484

The Application of the Theories of

Michel Foucault to Problems in the
Study of Religion

PHILIP MELLOR

A major area of discussion to which the comparative religionist is

forced to return, with some frequency, is that of methodology.
Ninian Smart has noted how the comparative religionist must use a
variety of disciplines, many of which make prior assumptions which
are, ifnot explicitly hostile, at least in contradiction to what he terms
the 'world-view' of the religion being studied.' Trevor Ling and
Wilfred Cantwell Smith have gone so far as to question whether the
application of the term 'religion' itself can be useful in such studies,
arguing that it is distortive and reductive." The sociologist Robert
Wuthnow has argued that a lot of the confusion over the study of
religion has been due to an insufficient attention to the need to
clarify terms, and the ideological structures which inform them." I
wish to add fuel to this smouldering methodological fire by suggest-
ing that a brighter illumination of the methodological question is
still necessary and that this task would benefit from an application
of some of the ideas of the French theorist Michel Foucault (1926-
1984).
Foucault defined discourse with reference to strategy and power."
Statements are not neutral, purely intellectual, communicative
commodities but rather something performative; that is, they arise
in a particular context with the aim of corroborating and elaborat-
ing the context itself. The statements of a discourse are contextual in
the most radical sense: social practices create statements and are
perpetuated by statements; both are thus inextricably dependent on
each other. It is well known that Foucault rejected what have
recently been called 'totalized' views," such as those of history,
psychology, sociology and, indeed, theology; that is, intellectual
attempts to funnel human experience into anyone conceptual
totality. If we apply this to the study of religion, a number of
'totalizing views' are rejected: religion cannot be explained away
with reference to a historically determined superstructure, as some
Marxists would have us believe, nor can it be reduced to trans-
historical ideologies such as humanists, and crypto-humanists, often
suggest. These approaches give insufficient attention to context;
stated most simply, discourse and practice cannot be explained away
by each other. Hence the rejection of totalized perspectives will
inform much of the following discussion.

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 Michel Foucault and the Study ofReligion 4 85
THE- PALE SHADOW

Some have taken the view that religion was once, long ago,
something purer, grander and more meaningful: this is what might
be termed the 'pale shadow' approach to religion, and seems to be a
result of the continued interest in the origins of religion, which in
turn grew out of the evolutionism of the late nineteenth century.
William James, widely regarded as a pioneer of the comparative
study of religion, had attacked the use of the term 'origins', but was
not averse himself to analysing religion in terms of origins when it
suited him: 'Churches, when once established, live at second-hand
upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power
originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the
divine." This makes it possible to view tradition as inferior to
origins, and to comprehend the historical course of a religion in
terms of decay or reduction.
Such an understanding has been very widespread. Karl Marx had
noted the interaction between religion and changing social circum-
stances when he observed that 'by commercializing all relationships
. .. industry was doing its best to wipe out both religion and
morality, or reduce them to a transparent lie'." This reduction of
religion has become a popular recourse for many religionists. For
example, Trevor Ling has repeatedly argued from such a quasi-
Marxian concept of reductionism: 'Buddhism is being reduced from
a civilisation to what the modern world understands by religion ... a
source of comfort to some, but in the last resort a private irrele-
vance."
This is the 'pale shadow' approach par excellence. Yet Ling's
approach is, perhaps, as value-laden as that of the textual-orien-
tated academics who looked disparagingly at modern Buddhism
when compared to the words of the Pali Canon. For Ling, modern
Buddhism seems similarly impoverished when compared with the
ideal of the Buddhist civilization he believes the Buddha established.
He accepts Cantwell Smith's statement that' "religion" is a modern,
artificial concept and is distortive',? and that it should be dropped in
favour of 'cumulative traditions'. The use of this term in an
academic context is highly questionable. It is required to encompass
all the changes, subtle or dramatic, that have occurred in the
definitions of Buddhism or Christianity over the millennia, with
little regard for how these views were propagated and developed in
the specific social circumstances of the time.
Foucault sees the use of the term 'tradition' as a political act:
tradition ... is intended to give a special temporal status to a
group of phenomena ... it makes it possible to rethink the
dispersion of history in the form of the same ... to isolate the new
against a background of permanence, and to transfer its merit to
originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals.'?
Foucault did not intend that the academic should not use the term

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486 JJhilijJ lkfellor

'tradition' (or 'religion' for that matter), but that the notion of
tradition should be the object of the study. Catholics might approve
of the term 'cumulative tradition' being applied to them, but most
Protestants would not, so it is surely unacceptable for the academic
to apply the term regardless of how it is understood in a particular
context. In Ling's work, for example, the background of cumulative
permanence implied by the term 'cumulative tradition' makes
possible the negative appreciation of modern forms of religion. Also,
the continuity implied by tradition makes possible an extreme
emphasis on the role of individuals, where origin is believed to be of
central importance. When Cantwell Smith rejects the term 'reli-
gion', he is doing so to assert the original and the personal above the
distinctions and categorizations of history: 'there is no generic
Christian faith ... There is only my faith and yours ... We are all
persons, clustered in mundane communities, no doubt, and labelled
with mundane labels but, so far as transcendence. is concerned,
encountering it each directly, personally.'!'
In a similar vein, in I gog Lenin wrote that 'Religion should be a
private matter' and not something which should be a concern of the
State." Here we can see the methodological muddle that results
from the pale shadow approach to religion. Cantwell Smith is
manifesting the modern emphasis on the personal nature of religious
commitment which he and Ling are reacting against by their
rejection of the term 'religion' as reductive. This is a kind of personal
theological exegesis rather than a detached scholarly analysis, the
reinterpretation of religion in a structure more in keeping with the
author's belief about the real meaning of religion.

THE STRUCTURALIST GAUNTLET

The American sociologist Robert Wuthnow has suggested that

structuralism provides the most adequate approach to religion,
because it avoids any emphasis on the personal in a polarized
relationship to the social. He discusses what he sees as the two major
traditions in the study of religion, 'dualism' and 'wholism' (sic).
Wuthnow explains dualism as having arisen from humanism; dua-
lism has, in turn, given rise to the academic pursuit of demystifica-
tion, or what Paul Ricoeur called the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' .13
Humanistic scholarship aimed to demystify the objectivity of reli-
giously conceived objects by identifying them as alienated elements
of the economic, social or psychological dimensions of the human
world.
The counter to this tradition was a wholistic approach, where an
emphasis was placed on the contextuality of meaning, and the
subjective religious view was not explained away by any objective
social fact. This found its expression in phenomenology, which
'explicitly denied the possibility of reducing religious symbolism to
any other aspect of reality' .14 Wuthnow suggests that religionists

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 Michel Foucault and the Study ofReligion 487

have confused the terms of these different epistemological traditions.

He argues that the idea of world-views (or belief systems) as the
creation of thinking individuals belongs to the dualistic tradition.
He prefers the term 'meaning system' (or 'symbol system'); this he
understands as a product of the wholistic tradition because it does
not refer to the subjective realm of the individual: 'A meaning
system refers to the dominant meanings in a culture that are
associated with a particular set of symbols.':" He also distinguishes
consistency, which reflects, he believes, a subjective, individualistic
view of religion, from coherence, which refers to life being made
meaningful by symbol systems. He sees structuralism as the ideal
approach for the religionist, as it takes the structure of symbolism as
its domain of enquiry and rejects the subjective content of the
individual symbol as an area for analysis.
Nevertheless, a major weakness in Wuthnow's argument is that his
distinction of different terms seems arbitrary. Surely 'coherence'
represents a totalizing funnelling of dispersed religious phenomena
as much as does 'consistency'? Wuthnow is correct to emphasize the
need for clarity in the use of terminology in the study of religion, but
his distinction of 'two epistemological traditions' is going too far.
While phenomenology is a response to the reductionism and insuf-
ficient attention to context in the approach he labels 'dualism', it is
still a humanist approach to religion. Phenomenology aims to be
scien tific, and claims a generality which lifts itabove the biases of
the particular religious viewpoint, as Ninan Smart makes clear:
If Religion [i.e. the phenomenological study of it] has any edge
over Theology ... it is because the Religionist attempts as far as
possible to describe and explain religion, and so contribute to the
general stock of human knowledge and science. On the other
hand the task of Theology is to express a world-view and a
commitment. 16
The humanist orientation of this is clear: the religious viewpoint is
inferior to the scientific. The inferiority of theology, in relation to
phenomenology, lies in its subjectivity. For Smart, the phenomeno-
logical method involves a bracketing off of questions of truth which
are pertinent to the subjective realm." However, structuralism goes
much further than this, denying that the subjective realm exists, and
so cannot be seen merely as a refinement of the wholistic position.'
Discussing the psychologist Jacques Lacan, Cathy Urwin points out:
'Lacan continually asserts that the "I" of the cogito, or the unitary
rational subject is illusory and forever unattainable. Instead his
account prioritizes the "symbolic order", or an order of signs and
meanings.':" On myth, Roland Barthes went further: 'myth cannot
possibly be an object, a concept, an idea; it is a mode of signification,
a form' .19 For Barthes, to talk in terms of an 'object' would be to
place one's analysis back within the discourse of the subject/object
dichotomy.

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4 88 ~hilij7 lkfellor
A SIGN OF THE TIMES

It is from the structuralist rejection of subjectivity that much of

Foucault's theory stems, but he rejects the totalizing character of
structuralism in relation to language. It is this break which makes his
approach so potentially useful for the contemporary study of
religion. I t is not enough to contextualize individual statements,
language itselfhas to be contextualized: '[The analyst's task does not
consist only of] treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying
elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices
that systematically form the objects of which they speak."? The
emphasis on specificity and contextualization make this perspective
characteristically flexible; no statement or action can be excluded
from the discourse/practice frame of analysis. This includes what is
said, what is not said, and the manner in which the discourse is
organized: 'we must try to determine the different ways of not saying
such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak are
distributed, which type of discourse is authorized"."
Consequently, when we can recognize a regularity between a
number of statements,we should not think in terms of coherence but
merely in terms of a discursive formation. Coherence is inappro-
priate because one of the most significant characteristics of discourse
is the factor of choice. For example, if we look at early Western
Buddhism we can isolate what Foucault terms 'points of diffraction',
meaning types of concepts which do not appear in the same series of
statements and appear to be mutually exclusive. Examples of this
are concepts of both the 'intuitive' East and 'rational' Buddhism, the
personalism of religion and the cultural impact of Buddhism on the
West, the superiority of the religious text and the desire for a
Western Sangha, the desire for this Sangha to be independent and the
use ofPali names and Thai ordinations as a form of legitimation. In
each case, the two concepts never appear in the 1920S in the same
series of statements in Buddhism in England, the journal of the
Buddhist Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and the major outlet
for Western Buddhist discourse at that time. However, this is not
because they are contradictory. Certain ideas may be dominant in
one particular period, forcing others into discursive subgroups, but
as circumstances change previously subordinate discourses can come
to dominate.
The level of objectivity this approach aims to establish is also
dependent on context for its signification, and does not exist in a
polarized relationship to the subjective. Consequently, it should not
be hostile to the focus of study. There is no bracketing of questions
of truth. In terms of such analysis, the consideration of the
resurrection of Christ from a scientific/humanistic position is no
more useful than explaining the decline of the British Empire with
reference to the doctrine of kamma (action-reaction). Such explana-
tions should be the object of study, rather than tricky ultimate
questions the analyst has to put aside. The phenomenologist has a

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 Michel Foucault and the Study of Religion 489

sneaky feeling that he or she should be answering such questions, but

is reluctant to be reductionist. However, the religionist should
merely be sensitive to religious data, and not subject them to various
conceptual distortions, for example the process of demythologising,
or deciding whether something is rational. These terms belong to
humanist discourse.
The possibility of greater sensitivity might be seen with reference
to the sacramental in Christianity. Roderick Strange, a Catholic
priest, describes the Catholic understanding of the sacramental:

The signs which give outward expression to the deep interior

truths and realities of our lives, like the kisses and declarations of
love between lovers, are not simply detached and arbitrary. They
are caught up inextricably in what they express. They are part of
the reality. Such a sign is not external. It participates in the reality
it conveys."
This emphasizes context in terms of the inextricable relationship
between how we speak, or signify, certain things and the perceived
reality of them. The process of signification participates in the
reality it is signifying, echoing Foucault's assertion that discourse
forms the objects of which it speaks.
Nevertheless, it is important to note the relationship between
transformations of discourse and their correlates in institutional,
social and political practices. It is this factor which ensures that
religion is not reduced into the concept of language. In this respect it
is useful to consider discipline in Buddhist monasticism. In his
discussion of discipline in the Vinayapitaka, John Holt emphasizes
that the formulators of the Vinayapitaka were involved in a creative
act in terms of the establishment of a Buddhist monastic identity."
Within Christianity the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, has
always associated authority with tradition. This position is similar to
that of the Buddhist Sangha. The Sangha sees itself as being in a direct
line of continuity from the positions and actions of the Buddha, and
as having a duty to preserve the Dhamma. This is the source of its
special authority, and is to some extent parallel to that of the
Church for Catholic Christians. For this continuity, and hence the
Sangha's authority, to be maintained, the monastic community must
be kept pure. The rules of discipline provide the norm for maintain-
ing this purity and for preserving a special identity and authority.
This normalizing function of a text dealing with discipline is not
unique to Buddhism. Michael Hill has noted how The Rule of St
Benedict has served such a function: 'Since the Rule was for a long
period the most important source of whatever uniformity existed
between the autonomous Benedictine abbeys, it acquired a very
strong evaluation.'?' The Rule was of particular significance as it
was a major source of uniformity, authority and the definition of
what it meant to be a Benedictine monastery. Within Buddhism, the
rules of discipline create a communal identity and establish a

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49° ~hilijb lkfellor
relationship between the Sangha and Buddhism, as well as structur-
ing the relationship between the individual bhikkhu (monk) and the
Sangha as a whole.
The maintenance of the purity of the Sangha is mirrored in the
discipline of the actions of the individual bhikkhu. Just as the purity
of the whole rests on eliminating the individual elements which
might threaten it, so the individual bhikkku has to control those
elements within himself which would threaten his status as a bhikkhu.
As Holt argues, the principle of discipline applies to all components
of an act: beginning with the contact between the object of the
senses with the sense organs, to the mind's response to that contact,
to finally the verbal, mental or bodily expression that is a conse-
quence of the mind's volition." Foucault has drawn attention to this
differentiating characteristic of discipline: 'Instead of bending all its
subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differen-
tiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of
necessary and sufficient single units ... Discipline "makes" indivi-
duals.?" On one level, the Vinayapitaka articulates such a procedure
of decomposition: it forces the individual bhikkhu to become con-
scious of himself as an individual to the extent that it requires a
decomposition of that individuality, in line with the Buddhist
doctrine of anatta (non-self). This individualizing effect is not in
contradiction to the normalizing process. As Foucault argues,
although normalization imposes homogeneity, it also individualizes
by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, and to fix
specialities. 27
In a study of Buddhist monasticism in Thailand, S.]. Tambiah
compares The Rule of St Benedict with the Patimokka, the Buddhist
disciplinary manual which contains the same precepts as the Vinaya-
pitaka, without the body of explanatory material." A problem in
Tambiah's analysis, which bears some relevance to the foregoing
discussion, is his attitude to hierarchy. He contrasts the hierarchy of
the Benedictine monastery with the anti-hierarchical character of
the Sangha. This is an extreme claim to make, and is not helped by
Tambiah's omission of a definition of hierarchy. As Spiro, among
others, points out, the Sangha is hierarchically organized, with the
hierarchy being marked by a set of status terms such as novice or
abbot. Within each position, hierarchy is also determined by the
number of years in the robe."
Tambiah's position leads to further complications: 'The paradox-
ical feature of the Buddhist Sangha is that, while its organizational
form is anti-hierarchical and antagonistic to specifying status posi-
tions with associated competencies, the disciplinary rules which the
monks have to follow are spelled out in such fine nagging detail."?
The paradox is entirely of Tambiah's making. As he himself points
out, even within the rules of discipline there is a hierarchy of
emphasis relating to the seriousness of offence. 31 In fact, all Buddhist
discourse seems to presuppose hierarchy, as is shown specifically by

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 Michel Foucault and the Study ofReligion 49 1

concepts such as rebirth. Amongst the contemporary English Sangha,

hierarchy is very important. Parallel to Spiro's distinctions, each
monk has a Pali term such as Anagarika, Bhikkhu or Ajahn as a sign of
his status, while they are also hierarchically structured within those
status terms. On a theoretical level, hierarchy is justified in terms of
it being the natural order of things: 'In the practice of the Dhamma
we are opening the mind to how things actually are, meaning that
we're beginning to notice that nature itself is hierarchical. '32
The conceptual and practical structure of hierarchy in Benedic-
tine and Buddhist monasteries may be very different, but the
limitation of Tambiah's analysis is a commitment to presenting
Buddhism in anti-hierarchical terms. We can understand this com-
mitment as a sign of a developmental, humanist view of history.
Hierarchy is understood as being archaic. People used to live in more
hierarchical structures, but these have made way for more egalitar-
ian forms. For Tambiah, who is clearly sympathetic to Buddhism,
the modern, egalitarian understanding of humanity is prefigured in
the earliest Buddhist discourse. Consequently, the significance of
Christian monasticism is localized in the medieval period, while the
significance of Buddhist monasticism resonates throughout history,
maintaining its relevance even today. While this perspective is
clearly hostile to Christianity, it also gives an insufficient account of
Buddhist monasticism. If Buddhist monasteries are clearly hierar-
chical in some sense of the word, actually using the term in their own
discourse, then we should consider how they use it and what they
mean by it. Religious phenomena should not be funnelled into the
categories of hostile ideologies.

CONCLUSION: THE DEATH OF HUMANISM?

Many of the theories developed by Foucault provide the basis for a

methodology which looks at how people use terms like 'religion', or
'Buddhist', or 'Christian', compared with other groups or other
periods. As I have suggested, it is not enough to stress the importance
of context; the process of contextualizing has to be integral to the
overall methodology. Discussing the Buddhist concept of anatta
(non-self), Stephen Collins has noted how attempts to reach final
conclusions on the reality of conceptual products of other cultures
has resulted in misrepresentations of anatta in terms of Western
categories of thought." Collins attempts to avoid such a trap by
placing himself 'in a Buddhist world', quoting Mauss' phrase
'experiencing Buddhist categories'. 34-
The post-structuralist does not attempt such a transfer, but tries
to establish a level of objectivity which emphasizes both the context
of the object of the study and that of the analyst. This emphasis on
situation extends to the concept of subjectivity, rejected by the
structuralists. Foucault reintroduces it, but only in terms of a
situated perspective, meaning that a subjective position is under-

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49 2 Philip Mellor

stood in terms of the complex set of relations within discourse, but

not in terms of a polarized relation to the objective. Foucault terms
his approach 'genealogical', in that he is concerned to trace the
development of different branches of discourse in terms of their
relationship to each other and the points at which they diverge, all
with reference to context and situation.
A similar approach to religion was implied by Clifford Geertz,
quoted in Collins' book, who argued as follows: 'What a religion is-
its specific content-is embodied in the images and metaphors its
adherents use to characterise reality ... But such a religion's
career-its historical course-rests in turn upon the institutions
which render these images and metaphors available to those who
thus employ thern.?" Such an approach is relativist to some extent:
questions about the truth of religious concepts, when compared to
each other, are excluded. As Collins argues, an individual may come
to a personal conclusion but this should not affect his or her work."
This is not to demean those personal conclusions, but to understand
that comparative religion should not have a world-view or express
an ontological position.
In the light of Foucault's work, the objectivity of scientific
disciplines such as sociology, psychology and phenomenology has
vanished: we can now understand them as conditional, relative and
reflexive to a specific context. In consequence, religion is freed from
the reductionism of humanist disciplines, and the comparative
religionist's approach becomes more humble. For this reason, the
genealogical method has no edge over theology, and would only be
valuable when used alongside openly religious positions. It does not
address the religious questions many would consider the most
significant. It is not meant to do so, but, unlike phenomenology, it,
does not regret the fact. Similarly, since it is not a humanist
orientation it has no pretensions to be scientific. I t is merely an
analytical tool which religious groups mayor may not find useful.
Many of the theoretical perspectives developed by Foucault there-
fore prove productive in helping to establish an approach which
aims to study religious phenomena without forcing it into the
categories of a conflicting religious or philosophical position.

Philip Mellor is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Comparative Religion

at the University of Manchester.

Notes
I Smart, The Phenomenon ofReligion (Mowbray 1978), p. 147·
2 Ling, The Buddha's Philosophy ofMan (Everyman 1981), p. xiv. Cantwell Smith,
The Meaning and End of Religion (SPCK, 1978).
3 Wuthnow, 'Two Traditions in the Study of Religion', JournalJor the Scientific
Study oj Religion, 20. I (1981), pp. 16-32.

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 Any News of the Social Good? 493

4 Foucault, The History ofSexuality (Pelican 1981), pp. 101-2.

5 Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (Polity Press 1984), p. I.
6 James, The Varieties ofReligious Experience, p. 30.
7 Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell Ig83), p. 4 14.
8 Ling, The Buddha (Maurice Temple Smith, Ig73), pp. 22-3.
9 Ling, 'Communalism and the Social Structure of Religion', Truth and Dialogue,
P·59·
10 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Tavistock 1972), p. 2 I.
I I Cantwell Smith, op. cit., p. 191.
12 Bottomore, op. cit., p. 415.
13 Wuthnow, op. cit., p. 18.
14 ibid., p. 23·
15 ibid., p. 24·
16 Smart, op. cit., p. 148.
17 ibid., p. 7g·
18 Urwin, 'Power Regulations and the Emergence of Language', Changing the
Subject (Methuen Ig84), p. 275.
19 Barthes, Mythologies (Paladin 1973), p. log.
20 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 49.
2 I ibid., p. 27.
22 Strange, The Catholic Faith (Oxford University Press Ig86), p. 108.
23 Holt, Discipline (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 198 I).
24 Michael Hill, A Sociology of Religion (Heinemann Educational Books 1973),
P·155·
25 Holt, op. cit., p. 119.
26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish (Peregrine 1979), p. 170.
27 ibid., p. 184.
28 Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand (Cambridge
University Press 1970), p. 88.
29 Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and Society (University of California Press 1982),
pp. 310-1 I.
30 Tambiah, op. cit., p. 81.
3 I ibid., p. 86.
32 Ajahn Sumedho, Head of the English Sangha, Honorary President of the
Buddhist Society, 'The Family', public talk, 'Amaravati', 5/10/86.
33 Collins, Selfless Persons (Cambridge University Press 1982), p. 3.
34 ibid.
35 Geertz, Islam Observed, quoted in Collins, op. cit., p. 262.
36 ibid., p. 3.

Review Article: Any News of the

Social Good?
NIGEL BIGGAR
Changing Britain By the BOARD FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
OF THE GENERAL SYNOD OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
Church House Publishing 198 7 70 pp. £3.50 plb
The Church exists for the sake of the world. Its raison d'Etre is to love
the world and seek its highest good. Therefore, it must enter into the

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