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Natural Supernatural Jindra AF 2003-Libre
Natural Supernatural Jindra AF 2003-Libre
Natural Supernatural Jindra AF 2003-Libre
2, 2003
MICHAEL JINDRA*
When considering the distinction between natural and supernatural, we usually
think we are talking about religion or religious phenomena. Yet if the whole
category of religion is problematic, might this also throw the natural/supernatural dichotomy into doubt? What is the relationship between the debate over
the usefulness of these terms and the debate over the validity of the concept of
religion? I shall not argue that the term supernatural be expunged from our
vocabulary. One can make a better case that the term religion should be
eliminated as an artefact of Western categorisation, as Timothy Fitzgerald (2000)
argues. Supernatural as a term does seem to allow people, especially in the
West, to communicate some things about their experience of the world. The use
of the term, however, comes out of a specific historical/theological context (Saler
1977). My intention is to show that the distinction between the natural and
supernatural breaks down in a number of contexts, especially in new religious
movements and other practices that are commonly thought to be on the (nonexistent) border between the religious and the non-religious.
A little history first: as Louis Dumont (1986) has argued, a distinctive modern
ideology has been constructed over the centuries in the West. A chief feature of
this ideology is a separation between the realm of relative values, or religion,
and the realm of the factual, neutral, rational and secular. Religion becomes
separated from its obverse: the natural world of objective facts, markets, and
individuals that underlies much of Western social science. Is the natural/
supernatural distinction also implicated in the historically particular construction
of the modern ideology that Dumont discusses, a reflection of our construction
of categories (going back at least to Kant) into natural (facts defined as rational
and universal) and relative (values defined as beliefs and particular), or, in other
words, the fact/value distinction (Dumont 1986:227233; MacIntyre 1984:77ff.;
Taylor 1989:5457)?
Yes, to a large extent it is. Hindu, Japanese, Indonesian, Native North
American, and many African cosmologies all contain notions of beings that are
essentially natural, but have extraordinary powers, sometimes at different
gradations, which serve to violate any boundary we might construct between
the natural and supernatural (Aragon 2000:18; Chilver 1990; Fitzgerald 2000:81,
*Michael Jindra, Department of Sociology, Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI 49283, USA.
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