The
Hermeneutics of Mircea Eliade) includes a very detailed analysis of
Mircea Eliade’s relation to history. A. Marino stresses the hermeneutic
character of Eliade’s approach, placing him on the orbit of the bestknown
hermeneutic scientists.
***
As it happens with any representative name in a field, Eliade could not
have stayed in the readers’ “reserve”. They have always existed and
definitely will always exist; in the end nobody denies their value and
usefulness. All in all, with criticisms and appreciations, Mircea Eliade’s
work is one of reference for the science of religions, and his contribution
to investigating the religious imaginary is – without a doubt – remarkable.
We mention only Gilbert Durand, who, discussing the exceptional
personality of the Romanian scientist, compared him to Henry Corbin:
“The difficulty of historicist explanations of the sacred determined in the
first years of our century an entire flow of «phenomenological» analyses
of the sacred (that is, sticking to «the thing itself », to the object specific to
homo religiosus). To this trend belong two of the main restorers of the
role of imagery in religious apparitions / «hierophanies» in human
thought: the Romanian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) and the French Henry
Corbin (1903-1978).xiii







BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Allen, Douglas, L’analise phénoménologique de l’experience religieuse in Les
Cahiers de l’Herne - Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.
2. Durand, Gilbert, Aventurile imaginii. Imaginatia simbolica. Imaginarul,
Nemira Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999.
3. Eliade, Mircea, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1992.
4. Eliade, Mircea, Nostalgia originilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest,
1994.
5. Eliade, Mircea, Le sacré et le profan, Gallimard, 1996.
6. Eliade, Mircea, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1992.
7. Eliade, Mircea, Aspecte ale mitului, Univers Publishing House, Bucharest,
1978.
8. Ries, Julien, Sacrul în istoria religioasa a omenirii, Polirom Publishing House,
Iasi, 2000.
9. Ries, Julien, Histoire de religions, phénoménologie et herméneutique, in Les
Cahiers de l’Herne Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.

ENDNOTES

i Mircea Eliade, Nostalgia originilor, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest,
1994 p.14
ii Julien Ries, Histoire de religions, phénoménologie et herméneutique, in Les
Cahiers de l’Herne
Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978.
iii Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1992, p.46.
iv Douglas Allen, L’analise phénoménologique de l’experience religieuse in Les
Cahiers de l’Herne - Mircea Eliade, Editions de l’Herne, Paris, 1978, p.128
v Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profan, Ed.Gallimard, 1996, p.31.
vi Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.63.
vii Mircea Eliade, Tratat de istorie a religiilor, Humanitas Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1992, p.5.
viii Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.6.
ix Julien Ries, quoted work
x Mircea Eliade, quoted work, p.25
xi Julien Ries, Sacrul în istoria religioasa a omenirii, Polirom Publishing House,
Iasi, 2000, p.65
xiiMircea Eliade, Aspecte ale mitului, Univers Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978,
p.5-6
xiii Gilbert Durand, Aventurile imaginii. Imaginatia simbolica. Imaginarul,
Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999, p.172

=================================================================

Shamanism

http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/dept/d10/asb/anthro2003/glues/shamans/shamanism.html

Shamanism - Extracted from Richard Shand
A Master of Ecstasy
"The word shaman comes to English from the Tungus language via Russian. Among the Tungus of Siberia it is both a noun and a verb. While the Tungus have no word for shamanism, it has come into usage by anthropologists, historians of religion and others in contemporary society to designate the experience and the practices of the shaman. Its usage has grown to include similar experiences and practices in cultures outside of the original Ural-Altaic cultures from which the term shaman originated. Thus shamanism is not the name of a religion or group of religions."
"Shamanism is classified by anthropologists as an archaic magico-religious phenomenon in which the shaman is the great master of ecstasy. Shamanism itself, was defined by the late Mircea Eliade as a technique of ecstasy. A shaman may exhibit a particular magical specialty (such as control over fire, wind or magical flight). When a specialization is present the most common is as a healer. The distinguishing characteristic of shamanism is its focus on an ecstatic trance state in which the soul of the shaman is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky (heavens) or descend into the earth (underworld). The shaman makes use of spirit helpers, which he or she communicates with, all the while retaining control over his or her own consciousness. (Examples of possession occur, but are the exception, rather than the rule.) It is also important to note that while most shamans in traditional societies are men, either women or men may and have become shamans." - Dean Edwards, "Shamanism-General Overview" (FAQ)
"These myths refer to a time when communication between heaven and earth was possible; in consequence of a certain event or a ritual fault, the communication was broken off, but heroes and medicine men are nevertheless able to reestablish it." - Mircea Elliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
"By entering an ecstatic state, induced by ritual dancing and the invocation of spirits, the shaman is believed able to return to that time, visiting heaven and hell to talk with gods, spirits of the dead, and animals." - Cosmic Duality
"Shamans reach the state that gives them access to the supernatural world in a variety of ways. A very common way is by ingesting mind-altering drugs of various types." - James Davila, "Enoch as a Divine Mediator"
"It is the Siberian and Latin American shamans who have most often employed psychedelics as booster rockets to launch their cosmic travels. In Siberia the preferred substance has been the mushroom known as Amanita muscaria or agaric. This is perhaps the much-praised soma of early Indian religion as well as one of the drugs referred to in European legends." - Roger N.Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism
"Another common method is to listen to the protracted pounding of a drum. Less direct methods are also widely practiced. These include various forms of isolation and self-denial, such as fasting, solitary confinement, celibacy, dietary and purity restrictions, and protracted prayer. Igjugarjuk, a Caribou Inuit shaman, claims to have been isolated by his mentor in a small snow hut where he fasted and meditated in the cold, drinking only a little water twice, for thirty days. After his initiatory vision (see below) he continued a rigorous regime involving a special diet and celibacy. Leonard Crow Dog, a Native American Sioux shaman, describes in detail the process of his first vision quest. He participated in a sweat lodge ceremony for spiritual cleansing, then was taken to a fasting place of his family's, where he was wrapped naked in a blanket and left in a hole to fast and pray alone for two days (an adult shaman will fast four or more days). Wallace Black Elk also frequently describes both the sweat lodge ('stone-people-lodge') ceremony and the vision quest. Ascetic practices by Japanese shamans are especially prevalent among those who actively seek shamanhood rather than being called by a deity. These practices include fasting and dietary restrictions of various kinds, seclusion in a dark place, walking pilgrimages between sacred places, and rigorous regimes of immersion and bathing in ice-cold water. These disciplines, especially the endurance of cold, eventually fill the shaman with heat and spiritual might." - James Davila, "Enoch as a Divine Mediator"
"Let him who would join himself to the prince of Torah wash his garments and his clothes and let him immerse (in) a strict immersion as a safeguard in case of pollution. And let him dwell for twelve days in a room or in an upper chamber. Let him not go out or come in, and he must neither eat nor drink. But from evening to evening see that he eats his bread, clean bread of his own hands, and he drinks pure water, and that he does not taste any kind of vegetable. And let him insert this midrash of the prince of Torah into the prayer three times in every single day; it is after the prayer that he should pray it from its beginning to its end. And afterward, let him sit and recite during the twelve days, the days of his fasting, from morning until evening, and let him not be silent. And in every hour that he finishes it let him stand on his feet and adjure by the servants (and?) by their king, twelve times by every single prince. Afterward let him adjure every single one of them by the seal." - Sar Torah, paras. 299-300
The shaman is said to 'make a journey,' during which he is spoken to by the spirits, who give him curing instructions and make their wishes known for certain kinds of propitiatory sacrifices; they may also appear to him in the form of visions or apparitions. Motifs of death and rebirth, often involving bodily dismemberment and reassimilation, are common in shamanism..." - McKenna and McKenna, The Invisible Landscape
"...It appears that shamans are able to draw on a range of psychologically skillful diagnostic and therapeutic techniques accumulated by their predecessors over centuries. Some of these techniques clearly foreshadow ones widely used today and thereby confirm the reputation of shamans as humankind's first psychotherapists." - Roger N.Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism
"We know today that the medicine man derives his power from a circular feedback involving his personal myth and the hopes and expectations of those who share it with him. The ensuing 'mutual exaltation' was studied by McDougal and by Gustave LeBon many years ago. It is still regarded as one of the key factors in the psychology of masses. It has subsequently been reinterpreted in Freudian terms as the individual's willing surrender to an all-powerful father figure capable of meeting the childish dependency needs still lingering in members of the group." - Ehrewald, The ESP Experience
"Shamanism often exists alongside and even in cooperation with the religious or healing practices of the community....Knowledge of other realms of being and consciousness and the cosmology of those regions is the basis of the shamanic perspective and power. With this knowledge, the shaman is able to serve as a bridge between the mundane and the higher and lower states. The shaman lives at the edge of reality as most people would recognize it and most commonly at the edge of society itself." - Dean Edwards, "Shamanism-General Overview" (FAQ)
Initiation Rituals
"A common experience of the call to shamanism is a psychic or spiritual crisis, which often accompanies a physical or even a medical crisis, and is cured by the shaman him or herself....The shaman is often marked by eccentric behavior such as periods of melancholy, solitude, visions, singing in his or her sleep, etc. The inability of the traditional remedies to cure the condition of the shamanic candidate and the eventual self cure by the new shaman is a significant episode in development of the shaman. The underlying significant aspect of this experience, when it is present, is the ability of the shaman to manage and resolve periods of distress." - Dean Edwards, "Shamanism-General Overview" (FAQ)
"Frequently a candidate will gain shamanic powers during a visionary experience in which he or she undergoes some form of death or personal destruction and disintegration at the hands of divine beings, followed by a corresponding resurrection or reintegration that purges and gives a qualitatively different life to the initiate. For example, the Siberian (Tagvi Samoyed) Sereptie, in his long and arduous initiatory vision (on which see below), was at one point reduced to a skeleton and then was 'forged' with a hammer and anvil. Autdaruta, an Inuit initiate, had a vision in which he was eaten by a bear and then was vomited up, having gained power over the spirits." - James R. Davila, "Hekhalot Literature and Mysticism"
"I saw that I was painted red all over, and my joints were painted black, with white stripes between the joints. My bay had lightning stripes all over him and his mane was cloud. And when I breathed, my breath was lightning." - Nick Black Elk, in the narrative of his Great Vision
"...The important moments of a shamanic initiation are these five; first, torture and violent dismemberment of the body; second, scraping away of the flesh until the body is reduced to a skeleton; third, substitution of viscera and reveal of the blood; fourth, a period spent in Hell, during which the future shaman is taught by the souls of dead shamans and by 'demons'; fifth, an ascent to Heaven to obtain consecration from the God of Heaven" - Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation
"They are cut up by demons or by their ancestral spirits; their bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped off, the body fluids thrown away, and their eyes torn from their sockets...His bones are then covered with new flesh and in some cases he is also given new blood." - Fabrega and Silver in Behavioral Science 15
"The ecstatic experience of the shaman goes beyond a feeling or perception of the sacred, the demonic or of natural spirits. It involves them shaman directly and actively in transcendent realities or lower realms of being.""The shaman is not recognized as legitimate without having undergone two types of training:1) Ecstatic (dreams, trances, etc.)2) Traditional ('shamanic techniques, names and functions of spirits,mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret language, etc.)The two-fold course of instruction, given by the spirits and the old master shamans is equivalent to an initiation.' [Mircea Eliade, The Encyclopedia of Religion, v. 13 , p. 202; Mcmillian, N.Y., 1987.] It is also possible for the entire process to take place in the dream state or in ecstatic experience." - Dean Edwards, "Shamanism-General Overview" (FAQ)
"The novice's task of learning to see the spirits involves two stages. The first is simply to catch an initial glimpse of them. The second is to deepen and stabilize this glimpse into a permanent visionary capacity in which the spirits can be summoned and seen at will." - Roger N. Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism
"All this long and tiring ceremony has as its object transforming the apprentice magician's initial and momentary and ecstatic experience...into a permanent condition - that in which it is possible to see the spirits." - Mircea Elliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
"The next thing an old shaman has to do for his pupil is to procure him anak ua by which is meant his 'angakoq', i.e., the altogether special and particular element which makes this man an angakoq (shaman). It is also called his quamenEg his 'lightning' or 'enlightenment', for anak ua consists of a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within the brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire, which enables him to see in the dark both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others; thus they look into the future and into the secrets of others."The first time a young shaman experiences this light...it is as if the house in which he is suddenly rises; he sees far ahead of him, through mountains, exactly as if the earth were on a great plain, and his eyes could reach to the end of the earth. Nothing is hidden from him any longer; not only can he see things far, far away, but he can also discover souls, stolen souls, which are either kept concealed in far, strange lands or have been taken up or down to the Land of the dead." - K. Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos
A Second Real World
"The pre-eminently shamanic technique is the passage from one cosmic region to another - from earth to the sky or from earth to the underworld. The shaman knows the mystery of the breakthrough in plane. This communication among the cosmic zones is made possible by the very structure of the universe." - Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
"The main feature of the shamans' universe is...the cosmic center, a bond or axis connecting earth, heaven and hell. It is often pictured as a tree or a pole holding up the sky. In a trance state, a shaman can travel disembodied from one region to another, climbing the tree into the heavens or following its downward extension. By doing so he can meet and consult the gods. There is always a numerical factor. He climbs through a fixed number of celestial stages, or descends through a fixed number of infernal ones. His key number may be expressed in his costume - for example, in a set of bells which he attaches to it. The key number varies from shaman to shaman and from tribe to tribe." - Geoffrey Ashe, The Ancient Wisdom
"He commands the techniques of ecstasy - that is, because his soul can safely abandon his body and roam at vast distances, can penetrate the underworld and rise to the sky. Through his own ecstatic experience he knows the roads of the extraterrestrial regions. He can go below and above because he has already been there. The danger of losing his way in these forbidden regions is still great; but sanctified by his initiation and furnished with his guardian spirit, a shaman is the only human being able to challenge the danger and venture into a mystical geography." - Mircea Elliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
"In the ages of the rude beginnings of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of metaphysics. Without dream, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dream; likewise, the idea of a soul's apparitional body: whence, all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods." - Neitzsche, Human, All-Too-Human
"We must recognize ourselves as beings of four dimensions. Do we not in sleep live in a fantastic fairy kingdom where everything is capable of transformation, where there is no stability belonging to the physical world, where one man can become another or two men at the same time, where the most improbable things look simple and natural, where events often occur in inverse order, from end to beginning, where we see the symbolical images of ideas and moods, where we talk with the dead, fly in the air, pass through walls, are drowned or burnt, die and remain alive?" - P. D. Ouspensky
Perception in Trance States
The ceremonies of the Cult of the Horned god were first found in the Paleolithic cave paintings of Ariege which depicted a dancing figure in the skin of a horned animal.
Cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic (20-30,000 years ago) depicts zig zags and dots combined with realistic images of animals against grid forms. Similar abstract geometric are also found in the ritual art of the South African bushman where the trance dance of the shaman is a central unifying force of the community. In the dance the shaman perceives his body as stretching and becoming elongated. His spirit soars out of the top of his head and is transformed into an animal. In the century old depictions of the trance dance, the bushman shaman absorb the energy of a dying eland and take on many of the magic animal's physical characteristics. He perceives his transformed state as similar to being under water; he has difficulty breathing and feels weightless. When he returns from his spirit journey he is able to perform healing and even his sweat supposedly posses curative powers. A few days later the shaman would be able to reflect upon his experience and paint it in natural rock shelters found in the surrounding cliffs. There was no esoteric stream of wisdom and everyone in the village would share in knowledge of the spirit world.
Psychologists differentiate two stages in trance states induced by drugs, fasting and/or sensory deprivation.1.) Antopic forms - abstract geometric forms such as grids, dots and spirals2.) Realistic images from memory combined in surreal ways against a geometric background.The Paleolithic paintings depicts similar hallucinatory images to the modern bushman's but differ in one respect; they were not done out in the open but in the deep, dark recesses of caves. Was the sensory deprivation of being immersed in the dark a means of inducing a trance state in the Cro-Magnon shaman? - "Images of Another World" An episode of Ancient Mysteries broadcast by the A&E Network
"Among the Eskimo shaman's clairvoyance is the result of qaumenaq, which means 'lightning' or 'illumination'. It is a mysterious light which the shaman suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within the brain, enabling him to see in the dark, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others. With the experience of the light goes a feeling of ascension, distant vision, clairvoyance, the perception of invisible entities and foreknowledge of the future. There is an interesting parallel, despite differences, in the initiation of Australian medicine-men, who go through a ritual death, and are filled with solidified light in the form of rock-crystals; on returning to life they have similar powers of clairvoyance and extra-sensory perception." - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions
Hypnogogic images"Hypnogogic images are the germinal stuff of dreams, and they usually begin with flashes of light. Often, an illuminated circle, lozenge, or other generally round form appears to come nearer and nearer, swelling to gigantic size. This particular image is known as the Isakower phenomenon, named after an Austrian psychoanalyst who first identified it. Isakower claimed the image was rooted in the memory of the mother's breast as it approached the infant's mouth.""Hypnagogic images can be interpreted in many different ways. Literally and figuratively, it's all in the eye of the beholder. The drowsy person in the hypnagogic state is just as open to suggestions as subjects in the hypnotized state.""When people start floating n the hypnagogic state, the amplitude and frequency of brainwaves decrease. The alpha rhythms of wakefulness are progressively replaced by slower theta activity. This translates to a loss of volitional control, a sense of paralysis. As the person descends further into sleep itself, the outside physical world retreats to the fringe of consciousness and the new reality becomes the internal dream world."
The final stage of hypnagogic images is, "polyopia, the multiplication of the image, usually seen in one eye....These specks of light...are produced by electrical activity in the visual system and brain. One can almost imagine the specks representing electric sparks flying along the neural pathways of the brain." They may look like hundred of stars "but they can also take the form of spots, circles, swirls, grids, checkerboards, or other figures composed of curves or lines. They are easy to see in the dark, but, in the light, they are on the borderline of perception.""Even when the hypnagogic forms are not consciously noticed, they can still register as subliminal stimuli and influence subsequent image formation and fantasy."
- Ronald K.Siegel, Fire in the Brain

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Mircia Eliade's Biography
http://www.gianfrancobertagni.it/materiali/mirceaeliade/biography.htm



web Resources:-
article in Look Smart Find Articles
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4044/is_200207/ai_n9140511
Journal for the Study of religions and Ideologies (article)
http://www.jsri.ro/old/html%20version/index/no_10/veresskaroly-articol.htm
abstract of journal article (Doshisha American Studies) translation
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110000198768/en/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=4&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Deliade%2527s%2Bhermeneutics%26hl%3Den

west minister college web
http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/TimMurph.htm
Mircea Eliade: the hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon ...
http://volgograd2007.goldenideashome.com/2%20Papers/Durac%20Livia%20p%202.pdf


Experience and hermeneutics in the histo- ry of religions
www.jsri.ro/new/?download=3a_%20cordoneanu_16.pdf

Mircea Eliade
http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Eliade.html
http://www.friesian.com/eliade.htm
Encarta Article
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761582232/Eliade_Mircea.html

Terms used in Mircea Eliade'sThe Sacred and the Profane,The Nature of Religion
http://www.friesian.com/vocab.htm
article in wikipedia-important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade

critical realism

wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_realism

Critical realism
In the philosophy of perception, critical realism is the theory that some of our sense-data (for example, those of primary qualities) can and do accurately represent external objects, properties, and events, while other of our sense-data (for example, those of secondary qualities and perceptual illusions) do not accurately represent any external objects, properties, and events. In short, critical realism refers to any position that maintains that there exists an objectively knowable, mind-independent reality, whilst acknowledging the roles of perception and cognition.
Critical realism refers to several schools of thought. These include the American critical realists (Roy Wood Sellars, George Santayana, and Arthur Lovejoy) and a broader movement including Bertrand Russell and C.D. Broad. In Canada, the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan developed a comprehensive critical realist philosophy. More recently it refers to the community associated primarily with the work of Roy Bhaskar. It is also the name used by a number in the science-religion interface community.

Locke and Descartes

According to

Locke and Descartes, some sense-data, namely the sense-data of secondary qualities, do not represent anything in the external world, even if they are caused by external qualities (primary qualities). Thus it is natural to adopt a theory of critical realism.
By its talk of sense-data and representation, this theory depends on or presupposes the truth of representationalism. If critical realism is correct, then representationalism would have to be a correct theory of perception.

American critical realism
The American critical realist movement was a response both to

direct realism (especially in its recent incarnation as new realism), as well as to idealism and pragmatism. In very broad terms, American critical realism was a form of representative realism, in which there are objects that stand as mediators between independent real objects and perceivers.
One innovation was that these mediators aren't ideas (British empiricism), but properties, essences, or "character complexes."

British realism

Similar developments occurred in Britain. Major figures included

Samuel Alexander, John Cook Wilson, H. A. Prichard, H. H. Price, and C.D. Broad.

Contemporary critical realism

General philosophy
Critical realism is presently most commonly associated with the work of

Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar developed a general philosophy of science that he described as transcendental realism, and a special philosophy of the human sciences that he called critical naturalism. The two terms were elided by other authors to form the umbrella term critical realism.
Transcendental realism attempts to establish that in order for scientific investigation to take place, the object of that investigation must have real, manipulable, internal mechanisms that can be actualised to produce particular outcomes. This is what we do when we conduct experiments. This stands in contrast to empiricist scientists' claim that all scientists can do is observe the relationship between cause and effect. Whilst empiricism, and positivism more generally, locate causal relationships at the level of events, Critical Realism locates them at the level of the generative mechanism, arguing that causal relationships are irreducible to empirical constant conjuntions of David Hume's doctrine; in other words, a constant conjuntive relationship between events is neither sufficient nor even necessary to establish a causal relationship.
The implication of this is that science should be understood as an ongoing process in which scientists improve the concepts they use to understand the mechanisms that they study. It should not, in contrast to the claim of empiricists, be about the identification of a coincidence between a postulated independent variable and dependent variable. Positivism/falsification are also rejected due to the observation that it is highly plausible that a mechanism will exist but either a) go unactivated, b) be activated, but not perceived, or c) be activated, but counteracted by other mechanisms, which results in it having unpredictable effects. Thus, non-realisation of a posited mechanism can not (in contrast to the claim of positivists) be taken to signify its non-existence.
Critical naturalism argues that the transcendental realist model of science is equally applicable to both the physical and the human worlds. However, when we study the human world we are studying something fundamentally different from the physical world and must therefore adapt our strategy to studying it. Critical naturalism therefore prescribes social scientific method which seeks to identify the mechanisms producing social events, but with a recognition that these are in a much greater state of flux than they are in the physical world (as human structures change much more readily than those of, say, a leaf). In particular, we must understand that human agency is made possible by social structures that themselves require the reproduction of certain actions/pre-conditions. Further, the individuals that inhabit these social structures are capable of consciously reflecting upon, and changing, the actions that produce them—a practice that is in part facilitated by social scientific research.

Developments

Since Bhaskar made the first big steps in popularising the theory of critical realism in the 1970s, it has become one of the major strands of social scientific method - rivalling positivism/empiricism, and post-structuralism/relativism/interpretivism.
An edited volume, Critical Realism: Essential Readings, is the best available reader in critical realism.
There is also a

Journal of Critical Realism, which publishes articles on the theory and results of the practice of critical realist social science.
A lively email discussion on critical realism can be joined on the critical realism e-mail list.
Since his development of critical realism, Bhaskar has gone on to develop a philosophical system he calls dialectical critical realism, which is most clearly outlined in his weighty book, Dialectic: the pulse of freedom.
Bhaskar is frequently criticised for the density and obscurity of his writing. An accessible introduction was written by Andrew Collier. Andrew Sayer has written accessible texts on critical realism in social science.
David Graeber relies on critical realism, which he understands as a form of 'heraclitean' philosophy, emphasizing flux and change over stable essences, in his anthropological book on the concept of value, Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams.


Theological critical realism

Critical realism is employed by a community of scientists turned theologians. They are influenced by the scientist turned philosopher

Michael Polanyi. Polanyi's ideas were taken up enthusiastically by T. F. Torrance whose work in this area has influenced many theologians calling themselves critical realists. This community includes John Polkinghorne, Ian Barbour, and Arthur Peacocke. The aim of the group is to show that the language of science and Christian theology are similar, forming a starting point for a dialogue between the two. Alister McGrath and Wentzel van Huyssteen (the latter of Princeton Theological Seminary) are recent contributors to this strand. Tom Wright, New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop of Durham also writes on this topic:
...I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of "knowing" that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence "realism"), while fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence "critical"). (The New Testament and the People of God, pp. 35)
Tom Wright's fellow biblical scholar--James Dunn--encountered the thought of Bernard Lonergan as mediated through Ben Meyer. Much of North American critical realism--later used in the service of theology--has its source in the thought of Lonergan.

Critical realism in economics

Heterodox economists like Tony Lawson, Frederic Lee or Geoffrey Hodgson are trying to work the ideas of critical realism into economics, especially the dynamic idea of macro-micro interaction.
According to critical realist economists, the central aim of economic theory is to provide explanations in terms of hidden generative structures. This position combines

transcendental realism with a critique of mainstream economics. It argues that mainstream economics (i) relies excessively on deductivist methodology, (ii) embraces an uncritical enthusiasm for formalism, and (iii) believes in strong conditional predictions in economics despite repeated failures.
The world that mainstream economists study is the empirical world. But this world is "out of phase" (Lawson) with the underlying ontology of economic regularities. The mainstream view is thus a limited reality because empirical realists presume that the objects of inquiry are solely "empirical regularities" - that is, objects and events at the level of the experienced.
The critical realist views the domain of real causal mechanisms as the appropriate object of economic science, whereas the positivist view is that the reality is exhausted in empirical - experienced - reality. Tony Lawson argues that economics ought to embrace a "social ontology" to include the underlying causes of economic phenomena.

References

Archer, M., Bhaskar, R., Collier, A., Lawson, T. and Norrie, A., 1998, Critical Realism: Essential Readings, (London, Routledge).
Bhaskar, R., 1975 [1997], A Realist Theory of Science: 2nd edition, (London, Verso).
Bhaskar, R., 1998, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences: Third Edition, (London, Routledge)
Bhaskar, R., 1993, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, (London, Verso).
Collier, A, 1994, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, (London, Verso).
Lonergan, B. 1957. "Insight", (London, DTL).
Lopez, J. and Potter, G., 2001, After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, (London, The Athlone Press).
McGrath, A. E., 2001, A Scientific Theology, (London, T&T Clark)
Meyer, B. 1989 "Critical Realism and the New Testament", (San Jose, Pickwick Publications)
Polkinghorne, J, 1991, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between science and theology, (London, SPCK)
Sayer, A. (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, (London, Routledge)
Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science, (London, Sage)

Bhaskar and American Critical Realism
Article from WSCR Archive

http://www.raggedclaws.com/criticalrealism/archive/iverstegen_baacr.html

By IAN VERSTEGEN

Critical Realism occupies an exciting position in contemporary philosophy. It seems poised to offer solutions for the contemporary post-positivist and post-theoretical situation in which philosophy finds itself. Much of the attractiveness of Critical Realism lies in this seeming uniqueness but perhaps as true, moderate Critical Realists we ought to resist a sense of destiny or ideology. In fact, while I am a convinced theoretical Critical Realist, I believe that our movement has a great deal in common with older movements; to be more precise, "American" Critical Realism.
Some familiar with contemporary Critical Realism and the works of Roy Bhaskar may be struck by the similarity of its name with that of the older American movement from the beginning of the twentieth century. Whether or not there is any doctrinal similarities, one thing is certain; the major proponents of contemporary Critical Realism do not seek to address older Critical Realism in any way. I propose to review the history of this movement to see exactly where any affinities, if any, lie.
"Critical Realism" was coined by Roy Wood Sellars (1880-1967; not to be confused with his son, Wilfred) in 1915. Sellars meant to refer to his brand of scientific materialism that stood in contrast to Idealism, Pragmatism and Realism. Although sometimes considered a position articulated in response to British Realism and the work of G. E. Moore, American Critical Realism really developed concurrently. The most tangible evidence of this movement was the volume Essays in Critical Realism, to which Durant Drake, J. B. Pratt, A. K. Rogers, George Santayana, Roy Wood Sellars, C. A. Strong, and Arthur Lovejoy all contributed (c.f., Chisholm 1982).
Much of the work of these contributors is quite diverse; for example, George Santayana is usually grouped with American pragmatists. Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962) was a mind-body dualist and in ethics a psychological hedonist. However, some of the works of the more canonical figures, especially Sellars, and to a lesser extent Lovejoy, bring out significant doctrinal patterns.
Sellars most wanted to promote a non-reductive scientific materialism. Thus, it is correct to say that whereas today's Critical Realism is a broad-based normative discipline, American Critical Realism was an epistemological doctrine. However, while American Critical Realists lacked a consistent social philosophy and ethics, their epistemological commitments implicated metaphysical issues as well.
Consistent with a critique of monistic theories of knowledge (be they idealistic or realist), American Critical Realists insisted on the structuredness of the world, its transcendent status, and our variable access to it in cognition. A good example is Lovejoy's (1930) "temporalistic realism" according to which reality is structured in a metaphysical pluralism, and determinate perspectives follow from this. In the end, Lovejoy strongly upheld epistemological dualism so that empirical questions could not be divorced from metaphysical questions. Here we find an early defense of Bhaskar's distinction between the Transitive and Intransitive dimensions.
Here the orientation of American Critical Realism to natural science is most evident. As the New Realism passed on to Ordinary Language philosophy and Rylian new-Re