Chapter 17 Outline

Religion: Ritual and Belief

Introduction

In the fall of 2018 two American icons, Aretha Franklin and John McCain, passed away. Their funerals were a study in contrasts because of who they were and the positions they held in American society.
Chapter 17 asks, Why do people believe things that others consider wrong? And within this broader question

How should we understand religion and religious beliefs?
What forms does religion take?
How do rituals work?
How is religion linked to political and social action?

Anthropologists understand that religious beliefs offer a roadmap for behavior and create meaning for people through the use of powerful rituals and symbols.

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. They thought their beliefs were non-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
By the 1870’s scholars began to systematically look for theories to help them understand the cultural importance of religious beliefs.
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.
From 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.
Tylor 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 (1956, 1970). 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. But he recognized the many different forms of supernatural belief: from animism to gods and spirits to more amorphous supernatural forces like the mana of native Hawaiians: a belief that sacred power inheres in certain high-ranking people, sacred spaces, and objects.
Wallace’s approach to religion can be criticized for not doing enough to explain religious change, for treating religious groups and individuals as intellectually impaired, 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” (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 assuming that people have a basic need for meaning and for making sense of the world, for not adequately distinguishing religion from other domains (science, aesthetics, common sense, or law), for not understanding the emotional experience of belief, and 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 its contemporary consequences, such as making sense of the 2015 terrorist attacks on the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

France has seen terrorist attacks for centuries. But this attack was unusual because the attackers were so willing to put aside their personal safety for their cause.
The attack on the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo came after the magazine published a satirical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad on its cover.
The Quran does not prohibit artistic images of the prophet but some jihadist groups object.
European leaders and the public were galvanized into action by the attack on free speech.
Anthropologists reject the view that these and similar attacks reflect a “clash of civilizations” and argue that they are about tensions resulting from discrimination and resulting inequities for Muslims. They are based both in religion and politics.

What Forms Does Religion Take?

Early anthropological scholars of religion viewed technologically primitive people as being primitive in all respects, even religion. Today, anthropologists don’t 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.
The Elema and Purari live in much higher-density villages full of long houses. Here, clan spirits are seen as inhabiting specially designed house boards—a specific, sedentary location, rather than the forest more generally. Clans associate with specific animal spirits and make offerings to them.

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 social 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 groups competing to “own” Native American 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, anthropologists have paid particular attention to this state of trance: a semiconscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and singing, or hallucinogenic 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 snuff 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 (called “glossolalia” by linguists).

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 (a religion of many gods) 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 (the belief in a single god) 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, but

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 Christian, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists do. The details of their worldviews are usually secular, but they are nevertheless built around symbols.
See “The Anthropological Life: Is Anthropology compatible with Religious Faith?”

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 our 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 laws of similarity and contagion.

See “Classic Contributions: Sir James G. Frazer on Sympathetic Magic”

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 including the funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain.

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

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 (that 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 much of our species’ history. America’s decision to formally separate church and state marked a revolutionary departure 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 post-1960s rise in Christian fundamentalists in the United States was paralleled by increasing Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East.
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.
See “Doing Fieldwork: Studying the Sikh Militants”

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.
See “Doing Fieldwork: Studying the Sikh Militants.”

Conclusion

The funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain illustrate how rituals help us construct meaning for social groups and can help us sort through complex issues.
The lessons we have learned from studying small scale societies can be applied to complex societies like our own.
Worldviews are built up of systems of symbols about how the world ideally should be. They are all in a sense arbitrary and always incomplete understandings of the world.
While most religious worldviews are constructed of symbols that feel intensely natural, they are anything but arbitrary.