ANTH 103 Lecture 12 Religion

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Cultural Anthropology

Religion
Lecture 12
What is Religion?
Features:
1) A belief in powers or deities whose abilities
transcend the natural world.
2) Myths and stories about the meaning and
purpose of life.
3) A set of ritual activities that reinforce or
instill these collective beliefs.
4) A symbolic system used in religious practice
that represents key aspects of the religion or
tenets of faith.
5) Identifiable specialists in the religion who
assist or instruct the average believer,
6) Institutions that preserve, explore, teach,
and implement the religion’s beliefs.
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Religious Beliefs
• Beliefs are ideas about:
– The spirit world
– Beings and forces that have spiritual power.
– The ways in which the universe was created and
continues to be organized.

• Beliefs are analyzed by anthropologists:


– Emic vs. Etic views

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Religious Beliefs
• Religious beliefs and practices may also correlate with
other aspects of society.

• For example, in egalitarian societies, relationships


with spirit beings tends to also be egalitarian.

• Monotheistic religions with a single supreme deity


also tend to have political systems with a central
supreme leader (such as a king, emperor or president)
Sacred Rituals
• Religious behavior is both practical and symbolic.

• Rituals are a performance or dramatization that


allows individuals to express beliefs.

• Sacred rituals: Enable people to make contact


with the spirit world and manipulate spirit
power for their own purposes.
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Religious Speech
• Invocations, prayers, prophecies, songs of praise,
and curses that are powerful means of transmitting
messages about the world and also creating the
world.

• Attempts to exert control over people, events or


natural phenomena.

• Causality: How things happen, how the world is


affected.
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Functions of Religion
• Explaining the Natural World
• Explain events that seem uncontrollable.

• Explain the origin of the universe and its inhabitants


(static? evolving?)

• Religious beliefs can help individuals gain some


sense of control over the unexplainable and
unpredictable events of life.
Functions of Religion
• Solace, Healing, and Emotional Release
• Therapeutic

• Confession (express remorse, feel rehabilitated)

• Explaining and dealing with the trauma of death

• An individual’s participation in rituals many have a


powerful healing effect by releasing tension and worry.
Functions of Religion
• Social Cohesion
• Unite kinship groups and local communities.

• Justify the existing social order

• Example: Portrayal of Hindu goddesses.


• Married = portrayed and nurturing and
trustworthy
• Unmarried = portrayed as aggressive, dangerous
and unpredictable.
Functions of Religion
• Social Control

• Laws and punishments may be based on the


teachings of religious doctrines, customs or texts.

• In some cultures, puberty may be marked by role


reversals.

• Socially disapproved behavior is permitted briefly


in ritual context (Amish teenager example).
Functions of Religion

• Social Control
• Rumspringa
• Rite of passage (adolescent) where an Amish
teenager can experience the outside world and
see if they want to return to Amish community
• 85-90% return
Functions of Religion
• Economic Adaptation
• Anthropologist Roy Rappaport
• Tsembagas of New Guinea
• horticulture and animal
husbandry.
• Ritual slaughter of pigs.
• Maintains ecological balance.
• Symbiotic relationship between
pigs and humans.
What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
 Émile Durkheim: The Sacred and the
Profane.
 Australian Aborigines.
 Sacred = practices, people, or objects that
are considered holy by a religion.
 Profane = unholy practices, people or
objects.
 Religion = a unified system of beliefs and
practices relative to sacred things.
 Durkheim viewed ritual as a powerful
social tool to bind society together
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What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
 Karl Marx: “The Opiate of the Masses”
 Marx views religion within the framework of
his larger view of economy and society.
 Infrastructure = “the base” referred to the
economic realities of the world in which
people lived (the environment may dictate
that plants that people could grow).
 Proletariat = needed religion the most
because they had a harsh life.
 Religion functioned to reinforce social
stratification and numb the poor.  Religion
is the opiate of the masses
 Do you agree with Marx?
What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
 Religion and Ritual
 What kinds of religious rituals
are you familiar with?

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Animism and Animatism
• Animism: Belief in the existence of souls.

• Animatism: Belief that all things are endowed


with some spirit form or essence.
• Ex. thunderstorm, tree or rock may have
spiritual powers.

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Ancestor Worship
• Belief in the importance of
ancestors as they affect the
lives of their survivors,
protecting their descendants.

• Ancestral spirits may bestow


blessings, good health and
fortune to kin.
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Mana
• A force, power, or essence that endows
people, animals, other living things,
and possibly inanimate objects with
special qualities or powers.

• Example: carrying around a rabbit foot


or a piece of wood for good luck.

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Totemism
• Belief system in which people
believe that they are descendants
of spirit beings.

• Totemic ancestors may have


human or animal form.

• Rituals are performed to honor


ancestors.
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Religious Practitioners
• Mediums
– Persons having special gifts to make contact with
the spirit world or the dead.

– Trance states

– Altered states of consciousness


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Religious Practitioners
– Diviners: Persons with the
power to predict the future.

– Use various techniques to


obtain a spiritual guidance.

– They may recognize patterns


or designs that tell a story.
Religious Practitioners
• Healers: Acquire spirit power to diagnose the spirit cause of
illness and effect cures.

• Diagnose spirit cause of illness and cure through the


performance of rituals.

• Healers may be suspected of using their control of spirit


powers to cause harm rather than cure illnesses (witchcraft,
witch doctor, etc.)
Religious Practitioners
• Shamans: Part-time religious
practitioners who make contact with
the spirit world through ritual, prayer
and trance.

• Enter trance states to receive visions


from the spirit realm.

• Work tends to be for the good of the


entire community, rather than just one
individual.
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Religious Practitioners
• Max Weber had proposed an evolutionary
typology of religion.
 Shamanism represents one of the simplest
form of religion.
 Egalitarian, band-level societies.
 No hierarchical structure.
 Shamans have a special and personal
connection with supernatural powers or
beings.
 Shamanistic abilities activated through
trance states.
 Meditation, fasting, ingestion of substances
to achieved altered stated of consciousness.
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Religious Practitioners
• Priests: Full-time religious practitioners who lead a religious
organization and officiate rituals.

• Uses learning and knowledge, not the ability to communicate


directly with the spirit world.

• Often preside rites of passage, such as those that mark birth,


puberty, marriage, and death.
What is a Ritual?
• Rituals: activities, including religious speech, ceremonies,
and behaviors, that are demonstrations of belief.

• Performance of religious beliefs.

• Make contact with the spirit world, express honor and respect
for spirit beings, obtain blessings, health, success and
achiever personal or communal goals.
Prayer and Sacrifice
• Prayer: Religious speech or thought through which
believers transmit messages to spirit beings.

• Sacrifice: a gift made to spirit beings, usually


requiring blood or pain

• Offerings: gifts made to spirit beings to show


gratitude and honor, usually food or money

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Rites of Passage

• Rituals performed to celebrate socially significant


transitions in an individual’s life cycle

• Typically conducted to mark birth, puberty,


marriage, and death

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Rites of Passage
Anthropologist Victor Turner
Forest of Symbols

Three stages:
1.) Separation (symbolic) (enter as a novice)
2.) Transition (liminal phase)(no status)
3.) Reincorporation

Communitas =
• liminal phase of a ritual rite of passage
• Novices bond on common ground.
• Heighted sense of intimacy and connectedness.
• Surrender of prior status (etopian idealism)
Rites of Passage

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B3Abpv0ysM
Puberty vs.
Funerary Rites
• Puberty Rites:
Rituals performed to • Funerary Rites:
mark the passage of Rituals performed to
an individual from mark a person’s
childhood to death and passage to
adulthood; also called the afterworld
initiation rites
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Religious Practices

• Healing and Curing:


– Health is thought of as a state of harmony or balance.
– Illness caused by spirit beings or forces.
– Patients may seek the aid of religious specialists.
– Diagnosis through revelation in a dream or vision.
– Causes: Soul loss, object intrusion, spirit possession,
violation of taboos.
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Spirit Possession
• Belief that spirits can enter a body and take over that person’s
thoughts and actions.

• May be welcomed as a positive experience or a symptom of


illness.

• May be used by a medium or healer to help address someone’s


illness.

• Individuals possessed by spirits may seek treatment aimed at


removing the spirit or enticing it to leave the person’s body.

• Allows for emotional release.


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Imitative vs.
Contagious Magic
• Contagious Magic: Magic
• Imitative Magic: that operates on the
Magic that operates principle that positive and
on the principle of negative qualities can be
“like causes like” transferred through
proximity or contact
• Image of someone can
• Must have piece of the
cause a real effect on
person or a belonging of
that person theirs to create an effect
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The Origins and
Functions of Religion
• Explaining the World:
– Gaining a sense of control
– Legitimating the status quo

• Solace, Healing, and Emotional Release:


– Providing psychological support

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The Origins and
Functions of Religion
• Social Cohesion:
– Justifying the existing social order
– Establishing a cosmology

• Social Control

• Economic Adaptation
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Revitalization Movements:
Prophets

• Religious leaders who receive divine inspiration,


often in a vision or trance.

• May receive direct messages from the spirit


world telling them to convey divine teachings to
the community.

• Encourage a return to traditional ways, stressing


the values of hospitality, generosity,
cooperativeness and solidarity.
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Revitalization Movements:
Nativistic Movements
Revitalization
movements attempting
to rid society of foreign
elements and return to
what is conceived to be
a prior state of cultural
purity
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Revitalization Movements:
Revivalistic Movements
Movements focused on
bringing back cultural
and religious practices
that express core
values that have been
largely abandoned
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Revitalization Movements:
Millinerian Movements
Incorporate apocalyptic
themes, prophesying an
abrupt end to the world as
we know it, leading to the
establishment of a new
way of life or form of
existence
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Revitalization Movements:
Messianic Movements
Revitalization
movements
stressing the role of
a prophet or
messiah as a savior
for people, usually
during an
apocalypse
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Cargo Cults
• Revitalization movements arising in
Melanesia in the early twentieth century
with the aim of obtaining material wealth
through magical means.

• Cargo cult followers built loading docks


along the coast, as well as landing strips
for airplanes in the bush, intending to
make landing site for ships and airplanes.

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Religion and Culture Change

• Role of Founders in Buddhism,


Christianity, and Islam.

• Founders reacted against human


suffering and the social and political
inequalities of their society.

• Advocated for establishment of


freedom, equality, justice and peace.

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Proselytism vs.
Fundamentalism
• Fundamentalism: A term
• Proselytism: The coined in the United States in
attempt to convert a 1920 meaning a
person or group from commitment to do battle to
one religion to another. defend traditional religious
beliefs.

•More popular as the process


of globalization continues
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Christian Fundamentalism
• Common topic of debate in modern day U.S. politics.
• Literal interpretation of the bible.
• Divine order of gender roles.
• Conservative political agenda.
• Against abortion rights.
• Against marriage equality.
• Against learning about racism.
• Oppose teaching evolution in schools.
• “War on Christmas?”

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