SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

164 I Social Theory and Social Action
details, adapting them to their own "geography," "history," and customs and
introducing the names of countries, peoples, and heroes suggested by actuality.
(Dumézil 1970, 1:63—73)
According to this method, comparison is made possible by the recognition of
similarities among traditions known to have been genetically related. The specifics
of local variation from the reconstructed prototype cannot, however, be explained
without invoking additional arguments of a sociological or historical
nature (Lincoln 1991:123). In clever hands, of course, similarities to an imputed
prototype can be used to hypothesize historical connection, as in Carlo Ginzburg's
attempt to trace, following the principle that "isomorphism establishes
identity" (1991:18), early modern ecstatic beliefs and practices to an origin in
the nomadic shamanism of Scandinavian and Siberian paleolithic peoples.
Reflective hermeneutics, especially as defined and practiced by the philosopher
Paul Ricoeur, is an important recent development in comparative scholarship
in the humanities and social sciences. By modifying the classic "hermeneutical
circle" from being a part-to-whole relationship within the domain of
understanding to the reciprocal dialectic between textual explanation (i.e., linguistics)
and textual understanding, Ricoeur's method of interpretation appropriates
the texts of temporally distant cultures in the service of self-understanding
(Ricoeur 1976, i99i:n8). s Through interpretation, people living in a scientific
worldview are able to recapture a lost dimension of human understanding, the
mythico-symbolic world of archaic cultures (Ricoeur 1967:350—52):
No interpreter in fact will ever come close to what his text says if he does not
live in the aura of the meaning that is sought. And yet it is only by understanding
that we can believe. The second immediacy, the second naïveté that we are
after, is accessible only in hermeneutics; we can believe only by interpreting.
This is the "modern" modality of belief in symbols; expression of modernity's
distress and cure for this distress. . . . But thanks to this hermeneutic circle, I
can today still communicate with the Sacred by explicating the preunderstanding
which animates the interpretation. Hermeneutics, child of "modernity," is
one of the ways in which this "modernity" overcomes its own forgetfulness of
the Sacred. (Ricoeur 19743:298)
Of course, the modern effort to think through primordial symbols, metaphors,
and allegories entails a demythologization in which critical objectivity resists an
equal dialogue with the "alien" text, since this earlier text contains only a pretheoretical
level of interpretation. This kind of comparative enterprise can easily
become self-serving, especially if the myths of other cultures are studied not with
the intent of grasping their meaning and function in their original context but
rather for personal needs of acquiring pearls of ancient wisdom (O'Flaherty
1986:226).
Various works of comparison, finally, are based on kinds of reductionism,
that is, on the finding of extra-systematic factors that account for the underlying
Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I 16$
patterns of similarity of cultural phenomena. These factors can be located, for
example, in ecological variables, biological constraints, sociobiological adaptations,
imputed facts of human nature, or the structure of the human mind, but
all of these arguments share the limitation of treating variation as both random
and epiphenomenal.
Comparative Philosophy of Religion as a Discipline
This account of three early patterns and four more recent strategies of comparison
provides a methodological backdrop for examining the potentials and
problems of the newly constituted discipline of the comparative philosophy of
religion. The papers presented in the conference series offer three differentially
weighted ways that this new discipline can be operationalized. For some, the discipline
is the comparative philosophy of religions, that is, the strictly philosophical
study, grounded in a comparative perspective, of the phenomena of religion.
While this perspective takes a relatively narrow view of the analytical discourse
required, it allows a broad acceptance of the range of phenomena to be considered
"religion." And, according to this perspective, the motive for comparison
lies primarily with the philosophically oriented analyst, rather than within the
realm of religion. For others, the discipline is the comparative [study of] philosophies
of religions; this implies a well-delimited object of the investigation,
namely, texts (or discourses, in the case of nonliterate cultures) created by philosophers
of religion (including esoteric specialists and ritual elders), yet allows
for considerable flexibility in the analytical methods used, including history, ethnography,
and philology. Finally, for several participants the discipline can be
characterized as the comparative philosophies of religions, that is, the study of
the explicit doctrines or implicit stances of various philosophers, religious thinkers,
and religious traditions toward other cultural traditions (Tracy 1990:15). In
contrast to the other two approaches, this view implies that the comparative impulse
comes from the religious thinkers or communities under study. Much of
the debate that made the Chicago conferences so lively was caused by fundamental
disagreements as to how to accent the very name of the discipline being constructed.
But, more importantly, the rich cross-disciplinary fertilization that is
revealed in the final papers results from a tacit agreement that these three perspectives
should be held in "essential tension" (Kuhn 1977), a collective decision
that allows for a "preventive pluralistic methodology" (Zilberman 1991:300) in
which historians, philosophers, ethnographers, and theologians are all welcome.
A critical consequence of this debate over the definition of the discipline is
the vital importance of the unifying recognition that the motive for comparison
and construction of comparative discourse belong both to the work of analytical
scholarship and to the world of philosophical and religious traditions being studied.
At the obvious level, if we set out to compare the philosophy of religion