Anthropology Appreciating Human Diversity Fifteenth Edition Conrad Phillip

Anthropology Appreciating Human Diversity Fifteenth Edition Conrad Phillip Kottak University of Michigan Mc. Graw-Hill © 2013 Mc. Graw-Hill Companies. All Rights Reserved. 21 -1

C H A P T E R RELIGION 21 -2

RELIGION • • What Is Religion? Expressions of Religion and Cultural Ecology Social Control Kinds of Religion World Religions Religion and Change Secular Rituals 21 -3

RELIGION • What is religion, and what are its various forms, social correlates, and functions? • What is ritual, and what are its various forms and expressions? • What role does religion play in maintaining and changing societies? 21 -4

WHAT IS RELIGION? • Religion • Wallace: belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces • Durkheim: religious effervescence • Reese: bodies of people who gather together regularly for worship • Turner: communitas: Intense feeling of social solidarity • Religion is a cultural universal 21 -5

EXPRESSIONS OF RELIGION: SPIRITUAL BEINGS • Tylor: religion evolved through stages • Animism: belief in spiritual beings • Polytheism: belief in multiple gods • Monotheism: belief in a single, all-powerful deity • Tylor: religion declines as science offers better explanations for things 21 -6

POWERS AND FORCES • Mana: sacred impersonal force existing in the universe • Melanesian mana similar to good luck • Polynesian mana attached to political offices • Because high chiefs had so much mana, their bodies and possessions were taboo: sacred and forbidden; prohibition backed by supernatural sanctions 21 -7

MAGIC AND RELIGION • Magic: supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims • May be imitative (as with voodoo dolls) or contagious (accomplished through contact) • Magic exists in cultures with diverse religious beliefs 21 -8

UNCERTAINTY, ANXIETY, SOLACE • Religion and magic don’t just explain things and help people accomplish goals • They serve emotional and cognitive needs • Malinowski: magic is used to establish control, but religion “is born out of…the real tragedies of human life” 21 -9

RITUALS • Ritual: formal—stylized, repetitive, stereotyped behavior, based on a liturgical order • Rituals convey information about participants and their culture • Rituals are social acts 21 -10

RITES OF PASSAGE • Rites of passage: customs associated with transition from one stage of life to another • Contemporary rites of passage include confirmations, baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, initiations, weddings, and applying for Social Security and Medicare • Liminality: in-between phase of passage rite 21 -11

RITES OF PASSAGE • Liminality is basic to rites of passage • Involves a temporary suspension and reversal of social distinctions • Such phenomena as humility, poverty, equality, obedience, and sexual abstinence; silence may be required from the sect or cult members 21 -12

RECAP 21. 1: Oppositions between Liminality and Normal Social Life 21 -13

TOTEMISM • Totem: animal, plant, or geographic feature associated with specific social group, to which that totem is sacred or symbolically important • Members of each totemic group believed themselves to be descendants of their totem • Uses nature as model for society • Cosmology: system, often religious, for imagining and understanding the Universe • Totemic principles continue to demarcate groups 21 -14

RELIGION AND CULTURAL ECOLOGY: SACRED CATTLE IN INDIA • Ahimsa: Hindu doctrine of nonviolence forbids killing animals • Western planners lament that Hindus are bound by culture and tradition and refuse to develop rationally • Assumptions are both ethnocentric and wrong • Cattle play an important adaptive role in Indian ecosystem 21 -15

SOCIAL CONTROL • The power of religion affects actions • Leaders have used religion to promote and justify their views and policies • Persuasion • Witchcraft accusations • Often directed at socially marginal or anomalous individuals 21 -16

SOCIAL CONTROL • Witch hunts play an important role in limiting social deviancy • Leveling mechanism: custom that brings standouts back in line with community norms • Many religions have formal codes of ethics to prohibit or promote certain behaviors • Religions also maintain social control by stressing the fleeting nature of life 21 -17

KINDS OF RELIGION • Religion is a cultural universal, but cultural differences show up systematically in religious beliefs and practices • All societies have religious figures • Shamans: part-time magic-religious practitioner • Totemic ceremonies of Native Australians temporarily brought together foragers • Productive economies can support full-time religious specialists 21 -18

KINDS OF RELIGION • Wallace: describes religions of such stratified societies as “ecclesiastical” (pertaining to an established church and its hierarchy of officials) • In monotheism, all supernatural phenomena believed to be manifestations of, or under control of, a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being 21 -19

PROTESTANT VALUES AND CAPITALISM • Max Weber linked spread of capitalism to values central to the Protestant faith: • • Ascetic Entrepreneurial Future oriented Capitalism required that traditional attitudes of Catholic peasants be replaced by values befitting an industrial economy 21 -20

WORLD RELIGIONS • World’s largest religions: • • • Christianity Islam Hinduism Chinese Confucianism Buddhism • More than one billion people claim no official religion 21 -21

Table 21. 1: Religions of the World, by Estimated Number of Adherents, 2005 21 -22

Figure 21. 1: Major World Religions by Percentage of World Population, 2005 21 -23

Table 21. 2: Classical World Religions Ranked by Internal Religious Similarity 21 -24

RELIGION AND CHANGE • Religion helps maintain social order • Religious leaders also may seek to alter or revitalize their society 21 -25

REVITALIZATION MOVEMENTS • Revitalization movements: social movements that occur in times of change • Colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake 21 -26

SYNCRETISMS • Syncretisms: Cultural, especially religious, mixes, emerging from acculturation • Voodoo, santería, and candomblé • Cargo cults: postcolonial, acculturative religious movements in Melanesia • Religious responses to expansion of the world capitalist economy 21 -27

Figure 21. 2: Location of Melanesia 21 -28

ANTIMODERNISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM • Antimodernism: rejecting modern in favor of what is perceived as earlier, purer, and better way of life • Fundamentalism: advocating strict fidelity to a religion’s presumed founding principles • Asserts an identity separate from that of the larger religious group • Seeks to rescue religion from absorption into the modern 21 -29

A NEW AGE • Number of Americans giving no religious preference grew from 7% to 16% between 1990 and 2007 • Canadians rose from 12% to 17% • Sociological research suggests that levels of U. S. religiosity have not changed much in the past century 21 -30

A NEW AGE • In U. S. , official recognition of a religion entitles it to a modicum of respect • Exemption from taxation • Not all religions receive official recognition 21 -31

SECULAR RITUALS • Formal, invariant, stereotyped, earnest, repetitive behavior and rites of passage that take place in nonreligious settings • How do we classify ritual-like behavior that occurs in secular contexts? • How can we tell what is religion and what not? • Who is to say which is “more religious”? 21 -32

Table 21. 3: Religious Composition of the Populations of the United States, 1990 and 2001, and Canada, 1991 and 2007 21 -33