Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Jonathan Z. Smith doesn't have the same range of influence as the other authors that I've mentioned in these posts. Most of his work is on comparative religion as a discipline, so that even when he's dealing with primary sources, it's generally with the ultimate goal of using them to question the work of some earlier scholar. That said, however, there are a few of his that I think writers and gamers can get some mileage out of.



The first involves the process of comparison itself, and can be extended to the process of invention. He's aware that we have to have some sort of categories in mind when we try to compare things ("X is like Y in these ways, but unlike Y in these other ways"), and that those categories are typically based on the forms with which we're most familiar, but it's important to recognize that (when it comes to things like religion) the categories themselves are artificial. We make them up, we imagine them, then use them to organize our experiences. Go back to Christian authors in the Middle Ages writing about Islam, and you'll find them either calling it some sort of paganism (itself a broad term for "not like our religion") or a Christian heresy. Why? Because they didn't have much else to compare it to.

That habit continued well into the 19th century, even as Western authors grew more familiar with the varieties of religious expression in other parts of the world. Their classifications grew more nuanced, but they still came down to the idea that Christianity (specifically, Protestant Christianity) was the measuring stick against which to compare any other religion. It still goes on in general conversation -- people who define Judaism as Christianity without Jesus, or who aren't sure whether or not to call Buddhism a religion or a philosophy -- and it tends to seep into the ways we imagine religions in fiction or games.

I'm not saying that's necessarily a problem, provided you've thought about your starting point and your assumptions regarding what is or isn't religious. (Smith gives a good historical example in one of his essays: when the Spanish reached the New World and were looking at the native people on the islands off the coast of America, they decided they didn't have any kind of religion. Why? Because they didn't see anything that looked like a temple. No temple, no religion, as far as they were concerned.) There are some good checklists that you can go through, by the way, if you want to go that route; they're a bit mechanical, but they at least cover the features that tend to appear to one degree or another in many religions.

This all leads to the second idea of Smith's that I like, where he throws out the usual way of classifying religions and suggests looking at them in terms of how rooted they are in a particular place. Some religions, he says, are locative: they're based on a particular environment and a relationship to that environment, and can't translate well anywhere else. Others are utopian (literally, placeless) and can function equally well anywhere. Locative religions tend to focus on maintaining the order of their sacred environment and the people within it; utopian ones can spread easily into new areas.

Like all the other categories, of course, the locative/utopian split is artificial. It's not an absolute division, but it gives you a new way of thinking about what makes a particular religion different than its neighbours.