Religion as Extension Transference

 

Edward T. Hall

In his 1976 book Beyond Culture, anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduces extension transference, a term that is both profound and simple. It is a doorway into the paradox of a fish asking another fish, "What is this thing they call the sea?" Extensions are things--tools, ideas, words, and customs--invented to improve survival or comfort. Once fully adopted, they tend to become invisible, "natural." Their rules function as a collective unconsciousness as we assume and obey them but barely notice them and can only haltingly describe them. The general word for the entire body of naturalized and accepted extensions of a group of people is culture. 

Within the last few million years, Hall points out, the human genome has changed very little, but cultural evolution--the evolution of our extensions--has made us vastly different from remote ancestors who had only "a few crude tools and the rudiments of language" (p. 40). The extensions of our native culture tend to be seen as facts of nature even if other cultures have constructed contradictory extensions that serve them as well. We lose track of the fact that our own culture's extensions are not innate but are human inventions, perhaps millennia old, transmitted from generation to generation. Extension transference is mistaking extensions for the innate functions they extend.

Language is an obvious example. Any dog owner knows that his pet has complex and effective thinking processes only loosely connected to language. Dogs inherit the brains of gray wolves, who survived in the wild by making good decisions under harsh conditions. To this type of thinking, humans add language, but much of our thought operates independently of verbal content. I may know someone but can't recall her name. A planned action occurs as a half-visual nonverbal flash. I perform it but can't explain why. Without this kind of thinking, sports would be impossible--indeed, most of our practical activity in the world. Trying to capture the musculature of walking in words is a sure way to stumble, best done sitting down. Language is a specialized, linear, public form of thought, culturally defined. Floating on a sea of sensation, memory, and intuition, expressing that sea for the practical purpose of social interaction, language is a set of ambiguous symbolic sounds, linear artifacts of non-linear thought. It is a specialized extension.

Language extends more basic thinking. Without the word dog, my dog can recognize a brother creature, and I presumably could too without a term for the species. But the symbolic sound, along with thousands of others in my vocabulary, organized by an intuitive grammar, enables me to think in a structured way and to communicate with others. Spoken English, like every other "natural" language, is a primary extension of thought, but the process doesn't end there. Culture forms in layers. Extensions are themselves extended. Writing extends spoken language (a secondary extension) and formal logic and prescriptive grammar extend that. Printing extends writing. Schools tend to teach  highest extensions, treating the printed, edited form of a language as if it were the real one. Dialects such as Black English and conversational Arabic, because they lack dictionaries and their extensions are not taught in schools, tend to be regarded as disorderly copies of higher-level extensions, but they have their own ordered grammar and vocabulary.

A culture is an inconceivably complex ecology of extensions, far more elaborate than anybody can be aware of at any given time. In practice, culture guides us unconsciously. It exists independently of any subset of people who practice it but also exists within those people. Whatever we learned when socialized as children is all-but indistinguishable from nature itself, and we can give no reasons for it except relative to other cultural extensions, so that our own culture is for us a self-justifying holograph of interlinked relations. It is like a holograph, Hall suggests: (1) from a part of it we can construct the whole, if more dimly, and (2) alteration of a part alters the whole (Beyond Culture, pp. 170-171). From inside a culture, we can't imagine another way of thinking and behaving, and, if we hear of one, our reaction may be disgust or disbelief. 

Of course, this is never entirely simple, there are subcultures within cultures, but ordinary social nonconformity takes the form of highly localized variations within broad patterns, a slogan within a shared language or a fashion within conventions of wearing cloth and grooming hair--or, politically, a change in the distribution of funds within a monetary system.

Unless we wish to revert to the life-style of primates, we must skillfully and intuitively operate within cultures of multilayered extensions. We internalize the informal rules of culture and obey them without thinking, only becoming aware if people violate them. 

 I'll share one delightful example from a field that Hall developed: proxemics the language of space (Silent Language, pp. 175-177). Social distance is understood as how far apart two friendly-not-intimate men stand in conversation. For Americans, it's about two feet. Standing closer is felt as aggression or unwarranted intimacy. Without thinking about it, we feel discomfort and back up. However, standing significantly farther away is read as "standoffish" and signals a formal relationship, something like public speaking or a boss behind a desk. This too is uncomfortable. It's hard to sustain a friendly one-on-one at that distance. We feel the need to step closer. 

In Arabic cultures, however, social distance is closer, producing the absurd situation of an American backing off from a friendly Arab, who then moves closer, until the pair progress across a room, the American walking backwards. Both are well-intentioned and expressing the norms of their cultures, trying to adjust, not understanding what is wrong. In the end, both may blame the crazy foreigner, but, with luck, the encounter may lead both to realize their own unconscious extension transference--the American that he has mistaken his culture-bound representation of aggression (standing "too" close) for the thing itself. Working with Arab students at a community college, I learned to stay put and accept their intrusion into my social bubble as friendliness.

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So what does this have to do with religion? 

Simply that religious language and practice are extensions of whatever religion is about. Thus, to take them as essentially real in themselves--however functional--is to falsify them. It isn't easy to discern what religion is about, its subject in the sense that cooking extends hunger/nutrition and language extends thought/feeling. Religion clearly has several functions, not the least as glue creating social cohesion, belonging, and structure--a function central to Emile Durkheim's theory of totems (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2022/07/blood-and-urine-crucifixes-flags-and.html). Then there's religion's function of giving a sense of control over the world, something powerful to pray and sacrifice to. Enlightenment theories of religion (a term not invented until the 17th century) traced its origins to the personifying of forces of nature, a first stage in the domestication of a chaotic universe. Or the subject of religion may be private mental states, "spiritual" conditions, a idea congruent with the Calvinist conversion and with Asian religions that seek enlightenment through spiritual discipline. The rituals, practices, scriptures, and beliefs of the international mishmash we call religion seem capable of serving at least three elemental functions. I don't presume to disentangle them.

It does seem clear that religion is an extreme case of extension transference. A great deal of reverence is shown toward the particular religious extensions of whatever people espouse, despite the fact that these are human inventions typically at several removes from anything elemental--culturally relative tools for social cohesion, cosmic explanation, or spirituality. Our knowledge of cultural pluralism tells us that other tools function well in other cultures, if not for us given the holograph we've inherited. We can't understand why Moslems get so excited about disrespect for a random copy of the Quran,  a mass-produced extension of the written words, which are themselves extensions of the sounds Muhammed recited, which are extensions of conventional meanings in his vernacular, which may be extensions of sacred functions such as social cohesion or spirituality. In that sense, it functions at at least four removes. But in their holograph, the book (as I understand it) stands for a Quran in Heaven, so the slightest disrespect cuts to the bone. And our religion has its own transference, sensitive to spoken blasphemy in public.

We can only understand another culture (imperfectly, like a second language spoken with an accent) by accepting elements of its system that contradict our own. Religions are embedded in cultures and look odd, even nonsensical, from the perspective of another self-justifying system of extensions. Only by stepping inside another holograph, accepting a foreign system as the system can we begin to see other people's extensions as they see them. Less obviously, only from such a foreign perspective can we become aware of our own culture (Beyond Culture, p. 187). 

Because my mother was an English teacher and corrected my speech, I learned near-perfect "grammar" as unconscious habit and couldn't relate to the "grammar" taught in English class, though I aced every test. It seemed like tautology, saying the obvious. Only after I studied French grammar did the rules of English suddenly materialize in contrast to it. Only by seeing other cultures as valid, our own as the alien one, can we avoid absurdities like backing across a room in a conversation. Because all of our experiences are embedded in culture, no religion or other extension is true in itself, but only as it functions within the system of extensions that are its home culture. Meanings are contextual--functional relations within coherent systems.

Americans in particular (and the West in general) tend to be ignorant this. Hall argues convincingly that ethnocentrism, seeing the standards of one's own culture as universals applicable to all humanity, may be itself one of the few true universals. Still, as heirs of the Industrial Revolution with its overwhelming transportation and weapons, the West has expressed its ethnocentrism in especially violent and oppressive ways, including the European invasion of the Americas with the explicit "missionary" purpose of destroying indigenous cultures. With violence and mechanized brute force, we have for centuries constructed the fantasy of our own privilege as God's gift to the world. In Hall's words: "We in the West are convinced that we have a corner on reality--a pipeline to God--and that the other realities are simply superstitions or distortions brought about by inferior or less developed systems of thought. This gives us the 'right to free them of their ignorance and make them like us'" (Beyond Culture, pp. 180-181).

References

Edward T. Hall. Beyond Culture. Anchor, 1976.

-----. The Silent Language. Anchor, 1990.