Religion and Ideology
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Religion can take many forms, there can be a worship of a range of deities (Gods) or one, or none. God can be constantly intervening, or rarely intervene. Gods can be punitive or benevolent. They can inspire awe and reverence or fear. People can either bargain with or outwit their God, and religions can offer moral guidance or none.
Why did religion come into being?
It came into being as an explanation for the unexplainable; source
of the ?big? questions: how did we get here? What happens after death?
Etc
Religion?s position is controlling forces in the universe that sustain the moral and social order of the people. It validates people?s lives.
Ideology- moral code, socially determined (government, religion, family).
Ideology is a framework of codes and ideas, and religion is part of
the ideology.
Polyethism- a religious belief system based on beliefs in many gods or deities.
Purposes of religion:
- Moral Code
- Sense of community and security
- Acceptance rituals; marriage, deaths, baptisms
- Helps people through crises- gives them hope and faith
- Pressures of demography (the study and measurement of populations).
It can help relieve stress and strain on a particular society, e.g. if
the population grows too big for its food supply- it can help by bringing
people together to save resources.
- Explains and soothes mysteries such as death by saying it?s part
of life?s cycle etc, and praying to the God of plenty in times of little
crops etc.
Neo- Marxists talk about religion as part of ideology; they are against it because religion and ideology justifies the status quo and the division of classes.
Substantive anthropologists look at the ?substance? of religion.
Functionalist anthropologists look at the function of religion.
E B Tylor in the 1960s said that religion was simply a ?belief in spiritual
beings?.
Emile Durkheim said that religion was ? a unified system of beliefs
and practices related to sacred things (?.), things set apart and forbidden?.
Durkheim believed that some things were scared, and others profane (non-sacred)
in religion.
C. Geertz defined religion in terms of what religion did: ?A religion
is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and
long-lasting moods and motivations (?.) by formulating conceptions of a
general order or existence and clothing these conceptions with such an
aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Origins of Religion
Dreams (dead ancestors encountered in dreams)
Ghost-souls (some part of people exists outside their physical bodies)
Spirits/ Animism (animals, plants and inanimate objects also have spirits)
Polytheism (more powerful spirits: many gods)
Monotheism (one God)
(Read 323- 326 Religion and its reasons)
Criticism: Ethnocentric. The anthropologist (Tyler) was a Christian- this progression means Christianity is the perfect result of years of evolution.
Religion and the Environment
Pg 332 (Water Temples of Bali)
Control - spiritual (influence over nature and the elements)
- social (social organiser benefiting within whole society) (physical
level)
Christianity is not concerned with nature, but also has spiritual control (nature of religious ideas influenced by the society?s circumstances, e.g. Christianity has an urban environment). Christianity is more concerned with the moral/ psychological world, than societal structure Usually, a case of similar values applied in different circumstances.
Religion: Ritual, Myth and Cosmos
Magic- Magic represents human attempts to manipulate chains of cause and effect between events that, to us, are unrelated, in ways that to us, are irrational.
Cosmology- An ideological system that explains the order and meaning of the universe and people?s places within it.
Magic deals with specifics, cosmology is an attempt at understanding an entirety. Both, however, relate to the supernatural.
Religion and Social Structure
Religion reflects and inverts social being. The concept of the world
is generated by direct inversion of the characteristics of ordinary experience.
This world is inhabited by mortal, impotent men, who live out their lives
in normal time ? the other world is inhabited by immortal, omnipotent beings
who exist perpetually in abnormal time in which past, present and future
all coexist.
Religious Rituals and Beliefs
Rituals- A behaviour which occurs within a society either on a regular
basis or at certain times of people?s lives when actions, not words, are
used to convey meaning
Rituals, religious and non-religious, are a universal feature of social
life. People in the West engage in religious rituals to cleanse people
of sins (such as confessions in Catholic Church), secular rituals to bring
people together (such as thanksgiving dinners in the USA), political rituals
to sway public opinion (such as baby-kissing by candidates) and many more.
Other societies have curing rituals to restore health, agricultural
rituals to make crops grow, fertility rituals to cause pregnancy and death
rituals to ensure the entry of the departed into the afterworld.
Quote from Leech, 1976
The procedures ( of a rite of a passage) separate the initiate into
2 parts- one pure, the other impure. The impure part can then be left behind,
while the pure part can be aggregated to the initiate?s new status. In
the case of sacrifice, the sacrificial victim plays the part of the initiate,
but since the victim has to first be identified with the donor of the sacrifice,
the donor is by vicarious association, likewise purified and initiated
into a new ritual status
(Basically, the person who is sacrificed gives the benefit to someone
else).
A sacrifice is an offering made to a spiritual being. The same term
is also used for the sacrificial ritual itself. The person or group making
the offering has some specific goal in line, such as ensuring a productive
agricultural season, or appeasing the anger of a defended God. The most
dramatic kind of sacrifice is the sacrifice of a human being (e.g. The
Aztecs in Old Mexico). People view scarification as reciprocal obligation-
the Gods become duty-bound to return the favour.
The Kwaio
- Tasks that men perform are almost always given more value and prestige,
even if women?s duties consist of most of the subsistence.
- Women accept their positions.
- Refrainement from sex probably occurs in this society and probably
serve as a sort of supernatural birth control.
Q1) What does the spatial layout of the Kwaio settlement symbolise in
terms of their cosmology?
Woman are polluting; by keeping them separate during the times at which
they can pollute (i.e. eating, urinating, childbirth etc), men are put
up on a pedestal, only they can communicate with the adolo. Sacred rituals
are performed with only one gender. By separating their houses, women can
move out when they are polluting, and men can perform their sacred rituals.
Cosmology- An ideological system that explains the order and meaning of the universe and people?s places within it.
Q2) In what ways do polluting taboos operate?
The polluting taboos within the Kwaio society are probably in existence
because they give the men in the society a reason to view women as inferior.
Menstruation and childbirth, which only females can experience, are seen
as the most polluting of all since they are something which men can?t experience,
and so can therefore twist around to make it seem as if they were negative
qualities. It gives the males a reason for their superiority, and also
a cause for blame during unexplainable illness, death or misfortune.
The World View of the Kalobari (fishing people in swampy delta, Nigeria)
Pg 306 (Horton 1962)
- Complicated system of cosmological beliefs
- 3 orders of existence postulated as lying behind the ?place of the people? (the observable world of human beings and things)
- First level; world of spirits. Everything, living or object, has a spirit.
- When a person dies or object is broken, spirit and physical form have been separated.
- 3 categories of free spirits; ancestral spirits, village heroes, water people.
- A personal creator exists, who lays the design for everyone?s life
- ?Great Creator? of the world; destiny
- Beliefs are never called into question; it is always something else which has interfered. The world is filled with accidents.
- 3 levels: Spirits- personal creator- Great Creator
Religion in Gopalpur
- Gods and their works are a continuous part of present reality in Gopalpur. Gods attend and take part in almost every ceremony. Sometimes a pries, sometimes even a perfectly ordinary person, begins to tremble. His arms shake uncontrollably; his legs move violently in response to the drumming. Sometimes the affected person screams and falls to the ground. The face goes rigid. Suddenly, the body is still and the voice of one of the gods speaks through his mouth. The god may make predictions, answer questions or give orders concerning the manner in which a particular ceremony is to be conducted.
- The order of god is, in many ways, parallel to the order of men. There are high gods, bearing such names as Shiva, who are worshipped by vegetarian priests. These gods, concerned with the higher-ranking jatis, are generally beneficent. Hanumantha and Bhimarayya are specifically charged with protecting villages, arranging successful marriages, and ensuring that married couples bear children. In a general way, these gods resemble the higher-ranking government officials. They are generally kindly but it is difficult to obtain an interview with them.
- Worship of the high gods requires that all members of the community participate, and that their manner be joyful and friendly. At such times, the quarrels between the two parties are forgotten, and no-one is turned away from any man?s door with an empty stomach.
- Below the male gods are non-vegetarian goddesses. The function of these goddesses is to protect the village from particular disasters, from flood and smallpox, from cholera and skin disease. When people are sinful, failing to perform appropriate sacrifices or violating the moral code, one of the goddesses approaches God and asks permission to punish the village- ?The mother punishes the child after getting the father?s permission?.
- If there is an epidemic of smallpox or cholera, the village is purified, and offerings are made to an appropriate goddess. The priests of the goddesses are drawn from the lower-ranking jatis; they need not be paid much money. The expense of worshipping a goddess stems from the fact that a goddess is not said to be satisfied with vegetarian offerings, but must have meat and beer.
- Often, when there is sickness in the family, an appeal is made to one of the gods or goddesses. If the sick person recovers, offerings are made to the deity considered responsible.
- When a man dies, God consults his records and determines whether the dead man has spent his life helping ot injuring others. Those who have done bad things to others are sent to the Underworld (good club! J), where they suffer hideous tortures. They are later reborn in the stomachs of dogs, donkeys or worms. People who lead good lives are reborn as men. If their previous lives were very good, they become great kings and sit on thrones. A really perfect man can be considered to be an earthly reincarnation of one of the gods.
- Sometimes, although evidently not within living memory, an individual dies without completing the things that were to be accomplished during his life on earth, or perhaps it is that an individual dies still hungry for sex, or food, or some other gratification. When this happens, the individual is likely to return from his/her grave and attack living people. Such attacks are most frequently made upon those who go outside in the dark of the moon without a lantern. Although there have been no recent attacks. It is said that the spirits enter into living men and make them behave in strange ways. When such things happen, the victim is beaten with a whip or with sandals until the spirit becomes uncomfortable and promises to leave. Sometimes the departure of the spirit is accelerated by offering him a chicken or a goat.
- With the possible exception of these attacks by ghosts and spirits, which occur rarely if at all, everything that happens to a man is determined by his behaviour in his former life as well as his present life.
- Everyone in Gopalpur is aware that there is a way to avoid committing sins and to avoid the unfortunate consequences of being born in this age of misery and mismanagement. The way out consists of foregoing all earthly desires and becoming an ascetic. An ascetic is required to abandon his family, to live on fruits and milk, and to wander from place to place.
- The major form of religious activity in Gopalpur is the religious ceremony in which men make gifts of food to the gods and, as a consequence, make gifts of food to other men.
- Representatives of virtually every jati in Gopalpur have a special role to play in each of the calendrical ceremonies. All must co-operate if the crops are to be good, and if the life of the village is to be happy. Sisters and daughters, the women whose daughters are ?potential wives? of men in Gopalpur, are invited to the more important calendrical ceremonies. Every effort is made to remind them that Gopalpur is happy village.
- In Gopalpur, gods and men strive for harmony and work toward a peaceful,
happy world where there is no sin. The individual man attempts to extend
ever outward his circle of kinsmen and his circle of friends. Bonds of
territoriality and of common descent are stretched to include the villages
of an entire region and to develop a common set of concepts and ways of
acting affecting millions of people. Inevitably, these bonds, stretched
out across many miles affecting many people, snap. It is the task of the
gods and the gaudas to restore order.
Magic
The difference between ritual and magic:
Ritual- stereotyped, repetitive behaviour, either religious or non-religious, that uses symbols to communicate meaning.
Religious rituals usually involve spiritual beings, and some beneficial result is desired. It is usually they, no the person performing the ritual, who are thought of as able to bring about their outcome. Magic, in contrast to religious ritual, is designed to bring about some desired practical result without the intervention of spirits. A magician attempts to take directs control over some part of nature or of other people.
Frazer considered magic to have more in common with science than with
religion. Instead of relying on spirits to grant what people wish, the
magician attempts, like the scientist, to manipulate the laws of nature
to achieve the desired result.
Frazer proposed that people first enter a magic stage, seeking to manipulate
objects and events without the help of spirits. When their attempts inevitably
failed, they turned in hope to spirits to provide them with the things
they desired, and the age of religion was born. Much later, sceptical individuals
realised that religion could not provide all the answers they needed, and
this led to the birth of science.
He distinguished between 2 types of magic, imitative (or homeopathic)
magic, where one imitates the desired effect and it happens.
E.g. Th Azande prick the stalks of bananas with the teeth of crocodiles,
hoping that the fruits will be as abundant as crocodiles? teeth.
Then, there is contagious magic- one obtains some object that was once
in contact with someone (e.g. clothing) and does something to it in the
belief that this action will affect the person with whom the object was
once in contact.
Cross culturally, it is common for the hair or nail clippings removed
from an individual as part of the separation phase of a rite of passage
to be carefully hidden lest some enemy get hold of them and burn them in
a ritual of contagious magic designed to injure those from whom they were
cut.
Rite of passage- a ritual marking a culturally significant change in
an individual?s life cycle, such as birth, puberty, marriage, old age and
death.
Witchcraft
Witches ?originate? from the inquisition- 16th century. They were defined
as non-believers in God. Women were most commonly accused of being witches.
Malinowski
To prove that ?primitive? people could distinguish between fact and
fiction, between technology and magic, Malinowski explained how complex
were the technical skills for activities such as gardening, sailing, fishing
that Trobrianders controlled. According to Malinowski, when Trobrianders
fish in the lagoon, the men never resort to fishing magic because the waters
there are relatively calm. But when they take their canoes into the
open seas, they turn to magic as protection from the hazards of strong
winds and rainstorms. It is only when confronted by situations they can?t
control, because their pragmatic skills are inoperable, that Trobrianders,
out of psychological stress, turn from technology to magic.
Gmelch observed the use of superstition in baseball. He discovered a
whole series of rituals, taboos, and sacred objects that together form
a complex of ?pitcher magic?; tugging one?s cap between pitches, touching
the resin bag after each bad pitch etc.
He demonstrated that Malinowski was right- in baseball, magic is most
prevalent in situations of chance and uncertainty.
Magic Vs. Religion
Magic- A pseudo- scientific agent automatically bringing about desired end (i.e. a ?scientific? performance to control certain aspects of nature over which we have no control).
Religion- Worship of and subjugation to divine beings / relationship with cosmos / extension of human relationships beyond the human sphere.
According to Frazer (?The Golden Bough? 1911-15), magic developed into religion.
Typology of Magic
Sympathetic (Law Of Sympathy) : Homeopathic/ Imitative magic (Law of Similarity) Contagious magic (Law of Contact)
Law of Sympathy (Sympathetic Magic)- Sir James Frazer?s explanation for the logic underlying magic, sorcery, and shamanism. He thought that tribal peoples believed that anything ever connected with a person, such as hair or blood, could be manipulated to influence that person. Things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy (e.g. Pre-enactment of childbirth in Somalia with a smile).
Law of participation- the assumption that a thing can participate in or be part of two or more things at once. Identified by Levy-Bruhl as the principle underlying his concept of prelogical thought.
Magic can de divided into the theoretical (magic as a pseudo-science)
and the practical (magic as a pseudo-art)
Practical magic: Positive magic- (sorcery / charms) ?Do this in order
for x to happen?
Negative magic- (taboos) ?Don?t do this or x will
happen?
The Masai use visual magic; pole on top of house- so will look up and not see the house.
Malinowski- magic supplies primitive man with a number of ready-made ritual arts which enable him to use practical techniques to bridge the gaps to impossible tasks.
How does magical thinking differ from Western Scientific thinking?
?Magical Thinking? reflects a kind of model of a universe far more
deterministic than ours, a universe where things do not just happen by
chance or accident. In such a universe, death, illness and crop failure
call for explanation
Magic, then, represents human attempts to manipulate chains of cause
and effect between events that to us are unrelated, in ways to us that
are irrational.
How is magic a psychological adaptation?
Some forms of magic, like the widespread New Guinea custom of men sticking
reeds up their nostrils to induce bleeding- in symbolic imitation of menstruation-
are physiologically harmful and sometimes cause fatal haemorrhaging . But
all are deeply meaningful to those who enact these practices. Further,
even though such practices may or may not be in themselves medically efficacious,
they may nevertheless have a benefit physiological effect owing to neurological
and immunological responses that are regulated by these emotions.
Applying the concept of magic to ethnographies
Trobrianders-
- For unmarried young people, each decorative element is carefully chosen to catch the eye of a possible lover, as each use of magic is calculated to ?make someone want to sleep with you?.
- Missionaries tried to persuade villagers that magic and sorcery had no basis in rational thought.
- Almost every death that occurs is believed to be the result of sorcery effected by a specialist who chants magic spells into the victim?s betel nut or tobacco.
- People known to possess powerful magic, including sorcery, are buried face-down to prevent their dreaded malevolent spirits from escaping the grave, as this spirit can being illness and death to survivors. The spirit can only linger for a few days, so the grave must be guarded by someone who also possess powerful magic.
- Adults and children alike fear little in their daily activities except sorcery. The most powerful magic spells for sorcery are known by only a handful of men. Many, but by no means all, are chiefs. Others must seek out one of these men and ask him to perform his craft. - A few women also learn the spells.
- Some women (and a few men) are thought to be ?flying witches?, individuals who have the ability to leave their bodies while asleep. In an invisible state they attack someone by destroying a vital organ, and only another flying witch can recite spells that will counter the attack and cure the patient. Therefore, a flying witch can be good or evil, and villagers take great care when they associate with anyone believed to have these powers.
- Even the strongest traditional sorcery works slowly; the deadly poisons believed to be in betel or tobacco can be countered if an afflicted person gains the help of a curing specialist.
- Important chiefs must demonstrate that they know formidable kinds of magic spells that successfully give them control over villager?s lives and the growing cycle of yams.
- The spells that are most talked about because they are the most dangerous are those for sorcery and those that control the weather. These traditional spells are the property of certain matrilineages and known only by a few men. Not all chiefs own sorcery spells, but since they usually have more wealth than ordinary men, they pay those who know the magic to accomplish their wishes.
- Although chiefs walk with the authority that control over sorcery
gives them, they themselves are not immune to its effects.
Yanomamo-
- In some villages a variety of magical plants are cultivated. Most
are associated with casting spells on others, spells that are often non-malevolent
as in the case of ?female charms?. Tiny packets of dusty powder, wrapped
in leaves, are used by men to ?seduce? young women. The charm is forced
against the woman?s nose and mouth. When she breathes the charm, she swoons
and has an insatiable desire for sex- so say both the men and the women.
The women also cultivate magical plants in some villages that allegedly
cause the men to become tranquil and sedate.
- In some villages, people allegedly cultivate an especially malevolent plant that can be blown on enemies at a great distance, or sprinkled on unwary male visitors while they sleep. A particularly feared class of these is called ?oka? and is said to be blown through tubes at enemies, causing them to sicken and die.
- All Yanomamo groups are convinced that unaccountable deaths in their own village are the result of the use of harmful magic and charms directed at them by enemy groups.
- Almost all deaths other than those obviously caused by human or animal
intervention are attributed to harmful magic. The Yanomamo suffer a high
infant mortality rate, and they attribute this to sent harmful spirits
who steal their souls. Thus, in every village, the shamans spend many hours
attempting to cure sick children and sick adults, driving out the malevolent
forces that have caused their illnesses, and in turn, sending their own
spirits and charms against the children in distant villages for revenge.
Gopalpur-
- The villagers believe that gods and goddesses are responsible for protecting villages, arranging successful, fertile marriages etc and that everything that happens to a person is determined by behaviour in a former life as well as behaviour in the present.About the Author
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Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 Time: 12:00 AM
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