HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies
ISSN: (Online) 2072-8050, (Print) 0259-9422
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Original Research
‘Primiive’: A key concept in Chidester’s
criique of imperial and Van der Leeuw’s
phenomenological study of religion
Author:
Johan M. Strijdom1
Ailiaion:
1
Department of Religious
Studies and Arabic, University
of South Africa, South Africa
Corresponding author:
Johan Strijdom,
strijjm@hotmail.com
Dates:
Received: 27 Aug. 2017
Accepted: 14 Dec. 2017
Published: 05 Apr. 2018
How to cite this aricle:
Strijdom, J.M., 2018,
‘”Primiive”: A key concept in
Chidester’s criique of
imperial and Van der Leeuw’s
phenomenological study of
religion’, HTS Teologiese
Studies/Theological Studies
74(1), 4797. htps://doi.
org/10.4102/hts.v74i1.4797
Copyright:
© 2018. The Authors.
Licensee: AOSIS. This work
is licensed under the
Creaive Commons
Atribuion License.
A critical examination of the history of theories and uses of concepts such as ‘primitive’ and
‘savage’ in the academic study of religion in imperial, colonial and postcolonial contexts is
particularly urgent in our time with its demands to decolonise Western models of knowledge
production. In Savage Systems (1996) and Empire of Religion (2014), David Chidester has
contributed to this project by relating the invention and use of terms such as ‘religion’,
‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ by theorists of religion in European imperial metropoles to South
African colonial and indigenous contexts. This article intends to take Chidester’s project
further by relating Gerardus Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological analysis of ‘primitive
mentality’ (particularly in De primitieve mensch en de religie, 1937) to Chidester’s analysis and
postcolonial critique of imperial theories of religion. By taking animism and dreams in
Chidester’s and Van der Leeuw’s works as example, it is argued that in spite of the latter’s
decontextualised use of ethnological material, a fundamental shift occurred in the judgement
of ‘primitive’ religion from Tylor’s evolutionary to Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological
analysis, which is contrary to claims according to which modern theories are unanimously
denigratory of indigenous religions.
Introducion
In a recent survey article on the anthropology of religion, Robert Winzeler (2016) states that
‘[m]ost of the terms used by anthropologists to identify, describe, analyze, and explain religion are
Western in origin’. Among these terms, a number of scholars of religion have rightly insisted, the
term ‘religion’ itself needs to be understood as a Western colonial construct that we need to
consciously fill with content, if we want to continue to use it for analytical purposes (e.g. Chidester
1996; Smith 2004; 2015). Winzeler, however, continues by observing that while some of these
Western terms ‘have differing scholarly and popular uses’, there are some of these terms still used
in popular discourses that ‘have become unacceptable in scholarly discourse, unless used in an
appropriate … context’. Among such unacceptable Western terms, he lists specifically the term
‘primitive’. He then proposes that the way to think through the vocabulary used by anthropologists
of religion is to understand the terms ‘in relation to the history of anthropological studies of
religion’ (my emphasis).
That an ethical obligation rests on anthropologists to assess the history of anthropology in order to
inform dilemmas of the present is a point that Isak Niehaus (2017) has argued in a recent article.
By comparing Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski’s engagements with South African indigenous
cultures in the 1920s and early 1930s, roughly between the two world wars, Niehaus shows that
while Radcliffe-Brown, on the one hand, promoted the sympathetic understanding of cultural
differences and indigenous cultures in a changing society as ‘an integral part of the modern
world’ where separation was impossible, Malinowski, on the other hand, collaborated with
colonial authorities and argued for the territorial separation and indirect rule of indigenous
cultures. Niehaus (2017:114) holds that ‘[the] arguments that Radcliffe-Brown, Hoernlé, and their
students advanced laid the foundations for an anthropological critique of apartheid’, but that
Malinowski’s:
commitment to the preservation of cultures … aligned himself with later apologists for apartheid … and
provided a language to legitimate the exclusion of Africans from centers of wealth and power. (p. 114)
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Within the present context of demands to decolonise Western models of knowledge production
(e.g. Al-Jazeera 2015; Chaudhuri 2016; Hall 2015; Kamanzi 2015; Mamdani 2017; Mbembe 2015),
it is ethically imperative that the academic study of religion too be subjected to a critical
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examination of the history of theories and uses of concepts
such as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’.
David Chidester, in Savage Systems (1996) and Empire of
Religion (2014), has contributed to this project by relating
the invention and use of terms such as ‘religion’, ‘primitive’
and ‘savage’ by theorists of religion in European urban
centres to South African colonial and indigenous contexts.
Chidester’s narrative in these crucial publications1 focuses
on the study of religion from the 19th century until the
beginning of the 20th century. The task remains to reassess
from a postcolonial perspective major theorists of religion
in the first part of the 20th century, whose work should be
contextualised in this period that preceded the independence
of colonised nations.
One major theorist of religion, Gerardus Van der Leeuw
(1890–1950), considered a pioneer in constructing a
phenomenological approach to the study of religion in the
first half of the 20th century,2 devoted a monograph to the
question of a ‘primitive mentality’ (De primitieve mensch en de
religie, 1937), which was published after his major work Die
Phänomenologie der Religion (1933),3 and was an elaboration of
an even earlier publication La structure de la mentalité primitive
(1928). In addition to these publications between the two
world wars, in 1940 he also published an essay on indigenous
religions (‘De religie der primitieve volken’) as a chapter in a
book that he edited for a more general readership on the
religions of the world (De godsdiensten der wereld).
In this contribution, I intend to complement Chidester’s history
of the academic study of religion, by relating Van der Leeuw’s
concept of a ‘primitive mentality’ to Chidester’s critical
analysis of the ‘primitive’ in imperial and colonial theories of
religion. Although I will focus on animism and dreams4 to
focus the debate, my limited discussion will give an indication
of how Van der Leeuw might be written into Chidester’s
postcolonial history of the comparative study of religion.
Against claims that modern theorists unanimously denigrated
indigenous religions,5 I will argue that Van der Leeuw’s
1.Chidester received an American Academy of Religion Book Award for Savage
Systems and a University of Cape Town Book Award for Empire of Religion. He is
internaionally recognised for his groundbreaking work in the study of religion, as
airmed by the repeated A-raing awarded to him by the Naional Research
Foundaion of South Africa.
2.Capps (1995:128), in his historical survey of theories in Religious Studies, considers
Van der Leeuw’s Phänomenologie der Religion ‘the best-known comprehensive
phenomenological work in the history of religions’. Hofstee (1997:262), in his
doctoral thesis on Van der Leeuw’s science of religion, claims that Van der Leeuw
was in the irst half of the 20th century not only ‘the foremost scholar of religion in
the Netherlands’, but also ‘one of the most important European scholars in this ield
of inquiry’. Waardenburg (1978:221) too appreciates Van der Leeuw as best known
internaionally for his work in the phenomenology of religion.
3.This major work of Van der Leeuw was already translated in 1938 by Turner as
Religion in essence and manifestaion. A revised ediion was published in French in
1948, which formed the basis for the posthumous German ediion of 1956. The new
English ediion of 1964 included appendices by Hans Penner that indicated the
addiions of the 1948 French and 1956 German ediions. Van der Leeuw had already
published his ‘small pheno’ in 1924 as Inleiding tot de godsdienstgeschiedenis and
in 1925 as Einführung in die Phänomenologie der Religion. A revised ediion of the
‘small pheno’ was, on the basis of the 1933 and 1948 ‘big pheno’, published in 1948
as Inleiding tot de phaenomenologie van den godsdienst.
4.The invesigaion could certainly be extended to other key terms in Van der Leeuw’s
analysis of a ‘primiive mentality’, such as dynamism (the belief in an impersonal
power in things, animals and humans), feishism, totemism, magic, myth and ritual.
5.See my discussion of Ciafa (2008) below.
htp://www.hts.org.za
Original Research
phenomenological study of religion, in spite of restricting
himself largely to debates among European theorists and
neglecting colonial contexts from which he drew his
ethnological data, brought about a fundamental change in the
study of religion and the judgement of ‘primitive religion’6 in
comparison with preceding evolutionary approaches. I will,
in conclusion, indicate how this contribution can be taken
further to achieve what Chidester has done in an exemplary
way for theorists of religion of the preceding period.
Chidester’s postcolonial criique of
‘primiive’ as a key concept in
imperial and colonial studies of
religion
In the preface to Empire of Religion, Chidester (2014) warns us
that in:
[f]ocusing on representations of indigenous religion in Africa, we
will encounter highly problematic terms – savage, primitive, and
even indigenous – that have featured prominently in the formation
and development of the study of religion. (pp. xii–xiii)
He explains that generally, although not always, in imperial
theories of religion savage referred to ‘wild people lacking
civilization, while primitive was a temporal term designating
the earliest or simplest stage of human development’, with
both of these terms carrying ‘traces of racist triumphalism’.
Although indigenous ‘seems to be a more neutral or even
positive term’, he holds that it too must be seen as arising
from encounters with imperial powers in different colonial
contexts.
In his critical analysis of the history of imperial comparative
religion,7 Chidester (2014) shows how classic theorists of
religion in the second half of the 19th century and beginning
of the 20th century decontextualised and distorted data obtained
from colonial middlemen in South Africa to develop their
theories of religion in imperial metropoles.
Chidester’s (2014:91–123) analysis of E.B. Tylor’s (1958)
theory of animism may serve to illustrate his argument.
In constructing his evolutionary theory of the animistic
origin of religion, E.B. Tylor in Britain made use of the
account of Zulu dreams in the work of the Anglican
missionary Callaway in Natal, who, in turn, received his
information on Zulu religion from his indigenous informant,
the Christian convert Mbande, who was himself located in
an ambivalent position between indigenous and colonial
Christian traditions. The formation of imperial theories of
religion can, as Chidester shows for Tylor and others
(specifically Max Müller, Andrew Lang and James Frazer),
therefore be best described as a complex process of triple
mediation.
6.Hofstee (1997:266) argues that Van der Leeuw’s ‘concept of primiive mentality is
the key to understanding Van der Leeuw’s science of religion’.
7.Chidester (2014:260–261) disinguishes between three types of imperial
comparaive religion: criical, interfaith and theosophical. His concern is with the
genealogy of the irst type as the one perinent to an academic study of religion.
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Religion defined as animism or the belief in spiritual beings,
Tylor maintained, could be explained psychologically in
terms of its cognitive origin in dreams. Dreams, he proposed,
probably gave rise to the belief in spirits. The best evidence
would come from the ‘primitive mentality’ or psychology of
the earliest human beings (the way ‘primitives’ used to
think), which, Tylor assumed, could be inferred by studying
the dreams of contemporary indigenous peoples (‘savage
tribes’) such as the Zulu. Drawing on Callaway’s account of
Zulu dreaming, Tylor held that Zulu speakers provided
evidence of the origin of religion, in the sense that when they
saw the spirits of deceased ancestors in their dreams, they
were unable to distinguish between subjective, inner dreams
as illusionary sense impressions and objective outward
reality when awake, leading to primitive religion as the
belief in the reality of spiritual beings. He observed remnants
of this same primitive thinking of confusion between
inner subjectivity and objective reality not only among
indigenous people like the Zulu, but also in his own Victorian
British society among spiritualists, children, peasants and the
urban working class – indeed, an erroneous way of thinking at
the base of all religions (from primitive animism and
polytheism to civilised monotheism) that modern logical,
scientific thinking was in his view supposed to overcome and
destroy in the best interest of humanity. Chidester (2014:108),
however, emphasises that Tylor’s evolutionary theory of
religion was clearly ‘formulated in the face of perceived
intellectual degeneration and moral decay in contemporary
British society’.
Characteristic of Tylor’s method in using the data that he
obtained about indigenous people from middlemen in the
colonies was the decontextualisation of the data. Mbande, as
recorded in Callaway, told the story of James, a convert who,
after receiving a calling to become a diviner, left the mission
station. According to Mbande, James increasingly had
dreams of ancestral spirits who came to kill him – a crucial
detail in Mbande’s report that Tylor ignored, instead
emphasising for purposes of constructing his theory of
animism the phrase in the report according to which the
diviner became a ‘house of dreams’. Chidester argues that
these dreams, understood within their 19th century context,
were indicative of the uncertainty and despair that colonial
dispossession and displacement caused among Zulu
speakers. Ancestral spirits appeared in dreams instructing
their descendants to sacrifice to them and to bring them back
to their territorial home (the ukubuyisa ritual), but the
descendants did not have enough cattle left and were no
longer living in their traditional ancestral places. The
ancestors were therefore angry with them, appearing to them
in their dreams to punish or even kill them. Rituals were
accordingly devised by diviners in an attempt to stop the
dreaming. Not only Tylor’s dream theory of primitive
animism as the origin of religion, but also Callaway’s
explanation of Zulu dreams as a kind of self-mesmerism in
which brain sensations of seeing and hearing were confused
with real seeing and hearing, according to Chidester,
distorted the data and did not do justice to Zulu dreams by
abstracting them from their colonial contexts.
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Original Research
Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological
analysis of ‘primiive’ as a universal
mental structure among humans
Turning to Van der Leeuw, we encounter a phenomenologist8
who strongly objects to theories of religion that attempt to
explain religion historically on the basis of presumed origins
and evolution from primitive to civilised (e.g. Tylor and Frazer),
or degeneration from monotheism to ancestor worship
(e.g. Lang).9 Instead, religious phenomena, with religion
conceptualised by him as essentially the revelation of a
transcendental Power to humans and their response of awe,
reverence and fear, in the presence of this sacred Power,10
should be sympathetically observed by the scientific researcher
of religion by bracketing his or her prejudices and should be
described as accurately as possible as the phenomena appear
to him or her.11 By studying religious phenomena comparatively,
the phenomenologist will make connections and be able to
abstract from the evidence recurring structures or patterns.
These structures, as he emphasises, are not those of participants12
and cannot be observed in reality, but are abstracted by the
phenomenologist to understand rather than explain the data.
He argues that there are two basic thought structures common
to all human beings: a ‘primitive mentality’ and a ‘modern
mentality’. These psychological patterns are not bound to
specific cultures or periods, but are always universally present
in the experience of all human beings – although one way of
thinking and living may be more pronounced in one case than
another.13 A ‘primitive mentality’ is, according to him, evident
8.Van der Leeuw’s (1956 [1933]:768–798) conceptualisaion of a phenomenological
study of religion is set out most clearly in the Epilegomena of his Phänomenologie
der Religion.
9.See Van der Leeuw (1956 [1933]:172; 1940:465) for his rejecion of Andrew Lang’s
theory. See footnote 23 below for references to Van der Leeuw’s explicit engagement
with Tylor.
10.Van der Leeuw’s concept of religion builds on Rudolf Oto’s concept of the Holy as
the Wholly Other, whose presence the believer experiences as a mysterium
tremendum et fascinans.
11.It needs to be pointed out that Van der Leeuw did not apply this prerequisite of
epoche strictly in his study of religion. As Chrisian believer and minister of the
Hervormde Kerk in the Netherlands, he maintained that it was legiimate to study
religions from one’s own religious persuasion on condiion that one is conscious of
it. Capps (1995:132) rightly states that Van der Leeuw ‘worked under the conscious
and deliberate inluence of strong theological compulsions’, and that ‘his work was
inluenced most signiicantly by his own devoional – shall we say liturgical? –
aitude to the materials he treated’, with his phenomenological account inally
becoming ‘a doxology to the God Chrisians worship’.
12.See Van der Leeuw (1940:432): ‘Deze structuur is natuurlijk ons eigendom, niet dat
der primiieven. En wij mogen dat geen ogenblik vergeten’. Following Söderblom,
Van der Leeuw here structures his analysis around the concepts of dynamism (the
belief in mana, an impersonal power or powers that things/feishes, animals or
humans may have or be charged with), animism (the belief in spirits) and belief in
Supreme Beings as the three main religious structures that may help us to classify
and understand religious phenomena. He emphasises that dynamism and animism
should not be seen as completely separate eniies, as they generally overlap; they
are simply here disinguished as diferent mental structures for the sake of analysis
(Van der Leeuw 1940:437).
13.See Van der Leeuw (1940): De primiiviteit is een gesteldheid van de menselijke
geest, die in alle ijden en culturen voorkomt, ook nog in de moderne cultuur en in
onze eigen ijd. Zo alleen is het te begrijpen, dat wij de primiieve elementen van
het geestesleven overal terugvinden, zij het, dat zij natuurlijk het meest
uitgesproken en het minst belemmerd naar voren treden bij de volken die wij als
‘natuurvolken’ plegen te bestempelen. Daarbij wordt ons ook duidelijk, dat wij het
recht hebben wat wij bij deze volken vinden in één vlak te stellen met wat ons
verhaald wordt van de primiieve achtergrond van andere religies, ook van onze
eigene. Wij moeten meer structureel te werk gaan dan historisch. Het gaat om het
bepalen van een geesteshouding, die in de menschengeschiedenis blijt, onder alle
historische veranderingen door. Maar deze houding speuren wij na bij de volken,
die haar het duidelijkst vertonen en daardoor een min of meer omgrensde groep
vormen (pp. 410–411).
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not only among indigenous groups [he uses the term ‘primitive
peoples’ (primitieve volken) for the earliest human beings and
contemporary indigenous groups], in ancient cultures, and
indeed in all religions,14 but also among children, the mentally
ill, poets and so-called ‘normal’ (meaning Western scientifically
educated) people.
He emphasises that the phenomenologist should under no
circumstances consider modern thinking and living as
superior to primitive thinking and living, or alternatively
idealise or romanticise the primitive mentality as better than
the modern mentality. Both are to be considered as different
but equally valid ways of thinking and living, although – it
must be added – that Van der Leeuw himself from time to
time expresses his preference for the ‘primitive’ way of
thinking and living.15
Drawing on Nietzsche’s critique of modernity as a nihilistic
dead end, a sickness unto death, a forgetting of what it means
to live and exist as a human being, Van der Leeuw (1937:
22–23) maintains that if the modern mentality attempts to put
the primitive mentality in us aside, it would mean a pitiful
loss of authentic human existence.
In comparing the characteristics of these two ways of thinking
and living, Van der Leeuw (1937:24–110) considers the unity,
participation or concrete and physical immediacy between
subject and object,16 between subject and subject,17 between
object and object18 and eventually the union of the mystic
14.See Van der Leeuw (1937): Bij deze pogingen werd zeer duidelijk, dat ‘primiief’ en
‘modern’ nimmer termen kunnen zijn voor bepaalde stadia in de evoluie der
menschheid, nog minder aanduidingen van de gesteldheid van sommige minder of
anders beschaafden, doch dat zij alleen dan wetenschappelijk zinvolle en nuige
symbolen zijn, wanneer zij gebezigd worden als namen voor bepaalde structuren
van de menschelijken geest, die in sommige culturen en perioden weliswaar
duidelijker uitkomen dan in andere, die echter essenieel van alle ijden en culturen
zijn. Het vraagstuk komt dan heel anders te liggen. Het gaat niet meer om de vraag
of een reeks ‘primiief’ genaamde volkeren anders denkt, gevoelt, leet dan wij. Het
gaat erom of in een dezelfde periode, ja wellicht in een en dezelfde persoon, naast
elkander verschillende geestesstructuren mogelijk zijn, die naar wezen van elkaar
verschillen (p. 11). See also Van der Leeuw (1937): De primiieve mentaliteit wordt
in alle ontwikkelingsstadia en bij menschen van allerlei anthropologisch type
gevonden. De eenige wijze, waarop wij met vrucht ons vraagstuk kunnen
behandelen, is het te zien als een structuur van den menschelijken geest, die naast
andere structuren voorkomt. Zulke structuren zijn eeuwig, en hoewel zij in sommige
perioden zeer duidelijk, in andere minder klaar omlijnd worden gerealiseerd,
kunnen wij ze nimmer beperken tot perioden of groepen (p. 24). And, again, Van der
Leeuw (1940): de scheiding tussen ‘primiieve’ en ‘niet-primiieve’ volken staat
geenszins vast. Wie de culturen – en daarbij vooral ook de godsdiensten – der z.g.
primiieve volken vergelijkt met die van ander volken, komt terstond onder de
indruk van het feit, dat er talloze verschijnselen zijn, zelfs in de gewoonlijk tot de
‘hoogste’ gerekende culturen en religies, die ‘primiief’ zijn. Dit gehele boek is
daarvan een bevesiging. De primiieve religies staan allerminst als een gesloten
geheel apart; het is integendeel mogelijk de Egypische, de Babylonische, de
Griekse en Romeinse religie, ja zelfs stukken van de Islam, het Jodendom en het
Christendom als primiieve godsdienst te behandelen (p. 407).
15.In discussing the diference between fairy tales (expressing ‘the typical’ and
exemplifying primiive mentality) and novels (focusing on the individual and
exemplifying modern mentality), Van der Leeuw (1937:28–29) remarks that he
himself would prefer the former: ‘Ik tenminste lees liever een sprookje dan een novella’.
16.For Van der Leeuw (1937:58–74; 1940:454–455), the kula and potlatch systems of
exchange as well as sacriice provide evidence for his argument of the relaionship
of the primiive mentality to objects. Again, it is the sacred Power in objects or
feishes that is stressed as essenial to understand the exchange.
17.Collecivism, the primiive sense of belonging to a group, is for Van der Leeuw
(1937) clear from the pracice of vengeance: niet N. heet Z. gedood, doch een
man, behorende tot den stam N., heet een man, behorende tot den stam Z., van
het leven beroofd. Nog juister: het geheel N. heet het geheel Z. nadeel toegebracht.
Het geheel Z. komt dan ook in beweging. En zoo ontstaat de z.g. bloedwraak
(p. 37).
18.See Van der Leeuw (1937): Dat wil posiief zeggen, dat de primiief niet analyisch
denkt, maar syntheisch; of liever, daar synthese altyd een voorafgaande analyse
vooronderstelt, dat de rekenschap, die hij zich geet van zijn ervaring, die ervaring
niet in haar deelen ontbindt, maar die als een geheel reproduceert (pp. 31–32).
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Original Research
with God, gods or spirits,19 as indicative of a primitive
mentality, and the dualism or split between subject and
object, between subject and subject, between object and object
and between God and humans, as typical of a modern
mentality. In the first case, the distinction between inside and
outside, and between body and soul, hardly makes sense.20
The primitive subject participates in objects (the borders
between subject and object are fluid), and the relationship
between subjects is communal rather than individualistic,
and the subject experiences union with God, the gods or
spirits. In the second case, a distance or dualism between
subjects, as well as between subject and object, and object and
object, and between human and sacred Power, is created
which makes it possible for individuals to study data
scientifically by means of abstract concepts. If the primitive
way of thinking is synthetic, the modern way of thinking is
analytic in dividing the unity into and creating gaps between
its constituent parts for purposes of scientific examination.
Animism as evidenced in dreams is, Van der Leeuw (1937:
50–58) holds, a feature of primitive mentality – present in all
of us, and not to be denigrated, if we want to understand
what it means to be a human being. In dreams, as in fairy
tales, one typically finds mythical and mystical language and
poetic images, in which objects may get transformed into
different objects, or subjects may magically metamorphose
into objects, or vice versa. The boundaries are fluid, as one
image flows into another that cannot be explained in a logical
way. Although Van der Leeuw agrees that Freud’s analysis of
Van der Leeuw (1937:34–35) endorses Lévy-Bruhl’s view that Australian aborigines
and naive Americans almost completely lack general concepts: the tradiional
healer, for example, can name speciic plants or illnesses, but does not have a
generic term for types of plants or illnesses. This characterisic among primiive
peoples is, Van der Leeuw (1937:36) holds, also seen in their languages:
Greenlanders, for example, have many words for diferent kinds of ish, but no
generic term for ish. Van der Leeuw (1937:45), however, does observe later in the
book that primiive cultures classify in their own ways: the Dobu in Papua, for
example, has a word that means ‘human’, which includes yams, but not white
people. To what extent this relects the capacity of forming abstract categories
among indigenous people, is not considered by Van der Leeuw.
19.Van der Leeuw (1937:18–21; 1940:451–455) includes among his examples of the
later, the essenial union between an individual or group and their ancestral totem
animals, emphasising the reverence and fear of the Power of the later (tabus
connected to the totem animals is evidence of this ambivalent aitude). Although
Van der Leeuw (1963 [1933]) would agree with Durkheim that the totems deine
group ideniies, he emphasises that the feeling of awe and fear consitutes the
essence of religion in this manifestaion too: From what has already been asserted
about the sacred community there clearly follows the truth, as well as the onesided exaggeraion of the so-called sociological school. That religion is no private
afair, that in the realm of religion communality and collecivity assume an
extraordinarily extensive status, in fact that the search for Power is essenially
connected with the light from solitude: all these are facts. But all the less,
therefore, have we any ground for allowing the religious to be merged in the social;
for the sacred common element is not sacred because it is common but, on the
contrary, common because it is sacred; and in worshipping God humanity does not
worship itself, but worships God as it were in assembling itself together (p. 269).
20.Van der Leeuw (1937): ‘Innerlijk’ en ‘uiterlijk’ hebben nauwelijks zin. … Al het
psychische is physisch, al het physische is psychisch, en beide zijn concreet. Van het
hoogste belang is dit alles voor de beschouwing van den mensch. Die is in de
primiieve mentaliteit kortweg een mensch … Een mensch is dus niet een ziel in een
liggaam, met een geest, die een liggaam heet, evenmin een ziel plus een lichaam,
of een lichaam, dat bewustzijn kent. Een mensch is een mensch, en wanneer wij
zeggen: een mensch psycho-physisch, dan maken wij, ook al bedoelen wij een
ongescheidenheid, een onderscheiding, die niet primiief is. … Het bewustzijn,
waaraan de modern mentaliteit zulk een groote waarde hecht, wordt in de
primiieve niet geaccentueerd en kan niet worden aangeduid (pp. 29–30). Van der
Leeuw (1937), ater quoing from Mary Kingsley’s West African Studies (1899):
What strikes a European when studying (feish) is the lack of gaps between things.
To the African there is perhaps no gap between the concepion of spirit and
mater, animate and inanimate coninues: De primiief heet den ‘geest’ nog niet
uitgevonden, met wiens hulp wij ons leven hebben afgedeeld in bomvrije
kasematen: hier het lichaam, daar de ziel; hier de pijn, daar de smart, hier de
religie, daar de prakijk. Hij kent het ‘gezichtspunt’ niet, dat de voorwaarde is van
onze wetenschap en ons inzicht, maar dat ons tevens behulpzaam is om het leven
niet te leven (p. 31).
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sexual symbols is undeniable in some dreams, he emphasises
that Freud’s explanation is reductionistic,21 as dreams reveal
much more to us about the human psyche: in the dream, the
unity between humans and things is unified again, and
things have a life of their own, doing what they want to do.
He, furthermore, rejects the Freudian evolutionistic view that
modern adults must outgrow the way children and primitive
people think.22 Children are in Van der Leeuw’s view full
human beings, as are indigenous people. The primitive
mentality in all human beings should be appreciated as
essential to being a human.
A child’s response to a question by Piaget illustrates for Van
der Leeuw the point. When the psychologist asked the
5-year-old child: ‘Is the dream in your head?’, the child
answered: ‘I am in the dream. It is not in my head. … I am in
the dream.’ Van der Leeuw (1937:57–58), nevertheless, adds
that while European adults dream in a primitive way, they
quickly resort to abstract concepts as soon as they awake,
whereas indigenous people typically continue to experience
their dreams as real after they have woken up.
Conclusion
I conclude with three observations.
Firstly, Van der Leeuw’s study of religion in general, and his
revaluation of the ‘primitive’ in particular, constitute a crucial
shift in comparison with preceding evolutionary theories.
It would be appropriate to characterise this as a paradigm
shift in Western productions of knowledge about religion.
It should be clear from the discussion above that Van der
Leeuw would accept the validity of Tylor’s definition of
animism as the primitive belief in spirits. He would,
furthermore, accept Tylor’s claim that deceased relatives not
only appeared in dreams to ‘primitive’ people, but were also
experienced by them as real after they woke up. Van der
Leeuw would, however, emphatically not accept Tylor’s
evolutionary explanation of the origin of religion and his
degradation of primitive thinking and living.23
This reading challenges unnuanced claims that Western
theories of religion unanimously denigrated indigenous
religions and misrepresentations of theories of some
individual Western scholars. Ciaffa (2008:124), for example,
claims that Lévy-Bruhl’s distinction between civilised and
primitive mentalities presents ‘one of the most notorious
21.See Van der Leeuw (1937): het gevaar [is] groot, dat nu ook alles uit den sexus
alléén wordt verklaard. En dit laatste woord duidt tevens de beperktheid van
Freud’s streven aan: hij wil verklaren, terwijl wij zouden begrijpen. De tweede
reacie [van Unger] is veel zelfstandiger dan die van Freud, die, hoe geniaal ook,
toch geen ander gezichtspunt kan geven dan het ons reeds bekende phylogeneischevoluionisische (p. 16).
22.See Van der Leeuw (1937): in den droom is de eenheid hersteld: mensch, ding en
droom zijn onontwarbaar vermengd. De droomer ziet, beleefd, handelt zelfs, maar
eigenlijk is het de droom, die zich om hem weet; de dingen worden gehanteerd,
maar zij hebben een eigen leven en gaan hun gang. En niets is vast, alles kan alles
zijn of worden (p. 54).
23.See Van der Leeuw (1948 [1924]:38–46, 1956 [1933]:77–86) for his explicit
engagement with Tylor’s theory of animism. Van der Leeuw’s rejecion of
evoluionary theories is fundamental to his argument and repeatedly stated
already in the introducion of De primiieve mensch en de religie (see, e.g. Van der
Leeuw 1937:6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16).
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Original Research
examples’ of ‘racism … under the guise of scientific
objectivity’, which served to reinforce European superiority
and rationalise colonialism. This claim, which was already
made in Van der Leeuw’s time, was emphatically rejected by
Van der Leeuw as a misrepresentation of Lévy-Bruhl’s
position. Hofstee (1997:214), in his discussion of Van der
Leeuw’s indebtedness to Lévy-Bruhl, states that the latter
consistently rejected evolutionary explanations of religion
and did not make any value judgements about the difference
between ‘primitive’ and civilised mentalities. My close
reading of Van der Leeuw above showed that he shared these
views in principle, and developed them further against the
views of British evolutionists such as Tylor.
Secondly, as in the case with the British evolutionists, the
debate on Van der Leeuw’s phenomenology has largely been
restricted to a debate among European theorists. It has been
correctly characterised as structural-psychological, drawing
on romantic reactions to one-sided appraisals of reason in
the Enlightenment’s tradition. Hofstee (1991, 1997) has
convincingly located Van der Leeuw’s approach to religion
and view of ‘primitive’ religion within this European
intellectual trajectory. In developing his phenomenology of
religion, Van der Leeuw drew on European ethnologists,
psychologists and philosophers, offering a critique of
reductionist modern scientific approaches to religion.
Looking closely at Van der Leeuw’s analysis of animism and
dreams as a key feature of his theory of a ‘primitive mentality’
in all human beings, it is clear that he develops his theory in
debate with European theories and theorists, across European
disciplines, such as the sociology of Lévy-Bruhl (singled
out with highest admiration),24 the psychological theories
of Freud and Piaget,25 the existentialist philosophy of
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, the study of religion
of Kristensen and Otto and the anthropology of Tylor, Frazer,
Lang and Malinowski (with appreciation of the latter’s
fieldwork among the Trobrianders).26
But, thirdly, just as Chidester offered a critical analysis of the
triple mediation of imperial theories of religion, we need to
scrutinise not only Van der Leeuw’s engagement with
24.Van der Leeuw (1937) not only dedicates De primiieve mensch en de religie to
Lévy-Bruhl, but also acknowledges in its foreword his indebtedness to Lévy-Bruhl.
Hofstee (1997:222–237) notes that Lévy-Bruhl endorsed Van der Leeuw’s insight in
his work, and ofers a substanial analysis of ways in which Van der Leeuw followed
Lévy-Bruhl in describing primiive thinking, but also took Lévy-Bruhl further in
arguing that a primiive mentality remains essenial in modern humans and
enlarging Lévy-Bruhl’s limited ethnological focus to include disciplines such as
psychoanalysis, child psychology and philosophy.
25.Van der Leeuw (1937:11–13) notes that although Lévy-Bruhl might have inluenced
Piaget, Lévy-Bruhl and Piaget did not atempt to explicitly relate their theories to
each other. If Lévy-Bruhl deliberately focused on ethnology and Piaget on child
psychology, Van der Leeuw atempted to broaden the examinaion of a primiive
mentality by relaing these and other disciplines that dealt with the problem to
each other.
26.Malinowski has, in Van der Leeuw’s view, convincingly argued against Freud’s
theory that dreams are expressions of desires, by showing from his ieldwork that
for the Trobriand islanders, ‘the dream is the cause of the wish’ rather than the
other way round as Freud would have it. When Van der Leeuw (1940:461–462; my
translaion) notes that ‘spirits of the deceased rule the life of the primiive in a very
real sense’, for example, by bringing a curse over a home which would require
sacriice, he anicipates Chidester’s analysis of 19th century Zulu dreams as having
a real efect on the lives and acts of descendants, except that Van der Leeuw does
not show any criical awareness of the funcion of dreams in colonial contexts,
which is indeed the crucial diference between Van der Leeuw and Chidester’s
approach to indigenous religions. Not only does Chidester insist on a contextual
interpretaion of Zulu dreams, but also on a criical assessment of them under
colonial condiions.
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European theorists across disciplinary boundaries, but also
with ethnographers in non-European countries that he
quoted. When Van der Leeuw (1937:8) quoted ethnological
examples from Dutch anthropologists such as Kruyt and Van
Ossenbruggen in the Dutch colony of Indonesia to illustrate
his arguments, he considered their work as providing ‘rich
material’ for a phenomenology of religion, without giving a
thought of it being produced under colonial conditions.
When he drew on material from South Africa, he
unproblematically quoted from the thesis of the Afrikaner
patriotic minister of the Hervormde Kerk in South Africa,
H.C.M. Fourie, who had done his doctorate on the
amaNdebele, in Theology, at the University of Utrecht. Van
Baaren (1957), Van der Leeuw’s successor at the University of
Groningen, started the reassessment of Van der Leeuw along
these lines by pointing out cases where Van der Leeuw
quoted his ethnographic sources out of context to support his
statements and disregarded ethnographic studies of his time
that would not support his views.
More important than van Baaren’s attempt, however, is the
fact that Van der Leeuw abstracted the ethnographic
material that he quoted from its colonial context, without
any critical awareness of the colonial context that the
data were drawn from – at a time when thousands of
indigenous people were killed by Dutch forces in the Dutch
colony of Indonesia and racist categories were being refined
in South Africa. In order to contextualise his material
within colonial relations of power, we will need to delve
into the archives in an attempt to find traces of Van der
Leeuw’s communication with these colonial middlemen
and theorists, and to establish his views on Dutch, British
and French imperialism, and on Afrikaner,27 Dutch and
German nationalisms.
The important task of reassessing classic figures in the
academic study of religion, of which Van der Leeuw is
undoubtedly one, has clearly just begun – a task that has
become ever more urgent as a moral imperative within our
current context of debates on the decolonisation of Western
productions of knowledge in the academy.
27.For an atempt to do this, see Strijdom (in press), in which a criique is ofered for
Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological concept of ‘sacred place’ by taking his speech
at the Voortrekker Monument as case study. The argument is developed in
dialogue with Chidester’s (1994) claim that Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological
approach was not only poeical, but also hinted at an awareness of poliical power
relaions. Although Chidester appreciates Van der Leeuw’s poeics, he holds that
‘in keeping with recent advances’, it is ‘the struggles over conquest, exclusion, and
appropriaion [possession]’ that now need to be foregrounded (Chidester
1994:228–229). I challenged Chidester’s reading of Van der Leeuw’s consciousness
of power relaions, by analysing the speech that Van der Leeuw gave as Dutch
representaive at the inauguraion of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria on 16
December 1949. In that speech, at the beginning of apartheid and sharing the
podium with the recently elected Prime Minister D.F. Malan, Van der Leeuw
expressed the joy of the Dutch people in sharing with the Afrikaner volk their
victory over the Zulu king Dingaan a century earlier, idenifying uncriically with the
foundaion myth of Afrikaner naionalism. I agreed, however, with Chidester
(1994:215) that Van der Leeuw’s poeics of sacred place too oten ‘[mysiied]
poliical relaions of power’ and ‘remythologized power from the vantage point of
the conqueror’ by appealing to ‘the mythology of place and person’, which ‘might
deny the legiimacy of any resistance to the conquest that had established a sacred
place’. Van der Leeuw indeed paid no atenion to resistance movements such as
the African Naional Congress (ANC) that emerged in the irst half of the 20th
century in South Africa, or to the thinking of black intellectuals on indigenous
religion, for example, the African American W.E.B. du Bois, or the South African
historian S.M. Molema and dramaist H.I.E. Dhlomo (for a discussion of these black
intellectuals, see Chidester 2014:193–255).
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Original Research
Acknowledgements
Compeing interests
The author declares that he has no financial or personal
relationships which may have inappropriately influenced
him in writing this article.
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