Religion

Question 1

Problems with Defining Religions

Answer 1

• Many societies don’t have a separate word for religion–it is so integrated into politics, kinship, and economics 
• What we consider as supernatural others may not
  
  • Shoshone water babies (pa:unha) or children of the water live in creeks and lakes and are about 1 –1 ½ half feet tall

Question 2

Defining Religion

Answer 2

• Myth and worldview
• myth: A religious or sacred story that explains how the world, people, or some event, phenomenon, or practice came to be.
• worldview: A society’s knowledge, beliefs, and perspective on the world.
• Religion (textbook): A system of beliefs and practices involving supernatural powers that functions to provide meaning and a sense of control over unexplainable phenomena
• Three components definition:
  
  • Belief in spirit infusing creation
  • Knowledge about supernatural powers – theory about the nature of supernatural power and the relationship between supernatural power, the natural world, and living people
  • Practices for interacting with or controlling supernatural power

Question 3

Some Major Works

Answer 3

• Primitive Culture (1871) Tylor
• The Golden Bough (1894) Frazer
• The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) Durkheim
  
  • Rites and beliefs; sacred and profane
• Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) Evans-Pritchard
  
  • Witchcraft is logical; it is functional
• The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) Turner
  
  • Ritual in Ndembu society effects change; rites of passage
• Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (1990) Tambiah
  
  • Magic, religion, and science as three “orderings of reality”

Question 4

Religion vs Magic

Answer 4

• Religion focuses on supernatural beings - establishing rapport by becoming subordinate
• religion: A system of beliefs and practices involving supernatural beings and forces that functions to provide meaning, peace of mind, and a sense of control over unexplainable phenomena.
• Magic focuses on supernatural forces – control using specific rites or practices
• magic: The manipulation of nature using supernatural techniques to accomplish specific aims.

Question 5

Frazer’s Types of Magic

Answer 5

• Imitative Magic (sympathetic)
  
  • logic is that the effect of the action on the representation will be imitated in the real object
• Contagious magic (homeopathic)
  
  • logic is that the effect will spread from the part to the whole.

Question 6

Witchcraft

Answer 6

• Witches are people with unique magical power
  
  • Powerful/dangerous
  • Azande witchcraft (mangu)
  • Witchcraft can be countered with magic (through witch doctor)

Question 7

The Sacred and Profane

Answer 7

• Introduced by Durkheim
• Edmund Leach Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954)
  
  • “Actions fall into place on a continuous scale… From this point of view technique and ritual, profane and sacred, do not denote types of action but aspects of almost any kind of action.”
• sacred: The aspect of such things as places, times, objects, and people that is beyond sensation that makes them special and thus worthy of great respect.
• profane: The utilitarian and secular world of work and routine experience.

Question 8

Rituals

Answer 8

• The practices part of religion
  
  • “a ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, or objects, performed in a sequestered place and designed to influence preternatural [magical] entities or forces on behalf of the actor’s goals or interests” Victor Turner
• Within religious context, it is a patterned set of actions, utterances and events for interacting with or manipulating supernatural beings and forces

Some Types of Ritual

• Calendrical rituals occur on a regular schedule
• Rites of solidarity
  
  • Ancestral cult
  • A ceremony performed for the sake of enhancing social integration among a group of people.
• Rites of passage
  
  • ritual that celebrates the transition of a person from one social status to another.
  • Naming rites, puberty rites, weddings, funerals
• Crisis rituals occur on the basis of need – Rites of affliction (Turner)

Question 9

The Rites of Passage (1908)

Answer 9

• ceremonies that mark a change in a person’s social position and also help them through the transformation. These ritualistic ceremonies, which have religious significance, help both individuals and society deal with important life changes such as birth, adolescence, marriage, and death.
  1. Separation - Preliminal
  
  • purification rites
  • rituals symbolize cutting or separating e.g. removal of hair
  • seclusion
    
    2. Transition - Liminal
  • person symbolically placed “outside” society
  • observes certain taboos or restrictions
  • normal rules of the society suspended
  • rite may be seen as a symbolic death, leading to a rebirth
    
    3. Incorporation - Postliminal
  • Symbolically reborn
  • completes transition to a new status
  • lifting of restrictions
  • wear new clothes and insignia

Question 10

Liminal period

Answer 10

• Initiate separated from normal life and secluded is in an ambiguous condition 
• Initiate has nothing – no status, property, rank or kinship position 
• Initiates may be seen as sexless or bisexual, or considered unclean or polluting 
• Treated as an embryo or a newborn infant, or thought of as “dead” (by and to parents and community) 
• A suspension of normative obligations 
• Stress on servility to absolute authority of the ritual elders 
• Secret, esoteric knowledge – the sacra 
  
  • = the “crux of liminality”

Question 11

Australian Aborigine Initiation Rites

Answer 11

• Initiation ceremonies for young boys culminate in circumcision
• The ceremonies are held at a special ceremonial grounds
• The final rituals are only open to men
• Young initiates are carried to their elders on the ceremonial ground and will stay with them during the all-night “Mandiwala” dance before their circumcision
• Boys are painted up for their “Mandiwala” initiation ceremony. Their circumcision takes place early in the morning
• Initiates during their ceremony in Borroloola; they are looking at a long line of dancers that will dance closely around them at the ceremony ground.
• The initiates act as though they were dead
• About an hour before sunset, the instructors take their charges to an appointed place for a “surprise”
• Several men emerge from the bush swinging their bullroarers
• circumcision initiation: the boy has been removed from his childhood, and his body has been sacrificed. Now he has a man’s body. There’s no chance of relapsing back to boyhood after a show like that

And they emerge as men

• Postliminal phase
• With the rights and duties of men
• With knowledge about skills and myths that properly belong to men
• With information about how to interact with women and children
• They will be socially recognized as men

Question 12

Types of Religious Organizations

Answer 12

• Also from Wallace (1966)
• Individualistic or personal
• Shamanistic
• Communal
• Ecclesiastical

Question 13

Individualistic or Personalistic

Answer 13

• Each person establishes a direct connection with supernatural beings, who then guard and assist
• Contact with the supernatural usually comes in the form of a vision
• After a time of trial, a being appears and directs the supplicant to do certain things
• No role specialization
• Food forgaging
• Crow vision quest
• individualistic cult: The least complex type of religious organization in which each person is his or her own religious specialist.

Question 14

Shamanistic

Answer 14

• A shaman is a person with unusual knowledge of the supernatural
• Shamans usually serve as mediums
• Shamans frequently operate by inducing trance, during which their spirits journey to the spirit land
• Part-time specialization
• Food forgaging, pastoralism, and horticulture
• Tungus shamanism

Shamanistic Complex

• Levi-Strauss: “The Sorcerer and His Magic”
• Shamanistic complex
• Manipulate symbols to generate belief in the healer, patient and social group
• All shaman are potential sorcerers
• shamanistic cult: A type of religious organization in which part-time religious specialists called shamans intervene with the deities on behalf of their clients.

Question 15

Communal

Answer 15

• Collective rituals
• Respected elders, but not religious professionals
• Ceremonies often include sacred objects charged with supernatural force
• Communal expression often is associated with the use of totems
• Groups perform rites for community
• Horticulture and pastoralism
• Totemistic rituals
• communal cult: A type of religious organization in which groups of ordinary people conduct religious ceremonies for the well-being of the total community.

Question 16

Ecclesiastical

Answer 16

• Associated with chiefdoms and states
• Bureaucracy
• Religious beliefs and practices are highly complicated, and require the full attention of a set of specialists
• Knowledge about the supernatural is a near monopoly of the priesthood
• The “Great Religions” — Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity
• Prevalence of ecclesiastical organizations in the modern world has not eliminated other forms of religious expression
• full-time specialization in hierarchy
• Industrialism
• ecclesiastical cult: A highly complex religious organization in which full-time clergy are employed.

Question 17

Why Religion?

Answer 17

• All societies have some sort of religious institution – some argue this is based in the fact that humans need some means of explaining/dealing with death and other misfortune (often a functionalist argument)
• Theories can be roughly grouped into three categories
  
  • Intellectual/cognitive
  • Psychological
  • Social

Question 18

Tylor’s Ideas/aminism

Answer 18

• Religious belief originates in efforts to explain experiences that do not conform to ordinary principles of causation
• Dreaming and death were especially important
• Existence must have two components, a body and a soul or spirit

Animism

• The belief that animals, plants, and inanimate objects are animated by spirits.
• Spirit animates things and gives them life
• Once people came up with the idea of “spirit” they applied it to other living things
• Animism = the view that each living thing had a personal spirit
• Tylor’s scheme
• Nature worship»»>polytheism (a small set of powerful spirits)»»>monotheism (belief in a high god)

Question 19

Frazer’s Idea and mana

Answer 19

• Many societies had no notion of things being animated by personal spirits; instead, some groups thought that there was a general cosmic force that flowed through things—the mana concept
• Mana explains personal misfortune—why things happen to specific persons and not others
• Frazer concluded that the notion of mana was even more elementary and ancient than the notion of animism
• mana: An impersonal and powerful supernatural force that can reside in people, animals, plants, and objects.

Question 20

Magic, Science, and Religion

Answer 20

• Magic is like science because both are concerned with attaining other goals
• Religion is different from magic and science because we do it for intrinsic reasons – it is an end in itself
• Magic came first as people struggled with controlling or managing their environment

Question 21

Freud’s Ideas

Answer 21

Freud’s Ideas

• Myth and ritual are reactions —“symptom formations”—to emotional tensions
• The main source of these tensions is the contradiction between individual needs and society’s interest in restricting the fulfillment of those needs
• When conditions prevent individuals from satisfying wants, they can use myth and ritual to expel frustration and to reinterpret their life conditions in more satisfactory ways

Question 22

Malinowski and Problem Resolution

Answer 22

• When knowledge and technology fail, people use the supernatural for assistance
• Trobriand Islanders fished in two kinds of situations: inside the reef that surrounded the main canoe harbor, or outside it in the open sea
• When fishing inside the reef, fishermen made no appeal to the supernatural, whereas fishing outside the reef always involved appropriate appeals to spirits and the use of amulets

Question 23

Levi-Strauss and Myth

Answer 23

• Cultures instill expectations that cannot always be met
• If that gap is large, individuals are inspired to act to remedy the situation
• The remedy involves the use of myth
  
  • We alter and reinterpret myth in ways that redefine goals in a more satisfactory way 1908–2009

Question 24

Social Theories

Answer 24

• Religion is a product (reflection of?) cultural context
  
  • Xenophanes observed that “the gods of Ethiopians were inevitably black…while those of the Thracians were blond with blue eyes”
• Group solidarity – remember ancestor cults?
• Religion and political organization
  
  • Social control (remember Whiting?) – politics by other means
• Durkheim – society is the object of religion

Question 25

Durkheim – The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Answer 25

- “A projection of the social values of society”, “a means of making symbolic statements about society”, “a symbolic language that makes statements about the social order”, “religion is society worshiping itself” - Social forces are invisible and work in ways that are mysterious to individuals - Religion rises from social experience and the object of religious worship really is society itself—the supernatural is an extension of the social

Question 26

Religion and Political Organization

Answer 26

- Sociologist Guy Swanson tested Durkheim’s thesis in a cross- cultural sample - Swanson found that belief in a paramount god was strongly associated with societies that featured three levels of group organization (e.g., lineage, clan, chief) - Provides evidence that there is some association between political organization and views of the supernatural - >social hierarchy=high god

Question 27

Religious Change

Answer 27

- Maintain order, “tradition” and the status quo - Syncretism (blend together 2 or more) - Revitalization movements – Wallace coined this too! - Nativistic, revivalistic, messianic, millenarian, and utopian movements are all varieties of revitalization movements - Ghost Dance - Cargo cult - Was the protestant reformation a revitalization movement? I would say yes

Question 28

Secularism

Answer 28

- Enlightenment – pushed religion out of European politics - Secularism as dominance of science - Secularism as a product of religion - Talal Asad “anthropology of secularism” - Protestantism, individual autonomy, and private affiliationsx - “worldly affairs”

Question 29

Functions of a Religion

Answer 29

- Social Control - Conflict resolution - Reinforcement of group solidarity - Cognitive function - explains the unexplainable - Emotional function - cope with anxieties