12 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014

Last fall, realizing that 2013 marked the twentieth an-

niversary of Talal Asads Genealogies of Religion: Dis-
cipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Is-
lam, I interviewed Talal AsadDistinguished Professor
of Anthropology at The City University of New Yorkon
the book and its reception and infuence on the feld. Ge-
nealogies of Religion infuenced me early in my gradu-
ate studiesparticularly the frst chapter on The Con-
struction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, in
which Asad argues that the concept of religion is, in
many contemporary contexts, fundamentally shaped by
Protestant assumptions. This was one of the frst books
I was exposed to that argued there is normative work ac-
complished by the very term religion, and all of my
writings since have taken this idea as a central starting
point. I want to thank Asad for taking the time to answer
the questions I posed to him.
Craig Martin: Can you discuss what you most hoped
to accomplish with Genealogies of Religion? Do you
think the book was received in the way you hoped it would
be?
Talal Asad: As far as I can tell, most people have un-
derstood that I was trying to think about religion as
practice, language, and sensibility set in social rela-
tionships rather than as systems of meaning. In that
book and much of my subsequent work I have tried
to think through small pieces of Christian and Islam-
ic history to enlarge my own understanding of what
and how people live when they use the vocabulary
of religion. I certainly did not want to claim that
as a historical construct religion was a reference
to an absence, a mere ideology expressing dominant
power. It was precisely because I was dissatisfed
with the classical Marxist notion of ideology that
I turned my attention to religion. I was gradually
coming to understand that the question I needed to
think about was how learning a particular language
game was articulated with a particular form of life,
as Wittgenstein would say. The business of defning
religion is part of that larger question of the infnite
Genealogies of Religion, Twenty Years On: An Interview with Talal Asad
Craig Martin, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, St. Thomas Aquinas College
cmartin@stac.edu
doi:10.558/bsor.v43i1.12
ways language enters life. I wanted to get away
from arguments that draw on or offer essential def-
nitions: Religion is a response to a human need,
Religion may be a comfort to people in distress but
it asserts things that arent true, Religion is essen-
tially about the sacred, Religion gives meaning to
life, Religion and science are compatible/incom-
patible, Religion is responsible for great evil, So
is science and religion is also a source of much
good, No, science is not a source of evil, as reli-
gion often is; it is technology and politics that are the
problemthe social use to which science is put.
I argued that to defne religion is to circumscribe
certain things (times, spaces, powers, knowledges,
beliefs, behaviors, texts, songs, images) as essential
to religion, and other things as accidental. This
identifying work of what belongs to a defnition isnt
done as a consequence of the same experiencethe
things themselves are diverse, and the way people
react to them or use them is very different. Put it this
way: when they are identifed by the concept reli-
gion, it is because they are seen to be signifcantly
similar; what makes them similar is not a singular
experience common to all the things the concept
brings together (sacrality, divinity, spirituality, tran-
scendence, etc.); what makes them similar is the def-
inition itself that persuades us, through what Wit-
tgenstein called a captivating picture, that there is
an essence underlying them allin all instances of
religion.
The things regarded as hanging together accord-
ing to one conception of religion come together very
differently in another. Thats why the translation of
one religious concept into another is always prob-
lematic. But Genealogies doesnt argue that the defni-
tion of religion is merely a matter of linguistic repre-
sentation. Religious languagelike all languageis
interwoven with life itself. To defne religion is
therefore in a sense to try and grasp an ungraspable
totality. And yet I nowhere say that these defnitions
are abstract propositions. I stress that defnitions of
religion are embedded in dialogs, activities, rela-
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 13
tionships, and institutions that are lovingly or casu-
ally maintainedor betrayed or simply abandoned.
They are passionately fought over and pronounced
upon by the authoritative law of the state.
Defnitions of religion are not single, completed de-
fnitive acts; they extend over time and work them-
selves through practices. They are modifed and
elaborated with continuous use. To the extent that
defning religion is a religious act, whether carried
out by believers or nonbelievers, it may also be
an attempt at attacking or reinforcing an existing re-
ligious tradition, at reforming it or initiating a new
one.
My problem with universal defnitions of re-
ligion, therefore, has been that by insisting on a
universal essence they divert us from asking ques-
tions about what the defnition includes and what
it excludes, how, by whom, for what purpose; about
what social/linguistic context it makes good sense to
propound a given defnition and when it doesnt.
Trying to construct genealogies of concepts is one
way of getting at such questions. For me the most im-
portant concern in all my writing has been, What,
in this matter, is the right question? So in Genealo-
gies of Religion I did not try to provide a better def-
nition of religion, still less to undermine the very
concept of religion. I was looking for ways of for-
mulating the most fruitful questions about how peo-
ple enact, declare, commit toor repudiatethings
when they talk about religion. Thus in Chapter 4,
in my exploration of Hugh of St. Victors account of
the sacraments, and of Bernard of Clairvauxs mo-
nastic sermons, I tried to get away from notions like
inculcation, a passive reception of dominating
power, and to move towards something more com-
plex. Thus I wrote, Bernard is not manipulating de-
sires (in the sense that his monks did not know what
was happening to them) but instead creating a new
moral space for the operation of a distinctive motiva-
tion. What interested me was how such subjective
processes related to embodiment and disciplineor
put differently, how objective conditions in which
subjects fnd themselves enable them to decide what
one must think, how one can live, and how one is
able to live. This was the project I was engaged in
when I wrote the essays making up Genealogies, and
this is what Im still engaged in. I dont think of that
book in isolation from my other work.
Many readers have understood what I was trying
to do and sympathized (even if guardedly) with my
effort. Some havent. It has even been alleged by the
latter, to my surprise, that I am hostile to religion,
and especially to the Christian religion, and that I
developed my hostility during my childhood when
I was supposedly humiliated at boarding school
run by missionaries (in India)because I once re-
ferred to that period in my early schooldays as the
time when I learnt to argue, to be combative, with
my Christian schoolmates! I was never humiliated
by Christian missionaries and never said I was. More
important: anyone who has read Genealogies of Religion
with some attention surely cant make sense of that
claim. In fact Ive learnt much about the complexity
of religion by reading Christian writers belonging
to different historical periods. I certainly dont think
that when people use a religious vocabulary they
are really talking about mere constructionsabout
ideological formations whose role is to provide justi-
fcation for social domination. Of course something is
constructed, and reconstructed, but this construction
is not teleological (made and completed for a specifc
purpose), and it is not properly described as essen-
tially social. That kind of functionalism is precisely
what I wanted to get away from in Genealogies.
CM: Could you comment on the different reactions to your
work by other disciplines or sub-disciplines? Im familiar
with how religious studies scholars have reacted to your
work, but do you feel that this work has made the impact
you hoped it would in, for example, anthropology, political
sciences, sociology, as well as the diverse areas of religious
studies?
TA: I really dont know what impact Genealogies
has had in the social sciences generally. I know that
a number of talented young anthropologists have
taken up the idea of embodiment, of sensibilities, of
tradition, and of virtue ethics in their ethnography
of Islam. They have recently been criticized by some
people for exaggerating the importance of formal
religiosity at the expense of ordinary spiritual
beliefs and I have been blamed for having started
this bad tendencyand then carried it on into a re-
actionary view of secularism. This is not the place
to engage with their complaints, especially because
they largely concern the anthropology of Islamand
so they are focused more on an earlier essay of mine
as well as on Formations of the Secular.
I gather that many sociologists and anthropologists
studying Muslim immigrants in Europe feel that my
14 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014
work is perversely normative, that it deliberately ig-
nores the reality of the social experience of Muslims
and their religious responsein short, that it over-
looks their modern predicament in secular liberal
countries. Thats one kind of reaction to my work,
I suppose. But I am curious as to why they feel so
strongly that my work threatens their truth. When I
was an anthropology student we used to joke about
senior ethnographers who responded to theoretical
arguments in seminars by interrupting, But in my
tribe people believed . . . This kind of empiricism
is still, unfortunately, with us. Many ethnographers
think that they have a proper understanding of their
informants experience (and therefore of their reli-
gious belief or disbelief) by virtue of the fact that
they have spent some (limited) time with them in
their form of lifeas if the experience of their infor-
mants was homogeneous, complete and consistent,
as if their form of life (shared briefy by the ethnog-
rapher) could be summed up in a representation re-
fecting an indisputable reality and was not itself an
internally ambiguous interpretation, and as if their
ordinary language was more authentic than the lan-
guage of their theological texts.
At any rate, there has been greater interest in For-
mations than Genealogies of Religion among political
scientists, although I see the former book as closely
connected to the latter and its questions about sec-
ularism more developed than they are in Genealo-
gies. This interest is, I suppose, due to questions of
pain, violence, and suffering that I share with some
of them. They already know that things are not as
simple as some versions of liberal ideology claim
they are.
CM: My own work is on the social construction of reli-
gion, and I see the frst chapter of this book cited ubiqui-
tously. However, do you think scholars both in religious
studies and other disciplines are any more sophisticated in
thinking about the baggage linked to the term religion
and its affliation with belief? That is, have things got-
ten any better in the last twenty years?
TA: Yes, there is still a tendency to think of be-
lief as the defning essence of religion. But is there
enough sophisticated thought about what belief
indicates? We are familiar with the idea that the
medieval period in Europe was the Age of Belief,
when it was virtually impossible not to believe in
God, whereas in our timethe Age of Secularity
belief in God is only one of many options. But what
is belief? Philosophers have talked of it as a feel-
ing (e.g., Hume), as a disposition (e.g., Ryle), and
more generally as a mental state. The grammar of
the noun belief (and of the verb to believe) in
each of the senses or combination of senses varies.
If religion is not best conceived as a fxed univer-
salas I argue it is notthen the attribution of typi-
cal beliefs to it (or rather, to its followers) becomes
problematic. Changes in the grammar of belief
are connected with changes in forms of life, so that
when people talk about believing they are refer-
ring to what are often incommensurable sets of sen-
sibilities, commitments, affects, etc.
Medievalists recognize the problem in translat-
ing Latin words we now assume correspond to the
modern English belief (or French croyance).
Take the word infdelitas, often glossed quite simply
as unbelief: Infdelitas was typically used in secu-
lar contexts such as charters, laws, and historical
narratives; it usually meant breaking a contract or
an oath, acting in a disloyal manner or breaching
someones trust. Infdeles were thus not simply those
who did not believe what the church taught; they
were frst and foremost those who acted disloyally
in some way, or those who, through acts of treason
or misfortune, were no longer a part of the relations
that bound together God, Latin Christians, and their
king one to another. Credere, the Christian Latin
word rendered into English as believe, usually
had an ethical rather than an epistemological sense,
meaning to trust someone more often than to be
convinced that a proposition is true. Thus Dorothea
Weltecke, who has written on this subject, cites the
case of Aude Faur, a young peasant woman, who
was brought before the Inquisition: she was unable,
she said, to credere in Deum. What that phrase meant,
Weltecke argues, emerges from the detailed context:
the existence of a God is taken for granted. It is be-
cause, in her desperation, Aude Faur couldnt see
in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because
she struggled with disturbing thoughts about incar-
nation, that she had no hope of Gods mercy.
It is not obvious, says Weltecke, that the doctrine of
Gods body appearing in the form of bread is being
challenged here; what is certainly being expressed
is Aude Faurs anguished relationship to God as a
consequence of her own incapacity to see anything
but bread. Did she believe in God? The Inquisition
would say she didnt, a modern critic would say she
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 15
did. In short, my point would be not that our present
concept of belief (that something is true, or that one
has a particular feeling associated with the rejection
of a particular defnition of God, or that one inhabits
a particular state of mind when one believes in him)
was absent in pre-modern society but that the words
translated as belief in God articulated distinctive
sensibilities, uncertainties, social commitments, per-
sonal hopes and fears. The grammar of that phrase in
the Middle Ages is different from its grammar today.
We cannot say defnitively that people at that time
couldnt disbelieve in God whereas now we can un-
til we understand the grammar not only of belief
but also of belief in God in the different historical
situations.
Clearly the question of translation often becomes
critical in understanding such concepts. Thus the
Arabic word imn is often translated into English as
beliefas in the frequently used Quranic phrase
ayyuhal-muminn, O Believers!but is better ren-
dered as faith, as in I shall be faithful to you.
Belief in the psychological sense is understood as
a continuum rather than as a binary (belief/disbe-
lief), and it is embedded in ritual and other practices.
Thus I know of a Muslim who describes himself as
weakly believing (daf al imn), and who uses the
word imn to excuse himself from the prescribed
daily prayers. The phrase itself, as I understand it, is
neither an expression of doubt nor of disbeliefnor
of any kind of certainty (including the certainty of
the agnostic who refuses to pronounce on the exis-
tence or otherwise of Gods existence). But it is also
not simply an instance of thoughtless speech and be-
havior; if it were there would be no need to describe
it as weakly believing. Its a kind of belief linked
to ordinary life that sometimes needs to be character-
ized as such.
Another word commonly glossed as belief,
itiqd, derives from the root aqada, to put togeth-
er. This root gives the word aqd, contract, and its
many cognates, and thus carries the sense of a bond
that commits the believer to God as well as to his
community. Thus in the classic sharia position per-
sonal conviction is said to be a matter between the
individual and his God (baynahu wa bayna rabbih).
What the law asserts is not that there is no such thing
as an individuals state of mind and that it is there-
fore meaningless to talk about belief in God. What
matters to the law is ones language-and-practice
that establishes the individuals behavior within the
network of Islamic norms, social obligations, etc. Any
attempt to penetrate into the real belief of individ-
uals (as in the Inquisition) is rejected as a legal and
political principle not as an epistemological position.
What people believe about God, how strongly they
believe, are part of the believers relation to him. Of
course, the notion of hypocrisy is employed in Islam-
ic discourse, but it refers to a disparity between state-
ments in one situation and the words and behavior
in another; it doesnt presuppose a deep inner space
in which real belief is located.
The idea that belief is the core of religion and
that it is essentially private, something that one
may or may not express in words and behavior as
one wishes, is central to much modern theorizing
about the social and political structure of secular-
ism. Talk about the privacy of belief is usually
intended to ensure immunity of the individuals lan-
guage when talking about religion; it is notneed
not bea claim to the effect that religious belief is
essentially untouchable and therefore private. It is a
serious mistake to insistas many atheists dothat
(authentic) religious belief is impervious to critical
reason. The question of how belief can be changed is
a complicated one and when change occurs its con-
sequences can be important for the way one lives.
The language of persuading people through criti-
cism, of urging them to change their belief or to act in
a different way is part of what was classically known
as rhetoric. Famously, political rhetoric employed
(and still employs) techniques of emotional arousal,
but it also provided internal reasonsthus creating
for listeners a moral space for forming their own mo-
tivation. The choice for the political orator between
the two means was often largely determined not by
considerations of truth but by what was likely to
be more effective. At any rate, a distinction must be
made between persuading and being persuaded, where
the motive of the critical persuader may be self-serv-
ing or partial (i.e., creating conviction without pro-
viding its justifcation), or enabling (i.e., helping the
subject to work towards the truth). Even when it is
well meaning, the process of persuasionwhether
political or religiousis a highly ambiguous mode
of exercising power over others, which is not to say it
is always successful as power. In our secular enthu-
siasm for critical thought and speech we tend some-
times to forget that persuasion works only through
the particularities of ordinary language (including
the use of stories, proverbs, jokes, anecdotes, sar-
16 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014
casm, promise, appeal, shame, insinuation, etc.), and
through the banalities of ordinary life that are shared
by persuader and persuaded. Most of religious life
works quite well without critique because most of
life does.
CM: The critique of the social construction of religion
has become something of a cottage industry in religious
studies. Any thoughts on why it became popular when it
did? Whose interests were advanced by its popularity (or
the vehemence it sometimes provokes)? Why it has turned
out to be mostly (although not entirely) white men who
are making the criticism?
TA: Im not sure I can answer this question because
I havent followed recent thinking and arguments
about the validity of religious studies as a distinc-
tive discipline. Perhaps the popularity of such cri-
tique has something to do with the global activism
of Muslim militants, the increasing prominence of
Christian fundamentalists in American politics,
of right-wing Hindu movements in India, etc. The
criticism of religion as a social construct may be a
way of accounting for these and other threats to
democracy, and at the same time a way of holding
out hope for the eventual triumph of a reconstructed
liberal religion rooted in the idea of private belief.
At any rate, if the very idea of the social construc-
tion of religion is being criticized it is probably be-
cause people cling to the notion that religion must
have an essence, and to believe that is to betray the
truth that a particular religion offers.
CM: Do you ever feel like the rest of Genealogies is ig-
nored because of how infuential or popular the frst chap-
ter has proved to be? For instance, although pain and
agency are themes in both Genealogies of Religion and
Formations of the Secular, most of the time when I see
these books referenced it is on the questions of religion
or secularism. Are there possibly structural reasons
your work on pain or agency drops out?
TA: Yes, I would have liked more engagement with
the chapters on pain precisely because my genealo-
gies of religion include some discussion of penance,
repentance, punishmentthat is, psychological and
physical manifestations of pain as transitive and in-
transitive modalities of discipline. The old claim that
religion is the cause of great human suffering I fnd
at once nave and boring. I am not really interested
in refuting that picture, or in balancing it by point-
ing to the good that religion has done. We need to
understand better than we do what the intellectual
and cultural consequences are of the different ways
we conceptualize pain and integrate it into our ways
of lifeincluding what we call religion. Perhaps the
best known of these is the notion of sacrifceat
once religious and secular. We have a rich vocabu-
lary for talking about pain as passion and action in
our secular world: suffering, violence, agony, hurt,
torment, torture, grief, and so forth. It has been said
that the secular Enlightenment has helped moderns
to overcome the brutalities of medieval religion, to
develop attitudes of squeamishness when confront-
ed by human pain and of the desire to lessen human
suffering (universal benevolence). But we might ask
ourselves why, for example, we are shocked and af-
fronted by some representations of pain, while ac-
cepting others simply as occasions for exercising
our virtue of compassion. I have been preoccupied
with pain in my work generally partly because it lies
at the interface of body and mind, and particularly
because it is a central theme in religion, liberalism,
and secularism.
CM: I know a number of claims in the book were received
as controversial. Can you comment on any signifcant
criticisms leveled at the book? Were there fair or persua-
sive criticisms that have led you to reject or revise some of
the claims you made?
TA: I havent read all the published criticisms lev-
eled at the book, although Ive mentioned a few of
them above. Of course I have received comments
and criticisms of my work from friends and aca-
demic colleagues, and that has helped me greatly
in rethinking aspects of what Ive writteneven
when I remain unwilling to abandon my basic argu-
ment. I have acknowledged these critics by name in
my publications. Ive also beneftted from reading
things that are at a tangent to my work. At any rate,
I am now persuaded that the lengthy introduction to
Genealogies (written very quickly to a short deadline)
is the least satisfactory part of the book. It doesnt
bring together the different themes of the chapters
adequatelymost of which, bear in mind, were
written several years earlier as essays (the analysis
of the anthropological category of religion, for ex-
ample, was frst published in 1982). But why has
the book been misunderstood as it sometimes has? I
VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION 17
suppose its fair to say that thats partly the books
fault. I should have made my arguments clearer than
I didbut then I was feeling my way forward at the
time without always being certain as to where these
arguments would lead. For example I recognize that
there is much more to be said about ritual than I write
in chapter twoalthough I still think that we need
fuller genealogies of the category of ritual that has
become an object of scholarly interpretation. Thats
something that hasnt yet been adequately attended
to by critics. Surveys of different approaches to the
study of ritual are useful but thats not what I mean
by a genealogy of the category.
CM: What current projects are you working on? Any-
thing that builds on, departs from, or runs parallel to Ge-
nealogies?
TA: Ive been thinking more about pain, suffering,
and violence, and especially about the ambiguous
distinction between religion and the secular, and
about tradition and habit. I am trying to think about
these matters in relation to aspects of human rights
history, European and Middle Eastern, past and
present.
The Occupy Movement, Religion, and Social Formations
Matt Sheedy
PhD candidate in religious studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
matt_sheedy@umanitoba.ca
doi:10.558/bsor.v43i1.17
In his essay Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain
(1989), Bruce Lincoln notes how during the Span-
ish Civil War some on the political Left engaged in
a shocking ritual act by exhuming the long-buried
corpses of priests, nuns, and saints, while putting
them on public display. Given that the exhumations
were not isolated events but appeared in dozens of
cities and towns across Spain in the summer of 1936,
Lincoln suggests that they should be understood as
having taken place during a liminal period, where
old rules and social boundaries had been rejected
and new rules had yet to come into place. More im-
portantly, Lincoln points out that the corpses were
used as visual evidence against the churchs long-
standing claim that the bodies of the pure do not rot
like those of the damned, and in this way acted as a
profanophany, which he defnes as a revelation of
the profanity, temporality, and corruption inherent
to someone or something (1989, 125).
What interests Lincoln is how social distinctions
such as these are constructed within societies through
the mechanisms of force and discourse. Since force is
ineffective in maintaining collective identities over
the long run, it is on the level of discoursein-
cluding myths, rituals, symbols and classifcation
that he fnds the most enduring mechanisms for both
preserving and challenging the legitimacy of social
order. In this sense, discourse acts as a form of ideo-
logical persuasion and is drawn upon to evoke senti-
ments of affnity or estrangement with this or that
person, group, or thing. While discourse often serves
the interests of dominant groups, it is also used by
subordinate classes in order to demystify and de-le-
gitimate established norms and institutions (1989, 5).
It is commonly held that the Occupy movement
was spurred in the United States by the economic
crisis of 2008, which included the subprime mort-
gage crisis and the fnancial bailout of major banks
(McLean 2012; White and Li 2012), along with the in-
fuence of multiple global uprisingsfrom Santiago
to London, Cairo to Madrid (Castells 2012; Dorfman
2012; Prashad 2012)as well as the American Tea
Party movement and the Madison, Wisconsin, pro-
tests and occupation of the state capitol that began in
February, 2011. The Twitter call to #OCCUPYWALL-
STREET proposed by Adbusters magazine on July
13, 2011, went viral on July 26, 2011 (Schneider 2013,
9-10), and culminated in the occupation of Zuccotti
Park in Manhattan on September 17, 2011. Occupy
became a household name in the United States after
a series of YouTube videos went viral showing con-
frontations between protesters and police (Schneider
2013, 42), including the arrests of some seven hun-
dred people on Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011