Ciò che il potere non spiega. Clifford Geertz e il problema antropologico della religione

This article reassesses Clifford Geertz’s anthropology of religion in relation to Talal Asad’s influential genealogical critique. Asad correctly emphasizes that religious symbols, practices, and orthodoxies are historically shaped by institutions, disciplinary techniques, and regimes of authorization. His critique, however, has often encouraged an explanatory framework in which power absorbs the semantic specificity of religion. The article reconstructs Geertz’s 1966 essay, “Religion as a Cultural System,” within its intellectual context and interprets it as a phenomenological and semiotic research programme. Geertz’s definition concerns the epistemological task of anthropology: understanding how religious symbols connect ethos and cosmos, operate simultaneously as “models of” and “models for” reality, and make an ultimate order experientially plausible through myth and ritual. The article then examines the logical and ethnographic limits of Asad’s position. The historical construction of a category does not entail the impossibility of comparative abstraction. Moreover, as Steven Caton’s work demonstrates, the relationship between practices and authorizing discourses is reciprocal: practices can consolidate the traditions that subsequently authorize them. Sindre Bangstad’s criticism of Asad’s “ethnographic refusal” further shows that an emphasis on orthodox discourse can obscure the diverse ways in which Muslims inhabit and negotiate religious and secular institutions. Drawing on Evans-Pritchard and Weber, the article argues that anthropology must examine the substantive content of religious traditions: the worlds they disclose, the promises they formulate, the modes through which those promises are proclaimed, and the moral styles they generate. Comparative reflections on Christianity, Islam, secularism, and redemption illustrate the analytical importance of these differences. Power remains indispensable to the study of religion, yet it cannot explain why religious symbols become compelling, how suffering is rendered meaningful, or what forms of hope and conduct traditions make possible. A return to Geertz restores the relative autonomy of religious meaning while retaining the historical insights of genealogical analysis.