‘Primitive’: A key concept in Chidester’s critique of imperial and Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological study of religion

Abstract

A critical examination of the history of theories and uses of concepts such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ in the academic study of religion in imperial, colonial and postcolonial contexts is particularly urgent in our time with its demands to decolonise Western models of knowledge production. In Savage Systems (1996) and Empire of Religion (2014), David Chidester has contributed to this project by relating the invention and use of terms such as ‘religion’, ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ by theorists of religion in European imperial metropoles to South African colonial and indigenous contexts. This article intends to take Chidester’s project further by relating Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis of ‘primitive mentality’ (particularly in De primitieve mensch en de religie ,1937) to Chidester’s analysis and postcolonial critique of imperial theories of religion. By taking animism and dreams in Chidester’s and Van der Leeuw’s works as example, it is argued that in spite of the latter’s decontextualised use of ethnological material, a fundamental shift occurred in the judgement of ‘primitive’ religion from Tylor’s evolutionary to Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis, which is contrary to claims according to which modern theories are unanimously denigratory of indigenous religions.

Introduction

In a recent survey article on the anthropology of religion, Robert Winzeler (2016) states that ‘[m]ost of the terms used by anthropologists to identify, describe, analyze, and explain religion are Western in origin’. Among these terms, a number of scholars of religion have rightly insisted, the term ‘religion’ itself needs to be understood as a Western colonial construct that we need to consciously fill with content, if we want to continue to use it for analytical purposes (e.g. Chidester 1996 ; Smith 2004 ; 2015). Winzeler, however, continues by observing that while some of these Western terms ‘have differing scholarly and popular uses’, there are some of these terms still used in popular discourses that ‘have become unacceptable in scholarly discourse, unless used in an appropriate … context’. Among such unacceptable Western terms, he lists specifically the term ‘primitive’. He then proposes that the way to think through the vocabulary used by anthropologists of religion is to understand the terms ‘in relation to the history of anthropological studies of religion’ (my emphasis).

That an ethical obligation rests on anthropologists to assess the history of anthropology in order to inform dilemmas of the present is a point that Isak Niehaus (2017) has argued in a recent article. By comparing Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski’s engagements with South African indigenous cultures in the 1920s and early 1930s, roughly between the two world wars, Niehaus shows that while Radcliffe-Brown, on the one hand, promoted the sympathetic understanding of cultural differences and indigenous cultures in a changing society as ‘an integral part of the modern world’ where separation was impossible, Malinowski, on the other hand, collaborated with colonial authorities and argued for the territorial separation and indirect rule of indigenous cultures. Niehaus ( 2017 :114) holds that ‘[the] arguments that Radcliffe-Brown, Hoernlé, and their students advanced laid the foundations for an anthropological critique of apartheid’, but that Malinowski’s:

commitment to the preservation of cultures … aligned himself with later apologists for apartheid … and provided a language to legitimate the exclusion of Africans from centers of wealth and power. (p. 114)

Within the present context of demands to decolonise Western models of knowledge production (e.g. Al-Jazeera 2015 ; Chaudhuri 2016 ; Hall 2015 ; Kamanzi 2015 ; Mamdani 2017 ; Mbembe 2015), it is ethically imperative that the academic study of religion too be subjected to a critical examination of the history of theories and uses of concepts such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’.

David Chidester, in Savage Systems (1996) and Empire of Religion (2014), has contributed to this project by relating the invention and use of terms such as ‘religion’, ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ by theorists of religion in European urban centres to South African colonial and indigenous contexts. Chidester’s narrative in these crucial publications ¹ focuses on the study of religion from the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th century. The task remains to reassess from a postcolonial perspective major theorists of religion in the first part of the 20th century, whose work should be contextualised in this period that preceded the independence of colonised nations.

One major theorist of religion, Gerardus Van der Leeuw (1890–1950), considered a pioneer in constructing a phenomenological approach to the study of religion in the first half of the 20th century, ² devoted a monograph to the question of a ‘primitive mentality’ (De primitieve mensch en de religie, 1937), which was published after his major work Die Phänomenologie der Religion (1933), ³ and was an elaboration of an even earlier publication La structure de la mentalité primitive (1928). In addition to these publications between the two world wars, in 1940 he also published an essay on indigenous religions (‘De religie der primitieve volken’) as a chapter in a book that he edited for a more general readership on the religions of the world (De godsdiensten der wereld).

In this contribution, I intend to complement Chidester’s history of the academic study of religion, by relating Van der Leeuw’s concept of a ‘primitive mentality’ to Chidester’s critical analysis of the ‘primitive’ in imperial and colonial theories of religion. Although I will focus on animism and dreams ⁴ to focus the debate, my limited discussion will give an indication of how Van der Leeuw might be written into Chidester’s postcolonial history of the comparative study of religion.

Against claims that modern theorists unanimously denigrated indigenous religions, ⁵ I will argue that Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological study of religion, in spite of restricting himself largely to debates among European theorists and neglecting colonial contexts from which he drew his ethnological data, brought about a fundamental change in the study of religion and the judgement of ‘primitive religion’ ⁶ in comparison with preceding evolutionary approaches. I will, in conclusion, indicate how this contribution can be taken further to achieve what Chidester has done in an exemplary way for theorists of religion of the preceding period.

Chidester’s postcolonial critique of ‘primitive’ as a key concept in imperial and colonial studies of religion

In the preface to Empire of Religion, Chidester (2014) warns us that in:

[f]ocusing on representations of indigenous religion in Africa, we will encounter highly problematic terms – savage, primitive, and even indigenous – that have featured prominently in the formation and development of the study of religion. (pp. xii–xiii)

He explains that generally, although not always, in imperial theories of religion savage referred to ‘wild people lacking civilization, while primitive was a temporal term designating the earliest or simplest stage of human development’, with both of these terms carrying ‘traces of racist triumphalism’. Although indigenous ‘seems to be a more neutral or even positive term’, he holds that it too must be seen as arising from encounters with imperial powers in different colonial contexts.

In his critical analysis of the history of imperial comparative religion, ⁷ Chidester (2014) shows how classic theorists of religion in the second half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century decontextualised and distorted data obtained from colonial middlemen in South Africa to develop their theories of religion in imperial metropoles.

Chidester’s ( 2014 :91–123) analysis of E.B. Tylor’s (1958) theory of animism may serve to illustrate his argument. In constructing his evolutionary theory of the animistic origin of religion, E.B. Tylor in Britain made use of the account of Zulu dreams in the work of the Anglican missionary Callaway in Natal, who, in turn, received his information on Zulu religion from his indigenous informant, the Christian convert Mbande, who was himself located in an ambivalent position between indigenous and colonial Christian traditions. The formation of imperial theories of religion can, as Chidester shows for Tylor and others (specifically Max Müller, Andrew Lang and James Frazer), therefore be best described as a complex process of triple mediation.

Religion defined as animism or the belief in spiritual beings, Tylor maintained, could be explained psychologically in terms of its cognitive origin in dreams. Dreams, he proposed, probably gave rise to the belief in spirits. The best evidence would come from the ‘primitive mentality’ or psychology of the earliest human beings (the way ‘primitives’ used to think), which, Tylor assumed, could be inferred by studying the dreams of contemporary indigenous peoples (‘savage tribes’) such as the Zulu. Drawing on Callaway’s account of Zulu dreaming, Tylor held that Zulu speakers provided evidence of the origin of religion, in the sense that when they saw the spirits of deceased ancestors in their dreams, they were unable to distinguish between subjective, inner dreams as illusionary sense impressions and objective outward reality when awake, leading to primitive religion as the belief in the reality of spiritual beings. He observed remnants of this same primitive thinking of confusion between inner subjectivity and objective reality not only among indigenous people like the Zulu, but also in his own Victorian British society among spiritualists, children, peasants and the urban working class – indeed, an erroneous way of thinking at the base of all religions (from primitive animism and polytheism to civilised monotheism) that modern logical, scientific thinking was in his view supposed to overcome and destroy in the best interest of humanity. Chidester ( 2014 :108), however, emphasises that Tylor’s evolutionary theory of religion was clearly ‘formulated in the face of perceived intellectual degeneration and moral decay in contemporary British society’.

Characteristic of Tylor’s method in using the data that he obtained about indigenous people from middlemen in the colonies was the decontextualisation of the data. Mbande, as recorded in Callaway, told the story of James, a convert who, after receiving a calling to become a diviner, left the mission station. According to Mbande, James increasingly had dreams of ancestral spirits who came to kill him – a crucial detail in Mbande’s report that Tylor ignored, instead emphasising for purposes of constructing his theory of animism the phrase in the report according to which the diviner became a ‘house of dreams’. Chidester argues that these dreams, understood within their 19th century context, were indicative of the uncertainty and despair that colonial dispossession and displacement caused among Zulu speakers. Ancestral spirits appeared in dreams instructing their descendants to sacrifice to them and to bring them back to their territorial home (the ukubuyisa ritual), but the descendants did not have enough cattle left and were no longer living in their traditional ancestral places. The ancestors were therefore angry with them, appearing to them in their dreams to punish or even kill them. Rituals were accordingly devised by diviners in an attempt to stop the dreaming. Not only Tylor’s dream theory of primitive animism as the origin of religion, but also Callaway’s explanation of Zulu dreams as a kind of self-mesmerism in which brain sensations of seeing and hearing were confused with real seeing and hearing, according to Chidester, distorted the data and did not do justice to Zulu dreams by abstracting them from their colonial contexts.

Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis of ‘primitive’ as a universal mental structure among humans

Turning to Van der Leeuw, we encounter a phenomenologist ⁸ who strongly objects to theories of religion that attempt to explain religion historically on the basis of presumed origins and evolution from primitive to civilised (e.g. Tylor and Frazer), or degeneration from monotheism to ancestor worship (e.g. Lang). ⁹ Instead, religious phenomena, with religion conceptualised by him as essentially the revelation of a transcendental Power to humans and their response of awe, reverence and fear, in the presence of this sacred Power, ¹⁰ should be sympathetically observed by the scientific researcher of religion by bracketing his or her prejudices and should be described as accurately as possible as the phenomena appear to him or her. ¹¹ By studying religious phenomena comparatively, the phenomenologist will make connections and be able to abstract from the evidence recurring structures or patterns. These structures, as he emphasises, are not those of participants ¹² and cannot be observed in reality, but are abstracted by the phenomenologist to understand rather than explain the data.

He argues that there are two basic thought structures common to all human beings: a ‘primitive mentality’ and a ‘modern mentality’. These psychological patterns are not bound to specific cultures or periods, but are always universally present in the experience of all human beings – although one way of thinking and living may be more pronounced in one case than another. ¹³ A ‘primitive mentality’ is, according to him, evident not only among indigenous groups [he uses the term ‘primitive peoples’ (primitieve volken) for the earliest human beings and contemporary indigenous groups], in ancient cultures, and indeed in all religions, ¹⁴ but also among children, the mentally ill, poets and so-called ‘normal’ (meaning Western scientifically educated) people.

He emphasises that the phenomenologist should under no circumstances consider modern thinking and living as superior to primitive thinking and living, or alternatively idealise or romanticise the primitive mentality as better than the modern mentality. Both are to be considered as different but equally valid ways of thinking and living, although – it must be added – that Van der Leeuw himself from time to time expresses his preference for the ‘primitive’ way of thinking and living. ¹⁵

Drawing on Nietzsche’s critique of modernity as a nihilistic dead end, a sickness unto death, a forgetting of what it means to live and exist as a human being, Van der Leeuw ( 1937 :22–23) maintains that if the modern mentality attempts to put the primitive mentality in us aside, it would mean a pitiful loss of authentic human existence.

In comparing the characteristics of these two ways of thinking and living, Van der Leeuw ( 1937 :24–110) considers the unity, participation or concrete and physical immediacy between subject and object, ¹⁶ between subject and subject, ¹⁷ between object and object ¹⁸ and eventually the union of the mystic with God, gods or spirits, ¹⁹ as indicative of a primitive mentality, and the dualism or split between subject and object, between subject and subject, between object and object and between God and humans, as typical of a modern mentality. In the first case, the distinction between inside and outside, and between body and soul, hardly makes sense. ²⁰ The primitive subject participates in objects (the borders between subject and object are fluid), and the relationship between subjects is communal rather than individualistic, and the subject experiences union with God, the gods or spirits. In the second case, a distance or dualism between subjects, as well as between subject and object, and object and object, and between human and sacred Power, is created which makes it possible for individuals to study data scientifically by means of abstract concepts. If the primitive way of thinking is synthetic, the modern way of thinking is analytic in dividing the unity into and creating gaps between its constituent parts for purposes of scientific examination.

Animism as evidenced in dreams is, Van der Leeuw ( 1937 :50–58) holds, a feature of primitive mentality – present in all of us, and not to be denigrated, if we want to understand what it means to be a human being. In dreams, as in fairy tales, one typically finds mythical and mystical language and poetic images, in which objects may get transformed into different objects, or subjects may magically metamorphose into objects, or vice versa. The boundaries are fluid, as one image flows into another that cannot be explained in a logical way. Although Van der Leeuw agrees that Freud’s analysis of sexual symbols is undeniable in some dreams, he emphasises that Freud’s explanation is reductionistic, ²¹ as dreams reveal much more to us about the human psyche: in the dream, the unity between humans and things is unified again, and things have a life of their own, doing what they want to do. He, furthermore, rejects the Freudian evolutionistic view that modern adults must outgrow the way children and primitive people think. ²² Children are in Van der Leeuw’s view full human beings, as are indigenous people. The primitive mentality in all human beings should be appreciated as essential to being a human.

A child’s response to a question by Piaget illustrates for Van der Leeuw the point. When the psychologist asked the 5-year-old child: ‘Is the dream in your head?’, the child answered: ‘I am in the dream. It is not in my head. … I am in the dream.’ Van der Leeuw ( 1937 :57–58), nevertheless, adds that while European adults dream in a primitive way, they quickly resort to abstract concepts as soon as they awake, whereas indigenous people typically continue to experience their dreams as real after they have woken up.

Conclusion

I conclude with three observations.

Firstly, Van der Leeuw’s study of religion in general, and his revaluation of the ‘primitive’ in particular, constitute a crucial shift in comparison with preceding evolutionary theories. It would be appropriate to characterise this as a paradigm shift in Western productions of knowledge about religion. It should be clear from the discussion above that Van der Leeuw would accept the validity of Tylor’s definition of animism as the primitive belief in spirits. He would, furthermore, accept Tylor’s claim that deceased relatives not only appeared in dreams to ‘primitive’ people, but were also experienced by them as real after they woke up. Van der Leeuw would, however, emphatically not accept Tylor’s evolutionary explanation of the origin of religion and his degradation of primitive thinking and living. ²³

This reading challenges unnuanced claims that Western theories of religion unanimously denigrated indigenous religions and misrepresentations of theories of some individual Western scholars. Ciaffa ( 2008 :124), for example, claims that Lévy-Bruhl’s distinction between civilised and primitive mentalities presents ‘one of the most notorious examples’ of ‘racism … under the guise of scientific objectivity’, which served to reinforce European superiority and rationalise colonialism. This claim, which was already made in Van der Leeuw’s time, was emphatically rejected by Van der Leeuw as a misrepresentation of Lévy-Bruhl’s position. Hofstee ( 1997 :214), in his discussion of Van der Leeuw’s indebtedness to Lévy-Bruhl, states that the latter consistently rejected evolutionary explanations of religion and did not make any value judgements about the difference between ‘primitive’ and civilised mentalities. My close reading of Van der Leeuw above showed that he shared these views in principle, and developed them further against the views of British evolutionists such as Tylor.

Secondly, as in the case with the British evolutionists, the debate on Van der Leeuw’s phenomenology has largely been restricted to a debate among European theorists. It has been correctly characterised as structural-psychological, drawing on romantic reactions to one-sided appraisals of reason in the Enlightenment’s tradition. Hofstee ( 1991 , 1997) has convincingly located Van der Leeuw’s approach to religion and view of ‘primitive’ religion within this European intellectual trajectory. In developing his phenomenology of religion, Van der Leeuw drew on European ethnologists, psychologists and philosophers, offering a critique of reductionist modern scientific approaches to religion. Looking closely at Van der Leeuw’s analysis of animism and dreams as a key feature of his theory of a ‘primitive mentality’ in all human beings, it is clear that he develops his theory in debate with European theories and theorists, across European disciplines, such as the sociology of Lévy-Bruhl (singled out with highest admiration), ²⁴ the psychological theories of Freud and Piaget, ²⁵ the existentialist philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, the study of religion of Kristensen and Otto and the anthropology of Tylor, Frazer, Lang and Malinowski (with appreciation of the latter’s fieldwork among the Trobrianders). ²⁶

But, thirdly, just as Chidester offered a critical analysis of the triple mediation of imperial theories of religion, we need to scrutinise not only Van der Leeuw’s engagement with European theorists across disciplinary boundaries, but also with ethnographers in non-European countries that he quoted. When Van der Leeuw ( 1937 :8) quoted ethnological examples from Dutch anthropologists such as Kruyt and Van Ossenbruggen in the Dutch colony of Indonesia to illustrate his arguments, he considered their work as providing ‘rich material’ for a phenomenology of religion, without giving a thought of it being produced under colonial conditions. When he drew on material from South Africa, he unproblematically quoted from the thesis of the Afrikaner patriotic minister of the Hervormde Kerk in South Africa, H.C.M. Fourie, who had done his doctorate on the amaNdebele, in Theology, at the University of Utrecht. Van Baaren (1957), Van der Leeuw’s successor at the University of Groningen, started the reassessment of Van der Leeuw along these lines by pointing out cases where Van der Leeuw quoted his ethnographic sources out of context to support his statements and disregarded ethnographic studies of his time that would not support his views.

More important than van Baaren’s attempt, however, is the fact that Van der Leeuw abstracted the ethnographic material that he quoted from its colonial context, without any critical awareness of the colonial context that the data were drawn from – at a time when thousands of indigenous people were killed by Dutch forces in the Dutch colony of Indonesia and racist categories were being refined in South Africa. In order to contextualise his material within colonial relations of power, we will need to delve into the archives in an attempt to find traces of Van der Leeuw’s communication with these colonial middlemen and theorists, and to establish his views on Dutch, British and French imperialism, and on Afrikaner, ²⁷ Dutch and German nationalisms.

The important task of reassessing classic figures in the academic study of religion, of which Van der Leeuw is undoubtedly one, has clearly just begun – a task that has become ever more urgent as a moral imperative within our current context of debates on the decolonisation of Western productions of knowledge in the academy.

Acknowledgements

Competing interests

The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.

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