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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
A significant point of contention in contemporary construals of continuity and discontinuity centers on the veiled logics of power/interest at work in human constructions of knowledge. In this paper I explore how the insights of anthropologist Mary Douglas might contribute towards a rethinking of memory and tradition within the ecclesial community. I argue that Douglas' perspective on the covert processes that create the social goods of both community and knowledge offer an important heuristic guide towards a more transparent analysis of tradition and how it functions in a globalized world. If continuity is both a claim and a practice that peoples make from shared histories for shared futures, the ecclesial claim and practice of continuity must enact a gospel reflexivity that is both critical and counter-intuitive in its hermeneutical retrieval of the memoria Christi. I conclude this paper with a detailed exploration of two dimensions such a critical, counter-intuitive hermeneutic might include.
1 See Alison, James, Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006).Google Scholar
2 Alison continues, “So, what we can describe as we undergo something is more akin to what a slow-motion surfer might describe of what she can see from the constantly shifting position of the waves on which she finds herself as she heads for shore more than it is to someone standing stably on a mountaintop with a clear vision all around. With the difference that when someone is undergoing something, it is not only what they see, but who they are who is doing the seeing, which is in a process of change.” Ibid., 3–4.
3 Congar, Yves, Lay People in the Church (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957), 57.Google Scholar
4 Boeve, Lieven describes the contemporary situation in Europe as one of “detradition-alization and pluralization” (God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval [New York: Continuum, 2007].Google Scholar Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai construes the global-local predicament as “rhizomic, even schizophrenic, calling for theories of rootlessness, alienation, and psychological distance between individuals and groups on the one hand, and fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other” (“Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large, [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 29).
5 Boeve, , God Interrupts History, 29.Google Scholar
6 Kathryn Tanner notes that “the authorizing force of the appeal to tradition is increased to the extent that the invented character of tradition—the selectivity and human effort of attribution involved in it—is disguised” (“Postmodern Challenges to ‘Tradition’,” Louvain Studies 28 [2003]: 175–93, at 184).
7 While the idea that institutions do the thinking for people smacks uncomfortably of Orwellian flights of fancy, some have linked Douglas to post-structural thinkers (notably Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas) who share a curiosity about the relational dynamics among symbols within traditions. See Robert Wuthrow's discussion of the similarities and contrasts in the post-structural approaches of Douglas, Foucault, Michel, and Habermas, Jürgen in his Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 50–65.Google Scholar
8 Douglas, Mary, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), x.Google Scholar
9 Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: BasicBooks, 1973), 68.Google Scholar
10 See Lechner, Frank J. and Boli, John, eds., The Globalization Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000)Google Scholar and O'Meara, Patrick, Mehlinger, Howard D., and Krain, Matthew, eds., Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Other titles include, Featherstone, Mike, ed., Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, (London: SAGE, 1995)Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; King, Anthony D., ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Rodrik, Dani, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997)Google Scholar; Stiglitz, Joseph E., Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2003)Google Scholar; Featherstone, Mike, Zash, Scott and Robertson, Roland, eds., Global Modernities (London: SAGE, 1995).Google Scholar
11 Donovan, Mary Ann, One Right Reading? (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1997) 4, 61.Google Scholar (my emphasis).
12 Ibid., 12: “As a second-century writer he [Irenaeus] assumes the objective, unchanging nature of truth, independent of the interpreter, a truth that is contained in the Rule of Faith and yet at the same time exceeds the grasp of human reason. Hence, he will develop a methodology that embraces both supreme confidence in the truth proclaimed by the Church and full awareness of the limits of human speech about God.”
13 “There was clearly one true auctor, one absolute auctoritas, God; but all that to which God gave the gift of being true, as expressing his truth and his will, became thereby an auctoritas whose exact position in time there was no need to plot with exactitude; the essential thing was that part of divine truth that it incorporated for us” (Congar, Yves, Tradition and Traditions [San Diego: Basilica Press, 1966], 90).Google Scholar
14 Speaking of the debates on tradition at the Council of Trent, Congar notes, “One fact dominated the discussion: the diversity of opinion among the Fathers and theologians, the lack of any definite idea of ‘tradition’” (ibid., 160).
15 Davaney, Sheila Greeve, Pragmatic Historicism: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 2.Google Scholar
16 Haight, Roger, Christian Community in History: Historical Ecclesiology, Vol. 1, (New York: Continuum, 2004), 27.Google Scholar
17 Sassen's, Saskia powerful phrase is used in her feminist analytics of contemporary globalization. See her essay “Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy,” in Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998), 81–109.Google Scholar
18 Miller, Vincent J., “History or Geography?: Gadamer, Foucault and Theologies of Tradition,” in Theology and the New Histories, ed. Macy, Gary (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis), 58.Google Scholar
19 Tanner, , “Postmodern Challenges,” 184.Google Scholar
20 Ibid.
21 Featherstone maintains that each society has a group of specialists (“priests, artists, intellectuals, educators, teachers, academics”) who participate in the production of a common understanding of culture. These “cultural specialists” possess considerable potential for the production and circulation of cultural goods.” … our overall sense of value, meaning and potential unity or crisis-ridden nature of a culture will depend not only on the conditions of social life we find ourselves in, but on the conditions of those who specialize in cultural production as well” (Undoing Culture, 3).
22 Douglas, Mary, A Feeling for Hierarchy: Marianist Award Lecture 2002 (Dayton, OH: University of Dayton, 2002).Google Scholar
23 Leach, Edmund. R., as quoted in Fardon, Richard, Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography (London: Routledge, 1999), 103.Google Scholar
24 “An anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, possibly a theologian and presumably known to her given a reference to her home on the lower slopes of Highgate Hill, perceptively noted an element of spiritual autobiography in Natural Symbols.” Fardon, , Mary Douglas, 103.Google Scholar
25 Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2d ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) with revised introduction, ix, xx.Google Scholar
26 Douglas, , “A Feeling for Hierarchy,” 15.Google Scholar
27 Ibid., 25.
28 Ibid., 20.
29 I agree with Robert Wuthnow's characterization of Douglas as a post-structuralist despite her focus on social structures. See, e.g., Wuthnow, , Meaning and Moral Order, 50–51.Google Scholar After stating that structuralism and Lévi-Strauss are “virtually synonymous as far as the social sciences are concerned,” Wuthnow locates Douglas among post-structuralists who “generally retain the structuralist emphasis on analyzing patterns or relations in cultural materials but reject the assumption that doing this will disclose the materials' ‘real meaning.’” He continues: “In a close critique of Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas (1967), for example, demonstrates that a single myth may in fact have many meanings and that these meanings are contingent on time and place. She also rejects Lévi-Strauss' rigorous emphasis on relationships among paired opposites. Yet she retains his interest in the symbolic boundaries or categories that may be present in pairs or more complex configurations of symbols. Foucault's work was also deeply influenced by structuralism, so much so that some commentators on his work have described it as a type of structuralism—a description, however, that Foucault himself rejected. The imprint of structuralism on his work is again that of seeing symbols as dramatizations of conceptual categories or of boundaries between categories. As in Douglas' work, the idea of looking at opposites often carries over into his work as a concern with boundaries between deviance and normality. In his work on madness, for example, Foucault (1965) considers insanity not in isolation but as a negation that clarifies the nature of reason. Habermas' indebtedness to structuralism stems less directly from Lévi-Strauss or Barthes, although one can be sure he has read them, but from structural linguists like Chomsky and Searle. He also rejects much of the physiological binarism on which Chomsky's work, in particular, is based. But … he shares with Douglas and Foucault an interest in the relationships among collections of symbols.” For Wuthnow's discussion of Douglas' connection to the communicative concerns of Foucault and Habermas, see also ibid., 52–57.
30 “Looking back on it now … I see that my intentions with regard to sociology of religion were subversive and with the times. I wanted to free it from subservience to confessional loyalties embedded in ancient institutions. At the same time my intentions with regard to anthropology were distinctly reactionary. Instead of turning over the old order, the aim was to rehabilitate an old theoretical approach, Durkheimian, and make it available for our understanding of ourselves. In one sense the book was counter-cultural, since I was less interested in attacking forms when they have lost their meanings and suffocate the people involved in them before they die, and much more interested in discovering how they ever get any meaning at all in the first place” Douglas, , Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), xii–xiii.Google Scholar
31 Douglas, , How Institutions Think, ix.Google Scholar
32 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 Those who have studied Douglas' grid-group and followed its development over the years are aware of its limits and its potentials. See Spickard, James, “A Guide to Mary Douglas' Three Versions of Grid/Group Theory,” Sociological Analysis 50, 2 (1989): 151–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Spickard notes that Douglas changes her unit of analysis from “society” to “institutions,” allowing more freedom in assessing the variety of institutions and social situations that characterize contemporary complex societies. See also Douglas, , Natural Symbols, in the revised introduction of 1996 version, xx–xxiv.Google Scholar Moving away from grid-group as a universal map, Douglas speaks of institutions as tending towards three kinds of social structures, each of which reinforces characteristic belief systems: hierarchical groups, egalitarian enclaves and entrepreneurial institutions.
34 Douglas, , Natural Symbols, 15 (my emphasis).Google Scholar
35 Douglas, , How Institutions Think, x.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., 31.
37 Ibid., 45.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Spickard, James, “Worldview, Beliefs and Society: Mary Douglas' Contribution to the Study of Human Ideas on Ultimate Reality and Meaning,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 13 (June 1990): 110.Google Scholar
41 Douglas, , How Institutions Think, 49.Google Scholar
42 Ibid., 48. “Here, it is assumed that most established institutions, if challenged, are able to rest their claims to legitimacy on their fit with the nature of the universe. A convention is institutionalized when, in reply to the question, ‘Why do you do it like this?’ although the first answer may be framed in terms of mutual convenience, in response to further questioning the final answer refers to the way that the planets are fixed in the sky or the way that plants or animals naturally behave” (ibid., 46).
43 Ibid., 55.
44 Ibid., 59.
45 Ibid., 47.
46 Ibid., 55: “Nothing else but institutions can define sameness … On the one hand, the emotional energy for creating a set of analogies comes from social concerns. On the other hand, there is a tension between the incentives for individual minds to spend their time and energy on difficult problems and the temptation to sit back and let founding analogies of the surrounding society take over.”
47 Ibid., 60.
48 Ibid., 63.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 112.
51 Ibid., 69. Douglas notes “that Merton has made a back door approach to the problem [of social amnesia]. He is not asking ‘How do people think about the constraints the social order imposes on their thoughts?’ He asks ‘How are they prevented from thinking? What are the impossible thoughts?’” (ibid., 76).
52 Ibid., 69–70. See also anthropologist Corinne Kratz's discussion of tradition and innovation in Okiek ceremonies. She notes that one of the five rhetorical techniques employed in the traditioning process is “canonization through silence.” Silence “is an effective and versatile way to deemphasize and eventually erase ceremonial change. As alternatives drop from memory, silence canonizes change as enduring tradition.” (Kratz, Corinne, “‘We've Always Done It Like This … Except for a Few Details': ‘Tradition’ and ‘Innovation’ in Okiek Ceremonies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.1 [1993]: 54).Google Scholar
53 “Certain things always need to be forgotten for any cognitive system to work. There is no way of paying full attention to everything” (Douglas, , How Institutions Think, 76).Google Scholar
54 See Mitchell's, Nathan discussion of “a God who doesn't act like one” in Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship and Sacraments (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006) 96–107.Google Scholar Although Mitchell does not explicitly describe God as agapic and paschal, his discussion of the intra-Trinitarian life as “given” and “kenotic” mirror my intent in this article. See in particular ibid., 58–62.
55 Collins, Mary, Contemplative Participation: Sacrosanctum Concilium, Twenty-Five Years Later (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 55.Google Scholar
56 See Tracy, David, On Naming The Present (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 14–15.Google Scholar
57 Sociologist Robertson, Roland notes that contemporary globalization is “a massive two-fold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of the universal” (Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture [London: SAGE, 1992], 100).Google Scholar
58 Boeve, , God Interrupts History, 36.Google Scholar
59 Boeve summarizes Joseph Ratzinger's remarks on the twentieth anniversary of the journal Communio. “[P]ost-Conciliar theologians have opted for what they consider interesting at the cost of what is true by presenting old liberal insights as new Catholic theology” ibid., 31 n. 2.
60 Ibid., 54.
61 Tracy, , On Naming The Present, 14–15.Google Scholar
62 Featherstone, , Undoing Culture, 6.Google Scholar
63 Indeed, her analysis parallels Michel Foucault's observation that power is relational, present only in its exercise, which is fundamentally the production of knowledge. Moreover, the predicament of power and social structure deepens when one considers Talal Asad's concern for the authorization of space. Douglas' framework appears to assume a non-coercive space that affords conversation, disagreement and argument among equals; Asad notes that such spaces rarely exist in social worlds. The negotiation of sameness may result less from cognitive agreement (“I truly see it your way”) and more from survival strategies (“The only way I can make a life in this context is to agree with you.”). See Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
64 Yves Congar coined the phrase “hierarchiology” to describe the overemphasis of the clerical prerogative that characterized pre-Vatican II ecclesiology. On the relationship between charism and structure, Congar notes, “Theologically, if the false opposition is accepted and a sharp division is made between charism and institution, the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ is destroyed and the claim is made that everything can be regulated and conducted, on the one hand without spirituality and exclusively in the name of power and, on the other, anarchically, in the name of the Spirit” (I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols., trans. Smith, David [New York: Seabury, 1983] 2:11)Google Scholar.
65 “God communicates himself to us, makes himself active in us and thus enables us to perform actions of ‘Christ in us’. … This is not the case of God replacing us … God's substance does not take the place of our substance. There is a communication of dynamism or of an active faculty and we continue to act. … It has to be recognized that we are and will be the subjects of a quality of existence and activities which go back to God's sphere of existence and activity. This is the ultimate context of the promise and the real fruit of the Spirit and the principle of our eschatological life.” Ibid., 1: 31–32.
66 See Congar's, chapter on the apostolicity of the church in I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 2: 39–49.Google Scholar
67 Ibid., 2:46.
68 Copeland, M. Shawn, “Memory, Emancipation and Hope: Political Theology in ‘the Land of the Free,’” The Santa Clara Lectures, (Santa Clara University, November 9, 1997), 7.Google Scholar
69 Copeland, M. Shawn, “Tradition and the Traditions of African American Catholicism,” Theological Studies 60 (2000): 638.Google Scholar
70 Rerum Novarum, 32, quoted in Copeland, , “Tradition,” 643.Google Scholar
71 Quoted in Copeland, , “Tradition,” 639.Google Scholar “The address of the Fourth Black Catholic Congress was published in the Boston Pilot (September 23, 1893) under the caption ‘The Colored Catholic Memorial: The Eloquent Expression of Their Fourth Congress’”(ibid., 639 n. 23).
72 “Dangerous memory” is used here in the Johann Baptist Metz's sense of memoria passionis, mortis, et resurrectionis Jesu Christi. Richard Gaillardetz, speaking of the notion of dangerous memory, notes that “Metz wishes to recover not so much a realized eschatology that simply speaks of God's presence in the world today, but an apocalyptic eschatology that sees the future as ‘interruption,’ shocking Christians into political action.” “A People Sustained by Memory” in Ecclesiology for a Global Church: A People Called and Sent (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008) 208–48, at 231.
73 From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, quoted in Oliver, Mary, Thirst (Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 2006), frontispiece.Google Scholar
74 Boeve, , God Interrupts History, 156.Google Scholar
75 Miller, , “History or Geography?,” 58.Google Scholar
76 Hinze, Bradford, “Ecclesial Repentance and the Demands of Dialogue,” Theological Studies 61 (2000): 209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar