ABSTRACT
After the communist revolution of 1949, the People’s Republic of China adopted a policy of official state atheism. Based on Marxist thinking that religion is class exploitation and false consciousness, the communist regime suppressed religion, “re-educated” believers and religious leaders, and destroyed religious buildings or converted them to non-religious uses. Since the death of Communist Party Chairman Mao, the Chinese government has relaxed some restrictions on religion, permitting “normal” religious practice and officially recognizing five major religions-Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, “Christianity” (that is, Protestantism), and Taoism (Barnett 2012: 29). However, the regime asserts control of Catholicism in China independent of Rome and continues to suppress new religions like Falun Gong. By some measures, over 40 percent of Chinese call themselves atheists or agnostics. When China invaded (or reclaimed, from the Chinese perspective) Tibet, a deeply Buddhist society headed by the spiritual and political authority, the Dalai Lama, Tibet was at first allowed to keep its religious system; an uprising in 1959 led to the exile of the Dalai Lama and a crackdown on Buddhism including “land reform and class struggle” (34). By the mid-1990s, Tibetans who worked for the Chinese administration, as well as all students, were prohibited from practicing religion at temples or monasteries or at home. Yet through most of its rule of Tibet, China has employed the strategy “to promote Tibetan religious dignitaries to be local rulers” (32), not destroying Tibetan religion but “micro-managing the mystical rituals at the heart of the Tibetan religiopolitical system” (31). For instance, the government has taken control of the identification of reincarnations of traditional lamas: in 1992 a seven-year-old boy was declared the seventeenth incarnation of the Karmapa, and he was soon taken on a tour through China to be celebrated and coopted. Even more remarkably, in 1995 a ceremony known as the Golden Urn ritual was televised across China, intended to identify the next Panchen Lama. Not only did the communist government control the ceremony but apparently also invented it: Barnett claims that for the Tibetan people, “the details of the ritual indicated that it was a fabrication carried out at gunpoint” (43). But, of course, the performance was not for the Tibetans; rather, this “imitation of religion is directed to the secularized, modern audience in inland China” (44), which entertained non-believers and “appears to demonstrate official respect for Tibetan ritual but at the same time forcibly reminds Tibetan viewers that it controls that ritual, including its outcome” (45). According to Adherents.com, there are some 1.1 billion “nonreligious” or “secular”
or “agnostic” or “atheist” people in the world; if so, they would constitute the third largest category after Christianity (2.1 billion) and Islam (1.3 billion). And not all of these non-religious people are found in China; according to various surveys, as many as 15 or 16 percent of Americans do not identify with a religion, up to 12 percent of whom
identify as atheists or agnostics. Much of Europe is often referred to as “post-Christian,” with very low levels of religious belief and participation-in 2005 only 16 percent of Estonians avowed a belief in God (Heelas 2013: 72), and a majority of Japanese call themselves non-religious (see p. 267 below). Thus irreligion or secularism would seem to be an urgent subject for anthropology. Yet, as Talal Asad admonished us, “anthropologists have paid scarcely any attention
to the idea of the secular” (2003: 17). He even cited a recent survey of syllabi for anthropology of religion courses conducted by Andrew Buckser for the American Anthropological Association, which revealed that the topic of secularism “makes no appearance in the collection. Nor is it treated in any of the well-known introductory texts” (22). But, as Asad insisted, “Any discipline that seeks to understand ‘religion’ must also try to understand its other” (22). Things are not as bleak as they were at the time of Asad’s pronouncement, nor even at
the time of the first edition of our textbook. Along with the anthropology of Christianity and of Islam discussed in Chapter 8, calls have arisen for an anthropology of secularism (e.g. Cannell 2010), and in 2011 The Australian Journal of Anthropology published an entire issue dedicated to the topic of secularism. An anthropological perspective on secularism or irreligion or atheism (which are not,
as we will see shortly, synonymous) is important not only because there is a lot of it in the world. Just as anthropology has insisted that “religion” is not a single simple thing, so an anthropological angle on non-religion suggests that it is complex and diverse. Indeed, if the concept or category of “religion” is socially constructed, then not only would the concept or category of “non-religion” or “anti-religion” be equally constructed, but the two concepts or categories would be mutually constructed. That is to say, by identifying or creating a phenomenon or space called “religion,” an accompanying phenomenon or space of “nonreligion” would appear, and, as the case of China illustrates, secularism or irreligion may exercise a sort of commanding power over what-and where-“religion” is.
