PRESENTATION Religion: Theoretical Instruments and Social Interactions Miguel J. Hernández Madrid 1 The study of religion as a social fact susceptible to observation, recording, analysis and explanation through Sociological and Anthropological methods has its main theoretical support in the works of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their attempts to define it as an object of knowledge in the Social Sciences. One salient problem in this effort has been the difficulty in coming to an understanding of the relationship between the symbolic meanings that constitute the complex components of religions and the social meaning that the congregation and detractors of a religion devise and implement in the course of their daily realities. This route has guided the course of the diverse approaches that have emerged through empirical research in order to examine the object of religion in specific social and cultural settings, to propose methodological approaches, and to illustrate the singular importance of religion in the social transformations of the contemporary world. In this context, the sociological writings and thought of Pierre Bourdieu occupy a place of undeniable importance in reflections on the phenomenon of religion, due to the heuristic vision in his approach and his constant invitation to discuss it. In this issue, Relaciones is honored to publish the Spanish translation by Alicia B. Gutiérrez of Bourdieu s article Genèse et structure du champ religieux [1971], an essay that has long been recognized by specialists as one of the pioneering works in which Bourdieu tests the analytical potential of his concept of field for an empirical object of study. Moreover, the theoretical acuity with which this article analyzes the phenomenon of religion has established it as a key reference for modern studies of this topic. The article itself is preceded by an Introductory Note by Hugo José Suárez, in which the author outlines the history of the translations of Bourdieu s works on religion into languages other than French, and situates them in the framework of his thought. Part of the context that Suárez reconstructs is the intellectual ambience of the epoch in which Bourdieu wrote Genèse et structure
du champ religieux, and the stimulation he received upon re-reading the sociological works of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. The Introductory Note identifies the links needed to comprehend Bourdieu s work on religion as part of a wider research project from which emerged the methodological concepts and tools required to study social phenomena of this kind. Related to the debate that Bourdieu s writings have generated, and among the many works inspired by some of his arguments, we find those of Jean Pierre Hiernaux, the author of the second article in our Thematic Section. Hiernaux first offers a review of key questions related to the symbolic meanings we attribute to religion and the sociological categories used to analyze them, which he places in the context of transformations of contemporary religions. The essay ends with a fruitful dialogue with, and among, classical authors like Durkheim, Freud and Weber. 1 The author fulfills several objectives that are quite stimulating for reflection. First, he suggests that we leave behind the dichotomy of substantive and functional distinctions of religion and establish a hierarchy of those categories that will serve to describe and circumscribe concrete fields of observation, and those that allow the comprehension of the radical phenomena that diverse, concrete socio-historical forms do little more than express. It is in this theoretical order that he frames his discussion. Second, the author retells his own experience in empirical research inspired in Greimas structural semantics on what he calls social symbolics, which would include within its dynamics phenomena identified as religion. To support his vision, he presents an exploration of the way in which two other authors Durkheim and Freud conceptualize the existence of this symbolic phenomenon ( idealization and illusion ), and their intrinsic theoretical link to the model of the individual-society relationship and the construction of a legitimate order. Coinciding with his earlier proposal on social symbolics, the author points out how these classical works also conceptualize symbolic dynamics including religion as a process of ongoing adaptation, adjustment and re-elaboration of subjects according to their experience of objective conditions. 1 The notes for the Presentation of Hiernaux s article were elaborated by Cristina butiérrez Zúñiga.
Finally, in a reflection relevant to the contemporary debate in the discipline of Sociology, the author discusses the pertinence of applying Bourdieu s theory of fields to the sphere of religion: acutely pointing out just how this focus implies the expropriation of the eventual work of subjects in favor of paying particularized attention to the work of specialists, which, in addition to contradicting the proposed model of social symbolics and its continuous re-elaboration by the actors themselves, turns out to be even more erroneous in a sociocultural context such as the current one, which is characterized by the desinstitutionalization and individualization of religion. The third article, and the one with which we close the Thematic Session, is by Amira Plascencia Vela, who analyzes another type of contribution to the field of religious studies through a review of the philosophical and literary works of Alberto Rembao. Though they are vast and include analyses of important topics, the writings of this Protestant author and theologian from Chihuahua are little known or disseminated in Mexico and Latin America, despite the importance of their thematic contents. Partly due to these circumstances, Plascencia was motivated to write about the factors that affected Rembao s career and the itinerary of his writings in the early 20 th century. One factor of note was, of course, that upon the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution he emigrated to New York, the city in which he lived while writing most of his theological and literary works. However, also important was the fact that he wrote during a period when the publishing industry in Mexico was dominated by the Catholic press, which meant that the cultural and political conditions for disseminating Protestant thought in many Spanish-speaking countries were very restricted. Plascencia a biographical and intellectual perspective on the fundamental aspects and directions of Rembao s thought taht emphasizes his interest in examining certain theological and cultural features of Latin America as a means of presenting Protestant thought through both academic books addressed to an erudite public, and novels intended to reach a wider audience. The social content of his focus and his concern for topics such as religious pluralism and ethnic differences in an indigenous and mestizo America reveal the importance of his works in the intellectual and transcontinental context of a time in which writers of the stature of José Carlos Mariategui in Peru were interpreting their own national realities.
In the final part of her article, Plascencia presents an analysis of Rembao s novel Lupita. Un relato de la revolución en México, which interweaves concerns for the future of religion in Mexico in light of the advance of Marxist ideology in the revolutionary regime. Through this essay, the author rescues and reveals a precursor of later thought on the theme of religion in Mexico and Latin America from the perspective of Protestantism, and provides keys to understanding Rembao s works and their relation to other intellectual approaches of the time. In the Documents Section, Alberto Carrillo Cázarez introduces and presents an unpublished document that illustrates the situation of the frontier region of Pénjamo-Tlazazalca in the late 16 th and early 17 th centuries. This text, rescued from the Archivo General de la Nación portrays the important role that the congregation of Pénjamo and Tlazazalca played along the frontier between the Chichimecas and Tarascos. The General Section of this issue begins with an essay by Juan Álvarez-Cienfuegos Fidalgo that compares descriptions of The Orient written by two Franciscan friars in the Late Middle Ages: Giovanni di Pian Carpino and Guillaume de Rubruck. The author situates the two friars in their historical context and summarizes the main points of the chronicles they wrote about their travels, suggesting that they formed part of the literary milieu in which Columbus wrote. The author corroborates what other historians and philologists who studied unpublished texts in the framework of the 500 th Anniversary of the Discovery of America had already shown: that Columbus vision of the new continent was conditioned by his earlier readings of medieval traditions on the wonders of The Orient and his expectation of reaching those lands. In the second article, Peter Gerritsen and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg adopt a socio-historical perspective to analyze the spatial and temporal dynamics of extensive cattle-raising in the indigenous community of Cuzalapa, located in the Biosphere Reserve of Manantlán on the southern coast of the state of Jalisco. The authors first present a brief description of the strategic role that cattle-raising played in forming the agricultural landscape from the Colonial Period to the Mexican Revolution and, later, in government policies that up to the decade of the 1970s fostered the development of the industrial and urban sector, and ending with the current production crisis. The practice of extensive cattle-raising that involves occupying large tracts of land, coupled with the low level of investment in maintaining pasturelands, have produced negative results in terms of viability and clear tendencies towards ecological deterioration. In this
problematic context, the authors examine the case of the expansion of cattleraising in the sierra of Manantlán, by seeing it as a social process that is reorganizing the dimensions of time and space. Based on findings from their analysis of the region, the authors suggest that the specific characteristics of indigenous and peasant areas must be taken into account in order to foster the sustainability of cattle production and strengthen endogenous processes that are taking place in such local territories. English translation by Paul C. Kersey Johnson