ABSTRACT
If we adopt Charles Long’s definition of religion as “orientation in the ultimate sense,” a move which I espoused in Chapter 1, it is possible to think of that orientation as directing people continually toward “value” or what is of worth.1 Euro-Americans are oriented as individuals and subjects in highly objectivized environments. This leads them very often to impose symbolic meanings upon the things of their world since so many of those things are, as objects, seemingly incapable of expressing any sort of personal meaning as subjects. To determine value, they then measure these symbolic meanings quantitatively against similar symbolic meanings imposed upon other things. Finally, as a side effect of the Euro-American prioritization of individualism, they accumulate the things determined to have the greatest abstract value as commodities that represent personal wealth. This process of commoditization contributes to Euro-American “world arrangements” and to the orientations people hold within those worlds. The process helps individuals to understand what their positions are relative to other entities, whether those entities are fellow persons capable of exchange, whether they are objects that are only recipients of action, or whether they are commodities. Thus, it is largely the human interpretations of and actions toward the a priori things of their environments, given to them by their creator or through biological processes (depending upon the individual’s perspective) that create and maintain such orientations. Nevertheless, as Karl Marx points out, Euro-Americans often fail to recognize their own interpretive roles in the worlds around them, and they assume their own interpretations to be “given” or “natural” rather than cultural.
