Fieldnotes From History (18)—Belief

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Fieldnotes From History."

[a] Blooming RF

Part of an occasional Round and Square series that follows the blog’s main theme (east meets west, round meets square, and past meets present), these snippets from my early fieldnotes are reproduced as they were written by hand—and then revised on an ancient desktop computer—during my first fieldwork stay in Taiwan (1985-1987).  All entries are the way that I left them when I returned to the United States in 1987—some nicely-stated and some embarrassing. Although the series began with my assumption that the entries can stand alone, I have found that separate comments and notes might help readers understand a world that is now, well, history. These are always separate from the original fieldnote.

Comment

[b] Abundance RF

I like this fieldnote, even though it is a little repetitive and quite open to misunderstanding. My missionary friends at the time, for example, did not appreciate my distinction between faith and smugness (or belief and certainty). I suspect that a few readers today won't see my point either. Back then, I wouldn't have worried about being perceived as "squishy" in my cultural relativism. We all were. The fact is that I did not then (nor do I now) regard the most important issue here as "relativism." No, I wanted then (and now) to understand smug certainty. I was becoming very interested in the increasingly common phenomenon among believers and atheists, both, that they know they're right. 

In any case, although I could never have known it at the time, this thinking led me eventually toward my research interest in the Chinese almanac and related religious and cultural traditions. This is a topic that will begin appearing on Round and Square in 2012.
 

Note
—The Clifford Geertz reference is to his essay "Religion as a Cultural System," which influenced my thinking profoundly in those mid-1980s days.
—As an example of various beliefs in a cultural context, the image to the right is more than a fish. Pictures of fish in Chinese culture convey meanings of abundance, since both fish (魚) and abundance (餘) are both pronounced yu.

4 June 1985

Taipei

A number of my missionary acquaintances have told me how exasperated they were by the smugness and certainty of people during the rains. This got me thinking. Is it really very different? I grew up around fairly intense religiosity, so I know the immediate objections. But I am not interested here in right, wrong, or "other." What interests me is the word "smug." What is it to be smug about something we cannot possibly know? To my mind, this is not sacrilege; it is just basic observation. I can't possibly know who will win tomorrow's baseball game. If I smugly say that I do know, anyone can see right through it. It is the smugness, not the faith, that concerns me here, and various friends have been fairly smug in their assessment that the rains had nothing to do with appeasing gods.

Smugness seems to be all of a piece; Christian and “pagan” certainty is not very different from agnostic certainty that nothing exists in the great beyond, or even scientific certainty about complex cause and effect—in other words, relativity.  We need, as Clifford Geertz writes, to account for the unaccountable, explain the unexplainable.  Religious or scientific, it is all explanation (and even belief) of a sort. It is not belief—or even faith or "science"—that I question here. I can't stop thinking about smug certainty, though.

[c] Perspective RF