anthropology studies of religion

"Every Culture Has a Religion"

(anthropologists dictum)

"Because religious experience, wherever it is observed, displays such great variation of cognitive and phenomenal expression, anything less than a wide-ranging holistic approach would not allow true comparisons; as a result, generalizations about the nature of religious systems would be incomplete as well as inaccurate" (Moro, 2008, pg. 2)

Outline on Religion from Cultural Anthropology textbook "Mirror for Humanity" (Kottack 2007)

• Introduction

  1. Anthony Wallace defines religion as belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces.

  2. Another perspective on religion focuses on bodies of people who gather together regularly for worship, and who accept a set of doctrines involving the relationship between the individual and divinity, the supernatural, or whatever is taken to be the ultimate nature of reality.

  3. Anthropologists have stressed the collective, shared, and enacted nature of religion, the emotions it generates, and the meanings it embodies.

     1. 1. Durkheim stressed religious effervescence, the bubbling up of collective emotional intensity generated by worship.

        2. Victor Turner used the term communitas to refer to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness.

  4. Like ethnicity and language, religion also is associated with social divisions within and between societies and nations.

  5. Religion is a cultural universal, although different societies conceptualize divinity, supernatural entities, and ultimate realities very differently.

Expressions of Religion

• 1. Neanderthal burials and European cave paintings may be evidence of early religious activity.

  2. Animism

     1. 1. E. B. Tylor was the first to study religion anthropologically.

        2. Tylor proposed that religion evolved through three stages: first animism, then polytheism, and finally monotheism.

           1. 1. Animism was a belief in spiritual beings that, according to Tylor, originated from peoples' attempts to explain dreams and trances (in which the soul was active).

              2. Polytheism is the belief in multiple gods.

              3. Monotheism is the belief in a single, all-powerful deity.

  3. Mana and Taboo

• • • 1. Mana is a sacred impersonal force that can reside in people, animals, plants, and objects.

      2. Belief in mana was especially prominent in Melanesia (the area of the South Pacific that includes Papua New Guinea and adjacent islands).

         1. 1. Melanesian mana, similar to our notion of efficacy or luck, could be acquired or manipulated by people in different ways, such as through magic.

            2. One could acquire mana by chance, or by working hard to get it.

            3. Because success was attributed to mana (and failure to a lack of mana), the notion of mana provided an explanation for differential success that people could not understand in ordinary, natural terms.

      3. In Polynesia, mana was attached to political offices.

• • • • • 1. Polynesian chiefs and nobles had more mana than ordinary people did.

          2. Chiefs were so charged with mana that contact with them, or with things they touched, was dangerous to commoners.

          3. Consequently, the bodies and possessions of high chiefs were taboo—set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people.

• 4. Magic and Religion

• • • 1. Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims.

      2. In imitative magic, magicians produce a desired effect by imitating it (e.g., the use of "voodoo dolls").

      3. With contagious magic, whatever is done to an object is believed to affect a person who once had contact with it.

      4. Magic can be associated with animism, mana, polytheism, or monotheism.

• 5. Uncertainty, Anxiety, Solace

• • • 1. Religion and magic can help reduce anxiety (e.g., facing death, enduring life crises).

      2. Malinowski argued that people turn to magic as a means of control when they face uncertainty and danger.

         1. 1. The Trobriand Islanders turned to magic only in situations (e.g., sailing) that they could not control and that therefore were psychologically stressful.

            2. In contemporary societies, magic persists as a means of reducing psychological anxiety in situations of uncertainty (e.g., baseball pitching).

• 6. Rituals

• • • 1. Rituals are formal—stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped—and performed in sacred places at set times.

      2. Rituals include liturgical orders—sequences of words and actions invented prior to the current performance of the ritual in which they occur.

      3. Rituals convey information about the participants and their traditions, and translate enduring messages, values, and sentiments into action.

      4. Rituals are inherently social, and by participating in them, performers signal that they accept a common social and moral order.

• 7. Rites of Passage

• • • 1. Rites of passage are customs associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another (e.g. Native American vision quests).

      2. Rites of passage have three phases:

         1. 1. Separation—when participants withdraw from the group and begin moving from one place or status to another.

            2. Liminality—the period between states, during which the participants have left one place or state but have not yet entered or joined the next.

            3. Incorporation—when participants reenter society with a new status, having completed the rite.

      3. Liminality involves the temporary suspension and even reversal of ordinary social distinctions, behaviors, and expectations.

      4. Communitas refers to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness during collective liminality.

      5. In certain societies, particularly nation-states, there are "permanent liminal groups" (e.g., sects, brotherhoods, cults) whose members adopt liminal features such as humility, poverty, equality, obedience, sexual abstinence, and silence.

• 8. Totemism

• • • 1. Rituals play an important role in creating and maintaining group solidarity.

      2. Social solidarity was also promoted by totemism, which was important in Native Australian religions.

         1. 1. In totemic societies, each descent group had a totem—an animal, plant, or geographical feature—from which they claimed descent.

            2. The members of a totemic group did not kill or eat their totem, except once a year when people gathered for ceremonies dedicated to the totem.

      3. Totemism uses nature as a model for society.

• • • • • 1. People relate to nature through their totemic association with natural species.

          2. Because each group has a different totem, diversity in the natural order becomes a model for diversity in the social order.

          3. At the same time, because all totems are part of nature, the unity of the human social order is enhanced by symbolic association with and imitation of the natural order.

Social Control

• 1. The power of religion affects action.

  2. Throughout history, political leaders have used religion to promote and justify their views and policies (e.g., the Taliban Movement in Afghanistan).

  3. Leaders may mobilize communities, and thereby gain support for their own policies, either by persuasion or by instilling hatred or fear.

  4. Witch hunts can be powerful means of social control by creating a climate of danger and insecurity that affects everyone, not just the people who are likely targets.

     1. 1. In state societies, witch hunts often take aim at people who can be accused and punished with least chance of retaliation.

        2. Witchcraft accusations are often directed at socially marginal or anomalous individuals.

        3. Witchcraft accusation may serve as a leveling mechanism, a custom or social action that operates to reduce status differences and thus to bring standouts in line with community norms—another form of social control.

  5. To ensure proper behavior, religions offer rewards and punishments, and many prescribe a code of ethics and morality.

Kinds of Religion

• 1. Although religion is a cultural universal, religious beliefs and practices vary cross-culturally.

  2. Wallace identified four types of religion: shamanic, communal, Olympian, and monotheistic.

     1. 1. Shamanic Religion

           1. 1. Shamans are part-time religious figures (e.g., curers, mediums, spiritualists, astrologers, palm readers, diviners) who mediate between people and supernatural beings and forces.

              2. Shamanic religions are most characteristic of foraging societies.

              3. Shamans often set themselves off symbolically from ordinary people by assuming a different or ambiguous sex or gender role.

        2. Communal Religion

• • • • • 1. Communal religions have shamans as well as community rituals such as harvest ceremonies and collective rites of passage.

          2. Communal religions are polytheistic—that is, their adherents believe in several deities who control aspects of nature.

          3. Although they are found in some foraging societies, communal religions are more typical of farming societies.

• 2. 1. 3. Olympian Religion

• • • • • 1. Olympian religions first appeared in states.

          2. Such religions have full-time, professional priesthoods that are hierarchically and bureaucratically organized, like the state itself.

          3. Olympian religions are polytheistic, characterized by pantheons of powerful anthropomorphic gods with specialized functions.

• 2. 1. 4. Monotheistic Religion

• • • • • 1. Like Olympian religions, monotheistic religions have priesthoods.

          2. In monotheism, all supernatural phenomena are manifestations of, or are under the control of, a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supreme being.

World Religions

• 1. Christianity (with more than 2 billion members) and Islam (with 1.2 to 1.3 billion practitioners) are the two largest religions in the world.

  2. More than a billion people claim no official religion.

Religion and Change

• 1. Revitalization Movements

     1. 1. Religious movements are social movements that occur in times of change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or revitalize a society.

        2. Christianity originated as a revitalization movement.

        3. The colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake is another example of a revitalization movement.

  2. Cargo Cults

• • • 1. Cargo cults are revitalization movements that emerge when traditional communities have regular contact with industrial societies but lack their wealth, technology, and living standards.

      2. Native communities attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior and manipulating symbols of the desired life style.

      3. The cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea blended Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs and practices.

         1. 1. Cargo cults take their name from their focus on cargo—European goods that have been brought to the region by cargo planes and ships.

            2. Because of their experience with big-man systems, Melanesians believed that all wealthy people eventually had to give their wealth away.

            3. Cargo cults emerged as a means of magically leveling Europeans, who refused to distribute their wealth or even to let natives know the secret of its production and distribution.

            4. Cargo cults paved the way for unified political action through which indigenous communities eventually regained their autonomy.

Secular Rituals

• 1. Ritual-like behavior can occur in secular contexts.

  2. If the distinction between the supernatural and the natural is not consistently made in a society (e.g., the Betsileo view witches and dead ancestors as real people), it can be difficult to define what constitutes religion and what does not.

  3. The behavior considered appropriate for religious occasions varies tremendously from culture to culture.

Anthropological Attempts at Defining Religion:

Tylor: "belief in spiritual beings, what he called "animism," the most primitive form of religion (Moro et al, 2008, pg, 3)

Spiro: "an institution consisting of culturally postulated superhuman beings" (ibid)

Norbeck: defined the supernatural as "to include all that is not natural, that which is regarded as extraordinary, not of the ordinary world, mysterious or unexplainable in ordinary terms"

[Through their comparitive research, anthropologists have shown that religious practices and beliefs vary in part as a result of the level of social structure in a given society. (ibid) ]

Wallace: concept of the cult institution-- "a set of rituals all having the same general goal, all explicitly rationalized by a set of similar or related belief, and all supported by the same social group" (ibid)

Cult formation:

1. individualistic: each person functions as their own specialist without intermediaries (similiar to "independent investigation of truth" in Baha'i)

2. shamanic: begining of a religious division of labor, part-time practitioners

3. communal: laypeople and specialists (priests)

Psychological Approaches

Two approaches in anthropology of religions developed: The militantly psychodynamic vs. the militantly social-structure approaches

Freudian: that religious practices can be usefully interpreted as expressions of unconscious psychological forces-- and this has become, amid much polemic, an established tradition of inquiry. In recent years, however, responsible work of this type has come to question the degree to which one is justified in subjecting historically created and socially institutionalized cultural forms to a system of analysis founded on the treatment of the mental illnesses of individuals.... The great majority of psychoanalytic studies of tribal beliefs and rites remain willfully parochial. (Moro et al, 2008, pg. 10)

Awe Theories: based on a vague sense of "religious thrill" when humans are brought to face universal forces

Confidence Theories: based on the "fear" approach. religion quiets fears of death, illness, etc. set forth by Malinowski [intrepid colonialist anthropologist] have no empirical basis or systematic conceptualization, and hence vague, like Awe theories.

Primitive Religion:

According to Levy-Bruhl, the thought of primitives, as reflected in their religious ideas, is not governed by the immanent laws of Aristotelian logical reasoning, but by affectivity-- by the vagrant flow of emotion and the dialectical principles of "mystical participation" and "mystical exclusion." (Moro et al, 2008, pg. 13)

Symbolic Systems:

Levi-Strauss looked to symbolic structures in terms of which they are formulated and expressed and applied. Myths and rites are systems of signs that fix and organize abstract conceptual relationships making abstract thought possible, permitting a construction of a "science of the concrete". "The objects rendered sacred are selected not because of their utilitarian qualities, nor because they are projections of repressed emotions, nor yet because they reflect the moral force of social organization ritualistically impressed upon the mind. Rather, they are selected because they permit the embodiment of general ideas in terms of the immediately perceptible realities--the turtles, trees, springs, and caves--of everyday experience; not , as Levi-Strauss says, apropos of Radcliffe-Brown's view of totems, because they are "goot to eat," but because they are "good to think". (Moro, 2008, pg. 13)

according to Levi-Strauss primitive religious systems are primarily communication systems "They are carriers of information in the technical Shannon-Weaver sense, and as such, the theory of information can be applied to them with the same validity as when applied to any physical systems, mechanical or biological in which the transfer of information plays a central regulative role." (Moro et al, 2008, pg. 14)

In religious belief and practice a people's style of life, what CLyde Kluckhohn called their design for living, is rendered intellectually reasonable; it is shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the world '"as it really is"' At the same time the supposed basic structure of reality is rendered emotionally convincing because it is presented as an actual state of affairs uniquely accamodated to such a way of life and permitting it to flourish. Thus do received beliefs, essentially metaphysical and established norms, essentially moral, confirm and support one another" (Moro et al, 2008, pg. 15)

Citations:

Kottack, Conrad Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology 5th Ed. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2007

Moro et al Magic, Witchcraft and Religion 7th Ed. McGraw-Hill New York 2008

Anthropology of Religion Articles:

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/BIOT_a_00018

Domestication of the Savage Mind, Jack Goody, http://books.google.com/books?id=baQtOyscXUwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false