Paganopoulos, Michelangelo (2024) Is the concept of the ‘sacred’ a fundamentalist type of ‘sympathy’? Reflections on institutionalized religion and the anthropology of the Sacred. In: RAI24 (Royal Anthropological Institute): "Anthropology and Education", 25th June – 28th June, 2024, Senate House, University of London.

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Abstract

David Hume's reputation as a “moral atheist” (Gaskin 1988/1998) was based on his distinction between the spheres of everyday morality and the institutionalized dogmas of the Church. In discussing morality in relation to the category of the ‘anthropology of religion’, this paper compares the contrasting approaches of David Hume, Emile Durkheim, and Carl G. Jung in terms of Hume’s ‘science of man’ against Durkheim’s science of the ‘sacred’ and Jung’s ‘archetypes’, respectively, to question the Durkheimian moral concept of the ‘Church’ as a moralized step too far from Hume's emancipating concept of ‘natural religion’. In this context, the paper asks whether the concept of the ‘sacred’, which is embedded throughout the history of the ‘anthropology of religion’ in various ways and contexts, constitutes a Christianized fundamentalist way of thinking, ideologically manifested as a kind of naturalized enthusiasm, carrying further theoretical and methodological, as well as ethical and historical implications regarding the study of the Sacred in the 'anthropology of religion'. By liberating, or “secularizing”, Durkheim's approach to the sacred from its moral implications, when associated with the evolution of the morality of purity and pollution (Douglas 1966), the paper expands on the question of moralization of theoretical approaches to the category of ‘religion’ itself, on the one hand, by looking at moral sense as an intuition and, on the other hand, as an institutionalized habitus. In doing so, the paper compares anthropological and psychological approaches to Belief, Design, and Experience, in relation to the ‘sacred’ as a tool of analysis of religious experience in the paradoxical terms of “belief” (Ruel 1982: 9-31) grounded as religious “totalism” (Anthony and Robbins 1995: 10-50), which transgresses the institution and its material history in “spiritual” and moralized realms as an ontological matter of Western theological concepts of Freedom and Otherness. The paper hence investigates the hypothesis that such experiential transgressions, which can lead to religious violence and genocide, cross into the theoretical boundaries within the category of ‘religion’ itself, not to mention its experiential limits as well as its historical association with colonialism, hence constituting a rather fundamentalist ‘educative’ approach to theory and history as part of the wider complex of institutions that support coloniality and its status quo. By transgressing the historical limits of the category of ‘religion’, the paper further wonders whether the human is naturally a fundamentalist animal motivated by sacred delusions, passions, and self-centrism, as manifested in Hume’s Dialogues through the characters of Philo, Demea, and Cleanthes, whose personal emotions challenge the Christian ideal of transgression and unity expressed in numinous sacred experiences. At the same time, the author examines whether this secularized approach to the sacred is limited in terms of the emotional and subliminal feelings of religious practices. This finding carries further implications regarding methodological issues of interpretation in anthropology and ethnography and the gap between theory and practice.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	David Hume, Dialogues, the sacred, fundamentalism, social sciences
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BL Religion H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) L Education > L Education (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Information & Library Services
Last Modified:	21 Mar 2026 20:55
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/52700

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