CATEGORIZING RELIGION

ROBERT A. SEGAL

1. Manifest and latent levels

One famous feature of 7he Canterbury Tales is that Chaucer's charac-

ters look the way they really are. Their appearance-their dress, their
language, their manner, and above all their physiognomy-evinces
their personality. In Chaucer, what you see is what you get.
By contrast, one prime characteristic of the social sciences in the
twentieth century has been the supplanting of appearance by a dis-
tinct, often contrary reality. What you see is not what you get, at least
not all of what you get. For example, sociology stands committed to
uncovering a reality beneath appearance. In the classic formulation
of Robert Merton, sociology seeks the latent, or unintended, function
of a social phenomenon as well as the manifest, intended one:
It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not
common knowledge, for these are unintended and generally unrecog-
nized social and psychological consequences. As a result, findings con-
cerning latent functions represent a greater increment in knowledge
than findings concerning manifest functions. They represent, also,
greater departures from 'common-sense' knowledge about social life.
(1968: 122)

Manifestly, crime harms society, but latently it provides jobs for the
otherwise unemployable. As Merton says of the Hopi rain dance:
Were one to confine himself to the problem of whether a manifest
(purposed) function occurs, it becomcs a problem, not for the sociolo-
gist, but for the meteorologist .... But with the concept of latent func-
tion, we continue our inquiry, examining the consequences of the cer-
emony not for the rain gods or for meteorological phenomena, but for
the groups which conduct the ceremony. And here it may be found, as
many observers indicate, that the ceremonial does indeed have func-
tions-but functions which are non-purposed or latent. (1968: 118)

Merton's indifference to the manifest function typifies his contention

that "the distinctive intellectual contributions of the sociologist are
found primarily in the study of unintended consequences (among
which are latent functions) of social practices" (1968: 120).
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In anthropology, the key twentieth-century trend has likewise been

what in both disciplines is called "functionalism": the view that, often
contrary to appearance, any social phenomenon serves to foment the
stability of society. To quote A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who provided
the classic anthropological articulation of this approach:
The discovery of the integrative function of an institution, usage, or
belief is to be made through the observations of its effects, and these are
obviously in the first place effects on individuals, or their life, their
thoughts, their emotions. Not all such effects are significant, or at least
equally so. Nor is it the immediate effects with which we are finally
concerned, but the more remote effects upon the social cohesion and
continuity. (1977: 44)
No more for anthropologists than for sociologists need the social
function be the intended, manifest one:
It must not be supposed that the meaning of an element of culture can
be discovered by asking the people themselves what it means. People do
. not think about the meaning of things in their own culture, they take
them for granted .... The meaning of any element of culture can only be
defined when the culture is seen as a whole of interrelated parts, and
this can only be accomplished by one who is able to take an objective
view of it, the ethnographer or descriptive sociologist, in fact. (1958: 68)

As Radcliffe-Brown says of religion itself, "The hypothesis, therefore,

is that in what we regard as false religions, though the performance of
religious rites does not actually produce the effects that are expected
or hoped for by those who perform or take part in them, they have
other effects, some at least of which may be socially valuable" (1952:
154).
Rejecting wholesale earlier, introspectionist psychology, twentieth-
century depth psychology assumes not merely that an unconscious
underlies consciousness but that what is unconscious is the opposite
of what is conscious. Venturing beyond sociologists and anthropolo-
gists, Freud and Jung postulate latent intent and not just latent effect.
The unconscious harbors a will of its own.' I
The most obvious consequence of the social scientific quest for the
latent level of phenomena is the displacement of the actor's point of

' In his otherwise careful evaluation of Freud's

claims, William Alston assumes
Freud to be claiming that psychological conditions are either sufficient but unneces-
sary for religious belief or else both necessary and sufficient. Alston never considers
the far likelier possibility that for Freud psychological conditions are necessary but
insufficient. See Alston 1964: 78-82.