of giving can still be said to enable the phrase. What is at stake here,
however, is no anthropological gift transfer but a particular cognitive
and linguistic resource of‘give’.
An overall criticism of pairs 1–4 and 2–5 is that if recognition
generally means that one identifies the thing with the recipient, then
sentences expressing recognition would be uninformative truisms,
like‘I recognize you as you are’,or‘we recognize your baptism as
baptism’. In some sense, this is a valid criticism. Historical and
philosophical studies point out that identification is a basic sense of
recognition. The three basic parts of the concept defined in section
1.4, that is cognition, attachment, and availability, are already present
in such truisms.
To encounter this criticism effectively, one needs to add that the
word‘identification’in our usage also contains an aspect of non-
identity. The sentences are not merely truisms but they assume that
there is or has been a non-identity that is now being overcome in the
act of recognition. This addition again evokes the claim of misrecog-
nition, as the speaker imposes a new identity on the one recognized in
this manner.^49 However, if the act of recognition is considered to be a
creative and constitutive act, it is not‘misrecognition’in the sense of
comparison with any given standard.
This being said, recognition is still a move in the power game in
which the identity of the recipient is defined in terms of the gift
transferred. This move can to some extent become relativized with
our historicalfindings that show how not only the recognizee but also
and perhaps primarily the recognizer is transformed in the act of
religious recognition. The table may illuminate this state of affairs, if
we assume that in giving oneself or presenting itself the giver or the
recognizer also changes because of the identification with the thing.
On the other hand, the table is not meant to explain all such issues,
only depicting some reflexive forms of giving and receiving, high-
lighting their proximity to the issues of religious recognition.
The table should not be used to reduce all issues of religious
recognition to the events of‘recognizing oneself’or‘itself’. Rather,
the analysis of reflexive forms shows how much can be achieved with
the linguistic resources of ‘give’. For this reason, anthropological
gift exchange may not be needed to understand the dynamics of
(^49) Cf. Bedorf’s (2010, 125) discussion of the sentence‘Perlmann als Perlmann
anerkennen’. Also Saarinen 2015.
Recognition in Religion 231