C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
䉷 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4502-0002$3.00
Asymptote of the
Ineffable
Embodiment, Alterity, and the
Theory of Religion1
by Thomas J. Csordas
Alterity is the phenomenological kernel of religion, and insofar
as alterity is part of the structure of being-in-the-world, religion
is an inevitable feature of human existence. This essay elabo-
rates these ideas by juxtaposing traditional phenomenology of re-
ligion with contemporary theorizing about alterity. The argu-
ment moves from an opening reflection about the “origin” of
religion and the presumed interiority of religious experience to a
critique that modifies the phenomenologists’ understanding of
religion’s object as a majestic and wholly “Other” with the no-
tion of an intimate alterity grounded in embodiment. The inti-
mate alterity of the gendered self as embodied otherness is illus-
trated in a series of ethnographic moments that pinpoint the
elementary structure of alterity described by the term “écart.”
Applying these insights to contemporary events suggests that
there is a sense in which political alterity is also a religious
structure.
t h o m a s j . c s o r d a s is Professor of Anthropology and Reli-
gion and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Case West-
ern Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106-7125, U.S.A.
[txc9@case.edu]). Born in 1952, he was educated at The Ohio
State University (B.A., 1974) and Duke University (Ph.D., 1980).
He was on the research faculty of Harvard Medical School
(1984–89) and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
(1989–90) before joining the faculty at Case in 1990. He was a re-
cipient of the 1988 Stirling Award for Contributions in Psycho-
logical Anthropology and has been a visiting fellow of the Rus-
sell Sage Foundation (1996–97). He has served as editor of Ethos:
Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology
(1996–2001) and as president of the Society for the Anthropology
of Religion (1998–2002). His research interests include anthropo-
logical theory, comparative religion, medical and psychological
anthropology, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globali-
zation and social change, and language and culture. Among his
publications are The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of
Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), (edited) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential
Ground of Culture and Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), Language, Charisma, and Creativity: Ritual Life in
the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1997; paperback ed. Palgrave 2002), and Body/Mean-
ing/Healing (New York: Palgrave, 2002). The present paper was
submitted 27 ix 02 and accepted 13 vi 03.
[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of this
issue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago/
edu/CA/home.html).]
1. A version of this essay was presented as the Presidential Address
to the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2002. I am grate-
In hitting upon a mathematical metaphor for the title of
this essay, I surprised myself. I am not typically one to
think in mathematical terms. But it is precisely the ca-
pacity to surprise oneself that I want to draw attention
to as an initial indication of my argument’s direction.
We can surprise ourselves; indeed, we are always a bit
outside ourselves, outrunning or lagging a bit behind and
seldom in perfect accord with ourselves. In making this
observation I am neither appealing to the unconscious
nor putting forward a description of consciousness. My
point is about being-in-the-world, our human condition
of existence not only as beings with experience but as
beings in relation to others. And here also we are inev-
itably surprised by others, given the impossibility of per-
fectly coinciding with them in thought or feeling, mood
or motivation. In this sense, the problem of subjectivity
is that we are never completely ourselves, and the prob-
lem of intersubjectivity is that we are never completely
in accord with others.
In a moment I will formulate a thesis about religion
that is foreshadowed in this observation about surprise.
First, however, we must come to terms with just what is
included in “religion” as a category of human activity and
experience. In her 2002 distinguished lecture to the So-
ciety for the Anthropology of Religion, Edith Turner di-
rectly confronted this issue in her title, which includes
the question “What Does This Binding Word ‘Religion’
Mean?” With this she alludes to the source of the word
“religion” in the Latin religare (from ligare, “to tie or
bind”). This etymology has often been disputed; most re-
cently, Jacques Derrida (1998), in a reflection on faith and
knowledge as sources of religion, invokes the debate about
whether the word derives from religare or relegere (from
legere, “to harvest or gather”). But what or who is being
bound or gathered, by whom, for what purpose, and as
protection against what? When we use the adjective “re-
ligious” to qualify reference to institutions, ideas, rituals,
experience, or imagination, what is being added that is
unique? What is the difference between “the religious
imagination” and imagination toutcourt? For that matter,
to borrow Derrida’s words, “All sacredness and all holi-
ness are not necessarily, in the strict sense of the term, if
there is one, religious” (1998:8–9).
Moreover, as Derrida insists, as soon as we adopt the
word “religion” to designate our interest “we are already
speaking Latin” (1998:29). This means that we are al-
ready laden with a great deal of cultural and historical
baggage, sedimented through the profound change em-
bodied in the succession of the Roman Empire by the
Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Church, and the Pax
Americana. Indeed, it is simple enough to relativize the
word with a few examples. In Japanese the word that
translates as “religion” applies only to so-called new re-
ligions and not to the established cults of Buddhism or
Shinto. In Navajo there is no generic word for “religion,”
though there are words for “holy” and for “sacred
ceremony.”
ful to Janis Jenkins, Michael Lambek, Veena Das, and the anony-
mous referees for current anthropology.
163
164 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
If the word “religion” carries too much baggage, neither
can we depend on neologism, as in “numinous,” a coinage
of Rudolf Otto (1923) from the Latin numen, self-con-
sciously on the model of the derivation of “ominous” from
“omen.” Nor does it feel safe simply to add together the
entire vocabulary of relevant words—“religion,” “the nu-
minous,” “the sacred,” “the holy,” “the supernatural,”
“the divine,” “the transcendent,” “the occult,” “mys-
tery,” “sacrifice,” “salvation,” “faith”—and declare that
their sum constitutes our interest. The relations among
these terms are endlessly nuanced, and we must be mind-
ful of the dangers in attempting to construct a universalist
definition of religion brought to the fore by Talal Asad
(1993) in his critique of Clifford Geertz’s (1966) well-
known definition. Yet I am in favor of keeping “religion”
as part of our conceptual repertoire: Asad’s critique of the
category was a necessary one, but it no more does away
with religion as an anthropological category than Wolf’s
(1982) critique of “history” or Abu-Lughod’s (1991) cri-
tique of “culture” forced scholars to stop using those
terms. Such critiques do not force us to abandon our con-
cepts; rather, they constrain us to use the concepts more
wisely.
In this respect, we are less well served by trying to
outline the boundaries of religion as a category than (tak-
ing a cue from the cognitivists) by searching for a pro-
totype around which what we will provisionally call “re-
ligion” has been built up. This prototype would be, in a
particular sense, the origin of religion—its experiential
source, its phenomenological kernel. My thesis concern-
ing this problem is that religion is predicated on and
elaborated from a primordial sense of “otherness” or al-
terity. Furthermore, because of this the religious sensi-
bility exists sui generis, that is, is not reducible to any
other category. But let me say this more precisely:
Thesis: Alterity is the phenomenological kernel of
religion.
Corollary: Insofar as alterity is part of the structure of
being-in-the-world—an elementary structure of exis-
tence—religion is inevitable, perhaps even necessary.
In the remainder of this essay I will elaborate, qualify,
and illustrate this thesis and its corollary. To begin, al-
terity is neither objective nor absolute. In the sense in
which I am using it, alterity is an elementary constituent
of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and this is how it
is part of the structure of being-in-the-world. Not only
can it be elaborated into the monstrous as well as the
divine but it can be transformed into identity, intimacy,
or familiarity. Certainly the mystics have discovered that
the wholly other can be modulated into the wholly one
and that it is equally awesome either way.
Originary Alterity
Let us begin with William Blake, poetic master of alterity
and imagination, from “The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell” (1988:38):
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with
Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and
adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers,
mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their
enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And
particularly they studied the genius of each city and
country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a sys-
tem was formed, which some took advantage of, and
enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or ab-
stract the mental deities from their objects: thus be-
gan Priesthood; Choosing the forms of worship from
poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the
Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that
All deities reside in the Human breast.
Blake’s theory is evidently a theory of primal animism,
but it is even more a theory of poetic and corporal bring-
ing-to-life made possible by the “enlarged and numerous
senses” of the prelapsarian moment. For Blake the fall
is a flight from concreteness to abstraction and the slav-
ery of mystification. Forgetting that all deities reside in
the human breast is for Blake equivalent to saying that
the “binding” achieved by religion is the binding, or
binding off, of the human imagination. Blake’s manifesto
is thick with meaning, one strand having to do with the
already braided historical-existential origin of religion,
another having to do with the apparent “interiority” im-
plied by the residence of deities in the human breast,
and yet another having to do with the humanism in the
poet’s—and the scholar’s—skeptical stance toward reli-
gion. In this section I will discuss origin and interiority,
returning to the problem of skepticism later.
The notion of an “origin” of religion can be taken in
both a historical and a phenomenological sense or, in
other words, a temporal and an existential sense—just
as the word “moment” can mean either a minute portion
of time or importance in influence or effect. I want to
clarify the sense in which I understand alterity to be the
phenomenological “origin” of religion. In looking for
help on this topic from an anthropological quarter, it will
not do to turn in the most obvious direction toward the
contemporary masters Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz,
and Mary Douglas, for, as penetrating as their analyses
are, their studies of religion are often means to an end
rather than attempts to understand religion in its own
right. Religion offers clear and compelling symbolic per-
formances and imperatives for behavior, and these can
in turn tell us much about cultures and social life. For
our present purpose, however, we will turn briefly in-
stead to two scholars who do make religion as such their
problem, namely, Weston La Barre and Roy Rappaport.
The first thing one notices about these two otherwise
so different thinkers is that their masterworks on reli-
gion share a concern for origins. The subtitle of La Barre’s
(1970) Ghost Dance is The Origins of Religion, and Rap-
paport’s (1999) posthumous magnum opus is Ritual and
Religion in the Making of Humanity. Both are concerned
in their own ways with adaptation and evolution and
less with the nature of culture and society than with the
nature of humanity as discerned through religion. Both
make explicit reference to Rudolf Otto’s notions of the
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 165
numinous and the mysterium tremendum, Rappaport
more favorably than La Barre. Most germane to my ar-
gument, both look for the origins of religion and the holy
in biology. I want to point to a correspondence between
what appears in their work as an appeal to evolutionary
origin through biology and what I am trying to outline
as an existential origin through embodiment, with the
point of correspondence being the sense of alterity.
In La Barre’s formulation, religious response is
uniquely human and foreign to animals because “the
context is the universally human nuclear family, the
condition is individual human neoteny” (1970:12). Neo-
teny is the human condition of being born immature. In
contrast to other animals, we have an unusually large
brain at birth that keeps growing afterward, generally
instinctless learning, and prolonged adolescence. In the
context of “the extravagantly heightened mammalian
dependency of the unfinished organism” (p. 94), “human
neoteny not only provides conditions for learning both
of group culture and individual character, but also forms
the experiential matrix for magic and religion, and in-
deed for the scientific world-view as well” (p. 87). In
biological terms, the effective environment for the hu-
man baby is not the material environment but that cre-
ated by other people. “The biologically infantilized hu-
man learns his humanity from infancy onward. This
humanity arises in the psychological experiences of his
particular animal milieu. The emotional reality of magic
and religion lies precisely in these experiences” (p. 357).
For La Barre the feelings of dependency and power orig-
inate in experiences of infantile omnipotence and the
subsequent omnipotence of the parents, particularly the
father. His psychoanalytic argument from neoteny is one
way to ground alterity in the body and to assimilate the
wholly other of religion to the intimately other of the
father.
Rappaport picks up this theme of infantile dependency,
though beginning from Erik Erikson he does so in ref-
erence to the infant’s experience of the mother rather
than the father. He also calls attention to the “pseudo-
infancy” evoked in some rituals, suggesting that it may
have “its ontogenetic origin in the relationship of pre-
verbal infants to their mothers” (1999:390). Several pages
earlier he cites Bateson citing Aldous Huxley on under-
standing a state of grace or holiness, “the holy” being
for Rappaport the union of the discursive and nondis-
cursive aspects of human experience or, in his terms, the
union of the sacred and the numinous: “the communi-
cation and behavior of animals has a naivete, simplicity,
which man has lost. Man’s behavior is corrupted by de-
ceit—even self-deceit—,by purpose, and by self-con-
sciousness. As Aldous saw the matter, man has lost the
‘grace’ which animals still have” (p. 384). Now, pseudo-
infancy and animal grace are incommensurable, both be-
cause one is preverbal and one nonverbal and because
for the infant there is already a powerful other while for
the animal there is none.
Rappaport strongly suggests that if there was such a
fall from grace in human evolution it came about
through the evolution of language and the alienation of
parts of the psyche from one another that it causes. The
emergence of language created an originary rupture, a
profound alterity. He frequently calls attention to Martin
Buber’s argument that the root of evil is the dual capa-
bility of humans to lie and to pose alternatives and em-
phasizes that these possibilities were constituted by the
emergence of language. At the same time he suggests
that “the sacred is inconceivable in the absence of lan-
guage,” which is unique to humans, but conversely that
“language could not have emerged in the absence of re-
ligion”—they are coeval (1995:602; 1979:210). Indeed,
language and the sacred “emerged together in a process
of mutual causation formally similar to, and in all like-
lihood concurrent with, that which is said to have or-
ganized the interdependent evolution of human intelli-
gence and human technology” (1999:418).
In fact, the formal similarity of these two evolutionary
pairs is only apparent, for while intelligence and tech-
nology developed in complementarity, by Rappaport’s ac-
count the sacred and language developed in opposition
or reversibility. In other words, if the emergence of lan-
guage introduced alterity into the structure of existence,
there was a second level of alterity simultaneously in-
troduced within the structure of language, in which one
term ceaselessly corrects the other. In terms of adapta-
tion, which Rappaport understands as the processes by
which living systems maintain themselves in the face
of perturbations (1999:408), “sanctity has made it pos-
sible for associations of organisms to persist in the face
of increasing threats posed to their orderly social life by
the increasing ability of their members to lie” (p. 416).
“The innumerable possibilities inherent in words and
their combinations are constrained, reduced, and ordered
by the unquestionable Word enunciated in ritual’s ap-
parently invariant canon. Sanctity orders a versatility
that otherwise might spawn chaos” (p. 418).
To put this slightly differently (as Rappaport does in
a way that we will construe as consistent), for Rappaport
there is both a dangerous rupture and potential for chaos
in language and a direct connection leading from lan-
guage to logos. He understands logos as a virtually pan-
cultural conception of a cosmic principle of order that
undergirds the sacred and sanctity, ritual, and the reli-
gious foundations of humanity. He refers to the “epochal
significance of language for the world beyond the species
in which it appeared. . . . Language has ever more pow-
erfully reached out from the species in which it emerged
to reorder and subordinate the natural systems in which
populations of that species participate” (1995:606–7).
This formulation of Rappaport’s almost appears to give
language an intentionality of its own, an alterity that
foreshadows its construal in human experience as logos.
This formulation reveals the alterity within language,
the split that pits sanctity and logos against lies and
alternatives. And finally, this analysis introduces a third
level of alterity, showing that in both positive and neg-
ative forms, as logos and lie, it appears compellingly on
both sides of the holy—the discursive sacred and the
nondiscursive numinous.
We must turn now to the second issue evoked by
166 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
Blake’s argument, the apparent “interiority” implied by
his reference to the residence of deities in the human
breast. William James (1961) based his well-known study
of religion on the most acute and extreme interior, per-
sonal, solitary spiritual moments of religious geniuses,
seeking the essence of religious experiences in those
“which are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.”
The reverse strategy of seeking the minimal criterion of
religious experience—the phenomenological kernel that
is the origin of religious symbol, sentiment, and insti-
tution—can be just as productive. Instead of examining
the most religious moments of the most religious man,
we want to know about the most marginally religious
moments of the least religious person.
James’s insights have been addressed by two eminent
anthropologists in the William James Lecture on the Va-
rieties of Religious Experience at his home institution
of Harvard. The 1998 lecture was delivered by Clifford
Geertz, who, as one might surmise, shifts the ground of
discussion from the solitary to the public. He suggests
that our times require “firmer, more determinate, more
transpersonal, extravert” terms than “experience,”
terms such as “meaning,” “identity,” and “power” (all
spelled with capital letters and placed within scare-
quotes) (2000:175). Yet in the end he recognizes that
James’s sensibility remains relevant to our era of seismic
religious change insofar as it provides “circumstantial
accounts of the personal inflections of religious engage-
ment that reach far beyond the personal” and reflects an
“openness to the foreign and unfamiliar, the particular
and incidental, yes, even the extreme and the brainsick”
(p. 185). To foreshadow the implications of my argument,
this openness to otherness and the unfamiliar is precisely
the route by which we can and must trace the link be-
tween personal experience and, in Geertz’s words, the
“conflicts and dilemmas of our age” (p. 185).
In the 1997 William James Lecture Arthur Kleinman
takes the opposite tack by explicitly embracing an an-
thropology of experience. For Kleinman the point of con-
vergence between an anthropology of experience and the
study of religion is suffering, not so much in the sense
of theodicy as in the sense in which it constitutes “the
stuff of experience that summons inquiry” (1997:316).
Speaking of the Weberian paradigm represented to some
degree by Geertz, he is led “to speak almost of a tyranny
of meaning” (p. 317) that suppresses the “fragmentary,
contradictory, changing, unexpressed, and inexpressible”
aspects of sensory conditions, moral and aesthetic sen-
sibilities, muscular agency and action, social relations
and memories. Citing Primo Levi and Veena Das, he ob-
serves that meaning-making can be inadequate, distort-
ing, and inhuman, “a political tool that reworks expe-
rience so that it conforms to the demands of power” (p.
318). Again to foreshadow my argument, Kleinman sug-
gests that the profound otherness of suffering can be un-
derstood only insofar as one understands that “experi-
ence is both within and without the boundary of the
body-self, crossing back and forth as if that body was
permeable” (p. 326), and that meaning-making is most
consequential insofar as it is a bridge between cultural
representations and transpersonal processes, on the one
hand, and bodily processes and embodied subjectivity,
on the other.
The shared theme of otherness in the above reflections
speaks directly to my thesis about the phenomenological
kernel of religion. The most explicit clue to what con-
stitutes this kernel, however, comes from the work of
phenomenologists of religion. Here I am thinking not so
much of the more widely read Eliade as of the less fa-
miliar Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw. Among
anthropologists, van der Leeuw is virtually unknown,
and Otto is often emblematic of anachronistic theories
of religion. As a student in the 1970s I learned about the
study of religion from an anthropological standpoint that
acknowledged precursors whose ideas were seminal but
who were now to be understood as quaint and out-
moded—among them Sir James George Frazier, Max
Muller, Edward Tylor, Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges,
and Rudolf Otto. I recall being surprised at some point
to discover that Otto was relatively quite contemporary
and continued to be read quite seriously in certain quar-
ters of religious studies.
For Otto, the object toward which the numinous con-
sciousness is directed is a mysterium tremendum et fas-
cinans, and he described its central characteristic as fol-
lows (1923:26–27):
Taken in the religious sense, that which is “mysteri-
ous” is—to give it perhaps the most striking expres-
sion—the “wholly other,” that which is quite be-
yond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and
the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the
limits of the “canny,” and is contrasted with it, fill-
ing the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.
. . . the essential characteristic . . . lies in a peculiar
“moment” of consciousness, to wit, the stupor be-
fore something “wholly other” . . .
The invocation of blank wonder, astonishment, and stu-
por is striking, but I would call attention instead to the
phenomenon of the “wholly other,” pointing as well to
the manner in which Otto cites the “limits of the
‘canny’” (an issue to which we will return). Van der
Leeuw (1986 (1938):23) had a corresponding observation
about the object of religion:
The first affirmation we can make about the Object
of Religion is that it is a highly exceptional and ex-
tremely impressive “Other.” Subjectively, again, the
initial state of man’s mind is amazement; and, as
Soderblom has remarked, this is true not only for
philosophy but equally for religion. As yet, it must
further be observed, we are in no way concerned
with the supernatural or the transcendent: we can
speak of “God” in a merely figurative sense; but
there arises and persists an experience which con-
nects or unites itself to the “Other” that thus ob-
trudes. . . . this Object is a departure from all that is
usual and familiar; and this again is the consequence
of the Power it generates.
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 167
This formulation is somewhat more sober than Otto’s,
even in the way it identifies amazement as the initial
state of man’s mind. It also, at least momentarily, speaks
of God in a figurative sense and of the supernatural and
transcendent as secondary to the encounter with oth-
erness. Then there is power, which van der Leeuw ini-
tially elaborates as a sublime potency using familiar eth-
nographic examples of mana and orenda. Otto too
evokes the notion of power but in his characteristically
more dramatic fashion initially elaborates it as an over-
powering “aweful majesty” (1923:20).
In looking to these quarters for insight about alterity,
it is well worth noting that vehement opposition to the
phenomenologists of religion persists. For example, as if
William James had initiated some kind of degenerative
process, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben identifies
Otto as the culmination of the psychologization of re-
ligious experience. Agamben argues that with Otto’s
“concept of the sacred that completely coincides with
the concept of the obscure and the impenetrable, a the-
ology that had lost all experience of the revealed word
celebrated its union with a philosophy that had aban-
doned all sobriety in the face of feeling. That the religious
belongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion,
that it essentially has to do with shivers and goose
bumps—this is the triviality that the neologism ‘numi-
nous’ had to dress up as science” (1995:78). This critique
indeed captures some of the flavor of Otto’s text, but in
its harsh dismissiveness it squanders the embedded jewel
of insight. Taking a different critical tack, Donald Wiebe
(1999) has identified the work of van der Leeuw as a
religio-cultural quest the effect of which is to depreciate
and undermine the scientific study of religion. Wiebe
cites van der Leeuw’s interest in comprehending phe-
nomena in accordance with their spiritual content and
his claim that all comprehension is ultimately religious
insofar as “all significance sooner or later leads to ulti-
mate significance” (p. 180). But let us be aware that in
religious studies the stakes in the battle between expla-
nation and understanding are even higher than for the
same battle in anthropology. In religious studies the sci-
entific account is pitted against theological commit-
ment, and to admit that religion has any existence sui
generis implies the theological conclusion (see Allen
1996). In anthropology the causal account is pitted
against the interpretive one, with the issue being the
relative merit of hard (I prefer to say “brittle”) and soft
(or “flexible”) methods, and the debate over whether re-
ligion has a sui generis status is often either sidestepped
or recognized as more a matter of theory than of the-
ology.
The problem with these formulations is not just that
the phenomenologists were inordinately psychological
in their approach, nor is it simply that they were Chris-
tian theologians and therefore both spiritually commit-
ted and ethnocentric. The problem is a theoretical one
or, perhaps more accurately, a methodological one that
comes from reifying alterity—reifying otherness as an
object, rendering it “out there” in such a way that we
can be “in its presence.” If one can suspend this reifi-
cation one finds, as Charles Long has observed, that
“Otto is telling us that it is possible to experience apart
from the categorical schema,” that is, to have “experi-
ence of reality as a priori, as a datum that has not yet
become a structure of the human project” (1976:402)—
in short, as simply other. I think that the basic insight
can be given a theoretical grounding that is not theolog-
ical but accounts for the possibility and perhaps inevi-
tability of religion. My argument is that alterity is a fun-
damental aspect of human being—let us say an
elementary structure of existence—and that misrecog-
nition of this has resulted in both untold misery and
boundless creativity in human life. This is no more than
what Blake said in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
In sum, the phenomenologists’ error was to make a
distinction between the object and the subject of religion
when the actual object of religion is objectification itself,
the rending apart of subject and object that makes us
human and in the same movement bestows on us—or
burdens us with—the inevitability of religion. The “ob-
ject” of religion is not the other; it is the existential
aporia of alterity itself. The difficulty in recognizing this
is precisely the difficulty of distinguishing a psycholog-
ical from an existential language and moving from a lan-
guage of interiority to a language of intersubjectivity.
This being said, our task is to rehabilitate the basic in-
sight of these writers in the light of anthropological in-
terpretation and update it in the light of contemporary
theorizing about alterity.
Intimate Alterity
For Otto, the numinous can be understood only “by
means of the special way it is reflected in the mind in
terms of feeling.” Following Schleiermacher, he identi-
fies this feeling as a certain kind of dependence (but is
it really a feeling of contingency?) the object of which is
the numinous. Curiously, he names this “creature-feel-
ing . . . the emotion of a creature, submerged and over-
whelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that
which is supreme above all creatures” (1923:10). Is this
creature the infant or the animal, or the adult in prayer?
It has been said that apes cannot swim and indeed often
panic and drown because, unlike other mammals in-
cluding dogs and horses, which swim instinctually, they
are rational beings and reason tells them that they will
drown if they breathe in water. Humans cannot swim
instinctually, either, but we have the capacity to imagine
beyond reason, and it allows us to transcend ourselves—
to surprise ourselves—and figure out how to move
around in the water.
The image of water, of being submerged, the invoca-
tion of the creature, of dependence, and most of all of
our attempt to come to grips with alterity suggest the
relevance of Georges Bataille’s theory of religion, in
which animality and water figure heavily. Bataille’s work
invokes a profound alterity by inverting the expected
relation between immanence and transcendence. In his
view the goal of religion is to recapture the intimacy of
168 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
an immanence prior to all alterity, and he shows how
very strange that is. The primary image is that of one
animal eating another. “What is given when one animal
eats another is always the fellow creature of the one that
eats” (1989:17), in complete immediacy and without
there being between the two any relation of subordina-
tion, difference, dependence, transcendence, objectifi-
cation, discontinuity, consciousness, or duration. Since
for the animal nothing is given through time, the de-
struction of the eaten is “only a disappearance in a world
where nothing is posited beyond the present” (p. 18).
Bataille might respond to Otto that this is the original
creature-feeling as opposed to the feeling of having been
created that Otto implies. And far more than the feeling
of being submerged, far more even than a feeling that is
“oceanic,” this ultimate intimate immanence of ani-
mality is a mode of being “in the world like water in
water.” (A startling, if not compelling, image that Ba-
taille might endorse as evocative of his point about an-
imality and watery immanence is included in the elec-
tronic edition of this issue on the journal’s web site.)
For Bataille the moment that renders us human is the
moment in which we posit an object. The initial object
is the tool, the “nascent form of the non-I” (1989:27),
and the moment of alterity and discontinuity constituted
by positing an object is what Bataille calls “transcen-
dence.” From this moment he demonstrates an inexo-
rable unfolding of a consciousness that reduces the orig-
inal immanence of the world to thingness and invents a
supreme being that is also a kind of thing considerably
impoverished from the animal sense of continuity. Dis-
continuity multiplies as humans sequentially develop
sacrifice, festivals, warfare, military order, universal em-
pire, and industrial order by means of processes including
dualism, reason, transcendence, mediation, morality,
clear consciousness, and sovereign self-consciousness
(pp. 56–57):
Man is the being that has lost, and even rejected,
that which he obscurely is, a vague intimacy. Con-
sciousness could not have become clear in the
course of time if it had not turned away from its
awkward contents, but clear consciousness is itself
looking for what it has itself lost, and what it must
lose again as it draws near to it. Of course, what it
has lost is not outside it; consciousness turns away
from the obscure intimacy of consciousness itself.
Religion, whose essence is the search for lost inti-
macy, comes down to the effort of clear conscious-
ness which wants to be a complete self-conscious-
ness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of
intimacy is possible only at a level where conscious-
ness is no longer an operation whose outcome im-
plies duration, that is, at the level where clarity,
which is the effect of the operation, is no longer
given.
Insofar as we are human we are always already in the
world from the stance of alterity so that, paradoxically,
it is identity and continuity that are alien to us and hence
frightening and “vertiginously dangerous” (p. 36). It is
immanence and not transcendence that constitutes the
true otherness of animal oblivion to which our con-
sciousness aspires but which, asymptotically, “it must
lose again as it draws near to it” (p. 57).
Put otherwise, “intimacy is the limit of clear con-
sciousness” (Bataille 1989:99); consciousness as such
cannot grasp intimacy because intimacy cannot be re-
duced to a thing. But consciousness can undo itself, re-
verse its reductive operations in order to reduce itself to
intimacy, by dissolving and destroying utilitarian “ob-
jects as such in the field of consciousness,” thereby re-
turning “to the situation of the animal that eats another
animal” (p. 103). The sovereign act of destroying objects
is simultaneously the destruction of the subject as an
individual, “but it is insofar as clear consciousness pre-
vails that the objects actually destroyed will not destroy
humanity itself” (p. 103). This is a form of violence, but
it is necessary—and here I am again reminded of Blake—
“for anyone to whom human life is an experience to be
carried as far as possible” (p. 110), and it leads directly
to the limit, the impossible. When we search for the
existential structure of this final alterity, we must take
our clue from Bataille’s observation that humanity’s first
object is the tool and combine it with Marcel Mauss’s
(1950) insight that humanity’s first tool is the body. But
the body is also the site wherein this “internally wrench-
ing violence that animates the whole . . . reveals the
impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears,” and this im-
possible is nothing other than “the sovereign self-con-
sciousness that, precisely, no longer turns away from
itself” (p. 111).
We have more to do in specifying this embodied oth-
erness, but let us pursue it by way of intimacy. The phe-
nomenologists of religion had not only a too objectified
understanding of the “wholly other” but one that was
too grandiose. Instead of the wholly other projected onto
cosmic majesty, I want to turn our attention to the in-
timately other. The intimate alterity that I will juxtapose
to the wholly other is not the intimacy of animality but
one that can only be an intimation of that intimacy,
insofar as it begins necessarily from our human con-
sciousness. As we have seen, one of the ways that Otto
characterized the wholly other was that it was outside
the canny, and, indeed, he equated the uncanny with the
numinous (1923:40). Here we must fold Freud into our
account for the manner in which he captures a much
more intimate alterity in this feeling. In his study of
religious representations of the monstrous, Tim Beal
compares the two writers’ approaches to the uncanny or
unheimlich as follows: “What Otto calls ‘wholly other’
Freud would call ‘other’ only insofar as it has been re-
pressed. For Freud the unheimlich is only ‘outside the
house’ (the house of the self, the house of culture, the
house of the cosmos) insofar as it is hidden within the
house” (2002:8). Yet the progression from self to cosmos
within Beal’s parentheses is itself a clue that we need
not choose between the two, for the wholly other and
the intimately other are two sides of the same leaf.
The image of otherness in Freud, insofar as it relates
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 169
to our topic, is to be found less in the notion of the
sovereign id or the hidden unconscious than in the no-
tion of the uncanny. My emphasis is not on the uncanny
as frightening but on the uncanny as close to us, as in-
timately other. First, there is something uncanny about
the word itself: not only can unheimlich refer to both
the wholly other and the intimately other but the root
word heimlich can in certain contexts mean its opposite.
Heimlich can mean something that is familiar or agree-
able but also something hidden and kept out of sight.
Although Freud is unclear about the precise relation be-
tween the two meanings, there appears to be a devel-
opment along the lines that what is familiar becomes
private, what is private becomes hidden, and what is
hidden becomes spooky. In any case, there is a semantic
alterity in this word such that “heimlich is a word the
meaning of which develops in the direction of ambiva-
lence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, un-
heimlich” (1955:226).
Freud’s famous conclusion is that the uncanny even-
tuates in the recurrence of something that has been re-
pressed, something originally familiar that by means of
this repression has become alienated and threatening in
the sense that, although we may yearn to return to the
womb, we would be terrified to find ourselves there again
or in the sense that the experience of having a double,
reassuring at a very young age, becomes a harbinger of
death much later. For Freud the factors that turn some-
thing merely frightening into something uncanny in-
clude the effacement of the distinction between imagi-
nation and reality found in animism, magic, and sorcery,
the infantile omnipotence of thoughts, the human am-
bivalence toward death, involuntary repetition, and the
castration complex (1955:243). Freud qualifies his ac-
count as perhaps satisfying psychoanalytic but not aes-
thetic interest in the uncanny and differentiates between
the uncanny we actually experience and that which is
portrayed in art and literature. Although he says nothing
explicitly about religion, he approaches it in summariz-
ing the two closely related phenomena that are the
sources of the uncanny: “An uncanny experience occurs
either when infantile complexes which have been re-
pressed are once more revived by some impression, or
when primitive beliefs [animism] which have been sur-
mounted [by reason] seem once more to be confirmed”
(p. 249).
Freud too easily discounts, I think, the importance of
a rival’s theory that highlights uncertainty about
whether something is living or not—a body ambiguously
dead or alive, an automaton ambiguously animate or in-
animate—because it does not quite fit the psychoana-
lytic account. It is also curious that among his examples
he does not mention the feeling of a presence that is not
really there. This would be a feeling that we could con-
trast both to the feeling of invisible divine presence in
religious experience and to the feeling of concrete inti-
macy in the caress of another person. But including
these, and with a somewhat broader notion of alterity
building on Freud’s intuition, we can see one reason that
religion can never go away—that it will always return
and return in a myriad of forms. In the language that I
have been developing here, the return of the repressed
is the inevitable betrayal of identity by alterity, the reen-
chantment of the world that imposes itself as soon as
the disenchanted world finally becomes so familiar as to
begin to appear strange—that strange interchangebility
or transposability of heimlich and unheimlich that Freud
talks about. At least, such an analysis might make it
easier to understand Eliade’s (1958) notion of hierophany
not as a manifestation of divinity but as an upwelling of
alterity, a spontaneous epoche or lowering of the veil of
cultural taken-for-grantedness that covers the illusion of
self-identity. The point again is that the other is much
closer than we would be led to believe by the phenom-
enologists of religion or at least that there is no under-
standing of the wholly other without the intimate other.
Let me specify this sense of intimate alterity with a
concrete ethnographic instance from my studies of Cath-
olic Charismatic healing. In what I called “imaginal per-
formances,” Jesus or the Virgin Mary would often appear
or be evoked in healing prayer that took the form of
visualization in which one of these divine presences
would speak and engage the afflicted person in a healing
embrace. Although these presences can be understood as
internal transitional objects in a psychoanalytic sense
and even as ideal objects or Others to which one can
have a mature, intimate relationship that serves as a
prototype for intimacy as an aspect of a sacred self, I
wanted to push the interpretation farther. I suggested
that this experience is a genuine intimacy with a pri-
mordial aspect of the self that is the existential ground
for both its fundamental indeterminacy and the possi-
bility of an intersubjective relationship—its own inher-
ent otherness. In other words, the imaginal Jesus is the
alterity of the self. In this sense, to speak of intimacy
with oneself is not to speak metaphorically. It is instead
to say that the capacity for intimacy begins with an ex-
istential coming to terms with the alterity of the self
and that the presence of Jesus is an embodied metaphor
for that condition of selfhood. This is the Jesus that
speaks with a “still, small voice” within and whose pres-
ence is an act of imagination (Csordas 1994:57–58).
This intimate alterity appears again in the Charismatic
practice of “resting in the Spirit,” in which a person is
overwhelmed by divine power/presence and falls, typi-
cally from a standing position, into a sacred swoon. Al-
though again we cannot fail to strike a psychoanalytic
chord in noting the “oceanic” passivity before an om-
nipotent paternal deity that characterizes this experi-
ence, I also suggested that the experience is constituted
in the bodily synthesis of preobjective self processes.
This is to say that the coming into being of “divine pres-
ence” as a cultural phenomenon is an objectification of
embodiment itself. Consider the heaviness of limbs re-
ported by people resting in the Spirit. Quoting Plugge,
R. M. Zaner points out that “within the reflective ex-
perience of a healthy limb, no matter how silent and
weightless it may be in action, there is yet, indetectably
hidden, a certain ‘heft’ ” (1981:56). This thinglike heft
of our bodies in conjunction with the spontaneous lift
170 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
of customary bodily performances defines our bodies as
simultaneously belonging to us and estranged from us,
and hence the alterity of self is an embodied otherness.
While resting in the Spirit, the heft that is always there
for us indeterminately and preobjectively is made deter-
minate and objectified. Its essential alterity becomes an
object of somatic attention within the experiential ge-
stalt defined as divine presence. The divine presence is
an intimate presence in a way that, because it encom-
passes multiple modalities of the body-self, surpasses hu-
man companionship. Like the divine presence in ima-
ginal performance, resting in the Spirit thus offers both
a surrogate source of intimacy for the lonely and a pro-
totype for human intimacy (Csordas 1994:246).
This alterity of the self can be taken in at least two
senses. According to Zaner, self-presence and presence
to the other are the two foundational moments of self.
Zaner understands self-presence as “situated self-reflex-
ivity” and presence to the other as an “urgency . . . to
reveal itself to other inwardly realized selves” (1981:153).
This is tellingly reminiscent of the urgency or energy
that Otto says is an element of religion’s mysterium tre-
mendum. Yet on the level of the intimately other rather
than the wholly other I think it appears more clearly as
imagination and desire. The vivid presence of Jesus or
Mary in Charismatic imaginal performance is a cultur-
ally specific way to complete the second foundational
moment, providing an ideal Other to correspond to the
moment of self-presence.
A second sense of the self’s alterity is grounded in our
very embodiment. Zaner shows that the inescapability
of our embodied nature and the limitations it imposes
contribute to the feeling that our bodies are in a sense
“other” than ourselves. Our intimacy with our own bod-
ies also implicates us in whatever happens to them, and
realization that we are thus “susceptible to what can
happen to material things in general” corresponds to ex-
periencing the “chill” of mortality. In addition, our bod-
ies are always “hidden presences” to us, both insofar as
autonomic processes typically go on outside of aware-
ness (see also Leder 1990) and insofar as the possibility
persists of seeing ourselves as objects from the perspec-
tive of another. Our bodies are thus hidden presences to
us at the same time as they are compellingly ours, and
accordingly Zaner argues (1981:54–55):
My body is at once familiar and strange, intimate
and alien: “mine” most of all yet “other” most of
all, the ground for both subjective inwardness and
objective outwardness. Whatever I want, wish, or
plan for, I irrevocably “grow older,” “become tired,”
“feel ill,” “am energetic.” . . . The basis for the oth-
erness (and thereby the otherness of everything else)
of the embodying organism is its having a life of its
own, even when the person is most “at home” or
“at one” with it. . . . The otherness of my own body
thus suffuses its sense of intimacy.
The necessity of this embodied alterity of the self even
when one is most “at home” evokes the notion of the
heimlich (homelike) and the unheimlich (uncanny). Za-
ner’s discussion shows that the uncanny is grounded not
necessarily in an abstract recognition of mortality but
in the concreteness of everyday embodied existence, in
which the “chill” is present even “at home.”
Elizabeth Grosz carries this line of thinking a step far-
ther, not only grounding alterity in embodiment but
making it the very precondition of embodiment (1994:
209):
Bodies themselves, in their materialities, are never
self-present, given things, immediate, certain self-ev-
idences because embodiment, corporeality, insist on
alterity, both that alterity they carry within them-
selves (the heart of the psyche lies in the body; the
body’s principles of functioning are psychological
and cultural) and that alterity that gives them their
own concreteness and specificity (the alterities con-
stituting race, sex, sexualities, ethnic and cultural
specificities). Alterity is the very possibility and pro-
cess of embodiment: it conditions but is also a prod-
uct of the pliability or plasticity of bodies which
makes them other than themselves, other than their
“nature,” their functions and identities.
Grosz makes these comments about alterity in the con-
text of sexual difference, and we will be obliged to return
to this issue as well. In general, the insistence on alterity
of which she speaks is a direct consequence of the in-
determinate pliability and plasticity that is emphasized
by much contemporary scholarship on embodiment and
for our purpose can be identified with the body’s spon-
taneity in contrast with its “natural” (regular and law-
governed) functions and cycles.
Embodied Alterity
I must make this notion of alterity of the self as em-
bodied otherness more precise, because when Blake says
that all deities reside within the human breast I want to
take him literally and say, yes, the breast and the limbs
and the genitals and the head and the manner in which
all are synthesized into the same bodily existence. Mer-
leau-Ponty goes to the heart of the matter when he dis-
cusses the intertwining or chiasmus between the sen-
tient and the sensible within our own bodies: “My hand,
while it is felt from within, is also accessible from with-
out, itself tangible, for my other hand” (1968:133). Fur-
thermore, he observes that one can have the curious sit-
uation of one hand’s touching an object and at the same
time being touched by the other hand, such that there
is a crisscrossing and reversibility of the sentient and the
sensible (p. 143):
There is a circle of the touched and the touching,
the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a
circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not
without visible existence; there is even an inscrip-
tion of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in
the tangible—and the converse; there is finally a
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 171
propagation of these changes to all the bodies of the
same type and of the same style which I see and
touch—and this by virtue of the fundamental fission
or segregation of the sentient and the sensible
which, laterally, makes the organs of my body com-
municate and founds transitivity from one body to
another.
Merleau-Ponty struggles for metaphors to describe this
intimate alterity of embodiment, trying two leaves or
layers, two halves of a cut orange that fit together per-
fectly but are still separate, two lips of the same mouth
that touch one another in repose, “two circles, or two
vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naively,
and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly de-
centered with respect to the other” (p. 138).
Slightly and, I might add, inevitably decentered, this
“fundamental fission or segregation” is also overdeter-
mined. We can see it in our mirror image, the encounter
with which Lacan (1977) argues is formative of the self
at an early stage of development. We can see it in the
bilateral symmetry of our bodies, which is, moreover, an
imperfect symmetry, as anyone can observe who has at-
tempted to grow nicely balanced sideburns on a face with
one ear inevitably slightly higher than the other. In an-
other sense, the phallus is the other of the male, as the
fetus is the other of the female. Certainly both the phal-
lus and the pregnant female are images that can be found
throughout human religion as symbols of the divine. But
the other on the body’s outside that is the phallus is
different from the fetal other within precisely in relation
to that profound dependence that Otto labeled creature-
feeling and may be one of its sources (the other being
infantile neoteny as identified by La Barre). In other
words, when the penis becomes the phallus it is sover-
eign, and the man who withdraws his allegiance in a
moment of doubt can be punished by the disappearance
of this other, the reversion of the phallus to a mere penis,
leaving him to drown in the mirror of abandonment. In
the case of the fetus, the valence of dependency is re-
versed; it is the fetus that is profoundly dependent and
cannot exist alone. Thus there are two gendered modes
of intimate embodied otherness with different valences
of dependency and therefore different potentials for be-
coming vehicles of the divine. From this standpoint, the
recurrence of the phallus and the pregnant female in re-
ligious symbolism does far more than to signal the ven-
eration of potency or fertility.
To describe the kernel of embodied otherness Merleau-
Ponty uses the French word écart, which can be trans-
lated as “gap,” “interval,” “distance,” “difference,” or
“lapse.” Gail Weiss calls attention to this term in a brief
but important chapter, calling it a “space of non-coin-
cidence that resists articulation . . . the unrepresentable
space of differentiation . . . the invisible ‘hinge’ that both
makes reversibility [between the sensible and the sen-
tient] possible and, simultaneously, prevents it from be-
ing fully achieved” (1999:120–21). Merleau-Ponty (1968:
148) indeed takes pains to emphasize that
it is a reversibility always imminent and never real-
ized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of
touching my right hand touching the things, but I
never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at
the moment of realization, and one of two things al-
ways occurs: either my right hand really passes over
to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the
world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the
world, but then I do not really touch it—my right
hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its
outer covering.
Weiss observes that “écart, as the moment of disincor-
poration that makes all forms of corporeal differentiation
possible, is also precisely what allows us to establish
boundaries between bodies, boundaries that must be re-
spected in order to respect the agencies that flow from
them” (1999:128). Yet it is the ground not only for bound-
aries but for intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. To
reiterate, the écart “founds transitivity from one body
to another.” Merleau-Ponty says, “If my left hand can
touch my right hand while it palpates the tangibles, can
touch it touching, can turn its palpation back upon it,
why, when touching the hand of another, would I not
touch in it that same power to espouse the things that
I have touched on my own?” (1968:141). Here my em-
phasis is on this inevitable moment of embodied oth-
erness as the kernel of the self’s alterity (an inner re-
versibility that corresponds to the reversibility between
self and other) and hence of the alterity that is ultimately
elaborated into the religious sentiment in all its multi-
tude of forms.
Luce Irigaray, in her sensuously intimate critique of
Merleau-Ponty (she calls him a male solipsist who ul-
timately privileges the visual over the tactile and makes
the diagnosis that his version of seeing “remains in an
incestuous prenatal situation with the whole” [1993:
173]), adds to the stock of images for embodied otherness.
She asks how the feeling-felt relation of hand touching
hand differs, with no subject or object and neither passive
nor active, if the two hands are joined “palms together,
fingers outstretched, constitut[ing] a very particular
touching. A gesture often reserved for women (at least
in the West) and which evokes, doubles, the touching of
the lips silently applied on one another. A touching more
intimate than that of one hand taking hold of the other”
(p. 161). And as for the lips, in women there are two sets
of two lips, those above and those below, touching each
other in different ways and existing in relation to one
another. “And this would be one of the differences be-
tween men and women, that these lips do not re-join
each other according to the same economy” (p. 167).
There is a para-theological strain in the interplay be-
tween Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, and this is not acci-
dental, since they are so close to discovering the origin
of religion in embodied otherness. In sorting out the va-
lences attributed to the interpenetration of vision and
touch Irigaray opens the question of how “God is always
entrusted to the look and never sufficiently imagined as
tactile bliss” (1993:162). Elsewhere she chides Merleau-
172 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
Ponty for espousing a form of animism. Indeed, he speaks
of a flesh of the world that interpenetrates and is re-
versible with bodily flesh as the general description of
the more specific instances of the “coiling over of the
visible upon the seeing body, of the touching on the tan-
gible body” (p. 146) and the “double and crossed situating
of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the
visible” (p. 134). This flesh that bridges or, better, enfolds
the écart is for Merleau-Ponty an element of being in
the sense that water, air, earth, and fire are elements.
When he speaks of language as flesh in its sonorous being
there is a sense of the ultimate sacred postulate of the
Bible as being reversed to read “and the flesh was made
word,” and when he ends his essay with an ellipsis the
preceding words are that reversibility “is the ultimate
truth. . . .” Moreover, it is no coincidence that when he
writes, “The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body
is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied
to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is sur-
rounded by it” (1968:138), his articulation of the world
as “flesh applied to flesh” is resonant with the way in
which, for Bataille, an animal’s life is like “water in wa-
ter.” Could it be that both are referring to the same in-
timacy of immanence, that we are no more aware of flesh
than the fish is of the water in which it swims, and that
the difference between the animal’s state of grace and
our state is the existence of the écart, or alterity itself,
that includes the possibility of becoming aware of the
element in which we move?
I will turn again to an ethnographic instance to capture
this element of embodiment more precisely. A Navajo
chanter of my acquaintance will declaim at length
against the contemporary travesty of tape recording sa-
cred songs as a means of learning how to conduct cer-
emonies. Perpetrators go from ceremony to ceremony
conducted by different healers instead of appropriately
learning from one mentor over an extended period of
time. They begin performing the ceremony without tak-
ing the trouble to understand how the songs are supposed
to be used. Worse, they use the material without either
being authorized by the chanter from whom they took
it or acknowledging the source. He tells of having caught
people in his ceremonies with a tape recorder concealed
in a coat or a blanket and expelling them from the pro-
ceedings. He says that sometimes a person with a re-
corder will be sitting all the way on the other side of the
hogan from the healer or standing outside the hogan, and
if the chanter is a powerful singer the person may even
be 100 yards away and still be able to record the song.
My initial understanding of why tape recording is un-
acceptable and inauthentic was in terms of the textuality
of the songs and their appropriate treatment. It was a
violent taking out of context, an arrachement, both as
a tearing out of its setting within a moment of perfor-
mance and as a wresting away from its legitimate owner.
It was also the imposition of a nontraditional medium,
inscribing and preserving sacred material that should
never be so fixed and frozen. Then the chanter told me
something that changed my understanding of his objec-
tion. He said that it used to be that the person learning
the songs would sit close enough to the chanter to see
his lips move as he sang. With the invocation of moving
lips, the song emanating from the bodily portal, power
passing by force of breath through the gap of the lips,
and the apprentice focusing on the action required to
bring the chant into intersubjective being, my under-
standing shifted ground from textuality to embodiment.
It shifted from context and technological medium to
lived spatiality and physical proximity.
Somewhat later I came across the following passage
in a book by Gladys Reichard on Navajo religion: “Since
power is to the Navaho like a wave in a pool, always
effective though becoming weaker the farther it radiates
from chanter and patient, each person in attendance de-
rives benefit from what is done in proportion to his prox-
imity to the ritual” (1950:xxxvii). Previously I would not
have taken the image of a wave in a pool quite so literally,
but I read this passage in the light of the chanter’s in-
vocation of watching moving lips in immediate prox-
imity, of recording from across the hogan, of recording
from outside, of recording from 100 yards away. Though
perhaps attenuated, power is still power at 100 yards’
remove. But the optimal form of otherness as power is
hardly grandiose, taking form in the écart—the narrow
gap between the chanter’s lips and the narrow gap be-
tween healer and apprentice. This is the origin of reli-
gion, the sacred, the holy: the intimate alterity of power
as a bodily secretion, not the wholly other of abstract
majesty.
Contested Alterity
Let me anticipate several objections that might arise to
my thesis that alterity is the phenomenological kernel
of religion. The first is that it is an essentializing move,
but this depends on how one construes it. The relevant
dichotomy is between the essential and the contingent,
and the current theoretical bias is in favor of the con-
tingent. The objection to positing an essence is valid
when that essence has a specific content that is abstract
and invariant. What I have called attention to, on the
contrary, is an alterity that is experientially concrete but
has no content prior to its elaboration in an ethnographic
or historical instance. Alterity is not an essential thing
but an essential displacement, not a center of meaning
but a duplicity (doubleness/deceit) of the kind that is
recognized in the phenomenological epoche. This epo-
che, often referred to as a phenomenological reduction
or bracketing, is not a mystery but a method. To give a
rudimentary example, it is the effect produced by utter-
ing a word (try it with “egg”) 20 or 30 times without
stopping. This effect is the bracketing off of the word’s
sonorous being from its semantic being. The point is not
to wrench the word from its context but to allow it to
become reduced to a “phenomenon” that can then be
subject to precise existential description. The epoche is
then a methodological elaboration of the alterity that is
an elementary structure of existence. When alterity is
elaborated in and for itself, what results is what we call
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 173
religion. From this duplicity, this gap, this écart there
develops an uncanny array of religious forms precisely
because of the inevitable contingency and indeterminacy
of existence. If there is an essence involved, it is an es-
sence of the particular—that is, it is to be empirically
described where it is found among the “minute partic-
ulars” of existence (again to borrow a phrase from Blake).
A second objection is that the alterity I have described
is everywhere and therefore it is nowhere and can ac-
count for nothing in particular. Here an evaluation is
needed, because if alterity is everywhere and nowhere,
my thesis may on that count be judged either as trivial
or as positing something equivalent in the domain of
existence to the “dark matter” recently discovered by
astrophysics in the cosmic domain. Alterity may be con-
stituent of a “general atmosphere” pervading existence
in a manner similar to sexuality as Merleau-Ponty (1962)
described it, a trace or dimension of it being present in
all our dealings with the world and others regardless of
whether they have any explicit sexual reference. Yet if
this is the case, alterity is hardly specific to religion.
Freud framed his essay on the uncanny as a discussion
of aesthetics, saying that the uncanny is a province of
aesthetics that has to do with the frightening. If the un-
canny is essential to religion and the aesthetic, how can
we distinguish the two? I might want to say, again fol-
lowing Blake’s theory of imagination, that I do not want
to distinguish the two—but it is more precise to say that
they are distinguished in that, though alterity is impor-
tant to both, alterity itself is the object of religion. To
state this point in more general terms, when alterity is
elaborated as oppression of the other we are in the do-
main of politics; when it is elaborated as striking beauty
we are in the domain of art and aesthetics; when it is
elaborated as competition we are (perhaps) in the domain
of athletics; but when it is elaborated as alterity in and
for itself, we are in the domain of religion. What can be
gained by this intimation of religion as diffused through-
out social reality? It might suggest the need to translate
or update van der Leeuw’s and Otto’s notion of power
as divine majesty into Foucault’s notion of power as in-
habiting the very interstices and sinews of social life. It
might suggest as well a reinterpretation of the thesis of
disenchantment of the world put forward by Marcel
Gauchet (1985), the last great theorist of religion’s in-
evitable decline. For Gauchet, despite the persistence of
belief, the human-social world was being reconstituted
not only outside religion but independently of the reli-
gious logic within which it originated. But it is perhaps
possible to interpret Gauchet’s disenchantment as an es-
cape of alterity from the domain of the strictly religious,
such that the sacred does not disappear but becomes dif-
fused through reality, rendering the human world even
more rather than less a religious phenomenon.
These considerations raise a further question, if not
an objection: If religion is inevitable, then how does the
question of skepticism, the problem of belief and un-
belief, enter this argument? Let us address this question
by turning again to William James and another of his
recent commentators, Charles Taylor. Taylor shows that
for James the choice between agnosticism and belief was
a “forced option” and claims that James’s poignant for-
mulation of this sometimes agonizing choice qualifies
him as “our great philosopher of the cusp” (2002:59).
James challenged the “agnostic veto” of faith that re-
quires skepticism “as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’
for religion can be found” (James, quoted in Taylor 2002:
48), on the grounds that it is not necessarily more irra-
tional to risk erroneous belief than to risk hoping that
what we desire to believe may be true. The cusp is pre-
cisely the choice of which form of risk to take, and, as
Taylor says, the choice must be made on “gut instinct”
(p. 58). Yet although this gut instinct may be derived from
originary embodied alterity, its content—including not
only theistic principles but also the sense that a choice
must be made and that this choice must be in the form
of a commitment—consists of many layers of historical
context and cultural meaning sedimented upon the phe-
nomenological kernel. To be precise, Taylor observes
that James’s notion of religious experience is predicated
upon the development of a kind of personal religion that
was made possible by Protestantism and that today has
evolved into a post-Durkheimian expressive individu-
alism in which “a host of urban monads hover on the
boundary between solipsism and communication” (p. 86)
and in which the emphasis of religion has “shifted more
and more toward the strength and genuineness of the
feelings rather than toward the nature of their object”
(p. 99). The phenomenological kernel I have identified
is at the opposite end of this continuum of elaboration
from James’s notion of religious “experience.” It does
not have to do exclusively with a personal religion ex-
perienced in solitude, for the alterity of self I have dis-
cussed is also the ground for intersubjectivity and, by
extension, collectivity. It does not have to do with a
personal religion that is an encounter with a personalized
divinity, for the sense of alterity can be eminently im-
personal. If my argument is accepted, one cannot be skep-
tical that there is a religious impulse that inevitably be-
comes culturally elaborated in a myriad of symbolic,
institutional, and experiential forms but must be skep-
tical of any particular elaboration as a product of its his-
torical and social conditions. In this sense, the thesis I
have developed here may contribute to the anthropolog-
ical theory of religion but offers no help in resolving
theological questions or dilemmas of faith.
A final objection is that my understanding of alterity
is too different from the way it is customarily used in
anthropology, as referring to political, racial, ethnic, gen-
der, class, religious otherness—the otherness that is the
occasion for identity politics, war, conflict, violence
(Corbey and Leerson 1991, Taussig 1993). But the im-
plication of my argument is that these forms of alterity
are also grounded in embodiment and have a religious
structure, and I agree with Derrida that “in these times,
language and nation form the historical body of all re-
ligious passion” (1998:4). Occasionally the religious di-
mension of political and ethnic alterity comes to the fore
in discussions by anthropologists. Here I am thinking of
Michael Taussig’s intuition of “the marked attraction
174 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
and repulsion of savagery as a genuinely sacred power
for whiteness” (1993:150). The colonial contrast between
noble Indians and degenerate blacks is not only a history
of labor discipline but “a Sacred History too, in which
race-fantasy takes the place of heavenly fantasy” because
insofar as the black phallus becomes a demonic figure
of what Durkheim called the impure sacred, race “ac-
quires the burden of carrying the emotive charge of men
exchanging women across the colorless line of colonial
proletarianization” (p. 150). I cite these examples in order
to suggest that if there is something to my thesis that
alterity is the phenomenological kernel of religion, then
there is a sense in which we will be able to say that
political alterity is a religious structure.
Let me pursue this line of argument in the light of
Derrida’s (1998) account of religion in the contemporary
world, which is riddled with reverberations of alterity at
almost every level. At the level of meta-discourse he
observes the apparent inevitability of finding not one but
two sources of religion, an alterity in the form of “di-
vision and iterability of the source” (p. 65). In his title
he identifies these two sources as faith and knowledge,
but they reappear as messianism and chora, experience
of belief and experience of the unscathed (the latter is
elsewhere called “experience of sacredness” [p. 62]), re-
legere and religare, attestation and disenchantment (pp.
64–65), immunity and autoimmunity (p. 47), absolute
respect for life and human sacrifice (p. 50), fiduciarity
and unscathedness (p. 58), and the works of Kant and
Bergson (p. 33). These pairs roughly map onto one an-
other at different levels of analysis, and I would want to
add to them the intimate alterity of the self and the
imposing alterity of the wholly other, but the one that
is of most interest in the moment is the image of im-
munity and autoimmunity.
Derrida asks, “Is not the unscathed (l’indemne) the
very matter—the thing itself—of religion?” (1998:23). If
“the thing itself” is the same object of religion identified
by Otto, then the wholly other is precisely the un-
scathed. But the most radically other for Derrida goes
beyond the positive Other represented in messianism; it
is chora, nothing (no being, nothing present), “the very
place of an infinite resistance, of an infinitely impassible
persistence (resistance): an utterly faceless other” (p. 21).
Indeed, for Derrida the holy is associated with un-
scathedness, indemnity, indemnification, and he links
these with immune, immunity, immunization, “and
above all, ‘autoimmunity’ ” (p. 70). In the autoimmune
response the immune system is not just reacting to itself
but “protecting itself against its self-protection by de-
stroying its own immune system” (this is a unique in-
terpretation of immunology, I think). He says that as this
becomes more prevalent “we feel ourselves authorized
to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization.
It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the re-
lations between faith and knowledge, religion and sci-
ence, as well as the duplicity of sources in general” (p.
73 n. 27). But this is really a general logic of alterity in
the form of an alterity of the self grounded in embodi-
ment, that is, corporal immediacy—what I would call
“raw existence” in contrast or confrontation with what
Agamben (1995) calls “bare life.” Reaction to the ma-
chine (and, I would add, its uncanny side, that of self as
automaton) is at once immunitary and autoimmune. It
is a fear of self in the context of the dislocation (alien-
ation?) produced by what Derrida calls tele-techno-
science, which contemporary religion allies itself with
(thereby becoming it) and reacts strongly against (thereby
reacting against itself) (p. 46).
“Globalatinization” (mondialatinization) is the term
he coins to describe this “strange alliance of Christianity,
as the experience of the death of God, and tele-techno-
scientific capitalism” (1998:13) or, again, “the strange
phenomenon of Latinity and its globalization” (p. 29),
where Anglo-American is the direct inheritor of Latin
proper. In this cultural regime,
Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like
an English word (comme un mot anglais) that has
been to Rome and taken a detour to the United
States. Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politico-
military figures, a hyper-imperialist appropriation
has been underway now for centuries. It imposes it-
self in a particularly palpable manner within the
conceptual apparatus of international law and of
global political rhetoric. Wherever this apparatus
dominates, it articulates itself through a discourse
on religion. From here on, the word “religion” is
calmly (and violently) applied to things which have
always been and remain foreign to what this word
names and arrests in history.
Globalatinization, the cultural dimension of the Pax
Americana, is the language of “religion” pronounced
with the accent of John Wayne. But I bring in these con-
siderations not so much to endorse Derrida’s argument
per se as to recognize in it one way in which religion
can be discussed as a cultural elaboration of alterity on
the level of global society at large and not merely as an
element of individual, interior experience. This goes be-
yond saying that specific forms of religion are spreading
globally or even that religion has taken on global sig-
nificance to suggest instead that the very boundary be-
tween alterity in its political and alterity in its religious
sense is becoming blurred.
In this context, the contemporary return of religion (of
the repressed?) can be understood as a global upsurge of
alterity that increasingly takes the form of autoimmun-
ity. There is no need for a society-as-organism metaphor
here—I follow Rappaport (1999) in identifying the locus
of the autoimmune response as an adaptive system
rather than an organism. Yet I want to say that this au-
toimmune response “metastasizes” to places like Na-
vajoland, where it creates the religious aporia encoun-
tered by the chanter discussed above. Should I, asks the
chanter, risk the dangerous desecration of committing
sacred material to this technological medium of audio
tape that is an arm of global culture, or should I risk the
disappearance of that knowledge altogether as the via-
bility of my practices is eaten away by the encroachment
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 175
of global culture? This autoimmune response is even
more virulent in those places less insulated from glob-
alatinization, more open to the brute presence of tech-
noscience and empire. Here the coefficient of hate, the
coefficient of alterity as self-destructiveness, language
itself as wholly other have risen in a demonic logic since
September 11, 2001. It is now possible, for instance, in
the case of the American government, to reason autoim-
munely as follows: “We are at war (in Afghanistan), in
that war we capture prisoners, but they are not prisoners
of war.” Or again, “We believe in free trade (e.g., the
North American Free Trade Agreement): we are free to
export at the price we freely choose and free to import
at the price we also freely choose.” And also, “We want
the Iraqi people (following their military defeat) to take
control of their country as soon as possible, but those
municipal authorities that have arisen without being in-
stalled by us need to step aside.”
To move once more to a concrete illustration from
social life, we are in fact living through a profoundly
religious moment. The transformation of consciousness
and of history that took place on September 11, 2001,
was a manifestation of the sacred in an unprecedented
and profoundly unsettling manner. What makes it reli-
gious? It is the rending of reality’s veil, the shock of
knowing that the world is not as we thought it was and
that we are not as we thought. Our experience (I use this
pronoun with the caveat that the immediacy and rele-
vance of this experience vary widely) of the collapse of
the World Trade Center is raw religious experience, prior
to morality, prior to God in the form of the Trinity or
Allah or Yahweh, prior even to meaning. The religious
part of it lies not in why it happened and certainly not
in the fact that it was done in the name of God but in
our response at the moment we first heard what had
happened and in the moments when with terrified fas-
cination we watched the film clip of the crashes. For just
a moment after the second plane had vanished inside the
building, just before the smoke and flames began to bil-
low, its outline appeared like a perfect silhouette on the
shiny glass facade. That was the point of no return for
the modern consciousness, because it was the moment
of absolute alterity. Moreover, to reprise our earlier dis-
cussion, this image captures an alterity that was simul-
taneously intimate and awesome. Impossible and pos-
sible collapsed upon each other and touched us at the
origin point of religion itself, that point in our souls at
which we are never at one with ourselves and everything
is strange.
Alterity in its public religious modality is also evident
in the figure of Osama bin Laden. It is less instructive
to say that bin Laden was demonized than to say that
he became a magnet for images of otherness. This is not
to say that demonization has been bypassed: when
George W. Bush referred to bin Laden as The Evil One,
the capitalization in his tone of voice made that quite
literal. Yet there was also, particularly among European
commentators, an impulse to cast him as a Franken-
stein’s monster created by the excesses of United States
military diplomacy. As one commentator noted, he also
appears to inhabit the American national consciousness
in the form of the villain in a James Bond movie. Yet
another, the author of a book on al-Qaeda, said that the
group’s media-conscious desire to put on the biggest
show possible had made its charismatic leader a kind of
Mick Jagger of religious excess. When the shifting in-
determinacy of this protean otherness became too un-
nerving, the target shifted to a more stable state, a more
stable face, that of Saddam Hussein. Yet quickly enough
the unnerving alterity became manifest there as well,
and no one could tell if the media images of Hussein or
his recorded voice were “really” his or those of shadowy
impersonators.
The well-publicized video tape of bin Laden’s com-
ments on the World Trade Center attacks exhibits this
uncanny otherness in a different way. While most West-
ern accounts emphasized its revolting hilarity and bla-
tant self-incrimination, too little attention was drawn to
the wonder and astonishment expressed. There is an el-
ement of the unimaginable coming to pass that contrasts
jarringly with the sense in which the events were uni-
maginable for Americans. This unimaginable resides in
bin Laden’s assertion that the result was miraculously
beyond his expectation—that from his experience in the
construction industry he was optimistic that the top
floors would be destroyed but never thought that both
buildings would completely collapse. Then there is the
incredible invocation of dreams and visions that pre-
ceded the attacks, dreams of airplanes and/or tall build-
ings recounted by various people within the network.
The interpretation of these dreams was that somehow
the plan was percolating in the collective imagination
and bubbling to the surface of consciousness. Because so
many were dreaming about it, bin Laden says, at one
point he told someone not to speak of his dream for fear
that the secret would be revealed.
So a towering edifice of global capitalism implodes and
collapses, and several thousand lives are destroyed. But
now our subject is Enron, followed by WorldCom, Tyco,
and Global Crossing. The real shame of the perpetrators
of such corporate scandals is to have created the occasion
to bring a smile to bin Laden’s face. If America’s recent
nemesis can boast of any triumph, it is to have rendered
it impossible to avoid making a connection between
these events. The shadow of the collapsing towers casts
a pall of religion, in its most frightening form of other-
ness, over the collapsing corporation. Perhaps this shows
that in some sense globalization is fundamentally a re-
ligious rather than an economic process, something that
partakes of a mysterium tremendum that we must strug-
gle to understand and control. Perhaps it suggests that
the destructive potential unleashed by globalization has
both an inside and an outside, the beast without and the
beast within. Or perhaps there is no “inside” and “out-
side,” which renders even more challenging the struggle
to understand and control our lives.
176 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
Inevitable Alterity
Here I return to my title, which I confess was intended
to be a bit mysterious. The asymptote is the line that is
approached by a parabola but never touched by it. There
remains a gap, an écart, no matter how close the curve
approaches. We humans are the asymptote of the inef-
fable that never touches us, that “deifines” (this word
appeared—surprised me—as a typographical error, but I
retain it as a contraction of “deify ⫹ define”) the alterity
that makes us human and that makes the ineffable in-
evitable. Of course, the mathematical metaphor has its
weaknesses. Perhaps the ineffable is the asymptote and
we humans are the curve that approaches it; perhaps the
point is the reversibility of the two. Then again, there
are non-Euclidean geometers who insist that ulti-
mately—in the ultimate—the curve and the line do
meet. And there are nuclear physicists who have posited
the existence of asymptopia, “a hypothetical region in
which the interactions of high-energy particles approach
constant values” or, as Time called it, “the far-out region
on the energy scale where all the complex events inside
the atom . . . come within reach of man’s understanding”
(World Book Encyclopedia).
I also confess that the theoretical move I have made
to embrace alterity is not yet so much the presentation
and defense of a thesis as the outline of a program of
research. My original intent was to bring contemporary
thinking about alterity to bear on the rehabilitation of
the notion of otherness found in Otto and van der Leeuw.
My preliminary conclusion is that it is the latter who
provide insight into the proliferation of theorizing about
alterity insofar as it coincides with the return of religion,
the reenchantment of the world. Does this leave me on
the verge of my own encounter with alterity, on the brink
of a theological position, or at least with the desire to
make what William James called a spiritual judgment
rather than an existential judgment about religion? I can
do no better than to quote Karl Jaspers, who said, “When
the professor is told by the barbarian that once there was
nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the
learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish
it were true, he is no judge of such things at all” (Smart
1986:xi). For myself, I feel no need to declare any religion,
since from my standpoint we are in the realm of the
religious whenever we encounter otherness in its own
right, whether or not it is impressive, and whenever
imagination sends a spark across the écart, animating
the alterity that is the phenomenological kernel of our
existence.
The theoretical consequences of this approach remain
to be elaborated. I have used the phrases “phenomeno-
logical kernel” and “elementary structure” interchange-
ably in this discussion to describe alterity. I have made
no effort to account for how or why different religious
forms and institutions are elaborated from this point. Yet
should we be surprised that Lévi-Strauss (1969; see also
Geller n.d.) found incest, conceivable as a primordial
problematization of intimate alterity, to be critical to the
elementary structure of kinship? Should we be surprised
that Durkheim (1995) found totemism, conceivable as a
primordial problematization of collective alterity and
identity, an elementary form of the religious life? Per-
haps for now our advance is in the ability to refine the
critique of Durkheim to say that, in arguing that society
is the powerful other whose mystification leads to reli-
gion, his error was not one of reductionism, the attempt
to explain religion in terms of society (cf. Csordas 1997:
265). Instead, it was to mistake the specific instance for
the general case—the alterity of the social for the general
existential condition of alterity. Such a refinement al-
lows religion, as a cultural elaboration of alterity sui
generis, to maintain its status as sui generis vis-à-vis
society without granting it the right to turn the reduc-
tionist tables and reduce society to itself or to claim any
content or meaning save that elaborated in the course of
human life. It also allows us the possibility of examining
the proposition that religion emanates from the core of
existence in a way that goes far beyond what we typically
label as religious. And as long as we leave the possibility
that we can still surprise ourselves, there is hope for us.
Comments
fiona bowie
Department of Anthropology, University of Bristol, 12
Woodland Rd., Bristol BS8 1UQ, U.K. 14 xi 03
The search for origins has fallen out of favour in an-
thropology, which, in its social and cultural forms, has
become increasingly the study of human beings in their
local context rather than the study of humanity. Csor-
das’s article is an exception to this rule. The question of
the origin of religion, often considered irrelevant in an-
thropology and best left to the archaeologists if worth
pursuing at all, has been taken up in several recent
works, all of which have approached the question on-
tologically rather than temporally. In this sense they are
the successors of Noam Chomsky’s search for a universal
grammar in the structure of the human mind. It is our
biology, manifest in walking, talking contemporary hu-
man beings, that holds the answer to the questions
“What is the essence of religion, and how did it
originate?”
Pascal Boyer, in his recent work Religion Explained:
The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001),
looks to cognitive psychology to provide a theory of re-
ligion, seen to derive from mental templates that are in
turn the result of an evolutionary process which favours
certain forms of cultural transmission over others
(Dawkins’s memes). Csordas’s argument shares certain
features with that of Boyer. It too eschews lengthy dis-
cussion of what we mean by religion or a focus on its
particular manifestations in order to ask more funda-
mental questions concerning its nature and origin. Csor-
das also makes assumptions regarding the essentially hu-
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 177
man origin of what is a priori conceived as a uniquely
human cultural phenomenon (other animals do not have
language and therefore cannot have religion). Both the
phenomenological approach favoured by Csordas and the
psychological one proposed by Boyer reject historical ex-
planations of religion (it can never be replaced by science,
as Marx or Malinowski might have imagined, or ex-
plained away as an epiphenomenon of power and privi-
lege, pace Foucault). It is a function of the mind, hard-
wired into our brains and reproduced in human infants
as they are socialized into language and culture not be-
cause they are told what to believe but because that is
the way we have evolved.
It is a tenet of Arctic shamanism that while appren-
ticeship to a more experienced shaman may be desirable
it is not essential to a shamanic vocation. The spirits
can call individuals and grant them powers irrespective
of any previous contact with a shaman or their personal
wishes. This is similar to a cognitive or phenomenolog-
ical view of religion in its severance of the necessity of
cultural transmission from its ontological core. The form
that a religion (or shamanic practice) takes may be cul-
turally determined, but the fact of its existence is not.
A key difference between the explanation of a shamanic
calling and the explanation of the origin of religion given
by Boyer or Csordas is a form of anthropocentricism. The
anthropologist, in contrast to the shaman, can conceive
of an explanation of religion in which it is possible to
begin and end with human beings or, more specifically,
the human mind (albeit embodied rather than abstract).
Csordas’s elegant and simple explanation for the origin
of religion (if rather complex in its working-out) is that
it is based on a fundamental embodied alterity. The self
is both subject and object; it contains “hidden presences
to us at the same time that they are compellingly ours.”
The asymptote of the title represents this alterity. The
desire for oneness or unity and identity can never be
consciously achieved. As we approach others or our-
selves we become strangers. Religion, in essence, is this
“inevitable moment of embodied otherness as the kernel
of the self’s alterity.”
While a minority voice in a search for origins, Csordas,
with Roy Rappaport and Pascal Boyer, represents at the
same time a conventional materialism in the anthro-
pological study of religion. There may well be much to
learn from their explanations, as indeed I think there is,
but I am concerned about the image of discrete human
bodies and minds or even groups of humans that these
explanations conjure. The fascination with the self has
overtaken an understanding of human beings in the
world, with the world as equal partner rather than as a
cipher for language and culture. The notion that an ex-
ternal reality (let alone a metaphysical reality) might ac-
tually impose itself upon us or interact with us is sub-
ordinated to a dominant and exclusive focus on human
beings. There is no space in the erudition of Csordas,
Rappaport, or Boyer’s language for a Word that does not
originate from and remain within the structures of the
human mind and society. To assert that our being-in-the
world is mediated through our embodied experience is
unproblematic, but to see religion as “alterity . . . elab-
orated in and for itself” rather than as an intimation that
permits dialogue with the world is to condemn our spe-
cies to a lonely, disengaged, and self-contained exist-
ence.1
m a r i e - c l a u d e d u p r é
CRENAM, 6 rue Basse des Rives, 42023 Saint-Etienne
Cedex 02, France. 7 xi 03
You have experience of charismatic religions, healing and
creativity, phenomenology and sacred self. Now you want
to get a wider view of your academic achievements, and
you pack the lot into three new words, “embodiment,”
“alterity,” and “theory-of-religion.” You bait Google with
them and wait for the fish that fall from the net. At the
same time, your prior work enables you to give special
meaning to the key words. Thus, “embodiment” refers to
phenomenology, a philosophical school. “Alterity” re-
ceives an interesting bias, meaning the wonder we feel on
sensing that we may be something more (or other) than
a self: the experience of an inner alterity. “Theory-of-re-
ligion” is a critical assessment of previous theories, all
issuing from a particular corner of the world, Christian
Europe, and therefore suffering from ethnocentrism and,
far worse for a U.S. academic, Eurocentrism. Derrida suc-
cessfully surfs on this roaring ocean.
We must keep in mind that Csordas is offering us a
prospective essay—unfinished, upsurging, and in need of
trimming. The three key words, whatever their biases,
are enough to lead the prospector onto side roads, by-
passes, and cul-de-sacs. Thus, the “surprise” metaphor
used at the outset disappears in the long run, while the
“asymptote” is picked up only at the end and barely
saved from oblivion. We Europeans, old and weary as we
may be, are accustomed to displaying key words in a
kind of genealogical chart. The main (and new) path of
Csordas’s essay is signalled by the coining of “inner al-
terity.” Yet, the fairies gathered around the cradle of the
newborn are not related to each other. Csordas is unable
to follow the growth of ideas running to and fro among
philosophers, historians, and writers who build upon
each other’s work. Coincidences or resemblances do not
make a new line.
Phenomenology, for example, brought to life by Hus-
serl (Europe, 1859–1938), full fledged with Merleau-
Ponty (Europe, 1908–61) and others not mentioned, and
glossed by Irigaray (Europe, still living), intends to grasp
consciousness at its very roots and has nothing to do
with Blake’s poetic statement that “All deities reside in
the Human breast.” Certainly, it is academically chal-
lenging to mix poets and philosophers in one essay. The
shot misses the mark because deities do not reside in
any part of a human body (incidentally, biologically
minded cognitivists tend to “see” God—that is, the hu-
man ability to pray or to meditate—in electrical activi-
ties in one corner of the brain). Deities are created by
1. I thank Dimitrios Theodossopoulos for his comments.
178 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
human bodily/mental experience of an inner alterity,
which can be termed, as Csordas does, embodiment of
the ineffable; being ineffable, before language, this par-
ticular sensual experience is translated into external al-
terity, into a relation with an entity other than the self
and (generally) deemed (cognitively) superior. Then cul-
tural rules give a name to the phenomenon so that rites
and gods of all sorts help the mind/body to turn the
“wholly one” into a “wholly other.” Csordas strives to
go the other way round, and I am grateful to him for that,
mainly because I have walked a few miles on the same
path (Dupré 2001).
According to academic rules (or should I say religion?),
an intuition, which is a kind of bodily/mental experi-
ence, has to be clothed with quotations and bibliography.
It has to be translated into an “other” by means of ac-
ademic language. I agree with Csordas’s intuition but
consider many of his references useless or superfluous
(unless he were to knit them all, with many more, to-
gether in a very big book). Capturing the inner other is
a wonderful experience—disturbing and totally new but
not always awesome. When we call it “awesome,” we
turn it upside down or, rather, downside up, and this is
how deities rise from and fly high over the human breast.
We remain prisoners of European Christocentrism,
which can only think of a deity as superior to man. Trav-
eling round the earth as ethnologists do gives one a dif-
ferent view of deities. The ineffable can also be voiced
(seen, termed, sensed, experienced) as ludicrous, joyful,
mean, compassionate, and what-not all at once. Thus
the wholly one, turned into the wholly other, can be
captured by ambivalence and framed as a coincidence of
opposites. Some European philosophers, long before
Freud, termed this “coincidentia oppositorum,” consid-
ering this oxymoron the best way of phrasing God’s re-
lations with his creatures. Europe is not entirely
Eurocentric.
beatrix hauser
Institut für Ethnologie, Martin-Luther-Universität
Halle-Wittenberg, Reichardstr. 11, 06114 Halle,
Germany (hauser@ethnologie.uni-halle.de). 5 xii 03
The main purpose of this very stimulating essay is to
provide us with a new approach to theorizing about re-
ligion. Csordas proposes to reconsider basic insights of
the phenomenology of religion (such as Rudolph Otto’s
concept of the wholly other) in the light of contemporary
thinking about alterity. Moreover, he aims for an an-
thropological theory of religion, but instead of defending
a consistent thesis he wants us to regard his contribution
as an outline of a research program.
He argues that religion is based on and elaborated from
a “primordial sense of ‘otherness.’ ” Insofar as alterity is
an elementary structure of existence, “religion is inev-
itable, perhaps even necessary.” Subsequently he elab-
orates on “intimate alterity” as a human condition of
life, allowing the self to become surprised, have visions
beyond reason, and objectify physical stimuli outside the
body. With reference to his previous study on Christian
charismatic healers, Csordas claims that “imaginal per-
formances” of Jesus and the Virgin Mary should be re-
garded as “embodied metaphors” for that alterity of self-
hood. Actors come to feel that heaviness of the limbs
that “is always there for us indeterminately and preob-
jectively.” By means of performance its essential alterity
becomes an object of somatic attention. To get it right,
according to Csordas, the “object” of religion is not nec-
essarily a well-defined other but the “existential aporia
of alterity itself.”
This idea of the intimate otherness of the self is ex-
tended by a complementary notion of “embodied alter-
ity.” Citing Merleau-Ponty, Csordas shows that human
beings have no choice but to sense the world through
their own bodies and therefore divine alterity ends up in
embodiment as well. From both perspectives alterity is
grounded in embodiment. These two sections form the
core of Csordas’s argument and can be regarded as a fur-
ther interpretation of his previous works on embodiment
towards a more general thesis on the experience of
alterity.
The next section, however, raises a number of prob-
lems. In “Contested Alterity” Csordas tries to outline
his argument against a number of objections. He admits
that alterity is elaborated for different purposes in diverse
cultural domains, such as politics and the arts and aes-
thetics. However, it is only the alterity that is elaborated
neither for oppression, glorification, nor competition—
that is “in and for itself” and has “no content prior to
its elaboration in an ethnographic or historical in-
stance”—that serves as the “phenomenological kernel of
religion.” To me, this specification raises more problems
than it solves. Alterity strikes me as the basis of all com-
munication, including the communication with god
(whether male/female, plural, or amorphous). One might
certainly recognize specific attention to alterity in reli-
gious discourse, but I doubt that this embodied alterity
significantly differs from that in other domains. Besides,
how are we to recognize whether the elaboration of al-
terity is for its own sake or not? Since religion is not
only belief but social practice, an encounter with alterity
“in and for itself” does not seem convincing. Moreover,
Csordas himself is not consistent with his definition. He
considers, for instance, the general perception of the
crash of New York’s twin towers as a “raw religious ex-
perience” in the sense that it created a transformation
of conciousness. In my view, this “moment of absolute
alterity” is hardly elaborated “in and for itself” and there-
fore collapses Csordas’s specification of a religious do-
main as well. At the same time, if any embodied oth-
erness is regarded as basically religious, then not only
will religion be inevitable but there will be hardly any
other domains left. Still, I do agree with Csordas that the
significance of alterity for the experience of religion is
not to be underestimated.
A theory of religion built on the assumption of a pri-
mordial sense of otherness seems to reestablish the ob-
solete priority of belief against religious practice. Have
we not learned that through repetition (folding the
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 179
hands, prostrating oneself, keeping silent, chanting
hymns) humans develop a “sense of ritual” (Catherine
Bell)—that belief follows action rather than vice versa?
Is the failure to realize the “imaginal performance” of
Jesus and the Virgin Mary merely a matter of “untaught
bodies” (Talal Asad)? Considering alterity as the phe-
nomenological kernel of religion, how are we to include
this process of embodiment? After all, it is familiar and
repeated actions (embodied practices) that serve as the
basis for an encounter with alterity. I wish that Csordas
had elaborated a bit on this point. In any case, his paper
raises a number of thought-provoking issues.
michael lambek
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto at
Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON,
Canada M1C 1A4 (lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca). 22 x 03
Csordas is one of the most original writers in the an-
thropology of religion; he continues to surprise us all and
not only himself. He is also one of the few (I would add
Bruce Kapferer) who is both comfortable and well-read
within the European tradition of phenomenology. This
is not a tradition in which I feel at home, and therefore
I find it difficult to respond to this remarkable paper with
the insight it deserves. Csordas anticipates many of my
criticisms and answers them brilliantly—for example,
where he asserts that “alterity is not an essential thing
but an essential displacement.” However, I do think that
his move from acknowledging Asad’s skepticism about
the existence of religion as a category to trying to “un-
derstand religion in its own right” is a bit abrupt. Rather
than, say, surveying for a family-resemblance (polythetic)
approach, Csordas dives straight for religion’s “minimal
criterion or phenomenological kernel.” The ensuing dis-
cussion is extremely interesting, but it does not convince
me that (a) intimate alterity is the core or kernel—or
specific object—of religion, (b) religion is necessarily the
kind of thing that has a core, or (c) if religion were the
kind of thing that had a core, that core should be found
in experience. Csordas cites Rappaport, but Rappaport’s
theory is notable not only for balancing the experiential
“holy” with the discursive “sacred” but for giving much
greater attention to the latter.
I remember being intensely irritated reading van de
Leeuw as an undergraduate, perceiving his inflated lan-
guage as a smokescreen for the underlying theological
assumptions. Csordas joins van der Leeuw in the as-
sumption that “religion has a sui generis status,” but he
is brilliant in de-reifying alterity as an external object of
power and reconceptualizing it as “intimate.” To say that
“the actual object of religion is objectification itself” is
very interesting and reminiscent of Durkheim, a com-
parison that Csordas reaches at the end of his essay. He
works hard to distinguish his position from that of Wil-
liam James’s personal religion, but he has some way to
go now to link alterity with the social and the moral.
ro l a n d l i t t l e w o o d
Department of Anthropology, University College
London, London WC1E 6BT, England (rejurol@
ucl.ac.uk). 5 xi 03
Whilst welcome as a return to considering the origin and
nature of religion in general, Csordas’s particularization
of “religion” as high religion and as a phenomenological
experience follows William James in wondering if this
kernel and prototype does not follow the “pattern setters
. . . for whom religion exists not as a dull habit but as
an acute fever” (James 1958[1902]:24). But, as the first
functionalists argued, origin is not continued practice,
and the psychology of creation is no guide to the psy-
chology of dutiful observance. We cannot assume that
the followers replicate the founding process (which may
be, as James and La Barre argued, a radically idiosyncratic
psychosis) in any close degree.
One autumn I gaze into my garden orchard laden with
apples and dimly perceive some movement at the end
which, following my experience among my fellows, I
characterize as some human or semi-human forms
whom I later interpret as the pink fairies who have come
to steal my fruit (and this is the origin of the Pink Fairy
Religion, with its well-known apple sacrifice). I look up
at the night sky and wonder about the recurrent cycles
of the planets and decide—again on the basis of everyday
human experience—that some human or human-like
form is necessarily guiding them, ensuring that each
planet rises and sets at its appropriate time and that it
conforms to its evident course. Now, are my cognitions
in these two cases so very different from my experience
and understanding of normal social life among my fel-
lows? Are my assumptions of action and agency in these
mythical creatures so very different from my habitual
experience in perceiving my omnibus turning the corner
and bearing the desired number? On closer examination,
they are not, in fact, but until the rise of natural science
my pink fairies and planetary angels were not subject to
closer examination.
Or take my daughter (a well brought-up bourgeois
atheist without television), whose pet cat died. Two and
a half years old, she had never experienced death before
or witnessed any mortuary rites. We had just dug a hole
in the centre of the garden and laid the cat in it when
she said, “Wait a moment,” and went to fetch the cat’s
ball and its toy clockwork mouse, which she then put
in the grave. Astonished, I asked her why she had done
this, and she just replied that the ball and the mouse
were for the cat. An extension of modern British ideas
of property ownership rather than an instance of the
“naturalness” of grave goods? Perhaps.
Religion is only our normal social world read in
slightly different colours. It is hardly so “other.” If re-
ligion is some solution to the problem of deceit and lying
(Buber and Rappaport), then why do the gods, demons,
and jihns of most local religions practice deceit on us?
The Pink Fairy Religion, once established and recog-
nized, becomes an idiom subserving other human inter-
ests—aesthetic, jural, agricultural, sexual, kin, and so on.
180 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
Operating within it, the priest, prophet, or functionary
may well seek to simplify matters and follow Occam’s
Razor to reduce the multifarious denizens of our parallel
world to one transcendent and ever less human power.
But this is hardly the origin or centre of religion. Far
from being an origin or prototype, the phenomenology
of high religion is a secondary elaboration by the lonely
mystic or ambitious thaumaturge.
The contemporary analogues of religion may lie not
in bin Laden and Saddam Hussein but in such phenom-
ena as alien abduction and multiple personality disorder.
The unknown world is not so unknown, for it is closely
modelled on our own and is not so very far away.
peter van der veer
Research Center Religion and Society, OZ
Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The
Netherlands. 17 xi 03
So much attention is given to the political significance
of radical religious movements and to their violent
clashes with the Other these days that it may come as
a relief to turn to religion as “feeling” and as an expe-
rience of alterity that does not imply ethnic cleansing.
Nevertheless, Csordas’s contribution evokes a strong
sense of alterity in me. It reminds me how much German
romanticism is still foundational to major strands in
American cultural anthropology. Writing about the ori-
gins of religion—phenomenological or evolutionary—
has always made me uncomfortable because its specu-
lative mode seems so close to theology. The phenom-
enology of religion, whose founders Rudolf Otto and Ger-
hardus van der Leeuw Csordas brings back to haunt us,
was developed in departments of religious studies within
divinity schools and rejected by anthropologists, whose
interest lay more in the social production of religious
experience and the problems of cross-cultural translation
of key concepts such as “religion,” “ritual,” and “belief.”
The impetus of much anthropological work on religion
has therefore been moving away from theology or the-
ology dressed up as philosophy such as the work of Der-
rida and Irigaray. I have always found it attractive in the
anthropology of religion that it is close to the anthro-
pology of labor and ordinary life and that it examines
theology as an object of study without becoming theo-
logical itself. It is therefore fair to say that I am not very
sympathetic to Csordas’s perspective and see some major
difficulties in it.
The first problem with this kind of universalistic ap-
proach is that it is ahistorical. One can, of course, derive
inspiration from William Blake for a theory of interiority
and the self as embodied presence, but I think that much
would be gained by reading Blake as an antinomian poet
who writes against the established doctrines of the
Church. Blake’s poetry does not simply well up from
deeply felt emotion but is inflected as a subaltern cri-
tique (van der Veer 2001:60–62). To do without a histor-
ical contextualization of what is one of the most im-
portant currents in British religious history is to reduce
oneself to phenomenology indeed.
The second problem with the body as the origin of
universal religion is, again, that the “techniques of the
body,” as Marcel Mauss has taught us, are historical.
Mauss (1979), followed by Bourdieu (1977) (who is not
even mentioned in Csordas’s discussion of embodiment),
uses the concept of habitus to analyse the ways in which
bodily aptitudes are formed. From this perspective a re-
search program that explores ways in which people learn
to experience has been developed (van der Veer 1988)
which seems more promising than speculation about pri-
mal experience. Csordas anticipates these two objec-
tions, but his response that one might want to translate
Otto’s notion of power as divine majesty into Foucault’s
notion of power strikes me as slightly disingenuous. Fou-
cault’s perspective has been developed in anthropology
by Talal Asad (1993) precisely to address the problems
that a universal definition of religion would confront.
As usual, the step from the universal to the particular
is quickly taken, and, indeed, one often encounters the
universal as the universalization of a modern Western
particularity. Csordas sees the happenings around 9/11
as profoundly religious. This may be the case for Osama
bin Laden and for apocalyptic Christians in the United
States, but from an analytical point of view it seems
preferable to analyse the impact of the media on the
understanding of the self and on events that lead to war.
To me the impact of the media today is a historical trans-
formation that affects the public sphere but also affects
religious experience (van der Veer and Munshi 2004), and
it should be understood historically rather than phe-
nomenologically.
o t á v i o v e l h o
Departamento de Antropologia–Museu Nacional,
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil (otaviovelho@alternex.com.br). 6 xi 03
Csordas has always had a stimulating effect on anthro-
pological debates. I can testify to this for my own coun-
try, where “embodiment” has encountered an affinity
with local practices. Now, 13 years after “Embodiment
as a Paradigm for Anthropology” (1990), Csordas again
surprises us. We are once again confronted with a major
theoretical piece that will certainly give rise to much
discussion and influence the future of the discipline.
Thus a first reaction can only be provisional.
Csordas arms his argument with many writers, an-
thropologists and nonanthropologists, inventing, so to
speak, a lineage for himself. This is done in such a way
that the reader himself can suggest other possible mem-
bers. Michel de Certeau, for instance, with his passion
de l’altérité (De Certeau 1987:xii) may be a candidate,
as is Paul Ricoeur, with his notion of ipséité in contrast
with mêmeté (Ricoeur 1995:101–8), not to mention Kier-
kegaard and Sartre. We are faced here with an illustrious
lineage, and the question arises to what extent it ob-
scures and reduces more than it clarifies Csordas’s con-
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 181
tribution. Alterity has had its detractors. In spite of a
certain boom in the 1990s, it has been the target of much
postcolonial critique. It has also been seen as creating
distance in the spirit of modernist anthropology, which
Ardener (1985) dates approximately between 1920 and
1975. Frequently it has also been seen as an instrument
for the construction of identity by opposition more than
as the means of access to the other’s reality (and, in a
way that may be relevant for the issue of religion, one
might add from the experience of constituting a “Bra-
zilian culture” that this is not necessarily the case only
vis-à-vis subalterns). To mention a well-known example,
Nicholas Thomas (1991:308–10) considers that ethnog-
raphy itself has been compromised precisely because the
“fabrication of alterity” is central to its project. One can
therefore say that there are general epistemological and
political problems involved with the concept. Although
at first sight religion is not the main target in these dis-
cussions, the homology that exists between the general
question of alterity and its application to religion, as
Csordas proposes, may not be without consequence. It
is as if one were confronted with the risk of exoticizing
God himself.
Csordas may answer that this is why he ends up with
“intimate” alterity. The point is that if the trajectory he
has followed is not misleading, it aligns him with what
one could label the “dualists.” At the same time, the
idea of intimacy seems to point in the direction of a
promising critique of a supposedly insurmountable dis-
tance between object and subject, words and things, etc.,
without falling into easy monistic solutions. In my opin-
ion this puts him in the company of Bruno Latour, Tim
Ingold, Nicholas Thomas, and others. Were he to choose
this other path I believe he would be able to come back
to Merleau-Ponty and the preobjective. He could then
consider dwelling in the world in very concrete terms
while also widening the world to include artifacts, non-
humans, images, and the gods themselves. Kierkegaard
would have to be traded for Spinoza and natura naturata,
but he could still have the sacred “everywhere,” al-
though in a very immanent, perhaps embodied, way.
In this way, there would be no treatment of difference
hinting at an oppositional economy but partial differ-
ences in a continuous social process, gaps (even those
between words and things) overridden by chains of me-
diators, networks, affections, and attachments—inti-
macy, so to speak—but no alterity in the sense of the
concept of the alien objectified other and the creation of
uniformity by pushing difference to a boundary that de-
mands translation for the artificial reconstitution of the
continuity of the world (Ingold 1993:227–30). Describing
both Otto’s and Csordas’s concepts in terms of alterity
may create a nominalist illusion. Besides, why cling to
the modern obsession for separating humans and non-
humans that is so foreign to the cosmologies of most
peoples and—as the debates on the nature of the Indians
in the sixteenth century suggest—is at the root of the
division between “them” and “us”?
I would like to endorse Csordas’s point of not consid-
ering religion merely an individual experience, but I
would suggest, following Latour (2000:203–7) to a certain
extent, that the global upsurge of alterity could be seen
as a lack of recognition of attachments in the name of
a Western ideal of detachment. This is what creates al-
terity vis-à-vis those who are not considered detached.
It is the alterity of attachments that is not realized. This
inhibits the recognition of a common world and the
choice between good and bad attachments. Perhaps one
could then say that we are in the realm of the religious
whenever we recognize attachments in their own right.
Reply
thomas j. csordas
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. 12 xii 03
These international commentators have done the
greatest possible service to a writer, none of them uni-
formly embracing or condemning the arguments I have
put forward but all offering reflections that invite me to
clarify my position in a variety of critical ways. I am
grateful to them all.
In Bowie’s reading, I approach the question of religious
origins ontologically rather than temporally. In fact I con-
sistently choose the term “existential” rather than “on-
tological,” and reflection on the difference between the
two is likely to be pivotal for this discussion. Certainly
it is critical insofar as framing the discussion of religion
along the axis ontological/temporal is doubtless what
allows her to juxtapose my argument with the approach
to religion taken by Pascal Boyer, a position which, from
where I stand, could not be more different from my own.
But there is more to Bowie’s point than can be resolved
by simply rejecting (as I must) the assertion that I would
agree with Boyer that religion is “a function of the mind,
hard-wired into our brains.” In fact, what I agree with is
that religion can neither be explained (causally) nor ex-
plained away (as an epiphenomenon). For Bowie the prob-
lem posed by the approaches she groups together is how
to recognize a reality that imposes itself on us or inter-
acts with us, and she wants us to see religion as an “in-
timation that permits dialogue with the world.” The
phenomenological insight that she perhaps misses is that
we are always already in the world, and establishing that
is not a burden that need be placed on religion.
Dupré evokes the image of a fish taking a bait and
falling into the net, but I won’t take the bait that she
offers to engage in a trans-Atlantic culture war of aca-
demic styles and Internet phenomenology. I will, how-
ever, take exception to her claim that the phenomeno-
logical goal of grasping consciousness “at its very roots”
and Blake’s assertion that all deities reside “in the Hu-
man breast” have nothing to do with one another. The
respective metaphors are quite compatible in any but a
very literalist reading. Aside from this, I fully appreciate
Dupré’s suspicion of a Christocentric understanding of
deity as necessarily superior to humanity, something
182 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
with which I was once profoundly impressed when
watching a film of women laughing and joking while
gathering important sacred plants. This is immediately
in accord with what I have discussed with respect to an
intimate alterity and with my attempt to domesticate
the melodramatic flights of Otto and van der Leeuw
about the majestically awesome wholly other. Finally, I
am grateful for Dupré’s comment that my intuition de-
serves being worked out in a very big book.
Lambek observes that my move from acknowledging
Asad’s critique of religion as a category to registering a
desire to retain it is abrupt. I agree. The problem is as
much with “religion” as a word as it is with religion as
a category. It is only as useful as we make it, and we can
be trapped by careless and uncritical uses of the word
just as we can be trapped by the historical matter from
which the category is constructed. But surely this can
be said of any word or category when we try to capture
it and harness it for scientific use. This would be the
Wittgensteinian approach to the critique of the cate-
gory—we find the meaning of religion by examining the
ways in which we use the word. It is one interpretation
of the strategy of surveying for polythetic family resem-
blance that Lambek identifies as an alternative to mine.
But actual religion as it is lived and felt and practiced is
not about the use of words per se, and it is not incom-
patible to ask what might be the basis for that family
resemblance. Is there a core of religion? How about of
economics? That would be exchange, right? (Or was that
production?) And I am not so sure I want to say that the
core is found in experience (since that word too easily
takes on a Jamesian cast). Rappaport does, as Lambek
observes, give more attention to the discursive “sacred”
than to the experiential “holy” (Lambek thereby might
have used the word “overbalanced” rather than “bal-
anced” to describe Rappaport’s position, developed from
an almost rabbinical sensibility for language while sin-
cerely remaining open to the transcendent). But the ex-
istential structure of alterity appears on both sides of
Rappaport’s equation, for example, in the possibility of
lies on the discursive side and the numinous on the ex-
periential side. The fact that it can be identified in var-
ious domains speaks to Lambek’s observation that al-
terity needs to be linked more precisely to the social and
moral. This was the step I began to take by addressing
contemporary events. I am gratified that Lambek rec-
ognizes that this is where the argument is going and
needs to go.
I am off on the wrong foot with Littlewood insofar as
I can neither figure out how he reads my discussion as
referring to “high” religion nor embrace his description
of how I am following James. These characterizations do
not go to the point of my attempt to domesticate the
phenomenologists like van der Leeuw with the notion
of intimate alterity or to marshal the phenomenologists
like Merleau-Ponty in support of embodied alterity, and
I am not sure how they could be read from the ethno-
graphic instances I evoke. I agree that assumptions about
action or agency are no different when comparing the
Pink Fairy religion with habitual actions such as riding
the bus—but I could say that assumptions about surprise
might be different in the two cases. Where assumptions
about surprise are the same, however, this could be so
either in the sense that Pink Fairies are taken for granted
as easily as is the appearance of the bus around the corner
or in the sense that one is transcendently and prayerfully
grateful at the miracle of the appearance of the correct
bus, brought about every day by the most loving and
powerful lord of the universe. And this takes us to Lit-
tlewood’s key phrase, “Religion is only our normal social
world read in slightly different colours,” which I think
precisely corresponds to my argument. There is hardly
a need to choose between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein
on the one hand and alien abduction and multiple per-
sonality disorder on the other as privileged sites of al-
terity—what I am asking us to consider is the nature of
the écart that accounts for Littlewood’s “slightly differ-
ent colours.”
When van der Veer responded to this article given as
a talk in Amsterdam, he recalled that as a graduate stu-
dent he had contracted with a professor to be exempt
from examination of van der Leeuw on condition that
he would never himself teach about religion. This is per-
haps related to his relief that anthropologists have by
and large rejected the insights of phenomenologists of
religion and his feeling of being haunted by ghosts res-
urrected in my argument—but thank goodness for his
defiance of the bargain with his professor and the op-
portunity to engage his vigorous critique. Let us begin
with Blake, who was not at all about interiority, self as
embodied presence, and deeply felt emotion in the sense
that van der Veer uses these phrases but about imagi-
nation. Blake saw visions and ghosts all the time and
refused to be surprised by them or awed by them, because
his revelry in imagination in all its spontaneity was a
full frontal embrace of alterity as the existential core of
being. This was the source of his antinomianism, as van
der Veer calls it, though I would prefer simply to call
him a political and religious radical, supporter of revo-
lutions and enemy of the mystification bred in power.
Second, to say that the body is the universal origin of
religion is not the same as to say that the body is the
origin of universal religion (van der Veer’s reading of me).
Van der Veer would have been correct to observe that I
have not mentioned Bourdieu in my discussion of alter-
ity, but he is rather off in saying that Bourdieu does not
figure in my discussion of embodiment or, for that mat-
ter, religion, insofar as my work is thoroughly seasoned
by Bourdieu and breaded with habitus (Csordas 1990,
1994, 1997, 2002). Indeed, the notion of habitus is not
the most obvious tool for getting a grasp on alterity—
but if we were to bring habitus into this discussion it
would be in conjunction with the unheimlich, precisely
where those dispositions inculcated in the body and en-
shrined in the symbolic order of the household begin to
reverse their sense of familiarity and reappear as down-
right spooky. As for the transmutation of Otto’s notion
of power into Foucault’s, I would prefer “tenuous” to
“disingenuous” as a descriptor, particularly since I agree
with Asad’s use of Foucault to warn against a universal
 c s o r d a s Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion F 183
definition of religion. But I never offer a definition of
religion as Geertz does, only a thesis about its phenom-
enological kernel. Missing this, in referring to my dis-
cussion of 9/11 van der Veer also glosses over a large
space between the religious (relevant only to bin Laden
and apocalyptic Christians) and the analytic (where focus
should be on the impact of the media). Are those anon-
ymous people who are the actors behind the media really
any more phenomenologically removed from the events
than anyone else within their purview? (And of course
there are those beyond the reach of media who may still
not have learned of the collapse of the World Trade Cen-
ter.) All of these issues are debatable, but in the end van
der Veer lessens the impact of his critique by appearing
to assume that history and phenomenology are mutually
exclusive, diametrically opposed, or theoretically incom-
patible rather than complementary moments of analysis.
Velho’s outline of a possible lineage for my argument
perhaps provides a head start toward the big book that
Dupré requires to be convinced of my argument. As part
of his subtle outline of alternative readings and routes
to take in developing this argument he calls attention
to the trickiness of using alterity in a rhetorical climate
of scholarly debate that might obscure its usefulness.
The notion of exoticizing God himself is particularly
intriguing, because it suggests a discussion in which the
alternatives to exoticizing might be reducing, explaining,
embracing, identifying with, and so on. Reverting again
to Blake, I would have to say that it is religion itself
rather than a theory of alterity that exoticizes God, and
this is part of the phenomenon we are called on to ac-
count for. A similar response can be made to Velho’s
more specific interrogation of where this argument falls
with respect to dualism and monism. To paraphrase
Drew Leder (1990), the possibility of dualistic thinking
(for example, the dichotomy between mind and body as
we have inherited it from Descartes) is grounded in the
existential structure of embodiment itself. It is thus
again part of the phenomenon to be accounted for in a
synthetic theory of the body, and to adopt it as a theo-
retical stance is a form of going native. I do not think
that recognizing alterity in the form of the écart we have
discussed requires “the artificial reconstitution of the
continuity of the world,” precisely because it is already
a part of the structure of human worlds, so that yet again,
“alterity in the sense of the concept of the alien objec-
tified other” is part of the phenomenon we have to ac-
count for. This would be the case whether the empirical
instances in question were describable in terms of op-
positional economy or in terms of partial differences in
a continuous social process. Finally, I detect a tantalizing
bit of Lévy-Bruhl in Velho’s notion of the alterity of at-
tachments and his suspicion of the way the moderns
separate humans and nonhumans. And where Lévy-
Bruhl would stand on the notion of alterity as the phe-
nomenological kernel of religion is certainly a point for
further investigation.
Hauser summarizes the first parts of my argument ac-
curately and succinctly, then encounters problems pre-
cisely at the point where the argument becomes most
problematic and where the most is at stake—the point
at which the theory of religion begins to engage the
broader social domain. She reads me as saying that it is
only the alterity that is elaborated in and of itself and
has no content prior to the elaboration of it that serves
as the phenomenological kernel of religion. What I have
said is that alterity has no content prior to its elaboration
in cultural life and that it is only when it is elaborated
in and of itself—as what we can recognize both as the
phenomenological kernel and reflexively as the object of
practice—that we are speaking of religion proper in dis-
tinction to other domains such as politics, aesthetics, or
athletics, for, as Hauser plainly agrees, alterity is the
basis of all communication. She also has difficulty with
my attributing a religious dimension to the attacks of
September 11, 2001. It is of course the case that the
alterity of the final attack on the World Trade Center
was not elaborated purely “in and for itself,” but I would
argue that in this case it is quite possible to identify that
phenomenological kernel in the sense of a residue of
alterity that can be accounted for in no other terms ex-
cept its own, that is, in terms of what I have called “raw
existence” in contrast to the “bare life” of biopolitics.
In other words, the kernel is not eliminated or super-
seded by cultural elaboration, political appropriation,
historical circumstance, or rhetorical spin but occasion-
ally becomes recognizable in and for itself, sui generis.
Thus what accepting my position on alterity means is
not that there will be hardly any other domains left aside
from religion but that those domains contain an element
of the religious and, furthermore, that the salience of
this element can vary according to historical conditions.
Perhaps part of our difference has to do with Hauser’s
understanding of my thesis in terms of a distinction be-
tween belief and practice. What I am saying has nothing
to do with belief. Indeed, if I am to be consistent in
arguing that there is a valid sense in which religion is
sui generis, then it must be existentially prior to belief.
As for practice, Hauser perhaps introduces another way
we can bring the notion of habitus to bear on this ar-
gument. Certainly the kinds of practices and techniques
of the body to which she refers are forms of cultural
elaboration that can be said to inculcate dispositions of
devotion, belief, and allegiance. To observe also that they
are the basis for an encounter with alterity—a process
of embodiment in the verbal sense (“to embody some-
thing”) attuned to evoke an aspect of embodiment (“em-
bodied alterity”) understood as our general existential
condition—is intriguing and worthy of much more
discussion.
In sum, I acknowledge again that my drawing upon
some of the contemporary literature on alterity in order
to rehabilitate the phenomenologists of religion had to
be evocative rather than definitive and that the same is
true of my ethnographic illustrations of various points
in the argument. I also acknowledge again that there is
much to be done along the lines I have sketched out here
to specify the role of alterity and of religion in social,
moral, and political life, particularly at this moment in
which the upsurge of alterity is taking place so broadly.
184 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 2, April 2004
In recognizing alterity in the sense I have elaborated it,
we are recognizing that the grounds for creating distance
are also the grounds for creating intimacy. We are rec-
ognizing that one problem for research is to specify the
level at which political narrative (“secular”) and cos-
mological narrative (“religious”) coincide and the role of
alterity as an elementary structure of existence in that
coincidence. Finally, I do not want to give the appearance
of trying to be prophetic or apocalyptic or melodramatic,
but I insist that we must recognize that alterity is an
essential structure of our existence and that if we do not
embrace it we run the risk of allowing it to destroy us,
that is, of destroying ourselves. Blake (maybe Casto-
riadis, too) would say that it is a matter of imagination—
that human history is the history of imagination and it
is our duty to claim that imagination rather than letting
it run away with us. Anthropology and the theory of
religion can ask for no more and no less.
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