Method Today

Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion

Edited by
Brad Stoddard
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 Chapter 9

Religion and Description

Daniel O. McClellan

I am grateful for the opportunity to engage with Naomi Goldenberg’s

thought-provoking essay, “Toward a Pushier Critical Analysis of ‘Religion’ and
Attendant Categories” (Chapter 7, this volume), and for the chance to be able to
make a small contribution to this volume. I find myself in agreement with the
broader strokes of her essay—and particularly her concern for religion’s concep-
tualization as a mechanism for social control—and so, rather than critique her
essay directly, my goal in this space will be to supplement it to some degree by
sharing a cognitive perspective on how conceptual categories such as “religion”
form and are used, and by discussing how I believe this bears on how religion is
and could be described. Central to this discussion is the observation that descrip-
tion is frequently understood as definition, which, I contend, is too often pre-
cisely prescription. The overlap of these approaches strikes me as a significant
methodological stumbling block for the study of religion today, and engaging it
directly will hopefully shed some additional light on the conventional concern for
“consistent and definable differences between ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’”
(Chapter 7, this volume) that Goldenberg laments in her essay, and perhaps raise
some possibilities for moving beyond it.
I would like to start, however, with an observation regarding Goldenberg’s fram-
ing of the category of religion. Following her description of the “God(s): A User’s
Guide” exhibit, she references Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous assertion that the issue
with religion as a category is “not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can
be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways” (Chapter 7, this
volume; Smith 1998: 281). Goldenberg cites Smith in order to show the category
is “an open-ended, enormous grab-bag of a category” that, as a result, can be
employed to describe almost anything.1 While there are certainly many scholars,
government entities, and others who exploit both the vagaries of the category as
well as the boundaries that have been asserted in ways that serve their interests,
these are features of numerous conceptual categories, and religion’s “perplexing
fluidity and lack of boundaries” (Chapter 7, this volume) is more a function of how
our minds seem to construct and use categories than of any kind of problem with
this particular one.
In light of this, what I would like to challenge in this response is the notion
common in various corners of the study of religion that a legitimate concep-
tual category ought to be amenable to definition. In the conventional sense, a
 Religion and Description • 107

dictionary definition of a concept, term, or category provides a list of features

shared by all the accepted members of that category in a way that distinguishes
those members from those of other categories. These features are generally
referred to as “necessary and sufficient features” (or “conditions”). They are
necessary for membership in the category and they are sufficient for distinction
from other categories. As an example of how this informs dictionary definitions,
the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED Online) currently defines the most salient
sense of the word “bird” as:
Any feathered vertebrate animal: a member of the second class (Aves) of the great
Vertebrate group, the species of which are most nearly allied to the Reptiles, but
distinguished by their warm blood, feathers, and adaptation of the fore limbs as
wings, with which most species fly in the air. (OED 2017a)

Here the first segment of the definition provides the broadest set of features nec-
essary and sufficient to distinguish birds from all other categories: (1) feathered
(2) vertebrate (3) animal. Possession of those three features absolutely deter-
mines membership in the category. The rest of the definition fills out a clearer
picture of the relationship of the category to others, adding other features that
are not sufficient for distinction, such as warm blood and “adaptation of the fore
limbs as wings” that help “most species fly in the air.” Because it is both natu-
rally occurring and biologically discrete, the category “bird” is more amenable
to delineation by means of necessary and sufficient features, but the assumption
underlying most dictionary definitions—namely that this approach to categoriza-
tion can adequately delineate all concepts—is untrue. It presupposes a conceptual
substructure of necessary and sufficient features governing the formation and use
of categories. This, however, is not how categories form, are learned, or are used.
To illustrate this, consider the word “furniture.” If you’re reading this, you’ve
probably used the word before. Did you have to look it up in a dictionary to under-
stand what it meant? Do you keep a list of the necessary and sufficient features
for “furniture” in your head and compare the features of a potential piece of fur-
niture to that list every time you need to decide if something’s furniture? The
answer to both questions is most likely no (but let me know if it’s not!). None of
these things are natural because that’s not how people learn and use categories.
If we look up “furniture” in the OED Online, it reads, “Movable articles, whether
useful or ornamental, in a dwelling-house, place of business, or public building”
(OED 2017b). By this definition, a telephone, rug, laptop, pillow, pen, or coffee
cup could be furniture. It’s “an open-ended, enormous grab-bag of a category.”
Someone might say a box of push-pins is “technically” furniture, which in this
case would be a way of saying we should “technically” include them because the
framework we use for definition forces us to, even though nobody ever uses the
word that way. Dictionary definitions are supposed to derive from usage, though,
which highlights a pretty significant flaw in that framework and contributes to
the prescriptive use of definitions.
So how do we form and use categories? Psychologists in the late 1960s and
1970s who were studying the perception of color noticed that colors tended to
108 • Daniel O. McClellan

have natural focal areas shared by languages and social groups around the world,
despite the fact that the color spectrum lacks natural boundaries (e.g., Berlin and
Kay 1969; Heider 1971; Mervis and Rosch 1975). Cognitivists began to investigate
the possibility that this phenomenon extended to other kinds of categories, and a
series of experiments conducted in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues
provided empirical evidence that it did (Rosch 1973a, 1973b, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c,
1976; Rosch and Mervis 1975; Rosch et al. 1976). In one early experiment, Rosch
asked psychology students to rate different items according to how well they rep-
resented a given category term (such as furniture, fruit, bird, sport, and other
broad level categories). The results showed a high degree of consistency in the
way the different items were ranked by the subjects, and particularly with those
items considered most prototypical of the categories. An apple was consistently
ranked as a good example of “fruit”; a strawberry was consistently a slightly less
good example; a fig was consistently a poor example (Rosch 1973a).
This led to a great deal of subsequent research that resulted in a model for
understanding how categorization works called prototype theory (Rosch 1978,
2011; Lakoff 1987; Geeraerts 1989; Taylor 1995). According to this theory, member-
ship in conceptual categories can be graded. There are better and poorer mem-
bers of most categories. If I ask you to think of a bird, few, if any, are going to
think of a penguin or emu. They’re at the periphery. They’re even qualified as
“flightless birds.” We don’t call robins “flight birds,” they’re just birds, without
qualification. The focus of category development and usage is the exemplars, or
prototypes. Rosch described the process of category formation in the following
way (Rosch 2011):

[P]eople form and use an idea and/or image of the category that represents the
category to them, and which is more like (or more easily generates) the good than
the poorer examples of the category. That representation often serves as the refer-
ence point to which people refer when performing tasks relevant to the category,
such as identifying something as a member of the category or using the category
in some other way.

Category usage and cultivation is thus focused on the center of the category, not
on the boundaries. Boundaries are actually not inherent to most conceptual cat-
egories, and so often don’t develop until a rhetorical need arises for them, at
which point they are often rather arbitrarily established, and on the basis of nec-
essary and sufficient features. Russell McCutcheon has popularized the follow-
ing example of how this can have real-world consequences (McCutcheon 2013:
122). The Nix family was a late-nineteenth century family in New York that made
their living importing tomatoes into the United States. At the time, vegetables
were taxed, while fruits were not. Collectors at the port of New York sued the Nix
family for back duties, and the case went to the US Supreme Court, where the
court ruled in 1893 that although tomatoes are botanically a fruit, they are eaten
during the “principle part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert”
(149 U.S. 304). Tomatoes, they determined, were to be considered a vegetable. So
the classification of the “common language of the people” was used to establish a
highly arbitrary boundary that rendered the taxes due.
 Religion and Description • 109

Finally, we learn about categories through experiencing the classification

of items in speaking, reading, and in all kinds of non-verbal communication.
Categories do not precede usage; they are formed through it. Because that pro-
cess is based on subjective experience, it is relative and contextual. If I ask an
American in San Antonio to think of a boot, most are going to think of something
approximating a cowboy boot. If I ask a UK citizen in London to think of a boot,
most are going to think of something approximating an army boot, if not the
trunk of a car. Our prototypes are different from person to person, from time to
time, and from place to place because we develop them ourselves through our
own experiences with the world and with language.
From the perspective of prototype theory, then, category boundaries are fuzzy
and negotiable, and are often a function of discourse about the category and indi-
vidual experience with it, and not of anything inherent or native to the cate-
gory itself. Going back to the “furniture” example, if we assert that the OED Online
adjudicates meaning and categorization, virtually anything placed in a room or
space to be used within that room or space could “technically” qualify as fur-
niture, no matter how ludicrous it would sound for someone to call it furniture
in a conversation. Additionally, any furniture not confined to a “dwelling-house,
place of business, or public building” would not “technically” qualify as furniture.
Definitions can and do sometimes include many entities not usually considered
part of the category, and can often exclude entities that usually are considered
part of it.
This should sound a lot like the concerns that people express with attempts to
define religion, but that resistance to definition is not necessarily a product of the
illegitimacy of the category. It’s a result of the fact that the practice of definition
requires the imposition of a conceptual framework upon categories that are not
always amenable to that framework. So, returning to Goldenberg’s discussion,
the fact that the category is an open-ended grab-bag is really not unusual, we just
normally aren’t aware of just how open-ended and fuzzy many of the categories
we use are. Ludwig Wittgenstein observed long ago:
[H]ow is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no
longer does? Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far
been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word “game.”)
(Wittgenstein 1958: 33)

I would argue that to expect or require definitions or boundaries for concepts like
religion and secularism is to depart from the realm of description and to enter
prescription. The production of a list of necessary and sufficient features for a
concept will focus on those features thought to essentialize the category, and
that process is often quite arbitrary and subjective, as Goldenberg’s discussion of
the “God(s): A User’s Guide” exhibit demonstrates. (I might highlight here Brent
Nongbri’s assertion that scholars tend to define religion as “anything that suf-
ficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity”; Nongbri 2013: 18). A more
consciously descriptive approach, I think, ultimately serves Goldenberg’s goal of
dismantling the secular/religious dichotomy, but I think it also raises the question
110 • Daniel O. McClellan

of how much prescription is going into the work that we do as scholars. In line
with Jonathan Z. Smith’s rhetorical point addressed above, it has been recently
argued within the social-scientific study of religion as well as within the cognitive
science of religion that we need some kind of clear definition of religion in order
just to be able to delineate what it is we’re studying (Schaffalitzky de Muckadell
2014; Franek 2014). In addition to appealing to distorting conceptual frameworks,
these scholars betray a concern for structuring the field in a way that empowers
scholars to declare where the boundaries of a discursively reified conceptual cat-
egory are to be drawn.
Yes, such boundaries would certainly serve to more clearly delineate the
broader subject of our study, but on a level that fundamentally impedes our abil-
ity to gain insight to the experiences and worldviews of individuals, who become
relevant within this framework only insofar as they index our delineation of the
category. For our conceptual frameworks to serve the data, they must be amena-
ble to the diachronic and synchronic variability of those data, which is not com-
mensurate with the prescriptive foundations of the practice of definition (and
particularly in a field so concerned for transhistorical and transcultural defini-
tions). The conceptual category of “religion” did not form upon, and is not gov-
erned by, underlying conceptual substructures, but rather is continuously reified
within discourse about it.
I think a proposal for moving forward that merits consideration is that of
Kocku von Stuckrad, who has advocated in recent publications for a discursive
approach to religion (von Stuckrad 2003, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015). A few princi-
ples he develops are particularly relevant to my comments. First is his sugges-
tion that we treat definitions not as tools for discursive analysis, but as objects of
discursive analysis. Next, instead of defining religion and its constituent parts,
he recommends we analyze the definitions constructed within discourse about
religion. Von Stuckrad yields to the gravitational pull of the definitional enter-
prise in trying to delineate the field of study, but he hands the keys to the objects
of study, defining religion as “the societal organization of knowledge about reli-
gion” (von Stuckrad 2013: 17). Now, he distinguishes the word being defined from
the word within the definition by putting the former in small caps, explaining
that the small caps “religion” is the discourse itself—the object of our study. The
word within the definition (“religion”) refers to contributions to a discourse on
religion—the “definitions, meanings, and communicational practices” provided
by agents engaged in that discourse, including scholars. This is a moving target.
This approach allows scholars of religion to function in a much more descrip-
tive capacity and allows the description of the object of study to accommodate all
the fluidity and variability that is realized within discourse about religion in all
the different registers in which it occurs. Now, my own specialization is Hebrew
Bible and Second Temple Judaism, and I try to avoid using “religion” in relation
to those fields precisely because no such concept or term occurs within the lit-
erary corpora, but when engaging communities that construct their self-identity
around a specific conceptualization of “religion,” a descriptive approach, I believe,
can and should acknowledge as well as interrogate that usage. Perhaps sustained
 Religion and Description • 111

engagement with the way the use of the term aids specific groups’ structuring of
values and power within and between communities would even be a helpful topic
of study in and of itself that could make it more relevant to discourse communi-
ties within the other language registers. That may facilitate greater awareness
of the problems with the term and its usage and move—or push—the discussion
toward breaking down the dichotomies decried by Goldenberg.

Daniel O. McClellan is a doctoral candidate in theology and religion at the University of

Exeter writing on Hebrew Bible, cognitive linguistics, and the cognitive science of religion.
He currently works as a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints.

Note

1 Of course, this is not how Smith reasoned about the category. For him, religion is
the proprietary product of scholarly discourse, and its definitions exist in order to
establish a “disciplinary horizon,” without which “[t]here can be no disciplined
study of religion” (Smith 1998: 281–282). The rhetorical goal of Smith’s assertion is
the scholarly arrogation of the category and its stewardship. As I will discuss below,
however, there can absolutely be disciplined study of religion without asserting the
sole right to define it.

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