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    American Academy of Religion

    Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion Author(s): Fitz John Porter Poole Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp.

    411-457Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464561Accessed: 16-08-2014 15:24 UTC

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  • Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV/ 3

    METAPHORS AND MAPS: TOWARDS COMPARISON IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION

    FITZ JOHN PORTER POOLE

    Conversations between anthropology and other academic studies of religion have been marked historically by considerable ambiva- lence and avoidance.' In the post-Malinowskian era of fieldwork- centered ethnography, the remarkable subleties of newly emerging and unexpected orders of data have challenged the adequacy of traditional academic perspectives on religion, many of which seemed bound-implicitly or explicitly-to the epistemological conventions and cognitive lenses of Western religions.2 From an anthropological perspective, the restricted emphasis on the written, enshrined texts of literate traditions and the curious assumption that religion could be studied almost in vacuo became untenable in the midst of a newfound functionalist concern to see religious phenomena intricately sus- pended in broader webs of cultural significance and subtly embedded in wider arrays of social institutions.3

    Fitz John Porter Poole is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093.

    1 For scholarly appreciations of the historical course of anthropological approaches to the study of religion, see especially van Baal (1971), Banton (1966), Evans-Pritchard (1965), Firth (1973), La Barre (1972), Skorupski (1976), and Wallace (1966). In addition, particular attention should be directed toward anthropological perspectives on religion associated with the seminal studies of Mary Douglas, James Fernandez, Clifford Geertz, Claude L6vi-Strauss, Melford E. Spiro, and Victor W. Turner, who have influenced perhaps most dramatically contemporary anthropological views on the subject. Finally, some aspects of the modern dialogue between anthropological and other forms of the academic study of religion are well represented in Bianchi (1973), Spiro (1973), and the remarkable studies of Jonathan Z. Smith.

    2 For elegant overviews of the American, French, and British traditions of fieldwork-based anthropology and their significance in conceptualizing key issues of theory, method, and data, see Boon (1982), Clifford (1982), and Stocking (1983), respectively.

    3 The theoretical consequences of this elaborated sense of socio-cultural context for understanding religious meanings, acts, experiences, personae, and institutions and for

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  • 412 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    The enchantment and challenge of prolonged field study-and thus an intimate sense of religion as a complex, lived reality in village communities-led many anthropologists to focus almost exclusively upon local nuances of the religions of single, simple, non-literate societies. Such studies devoted little attention to the historical or comparative contexts of local religions4 and placed severe strictures on reconstructive and comparative endeavors.5 To the extent that other scholars of religion have largely ignored, misunderstood, or misapplied anthropological efforts, or have tended to caricature them in simplistic or superficial slogans, many anthropologists have come to doubt even the possibility of interdisciplinary pursuits.6

    Yet, despite the differences between the archive and the field, various undertakings in the academic study of religion attend to both kinds of data and to the difficulties of their articulation. These

    articulating esoteric, textually-centered and popular, community-centered traditions are splendidly portrayed in the exemplary studies of Feeley-Harnik (1981) on images of the eucharist and passover in early Christianity, Geertz (1968) on the character of Islam in Indonesia and Morocco, Heilman (1976) on the socio-cultural significance of the synagogue in a community tradition of Orthodox Judaism, Obeyesekere (1984) on the shape and force of the cult of Pattini in South Asia and Sri Lanka, Ortner (1978) and Paul (1982) on the symbols of Sherpa religious experience, Spiro (1978, 1982) on the traditions of Burmese Buddhism, and Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) on aspects of culture, thought, and social action in Thai Buddhism (cf. Carrithers [1983] on Buddhist monks of Sri Lanka). For a general appraisal of the significance of such research for the broader academic study of religion, with a particular focus on the works of Geertz, L6vi-Strauss, and Turner, see Bianchi (1973) and Moore and Reynolds (1984).

    4 The relationship between anthropology and history in this regard has been a critical subject of vigorous and continuing debate. See Bagby (1958), Boas (1936), Cohn (1980), Eggan (1954), Evans-Pritchard (1962a, 1962b), Godelier (1971), Hudson (1966, 1973), Hughes (1960, 1964), Hultkrantz (1967), Kroeber (1935, 1963), Lewis (1968), Lowie (1917), McCall (1970), Munz (1956, 1971), Obeyesekere (1970), Olien (1967), Schapera (1962), J. Z. Smith (1982d), M. G. Smith (1962), and Sturtevant (1966). For critical and productive examples of anthropological ideas illuminating aspects of historical dis- course, see Finley (1975), Humphreys (1978), and Macfarlane (1970).

    5 It should be noted that the works of Claude L6vi-Strauss on mythology, Melford E. Spiro on psycho-cultural and psycho-social foundations of religious belief and practice, and Victor W. Turner on ritual have been remarkably influential in turning anthropol- ogy from narrow, cautious, parochial interests in local religious phenomena to compar- ative issues focused ultimately on the pan-human nature of religion. The present influence of more hermeneutical, interpretive approaches to the anthropological study of religions, however, perhaps most elegantly articulated by Clifford Geertz in his analytic concern with the project of "thick description" (1973), represents a challenge to the legitimacy of a positivistic, comparative search for universals and for explanations (in the strict hypothetico-deductive, causal sense) in understanding religious phenom- ena (see Geertz, 1984; cf. Spiro, n.d.).

    6 For an excellent discussion of the limits of naivety and responsibility in going beyond one's discipline of primary competence in the search for theoretical insight, see Gluckman (1964).

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 413

    approaches exhibit a commonality of interest with anthropology that should encourage mutual recognition of the importance and potential of intellectual cooperation.7 This essay constitutes an anthropological contribution to that significant, but still embryonic dialogue.

    i Any critical study of religion aims to develop interpretively

    sensitive and explanatorily (or theoretically) powerful analytic frame- works that make significant sense of complex cultural, psychological, and social data by delimiting a "domain" of religion. But to unravel the puzzle of religion a coherent theory must articulate the conceptual problem to be solved and shape the bracketing of the phenomena to be explored. This is easier said than done. In bounding a "domain" of religion, there is an inevitable tension between the illusory precision of monothetic categories and the more inchoate quality of polythetic categories. There is another tension between the desire to capture the richness, complexity, coherence, and ethnographic nuance of "na- tive" experience (whether lived or reconstructed) and the necessity for formal and abstract analysis. All academic studies of religion are thus obliged to forge an explicit and precise relationship between the particular and the general in the construction of any analysis. The particular anchors the analysis to some sense of ethnographic reality, and thus gives it empirical force. The general makes the analysis significant as an illuminating instance of religion, and thus makes it applicable to the constitution of an explanation.

    Any descriptive, interpretive, or explanatory endeavor involves relating phenomena to one another within a framework of categories extrinsic to the phenomena themselves.8 A general theory of religion is therefore necessary to guide the analysis of particular religious phenomena. To encapsulate an analysis within a single religious system-and thus within the semantic networks of the religion's own terms, categories, and understandings-entangles the analysis with the very discourse it seeks to interpret and explain. Since analysis entails going beyond the empirical facts and implicates a theory that

    7 A remarkable example of the theoretical insights to be gained from a careful, subtle, and critical bringing to bear of anthropological perspectives on general problems of both interpretation and explanation in the academic study of religion is to be found in the imaginative work of Jonathan Z. Smith, who has developed a sophisticated and critical sensitivity to the differences between germinative seed and discardable chaff in the range of anthropological theories of religion (see, for example, 1978a, 1978b, 1982a, 1982b, 1982c, 1982d, 1983).

    8 The limiting consequences and peculiar distortions of tradition-bound analyses for the academic study of religion are elegantly set forth by Smart (1973: 3-48, passim). See also Banks (1984), Bianchi (1973), Neusner (1983), Penner and Yonan (1972), and Smith (1982b, 1982c).

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  • 414 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    organizes, reconstructs, and redescribes them as data, all scholars of religion must concern themselves with a range of theoretical perspec- tives, including those of the social sciences. Theory and data are always bound up together. These common general interests and problems in the academic study of religion inevitably center on analytic frameworks that purport to be comparative.

    Comparison seeks to extend the scope and power of theory in order to provide a lens for viewing the particular phenomenon in terms of the general analytic puzzles it presents and to promote generalization and explanation.9 The historian Momigliano (1966: 581) notes that, "Comparative anthropology is more likely to indicate alternative possibilities of interpretation for the evidence we have than to supplement the evidence we have not."1o Comparison does not deal with phenomena in toto or in the round, but only with an aspectual characteristic of them. Analytical control over the frame- work of comparison involves theoretically focused selection of signif- icant aspects of the phenomena and a bracketing of the endeavor by strategic ceteris paribus assumptions." A comparative framework portrays the range of variation of the focal phenomenon either within a boundary and with respect to rules of inclusion and exclusion based upon distinctive features, or around a conceptual center and with respect to semantic distances from a prototype. Thus, comparison inevitably involves some mode of classification or categorization, which is predicated upon perceived similarities in various qualities or aspects of the phenomena to be compared.12

    The comparability of phenomena always depends both on the

    9 The significance of generalization follows from the manner in which the concept of explanation is understood and used. A generalization takes the form of an "if. .. X..., then ... Y ... " type of proposition or set of interlinked propositions. A theory-in the formal, hypothetico-deductive, causal sense--purports to explain formal generaliza- tions of that propositional form. Thus, an explanation establishes a connection between one or more initial conditions (X) and some consequence (Y).

    10 Note that Momigliano's emphasis is not on the renown ability of anthropology to extend the range of the phenomenological diversity of religions or religious phenomena from a cross-cultural perspective, but on the anthropological construction of compara- tive lenses for perceiving and understanding the inter-relationships of the particular and the general and of the different and the similar in human religion (cf. Smith, 1978a, 1982b). 11 In comparative analysis, the idea of "change of aspect" or focus permits a series of

    redescriptions of phenomena, which attend to different aspects of the phenomena, enable different comparative extensions beyond them, and facilitate different interpre- tations or explanations of them. This important characteristic of comparison implicates its analogic or metaphoric quality.

    12 Thus, as Nadel (1964:222-288) argues, the comparative method, as it is formally constituted in anthropology, is importantly an analog of the experimental approach that is variously considered to be a hallmark of other scientific endeavors.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 415

    purpose of comparison and on a theoretically informed analysis. Neither phenomenologically whole entities nor their local meanings are preserved in comparison. What matters in comparative analysis are certain variables that are posited by and cohere in theories and that are aligned with aspects of the phenomena to be compared through some set of correspondence rules. These conceptual variables must have theoretical relevance, conceptual independence, and con- ceptual indivisibility.

    A comparison becomes interpretable if it is possible to infer from it something theoretically significant about the relationship of two or more variables. In turn, the analytic project of comparison is condi- tioned by a set of fundamental assumptions:

    1. Two or more instances of a phenomenon may be compared if, and only if, there exists some variable X-with an identical meaning in all of its occurrences-that is common to each instance. 2. The comparison must attend to the strictures of Mill's canons of similarity and difference'3 and to Galton's problem of assessing interdependence.14 3. No second variable is the cause or effect of X if it is not found when X is found, if it is found when X is not found, or if a third variable is present or absent under the same circumstances as X.15 4. No variable is the cause of X if it is not antecendent to X.

    Other significant assumptions embedded in the logic, design, and method of comparative analysis generally are derivatives of one or more of these key principles (cf. Zelditch, 1973). The precise speci- fication of the generality and completeness of these principles may require their translation into the terms of formal logic in order to reveal both their essential properties and their possible transforma- tions. The general characteristics of comparative analysis-a tradi- tional mark of anthropological attempts to align the exotic and the familiar in the context of common human experience (Smith, 1978a)- form a cornerstone of a principled academic study of religion, which cannot ignore the matters of epistemology that are its ultimate foun- dation.

    13 For an excellent discussion of problems and refinements of Mill's canons, see Cohen and Nagel (1934) and Zelditch (1973).

    14 For a careful consideration of the implications of Galton's problem for comparative analysis and of possible solutions to that problem, see Naroll and D'Andrade (1963).

    15 This set of assumptions involves what is often termed the "rule of one variable." In other words, a comparison is considered to be interpretable if, and only if, the analyst varies one circumstance at a time to guard against the confounding of variables and any spurious types of correlations, as well as to assess the character of direct, indirect, or conditional relations between variables.

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  • 416 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    In his remarkable essay "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," Smith (1982b; see also 1978a) has precisely probed the critical foundations, dimensions, and analytic consequences of several modes of anthropo- logical comparison, but has led us to and not beyond a dilemma noted by Wittgenstein (1958: 84e, para. 215), who asked, "But isn't the same at least the same? We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity of a thing with itself.... Then are two things the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shows me to the case of two things?" Earlier, Wittgenstein (1956: II, para. 14) formulated his essential query in the guise of, "How do we compare games? By describing them-by describing one as a variation of another-by describing and emphasizing their differences and analo- gies.... [One may introduce a new proposition for comparative purposes and ask,] what does such a proposition do? It introduces a new concept, a new ground of classification."

    As Wittgenstein notes, concepts-including definitions and clas- sifications-are central to comparison.16 We cannot compare inter- twined currents and eddies in the phenomenal ebb and flow of events-historically situated beliefs, acts, experiences, or texts- without concepts that formulate theoretical problems ("ask particular and significant questions") in a methodologically rational way and give us a reason to compare.7 Comparisons in vacuo are meaningless, without intellectual context for their production or evaluation, and often mere juxtapositions of essentially incomparable phenomena. Formal comparison, however, involves an explicit analytic construc- tion, which frames and focuses the endeavor. All events have their

    16 Smith (1978b) distinguishes between definitions, as an atemporal and monothetic type of specification of a closed set, class, or category by a unique principle of closure, and classification, as a temporally specific, polythetic clustering. It is the latter that he considers to be an essential feature of comparative analysis.

    17 For the hermeneutic endeavors of historical inquiry, Dilthey (1962:77) notes that, "Interpretation would be impossible if [both past and alien] expressions of life were completely strange. It would be unnecessary if nothing strange were in them. It lies, therefore, between these two extremes." For an anthropological perspective on this genre of hermeneutical analytic enterprise, see Geertz (1973). In regard to a relativistic view of interpretation in the social sciences that becomes the foundation of these analytic positions, Winch (1963:108) firmly argues that, "Two things may be called 'the same' or 'different' only with reference to a set of criteria which lay down what is to be regarded as a relevant difference. ... [T]he sociological investigator.., .has to take seriously the criteria which are applied for... identifying the 'same' kinds of actions within the way of life he is studying" (my italics). In a highly restricted manner, these approaches do appear to recognize the necessity of comparison in analysis, but there is no clear sense in any of these views of an analytic framework which permits explicit, systematic cross-cultural or historical comparisons. Each approach tends to embed analysis in particular contexts, and any analytic movement or extension beyond these contexts is viewed as being either severely problematic or entirely unwarranted.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 417

    singularities, but both indigene and analyst create contexts (of dif- ferent kinds and for different purposes) that reduce some of the singularity of events for pragmatic or philosophical ends and by analytic, classificatory means. To be explicit and analytically useful, folk models and intuitive apprehensions of similarity and difference- both theirs (in the lived or reconstructed context) and ours (in the analytic context)-must be hammered out on the anvil of logically precise and consistent conceptual formulation. The in situ intuition that is reconstructed a posteriori as method is rationalization of a different order and yields neither insight nor theoretical advance in comparative analysis.18

    Smith (1978a, 1982b) brings us to what he calls a "gap" (perhaps an abyss) created by the postulation of difference, for he properly observes that comparison must formally involve a consideration of both similarity and difference. On the one hand, the postulation of identity precludes the possibility of comparison by obliterating the "gap" and rendering comparison tautological. On the other hand, the postulation of difference is meaningless for comparison without some connective tissue of postulated similarity. Difference makes a com- parative analysis interesting; similarity makes it possible.19 Neither quality, however, is simply and unproblematically inherent in the phenomena to be compared. Only abstract concepts can provide the problems, lenses, and constructed patterns in terms of which we can postulate analytically useful similarities and differences. Without theoretical concepts, there can be no "methodical manipulation of difference, a playing across the "gap" in the service of some useful end" (my italics) (Smith, 1982b: 35).

    Hempel (1966: 112-115), while defending his later and somewhat reformulated logic of induction, acknowledges the impossibility of eliminating a priori concepts from systematic inquiry, a perspective documented at length by Kuhn (1970) and variously supported by Kaplan (1964: 86), Medawar (1969: 128-173), Myrdal (1969: 9), and Nadel (1964: 20-34). Indeed, in noting the common fallacy of assum- ing an antithesis between assembled facts and theory, Medawar (1969: 149) correctly observes that, "... unprejudiced observation is mythical.... In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive ... [and] 18 On the problem of conceptualizing inter-relationships between folk or cultural and

    analytic concepts, see Caws (1974), D'Andrade (1984), Holy and Stuchlik (1981), Jenkins (1981), and Quinn and Holland (1986). 19 Complex philosophical issues pervade specifications of the nature and the inter-re-

    lationships of the notions of identity, similarity, and difference. For relatively clear expositions on these matters, see Butchvarov (1966) and Goodman (1970).

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  • 418 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    what... [one] sees conveys no information until... [one] knows beforehand the kind of thing ... [one] is expected to see." If theoret- ical concepts are an inevitable part of the analytic process, then a central issue in comparison is to make them explicit, systematic, and relevant to a corpus of significant questions.

    Accordingly, the problem of the nature of data is exceedingly complex from the standpoint of either an analytic philosophy in the Kantian tradition or of a constructivist psychology of cognition and perception (Quine, 1970: 1-17). The data of the anthropologists-from field observations and conversations, to notebooks, to varying levels of a posteriori analysis-may be conceived to be organized in terms of differing "grades of theoreticity" (in Quine's phrase) or conceptual distances from phenomenal "reality." Processes of induction and deduction may be sharply distinguished abstractly in terms of some direction of movement from an initial relative proximity to the "empirical world" or the "theoretical model," but in practice there is an essential coordination of these strategic modes of inquiry (Dubin, 1969: 9, 240). The relationship between induction and deduction is complex and dynamic. On the one hand, if a theoretical construct is a "concept referring to something that is postulated in order to explain the ... [particular] observed but that is not directly observable .... " (Pap, 1962: 426), then "it is theory ... that determines which facts out of a potentially infinite number are to be collected-those facts ... which are believed to constitute evidence for the theory at hand" (Spiro, 1972: 577). On the other hand, as Nadel (1964: 20-34), following Whitehead (1938: 2f.), observes, both theory and data are inextricably bound up together in analysis and mutually determine their relative significance. Indeed, Quine (1951) properly doubts that analytic questions of meaning and synthetic questions of fact can be sharply or rigidly distinguished, and Hempel (1952: 10f.) suggests that the project of "explication-the shaping and sharpening of more or less vague notions of theoretical discourse in terms of the subject matter at hand-blurs a precise distinction between conceptual anal- ysis and empirical inquiry (Quine, 1960: 258f.). Thus, if the terms of an empirical inquiry are generated in theoretical context, then there is no possible movement from observations that are shorn of theory to theoretical generalizations.20 The problem of pure induction tends to fade at the disintegration of an absolute faith in logical empiricism

    20 Note that the view that observations, meanings, and facts are theory-laden refers here to matters of interpretation and explanation in contexts of inquiry or discovery and not to matters of confirmation, validation, or falsification. Indeed, the hermeneutical claim that the rationale or grounds for constructing an interpretation or explanation and for accepting that interpretation or explanation are the same is seriously tautological (see Geertz, 1973, 1984; cf. Collin, 1985; Grtinbaum, 1984; Norris, 1985; Spiro, n.d.).

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 419

    (Sellars, 1963: 355). Indeed, Nadel's (1964) formulation of the inter- play between theory and data is a sophisticated commentary on the implications of Fortes' (1970: 129) famous anthropological dictum that, "Every way in which facts are grouped in description involves theories, implicit or explicit, about the connections between them that are significant; and significance is a function of the kinds of questions to which the observer seeks an answer.... Ethnographic facts [per se] ... are meaningless.... "

    If this brief portrayal of anthropological description and analysis is a reasonable characterization of what anthropologists do, it implies that both our ethnographic and our textual materials are selected, described, and organized in relation to the interpretive frameworks or theoretical models that we bring to bear on them at all stages of research (albeit in different ways). In contexts of inquiry or discovery where issues of initial insight, recognition of pattern, interpretation, and formulation of explanation are focal (Gruinbaum, 1984; Spiro, n.d.), the analytic and descriptive processes are intricately bound together through an engagement in what Geertz (1973) so vividly characterizes as "thick description." Through the metaphor of Dilthey's (1962) notion of a hermeneutic circle, Geertz (1973, 1976) endeavors to unpack layers of signification and to reveal patterns of significance with the suggestion of a process of "dialectical tacking" back and forth between the particular and the general, the experience- near and the experience-distant, the emic and the etic. All of these analytic contrasts invoke an image of the interweaving of theories and data in the mold of webs of cultural signification that Geertz seeks to disentangle without destroying their natural richness and fragile coherence. But his is ultimately an impossible stance for any compar- ative analytic undertaking.

    Although Geertz (1973, 1984) is skeptical about the possibility of a comparative analysis (cf. Skocpol and Somers, 1980), he develops a set of analytic models, strategies, and tactics that depend heavily upon analogical or metaphorical relations.21 Whether exploring the Balinese cockfight or theatre state, he elegantly maps significant contours of a socio-cultural landscape by means of a sensitive, subtle, 21 On Geertz's own comparative endeavors, however, see Geertz (1968, 1976). In the

    former work, Geertz utilizes a contrast in contexts-Moroccan and Indonesian-to explore both similarities and differences in two cultural modes of participation in a common, yet problematic Islamic civilization. The ideal types of the Indonesian mystical-aesthetic configuration and the Moroccan moral-warrior configuration figure prominently in this comparison. Geertz (1968:96-97) notes, however, that in the process of comparison "we look not for a universal property-'sacredness' or 'belief in the supernatural', for example-that divides religious phenomena off from nonreligious ones with Cartesian sharpness, but for a system of concepts that can sum up a set of inexact similarities, we sense to inhere in a given body of material" (my italics).

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  • 420 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    and often tacit explication of the implications of powerful trope constructions (e.g., a "reading-of-a-text" analogy). But Geertz's inter- twining of cultural, epistemological, and rhetorical metaphors is often dense and blocks the achievement of an analytic purchase that permits and enables a comparative inquiry. Although his approach places a clear emphasis on processes of local interpretation and contexts of inquiry or discovery rather than on processes of general explanation and contexts of validation (see Geertz, 1984; cf. Spiro, n.d.), Geertz's recognition of the importance of metaphorical or analogical configurations-and the nature of their analytic unpack- ing-in contexts of locally bounded cultural interpretation may hold significant insights for more comparative and generalizing modes of analysis.22 The metaphoric or analytic character of theoretical models is critically important for understanding key facets of comparative analysis.23

    Analytic models that exhibit metaphoric or analogic structure invoke a comparison by delimiting the focus of analysis to the comprehension of one entity in terms of another-often the more inchoate and problematic in terms of the better understood. They perform this function by emphasizing a particular dimension (or set of dimensions) of the phenomena to be compared, and not by postulating the comparison of phenomena in toto. Some features of the phenom- ena are selected at the expense of others, for metaphor "filters" perception or understanding (Black, 1962, 1979; MacCormac, 1985). The construction of a metaphor or an analogy involves a selection that posits a set of shared or analogous features between entities that otherwise may differ from one another in all or most respects. Thus, through what Field (1973) calls "partial denotation," the metaphoric or analogic structure of a theoretical lens affords "epistemic access" (Boyd, 1979) to two (or more) relatively similar-but also loosely 22 Geertz (1984) conflates contexts of inquiry or discovery and contexts of validation in

    a manner that perceives these contexts to be in conflict at the same level of analysis. Weber's (1963) program of analysis, upon which Geertz explicitly draws for inspiration, however, posits an essential difference between Verstehen and Erkliren as analytic modes of understanding, requires a critical complementarity between them at different levels of analysis, and, thus, does not envision a collision between them which requires the kind of epistemological choice that Geertz seems to emphasize. 23 On the complex role of metaphor and analogy in analysis, see Achinstein (1964),

    Adler (1927), Allers (1955), Arber (1947), Back (1963), Black (1962), Boyd (1979), Brown (1976, 1977), Burrell (1973), Gentner (1981, 1982), Gerhart and Russell (1984), Hanson (1961), Harr6 (1960), Hesse (1965, 1966), Kuhn (1979), Leatherdale (1974), MacCormac (1985), Martin and Harr6 (1982), Oppenheimer (1956), Pederson-Krag (1956), Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), Polanyi and Prosch (1975), Pylyshyn (1979), Ramsey (1964), Schlanger (1970), Simon and Newell (1963), Taylor (1971), and Toulmin (1953, 1972).

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 421

    distinguishable-entities before analysis draws and specifies the theoretically relevant distinctions between (or among) them. The metaphor often constructs the similarities in unexpected and insight- ful ways, and it may create something new by positing an illuminating resemblance between or among apparently disparate entities.24 The postulation of a metaphoric or analogic relation implicates a similari- ty-statement and, thus, provides the possibility of a comparison- statement.

    Metaphoric statements tend to be imprecise and open-ended. The more poetic characteristics of metaphor can be understood as a version of what Wittgenstein (1958) calls "seeing as" or "noticing an aspect" (cf. Hester, 1966). Indeed, the focal, constructed emphases of metaphor, which themselves demand careful and precise explication, are complemented by the resonances of associated or evoked impli- cations of similarity and difference, which provide possibilities of further analytic exploration of the metaphoric image (Black, 1979). Nevertheless, the fluid, poetic image of metaphor must ultimately acquire some semblance of explicit precision, order, and coherence by being translated into the explanatory, formally-phrased statement of a theoretical model (Black, 1962, 1979). The common analogic structure that underlies both metaphor and model facilitates such translation. Indeed, beyond the gaining of initial insight, much analytic effort is directed toward specifying the structure of that analogical mapping between the phenomena or domains to be com- pared.

    The target phenomenon or domain to be understood is new, abstract, uncharted, problematic, and less familiar than the source phenomenon or domain in terms of which it is to be described (Gentner, 1981, 1982). Aspects of the known domain are analogically mapped onto aspects of the target domain and specify the predicates (attributes and relations) of the former to be applied to the latter. Analogical mapping requires a distinction between objects or phe- nomena and their attributes, on the one hand, and relationships, on the other, and it promotes relatively explicit and elaborated represen- tations of the semantic structure of both domains. Knowledge of the domains is represented as a propositional semantic network of object nodes or loci and predicates. The nodes or loci that shape the network represent concepts that are treated more or less as wholes, and the predicates express propositions about them. These predicates can be 24 It is important to note, following Davidson (1978), that there is no necessity in

    positing some special and mysterious "metaphorical meaning." All that is required is an assumption that metaphor involves a special use, construction, or focusing of essentially literal meaning(s) to draw attention to what might not otherwise have been noticed.

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  • 422 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    either attributes (that is, predicates taking one argument) or relations (that is, predicates taking two or more arguments).

    On the basis of such a propositional representation, one can specify the character of a metaphor or analogy as a structural mapping between a known and a target domain. An analogical mapping from a source domain A to a target domain B is a statement that,

    1. there is a mapping X of the nodes al, a2, .. , an of domain A onto the nodes bl, b2,

    ..?. , bn of domain B;

    2. the mapping X is such that significant aspects of the struc- ture (nodes, attributes, and relations) of A apply in B-that is, many of the relational predicates that are perceived to be valid in A are hypothesized also to be valid in B on the basis of the cross-domain matchings of the different sets of nodes specified by the mapping X; and 3. relatively few of the valid attributional predicates within A apply validly within B.

    Note that statements 1 and 2 define the fundamental analogical mapping, but they are also compatible with, and the basis for, the postulation of a general similarity between the domains A and B. To indicate that the matching of these domains is one of analogical relatedness and not of literal similarity (Ortony, 1979), however, statement 3 must be claimed. Statements 2 and 3, taken together, assert that relational predicates, and not attributional predicates, bridge domains in analogical mappings. This claim follows from the key assertion that analogical mappings apply the same relations to dissimilar phenomena, and that the attributes of phenomena tend to be implicated only to the extent that the phenomena themselves-in significant contrast to their positions and functions in their respective systems-are similar.25 Thus, on the basis of this characterization of the process of analogical mapping, the characteristics of a good analogy include: (1) clarity of definition of mappings; (2) richness or density of predicates (especially relational predicates); (3) systematic- ity or coherence of mapping; and (4) abstractness of mapping with 25 The general implications of this sketch of analogical mapping are several. Following

    Gentner (1981, 1982), an overlap in relational predicates is necessary for a perception of similarity between domains. An overlap in both attributional and relational predi- cates is viewed as literal similarity, but not all attributes and relations may correspond perfectly. Indeed, if they did, the statement would suggest an identity, not a similarity, and, thus, a tautology. An overlap in relations but not in attributes, however, is seen to constitute an analogical relatedness. An overlap in attributes but not in relations, in contrast, is a temporal relatedness and not a form of similarity. Note that the key qualities of literal similarity and metaphorical or analogical relatedness are often best portrayed in the form of a continuum, not a dichotomy. If two or more domains overlap in relational predicates, they are more literally similar to the extent that there is also an overlap of their attributional predicates.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 423

    respect to the hierarchical level of the predicates in the propositional semantic networks representing the domains to be compared.

    The construction of analogical mappings, which are closely bound up with metaphorical understandings, may be facilitated by limiting the scope and complexity of the comparison, constraining the match- ing process of interlinking domains, and reducing spurious, non- productive matches between them. On the basis of the comparative logic of analogical mappings, the carefully focused use of theory- constitutive metaphors or analogies in their construction may repre- sent a strategy of non-definitional, causal, or ostensive "accommoda- tion" or "reference-fixing" that is particularly appropriate for facilitating the recognition of a promising domain of research, for giving first heuristic and then theoretically significant shape to that domain, and for avoiding certain kinds of definitional rigidity and ambiguity.26 Indeed, the traditionally knotty problem of the definition of religion as a guiding force in the comparative analysis of religions may appear differently in the light of metaphoric constructions and analogical mappings, which provoke a non-traditional view of the nature of definition and its analytic problems.

    ii

    Anthropologists have expended enormous, but largely unproduc- tive, effort in an attempt to define religion. The enterprise has tended to focus on delimiting the phenomenon of religion as a preliminary but necessary step toward analyzing or comparing instances of "it." Almost uniformly, such anthropological definitions have rested on an assumption that religion is a universal phenomenon with some com- mon, distinctive core of characteristics (Spiro, 1966: 86-87). The form of these definitions has tended to be monothetic; they have attempted to identify religion with some unique principle of partition or some set of distinctive features that provide the grounds of similarity for comparing religions and assessing the significance of religious differ- ences. In turn, the comparison of differences has tended to focus on variations of some abstract feature that is specified within the defini- tion, of some non-essential features that are not specified by the definition, or of some relations between features specified in the definition and aspects of the non-religious realm of socio-cultural life.

    Spiro (1966: 85-91) suggests that definitions of religion may be classified into two ideal types: real and nominal.27 Real definitions purport to be true statements about the essential and often non- 26 On the notions of "accommodation" and "reference-fixing" (including "dubbing"

    and naming ceremonies) see Boyd (1979), Kripke (1980), and Putnam (1975). 27 See also Achinstein (1968) and Hempel (1952:2-14).

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  • 424 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    empirical nature of the phenomenon to be explored, or to be analytic construals of complex concepts that are deemed to have unambiguous empirical referents. The core attributes or essential features that are postulated are often poorly defined, seemingly arbitrary, and deter- mined by extrinsic interests rather than intrinsic necessities. The empirical referents are often assumed (but not demonstrated) to be (and to have to be) universal. In the quest to discover order, realism assumes that there are definite relationships among the particular phenomena of the world, and that classification of such phenomena under general categories merely makes explicit the relationships already implicit in them. Thus, classifications are objectively right or wrong in accordance with the "natural" patterns that characterize phenomena. In turn, nominal definitions introduce "new" expres- sions or concepts that acquire meaning by stipulation. The introduced expression or concept (definiendum) is arbitrarily assigned meaning by being made synonymous with a known expression or concept (definiens). Nominalism seeks to constitute an order among phenom- ena through the construction of a set of classificatory concepts. To avoid a solipsistic abyss, such conceptualizations of phenomena are often assumed to be constrained, but there are no unambiguous standards of constraint beyond the usefulness of essentially linguistic conventions.

    Whether or not analytic categories are embedded implicitly and naturally in, or are imposed explicitly and conventionally on, phe- nomena determines the kind of knowledge of phenomena that is possible, but the matter probably cannot be resolved on empirical grounds. Yet, the philosophical consequences of the realist or nomi- nalist positions significantly shape the kinds of theories that will be accepted as proper guides to research.28 Although most anthropolog- ical definitions of religion are necessarily mixed types, the greatest problems are presented by their real definitional characteristics (Spiro, 1966: 86-91, passim). The key notion of similarity as the basis of comparison is peculiarly problematic for realism because the assertion of a real similarity among phenomena imparts an aura of reality to an abstract entity that necessarily exists apart from the phenomena to be compared. Also, with the notion of "explication" 28 The philosophical distinctions between realism and nominalism are partially but

    importantly correlated with Diesing's (1971:124-133) distinctions between formalism- and empiricism. On the one hand, formalism perceives phenomena to have both empirical and logical aspects. On the other hand, empiricism rejects this duality by denying a reality to the logical aspect of phenomena and viewing this matter as merely adopted for purposes of convenience and simplicity in analysis. With respect to this distinction, however, Diesing (1971:124-125) notes that belief and action, epistemol- ogy and ontology need not be consistent in the way research is actually conducted.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 425

    staking out an early and problematic middle ground, the foundations of both analytic-synthetic and the observational-theoretical distinc- tions, which are intricately bound up with the idea of real definitions, have been severely challenged.29

    There have been two major demurrals to the monothetic, substan- tive, and phenomenal definition of religion. The first is a concern that a priori categorization that may distort "reality" and preclude consid- eration of some intuitive sense of "relevant data." The second ques- tions the monothetic form of definition. The first demurral is aptly represented by Weber (1963: 1), who maintained that,

    To define "religion," to say what it is, is not possible at the start of a presentation. ... Definition can be attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study. The essence of religion is not even our concern, as we make it our task to study the conditions and effects of a particular type of social behavior.

    The external courses of religious behavior are so diverse that an understanding of this behavior can only be achieved from the viewpoint of the subjective experiences, ideas, and purposes of the individuals concerned-in short, from the view-point of the religious behavior's "meaning" (Sinn).

    And Evans-Pritchard (1967:9) noted that, " ... to obtain objectivity in the study of primitive religion what is required is to build up general conclusions from particular ones. One must not ask 'What is religion? but what are the main features of... [a particular] religion .... ' "

    Robertson (1970:34) and Spiro (1966:90-91) observe a critical dilemma in the stance adopted by Weber and Evans-Pritchard. On the one hand, an a priori substantive definition of religion prema- turely restricts and distorts an analysis. On the other hand, failure to specify the domain of religion blurs the focus of analysis and pre- cludes comparison. Neither a real nor a nominal definition of religion seems to avoid the problem in a non-arbitrary way (Stout, 1980). Geertz (1973, 1976) recommends his hermeneutical "dialectical tack- ing" back and forth in the production of a "thick description" as the necessary compromise in this dilemma, and the very abstractness and theoretical structure of his "semiotic" definition of religion seems well adapted to this purpose (Geertz, 1976). But the strategy largely abandons any formal, generalizing sense of comparative analysis (Geertz, 1973; cf. Geertz, 1968, 1976).

    The second demurral questions the appropriateness of monothetic categories and harks back to Wittgenstein's problem of discovering the common features of games. Anthropologists increasingly recog- 29 On the notion of "explication," see Hempel (1952:10-12, 1970) and Quine

    (1960:258-259). On philosophical problems of the analytic-synthetic and observational-theoretical distinctions, see Suppe (1977:66-118).

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  • 426 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    nize that all apparent members of the class or set constructed by a definition or classification do not necessarily possess all of the osten- sibly distinctive features of the class or set, and that there is no a priori way of establishing which features are most definitive. The structure of this variability within a definitional class, which cannot be ad- dressed in the logic and language of monothetic categories, and the consequent impossibility of establishing both necessary and sufficient criteria for class inclusion directly challenge the possibility of a monothetic definition of a bounded class. With respect to his focal exemplars of games, numbers, and words, however, Wittgenstein (1956, 1958) adopted a position of modified realism, rejected a claim of essentialism, and proposed an alternative mode of conceptualizing classificatory relations in the idiom of "family resemblances."30

    Drawing on the image of a thread of many fibers, Wittgenstein (1958:32e) suggested that "we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres." The salient points of Wittgenstein's account of family resemblances are signifi- cant for understanding the key classificatory characteristics of com- parative analysis. Certain phenomena have no common properties by virtue of which we apply the same label to them and include them in the same category. Consequently, there is no single, correct monothetic or Merkmal definition of such phenomena, and any suggested definition would agree only in part with the actual use of the label for the phenomena. Also, the ability to give a monothetic or Merkmal definition of the class of such phenomena is not a necessary condition of being able to understand that class. What makes the various phenomena called "X" into the class X is a complicated network of partial, but overlapping, similarities. Invoking the meta- phor of family resemblance, this network may draw on very different kinds of similarity. The explanation of the class X consists primarily in giving multiple and paradigmatic examples of the class, which may be coupled with extensions of the examples through similarity- or anaology-clauses (that is, "these and similar-analogous phenomena are X's") and thus may serve as conceptual "centres of variation." Hence, the class X can be explained, but it cannot be given a monothetic or Merkmal definition. The adducing of relevant similar- ities justifies uses of the label "X," since it is on account of relation- ships among X's and especially on account of relationships between particular phenomena and paradigmatic examples of X's, that we

    zo On problems of the notion of family resemblances, see Bambrough (1966), Fogelin (1976), and Lange (1970).

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 427

    properly call X's "X's." In other words, we call something an "X" because it is very similar in some ways to other phenomena that are properly called "X's." X's form a single family held together by the overlapping of many similarities and constituting, by virtue of this unity, a concept. The concept of a X has no sharp boundaries, and there is no precise specification and circumscription of the extension of the concept. The explanation of the concept is by means of paradigms, but no specification of the range or degree of similarities with the paradigms is required for inclusion under the concept of X. Explanation of a concept by examples is comparable to indicating a place by pointing, and not to delimiting it by drawing a boundary. Boundaries may be drawn around the concept of X for special analytic purposes, but the location of that boundary depends only on what best facilitates achieving those special analytic purposes.

    The lesson of Wittgenstein is simple, but profound: there may be classes with members that share no single feature in common, and these classes cannot be uniquely specified in terms of distinctive features or rules of closure. Thus, the similarity of membership in a class becomes problematic, and the boundary of a class becomes ambiguous. Borderline cases are inevitable. One has to trace each "fiber" of connection with great sensitivity to its construction and place it in some more complex thread or fabric, which is the analytic domain of interest. Following Campbell (1965), Needham (1975) has argued that a polythetic category formed on the basis of the similari- ties of family resemblance must have a list of "basic predicates." Rather than circumscribing the boundary of a category on the basis of shared characteristics in the manner of monothetic classification, a polythetic categorization directs attention to the interpretation of basic predicates as the principles that enable the connection of phenomena in family resemblance chains. Such predicates, therefore, are not empirical properties of phenomena, but are formal aspects of the model of classification. The use of formal predicates of analytic models rather than empirical properties of phenomena as the basis of categories is largely inimical to any single-factor similarity definitions of a class. Furthermore, a polythetic approach is sufficiently flexible to accommodate new knowledge without the monothetic necessity of modifying definitions and redrawing boundaries every time an anom- aly arises. This approach readily accommodates Bateson's (1979:142) important notion of abduction as the "lateral extension of abstract components of description," enabling a particular description of some phenomenon and an analogic search for other instances-that is, for phenomena that more or less fit the same rules that were devised for the description. It also readily accommodates a prototype theory of meaning and the nature of categories (Rosch, 1978; Rosch and Mervis,

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  • 428 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    1975). These analytic advantages of the idea of family resemblances as they yield polythetic categories are significantly strengthened by Vygotsky's (1962) demonstration that monothetic definition is cognitively unrealistic, and by Wittgenstein's (1956, 1958) argument that it is logically unnecessary.

    The basic problem of classification revealed in Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances has been variously recognized by the particular insights of ideas about "connotative features" ("D'Andrade, 1976), "paths of interlinkage" (Frake, 1969), "fuzzy sets" (Dubois and Prade, 1980; Kay and McDaniel, 1978; Kempton, 1978; Zadeh, 1965), "polythetic classes" (Needham, 1975), "prototypes" (Rosch, 1978; Rosch and Mervis, 1975), "inexact concepts" (Goguen, 1969), "images of wide scope" (Gruber, 1981), "features of similarity" (Tversky, 1977; Tversky and Gati, 1978), and "chain complexes" (Vygotsky, 1962). The somewhat related notions of "cluster concepts" (Achinstein, 1968) and "hedges" (Lakoff, 1973) also bear importantly on this fundamental problem. The primary implication of such perspectives seems to be that our analytic categories must be, as Waismann (1965) claims, "open-textured." Indeed, many centrally important cultural categories often encompass a broad range of apparently disparate meanings, and a recognition of this fact also has significant implica- tions for an anthropological or historical interpretation of cultural phenomena, including religious ideas and institutions.31 Our analytic categories must be designed to accommodate some of the central features of the design of the cultural categories that we seek to understand.32 Thus, our classificatory impulses to demarcate the domain of "religion," "ritual," "myth," or "tradition" in monothethic form must be tempered by a different sense of the possibilities of order or structure, of classification, and of categories. Yet, the Wittgensteinian "fibers" that we strive to follow and unravel in their densely woven and knotted threads and fabrics, the subtle relation- ships that we seek to illuminate, and the intricate contours and configurations that we hope to shape, are all informed by the analytic problems that we pose and by the strategic questions and tactical methods that flow from our senses of key theoretical puzzles.

    31 On the "polysemic" or "multivocal" nature of cultural (ritual) symbols, see Turner (1967). 32 Note that this sense of accommodation is focused on particular analytic interests and

    does not assume, as Needham (1975) sometimes does, that polythetic principles are somehow and intrinsically more faithful to ethnographic materials. The concern here is with a relationship between two genres of analytic categories-theirs and ours-and how they might best be compared.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 429

    iii

    If there is some utility in perceiving our categories of analysis to be "open-textured," then we must make sense of how that texture is constructed. In this regard, the subject of theoretical problem formu- lation and of metaphoric or analogic images, mappings, and models must re-emerge. Perhaps we must begin with our "prefigurations" of scholarly interest and contextual description, interpretation, and ex- planation. By prefigurations, I mean those often diffuse assumptions, interests, images, and theories that shape what we find to be intrigu- ing, important, puzzling, or problematic, and, thus, central to our analytic concerns in probing the significance of particular aspects of cultural, psychological, and social phenomena in cultural history and in anthropology (White, 1973:1-42). These prefigurations-always subject to various forms of modification-provide us with a very general set of guides and lenses in our set of assumptions about "human nature" in its most fundamental biological, cultural, psycho- logical, and social aspects.

    When we construct descriptions, interpretations, and explanations in (and of) particular cultural, historical, or social contexts (Scriven, 1959:450), we inevitably draw upon some notion of a problem to be explained, an explanatory logic, and a relevant context to be explored in empirical support of an explanation. All these matters rest upon the epistemological foundation of the epistemes or paradigms that encase our research traditions. Thus, we are engaged in the conceptual shaping or construction of two interrelated contexts: the more or less tentatively bounded cultural, historical, or social context that we claim is empirically relevant to some decipherment (description, interpre- tation, and explanation) of a particular puzzle; and the intellectual context that gives rise to our sense of relevance and to our sense of the puzzle that informs the criteria of relevance. These contexts are given focus and significance by the theoretical lenses that we bring to bear on analytic puzzles. Berlin (1954:54) reminds us, however, that the analytic process (despite its apparent goals) is often not "sufficiently clear, sharp, precisely defined to be capable of being organized into a formal structure which allows of systematic mutual entailments or exclusions." When I "describe" a rite of am yaoor ("male initiation"; literally, "house of a forest fern") among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of the remote West Sepik mountains of Papua New Guinea, I must intri- cately select from a diversity of data and shape a portrait of a facet of ten-stage, decade-long ritual cycle (Poole, 1976, 1982). The process is creative in constructing criteria of relevance for selecting and arrang- ing, foregrounding and backgrounding, and partitioning or articulat- ing the "important" and the "incidental" features of the focal rite. It

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  • 430 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    also provides information apparently extrinsic to what I see and hear, information that becomes intrinsic to my explanation of a problem or puzzle which I have formulated. The am yaoor is central to Bimin- Kuskusmin senses of a distinctive cultural tradition, of self, person, society, and cosmos-a root metaphor or world hypothesis in crystal- line configuration and of great salience as a cultural form, a psycho- logical experience, and a social force.

    No single description, interpretation, or explanation of the am yaoor will exhaust the puzzles it presents to scholars of religion in different theoretical frames. As the kaleidoscope of analogic mappings turns different metaphoric lenses-and, by implication, different the- oretical concerns-on the am yaoor, I have explored this ritual cycle as a tightly structured domain encasing a liminal exploration of existential problems in a socio-moral order (Poole, 1976), a constella- tion of gender images projected inward on the self and outward on a cosmological landscape (Poole, 1981a, 1981b), a design for learning and experiencing ways of thinking and feeling that enable revelations of ancestral understandings (Poole, 1982), a hierarchical organization of ritual understandings, ritual powers, and ritual ranks encoded in a complex sociology of knowledge (Poole, 1986a, 1986b, n.d.). In each of these analytic endeavors, I embed my conceptions of relevant cultural, historical, and social structures and process, and portray the subtleties of psycho-cultural experiences of ritual (Poole, 1976, 1982). I incorporate notions of the contours and the modes of transmission of tradition. I articulate ideas about the systematic balance or dialectical relationship between the particular and the general-both locally and in terms of broader comparative frames. In so doing, I explore my sense of what constitutes significant and illuminating exemplars of my general theoretical puzzles or problems, and I express my particular mode of appreciation of pattern in interpretation and of theoretically informed causal linkage in explanation. Cautiously but inevitably, I must go beyond the information that is locally presented in the Bimin-Kuskusmin rite not only in sound, sight, and experience, but also through indigenous exegesis, and I must re-capture the rite in another and wider lens that will distort some aspects of its local meanings in the service of a carefully constructed, comparative mode of comprehension. If I am to converse about my analytic projects with other scholars of religion, however, I must join with them in examin- ing how, and for what purposes, we go beyond the immediacies of our "texts" and create a puzzle or problem and a set of contexts for interpretation as the essential ground of explanation.

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 431

    iv

    Let us review our analytic pathways. Our puzzles or problems and our reasons or purposes, as well as the theoretical and ethnographic contexts in which they are to be embedded, do not represent the only arena of our negotiations. We must also recognize the formal proper- ties and the implications of how we formulate our problems, and what such formulations imply or entail for definition or classification, for descriptive portrayal, interpretive understanding, and explanatory argumentation about religious phenomena. Much of our initial, cre- ative formulation of problems may be usefully perceived as a genre of metaphoric construction that posits some critical "fiber" of resem- blance and constitutes the preliminary grounds for an analogic map- ping. Theoretically informed analysis then proceeds to explore the implications of that particular construction and mapping. Metaphors, by constructing an illuminating sense of similarity, allow us to see and to understand one domain in terms of another through a mapping of aspects of one onto aspects of the other. But the very nature of a "domain" of experience is shaped by (and in) the construction of the metaphor and of the analogic mapping that explicates metaphoric intuitions (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). "Love is a journey," "Love is madness," "love is bliss," and "love is war" (which, of course, "is hell"), are all metaphors-indeed, only a few points on the English metaphoric map of a complex landscape-that illuminate different facets of a vague concept. But they do not collectively define the phenomenon in any substantive, monothetic sense. Instead, by pro- viding a complexly articulated set of different lenses, they fix the reference(s) of the concept in a variety of ways, the precise articula- tion of which remains to be explored. Categories thus constructed are essentially "open-textured."

    Because these analytic categories derived from metaphoric con- structions and analogic mappings are not monothetically closed, they allow for the possibility of strategic and systematic elaboration and extension in a variety of ways and for various purposes. The analogies, metaphors, and hedges select or construct a prototype, exemplar, center of variation, or aspectual focus, and define various kinds of relationships to it. Each such relationship, and the coherences among such relations, must be explored for its subtle analytic implications. What is within or beyond the focus of analysis will vary from one metaphoric construction or analogic mapping to another. Yet, the partially overlapping foci of several more or less articulated meta- phoric lenses-and the analogic mappings through which they are explicated and made explicit-may provide an increasingly refined illumination of the contours and internal structures of the "domain" of

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  • 432 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    our inquiry with respect to the central puzzles that inform the linked constructions of analytic metaphors or analogies. When we seek to compare our analytic concepts with those of the "texts" composed by indigenes, we note that both sets-ours and theirs-are often "open- textured," but that each tends to select, bracket, and focus differently. This genre of comparative analysis is highly complex, for it involves consideration of comparisons among our (theoretical) analytic con- cepts, among their (cultural) analytic concepts, and between both sets of concepts. The relationship between tradition-bound folk models and theory-bound analytic models is complex and poorly understood, but it remains a central problem for the comparative study of religious phenomena (Caws, 1974; D'Andrade, 1984; Holy and Stuchlik, 1981).

    v

    To the extent that we may learn something from linguistics about the formal lexical structure, syntactic embeddedness, and semantic organization of metaphors and perhaps other trope constructions, we can compare these sets of analytic and cultural concepts-as meta- phors-to note how they are opened, closed, focused, and bracketed differently; how they overlap (if they do) or otherwise interrelate in the coherence of their semantic networks or structures and their logico-semantic implications or entailments; and how they draw different or similar maps of similar or different "territories" of theo- retical interest (Smith, 1978b). The intricate overlapping of meta- phoric constructions may be revealed in shared metaphorical entail- ments and in partial correspondences among the metaphoric networks, structures, or foci established by those entailments. There are often many metaphoric constructions that partially structure a concept or domain, each illuminating some facet of it. These various constructions and mappings tend to set different perspectives and to serve different analytic purposes by emphasizing varied aspects of the concept or domain.

    Evans-Pritchard's (1965) explication of the Nuer idea of kwoth by reference to not only various cultural metaphors that implicate matters of space, time, genealogy, ecology, et cetera, but also various facets of different cultural notions of deity, power, spirit, refraction, and other abstract notions, implicitly proceeds by analytic attention to meta- phoric constructions and analogic mappings. He attempts to align some aspects of the Nuer kwoth variously with the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and the Hebrew ruah, and to bracket the relationship between man and deity by reference to the concepts of agape and eros as they are portrayed in Anders Nygren's theological scheme. Yet, Evans-Pritchard (1956, 1965) is uncomfortable with this interweaving

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 433

    of a diversity of tradition-bound metaphors, for he properly sees that the illuminations of metaphor are eroded by their distortions. He declines to retreat into the illusory comfort of some monothetic classifications of Nuer religious ideas. In turn, my own approach to unraveling the nuances of the complex Bimin-Kuskusmin concept of aiyem-not much enhanced by an inchoate gloss of "sacred"-pro- ceeds more explicitly by analytic attention to metaphors and analogies that delimit a theoretical puzzle in the ways the idea is conceptual- ized, used, and experienced in myriad contexts (Poole, n.d.). The concept of aiyem may be an attribute of persons, things, contexts, and an aneng ("time-place"). It is generally viewed as a condition-a state to be inferred retrospectively from the outcome of events. It is best understood to be canonically a stative verb or, less commonly, an abstract verbal noun denoting efficacy or potency. Complex, linguis- tically facilitated comparisons of aiyem with the lexical, syntactical, and semantic variations of Polynesian ideas of mana provide an especially illuminating set of metaphoric lenses that probe the nu- ances of the notion more subtly than encasing them in some more simplistic anthropological version of the Durkheimian concept of the sacred.

    Each of these anthropological analyses attempts to say something of general significance about a culturally particular and peculiar concept, but neither endeavor seeks analytic closure in toto. Instead, each case presents, through sets of different selections, focusings, bracketings, and other shapings that are constructed by different metaphors, articulated by different analogic mappings, and motivated by different problem orientations or theoretical puzzles, a partial coherence among its metaphors or analogies that may tell us some- thing new, interesting, and even theoretically important. Analytic metaphors or analogies, however, are imaginative, creative construc- tions that must be explicated if precision of comparison is to follow comparative insight. Yet, we can only specify the formal properties of an extant construction, but not how to produce an illuminating and useful analytic metaphor.

    If we can begin to make significant sense of indigenous cultural- religious concepts in relation to our own analytic concepts by postu- lating that both are genres of metaphoric constructions, can establish this recognition as the (metaphoric) ground of our comparison of them, and can elaborate such comparisons by attending to the detail of the analogic mappings that interconnect these concepts and their do- mains, why can we not do the same with the diversity of our definitions or classifications of religious phenomena? This exercise demands that we consider the extent to which our real and/or nominal definitions, classifications, or modes of explication of religious phe-

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  • 434 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    nomena involve metaphors that are structured and focused to high- light certain theoretical problems or puzzles. To claim that "religion is X" does not necessarily imply that is all religion is, or even that a monothetic definition of religion is in any way central to the analysis. The recognition of such definitional limitations allows us to consider formally the theory-constitutive aspects of metaphor or analogy (Gentner, 1981, 1982).

    If we encounter claims that religion-or myth, ritual, or some other conventional aspect of religious phenomena-is performative (in the different senses of Goffman and Tambiah), a system of symbols (in the different senses of Geertz and Turner), a functional design focused on need-fulfillment (in the different senses of Freud and Malinowski), or sacred, social, ideological, or what have you, we must analyze those claims in the context of the descriptions, interpreta- tions, and explanations in which they are embedded. We must examine how those claims are put to use in shaping those descriptive, interpretive, and explanatory frameworks. In this critical way, we may render explicit the essential structure and entailments of these claims as metaphoric or analogic kinds of analytic constructions.

    When Leach (1968) defines ritual as a mode of communication and then forges a complex set of analytic metaphors in terms of the idioms of information theory, linguistics, and structuralism, the critical point of the definition is not a total encompassment of a phenomenologi- cally closed category to be explored in a totalistic sense. Indeed, Leach's analytic construction claims that if we explore certain (com- municative) facets of what is conventionally called "ritual" through the lens of this metaphor, the often postulated contrast between myth and ritual may be usefully dissolved; and both myth and ritual (together) may be innovatively analyzed by means of linked commu- nicative metaphors that yield a similar pattern of analogic mappings in each instance. Leach articulates the linkage or coherence among his metaphoric constructions in terms of their entailments in information theory, linguistics, and structuralism. He makes no claim that com- munication is a distinctive feature of a monothetic category of reli- gion, but shows that certain metaphors enlighten the interpretation of particular cases and produce comparative generalizations of broader theoretical significance.

    In another contribution focused on biblical texts, Leach (1969:25-83) employs a structuralist metaphor of mythology as a powerful intellectual device that both posits and mediates fundamen- tal, existential contradictions. He draws significantly on L6vi- Straussian insights into mythologiques, but his analysis is not encased in a L~vi-Straussian epistemology or methodology in certain impor- tant respects. Leach assumes that sacred texts contain a mysterious

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 435

    religious message that cannot be inferred directly from the surface structure and manifest content of the narrative, and that this mystery is somehow encoded in a complex, deep structure of the text (or, of a set of related texts). As a communicative form, the code is founded on permutations of patterned structures, and the analytic process of decoding attempts to discover what persists as an underlying pattern throughout a sequence of transformations. His exploration of the implications of this structuralist metaphor leads to a complex analytic construction of specific, formal, analogic relationships among other- wise seemingly disparate details of genealogy and geography, sexual and political relations, male and female categories, rules of exogamy and endogamy, ethnicity and conquest, images of priest and king, et cetera, which are drawn together in analysis through intricate and cross-referencing analogic mappings among myriad domains. The formal (quasimathematical) characteristics of Leach's analytic meta- phor are sufficiently explicit and systematic to permit a comparison of this mode of description, interpretation, and explanation with other genres of structuralist analyses of myth and other socio-cultural phenomena.

    L6vi-Strauss (1962) is a master of metaphor (or metonym, synec- doche and other figurative constructions) in structuralist analyses of cultural phenomena and reflections on traditional anthropological ideas. His grand studies of mythologiques are often composed in musical metaphors (overture, finale, fugue, sonata, cantata, et cetera), and the image of bricolage stands at the center of the classificatory capacities of la pens6e sauvage. Communication in any form is equated with one of its special forms-language. The idea of "circu- lation of women" becomes the critical nexus of marriage relations and kinship systems. The notion of "species for genus" becomes the idiom for articulating otherwise diverse cultural forms of the circulation, communication, and classification of phenomena. In a splendid tour de force, he dissolves and refigures the traditional anthropological "problem of totemism" by attending to the forms of classification that it was variously intended to encompass. His insight involves seeing totemic phenomena as constituting a second-degree dyadic relation- ship between two sets of first-degree relationships or as being predi- cated on an analogic resemblance between two systems of differences. L6vi-Strauss' dual appeal to intuition and to reason in his analytic characterization of totemism is bound up with his intricate use of analogy and metaphor, whether or not the analytic consequences achieve an empirical or theoretical solidity.

    In turn, drawing on speech act theory, Tambiah (1968, 1973) explores the several senses in which ritual acts and magical spells can be seen as performatives, drawing on the symbolic, iconic, indexical,

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  • 436 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    referential, and pragmatic meanings of rituals and the ritual modes of their articulation. Tambiah's sense of the analogy that constructs focal aspects of ritual as performatives is richly extended in Harris's (1978) analysis of Taita religion. Elaborating the performative metaphor with analytic subtlety, she demonstrates how performative utterances in contexts of ritual (re)create, present, and make present realities of the world that are framed, lived, and experienced in the ritual itself. In the ritual speech of kutasa, participants engage in performative acts of considerable consequence by refusing to incorporate or "casting out anger." The performative metaphor is more precisely explicated in analogic mappings onto myriad aspects of ritual contexts. In another metaphoric casting of religious phenomena, Turner (1967) explores the analogies of drama, transformation, periodicity, liminality, and other configurations of ritual structure, anti-structure, and process, and develops an insightful metaphoric conceptualization of ritual symbols in his elaboration of Freud's theory of dream symbolism. In yet another and quite different sense of analytic context, Spiro (1966:96-98, passim) defines religion as "an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhu- man beings," but his analytic metaphors and sophisticated analogic mappings are not to be confused or conflated with others that use similar terms for different concepts (Goody, 1961; Horton, 1960). In his intricate and compelling analyses, this complex, multi-faceted metaphor draws upon affective, behavioral, cognitive, and motiva- tional factors. These factors are both predicated on pre-cultural and pan-human factors and generated in the family through socialization and enculturation into a casual relationship to beliefs, rituals, and values as culturally constituted projective systems. Spiro finds Freud's analogic imagery a rich source for his own imaginative but highly systematic construction of a metaphor and analogic mapping. Founded on a carefully articulated sense of a theoretical problem and a clear logic of explanation, Spiro's analytic metaphor forges a coher- ent (hypothetico-deductive) relationship among cultural, psychologi- cal, and social variables in a manner that is shaped both by the problem orientation and the criteria of explanation (and their episte- mological foundations).

    A comparison of the studies of Spiro (1978, 1982) and Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) on Buddhism constitutes a splendid example of the differences in the consequences for analysis of differently constructed theoretical metaphors, the analogic mappings that such metaphors entail and enable, and the characteristics of the modes of description, interpretation, and explanation that they implicate. The analytic approaches of Harris, Spiro, Tambiah, and Turner differ not only from one another, but also from the approaches of Leach and L6vi-Strauss,

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  • Poole: Metaphors and Maps 437

    but one must go beyond the obvious contrasts and collisions of perspectives to consider whether or not there may be some overlap among them in which a partial coherence emerges. In this limited possibility of coherence, as well as in the more obvious contrasts, among such approaches (metaphoric constructions and analogic map- pings), one may find the promise of a principled linkage of related, albeit significantly different theoretical insights.

    As a final example of the characteristics of metaphoric construc- tion and analogic mapping in the analysis of religious phenomena, let us return to Jonathan Z. Smith, to examine the way how he proceeds in a comparison. For this finale, I choose the case of "Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon" (Smith, 1982c). Smith constructs his analytic metaphor by restricting the idea of "canon"- usually a tradition-bound term of theological discourse in literate, Western religions-in a carefully crafted manner that creates a rela- tionship of postulated similarity between "canon," on the one hand, and what he calls Listenwissenschaft, on the other. Such lists are typically small, mutable, open sets of unordered or arbitrarily ordered items, or are particular kinds of transformations or permutations of those features-for example, catalogs, in which the sets may remain heterogeneous and open, but an account can be given of their organization. A "canon" differs from a list or a catalog, however, because it is a closed and immutable set and requires a hermeneute or some technique of translation or interpretation. The concept of Listenwissenschaft refers to two linked aspects of lists-of which "canon" is a sub-type or with which "canon" exhibits a commonality of postulated aspect(s). In the first instance, the idea of Listenwis- senschaft is concerned with the formal characteristics or properties of the construction of lists. In the second instance, Listenwissenschaft focuses on the ways lists are used exegetically by interpreters to relate the particular to the general through a totalizing extension of the list corpus to diverse problems of interpretations by "readings" that link the list lexicon to semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic considerations.

    By bracketing, focusing, and otherwise shaping "canon" as Listenwissenschaft in this manner, Smith can compare-that is, con- struct an illuminating relationship among-such apparently diverse phenomena as New Guinea Iatmul initiations, Malay Pygmy explana- tions of storms, Babylonian omens, Talmudic interpretations, Austra- lian Walbiri designs, and African Ndembu and Yoruba divinations. Smith selects, shapes, and organizes specific aspects of each "ethno- graphic" case in accordance with the metaphoric construction that guides his analysis, yet he notes critical differences among cases as a way of expanding the permutations of Listenwissenschaft-that is, constructions of list types and related exegetical modes-and, thus, of

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  • 438 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

    "redescribing canon." In this manner of comparison, the analytic notion of "canon"-now no longer bracketed and limited by its tradition-bound sense-is not only linked to a significant set of theoretical puzzles and problems, but also refined formally in relation to similar intellectual devices and extended ethnographically. The possibilities of analogic mappings among domains is systematically extended, but the idea of canon is not subjected to some monothetic form of closure. Indeed, the metaphoric constructions and the analogic mappings that illuminate canon also imply new mappings that might be postulated with respect to current research in linguistics and ethnosemantics, set theory, cognitive science (especially cogni- tive psychology), and the anthropological perspectives of Turner (1967) on the character of indigenous interpretation and explanation and of Goody (1977) on modes of classification (including lists). Smith himself notes several significant implications of his endeavor that remain unexplored but hold promise of theoretical significance. In examples of this kind, "redescribed" as metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings, one can begin to perceive subtle images and tracings of the "fibers" that constitute partially overlapping strands of similarity in Wittgenstein's metaphor of family resemblances: the construction of new and significant analytic lenses without the logical empiricist compulsion to establish rigid monothetic boundaries, and of a sense of important theoretical puzzles or problems cast as metaphors or analogies. Such an approach suggests important new grounds of definition or classification and, thus, of description, inter- pretation, and explanation in analysis.

    We can evaluate theories as metaphors or theory-constitutive metaphors-and their entailed or implied analogical mappings-in terms of their formal structure, their clarity and precision in focusing and delimiting comparison, their possibilities of extension and gen- eralization, their imaginative formulation of interesting and important puzzles and problems, and their implications for charting future directions of analytic inquiry. The puzzles, problems, foci, and param- eters of future research, however, must be negotiated so that we come to have a sense of similarity and difference in what we imagine our materials to be, in what we ask of those "ethnographic" materials, and in why we ask what we ask. These fundamental questions, and the epistemes, paradigms, root metaphors, or world hypotheses that are their epistemological contexts, must shape the beginnings of our dialogues about the subject and the course of the academic study of religion. The close and careful assessment of the usefulness of illuminating metaphors, however, is a matter not on