From Religion to Culture: The Performative Pūjā and Spectacular Religion in India

Abstract

The predicament of defining ‘religion’ is shared by many scholars, who today are cautious about any implication of judgement or prejudice towards a specific point of view concerning the essential nature of religion. Identifying the common markers of religious practice, especially those markers that are not established by the religions themselves, is the foremost difficulty. The issue is significant since it provokes us to consider a larger question: whether or not to categorize as religion those practices whose religious character is more performative than discursive. In other words, a series of acts, reiterations, and citations that are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time constitutes that religious practice in such a way that the construction itself regularly conceals its genesis. I wish to identify and unpack those elements of religious practice that make a religious ceremony into a social phenomenon, based on its customs, motives, and content. If these acts and practices of mediation are accepted as given, it becomes apparent that religions, in one way or another, claim to mediate the transcendental, spiritual, or supernatural and make these accessible for believers.1 In fact, for religious traditions to continue through history they must be translated, or better, transmediated — put in a new form.2 This chapter will discuss religion as a practice of mediation, because the forms and practices of mediation that shape religion cannot be ignored.