Religion as an object of anthropological study

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Religion as an object of anthropological study

• 3.2.2005

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Readings

• Geertz, C. Religion as a Cultural System
• 1966 M. Banton (ed.) Anthropological Approaches
  to the Study of Religion
• 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures
• Asad, T. The Construction of Religion as an
  Anthropological Category
• 1993 Genealogies of Religion Discipline and
  Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

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Discussion topics

• Anthropological of religion
• Timeline in general
• 3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus
• Study of origin
• Study of function
• Study of meaning
• Geertz Religion as a Cultural System
• 1980s
• Thematic and theoretical pluralism
• Asad critique of Geertz
• Problems with anthropology of religion

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Anthropology of religion general timeline

• Second half of the 19th c
• Emergence of anthropology
• gt First anthropological studies of religion
• First half of the 20th c
• gt one of the four main themes in (British)
  anthropology
• Religion
• Kinship
• Economics
• Politics
• Second half of the 20th c
• more comparative and systematic approach (Morris)
• Widening of ethnographic, thematic and
  theoretical focus

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3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus

• General sequence of thematic focus
• Origin gt Function gt Meaning gt ...
• 1860s-1900
• Study of origin
• Evolutionism
• Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, Spencer, Durkheim
• 1900-1950
• Study of function
• Functionalism
• Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown,
  Evans-Pritchard

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3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus

• 1950-1980s
• Study of meaning
• Interpretive anthropology, symbolist
  anthropology, (structuralism)
• Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Douglas, Leach,
  (Lévi-Strauss) etc
• ______________________________________________
• 1980s-
• Theoretical and thematic pluralism
• Eg. Marxist approach
• Asad

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1860s-1900

• Earliest anthropological studies
• Mainly by armchair anthropologists
• Evolutionary approach
• Religion
• A primitive way of explaining the world
• Often opposed to science
• Non-rational, non-modern
• Evolution (magic gt) religion gt science

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1860s-1900

• Religion is universal
• non-rational / non-modern elements in any society
• all societies have some notion of the sacred
• Exceptions?
• Sir Samuel Baker (1866) about Nilotic people
• Without any exception they are without a belief
  in a supreme being, neither have they any form of
  worship or idolatry nor is the darkness of their
  minds enlightened by even a ray of superstition.

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1860s-1900

• Ethnographic focus
• primitive religions
• Thematic focus
• Definition of religion
• Origin of religion
• Definition of religion
• Tylor minimal definition of religion
• belief in supernatural beings ( animism)
• Durkheim definition through sacred

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1860s-1900

• The problems of definition
• Universalization
• Perception of religion as distinct, bounded
  entity
• Too tidy concepts
• in reality a diffuse phenomenon
• Christianity as the prototype of true religion
• Many theoretical assumptions derive from
  Christianity
• Creation/imposition of non-native categories
• Eg. belief

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1860s-1900

• Colonial / missionary encounter
• Creation of new words
• Eg. fetishism
• by Portuguese and Dutch slave traders
• on the Gold Coast of Africa (16th, 17th c)
• A hybrid object of bone, beads and feathers
• gt irrationality of local religion
• Later taken up by Marx
• Commodity fetishism
• irrationality of Western modernity

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1860s-1900

• Colonial / missionary encounter
• Reinterpretation of old words
• Eg. syncretism
• Erasmus of Rotterdam (1519)
• reconciliation and tolerance among Christians
• Missionaries
• contaminated Christianity

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1860s-1900

• Origin of religion
• How (Why) did religion evolve?
• How has religion changed in human evolution?
• Polytheism gt monotheism?
• (When did religion evolve?)
• The question of Archaeology
• Homo sapiens nenderthalensis
• 100 000 years ago

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1860s-1900

• Two main lines of argumentation
• Intellectualist
• Religion emerged as a way of explaining the world
  
• eg. Frazer, Tylor
• Functionalist
• Religion emerged for utilitarian reasons
• eg. French sociologists, particularly Durkheim

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1900-1950

• Early 20th c
• Neglection of evolutionist assumptions
• Influence of Durkheim
• Bridge between evolutionism/functionalism
• The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)
• analysis of the most primitive form of religion
• Religion / rituals gt social solidarity

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1900-1950

• Ethnographic focus
• primitive religions
• Thematic focus
• Function of religion
• What is the function of religion?
• What does religion do for people and for social
  groups?
• Two trends within functionalism
• Sociological
• Societys perspective
• Psychological
• Individuals perspective

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1900-1950

• Sociological functionalism
• eg. Durkheim and the French sociological school
• eg. Radcliffe-Brown
• Religion
• maintains/ reinforces social solidaty
• Integrates community (eg. rituals)
• Psychological functionalism
• gt religion reduces anxiety
• eg. Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard
• eg. Freud
• religious thought ltgt unconscious motivations
• religion
• a collective attempt to resolve the guilt and
  anxiety
• a neurotic need that humans would eventually
  outgrow

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1900-1950

• Melford Spiro
• Religion Problems of Definition and
  Explanation (1966)
• Three sets of basic desires gt three functions of
  religion
• 1) cognitive desires
• Desire to understand (eg. Illness, natural
  phenomena)
• gt Adjustive function of religion explanation
  and solution
• 2) substantive desires
• Eg. Desire for rain, victory in war
• gt Adaptive function of religion
• 3) expressive desires (often unconscious)
• Eg. Painful fears, painful motives (breaking
  social taboos)
• gt Integrative function of religion reduction
  and handling

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1950s-1980s

• Thematic focus
• Meaning of religion
• Roots in Webers ideas
• Fundamental importance of the problem of
  meaning
• Phenomenology and hermeneutics
• Religious symbols
• Symbolic anthropology / interpretive anthropology
• Geertz, Turner, Leach, Douglas
• Structure (eg myth)
• Structuralist anthropology
• Lévi-Strauss
• Religion as such
• Rationality debate (late 1960s)
• Return to the classics (Malinowski,
  Evans-Pritchard etc)
• Horton etc

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1950s-1980s

• Ethnographic focus
• primitive religions
• local forms of world religions (1950s)
• Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism
• Religious movements in the Third World
• The context of culture contact
• Millenarian movements
• Revitalization movements
• Eg. Ghost Dance, Peyote cult, cargo cults

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1980s -

• Theoretical focus
• Mixed
• Thematic focus new topics
• Religion and gender
• Religion and power
• New religious movements in the West
• Religious change, conversion etc
• Especially Latin America
• Religion and violence
• Religious fundamentalism (esp. Islamic)

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Clifford Geertz

• Interpretive anthropology
• Influenced by Weber, Dilthey, Jung, Eliade
• Religion as a cultural system
• 1966 M. Banton (ed.) Anthropolgoical Approaches
  to the Study of Relgion
• 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures.
• Other classics on religions
• 1960 The Religion of Java
• 1968 Islam Observed Religious Development in
  Morocco and Indonesia

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Religion as a cultural system

• anthropology of religion not adventurous enough
• no theoretical advances
• living off the classics
• Durkheim, Weber, Freud and Malinowski 
• gt need to widen the perspective
• A study of religion as a two-stage operation
• 1) analysis of meanings embodied in the religious
  symbolism
• neglected by anthropologists
• 2) relating of these to social and psychological
  processes

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Religion as a cultural system

• Religion is a distinctive perspective
• 4 perspectives on the world
• Common sense
• a form of naïve realism
• Science
• disinterested observation, based on formal
  concepts
• Aesthetic perspective
• sensory contemplation
• Religious perspective
• moves beyond the realities of everyday life
• corrects and completes them

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Religion as a cultural system

• Geertzs definition of religion
• Probably most influential in a. of religion
• gt a system of symbols
• Symbols
• anything that serve as a vehicles for a
  conception
• ( meaning)
• Religious symbols
• induce certain psychological dispositions
• gt gives meaning to human existence
• unique and universal function
• gt religion
• Synthesizes peoples ethos and worldview
• creates order from chaos
• importance of ritual

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Religion as a cultural system

• 3 situation where religion gives meaning
• bafflement (incomprehensibility)
• Explanation of anomalous events and experiences
• Suffering / pain
• Comprehension and emotional support for suffering
• Ethical / moral paradox
• provision of ethical criteria to explain the
  discontinuity between things as they are and as
  they ought to be
• Howells (1962)
• Four Horsemen death, famine, disease, the
  malice of other men

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Religion as a cultural system

• symbolic structures have a double aspect
• a model of reality
• a model for reality
• they both express the worlds climate and
  shape it.
•  
• Contrary to Marx
• Religion not a mere superstructure

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Talal Asads criticism

• The Construction of Religion as an
  Anthropological Category
• 1993 Genealogies of Religion Discipline and
  Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam.
• Focus on power and authority
• Marxist approach
• Influence of Foucault
• Geertz
• Divorces religion from the wider context
• development of western understanding of religion
• discursive processes
• by which meanings are constructed
• Historical and socia conditions
• that lead to particular religious practices and
  discourses

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Talal Asads criticism

• Geertz
• Universalist assumptions
• Religion is a distinct, bounded entity
• Commitment occurs through a form of inner
  belief or faith
• Asad
• In reality
• No universal concept of religion
• Geertzs category religion
• not applicable to medieval Chirstianiti or
  non-Western socieites
• Commitment through a form of inner belief or
  faith
• specific to a modern, private Christian
  religiosity

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Problems with anthropology of religion

• Reductionism
• Difficulties of studying belief
• Unclear relationship between religion and
  ideology
• Assumptions about of skepticism
• Schism within social scientific study of religion
  
• Concepual division between tribal and world
  religions

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Reductionism

• Anthropological studies of religion
• explaining away religion
• reducing it to social, psychological, political
  or other needs
• Eg. Marxist, Durkheimian and Freudian approaches
• Eg. conversion among the Zapotecs of Oaxaca
• Various theories of conversion
• pushes and pulls
• Pushes
• Economic deprivation
• Pulls
• promise of reward in the next life
• more immediate psychic compensators

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Rudolf Otto

• The Idea of the Holy (1917)
• Emphasis on numinous experience
• A feeling of awe and mystery
• An experience of something wholly other
• Numen (Latin) supernatural
• Those who have not experienced the feeling of
  numinous, need not bother to read the book.

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Mircea Eliade

• Religion
• A phenomenon sui generis
• a religious phenonenon
• must be understood within its own frame of
  reference
• Religious experience
• fundamentally irreducible
• to try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon
  by means of physiology, psychology, sociology,
  economics, linguistics, art or any other study is
  false it misses the one unique and irreducible
  element in it the element of the sacred.

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Difficulties of studying belief

• How do we know what people really believe?
• belief as an "internal state"
• unrelated to language?
• gt inaccessible to the "external" conscious
  reflection of the native and hence to the
  anthropologist
• can be described?
• gt dependent on language
• gt language may be more formulaic than reflective
  of what is believed

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Difficulties of studying belief

• Intellectual baggage of the English word belief
• Asad
• Emphasis on belief specific ot modern, private
  Christianity
• Evans-Pritchard
• The Nuer language does not have a word for
  believe
• Needham
• Belief, Language, and Experience (1972)
• The concept of belief is dependent on the word
  that describes it

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Religion vs ideology

• Various ideologies
• features of religion
• rituals, myths, sacred etc
• eg. communism, fascism
• civil religion

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Assumptions about skepticism

• Skepticism
• treated primarily as a western phenomenon
• Emerged only with modernity
• Non-western / premodern societies
• immersed into religious and mythological thought
• In reality
• skeptical views of religion are universal
• naturalistic worldview has a long history

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Assumptions about skepticism

• Douglas
• many tribal cultures that have a secular bias
• the myth of the pious primitive should be
  ditched 
• Radcliffe-Brown
• In every human society there inevitably exist
  two different and in a certain sense conflicting
  conceptions of nature. One of them, the
  naturalistic, is implicit everywhere in
  technology, and, in our 20th century European
  culture, has become explicit and dominant in our
  thoughts. The other, which might be called
  mythological, or spiritualistic conception, is
  implicit in myth and in religion, and often
  becomes explicit in philosophy.

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Schism within social scientific study of religion

• Separation between sociology and anthropology
• gt parochial perspectives (Morris, 1994)
• gt Unjustified specialization
• Sociology of religion
• Christianity
• Other world / historical religions (to a
  lesser extent)
• Secularism
• Anthropology of religion
• Tribal religion
• unjustified emphasis on more exotic aspects of
  religion

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Tribal religions vs world religions

• Howells (1962)
• Differentiating aspects of world religions
• 1) messianic (Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad)
• 2) rigid ethical form
• 3) missionary and imperialistic
• 4) inclusiveness (intolerance towards other
  faiths)
• Morris (1994)
• An unnecessary conceptual division
• gt different theoretical treatment

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Tribal religions vs world religions

• 1) religious systems of preliterate cultures
• gt basis for
• General discussions of religion
• Debates on the origins and functions of religion
• e.g. Evans-Pritchard
• Theories of Primitive Religion.
• dichotomy between natural and revealed religion
  is false
• yet data derived from tribal cultures is
  essential for ... determining the
  characteristics of religion generally.
• e.g. rationality debate (late 1960s)
• Science vs religion
• Religion traditional thought of preliterate
  cultures

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Tribal religions vs world religions

• 2) Different treatment
• historical world religions
• treated as conceptual entities
• tribal cultures
• dismembered and treated piecemeal
• Eg. most general texts on comparative religion
• World religions
• separate chapters on eg. Islam, Buddhism, and
  Judaism
• Tribal religions
• separate chapters on eg. mana, taboo, totemism,
  magic, shamanism, myth