Poole Metaphor

American Academy of Religion
Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion

Author(s): Fitz John Porter Poole
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp.
411-457
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1464561
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV/ 3
METAPHORS AND MAPS:

TOWARDS COMPARISON IN THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
FITZ JOHN PORTER POOLE
Conversations between anthropology and other academic studies
of religion have been marked historically by considerable ambivalence and avoidance.' In the post-Malinowskian era of fieldworkcentered ethnography, the remarkable subleties of newly emerging
and unexpected orders of data have challenged the adequacy of
traditional academic perspectives on religion, many of which seemed
bound-implicitly or explicitly-to the epistemological conventions
and cognitive lenses of Western religions.2 From an anthropological
perspective, the restricted emphasis on the written, enshrined texts of
literate traditions and the curious assumption that religion could be
studied almost in vacuo became untenable in the midst of a newfound
functionalist concern to see religious phenomena intricately suspended in broader webs of cultural significance and subtly embedded
in wider arrays of social institutions.3
Fitz John Porter Poole is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093.
1 For scholarly appreciations of the historical course of anthropological approaches to
the study of religion, see especially van Baal (1971), Banton (1966), Evans-Pritchard
(1965), Firth (1973), La Barre (1972), Skorupski (1976), and Wallace (1966). In addition,
particular attention should be directed toward anthropological perspectives on religion
associated with the seminal studies of Mary Douglas, James Fernandez, Clifford
Geertz, Claude L6vi-Strauss, Melford E. Spiro, and Victor W. Turner, who have
influenced perhaps most dramatically contemporary anthropological views on the
subject. Finally, some aspects of the modern dialogue between anthropological and
other forms of the academic study of religion are well represented in Bianchi (1973),
Spiro (1973), and the remarkable studies of Jonathan Z. Smith.
2 For elegant
overviews of the American, French, and British traditions of
fieldwork-based anthropology and their significance in conceptualizing key issues of
theory, method, and data, see Boon (1982), Clifford (1982), and Stocking (1983),
respectively.
3 The theoretical consequences
of this elaborated sense of socio-cultural context for
understanding religious meanings, acts, experiences, personae, and institutions and for
412
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
The enchantment and challenge of prolonged field study-and

thus an intimate sense of religion as a complex, lived reality in village
communities-led many anthropologists to focus almost exclusively
upon local nuances of the religions of single, simple, non-literate
societies. Such studies devoted little attention to the historical or
comparative contexts of local religions4 and placed severe strictures
on reconstructive and comparative endeavors.5 To the extent that
other scholars of religion have largely ignored, misunderstood, or
misapplied anthropological efforts, or have tended to caricature them
in simplistic or superficial slogans, many anthropologists have come to
doubt even the possibility of interdisciplinary pursuits.6
Yet, despite the differences between the archive and the field,
various undertakings in the academic study of religion attend to both
kinds of data and to the difficulties of their articulation. These
articulating esoteric, textually-centered and popular, community-centered traditions
are splendidly portrayed in the exemplary studies of Feeley-Harnik (1981) on images
of the eucharist and passover in early Christianity, Geertz (1968) on the character of
Islam in Indonesia and Morocco, Heilman (1976) on the socio-cultural significance of
the synagogue in a community tradition of Orthodox Judaism, Obeyesekere (1984) on
the shape and force of the cult of Pattini in South Asia and Sri Lanka, Ortner (1978) and
Paul (1982) on the symbols of Sherpa religious experience, Spiro (1978, 1982) on the
traditions of Burmese Buddhism, and Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) on aspects of culture,
thought, and social action in Thai Buddhism (cf. Carrithers [1983] on Buddhist monks
of Sri Lanka). For a general appraisal of the significance of such research for the broader
academic study of religion, with a particular focus on the works of Geertz, L6vi-Strauss,
and Turner, see Bianchi (1973) and Moore and Reynolds (1984).
4 The relationship between anthropology and history in this regard has been a critical
subject of vigorous and continuing debate. See Bagby (1958), Boas (1936), Cohn (1980),
Eggan (1954), Evans-Pritchard (1962a, 1962b), Godelier (1971), Hudson (1966, 1973),
Hughes (1960, 1964), Hultkrantz (1967), Kroeber (1935, 1963), Lewis (1968), Lowie
(1917), McCall (1970), Munz (1956, 1971), Obeyesekere (1970), Olien (1967), Schapera
(1962), J. Z. Smith (1982d), M. G. Smith (1962), and Sturtevant (1966). For critical and
productive examples of anthropological ideas illuminating aspects of historical discourse, see Finley (1975), Humphreys (1978), and Macfarlane (1970).
It should be noted that the works of Claude L6vi-Strauss on mythology, Melford E.
5
Spiro on psycho-cultural and psycho-social foundations of religious belief and practice,
and Victor W. Turner on ritual have been remarkably influential in turning anthropology from narrow, cautious, parochial interests in local religious phenomena to comparative issues focused ultimately on the pan-human nature of religion. The present
influence of more hermeneutical, interpretive approaches to the anthropological study
of religions, however, perhaps most elegantly articulated by Clifford Geertz in his
analytic concern with the project of "thick description" (1973), represents a challenge
to the legitimacy of a positivistic, comparative search for universals and for explanations
causal sense) in understanding religious phenom(in the strict hypothetico-deductive,
ena (see Geertz, 1984; cf. Spiro, n.d.).
discussion of the limits of naivety and responsibility in going
6 For an excellent
beyond one's discipline of primary competence in the search for theoretical insight, see
Gluckman (1964).
Poole: Metaphors and Maps
413
approaches exhibit a commonality of interest with anthropology that

should encourage mutual recognition of the importance and potential
of intellectual cooperation.7This essay constitutes an anthropological
contribution to that significant, but still embryonic dialogue.
i
Any critical study of religion aims to develop interpretively
sensitive and explanatorily (or theoretically) powerful analytic frameworks that make significant sense of complex cultural, psychological,
and social data by delimiting a "domain" of religion. But to unravel
the puzzle of religion a coherent theory must articulate the conceptual
problem to be solved and shape the bracketing of the phenomena to
be explored. This is easier said than done. In bounding a "domain" of
religion, there is an inevitable tension between the illusory precision
of monothetic categories and the more inchoate quality of polythetic
categories. There is another tension between the desire to capture the
richness, complexity, coherence, and ethnographic nuance of "native" experience (whether lived or reconstructed) and the necessity
for formal and abstract analysis. All academic studies of religion are
thus obliged to forge an explicit and precise relationship between the
particular and the general in the construction of any analysis. The
particularanchors the analysis to some sense of ethnographic reality,
and thus gives it empirical force. The general makes the analysis
significant as an illuminating instance of religion, and thus makes it
applicable to the constitution of an explanation.
Any descriptive, interpretive, or explanatory endeavor involves
relating phenomena to one another within a framework of categories
extrinsic to the phenomena themselves.8 A general theory of religion
is therefore necessary to guide the analysis of particular religious
phenomena. To encapsulate an analysis within a single religious
system-and thus within the semantic networks of the religion's own
terms, categories, and understandings-entangles the analysis with
the very discourse it seeks to interpret and explain. Since analysis
entails going beyond the empirical facts and implicates a theory that
7 A remarkableexample of the theoretical insights to be gained from a careful, subtle,
and critical bringing to bear of anthropological perspectives on general problems of
both interpretationand explanation in the academic study of religion is to be found in
the imaginative work of Jonathan Z. Smith, who has developed a sophisticated and
critical sensitivity to the differences between germinative seed and discardable chaff in
the range of anthropologicaltheories of religion (see, for example, 1978a, 1978b, 1982a,
1982b, 1982c, 1982d, 1983).
8 The
limiting consequences and peculiar distortions of tradition-bound analyses for
the academic study of religion are elegantly set forthby Smart(1973: 3-48, passim). See
also Banks (1984), Bianchi (1973), Neusner (1983), Penner and Yonan(1972), and Smith
(1982b, 1982c).
414
organizes, reconstructs, and redescribes them as data, all scholars of

religion must concern themselves with a range of theoretical perspectives, including those of the social sciences. Theory and data are
always bound up together. These common general interests and
problems in the academic study of religion inevitably center on
analytic frameworks that purport to be comparative.
Comparison seeks to extend the scope and power of theory in
order to provide a lens for viewing the particular phenomenon in
terms of the general analytic puzzles it presents and to promote
generalization and explanation.9 The historian Momigliano (1966:
581) notes that, "Comparative anthropology is more likely to indicate
alternative possibilities of interpretation for the evidence we have
than to supplement the evidence we have not."1o Comparison does
not deal with phenomena in toto or in the round, but only with an
aspectual characteristic of them. Analytical control over the framework of comparison involves theoretically focused selection of significant aspects of the phenomena and a bracketing of the endeavor by
strategic ceteris paribus assumptions." A comparative framework
portrays the range of variation of the focal phenomenon either within
a boundary and with respect to rules of inclusion and exclusion based
upon distinctive features, or around a conceptual center and with
respect to semantic distances from a prototype. Thus, comparison
inevitably involves some mode of classification or categorization,
which is predicated upon perceived similarities in various qualities or
aspects of the phenomena to be compared.12
The comparability of phenomena always depends both on the
9 The significance of generalization follows from the manner in which the concept of
explanation is understood and used. A generalization takes the form of an "if. .. X...,
then ... Y ... " type of proposition or set of interlinked propositions. A theory-in the
causal sense--purports to explain formal generalizaformal, hypothetico-deductive,
tions of that propositional form. Thus, an explanation establishes a connection between
one or more initial conditions (X) and some consequence (Y).
10 Note that
Momigliano's emphasis is not on the renown ability of anthropology to
extend the range of the phenomenological diversity of religions or religious phenomena
from a cross-cultural perspective, but on the anthropological construction of comparative lenses for perceiving and understanding the inter-relationships of the particular
and the general and of the different and the similar in human religion (cf. Smith, 1978a,
1982b).
11 In comparative analysis, the idea of "change of aspect" or focus permits a series of
redescriptions of phenomena, which attend to different aspects of the phenomena,
enable different comparative extensions beyond them, and facilitate different interpretations or explanations of them. This important characteristic of comparison implicates
its analogic or metaphoric quality.
12 Thus, as Nadel (1964:222-288)
argues, the comparative method, as it is formally
constituted in anthropology, is importantly an analog of the experimental approach that
is variously considered to be a hallmark of other scientific endeavors.
415
purpose of comparison and on a theoretically informed analysis.

Neither phenomenologically whole entities nor their local meanings
are preserved in comparison. What matters in comparative analysis
are certain variables that are posited by and cohere in theories and
that are aligned with aspects of the phenomena to be compared
through some set of correspondence rules. These conceptual variables
must have theoretical relevance, conceptual independence, and conceptual indivisibility.
A comparison becomes interpretable if it is possible to infer from
it something theoretically significant about the relationship of two or
more variables. In turn, the analytic project of comparison is conditioned by a set of fundamental assumptions:
1. Two or more instances of a phenomenon may be compared
if, and only if, there exists some variable X-with an identical
meaning in all of its occurrences-that is common to each
instance.
2. The comparison must attend to the strictures of Mill's
canons of similarity and difference'3and to Galton's problem of
assessing interdependence.14
3. No second variable is the cause or effect of X if it is not found
when X is found, if it is found when X is not found, or if a third
variable is present or absent under the same circumstances as
X.15
4. No variable is the cause of X if it is not antecendent to X.

Other significant assumptions embedded in the logic, design, and
method of comparative analysis generally are derivatives of one or
more of these key principles (cf. Zelditch, 1973). The precise specification of the generality and completeness of these principles may
require their translation into the terms of formal logic in order to
reveal both their essential properties and their possible transformations. The general characteristics of comparative analysis-a traditional mark of anthropological attempts to align the exotic and the
familiar in the context of common human experience (Smith, 1978a)form a cornerstone of a principled academic study of religion, which
cannot ignore the matters of epistemology that are its ultimate foundation.
13
For an excellent discussion of problems and refinements of Mill's canons, see Cohen
and Nagel (1934) and Zelditch (1973).
14
For a careful consideration of the implications of Galton's problem for comparative
analysis and of possible solutions to that problem, see Naroll and D'Andrade (1963).
15 This set of assumptions involves what is often termed the "rule of one variable." In
other words, a comparison is considered to be interpretable if, and only if, the analyst
varies one circumstance at a time to guard against the confounding of variables and any
spurious types of correlations, as well as to assess the character of direct, indirect, or
conditional relations between variables.
416
In his remarkable essay "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," Smith

(1982b; see also 1978a) has precisely probed the critical foundations,
dimensions, and analytic consequences of several modes of anthropological comparison, but has led us to and not beyond a dilemma noted
by Wittgenstein (1958: 84e, para. 215), who asked, "But isn't the same
at least the same? We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity
of a thing with itself.... Then are two things the same when they are
what one thing is? And how am I to apply what the one thing shows
me to the case of two things?" Earlier, Wittgenstein (1956: II, para. 14)
formulated his essential query in the guise of, "How do we compare
games? By describing them-by
describing one as a variation of
another-by describing and emphasizing their differences and analo[One may introduce a new proposition for comparative
gies....
purposes and ask,] what does such a proposition do? It introduces a
new concept, a new ground of classification."
As Wittgenstein notes, concepts-including
definitions and classifications-are
central to comparison.16 We cannot compare intertwined currents and eddies in the phenomenal ebb and flow of
situated beliefs, acts, experiences, or textsevents-historically
without concepts that formulate theoretical problems ("ask particular
and significant questions") in a methodologically rational way and
give us a reason to compare.7 Comparisons in vacuo are meaningless,
without intellectual context for their production or evaluation, and
often mere juxtapositions of essentially incomparable phenomena.
Formal comparison, however, involves an explicit analytic construction, which frames and focuses the endeavor. All events have their
16 Smith (1978b) distinguishes between definitions, as an atemporal and monothetic
type of specification of a closed set, class, or category by a unique principle of closure,
and classification, as a temporally specific, polythetic clustering. It is the latter that he
considers to be an essential feature of comparative analysis.
17 For the hermeneutic endeavors of historical inquiry, Dilthey (1962:77) notes that,
"Interpretation would be impossible if [both past and alien] expressions of life were
completely strange. It would be unnecessary if nothing strange were in them. It lies,
therefore, between these two extremes." For an anthropological perspective on this
genre of hermeneutical analytic enterprise, see Geertz (1973). In regard to a relativistic
view of interpretation in the social sciences that becomes the foundation of these
analytic positions, Winch (1963:108) firmly argues that, "Two things may be called 'the
same' or 'different' only with reference to a set of criteria which lay down what is to be
regarded as a relevant difference. ... [T]he sociological investigator.., .has to take
seriously the criteria which are applied for... identifying the 'same' kinds of actions
within the way of life he is studying" (my italics). In a highly restricted manner, these
approaches do appear to recognize the necessity of comparison in analysis, but there is
no clear sense in any of these views of an analytic framework which permits explicit,
systematic cross-cultural or historical comparisons. Each approach tends to embed
analysis in particular contexts, and any analytic movement or extension beyond these
contexts is viewed as being either severely problematic or entirely unwarranted.
417
singularities, but both indigene and analyst create contexts (of different kinds and for different purposes) that reduce some of the
singularity of events for pragmatic or philosophical ends and by
analytic, classificatory means. To be explicit and analytically useful,
folk models and intuitive apprehensions of similarity and differenceboth theirs (in the lived or reconstructed context) and ours (in the
analytic context)-must be hammered out on the anvil of logically
precise and consistent conceptual formulation. The in situ intuition
that is reconstructed a posteriori as method is rationalization of a
different order and yields neither insight nor theoretical advance in
comparative analysis.18
Smith (1978a, 1982b) brings us to what he calls a "gap" (perhaps
an abyss) created by the postulation of difference, for he properly
observes that comparison must formally involve a consideration of
both similarity and difference. On the one hand, the postulation of
identity precludes the possibility of comparison by obliterating the
"gap" and rendering comparison tautological. On the other hand, the
postulation of difference is meaningless for comparison without some
connective tissue of postulated similarity. Difference makes a comparative analysis interesting; similarity makes it possible.19 Neither
quality, however, is simply and unproblematically inherent in the
phenomena to be compared. Only abstract concepts can provide the
problems, lenses, and constructed patterns in terms of which we can
postulate analytically useful similarities and differences. Without
theoretical concepts, there can be no "methodical manipulation of
difference, a playing across the "gap" in the service of some useful
end" (my italics) (Smith, 1982b: 35).
Hempel (1966: 112-115), while defending his later and somewhat
reformulated logic of induction, acknowledges the impossibility of
eliminating a priori concepts from systematic inquiry, a perspective
documented at length by Kuhn (1970) and variously supported by
Kaplan (1964: 86), Medawar (1969: 128-173), Myrdal (1969: 9), and
Nadel (1964: 20-34). Indeed, in noting the common fallacy of assuming an antithesis between assembled facts and theory, Medawar
(1969: 149) correctly observes that, "...
unprejudiced observation is
mythical.... In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and

impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness.
Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive ... [and]
18
On the problem of conceptualizing inter-relationships between folk or cultural and

analytic concepts, see Caws (1974), D'Andrade (1984), Holy and Stuchlik (1981),
Jenkins (1981), and Quinn and Holland (1986).
19 Complex philosophical issues pervade specifications of the nature and the inter-relationships of the notions of identity, similarity, and difference. For relatively clear
expositions on these matters, see Butchvarov (1966) and Goodman (1970).
418
what... [one] sees conveys no information until... [one] knows

beforehand the kind of thing ... [one] is expected to see." If theoretical concepts are an inevitable part of the analytic process, then a
central issue in comparison is to make them explicit, systematic, and
relevant to a corpus of significant questions.
Accordingly, the problem of the nature of data is exceedingly
complex from the standpoint of either an analytic philosophy in the
Kantian tradition or of a constructivist psychology of cognition and
perception (Quine, 1970: 1-17). The data of the anthropologists-from
field observations and conversations, to notebooks, to varying levels of
a posteriori analysis-may be conceived to be organized in terms of
differing "grades of theoreticity" (in Quine's phrase) or conceptual
distances from phenomenal "reality." Processes of induction and
deduction may be sharply distinguished abstractly in terms of some
direction of movement from an initial relative proximity to the
"empirical world" or the "theoretical model," but in practice there is
an essential coordination of these strategic modes of inquiry (Dubin,
1969: 9, 240). The relationship between induction and deduction is
complex and dynamic. On the one hand, if a theoretical construct is a
"concept referring to something that is postulated in order to explain
the ... [particular]observed but that is not directly observable .... "
(Pap, 1962: 426), then "it is theory ... that determines which facts out
of a potentially infinite number are to be collected-those
facts ... which are believed to constitute evidence for the theory at
hand" (Spiro, 1972: 577). On the other hand, as Nadel (1964: 20-34),
following Whitehead (1938: 2f.), observes, both theory and data are
inextricably bound up together in analysis and mutually determine
their relative significance. Indeed, Quine (1951) properly doubts that
analytic questions of meaning and synthetic questions of fact can be
sharply or rigidly distinguished, and Hempel (1952: 10f.) suggests that
the project of "explication-the shaping and sharpening of more or
less vague notions of theoretical discourse in terms of the subject
matter at hand-blurs a precise distinction between conceptual analysis and empirical inquiry (Quine, 1960: 258f.). Thus, if the terms of
an empirical inquiry are generated in theoretical context, then there is
no possible movement from observations that are shorn of theory to
theoretical generalizations.20The problem of pure induction tends to
fade at the disintegration of an absolute faith in logical empiricism
20
Note that the view that observations, meanings, and facts are theory-laden refers
here to matters of interpretation and explanation in contexts of inquiry or discovery and
not to matters of confirmation, validation, or falsification. Indeed, the hermeneutical
claim that the rationale or grounds for constructing an interpretation or explanation and
for accepting that interpretation or explanation are the same is seriously tautological
(see Geertz, 1973, 1984; cf. Collin, 1985; Grtinbaum, 1984; Norris, 1985; Spiro, n.d.).
419
(Sellars, 1963: 355). Indeed, Nadel's (1964) formulation of the interplay between theory and data is a sophisticated commentary on the
implications of Fortes' (1970: 129) famous anthropological dictum
that, "Every way in which facts are grouped in description involves
theories, implicit or explicit, about the connections between them that
are significant; and significance is a function of the kinds of questions
to which the observer seeks an answer.... Ethnographic facts [per
se] ... are meaningless.... "
If this brief portrayalof anthropological description and analysis is
a reasonable characterization of what anthropologists do, it implies
that both our ethnographic and our textual materials are selected,
described, and organized in relation to the interpretive frameworksor
theoretical models that we bring to bear on them at all stages of
research (albeit in different ways). In contexts of inquiry or discovery
where issues of initial insight, recognition of pattern, interpretation,
and formulation of explanation are focal (Gruinbaum, 1984; Spiro,
n.d.), the analytic and descriptive processes are intricately bound
together through an engagement in what Geertz (1973) so vividly
characterizes as "thick description." Through the metaphor of
Dilthey's (1962) notion of a hermeneutic circle, Geertz (1973, 1976)
endeavors to unpack layers of signification and to reveal patterns of
significance with the suggestion of a process of "dialectical tacking"
back and forth between the particularand the general, the experiencenear and the experience-distant, the emic and the etic. All of these
analytic contrasts invoke an image of the interweaving of theories and
data in the mold of webs of cultural signification that Geertz seeks to
disentangle without destroying their natural richness and fragile
coherence. But his is ultimately an impossible stance for any comparative analytic undertaking.
Although Geertz (1973, 1984) is skeptical about the possibility of
a comparative analysis (cf. Skocpol and Somers, 1980), he develops a
set of analytic models, strategies, and tactics that depend heavily upon
analogical or metaphorical relations.21 Whether exploring the
Balinese cockfight or theatre state, he elegantly maps significant
contours of a socio-cultural landscape by means of a sensitive, subtle,
21 On Geertz's own comparative endeavors, however, see Geertz (1968, 1976). In the
former work, Geertz utilizes a contrast in contexts-Moroccan
and Indonesian-to
explore both similarities and differences in two cultural modes of participation in a
common, yet problematic Islamic civilization. The ideal types of the Indonesian
mystical-aesthetic configuration and the Moroccan moral-warrior configuration figure
prominently in this comparison. Geertz (1968:96-97) notes, however, that in the
or 'belief in
process of comparison "we look not for a universal property-'sacredness'
the supernatural', for example-that divides religious phenomena off from nonreligious
ones with Cartesian sharpness, but for a system of concepts that can sum up a set of
inexact similarities, we sense to inhere in a given body of material" (my italics).
420
and often tacit explication of the implications of powerful trope

constructions (e.g., a "reading-of-a-text"analogy). But Geertz's intertwining of cultural, epistemological, and rhetorical metaphors is often
dense and blocks the achievement of an analytic purchase that
permits and enables a comparative inquiry. Although his approach
places a clear emphasis on processes of local interpretation and
contexts of inquiry or discovery rather than on processes of general
explanation and contexts of validation (see Geertz, 1984; cf. Spiro,
n.d.), Geertz's recognition of the importance of metaphorical or
analogical configurations-and the nature of their analytic unpacking-in contexts of locally bounded cultural interpretation may hold
significant insights for more comparative and generalizing modes of
analysis.22The metaphoric or analytic characterof theoretical models
is critically important for understanding key facets of comparative
analysis.23
Analytic models that exhibit metaphoric or analogic structure
invoke a comparison by delimiting the focus of analysis to the
comprehension of one entity in terms of another-often the more
inchoate and problematic in terms of the better understood. They
perform this function by emphasizing a particulardimension (or set of
dimensions) of the phenomena to be compared, and not by postulating
the comparison of phenomena in toto. Some features of the phenomena are selected at the expense of others, for metaphor "filters"
perception or understanding (Black, 1962, 1979; MacCormac, 1985).
The construction of a metaphor or an analogy involves a selection that
posits a set of shared or analogous features between entities that
otherwise may differ from one another in all or most respects. Thus,
through what Field (1973) calls "partial denotation," the metaphoric
or analogic structure of a theoretical lens affords "epistemic access"
(Boyd, 1979) to two (or more) relatively similar-but also loosely
22 Geertz (1984) conflates contexts of inquiry or discovery and contexts of validation in
a manner that perceives these contexts to be in conflict at the same level of analysis.
Weber's (1963) program of analysis, upon which Geertz explicitly draws for inspiration,
however, posits an essential difference between Verstehen and Erkliren as analytic
modes of understanding, requires a critical complementarity between them at different
levels of analysis, and, thus, does not envision a collision between them which requires
the kind of epistemological choice that Geertz seems to emphasize.
23 On the complex role of metaphor and analogy in analysis, see Achinstein (1964),
Adler (1927), Allers (1955), Arber (1947), Back (1963), Black (1962), Boyd (1979), Brown
(1976, 1977), Burrell (1973), Gentner (1981, 1982), Gerhart and Russell (1984), Hanson
(1961), Harr6 (1960), Hesse (1965, 1966), Kuhn (1979), Leatherdale (1974), MacCormac
(1985), Martin and Harr6 (1982), Oppenheimer (1956), Pederson-Krag (1956), Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), Polanyi and Prosch (1975), Pylyshyn (1979), Ramsey
(1964), Schlanger (1970), Simon and Newell (1963), Taylor (1971), and Toulmin (1953,
1972).
421
distinguishable-entities before analysis draws and specifies the

theoretically relevant distinctions between (or among) them. The
metaphor often constructs the similarities in unexpected and insightful ways, and it may create something new by positing an illuminating
resemblance between or among apparently disparate entities.24 The
postulation of a metaphoric or analogic relation implicates a similarity-statement and, thus, provides the possibility of a comparisonstatement.
Metaphoric statements tend to be imprecise and open-ended. The
more poetic characteristics of metaphor can be understood as a
version of what Wittgenstein (1958) calls "seeing as" or "noticing an
aspect" (cf. Hester, 1966). Indeed, the focal, constructed emphases of
metaphor, which themselves demand careful and precise explication,
are complemented by the resonances of associated or evoked implications of similarity and difference, which provide possibilities of
further analytic exploration of the metaphoric image (Black, 1979).
Nevertheless, the fluid, poetic image of metaphor must ultimately
acquire some semblance of explicit precision, order, and coherence
by being translated into the explanatory, formally-phrased statement
of a theoretical model (Black, 1962, 1979). The common analogic
structure that underlies both metaphor and model facilitates such
translation. Indeed, beyond the gaining of initial insight, much
analytic effort is directed toward specifying the structure of that
analogical mapping between the phenomena or domains to be compared.
The target phenomenon or domain to be understood is new,
abstract, uncharted, problematic, and less familiar than the source
phenomenon or domain in terms of which it is to be described
(Gentner, 1981, 1982). Aspects of the known domain are analogically
mapped onto aspects of the target domain and specify the predicates
(attributes and relations) of the former to be applied to the latter.
Analogical mapping requires a distinction between objects or phenomena and their attributes, on the one hand, and relationships, on
the other, and it promotes relatively explicit and elaborated representations of the semantic structure of both domains. Knowledge of the
domains is represented as a propositional semantic network of object
nodes or loci and predicates. The nodes or loci that shape the network
represent concepts that are treated more or less as wholes, and the
predicates express propositions about them. These predicates can be
24 It is important to note, following Davidson (1978), that there is no necessity in
positing some special and mysterious "metaphorical meaning." All that is required is an
assumption that metaphor involves a special use, construction, or focusing of essentially
literal meaning(s) to draw attention to what might not otherwise have been noticed.
422
either attributes (that is, predicates taking one argument) or relations

(that is, predicates taking two or more arguments).
On the basis of such a propositional representation, one can
specify the character of a metaphor or analogy as a structural mapping
between a known and a target domain. An analogical mapping from a
source domain A to a target domain B is a statement that,
1. there is a mapping X of the nodes al, a2, .. , an of domain A
onto the nodes bl, b2,
, bn of domain B;
2. the mapping X is such
..?. that significant aspects of the structure (nodes, attributes, and relations) of A apply in B-that is,
many of the relational predicates that are perceived to be valid
in A are hypothesized also to be valid in B on the basis of the
cross-domain matchings of the different sets of nodes specified
by the mapping X; and
3. relatively few of the valid attributionalpredicates within A
apply validly within B.
Note that statements 1 and 2 define the fundamental analogical
mapping, but they are also compatible with, and the basis for, the
postulation of a general similarity between the domains A and B. To
indicate that the matching of these domains is one of analogical
relatedness and not of literal similarity (Ortony, 1979), however,
statement 3 must be claimed. Statements 2 and 3, taken together,
assert that relational predicates, and not attributional predicates,
bridge domains in analogical mappings. This claim follows from the
key assertion that analogical mappings apply the same relations to
dissimilar phenomena, and that the attributes of phenomena tend to
be implicated only to the extent that the phenomena themselves-in
significant contrast to their positions and functions in their respective
systems-are similar.25 Thus, on the basis of this characterization of
the process of analogical mapping, the characteristics of a good
analogy include: (1) clarity of definition of mappings; (2) richness or
density of predicates (especially relational predicates); (3) systematicity or coherence of mapping; and (4) abstractness of mapping with
25 The general implications of this sketch of analogical mapping are several. Following
Gentner (1981, 1982), an overlap in relational predicates is necessary for a perception
of similarity between domains. An overlap in both attributional and relational predicates is viewed as literal similarity, but not all attributes and relations may correspond
perfectly. Indeed, if they did, the statement would suggest an identity, not a similarity,
and, thus, a tautology. An overlap in relations but not in attributes, however, is seen to
constitute an analogical relatedness. An overlap in attributes but not in relations, in
contrast, is a temporal relatedness and not a form of similarity. Note that the key
qualities of literal similarity and metaphorical or analogical relatedness are often best
portrayed in the form of a continuum, not a dichotomy. If two or more domains overlap
in relational predicates, they are more literally similar to the extent that there is also an
overlap of their attributional predicates.
423
respect to the hierarchical level of the predicates in the propositional

semantic networks representing the domains to be compared.
The construction of analogical mappings, which are closely bound
up with metaphorical understandings, may be facilitated by limiting
the scope and complexity of the comparison, constraining the matching process of interlinking domains, and reducing spurious, nonproductive matches between them. On the basis of the comparative
logic of analogical mappings, the carefully focused use of theoryconstitutive metaphors or analogies in their construction may represent a strategy of non-definitional, causal, or ostensive "accommodation" or "reference-fixing" that is particularly appropriate for
facilitating the recognition of a promising domain of research, for
giving first heuristic and then theoretically significant shape to that
domain, and for avoiding certain kinds of definitional rigidity and
ambiguity.26Indeed, the traditionally knotty problem of the definition
of religion as a guiding force in the comparative analysis of religions
may appear differently in the light of metaphoric constructions and
analogical mappings, which provoke a non-traditional view of the
nature of definition and its analytic problems.
ii
Anthropologists have expended enormous, but largely unproductive, effort in an attempt to define religion. The enterprise has tended
to focus on delimiting the phenomenon of religion as a preliminary
but necessary step toward analyzing or comparing instances of "it."
Almost uniformly, such anthropological definitions have rested on an
assumption that religion is a universal phenomenon with some common, distinctive core of characteristics (Spiro, 1966: 86-87). The form
of these definitions has tended to be monothetic; they have attempted
to identify religion with some unique principle of partition or some
set of distinctive features that provide the grounds of similarity for
comparing religions and assessing the significance of religious differences. In turn, the comparison of differences has tended to focus on
variations of some abstract feature that is specified within the definition, of some non-essential features that are not specified by the
definition, or of some relations between features specified in the
definition and aspects of the non-religious realm of socio-cultural life.
Spiro (1966: 85-91) suggests that definitions of religion may be
classified into two ideal types: real and nominal.27 Real definitions
purport to be true statements about the essential and often non26 On the notions of "accommodation" and "reference-fixing"
(including "dubbing"
and naming ceremonies) see Boyd (1979), Kripke (1980), and Putnam (1975).
27 See also Achinstein (1968) and Hempel (1952:2-14).
424
empirical nature of the phenomenon to be explored, or to be analytic

construals of complex concepts that are deemed to have unambiguous
empirical referents. The core attributes or essential features that are
postulated are often poorly defined, seemingly arbitrary,and determined by extrinsic interests rather than intrinsic necessities. The
empirical referents are often assumed (but not demonstrated) to be
(and to have to be) universal. In the quest to discover order, realism
assumes that there are definite relationships among the particular
phenomena of the world, and that classification of such phenomena
under general categories merely makes explicit the relationships
already implicit in them. Thus, classifications are objectively right or
wrong in accordance with the "natural" patterns that characterize
phenomena. In turn, nominal definitions introduce "new" expressions or concepts that acquire meaning by stipulation. The introduced
expression or concept (definiendum) is arbitrarilyassigned meaning
by being made synonymous with a known expression or concept
(definiens). Nominalism seeks to constitute an order among phenomena through the construction of a set of classificatory concepts. To
avoid a solipsistic abyss, such conceptualizations of phenomena are
often assumed to be constrained, but there are no unambiguous
standards of constraint beyond the usefulness of essentially linguistic
conventions.
Whether or not analytic categories are embedded implicitly and
naturally in, or are imposed explicitly and conventionally on, phenomena determines the kind of knowledge of phenomena that is
possible, but the matter probably cannot be resolved on empirical
grounds. Yet, the philosophical consequences of the realist or nominalist positions significantly shape the kinds of theories that will be
accepted as proper guides to research.28Although most anthropological definitions of religion are necessarily mixed types, the greatest
problems are presented by their real definitional characteristics
(Spiro, 1966: 86-91, passim). The key notion of similarity as the basis
of comparison is peculiarly problematic for realism because the
assertion of a real similarity among phenomena imparts an aura of
reality to an abstract entity that necessarily exists apart from the
phenomena to be compared. Also, with the notion of "explication"
28 The philosophical distinctions between realism and nominalism are partially but
importantly correlated with Diesing's (1971:124-133) distinctions between formalismand empiricism. On the one hand, formalism perceives phenomena to have both
empirical and logical aspects. On the other hand, empiricism rejects this duality by
denying a reality to the logical aspect of phenomena and viewing this matter as merely
adopted for purposes of convenience and simplicity in analysis. With respect to this
distinction, however, Diesing (1971:124-125) notes that belief and action, epistemology and ontology need not be consistent in the way research is actually conducted.
425
staking out an early and problematic middle ground, the foundations

of both analytic-synthetic and the observational-theoretical distinctions, which are intricately bound up with the idea of real definitions,
have been severely challenged.29
There have been two majordemurralsto the monothetic, substantive, and phenomenal definition of religion. The first is a concern that
a priori categorization that may distort "reality" and preclude consideration of some intuitive sense of "relevant data." The second questions the monothetic form of definition. The first demurral is aptly
represented by Weber (1963: 1), who maintained that,
To define "religion," to say what it is, is not possible at the start
of a presentation. ... Definition can be attempted, if at all, only
at the conclusion of the study. The essence of religion is not
even our concern, as we make it our task to study the conditions
and effects of a particulartype of social behavior.
The external courses of religious behavior are so diverse
that an understanding of this behavior can only be achieved
from the viewpoint of the subjective experiences, ideas, and
purposes of the individuals concerned-in short, from the
view-point of the religious behavior's "meaning" (Sinn).
And Evans-Pritchard (1967:9) noted that, " ... to obtain objectivity in

the study of primitive religion what is required is to build up general
conclusions from particularones. One must not ask 'What is religion?
but what are the main features of... [a particular] religion .... ' "
Robertson (1970:34) and Spiro (1966:90-91) observe a critical
dilemma in the stance adopted by Weber and Evans-Pritchard. On
the one hand, an a priori substantive definition of religion prematurely restricts and distorts an analysis. On the other hand, failure to
specify the domain of religion blurs the focus of analysis and precludes comparison. Neither a real nor a nominal definition of religion
seems to avoid the problem in a non-arbitrary way (Stout, 1980).
Geertz (1973, 1976) recommends his hermeneutical "dialectical tacking" back and forth in the production of a "thick description" as the
necessary compromise in this dilemma, and the very abstractness and
theoretical structure of his "semiotic" definition of religion seems
well adapted to this purpose (Geertz, 1976). But the strategy largely
abandons any formal, generalizing sense of comparative analysis
(Geertz, 1973; cf. Geertz, 1968, 1976).
The second demurralquestions the appropriateness of monothetic
categories and harks back to Wittgenstein's problem of discovering
the common features of games. Anthropologists increasingly recogsee Hempel (1952:10-12, 1970) and Quine
29 On the notion of "explication,"
On philosophical
and
(1960:258-259).
problems of the analytic-synthetic
observational-theoretical distinctions, see Suppe (1977:66-118).
426
nize that all apparent members of the class or set constructed by a

definition or classification do not necessarily possess all of the ostensibly distinctive features of the class or set, and that there is no a priori
way of establishing which features are most definitive. The structure
of this variability within a definitional class, which cannot be addressed in the logic and language of monothetic categories, and the
consequent impossibility of establishing both necessary and sufficient
criteria for class inclusion directly challenge the possibility of a
monothetic definition of a bounded class. With respect to his focal
exemplars of games, numbers, and words, however, Wittgenstein
(1956, 1958) adopted a position of modified realism, rejected a claim of
essentialism, and proposed an alternative mode of conceptualizing
classificatory relations in the idiom of "family resemblances."30
Drawing on the image of a thread of many fibers, Wittgenstein
(1958:32e) suggested that "we extend our concept of number as in
spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the
thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its
whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres." The salient
points of Wittgenstein's account of family resemblances are significant for understanding the key classificatory characteristics of comparative analysis. Certain phenomena have no common properties by
virtue of which we apply the same label to them and include them in
the same category. Consequently, there is no single, correct
monothetic or Merkmal definition of such phenomena, and any
suggested definition would agree only in part with the actual use of
the label for the phenomena. Also, the ability to give a monothetic or
Merkmal definition of the class of such phenomena is not a necessary
condition of being able to understand that class. What makes the
various phenomena called "X" into the class X is a complicated
network of partial, but overlapping, similarities. Invoking the metaphor of family resemblance, this network may draw on very different
kinds of similarity. The explanation of the class X consists primarily in
giving multiple and paradigmaticexamples of the class, which may be
coupled with extensions of the examples through similarity- or
anaology-clauses (that is, "these and similar-analogous phenomena
are X's") and thus may serve as conceptual "centres of variation."
Hence, the class X can be explained, but it cannot be given a
monothetic or Merkmal definition. The adducing of relevant similarities justifies uses of the label "X," since it is on account of relationships among X's and especially on account of relationships between
particular phenomena and paradigmatic examples of X's, that we
zo On problems of the notion of family resemblances, see Bambrough (1966), Fogelin
(1976), and Lange (1970).
427
properly call X's "X's." In other words, we call something an "X"

because it is very similar in some ways to other phenomena that are
properly called "X's." X's form a single family held together by the
overlapping of many similarities and constituting, by virtue of this
unity, a concept. The concept of a X has no sharp boundaries, and
there is no precise specification and circumscription of the extension
of the concept. The explanation of the concept is by means of
paradigms, but no specification of the range or degree of similarities
with the paradigms is required for inclusion under the concept of X.
Explanation of a concept by examples is comparable to indicating a
place by pointing, and not to delimiting it by drawing a boundary.
Boundaries may be drawn around the concept of X for special analytic
purposes, but the location of that boundary depends only on what best
facilitates achieving those special analytic purposes.
The lesson of Wittgenstein is simple, but profound: there may be
classes with members that share no single feature in common, and
these classes cannot be uniquely specified in terms of distinctive
features or rules of closure. Thus, the similarity of membership in a
class becomes problematic, and the boundary of a class becomes
ambiguous. Borderline cases are inevitable. One has to trace each
"fiber" of connection with great sensitivity to its construction and
place it in some more complex thread or fabric, which is the analytic
domain of interest. Following Campbell (1965), Needham (1975) has
argued that a polythetic category formed on the basis of the similarities of family resemblance must have a list of "basic predicates."
Rather than circumscribing the boundary of a category on the basis of
shared characteristics in the manner of monothetic classification, a
polythetic categorization directs attention to the interpretation of
basic predicates as the principles that enable the connection of
phenomena in family resemblance chains. Such predicates, therefore,
are not empirical properties of phenomena, but are formal aspects of
the model of classification. The use of formal predicates of analytic
models rather than empirical properties of phenomena as the basis of
categories is largely inimical to any single-factor similarity definitions
of a class. Furthermore,a polythetic approach is sufficiently flexible to
accommodate new knowledge without the monothetic necessity of
modifying definitions and redrawing boundaries every time an anomaly arises. This approach readily accommodates Bateson's (1979:142)
important notion of abduction as the "lateral extension of abstract
components of description," enabling a particulardescription of some
phenomenon and an analogic search for other instances-that is, for
phenomena that more or less fit the same rules that were devised for
the description. It also readily accommodates a prototype theory of
meaning and the nature of categories (Rosch, 1978; Rosch and Mervis,
428
1975). These analytic advantages of the idea of family resemblances as

they yield polythetic categories are significantly strengthened by
Vygotsky's (1962) demonstration that monothetic definition is
cognitively unrealistic, and by Wittgenstein's (1956, 1958) argument
that it is logically unnecessary.
The basic problem of classification revealed in Wittgenstein's
notion of family resemblances has been variously recognized by the
particularinsights of ideas about "connotative features" ("D'Andrade,
1976), "paths of interlinkage" (Frake, 1969), "fuzzy sets" (Dubois and
Prade, 1980; Kay and McDaniel, 1978; Kempton, 1978; Zadeh, 1965),
"polythetic classes" (Needham, 1975), "prototypes" (Rosch, 1978;
Rosch and Mervis, 1975), "inexact concepts" (Goguen, 1969), "images
of wide scope" (Gruber, 1981), "features of similarity" (Tversky, 1977;
Tversky and Gati, 1978), and "chain complexes" (Vygotsky, 1962).
The somewhat related notions of "cluster concepts" (Achinstein,
1968) and "hedges" (Lakoff, 1973) also bear importantly on this
fundamental problem. The primary implication of such perspectives
seems to be that our analytic categories must be, as Waismann (1965)
claims, "open-textured." Indeed, many centrally important cultural
categories often encompass a broad range of apparently disparate
meanings, and a recognition of this fact also has significant implications for an anthropological or historical interpretation of cultural
phenomena, including religious ideas and institutions.31Our analytic
categories must be designed to accommodate some of the central
features of the design of the cultural categories that we seek to
understand.32 Thus, our classificatory impulses to demarcate the
domain of "religion," "ritual,""myth," or "tradition"in monothethic
form must be tempered by a different sense of the possibilities of
order or structure, of classification, and of categories. Yet, the
Wittgensteinian "fibers" that we strive to follow and unravel in their
densely woven and knotted threads and fabrics, the subtle relationships that we seek to illuminate, and the intricate contours and
configurations that we hope to shape, are all informed by the analytic
problems that we pose and by the strategic questions and tactical
methods that flow from our senses of key theoretical puzzles.
31 On the "polysemic" or "multivocal"nature of cultural (ritual)symbols, see Turner
(1967).
32
Note that this sense of accommodationis focused on particularanalytic interests and
does not assume, as Needham (1975) sometimes does, that polythetic principles are
somehow and intrinsically more faithful to ethnographicmaterials.The concern here is
with a relationship between two genres of analytic categories-theirs and ours-and
how they might best be compared.
429
iii
If there is some utility in perceiving our categories of analysis to
be "open-textured," then we must make sense of how that texture is
constructed. In this regard, the subject of theoretical problem formulation and of metaphoric or analogic images, mappings, and models
must re-emerge. Perhaps we must begin with our "prefigurations"of
scholarly interest and contextual description, interpretation, and explanation. By prefigurations, I mean those often diffuse assumptions,
interests, images, and theories that shape what we find to be intriguing, important, puzzling, or problematic, and, thus, central to our
analytic concerns in probing the significance of particular aspects of
cultural, psychological, and social phenomena in cultural history and
in anthropology (White, 1973:1-42). These prefigurations-always
subject to various forms of modification-provide us with a very
general set of guides and lenses in our set of assumptions about
"human nature" in its most fundamental biological, cultural, psychological, and social aspects.
When we construct descriptions, interpretations,and explanations
in (and of) particular cultural, historical, or social contexts (Scriven,
1959:450), we inevitably draw upon some notion of a problem to be
explained, an explanatory logic, and a relevant context to be explored
in empirical support of an explanation. All these matters rest upon the
epistemological foundation of the epistemes or paradigms that encase
our research traditions. Thus, we are engaged in the conceptual
shaping or construction of two interrelated contexts: the more or less
tentatively bounded cultural, historical, or social context that we claim
is empirically relevant to some decipherment (description, interpretation, and explanation) of a particular puzzle; and the intellectual
context that gives rise to our sense of relevance and to our sense of the
puzzle that informs the criteria of relevance. These contexts are given
focus and significance by the theoretical lenses that we bring to bear
on analytic puzzles. Berlin (1954:54) reminds us, however, that the
analytic process (despite its apparent goals) is often not "sufficiently
clear, sharp, precisely defined to be capable of being organized into a
formal structure which allows of systematic mutual entailments or
exclusions." When I "describe" a rite of am yaoor ("male initiation";
literally, "house of a forest fern") among the Bimin-Kuskusmin of the
remote West Sepik mountains of Papua New Guinea, I must intricately select from a diversity of data and shape a portrait of a facet of
ten-stage, decade-long ritual cycle (Poole, 1976, 1982). The process is
creative in constructing criteria of relevance for selecting and arranging, foregrounding and backgrounding, and partitioning or articulating the "important" and the "incidental" features of the focal rite. It
430
also provides information apparently extrinsic to what I see and hear,

information that becomes intrinsic to my explanation of a problem or
puzzle which I have formulated. The am yaoor is central to BiminKuskusmin senses of a distinctive cultural tradition, of self, person,
society, and cosmos-a root metaphor or world hypothesis in crystalline configuration and of great salience as a cultural form, a psychological experience, and a social force.
No single description, interpretation, or explanation of the am
yaoor will exhaust the puzzles it presents to scholars of religion in
different theoretical frames. As the kaleidoscope of analogic mappings
turns different metaphoric lenses-and, by implication, different theoretical concerns-on the am yaoor, I have explored this ritual cycle
as a tightly structured domain encasing a liminal exploration of
existential problems in a socio-moral order (Poole, 1976), a constellation of gender images projected inward on the self and outward on a
cosmological landscape (Poole, 1981a, 1981b), a design for learning
and experiencing ways of thinking and feeling that enable revelations
of ancestral understandings (Poole, 1982), a hierarchical organization
of ritual understandings, ritual powers, and ritual ranks encoded in a
complex sociology of knowledge (Poole, 1986a, 1986b, n.d.). In each
of these analytic endeavors, I embed my conceptions of relevant
cultural, historical, and social structures and process, and portraythe
subtleties of psycho-cultural experiences of ritual (Poole, 1976, 1982).
I incorporate notions of the contours and the modes of transmission of
tradition. I articulate ideas about the systematic balance or dialectical
relationship between the particularand the general-both locally and
in terms of broader comparative frames. In so doing, I explore my
sense of what constitutes significant and illuminating exemplars of my
general theoretical puzzles or problems, and I express my particular
mode of appreciation of pattern in interpretation and of theoretically
informed causal linkage in explanation. Cautiously but inevitably, I
must go beyond the information that is locally presented in the
Bimin-Kuskusmin rite not only in sound, sight, and experience, but
also through indigenous exegesis, and I must re-capture the rite in
another and wider lens that will distort some aspects of its local
meanings in the service of a carefully constructed, comparative mode
of comprehension. If I am to converse about my analytic projects with
other scholars of religion, however, I must join with them in examining how, and for what purposes, we go beyond the immediacies of our
"texts" and create a puzzle or problem and a set of contexts for
interpretation as the essential ground of explanation.
431
iv
Let us review our analytic pathways. Our puzzles or problems and
our reasons or purposes, as well as the theoretical and ethnographic
contexts in which they are to be embedded, do not represent the only
arena of our negotiations. We must also recognize the formal properties and the implications of how we formulate our problems, and what
such formulations imply or entail for definition or classification, for
descriptive portrayal, interpretive understanding, and explanatory
argumentation about religious phenomena. Much of our initial, creative formulation of problems may be usefully perceived as a genre of
metaphoric construction that posits some critical "fiber" of resemblance and constitutes the preliminary grounds for an analogic mapping. Theoretically informed analysis then proceeds to explore the
implications of that particularconstruction and mapping. Metaphors,
by constructing an illuminating sense of similarity, allow us to see and
to understand one domain in terms of another through a mapping of
aspects of one onto aspects of the other. But the very nature of a
"domain" of experience is shaped by (and in) the construction of the
metaphor and of the analogic mapping that explicates metaphoric
intuitions (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). "Love is a journey," "Love is
madness," "love is bliss," and "love is war" (which, of course, "is
hell"), are all metaphors-indeed, only a few points on the English
metaphoric map of a complex landscape-that illuminate different
facets of a vague concept. But they do not collectively define the
phenomenon in any substantive, monothetic sense. Instead, by providing a complexly articulated set of different lenses, they fix the
reference(s) of the concept in a variety of ways, the precise articulation of which remains to be explored. Categories thus constructed are
essentially "open-textured."
Because these analytic categories derived from metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings are not monothetically closed, they
allow for the possibility of strategic and systematic elaboration and
extension in a variety of ways and for various purposes. The analogies,
metaphors, and hedges select or construct a prototype, exemplar,
center of variation, or aspectual focus, and define various kinds of
relationships to it. Each such relationship, and the coherences among
such relations, must be explored for its subtle analytic implications.
What is within or beyond the focus of analysis will vary from one
metaphoric construction or analogic mapping to another. Yet, the
partially overlapping foci of several more or less articulated metathe analogic mappings through which they are
phoric lenses-and
explicated and made explicit-may
provide an increasingly refined
illumination of the contours and internal structures of the "domain" of
432
our inquiry with respect to the central puzzles that inform the linked
constructions of analytic metaphors or analogies. When we seek to
compare our analytic concepts with those of the "texts" composed by
indigenes, we note that both sets-ours and theirs-are often "opentextured," but that each tends to select, bracket, and focus differently.
This genre of comparative analysis is highly complex, for it involves
consideration of comparisons among our (theoretical) analytic concepts, among their (cultural)analytic concepts, and between both sets
of concepts. The relationship between tradition-bound folk models
and theory-bound analytic models is complex and poorly understood,
but it remains a central problem for the comparative study of religious
phenomena (Caws, 1974; D'Andrade, 1984; Holy and Stuchlik, 1981).
v
To the extent that we may learn something from linguistics about
the formal lexical structure, syntactic embeddedness, and semantic
organization of metaphors and perhaps other trope constructions, we
can compare these sets of analytic and cultural concepts-as metaphors-to note how they are opened, closed, focused, and bracketed
differently; how they overlap (if they do) or otherwise interrelate in
the coherence of their semantic networks or structures and their
logico-semantic implications or entailments; and how they draw
different or similar maps of similar or different "territories" of theoretical interest (Smith, 1978b). The intricate overlapping of metaphoric constructions may be revealed in shared metaphorical entailments and in partial correspondences among the metaphoric
networks, structures, or foci established by those entailments. There
are often many metaphoric constructions that partially structure a
concept or domain, each illuminating some facet of it. These various
constructions and mappings tend to set different perspectives and to
serve different analytic purposes by emphasizing varied aspects of the
concept or domain.
Evans-Pritchard's(1965) explication of the Nuer idea of kwoth by
reference to not only various cultural metaphors that implicate matters
of space, time, genealogy, ecology, et cetera, but also various facets of
different cultural notions of deity, power, spirit, refraction, and other
abstract notions, implicitly proceeds by analytic attention to metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings. He attempts to align
some aspects of the Nuer kwoth variously with the Latin spiritus, the
Greek pneuma, and the Hebrew ruah, and to bracket the relationship
between man and deity by reference to the concepts of agape and eros
as they are portrayed in Anders Nygren's theological scheme. Yet,
Evans-Pritchard (1956, 1965) is uncomfortable with this interweaving
433
of a diversity of tradition-bound metaphors, for he properly sees that

the illuminations of metaphor are eroded by their distortions. He
declines to retreat into the illusory comfort of some monothetic
classifications of Nuer religious ideas. In turn, my own approach to
unraveling the nuances of the complex Bimin-Kuskusmin concept of
aiyem-not much enhanced by an inchoate gloss of "sacred"-proceeds more explicitly by analytic attention to metaphors and analogies
that delimit a theoretical puzzle in the ways the idea is conceptualized, used, and experienced in myriad contexts (Poole, n.d.). The
concept of aiyem may be an attribute of persons, things, contexts, and
an aneng ("time-place"). It is generally viewed as a condition-a state
to be inferred retrospectively from the outcome of events. It is best
understood to be canonically a stative verb or, less commonly, an
abstract verbal noun denoting efficacy or potency. Complex, linguistically facilitated comparisons of aiyem with the lexical, syntactical,
and semantic variations of Polynesian ideas of mana provide an
especially illuminating set of metaphoric lenses that probe the nuances of the notion more subtly than encasing them in some more
simplistic anthropological version of the Durkheimian concept of the
sacred.
Each of these anthropological analyses attempts to say something
of general significance about a culturally particular and peculiar
concept, but neither endeavor seeks analytic closure in toto. Instead,
each case presents, through sets of different selections, focusings,
bracketings, and other shapings that are constructed by different
metaphors, articulated by different analogic mappings, and motivated
by different problem orientations or theoretical puzzles, a partial
coherence among its metaphors or analogies that may tell us something new, interesting, and even theoretically important. Analytic
metaphors or analogies, however, are imaginative, creative constructions that must be explicated if precision of comparison is to follow
comparative insight. Yet, we can only specify the formal properties of
an extant construction, but not how to produce an illuminating and
useful analytic metaphor.
If we can begin to make significant sense of indigenous culturalreligious concepts in relation to our own analytic concepts by postulating that both are genres of metaphoric constructions, can establish
this recognition as the (metaphoric)ground of our comparison of them,
and can elaborate such comparisons by attending to the detail of the
analogic mappings that interconnect these concepts and their domains, why can we not do the same with the diversity of our
definitions or classifications of religious phenomena? This exercise
demands that we consider the extent to which our real and/or nominal
definitions, classifications, or modes of explication of religious phe-
434
nomena involve metaphors that are structured and focused to highlight certain theoretical problems or puzzles. To claim that "religion is
X" does not necessarily imply that is all religion is, or even that a
monothetic definition of religion is in any way central to the analysis.
The recognition of such definitional limitations allows us to consider
formally the theory-constitutive aspects of metaphor or analogy
(Gentner, 1981, 1982).
If we encounter claims that religion-or myth, ritual, or some
other conventional aspect of religious phenomena-is performative
(in the different senses of Goffmanand Tambiah), a system of symbols
(in the different senses of Geertz and Turner), a functional design
focused on need-fulfillment (in the different senses of Freud and
Malinowski), or sacred, social, ideological, or what have you, we must
analyze those claims in the context of the descriptions, interpretations, and explanations in which they are embedded. We must
examine how those claims are put to use in shaping those descriptive,
interpretive, and explanatoryframeworks.In this critical way, we may
render explicit the essential structureand entailments of these claims
as metaphoric or analogic kinds of analytic constructions.
When Leach (1968) defines ritual as a mode of communication and
then forges a complex set of analytic metaphors in terms of the idioms
of information theory, linguistics, and structuralism,the critical point
of the definition is not a total encompassment of a phenomenologically closed category to be explored in a totalistic sense. Indeed,
Leach's analytic construction claims that if we explore certain (communicative) facets of what is conventionally called "ritual" through
the lens of this metaphor, the often postulated contrast between myth
and ritual may be usefully dissolved; and both myth and ritual
(together) may be innovatively analyzed by means of linked communicative metaphors that yield a similar pattern of analogic mappings in
each instance. Leach articulates the linkage or coherence among his
metaphoric constructions in terms of their entailments in information
theory, linguistics, and structuralism. He makes no claim that communication is a distinctive feature of a monothetic category of religion, but shows that certain metaphors enlighten the interpretation of
particular cases and produce comparative generalizations of broader
theoretical significance.
In another contribution focused on biblical texts, Leach
(1969:25-83) employs a structuralist metaphor of mythology as a
powerful intellectual device that both posits and mediates fundamental, existential contradictions. He draws significantly on L6viStraussianinsights into mythologiques, but his analysis is not encased
in a L~vi-Straussian epistemology or methodology in certain important respects. Leach assumes that sacred texts contain a mysterious
435
religious message that cannot be inferred directly from the surface

structure and manifest content of the narrative, and that this mystery
is somehow encoded in a complex, deep structure of the text (or, of a
set of related texts). As a communicative form, the code is founded on
permutations of patterned structures, and the analytic process of
decoding attempts to discover what persists as an underlying pattern
throughout a sequence of transformations. His exploration of the
implications of this structuralistmetaphor leads to a complex analytic
construction of specific, formal, analogic relationships among otherwise seemingly disparate details of genealogy and geography, sexual
and political relations, male and female categories, rules of exogamy
and endogamy, ethnicity and conquest, images of priest and king, et
cetera, which are drawn together in analysis through intricate and
cross-referencing analogic mappings among myriad domains. The
formal (quasimathematical) characteristics of Leach's analytic metaphor are sufficiently explicit and systematic to permit a comparison of
this mode of description, interpretation, and explanation with other
genres of structuralist analyses of myth and other socio-cultural
phenomena.
L6vi-Strauss (1962) is a master of metaphor (or metonym, synecdoche and other figurative constructions) in structuralist analyses of
cultural phenomena and reflections on traditional anthropological
ideas. His grand studies of mythologiques are often composed in
musical metaphors (overture, finale, fugue, sonata, cantata, et cetera),
and the image of bricolage stands at the center of the classificatory
capacities of la pens6e sauvage. Communication in any form is
equated with one of its special forms-language. The idea of "circulation of women" becomes the critical nexus of marriagerelations and
kinship systems. The notion of "species for genus" becomes the idiom
for articulating otherwise diverse cultural forms of the circulation,
communication, and classification of phenomena. In a splendid tour
de force, he dissolves and refigures the traditional anthropological
"problem of totemism" by attending to the forms of classification that
it was variously intended to encompass. His insight involves seeing
totemic phenomena as constituting a second-degree dyadic relationship between two sets of first-degree relationships or as being predicated on an analogic resemblance between two systems of differences.
L6vi-Strauss' dual appeal to intuition and to reason in his analytic
characterization of totemism is bound up with his intricate use of
analogy and metaphor, whether or not the analytic consequences
achieve an empirical or theoretical solidity.
In turn, drawing on speech act theory, Tambiah (1968, 1973)
explores the several senses in which ritual acts and magical spells can
be seen as performatives, drawing on the symbolic, iconic, indexical,
436
referential, and pragmatic meanings of rituals and the ritual modes of

their articulation. Tambiah's sense of the analogy that constructs focal
aspects of ritual as performatives is richly extended in Harris's (1978)
analysis of Taita religion. Elaborating the performative metaphor with
analytic subtlety, she demonstrates how performative utterances in
contexts of ritual (re)create, present, and make present realities of the
world that are framed, lived, and experienced in the ritual itself. In
the ritual speech of kutasa, participantsengage in performative acts of
considerable consequence by refusing to incorporate or "casting out
anger." The performative metaphor is more precisely explicated in
analogic mappings onto myriad aspects of ritual contexts. In another
metaphoric casting of religious phenomena, Turner (1967) explores
the analogies of drama, transformation, periodicity, liminality, and
other configurations of ritual structure, anti-structure, and process,
and develops an insightful metaphoric conceptualization of ritual
symbols in his elaboration of Freud's theory of dream symbolism. In
yet another and quite different sense of analytic context, Spiro
(1966:96-98, passim) defines religion as "an institution consisting of
culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings," but his analytic metaphors and sophisticated analogic
mappings are not to be confused or conflated with others that use
similar terms for different concepts (Goody, 1961; Horton, 1960). In
his intricate and compelling analyses, this complex, multi-faceted
metaphor draws upon affective, behavioral, cognitive, and motivational factors. These factors are both predicated on pre-cultural and
pan-human factors and generated in the family through socialization
and enculturation into a casual relationship to beliefs, rituals, and
values as culturally constituted projective systems. Spiro finds
Freud's analogic imagery a rich source for his own imaginative but
highly systematic construction of a metaphor and analogic mapping.
Founded on a carefully articulated sense of a theoretical problem and
a clear logic of explanation, Spiro's analytic metaphor forges a coherent (hypothetico-deductive) relationship among cultural, psychological, and social variables in a manner that is shaped both by the
problem orientation and the criteria of explanation (and their epistemological foundations).
A comparison of the studies of Spiro (1978, 1982) and Tambiah
(1970, 1976, 1984) on Buddhism constitutes a splendid example of the
differences in the consequences for analysis of differently constructed
theoretical metaphors, the analogic mappings that such metaphors
entail and enable, and the characteristics of the modes of description,
interpretation, and explanation that they implicate. The analytic
approaches of Harris, Spiro, Tambiah, and Turner differ not only from
one another, but also from the approaches of Leach and L6vi-Strauss,
437
but one must go beyond the obvious contrasts and collisions of

perspectives to consider whether or not there may be some overlap
among them in which a partial coherence emerges. In this limited
possibility of coherence, as well as in the more obvious contrasts,
among such approaches (metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings), one may find the promise of a principled linkage of related,
albeit significantly different theoretical insights.
As a final example of the characteristics of metaphoric construction and analogic mapping in the analysis of religious phenomena, let
us return to Jonathan Z. Smith, to examine the way how he proceeds
in a comparison. For this finale, I choose the case of "Sacred
Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon" (Smith, 1982c). Smith
constructs his analytic metaphor by restricting the idea of "canon"usually a tradition-bound term of theological discourse in literate,
Western religions-in a carefully crafted manner that creates a relationship of postulated similarity between "canon," on the one hand,
and what he calls Listenwissenschaft, on the other. Such lists are
typically small, mutable, open sets of unordered or arbitrarilyordered
items, or are particular kinds of transformationsor permutations of
those features-for example, catalogs, in which the sets may remain
heterogeneous and open, but an account can be given of their
organization. A "canon" differs from a list or a catalog, however,
because it is a closed and immutable set and requires a hermeneute or
some technique of translation or interpretation. The concept of
Listenwissenschaft refers to two linked aspects of lists-of which
"canon" is a sub-type or with which "canon" exhibits a commonality
of postulated aspect(s). In the first instance, the idea of Listenwissenschaft is concerned with the formal characteristics or properties of
the construction of lists. In the second instance, Listenwissenschaft
focuses on the ways lists are used exegetically by interpreters to relate
the particular to the general through a totalizing extension of the list
corpus to diverse problems of interpretations by "readings" that link
the list lexicon to semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic considerations.
By bracketing, focusing, and otherwise shaping "canon" as
Listenwissenschaft in this manner, Smith can compare-that is, construct an illuminating relationship among-such apparently diverse
phenomena as New Guinea Iatmul initiations, Malay Pygmy explanations of storms, Babylonian omens, Talmudic interpretations, Australian Walbiri designs, and African Ndembu and Yoruba divinations.
Smith selects, shapes, and organizes specific aspects of each "ethnographic" case in accordance with the metaphoric construction that
guides his analysis, yet he notes critical differences among cases as a
way of expanding the permutations of Listenwissenschaft-that
is,
constructions of list types and related exegetical modes-and, thus, of
438
"redescribing canon." In this manner of comparison, the analytic

notion of "canon"-now
no longer bracketed and limited by its
tradition-bound sense-is
not only linked to a significant set of
theoretical puzzles and problems, but also refined formally in relation
to similar intellectual devices and extended ethnographically. The
possibilities of analogic mappings among domains is systematically
extended, but the idea of canon is not subjected to some monothetic
form of closure. Indeed, the metaphoric constructions and the
analogic mappings that illuminate canon also imply new mappings
that might be postulated with respect to current research in linguistics
and ethnosemantics, set theory, cognitive science (especially cognitive psychology), and the anthropological perspectives of Turner
(1967) on the character of indigenous interpretation and explanation
and of Goody (1977) on modes of classification (including lists). Smith
himself notes several significant implications of his endeavor that
remain unexplored but hold promise of theoretical significance. In
examples of this kind, "redescribed" as metaphoric constructions and
analogic mappings, one can begin to perceive subtle images and
tracings of the "fibers" that constitute partially overlapping strands of
similarity in Wittgenstein's metaphor of family resemblances: the
construction of new and significant analytic lenses without the logical
empiricist compulsion to establish rigid monothetic boundaries, and
of a sense of important theoretical puzzles or problems cast as
metaphors or analogies. Such an approach suggests important new
grounds of definition or classification and, thus, of description, interpretation, and explanation in analysis.
We can evaluate theories as metaphors or theory-constitutive
their entailed or implied analogical mappings-in
metaphors-and
terms of their formal structure, their clarity and precision in focusing
and delimiting comparison, their possibilities of extension and generalization, their imaginative formulation of interesting and important
puzzles and problems, and their implications for charting future
directions of analytic inquiry. The puzzles, problems, foci, and parameters of future research, however, must be negotiated so that we come
to have a sense of similarity and difference in what we imagine our
materials to be, in what we ask of those "ethnographic" materials, and
in why we ask what we ask. These fundamental questions, and the
epistemes, paradigms, root metaphors, or world hypotheses that are
their epistemological contexts, must shape the beginnings of our
dialogues about the subject and the course of the academic study of
religion. The close and careful assessment of the usefulness of
illuminating metaphors, however, is a matter not only of the formal
recognition of theoretical puzzles and problems, but also of the
imaginative, creative aspects of their variable construction and ana-
439
lytic use as enlightening analogic forms. Perhaps we can develop a set

of evaluative criteria for judging particularly successful metaphoric
constructions, but we cannot yet specify formal procedures for generating sensitive, productive metaphors or analogies. All such undertakings rest heavily upon the creativity of the analyst, but our dialogue
must probe what can be understood and made explicit about the
nature of our theoretical problems and how they are instantiated in
our descriptions, interpretations, and explanations.
If we worry less about how to partition phenomena into bounded
categories imposed by the formal rigidities of monothetic definition,
and more about the logical nature and epistemological foundation of
our theoretical problems and the imaginative but constrained possibilities of their metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings, we
may discern more about what comparison can do. Among other
queries, nevertheless, two questions loom especially large: Is there
any systematic precision in metaphoric constructions and analogic
mappings? Can their coherence, if any, be developed, extended, and
generalized systematically? There is no hidden agenda here, for I
have implied all along that I am concerned to promote the position in
the academic study of religion that both local understandings and
broad abstractions must be anchored to matters of theory if they are to
be meaningful, and that description and interpretation are necessary
but not sufficient unless they are anchored to explanation, which
implicates theory and method (Grfinbaum, 1984; Penner and Yonan,
1972; Smith, 1978b; Spiro, 1966, n,d,; cf. Geertz, 1973, 1984).
On the matter of precision and rigor, Samuel Parker in 1666, a fine
year, one would think, for paradigm shifts, noted that "metaphorical
Termes, are not real Truths, but the meer products of Imagination,
dress'd (like Children's babies) in a few spangled empty words."33
Metaphor can indeed be vacuous, yet metaphor and other trope
constructions are among our most important cognitive-intellectual
devices for partial or aspectual comprehension of what perhaps cannot
be grasped or understood totally. Indeed, what perspective would be
involved in a total understanding of the whole of some phenomenon?
Cognitive science firmly notes the wrongheadedness of the very
question. Because our analytic concepts are metaphorically structured
("theories are edifices"), we are able to use expressions or ideas-for
example, "construction," "foundation," "level," "cornerstone," et
cetera-from one domain ("architecture") to elaborate corresponding
or matching aspects, features, dimensions, relational predicates, or
attributional predicates of a metaphorically structured target domain
("theories"), and to trace their implications by attending to the detail
"
Quoted in Lakoff and Johnson (1980:191).
440
of analogic mappings (Gentner, 1981, 1982). Any particular phrasing

and entailment or implication of an analytic metaphor (or set of
metaphors) and its similarity-statement(s) can be made formally explicit and then explored and extended in the precision and range of its
foci. Indeed, with the assistance of special insights from cognitive
science, linguistics, and philosophical logic, perhaps we can learn to
reconstruct our analytic metaphors with increasing clarity as a rational, systematic, and non-intuitive enterprise. If we can pursue this
aim and accomplish this goal, and we have not done so yet, we may be
able to make formal theoretical constructions of tighter specification
than "religion is a system of numinous symbols" without losing the
sometimes evocative power of such figurative statements and without
retreating toward the fabricated security of monothetic forms. Indeed,
this endeavor should enhance our fundamental comprehension of
comparative analytic constructions, which are centrally and intricately
bound up with metaphoric constructions and analogic mappings.
On the matter of coherence, the internal systematicity of both
particular metaphoric constructions and (interlinked) sets of analytic
metaphors must be examined in terms of the structure of semantic
foci, the overlap of semantic fields, the matching of the semantic
networks (nodes, attributes, and relations) that characterize domains,
and the linkage of metaphoric or analogic entailments or implications.
The idea of an analogic mapping holds much promise for this critical
exploration of senses of coherence (Gentner, 1981, 1982). If the
metaphoric mode of theory construction and of construing theory,
which implicates connections of family resemblance, is more or less
structurally integrated (in Leach's [1963: 1-10] mathematical sense),
we may explore the possibility of devising some topological series of
the metaphorical or analogical constructions of theoretical puzzles or
problems. Such formal explorations may show us not only significant
logical lacunae and other infelicities in our formulations of problem,
but also how analyses founded on a theoretically informed set of
metaphors and puzzle or mappings tend to cohere in important ways
that can be specified and assessed. The concerns presented here as
suggestive notes on certain philosophical concerns remain largely
speculative, and there is much discomfort both in some loss of faith in
a logical empiricist view and in the grounds and constraints of the
interest. Indeed, what
rising tide of hermeneutical-interpretive
Comte perceived as the rational fulfillment of human achievement,
Weber came to see as an iron cage (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1979; If.).
Yet, how our analytic constructions of religious phenomena are
epistemologically founded, theoretically articulated, and methodologically implemented cannot avoid such philosophical dilemmas and
must make reasoned choices with respect to them. The intellectual
441
consequences are considerable. When theoretically informed comparison and, thus, the possibilities of generalization are held to be central
and essential components of the academic enterprise of studying
religion by attending to religions, the choices are not open. Indeed,
the choices taken in this essay are clear: "ethnographic" description is
a constructed context for the interpretive unraveling of meaning and
the formulation of possible explanation with respect to matters of
discovery, which then must be articulated in a theoretical context and
form in the service of enabling comparison, generalization, explanation, and validation. The immediate concern of this essay, however,
has been to suggest that the structure of family resemblances,
polythetic categories, metaphoric constructions, and analogic mappings may shed important light on the formal nature of comparison.
That particular illumination is critical, for it focuses attention on
Smith's (1983b: 35) fundamental "question, 'How am I to apply what
the one thing shows me to the case of two things?' The possibility of
the study of religion depends on its answer." Amen. Let us center a
significant emphasis of our opening dialogue here.
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American Academy of Religion

Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LIV/ 3

METAPHORS AND MAPS:

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

The enchantment and challenge of prolonged field study-and

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

approaches exhibit a commonality of interest with anthropology that

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

organizes, reconstructs, and redescribes them as data, all scholars of

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

purpose of comparison and on a theoretically informed analysis.

4. No variable is the cause of X if it is not antecendent to X.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In his remarkable essay "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," Smith

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

mythical.... In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and

On the problem of conceptualizing inter-relationships between folk or cultural and

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

what... [one] sees conveys no information until... [one] knows

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

and often tacit explication of the implications of powerful trope

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

distinguishable-entities before analysis draws and specifies the

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

either attributes (that is, predicates taking one argument) or relations

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

respect to the hierarchical level of the predicates in the propositional

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

empirical nature of the phenomenon to be explored, or to be analytic

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

staking out an early and problematic middle ground, the foundations

And Evans-Pritchard (1967:9) noted that, " ... to obtain objectivity in

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

nize that all apparent members of the class or set constructed by a

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

properly call X's "X's." In other words, we call something an "X"

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

1975). These analytic advantages of the idea of family resemblances as

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

also provides information apparently extrinsic to what I see and hear,

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

of a diversity of tradition-bound metaphors, for he properly sees that

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

religious message that cannot be inferred directly from the surface

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

referential, and pragmatic meanings of rituals and the ritual modes of

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

but one must go beyond the obvious contrasts and collisions of

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"redescribing canon." In this manner of comparison, the analytic

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

lytic use as enlightening analogic forms. Perhaps we can develop a set

Quoted in Lakoff and Johnson (1980:191).

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

of analogic mappings (Gentner, 1981, 1982). Any particular phrasing

Poole: Metaphors and Maps

"Models, Analogies, and Theories." Philosophy of Science 31: 328-350.

Baal, Jan van