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This presentation discusses the role of religion in a variety of societies. It focuses on the types of religion and the situations in which religions can change rapidly. It concludes with a discussion of secular rituals and the way in which a trip to Walt Disney World might be studied as a secular ritual. Religion
Introduction • Religion (Wallace) • belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces. • So defined, religion is a cultural universal. • Neanderthal mortuary remains • earliest evidence of what probably was religious activity.
Animism • Animism is seen as the most primitive form of religion • defined as a belief in souls that derives from the first attempt to explain dreams and like phenomena.
Animatism • Animatism is the belief that all animate and inanimate objects are infused with a common life force • the assignment to inanimate objects, forces, and plants of personalities and wills, but not souls.
Mana and Taboo • Mana is defined as belief in an imminent supernatural domain or life-force, potentially subject to human manipulation. • Melanesian mana • a sacred impersonal force that is much like the Western concept of luck. • ***Examples in your own life? • Polynesian mana and the related concept of taboo • related to the more hierarchical nature of Polynesian society.
Magic and Religion • Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims. • Magic may be imitative (as with voodoo dolls) or contagious (accomplished through contact). • ***Have you tried this?
Anxiety, Control, Solace • Magic is an instrument of control, • Religion serves to provide stability when no control or understanding is possible.
Rituals • Rituals are formal, performed in sacred contexts. • Rituals convey information about the culture of the participants and, hence, the participants themselves. • Rituals are inherently social • participation in them necessarily implies social commitment.
Rites of Passage • Rites of passage which mark and facilitate a person's movement from one state to another • Rites of passage have three phases: • Separation – the participant(s) withdraws from the group and begins moving from one place to another. • Liminality – the period between states, during which the participant(s) has left one place but has not yet entered the next. • Incorporation – the participant(s) reenters society with a new status having completed the rite.
Rites of Passage • Liminality is part of every rite of passage and involves the temporary suspension and even reversal of everyday social distinctions. • Communitas refers to collective liminality, characterized by enhanced feelings of social solidarity and minimized distinctions.
Totemism • Rituals play an important role in creating and maintaining group solidarity. • In totemic societies, each descent group has an animal, plant, or geographical feature from which they claim descent. • Totems are the apical ancestor of clans. • The members of a clan did not kill or eat their totem, except once a year when the members of the clan gathered for ceremonies dedicated to the totem.
Totemism • Totemism is a religion in which elements of nature act as sacred templates for society by means of symbolic association. • Totemism uses nature as a model for society. • Each descent group has a totem, which occupies a specific niche in nature. • Social differences mirror the natural order of the environment. • The unity of the human social order is enhanced by symbolic association with and imitation of the natural order.
Religion and Cultural Ecology: Sacred Cattle in India • Ahimsa is the Hindu doctrine of nonviolence that forbids the killing of animals. • Western economic development experts often use this principle as an example of how religion can stand in the way of development. • Hindus seem to irrationally ignore a valuable food source (beef). • Hindus also raise scraggly and thin cows, unlike the bigger cattle of Europe and the U.S.
Religion and Cultural Ecology: Sacred Cattle in India • These views are ethnocentric and wrong as cattle play an important adaptive role in an Indian ecosystem that has evolved over thousands of years • Hindus use cattle for transportation, traction, and manure. • Bigger cattle eat more, making them more expensive to keep. • Another example: pig taboo in Middle East
Social Control • The power of religion affects action. • Religion can be used to mobilize large segments of society through systems of real and perceived rewards and punishments. • Witch hunts play an important role in limiting social deviancy in addition to functioning as leveling mechanisms to reduce differences in wealth and status between members of society.
Social Control • Many religions have a formal code of ethics that prohibit certain behavior while promoting other kinds of behavior. • ***Examples in your society? • Religions also maintain social control by stressing the fleeting nature of life.
Kinds of Religion • Religious forms vary from culture to culture, but there are correlations between political organization and religious type. • Religious Practitioners and Types • Wallace defined religion as consisting of all a society’s cult institutions (rituals and associated beliefs) and developed four categories from this. • Shamanic religions • shamans are part-time religious intermediaries who may act as curers--these religions are most characteristic of foragers.
Kinds of Religion (continued) • Communal religions • have shamans, community rituals, multiple nature gods, and are more characteristic of food producers than foragers. • Olympian religions • first appeared with states, have full-time religious specialists whose organization may mimic the states, and have potent anthropomorphic gods who may exist as a pantheon. • Monotheistic religions • have all the attributes of Olympian religions, except that the pantheon of gods is subsumed under a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being.
Christian Values • Max Weber linked the spread of capitalism to the values central to the Protestant faith: independent, entrepreneurial, hard working, future-oriented, and free thinking. • The emphasis Catholics placed on immediate happiness and security, and the notion that salvation was attainable only when a priest mediated on one’s behalf, did not fit well with capitalism.
Revitalization Movements • Religious movements that act as mediums for social change are called revitalization movements. • The colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake is an example of a revitalization movement.
Syncretisms • A syncretism is a cultural mix, including religious blends, that emerge when two or more cultural traditions come into contact. • Examples include voodoo, santeria, and candomlé. • The cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea are syncretisms of Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs. • Syncretisms often emerge when traditional, non-Western societies have regular contact with industrialized societies. • Syncretisms attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior and symbols.
A New Age • Since the 1960s, there has been a decline in formal organized religions. • New Age religions have appropriated ideas, themes, symbols, and ways of life from the religious practices of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and east Asian religions.
