Boundary Fetish

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Boundary Fetish

A Boundary Fetish is the persistent, often compulsive scholarly drive to establish sharp, hierarchical boundaries between systems of knowledge and life, typically positioning Western science at the top, Western monotheism in the middle, and Indigenous spirituality and magic at the bottom. This drive is motivated not by empirical evidence but by a conscious or unconscious desire to assert the superiority of one's own European, patriarchal, and materialist identity.

Concept Map

Key Concepts

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• Eupsychian Theory
• Critical Theory
• Evolutionary Theory
• Spiritual Theory

Spiritual Theory >

• Boundary Fetish
• Boundary Problem
• Epistemic Attachment
• Ontological Bias
• Religion
• Spirituality

Syncretic Terms

Boundary Fetish >

Related LP Terms

Boundary Fetish >

• Religion

Non-LP Related Terms

Boundary Fetish >

• Religion

Notes

The term appears in the Rocket Scientists' Guide to Religion: scholars "have been trying to distinguish and elevate their own 'adult, civilized white man' European institutions (e.g., monotheistic religion and science) as superior against the 'savage,' primitive, pre-logical, narcissistic, and infantile character of the knowledge systems of the so-called 'inferior races.'... They have had, in other words, a boundary fetish."

Classic inscriptions: Malinowski (science is logical, open, objective, and empirical; magic is occult, mystical, subjective, and driven by an irrational "play of emotions upon the human organism"); Frazer (magic's "fatal flaw" is a mistaken ontology, while monotheism's "more perfect submission to the divine will... affects only those higher intelligences"); Comte (the "law of three stages," with fetishistic Indigenous beliefs as the puerile products of an "infant species"); Freud (animism = narcissism, religion = childish attachment to parents, science = maturity); Tylor.

The fetish persists in modern dress. The secularization thesis (Berger, Wilson) is Comte's law of three stages repackaged — religious societies coded as cognitively immature, secular Western modernity as the telos of human advancement — and it functioned ideologically even after its empirical failure (explosive religious growth worldwide; Berger himself recanted, conceding "desecularization"). After World War I made overt triumphalism embarrassing, the "world religions" framework (Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions) repackaged the hierarchy as pluralism: the scripture criterion conveniently demotes Indigenous systems to a residual "primal" category, Christianity becomes "first among unequals," and the Western scholar is positioned as the neutral arbiter of what counts as religion. "The hierarchy was no longer written on the surface; it was woven into the very structure of the classification itself."

The boundary fetish "is not an accident or a relic of a less enlightened age. It is structural. It is what the academic study of religion has repeatedly been mobilized to produce." Every world religions syllabus that lists a dozen "major" traditions and relegates everything else to "primal religions" draws a boundary and performs an identity ritual: "this is what we are, and this is what they are." Every repetition of the failed secularization prediction does the same.

Every attempted boundary collapses under sustained empirical attention: hunter-gatherers are not especially animistic; magic is reserved for special circumstances or adjunct to ordinary empirical technique, not mistaken for everyday causation; the sacred/profane distinction is meaningless among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard), the Huichol (Myerhoff), and West African peoples (Goody); ancient magic was rational, empirical, and socially practiced (Frazer's own evidence); and substantive/functional definitions fail to separate religion from Hollywood, sports, the New Age movement, the Boy Scouts, or science itself.

The LP conclusion: the boundaries do not exist. Unless the goal is to demonstrate European/scientific/patriarchal superiority, they need not, and should not, be asserted. Abandoning the boundary fetish is "the first step in any serious and authentic attempt to decolonize not only the study of religion and spirituality, but religion and spirituality as well."

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Footnotes

References