The paradox of shibboleth: communitas and immunitas in language and religion

Abstract

Religion and language can be structurally compared, so that insights into the latter brought about by modern and contemporary language sciences may cast new light also on the former. Language is defined as a mechanism that presentifies an absent articulation of thoughts through a present articulation of expressive devices, such definition exceeding the domain of verbal language only. In present-day language sciences, not all agree with the semantic extension of the word “language”, but most agree on the fact that it designates a mechanism. This idea has become so commonsensical in many contemporary societies to exclude any possibility of linguistic ethnocentrism. Yet, linguistic ethnocentrisms were common in the past and are not completely absent in the present, since although language is more and more seen as a unifying mechanism of all humankind, it is also considered as able to produce differences that can be used as shibboleths. However, these shibboleths ideologically conceal the fact that language produces more thresholds than frontiers, as Hjelmslev’s theory on the dialectic between matter, form, and substance can help explaining. Therefore shibboleths exist on the basis of a pertinence determined by ideological power in order to entice a feeling of social immunitas more than a feeling of social communitas. Several phenomena in the modern history of humanity have progressively eroded the idea of linguistic shibboleths, some of the most important being the concept and usage of lingua francas, the theory and practice of translation, and scholarly research in comparative linguistics. The paper initiates a comparison between language and religion by asking three questions: 1) Is the linguistic concept of lingua franca somehow exportable to the religious field? 2) Is religious translation a legitimate idea? 3) Is it possible to compare religions in the same way in which scholars have been comparing verbal languages?