How Should We Understand Religion and Religious Beliefs?

• Anthropologists study religion to understand people. And the range of religious beliefs encountered by nineteenth-century scholars, both at home and abroad, made people seem inexplicable.

• Anthropologists, working in small-scale societies with relatively simple lifeways and simple technology, assumed that local religious beliefs were also simple.

  • A deeper investigation gradually revealed the complexity and diversity of beliefs held throughout the world—and the difficulty of defining “religion” cross-culturally.

• In this section, we will compare the approaches taken by Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), Anthony F.C. Wallace (1966), and Clifford Geertz (1966) as well as a fourth approach that builds upon these previous definitions.

• In 1871, anthropologist Edward Tylor introduced animism: an early theory that primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings.

  • Tyler proposed that religion evolved in stages from animism to polytheism to monotheism (an ethnocentric view since he came from a largely monotheistic culture).

    • Tylor took this progression a step further, arguing that humans would eventually yield to pure reason and abandon deities altogether—something that has not yet happened.

• In the twentieth century, Anthony F.C. Wallace studied the changing religious ceremonies and rituals (stylized performances involving symbols that are associated with social, political, and religious activities) of the Seneca, one of the Iroquois tribes.

  • His definition of religion became standard in anthropology: “beliefs and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces” (Wallace, 1966, p. 5).

• For Wallace, the characteristic that ties all religious beliefs together is the supernatural.

  • Wallace’s approach to religion can be criticized for not doing enough to explain religious change, for treating religious groups and individuals as intellectually imparied, and for not explaining the overwhelming fervency of religious believers.

• Clifford Geertz wanted to explain why people could believe the peculiar ideas that anthropologists had observed around the world. He thought religion could be best understood as a system of symbols:

  • “Religion is

    • (1) a system of symbols which act to

    • (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by

    • (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

    • (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

    • (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz, 1966, p. 4).

  • This definition emphasizes symbols that seem intensely real and factual to believers. What, to outsiders, appear to be mythological parables are often, to insiders, historical fact.

  • Regardless of the historicity of these symbols, they create purpose and meaning and help motivate behavior.

    • Religious symbols are a central part of a worldview: a general approach to or set of shared unquestioned assumptions about the world and how it works.

  • Symbols describe a “model of” how the world is, as well as a “model for” how the world (morally) should be.

  • Many anthropologists employ Geertz’s definition of religion as part of an interpretive approach: a kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and cultural interconnections within a society.

  • Geertz’s approach to religion has been criticized for viewing religion as a personal, rather than a social, phenomenon.

  • Beliefs are powerful because they are socially enacted repeatedly through rituals and other religious behaviors.

    • By acting together, the community of believers begins to accept the group’s symbolic interpretations of the world as if they were real rather than merely interpretation.

• The approach to religion used in this textbook views religion as a system of social action. A solitary nun and millions of believers joining the pope for mass are both practicing Catholicism. Both experiences are interpreted as being different from everyday life.

• Here, we define religion as a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life, including these four elements.

  • The existence of things more powerful than human beings. Although in many societies it takes the form of some supernatural force, we prefer to think of it as a worldview or cosmology that situates the place of human beings in the universe.

  • Beliefs and behaviors surround, support, and promote the acceptance that those things more powerful than humans actually exist.

  • Symbols that make these beliefs and behaviors seem both intense and genuine.

  • Social settings, usually involving important rituals, that people share while experiencing the power of these symbols of belief.

• We can apply this approach to religion to understanding is contemporary consequences. For example, France has witnessed terrorist attacks for the past two centuries, that have been both politically and religiously motivated.

  • The Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015 are used to illustrate how religious beliefs and behaviors are linked to political and social actions and violence.

What Forms Does Religion Take?

• Early anthropological scholars of religion, including Edward B. Tylor, viewed technologically primitive people as being primitive in all respects, even religion. Today, anthroplogists do not rank people or religions on an evolutionary scale of complexity.

  • But there are clear correlations between political organization, mode of subsistence, and religious practices.

• In Papua New Guinea, the significance of clan membership is reflected in religious systems.

  • The Ningerum live in low-population density forests and view their traditional clan lands as inhabited by a range of spirits with human emotions and motivations. These spirits must be appeased with offerings of gifts and pig feasts.

• Early anthropologists documented how some Native American clans identified with particular animals, often claiming to be descended from them.

  • These animals are sometimes called totemic species as part of a system of thought that anthropologists call totemism that associates particular groups with specific animal or plant species called “totems” as an emblem.

    • Both Native American clan totems and sports team emblems act as totems (the former spiritual, the latter secular). As we saw in a previous chapter, this has created conflict between gorups competing to “own” Native Americna mascot imagery.

• Beginning in the 1500s, European travelers encountered Siberian shamans: religious leaders who communicate the needs of the living to the spirit world, usually through some form of ritual trance or other altered state of consciousness.

  • More recently, anthroplogists have paid particular attention to this state of trance: a semiconscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and singing, or hallcuinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote.

  • This focus on altered psychological states reveals shamanism to be a widespread phenomenon, not limited to Siberia.

  • ‘Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch’s (1973) film Magical Death shows the Yanomamo ritual of shamanic healing, in which a shaman attempts to heal his family by ingesting hallucinogenic spuff made from a local plant.

    • The shaman is supernaturally assisted by a spirit familiar: a spirit that has developed a close bond with a shaman.

  • Closer to home, Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions engage in rituals like snake handling and speaking in tongues: the phenomenon of speaking in an apparently unknown language, often in an energetic and fast-paced way.

• Religious symbols can unify people around a shared identity but also reinforce social hierarchies.

  • For example, in the former kingdom of Benin, the Oba was considered divine and symbolized by a leopard. The Oba’s palace was an architectural model of the cosmos. Leopard imagery in the palace, arts, and festivals depicted, and maintained, the social order.

  • Egyptian pharaohs were also viewed as earthly manifestations of the gods, along with many others in their polytheistic system. Each of these gods had to be appeased in its own way to maintain the environmental conditions necessary for agriculture in the Nile River valley.

• Nearly all ancient societies in the Mediterranean and Middle East were polytheistic like Egypt.

  • The ancient Hebrews diverged from this norm by proclaiming Yahweh (who likely began as a local deity within a polytheistic pantheon) as the one true God, prompting a long-term shift toward monotheism that persists to this day.

    • As opposed to locally variable deities, monotheistic systems present themselves as world religions: religions that claim to be universally significant to all people.

      • The monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all became state religions, whose religious message and ritual supported the government of the state. These three “Abrahamic religions” effectively share the same deity.

    • Muslims feel that God’s message was most accurately received by the Prophet Mohammad, not by Christians and Jews. In much the same way, many Christian faiths believe that Jews were not given the full faith until Jesus arrived.

• World religions of Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism, are polytheistic and nontheistic, respectively.

  • Hinduism shares many traits with the polytheistic systems of the Middle East: religious specialists and political leaders maintaining cosmic and social order by seeking the intervention of local deities.

  • Just as Jesus challenged the sociopolitical order of Judaism in the Mideast, Siddhartha Gautama (born between the fourth and sixth centuries bce in northern India) challenged orthodox Hinduism. Taking the name “Buddha” (meaning “awakened one”), he taught a path of compassion and selflessness.

• Many anthropologists view atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers as having a worldview just as Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists do. The details of their worldviews are usually secular, but they are nevertheless build around symbols.

How Do Rituals Work?

• There are plenty of everyday secular rituals (e.g., tooth brushing). What sets religious rituals apart from these? Part of it depends on our perception of them—very few see brushing teeth as spiritually significant.

• Another distinction is that religious rituals are often described as “magical” in some sense.

  • In anthropology, magic refers to an explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations, that often works at a distance without direct physical contact.

• This definition differs from our everyday sense of magic as an intentional illusion. To believers in magical powers, these forces are very real and consequential. Whether we, as anthropologists, believe in magic is beside the point.

  • We seek an emic understanding of magic and its role in our informants’ lives. (Further, Americans are not immune to magical thinking—consider Gmelch’s (1978) study of baseball magic.)

• Anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer coined the term sympathetic magic: any magical rite that relies on the supernatural to produce its outcome without working through some supernatural being such as a spirit, demon, or deity.

• Frazer conducted a cross-cultural analysis of sympathetic magic, identifying two principles: the law of similarity and contagion.

  • Frazer’s law of similarity (imitative magic) encompasses things like voodoo dolls—harming an imitation or effigy of a real person is believed to harm that person.

    • Likewise, harming a representative object “contaminated” by a person is believed to harm the person via the law of contagion.

  • These laws are not mutually exclusive; they can, and do, co-occur in religious rituals. For example, Catholic communion combines them with its symbolic wafer and wine.

  • One of the most common forms of ritual worldwide is the rite of passage: any life-cycle rite that marks a person’s or group’s transition from one social state to another. These rituals are probably evident in many of the events students have experienced.

    • See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Examining Rites of Passage”

• Anthropologist Victor Turner (1967, 1969) focused on the links between ritual and symbols. Ritual symbols can consist of

  • Objects (wafer and winer)

  • Colors (white = purity or grief, depending on context)

  • Actions (moving like an emu totem)

  • Events (rituals that reenact mythic events)

  • Words (any number of ritual recitations of sacred texts)

How Is Religion Linked to Political and Social Action?

• In 1966, Time magazine questioned if religious identification would decline in the United States as it had in Europe. Despite a recent increase in Americans who don’t associate with any religious tradition, religious affiliation has remained stable and even risen in some categories since 1966.

• Why does the United States remain so unique among Western industrialized nations in terms of its religiosity (contrary to Time’s prediction)? Why is a secular worldview (i.e., does not accept the supernatural as influencing current people’s lives) relatively rare in the United States?

  • There are complex historical and political answers to this question. One factor is that science and reason have not replaced religious belief, as Time speculated they might.

• The combination of political and religious authority was something of a norm for human history. America’s decision to formally separate church and state marked a revolutionary departue from this norm. But religion and politics have never been completely separate in the United States.

• Religion, politics, and social change remain intertwined, especially with the rise of fundamentalists: people belonging to conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles.

• The term “fundamentalism” is sometimes used pejoratively to imply, at best, scientific illiteracy and, at worst, violent extremism.

  • Here, we use fundamentalism to mean conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles (i.e., not inherently ignorant or violent).

• In the 1990s, the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago explored fundamentalism across a wide range of religious groupings (many not traditionally associated with fundamentalism):

  • Christianity,

  • Islam,

  • Zionist Judaism,

  • Buddhism,

  • Hinduism,

  • Confucianism, and

  • Sikhism.

  • The project identified key themes common to all groups:

    • All are threatened by secularization and perceive themselves as fighting to return to “proper” gender roles, sexuality, and education.

    • They derive meaning and purpose from political and military efforts to defend their beliefs about life and death (especially those issues related to the beginning and end of life).

    • Fundamentalists define themselves in relation to what they are not: outsiders, modernizers, and moderates.

    • They are zealous, committed, and firmly convinced that they have been chosen to carry out the will of a deity.

• What’s most interesting about fundamentalism from an anthropological standpoint is how it differs from religious expression in smaller communities. In small-scale societies, religion often supports the existing social order.

  • Fundamentalism in larger societies sets itself up in opposition to the social order.

• This process of belonging and the social action associated with group membership is bolstered by important symbols—anthropologists have known about this for a long time.

Key Terms

1. Animism - the belief that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers are animated by spiritual forces or beings

2. Fundamentalism - conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles

3. Fundamentalist - a person belonging to a religious movement that advocates a return to fundamental or traditional principles

4. Interpretive approach - a kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and cultural interconnections within a society

5. Magic - an explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations, often working at a distance without direct physical contact

6. Monotheism - belief in a single god

7. Polytheism - belief in many gods

8. Quran - the main body of scripture in Islam, consisting of verses of classical Arabic poetry understood to be revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by Allah, often in dreams or in the midst of other activities. These verses were memorized by the Prophet’s followers and written down after his death

9. Religion - a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of social life that relate to ultimate issues of humankind’s existence

10. Rite of passage - any life cycle rite that marks a person’s or group’s transition from one social state to another

11. Rituals - stylized performances involving symbols that are associated with social, political, and religious activities

12. Secular worldview - a worldview that does not accept the supernatural as influencing current people’s lives

13. Shaman - a religious leader who communicates the needs of the living with the spirit world, usually through some form of ritual trance or other altered state of consciousness

14. Speaking in tongues - the phenomenon of speaking in an apparently unknown language, often in an energetic and fast-paced way

15. Spirit familiar - a spirit that has developed a close bond with a shaman

16. Sympathetic magic - any magical rite that relies on the supernatural to produce its outcome without working through a specific supernatural being such as a spirit, demon, or deity

17. Totemism - a system of thought that associates particular social groups with specific animal or plant species called “totems” as an emblem

18. Trance - a semiconscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and singing, or hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote

19. World religions - religions that claim to be universally significant to all people

20. Worldview - a general approach to or set of shared, unquestioned assumptions about the world and how it works