power and offers supernatural justifications for the established order.
This is true in the sense that many successful religious guilds were suc-
cessful precisely because they adopted this strategy. But it is misleading
in the sense that organized religious guilds of this kind are not the whole
of religion. Indeed, they choose this strategy precisely because the com-
petition is constant and in fact highly successful too.)
Given the elusive nature of the services they provide, literate groups
of religious specialists always remain in a precarious position. The dif-
ficult training and special knowledge make sense and can subsist only if
there is some guarantee that people will actually need the special ser-
vices. At the same time the services in question are very easily replaced, [277]
or so it would seem. Perceiving all this and reacting to it appropriately
does not mean that you have expert knowledge of political economy. In
all such groups, people have a precise though intuitive grasp of their
group's position in the market. It does not require much sophistication
to realize that your position as a priest or religious scholar is potentially
threatened by the alternatives offered by shamans and local healers.
One solution is to turn the guild's ministration into a brand,that is,
a service that is (1) distinct from what others could provide, (2) similar
regardless of which member of the guild provides it, (3) easily recog-
nizable by its particular features and (4) exclusively provided by one
particular organization. A Catholic priest offers rituals that are quite
different from the ancestor-based rituals his Fang congregation were
used to; Catholic rituals are also quite stable from one priest to
another; some observable features make it easy for most Fang
observers to distinguish between, say, a Catholic mass and what is
offered by rival guilds. There is nothing intrinsically demeaning in
saying that some services are offered in the form of a particular brand.
This is likely to occur whenever an organized group of producers is in
competition both with local, independent producers and with rival
organizations. Now the creation of recognizable brands of religious
services has important consequences on the kinds of concepts put for-
ward by religious institutions.
THE CONCEPTS OFFERED BY LITERATE GUILDS
Concepts of supernatural agency, as well as the norms of behavior
that come with them, are presented by the guilds as an explicit doc-
trine. In order to offer a unique set of religious servicesand a stable
WHYDOCTRINES, EXCLUSION AND VIOLENCE?