Introducing Anthropology of Religion

Introducing Anthropology of Religion
This clear and engaging guide introduces students to key areas of the field and shows
how to apply an anthropological approach to the study of religion in the contemporary
world. Written by an experienced teacher, it covers major traditional topics including
definitions, theories, and beliefs, as well as symbols, myth, and ritual. The book also
explores important but often overlooked issues such as morality, violence, fundamental-
ism, secularization, and new religious movements. The chapters all contain lively case
studies of religions practiced around the world.
The third edition of Introducing Anthropology of Religion is fully updated and contains
additional content on material religion, visual religion, and affect theory, and a new chapter
takes a closer look at medical and health topics. The author encourages the reader to engage
throughout with the unifying themes of race, gender, and power, and how these themes are
intertwined with anthropology of religion. Images, a glossary, and questions for discussion
are included and additional resources are provided via a companion website.
Jack David Eller is a retired Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Community

College of Denver and Head of Anthropology of Religion for the Global Center for
Religion Research in Denver, USA. He is the author of a major introductory textbook,
Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives (fourth edition, 2020).
Praise for the second edition:
“This book is the best example I know of its kind—an introductory text that combines
sophisticated, cross-cultural, and historically nuanced discussion with an intuitive order-
ing of subjects. Eller is especially good at weaving together contemporary perspectives
with classical anthropological theory. The book’s accessibility and erudition make it
perfect for advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars alike.”
Liam D. Murphy, California State University, Sacramento, USA
“The first edition of Introducing Anthropology of Religion was one of the most engaging,
comprehensive, and theoretically sophisticated overviews ever published. Eller’s second
edition includes a range of new and revised material as well as expanded web resources.
Beginning students and specialists alike will learn much from this volume.”
Stephen D. Glazier, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA
Introducing Anthropology
of Religion
Culture to the Ultimate
Third Edition
Jack David Eller

Cover image: Brazilian religious altar mixing elements of umbanda, candomblé
and Catholicism in the syncretism present in the local culture and religion
© Fred Pinheiro / Alamy Stock Photo
Third edition published 2022
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© 2022 Jack David Eller
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First edition published 2007
Second edition published by Routledge 2015
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eller, Jack David, 1959- author.
Title: Introducing anthropology of religion : culture to the ultimate / Jack David Eller.
Description: 3rd Edition. | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021029619 | ISBN 9781032023038 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032023045
(paperback) | ISBN 9781003182825 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology of religion.
Classification: LCC GN470 .E37 2022 | DDC 306.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029619
ISBN: 978-1-032-02303-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-02304-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-18282-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825
Access the companion website: https://www.routledge.com/cw/eller
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of figures vi
List of boxes viii
Introduction ix
1 Studying religion anthropologically: Definitions and theories 1

2 Beliefs, beings, and bodies 26
3 Symbols, specialists, and substance 50
4 Religious language: Words of truth, words of power 77
5 Ritual: Religion in action 102
6 Religion and morality: Forming society, transforming self 126
7 Religion, medicine, and wellness 150
8 Religious change and new religious movements 175
9 Translocal or “world” religions 201
10 Religious fundamentalism 228
11 Religious violence 254
12 Secularism and irreligion 279
Glossary 304
Bibliography 312
Index 336
Figures
2.1 Guardian angel. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and

Photographs Division 33
2.2 Detail of Tree of Life relief on a restored ninth-century Hindu temple at
Prambanan, Java. © Suzanne Long/Alamy 42
2.3 Graves in an urban Japanese cemetery. Courtesy of the author 47
3.1 The Wailing/Western Wall in Jerusalem (early twentieth century).
Courtesy of the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library
of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 58
3.2 Offering to the mountain spirits (Japanese drawing). Courtesy of the
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 60
3.3 Nunivak ceremonial mask. Courtesy of the Edward S. Curtis Collection,
3.4 Hindu god resting on a bed of snakes. Courtesy of the author 65
3.5 Yebichai, giving the medicine: Navajo shaman with participant. Courtesy
of the Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library of Congress Prints and
3.6 Buddhist monks in Thailand. Courtesy of the author 72
4.1 Yebichai prayer—Navajo dancing. Courtesy of the Edward S. Curtis
Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photograph Division 91
5.1 A shaman performing a ritual to heal a sick child in Sikkim (India).
Courtesy of the Alice S. Kandell Collection, Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division 117
5.2 A Colombian spiritual healer performs a ritual of exorcism on a woman
who claims to be possessed by spirits. Using fire, dirt, candles, flowers,
eggs, and other natural-based items, in conjunction with Christian
religious formulas, he attempts to drive the supposed evil spirit out of the
victim’s mind and body. Photo by Jan Sochor/Latincontent/Getty Images 119
5.3 Australian Aboriginal (Warlpiri) men and boys practicing a ritual dance.
Courtesy of the author 120
5.4 Pilgrims at Mecca (c. 1910). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division 122
5.5 Worshippers at a Japanese temple. Courtesy of the author 123
6.1 Indian brahmin painting his forehead with the red and white marks of his
sect and caste. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and
List of figures vii
6.2 Mardi Gras parade, New Orleans. Courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith
Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 145
7.1 An Aeta anito (healer or medicine woman) performs a ritual to heal a member
of her community. During the ritual the sickness of the woman (in this case
asthma) is transferred into a chicken to remove it from her body. Anitos are
deeply rooted in Aeta culture. Most Aetas will visit a community anito before
going to see a doctor or visit a hospital. © Jacob Maentz/Getty images 154
7.2 Witchcraft in South Africa: The magic world of Sangomas. South
African Sangomas are wizards and witches who are supposedly chosen
by their ancestors to follow a traditional training and go through a rite
of passage after which they become Sangomas and can cure and help
people. © Patrick Durand/Contributor/Getty Images 161
7.3 Sick man being healed by a shaman. © Floris Leeuwenberg/Getty images 163
7.4 Members of The Nharo San tribe from the central Kalahari in Botswana
perform their ritual inxam dance, symbolizing the healing and therapeutic
ritual cleansing of body and mind of evil forces. © Rajesh Jantilal/AFP via
Getty Images 164
7.5 Navajo medicine man and Navajo boys. A blind Native American Navajo
medicine man directs four Najavo boys in a “Red Ant and Sham” battle
dance, which is a healing dance. © Keystone View Company/FPG/Archive
Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 168
8.1 Midday mass at Cao Dai Great Temple in Tay Ninh, north of Ho Chi
Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. © agefotostock/Alamy Stock Photo 187
8.2 Heaven’s Gate website. © Pictoral Press Ltd/Alamy 188
8.3 Sioux Ghost Dance (nineteenth-century engraving). Courtesy of Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division 191
8.4 An Aum Shinrikyo follower meditates before a portrait of founder Shoko
Asahara. Photo courtesy of Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images 193
9.1 Grande Mosquée de Paris, France. Photo by Bruno DE HOGUES/Gamma-
Rapho via Getty Images 214
9.2 Orthodox priest at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Courtesy of the
10.1 Amish life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Carol M.
Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 231
10.2 Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations officiates a wedding at his
Aryan Nations compound in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 1998. Evan Hurd/
Alamy Stock Photo 240
10.3 Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a press conference
in New York (1981). Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images 243
11.1 Walking over hot coals in Agia Eleni. © Pixelstock/Alamy 255
11.2 A Shi’ite Muslim man, sitting by the side of the road, wearing white
clothing with blood stains, holding a long, bloody sword that is used for
self-flagellation, during the Day of Ashura. © Guido Dingemans, De
Eindredactie/Getty Images 268
12.1 Woman wearing Islamic clothing despite its ban in France. Photo by: BSIP/
Universal Images Group via Getty Images 297
12.2 Ataturk poster, Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey on June 9, 2013. Photo
by Raphael Fournier/Sipa USA/Alamy Stock photo 299
Boxes
1.1 The “language” of God in English and beyond 4

1.2 Learning to have a religious experience 9
1.3 Religion and the modern state: A contemporary controversy in Spain 23
2.1 Spirits of the living and dead in the Trobriand Islands 33
2.2 Changing of the gods in the western Himalayas 38
2.3 The gendered cosmos of the Desana 43
3.1 Picturing God in Ghana 66
3.2 The multiple personhood of the Yanomami shapori 68
3.3 Witchcraft and doubt in Indonesia 75
4.1 Hyborea: A Russian nationalist political myth 82
4.2 Searching for meaning in Bible reading 92
4.3 Word, voice, and gesture in Amazonian “somatic poetry” 95
5.1 Humor and violation in ritual: The Yaqui “ritual clown” 106
5.2 Ritual resistance: The anti-Trump witchcraft movement 110
5.3 Ambiguous pilgrimage to Walsingham, the Nazareth of England 123
6.1 Forming and performing self in Thai Buddhism 136
6.2 Religion resisting the state: Praying to Our Lady of the Wall 142
6.3 Christmas janneying in coastal Labrador 146
7.1 Nonsecular healing in a European women’s tantric retreat 155
7.2 Healing self, kin, and society in northern Australia 167
7.3 Divine assistance in an Ecuadorian fertility clinic 172
8.1 Falun Dafa: Chinese tradition, new religion, or “evil cult”? 182
8.2 Syncretism and “resonant rupture” in contemporary Navajo religion 189
8.3 Nation and gender in contemporary Polish “native faith” movements 195
9.1 Women and Islamic television talk shows in Pakistan 211
9.2 The Muslims of Texas, USA 214
9.3 Denominational disputes and the sociality of schism in Papua New Guinea 219
10.1 Male piety in an ultra-orthodox yeshiva 243
10.2 Women and fundamentalism in Yemen 247
10.3 Hindutva and the “Hinduizing” of Christian North India 249
11.1 Loving cattle, killing cattle among the Suri of East Africa 264
11.2 Asceticism, monasticism, and discipline in medieval Christianity 266
11.3 The persecution of Uyghurs in contemporary China 270
12.1 Teaching secularism in the Soviet Union 286
12.2 Learning to be secular among Japanese interfaith chaplains 294
12.3 Among secular humanists in the UK 301
Introduction
Christianity, specifically Catholicism through the missionary Society of Mary (also

known as Marists), was introduced to Bougainville Island (Papua New Guinea) around
1901. The local Nasiosi people possessed their own religious ideas, including supernatural
beings (Kumponi) that inhabited forests and rivers, spirits of the dead (ma’naari), and
ritual leadership that was closed to women, although the role of mother was prominent
and powerful in their matrilineal culture. Thus, the image of Mary—literally, statues of
the Virgin mother of God—and the Marist message of “love for Mary and … the com-
passion of Mary” were appealing to the Nasiosi, particularly because the missionaries
were heedful “not to disrupt social organization, and to a certain extent, they were quite
tolerant of indigenous beliefs and cultural practices, often integrating local beliefs in their
own teachings in order to facilitate conversion” (Hermkens 2012: 164). Consequently and
naturally, Christian figures like Mary, Jesus, and God were appropriated into the culture
as super-spirits that granted practical benefits and overpowered indigenous spirits. But
neither indigenous nor Christian religion prevented an outbreak of “vicious warfare” in
1988 between the government and the secessionist Bougainville Revolutionary Army
(BRA), which opposed governmental interference and unjust development in the region.
Instead, religion, including Mother Mary, factored significantly into the violence. With
churches (and almost all other infrastructure) destroyed and priests absent, “Marian
devotion kept people going” and “was important especially for those who were the vic-
tims of the conflict—women, children, and the elderly” (168). But Mary was not only a
source of comfort but also of combat. Early in the conflict, the Our Lady of Mercy
movement emerged, associated with the BRA and featuring “a strong nationalist ring”
(172). In 1995 it even issued “Military Moral Identity Orders,” making the struggle a holy
war for the freedom of the Holy Nation of Bougainville; in the process, the Catholic
rosary and statues of Mary were “turned into a nationalistic imagery that works for God
and Nation” (174). Near the end of the war, a Marian statue of Our Lady of Fatima was
taken on pilgrimage around Bougainville in an attempt to bring peace but also to estab-
lish a theocracy ruled “under the guidance of Mary and God” (175).
I, like most people and most anthropologists, am intrigued by religion. I have studied
the subject for over forty years and taught it for over twenty. In that time, the anthro-
pology of religion has advanced greatly, evolving from a field predominantly focused on
“primitive” and exotic religions to one fully conscious of the many points raised by
Hermkens’ study of Bougainville Christianity above—the spread of translocal or “world”
religions; the acceptance (or rejection or reinterpretation) of such religions, refracted
through local/indigenous beliefs and concepts; the materiality of religion; the inevitable
connection between religion and politics; the equally inevitable connection between
x Introduction
religion and gender, race, class, age, and other social variables; and the survival of reli-
gion in the modern world, often expressed in fundamentalist and violent forms. This
book is a summary and celebration of the field’s achievements.
The anthropology of religion has always been defined by a set of principles, shared
with the anthropological approach to all subjects. The first is the diversity among reli-
gions: there are many religions in the world, and they are different from each other in
multiple and profound ways. Not all religions include gods, nor do all make morality a
central issue, etc. No religion is “normal” or “typical” of all religions; the truth is in the
diversity. A second principle, often neglected or denied, is the diversity within any reli-
gion. No religion is a homogeneous, monolithic set of beliefs and practices; rather, within
each religion, particularly but not only the so-called world religions, there is a variety of
beliefs and practices—and interpretations of those beliefs and practices—distributed
socially, spatially, and temporally.
A third principle is the integration of religion with its surrounding culture. Anthro-
pologists call this holism or cultural integration: all of the parts of a culture are linked
and mutually influencing. More than simply integrated, religion tends to be, as Mary
Douglas phrased it, “consonant” with its culture and society as well. Each culture and
society has a style, a feel, an ethos which religion tends to replicate, making the experi-
ence of culture—even the “bodily” experience—consistent and symmetric.
A fourth principle is the “modularity” of religion: a religion is not a single “thing” or
essence but a composite of many elements or bits, nearly all of which have their non-
religious cognates. That is, there is religious ritual and there is non-religious ritual, reli-
gious violence and non-religious violence, etc. Further, not all of the modules in a religion
are entirely “religious”; rather, religions integrate non-religious components like politics,
economics, gender, technology, and popular culture.
A fifth principle is the relativity of language, which is a subtle yet crucial problem in
the cross-cultural study of religion. We describe and analyze religions in words, but our
words are seldom if ever neutral or universal. In the Western study of religion, the ter-
minology generally comes from the Christian perspective, where “god,” “heaven,” “sin,”
“soul,” “worship,” and even “belief” and “religion” themselves are appropriate and
intelligible. However, in discussing other religions, these terms may be unsuitable or
unintelligible. We must be alert to the danger of imposing alien concepts and ideas on
foreign religions and so distorting them.
A sixth and final principle is the lived and practiced nature of religion. Anthropology
cannot ignore religious texts and experts, but it cannot end with them. Anthropology
instead emphasizes how real human individuals understand and use their religious
resources—beliefs, objects, texts, rituals, and specialists—in specific social contexts for
specific social and personal reasons. This takes us necessarily into an examination of how
religion is embodied by persons and institutions and how it is materialized and visualized
in interpersonal experience (like the statues of Mary above).
In the book that follows, religions from around the world—large and small, familiar
and unfamiliar—are investigated with these six principles in mind. Additionally, the
topical coverage goes beyond the conventional treatment in the anthropology of religion.
Like all texts on the subject, we discuss beliefs, ritual, myth, and so on. However, we
place these standard topics in wider contexts—myth in “religious language,” ritual in
“religious behavior,” and the like; each of these is further relativized as a cultural concept
which we may not find at all in another culture or may find in quite unexpected form.
Even more, we introduce topics that receive little or no attention in standard texts, such
Introduction xi
as morality, translocal (world) religions, fundamentalism, violence, and secularism or
nonbelief. One might be surprised to learn—to an extent, I myself was surprised to
learn—that anthropology has approached or can approach these complex and sprawling
subjects with its time-tested concepts and methods, especially fieldwork or participant
observation. But since all religion is local and is always evolving and adapting to its
social circumstances, anthropology is perfectly, maybe even uniquely, equipped to
research all of these matters. And as not only scholars but citizens of twenty-first century
global society, it is incumbent upon us to study all of these matters. An anthropology of
religion without a commitment to contemporary manifestations like violence or funda-
mentalism renders itself quaint, tangential, perhaps even inconsequential for the modern
world. I hope that this book not only conveys some insight into the religions of the world
but illustrates how anthropology is relevant, indeed essential, for understanding and
inhabiting this world.
The structure of the book

The new edition preserves the basic structure of its predecessors. This structure includes:
An ethnographic vignette to open each chapter

Three boxes per chapter, all ethnographic (and almost all new to this edition), cov-
ering such diverse and fascinating topics as Tanzanian rainmakers, Islam and gender
violence in Spain, Mongolian shamans’ mirrors, African visual Christianity, female
radio preachers in Mali, Yaqui ritual clowns, Russian political myth, wiccans bind-
ing Trump, Our Lady of the Israel/Palestinian border wall, janneying in Labrador,
women’s tantric retreats in Belgium, God in an Ecuadorian IVF lab, China’s Falun
Gong, Lemba black Jews, Pakistani Muslim television talk shows, Israeli yeshiva
students, Venezuelan violent spirit mediums, Egyptian unbelief, UK secular huma-
nists, and many more
Evenly distributed coverage of traditional and contemporary societies around the
world, including modern Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East
Discussion questions at the end of each chapter
Several supplemental readings per chapter, listed at the end with reminders in the
text at appropriate spots, presenting the African devil that wears hijab, moving sta-
tues in Ireland, Samoan political myth, prayer in society that distrusts words, trick-
ster gods, Brazilian spirit-surgery, Japanese celebrity gods, Vodún tourism, Hasidism
in New York City, ethno-religious conflict in Sri Lanka, secularism in Islam, and the
atheist Sunday Assembly, to name a few
A glossary
A companion website, featuring the original supplemental readings plus study mate-
rials and useful links and resources.
New to the third edition

The third edition represents a significant, perhaps dramatic, revision from the previous.
Every chapter includes more and new material, combining classic anthropological
research with work done as recently as 2021. The two most exciting additions to the
text are:
xii Introduction
A unifying theme across chapters, namely, gender, with discussions and case studies
in every chapter considering how religious thought, practice, and organization affect
and are affected by gender differences
A brand-new chapter on religion and health/healing/wellness
Some of the changes and enhancements to the new edition include:
More material on contemporary societies, especially in Europe and the United States
Trimmed content on older, traditional religions and cultures; all deleted case studies,
and most other cut material, is preserved in an online document of “removed mate-
rial” per chapter
New or enhanced discussion of such cutting-edge topics as learning religion, affect
theory, Amazonian perspectivism, mana, material religion and mediatization, visual
religion, the modernity of witchcraft, political myth, ritual efficacy, ritual failure,
political rituals, religious improvisation and creativity, ordinary Muslim lives, Cath-
olicism, fundamentalism as world-making, ultra-orthodox Jews, sacrifice as an
economy of life, religious violence against a victim versus an enemy, religious ter-
rorism, secularism in India, and post-secularism
A bonus online chapter on vernacular religion
Students and instructors will find the new edition more current, more global, more eth-
nographic, and hopefully more eye-opening than the second, portraying the major
advances in anthropological thinking on religion in recent years, where the discipline may
go in the future—and how students help build the anthropology of tomorrow.
A note on verb tenses

Anthropology has long struggled with the representation of time in our descriptions.
Scholars have often adopted the so-called “ethnographic present,” writing about a people
or a practice as if things are the same today as when observed or first described (that is,
“the Yanomamo believe …” or “the Warlpiri do …”). However, in a world of rapid
change, it is dangerous to assume that religion or culture in general persists as previously
seen or depicted. In this book, unless the time-frame of an account or event is patently
clear, the convention will be to use the past tense for material that is more than a decade
old (pre-2010) and the present tense for more recent work.
1 Studying religion anthropologically
Definitions and theories
There is a Mande [West Africa] proverb, Ala ma ko kelen da—God did not create
anything single. The implication is that the world is made up of complementary relationships—
male-female, husband-wife, parent-child, elder-junior, brother-sister, and so forth—not indivi-
dual entities.
(Jackson 2009: 40)
Like all people, the Ihanzu (Tanzania) depend on rain for life. Unlike all people, the
Ihanzu believe that the rain comes in two forms, male and female. To bring rain, they
depend on two royal rainmakers, one male and one female. And this is only one facet of
a cultural and religious worldview characterized by “the blatant or latent gendering of
nearly everything”; Todd Sanders “found ‘male’ and ‘female’ rainstones, sticks, pots,
hoes, spirits, celestial bodies, deities, and much more” (2008: xiv). Fertility and transfor-
mation of all kinds depend on the complementarity, cooperation, and comingling of the
gendered principles. But the gendering of nature and supernature is not based on human
sex/gender differences—rather the other way around, human gender is one manifestation
of a “grander cosmic design” (26)—nor does Ihanzu gender map neatly onto bodies.
Every human is a mixture of male and female substances and forces, and males and
females alike contain both substances. Further, neither gender is independent or superior;
running a household, farming, and making rain require both. The matched pair of rain-
makers performs rituals with gendered rainstones to attract the rain, which arrives first
as male rain and later as female rain. And if the rain fails to come, people blame rain
witches—male and female, working in tandem to steal the rain and take it for them-
selves—who can only be opposed by rites in which women violate norms by dancing
naked and hurling obscenities, embodying “both genders simultaneously, … combining
and collapsing masculinity and femininity within themselves” (141). In this and other
ways, the Ihanzu “aim to establish an idealized gender order and by that means, to
change the world” (176).
Everywhere, humans do and say things that are strange, even incomprehensible, to
people outside their group. Some of these things we call “religion.” Sometimes members
of the society engaged in such practices call them religion, sometimes they do not. More
importantly, some societies have a term for “religion” while others lack it altogether, and
when we label an idea, behavior, object, or institution “religion” we are distinguishing it
from other categories such as “magic,” “superstition,” “spirituality,” and of course “pol-
itics” or “science.”
Like every aspect of humanity, both biological and behavioral, religions are remarkably
diverse. It is the business of anthropology to study human diversity. And as with the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-1
study of other aspects of cultural diversity such as language or kinship, it is not the
business of anthropology to judge religion, let alone to falsify or verify it. Anthropology
is not the seminary, indoctrinating the novice into any particular religion. It is not
apologetics, attempting to prove or justify some religion; neither is it an exercise in
debunking any or all religion. Anthropology starts with a different interest and a different
agenda, and therefore with different tools and concepts. What does it mean to study
religion anthropologically? The most profitable approach might be to answer this ques-
tion backwards, beginning with anthropology, then turning to religion, and ending with
study.
Studying religion “anthropologically”

Many disciplines explore religion—psychology, sociology, theology, even biology in some
instances. Each has its own focus and interest. The anthropological study of religion
must be distinguished and distinguishable from these other approaches in some mean-
ingful ways; it must do or offer something that the others do not. It must pose its own
specific questions, approach from its own specific perspective, and practice its own spe-
cific method.
Anthropology can best be thought of as the science of the diversity of humans, in their
bodies and their behavior. Thus, the anthropology of religion will be the scientific
investigation of the diversity of human religions. Minimally, the questions it asks include:
What is the range of diversity of religion—how many different kinds of religions and
religious beliefs, practices, institutions, etc. exist?
What commonalities or even universals are there between religions—are there any
things that all religions do or believe?
What relationships exist between various parts of any single religion, or between a
religion and its social and even natural environment—are there any regular patterns
that we can discern across religions?
Anthropology, like every discipline, begins to address its questions from a unique dis-
ciplinary perspective. Studying religion biologically implies a biological perspective
(emphasizing physical traits, perhaps most importantly the brain), while studying religion
psychologically implies a psychological perspective (focusing on internal “mental” phe-
nomena and processes). Anthropology has been open to and has profited from these and
many other approaches. Still, it has developed its distinctive concepts, tools, and empha-
ses. Central to anthropology is the concept of culture, the learned and shared ideas,
feelings, behaviors, and products of those behaviors characteristic of any particular
society. To study anything anthropologically—language, politics, gender roles, or eating
habits—is therefore to look at it as learned and shared thought and action. Since it must
be observable, anthropology also treats it as public behavior, not primarily something
that is “private” or “in people’s heads”; it is certainly not initially in people’s heads but
rather, since it is learned and acquired instead of innate, initially “outside” the individual
in his or her social environment. In a word, culture is a set of practices in which humans
engage and, among other things, about which they talk and in terms of which they
organize and interpret their activity. Therefore, anthropology does not limit itself to texts
or history (although it certainly considers these) but rather attends to culture lived by the
actual members of the society.
Studying religion anthropologically 3
This basic orientation leads to three dimensions of the “anthropological perspective.”
First, anthropology proceeds through comparative or cross-cultural description. Anthro-
pology does not consider only one’s own society and culture or those similar to it. It
adopts the premise of diversity and embraces the full range of diversity of whatever topic
is under investigation. It aims to describe each culture or aspect of culture in rich detail.
This mission leads to a process and a product. The process is fieldwork, traveling to and
living among the subjects of our study for long periods of time, observing and entering
their lives. Hence, the principal method of anthropology is generally considered to be
participant observation. The product is the “case study” or ethnography, an in-depth and
up-close account of the ways of thinking and feeling and behaving of the people we
study. Therefore, anthropological writings tend to be “particularistic,” to describe the
“small” or the “local” intensively. However and fortunately, anthropology does not
emphasize the local for its own sake; as Stanley Tambiah wrote, the point of ethnography
is “to use the particular to say something about the general” (1970: 1). Accordingly, Tim
Ingold recently opined that ethnography is not the same thing as anthropology nor is it a
mere means to an end: ethnography reports, while anthropology more ambitiously
inquires “into the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world” (2017: 21). But
ethnography is crucial to the anthropological project because no particular group or cul-
ture is typical or representative of humanity—in fact, there is no such thing as “typical”
or “representative” language or politics or religion—yet each sheds some light on those
general conditions and possibilities of human existence.
Second, anthropology adopts a perspective of holism, the notion that any culture is a
(more or less) integrated “whole,” with “parts” that work in specific ways in relation to
each other and that contribute to the working of the whole. From our examinations of
cultures, anthropology has identified four domains in all cultures—economics, kinship,
politics, and religion—although not always equally elaborated or formalized, or separ-
able, in all cultures. Each makes its distinct contribution to society, but each is also
“integrated” (although sometimes loosely) with the others, such that to understand the
religion of a society, we must also inevitably understand its political arrangements, its
kinship system, and even its economic practices. These major cultural domains are also
connected to, reflected in, and affected by more pervasive matters of language and gender.
And finally, all of these elements are situated within some environmental context.
Third, anthropology upholds the principle of cultural relativism, grasping that each
culture has its own “standards” of understanding and judging. Each occupies its own
universe of meaning and value—of what is true, important, good, moral, normal, legal,
and so on. It is obvious that the same behavior may be normal in one society but
abnormal or criminal or non-existent in another. We know that the same sound, gesture,
symbol, or action may have an entirely different meaning (or no meaning) in another
society; applying one society’s standard of meaning or judgment to another is simply not
very informative and may actually be counterproductive. This does not mean, of course,
that we must accept or approve what other societies do; however, we must understand
them in their terms, or else we misunderstand them.
Maintaining a culturally relative perspective is profoundly important and profoundly
difficult. Most of the time we do not think of our language, our political system, or our
gender roles or religion as “cultural” at all but rather as “what is done,” or worse, as
what is right and natural to do. We assume that people everywhere wear clothes and
marry monogamously, while in reality other peoples may not. And we tend to assume
that all religions entail a belief in God as well as prayers and rituals and ideas about
heaven and hell, while in reality many religions do not. If we were to act on our taken-
for-granted cultural assumptions, we would conclude that all people think and behave as
we do and interrogate them for their versions of our concepts, practices, and values. We
would be profoundly and dangerously wrong. A quick example will suffice. Imagine that
a Warlpiri (Australian Aboriginal) person were to do non-relativistic (ethnocentric or
culture-bound) research on your society. She would come to the task with a battery of
culturally specific concepts, like jukurrpa (usually translated as Dreaming or Dreamtime).
If that researcher were to ask about your notions of jukurrpa, you would say none, since
you have never heard that word before. If she were to interpret your actions or ideas
through the concept of jukurrpa, she would surely get you wrong. And if she were to
condemn you for lacking this key concept of theirs, it would surely be an inappropriate
and unhelpful conclusion.
In a strong sense, cultural relativism is a consequence of cross-cultural and holistic
study. If we are to consider extremely diverse cultures and to understand them in relation
to their web of ideas and practices, then we must be—indeed we are being—relativistic.
This raises a major question about the use of the terms and concepts of one culture to
describe and understand the concepts of another culture. The problem is particularly
thorny in the realm of religion. We necessarily approach religions with a vocabulary, a
terminology; we must have some words to discuss things. However, the vocabulary we
bring to the study is not a neutral, technical language but the language of a particular
religion—from Western societies, usually Christianity. Like the imaginary Warlpiri
researcher, we may find ourselves imposing concepts on a culture or religion when they
do not relate or even exist. We may ask the wrong questions, make the wrong assump-
tions, and form the wrong conclusions. While we cannot eradicate the problem com-
pletely, we must be constantly on guard against it. (See supplemental reading “Do
Ancestor Worshippers Worship Ancestors?”)
It is challenging to remain relativistic in any area of human culture; for instance,
people often judge other societies harshly for their marriage or sexual practices. When it
comes to religion, that relativistic objectivity has been more difficult to maintain. For
example, James Frazer, the great turn-of-the-century scholar of comparative mythology,
distanced himself from the myths he recounted in The Golden Bough, testifying that “I
look upon [them] not merely as false but as preposterous and absurd” (1958: vii). Of
magic he avowed that “every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as
such is false” (53). E. E. Evans-Pritchard, writing on witchcraft among the Azande of
Africa, asserted: “Witches, as the Azande conceive them, cannot exist” (1937: 63). These
men follow a long tradition, back to the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote: “My
duty is to report all that is said, but I am not obliged to believe it all” (1942: 556). Perhaps
it is good when they are honest enough to admit their struggles with foreign ideas,
although declarative statements like “Witches cannot exist” are not part of our anthro-
pological business. We might be chastened by the fact that an Azande anthropologist
could preface his or her ethnography of Western religion with the disclaimer: “God, as
the Christians conceive him, cannot exist.”
Box 1.1 The “language” of God in English and beyond

How would a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Taoist talk to each other about God—or
would they talk that way in the first place? Anna Wierzbicka, who has performed
valuable linguistic analyses on emotion words, which are not universal across cultures,
turns to religion to remind us that “the concept of ‘God’ is not universal, and neither
are concepts like ‘Tao’ or ‘nirvana’” (2018: 21): Christianity does not speak about Tao
or nirvana, and (at least some forms of) Buddhism and Taoism do not speak about
god(s). In such an interfaith conversation—which is precisely the kind of conversation
anthropologists have with their informants or collaborators—Wierzbicka would initially
have each party state, respectively, “‘for us, what is most important is called ‘God,’”
“for us, what is most important is called ‘nirvana,’” and “for us, what is most important
is called ‘Tao.’” Having introduced those key words that millions of people in certain
cultural traditions actually live by, some representative of these traditions can attempt
to explain those concepts (as embedded in their languages)” (21). But she also
recognizes that key words like God, Tao, or nirvana do not stand alone; each is what
she calls a “semantic molecule” that binds with and informs other words such as, in
Christianity, “church, priest, altar, nun, Bible, psalm, chapel, theology, religion, and so
on” (24). To practice that religion, and to study that religion anthropologically, is to
learn to speak that language (and recall, for instance, that not all varieties of Chris-
tianity have priests and nuns, etc.) This fact naturally creates problems for those who
would introduce a new religion to a society, like missionaries hoping to convert indi-
genous people to Christianity. What local term equates to God—or more pro-
blematically, to church or Bible or theology or religion itself? Or should the missionary
simply teach English (or whatever missionary language) words? Wierzbicka mentions
the case of a missionary to Sudan who chose the local term arum for God, not realiz-
ing that arum means not “spirit” in general (which would be a poor translation for God
anyhow) but spirits of specific dead people (roughly “ghost”), which is guaranteed to
give locals the wrong impression of the Christian god. Ultimately Wierzbicka offers a
supposedly culture-neutral definition of “God” (30), but one wonders whether phrases
like “There is someone not like people” and “This someone is above everything” really
are culturally neutral and universally intelligible, not to mention that her definition omits
complex concepts like the incarnation and the trinity or God’s multiple personhood.
Studying “religion” anthropologically

When we are studying religion, what exactly are we doing? What exactly is “religion”?
This raises the issue of definition. Let us begin by recognizing that definitions are not
“real” things; they are human and therefore cultural creations and categories, not natural
facts. A definition is not “true”; it is only more or less inclusive and productive. A
narrow definition excludes phenomena that would be included within a wider definition.
For instance, if we were to define religion as “belief in one god” we would be dis-
qualifying as religions all of the belief systems that lack a single god, so very few belief
systems would qualify. If we define it as “belief in god(s),” we would still be disqualifying
the religions that contain no god(s). By imposing one conception of religion on others, we
would be defining them into non-religion (i.e. “if you don’t believe in a god, then you
don’t have a religion”). This attitude echoes the fictional Parson Thwackum in the Henry
Fielding novel The History of Tom Jones, who declared, “When I mention religion I
mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant
religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.” That is not an
attitude that an anthropologist—or anyone else—should take.
The act of defining is an attempt to specify what is unique and distinct about the subject,
the sine qua non or “without that, not” that makes it what it is. Probably no single definition
of something as diverse as religion could ever quite capture it. Rather, what we find is that
various definitions emphasize certain aspects or betray the theoretical orientations of their
authors. For instance, one of the earliest anthropologists, E. B. Tylor, posited in his 1871
Primitive Culture a “minimal” or simplest possible definition of religion: “the belief in
spiritual beings.” A more compact assessment can hardly be imagined, but it faces at least
one complication: it introduces other terms—“belief” and “spiritual beings”—that beg for
definitions. Others have subsequently offered more elaborate definitions:
James Frazer: “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are

believed to direct and control the course of nature and human life” (1958: 58–59)
Émile Durkheim (sociologist): “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred
things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into
one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (1965: 62)
Paul Radin: “it consists of two parts: the first an easily definable, if not precisely specific
feeling; and the second certain acts, customs, beliefs, and conceptions associated with
this feeling. The belief most inextricably connected with the specific feeling is a belief in
spirits outside of man, conceived as more powerful than man and as controlling all those
elements in life upon which he lay most stress” (1957: 3)
Anthony Wallace: “a set of rituals, rationalized by myth, which mobilizes super-
natural powers for the purpose of achieving or preventing transformations of state in
man and nature” (1966: 107)
Sherry Ortner: “a metasystem that solves problems of meaning (or Problems of
Meaning) generated in large part (though not entirely) by the social order, by
grounding that order within a theoretically ultimate reality within which those pro-
blems will ‘make sense’” (1978: 152)
And perhaps Clifford Geertz provided the most frequently quoted definition: “(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” (1973: 90).
Meanwhile, Rudolf Otto thought it was the mysterious experience of the “holy”; Karl
Marx thought it was false consciousness intended to justify and perfect the exploitation
of the laborers, “the opiate of the masses”; Sigmund Freud thought it was a projection of
unconscious psychological processes; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl thought (at least for a time) that
it was a product of a “primitive mentality”; and so on.
Clearly, there is no scholarly consensus about this thing called religion. They empha-
size different aspects of it, whether belief and ideas, or ritual, or feeling, or morality, or
community. Further, they introduce other terms in the definition that plunge us into a
definitional spiral: what is “spirit,” “divine,” “belief,” “sacred,” or “holy”? Finally, does
it refer to something real “out there” or merely something “inside us”?
The truth is that religion probably involves all of these variables simultaneously but
disparately for different religions. Ritual, for instance, is certainly a key element of
religion, although not all religions promote or elaborate it equally. Ideas and concepts
are universal aspects of religion, although not all religions have the same concepts or
necessarily very conscious and consistent ones. Language or verbal action, including
“myth,” is important, as is “morality” or notions of good and bad behavior, and of
course community. But then rituals, ideas, verbal actions, morals, and communities
exist apart from religion too; they are not essentially religious phenomena. What makes
religion “religious”? (See supplemental reading “Religion by Any Other Name: Do All
Cultures Have ‘Religion’?”)
It would be foolish to attempt to adjudicate between the definitions of religion. Each
highlights a piece of the puzzle. Instead, we want to mark out an approach to religion
that distinguishes it from other human endeavors and thought systems and yet connects it
to them. What unifies religion with other social actions and institutions is physical
(embodied) ritualistic and verbal behavior, a concern with good or correct action, the
desire to achieve certain goals or effects, and the establishment and perpetuation of
communities. What distinguishes religion is the object or focus of these actions, namely,
nonhuman and typically “superhuman” being(s) and/or force(s) with which humans are
understood to be in relation—a recognizably “social” relation—that is mutually effective.
As Robin Horton has expressed it:
in every situation commonly labeled religious we are dealing with action directed
towards objects which are believed to respond in terms of certain categories—in our
own culture those of purpose, intelligence, and emotion—which are also the dis-
tinctive categories for the description of human action. The application of these
categories leads us to say that such objects are “personified.” The relationship
between human beings and religious objects can be further defined as governed by
certain ideas of patterning and obligation such as characterize relationships among
human beings. In short, Religion can be looked upon as an extension of the field of
people’s social relationships beyond the confines of purely human society. And for
completeness’ sake, we should perhaps add the rider that this extension must be one
in which human beings involved see themselves in a dependent position vis-à-vis
their non-human alters.
(1960: 211)
That is to say, religion is an extrapolation of culture, to include in society and as cultural

nonhuman beings and/or forces.
The key for anthropology is that religious beings and/or forces are almost universally
“social,” with the qualities of “persons” or at least “agents” of some sort. If they were
not, how would we make sense of them, and what would we do with/about them? In
other words, humans see themselves, in a religious context, as occupying a certain kind of
relationship with some being(s) and/or force(s) which we can rightly call a social rela-
tionship. It is a relationship of communication, intention, reciprocity, respect, avoidance,
control, etc. The being(s) and/or force(s) are like us in some ways, despite the fact that
they are greatly unlike us in others. They may have a language (usually ours), personality
or intentionality, desires and interests and likes and dislikes; they may live in their own
social arrangements; and they can be summoned and influenced. This takes us to the real
significance of religion as a cultural factor and its real distinction from the other domains
of culture. Economics, kinship, politics—these are all about humans. The characters in
religion are different, but they are not so different. They are the nonhuman: the dead
ancestors, or “spirits” of plants or animals or natural objects (the sun and the moon) or
natural forces (the wind and the rain), or “gods,” or impersonal supernatural forces like
mana or chi. Yet they interact with us. They are part of society. For instance, in a classic
encounter, A. Irving Hallowell reported asking an Ojibwa elder if all stones are alive and
animate, and the man replied, “No! But some are” (1960: 24).
In fact, the human propensities that make culture and society possible make religion
possible. Michael Jackson claimed that religion flows from our drive toward relatedness,
toward forming bonds and attachments, and this “human capacity for forming bonds
knows no bounds, encompassing other persons, objects, animals, abstract ideas, ideolo-
gies, possessions, and even the earth or cosmos” (2009: xiii). Maurice Bloch a year earlier
went further, asserting that what we call religion is simply one manifestation of human
“transcendental sociality,” that is, our ability and tendency to relate to others (human
and nonhuman alike) in ways that go beyond their apparent or surface qualities; he gave
the example of a Malagasy (Madagascar) elder who was infirm and somewhat senile
but still treated with respect and afforded an important ritual role because of the person
that he once was. Since transcendental social relationships rely partly on imagination
and memory—“the capacity to imagine other worlds”—they “can with no problem
include the dead, ancestors and gods as well as living role holders and members of
essentialized groups” like tribes and nations (2008: 2057). Finally, we can understand
religion as the product of a still more basic principle, which Marshall Sahlins in his
analysis of kinship called “the mutuality of being,” the idea that humans—and, from a
religious perspective, nonhumans and superhumans—“are members of one another,
who participate intrinsically in each other’s existence” (2011: 2). Kinship becomes just
one expression of this mutuality, with religion another and wider expression. No sur-
prise then that religious beings are often identified by kinship idioms like “mother” or
“grandfather.”
Of course, even this conception of religion does not solve all of our problems. There
are other beings, (potentially) real or mythical—say, extraterrestrials or vampires or
Santa Claus—that are not classified as “religious.” The lack of any sharp line separating
“religion” from “non-religion,” together with the stunning diversity of religions, has
caused some scholars, including religious studies scholars, to pronounce that there is no
such thing as religion. But this may go too far, and just because there is no such
“thing”—no single, bounded entity—as religion does not mean that there are no “reli-
gions.” Religion may be a fuzzy category that exists unambiguously in some cases,
ambiguously in others, and not at all in still others.
Assuming that we have permission to proceed with the study of religion, perhaps it is
more profitable to consider what religion does. So we can ask, what is the function of reli-
gion? Why do humans have such a thing, and what does it do for them? Of course, a member
might answer that we have religion because it is “true” and because we are the kinds of
beings who can perceive or receive the truth. This is not very helpful from an anthropological
viewpoint, especially since different societies have perceived or received such different truths.
No doubt there is something exceptional about humans that makes it possible (and neces-
sary?) for us to have religious notions, but let us set aside questions of “truth” and con-
centrate on social and cultural nature and functions of religion, which include:
1 Filling individual needs, especially psychological or emotional needs. Religion can

provide comfort, hope, perhaps love, definitely a sense of control, and relief from fear
and despair.
2 Explanation, especially of origins or causes. Humans wonder why things are as they
are. How did the world start? How did humans start? How did society start? Most
religions not only explain cosmogony (the creation of the world) but the origin of
specific cultural institutions, like marriage, language, technology, politics, and the
like. Religions also explain why things happen in the present: why do we get sick?
Why do bad things happen to us? Why do we die? In some societies, much if not all
of sickness and misfortune is attributed to “spiritual” rather than natural causes.
3 Source of rules and norms. Religion can also provide the answer to where the traditions
and institutions of the society came from. All religions contain some component of
“order-establishment” or “culture-founding.” This is the charter function of religion: it
acts as the “charter” or guideline or authority by which we organize ourselves in parti-
cular ways and follow particular standards. Why monogamy? Because a superhuman
being ordered it, or because the first humans set the precedent, etc. Why kings? Because
a superhuman being ordained the office of king, or because the kings are chosen by
superhuman beings or possess superhuman force, etc.
4 Source of “ultimate sanctions.” Religion is, among other things, a means of social
control. Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a large part of the religion is about
what we should do, how we should live. Politics and even kinship provide a measure
of this control. However, the limitation of political social control is its scope: human
agents of social control cannot be everywhere and cannot see everything, and the
rewards and punishments they can mete out are finite. For instance, they cannot
continue to reward or punish you after you die. But religious “sanctions” can be
much more extensive, exquisite, and enduring. In other words, religious being(s) and/
or force(s) not only make the rules but enforce them too.
5 Solution of immediate problems. If religion is the “cause” of a variety of human ills, then
religion can be the solution as well. If we are sick or distressed, are the beings or forces
causing it? What should we do about it? If there is an important social or political
decision to make (say, going to war), is there a way to discover the preferences and plans
of the beings and forces—to “read their mind”? Can we ask them for favors, give them
gifts, or do anything at all to influence their actions and intentions?
6 Filling collective needs. Beyond the individuals who compose society and their individual
needs, it is also possible to view society as an entity in its own right, with its own higher-
level needs. Certainly, not everything that a religion teaches or practices is beneficial for
every individual: human sacrifice does not fulfill the needs of sacrificial victims. Nor does
religion always soothe individual fears and anxieties; for instance, the belief in a punitive
afterlife may render people more fearful, and concerns about proper conduct of rituals or
about witches can add anxiety. However, belief in a punitive afterlife or witchcraft can
compel people to obey norms, which is “good for society.” The primary need of society,
apart from and often at odds with the needs of individuals, is integration, cohesion, and
perpetuation, and religion can provide an important “glue” toward that end.
Box 1.2 Learning to have a religious experience

From an anthropological perspective, whatever else we can say about religion, it is
certainly true that people learn religion. No one is born with any specific religious
knowledge, which is why religions often go to great lengths to inculcate their teach-
ings (from church school and catechism to shaman training and initiation).
Furthermore, as Tanya Luhrmann has emphasized in a series of influential publica-

tions, individuals must not only learn to have particular religious beliefs but to have
“religious” experiences in the first place. Working among American evangelical Chris-
tians, she finds that before one can experience God or the divine, one must first learn
to “experience what must be imagined as real, and improve upon what he or she
knows from the world” (2013: 146), that is, think that there is more to know and to
experience than the ordinary and mundane. She focuses on prayer as a technique for
instructing the person to have and to interpret particular experiences, for “paying
attention to internal experience (thoughts, images, and the awareness of your body)
and treating those sensations as important in themselves” and as referring to some-
thing beyond themselves (147). Evangelical Christian prayer shares with esoteric
mental states like “dissociation, hypnosis, and trance” a “capacity to shift attention
away from the everyday” (147) and toward some external target named God. She calls
this skill “absorption,” the ability and tendency “to focus in on the mind’s object (what
humans imagine or see around them) and to allow that focus to increase while dimin-
ishing one’s attention to the myriad of everyday distractions” (157). Among members
of Vineyard Christian Fellowships, she observes an explicit awareness that sensing
and hearing God (which they dub “discernment”) is “a skill which they needed to learn
by repeatedly carrying on inner voice ‘conservations’ with God during prayer and
being attentive to the mental events that could count as God’s response” (150). To
support her research, she actually conducted her own absorption experiments with
members—predominantly white middle-class women—who were given structured
training in “imaginative prayer,” which resulted in increased incidence and vividness of
reported phenomena like seeing angels, out-of-body experiences, and sensing God’s
presence. Practice really did make more religiously perfect.
“Studying” religion anthropologically

Anthropology as a science has carved out for itself a territory to investigate, and that
territory includes all of human behavior in its dazzling and bedeviling diversity. Religion
falls within that territory. But what precisely does anthropology hope to accomplish?
What does it mean to “study” religion, or anything else, from an anthropological or any
scientific point of view? The one thing is does not mean is to acquire a religion, to con-
vert to one, to become a member or functionary of one. Candidates for the priesthood
“study religion,” as do theologians, but their interests are to represent and defend one
religion, to believe more deeply and convince others to believe in it, which cannot be the
interest of anthropology. What anthropology, like any other science, ultimately wants to
do with its chosen subject matter is to explain it.
We can describe and catalog religions, but at some point we want to advance to
explanation; no longer content with definitions (“what is religion?”) or cross-cultural
descriptions (“how many kinds of religion are there?”), we move on to the question
“Why is religion?” One obvious answer is “Because it is true” or “Because God/the gods
put it in us.” These are answers with which anthropology or science in general cannot be
content. The ultimate goal of scientific explanation is a theory. A theory orients us to the
data in a particular way: what are the most important or irreducible or universal ele-
ments to look for, what relationship are they in with each other, and how do they
interact to produce the facts under investigation? A theory ought to offer us a model with
some specific mechanisms or processes that give rise to and shape the phenomenon; it
also ought to make some predictions which are testable in some way, allowing us
potentially to verify or falsify the theory. It should, therefore, promise the possibility of
using it to acquire further knowledge or understanding, as well as to eliminate error.
Anthropologists and other scholars of religion have constructed a variety of theoretical
perspectives, each productive and each limited in its own way. No single theoretical
perspective, like no single definition, can probably ever capture the entire essence or
nature of religion. Above all we should avoid reductionism, the impulse to explain reli-
gion in terms of or “reduce” it to a single non-religious cause or basis, whether that cause
or basis is psychological, biological, or social. At the same time, we cannot help but
notice that scientific/anthropological theories of religion often find the “reason” or
explanation for religion in non-religion.
Perhaps the first recorded instance of religious comparison was Xenophanes in the fifth
century BCE, who noticed that a people’s gods tend to resemble that people. He wrote:
Ethiopians have gods with snub noses and black hair, Thracians have gods with gray
eyes and red hair. … If oxen or lions had hands which enabled them to draw and
paint pictures as men do, they would portray their gods as having bodies like their
own; horses would portray them as horses, and oxen as oxen.
(quoted in Wheelwright 1966: 33)
Herodotus extended this “comparative method,” suggesting that the various tribal and
national gods he encountered were all local names for the same universal deities—his so-
called “equivalence of gods” principle. Thus, he concluded, the Egyptian god Horus was
the same god as the Greek Apollo, and the Egyptian Osiris was the same as Dionysus.
This led him naturally to the notion of cultural borrowing and diffusion to explain the
recurrence of the same beliefs in disparate locations. Euhemerus developed this ques-
tioning into a nearly explicit humanistic theory of religion, in which he expounded that
the gods were merely deified human ancestors or leaders, a position known as
euhemerism.
Historical/evolutionist theories
Even some of the ancient “theories” of religion had a historical or evolutionist flavor;
diffusion is a historical process, and Herodotus reiterated the even older Homeric vision
of a series of historical “ages” in culture and religion, from the “golden” age of gods to
the “silver” age of heroes to the “iron” age of normal humans, each inferior to its pre-
decessor. The works of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx reinforced the pattern of histor-
ical, “progressive” analysis, and the philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831) proposed a
comprehensive historical system progressing from the age of religion to the age of philo-
sophy to the final age of science, in which each phase is a clearer step in self-knowledge
of the Universal Spirit.
Much of the early comparative science of religion persisted in trying to establish the
ordered stages of religious evolution, often ultimately evolving away from religion to a
scientific/secular worldview. The sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) proposed his
own three-stage history, with the eras of theology, metaphysics, and science or positi-
vism. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a proponent of social Darwinism, echoed this idea in
a more down-to-earth version but still with science eventually replacing religion and
superstition. Early anthropologists like E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) also had a determined
evolutionist streak in their work. Finding animism or “nature worship” to be the first
phase of religion, Tylor then traced the development of religion to polytheism and finally
monotheism (judging, predictably and ethnocentrically, that the local form of faith is the
“highest”).
Another historical approach in anthropology was diffusionism. Fritz Grabner (1877–
1934), Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), and G. Elliot Smith (1871–1937) followed
this tradition in various versions. All diffusionists traced the diversity of the world’s
religions back to a few—or in Smith’s case, one (ancient Egypt)—sources; the common
origin accounted for the similarities, and the subsequent historical development of each
independent spin-off explained the differences.
Psychological theories
Some of the earliest modern theories of religion were psychological in nature, anchoring
religion in the thoughts or experience of the individual. This appeal could differ pro-
foundly: some forms of psychological theory of religion include emotionalist, psycho-
analytic, intellectualist, “primitive mentality,” and neurological.
Emotionalist theories
Many scholars emphasized the emotional quality of religion as its most distinguishing
and driving feature. Which particular emotion they emphasized varied. For the seven-
teenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, it was fear; bad things happened to
people beyond their understanding or control, so religion was invented to assuage una-
voidable fears. Although writing long before anthropology emerged, he made the relati-
vistic observation that out of this universal emotion grew such religious diversity that
peoples could hardly recognize let alone accept the religions of others.
Another famous focus for emotionalist theory is the experience of “awe” or “wonder,”
advanced by Max Mueller (1823–1900) and Rudolf Otto (1869–1937). Mueller stressed
the perception of “the divine” or “the infinite,” embodied in conventional entities or
forces like the sun or the moon or the seasons and so on. In his 1856 Comparative
Mythology he argued that pre-modern and tribal societies felt the vastness and power of
the cosmos but could only express their feelings in poetic symbolism incorporating nat-
ural objects; later, they forgot or confused their poetry with literal fact, resulting in reli-
gious belief. In other words, religion starts with overwhelming emotion and ends with
linguistic error. This led him to characterize religion as “a disease of language.” For Otto,
author of the 1917 The Idea of the Holy, the religious emotions—both fear and fascina-
tion, love and dread—were a response to the “transcendent,” the overwhelming power of
that which is outside humans, the Holy that is “wholly other.” The experience is pri-
mary, and religious ideas and practices derive from it.
In another vein, the “functionalist” theory of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) held
that religious beliefs and institutions exist and function to fill the needs of individual
humans, primarily psychological needs. Religion, as in his famous account of ritual in the
Trobriand Islands, came into play when individuals needed a feeling of reassurance,
control, and of course relief from fear; in other situations, where there was little threat or
a fair chance of practical success, people did not resort to religion but focused their
efforts on “practical” concerns.
Psychoanalytic theory
A special type of theory was pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), a medical pro-
fessional who quite literally diagnosed religion as a “symptom” or manifestation of
mental processes. For Freud, all humans shared a common set of unconscious drives and
instincts. These drives and instincts, many of them anti-social and most of them asocial
in a way, must and will be expressed. However, both physical and social reality force us
to curb, control, direct, sublimate, and in some cases completely deny or “repress” our
nature—to push or hold things down into the unconscious. In particular, Freud suggested
in his 1913 Totem and Taboo that a scene had been played out in real history in which
men acted on their desire to kill their father and take possession of his women (recapi-
tulated in the infamous Oedipus complex, which he thought was part of the deep psy-
chology of all males); subsequently, out of guilt, they reified or deified the dead father,
transforming him into an object of veneration and authority—perhaps more powerful
dead than alive. The dead but divine father was both the first god and the first conscience
or “superego.” From that event (literal or mythical) flowed a complex of “religious”
beliefs and practices like the incest taboo, totemism, sacrifice, propitiation of spirits, and
so on.
Even more fundamentally, religion, like all behavior (including “high culture” like art
and of course dreams), was a symptom and neurosis in the Freudian view. Our uncon-
scious, instinctive nature must and will come out, but the forms it can take are circum-
scribed by society. So, our unconscious mind often substitutes an (unacceptable)
formation with another (more acceptable) one. Very human kinds of psychological and
social dramas, like family dynamics or personal traumas, are played out in the “spiritual”
realm, being essentially symbols for the “real” processes in our minds and lives. The
living flesh-and-blood father is the prototype of the god, with his power to judge and
punish. The child, unable to resist or even respond, becomes the model for the believer,
putting his or her faith in the all-powerful adult. Religion, in this interpretation, is an
infantile obsessional neurosis and one that Freud hoped we would outgrow as we
understood and gained control over our own lives and drives (as evinced by his 1927 The
Future of an Illusion).
Twentieth-century anthropology was heavily indebted to Freud. The famous “culture
and personality school” absorbed much Freudian thinking, and many anthropologists
carried psychoanalytic concepts and tools into the field. Weston La Barre’s (1970) treat-
ment of the Native American Ghost Dance movement (see Chapter 8), subtitled “Origins
of Religion,” was explicitly Freudian in outlook.
Intellectualist theories
Other students of comparative religion have downplayed the emotional or “feeling” part
and highlighted the explanatory or “thinking” function. In the intellectualist tradition,
religion arises from question-asking or problem-solving. For instance, while Tylor’s fra-
mework was evolutionist, his attitude was intellectualist. Primitive humans, he reasoned,
noticed things that puzzled them, such as dreams, visions and hallucinations, and the
difference between living and dead beings. To explain these uncanny phenomena, they
invented an invisible, non-mortal, detachable part of the self called the soul or spirit.
From there, other concepts and behaviors would suggest themselves, such as cults of the
dead and propitiation of spirits, etc.
James George Frazer (1854–1941) also took an intellectualist stance in regard to reli-
gion. His position was that religion is an answer to a question or problem, just not a
rational answer. He too held a developmental or historical opinion about religion, except
that religion was not in his view the first step in the process. Before there was religion, he
said, there was magic, which is a kind of faulty reasoning, a brand of pseudoscience.
People want to know what causes what, or what they can do to cause or prevent what.
Primitive humans had the right general idea—cause and effect—but they got the causes
all wrong, indulging in magic instead of effective causal reasoning. But still, magic was
technique, a kind of “technology.” When magic failed, humans then attributed events to
intelligent, willful sources, namely spiritual beings. Thus the age of genuine religion
began.
Malinowski also noted the “pre-scientific” but rational nature of magic, making a line
between magic and religion. Both magic and religion he attributed to emotional needs.
However, magic was more purely goal-oriented or “instrumental,” whereas religion had
no specific “goal” but was more social or moral in nature. Furthermore, no human, even
a “primitive” human, was so backward as to rely exclusively on magic (or religion) to get
a job done; while they may pray or perform rituals over their crops, they also planted
seeds. So magic was one tool in the individual’s practical toolkit rather than a compre-
hensive way of life.
Primitive mentality versus psychic unity

One of the very first, foundational notions in modern anthropology was Adolf Bastian’s
(1826–1905) concept of elementargedanken or “elementary ideas.” All humans, he sug-
gested, share a certain set of basic, fundamental ideas (what Carl Jung would later call
“archetypes”). All humans are thus mentally the same; there is no profound and
unbridgeable difference between “primitive” and “modern” or “religious” and “scientific”
humans. There is, in other words, a common “psychic unity” of humanity. What does
differ is the local expression of these elementary ideas, which he called volkergedanken,
folk ideas or ethnic ideas. Thus, while all humans may have some idea of a transcendent
power or a life after death, the particular shapes that these ideas take may and will vary
from place to place and from time to time. Religious diversity then was to be examined
not for the surface variation but for the deeper and more universal patterns and truths
that were contained in them.
The exact opposite position was proffered by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), who
stated that the ideas and beliefs of “primitive” people originated from a completely dif-
ferent way of thinking than that of modern people. We moderns, he insisted, are logical,
obeying the “law of exclusion”: something cannot be itself and something else at the
same time. Primitives, however, knew nothing of this. Instead, they were “pre-logical,”
operating on the “law of participation,” which allows different or even contradictory
things to coexist or co-reside simultaneously. For instance, a statue could be a material
object and a god all at once, or a being could be a human and an animal at the same
time. If this analysis is true, then there is a deep gulf between them and us; however, even
Lévy-Bruhl himself disavowed it in his lifetime, and it is easy to see that “primitives” are
not always pre-logical (they may perform hunting rituals but they sharpen their spears
too) and that “moderns” are not always logical (they may use jet planes and cell phones
but still believe that a wafer is simultaneously a human body—the well-known doctrine
of the transubstantiation, that the Catholic communion wafer literally “becomes” flesh).
Structuralism
Structuralism generally refers to the view that the meaning or the functioning of a phe-
nomenon depends less on the nature of its individual “bits” than the relationships
between those bits and the rules for combining them. Language is the paradigm of a
structural system, in which the meaning of a word is determined by its place in an array
of words, and the meaning of a sentence is determined by its place in an array of sen-
tences. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) revolutionized linguists with this structuralist
approach, emphasizing the “grammar” or transformational practices which allowed
people who have mastered the rules of language (langue in his terminology) to produce
specific acts of speech (parole).
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was pivotal in applying this grammatical approach to
religion, especially religious language or mythology. Providing anthropology with a
“method” to analyze and interpret myths, he suggested that the symbols and events in
myth can only be understood as utterances within a grammar or pattern of transforma-
tions; as he wrote in The Savage Mind, religious facts such as myths or totems “are codes
suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes, and for
expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system”
(1966: 75–76). Thus, the analysis of myths and other religious facts involves the discovery
of the underlying relationships between the units or details of the whole.
While all versions of structuralism claim something similar, Lévi-Strauss’ version goes fur-
ther, which is why it is placed under the heading of psychological theories. He asserted that at
the foundation of mythical transformations was the nature of the human mind itself, which
operates in binary fashion. The human mind classifies things into pairs, such as nature/cul-
ture, male/female, alive/dead, raw/cooked, and so forth. The mind also seeks to resolve and
unify these binary contradictions, but since such resolution is not permanent if even possible,
humans generate repeated, varying, yet recognizably similar attempts to do so. Thus, any
myth, for instance, will appear to be struggling with the same issues over and over. Addi-
tionally, Lévi-Strauss suggested that the mind is a bricoleur (1966: 20–21) or playful creator of
meanings and manifestations, and we see the religious results: an ongoing attempt to examine
basic existential themes in multiple ways through “analogies and comparisons,” metaphors
and poetry. His theory and method penetrated the anthropology of religion for a generation,
inclining established anthropologists like Edmund Leach to apply it to many religions,
including Christianity, as in Leach’s memorable “Genesis as Myth” (1969).
Neurological theories
Where psychology meets neuroscience, there is an assortment of approaches to religion
that emphasize the physical substrate that makes belief possible if not necessary. This has
sometimes appeared as talk about a “god spot” in the brain, an area or structure that is
“tuned” or “designed” for religious functioning. Whether the brain makes religion or
religion makes the brain (that is, supernatural beings or forces arranged our brain as a
“receiver” for spiritual “transmissions”) is open to dispute.
A popular study by Newberg, d’Aquili, and Rause (2002) examined mystics during
their meditative practices and identified measurable differences in their brains in and out
of mystical states, with differing levels of activity in the left temporal lobe during medi-
tation. Their (unsound) conclusion was that, since ostensibly brains react to the external
world, the brain activity of adepts was evidence of their experience of some real external
phenomenon or power. Others, such as Michael Persinger (1987), have used medical
technology to assert quite the opposite: by stimulating certain areas of the brain with an
electrical device, Persinger was able to generate “religious experience” in subjects, leading
him to conclude that religion is a result of the brain’s own activity rather than of some
reality outside of the brain. It has also been clinically observed that patients who suffer
from left hemisphere epileptic seizures often develop obsessive interest in religious mat-
ters, which lasts long after the actual brain events.
Finally, Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1988) proposed another neurological basis of
religious notions and motifs in so-called “entoptic” images. These are the kinds of pat-
terns that are produced spontaneously by the nature of the human eye and nervous
system, consisting of geometric forms like dots, lines, zigzags, and so on. These patterns
and shapes are commonly reported by people in trance and other altered mental states
and represented in the art of traditional societies, such as rock paintings. These physio-
logical sensations, then, were interpreted as “supernatural” in origin and meaning and
attributed with significance and power beyond their organic sources.
Social theories
Not all scholars did or do turn to the individual or mental levels to explain religion.
Instead they note that, while religion certainly has some root or basis in the brain/mind,
it is a public or social phenomenon which cannot be explained in psychological and
subjective terms alone; further, many individuals never have a “religious experience” or
even believe religion. Such scholars, anthropologists among them, turn to an “external”
and social style of explanation. As a school of thought, social theories emphasize the role
of groups and institutions, of community, and/or morality, which were often con-
spicuously lacking in the previous theories.
Much of the pioneering work on the sociology of religion was done not by anthropologists
but by classicists studying ancient Greek, Roman, and Hebrew writings. (This was proble-
matic work, as it was not popular to treat the Christian scriptures as just another document
to be analyzed scientifically.) William Robertson Smith (1846–94) was a brave soul who lost
a teaching job for researching the origins of Hebrew/Old Testament rituals and beliefs. His
insight was that ancient peoples possessed gods and religions as peoples, that is, that reli-
gious beliefs and practices had “national” or “tribal” or “ethnic” pedigrees. Each group
worshipped its own god(s), which, as Xenophanes noticed twenty-five hundred years prior,
resembled the people of the group and legitimated the ways of the group. In fact, the essence
of religion, Smith decided, was the communal ritual, a social act by definition. Explicit
“doctrine” or creed came later as an interpretation for the rituals, but the bedrock of religion
was social behavior and, even more so, the social group that engages in the behavior.
Durkheim: Social classification and the sacred

The most important early sociologist, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), took this idea and
developed it extensively, particularly in his ground-breaking 1912 book, The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life (commonly mistranslated as The Elementary Forms of the Reli-
gious Life). He asked the question, what is most basic in religion? If we remove every
other layer and accouterment, what is left? His answer, as we saw in the definitions
above, was an irreducible dichotomy between the “sacred” and the “profane.” The sacred
is the special, powerful, set-apart realm, which we dare not touch or approach carelessly
if at all. (See supplemental reading “What is Sacred? Sacredness as Specialness.”) The
profane is the ordinary, the mundane, the everyday realm, which we inhabit most of the
time but which would damage or pollute the sacred by contact. But where could such a
notion as “the sacred” come from? Other scholars pointed to the psychology of awe and
wonder, but Durkheim pointed to the sociology of the group—literally. What is more
powerful than the individual, that exists before the individual, that survives after the
individual, and that provides the ground for the individual? It is the social group: “this
power exists, it is society” (1965: 257). The group is a “social fact” and a pivotal one.
There is the society as a whole and within it the family, the clan, the village, and other
concrete social aggregates. These social realities are symbolized, with a name or a banner
or a “totem.” They acquire their stories, their songs, their designs, their dances. And they
have their god(s). As he reasoned: “The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can
therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagina-
tion under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem” (236). In
other words, when the group celebrates or worships its spirits or gods, it is really cele-
brating or worshipping itself.
But tribal, social religion does more than celebrate; it creates. The main achievement is
social integration and cohesion, the creation and perpetuation of the group. This is
accomplished in two ways. The first is the establishment of a moral community, a group
of people with common norms, values, and morals. Religion not only tells them what to
worship and how to make it rain but what kind of person to be and what the correct
behaviors are for their group. By recognizing common rules and authorities, individuals
become a community of shared identity and shared interests. The second means of
achieving group cohesion is through the effectiveness of ritual (see Chapter 5). This
communal activity not only gives members ideas and beliefs in common but operates at a
lower and more instinctive level as well through a psychological power he called “effer-
vescence.” Whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of traditional ritual (and in many
ways it is not), it does evince a keen appreciation for the function of collective action. It
is well established that human beings are more excitable and suggestible in groups than
individually, and the more active the group the greater the effect.
Durkheim continues to reverberate through anthropology. The analysis in The Ele-
mentary Forms of Religious Life was informed by early ethnographic reports from Aus-
tralia, especially Spencer and Gillen’s 1899 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, and
seminal anthropologists from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Mary Douglas embraced his
emphasis on classification and social groups and boundaries.
Historical materialism
One of the dominant perspectives on religion over the past century and a half has been
that of Karl Marx (1818–83). His theory, identified most closely with political economy
and the ideology of communism, is actually a theory of social structure and social
change. Basically, his argument was that the driving force, the motor, of society and
culture is not ideas but action or practice. He meant the way that humans relate to the
world through their work or labor—the ways that we express and “objectify” ourselves
in our productions—and through the social relationships in which they organize them-
selves to perform that work.
The central concepts in Marx’s historical materialism are “mode of production” and
“relations of production.” However, he also recognized that a society is not a simple,
homogeneous collectivity but is composed of various subgroups with contrasting and
competing positions in the relations of production—different roles to play, different per-
spectives on the system, different interests, and different power. He called these sub-
groups “classes.” In class-differentiated societies, ordinarily one class enjoys more control
over the mode and relations of production than the other(s). The “upper class” is not
only richer and more powerful but is also dominant in ideas and values. As he concluded,
the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of the dominant group of the society, not
least because that group controls not only the economy but the ideological system
including education, whatever forms of “media” exist, and the institutions of society,
including the religion.
Thus, religion, he opined, reflects the practical realities of social life. If the economy
and the politics are very centralized, then religion will be centralized too, with one or at
most a few gods that govern everything. However, religion is more than reflection; it is
also legitimation. That is, people in the society—especially those who are not in the
upper class—may ask why they should participate in it. What is the benefit to them?
Religion provides the answer, by inventing and enforcing a worldview that explains and
authorizes the current social arrangement. Perhaps the purest version of this idea is the
“divine right of kings” conception from European history, which “proved” that the con-
temporary political system was correct; the traditional Chinese “mandate of heaven” and
the Hindu caste system accomplished the same end. In all societies, in the “charter”
function mentioned above, religion helps to account for why things are the way they are
and why we should go along with it. However, religion does not always accurately
represent society; it can misrepresent and even mystify social relations. Leaders may
intentionally foster religious views that prop up their power and prevent challenges. This
is why Marx (1843) called religion an “opiate of the masses” and the “heart of a heartless
world.” This is also why Marx, like Freud, hoped and expected that religion would
disappear.
A variation on the materialist perspective can be found in the work of Marvin Harris.
In such books as Cow, Pigs, Wars, and Witches (1974) he maintained that religious
practices like cow-worship in India or pig-aversion in Judaism can be attributed to
immediate material (namely, economic and environmental) causes. In India, cows are
worth more alive than dead, so religion built an aura of supernatural significance around
them to encourage people to preserve them. In the desert of Israel, pigs were economic-
ally unviable, so the same supernatural aura castigated them. In whatever case, a prac-
tical, non-spiritual reason for the belief or behavior can be found, which is then wrapped
in a shroud of religious meaning as a form of legitimation and compulsion.
Structural functionalism
Malinowski’s psychological theory discussed above is also known as functionalist because
it located the value of religion in the function that it served for individuals (essentially
emotional functions like a sense of security and control). But individuals do not (mostly)
invent their own solutions to life’s problems; they learn and inherit the solutions of their
ancestors and peers. Further, as indicated, religion may serve functions that do not
directly benefit, and may actually cost, the individual.
Alfred Reginald (A. R.) Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was the main rival for anthro-
pological theory in the first half of the twentieth century. He agreed that function was a
central issue but not the function that Malinowski and the “individualists” pursued.
Rather, Radcliffe-Brown emphasized the needs of the group or of society. But what needs
could society have other than the cumulative needs of its constituent members? The
answer is, as Durkheim pointed out, integration and cohesion. It is entirely possible for
every individual to be well fed and relieved from fear but for society to fragment or col-
lapse. Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, saw society and its groups and institutions as
having their own needs and therefore highlighted the function of all items of culture or
society as “the contribution that they make to the formation and maintenance of a social
order” (1965: 154).
Structural functionalism insists that religion plays its most important role in the crea-
tion and maintenance of the group and society, not the comfort of the individual. One
argument for this perspective is that without social maintenance society may come to an
end, endangering the lives of all the individual members. So, as Durkheim stated, religion
gives members of society a common identity, activity, interest, and destiny. It makes one
out of many. Even more so, there are moments in the life of a society when its very
existence is threatened—times of death, war, or other crisis. Ordinary ritual and belief
may get society through the ordinary times, but extraordinary rituals and beliefs may be
necessary for these extraordinary times. Thus, funeral rituals might be construed as
giving comfort to the grieving survivors, or they might be appreciated for holding them
together as a society at a time when fights or other conflicts could rip it apart. Some
rituals have purely social functions; Fourth of July festivities are fun for American indi-
viduals, but more importantly they remind and refresh the solidarity that binds them
together as Americans.
A second argument for social functions of religion follows from the first. Individual
functionalism depends on religion relieving fear, stress, and other negative emotions.
Radcliffe-Brown astutely realized that religious beliefs and actions sometimes actually
increase fear and stress; after all, if one does not believe in hell, one has no fear of hell.
There is the additional fear of the powerful and often capricious or malicious spirits, as
well as the fear of performing a ritual incorrectly and suffering the effects. There is the
fear of the shaman or witch or sorcerer who can use spiritual power for good or ill. So, a
simple “religion makes life better” view is naïve and insufficient. Sometimes, the indivi-
dual may have to be worse off for the group to be better off. Even “scapegoating” and
sacrifice mean pain and loss for the victim but (hopefully) gain for the group.
Symbolic/interpretive approaches
Most of the above theorists have relied intensely on the concept of “symbol.” It seems self-
evident that humans communicate in symbols and that religion in particular is a system of
symbols, although we will have the opportunity to critique this assumption in Chapter 3 and
beyond. Nevertheless, a school of anthropology developed in the 1960s, at least partly influ-
enced by the “revolution in philosophy” occasioned by the emphasis on symbols as con-
veyors and enablers of thought. Suzanne Langer in 1942 announced that all human thought
was symbolic by condensing meaning into some sound, gesture, image, etc.; symbols were
thus “vehicles for conceptions,” and conceptual thought would be impossible without them.
Anthropologists like Mary Douglas (1921–2007), Victor Turner (1920–83), and Clifford
Geertz (1926–2006) forged a symbolic or interpretive approach to religion or, in the case
of Geertz, to culture in general. As noted above, religion in Geertz’s definition is precisely
a system of symbols, and culture itself is a yet more extensive and complete system of
symbols, a “web of significance” of our own making upon which we are consequently
suspended (1973: 5). So symbols play a decisive role in Geertz’s understanding: they “are
tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms,
concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs” (91). Even
more, they are effective; Geertz regarded them as extrasomatic control mechanisms for
organizing experience and governing behavior. Thus, symbols are not mental but social,
observable in the “flow of behavior” and the “pattern of life” (17)—and shaping both.
Victor Turner developed the symbolic approach even more blatantly in the direction of
“performance,” eventually (e.g. 1974) offering a theatrical model in which religion, espe-
cially ritual, is a drama unfolding over time, through various acts and stages. Elsewhere
and earlier, he regarded ritual as a “process” (1969). For both Turner and Geertz, religion
and its rituals and symbols were not static but alive, embedded in and constitutive of
social order and individual experience. The “effectiveness” of symbols, therefore, resides
not only or mainly in human minds, but in political systems (Geertz 1980) and the very
human body (Douglas 1970).
Modular theories
Recently, but not only recently, scholars within and outside of anthropology appear to be
converging on an approach to religion that emphasizes the modular or composite quality
of religion. The idea of modularity is not new or unique to religion. We know that the
brain is not a single homogeneous organ but a modular one, composed of various spe-
cialized functional areas which combine to give us our human mental experience. Simi-
larly, the modular view of religion is grounded on the notion that religion is not a single
homogeneous thing and perhaps not a “thing” at all. Rather, it is a composite and
therefore a particular agglutination of elements—elements that may not be specifically
“religious.” As William James (1842–1910) admitted over a century ago, for instance,
there is “religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But reli-
gious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious
fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the
human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it”—in other
words, “there seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common
storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw” (1958: 40). In light of
such considerations, religion may not be a radically different phenomenon from other
cultural activities but may indeed be made of the same normal secular stuff as the rest of
culture, only, as we said earlier, directed to nonhuman and superhuman relational
parties.
The “building block” approach: Wallace

Anthony Wallace (1923–2015) suggested that religion may ultimately be “a summative
notion and cannot be taken uncritically to imply … one single unifying, internally
coherent, carefully programmed set of rituals and beliefs” (1966: 78). His view was that
religion starts from a single point, the “supernatural premise” that “souls, supernatural
beings, and supernatural forces exist” (52). This premise is then elaborated via thirteen
“elementary particles” (recall Wierzbicka’s concept of “semantic molecules” above) or
categories of religious action that work like building blocks for religion, including (1)
prayer, (2) music and dancing and singing, (3) physiological exercises, including substance
use and physical hardships and trials, (4) exhortation or orders, encouragements, and
threats, (5) myth, (6) simulation/imitation such as magic, witchcraft, and ritual, (7) mana
or the power one gets from contact with powerful objects, (8) taboo or the prohibition
from contact with certain things, (9) feasts, (10) sacrifice, (11) congregation or group
activity, (12) inspiration, such as hallucination and mysticism, and (13) symbols. Most if
not all of these, as James conceded, have their secular counterpart as well.
These elementary particles are aggregated into bundles or sequences of behavior, resulting
in “ritual complexes,” which are accompanied by “rationalization” in the form of beliefs (for
him, beliefs were quite secondary). A particular ritual complex may incorporate any set and
order of elements and exclude others; in fact, any religion may prioritize one or more ele-
ments over others, for instance stressing myth or sacrifice while minimizing prayer or mys-
ticism. Next, ritual complexes and their associated beliefs and social roles are combined into
higher-level “cult institutions,” which he defined as “a set of rituals all having the same
general goal, all explicitly rationalized by a set of similar or related beliefs, and all supported
by the same social group” (75). Finally, when “a loosely related group of cult institutions and
other, even less well-organized special practices and beliefs” (78) is agglomerated, the result
is “a religion.” Thus, any specific religion may differ from any other specific religion in the
selection and organization of its constituent pieces. The pieces may not even be essentially
“religious”—and non-religious modules can be added on—but each specific combination and
arrangement is one specific “religion.”
Cognitive evolutionary approaches

Observers have recognized since the time of Xenophanes that religious entities tend to
have human-like traits, a fact called anthropomorphism. Stewart Guthrie advanced his
“new theory” of religion based on a serious application of the anthropomorphic idea.
However, from his perspective, anthropomorphism in regard to the supernatural (and the
natural) world was not a mistake but rather a “good bet”:
It is a bet because the world is uncertain, ambiguous, and in need of interpretation. It

is a good bet because the most valuable interpretations usually are those that disclose
the presence of whatever is most important to us. That usually is other humans.
(1993: 3)
Of course, supernatural entities are not exactly like humans: they are often larger or
more powerful or invisible or immortal, but still these are extensions or negations of
human qualities (humans material, supernatural beings immaterial; humans mortal,
supernatural beings immortal). The key to personhood is not, finally, in bodies or mor-
tality but in intentionality, minds and wills.
Shortly thereafter, Pascal Boyer’s project to “explain religion” began with the now-familiar
premise that human thought is not a unitary and homogeneous thing but the result of
inter-operating thought modules, a “confederacy” of explanatory devices he called “inference
systems.” Among these systems are three with particular significance—concept formation,
attention to exception, and agency. Thought proceeds by the creation of concepts and even
more abstract “templates”; templates are like blank forms with certain fields to be filled, and
concepts are the specific way that the form is filled. For example, the template “tool” has
certain options, and the concept “hammer” completes those options in a particular way.
Likewise, the template “animal” or “person” has certain qualities with a set of possible
variables. One of these qualities of persons is agency—the ability to engage in intelligent,
deliberate, and more or less “free” action.
As committed as humans are to our concepts and categories (a Durkheimian point), we
are drawn to exceptions and violations of them. Humans are mortal animals with two arms;
a three-armed human would be interesting, but an immortal human would be compelling.
Some ideas, Boyer claimed, have the potential to “stick” in our minds better because they are
just exceptional enough: as he contended, a being that is immortal has sticking power, but a
being that only exists on Tuesdays does not. Not surprisingly, “religious concepts violate
certain expectations from ontological categories [but] they preserve other expectations”
(2001: 62). Among the most critical ones that religion preserves are agency and reciprocity/
exchange. Supernatural entities “are not represented as having human features in general but
as having minds which is much more specific” (144), which is not such a stretch for human
thinking, since even animals manifest some agency. Furthermore, it is advantageous, as
Guthrie opined, to attribute mind to nature and supernature, since (to paraphrase Blaise
Pascal’s famous wager), if we are correct it could be critically important but if we are wrong
no harm is done. (See supplemental reading “The Epidemiology of Religious Representa-
tions: Dan Sperber and Cognitive Theories of Religion and Culture.”)
As Boyer concluded, religion is constructed out of “mental systems and capacities that
are there anyway … [therefore] the notion of religion as a special domain is not just
unfounded but in fact rather ethnocentric” (311). In this view, religion does not require a
separate explanation at all but is rather a product or by-product of how mind in society
functions in all, including non-religious, contexts. In particular, he points to the evolved
mental predispositions of humans, the nature of social living, processes of information
exchange, and the processes of deriving inferences. If nonhuman agents exist, and they
can be engaged as social beings—as “social exchange partners”—this is clearly worth
thinking about and acting on.
Scott Atran expanded this view further. He too asserted that religion involves “the very
same cognitive and affective structures as nonreligious beliefs and practices—and no
others—but in (more or less) systematically distinct ways” (2002: ix). Since “there is no such
entity as ‘religion,’” there is no need to “explain” it in a unique way. Religion is once again a
by-product and epiphenomenon of other, generally human processes or modules, of which he
identified several: perceptual modules, primary emotional modules (for “unmediated” phy-
siological responses like fear and surprise and anger and disgust), secondary affective mod-
ules (for reactions likes anxiety and guilt and love), and conceptual modules. Agency is also
high on his list of human priorities, and we have elaborate and essential processes for
detecting and interpreting it, especially because we can be fooled and faked by others.
Supernatural agents are a mere and fairly reasonable extrapolation of human and natural
agency, “by-products of a naturally selected cognitive mechanism for detecting agents—such
as predators, protectors, and prey—and for dealing rapidly and economically with stimulus
situations involving people and animals” (15). No wonder, he reasoned, “supernatural
agency is the most culturally recurrent, cognitively relevant, and evolutionarily compelling
concept in religion” (57). Justin Barrett, in his 2004 Why Would Anyone Believe in God?,
posited a “hyperactive agency detection device” (HADD) and has since conducted many
experiments to test the intuitive “natural” assumption that agents operate around us.
Much of the cognitive science of religion revolves around psychological processes like
attention, motivation, and memory. A key question is, what kinds of religious ideas
attract our attention, stick in our memory, and motivate us to action? Harvey White-
house (1995) chronicled new religious movements among the Mali Baining, a people of
Papua New Guinea, where by the 1970s the Pomio Kivung movement, a kind of “cargo
cult” (see Chapter 8), was widespread until another later movement, Dadul-Maranagi,
arose in the community and largely displaced the first sect. The competition between
these two religious movements led Whitehouse to conceive his model of two distinct
“modes of religiosity.” Whitehouse designated one mode as the “doctrinal mode,” while
the other illustrated the “imagist mode.” The doctrinal mode depends on frequent repe-
tition of religious behaviors, on explicit religious teachings and formal leadership, and on
religious centralization, all of which satisfy the more “semantic” or language-based
memory processes. The imagistic mode, by contrast, functions through religious beha-
viors that are “invariably low frequency” but “also, without exception, highly arousing”
(2004: 70). These behaviors activate a different kind of memory, “flashbulb memory,”
which stick in the mind because of their drama and sensory power. Exciting the senses
and the emotions, they tend to downplay leadership, centralization, and orthodoxy; they
also tend to appeal to small/local and exclusive communities. Whitehouse finally claimed
that particular religions tend to “gravitate toward” (76) one end of this spectrum or the
other, although the two modes are not mutually exclusive.
One last fact that merits acknowledgement is that religion is often hard. Religions demand
behaviors that are expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes difficult, painful, or danger-
ous; religions often ask people to believe claims that frankly strain credulity. While burden-
someness might seem like an argument against religion, a number of scholars have contended
that it may convey evolutionary social advantages. In social groups, individuals need to
know that they can trust each other—that everyone is dedicated to the group and that
everyone is contributing to the group, not “free riding” on the efforts of others. Richard
Sosis, Candace Alcorta, and Joseph Bulbulia have collaborated on a series of essays pro-
moting “costly signaling theory” (e.g. Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Bulbulia and Sosis 2011). The
claim is that religion is socially integrative precisely because it is expensive and uncomfor-
table: social living depends on cooperation and mutual trust, but there is always the potential
of deception in the group. Thus, lazy deceivers find themselves in an evolutionary arms race
with comrades who, as deceiver-detectors, erect ever more demanding tests of honesty and
commitment, including and especially apparently impractical and arbitrary ones like religion.
“The result of such escalation would be increasingly complex ritual behaviors, as senders
attempt to deceive receivers and receivers seek to determine the truthfulness of the sender’s
signal” (Sosis and Alcorta 2003: 266). In a word, if religion was easy, it would not prove
one’s social commitment and willingness to cooperate and to conform; anyone could do it—
or fake it. The costly signaling idea might help explain some of the extreme ordeals to which
believers subject themselves and others, including sacrifice, self-injury, and war.
Box 1.3 Religion and the modern state: A contemporary controversy

in Spain
One common and valid critique of the cognitive-evolutionary science of religion is that
it perpetuates the focus on ideas to the exclusion of institutions and power. Multiple
anthropologists and other observers have commented that the very concept of “reli-
gion” is part of the project of modernity and particularly of colonialism. “Religion” was
identified and isolated as a specific bounded social domain and institution, and reli-
gions were named—and sometimes constructed—among colonized peoples in the
push to know, categorize, and administer those peoples. “Religion” also ideally pos-
sessed certain qualities: historian Geoffrey Oddie (2006) wrote for instance that mis-
sionaries and scholars in nineteenth-century India assumed that “Hinduism” was a
single unified faith with a corpus of sacred texts, a centralized priesthood, and a creed
and were frustrated and judgmental when it failed to meet their expectations. On more
than a few occasions, indigenous religions were “reformed” to suit colonial needs.
More generally, Talal Asad held that modern “secular” governments conceive of reli-
gion in their own countries as an institution that has a place and must stay in its place:
“religion has the option either of confining itself to private belief and worship or of
engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life. In either case such religion is
seen … to take the form it should properly have” (2003: 199). Countries like France
seek to manage religion, and many other countries apply modern norms to it. Clashes
between religion and the society or state can ensue, as in Spain between 2000 and
2004, after the imam (Islamic leader/scholar) Mohamed Kamal Mustafa published a
book entitled La Mujer en el Islam (Women in Islam). Addressing a Quranic verse about
husbands beating wives, he abjured that “battering of a disobedient wife as a pun-
ishment was something one should avoid as much as possible” but nevertheless
granted that it is “the husband’s privilege to ‘correct’ his wife” (but never vice versa) so
long as he causes her only minor pain and no great injury (Rosander 2011: 152). The
cry against his work was immediate and impassioned: calls came to ban his book, and
three women’s organizations sued him in court for violating the criminal code against
inciting gender violence. As a highly trained Muslim scholar, the author defended his
interpretation of scripture, but the judge ruled that his writings were “the personal
reflections of the imam” (155) and therefore punishable under law. The imam was
found guilty and sentenced to jail time and a fine, the judge explaining in his verdict,
“Defending ill-treatment is an offence in Spain and should be judged as such. No
argument, as religious as it may claim to be, can justify it” (156). Eva Evers Rosander
reckons that the offender “will probably never understand why he was sentenced for
incitement to violence on the basis of gender” (162) because he believes he accurately
depicted sacred teaching and actually advocated relative mildness in spousal
relations.
Conclusion
Whatever subject it approaches, anthropology brings its unique perspective of cross-cul-
tural or comparative study, holism, and cultural relativism. This entails treating each
religion in its own terms and relating it to its social and historical context. In the case of
religion, this is not always easy to achieve.
Religion has been notoriously difficult to define, and every proposed definition has
some value, emphasizing some important dimension of religion. No single definition is
entirely adequate, and no definition is ever “true,” only more or less inclusive and more
or less productive. How we define religion determines what we accept as religion, and
however we define religion, the definition presents new definitional problems. What is
“spirit”? What is “belief”? Anthropologists have found that “religion” itself is a culture-
specific concept in the first place, since not all cultures even have a word or concept for
religion.
Like definitions, theories are attempts to formulate what is important and unique about
religion, and different disciplines naturally see religion in different ways. Religion undoubt-
edly is emotion and idea and ritual and institution. Like definitions, theories set boundaries
and suggest lines of research. Recently, some of the most productive suggestions for research
have come from modular and evolutionary theories of religion, offering a convergence of
many disciplines but dominated by a psychological/cognitive perspective.
Yet, as promising as these theories are, anthropology is not fundamentally a psycho-
logical discipline. In fact, it could be argued that anthropology is not fundamentally a
theoretical discipline. Whatever takes place inside people’s heads, religion lives outside
the mind, in social actions and institutions, and anthropology itself has always lived—
and been most alive—in the field and in the ethnographic description of experiences in
the field. The power of anthropology has always been in the dynamic interplay between
theory and ethnography, encountering cultures and religions that are always more com-
plicated and exciting than any definition or theory can ever be, as we will see in upcom-
ing chapters.
Discussion questions
1 What does it mean to study religion anthropologically? How is the anthropological
perspective on religion different from the perspective of other disciplines?
2 What is the objection to using the terminology of one religion (say, Christianity) to
describe and analyze other religions? What are some religious terms that should only
be used by anthropologists judiciously, if at all?
3 Why is it so difficult to define religion? How would you define religion so as to
capture all religions but only religions? What do you think of the assertion that there
is no such “thing” as religion?
4 What are the major anthropological schools of thought or theoretical approaches to
religion? Which do you favor, and why?
5 What is the contemporary cognitive evolutionary approach to religion?
Supplemental readings
Religion by Any Other Name: Do All Cultures Have “Religion”?
Do Ancestor Worshippers Worship Ancestors?
What is Sacred? Sacredness as Specialness
The Epidemiology of Religious Representations: Dan Sperber and Cognitive Theories of
Religion and Culture
2 Beliefs, beings, and bodies
A South Indian woman becomes a jogati when she fulfills a harake or vow to be ritually
married to the goddess Yellamma. Both males and females who are so “dedicated to
Yellamma wrap themselves in saris and embody the devi [female god]. … they become
women and are called jogatis, although male women are more commonly called jogap-
pas” (Ramberg 2014: 3). They serve as the priestesses or caretakers of the goddess, for-
saking worldly marriage. Jogatis thus violate both sexual and marital norms, yet as
“wives of the deity—always married, never widowed—they are auspicious women asso-
ciated with all forms of fertility and well-being” (6). Once they reach maturity, “many of
these young women begin exchanging sex for means of livelihood—in villages usually
through a local system of patronage by a higher caste man and in towns through brothel-
based sex for cash transactions”; the upper-caste patrons of the goddess-spouses are
conventionally married but enter “long-term if not lifelong exclusive sexual relations”
with their jogatis. These mates of Yellamma play other ritual roles, such as “singing
devotional songs” and “giving blessings” and are part of “all the major festivals and
respond to calls from households to bring the devi, perform puja [worship], play the
shruti and chowdiki [musical instruments], and sing on auspicious occasions” (7). As
such, jogatis are heirs to a tradition of “temple women,” “choreographers, dancers,
musicians, and ritual performers whose sexual capacity was harnessed to their position in
the temple as wives of the deity” (18).
Whatever the ultimate definition and explanation of religion, any religion contains
certain ideas and conceptions about what kinds of things exist in the world, what they
are like, and how their actions affect humans. We might refer to this as the ontology that
each religion constitutes, in the sense of the entities that it posits—the beings, the forces,
and the facts of religious reality. These are commonly referred to as the “beliefs” of
religion.
Not all anthropologists and other scholars of religion have stressed the belief dimen-
sion equally. Anthony Wallace regarded behavior and ritual to be paramount, of which
“myth” and “belief” were adjuncts. However, Westerners, including scholars, typically
concentrate on if not privilege the “idea” or “intellectual” side of religion. Accordingly,
many definitions of religion feature if not accentuate the element of belief. Recall that E.
B. Tylor’s minimal definition of religion was “belief in spiritual beings”; Durkheim
insisted that religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices.” In other, although not
all, anthropological definitions, its beliefs comprise the essence of a religion, and belief
comprises the essence of religion. Scholars and laypeople alike have regularly assumed,
often uncritically, that to understand a religion is to describe its “beliefs,” and that we
can study and know the “beliefs” of a religion in a straightforward way.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-2
Beliefs, beings, and bodies 27
In this chapter we will investigate the range of belief-claims that religions tend to
include. In the best anthropological tradition, we will interrogate concepts and relativize
understandings, ensuring not to ascribe to other cultures what they do not avow of
themselves. This may and does include familiar notions like “god” or “soul” or “heaven.”
This may include the very notion of “belief” itself and the notion that religious beings are
necessarily immaterial and disembodied. Rather, we will find that bodies—human and
superhuman—and embodied experience are present in, if not central to, all religions. (See
supplemental reading “Miracles and Religious Experiences among the Samburu.”)
The anthropology of belief

Belief is so self-evident to most of us that we cannot help but speak and think in terms of
it. Often enough, the term is not even defined, since it seems patently obvious; we think
that we could not speak of religion at all unless we spoke the language of belief. Melford
Spiro, in his study of Burmese religion, took the time to define the term, by which he
meant:
any cognition concerning human beings, society, or the world that is held to be true.
By “religious belief” I mean any belief that directly or indirectly relates to beings who
are held to possess greater power than humans and animals, with whom human
beings sustain relationship (interactions and transactions), and who can affect human
lives for good or for evil. In short, “religious” beliefs are beliefs related to super-
natural beings.
(1978: xii)
Thus Spiro affirmed the standard view that religious beliefs are allegedly true convictions
about supernatural beings. But more interestingly, he upheld that belief is not unique to
religion; religious beliefs are a subset of beliefs in general. Still, beliefs in general are
“cognitions” and are “held to be true” by those people who avow them.
Others, however, have asked whether belief is as simple and as universal as we think.
Rodney Needham performed an extended analysis of belief across cultures, starting with
the observation that the view that humans “can be said to believe, without qualification
and irrespective of their cultural formation, is an implicit premise in anthropological
writings” (1972: 3). But anthropologists cannot leave such premises implicit and unques-
tioned, and closer inspection reveals belief as a much fuzzier concept than we realize—
and much more culturally specific.
Needham examined a wide variety of cultures and languages in which the word for
and the experience of belief is very complex and unlike the familiar (Western-Christian)
notion. Nuer (East Africa), Navajo, Hindi, Kikchi (Guatemala), Uduk (Ethiopia), Penan
(Borneo), and Chinese were some of the languages he surveyed, with three important
consequences:
The first consists in a clearer and more evidential recognition of the bewildering
variety of senses attaching to words in foreign languages which are indifferently
translated by the English “believe.” The second is that, whereas it may often seem
possible, in comparing other languages, to isolate this as the equivalent in each of the
English word “believe,” there are languages in which senses that to an English
interpretation are quite disparate are nevertheless so conjoined, and so equally
expressed, as to make it unjustifiable to abstract any one of them as definitive.
Thirdly, there are apparently languages in which … there is no verbal concept at all
which can convey exactly what may be understood by the English word “believe.”
(37)
In fact, Evans-Pritchard warned us in his classic study of Nuer religion that “belief” is
not an indigenous Nuer concept: “There is, in any case, I think, no word in the Nuer
language which can stand for ‘I believe’” (1956: 9). Instead, the Nuer said that they ngath
their god/spirit (kwoth), which Evans-Pritchard argued we should translate as “trust,”
not “believe in.” Thus, anthropologists do not say that no religions—or no religions
other than Christianity—have a concept of belief. Rather, we say that we cannot attribute
such a concept to them unless they actually do have it. Accordingly, “we are not sharing their
apprehension and are not understanding their thought if we foist this typically Western dis-
tinction on to them” (Needham 1972: 175).
A further problem with the belief concept across cultures is that it has both “objective”
and “subjective” sides. In other words, “belief” has a propositional and a psychological
nature. As an objective proposition, a belief is a publicly available “truth claim,” an
assertion about something “real” in the world. If a person or society is said to “believe”
something—or to “believe in” something—then the individual or group is making a
claim about reality. Of course, as Needham reminded us, such a belief “does not
necessarily depend on the reality of what is believed” (66). A belief may be false, and
the ordinary English usage of the term implies uncertainty or the possibility of falseness
(i.e. one does not say that they “believe” that two plus two equals four or that they
“believe in” their foot).
On the subjective or psychological side, beliefs are construed as mental states of indi-
viduals. That is, if we say that a person believes X, we are making a statement about that
person’s thought processes. But can we attribute a belief equally strongly and equally
clearly to all members of a society? Spiro’s response was that the psychological compo-
nent of belief is not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional, with at least five increasing
levels: acquaintance or familiarity with the belief, understanding of the belief in the
orthodox way, proclaiming the belief as “true,” holding the belief as important or central
to her life, and following the belief as a motivational or guiding force (1978: xiii–xiv). For
any given belief in any given society, individuals will fall variously along this spectrum—
some understanding it differently, some rejecting it, and some unacquainted with it.
This is particularly significant because anthropologists often seek out the “specialists”
of a religion (see Chapter 3) to discover its beliefs. However, as Spiro cautioned, “there is
no a priori reason to assume that the meanings attributed to beliefs by religious virtuosi
are shared by the other members of the group” (1978: xv). Even worse, Needham found
no consistent or “essential” psychological aspect of belief, no specific mental or physical
state that accompanies it or distinguishes it. Even in vernacular English, “belief” conveys
three quite distinct senses. First, it can be a proposition, a claim of truth, such as “God
exists”; other religions are thus assumed to “believe” that “jukurrpa exists” or “hekura
spirits exist.” Second, it can be a statement of confidence or trust, as in “I believe my wife
will pick me up from the airport”; here, the existence of my wife and the airport are not
in question but rather her trustworthiness. (Jean Pouillon makes the same distinction in
French, between croire á, “to state that something exists,” and croire en, “to have con-
fidence” [1992: 2].) Third, it can express commitment or value, as in “I believe in
democracy,” in which one is not disputing the existence of democracy but the goodness
of it. In any religion or religious attitude, these three senses may be combined or sepa-
rated: for instance, a Christian might believe that Satan is real (propositional truth) but
not trust or commit to such a being.
A consensus is emerging that belief is not only problematic but inadequate for under-
standing religion. Religious studies scholars like Donovan Schaefer have introduced
“affect theory” into their research, asking, “In what ways is religion … about the way
things feel, the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured,
magnetized worlds?” (2015: 3). Critiquing the “linguistic fallacy” that religion is pri-
marily or exclusively language—or worse, “ideas”—affect theory stresses that religion is
“made up of clustered material forms, aspects of our embodied life, such as other bodies,
food, community, labor, movement, music, sex, natural landscapes, architecture, and
objects” (3). This perspective complements the anthropological interest in embodiment,
how religion and all of culture are not only thought but felt and sensed and lived. In the
words of Tim Ingold (2000), religion is not so much about believing as about “dwelling,”
which further entails acquiring (Ingold says “growing”) the skills to do religion “through
training and experience in the performance of particular tasks” with our entire body and
sensorium (see Luhrmann in Chapter 1 on learning religion).
Affect theory meets embodiment for anthropologists because, as Kevin O’Neill postulates,
“affect is corporeal” (bodily) as well as “intersubjective” (social/interpersonal) (2013: 1103).
The spirits and gods themselves often have corporeal, material forms (see below) and dwell in
animals, plants, and places; they too have bodily states, from hunger to anger. And humans
feel the spirit world on their skin and in their guts; for instance, in what Liana Chua calls “soul
encounters,” the Bidayuh of Malaysian Borneo understand “certain corporeal and emotive
means through which [they] come to know and experience both the world and the shifting
spiritual realities around them” (2011: 2)—literally through sights, sounds, smells, and the
weird sensations they feel in particular locations and occasions. For them, and for us, “belief
itself might be understood as a material form—as a corporeal, tangible, and public component
of religiosity that is instantiated in somatic experience, bodily states, and social interactions”
(13). Indeed, such material or materializeable “spirits” are exactly the kind with whom humans
can enjoy or suffer relationships, like the Indian jogatis above. This viewpoint will inform the
rest of the present chapter, Chapter 3, and much of the remaining book. (See supplemental
reading “Belief or Relational Action? Papua New Guineans in a Christian Hospital.”)
Religious ideas: Beings and forces

Although anthropologists have become chaste about the use of belief as a descriptive and
analytical category, we can with some trepidation talk about the ideas or concepts that
fill a religious ontology or worldview. Every religion contains ideas of and about non-
human and superhuman agencies in the universe; however, not all of these agencies are
equally “agentive,” that is, not all equally have “personalities” or “minds” or “wills.”
This is another reason why Tylor’s venerable definition is insufficient: not all religions
have supernatural beings. At the same time, all religions contain much more than just
“beliefs” about the supernatural; they also have more or less elaborated and explicit
stories about them, more or less formal activities to perform with and toward them, and
more or less specific principles or codes of conduct or “morality” demanded of people
because of them. All of these will be subjects for discussion in later chapters.
In any particular society there may be many religious entities or a few, although no
religion includes only one. Some religions do not include beings at all but rather one or
more forces—impersonal energies or principles that inhabit the world. And some include
a combination of beings and forces, which is why we cannot speak of these as “types”
but rather components of religion. Furthermore, “supernatural” is another problematic
term; not all cultures have exactly this concept of the Western/Christian sort, and often
what Westerners/Christians would call supernatural beings are quite “natural,” or on the
borderline between natural and not, for other religions. Finally, as argued already,
supernatural or spiritual does not always mean immaterial or disembodied.
Religious beings
Most but not quite all religions have conceptions of more or less well-known religious
beings. But what precisely is a religious being? As we learned in the previous chapter,
from the vantage of cognitive-evolutionary theory, the point is not whether such beings
lack bodies. The point, instead, is that they violate certain expected qualities of mundane
beings, such as visibility or mortality. The one quality that they surely possess, though, is
personhood or agency, that is, they are individuals with wills and “minds” and “person-
alities” of their own. Beyond that, the variation is almost limitless.
Some observers have attempted to distinguish “spirits” from “gods.” According to
Levy, Mageo, and Howard, spirits and gods stand at opposite ends of “a continuum of
culturally defined spiritual entities ranging from well-defined, socially encompassing
beings at one pole, to socially marginal, fleeting presences at the other” (1996: 11).
Allegedly, gods are the former, spirits the latter. The writers offered four variables that
separate gods and spirits—structure, personhood, experience, and morality. By structure
they meant that gods are the focus of more detailed social institutions, including priest-
hoods, shrines, and festivals, as well as specific territories; spirits are not the subject of
such elaboration, being more “fluid,” “emergent, contingent, and unexpected” (14). By
personhood they claimed that gods are more physically and socially human, while spirits
are “vague … only minimally persons” (15). By experience they maintained that gods are
actually less directly experienced whereas spirits are more commonly encountered and
often more immediately the objects of human concern. Finally, gods are more likely
agents and paragons of moral order than are spirits, who tend to be “extramoral” or evil.
Gods, they argued, “are clear models for social order” (21) who establish and sanction
human morality, but spirits “are threats to order and frequently must be purged so that
order may be re-established” (16).
As hopeful as this dichotomy is, it is not supported by the empirical evidence. First, as
we will see, gods are not always particularly good or moral, nor do they always take an
interest in human affairs. Spirits may be the objects of extremely elaborate ritual beha-
vior, while gods (especially distant “high gods”) may be so abstract and remote as to
stimulate little human interest and action. Also, spirits, since they are more immediate,
are often better known and more like persons than gods. Finally, as the authors admitted,
this continuum ignores all kinds of other beings— “giants, gnomes, fairies, phoenixes,
and the like” (12)—as well as zombies, ghosts, and an unlimited number of others.
It is probably more apt to consider “spirit” the most general category, with “god” a
subset of this category. In other words, gods are a particular kind of spirit, a kind that
may not appear in all religious systems. In some situations, it is not clear and unequivocal
whether a spirit is a god or not, and the distinction may be trivial or ethnocentric in the
end. Anyhow, nature abhors categories, and religious beings frequently escape our
(Western/Christian-derived) categorization.
Human spirits
One of the most persistent and obvious ideas across cultures is that humans have a
spiritual part or parts, which co-habit(s) the world with the body in some manner and
which survive(s) the body (for a time at least) after death. In the Christian tradition, this
is called the “soul.” In Hinduism, it is known as the atman. The concept has not only
different names but (wildly) different descriptions and destinies in different societies. The
crucial thing is that humans, even while alive, are spiritual beings after a fashion. Again
in the Christian tradition, it is asserted that this spiritual-human part is implanted in
humans from outside (it was originally “breathed into” the first created human), resides
in our body in some obscure way, and detaches from the body at death to continue its
existence in another form.
The precise characteristics of the human spirit, alive or dead, vary dramatically across
cultures. The notion with which Westerners/Christians are most familiar is a single,
permanent, integral soul, not situated in any particular part of the body, which preserves
one’s individuality in its single, permanent, integral destination (namely, heaven or hell).
That is far from a universal idea. Some cultures tell of multiple souls or a soul with
multiple parts. The Senoi of Malaysia said that humans have two souls, a “head soul”
(rewaay) located outside of and on top of the head and a “heart, liver, or blood soul”
(hup) residing under the sternum; although the rewaay stays with the body until death,
the hup “is much less securely attached and can be accidentally dislodged by loud or
startling noises or dropped objects” (Whitehead 2019: 9). The Iu-mien (Laos) told Jeffery
MacDonald that a child is given three souls (faam wuohn) associated with the head a
month after birth, later to add seven souls (cietv mbaeqv) in the body; upon death, one
head soul, the lingh wuonh, becomes a jaa fin or ancestor spirit until it disappears, while
the second soul stays with the corpse, and the third is reincarnated nine generations later
(2002: 62). Most remarkably, the Nusu (southwest China) think in terms not of inte-
grated souls but of “soul attributes” (ya-n-hla), that is, “latent and malleable components
of the person that, in becoming manifest, may acquire their own agency, acting without
their owners’ knowledge”; further, women have seven such soul attributes while men
have nine, enabling men but never women to become shamans (Mazard 2018: 23). These
soul-bits can operate in fractions, dividing, combining, doubling, and phasing in and out
of existence.
An equally unique concept is the djuluchen on the Siberian Eveny people. Olga Ultur-
gasheva characterizes djuluchen as “an incorporeal avatar of a body that is distributed
along the spatial trajectory toward the point of a person’s arrival”—what she calls a
“spirit of the future”—“while moving the person irreversibly toward his or her destiny
and future ‘self’” (2018: 57). Such a “spirit that travels ahead,” which never completely
detaches from the individual, makes good sense in a hunting/herding society where life
means constant traversing of territory. She aptly reasons that the djuluchen is best
understood “as embedded in the reindeer herding practices of movement in which envi-
saging one’s destination and visualizing or even narrating one’s arrival at the end of one’s
travel amount to near actualization of the envisioned event” (65), the spirit stretching the
person’s presence from here to there, from now to then.
As these cases demonstrate, humans are/have spirits while alive but naturally even
more so after death. The spiritual fate of deceased humans also varies from society to
society. Even in modern Western/Christian societies, many people believe that souls can
become ghosts, at least temporarily. Ghosts are spiritual parts of dead humans that
continue to exist and participate in the human world, usually to the detriment of the
living. The Burmese villagers that Spiro studied, while being nominally Buddhist, recog-
nized the spirits of the dead or leikpya as potential mischief-makers lingering around the
house or village and haunting its living inhabitants; former government officials were
particularly likely to end up this way, since they did not like relinquishing their power.
More worrisome than the ordinary dead were the spirits of those who lived wicked lives,
for they were transformed into tasei or thaye, evil ghosts, usually invisible but potentially
visible, with a “flimsy and resilient materiality.” They were enormous (over seven feet
tall), dark or black with huge ears, tongues, tusk-like teeth—“repulsive in every way”
(1978: 34). These bad ghosts camped on the edge of the village, especially near burial
grounds, whence they ate corpses or attacked and consumed the living.
Other if not most societies also fear or worry about their dead. For Navajos, a ghost
was the evil part of the deceased person, so ghosts were all evil by definition (Downs
1972). The Dani of New Guinea too claimed that most ghosts were malevolent and
tended to attack living adults, usually from the front (Heider 1979). The dead do not
always become troublesome, though. One Christian belief is that dead souls become
angels, either disembodied or embodied beings in a “heavenly” realm (see Figure 2.1).
Sometimes these angels interact with humans, as in “guardian angels” (the word “angel”
derives from the Greek angelon for messenger). Other angels were apparently created
before humans and never were humans at all. Finally, in some religions or sects of reli-
gions, especially pious and virtuous former humans can become saints, who also may
continue to act on behalf of humans, protecting travelers and the like. In Islam, the
veneration of saints is common, particularly in certain “popular” sects and interpreta-
tions, and prayers, rituals, and vigils may be held at their tombs or shrines. In many
traditions a body part (a relic) or artifact of a deceased holy person may be revered and
incorporated into worship and ritual. This can take any form, from the bones of a saint
to the Buddha’s tooth to a piece of the “true cross” or the burial shroud of Jesus (the
“shroud of Turin”).
Many societies assert that the individual soul eventually returns to bodily existence,
that it is reincarnated. The person cannot always remember the life of the previous body;
the spirit of the person may not even be completely “personal,” as in the case of the
Warlpiri (Australia), where it is essentially nonhuman or pre-human first and incarnates
in human form. Other twists on the dead-spirit theme include a zombie who is a dead
individual who has somehow been reanimated but without his or her soul; this is not
completely dissimilar to the European concept of a vampire, a dead person without a soul
who is now “undead.”
In some instances beliefs about the dead can coalesce into systems and institutions
concerning ancestor spirits. An ancestor spirit is the non-physical aspect of a dead family
member that continues to interact with them, for better or for worse. Ancestor spirits are
particularly significant for clan-based societies like the Tallensi (Africa), to whom the
living not only owed allegiance but who supernaturally affected the lives of the living
through the control of “destiny” (Fortes 1959). Chinese homes, as in many other societies,
traditionally had alters to the spirits of the kin group, where prayers and other offerings
were made, again suggesting that the fundamental bonds of kinship do not expire with
death. But the ancestors were not always benevolent, nor were they individually remem-
bered. Among the !Kung or Ju/hoansi of the Kalahari desert (for whose language we use
punctuation marks to symbolize click sounds), the ancestral //gauwasi or //gangwasi were
a source of danger to their kinfolk, lonely and sad in death and eager to have the living
Figure 2.1 Guardian angel. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
join them. Ancestors were yet more malevolent for the Wa (Burma/China), where the
anonymous ancestors “lack any compassion for the living; they never help the living, only
torment them, while jealously seeking to pull them over to the other, invisible side”; the
ancestors even recruit qong taox or spirit accomplices to inflict disease on the living,
specializing in eating and digestion disorders (Fiskesjö 2017: 345).
Box 2.1 Spirits of the living and dead in the Trobriand Islands
In the Trobriand Islands (eastern Papua New Guinea), made famous in Malinowski’s
classic ethnography, the dead dwelling on the island of Tuma are known as baloma,
but living humans also have or are baloma. In fact, the living and the dead are equal
and opposite: when a human dies, a Tuman is born, and when a Tuman “dies” or
sheds its skin, a waiwaia or human fetus appears. The continuity and reciprocity
between living and dead baloma extend to exchanges of material goods, called
bwekasa (sacrifice), as well as to immaterial things like dreams, visions, morality, and
magic spells (megwa). For example, in gardening magic, “it is named spirits who are
the critical magical agents”; “without the active participation of spirits those words in
and of themselves are insufficient to produce the desired results” (Mosko 2017: 91).
The link between worlds is momova (life-force, vitality), which is manifested as
“images” (kekwabu) and “power” (peu’ula). Magical words flowing from a singer invoke
the kekwabu and peu’ula of specific spirits, which emerge “as the spell’s potent ‘fruit,’
‘offspring,’ or ‘child.’ This means that the vocalization of the structured sequence of
kekwabu images recreates or reinvigorates the identity and relations of the persons …
associated with the spell” (130). And spirits leave their images and powers in our world
by other means too: when they arrive to accept gifts of food they deposit “traces of
their saliva (bubwalua)” on the food, which fortifies it and gives it the strength “to
sustain human life” (179–80). But the spells do more than produce results; they pro-
duce people. Spells are considered the property, the “hereditary legacy” of particular
social groups called dala. Dala has been translated as subclan or lineage, specifically
matrilineage, and Trobrianders believe “that the kekwabu and peu’ula ingredients of a
given dala’s spells are congenitally contained or stored in the blood of dala members
from the moment of conception” (131). But offspring receive spiritual energy from both
parents and share this vitality with nonhuman beings and objects such as “birds, fish,
mammal and plant species, koni emblems, designs and decorations, traditional lands,
and politico-ritual rank” (141)—that is, individuals and groups are one expression
or form of ubiquitous spiritual powers but unite humans (living and dead) and
nonhumans.
Nonhuman spirits
Many other kinds of spiritual beings never were and never will be humans, although they
may be like humans and interact with humans. Perhaps the most common of these are
the “nature spirits,” the spirits that are, or are in, plants and/animals and/or natural
objects and/or phenomena. This observation led Tylor (1958) to formulate the concept of
animism. Animism, derived from the Latin anima (soul or more literally “alive” or
“moving”) is the general notion that nonhuman beings can and do have spiritual parts.
(See supplemental reading “Reviving Animism: Contemporary Anthropological Thoughts
on the Concept of Animism.”)
Not every nonhuman thing is necessarily “animated.” For the Warlpiri, some trees and
rocks have spirit or pirlirrpa and some do not; they can point at one tree and say that it
is “just a tree,” while another of the same species is a spirit. Some entire animal and plant
species are spiritually important, and others are merely natural beings. This relationship
between humans and nonhuman material objects is sometimes called totemism, a term
not much in current usage. The idea behind totemism is that an individual or a group
(family, clan, village, etc.) has a unique spiritual relationship with a particular species or
object; this species or object is the person’s or group’s “totem.” The relationship com-
monly results in some special behavior toward the totem, such as not eating it; however,
some societies do eat their totem species. So totemism is not a consistent phenomenon
and is probably just one form of a greater spiritual relationship between humans and the
nonhuman. (See supplemental reading “Philippe Descola’s Four Ontologies.”)
The spirits of plants and animals, etc., may be “individual” or “mass.” That is, each
single kangaroo may have its own “personal” spirit, or there may be a “kangaroo spirit”
that animates all kangaroos. Either way, “spiritualized” plants or animals or natural
forces cannot be ignored; if there is a seal spirit or a spirit of the lake, those spirits pos-
sess intelligence and will not unlike our own. They communicate and interact with us.
For the Ainu, an indigenous people of northern Japan, the “landscape is aware and
responsive in the same way that humans are aware and responsive,” making of the nat-
ural world “a carpet of spirits” (Strong 2011: 67). These spirits or kamui tend to embody
“as physical presences”: they
dress in a physical aspect as an animal, plant, or other natural phenomenon in order

to appear in the human range of experience. This physical aspect is put on by the
spiritual beings in much the same way that we would put on a suit or costume. This
visible, phenomenal-world guise of the spiritual beings is called hayokpe, (literally,
“armor”) in Ainu and frequently constitutes the gift of meat, fur, or other useful
products that the spiritual being in bringing to the humans.
(68)
And living beings are not alone as spirits in physical disguise: “what we think of as the
inanimate components of the landscape—its mountains, rivers, headlands, and so forth—
also have spiritual natures that are coincident with their physical presences” (72).
Like the Ainu, the Runa of Amazonian Ecuador encounter supai spirits in their world.
Human-looking beings that “inhabit lagoons, mountains, or remote parts of the forest,”
certain supai “are the ‘masters’ of certain animals, plants or features of the landscape,
those in charge of their well-being and reproduction” (Mezzenzana 2018: 276). Like
humans, they speak (the Runa language), eat meat, drink beer, build houses, and cele-
brate festivals, all a testament to their material bodies. Mezzenzana is especially inter-
ested in how people learn to recognize and interact with supai, through a form of “ritual
training” called sasi which involves not only ideas and beliefs but “herbal vaporizations,
ingestion of liquid substances, abstinence from eating strong-smelling foods, and so on,”
increasing “the porosity of corporeal boundaries” and the capacity to perceive spirits
through dreaming and smelling them (291).
On the subject of spirits and bodies, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro made a most impor-
tant discovery in the Amazonian context. He concluded that local religions and world-
views demonstrated a distinctive kind of “perspectivism” in which humans and animals
alike “are people, or see themselves as persons.” To be precise, humans naturally see
themselves as humans but perceive “animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as
spirits”; however, from the animal and spirit perspective, those beings see themselves as
humans and see humans as the animals (predator or prey) (1998: 470). In explanation of
this odd arrangement, Vivieros de Castro emphasized the differences in the bodies (sense
organs, limbs, viscera, etc.) of the various species: humans, animals, and spirits all share
the same mental or “personal” qualities, but their particular physical qualities, their
bodily differences, cause them to experience the world differently. This is the polar
opposite of ordinary Western thinking, in which humans and animals share the same
physical stuff but possess different minds (if animals are granted minds at all). The
Amazonian worldview, he concluded, is characterized by “multinaturalism,” each type of
being experiencing the world according to its embodied nature but sharing a common
psychology and culture—the reverse of “multiculturalism” in which each kind has a
similar body but different psychology and culture. This, finally, accounts for religious
practices wherein people don or mimic the bodies of other species (including spirits) in
order to adopt their perspective.
Lastly, more than a few spirits had the ability to assume human form and the tendency
to seduce humans. Among the Mapuche of Chile, a “person” (che) is considered to be
productive, both economically and sexually, but they also recognize a class of “nonperson
humans” who have bodies but lack the capacity to enter productive relationships. One
such nonperson human is the pun domo or “night woman,” a being like a woman who
appears at night to bachelors; a human male may join the being in an emotional or sexual
relationship for years before realizing that she is not a che. Another nonhuman person is
the witranalwe or “cowboy demon” who blocks the path of travelers at night; created by
witches, the witranalwe looks like a white person, wears black clothing, and rides a
horse. He will eventually kill and eat animal herds and their human owners (Course
2011). (See supplemental reading “The Devil Wears Hijab: The Veiled She-Demon of
Niger.”)
Of the nonhuman spiritual beings, the greatest are the gods. There is no settled, uni-
versal definition for gods, but we tend to imagine them as extremely powerful, mostly
moral or beneficent, usually creative, and utterly “other” spiritual beings. By “utterly
other” we mean that they are not part of nature or in nature, nor do they always interact
directly with humans. Richard Swinburne, a prominent Christian philosopher, defined
god as:
a person without a body (i.e., a spirit) present everywhere, the creator and sustainer
of the universe, able to do everything (i.e., omnipotent), knowing all things, perfectly
good, a source of moral obligation, immutable, eternal, a necessary being, holy and
worthy of worship.
(1977: 2)
However, this is not a definition of god but a description of a particular god, namely the
Christian god. It does not fit all cases. Among the ancient Greek gods, for instance, some
were good, some bad, or both or neither. Some were more or less eternal, but many were
born of other gods (or humans), and many died. Some played no part in creation, as
creation was in place by the time they were born. Often, each had his or her assignment
in a supernatural “division of labor”—i.e. a god of the sea, a god of war, a god of love, a
god of wine, etc. Many societies that recognize gods do not attempt to communicate or
relate directly with them but rather through lower-level spiritual intermediaries, like
saints or ancestors or other lower spirits.
A religion that includes god(s) is called a theism (from the Greek theos, related to the
Latin deus, English “deity,” and Hindu male deva or female devi). In any particular
theism there may be one or more (sometimes many more) than one god, and there may
be—and always are—other religious beings as well. A theistic religion that contains
many gods is known as polytheism, while a theistic religion that contains one god is
known as monotheism. Ancient Greek religion is a familiar example of polytheism, with
its “pantheon” (from pan- for “all”) residing on Mount Olympus. Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam constitute the dominant monotheisms in the world, although there are others
like Sikhism and Baha’i. Some versions of Christianity posit a “trinity” of three “persons”
in God, while Islam insists that Allah is one (the doctrine of tawhid)—no son, no trinity,
and nothing else like its god.
Theism can take other less familiar forms. For instance, deism is the position that there is
or was a god who created the world and put it in motion but then withdrew from it; this god
is more or less “impersonal” and may take no active part in the daily affairs of humans at all.
Monolatry refers to the worship of one particular god without necessarily denying the exis-
tence of others; some scholars regard the earliest sections of the Judeo-Christian scriptures as
representing monolatry, in which Hebrew leaders like Abraham and Moses were given “their
god” to worship, while other peoples (presumably) had their own. Some thinkers like the
philosopher Baruch Spinoza contend that god is everything and everything is god, a belief
known as pantheism. Meanwhile, some “mystical” traditions within larger religious systems,
and to an extent the entire system of Hinduism, maintain that the whole universe is really
god or the “mind of god” or one great cosmic soul (the Brahman in Hinduism), of which the
human soul (atman) is one small alienated piece.
Within these major classes there is incredible diversity in teachings about gods. Some are
creators, others are not. Some are moral guarantors and arbiters, others are not. Some are near
and well known, others are not. The islanders of Ulithi in Micronesia spoke of several gods,
none of whom were creators, and their religion contained no creation story, according to Lessa
(1966). There was a high god, Ialulep, who was described as very large, old, and weak, with
white hair, and who held the “thread of life” of each person and decided when a person would
die by breaking the thread. Under him were numerous sky gods and earth gods, including his
son Lugeilang, who liked the company of human women and fathered the trickster god Iolo-
fath. The earth gods included ones with more or less specific natural and social jurisdictions,
like Palulap the Great Navigator, Ialulwe the patron-god of sailors, Solang the patron-god of
canoe-builders, and so on.
In other places, gods are much vaguer and much less central; across the African con-
tinent, the local god “is typically an abstract and otiose figure, having long ago absented
himself from the human world” (Jackson 2009: 21). The Azande god Mbori or Mboli
was morally neutral and not terribly interested in human affairs. Locals did not even have
clear and consistent “beliefs” about him: some said he moves about on the earth, but
others disagreed (Evans-Pritchard 1962). The Kaguru god mulungu was a universe crea-
tor, but the people did not know the story of this creation nor care very much; the god
itself was imagined as human-like but with only one foot or arm or eye or ear (Beidelman
1971). The high god Oladumare of the Orisa religion of Trinidad, with African roots, is
another instance of “an otiose god who has no direct interaction with humans”; instead,
it is the myriad spirits “who interact extensively with humans” (Glazier 2008: 30).
In the worst case, the local god is not an object of love and worship but of dread and loathing.
The Semai of Malaysia are renowned as one of the world’s most peaceful societies. However,
Robert Knox Dentan instructed that they “have learned their nonviolence in the darkest places
of the soul” (2008: 5), as a reaction to a horrific history of atrocities committed by invading
groups. Their aversion to the outside world is reflected in their religion, featuring “a theology
that displays and reinforces a sense of terrorized helplessness learned from the experience of
slaving, slavery, and general cruelty” (66). Consequently, their deity, symbolized by frightening
thunder, is “a stupid, incontinent, violent dupe” (84), a “vicious ludicrous monster” (74) simul-
taneously feared and ridiculed. The stupidity of their god allows the Semai to employ one of the
central tactics of the weak, duplicity: “Semai say they tricked God into giving them access to His
hnalaa’ power” (88). Beyond theism, Semai humans and demons stalk and hunt each other in a
“whirling totality of eater and eaten, the wheel of predation” (93).
As argued above, the line between gods and other kinds of spirits is not always clear or
firm—if it exists at all. The Tewa, a southwestern US indigenous society, had a six-tiered
theory of “personhood,” of which the lower three were humans and the upper three
spirits. When a person in the lowest tier of humans died, s/he entered the lowest tier of
spirits; likewise, when members of the highest tier of humans (what they call “Made
People” or Patowa) died, they became and joined spirits of the highest tier, the “Dry
Food Who Never Did Become” or the spirits who never took human form. These spirits
or gods were the remote, detached types of deities who were not discussed much or
known in much detail. They were talked about as opa pene in or opa nuneh in, meaning
“those from beyond the world” or “those from with and around the earth,” respectively.
Eight named gods, in the class of oxua, were associated with each moiety or half of
society, in a ranked order (Ortiz 1969).
Perhaps the most legendary ethnography of the god problem is Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer
Religion (1956), an extended struggle with that society’s concept of kwoth, which he
translated as “god” or “spirit.” Kwoth seemed to be a particular being, a “god.” It was
construed as in the sky and was associated with the sky and celestial objects and events
(like rain and lightning), but it was not the same thing as these physical phenomena. It
was the creator, cak ghaua or creator of the universe; it was also a person or ran, with
yiegh or breath or life. At the same time, kwoth manifested itself as various types of
named spirits, including kwoth nhial (spirits of the sky) and kwoth piny (spirits of the
earth). Kwoth, then, as spirit was one and many at the same time.
Box 2.2 Changing of the gods in the western Himalayas

It is part of Judeo-Christian ideology that their god is eternally immutable, forever the
same (although the biblical god changed his mind several times, about destroying
cities, plaguing Job, and redoing creation by drowning the world). In the western
Himalayas, local and indigenous gods have recently been mutating. For instance, the
god Paba-sı- only lately became a vegetarian, which makes animal sacrifice a problem;
devotees reckon that the meat offering is not for the god himself but for one of his
underlings, birs or “soldier-gods” (Sharabi 2019: 1). The last god or devta- documented
to convert to vegetarianism was Ba-sik in 2016. On the whole, Sharabi asserts that the
gods “are viewed as more abstract, less concrete than how they were once perceived”
(6). Both of these qualities, vegetarianism and abstraction, have been linked by multi-
ple observers to a process of “Sanskritization of local gods,” as indigenous deities
morph to conform to mainstream, scriptural, priestly Hinduism and the profiles of its
gods. So far, they still retain some of their pre-/non-Hindu features, some functioning
as “royal deities, in what the locals call devta- ka- ra-j (government by deity)” (4). In their
governing capacity, followers tend to appeal to the gods “to render judgment on
interpersonal conflicts or dissension between villages” (4). But, as elsewhere in the
mundane world, the gods do not show up themselves to offer opinions and settle
disputes; rather, they appear through human mediums (see Chapter 3), which poses
another religious dilemma: how do the petitioners know that it is the god who speaks
and not the human? This rational skepticism about the gods and the pronouncements
of mediums explains the practice of gatti during the ritual session. Once the medium
begins speaking as/for the god, the supplicants confront the medium/god:
with several options, usually in the form of small heaps of rice. Each heap repre-
sents some kind of problem: a medical issue, a land dispute, financial problems,
mental issues in the family and so on. Sometimes a heap of rice doesn’t represent
anything. The supplicants do not reveal the significance of each heap to the ma-lı-
[medium], so it is up to him to choose the correct one. The practice of gatti tests
the agency of the devta- as an epistemological problem. That is, the question is
whether the devta- is actually speaking in the voice of the ma-lı-.
(7)
Clearly, worshippers do not “believe” in the god with unquestioning credulity.
Religious forces
Not all religions include beings at all, and many that do have beings have claims about
impersonal forces—ones that are not associated necessarily with any particular living
thing nor have an individual mind or will. Often these forces are more like spiritual
water or electricity—a (super)naturally occurring power that exists in and flows through
nature, affecting the operation of the world and its human inhabitants. The term for
these forces is animatism.
The archetype of a spiritual force is mana as understood in numerous Pacific Island
cultures. On the island of Tikopia, the word mana could be a noun, an adjective, and/or
a verb. According to Raymond Firth, it was accurate to say either that a person “has
mana” or “is mana,” and the key indicator of having/being mana was potency, efficacy,
power, that is, the capacity to make things happen. A chief had/was mana, as did/was a
great warrior or hunter. Mana should not be understood as a possession or property of a
chief, though; rather, the “only real source of mana is in the spirit world. Mana does not
mean the exercise of human powers but the use of something derived from gods or
ancestors” (1940: 501). The message, then, was the “nature does not work independently
of man; fertility is not merely a concatenation of physical factors but depends on the
maintenance of a relationship between man and spiritual beings” (505).
In a recent revisiting of the mana concept, Andy Mills reminds us that it is not a purely
ethereal force but has “both material and immaterial manifestations” (2016: 78). Indeed,
in Tonga, the word manava derived from a local term that literally means “breath” (as
do “spirit” in English, from spiritus, Latin for breath, and ruah in ancient Hebrew) and
refers more concretely to “the heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, womb and bowels” (80).
Further, it was related to the concept of tapu or taboo, which was experienced through
the human body and the substances introduced into the body, like food; it was also,
consequently, a political concept with gender inflections. In the “manava system,” it was
a spiritual violation “for a man’s child or wife to ever touch his head, touch any part of
him while he was eating, consume his food or drink, or touch his bed, headrest, staff,
weapons, fly-whisk, or fan” (83). So the “relational function of the superior’s mana …
ideologically enforced status asymmetry in the household” (84). This spiritual hierarchy
held beyond the family; the chiefs (‘eiki) were viewed as “the conduit of divine mana and
fertility” for the commoners (tu’a) under their authority, and such inequality applied to
all social relations: “Between any two Tongans, one is always ‘eiki to the other, who is
correspondingly tu’a” (86). The gap between chiefs and commoners was so great that
only chiefs were believed to have eternal souls and to merit funeral rites.
The Chinese notion of chi is another familiar animatistic principle, most clearly and
poetically elucidated in the ancient work Tao Te Ching, historically attributed to the sage
Lao Tze. In this book, the tao is described as the “way” or “path” of nature and the chi
that animates and flows through it. In Chinese and Chinese-derived thought systems, chi
operates in two modes—a fast, bright, dry, male mode (yang) and a slow, dark, moist,
female mode (yin). Both modes are present in all things in various proportions, the sun
being the most yang thing and the moon the most yin. Chi flows through the world and
through humans, impacting every aspect of human life. An imbalance or blockage of chi
can cause illness, which can be corrected by diet, movement, or treatment like acu-
puncture or acupressure. The way of chi even informs such mundane matters as archi-
tecture and home furnishing: the practice of feng shui takes advantage of the flow of chi
to construct healthy, efficacious spaces.
Variations on this idea of force abound. The Dusun of Borneo worried about “luck”
which was a finite spiritual resource: if a person could expend his or her luck in one area
of life, it endangered other areas (e.g. acquisition of property, success in disputes, etc.).
Also, luck was finite in society, making one person’s gain another person’s loss; this
naturally led to disputes about surreptitious efforts to steal or damage each other’s
luck (Williams 1965). The Apache knew a power called diyi, which for them was in
infinite supply. Individuals who possessed or controlled diyi were markedly different
from those who did not. Many forms of this power were recognized, related to differ-
ent animals or natural phenomena. In a twist on the animatistic theme, diyi did have
some “personal” attributes, including the ability to seek out people to attach to (indi-
viduals could also seek diyi) and to experience anger, which could of course be harmful
to humans (Basso 1970). The Menomini of North America also described a power
called tatahkesewen (“that which has energy”), meskowesan (“that which has
strength”), or ahpehtesewesen (“that which is valuable”). They described it as non-
material and invisible but like a bright light. This form of power could also be sought
and mastered, through dreams, vision quests, and the guidance of guardian spirits
(Spindler and Spindler 1971).
For the Tallensi, “fate” or “destiny” was a fundamental religious category. In Tallensi
ontology, humans were born with a good or evil destiny which determined the course of
their lives. An evil destiny was signaled by the person’s refusal or inability to perform his
or her social roles and obligations; a person’s successful fulfillment of social expectations
was proof of a good destiny. Thus, human social failings were traceable to supernatural
sources and “no fault of our own.” In a view that ties animatistic and ancestral “beliefs”
together, it was the dead ancestors who assigned a person his or her fate. But fortunately
not all was lost for the person born with evil destiny: rituals could be performed to help,
on the premise that ancestors were potentially amenable to reversing their original
assignment of destiny (Fortes 1959).
Religious ideas: The universe and human existence

While ideas about beings and forces underlie all religions, those traditions teach about
many other subjects. These include origins and ends, reasons and relations, health and
sickness, morality and meaning, and virtually any topic that might come to the mind of
humans. In the remainder of the chapter, we discuss religious notions about the nature
and shape of the universe, good and evil, human birth and death, and the end of the
world.
Cosmology and cosmogony

Nearly all religions offer a vision of what the universe is “really like”—what it is made
of, what parts or layers it has, and how all of this relates to humanity. Cosmology deals
with the order or structure of ultimate reality, whereas cosmogony deals with the origin
of that structure or order. Both words derive from the Greek root kosmos for “universe”
or “order” (as opposed to “chaos”), and the former has been absorbed by science to name
astronomical and physical theories about the universe, while the latter has not found any
scientific application.
The cosmologies and cosmogonies of different religions vary extensively. The Christian
version tells of a fundamentally three-layered reality, with a heaven (above) and a hell
(below) sandwiching an intermediate world inhabited by humans and other material
beings (interestingly but not surprisingly, contemporary fictional cosmologies, like that of
The Lord of the Rings, echo this same design, with a Middle Earth where humans and
hobbits reside). Other religions envision ultimate reality in very different terms. The
Yanomamo (Venezuelan/Brazilian Amazon) worldview featured a four-layered reality,
“like inverted dinner plates: gently curved, round, thin, rigid, and having a top and
bottom surface” (Chagnon 1992: 99–100). These four layers included the highest one,
called duku ka misi, which was of least concern to them, being “empty” or “void.” The
second-highest level, hedu ka misi, had the sky as its lower surface; on it, animals and
plants and dead ancestors lived very much as we do. Humans resided on the third level,
hei ka misi, which formed when a bit of the upper layer broke off and fell. The bottom
layer, hei ta bebi, was “almost barren” except for an odd race of Yanomamo-like people
called the Amahiri-teri. Since their netherworld was so lifeless, they sent their spirits on
cannibalistic expeditions to the “real world” above to capture Yanomamo, especially
children.
The Navajo conceived the universe as a “stack” of fourteen “world structures” or
platter-shaped worlds laid out on top of each other. Sam Gill does not tell us how these
world structures originated, but within this system an “emergence” began at the center of
the lowest level, moving upward through a series of events told in myth. Living in the
lower levels were insect-, animal-, and bird-people with their own languages and socie-
ties, and the “upward journey was a forced movement due to the misconduct of these
peoples. Each world offered the promise of happiness and a good life to its inhabitants,
but they were unable to maintain proper relationships with one another” (Gill 1981: 51).
For each layer along the way, detailed descriptions of the geography as well as of his-
torical events were known. Emerging finally at the top world, which is the contemporary
earth, First Man and First Woman “begin to whisper to each other, planning what will
be created on the earth surface” (52). Out of these deliberations and their actions came
the first sweat lodge, the first hogan (dwelling structure), the sacred medicine bundle as a
reservoir of spiritual power, and the birth of Changing Woman. A ceremony created the
original two groups of “human forms” and a man and woman “who represent the means
of life for all things as they proceed through time” (52). Finally, the Holy People who had
achieved the emergence departed, ushering in the era of culture heroes and of the origins
of contemporary rituals.
Many religions and cosmologies visualize the universe as round or circular, with the ter-
ritory of the particular society as the center of the world. Often, there is a connection—
sometimes a literal line—that attaches the center point of the world to the spiritual realm.
One common motif to depict this relation is the axis mundi or “tree of life” which stands at
the center of creation and reaches up to “heaven.” The Hindu texts Bhagavad Gita and
Mahabharata refer to such a cosmic tree. The Norse also spoke of a cosmic tree, called
Yggdrasil, the Tree of Wisdom and the Tree of Life (reminiscent of the tree in the Garden of
Eden) (see Figure 2.2). The gods met at the ash tree, as perhaps the ancient druids did and
some modern-day wiccans do, which connected and organized all of creation. In other cases
the central point is a mountain; for Hindu and Hinduized cultures like traditional Java,
Mount Meru was such a focal point, while for ancient Greece it was Mount Olympus. Even
Moses met the god Yahweh on a mountain. All such images not only provide a cosmology
but a “sacred geography” tying together earth, heaven, society, and spirits.
Figure 2.2 Detail of Tree of Life relief on a restored ninth-century Hindu temple at Prambanan,
Java. © Suzanne Long/Alamy.
Box 2.3 The gendered cosmos of the Desana

For the Desana (Colombian Amazon) creation began with sex. The Sun lived with his
daughter “as if she were his wife” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 24). This incestuous rela-
tionship had other repercussions: causing her to bleed, “since then, women must lose
blood every month in remembrance of the incest of the Sun and so that this great
wickedness will not be forgotten” (28). The earth too was gendered, the land mascu-
line and the water feminine in a great cosmic “system of reciprocal relationships” (42).
The celestial Milky Way was “an immense seminal flow that fertilizes all of the inter-
mediate zone, or the underlying biosphere” (43), the realm of humans and all organic
life. Desana thought was replete with sexual symbolism, anchored by the concept of
fertility and energy, emanating from the sun. The Sun-god was named go-á-mëe
(“bone” and “power/potential”). This bone-god was a penis, a divinity that “penetrates
the Universe vertically in the form of an immense phallus … in permanent copulation”
with the world below (49). Likewise, at night “the moon descends in the form of a man
to cohabit with women during their sleep,” and Vaí-mahsë, the Master of the Animals,
chased women and molested them if he could. It was the Sun’s daughter–wife who
taught “the secrets of sexual life” to humankind (74). The dew (dihsiko) was “a seminal
fluid that fertilized nature” including human women (72), and the rainbow was a great
cosmic vagina (79). Virtually every object, species, and natural phenomenon had some
gender or sexual aspect, all linked through a complex symbology that associated
objects with human gender, the “sexual energy of the biosphere,” and with the crea-
tive “cosmic energy” (95).
The central preoccupation of Desana religious thinking is the control of human

and animal fertility, and around this fundamental nucleus revolves the language of
their myths and the message of their ceremonies and dances, their moral norms,
their social and economic relationships, in other words, all of their institutions and
cultural patterns. It is not sex in its carnal, erotic meaning that preoccupies them
but the simple fact of male fertilizing power that acts upon female principle and
thus creates a new being.
(97)
Theodicy: Explaining evil

It is undeniable that in all places and times bad things happen to people, even good
people. Humans look for explanations for these misfortunes, as well as ways to control
or prevent them. No matter what the precise form of explanation, it tends to involve an
“intentional” or even “personal” source. Theodicy is the Christian term for explaining
evil or suffering, especially in a world made and ruled by an all-powerful and all-good
divinity.
The concepts of beings and forces and of cosmology obviously shape the concepts of
evil; in fact, they will even determine what is considered evil in the first place—or whe-
ther “evil” as a concept exists. For instance, in a tradition that believes in the existence of
an all-good spirit, evil is a particularly vexing problem. One solution is to blame humans
for it, through a subordinate concept like “free will.” Another, often in tandem with the
former, is to attribute it to one or more beings of evil (a devil or demons). A third and
less appealing possibility is that the good spirit creates evil too or at least allows it. “I
form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I, the Lord, do all these
things,” prophesied Isaiah (45:7), speaking for his god Yahweh. The Book of Job is
urgently concerned with the problem of evil, portraying that there is no relationship
between the goodness of the person and the evil that befalls him—and that religion may
provide no answer.
Christian theodicy also suggests the general solution of “dualism” for the problem of
evil, that is, that there are two distinct and opposing forces or beings, the clash between
which results in visible evil. This is a recurring theme, as seen in the even older religion
of the Persian prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, who taught of a universe with two
equal and opposed forces—light (Ahura Mazda) and darkness (Ahriman or Angra
Mainyu). Angra Mainyu was a kind of “counter-creator” or “anti-creator,” who was
responsible for bringing the serpent, plagues, “plunder and sin,” unbelief, “tears and
wailing,” and 99,999 diseases into the otherwise perfect creation of Ahura Mazda. The
two gods or forces were perpetually at war, rendering the universe a battleground; thus
all of religion and all of human existence was or should be directed toward combating
Angra Mainyu and his forces of evil, and all humans were in fact warriors in the struggle
between light and darkness.
Other belief systems locate the cause of misfortune in other agents, human and not-so-
human. This might consist of ancestral spirits, as we discovered above. It might also consist of
human actors—witches, sorcerers, and the like—as discussed in the next chapter. Another way
to approach the problem of evil is to accept it as inevitable, as inherent in the nature of exis-
tence. Buddhism finds suffering or brokenness (dukkha) to be an intrinsic quality of reality; the
only relief is detachment from that reality. The ancient Greek poets never pretended that their
gods were all good. The gods, like humans, were good and bad, grand and petty, full of all the
emotional and intellectual foibles that a being can exhibit. They were arbitrary and capricious,
doing what they will. Sometimes evil was just the result of dumb luck or bad choices, as when
Pandora opened her box.
In some religious views, the world is simply dangerous. For the Piaroa (Venezuela)
danger arose from the actions of the two creator beings, Kuemoi and Wahari (Overing
1986). Kuemoi, the Master of Water, was a fierce—even insanely violent—ugly cannibal,
while Wahari, the Master of Land, was the creator of the Piaroa people. Invading
Wahari’s land domain, Kuemoi created fire, plants and animals, and “culture,” the
knowledge and skills of farming and hunting. Wahari, in addition to creating humans in
his own domain, made fish and fishing in Kuemoi’s. More consequentially, he trans-
formed the nonhuman species into their present edible forms, depriving them of their
original spiritual and anthropomorphic nature. They thereby became proper food for
humans. The extreme and almost unbearably contradictory message in this tale is that
poison is everywhere in their world. Culture is poisonous because it was formulated by a
mad god. Food is also poisonous; animals and large fish are dangerous to eat, but so are
small fish, birds, and even plants. Consuming any of these things is perilous, not because
they cause physical harm but because they cause spiritual, invisible harm. After all, ani-
mals and fish are jealous and angry for losing their human traits and their culture.
Therefore, when we humans eat them, they try to avenge themselves by “eating” us. The
world, thus, is an inescapably violent and hazardous place. If we do not eat, we die, but
if we eat, we may also die. Every choice, every step, is fraught with peril.
A final way to “solve” the problem of evil is to deny, in a sense, that there is any
problem. In other words, a tradition may assert that evil is only apparent and that from
another, more enlightened, point of view it does not exist at all. The Bhagavad Gita, the
most famous and popular of the Hindu scriptures, makes this point clearly. In this tale,
the warrior Arjuna finds himself on the eve of battle inspecting the battlefield, where the
enemy includes some of his own kinsmen. As he prepares to throw down his bow and
arrow in desperation, his chariot-driver, the god Krishna in disguise, begins a discourse
on the proper actions of a righteous man. As a member of the kshatriya or noble/warrior
caste, Arjuna’s duty is war. He would be at fault to refuse his duty, which would con-
demn him to a demotion in the great cycle of samsara or rebirth, which is the greatest
evil. But more than this, Krishna instructs the reluctant warrior why neither he nor any
man should worry about taking a human life: since the true essence of a person cannot be
killed, and since the body is a mere temporary receptacle for that essence, then the fate of
the body is of little import. In fact, killing a kshatriya helps him achieve a higher
existence.
Human conception, birth, and death

Human birth and death are widely regarded as spiritual or religious events, hedged about
with beliefs, rituals, and moral value. Death in many religions is the transition from a
mundane to a spiritual condition; birth may be such a transition as well (or in the case of
the Trobrianders above, the reverse, from spiritual to mundane). Among the Azande, for
instance, semen (nziro) was thought to contain the soul of the unborn child. In the womb
male and female “soul-stuff” mixed, and whichever parent’s part was stronger deter-
mined the sex of the child. A fetus was regarded as “a soul with an undeveloped body,
and even when the child is born the soul has not become completely and permanently
attached to its abode,” making it susceptible to “flying away” and death (Evans-Pritchard
1962: 246). The fetus was strengthened and built out of the blood of the woman and the
repeated insemination of the man, as well as the mother’s food.
The Dinka (East Africa) said that men and women give birth jointly, with divine
intercession to “create” the child and the ancestors’ assistance to protect it from mal-
evolent forces. In other words, two supernatural media (a god and ancestor spirits) joined
with humans to make life and guard it against a third supernatural medium (evil powers)
(Deng 1972). The Ainu asserted that conception and birth were not caused by sex at all
but by the god Aynu Sikohte, since humans do not have the power to make life. Simi-
larly, Australian Aboriginals allegedly did not see a link between sex and procreation; in
many of their societies, babies were reincarnations of Dreamtime beings, “spirit children”
born into human form. These spirits dwelt in the landscape and entered a woman’s
womb when she sat, lay, or camped at sacred sites. Human women were sometimes
considered to be passive “hosts” of the spirits that desired to be born, while men played
no part at all except perhaps to “open the way.”
The Kaguru of East Africa (Beidelman 1971) had a belief similar to the Trobrianders.
According to Kaguru religion, when a human died he or she went to the land of the dead
or the ghosts. However, when a human child was born, that person was born out of the
land of the ghosts, such that a human birth was a ghost death. Just as the living mourned
the loss of one of their own from death, the ghosts mourned the loss of their own from
“birth.” Hence, there was a reciprocal life-and-death relationship between ghosts and
humans in which each was born and died into the other.
Once birth has occurred, not all societies consider this the achievement of one’s
humanity, certainly not “socially” and sometimes not even physically. Newborns are
widely held to be particularly vulnerable to supernatural threats, whether from demons,
witches, or spirits; accordingly, they are often subjected to periods of ritual seclusion.
The Tewa, for example, conducted a series of initiations from the fourth day after birth
until about age twenty in which the child was transformed into a full human (a “Dry
Food person” or seh t’a, literally meaning “dry food”). An ochu or moist/unripe (“green”)
person was not quite a person at all, because they were ignorant and innocent:
To be innocent is to be not yet Tewa; to be not yet Tewa is to be not yet human,
and to be not yet human is to be, in this use of the term, not entirely out of the realm
of spiritual existence.
(Ortiz 1969: 16)
At the end of the initiation cycle, not only was the child a real Tewa, but he or she was
situated firmly in the kinship (moiety) system; he or she had taken his or her place in
society.
Eventually every life ends, and in many if not most societies, something is believed to
follow it. The Kaguru, like many peoples, envisioned the domain of the dead to be very
similar to the domain of the living, where dead spirits “lived,” farmed, hunted, fought
and quarreled, and in numerous ways conducted familiar lives, including “dying” and
being mourned by their survivors. They were not particularly clear on where this ghost
world was (some said above, some said below). For the Huron too, the “village of the
dead” resembled the habitations of the living. Even more, different dead had different
courses to follow: the very old or very young might linger around their families, while
those who died in combat gathered to make their own unique community. And of course,
the departed were often threats to the living, especially if they died badly (Trigger 1969).
Many religions understood death as a kind of journey between worlds that takes time
to complete and involves challenges and obstacles. The Ainu said that the dead spirit
remained around the body through the funeral, and then sojourned to the land of the
dead to be rejoined with the body; in fact, the dead were called yayasirika or “reborn.”
They traveled to a dead world called auru un kotan that was similar to the living world
except reversed in seasons. The living could visit the dead, although the dead could not
see them (while, interestingly, dogs could smell them). Among the Tewa a dead body
(from which the spirit escaped via the mouth) was buried with an amount of food,
depending on how long the voyage to the next life would take; good people took a
“straight” and short path, but bad people would travel a long and winding road, some-
times encountering beasts along the way. The dead spirit wandered with its ancestors for
four days, during which time the living were nervous about its effects on them, since the
dead get lonely and may return to take relatives with them, especially children. On the
evening of the fourth day, a “releasing” ritual was performed to send the spirit on its
way, with a repeat performance on the first anniversary.
Clearly not all societies considered death to be an instantaneous phenomenon and
transformation. The Mandinko (West Africa) said that a person was not entirely dead at
death but was a “transitional corpse,” who would be interviewed by the angel Malika in
the grave before moving on. The Dusun explained that the dead soul waited near the
Figure 2.3 Graves in an urban Japanese cemetery. Courtesy of the author.
village for seven nights before going on to its final destination of Nabalu on the summit
of Mt. Kinabalu. But some souls would never make it, since they could be captured and
imprisoned by other dead spirits or by “disease-givers” or such evil-workers. A related
idea is the practice of zombification of the dead or the creation of “undead.”
Death is almost always an occasion for more or less elaborate ritual interventions,
intended to soothe the survivors, dispose of the body, and facilitate the spiritual transi-
tion to an afterlife existence. Among the Mapuche this facilitation takes a fascinating
form, highlighted by amulpüllün or funeral speeches. To understand this practice we
must first grasp the spiritual composition of a Mapuche person, including the alwe
(impersonal life-force), am (individual personality), and püllü (“unique inner core of
being”) (Course 2011: 101). To be a Mapuche person is to be social, to form bonds of
kinship and reciprocity, which are accumulated over a lifetime and are inevitably left
behind—and left incomplete—at death. The ritualized retelling of the biography of the
deceased (nütrantum) serves the purpose of “completing” or “finishing” the person. The
amulpüllün brings to a close and fulfillment the sociality of the person, who is thereby
“cut free of the relations of reciprocity from which he or she was constituted” in the first
place; Course writes that “death is the cessation of sociality, but paradoxically it is a
cessation that must be achieved by others” (108).
End of time: Eschatology

Many but not all religions have some conception of the “death of the world,” of an end
at least of the present age if not of all of creation. This is the area of eschatology, from
eschaton for end or last or farthest. Christianity is a highly eschatological religion,
promising a final confrontation between good and evil in which evil will be defeated and
consumed, the earth as we know it destroyed, and the final victory of God enshrined in a
new earth where Jesus rules supreme. Linear traditions like Judaism and Christianity
posit a single creation, existence, and destruction, but other cyclical traditions allow
multiple recurring creations. Hinduism describes a reality which is repeatedly made and
unmade, as god Brahma sleeps and wakes, bringing the universe into existence in his
dreams. Each cycle of creation undergoes a decline from its perfect initial stage to its
eventual destruction and replacement with a new, pristine godly dream. The present age,
the Kali yuga or age of Kali (the goddess of death), is the end-stage of the most recent
creation. It is distinguished as a time of troubles, of power and injustice, and of the
breakdown of social institutions and the loss of piety. According to one version, as the
end of the cycle approaches, the earth becomes an uninhabitable wasteland, killing off
most of the beings that once lived on it. Then the god Vishnu himself completes the
devastation, drinking up the last waters and allowing seven suns to scorch the desiccated
surface. After that, torrential rains extinguish the fires but inundate the land with floods,
which is finally ripped by high winds. Only after all life is crushed and all energy
expended does Vishnu again take the form of Brahma and bring about a new cycle of
creation, which in turn will pass through thousands of ages until it too ends harshly.
Another well-known version of the end is told in Norse tales, of Ragnarok. According
to the Edda, winter will engulf the land, during which time social order will break down.
Brothers will fight, taboos will be broken, wars will flare, all ending in the world’s ruin.
A wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf will swallow the moon. Earthquakes will
tear down great trees and mountains, followed by floods and tidal waves. Out of the
shattered sky will ride the sons of Muspell, and the gods will awaken and meet in
counsel. Odin and his court will battle Muspell’s sons and their evil hordes until all the
gods and men and even the tree Yggdrasil have been laid waste. However, out of the sea
a new earth will rise, with new good lands and new good gods and new people and a
new sun.
Eschatological views are not particularly common among the small-scale, “traditional”
religions of the world. Most appear to have a more continuous notion of existence, in
which things persist much as they are. However, as we will see, eschatological ideas have
diffused around the modern world and penetrated many religions, generating new beliefs
and new movements of great historical and cultural importance.
Conclusion
Every religion comprises a (more or less integrated) system of claims about the “super-
natural” world and its relationship with the natural, human, and social worlds. Whether
or not we can call these “beliefs” is an interesting relativistic question; religions are cer-
tainly not entirely cognitive or conceptual but also embodied and materialized. Never-
theless, ideas or concepts or categories of religious entities are a universal and necessary
component of religions, including both personalized beings and impersonal forces. We
cannot always, however, divide these ideas and resulting religions into neat “types,” and
perhaps we are better served if we do not attempt it. Rather, it might be more meaningful
and accurate to think of components—building blocks or modules—of religious concep-
tions, which can be assembled in various combinations to yield particular religions. Then,
we might be better off to speak of a “religious field” than a “type of religion,” granting
that any religious field may contain some and not other elements, may elaborate some
elements more than others, and may mix elements in ways that at first would seem to us
unlikely or incompatible. Precisely because religions are often not explicit cognitive sys-
tems, such (apparent) incompatibility is less of a problem than we usually think.
1 What is the anthropological critique of “belief”? Is “belief” part of all religions or
critical to religions?
2 What do affect theory and materiality add to anthropology’s understanding of reli-
gious beings, forces, and experiences—and to the critique of “belief”?
3 How are religious or supernatural beings “agents” or “persons” like, but different
from, humans?
4 What is the difference between animism and animatism? And why do people often
not “worship” the ancestor spirits?
5 What are the main areas or topics on which religions provide ideas or explanations?
Miracles and Religious Experiences among the Samburu
Belief or Relational Action? Papua New Guineans in a Christian Hospital
Philippe Descola’s Four Ontologies
Reviving Animism: Contemporary Anthropological Thoughts on the Concept of
Animism
The Devil Wears Hijab: The Veiled She-Demon of Niger
3 Symbols, specialists, and substance
Mongolian shamans wear multiple mirrors (toli) on their clothing. Fashioned from metal,
the outward side of toli (a word that also means “store of knowledge”) is shiny but the
back side is dull or blank. The entire object is held to be alive and “said then to have its
own ability to move, and to deflect, suppress or destroy psychic energies,” specifically the
energies of spirits (Humphrey 2007: 35). During ritual the shaman is possessed by spirits,
and the mirrors act as containers for the spirits as well as shields against them. The
mirror also has a spirit of its own, “which is introduced into the metal by a rite called
amiluulah (‘giving life’)”; at the height of the performance, “the inner side of the mirror
is thus populated in a complex way with its own as well as transitory/invited spirits,
including the possessed shaman” (42). The spirits with whom shamans interact are
mostly ongon, the souls (süns) of deceased humans inhabiting a Dark World “visible only
to shamans in trance,” which is why shamans “perform at night, many of them also with
their eyes closed” (48). Most importantly, by capturing spirits in their mirrors and by
seeing “through” the mirror into the spirits’ Dark World—by occupying the mirror with
the spirits—the shaman is uniquely able to adopt the viewpoint of the spirits, perceiving
reality from “two different perspectives, of the living and of the souls/spirits” (35).
Although concerned ultimately with the “spiritual” or “supernatural” realm, religion
must and does find its expressions and effects here in the world of society and matter.
Even more, humans cannot relate to entirely disembodied or abstract beings or forces,
and even if we could, as long as we live in the physical world those beings or forces will
be experienced or made manifest in and through specific objects and specific persons.
However “transcendental” it may be, religious reality must be made immanent for
humans to know it and to interact with it—to communicate with it and about it. It must
take concrete forms, both nonhuman and human.
It may not be obvious at first what religious symbols and religious specialists have in
common; one is an image, a word, a gesture, while the other is a human being. But both
are palpable, visible manifestations of the religious truths and powers in a particular
society. Symbols are usually thought to be things that “stand for” or “represent” other
things, which are their “meanings.” However, symbols are things themselves, and pow-
erful things at that; they may not so much represent spiritual beings and forces as make
those entities present. The same is true for religious specialists: they may stand in for
these entities, serving as their embodiments or intermediaries in the human world. As
Victor Turner phrased it in discussing the symbolic work of the Ndembu of Zambia,
symbols and the specialists who use them (and in a certain sense are them) “make visible,
audible, and tangible beliefs, ideas, values, sentiments, and psychological dispositions
that cannot directly be perceived” (1967: 50). To continue the line of inquiry opened in
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-3
Symbols, specialists, and substance 51
the previous chapter, Webb Keane declared that religions “may not always demand
beliefs, but they will always involve material forms” which allow ideas and purported
beings and forces to “provoke responses, … have public lives and enter into ongoing
chains of causes and consequences” (2008: S124). We could say that symbols as sub-
stantial forms and specialists are sites of spiritual presence and that symbols, specialists,
and spirits jointly act to establish the religious world.
The anthropology of symbolism

Symbols, in the familiar sense, are things—objects, images, sounds, actions, gestures,
utterances, and almost any other medium—that point to something other than them-
selves, that “have a meaning.” The meaning is that which the symbol “stands for,” of
which it is a representation or a place-holder. Moreover, the relationship between the
symbol and its meaning is arguably arbitrary and conventional, that is, there is no
necessary connection between meaning and symbol. It is only cultural habit that unites
the two. In other words, humans could and do use any linguistic symbol (i.e. word) for
“dog” and still mean “dog.” Humans could use any symbol to represent the United States
or Christianity, and the meaning would be the same (in fact, the United States and
Christianity have been represented variously over time). Conversely, any symbol could
have different meanings, like the swastika for Nazi Germany or Hinduism.
Symbols are clearly not the only kind of “meaningful” things. For example, in Symbols:
Public and Private, Raymond Firth (1973) distinguished symbols from “indexes,” “sig-
nals,” and “icons.” An index is a signifier that is directly or objectively related to what it
signifies, perhaps as part-to-whole or particular-to-general, like the tail of a dog signify-
ing a dog. A signal is something that is “made” by or co-occurring with the signified, like
the footprint of a dog. An icon is a “sign” that bears some similarity or resemblance to
the thing it signifies, like a picture or statue of a dog. Finally, a symbol is not directly or
objectively related to its meaning and is “meaningful” through a chain of associations, for
instance, the dog being a symbol of companionship or loyalty.
Making and using symbols entails the cognitive ability to find or create and place
meaning where it otherwise “is not.” Leslie White believed that the essence of culture
itself was this process of “bestowing meaning upon a thing or an act, or grasping and
appreciating meanings thus bestowed,” or symboling (1959: 231), and he offered holy
water as a prime example. Holy water is water, physical and material, but humans add a
dimension of holiness to it. People who have learned to “grasp and appreciate” the notion
of holy water comprehend it as holy; for everyone else, it is just water.
While symbolism has come to be a vital element in anthropological thought, it hardly
originated with anthropology. Freudian psychoanalysis took the notion of symbol particu-
larly seriously and particularly far. In fact, Weston La Barre, one of numerous twentieth-
century anthropologists to apply psychoanalytic thinking, credited it as “the first psychology
to preoccupy itself with the symbolic content and purpose, as opposed to the mere modalities
and processes, of thinking” (1970: xii). According to Freud, dreams were a symbolic “lan-
guage” for unconscious mental phenomena, and not dreams alone: neuroses and other
mental illnesses were symbolic, as were “slips of the tongue” (so-called Freudian slips),
making both significant for plumbing the mind. As Freud’s thinking evolved, he also attrib-
uted “higher” cultural achievements like art, ritual, and myth to this same symbolic process,
as well as “primitive” culture in general. Carl Jung, while more sensitive to religion, echoed
Freud’s approach. In his famous essay “Concerning the Two Kinds of Thinking,” he argued
that while dreams are “apparently contradictory and nonsensical,” they arise from a distinct
symbolic mental process (1949: 9). Jung identified this same symbolizing mentality in two
other realms—ancient history and “primitive society,” in particular religion.
An advance (some would say a revolution) in symbolism came in 1942 with Suzanne
Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. She contended that symbolism was a much more
pervasive thought process than previously suspected, in fact that the problem of “mean-
ing” was not a strictly symbolic problem but the fundamental human problem. All
experience, including the experience of “sense-data,” is “primarily symbolic” (16). Sym-
bolization then is “the starting point of all intellection in the human sense, and is more
general than thinking, fancying, or taking action” (33). All thinking commences with
concepts, not isolated perceptions, and all concepts are symbolic in that they refer to
“types” or “classes” of things, not individual things: “Rover” may name a specific dog,
but “dog” names a general kind of being.
Rather than searching for “the meaning” of a symbol—that is, translating it into
another “language” (for instance, the Freudian language of sex or unconscious drives)—
she proposed that symbolism was not linguistic in the strict sense or at least that it con-
stituted a kind of “non-discursive language.” She distinguished language and symbolism
as follows (Table 3.1):
Table 3.1 Langer’s comparison of language and symbolism

Language Non-discursive (symbolic) “language”
Has vocabulary and syntax Has no vocabulary—cannot be broken into

“words” or “morphemes”
Dictionary possible (one word can be “defined” No dictionary possible (one symbol cannot be
by or “translated” into another) “defined” by or “translated” into another)
Translatability (words in one language can be No translatability (symbols in one medium or
rendered by equivalents in another language) genre cannot be rendered into equivalents in
another medium or genre, i.e., you cannot re-
state a symphony as a poem, etc.)
The key to Langer’s new philosophy is metaphor, the use of one thing to suggest another
through the similarities between the two (for example, “time is money” in that both can be
saved, spent, wasted, and so on). Another term is analogy, that is, one thing is like another in
certain ways, although not in all ways. Metaphor or analogy is thinking, she insisted, but it is
not “rational” or fact-related thinking; even though the “grammar” of such statements looks
literal, they are not to be taken literally. Instead, she proposed that much of symbolism is
image-based rather than verbal, and images quickly crowd upon images, forging additional
analogical or associative links. The result is a flight along metaphoric chains that go where
nobody knows or predicts: “Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic” (119). The
end-product is a tangled and virtually impenetrable forest of meaning and metaphor, in
which “the very use of language exhibits a rampant confusion of metaphorical meanings
clinging to every symbol, sometimes to the complete obscurance of any reasonable literal
meaning” (120–21). One name that she gave to this process, as opposed to the denotative or
“factual” type of thinking and speaking, is poetic significance.
This excursion into psychology and philosophy has been necessary because those dis-
ciplines were so influential on anthropology. Clifford Geertz’s definition of symbol, for
example—“any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle for a
conception—the conception is the symbol’s ‘meaning’” (1973: 91)—reflects and is expli-
citly credited to Langer. He also embraced philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s suggestion that
mind and meaning are fundamentally “public” and to an extent “objective” and echoed it
in his subsequent statement that symbols “are tangible formulations of notions, abstrac-
tions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, atti-
tudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs” (91, emphasis added).
With symbols playing such a powerful role, it is no wonder that Geertz viewed religion
as exactly a system of symbols, as his celebrated definition (see Chapter 1) shows. Cul-
ture itself is a system of symbols, of which religion is one component or cluster, though a
particularly important one.
The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing … that

man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take cul-
ture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.
(5)
Victor Turner was another prominent promoter of the symbolic perspective in anthro-
pology. In his aptly named The Forest of Symbols, he explored the ritual symbolism of the
Ndembu. For him, ritual and symbolism were intimately linked; indeed, he posited that the
symbol “is the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific properties of ritual
behavior; it is the ultimate unit of specific structure in a ritual context” (1967: 19). Symbols
were construed incredibly widely, to include “objects, activities, relationships, events, ges-
tures, and spatial units” (19). Surveying the types and uses, he arrived at three properties of
symbols—condensation, unification of disparate significata, and polarization of meaning. By
condensation he meant that one symbol can and frequently does carry multiple meanings or
representations simultaneously. These multiple or disparate meanings or significata “are
interconnected by virtue of their common possession of analogous qualities or by association
in fact or thought” (28). A central example for the Ndembu was the milk tree, which he
interpreted as standing at once for “women’s breasts, motherhood, a novice at Nkang’a [an
initiation ritual], the principle of matriliny, a specific matrilineage, learning, and the unity
and persistence of Ndembu society” (28). Finally, symbols bring together two “poles” of
experience, the natural/physiological and the moral/social. Thus, a symbol integrates the
physical qualities and associations of the symbolic object (e.g. the red and therefore “bloody”
quality of the mukula tree) and the emotional and even visceral reactions it inspires with the
ideas, norms, and values of the group that uses it.
In conclusion, then, Geertz and Turner guided the symbolic turn in anthropology. If
culture generally and religion specifically is a system of symbols, then the task of
anthropology is to “interpret,” “translate,” or “decode” these symbols. As Geertz put it,
anthropology becomes an essentially “semiotic” exercise, “reading” culture for the
“meanings” behind cultural actions. Real-life social action is never lost or ignored; we
cannot study symbols in abstract isolation from social life. But still, social life and culture
as such were to be treated as a “text” for reading or a “language” for speaking.
Is religion symbolic?
While no one could deny that symbols exist and that much of religion and culture is
symbolic, the treatment of culture and religion as essentially or universally symbolic is
not shared by all. For instance, Bronislaw Malinowski rejected the symbolic approach to
myth, if not all religion: in his essay “Myth in Primitive Psychology” (see Chapter 4) he
insisted that myth “is not symbolic. … We can certainly discard all … symbolic inter-
pretations of these myths of origin” (1948: 101).
Dan Sperber posed the provocative question of why we seek symbolic explanations in
the first place. He suggested that when anthropologists hear certain accounts from
informants, they conclude, “‘That’s symbolic.’ Why? Because it is false” (1975: 3). In
other words, most of the time, we dub symbolic “all activity whose rationale escapes me”
(4), which speaks to a deeper issue, the issue of the veracity and rationality of other
people’s beliefs. For Sperber, Radcliffe-Brown would probably represent the standard
social science position when the latter pronounced:
we have to say that from our point of view the natives are mistaken, that the rites do
not actually do what they are believed to do. … In so far as the rites are performed
for a purpose they are futile, based on erroneous belief. … The rites are easily per-
ceived to be symbolic, and we may therefore investigate their meaning.
(1965: 144)
False or impractical behavior, that is, requires a “symbolic interpretation,” whereas true
or practical behavior does not: we do not ask the meaning of planting seeds in the
ground, but we do ask the meaning of performing a ritual over the garden.
Further, Sperber argued that interpreting a symbol or an entire symbol system requires
a “key” or “decoder,” which does not exist in most societies. We might query the mem-
bers as to the meaning of their behavior, but the explanation they offer is not, in most if
any cases, the “meaning” of the symbol but merely a further elaboration of it (34)—just
more symbol. And if we told the members that their behaviors or beliefs were symbolic,
often enough they would disagree. For example, comparative religionist Joseph Campbell
wrote throughout his career that “God is a symbol,” one that can and must be inter-
preted “in psychological terms … [such that] what is referred … as ‘other world’ is to be
understood psychologically as inner world” (2001: 25). “God is not a fact” (17). How-
ever, presumably few believers would accept such an “interpretation”; they would
respond that their god is very real. Ultimately, Sperber decided that the entire discussion
of symbols and meaning may be our imposition on the ethnographic data: “The attribu-
tion of sense is an essential aspect of symbolic development in our culture. Semiologism is
one of the bases of our ideology” (1975: 83–84).
Soon after Geertz’s symbolic definition of culture and religion, and right behind Sper-
ber’s critique, Talal Asad mounted a devastating and prescient attack on the Geertzian
symbolist approach. An obsession with symbolic meaning, he contended, “omits the
crucial dimension of power” and ethnocentrically “resembles the privatized forms of
religion so characteristic of modern (Christian) society” (1983: 237). Asad sought to
replace the “meaning” of symbols with “the form of life in which they are used” (251),
asking “what are the historical conditions (movements, classes, institutions, ideologies)
necessary for the existence of particular religious practices and discourses,” that is, “how
does power create religion?” (252). Perhaps the key word in his comment is practice, as
he emphasized the action of people with symbols—and the action of symbols them-
selves—in the real world versus the purely mental contents or meanings of those symbols.
Others subsequently advanced the critique, as anthropology took another turn, away
from symbolism and toward materiality. In a volume titled Materiality, Keane resisted
conceptualizations of symbols that “privilege language, or even received notions of
meaningfulness, as their model” (2005: 197). Birgit Meyer, whom we will meet again in
this chapter, introduced the term “sensational form” to designate those “religious media”
that stimulate the human body and “sensorium” (the full complement of sight, hearing,
touch, smell, and taste) and instill “sensibilities and emotions through authorized, dis-
tinctive aesthetic [i.e., feeling] practices.” “Meaning production,” she ultimately reasoned,
“is not disembodied and abstract, but deeply sensorial and material” (2012: 28). These
sentiments reflect thinking in the field of religious studies too, where for instance Robert
Orsi referred to “the corporalization of the sacred” or “the practice of rendering the
invisible visible by constituting it as an experience in a body.” “Once made material,” he
explained, “the invisible can be negotiated and bargained with, touched and kissed, made
to bear human anger and disappointment” (2005: 73–74). Likewise, Sally Promey of Yale
Divinity School, where she directs the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cul-
tures of Religion and heads the Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group, echoes
Asad’s analysis that an overly linguistic immaterial understanding of religion reflects
Christian, more particularly Protestant, attitudes that equate religious truth and cultural
progress “to an ‘advanced’ private and dematerialized state of interiority and invisibility”
in which religion was purely words and “beliefs” (2014: 5).
(How) do symbols mean?

Anthropologists do not deny that there is such a thing as a symbol or that some cultures
and religions do recognize them as such some of the time. Nevertheless, they raise several
objections that make us more circumspect about symbol-talk. First, we may be attribut-
ing “symbolism” where the locals do not. Second, we may be imputing meanings to
symbols that they do not. And third, “meaning” may not be the only or primary con-
sideration in analyzing symbols when we do encounter them. In his work with the Berti
of Sudan, Ladislav Holy found that “meaning” or “interpretation” or “speculation” is not
an aspect of indigenous religion. From the Berti point of view, religion was more instru-
mental and “practical” than symbolic and expressive; they were “more concerned with
means than with meanings, with results than with reasons, with controlling than with
explaining” (1991: 76). The Berti did not know or care how religion works; they were
simply sure it works. This led him to dispute the tradition of treating culture as “first of
all a cognitive device. … If it is seen as an instrumental device at all, it is seen as such,
not for achieving practical goals, but for imposing meaning on experience and for
expressing that meaning” (202).
The customary approach to symbols, as we have seen, stresses their cognitive and
“expressive” aspect: symbols are “vehicles for a conception,” depositories of cultural ideas,
which are their “meaning.” Precisely what meaning(s) to ascribe to a symbol—and by
whom—has been a contentious issue. S. F. Nadel among others urged that we should not
assign meanings other than the ones members themselves avow. In other words, the only
possible meaning of a symbol is the symbol-user’s meaning; there cannot be, Nadel insisted,
“uncomprehended meanings,” let alone “uncomprehended symbols.” If the entire point of a
symbol is to mean or convey something, and if symbols mean “nothing to the actors, they
are, from our point of view, irrelevant, and indeed no longer symbols” (1954: 108).
Turner fundamentally disagreed. For him, symbols may mean and therefore be inter-
preted in three different ways—by the members’ explanations, by the overt qualities of
the symbols themselves, and by the contexts and ways in the symbols are employed. In
fact, there are two reasons why members might not be able to express all the meanings of
a symbol. First, each individual sees only one social “angle” on a symbol, while the
anthropologist has a more “inclusive” view, not committed to just one position in
society. Second, the society may have an “official” interpretation that more or less inten-
tionally rules out certain understandings.
On these grounds, therefore, I consider it legitimate to include within the total

meaning of a dominant ritual symbol, aspects of behavior associated with it which
the actors themselves are unable to interpret, and indeed of which they may be
unaware.
(1967: 27)
In fact, since a symbol can have multiple meanings, and since it can and tends to embrace
all of the ambiguities and contradictions in social life, many meanings escape or are
unacceptable to the members themselves.
Gananath Obeyesekere developed this latter point with his notion of “personal sym-
bols.” Using hair, an important Hindu symbol, as a case study he showed that the life
experiences of specific individuals shaped the meaning and valence of public “cultural
symbols.” Public symbols and their conventional meanings certainly exist; these symbols
precede the individual and make certain experiences possible and typical. Thus, “the
Hindu’s consciousness is already influenced by his culture, facilitating the expression of
intrapsychic conflict in a cultural idiom” (1981: 21). However, by refraction through the
individual’s unique biography and personality, the public symbol is appropriated, recre-
ated, “reloaded” with meaning. In other words, a personal symbol is a public symbol
“whose primary significance and meaning lie in the personal life and experience of indi-
viduals” (44). Importantly, once an individual personalizes a symbol, that symbol and its
novel meaning are available to others as a public symbol.
But even Geertz and Turner did not limit their analyses to the intellectual dimension of
symbols. As Turner admitted openly, “Symbols instigate social action. In a field context,
they may even be described as ‘forces,’ in that they are determinable influences inclining
persons and groups to action. … The symbol [is] a unit of action” (1967: 36). For Geertz,
the function of symbols was “controlling behavior” (1973: 52), although this control may
have been too muscular; symbols, the constituents of religion and culture, “are ‘pro-
grams’; they provide a template or blueprint for the organization of social and psycho-
logical processes” (216). That is, symbols may not be so much about thinking as doing.
In her influential essay “On Key Symbols” Sherry Ortner (1973) explored the multiple
powers of symbols. She organized symbols into two major classes, which she labeled
“summarizing” and “elaborating.” Summarizing symbols capture or condense a major
and powerful concept, experience, or feeling for the society; they do so, however, in a
fairly “undifferentiated” way, that is, they do not ask members to think or feel any one
thing in particular nor to reflect on or analyze those feelings or their source. Elaborating
symbols are exactly the opposite: they are “analytical” and provide opportunities and
tools for “sorting out” the complexities of concepts and emotions and, of course, trans-
lating them into specific experiences and actions. These are “modes” of symbolism,
naturally, and may therefore occur in the same symbol.
The precise differences between the two types are broken down into content versus
form, quality versus quantity, and vertical versus lateral. Summarizing symbols are more
about “content” or meaning, while elaborating symbols are more about form, especially
their ability to enter into structured relations with other formal symbols. Summarizing
symbols also emphasize quality, the “ultimacy” and “priority” on which other experi-
ences and meanings depend, whereas elaborating symbols are more important as quanti-
tative elements or bits in symbolic “clusters” or chains. Finally, summarizing symbols are
vertical in the sense that they “ground” meanings to deeper or “higher-level” concepts
and feelings, while elaborating symbols are lateral or horizontal in the sense that they can
and do interrelate with other like symbols to form chains or “scripts” or “narratives.”
Elaborating symbols, construed as more “active,” are subdivided further into what she
called root metaphors and key scenarios. Root metaphors are those analogies that help us
organize our thinking on a particular subject; a minor example would be the metaphor of
an atom as a miniature solar system, while a major example would be the metaphors of
the human body as a machine (or the brain/mind as a computer) or of society or the
universe as an organism or body. They are about modeling and thinking. Key scenarios,
on the other hand, are about acting; they are the “scenes” or “plots” or bits of “story”
that we tell ourselves to organize our expectations and our goals. It is not hard to see—in
fact, it is probably the whole point—that these root metaphors and especially these key
scenarios can be associated with each and attached to each other into more complex
models and narratives, including “myths” and “rituals.” That is exactly their power and
their function. They help us think about who we are and what we should do.
Religious symbols and objects, or religion objectified

Based on everything we have learned, the anthropological project changes from an
“interpretation” of the “meaning” of symbols to an investigation into “how people make
religion ‘happen’ in the world and how, in turn, religion plays a part in their world-
making” (Meyer 2012: 7). Granted, symbols, religious and otherwise, mean something,
but they also are something. They are objects, images, words, or actions. But they are
often more; they are the things, powers, or persons that they “stand for.” Those things,
powers, or persons are present in the symbol. For instance, Turner relayed that the
Ndembu spoke of their symbols as ku-solola, not “representing” but “revealing” or
“making visible” a truth or a power (1967: 48). In other words, for members of the reli-
gion, the “symbols” may be manifestations or results or remnants of spiritual activities or
events, or else conduits through which the beings or forces act—what the great com-
parative religionist Mircea Eliade called a “hierophany,” from hieros for “holy” and
phany for “appearance” or “manifestation” (1970: 447).
In order to substantiate our claim, another brief excursion is necessary. In 1977,
addressing a body of literature about religion and personhood in India, McKim Marriott
and Ronald Inden introduced the term “dividual” to describe a person who, unlike the
Western individual, is not an indivisible whole but is divisible, “partible,” a composite of
elements that may “come in” from the outside or “go out” from the inside. Much more
recently, Karl Smith (2012) deems such personhood “porous” and “permeable” and insists
that we find it in Western thinking as well: we often think of having a loved one “in us”
and of “putting ourselves into” our creations. Marilyn Strathern (1988) picked up this
concept in her work on personhood in Melanesia.
A decade later, Alfred Gell seized the notion of partible or “distributed” personhood in
his anthropological study of art. A person, he maintained, “may be ‘distributed,’ i.e. all
their ‘parts’ are not physically attached, but are distributed” (1998: 106), including and
especially in objects. That is, in many instances “a person and a person’s mind are not
confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates” (namely, the organic body) but are
dispersed in and among “material objects, traces, and leavings” (222). Religious beings
(and sometimes forces) too can simultaneously inhabit their spiritual realms while present
in multiple material objects, objects that we are too quick to dismiss as “symbols.”
This perspective draws our attention once more to the materialization and “mediati-
zation” of religion. Media here (plural of medium), as in art, refer to all of the substances
in which religious ideas and concepts might be instantiated, such as wood, stone, clay,
paint, textiles, food, land, the human body, and essentially any other material and
immaterial (e.g. sound) form—forms that “mediate” or provide a conduit between reli-
gious being/forces and human beings. The following section surveys the range of these, as
Meyer earlier labeled them, “sensational” or sense-able forms.
Sacred spaces
One of the most persistent media, literally locations, of materialized religion is physical
space. In most if not all religious traditions, “place” is deeply important for belief and
worship, often not a random space but a space where something happened or where
something resides (the Ndembu called it isoli or chisoli, a “place of revelation”). In
Judaism and Christianity, the city of Jerusalem is a “holy” place, for clear historical
reasons. Within the city, some sites are more sacred than others; for Christians, these
include the locations where Jesus reportedly walked and suffered and was buried.
Modern-day Christian pilgrims perambulate along the Via Dolorosa, the path their
savior trod on his way to crucifixion. Modern-day Jews perform prayers and leave
prayer-messages at the Western or “Wailing” Wall on which the Temple once stood (see
Figure 3.1). Islam has its own holy places, in particular Mecca, the home city of the
prophet Muhammad (as well as Jerusalem, leading to struggle over the city). Within the
Figure 3.1 The Wailing/Western Wall in Jerusalem (early twentieth century). Courtesy of the G.
Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photo-
graphs Division.
borders of Mecca, some sites are yet more sacred or holy, climaxing in the structure
called the Ka’aba, regarded as the center of the Muslim world.
Mountains (e.g. Mount Fuji in Japan, Mount Meru in Hinduism) are likely candidates
for religious interest; rivers too are often sacred sites, like the Ganges in India. Of course,
wherever a spirit is believed to dwell—potentially any body of water, any mountain or
hill, any tree, any cave—is spiritually interesting or concerning (see Chapter 2). It is also
possible for humans to create a sacred space, by infusing it with spiritual power or sig-
nificance. Christians have built churches on spots where important events occurred, most
notably the cathedral of St. Peter in Rome, the site of the Catholic Vatican, where
Christians believe that the disciple Peter was killed. Cathedrals constructed where no
event consecrated the ground were often provided with a sacred object—in particular a
“relic” or body part of a saint—to “plant” sacredness there. In many Islamic societies the
tombs of saints are sacred sites.
Spaces are religiously significant for additional reasons. The souls of the recent or
ancient dead may also inhabit places, and one or more places may be the official abode of
the dead (like the island of Tuma in the previous chapter). It is a widely held opinion in
Native American cultures that the four (or six, if you include “up” and “down”) cardinal
directions are sacred. The Tewa of the American Southwest have the added benefit of
four prominent mountains that mark the cardinal directions for them. Each of these sites
is regarded as an “earth navel” and as an entry way into the underworld, and even more
as a place where the three levels of the world (above, middle, and below) most closely
intersect. At the center of these points is the center of existence, which they refer to as
“Earth mother earth navel middle place.”
Finally, the land itself or ordinary buildings may acquire spiritual import, even per-
sonhood. The spirits (poti) of the Manggarai of West Flores Island in Indonesia “animate
and merge with a material landscape of energies, effects, and practical consequences”
(Allerton 2013: 108). Still more, the spirits may be understood as “an energy that belongs
to the land itself” (108). Accordingly, “the land has agency” including “appetite” and an
“ability to talk”; ultimately, what appears to be spirits, the people say, is “really the
land” (122). And the agency of places extends to everyday sites, such as a house and even
a particular room; houses and rooms too are persons, and they are permeable persons
that absorb the sounds, smells, and energies of their human inhabitants. John Gray
argues that the house in Nepal operates like a Hindu mandala or “mystical diagram” and
“map of the cosmos”; humans live inside this microcosm of the cosmos, this constructed
“embodied revelation” which becomes “the medium through which … abstract cosmo-
logical ideas are given tangible form” (2009: 195). (See supplemental reading “Sharing
Sacred Space: Co-existence in Religious Places.”)
Statues, idols, and divine abodes

“Idol” has a negative connotation in English and in Judeo-Christian parlance; Judaism
and Islam in particular explicitly forbid likenesses of Yahweh or Allah, on the belief that
divinity cannot possibly be visualized and that such attempts amount to “idolatry” (shirk
in Arabic, often associated with polytheism). This is the exception among religions,
though, as nearly all religions—including Catholic and Orthodox Christianity—welcome
ways to represent (re-present, to make present again) the gods or spirits among humans.
Ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions featured life-size or larger-than-life-size
statues of gods, often with fantastic traits like the heads of birds or other animals.
Figure 3.2 Offering to the mountain spirits (Japanese drawing). Courtesy of the Library of Con-
gress Prints and Photographs Division.
Ancient Greeks also erected likenesses of their gods, including Athena in the Parthenon at
Athens.
These images of the gods are not always, if ever, mere inanimate semblances. In Hindu
temples, priests wake the divine statues in the morning, feed and wash them, and attend
to them like a living person; at the end of the day the gods are put back to bed. Nor does
this occur only in exotic Eastern religions; in Glastonbury, England, “willow wickerwork
statues” of the Glastonbury Goddess “are venerated, spoken with, petitioned, and said …
to ‘embody’ the Goddess” (Whitehead 2013: 76). She too is dressed and decorated, kissed
and given offerings, and not just in her wicker form; an artist rendered her in paint, a
portrait into which the Goddess “settled,” eventually “containing and embodying” her
(81). As we will explore in Chapter 9, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity do not
share Protestantism’s disparagement of divine images, and statues of saints or ornate
icons are central to their worship.
Other material objects serve as containers for gods or spirits. At a Japanese Shinto-
shrine (a jinja or “god-home”), the innermost sanctuary contains a shintai or “god-body”
in the form of a stone, a text, a weapon (e.g. sword), paper, hair, jewels, pictures, or
recently a mirror (Holtom 1965: 10). During Sherpa (Nepal) rituals the gods were invited
to “take a seat” on a torma or molded dough figure, which became a temporary body for
the gods—a body in which they could not only accept human gifts but also share human
emotions (Ortner 1978). (See supplemental reading “The Moving Statues of Ireland.”)
Charms, amulets, and ritual objects

All religions make or find, keep, and use objects—natural or artificial—as foci of mean-
ing and power. Such objects of power have been denigrated as “fetishes” (from the Por-
tuguese feitço, charm, sorcery; ultimately from the Latin facere, to make or do, which
also gives the words “artificial” and “fact”), human-made objects attributed with extra-
ordinary powers. How, it was felt, could a natural object obviously crafted by human
hands also be supernatural? But we should remember that Bibles and crosses and rosary
beads are physical objects made by humans, no less potent for being (mass-) produced.
Evans-Pritchard described Nuer kulangni, pieces of wood which the Nuer testified
could speak, move, and especially harm. Kulangni, which could be bought or inherited,
were “amoral” in the sense that anyone could use their power for any purpose, and they
and the people who owned them (gwan kulangni) were feared as dangerous (1956: 101).
The Bagandu of central Africa used their power-objects as “counter-magical” protections;
purchased from specialists in spirituality and medicine, these included natural items like a
mole’s tooth, which was supposed to repel witches (Lehmann 2001: 159). The Kiowa
(North American Great Plains) revered the Ten Medicines, sacred bundles of super-
natural origin. Each bundle, and an eleventh (Taime, the Sun Dance bundle), was kept by
an ondedɔ man who evoked it to pray for and cure individuals or the group. Containing
objects human-shaped stones, “red paint, cedar, buffalo chips, blends of old and new
tobacco,” and parts of human bodies, they were so sacred that “the keepers never
exposed the bundles or looked at the contents, and they averted their gaze when the
bundles were opened during renewal meetings” (Kracht 2017: 141).
Various religions employ a wide array of other objects. The Yupik or Inupik (North
American Arctic) made and used an assortment of amulets (iinrug or inogo), normally
small things, a few inches long at most, sometimes as simple as a stone or feather or
animal part. Individuals would often collect dozens of iinrug, some original, some
inherited, and some acquired from spiritual leaders. Owners carried their amulets at all
times, hung on belts, sewn on clothing, dangling around the neck, or tucked away in
pouches. Charms were more often used to communicate with and control spirits and
were therefore most likely the property of shamans. Sometimes small and sometimes
larger (and more often human-like than amulets), persons of power would fashion them
and display them on houses boats or wield them in curing rituals (Burch and Forman
1988).
Miniatures also figure prominently in the religious life of peoples of the Andes in South
America. Small stones (inqaychus) shaped like alpacas, llamas, sheep, and cows are
highly sought and carefully tended, passed between the generations as family heirlooms.
Not inert objects, they are addressed as kawsaq (living one), khuyaq (caring one), or
khuya rumi (loving stone) and said to “emerge from powerful places” (Allen 2016: 427).
Such powerful places (apus, lords) are themselves more than impersonal landscape but
are persons with kamachikuq (authority) over a circumscribed region. As such, an
inqaychu “is not a representation of an animal,” much less a “symbol” of an animal or of
an apu, but is “a special kind of animal, an instantiation of the apu” (430), participating
“in the distributed being” of the sacred place (435).
Objects are often necessary to perform ritual action. Mundurucu (Amazonia) and Sambia
(Papua New Guinea) men both jealously guarded sacred flutes, which were carefully hidden
from women in a men’s cult house, a gender-segregated space in the village. Australian
Aboriginal religion was inconceivable without the sacred churinga or tjurunga, stones or
wooden boards of various size (from a sliver to several feet long) sometimes incised with
carved patterns, stored around their territory, and handled during rituals (smaller ones
swung on string as a bullroarer to produce the whirring sound of a spirit voice).
Masks
Many societies make and use masks during ritual cures or re-enactments of myth. The
Yupik exercised great creative freedom in the styles they produced, from the realistic to
the surreal. Formally, they were made of wood, some as long as four feet, and painted
brightly in white, black, red, and blue-green. They were often decorated with feathers,
quills, down, hair, fur, grass, and other materials and had amulets and charms suspended
on them. They represented human, animal, and other less realistic and more or less gro-
tesque figures. Functionally, the most visually stunning and spiritually powerful masks
were made and used by specialists in ceremonial activities. Each mask existed, then, not
as an “art” object or even a stand-alone power object “but as part of an integrated
complex of story, song, and dance in religious and secular activity” (Ray 1967: 6).
Figure 3.3 Nunivak ceremonial mask. Courtesy of the Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Masks are remarkably common in both religious and secular contexts across cultures.
They enable human participants to portray and impersonate, to become the figures,
including spiritual figures, referenced in ritual. The Hopi wore masks of their kachina
spirits in their ceremonies. Balinese use masks extensively in their narrative and ritual
traditions, portraying both historical and divine characters, among them the all-good
Barong and the all-evil Rangda. African masks are rightly famous, used by societies all
over the continent, including the Dogon.
In perhaps more familiar settings, masks were employed in “dramatic” activities like
ancient Greek and traditional Japanese theater. Behind masks, the “actors” were not
encouraged—or in fact able—to display individual expressions but were rather presenting
highly stylized forms of stock characters. In fact, in a real sense, the whole point of a
mask is to “hide” the individuality of the actor and to replace it completely with the
person of the character he or she played.
The human body

Among the many ways that a community embodies its ideas and values—and its identity
as a community—is through its treatment and manipulation of the human body itself.
Mary Douglas (1970) called the human body the ultimate “natural symbol.” This can
include standards of dress and comportment, including grooming. In at least some
Muslim societies or subcultures, men are expected to grow beards, and of course women
are expected to wear some version of the veil, from a light scarf over the head to a
thorough draping over the entire body. Traditionalist Jewish men can be seen wearing
the long curls of hair hanging from their temples (earlocks), and many Jewish men wear
the skullcap or yarmulke. At least on ritual occasions, including prayer, they may also
don the prayer shawl and phylactery, a small box on a leather strap worn on the arm and
the forehead which holds a verse from scripture (not unlike the Muslim amulets above).
Other cultures ordain other forms of dress or personal presentation, especially on cer-
emonial occasions. Orthodox or Khalsa Sikhs are distinguished by five traditional mar-
kers—unshorn hair (Kesh), the sword (Kirpan) which should be worn at all times, a
special type of undergarment (Katcha), a comb (Kanga), and a bracelet or bangle (Kara).
Clothing can and often does have symbolic significance. The Muslim women of Dolina
(Bosnia) wore a type of baggy trouser (dimije) and headscarf to state their identity vis-à-
vis the Catholic women in the village, and the men wore dark blue berets. Certain colors
can have religious meaning, such as green in much of Islam. Of course, religious specia-
lists and people participating in religious activities tend to dress and comport themselves
in distinguishable and typically more “formal” ways.
From Amish farmers to Hindu yogis, people display their religious beliefs and their
spiritual state by the manner in which they manipulate their bodies. Religion is literally
inscribed on and in their flesh. Australian Aboriginal men scarred their chests, knocked
out a front tooth, pierced their nasal septum, and circumcised and subincised their peni-
ses. Nuer pastoralists in East Africa cut scars or gar into the foreheads. Women across a
swath of Africa and the Middle East undergo “female circumcision” of more or less
extreme kinds. Hindu women wear a dot between their eyes to indicate their marital
status, whereas mainstream Americans wear a golden ring on their left hands. Many
cultures, like the Iban of Borneo, tattooed themselves grandly. As mentioned previously,
pieces of the dead bodies of saints or powerful religious figures may serve as “relics” for
contemporary worship.
Texts
All literate religions include a set of writings in their kit of religious objects. Some of
these texts are to be read by all members of the society; in other cases, the texts are secret
or esoteric and only intended for the initiated or for fully qualified practitioners. One
function of religious specialists may be to read, memorize, and recite these texts on cer-
emonial occasions (see Chapter 4).
The principal text of Christianity is the Bible, and in Islam it is the Qur’an along with
the Hadith, a record of deeds and sayings of the prophet Muhammad. The earliest writ-
ings of Hinduism are the Vedas, books of hymns and ritual rules and practices. Epic tales
like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata came later, as well as the teachings known as
the Upanishads, which are more philosophical in nature. Buddhism has a huge scriptural
literature, including the oldest sutras in the Pali language but continuing into current
times with books and commentaries by Tibetan, Zen, and other masters. Still more
ancient religions possessed writings, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to the Sumerian
Enuma Elish and Epic of Gilgamesh to the Zoroastrian Avestas. Chinese religions have
their Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and the works of Confucius and others, while Sikhism
has its Sri Guru Granth Sahib, which is esteemed as a textual “person.” And new scrip-
tures continue to appear or be written. For instance, the Book of Mormon was revealed
in the 1800s. The Kitab-i-Aqdas forms the basis of the Baha’i faith, while L. Ron Hub-
bard’s Scientology and Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science stem from these individuals’
publications. Even more non-mainstream works, from The Urantia Book to Gerald
Gardner’s works on Wicca, have provided foundations for new religions.
Texts are sometimes regarded as conveyers of ideas, but they can also be regarded as
objects of power in their own right. Both Jews and Muslims treat their physical scrip-
tures with great deference. Ladislav Holy noted that Berti religious leaders (faki) respec-
ted the words of the Qur’an for their inherent power to cure diseases or achieve other
effects, and part of the training of a faki was learning which verses “worked” for which
problems. And texts could be transformed into charms and amulets (hijbat) by sewing
Quranic words or verses into a leather bag or strip of cloth to counteract sorcery or the
evil eye, to ward off diseases or weapons, to attract wealth or customers or lovers, and to
prevail in court; they could also be used for malicious purposes. Or scriptures could be
literally incorporated by writing verses on slates, washing the slates, and drinking the
inspired liquid.
Pictures and images

Religious objects and their materialized personhood need not be three-dimensional or
even tangible. Pictures, paintings, photographs, movies, and now virtual/digital images
can do the same work of spiritual mediatization. Anthropology has long had a speciali-
zation in visual anthropology, the study of how cultures use images as well as of how
anthropology can deploy image-recording (e.g. film and photography) in fieldwork.
Anthropologists and religious studies scholars have since converged in the pursuit of
“visual religion” or what David Morgan called “visual piety” (1998), although he origin-
ally applied the idea specifically to popular religion. Soon thereafter, he expanded the
inquiry into more general visual practices, recognizing that “seeing is an operation that
relies on an apparatus of assumptions and inclinations, habits and routines, historical
Figure 3.4 Hindu god resting on a bed of snakes. Courtesy of the author.
associations and cultural practices” (Morgan 2005: 3)—that is, that seeing is cultural, and
not only in regard to the “sacred gaze.”
Visualizations of religious figures and forces are if anything more common today than
ever. Christopher Pinney described the critical role of pictures of the gods in India, with
Hinduism’s “enormous stress of visuality” and the concept of darshan or “‘seeing and
being seen’ by a deity” (2004: 8–9). The new Venezuelan cult of María Lionza utilizes
statues, paintings, pictures cards, murals, and lately digital pictures to access her; a ritual
altar always bears her image, and when statues are included her devotees put makeup on
them, do their hair, and “dress them like princesses from fairy tales” (Canals 2017: 76) as
well as hugging and caressing them. But most interesting are Facebook and other internet
pages featuring her image which “are conceived as offerings or gifts” to the goddess;
deleting her image “is seen as an offence against the divinities” (144–45). Even an offi-
cially “aniconic” religion like Islam nevertheless makes room for images, like the paint-
ings and tapestries depicting key persons and events such as the Battle of Karbala used by
Iranian Shi’ites in their religious services (Flaskerud 2010). Inevitably, and not only
recently, images on television and in movies have broadened the field of visual religion
(think of decades-old movies like The Ten Commandments). In India, television pro-
grams and films have dramatized traditional Hindu religious tales (see e.g. Dwyer’s 2006
Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema); in Africa, Nigerian videos illustrate
heroic conversions to Islam (even of vampires!) (Krings 2008), while television melo-
dramas in the Democratic Republic of Congo pit Pentecostal Christians in battles with
the devil (Pype 2012). (See bonus chapter “Vernacular Religion.”)
Box 3.1 Picturing God in Ghana

In an impressive series of books and articles, including her 2016 Sensational Movies:
Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana, Birgit Meyer has documented the visuality of
Christianity in West Africa. Films, photographs, and pictures there as elsewhere
“streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve
embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see” (2015: 333).
Despite concerns about idols, fetishes, and traditional/pre-Christian religion in general,
Ghanaian culture is filled with “posters of Jesus and other devotional pictures as well
as representations of evil spirits—ghosts of the dead, mermaids, witches and other
‘powers of darkness’” against which Christianity struggles (334). These ubiquitous
images speak to a deeper issue, the specificity and “superiority of Christian vision,
understood as the capacity to look into what is hidden for the naked eye, right into the
spiritual realm that is the site of a battle” between good and evil (348). Faith grants
Christians “an extraordinary gaze circumscribed as the Spirit of Discernment” (348),
rendering the believer not only subject to God’s view but capable to an extent of
sharing this God’s-eye view to “look into the spiritual dimension of the material world”
(349). Ghanaian Christians have saturated their lifespace with pictures, drawings, and
posters of Jesus and other biblical and religious figures, thus inviting the sacred into
the mundane. But as Meyer stresses, “Picturing and displaying a normally invisible
being—be it an evil spirit or an effigy of Jesus—is a potentially risky affair” (351) pre-
cisely because pictures are not mere symbols. This threat is especially acute in the
case of movies, both for viewers and for actors: “on the film set of popular video
movies, actors were often concerned about the potential danger incurred in setting up
fake shrines or dressing up as demons and monsters for the sake of a movie” (351).
As in Pype’s research on African television melodramas, depictions were often treated
and feared as more than fictions but as real encounters with potent beings and forces.
Religious specialists
As in all other walks of life, there are some individuals who have more knowledge or
ability in religion than others. This skill may come from training, personal experience,
innate talent or spiritual power, or other such factors. These individuals may be leaders
and functionaries, but they may be much more—the medium through which the spirits
interact with the human world or vice versa. They may embody and make present the
spirits on earth as emissaries or spokespeople, or they may be those who, for one reason
or another, have broken through the barrier between the two dimensions and can thereby
perceive both.
There is great variety among religious specialists, in terms of abilities, practices, and
the beliefs or concepts underlying them. Scholars often try to organize this diversity into
types with discrete capabilities and functions; however, as in other instances we have
seen, actual specialists often slip through such typologies, merging aspects of different
“types” and/or lacking one or more of the “typical” features. Rather, it might be better to
think of religious specialization from the modular perspective—as roles that combine
various powers and functions. There are certain religious “jobs to do” in a society (curing
ailments, leading rituals, bringing luck or preventing bad luck, enhancing fertility, pro-
ducing rain, and a host of others), and those jobs can be apportioned in any number of
ways. One specialist may perform a bundle of tasks, or the tasks may be distributed to an
assortment of specialists. And the very tasks that exist in a society will depend on the
concepts and beliefs and the interests and goals of the society.
Shaman
One of the most celebrated of all religious characters is the shaman, sometimes called
(impolitely and inaccurately) a witch doctor or medicine man. The term “shaman”
derives from the Siberian (specifically Tungusic) word saman. The defining feature of
shamans is their unique talent to achieve certain spiritual states and purposes. In fact,
Mircea Eliade considered shamanism a “technique of ecstasy” (1964: 4). (See supple-
mental reading “The Problem with Shamans: Shamanism in Contemporary Nepal and
Mongolia.”)
The shaman frequently demonstrates a propensity or tendency early in life for singing,
entering trance, receiving visions, or similar uncanny experiences. One very common
element in the shaman’s biography is a serious illness, from which the patient dramati-
cally or miraculously recovers. This is evidence that he or she “has the power” and is
often the first significant contact with the spirit world. The aspiring shaman often then
Figure 3.5 Yebichai, giving the medicine: Navajo shaman with participant. Courtesy of the Edward
S. Curtis Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
becomes a student or apprentice to a senior shaman, who “teaches” the novice; however,
this teaching seldom includes explicit verbal instruction. Instead, the master may subject
the apprentice to physical ordeals, like sleep deprivation, long hours of chanting, drug
ingestion, seclusion, quests of various kinds, and other difficult and even painful trials.
A key step in becoming a full-fledged shaman is often acquiring a helper-spirit, some-
times called a “spirit familiar.” These spirits may guide shamanic learning and perform-
ing, teaching about the spiritual realm and bestowing a personalized set of songs, dances,
symbols, and other spiritual tools. The shaman’s skill is often directed specifically to
healing (see Chapter 7). !Kung or Ju/hoansi shamans, for example, were called upon
when a member of the band was sick or troubled. According to Katz (1982), nearly all
men and most women attempted to become shamans, or n/um kausi (“master/owner of n/
um”). Spiritual power was primarily acquired by doing the trance dance; those who
demonstrated an aptitude for the trance state (kia) were said to receive n/um from the
spirits, who placed the power in songs and visions; another source was senior shamans,
who gave their juniors n/um “to drink” by shooting them with invisible arrows of power
by snapping their fingers. Fortunately, there was an infinite supply of n/um in the world,
so about half of men and one-third of women succeed in their spiritual quest.
!Kung shamans began their work by singing and chanting until the n/um located at the
base of the spine heated and boiled, rising up the spine in a painful manner. They fell,
literally, into a trance; the body collapsed on the ground because the “soul” had departed
to sojourn in the spiritual dimension. Having become a spirit, they might struggle with
the ancestors (//gauwasi) or, in the case of very serious illness, the great god Gao Na.
Shamans, still in trance, regained their senses and conducted “operations” that include
rubbing their own sweat on the patient, with the belief that the sweat of the shaman is
spiritually potent. They also practiced a technique called twe that entailed pulling the
sickness out of the victim.
In Australian Aboriginal societies, shamans would often accomplish their cures by
pulling objects like stones or feathers out of the body of the victim. Shamans also might
incorporate more mundane elements into their cures, including potions, charms, sacri-
fices, and such. As noted at the outset of the chapter, shamans might also depend on
material objects for their spiritual work, like the Mongolian shaman’s mirrors. The
Korean mansin, frequently a woman, uses a drum, a fan, bells, and especially paintings of
gods which are “animated images, objects entered by gods”; “the god who is otherwise
invisible, except in shaman’s dreams and visions, claims material form and location in the
shrine through the medium of the painting” (Kendall and Yang 2015: 158).
Ongoing research on shamanism reveals a more complex and intriguing ontology,
characterized by flux, mutability, and multiplicity. The deep skill, as indicated by the
Mongolian shaman, is to occupy or move between multiple perspectives (human and
spiritual, living and dead, etc.) or, in the case of Bugkalot or Ilongot (northern Phi-
lippines) ago’yen, to become a permanent agent of flux or chaos (gongoi) (Mikkelsen
2016). This fluidity can extend to gender. (See supplemental reading “The Man Who
Became a Woman Shaman.”)
Box 3.2 The multiple personhood of the Yanomami shapori

In the Venezuela/Brazil region of the Amazon, the Yanomami (or Yanomamo) shaman
or shapori combats the hekura spirits and pulls sickness out of their human victims.
But he possesses this power by ironically integrating hekura into himself during his
shamanic training. Informatively, the term shapori is related to the word shapono, a
dwelling, both human and supernatural: humans reside in a shapono, and hekura
spirits inhabit one too. In shamanic initiation, the shaman calls upon various specifi-
cally named hekura, inviting them into his very body as a spiritual vessel; in so doing,
“he also transforms into a hekura or, to say it better, assumes the identity as a living
hekura-in-flesh” (Jokic 2015: 73). Or more correctly and profoundly, the shaman
changes into multiple hekura, serving as a home for a number of visiting spirits. Con-
sequently, he is no longer an individual but “a unified multiplicity of all of his embodied
spirits and also one of the spirits. He is a total but divided being: a fractal multiple
‘one’” (74). He thereby assumes the identity of a “living ancestor,” an incarnated
spirit—or many incarnated spirits. At the same time, his individual body is remade into
a “cosmic body—a microcosm of other hekura and a matrix for the full manifestation
of the Yanomami macrocosm and any of its constitutive components” (135). The
Yanomami shapori, as an embodied multiplicity of spirits, is unstable, and this may be
the real essence of the role and perhaps of all shamans. The unique shamanic posi-
tion, and message, consists not only of a shift of consciousness or awareness from
the mundane to the spiritual but of life itself as a perpetual state of multiplicity and
change.
Priest
In conventional thinking, priests are all of the things that shamans are not. They are full-
time specialists occupying a formal religious “office” earned by study, testing, and ordi-
nation in a religious institution or structure with the power and authority to invest
priests. Priests may or may not be powerful or impressive individuals—some are quite
ordinary people—but they fill a powerful role. Many, probably most, societies, have
nothing as formal as a priest. Certainly small-scale, foraging societies like the !Kung and
the Aboriginals did not. Even some larger-scale societies such as the Swazi (southern
Africa) did not; despite the fact that they achieved a level of political integration includ-
ing a king, the leader of spiritual activities was merely the family head (Kuper 1963: 60).
One becomes a priest by very different means than one becomes a shaman. Commonly,
acquiring a priesthood means mastering a body of knowledge and dogma, becoming an
expert in some orthodoxy (ortho for “correct/straight” and doxa for “opinion”). The
activities of priests tend to differ as well. The occasional priest may engage in curing
practices, but more often priests are ritual leaders, functionaries who organize, conduct,
and preside over more formulaic ritual situations. Priests are not as free to improvise or
receive their own private spiritual instructions or resources; they do not, for instance,
have spirit familiars. In many societies, every time a priest performs or leads a ritual, it
should be exactly the same, down to the finest detail. The efficacy of the ritual may
depend on each bit of it being correctly done (see Chapter 5).
The priesthood, while not always hereditary, may have a hereditary component. In
ancient Hebrew religion, one lineage or clan, the Levites, was granted the honor as the
priestly class. This suggests and requires a certain amount of social hierarchy and strati-
fication. Hindu brahmins also constitute a closed category (caste) of priests, and in
Barabaig (Tanzania) society five of the clans were priestly (the Daremgadyeg) and fifty-
five of the clans were purely secular.
Priests may combine ritual tasks or distribute tasks. Among the Nuer, weddings, funerals,
adoptions, and initiations, as well as rites for the colwic (dead human) spirits, required a
“master of ceremonies” or gwan buthni. Sacrifices were conducted by the famous kuaar twac
or kuaar muan, the leopard-skin or earth priest. And a panoply of priests or “owners” shared
ritual duties, including the kuaar/gwan yika (priest/owner of the mat, who arbitrated
between in-laws in the case of death during childbirth), the kuaar/gwan muot (priest/owner
of the spear, who performed war and hunting rituals), the kuaar/gwan pini (priest/owner of
water, who protected against floods), and more. On the other hand, the Huichol (Mexico)
mara’akame and the Cubeo (northwest Amazonia) paye combined the functions of shaman/
healer and priest/leader, using their spiritual powers to diagnose and cure sickness while also
presiding over rituals (including, in the Huichol case, the annual pilgrimage) and acting as
authorities on religious knowledge and practice.
Diviner/oracle
If gods and spirits exist, it can be extremely valuable to know what those beings want or
intend. The diviner/oracle specializes in reading or interpreting the will of spirits, some-
times by asking direct questions and inspecting some material medium for an answer.
Astrology has traditionally been a divining activity, looking for traces of divine commu-
nication in the stars. Any number of other kinds of signs are read for spiritual meaning,
from tea leaves and coins to the bones or entrails of animals; a diviner may put a ques-
tion or request to the spirits, then kill and study the body of an animal for indications of
an answer. The Azande chicken-oracle administered poison to a chicken for a quick
answer. Probably the most famous oracle in Western history was the Greek oracle at
Delphi, where citizens—including kings and generals—would ask advice from young
priestesses who would give cryptic responses while in a trance. Decisions to go to war
and other epoch-making decisions were settled this way.
The Bunyoro of Uganda practiced divination for illness, childlessness, theft, and other
offenses and misfortunes. Beattie (1960) characterized most diviners as “doctors” too,
diagnosing and curing physical problems in shamanic style. The most common Bunyoro
method of divination was throwing cowry shells and reading the resultant pattern; how-
ever, other techniques included throwing small leather squares, sprinkling water, rubbing
blood on a stick to see where the hand sticks to it, and reading the entrails of animals.
The Swazi also practiced divination, and diviners or tangoma were regarded as more
important and powerful than curers, although their role was diagnosis, not cure. Their
abilities came from spirit possession, which explains why women were more often divi-
ners than men, since they were thought to be more easily possessed than men. Swazi
diviners conducted séances to communicate with the dead, tossed bones to read the pat-
tern, and performed a poison oracle similar to the Azande.
Among the Kaguru, the diviner (muganga) was almost always a senior male, and his
power was used regularly to combat the effects of witchcraft and sorcery. For their divi-
nation (maselu) work they incorporated various techniques such as “gazing into bowls of
water, casting stones, seeds, or sandals, or poisoning chickens and watching how they
flutter” (Beidelman 1971: 36). The Barabaig diviner or sitetehid manipulated a pile of
stones and studied the patterns for messages, usually involving witches or angry ancestor
spirits, although he did not actually perform the cure, which was turned over to another
specialist. Outside of Africa, the Menomini (or Menominee, north-central United States)
ceseko, sometimes translated as “juggler,” combined the functions of diviner and shaman:
they would diagnose spiritual illness, listening for voices in the wind that blew against
their special-purpose lodge and responding via the medium of a turtle. To cure witchcraft
they would call the victim’s soul to enter a small wooden cylinder, which they would
return to the family, or they would suck out the witches’ infection (an “arrow”) which
they spat out in the form of “a maggot, a fly, a quill, or some other small object” that
had entered the body (Spindler and Spindler 1971: 45). (See supplemental reading “The
Professionalization of Divination in China.”)
Prophet/medium
Prophets offer another solution to the problem of supernatural silence. A prophet receives
direct communication from the spirits, often quite involuntarily (recall how Moses and
other Hebrew patriarchs were often reluctant to take on the burden), and accepts the
obligation to pass that communication along to other humans. Prophecy, which is often
confused with telling the future, is a bulwark in the Christian tradition, and Muhammad
is revered among Muslims as not only a messenger but “the seal of prophets”—the final
and authoritative spokesman. His prophecy, received as a recitation or Qur’an from God
and his angels themselves, completes and corrects all prophecies. Obviously, though,
there have been many since who believed they were prophets, both within and outside the
Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition.
Mediums between humans and spirits are remarkably common across cultures, often
joined through spirit possession. Interestingly, possession may be construed as an afflic-
tion or as a treatment or as a spiritual gift (see Chapters 6 and 7). Women are especially
prone to possession and mediumship, which likewise may be a weakness or a strength, as
the medium gains some of the authority and agency of the spirit, like the Tamil women
who enjoy a “porous subjectivity” and “intercorporeality” with a spirit or goddess,
embodying and literally speaking for and as the deity (Ram 2013). And mediumship, like
religion generally, is an acquired skill; members of Brazilian Xangô understand that
possession must be learned—which they call “indoctrinating the body” (doutrinar o
corpo)—and that “learning possession means in the first place to learn to identify and
react to specific emotional states in accordance with cultural representations and expec-
tations” (Halloy 2012: 177). Valuing the experience of possession as “gratifying” (gratifi-
cante), Xangô elaborates three stages of possession through which “novices are expected
to learn how to dance, and to behave according to their orixa’s [spirit/god] archetypal
and aesthetic prerequisites” (181).
In a way, both shamans and diviners are mediums in that they provide the mediation
between the mundane and spiritual worlds. Dozier (1967) identified the medium as the only
religious specialist among the Kalinga of the Philippines and went on to attribute to them
many of the skills or powers of the shaman or diviner, including curing illness (by guiding the
soul of the ill person back after its capture by a malicious spirit or ancestor). Kalinga med-
iums underwent a “calling” similar to a shaman, and most of them were women.
Ascetic/monk/mendicant
In a variety of religious traditions, there are those who voluntarily remove themselves from
society and cloister or even scourge themselves, either for their own benefit or for the benefit
of their family, village, society, or species. Ascetics are specifically people who choose a dif-
ficult, even painful, existence for themselves out of some religious motivation. There is a
vigorous ascetic tradition in Christianity, flowing from a combination of the general sinful-
ness of human nature and the need to avoid physical (especially carnal) pleasure together
with the model of a suffering savior. Hence, some Christians, at least since the time of St.
Anthony (c. 300 CE) who withdrew into solitary existence in Egypt, have rejected “worldli-
ness”; in fact, Anthony’s example set the standard for monasticism, in which groups of men
(or women, in the case of nunneries) would seclude themselves from the world and focus on
their spiritual business.
From the monastery comes the monk, who chooses (usually) this set-apart life for
himself. Again, he may do this for his own personal spiritual advancement. The Buddhist
tradition, especially in its Theravada form, emphasizes this course: the spiritual seeker
should abandon worldly goods, or at least worldly attachments, and become a full-time
spiritual practitioner. However, one person’s quest cannot possibly aid another’s, any
more than one person’s antibiotic treatment can cure another person’s infection. Even-
tually, various local Buddhist traditions developed the notion of having monks perform
their spiritual exercises for the good of the whole family or community or even the dead.
At the same time, this is often the path to an education, since the monastery may be the
center of literacy in the community.
The life of the ascetic or mendicant is a difficult one. In its most absolute form, it
entails the renunciation of family and other social obligations, often a wandering life-
style, and usually deprivation of food, wealth, and comfort. The ascetic, monk, or men-
dicant may own little or nothing and beg for his/her meal; a classic Buddhist mendicant
owns only a robe, sandals, and a begging bowl, and they can be seen today looking for
Figure 3.6 Buddhist monks in Thailand. Courtesy of the author.

offerings of food, which “make merit” for the giver. In Hindu theory, asceticism or
mendicancy is not so much a choice as a life stage. Although not all follow the prescrip-
tion, the life of a man should culminate in the phase of sannyasin in which he renounces
his home and family and embarks on the itinerant spiritual life; this stage only comes in
later life, after he has completed the stages of student and householder. At this final stage
of life, his main concern is and must be his own spiritual progress. In more than a few
cases, asceticism crosses the line to self-mortification (see Chapter 11).
Sorcerer
Sorcerers are generally people believed to exercise spiritual power, typically for the
worse, through specific technical means. That is, sorcery might be classed as a subset of
magic, which is normally thought of as an instrumental action in which certain gestures
or behaviors “automatically” lead to certain results. The sorcerer, then, can be conceived
of as a person who performs “black magic” or such activities as ordinarily cause evil or
harm.
Among the Bunyoro, sorcery was not only a great but actually a growing concern. Like
many societies, they thought that little if any misfortune befalls people accidentally; there
were few “natural” causes. The Bunyoro sorcerer used a mixture of natural and super-
natural means to inflict intentional harm, usually on those fairly close to him in proxi-
mity and kinship. As one of Beattie’s informants told him:
A sorcerer is a person who wants to kill people. He may do it by blowing med-

icine toward them, or by putting it in the victim’s food or water, or by hiding it
in the path where he must pass. People practice sorcery against those whom they
hate. They practice it against those who steal from them, and also against people
who are richer than they are. Sorcery is brought about by envy, hatred, and
quarreling.
(1960: 73)
Similarly, the Kapauku of New Guinea feared and disliked the sorcerer or kego epi me.
The Kapauku sorcerer had his own supernatural powers, not emanating from any spirit-
familiar like that of a shaman. Rather, he secretly performed spells and magical processes
(including imitative magic) to injure or kill his victim. Anyone suspected of sorcery was
avoided or even ostracized, and in extreme circumstances might be killed by the family of
his alleged victim (Pospisil 1963).
On the Pacific atoll of Ulithi, people hired sorcerers secretly to do evil to those “whom
they feel are guilty of ill will or overt action against them” (Lessa 1966: 71). The mate-
rials utilized in this setting included “magical starfish, live lizards, and coconut oil” that
had been sung over and planted in or near the victim’s house; also potions might be
poured on the victim’s comb or clothing (72). Apache sorcerers had an array of techni-
ques to draw from, including poisons, spells, and “injection” of a foreign substance into
the person’s body. Males were more often sorcerers because they were held to be more
prone to kedn or “anger” than women. Spell sorcery, the most varied type, tended to
involve ritual actions in fours, such as walking around the victim’s person or home four
times or situating four pieces of wood in the cardinal directions around his or her resi-
dence. Sorcery could be aimed not only at the person but at other things, including their
animals and even personal property.
Witch
The stereotype of the witch in the Western world is female, old and ugly, wearing a
wide-brimmed pointy hat. This is a cultural image at best. As a cultural concept, witch-
craft is very diverse, but the common thread is that witches are responsible for bad things
that happen to others—often all bad things. In his classic study of witchcraft, Evans-
Pritchard, who is largely responsible for the anthropological conception of witchcraft and
sorcery, argued that the Azande of the Sudan saw witches at work everywhere:
If blight seizes the ground-nut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is vaingloriously

scoured for game it is witchcraft; if women laboriously bale water out of a pool and
are rewarded by but a few small fish it is witchcraft; if termites do not rise when
their swarming is due and a cold useless night is spent in waiting for their flight it is
witchcraft; if a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband it is witchcraft; if a
prince is cold and distant with his subjects it is witchcraft; if a magical rite fails to
achieve its purpose it is witchcraft; if, in fact, any failure or misfortune falls upon
anyone at any time and in relation to any of the manifold activities of his life it may
be due to witchcraft.
(1937: 18–19)
Some societies viewed a witch as a person with an innate, even anatomical, power to
do harm; the witch may have an extra organ in his or her chest that emanates spiritual
malice. Witch-power may actually be involuntary, at least initially; they may simply
exude negativity in ways that even they do not understand or control. Or they may
practice, sharpen, and intentionally engage their power for their benefit, especially against
rivals, including rival witches.
According to the Burmese studied by Spiro (1978), witches filled out a spiritual world
that also included souls of the dead, ogres, Buddhist deities, and the multifarious nats.
Some informants claimed that witches were not even human but evil spirits in a human
guise; also they did not make a sharp distinction between sorcery and witchcraft. A witch
might have innate evil powers or the learned and acquired power more usually associated
with a sorcerer. They distinguished two main types, the witch (soun) and the master
witch (aulan hsaya). The soun was almost always female, recognizable by her dimly
colored eyes; her power could be inherent or learned, with the learned witches being less
powerful but more deliberately evil (since they sought out the ability actively). They were
believed to cause various illnesses and to eat feces by detaching their heads and rolling
along the ground. They might also work in conjunction with bad spirits. The master
witch was much more powerful and always male. He did his dirty work by controlling
evil spirits, feeding them raw meat until they became dependent on him. Interestingly,
though, there were also good master witches (ahtelan hsaya) who could counteract the
malice of aulan hsaya.
It has surprised some observers that witchcraft beliefs and accusations have not faded
in the modern world and in some instances have intensified. Peter Geschiere (1997) was
among the first to assert the modernity of witchcraft (as his book was titled), which seeks
to make sense of the mysterious, uncontrollable, and arbitrary and unfair forces and
outcomes of modern life—as well as to take control of those forces to gain success and/or
to interfere with the success of others. (In places with a shamanic worldview, like Mon-
golia, those same inscrutable modern forces are interpreted as untamed shamanic spirits,
as Pedersen [2011] argues). John and Jean Comaroff offered the term “occult economies”
to refer to the same “deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends,”
including such unsavory tactics as “‘ritual murder,’ the sale of body part, and the putative
production of zombies” (1999: 279).
Box 3.3 Witchcraft and doubt in Indonesia

“What is it like,” Nils Bubandt asks in his ethnography of Buli (Indonesia) witchcraft, “to
live in a world where cannibal witches are undeniably real and yet too ephemeral and
contradictory to be an object of belief?” (2014: 236). Buli witches are highly visceral
“spiritual” beings, who assault and molest humans. They are also incredibly, impos-
sibly ambiguous creatures: the Buli can never be sure if a witch is at work or even who
is or is not a witch (gua). Hence they suffer not only from witches but from the “ines-
capable yet undecidable possibility of witchcraft—its suffusion of all aspects of Buli
subjectivity and sociality” (2). Because of its elusiveness and uncertainty, Bubandt
inspects witchcraft through the lens not of belief but of doubt and “aporia,” the frac-
ture or threshold or “impassable situation” in thought and experience. He insists that
“belief” is an unhelpful concept since it minimizes very real doubt and confusion. For
the Buli, he maintains, witchcraft is not the solution to a social problem but is rather
itself a puzzle or problem to solve as the world “continually recedes from human
attempts to understand or manage it” (63). Buli witchcraft is specifically “a matter of
eating and being eaten,” and the gua is strangely “excessively corporeal and entirely
disembodied at the same time” (119). A gua attacks human livers and genitals but also
invades the mind and consciousness; the victim too “becomes a witch when a gua
spirit takes the place of his or her gurumin, or shadow-consciousness. The gua spirit
uses its human host as an outrigger boat, transferring to the host its own cannibalistic
cravings” (129). Worst and most intolerably of all, since being a witch entails a certain
loss of one’s own consciousness, it is possible to be a witch and not even know it—
making witchcraft omnipresent yet evasive and never truly knowable.
Conclusion
Religion is about ideas and beliefs but even more about power and efficacy. And while
transcendent and abstract, it must be made immanent and concrete in order for it to have
that power and effectiveness. Objects, actions, places, and people can all be material
manifestations of and conduits to religious beings and forces. Sometimes these manifes-
tations may be “symbolic” in the familiar sense, as standing for or reminding of other,
non-natural and nonhuman phenomena. Sometimes, though, they are not mere stand-ins
or reminders but, to the believers and practitioners, real containers, products, or pre-
sences of supernatural power. Geertz called symbols vehicles for meanings, but at least in
some cases they are vehicles for actions, vitalities, and effects. We should not impose
intellectualist interpretations where the members view themselves as doing something.
And, of course, doing requires a doer, a human actor or intermediary. Since religion is
fundamentally a “social” relationship between the human and the nonhuman, some per-
sons must take their place as the partner or contact-point with the supernatural—a role
of power and danger, precisely because of the power involved.
1 Why was symbolism such a powerful concept in anthropology—and why has it
undergone extensive anthropological critique?
2 What is materiality, and why do (and must) all religions take some material forms?
3 What is Alfred Gell’s notion of “distributed personhood,” and how is it relevant to
religious objects and practices?
4 What are the main kinds of religious specialists, and what tasks do they character-
istically perform?
5 What does it mean to say that shamanism is about mutability and multiplicity, and
that witchcraft is modern?
Sharing Sacred Space: Co-existence in Religious Places
The Moving Statues of Ireland
The Problem with Shamans: Shamanism in Contemporary Nepal and Mongolia
The Man Who Became a Woman Shaman
The Professionalization of Divination in China
4 Religious language
Words of truth, words of power
Within the Islamic renewal movement in contemporary Mali (West Africa), women have
started speaking on the radio to encourage other women to engage in “personal moral
reform.” These women, older and already respected as neighborhood leaders of “Muslim
women’s groups” (silame musow ton), “stress that they are not Muslim ‘teachers’… and
do not voice independent interpretations but merely offer ‘moral lessons’” which is a
conventional female activity (Schulz 2012: 24). One excerpt from such a radio program
goes:
Today, I will lecture about a Muslim woman’s proper conduct. … The true Islamic
prescriptions [silameya saria] for proper female conduct are simple and never
change. … Be modest. Show patience and forbearance with your husband. Do not
backbite and gossip about your co-wives and neighbors. Nowadays, family life is
disrupted by endless quarrels over money. Do not quarrel with your husband and in-
laws; do not blame them for contributing too little to the family’s survival. …
Women, imitate the example set by the wives of the Prophet (PBUH). They excelled
in patience, forbearance, and generosity. This will ensure you eternal existence in the
afterlife.
(27)
Despite its conventionality, there is considerable resistance to female lecturers, on the

grounds that public speaking and preaching display “their lack of modesty and their lack
of religious knowledge” (24). Significantly, while male preachers may be criticized for
inferior knowledge, women are more often attacked for their inferior morality and, on
the radio, for “the seductiveness of their voices.” They are hence banned from major
commercial stations and consigned to smaller private outlets. But two other cultural
factors are also in play. First, higher-status individuals traditionally did not speak in
public, the task left to the nyamakalaw, a class of public praise orators. Second,
throughout West Africa, “Voice and speech are considered to ‘touch’ listeners in a phy-
sically experienced sense and thereby to move individuals from an attitude of passivity,
even reticence, to action and the accomplishment of extraordinary deeds (kewale)” (29),
rendering disembodied (and female) voices problematic.
Much of religious knowledge is stored and transmitted in language, and humans
interact with religious beings, forces, and objects through language as well as other
media; they talk to us, and we talk to them. The present chapter explores religious lan-
guage. Often, including in anthropological analyses, this has been taken to mean myth.
Myth is in fact an extremely common and important form of religious speech but by no
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-4
means the only form. There are other major activities and genres, such as prayer, incan-
tations or “magical speech,” songs, proverbs or wisdom literature, and preaching that
deserve description and analysis. Accordingly, we will begin with myth in this discussion
but proceed to these other verbal forms.
Central to the anthropological perspective on religious speech is the notion that it, like
all speech, is action. Even telling a myth (or more commonly, enacting a myth) is social
behavior. This means that we must respect not only the “ideas” and the “meanings”
conveyed in words but the actual performance of language. And attention to performance
also directs attention to results. What is interesting and important is the “effectiveness” of
speech: people often speak not so much to state something as to achieve something.
Words have, words are, power.
Myth as religious language

Humans can do many things with language—share facts, ask questions, issue commands,
express emotions, etc. One thing all humans do with language is tell stories, presenting
happenings in a “narrative” format such that they are connected in a sequential (i.e.
unfolding over time) way. Events, in a narrative form, do not occur randomly but have
coherence and significance, that is, they signify something; there is a theme (often a
“moral”) to the story, even (or especially) if it is a life story or biography.
In popular vernacular, “myth” tends to designate a false account, like “the myth of
Atlantis” or “ten myths about retirement.” In anthropology and other scholarly studies of
religion, though, myth does not imply falseness. Rather, a myth is a particular kind of
story, specifically one involving the doings of the spirits or ancestors, or as Jack Goody
puts it, “a particular kind of oral literature, the subject of which is partly cosmological”
(2010: 52). In the immortal words of Eliade:
Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial
Time, the fable time of the beginnings. In other words, myth tells how, through the
deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality,
the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular
kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a
“creation”; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of
that which really happened, which manifested itself completely. The actors in myths
are Supernatural Beings. … Hence myths disclose their creative activity and reveal
the sacredness (or simply the supernaturalness) of their works.
(1998: 5–6)
Thus, myths are frequently creation or origin stories, in which superhuman beings are the
characters and protagonists. The myths tell us what transpired “in the beginning”—not
always or necessarily in the beginning of time, but in the beginning of some particular
fact or phenomenon, natural or social. As such, they are treated as true stories, an accu-
rate account of events, by those who tell them (i.e. no one calls their own myths
“myths”).
Myths, thus, not only represent an explanation for things, but also, like many religious
symbols, a hierophany, an eruption of the sacred into the profane or mundane. Eliade
added that “myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the
sacred (or the ‘supernatural’) into the world. … It is this sudden breakthrough of the
Religious language 79
sacred that really establishes the World and makes it what it is today” (6). The inter-
ventions or manifestations of the superhuman give the natural and social worlds their
shape and character; the natural and social come from and depend on the supernatural
and superhuman in some essential way.
While myth is characteristically assumed to “explain” something, to answer some fac-
tual question about the origin or disposition of reality, as explanations myths confront
one serious objection—that they are fanciful, contradictory, usually unprovable, and
often enough patently false. One religion’s myth might explain the origin of humans in
one supernatural way and another religion’s myth in another and completely incompa-
tible way. Especially when it comes to other people’s religions, it has been common, as
Radcliffe-Brown warned, to treat them as “systems of erroneous and illusory beliefs”
(1965: 153). In fact, people typically regard their own religious stories as true, retaining
“myth” to designate other people’s (false) stories.
Fortunately, as Goody advises, although we expect that myths are “explanatory,” in
reality “most are not” (2010: 42). In fact, decades before, Malinowski proposed a very
different role for myth. He strenuously insisted that myth is not speculative story-telling
or question-answering or even holy history but something else. “Myth is not a savage
speculation about origins of things born out of philosophic interest. Neither is it the
result of the contemplation of nature—a sort of symbolic representation of its laws,” he
wrote (1948: 83–84). If myth is not speculative and explanatory, then what is it? He
answered this question in what is probably the most oft-quoted passage in all his
writings:
Studied alive, myth … is not symbolic, but a direct expression of its subject matter; it
is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrec-
tion of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings,
social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive
culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safe-
guards and enforces practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital
ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force;
it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of
primitive faith and moral wisdom.
(101)
In other words, myth:
is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction, such as
we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in
primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human
destinies.
(100)
Therefore, he concluded, myth should not be treated as explanation or as symbol but

rather in terms of how it motivates people and shapes their lives and realities. Rather
than a factual description, it is a plan, a model (a “model for,” as Geertz put it), or—in
Malinowski’s own word—a “charter” or guideline for life.
What myth then purports to do is to express or clothe the timeless or eternal or at least
“non-temporal” in a specific and temporal guise. We might say, along with Jeannette
Mageo, that myths “are collective tales in which individual destinies represent cultural
outcomes,” where specific characters “represent the identity of their respective groups”
(2002: 499). For instance, in Judeo-Christian narrative, what befalls Adam and Eve indi-
vidually becomes the fate of all humans; likewise, as we will see below, when certain
ancestral beings accepted the mysterious prophecy of a talking stick, they were trans-
formed into the present-day Yaqui or Yoeme people. The “events” in myth, from this
perspective, are not merely events but rather paradigmatic or foundational situations—
situations that did not happen just once in the long-ago but that happen (or should
happen) continuously. To say it another way, myths are less about the “then” than the
“now.” They set the stage—and the standard—for our present lives.
Types and themes of myth

Myths are highly diverse. Still, perhaps because humans have a limited set of typical or
even archetypical experiences, there are certain recurring elements across cultures. Crea-
tion is one obvious and compelling theme, understandably since religion attributes most
of the creativity to non- and superhuman beings and forces. Myths often describe how
the universe as a whole, the earth in its present form, human beings, and social institu-
tions began (see Chapter 2). There is a tremendous amount of latitude in such matters,
yet some motifs appear repeatedly. Clyde Kluckhohn (1965) conducted a survey of
recurrent themes in world mythology and derived a list of six common themes across the
fifty societies he studied: a flood element in thirty-four of the fifty societies, a monster-
slaying element in thirty-seven, an incest element in thirty-nine, a sibling rivalry element
in thirty-two, a castration element, including four cases of actual castration and five of
threats, and an androgynous deity element in seven.
Myths are repositories for cultural ideas about issues like cosmology and cosmogony,
which are usually if not always portrayed in mythic terms. The Judeo-Christian notion of
creation of the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) is often lacking in cross-cultural myths,
but the origin of humans is regularly told. Among the Kiowa, the first people:
emerged from the underworld when Saynday (or Sindhi), the shape-shifting, part-
animal, part-human culture hero, tapped on a tree or hollow log, summoning the
underground-dwelling Kiowas to inhabit the earth’s surface. As the people crept
upward single file, a pregnant woman lodged in the narrow aperture, preventing the
people below from surfacing. Only half the Kiowas made it to the world they inhabit
today.
(Kracht 2017: 54)
Saynday then supplied the people with buffalo by chasing the animals from another
underground cave.
Sometimes humans obtained their physical form through the agency of superhuman
beings, as remembered by the Central Australian Aboriginal myth in which two beings in
the western sky noticed the Inapertwa, “rudimentary human beings or incomplete men,
whom it was their mission to make into men and women”:
In those days there were no men and women, and the Inapertwa were of various
shapes and dwelt in groups along the shores of the salt water. They had no distinct
limbs or organs of sight, hearing or smell, and did not eat food, and presented the
appearance of human beings all doubled up into a rounded mass in which just the
outline of the different parts of the body could be vaguely seen.
Coming down from their home in the western sky, armed with their Lalira or
great stone knives, the [sky beings] took hold of the Inapertwa, one after the other.
First of all the arms were released, then the fingers were added by making four clefts
at the end of each arm; then legs and toes were added in the same way. The figure
could now stand, and after this the nose was added and the nostrils bored with the
fingers. A cut with the knife made the mouth, which was pulled open several times to
make it flexible.
(Spencer and Gillen 1968: 388–89)
The operations continued until humans were fashioned. But because the Inapertwa were
initially creatures intermediate between humans and plants/animals, they remained “inti-
mately associated with the particular animals or plant of which he or she was a trans-
formation,” resulting in the totemic culture and religion of the society. (See supplemental
reading “Stories of Spirit and Animal in Ainu Culture and Religion.”)
Naturally, myths across cultures are filled with gender and sexual images and mes-
sages. Judeo-Christian scriptures document how the first woman was created and how
women came to suffer pain in childbirth thanks to the actions of the ancestor of all
women. Few societies possess a cosmology and mythology more sexualized than the
Desana (see Chapter 2). According to the Desana, the Sun designed one man of each of
the local tribes and sent a being named Pamurí-mahsë to deliver them to earth. The
“personification of a phallus that ejaculates, a new creator” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971: 55),
Pamurí-mahsë transported the men from the paradise-uterus Ahpikondiá aboard his
female Snake-Canoe pamurí-gahsíru (“to ferment-placenta”). But despite the fact that the
animals and fish already had male and female mates, there were no human women.
One night the men had a feast and danced. The Daughter of Aracú [a fish] … saw
the Desana; she fell in love with him. The man gave her honey, and she tried it and
liked it. So she stayed with him on land. … From the union between the first Desana
and the Daughter of Aracú, sons and daughters were born. The first sib of the
Desana was born and then all of the Desana tribe.
(30)
We previously learned that the Sun had incestuous relations with his own daughter, as a
result of which “her blood flowed forth; since then, women must lose blood every month
in remembrance of the incest of the Sun and so that this great wickedness will not be
forgotten” (28).
Dogon (West Africa) mythology too recognizes the centrality of sexuality in the cos-
mogonic process. According to Marcel Griaule’s well-known but controversial conversa-
tions with the elder Ogotemmeli, the god Amma formed the earth from a lump of clay:
The earth lies flat. … It is like a body, that is to say, a thing with members branch-
ing out from a central mass. This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north
to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is an ant hill, and its clitoris a termite hill.
Amma, being lonely, and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it.
That was the occasion of the first breach of order of the universe.
(1975: 17)
Amma was compelled to remove the termite hill to complete the illicit act, and the result
of this “defective union” was the jackal, an enemy of god. Repeated sex with his “earth-
wife” led to the birth of the great spirit-twins, the Nummo. Perceiving the naked body of
their mother, the Nummo clothed her in plants from heaven, giving her a cover of vege-
tation and a language.
Myths can also recount the origins of human institutions or social relations, authoriz-
ing and legitimizing those institutions or relations. A Bunyoro myth narrated the origins
of servitude and kingship, based on the primordial actions of a set of siblings. The first
human father, Kintu or “the created thing,” had three sons. The boys were given two
tests. First, six objects were placed where the boys would find them—an ox’s head, a
cowhide thong, a bundle of cooked millet and potatoes, a grass head-ring (for carrying
loads on the head), an axe, and a knife.
When the boys come upon these things, the eldest picks up the bundle of food and
starts to eat. What he cannot eat he carries away, using the head-ring for this pur-
pose. He also takes the axe and the knife. The second son takes the leather thong,
and the youngest takes the ox’s head, which is all that is left. In the next test the
boys have to sit on the ground in the evening, with their legs stretched out, each
holding on his lap a wooden milk-pot full of milk. They are told that they must hold
their pots safely until morning. At midnight the youngest boy begins to nod, and he
spills a little of his milk. He wakes up with a start, and begs his brothers for some of
theirs. Each gives him a little, so that his pot is full again. Just before dawn the eldest
brother suddenly spills all his milk. He, too, asks his brothers to help fill his pot
from theirs, but they refuse, saying that it would take too much of their milk to fill
his empty pot. In the morning their father finds the youngest son’s pot full, the
second son’s nearly full, and the eldest sons’ quite empty.
(Beattie 1960: 11–12)
These decisions settled the identity and fate of the sons and their descendants forever. The
first son and his line would always be servants and farmers, laboring for his younger brothers
and their descendants; he was named “Kairu” or peasant. The second son and his descen-
dants would have the elevated status of cattle herders; he was called “Kahmua,” little cow-
herd. The youngest son would be political heir and leader, so he was named “Kakama,” little
Mukama or ruler. His descendants became the kings of Bunyoro.
Box 4.1 Hyborea: A Russian nationalist political myth

Contemporary societies and states also flourish on political myths, stories that bind
their future to their past. One such myth among Russian radical nationalists is the
myth of Hyperborea. After the fall of communism many Russians faced a political and
identity crisis, pining for a great and pure Russia. Suspecting that official and Western
historians had distorted or suppressed their history, many nationalists were attracted
to a national/racial myth that portrayed modern-day Russians as descendants of an
“ancient people,” romanticized as “robust, noble, reliable, truthful, courageous, gen-
erous, skillful, knowledgeable and wise” (Shnirelman 2014: 124). These idealized
ancestors built a great civilization in the far north, on a polar island called Arctida or
Hyperborea. More grandly, the original Russes were the original Aryans, “forefathers of
the White Race, and all the other ‘white people’ are viewed as their younger brothers”
(127). Naturally, the white Russes were contrasted to, and opposed by, their southern
dark-skinned neighbors, who were driven down to Africa. This political myth legitimates
Russian racial superiority to non-white people; further, it elevates white Russians over
other white people, placing Russians at the root of the whole white race. That alone would
entitle Russians to a (racially exclusive) national state. But in some versions, ancestral
Russians once occupied most or all of the northern hemisphere; hence:
all Eurasian territory between the Baltic Sea and the Kuril Islands is their historical
heritage. The myth does not stop at that and points to the Slavic Aryan expansion
into Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, China and even the Americas.
(129)
The myth sometimes perniciously proclaims that the vanquished black race “went to
America to be slaves there in order to take revenge upon the White Race today for
defeat in the prehistoric past” (129). And nationalists on the fringe of the myth/move-
ment depict Jews as “a product of some experiment carried out by Egyptian
priests, … an artificial population, or bio-robots. Thus, they deprive them of human
nature and, especially, of positive moral qualities” (128). At the extreme, the Russian
people are deified as “the major and necessary integral part of the All-Cosmic evolu-
tion of God and God-like in unrealized reality” (134).
(See supplemental reading “Samoa and the Tongan Empire: A Political Myth.”)
Myths finally account for specific roles in society, including religious roles themselves.
Hence, a specialist position like shaman or priest is often given mythical origins and
sanction. Goldman reported the myth of the first Cubeo shaman or paye:
Once there were no payes. A youth named Djuri wishing to become a paye went to
the forest … and sat in a small clearing and thought about how he should go about
making thunder. While he was deep in thought, Onponbu [Thunder Man], the
owner of dupa appeared. He knew the thoughts of the youth and he could see that he
had a clean body. He decided to make him yavi and set down beside the boy three
objects—a fragment of dupa, a small container of beeswax, and a tray of eagle
down. The youth prepared the dupa and beeswax for inhaling and he also inserted
the eagle down up his nostrils from where it moved to lodge in his head.
That night he had visions, and he then understood how to make thunder. In his visions,
he saw the houses where the payes gathered and saw that there were very many in them.
He slept and when he awoke before dawn, he heard the first thundering in the East where
the rivers fall off the earth. He fell asleep again and dreamt that Onponbu was asking him
if he was satisfied with what he had been given and if he believed he had learned how to
make thunder. Onponbu advised him how to live. He cautioned him not to sleep with a
woman. “You must guard the conduct of your life,” he told him. “You must not eat what
others eat. You are to eat only farinha of starch. … You should not eat anything hot or
take food directly from the hand of a woman. Set hot food aside until it turns cold, and it
will cause you no harm.”
(2004: 303–310)
Onponbu proceeded to give the boy many gifts, including thunder and lightning. He also
taught him to seek out specific powerful plants. And he transformed the boy into a
shaman by literally changing his body, inserting spines into his forearms and putting a
stick in his mouth. Finally, he received ritual objects, like a rattle with small stones
inside, a feather crown, and stone and bark ornaments.
A myth may even foretell the future. Multiple versions of a Yaqui/Yoeme (United
States/Mexico border) myth chronicle the pre-human Surems, a race of small, quiet, non-
violent beings. One day, a tree (or pole or large stick) began making a sound, which no
one could understand except one woman. One version predicted that “the time of con-
quest would come and all would have to be baptized” (Shorter 2009: 132); other versions
more specifically foresaw that “white men from the east would bring them seeds to plant
and cows and horses, and that they would baptize all the children” (134). These new-
comers would reveal many wonders such as long-distance communication and flight but
would come “with armor and new weapons” bringing “much strife and bloodshed” (138),
“wars, famine, floods, drought, new inventions, even drug problems” (139). Upon hearing
this prophecy, some people angrily rejected the future. “Only a few people liked what the
stick predicted, and these waited. These men are the Yaquis” (136).
The structural study of myth

The collection and comparison of myths is one of the most venerable preoccupations of
anthropology. An especially celebrated example is James George Frazer’s The Golden
Bough, first published in 1890 but revised and expanded several times thereafter. Frazer’s
work inspired generations of scholars after him but was hardly the first attempt to make
sense of the verdant plenitude of myth. Daniel Brinton’s 1868 The Myths of the New
World preceded Frazer’s work by over two decades and provided a similar riot of
decontextualized (in this case, Native American) myths.
By the 1950s there was substantial knowledge of myths but little notion of what to
do with all of these fantastic, ambiguous, and almost certainly fictitious tales. Is it
possible to treat myth, which seems immanently non-scientific, scientifically? In
answer, Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced a revolutionary approach—literally a
method—for the scientific study of myth, based not on the “contents” of myth so
much as on its “structure.”
Lévi-Strauss honed his method in the area of kinship. Taking seriously the idea of a
kinship system as a language, he proposed that the meaning of kinship terms is not so
much in the individual words as in the “grammar” or relationships between the words,
that is, the structure. Language in this view is a set of combinatory and transformational
rules, a syntax or grammar, for arranging its “bits” or words. The structural model thus
suggests that the meaning is not in the words or symbols but between them, in how they
are related to each other. Thus, actual speech can convey the same meaning in many
different ways as well as using the same bits or words to convey very different meanings.
Lévi-Strauss applied this perspective to religion in the analysis of “totemism” or the
spiritual link between natural species or phenomena and human individuals and groups
(see Chapter 2). Before structuralism, the common interpretation was that a totem
reflected some characteristic possessed by it and an individual/group which established a
commonality (e.g., people of the bear totem might be strong, etc.). This realist or litera-
list approach is precisely what the structuralist method avoided. As Lévi-Strauss wrote in
Structural Anthropology:
If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil
grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil
and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relations.
(1963: 202)
However, that would be a case of looking for the meaning of the myth in the individual
item rather than in the structure or context in which the item is deployed.
Despite linguistic and cultural difference, Lévi-Strauss argued, myths across cultures
are remarkably similar and mutually intelligible. His explanation for this similarity and
intelligibility was the one thing that all humans have in common—the human mind. All
myths being products of the same human mental processes (see Chapter 1), they have a
common and analyzable nature. The essential quality of this mind is its binary nature:
humans think in pairs of opposites like male/female, living/dead, nature/culture, matter/
spirit, and us/them. The mind then operates on these oppositions or contradictions with a
battery of transformational rules, generating the assortment of myths we encounter cross-
culturally to “resolve the contradiction” or synthesize the opposites. Myth achieves this
goal by mixing or manipulating two different variations of time, the eternal or timeless
(universal) and the temporal (particular). Myth, then, is both historical and ahistorical,
the manifestation in time of timeless truths.
If myth “works” to resolve or synthesize oppositions and contradictions, then in the
end it does not and cannot succeed; life and death, matter and spirit, male and female,
and so on cannot be resolved or synthesized, at least not permanently. But this helps
explain the productivity and proliferation of myth: we cannot stop at one resolution or
synthesis, one story uniting the timeless and the temporal. Rather, we must make and tell
the stories in endless variation, in a kind of playful seriousness that Lévi-Strauss called
bricolage. Myths in this regard are more like dreams than we realize; no single dream can
definitively capture or exhaust an unconscious thought or desire. We can and must
express it repetitively. The contradictions that myth manipulates are not changed or
eliminated by the manipulation, and so another myth, like another dream or another
work of art, will follow in an unending stream of temporal iterations of timeless themes.
Lévi-Strauss next demonstrated how to put this theory into practice, providing a
“method” for the structural analysis of myth. First, he said, we must break the myth into its
smallest possible narrative pieces, which he called “mythemes.” Literally we might write
each scene or event in the myth on a card and lay them on a table. We would then arrange
the mythemes into a scheme of rows and columns, rows representing time (flowing from left
to right) and columns representing similar types of events or themes that occur at different
places in the myth. In his legendary dissection of the Oedipus myth he had one column for
scenes that invoke problematic or incestuous family relations, another column for murders,
and yet another column for slaying of monsters. The result, he claimed, is a kind of “musical
score” of the myth, with the melody and harmony, rhythm and counterpoint, laid out gra-
phically. The product is the “structure” of the myth, the particular kinds of oppositions or
contradictions dealt with by it and the means by which they are resolved or synthesized.
Naturally, different myths will deal with different contradictions, but there is in the
end a finite list of such topics, and some—like life/death or male/female—will appear
incessantly. The structural method should identify these recurring patterns as well as
doing one other important thing, namely, removing any “observer bias” from the analy-
sis. Structural analysis should be completely “objective” such that all analysts achieve the
same results. Another benefit of such an objective study is the alleged elimination of
“translation” and “version” problems of myth. In other words, if the meaning of myth is
in its particular words or in the culturally specific value of actions or ideas, then trans-
lating a myth would distort or destroy exactly what we seek. However, if myth is a
manifestation of a “deep grammar” underlying all myths, then we can confidently trans-
late without fear of loss. Also, we know that different informants will sometimes give
different versions of the same myth, or that different regions will relate a variant of the
myth. That is a huge problem for realists, who must study each version separately or else
locate for the “true” or “original” myth. For structuralists, each version is little more
than a new twist on the same deeper structure; there is no true version of the myth, and
every permutation of the myth is just as good as another.
Myth as oral literature

Many anthropologists adopted Lévi-Strauss’s proposal, including the already-established
Edmund Leach, who subsequently produced his famed essay “Genesis as Myth,” sub-
jecting the biblical creation story to structural analysis and identifying binary themes of
life/death and static world/moving world. However, it soon became clear that structur-
alism ignored much that was crucially important to myth, and one counter-reaction was
the symbolic approach to religion of Geertz and Victor Turner (see below and Chapter
1). Indeed, Geertz ridiculed “the construction of impeccable depictions of formal order in
whose actual existence nobody can quite believe” (1973: 18).
The first step is to put myth in its wider linguistic context. Myth is narrative of a
specific kind, but it is not the only kind of narrative (religious or non-religious), and
narrative is not the only form of speech. Anthropologists and scholars of myth and oral
literature often characterize myth as a subgenre of the much more inclusive category of
folklore. Folklorist William Bascom held folklore to include “myths, legends, tales,
proverbs, riddles, the texts of ballads and other songs, and other forms of lesser
importance” (1953: 287) but not behavioral genres like dance or art or costume and
such. Anthropologist of folklore Alan Dundes offered perhaps the most comprehensive
list:
Folklore includes myths, legends, folktales, jokes, proverbs, riddles, chants, charms,
blessings, curses, oaths, insults, retorts, taunts, teases, toasts, tongue-twisters, and
greeting and leave-taking formulas. … It also includes folk costume, folk dance, folk
drama, folk instrumental music …, folksongs …, folk speech …, folk similes …, folk
metaphors …, and names. Folk poetry ranges from oral epics to autograph-book
verse, epitaphs, latrinalia (writings on the walls of public bathrooms), limericks, ball-
bouncing rhymes, jump-rope rhymes, finger and toe rhymes, dandling rhymes (to
bounce children on the knee), counting-out rhymes …, and nursery rhymes. The list
of folklore forms also contains games; gestures; symbols; prayers (e.g., graces);
practical jokes; folk etymologies; food recipes; quilt and embroidery designs; house,
barn, and fence types; street vendor’s cries; and even the traditional conventional
sounds used to summon animals or to give them commands.
(1965: 3)
While we might quibble about the details of the list (for instance, Bascom and others
would exclude art, dance, music, costume, and such non-verbal media), it does alert us to
the fact that there are many things humans do with language other than tell myths.
According to most students of folklore, the items on these more or less extensive lists
share certain key features, particularly being oral, traditional, and face-to-face. Dundes
and others disagree with or at least problematize this definition, since obviously not all
folklore is oral (some has long been committed to writing) or therefore face-to-face; in
addition, “traditional” is relative (some folklore is very old, but some is much more
recent). And even precisely who the “folk” are is debatable. Further, Dundes concluded
that if we accept this standard view, then “the folk of today produce no new folklore”
(1965: 1)—in fact, “new folklore” would be an oxymoron.
These concerns and objections notwithstanding, within the category of folklore we can
distinguish at least two main types, namely narratives and non-narratives, with myth
falling in the genus “narrative folklore.” Other species of this genus include legends and
folktales, fairy tales, and epics. Elliott Oring differentiated the three major species of
narrative folklore—myth, legend, and folktale—less by “form” than by the “attitudes of
the community toward them.” Myth, he claimed, is a story “generally regarded by the
community in which it is told as both sacred and true,” and myths “tend to be core
narratives in larger ideological systems.” Typically the narrative setting of the story is
“outside of historical time.” Also, the delivery of myths differs:
Myths are frequently performed in a ritual or ceremonial context. There may be

special personnel designated to recite the myth; the time and manner in which it is
performed may also distinguish it from the other forms of narration in the society.
Indeed, the language of the myth may be as sacred as its message.
(1986: 124)
In contrast, legends, while tales of heroic, uncanny, or miraculous events, are usually set
in historical time and may or may not be treated as true, and folktales with stereotypical
characters (the beautiful princess, the evil witch, the innocent child, etc.) are generally
“related and received as a fiction or fantasy” (126).
However, anthropologists endorse Bascom’s declaration that myths, legends, and
folktales are not “universally recognized categories” but rather Western folk classifica-
tions exploited as “analytical concepts” (1965: 5). Professionally wary of such ethno-
centrism, anthropologists advise understanding other societies’ narrative practices
through their own local categories, concepts, and terms. For instance, Mark McGrana-
ghan tells us that the |Xam bushmen (South Africa) possess just one term for all narra-
tives, from creation myths to biographical stories (2014: 6). Yoruba (West Africa) oral
literature is organized:
not according to subject-matter or structure but by the group to which the reciter
belongs and, in particular, by the technique of recitation and voice production. Thus
there is ijala (chanted by hunters in a high-pitched voice), rara (a slow, wailing type
of chant), and ewi (using a falsetto voice).
(Finnegan 2012: 9)
In a detailed examination of Arikara (South Dakota) narratives, Douglas Parks found

that Arikaras distinguished “true stories” (which did not have a genus name but were
spoken of as tiraanaaNIs meaning “it is true”) from “tales” or naa’iikaWIs. Under the
heading of true stories were both sacred and non-sacred narratives. Sacred stories
included “genesis traditions” in which the origin of each village was revealed in a dream
by a religious being. As true stories, “myths” consisted of:
traditions of incidents that occurred during a period before the earth had fully taken
its present form, before or at a time when human institutions were developing. Ari-
karas refer to this as a holy period, the time when mysterious events occurred.
Stories set in this ear are said to be holy (tiraa’iitUxwaaRUxti’, “it is a holy story”).
It was a time when animals were the actors in dramas and deities came down to
earth from the heavens above, when animals killed humans and buffalo ate people
rather than the reverse.
(1996: 49)
Finally, legendary tales as true stories fell into three subtypes—(1) “etiological narra-
tives” that told of the beginning of a particular social institution or tradition; (2) “dream
stories” in which human characters interacted with animals or supernatural agents who
help the humans by giving them special powers in hunting, war, or medicine; and (3)
stories of supernatural occurrences in which uncanny events took place, like “a girl is
shamed and turns into stone” (50).
The category of “true stories” also included non-sacred accounts of historical events,
personal/biographical stories, and war reports. All “true stories” contrasted with the
second major category of “tales” or non-true stories. These included trickster tales and
other animal stories as well as stories about humans, with a limited and well-known cast
of characters such as Bounding Head, Lucky Man, Bloody Hands, Scalped Man, and
Stays In The Lodge Dressed in Finery. Finally, Arikara individuals were not totally
unanimous about their narrative classification:
What are true myths for some Arikaras today are tales for others. For many stories,
in fact, it is doubtful that consensus in regard to their historical validity could be
achieved now—or even, perhaps, could ever have been achieved in the past—since in
no culture does everyone hold identical beliefs.
(51)
Beyond myth: Other religious language genres
As prominent as myths are, and as much as they have preoccupied anthropologists and
religious studies scholars, they are far from the only—or in many societies the most
common—form of religious talk. The broad category of non-narrative religious language
may actually contain more of a society’s oral literature, since there are so many things
humans can do with words besides tell stories. Among the speech genres most frequently
encountered in religions around the world are chants, spells, curses, incantations, poetry,
song, hymn, prayer, creed, and preaching, as well as non-oral forms like texts and
scriptures.
Across cultures, chants may be as simple as a single word, for example Hindu mantras
like Om. Repetition is a regular and potent quality of chants, as in the Buddhist chant of
The Three Refuges:
I go to the Buddha as my refuge

I go to the Dhamma [religious teachings] as my refuge
.
I go to the Sangha [community of monks and nuns] as my refuge
For the second time, I go to the Buddha as my refuge
For the second time, I go to the Dhamma as my refuge,
.
For the second time, I go to the Sangha as my refuge
For the third time, I go to the Buddha as my refuge
For the third time, I go to the Dhamma as my refuge
.
For the third time, I go to the Sangha as my refuge.
(Buddha Dharma Education Association 2002: 1)
Language is almost always integrated into other ritual activities, such as divination (tail
lilo) by the Meto of Timor-Leste. In this excerpt, seeking academic success for the
society’s children, the hala, kuan, and enu are parts of the pig’s liver that are inspected
for spiritual signs:
Push the children

The girls and the boys
So that their pencils and
Charcoal not be held back
The birth children, the adopted children
You are cooling them
You are making them fresh
You give them good letters, good charcoal
Letters are there
Posts [with the government] are there
[May the] hala be smooth, the kuan stand,
May the enu be full,
[so] I see and know [what you are saying].
(Rose 2018: 460)
For the Bakossi of Cameroon, an essential part of religion is poetry, which “is con-
cerned mainly with the Bakossi people’s relationship with God, with their fellow men,
and with nature” (Mirabeau 2011: 308). Poems are chanted by men near shrines in times
of collective crisis such as “drought, warfare, or an epidemic” as well as on the occasion
of individual illness. Incantations, which Mirabeau characterizes as “the use of magical
formulae,” are the most important kind of religious poetry, uttered to aid in hunting,
calling on the ancestors “to release the forest animals to the hunters” (310), and to
combat witchcraft; they can also be used to place curses. The following is an incantation
intended to relieve a woman of witchcraft:
If you have been asked to assemble here today,

It is because one of our daughters
Has been bewitched,
And we ourselves are the wizards.
Shall we become the wild cat
That eats itself when caught in a trap?
Shall we kill our daughter?
Our fathers always said,
That a man who always has people
Is greater than a man who has wealth.
Plums near the house
Are never harvested using a fork stick.
We should give our daughter her health.
(322)
A key verbal form in many religions is the divine epithet, a word or phrase expressing
a conventional name or trait of a superhuman being. Islam is renowned for the ninety-
nine names of God, including al-Rahman (the compassionate), al-Rahim (the merciful),
al-Nur (the light), and al-Barr (the good). Writing about ancient Assyrian and Babylonian
religion, Peter Westh shares a number of divine epithets, as in this invocation attributed
to the king Assurbanipal:
O great lord who occupies an awe-inspiring dais in the pure heavens,

Golden tiara of the heavens, symbol of royalty,
O Samas, shepherd of the people, noble god,
Seer of the land, leader of the people,
Who guides the fugitive on his path,
O Samas, judge of heaven and earth,
Who directs the heavenly gods,
Who grants incense offerings to the great gods,
I, Assurbanipal, son of my god,
Call upon you in the pure heavens.
(2011: 48)
The piling-on of honors and titles resembles how a commoner would speak to human
royalty.
Prayer is a central component of many, but by no means all, religions. Words spoken
to a supernatural or divine being, prayer is important in Christianity and absolutely
fundamental in Islam, which promotes sala-t or salah as one of the five “pillars” of the
faith. Ideally practiced five times per day at set hours, Islamic prayer features set
phrases (most famously Allahu akbar, “God is great”) and bodily postures including
bowing and lowering the forehead to the ground (see https://raleighmasjid.org/how-to-p
ray/salah.htm for detailed instructions on how to pray properly). Anthropologists like
Heiko Henkel stress Islamic prayer as “a mobile discipline” providing believers “with a
formidable resource for strengthening their commitment to Islam and asserting mem-
bership in a community of believers” (2005: 487), a technique of moral self-formation
(see Chapter 6).
Navajo (southwestern United States) religion also contains an elaborate prayer tradi-
tion, consisting of at least eight general types: blessings, prayers of restoration/recovery
by reidentification/reassociation with the means of health, prayers of restoration by
expulsion of foreign malevolence, prayers of restoration by expulsion of the malevolent
influence of native ghosts or witches, prayers of restoration by the removal of the mal-
evolent influence of Holy People, prayers of restoration by the recovery, return, and
reassociation with the means of health, prayers of procurement of protection against
potential attack, and prayers of restoration by remaking/redressing the Holy Person’s
means of health and life (Gill 1981: 39–42). Each type is determined by the elements or
segments of which prayer utterances are composed and the arrangements of those
Figure 4.1 Yebichai prayer—Navajo dancing. Courtesy of the Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library
of Congress Prints and Photograph Division.
segments, together with the relation between the resulting structure and the function or
use of the prayer. An Enemyway prayer to expel malevolent forces runs as follows:
He of “Waters flow together”!

His feet have become my feet, thereby I shall go about,
By which he is long life, by that I am long life,
By which he is happiness, by that I am happiness,
By which it is pleasant at his front, thereby it is pleasant at my front,
By which it is pleasant in his rear, thereby it is pleasant at my rear,
When the pollen which encircles sun’s mouth also encircles my mouth, and that
enables me to speak and continue speaking,
[replace “feet” with “legs” and “body” and “mind” and “voice” and repeat]
You shall take the death of the upright, of the extended bowstring
out of me! You have taken it out of me, it was returned upon him,
it has settled far away!
Therefore the dart of the Ute enemy’s ghost, its filth, by which it
bothered my interior, which had traveled in my interior, which had absorbed
my interior, shall this day return out of me! This day it has returned out of me! …
Long life, happiness I shall be, pleasant again it has become,
pleasant again it has become, pleasant again it has become,
pleasant again it has become, pleasant again it has become.
(based on Gill 1981: 106–7)
Prayer can also overflow language, taking material form in Catholic rosary beads or
Buddhist prayer wheels or flags, which emanate prayers as they spin or flap. (See sup-
plemental reading “Prayer in a Society that Distrusts Words.”)
Lastly, religious language, including myth, is not necessarily oral and has not been for
five millennia, since the invention of writing. Religious words and knowledge, in all its
genres, have been entextualized, from tales like the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, the Hindu Vedas, and the Hebrew Torah. Once they are committed to
writing, religious language is comparatively “fixed,” as with the Christian “Lord’s
Prayer” or various official Church “creeds”—which does not prevent disagreement about
the meaning of texts or even about which texts to include in the canon (see Chapter 9).
Further, as Keane asserts, when “divine words are rendered into script, they possess a
distinctively material quality and form. They appear on some physical medium, and so
are both durable and potentially destructible” (2013: 2). Consequently, books or other
scriptural forms may become objects of study and debate and of veneration and power in
their own right, like, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Qur’an or the Guru
Granth Sahib. Newly written or discovered books like the Book of Mormon can become
the basis for new sects or religions.
Box 4.2 Searching for meaning in Bible reading

People usually assume that scriptures (and other religious language) have “a meaning”
and that to read the text is to discover the meaning. However, working in a Lutheran
men’s Bible-discussion group in the American Midwest, James Bielo found that
meaning “is best conceptualized as a process that unfolds through social practice
rather than a product that is discovered” (2008: 1). Indeed, “meaning” may never be
found at all. Bielo observed as the men explored verses from the Book of Proverbs,
straining to interpret those written words. Often if not usually, they arrived at no con-
sensus on the “meaning” of the scriptures, which was left “frequently unresolved” with
“multiple interpretations” entertained by the members (1). Surprisingly, this was not a
serious problem for the Christian men, leading him to conclude that:
the identification of settled textual meanings is not the most significant facet of
Bible reading; instead, it is the process of discussing and evaluating various
possibilities of meaning. It is in this search for meaning—illustrated by three group
interactions where uncertainty is left to linger—that this group of conservative
Evangelical Christians addresses core issues of faith, including presuppositions
about the Bible, religious identity, and the nature of group study.
(5)
What the men demonstrated, rather than any single meaning, was a set of reading
practices and concerns that were unaffected by their ultimate failure to determine the
“true meaning.” For instance, the participants were confident that “the Bible is intern-
ally consistent, and does contain a definite message, which provides a safe backdrop
for the group’s inability to locate these meanings” (11). Uncertainty could be attributed
to the particular translation, assured as they were that the original was clear and cer-
tain. Disputes over the meaning of specific words were set within the belief that the
Bible is a coherent whole and indeed that all versions of the Bible were part of a
super-textual whole. In the end, failure to agree on “meaning” was actually useful. It
allowed each man to find the “relevance” of the text for himself, so that disparate
meanings were “a natural ‘outcome’ of multiple readers approaching the same text”
(17), and the entire enterprise of haggling over the Bible provided “a positive spiritual
experience” while affording the opportunity to deepen their Bible-reading skills and
assert their “identity as a conservative Protestant” (16).
(See supplemental reading “Evangelical Christian Conversion as Language Learning.”)

It is worth mentioning that not speaking—for instance, silence or secrecy—is also
powerful linguistic practices, inside and outside of religion.
Religious language as performance

The scriptural nature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has tended to focus scholars on
the words, or worse on the “beliefs” or “meanings,” in religious language. Structuralism
went further in exclusively privileging the “plot” of myths. But it soon became apparent
that the single-minded concentration on ideas and plots overlooked crucial, if not the
most crucial, aspects of religious words. At the heart of the matter is the fact that oral
genres, whether they are myths, chants, prayers, sermons, or what have you, are per-
formed and, to a greater or lesser extent, only exist in the performance. What this means
is that we do not have the luxury of examining only the “content” of myths and other
oral and textual religion but should and must include how this speech is practiced.
Dell Hymes advocated a more performance-based approach to myth and oral litera-
ture. A speech performance, whether reciting a myth, greeting someone in the morning,
or telling a joke, “as an event, may have properties (patterns and dynamics) not reducible
to terms of individual or standardized competence [that is, rules]. Sometimes, indeed,
these properties are the point” (2001: 65). In the main, there are two sets of these prop-
erties: stylistic components and social context. Gill too wrote in his study of Navajo
prayer that descriptions of oral literature that emphasize performance “have begun to
show us that the elements of context and style in specific performances of any oral act are
essential to our fuller understanding of it” (1981: xxii–xxiii). Myths, for instance, are not
normally if ever told like other kinds of stories; they may not be “told” at all but may be
recited, enacted, chanted or sung, alone or as part of ritual performances. Or myths may
be the background knowledge informing other verbal or performative events. The fact
that scholars often collect myths as “narratives” outside of the speech and ritual events in
which they are invoked has tended to prejudice us toward the plots over the
performances.
Parks, for example, offered a rich description of the stylistic qualities or devices of
Arikara story-telling genres mentioned earlier. “Narrative perspective” was one device:
the teller usually removed himself or herself from the account, speaking in the third
person. Also, Arikara language included grammatical forms like “evidentials,” verb var-
iations that indicated the action was being reported second hand and that its truth could
not be verified. Two examples were the “quotative,” indicating that the speaker was
repeating something previously heard rather than witnessed, and the “evidential proper,”
signifying the action was “apparently the case” but was not personally observed (1996:
65). Besides narrative perspective, Arikara myth-telling counted on indirect discourse or
the use of quoted speech, in which the speaker quoted other speakers, often who them-
selves were quoting other speakers. The sequencing of events and episodes marked a
story, by stating the result of an event first and then telling the event itself; also, actions
might be described before the actor was named, and generalities would be described
before the details were given. “Discourse bracketing” involved formulaic introductory
and closing forms, such as “This is what he did” or “Then he said” or “This is what he
said.” A final remark like “That is what I want to say” ended the story. Finally, other
devices such as repetition, indeterminacy (marking when details are missing or left out),
abbreviation, and numerical patterning were used to build a good Arikara performance.
Thanks to the awareness of these performative qualities, a specialized field within
anthropology has developed to attend to a culture’s linguistic devices or options for
producing different kinds of religious speech and how they relate to other non-religious
kinds of speech. This subfield is known as the ethnography of speaking. Joel Sherzer
(1983) pioneered the ethnography of speaking in his account of several different linguistic
variants in Kuna (Panama) depending upon what kind of talk is occurring. Kuna every-
day speech or tule kaya typically took the form of a dialog between a speaker and a
responder, with the speaker engaging in reports or retellings of things that he or she had
heard or previously said. Political or chiefly speech (sakla kaya) was done only at the
meeting house and was characterized by “chanting” (namakke), which could last for an
hour or two, starting softly and building in volume over time. Like everyday speech, it
too took the form of dialog, with a “chanting chief” and a “responding chief” as well as a
spokesman or interpreter for the crowd. Words were spoken more slowly and formally,
with vowels fully enunciated. There was more repetition, parallelism, and length in the
language and many occasion-specific alternative words. There were also special words
and phrases to indicate the beginning and end of “verses” in the chant, as well as elabo-
rate and creative use of metaphor (as a really good English speechmaker might do).
Further along the spectrum of specialized and formalized speech was the curing song
(suar miimi kaya), performed in “stick doll language.” In this case, the “partner” in the
dialog was a doll, to which the words were spoken or sung (to Sherzer’s ear the speech
sounded like song, but the Kuna claimed that it was spoken or sunmakke). The for-
malization of this style included even more retention of phonemes and words and phra-
ses, more specialized vocabulary, and a unique set of prefixes and suffixes. It was also
highly standardized and “routinized,” with fixed metaphors and figurative language. At
the extreme end of formality was the ritual language associated with girl’s puberty rites
(kantule kaya), which they described as neither spoken nor chanted but “shouted” (kro-
makke). The dialog here was conducted with the spirit of the ceremonial flute. The
speech style was more conservative than any other, with the most retention and ela-
boration of sounds, words, and phrases and the most specialized lexicon. Finally, the
lines were recited identically in each performance, and the recitation had to be letter
perfect—no creativity or clever improvisation allowed.
Similarly, Petalangan (Sumatra, Indonesia) religious speech contained two genres,
belian for public healing rituals and monto privadi for personal beauty and love magic.
Both were regarded as “ancestor’s words” (kato o’ang tuo-tuo dulu), but belian incor-
porated songs called anak iyang sung by shamans to spirits as part of a ritual (Kang
2006). And any particular ritual/speech event might entail multiple language genres. In
the Taiwanese Taoist exorcism rite of che ngo-kui (“controlling/propitiating the Five
Ghosts”), the presiding Red-Head Master of Magic addressed the demons and gods
alternately with respect, threats, jokes verging on rudeness, and ultimately shouting,
“both fierce and controlled, the embodiment of authority,” to vanquish the evil spirits
(McCreery 1995).
Such qualities are notoriously difficult to communicate, especially in writing. To cap-
ture and convey such performance qualities of Zuni (southwestern United States) narra-
tive poetry, Tedlock (1972) designed a system for arraying the written word like the
spoken word. He literally used upper-case and bold letters to express louder speaking,
even placing the letters at rising or falling angles to indicate tone of voice, as in the
following:
SON’AHCHI. [a convention story-opening]

SONTI LO——————NG AGO
[pause]
AT STANDING ARROWS
OLD LADY JUNCO HAD HER HOME
And COYOTE
Coyote was there at Sitting Rock with his children.
He was with his children
And Old Lady Junco
was winnowing.
Pigweed
and tumbleweed, she was winnowing these.
(based on Tedlock 1972: 77)
Box 4.3 Word, voice, and gesture in Amazonian “somatic poetry”

Among the Napo Runa, “communicative action is not limited to humans but also
includes spirits and beings from the nonhuman phenomenological world” including
plants and animals (Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy 2012: 23). One way that humans
interact with these beings is “somatic poetry,” a kind of speech that engages the
entire body “by listening, feeling, smelling, seeing, and tasting.” Obviously this inter-
action depends on “the creative use of words and music and also plants, animals, and
the landscape,” since all such entities are “recognized as having subjectivity and
creative powers” (23). Not surprisingly, then, when a shaman conducts a healing ritual
or when a storyteller recites a myth, he or she uses not only voice but gesture to make
the experience as vivid and multisensory, as bodily, as possible. So, in presenting
these performances, Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy enhance the written account
with simple line-drawings of the gestures that the speaker makes, such as raising the
arms, clasping the hands, pointing, adjusting clothing, and moving the head. All of
these movements are part of the performance/experience, and all would be lost if we
treated myth and poetry as mere text or grammar.
The following is an extract from a story explaining the origins of the anaconda told
by Grandfather Alberto Grefa of Pumayaku (text and illustrations courtesy of Michael
Uzendoski). The story is about the culture heroes, the twins, named “Kyullur.” In this
story the younger brother Kyullur sexually desires a very attractive woman who
appears as a yutu bird. She realizes Kyullur’s intensions, however, and attacks Kyullur
by stabbing his penis with her sharp beak. She then flies away, stretching it very far.
The older, wiser brother then cuts the penis to normal length and throws the leftover
pieces into the various rivers around Napo. The cuttings transform into anacondas.
The story not only explains the origins of the anaconda but also is metaphorical of the
process of life and the poetics of human–animal somatic flow.
The Kyllur brothers

were walking through the forest
when they came up on a yutu bird
yutu (tinamus major)
so while they were going

just like this from above (yutu cried out) Figure 4.2a Gesture drawings for a
UW UW UW UW UW UW Uw uw uw uw Napo Runa story
(she) got scared and flew off explaining the origins
getting scared of the anaconda
AYYY AYYYY [she cried] while flying away

“They scared me so much …
and in a bad way”
“If they would have caught me …

they would have had their way [sexually] with me.”
she said they say
and so going far away to land

landing far away saying [thinking]
and then
to that Kyullur brother with bad intentions
right there Figure 4.2b
all of a sudden
she flew right back over

attacking him [Kyullur] right in his “thing”
[laughter]
TSAK [ideophone = stabbing]

sticking it
[she] she took off flying
way over there
she went very far Figure 4.2c
And so going so far

his penis was stretched long
very long
And so Kyullur could no longer walk

he could not even move
with such a heavy penis
Surveying the field, Bauman (2001) composed a list of common or potential performa-
tive qualities or “keys” to performance, including:
1 “special codes, e.g. archaic or esoteric language, reserved for and diagnostic of
performance”
2 “special formulae that signal performance, such as conventional openings and clos-
ings, or explicit statements announcing or asserting performance”
3 “figurative language, such as metaphor, metonymy, etc.”
4 “formal stylistic devices, such as rhyme, vowel harmony, other forms of parallelism”
5 “special prosodic patterns of tempo, stress, pitch”
6 “special paralinguistic patterns of voice quality and vocalization”
7 “appeal to tradition”
8 “disclaimer of performance” (171).
As Sherzer’s material illustrates above, each culture and each oral genre may have its own
distinct set of these keys.
In addition to the linguistic styles associated with myth or other genres, there are
extra-linguistic contextual elements as well. These may include who can perform the
speech-act and when they can perform it. Oring contended that oral narratives:
are performed in specific social contexts. These contexts are constituted by a specific
group of people, by a specific set of principles governing their interrelationship, by a
specific set of behaviors and conversations in which the narrative is embedded, and
by a specific physical and symbolic environment present at the time of narration. The
understanding of a narrative is governed to some extent by an understanding of the
specific situation or situations in which it is told.
(1986: 136–37)
Parks noted that Arikara storytelling was mostly a male prerogative. Some myths or
parts of myths should only be told during certain seasons or at certain times of day;
Arikara myths and tales were only to be told during the winter. Some myths or parts of
myths might only be recited in the midst of rituals. They might also only be told before
certain audiences. There might be specialists with the prerogative to tell myths—priests,
shamans, or designated story-keepers. And other performative features might accompany
the story, such as singing, dancing, noise-making of various kinds, and so on. Irving
Goldman reported how he was reviewing his field notes on mourning rituals with an
informant:
when the traditional dance leader rose from his chair to dance a few steps while
illustrating a mourning song. He turned to me and said, “It cannot be done this way.
I cannot sing without dancing.” Then after a long pause he said, ‘I cannot dance
without wearing the mask’.
(2004: 5)
A special symbolic or sacred space may be reserved for the telling or created by the tell-
ing. Finally, speakers and/or participants may have to be in special ritual conditions (e.g.
purified) in order for the telling to occur. The narrative cannot be told—or least it may
not work—otherwise.
One last objection to conventional treatments of myth and other religious language is the
social distribution of such knowledge and skill. It may be particularly misleading to
speak of “the myths, curses, spells, etc. of X society” because this material may be dif-
ferentially available to individuals or groups in the society. In many Australian Abori-
ginal societies, religious knowledge, including songs and stories, is the “property” of
specific individuals or clans, based on their kinship ties and relations to sacred places;
men who lack rights over those words may not utter them or share them. Further, myths
and songs exist in multiple versions, with less esoteric versions told in front of general
audiences and “inside” or esoteric versions reserved for initiated men. This observation
led various (male) anthropologists to assume that women were excluded from religious
knowledge and speech, until (female) anthropologists like Diane Bell (1993) accessed
women’s religion and proved that women controlled and performed their own myths,
rituals, and sacred places that were off-limits to men. In short, there was a conspicuous
gender division of labor in religious speech.
The power of words

We end by returning to the questions of belief and meaning raised in previous chapters.
The ordinary understanding of language is a symbolic system to convey ideas; therefore,
the obvious response is to “interpret” words and sentences for their “meaning.” But when
people utter a love spell or healing prayer or curse, they are not trying to transmit
meaning but to make someone fall in love or to heal a sickness or to inflict an injury.
How can words have such practical effects?
The notion that words can make things happen is not completely unfamiliar; after all,
the Judeo-Christian deity created the entire universe through speech. And many if not all
cultures insist that their speech-acts—whether prayers or songs or myths—have or at
least seek demonstrable impact on the world. J.L. Austin, in How to Do Things with
Words (1962), showed that this is less exotic than we think and not limited to religion.
He distinguished various functions of speech, including the customary propositional or
“locutionary” purpose; this is the “meaning” of a statement in the everyday sense, its
content or claim. As such, an utterance is either true or false. If I say, “The cat is on the
mat,” I am making a factual claim about the world, which is either true or not. Much of
our speech is of this sort—but less than we usually assume.
An entirely separate mode or function of language entails its “illocutionary force,” the
effect that the speech achieves or how saying something makes it so. When a priest or
minister says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the utterance accomplishes the act
and brings about the state of marriage. Other examples include a college dean or pre-
sident conferring degrees on graduates or a monarch knighting a servant. By speaking the
words “I knight thee” or “I confer this degree on you,” the recipient becomes a knight or
a college graduate. Of course, in the modern Western world, where not only language but
official pageantry and symbolism have lost much of their power and significance, students
feel equally graduated without the dean’s speech-act (they might not even attend the
ceremony), but the point is that for many people in many times and places speech has
been not merely a description of events but an actual doing of events.
Finally, Austin also mentioned the “perlocutionary force” of speech, in which words
neither describe facts nor effect changes but make psychological impressions on the
hearers. For instance, an utterance or series of utterances (namely, an “argument”) can
convince or persuade people to believe a claim or to come to a conclusion or, more
importantly, to take an action. Clearly much of political speech, not to mention adver-
tising, is of this sort. Hopefully a politician or a commercial speaks true facts, but that is not
really the point of the exercise, and certainly when a politician asks “Vote for me” or a
commercial pleads “Buy this product,” no fact is expressed. The goal is to alter the listeners’
thoughts and actions in particular ways, and as such the speech may succeed or fail.
A hugely important consequence of this analysis is that some kinds of talk cannot, at
least not primarily and usefully, be subjected to true/false analysis. Questions (“What
time is it?”), imperatives (“Open the window!”), and expletives (“Liver again, yuck”) are
among the non-propositional uses of language. Utterances that sound like propositions
may not be propositional but illocutionary or perlocutionary in function (e.g. “You are
under arrest” or “Be very afraid”), and non-propositional speech cannot in any mean-
ingful way be assessed as true or false. It might, however, be more or less successful or
effective. I might decide to vote for a candidate or not, to buy the product or not, to halt
for the police or not, or feel or not.
In order to be successful or effective, the speech must satisfy certain culturally and
situationally relevant conditions. It must be performed correctly, that is, the right words
must be said in the right way. It must be performed by someone authorized to perform it.
For instance, only an ordained priest can conduct a Catholic mass, and only a Taiwanese
Red-Head Master of Magic can perform an exorcism; it would not “work” or “count”
otherwise. It must be performed in the correct or “official” context and circumstances—
which explains the difference between a wedding rehearsal and a wedding. And perhaps
the performer must be in the correct social or spiritual or ritual condition (e.g. be pur-
ified, have observed prohibitions, or be in the right state of mind, including “sincerity,”
since performances can be “faked”). (See supplemental reading “The Power of Words in
Mongolian Divination.”)
Malinowski called myth a “charter,” and Geertz emphasized religion’s “modeling” capa-
city. Both referred not to description but to creation or production: religious language par-
ticularly, and language generally, not only portrays the world (model of) but produces the
world (model for). Language is productive, effective, because for many societies words have
power. Uttering the divine epithet, speaking the spell, chanting the incantation—doing these
things changes reality, either directly or through the intervention of the spirits, who listen,
respond, and act. However, as Keane emphasized, the problem with spirits as commu-
nicative partners is that their very spiritual nature makes communication uncertain. Thus
one vital difference between mundane talk and religious talk is that “the presence, engage-
ment, and identity of spiritual participants in the speech event cannot always be presupposed
or guaranteed” (Keane 1997: 50). Being often invisible, we are not even sure of their presence;
if they are present, we cannot be sure if they are listening, taking an interest, understanding,
or responding. Christians confront this issue in their quandary as to whether God answers
all prayers.
Because of the dangers inherent in any situation of speaking to superiors, and because
of the particular dangers in saying the wrong thing, religious speech may evince special
qualities (not totally foreign to mundane speech), such as repetition, formalization
(especially speaking in highly respectful ways), standardization and formulaic utterances,
and even the use of specialized “religious languages” (like Latin in Christianity or Arabic
in Islam). And other actions may be added to get the attention and approval of the
spiritual interlocutors, such as noise, pageantry, and material offerings.
Finally, as the mention of Latin and Arabic suggests, the power of words may not
depend at all upon understanding those words. Many Christian audiences sat through
Latin mass without any comprehension of the speech, confident in its truth and power.
Anthropologists have documented this phenomenon around the world. In Thailand,
Buddhist monks chanted for the public in obscure ancient Pali which was unintelligible to
layfolk; these chants “are meant to be heard but paradoxically they are not understood
by the congregation (nor by some of the monks themselves),” yet the villagers were
“emphatic that through listening to the words the congregation gains merit, blessings,
and protection” (Tambiah 1970: 195), which Tambiah labeled “the virtue of listening
without understanding” (196). In the Timor-Leste ceremony mentioned above, Rose
noted similarly that when asked what the speaker was talking about, “no one was able to
explain beyond saying (superfluously perhaps) that it was tradisaun or adat [tradition]”
(2018: 456). And as we have seen before, language need not be in verbal or legible form at all
to have power: a written verse in a Jewish mezuzah or phylactery (posted on a door-frame or
worn on the body, respectively) or embedded in an amulet or charm—or even swallowed in
the case of the Berti chalk verses dissolved and drunk (see Chapter 3)—exercises its power
without conferring “meaning.”
Conclusion
Language is an inherent aspect of human social life. Humans talk to each other in many
ways and for many mundane purposes. But they speak for other purposes—and to other
listeners—as well. One subject or subset of language is religious language, with most if
not all the same processes and properties of non-religious language, plus some distinct
ones of its own. Religion, positing nonhuman beings or agents, encourages humans to
speak to and about them too. It compels humans to communicate facts and feelings to
spiritual entities and to employ styles for these specific subjects, situations, and relations
that may not be used in any other moment of culture. And they speak of and to the
supernatural in order to unleash and direct the power of the religious dimension.
Myths, as a narrative repository of the knowledge of the past actions of superhuman
beings, have received most of the attention from students of religion. However, myths are
more than tales of the past; they explain, legitimize, and sanctify social and natural rea-
lity. Additionally, there are many other genres of religious language, including spells,
chants, songs, poetry, prayer, and sermons, each for its specific “audience” and purpose.
Surely in many instances the words and sentences in religious talk “mean” something,
but, as is often the case in ordinary speaking, “meaning” is not always the point. Instead,
religious talk and the specific ways in which this talk is performed contribute to the for-
mation of individual and collective thought, action, and organization and serves as an
effective means to influence and alter other humans and society, the natural world, and
the supernatural itself.
1 What is myth, and why has it been such a central topic in the study of religion? Why
did Malinowski call myth a “charter”?
2 What was Lévi-Strauss’s structural approach to religious language? What are its
strengths and weaknesses?
3 How is religious language a “performance,” and what does a performative approach
add to our understanding of religious language?
4 What are some of the other, non-narrative genres of religious language, and what
roles do they play in society?
5 What are the similarities and differences between ordinary language and religious
language? Why are they similar, and why are they different?
Stories of Spirit and Animal in Ainu Culture and Religion
Samoa and the Tongan Empire: A Political Myth
Prayer in a Society that Distrusts Words
The Power of Words in Mongolian Divination
Evangelical Christian Conversion as Language Learning
5 Ritual
Religion in action
On the day of Belaini’s desinto (male initiation ritual), the women of Bashada (southern
Ethiopia) refused to cooperate; they ceased their work and sat off to one side of the cer-
emonial area, leading people to ask, “What is that? Is it a d’abbi [culprit/wrongdoer]?”
(Epple 2018: 346). When a Bashada person commits an offense, the offended party may
take advantage of a ritual occasion to “publicly refuse to contribute to the ritual, thereby
bringing it to a standstill,” even if that means waiting for months or years for the right
moment (342). This is particularly true if the d’abbi is male and the victim is female,
since women do not ordinarily confront men directly. However, women’s participation in
male initiations is essential, “as they are the ones who fetch water and collect wood,
prepare the cooked food and drinks, and sing and dance for initiates and deceased as part
of the blessing” (345). When the women’s refusal causes a sudden halt, the guilty man is
unable to escape the charge or to resist the women’s demands. A mediator is chosen “to
find out the reason for the refusal, publicly ask for forgiveness, and agree to pay a fine or
compensation to the offended party” (342). By standing together to support their fellow
woman, the Bashada women seize key male rituals as “a chance for women to demand
their rights in front of men” when “one of them is insulted or treated disrespectfully”
(346). It is fair to say that, in Bashada society, interruption of a ritual is “a cultural
practice that, even though it impedes a specific process, is an acknowledged part of the
ritual domain” (342).
In the early years of anthropology, R.R. Marett proclaimed that religion “is, funda-
mentally, a mode of social behavior” (1909: ix). Like all social behavior, humans do it
together in groups, but unlike other social behavior, it also involves nonhuman/superhu-
man agents. In fact, in contrast to the reigning intellectualist approach of E.B. Tylor and
others (see Chapter 1), Marett felt that action was more important than ideas: religion,
especially but not exclusively “primitive” religion, “is something not so much thought out
as danced out,” favoring “emotional and motor processes” (xxxi). This attitude contra-
dicts the modern preference for ideas, explanations, and “meaning” with its devaluation
of behavior as mindless and rote. However, not all religions share the modern (some say
Protestant) perspective, and all religions engage in some behavior.
The previous chapter discussed various types of religious speech, with the view that
speaking is acting. Further, religious speech is often if not usually part of a larger per-
formance, including bodily motion and religious objects. We call such behavior ritual,
which can be a protracted multimedia performance of multiple “scenes” that may take
hours or days to complete. Victor Turner wrote that a ritual “is segmented into ‘phases’
or ‘stages’ and into subunits such as ‘episodes,’ ‘actions,’ and ‘gestures.’ To each of these
units and subunits corresponds a specific arrangement of symbols, of symbolic activities
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-5
Ritual 103
and objects” (1981: 3). Accordingly, a ritual typically recruits many genres of action,
from language to dance to stillness and silence to material items (masks, body painting,
sacred objects of various kinds) and food and any number of other elements.
In this chapter we will consider the role of ritual in religion. We will notice and
explore the fact that ritual as communication and social action is not unique to religion—
in fact, much of human life is “ritualized”—nor even to humans. It is quite clear that
social species, including humans, can and often do communicate or interact ritually.
Ultimately, ritual interaction may not be “communication” in the normal sense—that is,
the transmission of information—so much as social behavior intended to get things done,
to affect the social, natural, and supernatural world. And humans interact ritually with
superhuman beings because ritual is how humans interact.
The anthropology of ritual and ritualization

Ritual is present if not indispensable in all religions, yet Western societies tend to dismiss
it; Protestant Christianity explicitly condemned Catholic Christianity as ritualistic
“priestcraft.” When encountering foreign and “exotic” or “primitive” rituals and reli-
gions, Western observers were often quick to judge them as irrational if not simply false,
much like non-Western beliefs and myths. At best, non-Western ritual could be construed
as “symbolic,” in Sperber’s sense of the term, that is, a polite way of saying “false” (see
Chapter 3). But in his analysis of ritual efficacy, William Sax contends that the underlying
attitude was (and is) “not so much that it is nonrational, but rather that it is ineffective”
and thus not worth considering (2010: 4). Thus ritual “has come to be thought of in
popular discourse as a kind of action that is ineffective, superficial, and/or purely formal,
and this view is the unexamined premise behind much of ritual studies” (6), including
some anthropological studies. The task of ritual studies then becomes to “interpret”
rituals, to discover their “meaning,” since they could have no other point.
Sax responds, however, that ritual participants see things otherwise. Literally, many
societies lack the word “ritual,” and for instance in North India, “the closest analogue to
the term ‘ritual’ would be devakarya, ‘the work of the gods’”; significantly, Raymond
Firth also titled his 1939 ethnography of Polynesian ritual The Work of the Gods in
Tikopia. In short, “What we see as ritual, they see as technique” (Sax 2010: 4), as work
to perform, as business to conduct. (Interestingly, the Warlpiri use the English word
“business” to refer to their ritual activity.)
Nor is ritual exclusive to religion. College graduation is a ritual with little or no reli-
gious content or significance. Some hold that getting your first driver’s license and going
on your first date are rituals. We even speak of someone washing their hands or engaging
in some other such mundane behavior “ritualistically.” As Anthony Wallace commented,
“although ritual is the primary phenomenon of religion, the ritual process itself requires
no supernatural belief” (1966: 233). (See supplemental reading “Secular Ritual and
Women’s Empowerment: The Japanese Tea Ceremony.”)
Anthropologists have studied ritual intensely and defined it in many ways, including
the following:
Victor Turner: “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to techno-
logical routine, having reference to belief in mystical beings or powers. The symbol is
the smallest unit of ritual” (1967: 19).
104 Ritual
Stanley Tambiah: “a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is
constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in
multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree
by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and
redundancy (repetition)” (1979: 119).
Anthony Wallace: “communication without information: that is to say, each ritual is
a particular sequence of signals which, once announced, allows no uncertainty, no
choice, and hence, in the statistical sense of information theory, conveys no infor-
mation from sender to receiver. It is, ideally, a system of perfect order and any
deviation from this order is a mistake” (1966: 233).
Thomas Barfield: “prescribed, formal acts that take place in the context of religious
worship” as well as “any activity with a high degree of formality and a nonutilitarian
purpose. This usage includes not only clearly religious activities, but also such events as
festivals, parades, initiations, games, and greetings. In its broadest sense, ritual may refer
not to any particular kind of event but to the expressive aspect of all human activity. To
the extent that it conveys messages about the social and cultural status of individuals, any
human action has a ritual dimension. In this sense, even such mundane acts as planting
fields and processing foods share a ritual aspect with sacrifice and the mass” (1997: 410).
Edmund Leach: “Behavior which forms part of a signaling system and which serves to
‘communicate information,’ not because of any mechanical link between means and ends,
but because of a culturally defined communication code”; and “Behavior which is potent
in itself in terms of the cultural conventions of the actor but not potent in a rational-
technical sense … or alternatively behavior which is directed towards evoking the potency
of occult powers even though it is not presumed to be potent in itself” (1966: 403).
As different as these definitions sound, they share a few recurrent themes. They emphasize
action (although not always “practical” or “instrumental” action), patterning, and commu-
nication—even if, at least in some cases, that communication is regarded as “empty.”
Catherine Bell noted that ritual theories tend to stress “formality, fixity, and repetition” as
central aspects (1992: 91–92). Further, anthropological treatments of ritual have often sepa-
rated it from the more “cognitive” or “conceptual” dimension of religion. As she asserted:
Theoretical descriptions of ritual generally regard it as action and thus automatically

distinguish it from the conceptual aspects of religion, such as beliefs, symbols, and
myths. … Ritual is then described as particularly thoughtless action—routinized,
habitual, obsessive, or mimetic—and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and
mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.
(19)
She concluded that “beliefs could exist without rituals; rituals, however, could not exist
without beliefs” (19).
Ritual and the “interaction code”

Although ritual is a fundamental component of religion, it is not restricted to religion
in any way. Jack Goody asserted that “‘routinization,’ regularization, repetition, lie at
the basis of social life itself” (1977: 28). From this viewpoint, all of culture is “ritualistic”
Ritual 105
in the sense that it establishes and enacts patterned, fixed, communicative habits of
behavior.
In philosopher John Skorupski’s commentary on anthropological theories of symbo-
lism and religion related to ritual and ritualization, he indicated how the symbolist school
of Durkheim and most subsequent social scientists disregarded religion content or beliefs
and emphasized its expressive and representative functions. This conveniently exempted
them from engaging the truth-claims of a religion, which are often dubious. However, to
do so, he said, is to betray the member’s view of religion: “If Trobriand canoe magic is a
ritual which ‘stresses the importance of canoe-building for Trobrianders,’ then pre-
sumably running away from a lion is a ritual which expresses the importance of not
being eaten for the runner” (1976: 172). This satirical example makes Skorupski’s point
that perhaps the people mean what they say and do—and expect it to succeed.
He posited that most if not all rituals are “interaction ceremonies” in which humans as
agents interact with other agents, usually human. Interaction ceremonies “communicate”
between the parties in a conventional “language” that he called the interaction code.
“The point of interaction-code behavior is to establish or maintain (or destroy) an equi-
librium, or mutual agreement, among the people involved in an interaction as to their
relative standing or roles, and their reciprocal commitments and obligations” (77). Thus,
there is an available “vocabulary” of coded actions which participants master and from
which they select to construct their interactions with each other.
Interaction-code (IC) behavior is not solely human. Skorupski considered it “part of a
more general form of social life” (77) which we would see in virtually all social species.
Certain species-specific behaviors “mean” a challenge or a surrender or an invitation to
mate, if they are performed correctly. And if all goes well, the behaviors should also
invoke the appropriate response. Interestingly, just as cats, birds, or fish need not
“understand” or “agree to” the interaction code, so humans need not either. Humans
only have to be able to perform the code, with or without “believing” it or “meaning”
it. The point of IC behavior rather is “that people should use the code to establish the
relationship which ought—in accordance with other norms—to hold between them, to
maintain it, to re-establish it if it is thrown out of equilibrium and to terminate it
properly” (83–84). And this code permeates human society, from the grand religious
gestures through the high-level political ones of prostrating oneself before the king and
kissing his ring to the minor and mundane ones that pervade and lubricate everyday life
like handshaking and exchanging greetings—what John Haviland (2009) has aptly
called “little rituals.”
While IC behavior is part of daily life, it is distinguished from ordinary activity by its
elaboration and formality. IC behavior, and especially ceremonial and ritual behavior, is
singular in its seriousness, precision, stereotypy, and detail. Part of this elaboration
ensures that the ritual is done correctly, but another part is self-referential, that is, a way
“of marking out, emphasizing, underlining the fact of code behavior” (87). It must be
clear and apparent to participants that this is not normal everyday behavior but some-
thing special that demands a (perhaps equally elaborate, formal, and specific) response—
what he called operative acts. “Operative acts are performed to set up new patterns of
rules. Hence one can also say that they can establish people in new statuses or roles, and
can set up new institutions” (99). Operative acts “are produced, then, by being said to be
produced (the ‘saying’ need not be verbal, of course)” (103). Thus, interaction-code
behavior, of which the most striking is religious ritual, does not in his view so much
represent social realities as create and perpetuate them.
106 Ritual
The formality and fixity of ritualized behavior help to assure communicative success; if
the action is always done the same way, there should be no confusion over its intention.
Communication in this sense means not so much the conveyance of information as the
achievement of goals. It follows, then, that different kinds of communicative/interactive
situations, between different kinds of actors, would display kind different kinds or
degrees of ritualization. In other words, ritual behavior falls along a spectrum, from
individual/compulsive to casual to etiquette/diplomacy to normal religious to liturgical.
Individual rituals would include repetitive behaviors that a single person performs, often
not culturally acquired at all and even “neurotic,” such as superstitious gestures or
obsessive hand washing, etc. These behaviors often have meaning for the individual, but
more important they (are believed to) have results too—perhaps to insure success in
sports or love or to protect one from the harmful consequences of germs or a more gen-
eral loss of personal control.
Casual rituals, the first level of interaction-code behavior, occur continuously in human
social life. From saying hello and shaking hands to more elaborate and situational rou-
tines, societies have a set of culturally appropriate interactional patterns that would seem
odd if omitted or done improperly. Etiquette typically appears at more formal social
occasions, such as festive gatherings or ceremonial dinners. There is a proper way to send
thank-you notes after a wedding and a correct fork to use at a dinner; there are the polite
things to say to a host or friend (or an enemy). Mastery and performance of these rituals
verifies one’s social skill and status as well as respect (or disrespect) for one’s peers; it is
easy to accidentally (or intentionally) send other messages—including slights and
insults—by subtly modifying or ignoring the code. Specialized rituals pertain to particular
occasions. In courtrooms, for example, there are ritualized ways of standing and speak-
ing, rituals for swearing oaths, and such. Diplomacy, on the other hand, tends to emerge
when persons of power interact, like heads of state. The formality and predictably of
diplomatic rituals minimizes misunderstandings when respect is due and the stakes are
unusually high.
Normal religious rituals tend to escalate the formality and stereotypy, since for the first
time on the ritual continuum nonhuman and superhuman agents are participating.
Greater beings must be approached with more respect and caution, although not all
religions or religious occasions are necessarily solemn. Further, while a certain degree of
formulaic repetition is typical of religious ritual, there is also a degree of freedom and
creativity in how the formulas are invoked and employed. Even religious rituals allow for
some deviation, invention, or interpretation. Liturgies are the most formal, fixed, and
weighty of rituals, in which the exact gestures, objects, and words must be used in the
precisely correct ways in order. In fact, a poorly or wrongly done liturgy can be worse
than no liturgy at all. The Catholic mass is an example of a highly formalized liturgy,
and other Christian and non-Christian religions also have liturgical aspects or moments,
like the Kuna rituals discussed in the previous chapter. (See supplemental reading “Cog-
nitive Science of Religion and Ritual Competence: McCauley and Lawson.”)
Box 5.1 Humor and violation in ritual: The Yaqui “ritual clown”
For most Western observers, nothing could be more anathema to religion than humor
and hijinks. Nevertheless, across cultures there is a class of ritual specialists some-
times collectively known as “ritual clowns.” Often dismissed as irrelevant if not con-
trary to the sacred business of ritual, their ubiquity calls us to take them seriously. The
Ritual 107
ritual clown, known by specific local terms, is often, like the incongruous figure at a
Pakistani wedding, an “outrageous and disorderly figure,” grotesque, contradictory, or
liminal (see below), free to break norms and taboos—in the Pakistani case a trans-
vestite who “joins in the sexual joking, bawdy pranks and erotic dancing in the
women’s quarters” (Werbner 1986: 228). Among the Hopi (southwestern United
States) the tsukskut clowns accompany the katsina ancestor spirits during the holiest
ceremonies. Performing “creative and spontaneous” skits that “range from slapstick to
seriousness, from G-rated to XXX-rated” (Hieb 2008: 108), the clowns personify
everything that is qahopi (un-Hopi, bad, inappropriate) and yet are considered “priests
whose role is sacred and serious” (107). Looking more closely at the Chapayeka role
among the Yaquis (Mexico), Marianna Keisalo describes them as “masked ritual
clowns representing Judas and the Roman soldiers in the Easter ritual” (2016: 101). In
a society where “participation in ritual is seen as the performance of ritual labor
(luturia), good in itself,” the Chapayekas blend “innovation and convention” in antics
sometimes “playful and quite intentionally very funny” and sometimes “more straight-
forward, aloof, or even frightening” (102). Always enacted by married adult men, they
wear masks portraying non-Yaquis like “foreigners, animals, mythological figures, and
also characters from television and movies” such as Chucky from the horror-film
series or Rambo (107). In one instance a Chapayeka talked into a toy cell phone; in
another, he played with a red yo-yo in the middle of church. The point and the value of
the Yaqui clowns is they can cross boundaries, even the boundary between sacred and
profane. With their behavioral unpredictability they “do not just represent otherness in the
world-outside-the-ritual, they bring it with them” (115). For this very reason, their clown-
ing, with its “reversible reversals into invention and back to convention within the Yaqui
Easter ritual, is a part of the efficacy and power of the total ritual” (116).
Whatever their form and content, the essential aspect of interaction rituals is that they are
interactions that “call out” and demand certain responses. That is, ritual actions request the
receiver—human or superhuman—not only to know something but to do something. Ulti-
mately, religious ritual as a distinct species of coded behavior cannot be understood without
considering and taking seriously the religious beliefs of the society: what kinds of beings and
forces are there, and what can they do? Accordingly, Skorupski concluded that “to a large
extent religious rites are social interactions with authoritative or powerful beings within the
actor’s social field, and … their special characteristics are in large part due to the special
characteristics these beings are thought to have” (165). In other words, if you bow deeply to
a human superior, you would likely bow (maybe more deeply) to a superhuman one. Reli-
gious ritual extends the interaction code beyond the human realm into the nonhuman, to
include those nonhuman agents that the particular society “believes in.” Recall Robin Hor-
ton’s definition of religion (see Chapter 1), “an extension of the field of people’s social rela-
tionships beyond the confines of purely human society” (1960: 211).
Beyond communication: Ritual efficacy, success, and failure

The emphasis on interaction undoubtedly contributes to our understanding of the place
of ritual in everyday and religious contexts, but it also perpetuates the presumption of
108 Ritual
ritual as “communication” that many religion scholars have come to criticize. After all, if
religion wants to communicate something—in ritual or in myth—then why not just say
or do it more clearly and directly?
Frits Staal deliberately moved ritual studies in the opposite direction. He insisted that
ritual is meaningless, in contrast to the standard notion that “it consists in symbolic
activities which refer to something else” (1979: 3). He by no means implied that ritual
was pointless but instead that ritual “is primarily activity”; even more, “It is an activity
governed by explicit rules. The important thing is what you do, not what you think,
believe, or say” (4). Brahmin priests in Hinduism never offer symbolic interpretations of
their ritual activity: when asked why they perform a ritual, they say:
we do it because our ancestors did it; because we are eligible to do it; because it is
good for society; because it is good; because it is our duty; because it is said to lead
to immortality; because it leads to immortality.
(3)
In short, Staal argued that people engage in ritual because they feel that they must engage
in ritual. Ritual is “pure activity” (9), done because that is what you do.
Staal took the remarkable step of actually listening to what local practitioners said
about their own ritual acts, but the sheer obligatoriness of ritual—ritual for ritual’s
sake—is but one way in which “meaning” misses the point of ritual. In fact, listening
closely to the Brahmin priests, they also insisted that rituals are “good for society” and
that they “lead to” something. In other words, people perform rituals not only because
they must but because they expect some result from them; as said before, sufferers seek
curing rituals, and specialists perform them, not to “communicate” but to recover, and
pilgrims undertake grueling journeys to heal, to reverse their luck, to achieve practical
benefits. Rituals, from the members’ viewpoint, have effects.
As mentioned in the first chapter, Durkheim elevated ritual to the center of his reli-
gious theory. For him, ritual was the process by which, the moment in which, society was
forged. When people are gathered in ritual events:
a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to

extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without
resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each re-
echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others. The initial impulse thus proceeds,
growing as it goes, as an avalanche grows in its advance. And as such active passions
so free from all control could not fail to burst out, on every side one sees nothing but
violent gestures, cries, veritable howls, and deafening noises of every sort, which aid
in intensifying still more the state of mind which they manifest. … So it is in the
midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself
that the religious idea seems to be born.
(1965: 247)
This psychological experience of ritual “effervescence” served the function or had the
effect of binding individuals into a social unit.
Still, most people do not perform rituals, at least consciously, to integrate society; their
goals are much more immediate and personal. When Eva, a Mexican curandera (female
healer), conducted a ceremony for Jorge, she aimed to relieve his fear and distress,
Ritual 109
sometimes diagnosed as susto, fright resulting from “soul loss” (see Chapter 7). She
combined words, objects (herbs, a pan of mesquite coals, bolts of purple cloth, Tarot
cards, etc.), and physical gestures and acts in her curing ritual. First she massaged Jorge’s
feet, then she performed “a limpia—a cleansing or barrida, ‘sweeping’—to remove
negative forces” across his body with burning sage (Mulcahy 2010: 40). She sent him
away with a protective amulet. When the anthropologist received her own ritual treat-
ment, she got a limpia, a pan of coals under her feet, holy water on her hands and feet,
and a “sweet-smelling purple cloth lightly over my head” (43).
Some elements of ritual acts may be “symbolic” in the sense of a conceptual or visible
relationship between the act/object and its goals. In Turner’s groundbreaking study of
Ndembu “rituals of affliction,” the mujiwu plant was used to treat infertility because it
“has many roots, therefore many children” (1981: 61); likewise, sections of wood were
carved into figurines resembling babies, and a red mixture of rooster blood, clay, bark,
and the patient’s own hair and nails was applied to the figurines, reminiscent of men-
strual or birth blood. But the symbolism pointed to the intent and the effect of the ritual,
namely, healthy fertility.
And, whatever outsiders may think of it, insiders are often convinced of the efficacy of
their ritual actions and objects. Among the Afro-indigenous Miskitu (Honduras), women
practice praidi saihka (“Friday’s medicine,” sexual magic) to “beguile men” into surren-
dering their money (Herlihy 2006: 143). Such medicines (sika) are used for many practical
purposes, “for healing physical, emotional, and psychological illness,” and “both men
and women wholeheartedly believe in the effectiveness of these potions to control the
emotions and actions of others” (150). In the society where men often work far from
home and may take mistresses while away and accuse their wives of infidelity, women
make a variety of substances to “bewitch men into falling in love with them, beguile them
into giving them cash and gifts, and bewilder them by erasing their memories of former
wives and families” (153). So sure are the men in the power of these ritual concoctions
that some bought “counteractive potions and charms to defend themselves” in a sort of
ritual arms race (151).
Nor do we encounter such thinking only in pre-modern and “backward” societies.
Contemporary feminist witches in New Zealand ply their craft during eight annual fes-
tivals and “to mark important rites of passage in women’s lives,” but they also perform
“mini-rituals” or spells individually or in groups “mainly for a specific instrumental pur-
pose” (Rountree 2002: 44). After first setting a ritual altar, they cast a circle and do a
purification by, for instance, “passing around a bowl of sea water or perfumed fresh
water for women to wash in” or stroking each other’s “auras with a flowering branch or
a smoldering sage wand” (45). Then they reach “the heart of the ritual, which involves
symbolic activity related to the ritual’s theme and purpose, along with chanting, singing,
and sometimes drumming and dancing” (45). The efficacy of such ritual follows from a
shamanic notion “that all matter, energy, and consciousness are connected in a dynamic,
interactive system” (47) and therefore that human action and thought can influence the
world’s matter and energy.
Fascinatingly, the New Zealand witches contradict two other standard assumptions of
ritual theorists. First, their rituals are not entirely rote and unchangeable; they “are not
concerned about using any prescribed, hallowed or hereditary tools, ingredients, or pro-
cedures,” and there “are no prescribed word forms or formulas which are believed to
possess special inherent power” (Rountree 2002: 51). Considerable freedom and creativity
are left to the ritualists. Second, and therefore:
110 Ritual
It is impossible to make a dangerous mistake, or any mistake, while doing a spell.
No ritual specialist or high priestess is believed to “know best” or is required to
perform the spell or to guarantee its efficacy. Anyone may do a spell for any purpose
she chooses (except to harm someone) and may invent the spell herself, choosing the
symbolic objects, words and actions she wants to use.
(51)
Box 5.2 Ritual resistance: The anti-Trump witchcraft movement

Rituals may be aimed at broader, even political, goals—as witnessed in the
#MagicResistance movement against President Donald Trump. In 2016 Michael
Hughes disseminated “A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him,”
and subsequently witchcraft practitioners opposed to the president “perform monthly
rituals to symbolically bind Trump in order to prevent him from doing harm” (Fine
2022: 142). Hughes’ original spell included three symbolic representations of Trump—
“an unflattering photo of Trump (small),” the Tower card from a tarot deck (associated
with “misery, distress, … calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin” according to A.E. Waite’s
1911 The Pictorial Key to the Tarot), and “a tiny stub of an orange candle” on which
Trump’s name is inscribed (146). For satire on Trump’s orange complexion, practi-
tioners have added baby carrots and shriveled Cheetos as symbolic representations.
Many also use insulting nicknames like “Cheeto,” “Toddler in Chief,” “tmurp,” “trunt,”
or “SCROTUS the impeached,” suggesting a belief in the spiritual power of names: the
nicknames may constitute an “intentional mangling” of his name or a cautious avoid-
ance of his real name. During the ritual itself, practitioners “perform actions to change
the position or material state of each symbol,” expecting to impose similar effects on
the man (146). The Tower card is turned upside down, and the candle’s flame burns
the photo. Each physical action is accompanied by words of power: “As the practi-
tioner lights the orange candle stub inscribed with Trump’s name, they are told to say,
‘I call upon you/To bind Donald J. Trump/So that his malignant works may utterly fail.’”
Then they beseech spirits to “Strike down their towers of vanity” as they flip the Tower
card face down.
At the culmination of the spell, when the practitioners ask the spirits to “Bind them
in chains/Bind their tongues/Bind their works/Bind their wickedness,” they are
instructed to light the photo of Trump on fire, burn it, then blow out the orange
candle, “visualizing Trump blowing apart into dust or ash.”
(146)
Increasingly, the ritual ends with Trump’s signature phrase, “You’re fired” as the pho-
tograph burns. Afterwards, the candle remains are buried at a crossroads or disposed
in running water, Trump thereby equally dispatched.
Finally, since not all religions share the confidence of New Zealand witchcraft or
Miskitu sexual magic, there is the ever-present threat of ritual failure. Across cultures,
there are a number of ways in which rituals may fail. Most obviously, they may fail to
produce their desired effects, for instance an Ihanzu rain ceremony (see Chapter 1) may
Ritual 111
bring no rain. There are many ways to account for such ineffectiveness, including cer-
tainly the agency of supernatural beings, who may choose not to respond. Second, and as
a further explanation, humans may perform the ritual incorrectly or fail to complete the
procedures (Schieffelin 2007: 3).
The classic study of ritual failure is Geertz’s case of a funeral in Java, which he blamed
on social change and the consequent mismatch “between the cultural framework of
meaning and the patterning of social interaction” (1957: 53). This is always a distinct
possibility, although rituals have also demonstrated flexibility in adjusting to changed
society. On other occasions, the ritual may be at least temporarily disrupted by practical
circumstances, as when a ceremonial chariot tipped over during a procession in Nepal,
delaying the proceedings for a month (Emmrich 2007). Or individuals may refuse to
allow the ritual to occur, briefly like the Bashada women discussed earlier or permanently
as with some animal sacrifice rituals that people no longer tolerate.
When a ritual does not deliver the expected outcome for Garhwalis (Himalayan India),
people “start looking for the reasons for the failure,” and the party or parties “identified
as responsible for this failure … will thus have to suffer the social consequences” (Polit
2007: 201). Such befell a childless woman who remained infertile despite repeated ritual
interventions: after she claimed a miscarriage, a ritual specialist concluded that:
he had bound the demon [that afflicted her] for three months and that he had told
her to come back after that to perform another final ritual that would then rid her of
the demon. Since she had not come for this final ritual, he said, the demon had been
set free again and had destroyed her child.
(205)
Her own alleged guilt for her barrenness and miscarriage forced her to accept a second
wife for her husband.
Finally, a ritual system may include mechanisms for its own interruption and change.
In the village of Itaran (Bali, Indonesia), two parallel or rival ceremonial processes
coexist. Hindu priests (pedanda) preside over a formal ritual in which the gods arrive to
accept offerings and the human attendees receive holy water and blessed rice. A second,
much more raucous ritual features “a trance séance with many people actively partici-
pating with outbursts of yells and abrupt motions, with people fainting and dancing
about wildly” (Hauser-Schäublin 2007: 250). During such events, “priests and the audi-
ence anticipate that the gods will reveal mistakes, the breaking of taboos, incomplete-
ness—thus a lack of ritual efficacy” (251), and accordingly at one séance a goddess
criticized the priests for situating her shrine in the wrong place in the temple. After pro-
viding her the blood sacrifice she demanded, the priests promised ambiguously “to
upgrade her status in the near future” (252).
Rites of passage: The structure of ritual

Students of religion like Victor Turner have suggested that there is a “ritual process” that
transcends the superficial differences between rituals to unify them at a deeper level.
Turner wrote extensively on the ritual process, developing the ideas of Arnold van
Gennep on so-called “rites of passage.” Many rituals around the world occur at key
moments in the life of individuals, groups, or society as a whole. Rituals attend these key
moments—moments when things are changing or threatening to change in some way,
112 Ritual
such as puberty, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, and death. Even more, though, the
rituals help or serve to accomplish the change occurring at that moment; along the lines
of illocutionary speech acts, the ritual facilitates the change rather than merely acknowl-
edging or celebrating it.
In Turner’s (1969) model, the ritual process involves three stages, the middle of which
drew the bulk of his attention. These three stages can be conceptualized as follows:
Separation ! Marginality/Liminality ! Aggregation
The best way to think of this progression is in terms of the condition or status of the
subjects before and after the ritual. Prior to a ritual, a person is in some state—say,
unmarried or juvenile or ill. Subsequent to the ritual, the person is in a different state—
say, married or adult or healthy. Something happens in between that transforms the
individual from one status to another. However, that cannot happen without two con-
comitant things happening—the loss or falling away or “death” of the old status and the
journey through an ambiguous transitional phase.
Thus, a rite of passage typically begins with a symbolic break from the previous status.
In some societies, an initiation ritual of youths into adulthood (perhaps the classic rite of
passage) or of a shaman into his or her new vocation starts with a capture of the candi-
date and even a mock “death.” In the case of coming-of-age initiations, adult men may
enter the community and seize the young males while their mothers wail that they will
never see their children again. In a certain sense, they are correct. The adolescents may be
sequestered from the rest of society for the duration of the ritual or for weeks or months
at a time, where they are put through trials including physical operations like circumci-
sion or scarification, shown sacred objects, and instructed in religious knowledge. Or
there may be little such “training.” In the Gisu (Uganda) initiation ritual, males aged
eighteen to twenty-five were publicly circumcised and then given gifts like farming tools,
signifying their entry into manhood. However, what they did not receive was any specific
teaching. The main function of the ritual, other than to announce maturity, was to gen-
erate the emotional or psychological trait called lirima, the manly quality of violent
emotion, connected with anger, jealousy, hatred, and resentment. It was not totally wild
emotion, though; it also implied or required self-control, strength of character, bravery,
and will. It was the characteristic that enabled men to overcome fear (the ritual itself was
a test of overcoming fear), but it was also a dangerous characteristic, one that produced
aggressiveness in men that even the Gisu themselves regretted (Heald 1986).
To return to Turner’s model, having been separated from their social world and their
previous lives, the candidates for rites of passage enter into the second or “liminal” (from
the Latin limen or threshold) stage. This is a condition that Turner described as “betwixt
and between,” not another status but a non-status. It is the absence of status, a social no-
place, but a condition of potential. It is the doorway or portal between statuses, the road
that links the origin and destination. This non-status takes a variety of symbolic forms,
often likened to or expressed as death, wilderness, return to the womb, even bisexuality.
It is without name, rank, or social identity. Occupants of this threshold might be
deprived of possessions including clothes; they came into life naked, so they must enter
into their new life naked. They are often expected to be obedient, passive, receptive, and
non-assertive. In other situations, including periodic rituals partaken by adults, the lan-
guage of liminality may involve opposites, doing things “backward” or “upside down,”
and other forms of contradiction or violation of everyday behavior, as we will see below.
Ritual 113
In a way, the liminal condition is a lowly one, virtually outside of society altogether. In
another way, though, it is a sacred condition—special, powerful, and perhaps dangerous.
One particular way in which liminality combines all these features is in the elimination of
distinctions, social and otherwise. It is a manifestation of the unnamed state, the cir-
cumstance when all things are equal but therefore unstructured. Turner refers to this
condition as communitas, a kind of undifferentiated and structureless existence. There are
no children or adults, no males or females, no kings and commoners. As an example,
when Muslim pilgrims undertake the hajj or journey to Mecca, they shed their markings
of nationality or rank and don the same white robes, indicating the shared (and therefore
undifferentiated) status of pilgrim (see below).
It should be easy to see that, while this is a creative state, it is also an unstable one.
Neither individuals nor society can endure liminality for long. In other words, “all sus-
tained manifestations of communitas must appear as dangerous and anarchical, and have
to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions, and conditions” (Turner 1969:
109). Interestingly, Turner identified this communitas experience in other social locations
besides the liminality of ritual passage, including the status of “hippies,” monks, pro-
phets, and jesters/comedians, and no doubt poets and artists—all those people who are at
the margins or the “interstices” or the bottom of society. Structured society tolerates
them, even benefits from them, but their “anti-structure” always poses a threat to social
order. They also represent the creative corner from which new social orders will emerge.
Thus, ultimately, society, via religion and ritual, is a cycle or dialectic of communitas and
differentiation, anarchy and order.
The diversity of religious ritual

Despite the commonalities of religious (and non-religious) rituals, there is also great
diversity among them, both in structure and in their function. Anthony Wallace (1966)
suggested that we regard religion as a composite of discrete bits, a cumulative phenom-
enon composed of identifiable and not necessarily distinctively religious building blocks
(see Chapter 1). Rituals, he proposed, are built out of even more elementary particles, the
thirteen different activities including prayer, music/dancing/singing, physiological exercise
(e.g. self-mortification, drug ingestion, food and sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation,
etc.), exhortation (messages or commands to other people including orders, threats, and
words of comfort or encouragement), myth, simulation/imitation (e.g. magic, ritual, and
witchcraft), mana or power, taboo or restrictions, feasts, sacrifice, congregation,
inspiration, and symbolism and symbolic objects. Any actual ritual could contain any or
all of these parts in any combination, including multiple instances of each (e.g. a number
of different prayers or simulations or symbols). Of course, the list of ritual elements is
disputable and could be longer or shorter, nor is every entry on it is necessarily elemen-
tary: prayer or sacrifice or congregation may itself be a composite of multiple ritual
objects and gestures.
Anthropologists have also attempted to sort rituals into typologies. Wallace divided
rituals into five categories:
1 Technical, those intended to achieve natural or supernatural effects through “techni-

que,” the more or less mechanical manipulation of objects and words which is more
or less guaranteed to bear results. We might think of it as a version of “spiritual
technology” or “spiritual cause-and-effect”: do X and Y will result.
114 Ritual
2 Therapeutic/anti-therapeutic, for curing or preventing illness or other misfortune
(e.g. bad luck), or alternately for causing such misfortune. In many societies, it is
believed that much if not most or all harm, sickness, and death are attributable to
spiritual causes, human or otherwise. Forest Clements (1932) proposed that there are
six sources of misfortune understood across cultures, one natural and five spiritual:
magic, object intrusion, soul loss, spirit intrusion (possession), and breach of taboo.
Therefore, the appropriate solution for (or way to cause) such circumstances is ritual
(see Chapter 7).
3 Salvation, that seek to cause change of personality. Since salvation is such a specifi-
cally Christian concept, another term like “transformation ritual” or “psychological
ritual” might be more cross-culturally informative and appropriate.
4 Ideological, rites of social control, in which individuals, groups, or society in its
entirety are moved, influenced, and manipulated. These rituals function to structure
social reality and to adjust individuals to that reality, creating the rules and experi-
ences that shape and perpetuate the members’ reality. Some of these rituals are
instructional or informative, while others are intended to instill “moods and moti-
vations” upon which society depends.
5 Revitalization, which appear when a society, or at least some segment of a society, is
in crisis, providing the language and practice for rethinking rules, roles, and realities
and for responding to the critical challenges with a new vision intended to breathe
new life into a staggering social, natural, and supernatural order. Among the types of
rituals or ritual movements in this category are messianic and millenarian rites, cargo
cults, nativism and fundamentalism, syncretism, separatism/schism or the founding
of new religious sects within an existing tradition or church, and “new religious
movements” with more or less novel spiritual beliefs and agendas (see Chapters 8, 9,
and 10).
Catherine Bell (1997) proposed an alternate list of ritual types based on their functions,
including:
1 Rites of passage or life crisis rituals, which “accompany and dramatize” key
moments in individual life such as birth, adulthood, marriage, and death. Consistent
with Turner’s concept of ritual passage, these rites “culturally mark” but also
achieve or cause transition from one life stage to another (Bell 1997: 94).
2 Calendrical or commemorative rituals, which occur regularly at certain times of year.
Rather than a “kind” of ritual, they are a means for organizing or timing rituals. Bell
suggested two main types—seasonal rituals (for instance those that fall at moments
in the agricultural cycle) and commemorative rituals (those that harken back to cer-
tain historical events, like Christmas or Hannukah).
3 Rites of exchange and communion, during which participants offer gifts or sacrifices
to the gods, spirits, or ancestors, often with the expectation of receiving something in
return.
4 Rites of affliction, intended to relieve illness or misfortune caused by spiritual
sources.
5 Rites of feasting, fast, and festival, which often emphasize “the public display of
religiocultural sentiments” (120). Feasting and fasting illustrate the religious sig-
nificance of food, while festivals may range in mood from boisterous play to “sober
suffering” (120).
Ritual 115
6 Political rituals, designed to “construct, display and promote the power of political
institutions (such as king, state, village elders) or the political interests of distinct
constituencies and subgroups” (128).
Plainly there is overlap but also discrepancy between the two categorizations. Neither
is perfect. For instance, Bell’s “calendrical rituals” are not a type of ritual but can include
any type, or more than one type; likewise, rites of exchange and of feasting/fasting are
more properly conceived as elements of various rituals than as stand-alone ceremonies.
Political rituals, especially in modern Western societies, may be (almost) entirely secular,
without reference to the supernatural.
Technical rituals
Weaving together these two proposals for classifying ritual activity, we should first
acknowledge that most if not all rituals are “technical” in the sense that they employ actions
(techniques) intended to have some demonstrable effect. One subtype of technical ritual is a
rite of intensification, which seeks to increase the fertility or number of natural species. It is
widely claimed across cultures that humans have a power if not a duty to preserve and
reproduce the natural life of the earth. The Inuit, like most foraging societies, shared a fun-
damental and inescapable spiritual relationship with nature. Most acutely, they believed that
the seal was or had a spirit, and the Seal Goddess animated and guided the beasts. Seals,
spiritual as well as material beings, participated reciprocally with humans in the hunt; far
superior to humans, they could easily elude capture if they chose, yet they volunteered their
lives for the benefit of humans. This was a gesture that humans could not take lightly: dis-
respecting the seal might cause it to stop offering itself for the hunt.
Therefore, the Yupik people, for instance, had a complex of three rituals in which they
honored the seal and requested its continued self-sacrifice. In the first of these, the Blad-
der Festival, fallen seals were honored by returning their preserved bladders to their
ocean home. The bladder was the chosen body part for ritualization because the Yupik
believed that it was the seat of yua, roughly translated as “spirit.” (Yua comes from the
same root as yupik, their word for themselves, literally “person.”) In the Bladder Festival,
songs and dances were performed to entertain the animal spirits. The Messenger Festival,
so named because communities sent messengers to their guests to inform them of the
event, also invoked the hunted animals; masked dancers would imitate the behavior of
seals as well as the actions of hunting and killing them. However, masks were most
intricately involved in the Inviting-In Feast (Agayuyaraq or “way of requesting”), in
which masked dancers entreated the animals to offer themselves up to the hunters again
during the next season—in other words, the animals were “invited in” to participate in
the hunt along with the hunters who were ready to receive them. As a critical part of the
ritual, shamans wearing masks would travel to the moon, where the moon-man spirit
who controls the movements of all animals lives.
Another ritual considered technical by Wallace is divination, which often entails using
some material object or substance to discern information from the gods or spirits (see
Chapter 3). This can include tarot cards, I Ching wands, the stars, or the entrails of
sacrificed animals where spiritual beings may write messages for the skilled specialist to
read (recall the pig’s livers named in Meto divination in Chapter 4).
Although Wallace does not mention it, perhaps this is the right moment to discuss
magic as well. Magic is frequently distinguished from religion in that the former is more
116 Ritual
technical and the latter more social; so claimed James Frazer. Magic supposedly works
directly on the object of magical action, while religion tends to depend on an indirect
relationship between means and ends, mediated by spirits or gods. For instance, rain
magic or “voodoo” functions by immediately affecting the clouds or the human victim
through manipulation of materials (water, perhaps, or an effigy of the victim). Magical
behaviors cause or compel their effects. Religion, on the other hand, requires the assis-
tance and will of spiritual others; humans cannot cause effects but can petition for them.
As Malinowski expressed it, religion is a social thing, an end in itself, whereas magic is a
means to an end. Note, however, that as a technique magic can be implicated in various
types of rituals, including rites of passage and therapeutic rituals/rituals of affliction.
Most famously, Frazer divided magic into two types, imitative/sympathetic and con-
tagious. Imitative magic relies on some similarity between the technique and the end: a
rain-making ceremony in which water is poured onto the ground imitates the goal of rain
falling from the sky. Resemblance between the object of the ritual and its target also
qualifies: a doll that represents a human victim can substitute for the victim in a magical
or sorcery ritual. Turner’s discussion of Ndembu symbolism or Fine’s case of anti-Trump
magic rests on the same principle. Contagious magic, on the other hand, depends on a
physical contact or connection that exists or has existed between the technique and the
goal. This might involve the manipulation of a lock of hair, a bit of fingernail, or a piece
of clothing of a person in order to make magic on it, thus transferring the effects from
the part to the whole. Touching someone with a magically powerful object could also
qualify.
Therapeutic rituals/rituals of affliction

Both Wallace and Bell highlight rituals intended to cure—or to cause—sickness and
misfortune. Mulcahy’s case above of the Mexican curandera is clearly an instance of
therapeutic/affliction ritual. One common form or context of therapeutic ritual is sha-
manism (see Chapters 3 and 7). A task of the shaman is diagnosis and treatment of
complaints by a combination of spiritual (e.g. soul flight) and material (e.g. medicinal
plants) means. Other specialists like witches and sorcerers inflict harm, sorcerers classi-
cally by manipulation and ritual, whereas witches are often understood as people with
“natural,” even organic, powers to cause harm when they project malice or negative
emotions such as anger or jealousy (see Chapter 6). A witch or sorcerer alternatively
might use his or her power to ward off the evil effects of others, either for themselves or
for their clients.
Christianity too has a place for therapeutic and anti-therapeutic practices. Faith healers
are believed to channel divine power, often through their hands and touch, to cure the
faithful of all manner of maladies, commonly including sensory loss (e.g. blindness and
deafness), pain and paralysis, and diseases like cancer. This curative function also entails
in many cases combating the destructive power of demons or the very devil himself.
Other specific traditions, such as Christian Science or Seventh-day Adventism, have taken
the health effects of religion and spiritual forces even further.
Rites of passage
Curiously, Wallace does not identify rites of passage specifically, although such rituals
could fall within his “salvation” category. And while Bell does place them on her list, it is
Ritual 117
Figure 5.1 A shaman performing a ritual to heal a sick child in Sikkim (India). Courtesy of the
Alice S. Kandell Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
worth noting that such rituals can vary tremendously within a society and can feature
many different ritual practices over a protracted (often days, weeks, or longer) period.
The most familiar instance of passage rites is initiation into adulthood. In many
societies, men—and in more than a few societies, women—undergo elaborate and often
painful rituals to pass from juvenile to adult. In Aboriginal Australia, young males were
subjected to isolation, circumcision, tooth evulsion, and nasal piercing as part of their
initiation ordeal. On the island of Samoa, tattooing is a major initiatory practice. A
“technical” ritual after a fashion, a kind of “doing” (fai) in which the master tattooists
(tufuga ta- tatau) apply their skills and tools to a human body, tattooing as described by
Sébastien Galliot results in not just body modification or art but “genuine living artefacts
used by bearers after their creation” (2015: 117). The operation accomplishes the state of
adulthood as “the pain of initiation reveals to the patient his own limits and the extent of
his courage” while also demonstrating to the society “the patient’s state of mind (good or
bad) and the quality of the relations between the people involved in making the tattoo”
(113). And the efficacy of the process “is guaranteed by a series of technical actions con-
sisting of different ways of acting on a set of animal and vegetable materials and sub-
stances” (105), tools and pigments which may be attributed with life and agency of their
own. (See supplemental reading “Women’s Role in Male Initiation in Papua New
Guinea.”)
Among the many prominent occasions for rites of passage is the initiation of religious
specialists like shamans. Through ritual the future specialist is transformed into a new
kind of person, one with spiritual powers, even one who is “dead” in a certain sense or
has died and returned to the living. Master shamans prepare and instruct apprentice
shamans not only (or mostly) by conveying information to them but by exposing them to
118 Ritual
experiences and perils that alter their consciousness. Typically this exposure includes
sleep and food deprivation, long periods of singing or chanting, painful ordeals, and
psychoactive drugs. At a point in the process, the former mind or personality of the
novice breaks and is replaced by the new.
Within any society initiation procedures may vary for different ritual specialists. In
Buddhist Burma, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière finds three distinct practices for diverse
specialists. All young boys are initiated as novice monks, most only serving briefly; their
induction to the monastery occurs in two steps:
one lavishly ostentatious, in which the young boys are taken by their entourage in
royal pageant around their locality, and the other more modest, taking place in the
monastery through which their admission to the Sangha (P. pabbajjâ) is performed.
(2017: 68)
As well, for elevation to full monkhood, a higher ordination (upasampadâ) is conducted.

For “esoteric” Buddhist specialists who will learn alchemy, traditional medicine, and
exorcism, there is a second ritual path starting with tattooing on the head and upper
body and then the feet and heels; this tattoo is a kind of medicine (gaing hsay) and
knowledge (pinnya). Third, the future spirit medium (nat kadaw), whether male or
female, becomes a “wife” of the spirits; married in a nuptial chamber, the candidate
undergoes a long period of tutelage by a senior medium, learning to admit the spirit into
his/her body and mind.
For the average individual, expiation is another personally transformative ritual.
Expiation refers to the process of shedding guilt or sin, and rituals with this intent change
the person by relieving the burden of spiritual negativity, lightening him or her spiri-
tually. Confession might be an example within the Catholic tradition, in which sins are
forgiven by being admitted and then paid for with various ritual acts, verbal and manual
(e.g. repeating Hail Mary’s or counting rosary beads). Sacrifice is a way for an individual
or community to expunge guilt or other negativity, by symbolically transferring the
burden to the sacrificial victim and then destroying it, thereby destroying the burden (see
Chapter 11).
Spirit possession is a final form of salvation ritual on Wallace’s list. This might strike
us as strange, since possession by spirits is viewed as wholly negative from the Western/
Christian perspective and a condition to be cured (unless it is possession by God), but as
we see in the Burmese initiation case, spirit possession may be actively sought. Erika
Bourguignon (1976: 9), for example, found that there are at least three different ideas
about and attitudes toward possession cross-culturally. One is the familiar view that
possession is wholly undesirable, to be avoided, and to be cured when it happens. How-
ever, in other circumstances societies may regard the initial possession experience as bad
and even sickness-producing but then respond by inducing a possession trance in an
intentional and controlled way. In still other contexts possession is actually seen as a
positive state and is literally sought and voluntarily induced.
Ideological/political rituals
Under the ersatz category of ideological or political rituals, which imperfectly across the
two typologies embrace rituals of social control, Wallace placed rites of passage, which
we have already surveyed. Another kind he called “social rites of intensification” by
Ritual 119
Figure 5.2 A Colombian spiritual healer performs a ritual of exorcism on a woman who claims to
be possessed by spirits. Using fire, dirt, candles, flowers, eggs, and other natural-based
items, in conjunction with Christian religious formulas, he attempts to drive the sup-
posed evil spirit out of the victim’s mind and body. Photo by Jan Sochor/Latincontent/
Getty Images.
which the social group is “restored in its attachment to the values and customs of its
culture” (1966: 130). As Radcliffe-Brown commented, contrary to Malinowski, the func-
tion of religion is often not to satisfy the needs of the individual, especially the need for
freedom from fear and anxiety. Rather, Radcliffe-Brown suggested that much of religion
and ritual functions above the personal level, for the benefit of society as an integrated
whole. Especially in times of crisis, but often on a day-to-day basis, society is threatened
with disintegration, the collapse of groups and order and the atomization of individuals
or families. When there is a death (particularly a suspicious one, and recall that death is
often if not always suspicious in some societies), a natural disaster, a war, or merely an
internal feud, society could disintegrate. Rituals, even negative ones like witch inquiries
or hostile funerary rites, can prevent the disintegration of society by giving people things
to do and ways to direct their feelings and concerns.
Australian Aboriginal societies often addressed a death with an aggressive duel between
kin groups. Dancing in opposing lines, the event was consummated by a confrontation in
which the sides tossed spears at each other. Usually, no mortal injury was desired or
attained; one side or both would draw blood (normally by bouncing spears off the ground so
that they would strike at unpredictable angles), and when the blood-vengeance was satisfied,
the ritual could end and people could return to their common lives together.
Taboos and ceremonial obligations form a genus of ideological rituals. These types of
beliefs and behaviors center around things that people must or must not do or touch. The
very essence of these restrictions is the notion of sacredness, as Durkheim hypothesized.
120 Ritual
Some objects, actions, or persons are so powerful that they are dangerous, at least for the
normal person in normal circumstances. When a person is properly prepared (purified,
ritually protected, etc.) he or she might approach these same items or perform these acts
safely. Perhaps the social significance of taboo is the experience of ritual seriousness—
that all things are not equal and that our behavior must reflect this fact. And of course it
is not only things that are unequal but people.
This moves us in the direction of more explicitly political rituals. Rituals of kingship,
for example, established the powerful or even sacred nature of the king or ruler, and
ideologies such as the “divine right of kings” justified and perpetuated that power. A
prototype case is the Shilluk (Sudan) king or reth, who was believed to be a reincarnation
of the original legendary king Nyikang. Upon his death long ago:
Nyikang’s spirit left him and entered a wooden effigy. Once a new reth was elected,
the candidate had to raise an army and fight a mock battle against the effigy’s army
in which he was first defeated and captured, then, having been possessed by the spirit
of Nyikang, which passed from effigy back into his body, emerged victorious again.
(Graeber 2011: 3)
Ritual violence, up to and including human sacrifice, was often key to the establishment
and display of sacred kingship.
In some societies, ritual and politics were almost inseparable. Perhaps the greatest
example is traditional Balinese culture, which Geertz dubbed a “theater state” where
ritual was politics and politics was ritual. In the theater state:
Figure 5.3 Australian Aboriginal (Warlpiri) men and boys practicing a ritual dance. Courtesy of the
author.
Ritual 121
the kings and princes were the impresarios, the priests the directors, and the peasants
the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations, tooth fil-
ings, temple dedications, pilgrimages, and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds and
even thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to parti-
cular ends: they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court
ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a
device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device
for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power.
(1980: 13)
Balinese political ritual or ritual politics was a great theater of the society, by the society, and for
the society—in which people enacted their roles and their rules and, in enacting them, made
them real. A ceremony like a royal cremation (recounted in detail by Geertz) was a performance
of the deepest and most important themes of Balinese culture: “the center is exemplary, status is
the ground of power, statecraft is a thespian art” (120). This is probably true today, even in the
Western world, and it is perhaps more visible today than at any time in its past: politics is per-
formance, political leaders are actors, and the public is the audience, and together they create
and maintain their cultural and political reality. The ceremonialism of society is never merely
superficial decoration, in pre-colonial Bali and arguably in all societies at all times, “the
pageants were not mere aesthetic embellishments, celebrations of a domination independently
existing: they were the thing itself” (120). Rituals, in other words, are “great collective gestures”
(116), realizations in the sense that they “make real” cultural ideas and ideals.
Finally, in diametric opposition, Wallace discussed “rituals of rebellion,” which we
might, in some cases anyhow, regard as anti-ideological rituals. Rituals of rebellion
comment upon, criticize, and even invert everyday social relations and structures. Carni-
val in the traditional sense was one such occasion, where the point of the event was to
break intentionally many of the rules and norms of society; nonconformity, sexual
license, and “political” inversions (making fun of or even desecrating the king, among
others) were common forms, and we can still see some of this in the New Orleans Mardi
Gras festival or more so in the Brazilian carnivale. Halloween is a faint echo of such a
practice, when people deliberately conceal their identity and adopt fictional and even
sacrilegious personae for the day. At the same time, these rule-ordered rule-breakings also
have the effect of restating and reaffirming the structures and power relations of society;
the very fact that you can belittle the king on one day a year (with his permission)
establishes his power every other day of the year (see Chapter 6).
Pilgrimage: Religion in motion

One of the most prolonged and psychologically meaningful rituals is pilgrimage. Chris-
tians have been making pilgrimages to Jerusalem and to various sites in Europe for cen-
turies, and the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the obligatory “pillars” of Islam, yet
anthropology arguably overlooked pilgrimage until the 1970s. Barbara Myerhoff’s (1974)
rich description of the sacred journey of the Huichol people of Mexico known as the
Peyote Hunt was one of the first extended analyses. (See supplemental reading “Return to
Paradise: The Peyote Hunt of the Huichol.”) However, in her introduction to Victor
Turner and Edith Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (originally pub-
lished in 1978), Deborah Ross credits the couple as “the founders of pilgrimage studies”
(Turner and Turner 2011: xxxiv).
122 Ritual
Figure 5.4 Pilgrims at Mecca (c. 1910). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division.
Predictably, for the Turners pilgrimage represented a rite of passage, exiting the mun-
dane state and crossing a threshold into a different place and a different time—that is,
into liminality. The site of pilgrimage is literally often far away and difficult to reach, yet
for the pilgrim it is the most important place, even the true home from which she is
separated and alienated in everyday life. It is “the center out there,” as Victor Turner
(1973) phrased it in another essay. Sometimes the site is a hierophany in Eliade’s sense, a
location where something significant once happened and/or where power and meaning
reside today. According to Turner, the journey of the pilgrim “reenacts the temporal
sequences made sacred and permanent by the succession of events in the lives of incarnate
gods, saints, gurus, prophets, and martyrs” (1973: 221), and the pilgrim adds his/her
effort to the historical accumulation of energy on that route.
As a path that others have trod—at the very least, the spirit or ancestor who estab-
lished the path, and most likely a train of previous pilgrims—the space of pilgrimage is
not spontaneous or idiosyncratic but typically well marked. There may be and often is a
designated pilgrimage “course,” as in Japan, where the standard pilgrim course “is a visit
to a series of temples in a set order, resulting in a circuit” (Usui 2007: 29). For instance,
the pilgrimage of the Thirty-Three Holy Places of Kannon involves a circuit of thirty-
three temples dedicated to the deity Kannon, while eighty-eight temples constitute a pil-
grimage circuit on Shikoku Island. Altogether, Sachiko Usui indicates 234 pilgrimage
courses around Japan, linking 4,423 temples. (See supplemental reading “Two Turkish
Pilgrimages: The Islamic Hajj and the Return Home.”)
An inherent aspect of pilgrimage is movement, both in the sense of moving out of one’s
everyday space and of moving to and through the pilgrimage space. As such, the issue of
pilgrimage fits well with anthropology’s increasing interest in flow and circulation, in
crossing boundaries and frontiers. Pilgrimage also raises important questions about the
body, since the pilgrim’s body undergoes many new and sometimes trying experiences,
Ritual 123
Figure 5.5 Worshippers at a Japanese temple. Courtesy of the author.
not the least of which is walking. A pilgrim’s commitment, Turner wrote, is to “full
physicality,” to being there, and the pilgrim thus “becomes himself a total symbol” (1973:
221) who enacts and embodies the message and power of the place and its history.
Box 5.3 Ambiguous pilgrimage to Walsingham, the Nazareth of England

Nestled in an idyllic setting in eastern England, the small village of Walsingham is a
destination for Catholic and Anglican pilgrims. “Statues of the Virgin Mary adorn shop
windows and front rooms of houses in the High Street; the roads in and around the
village are frequently clogged by slow-moving processions of people chanting the Ave
Maria; a number of signs and posters inform the visitor that they have arrived at
‘England’s Nazareth,’ a name intriguingly juxtaposing the national and the biblical,”
drawing a quarter of a million visitors in the early 2000s (Coleman 2004: 53). At this
site, pilgrims can connect with the religious past via objects and narratives that “evoke
biblical myth through a view of English history and landscape” (54). Simon Coleman
tells that the town was an important place in the Middle Ages but lost much of its
appeal from the Protestant Reformation and the reign of Henry VIII until the nineteenth
century. A few key individuals helped restore the site, with a Catholic mass in 1934
and a steady expansion of the Catholic elements of the town, including a Chapel of
the Holy Ghost in 1938 and Chapel of Reconciliation in 1982; “Crosses were carried
from all parts of the country and added to the shrine, forming the Stations of the
Cross, in 1948” (56). Not to be outdone, Anglicans became interested in the town and
developed their own pilgrimage spaces; consequently:
124 Ritual
a single shrine and tradition were split into two parts, one might almost say moi-
eties [binary kinship groups], each echoing but also transforming the other, both
claiming faithfully to represent not only the true tradition of the church universal
but also that of medieval pilgrimage to the site.
(57)
Reconstruction of sacred places self-consciously invokes if not invents the past, like the
walls of Holy House which integrated “more than 170 stones taken from the monasteries
dissolved by Henry VIII” (59). The contested history of the town, and of religion in England,
combines with general lack of knowledge about medieval Walsingham, making the place
something of a “historical and quasi-mythical blank” on which different pilgrims can write
(60). Catholics tend to arrive in groups led by their local parish priest; visiting the Catholic
buildings and shrines, for them “Walsingham incarnates the past. … Stability and con-
tinuity are reflected in pilgrimages through the village and the chosen site. The same
activities are carried out often by the same people at the same time each year” (61). But
these “parish pilgrims” are not the only visitors. They share the space with Anglican pil-
grims, visiting their respective sites, and by “heritage pilgrims” who are not committed to
any sectarian interpretation of the site. They seek an experience—of Christianity, of Eng-
land, of novelty—and the “official routes and narratives offered by the shrines may be
deliberately avoided by these pilgrims” (62). There may be a history and a meaning to
Walsingham, or more than one, but for some people at least the “carnivalesque space
and time of pilgrimage provides the opportunity for creative, sometimes playful, some-
times ironic appropriations of the place and its narratives” (63). (The Shrine of Our Lady of
Walsingham has a website, www.walsinghamanglican.org.uk.)
Since the founding work of the Turners, the anthropological study of pilgrimage has grown.
In their examination of Muslim pilgrimage, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (1990) ques-
tioned whether pilgrimage is necessarily an extraordinary experience compared to everyday life
and routine; more recently, Ingvild Flaskerud and Richard Johan Natvig (2018) explored the
surprising subject of Muslim pilgrimage in Europe. John Eade and Michael J. Sallow (1991), as
the title of their Contesting the Sacred implies, stressed the divergences and disagreements in
the experiences and interpretations of pilgrims rather than their imputed communitas. Finally,
anthropologists and other scholars could not help but notice the similarities between pilgrim-
age and “tourism”: as the Turners themselves opined, “A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is
half a tourist” (2011: 20). Both travel in search of something, and both are perhaps transformed
by their voyage. People may even visit religious sites as tourists rather than as pilgrims. At the
same time, ultimately, people may visit secular sites and walk secular circuits with the attitude
of a pilgrim: Elvis Presley fans may treat a stop at Graceland as a pilgrimage and sacred
experience (see Davidson and Gitlitz 2002), just as Americans may treat a tour of Gettysburg
or Plymouth Rock as a pilgrimage to a sacred place.
Conclusion
Rituals are a key component of religion. However, the tendency to see ritual as uniquely
religious and uniquely symbolic distorts both religion and ritual. Religion is not so much
Ritual 125
a thing to believe or to “mean” as a thing to do. Humans have goals—practical and
social—to accomplish. If language is effective, though, then action is doubly so. Social
action—religious or otherwise—is interaction, and it makes sense that humans who
ascribe supernatural agency to the world would interact with those agents in the only
ways they know how. Since all human social interaction takes place within an “interac-
tion code” which not only comments on but performs and achieves those interactions,
then religious interactions can be understood as instances—and particularly formal and
serious instances—of a behavioral code as well. And while much human behavior is
symbolic (and some may be purely symbolic), religious behavior must be understood,
from the actor’s perspective, as at least partly “real” too. Religious rituals, whether or
not they have practical effects, have social effects, but it is hard to imagine that people
would perform healing rituals solely for the social effects. They must think, rightly or
wrongly, that the ritual has some healing effects as well. In other words, rituals are not
merely informative (and often not informative at all) but transformative—establishing
certain states of being (like wellness), certain kinds of persons or social statuses, a certain
kind of society, and ultimately a certain kind of world.
1 What is ritualization? How does the “interaction code” help explain the special
qualities of ritual?
2 Is ritual only about “communication”? What is ritual efficacy, and how is it achieved?
3 How can rituals “fail,” and how do various societies and religions respond to ritual
failure?
4 What is Victor Turner’s “ritual process”? Do you think that it underlies all ritual
activity?
5 What are the main types of ritual, and how do they differ?
Secular Ritual and Women’s Empowerment: The Japanese Tea Ceremony
Cognitive Science of Religion and Ritual Competence: McCauley and Lawson
Women’s Role in Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea
Two Turkish Pilgrimages: The Islamic Hajj and the Return Home
Return to Paradise: The Peyote Hunt of the Huichol
6 Religion and morality
Forming society, transforming self
Among the Rawa of Papua New Guinea a person who practices sorcery or yomburi is
considered an “enemy person” (mundi oni) or “thief” (yakakamboro) (Dalton 2007: 40).
Yomburi is one form of “mystical violence” causing sickness and death, resulting when
“the enormous heat of the physical emotional state of anger” carelessly escapes the body
of a perpetrator and damages the body of a victim; more intentionally, a person may call
on ancestral spirits to curse a victim (40). Not surprisingly, as anthropologists have dis-
covered around the world, the most likely targets of Rawa sorcery, and of interpersonal
anger, are close kin and housemates, particularly in-laws and spouses. So, for instance, a
Rawa man is wise “to mollify his wife’s parents and thus prevent their anger from
afflicting his children” (40). Further, a sorcerer—always male, as only men are capable of
such intense ire—is recognizable as a “sullen and morose figure,” “ungenerous and
unsupportive,” and ultimately an “unhappy non-conformist,” one who is “without
shame” and “unconstrained by social mores and unobliged in a community of relations
based on mutual indebtedness and obligation” (42). That is, accusations of sorcery are
potent condemnations of antisocial and immoral conduct, potentially and ideally pre-
venting people from engaging in such behavior; in short, throughout Melanesia and
elsewhere, “sorcery has been found to function positively as a legitimate means of social
control and leadership and as a mechanism of conflict resolution and healing” (44).
Indeed, before colonization, Rawa sorcerers were the main moral agents of society, the
“known men” and leaders of the group. As Dalton sees it, sorcerers and leaders are alike
in being “extremely sensitive to the subtleties of social interactions and obligations” and
in intervening forcefully in social life to both injure and redeem (47). As such, the sor-
cerer is not pure evil but a social “thermometer,” whose “physical-emotional state mea-
sures his moral times and circumstances” (49) and who exposes—literally embodies—
kinship and wider social tensions, making possible the healing of those rifts. (See sup-
plemental reading “The Moral Power of Witchcraft among the Sukuma of Tanzania.”)
The one thing that most members and observers of religion agree on is that morality is
the essence and perhaps greatest benefit of religion. People who know or value little else
about religion may esteem it for its moral qualities; parents may expose their children to
religion solely for the purpose of making them “good.” In fact, some argue that it is
impossible to be “good without God” (which raises the doubly awkward problem that
“good” is a relative term and that not all religions have gods).
There is no doubt that all cultures feature behavioral exhortations and injunctions, but
the relationship between morality and religion is a controversial one. E.B. Tylor wrote
dismissively that the “moral element which among the higher nations forms a most vital
part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races” (1871: 29). Many
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-6
Religion and morality 127
proponents of Christianity were sure that the moral or ethical dimension most separated
“lower” and “higher” religions. Durkheim, on the other hand, lodged morality in the very
definition of religion: “beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community
called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (see Chapter 1).
In this chapter, we will explore the relation between religion and morality in the
widest possible sense, as codes or standards for individual behavior and the order and
institutions of society. From an anthropological perspective, we are less interested in the
particulars of any moral system, let alone in ranking such systems as low or high, than in
how such systems contribute to society and to the construction and transformation of
individuals in society. Religion is by no means the only source or sanction of rules, but in
its Malinowskian function as a “charter” for society, it is potentially the firmest source.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the role of disorder or at least of the violation,
transgression, and inversion of order as part of social reality, with its inevitable tensions,
complexities, and ambiguities.
The anthropology of morality

Millennia of philosophers have struggled to define and determine morality, with little
success or consensus, so we will not try to solve the problem here. What anthropology
brings to the discussion is attention to moral diversity, to its social construction, and to
the relativity of moral language. First, it is immanently obvious that morality exists as a
widely varied congeries of moralities, just as religion exists as a widely varied congeries
of religions. Most studies of morality have been attempts not so much to describe and
explain morality as to propose a—or the—“true” or “best” morality. In other words,
most “moral theories” have in reality been advocacy for a certain moral system. The idea
of moral diversity has been lacking.
Yet, when we look cross-culturally, we find, as the philosopher Nietzsche put it, a thou-
sand and one different tablets of good and evil. There are many moralities, each different in
small or substantial ways from the others. In some societies, polygamy is regarded as
immoral, and in others it is the ideal kind of marriage. Even killing is tolerated or celebrated,
at least in some forms, in virtually all societies. The Judeo-Christian scriptures, while they
forbid killing in one passage (“Thou shalt not kill”), make time for killing in another (“A
time to kill, a time to heal”), and most Westerners regard killing in self-defense and “just
war” as morally acceptable if not noble. Certainly killing insects is of no moral consequence
to most Westerners, but a Jain in India might consider it a grievous moral failing.
On closer inspection, it is not clear what morality means. It is not even clear what is or
is not a moral question in the first place. In the United States, public nudity is a moral
concern, but in other societies it is not. In the United States, premarital sex is at least a
subject for moral argument, but in other societies it is not. In his portrait of Nuer reli-
gion, Evans-Pritchard painted them as remarkably “Christian” in their attitudes and
practices, but he also warned that
we have to be more than usually on guard against thinking into Nuer thought what
may be in our own and is alien to theirs. From this point of view the ethical content
of what the Nuer regard as grave faults may appear to be highly variable, and even
altogether absent.
(1956: 188)
Indeed, what the Nuer judged as “grave faults, or even as faults at all,” may appear to a
Westerner as “rather trivial actions” (189)—and no doubt the feeling is mutual. Incest
and adultery are major issues for both, but the Nuer injunctions against “a man milking
his cow and drinking the milk, or a man eating with persons with whom his kin are at
blood-feud” (189) seem oddly irrelevant to Westerners, as many traditional Judeo-Chris-
tian injunctions—such as prohibitions on eating meat on Friday or eating pork or shell-
fish at all—would seem oddly irrelevant to the Nuer (and to many modern Christians).
So, it seems that there are no universal moral answers, because there are no universal
moral questions. Rather, when most English-speakers talk about morality, they mean
something vague about “good behavior” (or worse, a code word for sexual and repro-
ductive behavior, highly gendered). But there are varying definitions and standards of
“goodness” across societies and religions. One way that anthropologists and other scho-
lars have tried to settle the dispute over “goodness” is in terms of “prosociality,” which
Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff define as “acts that benefit others at a personal cost”
(2008: 58). But it is hard to see how some “moral” issues, such as public nudity or pre-
marital sex, have anything to do with “benefit,” and the fact that many religions offer
rewards for good behavior mitigates the cost. Additionally, as morality scholars Jesse
Graham and Jonathan Haidt (2010) contend, there is much more to morality than “being
good,” which is usually construed as “altruism” or Graham and Haidt’s first moral virtue
of care; equally important for morality—and potentially more important for society—are
fairness/reciprocity, in-group loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. (See supple-
mental reading “The Evolutionary Origins of Morality.”)
Even in Western society, not all undesirable actions are “immoral.” “Moral” as an
adjective is part of what philosopher Kai Nielsen (1989) called “appraisal language,” the
vocabulary that English speakers use to appraise or judge their own and each other’s
behavior, including such terms as “(ab)normal” or “(un)ethical” or “(il)legal” or “(in)
sane.” Not every action that is immoral is illegal and vice versa (e.g. speeding is not
immoral by any familiar standard). Ethics and morality are not completely synonymous,
since we can speak of “business ethics” but not usually of “business morals.” Even eti-
quette and propriety shape our behavior and our evaluations of others’ behavior: it may
be unetiquette, but not immoral, to refuse a handshake or to use the wrong fork.
Sin and pollution

Just as with belief, symbol, and myth (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively), the dis-
course of morality in Western societies, and in much of anthropology, is Judeo-Christian
discourse. In this religious tradition, morality is generally perceived as explicit, formal
(even written down), abstract, and legalistic. It is also typically seen as an individual
(rather than collective) and “existential” matter, that is, a commentary on the individual’s
essential state of being. A crucial part of this language is the concept of “sin,” a condition
of moral and spiritual fault. However, like belief and symbol and myth, sin in particular
and morality in general may be impositions of one religion’s worldview on others.
Sin is a concept that does not appear in all religions; it is a concept with varied and
evolving meaning even in Judeo-Christian religion. One scriptural Hebrew root for sin is
chet or khate, meaning going astray or missing the mark (the term used in archery for
missing the target). Three varieties of sin are recognized: pasha or mered for intentional
defiance of God’s laws, avon for lust or other strong emotions (intentional but not defi-
ant), and cheit for unintentional violations of law. (In fact, the first occurrence of the
word “sin” comes in the fourth chapter of Genesis, or Bereishith in the original Hebrew,
before any specific laws had been instituted.) Christianity eventually evolved the concept
of “original sin,” a congenital and therefore unavoidable state of imperfection or guilt,
for which divine salvation is the only remedy.
However, in the original usages of the sin-concept, congenital, permanent, and even
“moral” connotations were not implied. Sin was often temporary, fading over time, or
could be removed and “cleansed” through specific ritual actions such as washing or
sacrifice. In fact, many things that Christians interpret as “sins” were better understood
as “abominations” or “uncleanness” and applied to areas of conduct that most modern
Westerners would classify outside the scope of morality. Dietary laws, for instance,
identified particular plant and animal species as fit or unfit to eat; likewise, men and
women were instructed not to wear clothing of the opposite sex (Deuteronomy/Devarim
22:5). A word meaning “unclean” (niddah or tum’ah) indicated the effects of actions as
disparate as touching a dead carcass or any prohibited animal, committing adultery, or
merely giving birth. A woman was unclean for seven days (for a boy-child) or fourteen
days (for a girl-child) after birth, and adultery with a brother’s wife was not immoral but
unclean, resulting in childlessness (Leviticus/Vayiqra 20:21).
According to Evans-Pritchard the Nuer too had a notion of sin (nueer), but he admit-
ted that “Nuer do not express indignation at sin and that what they get most indignant
about is not thought of as sin” (194)—in other words, “sinful” actions were not their
greatest “moral” concern. Further, the threat of an act was not its “immoral” nature but
the “state of grave spiritual danger” it engendered: for example, it was not wrong to kill
a man in fair combat, but it was still spiritually dangerous. Thus, the real issue for the
Nuer was not with “people’s morals, whether according to Nuer ideas they are good or
bad people, but with their spiritual condition, though good or bad conduct may affect
this condition” (195).
Notice that Nuer actions were not punished because they were “bad” but rather were
bad because they were punished; the badness lay in the consequences, not the “morality,”
of the behavior. Kwoth (spirit) reproved what kwoth reproved, even or primarily
“unwitting offences” which made people feel worried but not guilty. The consequences of
course could be quite severe, including physical illness. However, the solution to spiritual
danger and punishment was woc, to wipe it away, through religious as well as material
means such as medicines and other cleansing actions but especially through sacrifice.
As dissimilar as they are, the Nuer and Judeo-Christian views of sin share two quali-
ties. The first is that it results from violations of supernatural strictures. The second is
that it is “infectious” in the sense that it contaminates the individual and, potentially, the
family, society, and physical world itself. Various terms that might be and have been
applied to this conception are pollution, defilement, impurity, uncleanness, and profana-
tion. (Recall that Durkheim suggested that the core of religion is the separation of the
sacred and the profane.) Immorality in this sense is like a disease—but mostly a curable
one—that corrupts the person, body or soul or both.
One of the first anthropologists to take seriously the idea of purity, cleanness, and
“dirt” and their relation to religion and danger was Mary Douglas. In her Purity and
Danger, first published in 1966, she connected dirt with disorder, including social dis-
order. Notions of dirt or impurity, along with those of (physical and spiritual) hygiene,
constituted “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (1988: 35).
Pollution or profanation “offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative move-
ment, but a positive effort to organize the environment,” both natural and supernatural
(2). In her most famous analysis, she explained the Jewish dietary laws, the so-called
“abominations of Leviticus,” as violations of classification. Some animals, she reasoned,
belonged to the category of species that “split the hoof and chew the cud,” which were
“clean” and proper to eat. Animals that deviated from this type were unclean and
improper (but not “immoral”) to eat. Likewise, a “true fish” had fins and scales, and any
exception to this type, like shellfish, was not a fish and therefore unfit for consumption.
As she concluded:
in general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform
fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their
class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world.
(55)
In the same year as Douglas, Louis Dumont published Homo Hierarchicus stressing
the significance of “purity” for India and the caste system. Humans are classified into
castes, he insisted, on the basis of their spiritual or ritual purity, and the highest and
purist caste (the priestly Brahmins) worried about the literal defilement that came with
the touch of a low-caste individual, especially the “outcastes” or “untouchables.” Lower
castes were certainly not “immoral” as such but were polluted and polluting. Mixing
castes, like eating the wrong animal or performing the wrong action for Douglas, was a
transgression against the order of things—of the rules and categories that comprise
society—and dangerous. Douglas thus concluded that beliefs about impurity, pollution,
and “sin” and the perils thereof:
are a strong language of mutual exhortation. At this level the laws of nature are
dragged in to sanction the moral code: this kind of disease is caused by adultery, that
by incest; this meteorological disaster is the effect of political disloyalty, that the
effect of impiety. The whole universe is harnessed to man’s attempts to force one
another into good citizenship.
(1988: 3)
Morality and the demands of social living

While the details of morality or proper conduct differ greatly from one society to another,
some form of appropriate behavior, and some standard for appraisal of behavior, appears
in all societies. Durkheim went so far as to state:
Law and morality are the totality of ties which bind us to society, which make a
unitary, coherent aggregate of the mass of individuals. Everything which is a source
of solidarity is moral; everything which forces man to take account of other men is
moral; everything which forces him to regulate his conduct through something other
than the striving of ego is moral; and morality is as solid as these ties are numerous
and strong.
(1933: 398)
Morality in an important sense is society, or perhaps society is morality. That is,

humans living in social arrangements will have normal, or at least “channeled” and
habitual, ways of doing things because we must have them. Social normality depends on
regularity and predictability in human affairs, such that I know what I am supposed to
do, that I know what you are supposed to do, and that I can reasonably assume what you
are going to do it—and judge you if you do not. Social life without such guidance would
be virtually inconceivable, and in their absence new guidelines would be quickly
established.
This goes not only for human social life but the lives of all social species. Charles
Darwin observed in The Descent of Man that “any animal whatever, endowed with well
marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would
inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience” (1882: 98). In other words, some sort of
behavioral order is a social necessity. We have learned that humans are not the only
species with an “interaction code” that ritualizes behavior; an interaction code is one of
the prerequisites of a social species (see Chapter 5). Accordingly, studies of humans
and nonhuman social animals alike have shown evidence of “moral” elements,
including attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid (including altruism or
“self-sacrifice”), sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, conflict reso-
lution and “peacemaking,” deception and deception detection, concern with the eva-
luations of other members of the group, and an awareness of and responsiveness to
group rules or norms. What humanity essentially adds to this list is self-consciousness
of these traits and the ability to speculate on them and to elaborate or “theorize”
about them—that is, to create moral “systems” or “interpretations” where moral
“behavior” already existed.
This discovery supports Durkheim’s assertion that morality, “in all its forms, is never
met with except in society” (1933: 399) but also that it is always met with in society.
Societies—of humans, apes, fish, or bees—are all “moral communities” in the sense that
there are right and wrong ways to behave within them. Morality, in a fundamental way,
is an effect of living in and being sensitive to a social group. Again, a social group with-
out some “moral standards” (however tacit and unconscious, even instinctual) could
probably not survive; its members would either kill each other or scatter.
But it is not just as a mundane order of human relations that society provides both
form and substance for moral concerns; “society also consecrates things, especially ideas”
(Durkheim 1965: 244). One of the properties or functions of society is to envelop its
social realities with what Geertz called an “aura of factuality” and often an aura of
sacrality. We will discuss this much further in the final section of the chapter. For now,
let us think of Radcliffe-Brown’s concept not only of “social function” but of “ritual
value.” He proposed that the central function of any social fact, including religion or
morality, is the contribution it makes “to the formation and maintenance of social order”
(1965: 154). This order is itself a social fact: people really are in various relationships,
groups, and institutions with various rights and responsibilities to each other. (Many of
these social realities even predate Homo sapiens and spoken language, etc.) There are
rules and norms and “customary” arrangements between individuals. He wrote:
For every rule that ought to be observed there must be some sort of sanction or
reason. For acts that patently affect other persons the moral and legal sanctions
provide a generally sufficient controlling force upon the individual. For ritual obli-
gations conformity and rationalization are provided by the ritual sanctions. The
simplest form of ritual sanction is an accepted belief that if rules of ritual are not
observed some undefined misfortune is likely to occur.
(150)
Morality in this sense is an extra layer of value and of obligation or coercion: the
practices, rules, or institutions are not only valuable in themselves but “morally” valuable
too. That is, they are not only real but right. Even if those practices, rules, and institu-
tions entail war, headhunting, or human sacrifice, they are important because they are
done (and perhaps only because they are done), and they attain the status of “moral”
duties or concerns.
The moral efficacy of religion: Formation and transformation

Morality is not just an idea or belief but a practice. Therefore, producing moral behavior
means producing human beings with certain inclinations and dispositions, which in turn
means producing society with certain institutions and relations. Or, in Geertz’s classic
formulation, the point of religion is to “establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting
mood and motivations” in people (1973: 90). We might say then that the power of reli-
gion is not so much to inform humans (to transmit knowledge or belief) as to form and
transform them—to construct them as individuals who behave in specific ways. Religion
in-forms humans in the sense of forming them; religious instruction in-structs in the sense
of structuring them. And religion, among all the elements of culture, is particularly suc-
cessful at this because it operates as “the really real.”
Durkheim emphasized the effectiveness, the efficacy, of religion: it works by shaping
humans individually and collectively. Through doing religion, “men become different”
(1965: 241). Specific ideas, and still more so sentiments, are aroused and established in
them. A society has—perhaps is—a set of such ideas and sentiments; that is what he
meant by “moral community.” The “social facts” (the families, lineages, clans, tribes,
villages, etc.) are there. The members of society must not only represent these realities to
themselves; they must also commit to them, be swayed by them.
Durkheim saw religion, or more precisely religious ritual, as the process by which this goal
is reached. During ritual, a psychological force that he called “effervescence” is unleashed, a
state of excitement, suggestibility, and mental contagion. “In the midst of an assembly ani-
mated by a common passion,” he stated, “we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of
which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces” (240). At such times, “Every sen-
timent expressed finds a place without resistance in all minds, which are very open to outside
impressions; each re-echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others” (247). The entire
experience is “ecstatic” in the sense of the individual going beyond herself and feeling the
presence and power of a greater external reality, which is society.
Durkheim exaggerated the immediacy and unanimity of ritual experiences; not all
people—whether “primitive” or “modern”—come away with exactly the same ideas and
attitudes of the same intensity. Nonetheless, Radcliffe-Brown agreed, in almost identical
words, that:
an orderly social life amongst human beings depends upon the presence in the minds
of the members of a society of certain sentiments, which control the behavior of the
individual in his relation to others. Rites can be seen to be the regulated symbolic
expressions of certain sentiments. Rites can therefore be shown to have a specific
social function when, and to the extent that, they have for their effect to regulate,
maintain, and transmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the
constitution of the society depends.
(1965: 157)
And Malinowski, better known for elevating individual needs over collective ones, con-
curred to an extent; of initiation rites, he opined:
they are a ritual and dramatic expression of the supreme power and value of tradi-
tion in primitive societies; they also serve to impress this power and value upon the
minds of each generation, and they are at the same time an extremely efficient means
of transmitting tribal lore, of insuring continuity in tradition, and of maintaining
tribal cohesion.
(1948: 40)
So, religion is an integral ingredient in the creation and perpetuation of social order as an
integral ingredient in the minds and experiences of the people who compose society.
The overall effect, as Geertz stressed, is to give these social and religious realities such
an “aura of factuality” that humans take them for granted and experience them as “really
real.” Religion contributes to this effect by attaching social relations to or founding them
on a super-social ground. One of the best and strongest expressions of this idea came
from Marshall Sahlins (1976), who described “the culturalization of nature and the nat-
uralization of culture.” That is, the source of and thus the reason and justification for
culture are displaced from culture onto non-culture; they are certainly not human inven-
tions but are independent and real. This is not only true of religion. He argued that
Darwin’s theory of natural selection projected nineteenth-century capitalist concepts and
practices, particularly competition and the elimination of competitors, onto nature and
thereby implied that those cultural concepts and practices are natural. Throughout his-
tory, before and since, people have appealed to nature for models of culture or to culture
for models of nature, often if not usually unconsciously. Marx believed he had discovered
natural laws of history and society, and even the Enlightenment spoke of “natural rights”
as if these rights were something you find in nature. The rhetorical force of this approach
is obvious: if your social and cultural principles are “natural,” they are intellectually true
and morally obligating.
Religion goes one step further. It appeals not only “below” human life and culture (to
nature) but “above” human culture (to the supernatural) as well. So we should restate
Sahlins’ proposition to include the culturalization of supernature and the super-
naturalization of culture. The source, model, and authority of human relations, regula-
tions, and institutions is then not merely nature but the superhuman agents and realities
named in religion. Culture is extra-human and superhuman, given to or established for
humans. Human society and culture is one dimension in a trans-human system, all of
which dimensions reflect the same basic natural/supernatural truths.
If Nietzsche was correct that “everything you like you should first let yourself be
commanded to do” (1976: 160), then the missing piece of morality is command. Roy
Rappaport suggested that the key aspect of ritual and religion is not the acts and the
“content,” let alone the doctrine or beliefs, nor even the meanings of the acts and sym-
bols, but the attitude toward all of these things and what they stand for, namely, the
attitude of commitment. He proposed that the very performance of rituals, the very
manipulation of symbols, generates moral states and expresses and accomplishes com-
mitment to them. For him, religion action had two “offices.” The first is acceptance: to
do or participate in a rite is to publicly accept its right if not its rightness. He was ada-
mant that acceptance is not “belief” and can happen separately from or without belief.
The point is to embrace the obligations associated with the ritual, the morality, the
religion, and the culture. When people join a ritual, they communicate that such behavior
is the “right thing to do” and that those who lead the ritual have the right to do so. This
recognizes not only obligation but authority. The second office, then, is the establishment
of convention, of those “right things to do,” in the first place. Once established, the
convention is endowed with importance, with “sacredness,” which makes it obligatory.
Hence, the obligation of conventional behavior becomes morality: “Breach of obligation
may, then, be the fundamental immoral act. … [F]ailure to abide by the terms of an
obligation is universally stigmatized as immoral” (1999: 132). Here is perhaps a theory of
the genesis of morality.
In Meyer Fortes’ ethnography of Tallensi religion and morality, he found exactly these
forces at work. The Tallensi observed an array of behavioral restrictions, some of which
Fortes referred to as matters of propriety, while others were matters of “moral or ritual
injunction.” Moral/ritual rules distinguished between “ritual custom” (malung) and “taboo
custom” (kyiher), the difference being that “Fear of embarrassment is the sanction of the
former. In the case of the latter it is the likelihood of mystical retribution” (1987: 125). Despite
the differences, all of their customary regulations were “accepted as absolutely binding,”
“moral imperatives complied with in acts of individual observances or abstention” (126).
The observance of a taboo signifies submission to an internal command which is

beyond question. … Transgression is tantamount to repudiating one’s identity, or
one’s identification with a locality or office of status … [Such] taboos ordain rules of
conduct that are binding on the individual, in the first place because he is the person
he is in the situation he is in. Compliance with them means that he identifies himself
with, appropriates to himself, the capacities, the rights and obligations, the rela-
tionships and the commitments that devolve upon a normal person of his status in
his situation. He has, it must be remembered, been cast in these roles or in roles
preparatory to them since childhood. Being with him all the time taboos keep him
aware of his enduring identity, as a person in contraposition to other persons.
There is, however, a second factor of fundamental importance in these prescrip-
tions. They are defined as obligations to the founding ancestors and to the Earth. …
They represent acknowledgement of a particular form of dependence … to bonds
that amount to inescapable bondage.
(126–27)
(See supplemental reading “The Moral of the Story: Persons, Places, Stories, and Mor-
ality among the Apache.”)
Religion and the “embodiment” of morals

As Fortes suggested, humans are carefully and continuously groomed to assume their
roles in society and in religion. This means that, although religious concepts and morals
supposedly emanate from the nonhuman realm, they are incarnated in real flesh-and-
blood humans. The concepts and morals must become part of actual human minds and
bodies as well as of shared practices, relations, and institutions. This includes beliefs and
ideas but also emotions. The goal is to produce persons who think and feel—and there-
fore act—in designated ways and to suspend and bind them in social relationships that
support these actions and are in turn reproduced by these actions. This may include lit-
erally “inscribing” religion in or on the bodies of members.
The acquisition of Geertzian “moods and motivations” means training the mind, the
emotions, and the body itself, to experience and respond in certain ways. But Geertz, like
Durkheim, was wrong to put all of the burden on formal religious occasions; rather,
humans receive multiple and perpetual messages about proper conduct and feeling.
Charles Hirschkind (2001; 2006) made the point when he examined the practice of lis-
tening to religious tape-recordings among Egyptian Muslims. Instead of following the
typical method of studying the dramatic moments of ritual, he looked at the repetitive,
everyday activity of playing pre-recorded lectures and sermons and the effects of this
behavior. He concluded that immersing oneself in this “ethical soundscape” equated to
the acquisition and perfection of perceptual skills—of habits of thinking, feeling, and
paying attention—that were at least as important as doctrine or formal ritual. In this case
and many others, the exercises and disciplines that people undergo and perform, trivial as
they seem, generate a “sensibility” that is an effect of and a further cause of religious
belief and practices. The same general point was made by Pierre Bourdieu (1977): a way
of thinking, feeling, and acting, what he called a habitus, must be instilled in the person,
and once instilled it will produce more of the same experiences, right down to how the
senses and organs function. A “socially informed” body, in particular a “religiously
informed” or “morally informed” body, is thereby constructed.
Versions of this social and moral in-formative process abound in the anthropological
literature. Simon Coleman, for instance, explained how the proselytizing methods of
Swedish Christian Pentecostals attain similar results. For the new convert, “telling and
retelling conversion stories is a central ritual of faith, framing personal experience in
canonical language and recreating that experience in the telling” (2003: 16–17). Likewise,
day-to-day activities like knocking on doors, teaching bible school students, traveling
abroad, public witnessing, and so on—including consuming their own media like tape-
recordings, newspapers, and television programs—are part of the ongoing structuring of
the self and the group. Whether or not they win new converts, these practices reinforce
conviction in the proselytizers.
Saba Mahmood’s (2001; 2005) important study of the Islamic women’s piety movement
revealed the same phenomenon. In a society and religion seldom appreciated for female
independence, Mahmood held that Muslim women expressed agency by choosing
“docility,” not in the sense of passivity or victimhood but in the sense of teachability. A
docile agent is not one who surrenders her will but who wills herself “to be instructed in
a particular skill or knowledge” (2001: 210), in this instance Islamic skill and knowledge.
One such lesson, which violates Western notions of feminism, is modesty or shyness (al-
haya’). “To practice al-haya’ means to be diffident, modest, and able to feel and enact
shyness” (213), and it is a religious moral or virtue (fadail) that demands conscious cul-
tivation. As one woman expounded, “I realized that al-haya’ was among the good
deeds … and given my natural lack of al-haya’ I had to make or create it first. I realized
that making (sana’) it in yourself is not hypocrisy (nifaq), and that eventually your inside
learns to have al-haya’ too”; she added that achieving al-haya’ “means making oneself
shy, even if it means creating it” (213). In common with other virtues such as sabr or
quiet endurance in the face of hardship, or indeed of hijab and modest dress, such pious
ways “are the critical markers, as well as the ineluctable means, by which one trains
oneself to be pious” (214, emphasis in the original). They are, in other words, “the means
both of being and becoming a certain kind of a person” (215, emphasis in the original).
Mahmood’s work raises another valuable point: religiosity and morality are often
experienced by members not so much as achievements but as aspirations. That is, they
may feel that they are not successful devotees or practitioners now but that they aspire to
greater religiosity and morality in the future. Muslims may be self-critical that they do
not pray sufficiently or attend mosque often enough, due to practical considerations like
work and family, but that they hope to “be better Muslims” someday. Across religions,
the faithful may decry their lack of faith, their failure to read scripture, follow the com-
mandments, or love their god(s) adequately. In the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness (ISKCON, popularly known as Hare Krishna) community studied by John
Fahy, the ideal moral/emotional state is prema or “pure love of Krishna.” While devotees
love Krishna, they have not yet realized prema; as one woman confessed, pure Krishna
love “was expected to take a lifetime”—or, in a religion of reincarnation, many life-
times—during which she must maintain “humility, weakness and a commitment to strict
spiritual practices” (2019: 149). In the meantime, striving for perfect love “would allow
her to live a good life,” keeping “the pursuit of prema … central to devotees’ projects of
moral self-cultivation” (149–50).
Box 6.1 Forming and performing self in Thai Buddhism

Every religion offers a distinct vision of the moral self and society. Buddhism formally
teaches the Eightfold Path of right understanding (samma ditthi), right thought (samma
sankappa), right speech (samma vaca), right action (samma kammanta), right livelihood
(samma ajiva), right effort (samma vayama), right mindfulness (samma sati), and right
concentration (samma samadhi). That arduous path and the doctrine of anatta (no-self)
pose daunting challenges for the lay Buddhist, and many observers conclude that few
ordinary Buddhists follow or even understand the high religious concepts. Julia Cas-
saniti responds that everyday Thai Buddhists understand and practice more of Bud-
dhist virtue than they are usually credited for. Central to their ideal of the Buddhist
person is tham jai or “making the heart,” which is related to the scriptural notion of
anicc (impermanence, instability, or change). Not at all ignorant of or indifferent to the
formal doctrine, laypeople “invoked anicca for what seemed to be the purpose of self-
work, advising themselves to temper their emotional reaction to a catastrophic event,
or even to temper the emotions against the mere possibility that such a catastrophe
might occur” (2015: 27). Accordingly, they strove for and often attained jai yen, “cool
heart” or calm: “People didn’t seem to get angry, or sad, or full of joy, or excited, as far
as I could tell” (41). The Buddhist noble truth of detachment leads to an attitude of
ploy (“to let go”) or plong (“to dispose of, to lay down a burden, … letting go”). The
consequent “local model of personal agency” shaped by Buddhism holds that imper-
manence and letting go:
brings about positive results, and this detaching is practiced through the cultiva-
tion of calm, cool, affective orientations (as captured by making the heart in tham
jai). Merit making and the work of karma serve to mobilize the effects of these
practices.
(179)
Significantly, a neighboring Christianized village displayed much more “heat” or emo-

tion, illustrating how religion can differently inform the same society.
To select just one area of culture for further comment, food carries symbolic and moral
meaning in virtually all societies. Already mentioned were the dietary laws of the Hebrew
scriptures, which give rise to modern Jewish concepts and practices of kosher. Islam contains
a similar system of halal foods and food-preparation processes; some foods prepared in
acceptable ways are “permissible” (halal), while others are “forbidden” (haram). (See sup-
plemental reading “What is Allowed, What is Forbidden: Halal Goods and the Global Halal
Industry in Islam.”) Other religions and cultures enforce different food rules or taboos
depending on local ideas and beliefs. The pollution rules of the Hua (Papua New Guinea)
applied to food and other substances like “blood, breath, hair, sweat, fingernails, feces, urine,
footprints, and shadows” (Meigs 1984: 20). Virtually everything that a person touched or
that came from their body carried some of their nu or personal (spiritual but also physical)
essence. Men had to avoid the nu of women, as well as foods thought to contain feminine nu
and sexual intercourse which depleted their male nu.
For the Amazonian Muinane, human morality is an effect of the substances that they
consume. Every substance has its unique “speech” or “breath”; tobacco, the most moral
substance, gives humans “proper thoughts/emotions and the capacity to learn, remember,
and discern” (Londono Sulkin 2012: 96). Substances are also gendered: both male and
female bodies contain tobacco, but coca is consumed only by men, while women consist
mostly of manioc, chilies, and cool herbs. When humans consume the correct substances,
they are naturally moral beings. However, if they consume the wrong substances or are
invaded by a foreign (e.g. animal, like a jaguar) speech/breath, immorality follows.
Writes Londono Sulkin, “it is not rare for people to claim that a man who misbehaved
had a jaguar inside, or that he spoke the speech of a jaguar” (55).
Finally, leftover food is a special problem for Hindus in Trinidad. Deeply concerned
with purity and pollution, as introduced earlier, juthaa or partially consumed food is felt
to be “symbolically tainted by association with another person (really, another person’s
essence, concretized as bodily substance, e.g. saliva, sweat, etc.)” (Khan 1994: 245). On
one level, “juthaa is so polluting that only the lowest ranked or subordinate accept it”
(250). On another level, people are willing to accept leftovers from certain others,
depending on their relationship to the recipient “which in turn derives from his or her
assessments of that other’s behavior” (254). That is, moral calculations enter into food
sharing. At the highest level, food that has been offered to a god (but naturally not divi-
nely consumed) is eagerly distributed and consumed; this prasad is believed to be
“imbued with divine attributes. Eating prasad, then, is a blessing” (256). One is reminded
of the Trobriand spirits who lick food, depositing on it their supernatural power (see
Chapter 2).
Religion and the social order
If mind, body, society, nature, and supernature are all dimensions of an integrated cul-
tural system, then we should expect to find connections between and reflections of each in
the others. We would expect the myths, rituals, beliefs, and values of a religion to relate
to the kinship, political, and even economic practices and institutions of the society.
Durkheim viewed this fact as virtually mandatory, since religion is “a system of ideas
with which the individuals represent to themselves the society of which they are mem-
bers, and the obscure but intimate relations which they have with it” (1965: 257). Society
provides the “inspiration” for religion by being omnipresent, external, “real,” and coer-
cive or at least inevitable; it also shapes the “content” of the religion, being as it is the
model upon which the group’s religion is based.
Durkheim’s theory is too simplistic and causal, but it was highly influential in the
social-scientific study of religion and was expanded by anthropologists from Radcliffe-
Brown to Mary Douglas. Most famously in Natural Symbols Douglas laid out a view of
religion in which the quality of religious experience is molded by the quality of general
social experience, which she called the “symbolic replication of a social state” (1970: 82).
Humans therefore not only get the idea of religion but specific religious forms from
society. Society provides the experience and sentiment from which religion springs but
also the categories or order that inform religion. In other words, “Religious forms as well
as social forms are generated by experience in the same dimension” (16), which is the
dimension of everyday lived existence.
She identified two variables of social experience that have measurable impact on reli-
gious expression, dubbed “group” and “grid.” Grid refers to the individualistic or ego-
focused experiences or categories, such as the available titles, roles, statuses, and names
in a society, that is, the order within which individuals define their identity. Group, on
the other hand, stands for the macrosocial organizational patterns such as class, caste,
lineage, and other institutional or political structures to which individuals belong or in
which they participate. Thus, humans live within a social context in which “personal”/
grid and “structural”/group experiences intersect in some way: grid and group may both
be strong or both be weak, or one may be strong while the other is weak. The result is an
overall “feel” or ethos to social life. Societies with a particular combination of group and
grid features will be prone to particular religious attitudes and practices, she argued, such
as spirit possession, trance, and so on.
Douglas stressed a psychological process to link the personal, social, and spiritual
dimensions. She named it consonance, “sounding like/with,” to suggest that social
experience and spiritual experience establish a consistency or equivalence. She wrote that
there is a “drive to achieve consonance between social and physical and emotional
experience” (149) which explains “the power of social structures to generate symbols of
their own” (151). People who inhabit a specific psychological and social order will learn
to think and feel in specific ways; their very bodies trained and attuned to certain habits
and sentiments. Institutions or beliefs that are “out of tune” with the quality of their lives
would create a kind of “dissonance.” Hence, “Just as the experience of cognitive dis-
sonance is disturbing, the experience of consonance in layer after layer of experience and
context after context is satisfying” (70). It is a very human way of bringing one’s social
order, emotional order, and spiritual order into alignment.
Thus we should expect to find some organizational principles and some myth/ritual/
moral systems that co-occur and others that do not. Small, egalitarian societies do not
tend to possess hierarchical religions—pantheons of judgmental and punitive gods, for
instance. Societies tend to see their own economic and political institutions reflected in
their religions; the Dogon, a horticultural society, had an elaborate cosmology concerning
grains, granaries, and blacksmiths, whereas for Nuer or Dinka pastoralists cattle were
central to their symbolism and ritual. Societies that have unequal or even tense gender
relations reflect those relations in myth and ritual. Meanwhile, via a cross-cultural survey
of 186 societies, Frank Roes and Michel Raymond (2003) found a correlation between
large societies with levels of external conflict and beliefs in “moralizing gods.”
Around the world and throughout time, societies have developed the religion and
morality that suits and strengthens their social order. Chinese Confucian ideals of proper
behavior or li (translated alternately as etiquette, propriety, morality, or ritual conduct)
were expressed in and productive of the so-called Five Relationships—father and son,
husband and wife, elder and younger, older brother and younger brother, and ruler and
subject. Each relationship reiterated the same pattern, a rightfully dominant but bene-
volent superordinate and an obedient and respectful subordinate. In fact, the Chinese
character for the fundamental value of jen or “humaneness” is a composite of two char-
acters, one meaning human person and the other meaning “two” (Brannigan 2005: 296)
Thus, humaneness, morality, and social order are overtly about humans in social
relations.
There are many other ways in which religion relates to its cultural context. Lenora
Greenbaum (1973) illustrated that there are strong correlations between spirit-possession
and other cultural variables. Spirit-possession is a very common concept worldwide, but
86 percent of cultures that practiced slavery, for instance, also had spirit trance compared
to 14 percent of cultures without slavery. Likewise, 58 percent of societies with a strati-
fication system of two or more classes experienced such trances, while 74 percent of those
without class inequalities also lacked trances. Societies that practiced patrilocal marriage
were twice as likely to include spirit-possession, and larger societies (more than one
hundred thousand members) were more than twice as likely. Agricultural societies (87
percent), societies that practiced bride price or bride service (89 percent), and societies
with multiple levels of political power (83 percent) were all dramatically more likely to
believe in possession.
Wallace (1966) identified an even wider array of religious phenomena with social cor-
relates. Witchcraft, for instance, was more common in societies that lacked “political
superiors” to administer punishments or in societies without a central social authority;
this suggests that witchcraft provided the missing function (like sorcery among the Rawa,
as discussed earlier). In addition, a concept of a “high god” occurred more often in
societies with multiple distinct and sovereign subgroups and seldom in homogeneous
societies. A pantheon of gods and a “supernatural sanction for morality” were much
more associated with social stratification than with egalitarianism.
Legitimating order
It is well known and well established that religion legitimates human relations and institu-
tions; members of religious communities tend to conceive that their institutions and practices
(their language, their knowledge and skills, their kinship arrangements, their political sys-
tems, etc.) were given by spiritual sources—perhaps the ancestors, perhaps the gods—which
is why those institutions and practices are morally obligating. Indeed, their lives and the very
shapes of their bodies may have been established in a supernatural way. The religious legit-
imation of the human order amounts in the end to the claim that the order originates from or
is authorized by a nonhuman reality—the natural and/or supernatural realms themselves. As
Sahlins characterized it above, culture becomes naturalized (and supernaturalized), and
nature (supernature) becomes culturalized.
Religion contributes to the legitimation of social arrangements in three separate but
often interacting ways. First, religion can provide the mandate for social order by directly
stating the rules and expectations and the consequences for noncompliance; the Judeo-
Christian Ten Commandments (appearing in two entirely different versions in Exodus 20
and Exodus 34) are a prime example, along with the myriad of biblical laws regarding
food, dress, and other subjects. Second, religion puts forth the model or paragon of virtue
in the founder or early figure(s) of the religion; Christians are taught to emulate Jesus,
while Muslims consider Muhammad the ideal human (basing many of their actions on
the Hadith of the prophet’s rulings and actions), and Buddhist follow the example of
Gautama, the first enlightened one. Third, religion decrees a metaphysics which describes
how the world works: karma may carry the consequences of behavior into the next life, a
god or devil may punish bad action now and eternally, or the Buddhist concept of
dukkha may teach that existence is flawed and broken and therefore pain and suffering
are inevitable, to be remedied only be detachment (see the Thai Buddhist case above).
Perhaps the most thorough expression of religious organization of society is the caste
system of India. According to Dumont and others, the Hindu caste system essentially
involves the stratification of society through an integrated network of kinship, economic,
political, and religious concepts and institutions. Kathleen Gough (1971: 11), for instance,
gave these characteristics of castes, although we must keep in mind that the system
functioned differently in different areas of southern Asia:
Inherited by birth
Endogamous, that is, in-marrying
Associated with an occupation
Ranked and hierarchical in prestige, power, and usually wealth
Separated by “social distance” and sometimes by physical distance as well (e.g. living
in different districts or neighborhoods of the same village)
Based on a notion of ritual purity and pollution
Clearly all of the functional domains of culture are implicated in this comprehensive
system.
Most readers will be familiar with the four major “caste” categories, namely brahmins
(the highest rank, of priests and scholars), kshatriyas (the second rank, of warriors and
political leaders), vaishyas (the third rank, of merchants, craftspeople, and farmers), and
shudras (the fourth rank, of laborers and servants). At the bottom of or even outside the
system was the panchama or pariah class, also known as Dalits or harijan (“children of
god”) and sometimes called “outcastes” or “untouchables.” They did and do the most menial
and dirty of work, such as cleaning streets and sewers, handling dead bodies, and so on.
Not surprisingly, caste status tended to affect wealth and standard of living. In the
southeast Indian village that Gough studied, each category tended to be residentially
segregated and possessed its own norms and morals: brahmins notably practiced crema-
tion, widow celibacy, proscription of divorce, avoidance of animal sacrifice, and other
specialized behaviors. Ultimately, the gap between castes was not merely economic or
social but spiritual as well—according to Dumont, a matter of purity. Brahmins were not
merely socially or economically superior to their underlings but spiritually purer. A
brahmin was a higher incarnation of humanity, burdened by comparatively less karma
and closer to the attainment of the goal of religion. “Naturally” they deserved the status
and advantages that they enjoyed, for truly they were better beings. As Gough pointed
out, one’s wealth and power did not confer caste status but rather one’s caste status
conferred wealth and power:
Ritual rank inheres in castes by virtue of birth, and has connotations of worth. A
high caste is often called a “good” caste, and a low caste a “bad” one. … A rich or
powerful man is not thereby a “good” man but a “big” man; a poor or powerless
person not a “bad” man but a “small” one.
(51)
Figure 6.1 Indian brahmin painting his forehead with the red and white marks of his sect and caste.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Religion’s legitimation capacity is most prominent in the area of social and political author-
ity. In nearly all societies, religion is one answer to the question of why leadership exists and
why particular individuals or groups are in power. In some instances, the offices and office-
holders are ordained or anointed by deities, as in the European “divine right of kings” and the
Chinese “mandate of heaven.” In other cases, rulers are themselves deities, like the ancient
Egyptian pharaohs; the Japanese imperial family was traditionally revered as descended from
the sun goddess Amaterasu-Omikami. Or more generally and less dramatically, elites may
possess spiritual powers that entitle them to authority. One such power is mana, the Polynesian
principle of potency and fertility discussed in Chapter 2. A similar idea animated the Merino
and Betsilio kingdoms of Madagascar, where rulers were attributed with hasina, a supernatural
power associated with life and reproduction. Having or controlling hasina entitled the bearer to
honor and authority, with the sovereign’s spiritual energy flowing down to the people and the
land (Bloch 1979). Ideologically, the kingdom depended on the king and not vice versa.
The supremacy of the ruler might also depend on his or her participation in ritual
activities. Roman emperors were the focus of sacrificial cults (and one reason for Roman
hostility to Christianity was Christians’ refusal to perform these rituals to the emperor).
From the Aztecs to the Hawaiians and Dahomey (West Africa), kings administered life
and death through human sacrifice; sacrifice was often necessary to spiritually strengthen
the ruler, while it overtly displayed his preeminence. But if royal reigns stand on cere-
mony, so they can fall on ceremony: religion scholar Anne Mocko (2016) reports that the
monarchy in Nepal was overthrown in 2008 not by force but by depriving the king of his
ritual functions. The king’s royal status was produced and reproduced through ritual
action; without that religious role, his political authority evaporated.
Box 6.2 Religion resisting the state: Praying to Our Lady of the Wall
Just as Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho with faith, Palestinian Christians and
their advocates hope that piety will topple the security wall erected by Israel. During
weekly rituals of the Catholic rosary, Italian nuns gather at Checkpoint 300, the military
entry point to Bethlehem, “to beseech the Virgin Mary for the miracle of destroying the
Wall” (Farinacci 2017: 85). Like prayer warriors they “unsheathe” their rosary beads
and hurl prayers at the wall:
As the fingers work their way through the beads of the wooden rosaries, the group
walks back and forth from the checkpoint to the end of the road in front of the gates
of the Greek Catholic convent of the Emmanuel where the recitation ends with the
singing of the Salve Regina in Latin in front of the Our Lady of the Wall icon.
(93)
Although obviously not an official site of prayer or pilgrimage, this section of the wall has
become a shrine of sorts, complete with a painting of the Virgin Mary. Eventually two
more icons were attached to the wall, “aiming to increase the agency of Mary against the
Wall, as well as expanding the shrine itself” (102) and creating a forceful new sacred site.
In the process, the pious protesters seek to redefine the edifice, altering it from a political
instrument of the Israeli state into “a potent venue of political dissent over borders” (97).
And the regular prayer events convey at least two meanings—resistance to the division of
land and peoples and recognition of Palestinian Christians and their “right to live in this
territory in the face of their status as an ethnoreligious minority” (83).
The most revealing aspect of the legitimating function of religion is its adaptability to
changes in social institutions and relations. Society is not written in stone, so neither are the
religious sources of society fixed and settled. Australian Aboriginal groups had mechanisms
for sharing, trading, and redistributing religious knowledge and sacred sites (see Chapter 8).
Beidelman gave another example of religion flexing to adjust to and legitimate changing
social realities. Among the Kaguru, clans owned particular parcels of land and performed
annual rites (tambiko) to rejuvenate the land, guaranteeing rainfall and fertility largely
through the agency of clan ghosts (misimu). However, he also reported:
These annual rites are a useful means by which the members of an owner clan
enforce their rule upon the other residents in their land. Although Kaguru always
speak of this enforcement in mystical, ritual terms, however, these activities are
invariably the expression of the power relations within a local area; when in the past
these relations changed and a clan’s power was lost, ritual was usurped by others,
who quickly put forward a new legendary justification for their powers.
(1971: 34)
Observers of modern religions have noticed this property again and again: a group that
enters new relations, like occupying new territory, develops mythico-ritual bases for their
changed circumstances. Often the newcomers will appropriate part of the displaced
group’s beliefs and practices; sometimes they will superimpose their rituals or myths on
the prior ones, for instance adopting the same days for ritual activities (the Christian use
of Sunday for its sabbath was an appropriation of the pagan Roman sun cult, as was the
adoption of December 25th as their incarnated god’s birthday, a belief inherited from the
worship of Mithra) or literally locating their sacred sites on top of previous sacred sites
(the Dome of the Rock on the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem being a prime exam-
ple). Then, the transfer of divine legitimation from old to new goes along relatively
unproblematically.
Inverting order
Social order is necessary and normal, but humans, it appears, cannot live by order alone.
Anthropologists have learned that disorder is as natural and perhaps essential to society as
order and has its own social functions, not always negative. Transgressions of social order
may actually reaffirm that order, or they may provide openings for major social change.
Max Gluckman (1956) was one of the first anthropologists to appreciate the role of
conflict in the ordinary course of society; rather than merely destructive, conflict could be
constructive, giving society and its relations with other groups a definite structure. In a
lecture delivered in 1952 and published in 1954, he coined the term “rituals of rebellion”
for his analysis of the Swazi (southern Africa) Incwala or Ncwala ceremony, originally
reported by Hilda Kuper in 1947. During this royal ritual, participants sang scathing
critiques of the king, such as “you have wronged/bend great neck/those and those they
hate him, they hate the king. King alas for your fate/King they reject thee/King, they hate
thee” (Kuper 1947: 204). When the king emerged from his sanctuary, he appeared in the
guise of Silo, the “monster of legends.” Nevertheless, the ritual ultimately resulted in the
reinstallation of the king and the health of the Swazi people and land. For Gluckman, this
scene was the ritualization of social tensions, particularly between the king and rival
nobles, which, brought into the open in a controlled manner, could be acknowledged,
resolved, and transcended. Forty years after the initial ethnography, Bruce Lincoln offered
an entirely different interpretation, ascribing the ritual to protest against British coloni-
alism: “By an epiphany of raw, untamed force, [the king] served clear notice that colonial
restrictions and pressures notwithstanding, the Swazi king retained his strength and his
energy, his determination and his courage, indeed his kingship unimpaired” (1987: 148).
In the equally famous Shilluk example mentioned in the last chapter, a more protracted
violent confrontation also resulted in the restoration of the king and the institution of
kingship. Recall that living kings inherited the place and power of the ancestral king,
Nyikang. The inauguration of a new king entailed a symbolic war between the king-to-be
and Nyikang himself, present in effigy. The effigy of Nyikang traveled through the
northern part of the kingdom literally gathering the subjects of the mythical monarch.
Finally, the army of Nyikang confronted the army of the prospective ruler:
The army of the king-elect is defeated and he is captured by Nyikang and taken by
him to the capital. The kingship captures the king. There Nyikang is placed on the
royal stool. After a while he is taken off it and the king-elect sits on it in his stead
and the spirit of Nyikang enters into him, causing him to tremble, and he becomes
king, that is he becomes possessed by Nyikang.
(Evans-Pritchard 1962: 205)
In an important and symbolic sense, after and thanks to the confusion and disorder, order
was re-established—and it was the same order (literally the same royal spirit) as before.
Rituals of rebellion—which are often if not usually hardly rebellions at all—might be
classified until the wider heading of rituals of reversal or symbolic inversion. In his
seminal The Ritual Process, Victor Turner addressed what he called “rituals of status
reversal” in which it is common that “inferiors revile and even physically maltreat
superiors” (1969: 177). Naturally, Turner interpreted such behavior in terms of his model
of ritual, particularly his concept of liminality: liminal situations like the insult or assault
of an authority were dangerous and polluting but in the end conservative.
By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle. By
making the low mimic (often to the point of caricature) the behavior of the high, and
by restraining the initiatives of the proud, they underline the reasonableness of
everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates of society.
(186)
Branding such actions as “powers of the weak,” these rituals did not change power
relations.
Ritual reversals are not always pointed directly at political leaders; they may take
more diffuse aim at social propriety in general. In his survey of symbolic inversion,
Jacob Pandian shared that the anthropological literature is replete with exceptional
behaviors like “nudity, impersonation, sexual license, inverted speech, inverted walk-
ing, regurgitation, devouring filth, fire-walking, mortification of the flesh, and scato-
logical acts that occur during religious and nonreligious rituals” (2001: 558). From
nudity at Konyak Naga (India) funerals and cross-dressing, mock trials, and anti-
priest plays in Spain to suspension of pollution restrictions between castes in India in
which upper castes are treated with “helplessness, contempt, and derision” (561), no
dimension of culture and society is exempt from lampooning and disrupting.
Among the most celebrated expressions of ritual reversal is “carnival,” which was
brought to scholarly attention by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In his
1965 Rabelais and His World Bakhtin opined that an event like carnival:
celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truths of the established order; it
marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.
Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It
was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.
(1984: 10)
Vestiges of carnival remain in Mardi Gras and perhaps Halloween in the United States,
where the strange, the evil, and the immoral are allowed and celebrated. In other times
and places, the purpose and practice of carnival have been much more serious.
Turner himself pondered the Brazilian tradition of Carnaval in a 1983 essay, com-
menting that ordinarily subordinated groups like women and Afro-Brazilians featured
prominently, even “became the very soul of” or “formed the very core of” the event,
Figure 6.2 Mardi Gras parade, New Orleans. Courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
while the middle class scurried out of town to avoid the festivities, “dreading the carnival-
esque reversal of their hard-won bourgeois values” (124). He also recognized that, far from
chaos, Carnaval was highly structured, with competing samba schools organized into leagues
and judged by an awards committee. Turner decided that Brazilian Carnaval was an instance
of “creative anti-structure” appropriate to the modern age.
Alessandro Testa’s new historical anthropology of carnival finds carnival deep in the
heart of European culture, traced back to Rome—the seat of Western Christianity—at
least as early as the year 1140. From the Latin carnem levare (to leave/cease eating meat),
carnival developed into “the period of feasting that precedes that of fasting” during Lent
(2021: 17). Characterized by “exuberance, laughter, the comical, the grotesque, and car-
nival vulgarity” (23), early Roman carnival was:
the principal manifestation and proof of an irreducible popular proclivity for enter-
tainment and hilarity, for the grotesque, for laughter, for parody, and for derision,
all of which are tendencies clearly opposed to the austerity and rigidity of high cul-
ture in general, and to the clerical one in particular.
(21)
It is little wonder, then, that the Catholic Church “resolutely condemned and some-
times repressed all the practices” associated with the festival, not least masking which
acquired satanic meanings but also identity shifts of “boys into girls, men into ani-
mals, adults into children, and even Christians into Mohammedans” (114).
Box 6.3 Christmas janneying in coastal Labrador

In the villages of Labrador (northeastern Canada), Christmas was a time for cele-
brating—and for inverting the social order. Karen Szala-Meneok documented the
local custom of “janneying” or visiting neighborhood houses in disguise. A classic
“inversion of the conventional” (1994: 107), the janneys strove to conceal their true
identity from locals while breaking many social norms, beginning with their cloth-
ing. Men and women alike dressed in “old clothes turned inside out (or worn back
to front), oversized clothes (stuffed with pillows, etc.), clothes of the opposite sex
(or both sexes), mismatched or oversized boots, gloves, and mitts” (106). Face
masks were crucial along with “capes, hoods, hats, and veils” to hide their
appearance, and even their height (by stooping), and ways of walking were altered.
Then their social interactions were exceptional. For instance, locals normally visited
homes individually or in small groups of family or friends; janneys instead arrived in
large groups, knocked on doors (an abnormal practice where everyone knew
everyone), and “conduct[ed] themselves in a boisterous manner, purposefully
drawing attention to themselves” (107). Continuing to violate etiquette, they kept
their shoes on indoors, jostled their hosts, and even carried sticks of firewood to
threaten the residents. Most scandalously, janneys:
will try to steal a kiss from a woman or punch a householder “playfully.” Sexually
ribald remarks, jokes, or songs are sung without inhibition. Women janneys take
leave of their ordinarily reticent tone and frequently behave as brazenly and
roguishly as their male counterparts.
(107)
To a certain extent, the Labrador janney played “the fool” (108) but also repre-
sented the stranger and outsider—including and especially the strange and
unknown aspect of every member of society. In such an intimate community,
“there is a necessity … where public scrutiny is pervasive, for the concealment of
some part of one’s personality which will always remain unknown or ‘strange’ to
others”; even in the closest of relationships, a resident “strives to preserve the
unknown depths of him or her self, while maintaining the known and familiar” (108).
Finally, as part of the Christmas season, other norms were relaxed or reversed:
work was forbidden, and daytime became the hours to recuperate from nighttime
revelries. Most fascinating, Santa Claus, much welcomed and loved in some
societies, was rather feared—coming from far away, disguised, “noisy, mis-
chievous, and inhibited” (109), making fun of recipients, frightening children, and
pinching ladies—that is, acting like a stranger and janney.
Most of the time, rituals of reversal and symbolic inversions are never really a danger
to social order: the king will be seated, gender norms will return, caste barriers will
survive. The temporary inversion is always, as literary critic Terry Eagleton put it, “a
licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony” (1981: 148). The
authorities usually sanction and condone it—even the Church tolerated it—and provide
security so that it can transpire but not escalate to full-scale revolt. Moreover, as
anthropology emphasizes, people learn the rules of acceptable exception, that they are
expected not to carry their transgressions across the line that separates carnival from
“real life,” which would be a real transgression. Instead, symbolic inversion remains
primarily a game played on a circumscribed field—a game, potentially, with real and
positive effects but one that is not allowed to persist outside of the time and place set
aside for it. It is, in the end, a legal illegality, an ordered disorder, a moral immorality.
As the marketing slogan for America’s permanent site of temporary transgression, its “sin
city,” warned, “What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.”
Not all reversal of ordinary roles and morals is so playful, though, and with the goddess-
possessed mediums in Kalpana Ram’s research we see momentary anomaly as an avenue to the
justice denied in normal life. In possession rituals, Dalit women—usually India’s most abject
population—are transformed into “agents and instruments in the conduct of a Court of Divine
Law” (Ram 2013: 194). A Dalit woman’s life is riddled with injustices, which condense into a
lack of caring, “the failure of family, kinship, and marital relations to provide them with the
nurturance and love that their culture professes” (205). They bring their complaints to the court
of the goddess and in concert with the goddess-in-person narrate their suffering in the presence
of kin and neighbors.
The goddess does more than simply revoice the concerns of the petitioner. Her mode of
enunciation is itself a promise of retribution, of justice and the advent of hope. She speaks
in a grand tone, far different from that of the lamenter. … In laments directed at their
neglectful children, for example, women speak of maternal love not simply as emotion but
as the bodily experience of labor, a labor that swells the belly, bends the back, explodes in
the pain of childbirth, and leaks and flows as milk from the breast. … The goddess pro-
mises to bring the erring son to the court. But she promises, too, to teach him to care.
(206–7)
(See supplemental reading “The Trickster: A Chaotic Creator God.”)

Finally, then, there are the “institutionalized” roles of inversion and “immorality,” like the
witch and the sorcerer, who as the opening vignette illustrated are not as immoral as pre-
sumed. We know that many if not most societies have attributed much or all of human
misfortune to malevolent persons such as witches and sorcerers, not to mention dead
ancestors and other spirits and gods (see Chapter 2). The Kaguru believed that witches were
innately evil, “the physical opposites of humans even though they may appear to be like
ordinary humans” (Beidelman 1971: 37). They were thus some kind of perversion or cor-
ruption of human nature. Most tellingly, they were said to be “backward,” veritable con-
tradictions of humanity: they were cannibals, they “walked and danced upside down,” went
about naked, committed incest, and did their work at night.
All this is the reverse of what is normal for humans; they confound humans with ani-
mals, kin with nonkin, up with down, day with night, and shame (clothing) with sha-
melessness (nakedness and incest). What Kaguru seem to be saying is that witches do
not recognize the rules and constraints of society, and those accused of witchcraft are
those who do not seem to fulfill their basic social obligations to other humans
(37)
Among the Apache, too, the characteristics of a witch were anti-social tendencies—
selfishness, anger, bellicosity, meanness, dishonesty, gossip, threats, adultery, and thievery
(Basso 1970: 81). But as evident in these cases and the Rawa case earlier, both victimi-
zation of witchcraft or sorcery and accusations of witchcraft or sorcery served as pow-
erful tools of social control: members of society ideally avoided behaviors that would
draw the ire of a witch/sorcerer or of their family and neighbors who might condemn
them as a witch/sorcerer. The same could be said of the ubiquitous concept of the “evil
eye,” the angry and jealous glance that can injure or kill.
It only follows that witchcraft and sorcery would occur most often between people who
know and/or are related to each other. In addition to describing the Swazi ritual of rebellion,
Hilda Kuper wrote that Swazi witchcraft was “usually aimed at persons who are already
connected by social bonds” (1963: 66). For them as for many societies, the “automatic”
character of witchcraft was invoked in situations of “hatred, fear, jealousy, and thwarted
ambition,” all social emotions. Basso said of the Apache that people who were “suspected of
witchcraft are by definition guilty of hatred” (1970: 87). But the moral function of such
immoral conduct goes further. Among the Menomini, witches were not the usual anti-social
deviants but the category in society with the most power and prestige, the elders. George and
Louise Spindler noted that “social control is achieved … by the threat of witchcraft by power
figures rather than through accusation of the witch by the community” (1971: 73). All elders
were believed to be potential witches which, in a society of relative equals, was one of the
few “power relations” available. As Gluckman remarked, the Zulu king was the supreme
sorcerer.
It bears observing that, like Labrador janneying, symbolic inversions and ritual rever-
sals are not merely cathartic, “blowing off steam.” True, order can be oppressive, even
suffocating (see Chapter 8). But as lived in the shaman (see Chapter 3), ritual/symbolic
exceptions teach a deeper lesson—that human existence is not one-dimensional nor is it
stable. Society, even reality itself, contains flux and paradox, both order and disorder,
good and evil, moral and immoral. One will never eliminate the other; existence will only
alternate between them.
Conclusion
Every society gives its members a sense of the correct, valuable, or good things to do and
not only through religion. As discussed in the previous chapter, religious ritual falls on a
continuum of other more general forms of socially appropriate behavior. The same is
true of morality, which is itself a form of social sanction specific to certain cultures and
religions. The very concept of “morality,” not to mention the details of moral conduct, is
relative, but the underlying force and motive perhaps are not. Different cultures and
religions ordain different behavioral standards, but the key is that all cultures have such
standards and that these standards are ordained—religion being the most profound
source of ordination. What precisely humans are supposed to do is less important than
the fact that there is something to do and that humans are supposed to do it. Herein lies
religion’s “charter” function, its “model of/for” function, and its function to in-form and
in-struct individuals, groups, institutions, and society as a whole. Religion communicates
that the relationships and orders of the social and natural world are “given”—they have
been established, and this establishment comes from outside, from the super-social and
supernatural realm. Human social life is based ultimately on obligation, on commitment.
Not only are humans pressured to acknowledge and comply with these standards, but
they are given continuous opportunities to experience and practice them. Religion can
and does specify and legitimate these obligations, the roles and institutions in everyday
society, but it also provides exceptions and inversions of the normal and the moral that
at once reaffirm and challenge the structures of society and highlight the complexity and
paradox of being human.
1 What is the anthropological perspective on “morality”? How are notions of pollution
central to cultural and religious concepts of morality?
2 How does religion in-form and transform individuals, mentally, emotionally, and
physically?
3 How does religion legitimate society—and sometimes contest society’s legitimacy?
4 What is ritual reversal or symbolic inversion? Why does it occur, and what does it
say about social order, hierarchy, and morality?
The Moral Power of Witchcraft among the Sukuma of Tanzania
The Evolutionary Origins of Morality
The Moral of the Story: Persons, Places, Stories, and Morality among the Apache
What Is Allowed, What Is Forbidden: Halal Goods and the Global Halal Industry in Islam
The Trickster: A Chaotic Creator God
7 Religion, medicine, and wellness
The chief role of a Hofriyat (northern Sudan) woman is wife and mother, ideally of many
sons, and from youth she is prepared socially and physically for her lot in life. “A girl’s
body is ‘purified,’ feminized, closed by the removal of clitoral tissue and infibulation
[sewing together] of her external labia, then concealed behind courtyards and walls,
where she is expected to remain” (Boddy 2010: 116). However, Hofriyati women may
suffer infertility, miscarriage, and other physical and mental ailments, which are blamed
on zayrân (singular, zâr), spirits of the type known as jinn in this Muslim society. Jinn
are not regarded as “supernatural” but as material beings composed of wind and fire who
are born, mature, marry, and bear children of their own. They are able to pass through
walls and, more importantly, human skin, where they can possess and afflict humans,
especially women. In fact, the zâr or red jinn is:
powerfully attracted to women’s blood, the exposure of which is thus carefully con-
trolled, for drawing the attentions of a zâr can have serious repercussions for preg-
nancy and birth. Zayrân who “seize” a woman’s blood can prevent her from
becoming pregnant or can ‘loosen’ her fetus and precipitate miscarriage.
(117)
The treatment for the illness (also called zâr) caused by a zâr is a ritual (also called zâr)
to appease the foreign being. However, a Hofriyat woman seldom expects to exorcize or
eliminate the invader; instead, the “purpose of the healing rite is to tame the zâr and
establish a social relationship between it and its human host” (118). In other words, the
woman will probably live with the zâr for the rest of her life; possession, Janice Boddy
argues, is thus “therapeutic” for the woman who is deemed a “bride of the zâr” and who,
while possessed, “is not human, not Hofriyati, not even, in most cases, female” (122).
Whether or not sharing her life with a zâr (or more than one) restores her fertility, Boddy
concludes that the experience “offers participants a way to open up the dense knot of
relationships in which they are invariably caught, so as to subtly navigate their position-
ing and gain insight into the logic that informs their daily lives” (127).
People in all societies suffer pain, injury, sickness, and other misfortunes. Religions in
all societies, in one way or another, offer explanation and response, if not relief, for those
conditions. As we have learned through the first six chapters of this book, religions do
not merely reside in, and are not merely concerned with, the “spiritual” realm but very
much engage the body and the material world. Of course, even from the religious per-
spective, not all illness or loss is spiritual or supernatural in origin, but anthropologists
emphasize the cultural construction of illness and of regimes of treatment. In a worldview
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-7
Religion, medicine, and wellness 151
inhabited by nonhuman and superhuman beings and forces, it stands to reason that those
entities would affect human health and well-being, for better and for worse.
This chapter explores the rich interaction between religion on the one hand and health
and medicine on the other. Religion and health/medicine overlap on many points, from
basic concepts of the body and of personhood to causes of illness and subsequent treat-
ments, including specific healing roles. Religion and modern scientific medicine or “bio-
medicine” are also not always rivals, often sharing healing duties in a relation of
“medical pluralism.” Either way, the study of religion and health goes to the heart of
some of the most profound and enduring questions in anthropology—questions of
rationality, embodiment, and ritual efficacy.
Medical anthropology
It might surprise some readers to learn that anthropology was a biological and physical
science before it was a cultural one, focused on the subject of human “races” or biologi-
cal types. Accordingly, many of its early practitioners were biologists, anatomists, and
physicians. Among the most illustrious was W.H.R. Rivers, whose posthumous 1924
Medicine, Magic, and Religion recognized medicine as a cultural topic and as inseparably
entangled with the cultural domains of magic and religion. The first paragraph of that
book reads:
Medicine, magic, and religion are abstract terms, each of which connotes a large
group of social processes, processes by means of which mankind has come to reg-
ulate his behavior towards the world around him. Among ourselves these three
groups of process are more or less sharply marked off from one another. One has
gone altogether into the background of our social life, while the other two form
distinct social categories widely different from one another, and having few elements
in common. If we survey mankind widely this distinction and separation do not
exist. There are many peoples among whom the three sets of social process are so
closely inter-related that the disentanglement of each from the rest is difficult or
impossible; while there are yet other peoples among whom the social processes to
which we give the name of Medicine can hardly be said to exist, so closely is man’s
attitude towards disease identical with that which he adopts towards other classes of
natural phenomena.
(2001: 1, emphasis added)
Other observers also recognized the religious dimension of health. Noting that “the
practice of medicine and the practice of magic have been closely associated” throughout
history, Edmund Leach insisted that modern medicine retained a certain magical quality,
while “people with completely mystical conceptions of the origins of illness may still
handle minor ailments in a practical common sense manner” (1949: 165).
Anthropology’s interest in the cultural nature of health and illness soon evolved into a
thriving and practical branch of the discipline. By the 1950s “many anthropologists were
working on problems of international health; they were employed as teachers, research-
ers, and administrators both in universities and in hospitals” (Bhasin 2007: 2). One
example was Cora Du Bois, who was hired by the World Health Organization in 1950.
William Caudill is generally credited with coining the term “medical anthropology” (or
“applied anthropology in medicine”) in 1953, and Benjamin Paul edited one of the first
medical anthropology texts, Health, Culture and Community: Case Studies of Public
Reactions to Health Programs, in 1955.
Progress in the anthropology of health and medicine was signaled by the founding of
the forerunner of the Society for Medical Anthropology (www.medanthro.net) in 1967.
Medical anthropology, according to the Society for Medical Anthropology, is the branch
of anthropology investigating:
those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined), the experience
and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing pro-
cesses, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and
utilization of pluralistic medical systems. The discipline of medical anthropology
draws upon many different theoretical approaches. It is as attentive to popular health
culture as bioscientific epidemiology, and the social construction of knowledge and
politics as scientific discovery and hypothesis testing.
More succinctly, in a textbook aimed at health professionals, Cecil Helman defined

medical anthropology as the study of “how people in different cultures and social groups
explain the causes of ill health, the types of treatments they believe in, and to whom they
turn if they do get ill. It is also the study of how these beliefs are practices relate to
biological, psychological, and social changes in the human organism, in both health and
disease”; in a word, it is “the study of human suffering, and the steps that people take to
explain and relieve that suffering” (2007: 1).
The most basic, and in some ways pernicious, distinction that anthropologists and
health professionals make is between biomedicine and ethnomedicine. Biomedicine is
roughly synonymous with modern Western medical concepts and practices, so named
because it “views disease as having a unique physical cause within the body, whether it is
a microorganism causing infection, the growth of malignant cells or the failure of an
organ due to repeated insults (such as alcohol consumption)” (medanth.wikispaces.com/
Biomedicine). It is, for most people, simply “medicine,” the “kind of legitimized, cre-
dentialed medicine practiced and recognized throughout the world by governments and
licensing bodies.” The “bio” in biomedicine, as Byron Good contended in his analysis of
medical anthropology and the question of rationality, implies that a person’s symptoms
are related to or caused by “their functional and structural sources in the body and to
underlying disease entities” including bacteria, viruses, tumors, and such (1994: 8). Not
only are all illness and disease physical or biological, but they are therefore individual
and universal, that is, any medical condition of mine can be ascribed to my body in iso-
lation, disembedded from its social environment, and any other human body under the
same circumstances would have the same complaints. Biomedical treatments therefore
take the form of operations, pharmaceuticals, and other direct interventions on the indi-
vidual body.
Ethnomedicine refers to “the medical institutions and the manner in which peoples
cope with illness and disease as a result of their cultural perspective” (medanth.wikispa
ces.com/ ethnomedicine) but ultimately tends to specify other cultures’ medical concepts
and practices. Often the implication, if not the overt criticism, is that ethnomedicine is
primitive, unscientific, and irrational and less true than Western biomedicine. Often,
ethnomedicine is dismissed as folk knowledge or, worse, as “belief.” Such condescension
speaks to a fundamental issue raised in previous chapters, namely, the problem of belief.
We noted elsewhere (see especially Chapter 2) that anthropologists and others have
generally assumed that religion is a province of “belief” (and that belief is essential to
religion) while (at least implicitly) maintaining a contrast between belief and “knowledge.”
In this view, biomedical professionals (e.g. doctors and nurses) have medical “knowledge,”
but non-Western cultures—and especially religions—have medical “beliefs.” Good attacked
this attitude, which he identified for instance in Evans-Pritchard’s pioneering study of
Azande witchcraft, which Good credited as “the first and arguably still the most important
modernist text in medical anthropology” (1994: 11). Evans-Pritchard insisted that the Azande
“believe” that witches exist and “believe” that sorcerers inflict harm, adding famously that
Azande witches certainly do not really exist. (See supplemental reading “Witchcraft, Harm,
and Healing among the Azande.”) But Good was quick to stress, and we will have reason to
concur later, that biomedicine is also a cultural system, a “rich cultural language, linked to a
highly specialized version of reality and system of social relations” and “diverse interpretive
practices through which illness realities are constructed, authorized, and contested in perso-
nal lives and social institutions” (5).
Aptly, Robert Hahn and Arthur Kleinman declared that biomedicine “is an ethnomedi-
cine, albeit a unique one”; it is Western ethnomedicine, “the product of a dialectic between
culture and nature” like every other healing tradition and therefore a biocultural thought-
system like every other (1983: 306). In other influential works, Kleinman elaborated the
concept of “explanatory model” to account for these different medical traditions. In a 1978
article and a 1980 book he proposed the term “explanatory model” to designate “the notions
about an episode of sickness and its treatment that are employed by all those engaged in the
clinical process” (1980: 105) and thereby act as “the main vehicle for the clinical construction
of reality” (110). A model consists of the terminology, practices, roles, institutions, and
instruments related to five variables in the sickness episode—etiology or cause, time and
mode of onset of symptoms, pathology, course of the sickness, and treatment.
Kleinman further asserted that there were three “sectors” or “social arenas” in societies
“within which sickness is experienced and reacted to”—the popular, the folk, and the pro-
fessional (1978: 86). The popular arena “comprises principally the family context of sickness
and care, but also includes social network and community activities”; not only does the vast
majority of medical care happen in this sector, in non-Western and Western societies alike,
but “most decisions regarding when to seek aid in the other arenas, whom to consult, and
whether to comply, along with most lay evaluations of the efficacy of treatment, are made in
the popular domain” (86). The professional sector or arena “consists of professional scien-
tific (‘Western’ or ‘cosmopolitan’) medicine and professionalized indigenous healing tradi-
tions (e.g. Chinese, Ayurvedic, Yunani, and chiropractic)” (87). Note, significantly, that
Kleinman’s professional sector does not equate to biomedicine nor does it exclude non-
Western and non-modern systems. Finally, the folk sector/arena “consists of non-profes-
sional healing specialists” (86), which is an incredibly broad and unstable category, as any
healing tradition may professionalize. He concluded that the three sectors/arenas “organize
particular subsystems of socially legitimated beliefs, expectations, roles, relationships,
transaction settings, and the like. These socially legitimated contexts of sickness and care, I
shall refer to as separate clinical realities” (87), which may nevertheless overlap and interact.
It is in the folk sector that religious beings and forces, along with human specialists
like the shaman and the medium, would appear most likely to fit. Notice, though, that
religious conceptions and practices of health can also occupy the popular and, increas-
ingly, the professional sector. Additionally, Elizabeth Roberts insists that religion once
held a much more central place in medical anthropology: as originally the study of
“nonbiomedical health systems of others,” early medical anthropologists naturally
“deployed the anthropology of religion, especially with regard to belief, ritual, and the
efficacy of symbols” (2016: 213). It was only when medical anthropologists widened their
attention, quite justifiably, to Western medicine that the field was “secularized” (see
Chapter 12). This is not to say that contemporary medical anthropology utterly ignores
the religious realm; Mari’s Womack’s (2010) introductory The Anthropology of Health
and Healing, for example, features a chapter titled “Calling the Spirits,” although its
coverage of “shamans, sorcerers, and mediums” is overly simplistic (and, limited to those
three specialties, incomplete).
Roberts, among others, in reaction calls for a “nonsecular medical anthropology”
which does not abolish gods (and other religious entities, although she does not mention
them) but examines how they are “part of medical practice” (2016: 209). Most remark-
ably, she posits that religious beings and forces are no more socially constructed than
petri dishes and the germs that grow in them but no less constructed. All of the elements
of a health system and worldview are equally important and equally oblige analysis and
explanation. A fully conceived nonsecular medical anthropology, she reasons, would not
assume spirits and spiritual specialists are nonexistent or peripheral but also would not
assume “that deities are everywhere, or everywhere the same”—or, again, that deities are
the only spirits or spiritual specialists—while inspecting “what deities do and how they
are often part of the looping conditions integral to specific bodies’ lives and practices,”
that is, taking seriously the dependence of humans, material medical objects, and reli-
gious beings and forces (216). (See volume 35, issue 3 [2016] of the journal Medical
Anthropology for a special issue on nonsecular medical anthropology.)
Figure 7.1 An Aeta anito (healer or medicine woman) performs a ritual to heal a member of her
community. During the ritual the sickness of the woman (in this case asthma) is trans-
ferred into a chicken to remove it from her body. Anitos are deeply rooted in Aeta cul-
ture. Most Aetas will visit a community anito before going to see a doctor or visit a
hospital. © Jacob Maentz/Getty images.
Box 7.1 Nonsecular healing in a European women’s tantric retreat

Many members of modern Western societies do not subscribe to entirely secular
medical approaches to wellness. Carine Plancke describes a three-day retreat in Bel-
gium where women seek to “reconnect with their vital sexual energy, rediscover the
sacredness of their female bodies, and possibly heal from damaging and even trau-
matic experiences regarding their femininity and sexuality” (2020: 285). The partici-
pants, characterized as mostly white, middle class, and heterosexual, aged twenty-five
to sixty-five, were welcomed with a ritual during which the two facilitators “slowly
lowered both hands close to each woman’s body until they reached her feet, then
wished her welcome while envisioning her internally as an embodiment of the god-
dess” (288). The first day also included dancing, “grounding exercises” to get in touch
with the body, massage, and sharing of feelings. The second day began with a tantric
meditation for which the women were invited to shed some or all of their clothes; the
most dramatic moment occurred in the afternoon and evening, when they underwent
an “initiation ritual” consisting of “ritualized massage intended to sacralize the female
sex and venerate women as goddesses” (289). During this exercise, if she agreed,
each woman lay naked as a partner “slowly and delicately touched the sexual organs
themselves and introduced a finger into the first woman’s vagina” (289). On the final
day they engaged in more dance and meditation, deep breathing, and contemplation
of the goddess while holding a dialogue with her yoni (Sanskrit for female sex organ).
In Plancke’s interpretation of the event, the women learned new states of somatic or
bodily experience as well as shifts in relationships and self-image. Sharing intimacy in
unconventional ways, several women reported “emotions that were mostly character-
ized as spiritual, divine or magical—feelings of going beyond the boundedness of the
self and opening oneself up” (293). Most specifically, they were invited to imagine
themselves as the goddess, with an actual goddess statue set on an altar, which was
used during the retreat “in the expression of ‘becoming the goddess,’ in which each
woman was seen as an embodiment of the divine,” suggesting empowerment and
“the possibility of positive change” (293–94).
Religion in the making and unmaking of health and wellness

Any health system, religious/folk and biomedical alike, is composed of a variety of ele-
ments. Among these are basic knowledge and concepts (some would say “beliefs”) about
the human body; ideas about the etiology or cause of maladies, the classification and
labeling of illness, and treatments and cures; and healing roles performed by members of
society. The only difference between biomedicine and religion-oriented wellness practices
is the inclusion of religious beings and forces in the latter—and even that is not an
absolute distinction, as we will soon see.
Health and the cultural body

One of the key premises of biomedicine is that the human body is a biological machine to
be serviced in isolation from other bodies, social relations and institutions, and the
natural world. Not all societies share this outlook, and medical anthropology compre-
hends the body—including the biomedical body—as a cultural construct in a web of
relationships. Indeed, in their influential thinking, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret
Lock proposed that anthropologists should consider three kinds of body in cultural
practice. They distinguished the ordinary body as experienced by the person “in” it as the
“individual body-self”; seemingly self-evident, it is really a highly variable concept in
terms of how its parts and functions are defined and integrated. Second is the social body
or “the representational uses of the body as a natural symbol with which think about
nature, society, and culture” (1987: 7). “The body in health,” they opined, “offers a model
of organic wholeness; the body in sickness offers a model of social disharmony, conflict,
and disintegration. Reciprocally, society in ‘sickness’ and in ‘health’ offers a model for
understanding the body” (7). Third, the body politic designates “the regulation, surveil-
lance, and control of bodies (individual and collective) in reproduction and sexuality, in
work and in leisure, in sickness and other forms of deviance and human difference”; in all
societies, “the stability of the body politic rests on its ability to regulate populations (the
social body) and to discipline individual bodies” (7).
Some cross-cultural examples will illustrate the diversity of body concepts and their
relevance for wellness practices. In the Bolivian Andes, where mountains are the most
prominent geographic feature, Qollahuaya people “understand their own bodies in terms
of the mountain, and they consider the mountain in terms of their anatomy” (Bastien
1985: 598). Like a mountain with its vertical circulation of air and water, they conceived
the body “as a vertically layered axis with a system of ducts through which air, blood,
fat, and water flow to and from the sonco (heart). … If these fluids accumulate, they
become noxious and must be purged from the body” by means of “enemas, fastings,
dietary restrictions, and baths. Basically, the body is a hydraulic system with distillation,
circulation, and elimination processes” (595). Sickness, then:
is a disintegration of the human body similar to the landslide on the mountain, and
health is restored by feeding the complete mountain. During healing rituals, diviners
create a metaphorical image of the body when they feed the earth shrines of the
mountain. Diviners serve coca, blood, and fat in thirteen scallop shells to different
earth shrines, which are associated with topographical features of the three ecologi-
cal levels and with anatomical parts of the human body.
(598)
Key to their health thinking were oppositions of hot/cold and wet/dry:
Hot and dry blood is symptomatic of tachycardia or thinly oxygenated blood and
refers to rapidly dispersing blood with little air and fat. Cold and wet blood is
symptomatic of arthritis and refers to sluggish blood that does not disperse to the
muscles. Cold and dry blood is symptomatic of respiratory ailments and refers to
blood with a low concentration of air and a slow rate of dispersal to the parts of the
body. Corresponding to the diagnosis, herbalists prescribe an herb to regulate
hydraulic forces of the blood.
(599–600)
Similarly, for the agricultural Chewa of Malawi, “conceptions of the body are based
on agricultural metaphors” (Kaspin 1996: 561), and “homologies between the farm and
the body inform the management of the body” (567) and thus notions of health. Just as
rain is critical to crops, bodily fluids and humors were basic to human beings, yielding
moyo or “life.” “Moyo is not an entity but a force, the quality of being alive and vital”; it
is “concentrated in the blood, to a lesser degree in semen, and to a still lesser degree in
saliva, milk, urine, and phlegm. All bodily humors contain the life force, which ebbs and
flows through the course of a lifetime” (568). The human body was then a microcosm of
the physical and cultural world, and “similarities between the seasons and physiological
conditions reflect an overarching set of equivalences in which agricultural production and
human reproduction are analogous as systems” (570).
The body in sickness and health may be modeled on the natural environment and
economic practices, but in many societies it is perceived even more as a product or com-
posite of social actions and social relations—not at all a closed organic mechanism. We
observed in the last chapter how bodies and embodied morality are constructed from the
substances they consume or the “speeches” they absorb (see Chapter 6). Among the
Cashinahua (also Kashinawa or Kaxinawa) of Brazil and Peru, “a healthy body was one
that constantly learned through the senses and expressed the accumulated knowledge in
social action and speech,” and an ailing body was “one that no longer knows. Curing,
therefore, acts to restore a person’s capacity to know” (McCallum 1996: 347). The
Cashinahua body was a nexus and product of a person’s spirits (in the plural) and
“physical, mental, and emotional capacities” including speech (348). Spirit and body were
not opposed; they were hardly differentiated. Nor was mind separate from body: the
Cashinahua did not assign knowledge strictly to the brain, and they had no word that
meant “mind” in contrast to body. Attributing no special role to the brain, knowledge
was distributed throughout the body. Each organ—“skin, hands, ears, genitals, liver, and
eyes”—was “linked to a specific process of acquiring knowledge and of putting it to use
in physical action” (355–56). “Thus the body integrates different kinds of knowledge
acquired in a varied manner, in different body parts” (356). Not surprisingly, changes in
spirit were felt in the body as “medical” symptoms like fainting and dizziness. Illness and
ultimately death resulted from loss of knowledge, specifically of closing off connections
with other people, and illness was treated with various kinds of dau or medicine, any
substance “used to transform the body’s capacity to know” (363).
For one last example, which will prove useful later, Khoisan peoples of southern Africa
say that wind shapes and connects human and other beings. Hunter-gatherers for whom
wind is critical in tracking prey, they sensibly explain that every life form “has its own
wind or smell which is a personalized expression of the breathing divinity. … Different
winds define a particular sort of life, or person,” and like the flow of air this (super)nat-
ural wind or smell “can move between phenomena, embedding itself in the percei-
ver”(Low 2007: S71–72). Consequently, exchanges or disruptions of wind can affect the
function and health of the body, linking smell, potency,
spirits, dead people, illness, and contagion. Moving wind is offered by some Khoisan
as a rationale for medical treatments, including massage, “medicinal cuts”, and the
wearing of powerful animal- or plant-based necklaces and bracelets. Sharing wind
essence ties people and animals together across time and space.
(S71)
It also enters into shamanic cures, to which we will return shortly.

Causes and categories of illness
The cases just discussed demonstrate that cultural concepts of the body (not excluding
biomedical notions) account for cultural explanations and classifications of the malfunc-
tion of the body and symptoms of illness and disease. To start, perhaps the most
common of all religious ideas—that human beings contain some immaterial part(s),
commonly called “soul” (see Chapter 2)—lends itself to the notion that the soul(s) may
detach from the body, initiating sickness. A body might survive temporarily without its
soul(s); in fact, a person’s spirit is widely thought to depart the body and wander during
sleep. However, long-term “soul loss” inevitably leads to the decline of the body and,
after a time, death.
Across Latin America, a local diagnosis related to soul loss is susto, manifested in both
emotional symptoms like sadness and anxiety and physical infirmities like “tiredness,
disturbed sleep, loss of appetite, diarrhea, bodily aches … and weakness”; Frida Herrera
and David Orr add that susto “is strongly associated with infants, whose souls are not
yet securely attached and who startle easily, but adults are also affected by it, often
severely” (2020: 69). Interestingly, susto is one of several “culture-bound syndromes”
recognized in Western psychiatry (or “cultural concepts of distress” in the fifth edition of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), along with ataque de nervios, Dhat syndrome
(India), Khyâl cap (Cambodia), ghost sickness (Native America), Kufungisisa (Zim-
babwe), Maladi moun (Haiti), nervios (Latin America), Shenjing shuairuo (China), and
Taijin kyofusho (Japan). The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and
Related Health Problems, tenth revision, admits most of this list together with amok
(Southeast Asia), koro (China), pibloktoq or “Arctic hysteria” (Inuit), and windigo
(Native America).
Mark Glazer et al. (2004) hesitated to equate susto to soul loss, as the Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans they interviewed did not identify the two; indigenous people of the
region “tended to associate susto with the interference of supernatural forces, which
captured one’s wandering spirit,” but non-indigenous people “associated it with a frigh-
tening or startling experience with humans or domesticated animals—for example, being
accosted by a drunk or being startled by a barking dog” (273). Further, true soul loss
usually spelled death. Better translated as “fright sickness” according to Herrera and Orr,
one local specialist told them that it is sparked by “a strong shock, by a feeling of fear or
insecurity,” making it sensible that women and children were the most likely victims
“because women are commonly victims of abusive treatment and that this also affects
their children” (2020: 78). They continue that it is not the soul but rather the animo, “an
invisible animating essence akin to air or the breath, which provides the person with the
energy to move and work,” that escapes or is “captured by the earth of another spiritual
entity” (80–81). As mentioned, real-world disadvantages like poverty, malnutrition, dis-
crimination, and violence weaken a person, making “the animo’s tie to the body more
tenuous, less firm” and therefore more vulnerable to susto (82).
Another recurring theme in the religious etiology of illness flows from another nearly
universal religious idea, that is, the existence of nonhuman spirits. Forced to coexist with
spirits of dubious intent but often great power, humans are susceptible to the whims of
beings like the zayrân in Hofriyat village. In Nepal, omnipresent spirits “dwelling every-
where from graveyards to houses can inflict illness because they are ‘hungry.’ If they are
not appeased through food offerings, sometimes regarded as a substitute for the human
body, they can attack humans and cause illness” (Tol et al. 2005: 327). Spirits, including
spirits of the ancestors, throughout the world plague living humans for disrespect and
neglect of the spirits, for ritual or taboo violations, or out of pure caprice or malice.
Spirits may harm people from the outside or from the inside, by taking “possession” of
the person and thereby doing damage. Erika Bourguignon was a leading scholar of pos-
session, which she wrote entails “spirits, power, persons, ‘viewed as superhuman’ at least
in some cases, which can take over the will or consciousness of man” (1976: 6), in other
words, the (at least partial) replacement of the individual’s personality and agency by a
foreign spiritual entity. Possession is a major factor of the diagnosis of illness in Brazilian
Spiritism, a tradition stemming from the “spiritualist” movement of the late nineteenth
century and formulated by French thinker Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (better known
as Allan Kardec) in the 1860s. According to psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida and
anthropologist Joan Koss-Chioino (reminding us that anthropology has a long history of
collaboration with psychiatry), Spiritism “accepts fully the biopsychosocial model for the
etiology and treatment of mental disorders but adds a spiritual component to this
model,” specifically the “persistent negative influences of disincarnated spirits (called
‘obsession’)” (2009: 272). Actually, Kardec taught about three different and increasingly
serious levels of obsession, from “simple obsession which is a subtle disturbance, a form
of confusion” to “obsession through fascination, which can lead us to obsessive dis-
turbances with loss of logical reason and lucidity” to “obsession through subjugation
which can be compared to conditions such as profound depression, schizophrenia, etc.”
(278, emphasis added). Curiously, Moreira-Almeida and Koss-Chioino found that
“obsession by a molesting spirit” was less likely to be diagnosed by Spiritists in Brazil
than in Puerto Rico, Brazilian practitioners more inclined to name medical/psychiatric
causes (278). We will return to Spiritist cures below.
Physical and emotional illness as an effect of possession or other spiritual torment is in
no way restricted to tribal and fringe religions. Christianity has always maintained that
the devil himself and his demonic minions can harass, persecute, and possess humans. In
his work with American charismatic Christians, Thomas Csordas located the same dis-
tinction between (rare) possession and (common) oppression, the latter amounting to a
corruption “in a limited domain of the person’s life” rather than a total takeover of his
personality (2002: 15). Notably, rather than bearing individual names as in some socie-
ties, the offending spirits were known by the terms for:
various sins, habits, or unfavorable behavior traits and tend to appear in clusters.
Thus an individual may harbor a sexuality cluster (for example, Lust, Perversion,
Masturbation, AduItery) or a falsehood cluster (for example, Falsehood, Lying,
Deceit, Exaggeration). The troop of demons is often headed by a “manager spirit,”
which is analogized to the taproot of a weed-hardest to get out, but if it goes, the
lesser ones follow.
(15)
Two facts about spirit possession are worth noting. First, as previously suggested,
cross-culturally women are particularly prone to possession afflictions, like the Hofriyat
women in the introductory case. On the island of Mayotte, between mainland Africa and
Madagascar, victims were also women, whose personalities or subjectivities were totally
displaced by a spirit during the possession encounter (Lambek 1980). Likewise on Samoa,
ma’i aitu or “spirit sickness” impacted young women; in a society where females were
expected to display quiet, respect, and chastity, a girl who flouted these norms,
particularly by taking a lover, was diagnosed as possessed by a Teine, one of the spirit-
girls who were regarded as “anything but virgins” (Mageo 1991: 359). When a girl was
said to be possessed by a Teine, her impulsive and extravagant behavior was likened to
that of a spirit-girl, donning bright clothing and wearing her hair down in a libertine
way. One more contemporary example involved young women working in Malaysian
factories, where they were valued for their shyness, obedience, and deference, that is,
willingness to follow orders without objection. However, “when young peasant women
began to leave the kampung [village] and enter the unknown worlds of urban boarding
schools and foreign factories, the incidence of spirit possession seems to have become
more common among them” (Ong 1988: 32; see also Ong 1987). Aihwa Ong reasoned
that these outbreaks of spirit possession—in which women-workers “explode into
demonic screaming and rage on the shop floor” (1988: 28)—“may be taken as expressions
both of fear and of resistance against the multiple violations of moral boundaries in the
modern factory”—symbolic expressions of real-world oppression (38).
In some instances, a spirit may wreak havoc not by possessing a human but by
drawing him or her into a self-destructive relationship. The people of Nunavik (north-
ern Quebec) differentiated the penetration of an uuttuluttaq, a shapeless being that
troubles and tempts the victim from the inside, from the relationship with an uirsaq
(fiancé) or nuliarsaq (fiancée) spirit which “manifests itself in human form” and
becomes the person’s “imaginary mate,” leading him or her to undertake “a second,
parallel life with this entity” (Fletcher and Kirmayer 1997: 199). Symptoms included
“auditory and visual hallucinations; lack of concentration; constant nervousness; con-
stant moving about; an unusual desire to be alone; excessive staring at nothing; sweaty
palms; a distinctive odor; and generalized weakness of the body” as well as unpredict-
ability and aggression (200–201).
Second, as is apparent in some of these cases, spirit possession is not necessarily drea-
ded as affliction but may be welcomed or even sought as the acquisition of power and the
treatment of an affliction, as among Hofriyat women. Likewise, women on Mayotte
learned to live with their occupying spirit, entering into a long-term relationship of
mutual rights and responsibilities as the spouse of the spirit. And just as the host learned
from the experience, so did the parasite: “The spirit learns to listen to others and to
speak its own thoughts so that the others will understand in turn. The spirit also
becomes more open concerning the topics about which it is willing to converse” (Lambek
1980: 322). Recall from the previous chapter that a medium possessed by a goddess might
mete out justice in India, offering some relief from physical and emotional pain and from
social neglect and unfairness. Elsewhere, a Sidamo (southwest Ethiopia) man might
exploit possession strategically. In that society, a man was required to distinguish himself
in some way—as a lion-killer, warrior, speaker, farmer, etc. However, for the man who
otherwise lacked talent:
spirit possession provides an alternative opportunity for achieving status. A person

with a powerful spirit may accumulate wealth from gifts, and he has the potentiality
of attracting large audiences when he undergoes possession, even if he is completely
ignored in the assembly of elders.
(Hamer and Hamer 1966: 399)
And of course there is no greater gift for charismatic Christians than possession by the
Holy Spirit.
In many societies, it is not only or especially nonhuman spirits that perpetrate injury
against humans; instead, the malefactor may be another human employing religious
powers and techniques. Often labeled by the local equivalent of witch or sorcerer, they
are frequently thought to be a much greater and more common threat. Evans-Pritchard
commented that the Azande ascribed virtually every negative occurrence, from sickness to
the collapse of a granary, to witches, and Lloyd Warner (1969) concurred that the
Murngin (Aboriginal Australia) blamed death, sickness, and various bad luck on “black
magic.”
We had a good deal to say about witches and sorcerers in a prior chapter (see
Chapter 3), who may cause harm intentionally or who may simply radiate anger, jea-
lousy, and hatred onto their kinfolk and neighbors. The distinction between witches as
“natural” evil-doers (often based on an inherent power or even a “witch-organ” that
spews malevolence) and sorcerers as practitioners of a technique does not always apply
cross-culturally.
Some observers like James Whitaker have adopted the term “assault sorcery” for
certain kinds of spiritual aggression against members of one’s own society. The
Makushi, an Amerindian people in Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela, call such action
kanaima, which also refers to human practitioners “who (alone or in groups) target
and kill others” with “poisons, charms, bodily transformations (including shape-
shifting), and assaults” (2021: 3–4).
Figure 7.2 Witchcraft in South Africa: The magic world of Sangomas. South African Sangomas are
wizards and witches who are supposedly chosen by their ancestors to follow a tradi-
tional training and go through a rite of passage after which they become Sangomas and
can cure and help people. © Patrick Durand/Contributor/Getty Images.
The reasons for being targeted vary, but often center around offenses and failures to
practice normative reciprocity or generosity. Envy (either by the kanaima or whoever
“sends” the kanaima) is frequently the motivation. Whatever the cause, kanaima
attacks consist of a surprise assault when the victim is alone—often on a path, in the
farm, or going outside at night. The attack combines physical assault (often dis-
locating joints) with poisoning. In particular, the tongue is pricked with snake fangs
and the anus is damaged to tie the intestines. Kanaima often dress in jaguar skins
during such attacks.
(4)
As mentioned, these sorcerers often act in groups with a leader or master, and they are
reputed to “return to the graves of victims to consume blood (hematophagy) or another
part of the corpse. For kanaima, this is similar to a beer drinking festival” (4)—a per-
version of a key Makushi social event.
Treatment and cure of illness

Finally, every healthcare system has its treatment regimens and its healing roles, inevi-
tably determined by the society’s conceptions of the body and its (mal)functioning and of
the causes and categories of sickness. When physical, mental, and emotional symptoms
are understood as spiritual or supernatural in origin, it only makes sense that the cures
and curers would be of a spiritual or supernatural sort too.
The classic religious healing role is the shaman, sometimes dubbed a “witch-doctor.”
(Evans-Pritchard actually used the term “witch-doctor” for a ritual healing specialty among
the Azande.) Even Womack referenced shamans in her survey chapter on spiritual medicine.
Shamans are renowned for performing cures by taking advantage of the very condition that
endangers many patients, namely, detaching their spirit/soul and sojourning to the spirit
world. Unlike ordinary people, though, they are able to control the experience and return
safely to their body, informed and/or empowered by their spiritual encounter.
The view of the shaman as a master of soul flight is sometimes accurate but overly
simplistic. Shamanism does not always entail soul flight, nor is curing the only function
that shamans perform. In fact, as manipulators of great power, shamans can also be
harmful, to ordinary folk, to other shamans, and to themselves. What Neil Whitehead
(2002) called “dark shamans” in his own study of kanaimà in Guyana conveys the moral
ambiguity of spiritual virtuosos, who may injure members of society or engage in strug-
gles and wars with rival shamans. (Some observers have pondered in seriousness whether
the shaman is him/herself mentally ill, but if so it is a socially sanctioned and socially
valued kind of illness.)
At any rate, shamanism is much more culturally diverse than the term implies. For
instance, for the Khoisan investigated by Low, among whom wind was thought to ani-
mate and bind living beings in fabrics of connection, this same idea of:
threads of connection inherent in tracking and smell plays into the invisible world of
the Khoisan shaman. A Ju/‘hoansi healer, Kxao≠oma, described tsso, a floating
yellow and green string or rope that he sees in the healing dance. The string goes to
many places. Khoisan follow it to the dead people. Cwi Cucga sometimes followed
the string or rode on the back of animals to the village of the dead people.
(2007: S75)
Figure 7.3 Sick man being healed by a shaman. © Floris Leeuwenberg/Getty images.
The confluence of two local notions—that the seat of the soul is the heart and that the
shaman possesses a unique potency (so-xa)—yielded the Khoisan belief that shamans heal
by traveling to the deity:
who is thought in such instances to have stolen the sick person’s heart and hence
their life-wind and soul. They plead with God for its return. If the heart is given
back to the victim, via the shaman, he or she will survive. If not, he or she will die.
The idea of the heart moving and causing sickness has a wider context in Khoisan
concepts of disease. Many illnesses are attributed to moving organs, although it is
only the heart that is envisaged as being taken outside the body.
(S77)
Further, shamans across cultures do not only cure by spiritual means but also by material
ones. The Khoisan shaman could transfer potency and health by rubbing the substance into
cuts on the body; such “medicinal cuts” for depositing healing power were effective against
“children’s sicknesses, leg pain, back ache, and abdominal problems” (S83). In Australian
Aboriginal societies, a shaman often achieved his results by removing harmful objects from
the victim’s body, like stones, feathers, and twigs, placed there by sorcery. Brazilian Spiritists
might also reach or cut into bodies to miraculously withdraw offending objects. Shamans
across cultures may handle physical objects symbolizing the patient and his malady or
administer material medicines derived from plants or other natural sources. (See supple-
mental reading “Spirits with Scalpels: Ritual Healing in Brazil.”)
Remarkably (or not, as the body often heals itself given the opportunity), even secular
medical anthropologists like Womack (2010: 216) grant that shamanic cures often
Figure 7.4 Members of The Nharo San tribe from the central Kalahari in Botswana perform their
ritual inxam dance, symbolizing the healing and therapeutic ritual cleansing of body and
mind of evil forces. © Rajesh Jantilal/AFP via Getty Images.
succeed. How they do so is a matter of speculation and controversy. In one of the most
celebrated analyses in the anthropology of religion, Claude Lévi-Strauss compared the
work of the shaman to that of the psychoanalyst. His material centered on a curing ritual
among the Cuna or Kuna people of Panama, intended to relieve a troubled childbirth,
which would appear to be a thoroughly physical problem. By interacting with spirits, the
ritual specialist known as nele could aid the woman, who suffered from a spiritual rather
than medical ailment—the loss of one of her spiritual components, which he retrieved
from the spirit. Lévi-Strauss argued that the shaman’s curing song “constitutes a purely
psychological treatment, for the shaman does not touch the body of the sick woman and
administers no remedy”; yet, the ritual or symbolic action succeeded, because it func-
tioned as “a psychological manipulation of the sick organ” (1963: 191–92). The pivotal
observation of Lévi-Strauss was that by “calling upon myth” the shaman reintegrates the
woman, also providing her “with a language, by means of which unexpressed and
otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed” (197). Here he
located the parallel between shamanism and psychoanalysis:
In both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances
which have remained unconscious, owing either to their repression by other psycho-
logical forces or—in the case of childbirth—to their own specific nature, which is not
psychic but organic or even simply mechanical. In both cases also, the conflicts and
resistances are resolved, not because of the knowledge, real or alleged, which the sick
woman progressively acquires of them, but because this knowledge makes possible a
specific experience, in the course of which conflicts materialize in an order and on a
level permitting their free development and leading to their resolution.
(198)
The key difference, Lévi-Strauss hypothesized, is the source of the efficacy of this
healing action. In psychoanalysis, “the patient constructs an individual myth with ele-
ments drawn from his past”; in shamanic cure, “the patient receives from the outside a
social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state” (199). Either way,
he insisted, sufferers are healed by the power of stories: in psychoanalysis “the healer
performs the actions and the patient produces his myth; in the shamanistic cure the
healer supplies the myth and the patient performs the actions” (201). This conclusion
supported Lévi-Strauss’s general contention that the mind, especially the unconscious,
operated on the principle of myths and symbols and therefore that the content of heal-
ing stories and experiences was less important than their form; if Freud was correct
that neurotics are plagued by painful memories (suffering from reminiscences, he said),
then new healthy memories can be constructed from individual biography or collective
mythology. Lévi-Strauss added that “any myth represents a quest for the remembrance
of things past” (204).
Other healing roles and traditions conform to the religious and medical expectations of
the local society. We introduced a curandera in Chapter 5 who specialized in susto ill-
nesses, integrating words, gestures, and material objects into her ritual treatments, which
were centered on “cleansing” unhealthy forces and making the patient clean (limpia). The
idea of limpia also figures in Herrera and Orr’s ethnography of susto, finding that the
cure begins with a limpia “to diagnose and determine that llamadas espirituales (soul
callings) will be needed” (2020: 78). Once that information was ascertained, the cur-
andera traveled in dreams to the afflicted soul and negotiated with the oppressive spirits
that “retain the person’s soul, causing susto sickness. The curandero’s role is to make
offerings and entreat these entities, but also to take food—beans, tortillas, and chili—to
the place where the person was frightened” (78).
Like shamanism, spirit possession can work for good or ill, and in societies where
possession is the problem, it is also often the solution. In Brazilian Spiritism, spiritual
“obsession” is detected by “mediumistic meetings when the obsessing spirit commu-
nicates through mediums or when a spiritual guide manifests through a medium and
explains the cause of the patient’s problem” (Moreira-Almeida and Koss-Chioino 2009:
272). Mediums, approximately three-quarters of whom are women, then activate a vari-
ety of healing responses, including séances, “passes” of the medium’s hands over the
victim’s body, prayers, and “injunctions to live according to ethical principles” while
attempting to convince the “distress-causing spirit” to depart. Describing much the same
scene, Greenfield significantly added that patients have “only a vague knowledge of the
Kardecist belief system” underlying these “disobsession” rituals and were passive if not
peripheral to the event: “The patient seemingly took no part in the ritual drama” which
was staged between the medium and the foreign spirit; “He stood by, observing what was
being done on his behalf with glazed eyes and a look of disbelief on his face” (2004: 180).
For the charismatic Catholics studied by Csordas, who practice a religion constituted
primarily by words (see Chapter 4), healing took the form predominantly but not exclu-
sively of verbal interaction. The process included “healing of memories” during which
“an individual’s entire life is prayed for in stages, from the moment of conception to the
present. Any events or unreconciled relationships that emerge in this review of life history
are given special attention” (2002: 15). Another verbal technique was “prayer for deli-
verance” if spirit oppression or possession was detected; then the evil spirit was “bound”
by the healer in the name of Jesus, commanded to identify itself, and ordered to leave.
But treatment was not wholly verbal; it might also entail touch (“laying on of hands”)
and anointing with water or oil.
Many other ritual healing strategies exist across cultures, including beneficial pil-
grimages. Healing power resides in such places, infused by spirits or by spiritually pow-
erful humans like saints. Nurit Stadler and Nimrod Luz accompanied pilgrims to so-
called “womb tombs” in Israel/Palestine, which is rich with Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim sites. Visitors to the shrines “seek preternatural intervention for infertility, sick-
ness, pain, and other misfortunes” while also, like the petitioners at Our Lady of the
Wall (see Chapter 6), voicing their “indigenous claims to the land” (2014: 183). The
world is dotted with such spaces, like Lourdes (France), Medjugorje (Bosnia), the Ganges
River (India), Glastonbury (United Kingdom), and the Sanctuary of Chimayö (United
States). (See for example Dubisch and Winkelman 2005.) (See supplemental reading
“Music, Prayer, and Healing in Uzbekistan.”)
Finally, recipients of religious healing are not always as inert as those undergoing
Spiritist disobsession. Csordas explicitly insisted that traditional Navajo ritual therapy is
“didactic” in nature, that is, the patient is not a mere “spectator” but is actively engaged
and guided toward self-understanding; the principle, as he phrased it, was to “talk to
them so they understand” (2002:167). This goal did not preclude symbolic and ritual
behavior, such as the Enemyway ceremony (Ana’i Ndáá) performed to expel and defeat
the “enemy” within and without, or throwing of corn pollen. Talking to the sick and
suffering may inform them, but religious curing, like all ritual behavior, aims at more—
the transformation of the person from sick to well. And this, as illustrated by Navajo
ideology and tradition, entails not only fixing the individual body. Another ceremony, the
Blessingway, transcends the individual “to awaken one to natural order (hozho); choos-
ing constructive and life-affirming choices; healing from intentions and decisions that
destroy oneself and others,” according to Choctaw/Navajo Wisdom Keeper Patricia Anne
Davis (nativeamericanconcepts.wordpress.com/the-blessing-way). This in turn is shaped
by the Navajo philosophy of Sa’qh Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫǫn or the pursuit of a long,
healthy, and harmonious life.
The destination, or rather the journey, of health and harmony necessarily implicates
the self in social relationships, which may require an overcoming of the present sick self.
This is beautifully portrayed in the Quechua (Peruvian Andes) practice of symbolic self-
sacrifice. When a person suffered from “fright” (mancharisq’a) and soul loss—one of
many spiritual perils including “evil winds (machu wayra), devils (soqa), walking souls
(urana), and being grabbed and eaten by the hungry earth (hap’iqasqa)”—a soul-calling
ceremony was held to transfer the patient’s damaged self to a symbolic object, which was
then burned. This destruction of the bad self was a sacrifice, an “inversion” of ritual
payments made to spirits: “The healer gives an offering to the spirits in exchange for the
creative, animating, force that the ill patient needs to restore his or her health,” recreating
the flawed self as a well self (Greenway 1998: 157).
As suggested, and in sharp contrast to biomedicine which typically treats the individual
body with indifference to its social network, rebuilding healthy persons often if not
usually demands rebuilding healthy families, societies, and worlds. Among the people of
Nunavut, healing operated simultaneously at the levels of “spiritual, social, familial, and
personal states of well being,” where saimmatsianiq refers to “an element of physical and
social health that is characterized by a sense of well being in one’s self and in relation-
ships with others that produces a feeling of joy in life” (Fletcher and Kirmayer 1997: 192).
The Hindus of Réunion Island (a French department in the Indian Ocean) cured mental
illness by repairing not just the mind of the individual but the relationship between her
and other people, including the ancestors. Mental illness was understood as “the result of
a generational disorder brought about by a breakdown in the symbolic filiation”
(Govindama 2006: 489), that is, in the bond between offspring and their elders and
ancestors. The ritual worked by recovering “the symbolic debt of life” between the
victim, the founder of the society and civilization, and the genealogical line in between. In
short, the intervention “aims not at treating mental disorder directly but at reintroducing
order according to natural rules and reaffiliating symbolically the subject to the founder
as well as his ancestors and descendants” (508). At the grandest level, the Suniyama ritual
of Sinhalese Buddhists (Sri Lanka) combated sorcery via “the radical creative and
destructive, world-unmaking and world-remaking action of human beings” (Kapferer
1997: 86). A nonviolent sacrifice, the Suniyama is:
a rite of (re)origination whereby the patient effectively repeats the primordial world-
ordering action of Mahasammata, who is the collective manifestation of the con-
stitutive power of the consciousness of human being [sic]. In other words, the
Suniyama reinstills within the patient the potency of the first world-creating act
whereby the patient is reempowered with consciousness and once more becomes
capable of socially constitutive action in which the patient’s life and that of others
can be developed and sustained.
(104)
Box 7.2 Healing self, kin, and society in northern Australia

Although many Yolngu (Aboriginal) residents of the Galiwin’ku community in northern
Australia are Christians, Carolyn Schwarz assures us that they “continue to grant
preeminence to sorcery in explaining sickness and death. The common terms Yolgnu
use for the ‘sorcerer’ today are galka or ragalk” (2010: 64). Certainly not all unwellness
is supernatural; some is “just sickness” (rerri yän). To distinguish the two, locals con-
sider a number of variables including “symptom type, how quickly the symptoms
came about, the whereabouts of the person prior to the onset of the sickness and the
longevity of the sickness” (65). If the culprit is a sorcerer, the evildoer may have
employed techniques like “‘pointing of the bone (manggimanggi)’ [to project malevo-
lent energy], the use of particular ‘killing weapons’ (girri’wuthunaraw), or causing harm
through the victim’s bodily matter, such as hair or feces” (65). Fortunately, sorcery can
be countered by the marrnggitj or healer who treats the sick with help from “spirit
familiars, healing stones and ghosts of the dead” but also incorporates practical
remedies from plants and other materials (72). While illness is obviously an individual
condition, at Galiwin’ku as in many parts of the world it is “also connected to the moral
state of the community” and can be construed “as a barometer of social cohesive-
ness” (63). For instance, in the past before European colonization, sorcery was largely
the province of older men who applied it “for legitimate reasons, such as the punish-
ment of those who broke the Law” (67). That is, sorcery was at least to an extent a
moral force. In the present, though, illegitimate actors (like youths) engage it in for
illegitimate and selfish purposes. Consequently, Yolngu complain that there is more
sorcery today than formerly, evident in the increase in diseases (many Western in
origin), malnutrition, substance abuse, and social conflict. But just as sorcery can be
the source of personal and social deterioration, so treatment of sorcery can be a
source of personal and social reintegration. Traditional (and Christian) healing tends to
involve more than treatment of the individual body but also “more explicit attempts to
reconcile relations among kind with a history of interpersonal problems” (63). Kin come
together to diagnose and support the victim and to administer justice or retribution
against the sorcerer, enabling “both the people in question and the community to
become whole (dhorru) again” (64).
Religion in the clinic: Medical pluralism

Finally, if it is not already apparent, any society may feature multiple healthcare alter-
natives—popular, folk, and professional—and individuals and families may avail them-
selves of more than one healing course, consecutively or simultaneously. Indeed, one
more unmerited presupposition of biomedicine is that modern scientific medicine invari-
ably displaces irrational and “superstitious” treatments and that if people become aware
of and have access to biomedical treatments they will certainly choose them. But this is
Figure 7.5 Navajo medicine man and Navajo boys. A blind Native American Navajo medicine man
directs four Najavo boys in a “Red Ant and Sham” battle dance, which is a healing
dance. © Keystone View Company/FPG/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
not the case. Rather, religious and secular medical ideas and practices frequently coexist
and often interact.
Medical anthropologists refer to “medical pluralism” to describe the multiplicity of med-
ical traditions in any given society, including Western biomedicine and what medical pro-
fessionals call “complementary and alternative medicines” (CAM). The National Cancer
Institute, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/
treatment/cam), defines CAM as “medical products and practices that are not part of stan-
dard [read, biomedical] medical care,” such as “mind-body therapies” (e.g. meditation, yoga,
tai chi), massage, reflexology, “biofield therapy” (e.g. reiki, therapeutic touch), and “whole
medical systems” (e.g. non-Western traditions like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine).
Although it does not mention religious and indigenous healing ideas and practices, these
could easily fall within the “whole medical systems” category, which medical anthro-
pologists would advocate. (See supplemental reading “Three Healing Traditions in Con-
temporary Navajo Society: The Navajo Healing Project.”)
That religion and medical science need not be enemies, contrary to the expectations of
many scientists and secularists, is revealed in Maria Coma’s account of Spanish charis-
matic Catholics who believe in the healing powers of religion and “associate healing with
salvation” (2015: 159), performing healing prayers and laying on of hands in their ser-
vices. Yet these believers do not dismiss biomedicine and certainly “do not refrain from
seeking medical attention when they are sick. The relationship between biomedicine and
religion is not seen as contradictory, and combining prayers with pills causes no conflict
at all” (167). Indeed, they subsume biomedicine within religion, as part of God’s gift to
humanity and as “a divine instrument for accomplishing His healing action” (167).
A particularly clear case of the meshing of spiritual and secular medicine is, surpris-
ingly, the Brazilian Spiritist system discussed several times earlier. Despite his teachings
of spirits and spirit obsession, Kardec in no way rejected modern medicine; in fact,
Kardec himself wrote that therapists “have often mistaken for cases of possession what
were really cases of epilepsy or madness, demanding the help of the physician rather than
of the exorciser” (quoted in Moreira-Almeida and Koss-Chioino 2009: 277). Moreover,
Spiritists in Brazil and beyond have opened healing centers and hospitals: more than a
decade ago, Moreira-Almeida and Koss-Chioino counted:
as many as ten thousand Spiritist centers that provide free counseling, emotional,
spiritual, and material support, and free spiritual and medical treatments. All Spiri-
tist centers are entirely based on charitable, voluntary work. In addition, there are
approximately 50 Spiritist psychiatric hospitals. All of these psychiatric hospitals
offer a combination of orthodox medical/psychological care and Spiritist therapies.
(272)
There is also a professional Brazilian Association of Spiritist Psychologists. (See imhu.

org/brazil-spiritist-hospitals for a summary of what Spiritist hospitals offer.)
Spiritism is not alone in offering medicine together with religion. Two other religious
traditions that also emerged from nineteenth-century spiritual and revival movements
were Seventh-day Adventism and Christian Science. According to the website of the
Seventh-day Adventist Church (www.adventist.org/articles/operating-principles-for-hea
lth-care-institutions), the organization “includes a ministry of healing to the whole
person—body, mind, and spirit” which provides “care and compassion for the sick and
suffering”:
Health-care institutions (hospitals, medical/dental clinics, nursing and retirement
homes, rehabilitation centers, etc.) function as an integral part of the total ministry
of the Church and follow church standards including maintaining the sacredness of
the Sabbath by promoting a Sabbath atmosphere for staff and patients, avoiding
routine business, elective diagnostic services, and elective therapies on Sabbath.
These standards also include the promotion of an ovo-lactovegetarian diet free of
stimulants and alcohol and an environment free of tobacco smoke. Control of appe-
tite shall be promoted, use of drugs with a potential for abuse shall be controlled,
and techniques involving the control of one mind by another shall not be permitted.
Accordingly, it runs 227 hospitals and sanitariums, 133 nursing homes, 673 clinics and
dispensaries, and receives more than 1.5 million inpatient visits and twenty million out-
patient visits. Developing the notion of “mind-cure” current in the late 1800s, Christian
Science founder Mary Baker Eddy wrote Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
In the words of the church’s website (www.christianscience.com/christian-healing-today),
“Her Bible-based textbook on spiritual healing has helped people around the world
experience health and solutions to all types of suffering. Living and sharing this spiritual,
scientific method of healing based on Jesus’ teachings is the continuing mission of this
Church.” The site offers a two-week course preparing students “to be effective Christian
healers.” The church maintains a searchable database of Christian Science practitioners
at www.christianscience.com/find-us/find-a-christian-science-practitioner.
Many other religions offer healing services, consistent with their religious ideas and
practices. The Abbasai temple was one of three Mahanubhav centers in the town of
Phaltan (Maharashtra, India), focusing on mental illness. Here families brought disturbed
individuals (or disturbed individuals occasionally brought themselves) for aid; the temple
provided living spaces for kin who remained on site for an average of three or four
months, tending to their troubled relatives. Significantly, women were both frequent
patients and frequent members of impromptu therapy management groups, commonly
traveling to care for a husband or son. In many cases, women retreated to the temple
“because of some major upheaval or conflict in family relationships”; they were almost
universally “divorced, widowed, or childless” and arrived “feeling depressed and tired”
(Skultans 1987: 664). Vieda Skultans surmised that such women “come to the temple, not
so much because their symptoms are intolerable, as because their social situation is
intolerable” (664). In other instances, families took misbehaving relatives to the location,
dubbing them “mad,” although there was a noticeable absence of clarity about what
madness was, beyond standard symptoms like “dirtiness, incoherent and inappropriate
talk, fighting without reason, inability to work or execute orders, aloofness and having
no structure to one’s daily activities” (667). The most striking aspect of life in the temple
was that the mentally ill individuals were largely passive and uninvolved; it was instead
the kinfolk, particularly the women, who “throw themselves into a round of frenzied,
ritual activity, [while] the patients remain detached and seemingly disinterested specta-
tors” (667). This frenetic activity typically featured women going into trance, which they
welcomed and intentionally pursued as a means of redirecting alleged spiritual attacks
away from their male kin and onto themselves. In other words, “women cultivate trance
as a sacrificial device to ensure the health and well-being of the rest of the family” (661).
Skultans saw this practice as an indicator of the social burden that women bore for the
health of their families and for the related notion that illness, mental or otherwise, was a
collective and not merely an individual affliction.
Religious and secular cooperation is still more conspicuous at the south Indian temple
researched by Marie Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky and Brigitte Sébastia. The temple in
Gunaseelam hosts a clinic associated with Sowmanasya Mental Hospital, whose psy-
chiatrists visit several times a week to dispense counseling and pharmaceuticals. Patients,
as the article’s title (“Mixing Tı-rttam and Tablets: A Healing Proposal for Mentally Ill
Patients in Gunaseelam [South India]”) indicates, are given both pills along with tı-rttam
or “a ritual during which the priest energetically sprinkles holy water on the devotees’
faces” (2015: 130). Although both kinds of intervention are offered, “the psychiatric and
religious conceptions of care remain mutually exclusive: psychiatrists trust only anti-
psychotic drugs, whereas priests credit the tı-rttam and god’s instruments of healing with
more power” (133).
Another common relationship between religious and biomedical cures is to keep them
separated from or parallel to each other. In Ghana, for example, there is a fairly common
division between “illness of the body” (locally known as honam yadeɛ) and “illness of the
spirit” (sunsum yadeɛ). Predictably, sunsum yadeɛ is “linked to supernatural causation
such as witchcraft, sorcery and curses” (Read 2016: 52), and to address it folks have a
variety of religious options—traditional healers (akɔmfoɔ) who combine rituals with
herbal treatments, Muslims mallams with their prayers and Qur’anic readings, and Pen-
tecostal preachers. There are also medical hospitals. Curiously, the split between bodily
and spiritual illness does not correspond to particular symptoms but to the duration of
sickness: if the suffering is prolonged or recurrent, then spiritual causes are suspected.
This means that the expected order of treatment—first traditional or religious, then bio-
medical—is reversed: people try the medical hospital first, but if the problem is not cured
or it returns, they assume “a malign spiritual cause” and turn to traditional/religious
specialists (54).
Religion may seep into the medical setting in other ways. The Bahir Far Fistula Center
in northwest Ethiopia treats women suffering from the entirely physical condition of fis-
tula, a tear in the bladder or rectum producing leakage of urine or feces from the vagina
and associated with protracted labor and difficult childbirth. At the hospital, women get
surgery to repair the damage, but religion enters the scene before and after surgery.
Despite their physical complaints, pre-operative women “are still expected to fulfill their
social duties” such as attending “market days, births, weddings, and funerals” (Hannig
2017: 50–51), and failure in these activities is as serious as their health issues. Of all their
social relationships, “their individual relationship with God” (69) is most threatened,
because their incontinence forbids these Orthodox Christians from entering a church and
taking communion; many opt to approach but remain outside the church and to empha-
size fasting over praying. At the hospital, the white Australian founders of the clinic impose
Protestant discourses and practices on their patients. Having to overcome their values of
modesty and seclusion, the women are subjected to a regimen of surgery-as-salvation that
combines Protestantism with the acquisition of modern skills and selves. They are put
through “projects in moral education and social transformation” including classes on
hygiene, nutrition, family planning as well as “literacy, math, religion, and knitting” (150)
which communicate that their former “backward” culture is much of their problem. Some
eventually become employees of the hospital, while others become long-term residents of a
“training and rehabilitation center” where they can escape their rural past and “realize their
potential as entrepreneurs” (199) who are productive and self-sufficient.
Religion enters from yet another angle at the Madang Hospital in Papua New Guinea.
Alice Street recounted how the all-Christian medical staff of the hospital promotes
Christianity and encourages patients to become believers; local preachers “also slip into
the wards when the doctors are absent and give sermons to the patients, telling them that
their body is the house of God and they needed to renew their belief in order to get well”
(2010: 262–63). And many patients do proclaim their belief, some presumably because
they truly “believe” and others because they feel that they are expected to say so. How-
ever, Street proposed that by seeking knowledge of and a relationship with the Christian
god, the sick and injured “put their relationship with the doctor at the center of hospital
medicine” (267) and seek his/her knowledge.
Like the Ghanaians, the Papuans made a distinction between sik bilong ples or tradi-
tional/village sickness and sik bilong marasin or sickness within the realm of Western
medicine. In village culture, sik bilong ples “referred to the potential of particular persons
or relationships to have effects on their bodies,” so therefore people “constantly looked to
their health and bodily appearance as an index of the state of their social relationships”
(266). A positive relationship took the form of wanbel, “bel” indexing the heart or sto-
mach (the “belly”), such that all participants “share a similarity of emotional states and
intentions toward each other” (269)—literally, one-heart. A negative relationship, one
that made the body sick, was regarded as tubel (two bellies or hearts), that is, “to have
divided thoughts, to have ambivalent or negative thoughts or emotions,” or to suffer from
uncertainty, disapproval, or lack of commitment. In short, locals worried about the state
of their relationships, which directly impacted their health. But the hospital was itself a
site of anxious and uncertain relationships. Patients stressed that following the doctors’
orders was not sufficient to recover; they desired a strong positive relationship with the
caregivers but “did not know exactly what a good relationship with a doctor might look
like” (269), since the medical staff was outside their kinship network. Hence, if the doc-
tors and nurses wanted the patients to practice Christianity and to repeat Christian
beliefs, the patients were happy to oblige; such cooperation hopefully made doctors and
patients wanbel. So conforming to the hospital staff’s Christianity is one way “to reduce
multiple concerns to a single focus” (273).
Box 7.3 Divine assistance in an Ecuadorian fertility clinic

People go to fertility clinics for assistance with reproductive problems. In rich and
relatively secularized societies like the United States, pregnancy and childbirth are
considered essentially natural processes, and the assistance at in-vitro fertilization
(IVF) labs is exclusively scientific and practical. However, “in a precarious and unequal
world with a minimal social safety net and chronic economic insecurity” and less
guaranteed access to modern medical technology like Ecuador, patients may seek to
enhance their resources through extended family networks and religious beings like
the Christian god (Roberts 2013: 562). Elizabeth Roberts, who earlier introduced the
term “nonsecular medical anthropology,” discusses just such a case in two Ecuador-
ian cities (Quito and Quayaquil), where what locals call nuestra realidad (our reality)
includes unpredictability and dependence. Unlike couples in California, who largely
undergo the procedure alone, Ecuadorians perceive themselves as much more
enmeshed in relationships with medical professionals, kin, and God—and doctors and
nurses shared this sense. “I came to realize that God was an integral part of the IVF
process for both patients and practitioners”:
God was always present to be called on, never distant, impersonal, or bureau-
cratic. … [Even] the majority of Ecuadorian IVF practitioners I met were insistent
on their dependence on God. They proclaimed their laboratories to be God’s and
repeatedly reminded themselves and others of their need for assistance.
(571)
Religion appears in many forms: doctors and nurses “touched crucifixes on gamete
incubators and called on God to aid their patients” and “asked God to fertilize the
eggs”; one doctor “would make the sign of the cross before he placed the petri dish
with the ovum and sperm in the incubator” (571). These gestures and many more
signal that “the power of life rests in divine hands” and that they therefore depend on
“the assistance they received from both technology and God in their pursuit of chil-
dren” (571). From the Ecuadorian IVF lab perspective, Roberts concludes:
God manipulated the material world on behalf of family continuity. His actions did
not unsettle the laws of nature, as “all of science is thanks to him”. God’s direct
interventions in biological processes were real, not unnatural or supernatural, and
were consistent with the way people and things need to come together to mould
assisted reproduction.
(571)
At the extreme, as implied by these cases, even the modern biomedical hospital might
be experienced as a site of sacredness and magic. Sjaak van der Geest argued that there is
“a ritual dimension of hospital work, a chain of words and acts, which fill patients with
hope for a ‘future life’” (2005: 135). Taking seriously the notion of doctors as “the new
priests,” van der Geest compared medicine for the body to grace for the soul and urged
us to reflect on the rituals and metaphors, indeed the “sacraments,” of biomedical heal-
ing. Ultimately:
Being seriously sick and facing possible death is therefore a religious experience. The
nurse and doctor fighting for the patient’s life become participants in a religious
drama. Their actions, such as technical interventions, caring gestures, and medical
substances, assume religious significance.
(144)
Before leaving this topic, we would be remiss to ignore the potentially negative, even
life-threatening, aspects of the overlap of religion and healthcare. Some religions oppose
or forbid various medically acceptable procedures, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses ban on
blood transfusions and Catholic and evangelical Christian disapproval of abortion. In the
United States, where “religious freedom” is enshrined in the culture and Constitution,
religious exemptions from standard medical treatments, especially when religious parents
make decisions regarding their children’s health, can end in “faith-based medical neglect”
(Swan 2020)—for instance, reliance on prayer and scorn of medical treatment as faith-
less—and preventable suffering and death.
Conclusion
Religions are cultural systems with ideas about what exists in the world in addition to
humans and about how humans should interaction with and control that entities and
forces. These ideas and practices extend to the functioning and malfunctioning of the
human body and its relations with other people, the natural environment, and the spiri-
tual dimension. From its earliest days, anthropology has been interested in concepts of
affliction and healing, taking the form of a subdiscipline of medical anthropology and
recognizing the connection between medicine and religion. Medical anthropology further
recognizes modern scientific biomedicine as a cultural system and the most familiar ver-
sion of ethnomedicine. The anthropological study of religion, medicine, and health begins
with cultural conceptions of the human body, which inform notions of the causes and
classes of illness and then of the courses of therapy for sickness. Religions provide roles,
supernatural and social, for both healing and harm, which are often embodied in the
same figures. Finally, while secular science and medicine often denigrates and ignores
religion, for many people in many societies religious and biomedical cures coexist and
frequently cooperate in achieving the best health outcomes for religious believers or for
those under the care of religious believers.
1 What is medical anthropology? How does medical anthropology think about biome-
dicine and ethnomedicine?
2 What is nonsecular medical anthropology? What advantages does it offer, and what
challenges does it face?
3 What are some examples of how cultural conceptions of the body are holistically
related to other aspects of culture and society, and to practices of healing?
4 What are some of the ways that religions explain illness and other misfortunes?
5 What are some of the ways that religions offer to treat or combat illness and
misfortune?
6 What is medical pluralism, and how do scientific and religious health regimes coexist
and overlap?
Witchcraft, Harm, and Healing among the Azande
Spirits with Scalpels: Ritual Healing in Brazil
Music, Prayer, and Healing in Uzbekistan
Three Healing Traditions in Contemporary Navajo Society: The Navajo Healing Project
8 Religious change and new
religious movements
During the 1810s and 1820s throughout the Pacific region, islanders destroyed their tra-
ditional religious objects and buildings, smashing, burning, or burying statues, altars, and
temples. This “Polynesian iconoclasm” (Sissons 2014) was associated with the arrival of
Christianity and would seem to be an instance of the radical break from traditional reli-
gion and culture that often comes with the adoption of Christianity (see Chapter 9). Yet
in many ways this iconoclastic event was entirely continuous with Polynesian pre-contact
culture, characterized by a seasonal cycle of power and social structure. Around
November, when the constellation Pleiades was rising, social rules were loosened and
social distinctions minimized or ignored. On Tahiti:
people drank large quantities of kava and sang blasphemous cursing songs. Com-
moners and nobles, men and women, then bathed together in the ocean. … Over the
next four days, sexual orgies and feasting took place. … During this period of
revelry the high priest was secluded and blindfolded so that he would not see the
violations of sacred restriction.
(14)
Power struggles during this period might eventuate in the destruction of temples and the
desecration of sacred objects. However, months later as Pleiades sank below the horizon,
order was restored: sacred statues were displayed in “a dramatic performance through
which gods were called to sanctify their images and then sent away, leaving only priests
and high chiefs as their representatives” (17). There was always a tension that traditional
rules and power might be overthrown and not reconstituted as before. Such occurred in
June 1815 as the stars descended: the Christian chief Pomare asserted control, ordering
local chiefs and priests to dispose of pagan temples and objects, clearing the way for
establishing a new sacred order dedicated to the new god, Jehovah, with new “tem-
ples”—Christian churches—and new rules and powers founded for his regime. In a word,
the Polynesian iconoclasm and the conversion to Christianity was a variation of the
Pacific tradition of periodically challenging and displacing and replacing religious
traditions.
Religions often speak of eternal truths and unchanging gods, but permanence and
immutability are more aspects of the ideology of religions than accurate descriptions of
religions. That is, religions seem—and often claim—to ordain a way of life and a system
of meaning and morality that is settled once and for all and that cannot change, at least
not without being corrupted. This attitude tends as well to lead to the assumption that
religions are a mainly or even totally conservative force in society. However, the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-8
176 Religious change and new religious movements
historical and ethnographic record demonstrates that these suppositions are not true.
Religions are born, and religions die; in between, any religion constantly changes,
adapting to its social, physical, and technological circumstances, adding and deleting
elements, and multiplying into disparate, competing, and sometimes hostile sects. Chris-
tianity and Islam, as we will discuss in the next chapter, were once new religions,
although each tried and succeeded to offer itself as a perpetuation of ancient religious
truths. And according to one source, two or three new religions are invented every day
(Lester 2002: 38).
Rather than seeing religion as a static and conservative fact, we should see it as a
dynamic and highly malleable process. As a part of culture and as a composite phenom-
enon, religion can and must absorb aspects of the wider culture while diffusing into the
wider culture. Of course, religions meet and interact—sometimes clashing but frequently
borrowing. Thus, in this chapter we will explore the ongoing construction of religion.
Even small-scale tribal religions were dynamic, and no particular version or moment of
such religions—or of the familiar “world religions”—was the “true” or “traditional” one.
Further, by the time anthropologists arrived on the scene, many remote non-Western
religions had already encountered missionaries or followers of other religions like Chris-
tianity, Islam, or Buddhism. In more recent times, the processes of religious change have
accelerated, as and because the more general processes of cultural change and globaliza-
tion have accelerated.
The anthropology of religious change

As Malinowski noted long ago, “The figment of the ‘uncontaminated’ Native has to be
dropped from research in field and study. The cogent reason for this is that the ‘uncon-
taminated’ Native does not exist anywhere” (1961: 2). Therefore, “the scientific anthro-
pologist must be the anthropologist of the changing Native” (6). Of course, contemporary
anthropology is the science of the modern global citizen and cosmopolitan society too.
Nevertheless, in the realm of religion, the honest and informed anthropologist must be an
anthropologist of changing religion. In fact, religious change is a species of cultural
change generally, which Malinowski defined as “the process by which the existing order
of a society, that is, its social, spiritual, and material civilization, is transformed from one
type to another” (1). The significance of this understanding is two-fold: changes in reli-
gion will be holistically related to changes in other aspects of culture, and the same basic
change processes will operate in both.
In religion specifically and culture generally, the two most basic change processes are
innovation and diffusion. In the former, an individual or group within the society invents
or discovers some new idea, object, or practice—in the case of religion, a new entity to
believe in, a new myth to tell, a new symbol to use, a new ritual to perform, etc. In the
latter, an idea, object, or practice from one society is introduced to another society,
which entails further cultural processes such as contact, migration, intermarriage, inva-
sion, or conquest. Whichever is the ultimate source of novelty, the course of change only
begins with the appearance of the new item, as we will see below.
We can be considerably more precise about the forms and outcomes of religious and
cultural change. The result may be addition of an item to the pre-existing repertoire.
Evans-Pritchard commented, for instance, that several aspects of Nuer religion appeared
to come from outside Nuer society, specifically from their Dinka neighbors. The kwoth
nhial or “spirits of the air,” according to informants, “had all ‘fallen’ into foreign lands
Religious change and new religious movements 177
and had only recently entered into Nuerland and become known to them” (1956: 29).
Ideas about totems, nature sprites, and fetishes were also often attributed to the Dinka.
Conversely, deletion may occur when an item is dropped from the repertoire, as when a
society stops performing a certain ritual. Often, a reinterpretation of previous beliefs and
practices takes place, with old forms given new meaning; this can happen due to changing
social circumstances and experiences or the mere passing of the generations, new mem-
bers bringing new perspectives. Other outcomes, or perhaps versions of reinterpretation,
include elaboration, in which a pre-existing notion or practice is extended and developed,
sometimes in quite unprecedented directions; simplification, in which a pre-existing
notion or practice is trimmed of detail or sophistication; and purification, in which
members attempt to purge (from their point of view) false or foreign elements and to
return to the “real” or “pure” form.
One of the most common and well-studied change processes is syncretism (see below),
in which elements from two or more cultural/religious sources are blended, more or less
intentionally, to create a new culture or religion. The result may not be a simple combi-
nation of sources but a truly original and creative hybrid, like Rastafarianism or
“voodoo” (more properly, Vodun); in the same way that an alloy of two metals is not
merely an intermediate of its constituents, so alloys of cultures or religions can also
exhibit new and unique properties. On the other hand, for any number of reasons, the
consequence of religious dynamism may be schism or fission, the speciation or prolifera-
tion of religions as branches from prior beliefs and traditions, leading to “sects” and
“denominations” and ultimately entire religions; a classic example would be the Christian
schism of Protestantism from Catholicism. In some cases, the result of all of these pro-
cesses may be the abandonment of a religion and its replacement or substitution by a new
or foreign one, leading perhaps at the extreme to the extinction of the former religion.
The invention of (religious) tradition

Anthropologists have conventionally stressed the stability and continuity of culture and
of religion, especially since anthropology has been largely associated with—and has
associated with—“traditional” societies. Often the sense was that such societies are
unchanged from time immemorial, living fossils that represent the early stages of
humanity and society. The implication was antiquity and authenticity; however, as just
noted, Malinowski quickly dispensed with the suggestion that “traditional societies” were
ancient and immutable. In fact, the word “tradition” does not entail absolute continuity:
from the Latin tradere (across-give), its connotation is to deliver, transmit, or hand
down, but this does not tell us how long or how perfectly the transmission process has
occurred.
In religion, the issue of tradition is particularly acute, because religion obtains much of
its authority from its antiquity and from its supposed continuity. However, in 1983 his-
torians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their ground-breaking study of
“invented traditions,” showing that many purportedly old traditions (like Scottish tartans
or various rituals or texts) were actually of surprising recent vintage. Hobsbawm thus
insisted that, while traditions usually claim to be about “the past,” this past does not
have to be old nor even real.
The historic past into which the new tradition is inserted need not be of length,
stretching back into the assumed mists of time … However, insofar as there is such
reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of “invented” traditions is that the con-
tinuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations
which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past
by quasi-obligatory repetition.
(1983: 2)
Even more than anthropologists, folklorists and religion scholars were immediately
sensitive to the problems of changing or even inventing traditions. Dell Hymes, a folk-
lorist and anthropologist, went so far as to recommend thinking of tradition as a verb, as
“to traditionalize,” saying that “every person, and group, makes some effort to ‘traditio-
nalize’ aspects of its experience” (1975: 353). That is, individuals and groups attempt to
establish their ideas, practices, and institutions as traditions, to have those things trans-
mitted or handed down and to attach them to “the past” in some way. What we call
tradition is actually the current moment in a process of traditionalization, leading him to
conclude that “intact tradition is not so much a matter of preservation, as it is a matter
of re-creation, by successive persons and generations, and in individual performances”; in
short, there are no non-traditionalized traditions, if by non-traditionalized “is meant the
absence of creative interpretation and effort” (355). Biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman
affirmed the “traditioned” character of the Judeo-Christian scriptures themselves, arguing
that “there was a long process of traditioning prior to the fixing of the canon as text in
normative form” (2003: 11). Ironically, one of the ideologies of the “traditioning” process
(the invention of tradition) is that each version or interpretation is the absolute and
authoritative one:
each version of the retelling (of which there were surely many in the long-term pro-
cess) intends, perforce, that its particular retelling should be the “final” and surely
the correct one. In the event, however, no account of traditioning turns out to be the
“final” one, but each act of traditioning is eventually overcome and in fact displaced
(“superseded”) by a fresher version. The later, displacing form of the tradition no
doubt is assumed to be the “final and correct” one, but is in turn sure to be overcome
and, in part, displaced by subsequent versions of the memory.
(9)
Ultimately, Brueggeman referred to this traditioning, this “work of tradition,” as “ima-

ginative remembering” (7).
The invention of “traditional” religion

While traditioning or traditionalization is easy to observe in modern literate cultures and
religions (especially in literate ones, where we can compare present texts, interpretations,
and practices to previous ones), the invention of tradition is not unique to the modern
world. The traditionalization of “traditional societies” has become clearer through eth-
nographic observation. If there is a paragon of “traditional culture,” it is Australian
Aboriginals. In fact, Durkheim used them explicitly as his model for “elementary reli-
gion”—the simplest, oldest, most unchanging, and therefore “purest” religion (even the
name “Aboriginal” derives from the roots ab origine for “from the beginning”). Abori-
ginal societies themselves often present their religions as immutable relations between the
spiritual, human/social, and physical worlds, expressed by the Warlpiri for instance in
terms of jukurrpa or Dreaming. The Warlpiri told me personally that “the Law” (their
English-language gloss for religious knowledge and order) cannot be changed, and Fran-
coise Dussart stated: “If one asks the Warlpiri whether the Jukurrpa … is susceptible to
change, they will say, point blank, that it is not” (2000: 23). Richard Waterman and
Patricia Waterman opined that Westerners have been seduced by this indigenous dis-
course into thinking that “Aboriginal culture is set up in a way calculated to stifle
inventiveness” (1970: 101), while in reality Aboriginal religions have been remarkably
flexible and have even included “traditional” methods of innovation and change, akin to
if less bombastic than the Polynesian iconoclasm. We might go so far as to insist that
innovation and change are Aboriginal religious traditions.
There were three processes by which novelty could be introduced into Aboriginal reli-
gions without appearing to be novelty at all. The first was revelation. While it would
appear that the jukurrpa is closed and that no new knowledge or practice could be added
to it, the Aboriginal view was that there were always more spiritual truths to learn. One
obvious doorway through which new knowledge could come was dreams. Jukurrpa also
literally meant nighttime dreams among the Warlpiri: if a person dreamed a song or
dance or symbol or design or entire ritual, the person was “seeing” a previously unre-
vealed piece of the Dreaming. Individuals were not regarded as the creators or authors of
these bits of religion but as recipients of the ongoing and never-completed revelation of
the Dreaming. Humans could also discover previously unknown religious sites or objects.
At the same time, old content could be dropped. As Dussart wrote, “If, however, you ask
them whether a specific Dreaming segment … can be forgotten, they will readily admit
that such amnesia is quite common” (23). This, like addition, does not affect the jukurrpa
itself but only people’s knowledge of it.
The second process was diffusion and exchange. Aboriginal Australia was a huge
trading sphere of religious ideas, material resources, and entire complexes of spiritual
(and other cultural) knowledge and practice. Franz Josef Micha (1970) found evidence of
trade and diffusion of different types of stone, of techniques like tool-making, and of cult
objects, myths, and rituals. It was only too clear that major religious elements like the
myths of the Wawilak sisters or the Rainbow serpent or the Kunapipi or the Kurangara
cult were sweeping Aboriginal Australia by the mid-twentieth century. Sylvie Poirier
(1993) witnessed a formal exchange of knowledge and ceremonial forms, focusing on two
women’s rituals called Tjarada and Walawalarra. In March 1988 thirty women from the
Balgo area traveled to the Pintupi community of Kiwirrkura to transfer the Tjarada
ritual. Apparently, this was the final stage in a long, multi-stage process of ritual
exchange between the two groups, one step in “an ongoing process that involves the
participation of various groups from different cultural areas, and in which the fulfillment
of any exchange in its entirety might last for years, sometimes even for decades” (758).
Accordingly, the Walawalarra ritual, which had been traveling at least since the 1950s,
was simultaneously being passed northward to Kiwirrkura. In the final analysis, circula-
tion of “traditional” religion was the norm; in fact, she declared that “the very possibility
of long-term ‘ownership’ or ‘accumulation’ of such bodies of knowledge appears to be
ruled out, and groups seem to insist upon an ongoing circulation” (771).
The third process of novelty was social distribution and interpretation of religious
knowledge. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp the nature of Aboriginal
knowledge, which was set in a context of “ownership” and “rights” that had a profound
impact on its construction and constitution. Different individuals and social and local
groups had different kinds and degrees of rights over knowledge and objects, depending
on various factors and determining various outcomes. Howard Morphy gave a sense of
the complexity of rights over paintings, from “ownership” to “the right to produce cer-
tain paintings, the right to divulge the meanings of a painting, and the right to authorize
or restrict the use of a painting” (1991: 57–58). The effect on religious knowledge was
necessarily a kind of distribution: different individuals had access to different parts of it
and/or arrived at different meanings depending on a variety of social factors. Two key
factors were, of course, age and gender. Much of Aboriginal religion was strongly gender
segregated; also, younger people had less knowledge and less right to knowledge than
elders. Beyond that, individuals and social groups—families, “clans,” Dreaming “lodges,”
and local/residential groups—had different access to knowledge of and interpretations
about religious matters.
So Aboriginal religious knowledge was not only distributed but restricted, or what
Morphy called “layered.” In Warlpiri society, this layering of knowledge was captured in
the indigenous classification of “cheap,” “halfway,” and “dear” knowledge and perfor-
mance (Dussart 2000). “Cheap” was public, relatively non-powerful and therefore with-
out spiritual risk, and available to all. “Halfway” was somewhat powerful and dangerous
and as such restricted to ritually active members of both sexes. However, “dear” knowl-
edge, objects, or practices were very powerful and dangerous, secret, and restricted only
to initiated men. Interestingly, the very same object or ritual or tale could be cheap or
halfway or dear depending on how much of its “inside” detail and meaning were
revealed; that is, the power and significance of a religious item can be “hidden in plain
sight.”
From religious change to religious movement

Despite the fact that “traditional” religions like Warlpiri were anything but static and
traditional, there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between those processes and
products and the processes and products we see in the present. Even for the Aboriginals
today, religious (and other cultural) change comes faster and diverges more greatly from
previous patterns. In other words, indigenous Aboriginal cultural processes did not create
completely new religions but rather permutations of recognizable forms. At a certain
point, however, a conspicuously new kind of religion enters the picture, which is widely
referred to as a “new religious movement.”
The study of new religious movements (NRMs) is even more problematic than the study
of religion in general. For one thing, what does “new” mean? It is unclear how recent in time
and how different in content a religion must be to qualify as a “new religion” and therefore
when a religion ceases to be “new” and becomes “established” or “orthodox.” For another, it
is not always obvious what is “religious” about NRMs. Many NRMs integrate non-religious
as well as religious elements or modules, like Scientology, “Heaven’s Gate” or TELAH (see
below) and Raelianism. Many NRMs also pursue non-religious as well as religious goals,
including political, economic, and personal/psychological ones. In his study of “cargo cults”
(see below), Peter Lawrence went so far as to characterize them as incipient political move-
ments, which gave members “a sense of unity they had never known before European contact
and, especially, its last stage, developed into a form of ‘embryonic nationalism’ or ‘proto-
nationalism’” (1964: 7). Others like the Taiping Rebellion in China expressly combined
spiritual and political and even military ends.
Third and finally, NRMs are not simply religions but religious movements. As such,
they represent a sub-category of social movements or even “mass movements,” which
tend to have certain common features. Primary among them is the social condition out of
which they emerge. H. Neill McFarland, in his memorable investigation of new religions
in post–World War II Japan, called them “crisis religions,” fashioned “to shelter the
masses from the impact of a threatening world” (1967: 13). (See supplemental reading
“Celebrity Gods and Female Prophets in Occupied Japan.”) The same pattern is repro-
duced in other times and places: NRMs arise as responses, accommodations, or protests
to new and unsatisfactory social circumstances. So, as he urged, to explain them is “to
explore the dynamic relations between these religious movements and the emergent
society” in which they occur (13). In other words, each movement is a unique product of
various social factors, including the particular society where it transpires, the particular
external forces that impinge on it and the particular ways in which those forces are
manifested, the particular individual(s) who offer the response, and the particular inter-
section of all of these factors.
Despite their diversity, NRMs in the modern world tend to share some qualities.
McFarland identified seven such qualities in Japanese new religions, which are more or
less typical across cultures:
Charismatic leadership, with a founder or prophet who claims or is endowed with

supernatural authority and/or power
Concrete goals, or a program for improving individual or collective life, including
health, happiness, success and wealth, etc.
Community identification, which often involves seeking recruits among the “hopeless
and lonely,” the “disinherited” of society, and forming them into a new group
Highly centralized organization, frequently quite controlling and “undemocratic”
Ambitious construction projects, such as headquarters for the movement
Mass activities, not the least of which are aimed at proselytization
Syncretism, mystery, and novelty, such as a sense of chosenness or possession of a
special revelation or message or responsibility
Finally, the ways in which the general public, and often enough the academic community,
talks about such movements tends to convey two prejudices: first, a negativity toward
such groups, and second, a distinctly Western/Christian bias. NRMs, which are usually
small and almost by definition “unorthodox,” are often branded as “cults,” with accusa-
tions of “brainwashing,” abuse, exploitation, extremism and anti-social tendencies, and
even violence, and of course sheer falsity and delusion. People forget all too readily that
the “orthodox” religions were new religions initially, held in as much contempt by their
surrounding societies as “cult” groups are today. Christianity was a cult to the ancient
Romans, and early Protestantism was a cult (or a collection of cults) to the Catholic
Church. Every new Christian sect—from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
or Mormons, to Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Branch Davidians, the
various Pentecostal churches, etc.—has been condemned as a cult by someone, and less
mainstream religions like Scientology, Aum Shinrikyo, and Raelianism frequently still
are.
It should be obvious that “cult” is not a technical term but a judgment. In popular
language, it is a pejorative term used to express disapproval of certain kinds of “strange”
or “unacceptable” or “bad” religion. Nobody ever describes their own religion as a cult;
it may be unorthodox, but it is not bad from the member’s perspective. The academic
treatment of cults has too often and closely followed the popular one, which itself is
dominated by sectarian interests. The Christian apologist Jan Karel van Baalen literally
and unhelpfully named a cult “any religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious” (1956:
363), and notwithstanding that the new religion must be regarded so by someone, this
usage has found its way into some dictionary definitions. Not surprisingly, he equated
orthodoxy with mainstream Christianity. Walter Martin, Baptist author and founder of
the Christian Research Institute, made his definition even more dependent on Chris-
tianity, calling a cult “a group of people gathered about a specific person or person’s
interpretation of the Bible,” such that cults “contain not a few major deviations from
historic Christianity” (1976: 11). By this definition most cults would not be considered
cults at all, since they have little or nothing to do with Christianity—and many or most
contemporary Christian groups would be considered cults.
Box 8.1 Falun Dafa: Chinese tradition, new religion, or “evil cult”?
Contemporary China is not a congenial setting for religions, new or old, especially if
their doctrine or organizational success threatens the regime. It is nonetheless a fertile
setting for religious reactions to current social and economic conditions. Falun Dafa,
perhaps better known as Falun Gong, emerged in 1992 and was soon suppressed by
the government. Like virtually every new religious movement, Falun Dafa is an out-
growth of earlier ideas and practices, leavened by present-day concepts and social-
political forces. Chi or qi is a very ancient notion in China, referring to breath and more
inclusively to “the animating energy of the universe” which also naturally circulates
through the human body (Palmer 2003: 80). Much of traditional Chinese medicine is
informed by this concept, inspiring various practices of qigong (gong, work, effort,
training) or what David Palmer writing in the journal Asian Anthropology called “body
cultivation techniques” (80). Ironically for its eventual fate, when the Communist Party
took control in 1949, it promoted qigong as a healthcare method and inevitably as “an
ideological project: to extract Chinese body cultivation techniques from their ‘feudal’
and religious setting, to standardize them and put them in the service of the con-
struction of a secular, modern state”—a textbook-invented tradition (81). Qigong
practices were professionalized, transferred from traditional “masters” to formally
educated and government-sanctioned “medical workers.” Although it veered between
official approval and disapproval, by the 1970s qigong movements were increasingly
popular—and claiming increasingly spectacular powers or what became known as
“extraordinary functions of the human body,” virtually super, and supernatural, abil-
ities. In a 1991 book entitled Swirls of Qi in the Celestial Empire, Zheng Guanglu pro-
moted qigong as the “art of the Immortals,” granting advanced practitioners
“penetrating vision, distant vision, distant sensation, the ability to immobilize one’s
body, to fly miraculously, to cross walls, to soar spiritually, to call the wind and bring
the rain, to know the past and the future” (quoted in Palmer 2003: 88). Yet qigong was
also heralded as science: a Chinese qigong science association was founded, and the
National Science Commission recognized the system “as a scientific discipline” (88).
This enthusiastic “renaissance of Chinese civilization” not only united science and
religion/tradition but also promised to elevate Chinese science and culture to or above
the status of Western secular science and, in the words of Qian Xuesen, to relieve
China’s shame of its ancestors and its current place in the world (91–92). Palmer
characterized qigong as a combination of ancient animist religion, messianism or sal-
vation doctrine, modern science (or scientism), and nationalism (94). However,
scandals and defections in the 1980s and 1990s left qigong weakened, opening a
space for a new movement. In 1992 Li Hongzhi introduced Falun Gong (Dharma Wheel
Practice/Cultivation), which he preferred to call Falun Dafa (Dharma Wheel Great Law),
dafa or “great law/dharma” resembling the Taoist concept of dao/tao or “way” (Wes-
singer 2003: 217). Combining qigong, Taoism, and folk Buddhism, within two years
Falun Dafa had evolved into a large decentralized movement less committed to phy-
sical health than to salvation through spiritual purification. In what became the sacred
scripture of the movement, Li’s 1995 Turning the Dharma Wheel advocated perfection
of the devotee’s “spiritual nature” and salvation “from the demonic world of ‘ordinary
people’”:
The ideal of a transcendent renewal of science and tradition remains, but associated
with a paranoid fundamentalism: the religions and traditions of the past are, in the
present “period of the end of the Dharma,” possessed by demons, and modern sci-
ence is an extra-terrestrial plot: both should be avoided and the practitioner should
devote himself exclusively to the much higher Dharma of Falun Gong. All other
spiritual, philosophical, religious or health practices or books are forbidden.
(99)
Li eventually added extraterrestrials to his list of threats to human spiritual

advancement. But it was not the group’s unorthodox doctrines that earned it govern-
mental condemnation as a xiejiao (evil cult). Rather, in 1999 over ten thousand fol-
lowers descended on the home of high party officials, just a decade after the
demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. On 2 July Falun Dafa was banned because it
represented “an image of social power which could rival with that of the Communist
Party” (102). Falun Dafa continues to operate underground in China as well as around
the world, claiming tens of millions of adherents and maintaining a website (https://en.
falundafa.org).
Religion and revitalization: Using religion to bring society back to life

Throughout history, societies and their religions have found themselves in crises of var-
ious kinds—wars, disasters, contact with hostile or merely different peoples and religions,
and the like. Or sometimes they have simply discovered that their expectations did not
match reality or that their predictions failed and their practices yielded no results. From
that experience, a kind of innocence was lost, and tough new questions were thrust upon
them. Even more profoundly, individuals and societies have often found themselves
exposed to forces beyond their control and their comprehension—world-historical forces
like urbanization, colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and detribalization. Their
Durkheimian “moral communities” may be smashed and atomized, or at least churned
and remixed, by these forces. Without “traditional” moral communities, the solutions
adapted for such communities will not suffice. New ones must and will be sought.
Humans in these situations may feel a disconnection, a sense of loss, a cultural (and
often enough literal) death of their way of life, their people, and their very world. They
may also see themselves reduced to an impoverished group, a minority or lower class in a
larger social system not of their making and not in their interest. They may experience
“deprivation”—deprivation of independence, of meaning, of land and wealth, of control, of
life itself. Many such societies have long since disappeared from human history, physically or
culturally. Many individuals have been absorbed into larger, “modernizing” entities—cities,
states, mass movements, world religions, etc. However, there is always the possibility and
hope of new life, new community, and new meaning. This is why many religious (as well as
non-religious) movements take the form of some type of “revival” or “revitalization.”
Revitalization movements
Activities to revive a moribund culture or to modify a dissatisfying one often take the
form of revitalization movements. Anthony Wallace defined revitalization movements as
“deliberate, conscious, and organized efforts by members of a society to construct a more
satisfying culture” (1956: 265). They are therefore a subset of culture change, specifically
a type of directed change in which people more or less consciously set out to effect
alterations which they think will improve their lives and society in some way. They may
not write a manifesto or scripture for revitalization, but someone will propose a specific
change or set of changes.
Like all culture processes, revitalization efforts have certain regular features. According
to Wallace, revitalization movements emerge when individuals feel chronic psychosocial
stress, caused by the mismatch between their existing beliefs and behaviors and the
workings of their new social world. In other words, social conditions change, and reli-
gious conceptions and practices adjust to try to establish some new consonance. The first
inclination of humans is to make the new conditions conform to the old conceptions or
to assume that they do, but often this simply will not work. At a certain point, perhaps
(and usually) one person will conceive a new idea, a new interpretation, a new view that
is intended to lead society out of its impasse and into a better tomorrow. This is the
revitalization.
Wallace described a consistent pattern among such movements, starting with the ori-
ginal cultural condition before any jarring social change impinges. He called this the
“steady state” (although we know that this “traditional” state was not always so steady
or traditional): the worldview of the society fits the world adequately enough, and any
threats to that worldview or society can be accommodated within the existing beliefs and
practices. However, whether through contact, conquest, disaster, globalization, or other
experience, a period of increased individual stress begins; changes in the real-life, on-the-
ground situation no longer match the traditional worldview or beliefs. People may con-
tinue doing what they always did but with diminishing or no effect. Their traditions are
clearly failing them, and their world does not quite make sense.
This is followed by a phase of cultural distortion, where the prolonged and intense
stress of cultural failure leads to negative responses like alcoholism, depression, violence,
neurosis, suicide, and the breakdown of social institutions. People perceive that things are
going wrong but do not know how to respond effectively. Many give up, perhaps
assimilating into another social system, often the one that brought the disjunction in the
first place. In many other cases the society simply disintegrates.
However, in more than a few instances in human history, a response emerged; this is
what Wallace called the period of revitalization. This phase of cultural or religious
innovation has several significant sub-phases:
1 Cultural/psychological reformulation. Existing elements of society and/or new ele-
ments are put forth by a creative individual, a prophet or a leader. It is extremely
noteworthy that the innovator usually is a single individual, someone who has a
“moment of insight, a brief period of realization of relationships and opportunities”
which seems to him or her and to others as a revelation or inspiration—a gift from
outside (270). Often enough, this insight comes from a dream or vision, a purportedly
supernatural or spiritual experience in which the innovator is shown or taught some-
thing. The dream or vision may be apocalyptic or utopian; Wallace suggested that “such
a dream also functions almost as a funeral ritual: the ‘dead’ way of life is recognized as
dead; interest shifts to a god, a community, and a new way” (270). What kind of person
is prone to such experiences? The potential revitalizer is a person in crisis, perhaps
someone given to visions and dissociative breaks. He or she is very often someone who
suffers a serious, even life-threatening illness or other personal failure. But whatever the
impetus for the experience, they “come back” with some specific “content”—some sug-
gestions for what to do, what to believe, and how to live. These suggestions can be more
or less articulate and thorough, but they are often remarkably so.
2 Communication. Next, the innovator must express and spread her vision: what is
wrong, why is it wrong, and what must we do to remedy it? The prophet may
achieve a kind of prestige from having survived an illness—having “come back from
death’s door.” Two recurring themes in this “proselytization” phase are the estab-
lishment of a new community under the care of the spirits and the promise of success
(in whatever terms) for the members of that community; they may attain material
wealth, or regain control of their land, or bring back the dead ancestors, etc. The
precise methods of communication can and will vary, and of course many a revita-
lization program has no doubt been offered but found no takers.
3 Organization. Usually a small number of converts become the core of the new
movement; often this is the family of the prophet. A basic organizational structure
coalesces—leader, “inner circle” of disciples or apostles, and the rest. Effective lea-
dership of the movement may pass into the hands of “men of action,” practical
“political” leaders who act for or in the name of the spiritual messenger. As the
movement gains momentum—and numbers—it will have to reorganize again, since
the simple “primitive” community cannot handle its own success. It must often
“bureaucratize” to cope with its growing membership and its growing influence in
society.
4 Adaptation. Like any instance of culture change, a revitalization movement may not
and most likely will not remain the same—doctrinally, behaviorally, or organiza-
tionally—over time. It will encounter resistance, incomprehension and mis-
comprehension, challenges and failures, and rivals and threats, since there may be
more than one revitalization effort in any society at any time. The movement, if it
achieves any growth at all, will institute a variety of adaptations, including “doc-
trinal modification, political and diplomatic maneuver, and force” among others and
in various combinations (274). Modifications may adjust it to the tastes, preferences,
and preconceptions of the believers as well as to changes in the social context since
the movement first appeared. Frequently, hostility from some or all of the sur-
rounding society (and forces outside the society) radicalizes the movement, trans-
forming it “from cultivation of the ideal to combat against the unbeliever” (275).
Those who resist or fight the movement, or simply fail to join it, may be branded as
demonic or subhuman.
5 Cultural transformation. If the movement achieves sufficient proportions, a new
cultural pattern is created by and around it. A sense of excitement, of reversal of
fortunes and of ascending power and success, can arise. The previous deterioration
seems to have ended. However, this new plan and culture “may be more or less
realistic and more or less adaptive: some programs are literally suicidal; others
represent well conceived and successful projects for further social, political, or eco-
nomic reform; some fail, not through any deficiency in conception and execution, but
because circumstances made defeat inevitable” (275).
6 Routinization. If the movement survives all of the traps and pitfalls above, it will and
must eventually settle into a routine pattern. The initial “revolutionary” spirit cannot
be sustained forever and probably should not be (recall Turner’s warnings of the
dangers of liminality). Organizational structures are put into place, lines of succes-
sion are established, and doctrines are worked out and formalized. If the movement
is sufficiently successful, it can even become the “new orthodoxy.” What was once
innovative and radical becomes familiar and mainstream.
Having passed through all of these stages, the final destination of a revitalization move-
ment is the new steady state, in which the movement has not only institutionalized but
matured into a culture and worldview that solves the problems it set out to solve, giving
people the sense of security, certainty, and satisfaction that they so palpably lacked in the
pre-movement era. However, Wallace maintained that the vast majority (99 percent) of
such movements fail, that the most likely moment to fail is the “cultural transformation”
phase, and that most of those that survive remain small subcultures in their respective
societies, not dying out completely but stalling as minority or alternative systems—
“sects,” “denominations,” or even “cults”—in a greater religious field. It stays on the
“fringe” of society as yet one more religious and social alternative.
Types of revitalization movements

Anthropologists have distinguished a variety of different types of revitalization move-
ments, based on their aims and methods. But, as in all of the typologies we have exam-
ined previously, these types are not pure or mutually exclusive categories. An actual
movement can and generally does show qualities of two or more of these categories, or it
may not show all of the qualities of any one category. Finally, these types or processes
are not exclusive to religion. Still, the categories proposed by Wallace are analytically
useful.
Syncretism
Syncretism (from the Greek syn, with or together with) refers to an attempt to mix or
blend elements of two or more cultures or belief systems to produce a new, third, better
culture or system. Some anthropologists and other scholars, like Rosalind Shaw and
Charles Stewart (1996), have defended the position that syncretism refers exclusively to
religion and, more, to the interactions between two or more distinct religions. Others,
like André Droogers (1989), following J.H. Kamstra, hold that syncretism can occur
within a single religion, by absorbing elements of the non-religious culture. While it may
be desirable to have a term for specifically religious blending processes, such processes are
in no way unique to religion: blending (by the name of syncretism or by any other name)
occurs in food, clothing, music, and every domain of culture.
In a very real sense, all religion is syncretistic. Shaw and Steward admitted that “all
religions have composite origins and are continually reconstructed through ongoing pro-
cesses of synthesis and erasure” (7), or, in terms of our earlier discussion, all religions are
the product of traditioning. Indeed, it is fair to say that all culture (and potentially all life
and physical existence) is syncretistic, mixing and blending down to the genetic level.
However, for our purpose, religions not only consciously or unconsciously borrow from
each other, but individuals and groups may intentionally practice such borrowing in the
interest of inventing a new sect or denomination or even an entirely new religion. And
since syncretism is so ubiquitous, Shaw and Stewart suggested that “rather than treating
syncretism as a category—an ‘ism’—we wish to focus upon processes of religious synth-
esis and upon discourses of syncretism” (7).
Figure 8.1 Midday mass at Cao Dai Great Temple in Tay Ninh, north of Ho Chi Minh City
(Saigon), Vietnam. © agefotostock/Alamy Stock Photo.
Religious syncretism can obviously draw from diverse religious sources. Cao Dai, a new
religion that originated in Vietnam in the early twentieth century, overtly incorporated
conceptual and organizational elements from Buddhism, Chinese religions (especially Con-
fucianism and Taoism), and Christianity (especially Catholicism). Aum Shinrikyo, the
group responsible for the subway gas attacks in Japan in 1995, also merged Hindu-Bud-
dhist ideas with Christian components. Smaller-scale local movements like cargo cults, the
Ghost Dance, and the Handsome Lake movement, tended to intermingle traditional beliefs
and practices with those of the invading religion, frequently Christianity.
Syncretism, even in religion, can and often does draw upon other non-religious sources
too, which can contribute modules to a new religious composite. Aum Shinrikyo mixed
the prophecies of Nostradamus with modern technology (like preparing poison gas) and
“Y2K” (Year 2000) or turn-of-the-millennium fears. The California-based suicidal group
popularly known as Heaven’s Gate but formally as TELAH (The Evolutionary Level
Above Human) borrowed from computer technology and the internet as well as UFO
beliefs. Scientology not only got inspiration from but actually originated as a psycholo-
gical and health movement, not unlike qigong. Finally, the women’s spirituality move-
ment, in various forms, synthesizes elements of many different religious traditions
(Christian, Eastern, tribal, pagan, etc.) along with political, psychological, and gender
issues and goals.
The mention by Shaw and Stewart of the discourses of syncretism reminds us that not
all observers welcome the phenomenon equally. For anthropologists, ideally, it is a neu-
tral process; however, especially for members of an orthodox religion, as well as for
scholars with an investment in an orthodox religion, syncretism is “often taken to imply
‘inauthenticity’ or ‘contamination,’ the infiltration of a supposedly ‘pure’ tradition by
Figure 8.2 Heaven’s Gate website. © Pictoral Press Ltd/Alamy.

symbols and meanings seen as belonging to other, incompatible traditions” (Shaw and
Stewart 1996: 1). While anthropologists could argue with such an assessment or simply
exclude it from consideration, Droogers advised that “the controversy within a religion
on the acceptability of syncretism should not be left out of the definition of the concept”
(1989: 9).
Accordingly, Shaw and Stewart stressed that we should also pay attention to the
opposite of syncretism, which they called “anti-syncretism,” “the antagonism to religious
synthesis shown by agents concerned with the defense of religious boundaries” (7). Often
expressed in terms of the purity or authenticity, even the “truth,” of a religion, anti-syn-
cretism prevents mixing or purges already-mixed foreign elements. Islam, for example,
explicitly forbids bid‘a or “innovation/novelty,” just as Christianity frets about heresy,
although the history of both religions has been schism and perpetual reinterpretation.
Small-scale religions also sometimes oppose the encroachment of world religions. Cathe-
rine Allerton, who reported the personhood of Manggarai land (see Chapter 3), also
noticed that the Manggarai have so far resisted syncretism in their land-related beliefs
and rituals. Although most Manggarai identified as Catholic, many of them continued to
treat Christianity as foreign and “not applicable to practices concerned with the land, its
energies and fertility” (2009: 277). They went so far as to “reject the possibility of a fully
Catholic landscape” (271), at least partly because in Christianity land is inert matter, not
a living person, and because to:
have a fully Catholic landscape … one would need to change the name of the land
from Manggarai, and change the names of all the hills, rivers, mountains and vil-
lages. In short, one would have to make it a completely different land.
(278)
(See supplemental reading “Syncretism and Inculturation in Christianity.”)
Box 8.2 Syncretism and “resonant rupture” in contemporary

Navajo religion
Some 20 percent of Navajo (southwestern United States) belong to the Oodlání or
“believers” movement, a strain of Pentecostal Christianity. Opposition to traditional
Navajo religion is central to their belief: “traditional ceremonialism is regarded by
Oodlání as (at best) idolatry and (at worst) demonically driven witchcraft” (Marshall
2016: 44). Devotees “often directly confront family members over faith” (44), and some
have gone further to destroy items of pre-Christian religion such as medicine bundles.
Still, within the rupture of religious identity and practice, Kimberly Marshall also hears a
resonance—the continuing presence of older Navajo ways. First, as in many newly
Christianized cultures, Oodlání do not claim that the old religion is false; they claim
that it is bad. The ancient Navajo spirits are real to them, reconceived as demons and
devils; in fact, in Navajo country as elsewhere, the appeal of Christianity is often its
power over the bad old spirits. But the resonance goes deeper: inevitably, as else-
where, the new religion is “enriched by ‘feelingfully’ familiar aesthetic forms” (15) that
make it a distinctly Navajo kind of Christianity. Thus, second, although Christianity is
perceived as highly individual and often pits believers against family, “the success of
the movement can be attributed to the way it has capitalized on kin networks rather
than isolating individuals from them” (36). Marshall also detects the survival of Navajo
styles in Oodlání worship, including the structure of prayers and songs, the practice of
offerings, and the fundamental emphasis on healing, which is much more prominent
than “salvation” in their services. Navaho Pentecostalism also integrates American
country music, or country gospel music, in harmony with “the broader Navajo cowboy
culture” (127). At bottom, she notes the persistence of the basic Navajo philosophy of
life, Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon or “one’s journey of striving to live a long and
harmonious life” (47). Nor do believers seek to overthrow every aspect of pre-Christian
life: Oodlání “regard themselves as Navajo in all areas other than religion. Navajo lan-
guage, dress, food, and culture are all celebrated by Oodlání, but religion is parceled
out and rejected” (48). The result is an incomplete break, a “resonant” rupture, a syn-
cretism and “a distinctly Navajo ‘flavor’ of Pentecostalism” (194).
Millenarianism
Millenarianism (from the Latin mille, thousand) is a familiar concept to those versed in
Christianity, which is an inherently millenarian religion. Christianity teaches that at some
point in the future the world as we know it will end. Opinions about the specific order of
events, and what is to follow, vary between denominations and sects, but it is generally
agreed that the transformation will not be easy or painless. Naturally, not all religions
contain such eschatology (see Chapter 2), and most that include a prediction do not
conceive of it in thousand-year terms; this is an artifact of the base-ten system of the
West (in which 1,000 is 103). Societies that do not operate in base-ten, like the ancient
Maya, or that start their calendars on different dates, do not reckon time as Westerners
do. So the point of millenarianism is not literally the thousand-year period but the view
that the world proceeds through historical or spiritual periods, the current one of which
will end, usually soon. Thus, millenarianism is a type of movement based on the con-
ception that the present age of the world (an inferior, unhappy, or wicked one) is nearing
its end and that a superior age is imminent. The followers of the movement must either
prepare for the coming change (which is instigated by supernatural forces of evil and
darkness or by human forces of power and wealth) or act to set the change in motion.
Although not universal, millenarianism is a surprisingly common dimension of new
religious movements. There are probably two reasons for this. One is the global influence
of Christianity, which has transported the expectation to other cultures. The second
reason is the general “protest” nature of many NRMs, which are explicitly aimed at
modifying or eliminating the reigning religious and cultural circumstances. The Taiping
rebellion in China (1850–64) was clearly millenarian (as well as syncretistic), expecting
and determined to eradicate a decadent society and to achieve a new divine one. Opposed
to Manchu domination and foreign intervention, a man named Hung Xiuquan launched a
millenarian movement based on a vision in which he met his true mother and father,
namely the Christian god and that god’s wife, meaning that Hung was the Christian
god’s Chinese son and the younger brother of Jesus. His Bang Shangdi Hui or God-
Worshipping Society eventually grew a military branch to wage war against the evil
powers of traditional religion, the Chinese government, and Western invaders. In 1851
Hung decreed the era of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which expired in 1864 with the
defeat of his saintly army and the loss of tens of millions of lives.
Among the many variants of millenarian movements in the anthropological literature
are the Native American Ghost Dance and an assortment of “cargo cults.” Emerging in
the context of the annihilation of indigenous cultures in the mid-to-late nineteenth cen-
tury, the Ghost Dance is attributed to a Native American prophet named Wovoka who
received a vision not unlike Hung’s, in which the dead ancestors were alive and young
again in heaven, dancing and happy. Diffusing from the American Northwest after 1870,
the message reached Plains Indian cultures like the Lakota by 1890. The movement
encouraged people to join a dance, the Ghost Dance, doing a shuffling step in concentric
circles while holding hands. Participants anticipated the restoration and rejuvenation of
earth and society, as soon as spring 1891, when the dead ancestors would return and
white Americans would be eliminated. Lakotas also adopted the Ghost Dance shirt, a
garment with spiritual significance and magical power. It was believed at least by some to
protect the wearer from bullets. This proved tragically untrue, as white reservation offi-
cials (like the Chinese in response to Falun Dafa) feared a political uprising and answered
with force, killing three hundred unarmed dancers at the 1890 “battle” or massacre at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
Cargo cults are most associated with Pacific Islands and Melanesia in the early and
mid-twentieth century. As Americans and Europeans arrived on those remote shores,
local peoples found themselves marginalized and overwhelmed in their own lands. More
puzzling still was the amazing amount of wealth and goods that the foreigners possessed,
without ever doing any visible work; ships just appeared on beaches with loads of cargo.
In many places, cultural-religious movements flared on the premise “that European goods
(cargo) … are not man-made but have to be obtained from a non-human or divine
Figure 8.3 Sioux Ghost Dance (nineteenth-century engraving). Courtesy of Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division.
source” (Lawrence 1964: 1). In the prototype cargo cult, members followed a prophet in
abandoning some or all of their pre-contact culture, observing various practical and
spiritual rules (e.g. no alcohol or fighting), and imitating aspects of Western culture (for
instance, standing or marching in formation) to inspire the return of their ancestors with
loads of cargo for them. Interestingly, James Whitaker uncovered a much earlier example
of such a movement in early-nineteenth century British Guiana, where a local shaman
founded a village called Beckeranta or “Land of the Whites.” Leading his followers in
song and dance, he taught that the spirit Makunaima “would put them on an equal social
footing with the whites and would give them wealth, guns, and white women as wives.
They would undergo transformation and ‘get white skins instead of brown’” (2021: 6).
(See supplemental reading “The Classical Study of Cargo Cults.”)
Messianism
Messianism is another term borrowed from the Judeo-Christian tradition, which insists that
a messiah or “anointed one” will appear (or has appeared) to guide the society to salvation
and happiness. As such, it is probably either a subtype of millenarianism or a concomitant of
it: when the millennium comes, a messianic figure will be the one who ushers out the old and
ushers in the new. Perhaps the key trait of a messianic movement is the notion that some
individual will appear to found and/or lead the movement. This figure may not always be a
messiah but is generally a prophet or spiritual leader/teacher of some sort.
Various characters, ancient and modern, have claimed or been assigned the role of a
messianic figure. In Christianity-inspired movements, the messiah figure is often thought to
be an incarnation of Jesus; such was the case in the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas,
where David Koresh (who had even changed his name for the occasion) was accepted as
more than a religious leader but as literally the messiah returned to fulfill the promise of the
second coming. In Mormonism (formally, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,
or LDS), Joseph Smith (1805–44) played the role of founder and prophet, and all subsequent
leaders (and even regular members) are recognized as prophets. Shoko Asahara performed
the function for Aum Shinrikyo (Japan, see Figure 8.4), while Sathya Sai Baba was the focal
figure of his movement in India. In fact, since movements are almost always the invention of
an individual, there is almost always a single identifiable founder. In Seventh-day Adventism
it was Ellen Harmon White (1827–1915); in Scientology it was L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86);
and in the Unification Church, it was Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012)—significantly, a name
meaning, at least in some translations, “he who has clarified the Truth.”
The role of the founder and his/her personal qualities have been noted since Max
Weber if not before. Weber regarded “charisma” as a critical non-traditional as well as
non-rational form of power and authority, based on the extraordinary and even super-
natural characteristics of the leader—his or her ability to perform miraculous acts, dis-
play wisdom and answer questions, prophesy the future, and achieve results. Peter
Worsley likewise stressed charisma in his survey of cargo cults, noting that charisma
alone is never enough to sustain a movement; it must be institutionalized, crystallizing:
individual beliefs into a belief system and believers into a social collectivity, the
perceptions [of which] must further generate a disposition to behave in socially
meaningful and causally significant ways, and to do so in coordination with others in
a goal-directed and normatively controlled fashion.
(1968: xii)
Figure 8.4 An Aum Shinrikyo follower meditates before a portrait of founder Shoko Asahara.
Photo courtesy of Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images.
In other words, while a charismatic movement “is non-routine behavior par excellence”
(xlviii), it must settle into an organization or institution—and not only that, but produce
some effects. “This is why ‘signs,’ ‘proofs,’ the behavioral acting out or demonstration of
the abstract ‘promise’ are a sine qua non for the continuation of the movement” (xii-xiii).
Irredentism
Irredentism (from the Italian irredenta, unredeemed) is another recurring if less familiar
feature of movements. Irredentist movements are efforts to reclaim and re-occupy a lost
homeland; not all are religious in nature, but religion can serve as a mighty justification for
the movement. They are at the heart of many of the ethnic conflicts in the modern world.
The Sinhalese/Tamil struggle over Sri Lanka was a sort of irredentist movement: the Tamils
claimed to be fighting for their former homeland, Tamil Eelam, which they justified on the
basis of their distinct culture, their prior occupation, and their demographic majority in
certain territories. We can also glimpse the irredentist aspects of the 1990s Yugoslavian wars,
in particular the Serb demands for chunks of Bosnia and even more so for Kosovo.
The Zionist movement, beginning officially in the late 1800s but with much older
roots, set as its goal the re-creation of a Jewish national state in the Jewish “holy land.”
On the basis of a variety of justifications—divine intent and “covenant” (the “promised
land”), prior occupation and political control (the ancient kingdom of Israel), right of
conquest (the biblical Hebrews under Moses and Joshua had seized the land they were
promised), and in the modern context cultural rights and cultural survival (living in
Europe had proven to be a risky proposition)—Zionists like Theodore Herzl, author of
the 1896 The Jewish State, set about reclaiming their lost homeland, from which they had
been dispersed (referred to as the Diaspora) for nearly two thousand years. The sub-
sequent establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was the culmination of this
movement, and contemporary Zionist extremists like the organization called Gush
Emunim envision a day, based on scriptural and historical grounds, when all of ancient
Israel and beyond—“from the Euphrates River in Iraq to the Brook of Egypt” (Aran
1991: 268)—will be returned to the Jewish people (see Chapter 10).
Of course, a place is not just a physical geographical location; it is also an idea and a
memory (both often invented). “Zion” is the strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean
coast for Jews. For Rastafaris in Jamaica, “Zion” is relocated to Africa, specifically
Ethiopia, an imagined lost homeland (imagined because Caribbean African slaves were
largely taken from western Africa, not eastern Africa). And as early as the 1940s some
Jamaican Rastafaris did “return” to Ethiopia, but what many found was not “home”:
they had difficulty obtaining Ethiopian citizenship or rights to own land, and their
Jamaican/Rastafari identity set them apart from native Ethiopians (Niaah 2012). Subse-
quently, some Rastafaris reimagined “Zion” again, locating it in Jamaica. Most fasci-
natingly, as Rastafarianism has flowed around the world, Zion has moved with them.
Some Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, have adopted Rastafarianism,
mixing its styles with traditional Maori culture like moko face tattoos, and of course for
them Israel, Ethiopia, and Jamaica hold no significance. Instead, their lost homeland is
the colonized islands of New Zealand, and their Zion is the local Mount Hikurangi
(Douglas and Boxill 2012).
Nativism/fundamentalism
Frustrating or threatening social conditions often induce people to retreat into tradition.
Nativism is a form of movement that emphasizes indigenous or traditional culture and
resistance to or even expulsion of alien cultural power and influence. Ralph Linton, more
than a dozen years before Wallace, defined a nativistic movement as “[a]ny conscious, orga-
nized attempt on the part of a society’s members to revive or perpetuate selected aspects of
its culture” (1943: 230). This is a telling definition, since it indicates that nativism or funda-
mentalism is not merely “tradition” but tradition selectively and intentionally revived or
perpetuated. Thus, it can never be entirely traditional, in spirit or in detail: for instance, the
Ghost Dance emphasized certain aspects of traditional culture but also specifically embraced
“the use of cloth, guns, kettles, and other objects of European manufacture” which, they
were guaranteed, would be theirs when the whites were “swept away” (231).
Linton further specified four subtypes of nativistic movements: (1) revivalistic-magical,
(2) revivalist-rational, (3) perpetuative-magical, and (4) perpetuative-rational. In terms of
their goals, revivalist movements strive to recover lost cultural elements, while perpetua-
tive movements struggle to preserve existing ones; in both cases, there are no strong
claims that the elements of interest are particularly ancient or pristine. In terms of their
attitudes or practices, magical movements resemble the sort we have been discussing—
often promoted by a prophet or charismatic founder with “supernatural and usually …
apocalyptic and millennial aspects” (232). Items of culture are focused on:
not … for their own sake or in anticipation of practical advantages from the ele-
ments themselves. Their revival is part of a magical formula designed to modify the
society’s environment in ways which will be favorable to it. … The society’s
members feel that by behaving as the ancestors did they will. In some usually unde-
fined way, help to recreate the total situation in which the ancestors lived. Perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that they are attempting to recreate those aspects of
the ancestral situation which appear desirable in retrospect.
(232)
On the other hand, rational movements are primarily psychological and self-consciously
“symbolic” and social: their function is to provide self-esteem to the individual members and
to maintain solidarity for the collective society. Interestingly, Linton concluded that all of the
subtypes are quite common except perpetuative-magical, of which he claimed to know no
examples. At any rate, we discuss fundamentalism further in Chapter 10, of which there are
many cases in the modern world; indeed, fundamentalism may be one of the, if not the, most
frequent forms of religious revitalization forms in the present.
Box 8.3 Nation and gender in contemporary Polish “native faith”

movements
In the rubble after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, some countries have
sought identity and unity in religion, either Christianity or “native faith.” Religion scho-
lar Scott Simpson explains that Rodzimowierstwo in Poland refers to individuals and
groups (often small and only loosely interconnected) “who practice a Slavic spirituality
that acknowledges some form of polytheism … based in a continuation of Slavic tra-
ditions of the pre-Christian past, with emphasis on the use of historical and ethno-
graphic sources” (2015: 3). Given the intimate relation between religion and Polish
identity in this movement, it is only natural that “there are sectors of the Rodzimo-
wierstwo spectrum which lean toward extreme, right-wing nationalism and which treat
‘the nation’ as an integral part of their sacrum” (Simpson 2017: 72). Like nationalist
and so-called “pagan” or “neo-pagan” movements around the world—but with the
interesting exception of Western European and American paganism, which tends to be
quite liberal and feminist—right-wing native faith groups exhibit the same predictable
pattern of hostility to non-members of the nation, especially immigrants, and to
women. Based on fieldwork with Polish native faith groups, Mariusz Filip learns that
Zakon Zadrugi “Północny Wilk” (The Order of Zadruga “Northern Wolf” or ZZPW)
practices a kind of “Aryan Paganism or racist Paganism,” even adopting the con-
spiracy theory term “ZOG” (Zionist Occupation Government) for international Judaism
and the infamous “Fourteen Words”—“We must secure the existence of our people
and a future for White Children” (2015: 8). And like in right-wing white nationalist
groups in the United States, the preservation and purity of the race depends on the
purity of its women. Predictably the group was composed exclusively of men, who
presumed to speak for the nation’s women. According to the movement magazine/
newsletter Securius, men were fit for “struggle and creation” while women were fit only
for “home, land, and fertility” (13). The male dominance of the group and movement
was evident in:
its combat aesthetics of symbols and clothes, by the physical strength of the group
members, bluntness of language, and a predatory attitude towards the world. Being
a Pole and an Aryan seemed to count for nothing if a person was a woman.
(11)
Women served in auxiliary roles at best, such as priestess and cook; they participated
in some minor rituals, but their primary lot in life was to bear and nurture those pre-
cious White Children. Even more liberal branches of Rodzimowierstwo subscribed to
the essentialist notion that women were different from men and suited to separate
roles, although those roles might be “equal” to men’s. And the movement finds justi-
fication for its sexist attitudes among the gods themselves, who also have “clear-cut
genders and heterosexual personal relations”: one spokesman wrote, “The Gods are
many … and they form relationships with Goddesses, begetting younger Gods. … All
are the children and grandchildren of the primordial divine parents, Father God Sky—
Rod and Moist Fertile Mother—our Earth” (17). (See supplemental reading “An Old
Religion as a New Religion: Druidry in the United States.”)
Modernism/vitalism
To the contrary of nativism, modernism or vitalism seeks to import and accept alien and
modern cultural ways, in part or in total. Modernism does not always take the form of
religion. For instance, when Japan was finally “opened” to the West in 1854, it began to
adapt itself to this new contact by appropriating much from the Western world. Tech-
nology, military organization, language, and styles of dress and music were absorbed. By
1868, a revolution known as the Meiji (Japanese for enlightenment) was underway. A
modern constitution was written, establishing the emperor as the head of state. The
feudal system was abolished, mass state-sponsored education was put in place, and con-
centrated efforts to industrialize and to modernize the army were made.
The most complete form of modernism in religion is conversion, the wholesale accep-
tance of a foreign and ostensibly “modern” set of beliefs, values, and practices. In the
realm of religion this means usually conversion to a foreign religion that is perceived as
modern, especially a world religion and proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam
(see Chapter 9). Indigenous religions can also modernize themselves by incorporating
aspects of new and foreign religion and culture, in particular beliefs in a single god or in
an apocalyptic end-time, or values and practices like monogamy or avoidance of alcohol.
Members may go so far as to condemn and reject their traditional religion and associated
practices and institutions (often under the influence of foreign agents of change like mis-
sionaries). (See supplemental reading “The Making of a Modern Zoroastrianism.”)
At the same time, probably all movements show some degree of modernism, even if
only in the adoption of modern technologies to preserve and propagate old beliefs and
practices; many indigenous societies, for instance, maintain websites and use cell phones,
automobiles, and airplanes. Thus, modernism/vitalism is not a total phenomenon; rather,
ordinarily we find a combination of old and new—and new seen through the eyes of
old—in unique and surprising ways, as we explore next.
Religion evolving: Religion meets modernity

The previous paragraph reminds us that religious change does not always take the form
of an organized religious movement or of the propagation of a new religion. Rather,
existing religions, even venerable and well-established ones, continue to evolve over time
and into the present day, adapting to new social realities and absorbing influences from
every domain of culture. This is possible because religions are highly plastic cultural
systems, forever in the business of traditioning, as Brueggeman indicated earlier. It also
flatly refutes the suggestion that the material world and modernity are incompatible with
religion and that “secularization” or the disappearance of religion is the only future.
Every development of society and culture has been taken up by religion. When writing
was invented, religious texts were composed; the Gutenberg Bible was one of the first
books off the new European printing press. Religion hopped onto photography, radio (see
Chapter 4, e.g. female Muslim radio preachers), and movies (see Chapter 3), then televi-
sion, and lately the internet and social media. We have observed in previous chapters
how Christians and Muslims among others use televisual media to represent and dis-
seminate their ideas, practices, and values. And people find or make the religion that
suits—in the terms of Mary Douglas, that is consonant with—their everyday lived
experience. Suburban Americans may gravitate toward “mega churches” organized much
like the offices in which they spend their work days.
Stef Aupers even discerned that people employed in ultra-modern careers like computer
programming may develop a kind of “technopaganism” based on conceiving of “the act
of programming as magical” (2009: 153). Noting first that “pagans are more active on the
Internet than other religious groups” (156), Aupers accepted Erik Davis’ (1995) definition
of technopaganism as a “small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot
in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and wooly world of Paganism. …
They are Dionysian nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical
machines.” The magic of educated computer professionals, though, is not “magic as a
ritual” but rather “the mystery of intangible, opaque, digital technology,” in which “the
personal computer is sometimes the object of mystical speculations” (Aupers 2009: 161).
Ironically but profoundly, computer technology is simultaneously vanishingly small and
vanishingly large: it encompasses the wonders of microprocessors and whirling electrons
as well as the globe-spanning scope of the World Wide Web. Furthermore, “the Internet
can no longer be understood in a mechanical way since it ‘grows’ and ‘behaves’ in an
organic fashion”; indeed, “the Internet actualizes an ancient holistic claim about the
universe: like in the cosmos as a whole, everything and everyone is ‘connected’” (161). In
a word, technopagans experience digital technology as a kind of animism: computers and
related technologies have a life of their own, beyond the total understanding or control of
humans. Because computers and the Internet transcend humans although they are human
creations, technopagans see a kind of unpredictability, even agency, in technical systems,
and this unpredictability “in turn, raises feelings of ‘awe’—a mixture of fascination,
delight and excitement on the one hand and fearfulness on the other hand” (165)—the
essence of the experience of “the holy.”
Modernity and its effects on religion can be felt in virtually all the world, including the
high-tech hub of Bangalore, India. We might expect modern technology to drive religion
out of the city; instead Tulasi Srinivas describes a spirit of creativity, improvisation, and
experimentation that similarly informs religions everywhere and that does not threaten
religion but rather enlivens it. Among the colorful examples she offers is an animatronic
goddess, a “machine-Devi,” at a Ganesha Temple that:
clutched a shining, tin-foil trident, while at her feet lay a papier-maché image of the
buffalo, its severed head smeared with red ink. As we watched, light bulbs within the
sanctum flashed, and the right arm of the deity thudded down, causing the trident to
strike the buffalo’s body.
(2018: 139)
Instead of being offended by the sacrilege, the crowd was delighted. They were equally
entertained and enthralled by the helicopter that flew over the temple, carrying along a
Garuda bird in the wind of its blades. Not every experiment is successful for all audi-
ences. When temple musicians were replaced by an automatic drumming contraption,
older and more conservative temple-goers disapproved, but the young “enjoyed the cut-
ting edge and the fashionable against the out-of-date ‘oldfashiondu’” (154–55). The offi-
cials of the temple thus achieved their goal of being “Bombhat, sakkath, rivaju! (Cool,
awesome, fashionable!)” (147).
Improvisations and experiments in the even more deadly serious world of Buddhism
only make the phenomenon more noteworthy. Despite its reputation of otherworldly
disengagement from ordinary life, Japanese Buddhist leaders have imagined creative ways
to increase their relevance and their outreach. Some Buddhist priests and temples have
become involved in social welfare and “Buddhist-inspired activism” such as collecting
money for the poor or assisting in disaster relief. Others have begun to offer funeral and
burial services for pets, while one opened a temple in a shopping center (ambitiously
named Everyone’s Temple), and another runs a bar (the Osaka Vows Bar) where the
drinks have Buddhist names like “the hell of lust” and “the priest’s shaven head.” Yet
another sponsors “lectures, concerts, theater performances” (Nelson 2013: 118) and other
entertainments, while most remarkably one temple features an “all-woman cabaret dan-
cing group”: “In sequined but skimpy costumes with feather head ornaments and high
heels, they performed a line dance routine titled ‘Light of the Buddha,’ which ended with
synchronized high kicks” (168).
One of the most significant changes in the religious terrain is the extent to which lay-
people have seized the initiative to make religion for themselves, apart from and often
against the power of official representatives and keepers of religious traditions. This
naturally leads not only to a proliferation of religious opinions and of entire new reli-
gious systems but to a crisis of authority, as those who once dictated the norms of reli-
gion no longer monopolize that function. Islamic studies scholar Gary Bunt finds this in
the rise of what he dubs “hashtag Islam” in which “technology has moved to the heart of
religious teachings, mobilization, ad networking” (2018: 3). While Muslim specialists and
governments have made their own appearance online and/or attempted to filter or censor
non-official channels, anyone with a computer or smartphone and an internet connection
can use them for contacting authorities, creating or exploring archives, sharing opinions
and interpretations of the Qur’an, issuing a fatwa (decision or ruling)—previously a
prerogative of recognized officials—and even dating (via the website Muzmatch).
Residents and adherents in Xiamen, China also took it upon themselves to revive and
reform the City God Temple recently. They organized the neighborhood and established a
network for planning and funding ritual events, connecting to other organizations like the
Xiamen Folklore Association and the Chinese Straights Culture and Business Development
Association. Their efforts have “allowed the temple to not only organize events through
these two groups (and, as such, avoiding regulations around religious event laws), but also
draw on their membership for volunteers, donors, and so forth” (Murray 2018: 286).
Finally, this do-it-yourself modern ethos toward religion not only blurs the line
between authorities and layfolk but between the sacred and the secular. In the modern
world, religion does not remain quietly in its religious slot but may occur almost any-
where in any form. Anthropologists and other religion scholars have been most fasci-
nated by the creativity and entrepreneurship that converts popular culture into religion
and vice versa. Pentecostal Navajos are hardly the only people who appreciate and make
country gospel music—or for that matter, rock gospel or rap gospel. Popular literature
such as the Left Behind series elaborates standard Christian themes like the Rapture in
entirely new directions.
Meanwhile, popular cultural forms that had no particular, or no serious, religious
identity can be and have been transformed into religions, more or less flippantly but
again blurring the line between what is religion and what is not. A prime example is
“Jediism,” inspired by the imaginary world of the Star Wars movie series. The mys-
tical ideas of Jedi knights and the “Force” have spawned religious communities in the
real world such as the Jedi Church (jedichurch.org) and the Temple of the Jedi Order
(templeofthejediorder.org). The former explains on its website that the Jedi Church
“believes that there is one all powerful force that binds all things in the universe
together. The Jedi religion is something innate inside every one of us, the Jedi Church
believes that our sense of morality is innate,” while the latter claims on its website that
the Jedi “are real people that live and lived their lives according to the principles of
Jediism, the real Jedi religion or philosophy,” and mentions “Jedi ministers.”
Religion scholars Katharine Buljan and Carole Cusack (2015) discuss how Japanese
anime both reflects and leads contemporary Japanese religion and spirituality. Similarly
or conversely, religious enthusiasts have used popular culture media to promote and
adapt their ideas, practices, and values, including Sufi Comics (www.suficomics.com,
with its slogan “Comics for the Soul”), Kingstone Comics (Kingstonecomics.com), a
purveyor of Christian graphic novels, and Campfire Graphic Novels (www.campfiregrap
hicnovels.com/mythology.htm) with titles such as “Krishna, Defender of the Dharma”
and “Zeus and the Rise of the Olympians.” And even cursory research unveils an endless
stream of new popular culture or science fiction–derived religions including the Church of
all the Worlds (churchofallworlds.org), moved among other things by Robert Heinlein’s
fictional Stranger in a Strange Land, Tolkienism obviously based on the epic fiction tril-
ogy The Lord of the Rings, and Otherkin, who perceive themselves as something other
than human. Some new religions may be parodies of religion: Pastafarianism or the
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster began as satire against religion but has itself
morphed into a legally recognized religion in some places.
Conclusion
Religion, like all of culture, is in a constant state of flux and emergence, or it might be
better to think of religion, like all of culture, as dynamic. Social and cultural processes
and practices continuously produce and reproduce religion; when they reproduce it as it
was previously, we have “religious stasis” or apparent stability, but they reproduce it
with modifications, we have “religious change.” Religions have a tendency, indeed a
vested interest, to portray themselves as unchanging, eternal, and immutable, but this is
part of religious ideology rather than a fact of religion. Religions evolve over time by the
same processes through which all of culture changes—by addition and deletion, elabora-
tion and schism, and so forth. Much of religious change is intentional and orchestrated,
taking the form of new religious movements, which display a typical path of origination,
development, and spread. However, even within established religions which do not see
themselves as changing, adaptations and accommodations to the modern world have
produced new religious contents, new religious attitudes, and often entirely new religions
that challenged conventional notions of religious authority and truth.
1 What do anthropologists mean by “the invention of tradition”? How do even “tra-
ditional” religions invent their beliefs and practices?
2 What are the processes of cultural and religious change, and how is change different
from “movement”?
3 What is a revitalization movement, and what are the types or elements of revitaliza-
tion movements?
4 Why is it simplistic if not false to say that modernity is hostile to religion? How do
modern life and technology actually contribute to religious vitality and creativity?
Celebrity Gods and Female Prophets in Occupied Japan
Syncretism and Inculturation in Christianity
The Classical Study of Cargo Cults
An Old Religion as a New Religion: Druidry in the United States
The Making of a Modern Zoroastrianism
9 Translocal or “world” religions
For more than a century, travelers and observers have commented that the Lemba of
southern Africa are culturally unlike their neighbors: they practice male circumcision,
marriage endogamy, ritual slaughter rules resembling kosher, and prohibitions on eating
pork. Throughout that time, scholars and pundits asked whether Lemba “were really
native Africans, Muslims, or Jews, and they speculated about Lemba origins outside of
Africa” (Tamarkin 2020: 18). A 1935 survey of southern tribes concluded that they were
“beyond doubt Semites (Arabs?) who have gradually drifted thus far to the South”
(quoted in Tamarkin 2020: 34). The uniqueness of the Lemba became an important
political issue in independent apartheid South Africa, since their official recognition as a
people depended on possession of a distinct language and culture. As recently as 1958,
members of the Lemba Cultural Association insisted that their contemporary political
status was more critical than their origin. However, various circumstances contributed to
their identification not only as Jewish but as “Jews” or “Hebrews,” indeed potentially a
lost tribe of ancient Israel. A Jewish ethnomusicologist, Margaret Nabarro, promoted
their identity as Jews, and the media soon labeled them Africa’s “black Jews,” not only
practicing Judaism but descended from biblical Israelites. Some Lemba leaders embraced
the idea, not so much to claim Israelite antiquity as to demand recognition in the present.
Still, with the advent of DNA technology, perhaps inevitably genetic testing was per-
formed, suggesting that the Lemba were indeed part of the “genetic diaspora” of Jews.
(Curiously, much of this testing focused on the Y chromosome, which is inherited from
the father, while traditionally Jewish identity is assigned from the mother.) But genes
alone do not a religion make, and although many Jewish representatives outside of Africa
were keen to welcome the Lemba into their fold, they were also frustrated that most
Lemba belonged to a Christian congregation. Some Jewish visitors attempted to instruct
them in “proper” Judaism, even to “convert” this allegedly Jewish population, which
many Lemba resented. Kulanu, an organization which according to their website (kulanu.
org) “supports isolated, emerging, and returning Jewish communities around the globe,”
eventually gave up on South African Lemba and “moved on to work with other Lemba
people in Zimbabwe who were more amenable to formal conversion and to sending
young people to Israel to train as rabbis and Jewish educators” (77).
Anthropology has made its mark investigating small, local, “tribal” or “traditional”
religions. But religions have never been as isolated and as local as we imagine: Dinka and
Nuer religions interacted in East Africa, Warlpiri traded religion with their neighbors in
Central Australia, and Buddhism coexisted with non-Buddhist ideas and practices in
Thailand, as we have seen in previous chapters. Long ago, some religions became trans-
local, even international, achieving the status of “world religions.”
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-9
It might seem that anthropology is ill-suited to study translocal religions, since our
method of participant observation favors intimate knowledge of a single setting. How-
ever, whether in Africa, Australia, Thailand, or America, the translocal or global exists
in local settings, and translocal or global religions like Christianity necessarily take spe-
cific local forms. In other words, every translocal or “world” religion is a congeries of
local religions, that is, there are multiple Christianities and Islams and Judaisms, etc.
Thus, anthropological concepts and methods are equally applicable—and critically
necessary—to the study of translocal or “world” religions.
After introducing factors relevant to all translocal religions, including new ones ema-
nating from non-Western societies, this chapter will primarily focus on the two largest
translocal religions, Islam and Christianity, not because they are the most important or
the most representative religions (they are not) but because the encounter with those
religions has had the most transformative effect on anthropology. Moreover, these efforts
are remarkably recent: just a few years ago some anthropologists insisted that, while
there were anthropological studies of Christian or Muslim groups, there was no
“anthropology of Christianity” or “anthropology of Islam,” and much energy has gone
into the debate over the anthropological treatment of these two massively translocal
religions, which between them claim at least half of humanity.
Additionally, the anthropological study of translocal religions raises issues of vital
significance to anthropology. One issue is the formation and spread of new religious
movements, the subject of the previous chapter. Another is the diversity within religions,
which adapt to and become more or less consonant with their local social and cultural
surroundings. A third issue is the interaction between religions, which usually share a
religious field where they compete and/or cooperate. A final issue is the question of reli-
gious identity, that is, how and why people come to affiliate with one (or more than one)
translocal religion and how this affiliation shapes their identity and their relations with
other religious communities and the wider society.
The anthropology of the “great transformation”

Until recently, we could speak of the world’s religions but not of “world religions.”
There were literally thousands of religious beliefs, practices, myths, rituals, and specia-
lists; virtually every identifiable social entity had its own. Or to say it another way, there
were literally thousands and thousands of societies, each with distinct religious or spiri-
tual traditions. Religion was “local.” A few anthropologists have proposed that, at cer-
tain times in certain places for certain reasons, a “great transformation” occurred: in
addition to, or out of, some local “traditional” religions, not only new religions but a
new kind of religion sprouted. These theories depend on a considerable amount of cross-
cultural generalization, but they are interesting and important.
Robert Redfield (1953) was among the first to attempt a comparison of local and
translocal religions, or what he called “small traditions” and “great traditions.” Accord-
ing to him, small or local religions were products or features of a specific kind of society,
the kind that all societies arguably once were. Small and isolated, “self-contained and
self-supported,” they were socially homogeneous, with a strong sense of group solidarity.
Kinship was the basic organizing principle; social relationships were personal and infor-
mal. Social control was therefore informal and almost unconscious: people behaved in
particular ways “because it seems to the people to flow from the very necessity of exis-
tence that they do that kind of thing” (14). Religion provided the glue or the ties that held
Translocal or “world” religions 203
society together and made it seem necessary and self-evident; in fact, religion was and
perhaps depended on being largely unreflective and unsystematic. The result was a
“moral community” of the sort described by Durkheim; as Redfield put it, “the essential
order of society, the nexus which held people together, was moral” (15).
“Moral order” includes the binding sentiments of rightness that attend religion, the
social solidarity that accompanies religious ritual, the sense of religious seriousness
and obligation that strengthens men, and the effects of a belief in invisible beings that
embody goodness.
(21)
But all of this changed when social and political circumstances changed. The experience of
living in a “great society,” what Redfield called a “civilization,” required a different religious
ethos. Civilizations are characterized by large and/or interconnected communities which are
socially heterogeneous. Social relationships cannot remain personal but become institutional
and “rational.” Kinship as an organizing principle gives way to “politics,” in the shape of
formal government, contractual relations, and the stratification of power and wealth. Spe-
cialization and differentiation within the society come to include religion itself, which
becomes one institution among many, albeit one that supports the political and social hier-
archy. In the process, religion becomes “professional,” with religious specialists, and more
reflective, self-conscious, and systematic. The old moral order cannot unify such a society,
but neither can a new moral order of the old variety. Instead:
In civilization the moral orders suffer, but new states of mind are developed by
which the moral order is, to some significant degree, taken in charge. The story of
the moral order is the attainment of some autonomy through much adversity.
(25)
Ernest Gellner also pondered this hypothetical break between local and translocal
religion. Local religions, he opined:
took the overall meaningfulness of the world for granted, even though they had done
so much to maintain it. They did not feel obliged to supply guarantees of the overall
goodness of the world. Meaning was conferred on the world absent-mindly, without
a codified revelation.
(1988: 91)
They were “concrete,” not particularly given to “speculation” or intense philosophical

introspection. Rather, they “take for granted” the truth of their beliefs and the efficacy of
their actions as “self-evident.” They were more “ad hoc,” in the sense that they dealt with
specific spiritual or practical problems when those arose rather than establishing a per-
manent self-sustaining “institution” and “orthodoxy.” In particular they were non-codi-
fied, not written down or “settled” into a “canon” of official dogma. People did not so
much believe their religion as do it. The “beliefs” of the religion mirrored and reinforced
the “morality” or behavioral imperatives of it, which themselves were embedded in cul-
tural practices and social institutions.
In what Gellner called one of the “big divides in human history,” a few religions began
to spread from their original sites to other and potentially all places, peoples, and times.
These religions, sometimes also designated as “high” or “universal” religions, were not
only “bigger” than the local ones but different in some fundamental regards. The main
factor in the creation and diffusion of a translocal or “world” religion is, necessarily, its
detachment and separation from place. This is not to say that a world religion cannot
have sacred places; they can and do. However, a religion that can only be practiced in
one location is by definition not a translocal religion.
Translocal/world religions get “uprooted” from their original social context to become
traveling, and often enough missionizing and proselytizing, religions. After all, they must
recruit members and create for them a new community and sometimes a new identity.
Translocal religions therefore tend to be voluntary movements or associations which
individuals can join by intentional decision. This leads to another common trait of
translocal religions: they tend to be “individualistic” in a critical sense. This is not to say
that there is no religious community nor that the individual can think or do whatever he
or she likes. Rather, it is to say that individuals may have to choose to join the religion
and to accept its doctrines as a personal act. It follows that translocal religions will be
concerned with doctrine, with dogma, with belief (“orthodoxy,” correct or straight
belief). Unfortunately, the “true” or orthodox doctrine may be a source of intense debate,
disagreement, and even violence (see Chapter 11).
One of the fundamental requirements for this elaboration and dissemination of ortho-
doxy is writing—and specifically the composition of a standard, official body of religious
literature, that is, a canon. In pre-literate societies, varying versions and interpretations
could coexist. For example, ancient Greek myths were never committed to writing and
varied from performance to performance. However, once doctrines and myths are set
down in writing, they became “fixed” or “frozen” into an orthodox version. Certainly
differing versions or pieces of Christian and Muslim texts existed (and still exist) before
they were “settled” into the canonical scripture that became the Bible and the Qur’an
respectively. Other variants became unorthodox at best and schismatic or heretical at
worst. Along with the settlement of an official doctrine based on a canonical book, a
“scripture,” came a specialized class of individuals to study, represent, perform, and
preserve those doctrines—that is, an ecclesiastical institution of priests and other officials.
Religion thus became institutionalized and professionalized in unprecedented and fateful
ways.
Christianity and Islam are the most successful of the translocal religions, carried along
by missionary zeal, long-distance trade, and military force. The other religions generally
classified as world religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism; although none of
those three can boast the levels of membership of Christianity and Islam, all three possess
their own quite extensive literature of doctrine and commentary. Further, many newer
religions such as Sikhism, Baha’i, and Cao Dai have memberships in the millions and
members spread around the globe. (See supplemental reading “Hinduism and Buddhism
as Translocal Religions.”)
Given the prominence of Christianity and Islam, which both were initially local reli-
gions, one of the livelier debates in anthropology was whether other local religions could
and would have morphed into translocal religions in their own right. That is, if the
conditions described by Redfield and Gellner had obtained elsewhere, would they have
spawned translocal religions from their local predecessors? In 1972, Robin Horton
championed the notion that African local religions had the potential of becoming trans-
local. His famous “thought experiment” imagined African societies undergoing their own
“great transformation” without colonization or missionization, what he called “the
modern situation, minus Islam and Christianity” (1972: 102). Would they independently
breed a translocal/world religion?
Horton answered yes. First, he believed, “faced with the interpretative challenge of social
change, [a traditional religion’s] adherents do not just abandon it in despair. Rather, they
remold and develop it” (102). In particular, he found a universalizing potential in African
religions in the form of a two-tiered belief system, consisting of lower and lesser spirits (who,
he argued, represent the local or “microcosmic”) and of a higher or supreme being (who
represents the global or “macrocosmic”). Over time, he expected that people would ignore
the lower spirits and “develop a far more elaborate theory of the supreme being and his ways
of working in the world, and a battery of new ritual techniques for approaching him and
directing his influence.” In addition, they would:
evolve a moral code for the governance of this wider life. Since the supreme being is
already defined as the arbiter of everything that transcends the boundaries of the
microcosms, he is seen as underpinning this universalist moral code. From a position
of moral neutrality, he moves to one of moral concern.
(102)
Horton’s conclusion was that religious change in Africa was inevitable, Islam and
Christianity merely playing “the role of catalysts—i.e., stimulators and accelerators of
changes which were ‘in the air’ anyway” (104). This explains, he said, why Christianity
and Islam had so little success in converting locals in the absence of wider social changes.
Horton received passionate opposition, though, from Humphrey Fisher, who in a pair of
articles (1973; 1985), contested both Horton’s notion of a distinct African cosmology and
his assessment of the minor and recent role of Christianity and Islam. Fisher responded
that Islam in particular was more than a catalyst for indigenous change but was a “jug-
gernaut” with “its own momentum” (1985: 156), one that had been present for centuries.
In other words, Islam was already an African religion by the time of Horton’s thought
experiment, and Islam in Africa had already wrought “a new cosmology” (166) on the
continent, which he contended that Horton ignored or denied. (See supplemental reading
“Back to Africa: Traveling with Vodún.”)
“Conversion” to translocal religions

Whether local religions have the potential to transcend their original social and spatial con-
texts, the truth is that most societies have encountered an already-existing translocal religion
(and often more than one). Further, translocal religions tend to be accompanied by other
social and cultural changes, part of a package that Horton called “the modern situation.”
Accordingly, new concepts, institutions, and relationships arrive and arise as a consequence
of culture contact and culture change, and new individual attitudes and identities are prof-
fered and accepted in what is conventionally recognized as “conversion.”
The standard model of conversion perceives it as a sudden and total shift in religious
perspective and commitment, including identity. Upon exposure to a new religion—and
after grasping its “truth”—one sheds one’s prior religious affiliation and devotes oneself
exclusively and irreversibly to a new one. This is indeed the discourse of conversion in
Christianity (e.g. Paul’s “road to Damascus” experience), but ethnographic research
reveals that personal change of religion is a much more nuanced, complicated, and con-
tested process that does not operate solely at the individual level.
The discipline’s interest in conversion was enhanced greatly by the 1993 volume Con-
version to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Trans-
formation. In his introduction to the edited volume, Robert Hefner stressed that the
unique and powerful nature of translocal religions like Christianity or Islam is not simply
doctrinal but “social-organizational” (1993: 19). In other words, while the “message” of
such religions is novel, what is most effective about them is their capacity to institutio-
nalize, to establish and maintain “institutions for the propagation and control of religious
knowledge and identity over time and space” (19). But they must dominate more than
religious knowledge, identity, and institutions, which demands that they must establish—
or at least establish interdependencies with—non-religious knowledge, identity, and
institutions as well. This implicates politics, economics, kinship, education, and many
other domains of society. Failure to institutionalize in the non-religious realm can result
in the failure of conversion.
Even before this publication, ethnographic studies suggested the need for a more care-
ful analysis of conversion. Marshall Murphree’s (1969) research on the “conversion” of
the Shona in Southern Rhodesia made the point clearly. Not only did locals interpret and
construct conversion idiosyncratically, but various Christian sects presented it differently.
Methodist missionaries emphasized personal ecstatic experiences; for Catholic priests, on
the other hand, “conversion involved not a subjective experience, but rather commitment
to a given system of beliefs and practices, coupled with loyalty to the organization” (80).
Since Methodism supposed a mature religious experience, adults were its focus, while
Catholicism concentrated on children, who could be recruited and socialized into the
religious institution.
As Catholic practices indicated, conversion did not always require prior training in or
acceptance of Christian doctrine and probably seldom required or demonstrated real
understanding or orthodoxy of beliefs, let alone a personal transformation. Often, the
ritual of baptism was conversion from the Catholic stance, so a person could be baptized
first and educated later. Maia Green (2003) likewise noted that in southern Tanzania
during the 1920s most of the baptisms were infants, and as late as the 1950s the majority
of “converts” were either children or the dying—or even the dead, who were past having
any conversion experiences.
The inevitable result of these “conversion” practices was, to say the least, religious
heterodoxy and sometimes a total lack of comprehension or serious concern for right
doctrine. In Murphree’s research as elsewhere, pre-contact religious beliefs and practices
survived and even provided the lens through which new religions were viewed. He
explained that many Shona Christians continued to believe in traditional spirits, while
some Shona non-Christians absorbed concepts such as heaven. Other people, like a sub-
chief he interviewed, explicitly claimed to practice tradition along with Christianity: “‘It
is best,’ he says, ‘to believe it all’” (1969: 132)—a thoroughly unorthodox, if not heretical,
position in Christianity.
Not only was conversion less than complete among the Shona, but it was also often
not irreversible. Murphree found that many people converted more than once and in
multiple directions—from traditional to Christian, or from Christian to traditional, or
from one Christian sect to another or to some other religious movement. Ultimately, he
rejected the concept of conversion altogether, preferring to discuss “religious mobility”
(137). Worse, individuals typically did not grasp or share the notion of an exclusive
“religious affiliation” or “religious identity” at all. Rather, “a person, at certain times and
in given circumstances, moves out of the pattern of beliefs and practices standard for his
religious group, and temporarily and for specific purposes aligns himself with that of
another” (140), for instance on occasions when a Christian had to partake in a traditional
ceremony or vice versa.
Finally, “conversion” or religious mobility was not always about “believing” the new
religion. Maia Green stressed that conversion or at least affiliation to Christianity some-
times had less to do with the truth of doctrines than with perceived advantages. The
Tanzanians in her research thought that Christian priests controlled energies, literally
substances or “medicines,” which were supernaturally present in waters and oils
employed by priests. Accordingly, they sought baptism or other sacraments not for their
Christian spiritual value but for their (traditional) practical effects, “to incorporate
Christian substances and objects into themselves” to promote growth, wealth, success,
etc. (2003: 67). In still other situations, foreign religious authorities held literal control of
resources like food and money, as well as of institutions like marriage, employment,
education, and even government; in Tanzania, the Church interjected itself into marriage
arrangements and bridewealth payments in order to influence who married whom and
how (specifically, to guarantee that Christians married Christians within the Church).
These and many other anthropological studies show that the standard Judeo-Christian
model of conversion does not apply in all circumstances. As Diane Austin-Broos con-
cluded in a more recent volume, The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, conversion
is not a “singular experience, paranormal or otherwise, or an absolute breach with a
former life. … [Rather] conversion is a passage: constituted and reconstituted through
social practice and the articulation of new forms of relatedness” (2003: 9). In fact, cases
like the Pentecostal church in Kyrgyzstan described by Mathijs Pelkmans (2009) illustrate
that “conversion” is often temporary; therefore, anthropologists should not consider
conversion “total” when individuals join a church, as they may later leave. In other
instances, for example with Islam, “conversion” might not be the operative concept at all
(see below).
Finally, ambitious translocal religions may encounter passive indifference or active
resistance. Aram Yengoyan (1993) insisted that the moods and motivations of Chris-
tianity were simply too alien for Australian Aboriginals. Between the 1960s and 1980s
only eight or ten real conversions were made among the Pitjantjatjara; most people found
Christianity “incomprehensible,” although many others hung around the church because
they enjoyed the singing. He suggested that Christian concepts like salvation, damnation,
and sin had no resonance for the locals; that the notion of a “single omnipotent force”
with no “physical referent” (248) made no sense to them; and that their lack of “indivi-
dualism” made religious “choice” unappealing. For these cultural and religious reasons,
“it is apparent that the Pitjantjatjara and other desert-dwelling Aboriginal societies
simply do not convert to Christianity” (244).
Charles Keyes (1993a) argued that Thais were resistant to Christianity for very differ-
ent reasons. In this case, Christian missionaries failed to compete successfully with
another world religion—namely, Buddhism—for converts among the traditional villagers.
Keyes proposed two reasons. First, unlike Christianity, “conversion to Buddhism does
not require that people radically reject their previous beliefs” (268); resident and visiting
monks emphasized that local spirits were not false but were subject to Buddhist concepts
like karma too. Once villagers had their traditional beliefs subsumed by Buddhism,
Christian missionaries were unable to persuade them that Christianity “offers greater
insight into ultimate Truth than does Buddhism” (277). Second, the local political and
economic institutions were sufficiently strong and independent to prevent Christian
penetration and domination; with no way to monopolize and exploit resources and
opportunities—and no way to “institutionalize”—Christianity could gain no foothold in
the villages. (See supplemental reading “Why Have the Akha Resisted Christian
Conversion?”)
The anthropology of Islam

In the early twenty-first century, there is a greater need than ever to understand Islam, in
all its diversity and in all its global locations, not simply the Middle East. Indeed, not all
Muslims are Arabs or live in the Middle East (the largest population of Muslims inhabits
Indonesia), and not all Arabs or Middle Easterners are Muslims. There are Muslims in
Europe and the United States; more than three million Muslims reside in the United
States, approximately two-thirds of whom are immigrants and one-third American con-
verts, including many African Americans. Most Westerners and Christians know little
about Islam beyond the stereotypes of desert nomads, veiled women, and terrorists,
which feeds Western/Christian “Islamophobia” or fear and loathing of Muslims. In his
essay “The Islam of Anthropology,” Christopher Houston boldly and proudly claimed
that anthropology could serve as “an antidote to the Islamophobia of much talk about
Islam” on all sides of the political spectrum (2009: 198).
Orientalism and the anthropological study of Islam

Anthropologists, along with other scholars, have a long history of accounts of Islamic
societies. As early as 1926 Edward Westermarck published Ritual and Belief in Morocco,
and more than two decades later Evans-Pritchard—who is better known for his work on
the Nuer and Azande—released his The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949), which Benjamin
Soares and Filippo Osella call “perhaps the first anthropological study focused on Islam
and Muslim society per se”:
At a time when anthropologists were almost exclusively concerned with small-scale

societies or those deemed to be somehow more authentically “African” or “Asian,”
the originality of Evans-Pritchard’s book was to show how a specifically Muslim
institution—the Sufi order—could be established along extensive trans-Saharan trade
routes and subsequently used to mobilize “tribal” groups against the Italian occupa-
tion of Libya.
(2010: 2–3)
However, anthropology’s record with Islam has been subjected to intense criticism.
One criticism is that anthropologists tended to focus on “nomads or pastoralists”
(McLoughlin 2007: 280), perpetuating a set of dichotomies between rural and urban Islam
and between “‘folk’/‘popular’/‘local’ forms of Islam and ‘high’/‘reform-minded’/‘book-
centred’/‘doctrinal’ Islam” (Marsden and Retsikas 2012: 5). Ironically related to this first
critique is the assumption that Islam is a monolithic whole, that there is “a single object
called ‘Islam’” and that “we can find that object directly in scripture” (Bowen 2012: 2).
This scriptural or textual obsession in analyses of Islam makes the religion seem parti-
cularly static and totalistic: Ernest Gellner’s Muslim Society called Islam “the blueprint of
a social order” the rules of which “exist, eternal, divinely ordained, and independent of
the will of men” (1981: 1). Unsurprisingly, Islam has been characterized as uniquely
immune, even hostile to, modernization, democracy, human rights, and secularization.
Islam is chronically portrayed as radically other, as different from the West (which is
never referred to as “Christian society”) in every significant way. In a very influential
book, literature scholar Edward Said (1978) proposed the term “orientalism” for this
propensity of Western society and scholarship to construct and use Islam and Muslims as
the absolute opposite and other.
Samuli Schielke concluded pithily that “there is too much Islam in the anthropology of
Islam” and not enough anthropology, that is, not enough awareness of society, culture, poli-
tics, and “the existential and pragmatic sensibilities of living a life in a complex and often
troubling world” (2010:1). Clifford Geertz was one of the first to try to contextualize the
cultures of Islam, observing its diversity by comparing the religion in two widely separated
locations, Morocco and Indonesia. He firmly reminded us that a translocal religion like Islam:
even when it is fed from a common source, is as much a particularizing force as a

generalizing one, and indeed whatever universality a given religious tradition man-
ages to attain arises from its ability to engage a widening set of individual, even
idiosyncratic, conceptions of life and yet somehow sustain and elaborate them all.
(1968: 14)
What emerged were two local Islams, a distinctly Moroccan Islam and a distinctly Indone-
sian Islam, each consonant with its local culture, politics, and history. In Morocco, the basic
style of life—and therefore of religion—was “strenuous, fluid, violent, visionary, devout,
unsentimental, and above all, self-assertive” (8). “Activism, fervor, impetuosity, nerve,
toughness, moralism, populism, and an almost obsessive self-assertion” being cultural norms
(54), heroic “holy-man” piety evolved to match strong-man politics. The central figure was
the saint or religious leader (marabout) who enjoyed blessing or divine favor (baraka). Fol-
lowers organized into brotherhoods (awiya) around such leaders, and dead saints (siyyid)
and their tombs were religious fixtures. The Indonesian style of life, alternatively, was
“remarkably malleable, tentative, syncretistic, and most significantly of all, multivoiced”
(12), leading to norms of “inwardness, imperturbability, patience, poise, sensibility, aesthe-
ticism, elitism, and an almost obsessive self-effacement” (54). Indonesian Islam did not seek
purity of religion or a single dominant figure; instead it produced “a proliferation of
abstractions so generalized, symbols so allusive, and doctrines so programmatic that they can
be made to fit any form of experience at all” (17).
In light of Geertz’s work, Abdul Hamid el-Zein initiated “a search for an anthropology
of Islam,” accusing all sides of approaching Islam “as an isolable and bounded domain of
meaningful phenomena inherently distinct from other cultural forms such as social rela-
tions or economic systems and from other religions” (1977: 241). He countered that there
was no such thing as “Islam,” rather a family of local “Islams.” Talal Asad responded with
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” accepting the heterogeneity of Islam but offering
the productive suggestion that these diverse local forms share a discursive tradition “that
addresses itself to conception of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular
Islamic practice in the present” (2009: 20)—a very anthropological take on tradition.
The ordinary lives of Muslims

In addition to stressing the diversity between and within Muslim-majority societies,
anthropology has increasingly highlighted how people live their everyday modern lives in
the framework of Asad’s Muslim discursive tradition. Rather than the rigid, dour image
of Islam, anthropology finds a dynamic and often contentious engagement of individuals
with the religious tradition.
Two areas of particular interest have been youths and women. A great amount of research
has emerged on young Muslims, such as Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in
the Global South and North (Herrera and Bayat 2010), Muslim Childhood: Religious Nur-
ture in a European Context (Scourfield, Gilliat-Ray, Khan, and Otri 2013), Improvisational
Islam: Indonesian Youth in a Time of Possibility (Ibrahim 2018), and Muslim Cool: Race,
Religion, and Hip Hop (Khabeer 2016), the last examining the Inner-City Muslim Action
Network in Chicago and drawing together religion and race in the United States to empha-
size “Muslim Cool Blackness” as a struggle against white supremacy.
As Bayat and Herrera declare in the introduction to their edited volume, “there is more
to the lives of Muslim youth … than mere religiosity, conservative cultural politics, and
extremism” (2010: 5). Like young people everywhere, but especially in Arab countries
where already a decade ago a “youth bulge” meant that 65 percent of the population was
less than twenty-five years old and faced 25 percent unemployment (Herrera 2010: 128),
much of their energy goes into battling joblessness and social-political injustice. Intense
religious piety is always one option, as evinced by the Gambian youths who join Tabligh
Jama’at (roughly, “missionary society”), pitting them in a contest with their elders for
religious authority and propriety—many parents feeling that their sons have slipped into
“religious radicalism”—as well as with their peers for modern legitimacy. While the
Tablighis wear traditional garb and spread religious messages, their age-mates hang out
on the streets “spending their time drinking tea; listening to hip-hop and reggae music;
playing football or the boardgame draughts; meeting their girlfriends; commenting on
local, national, and international news; and dreaming about going to Babylon (i.e., the
West)” (Janson 2010: 106). Meanwhile some Sufis in Mali don dreadlocks, earning them
the name “Rasta Sufis,” and one of their primary leaders “has been actively incorporating
elements of youth culture into religious practice” such as sports and martial arts (Soares
2010: 254–55). And the “jihad rap” of the British group Fun^Da^Mental blends rap and
industrial music with Islam and political critiques of British and Western culture (Swe-
denburg 2010).
The place of women in Islam has been an unusually fraught topic, the veiled Muslim
woman often providing the image of a backward and oppressive religion. Not to mini-
mize the religious and cultural restrictions and burdens on women, Saba Mahmood (as
mentioned in Chapter 6), argued that Western concepts of feminism do not quite apply
for women who choose Islamic piety as a path toward morality and virtue. More vocif-
erously, Palestinian-American Lila Abu-Lughod interjected that more than a few con-
temporary Muslim women voluntarily adopt some version of the veil (sometimes a
simple headscarf or hijab, sometimes a full covering or burqa), even if those women were
raised or had lived in “modern” and “liberated” cultures. The custom of the veil carries
different meanings for different women: some see it as an act of faith or a religious duty,
while for others it is modesty or privacy, or a marker of identity, or mere tradition. Abu-
Lughod insisted that “we need to work against the reductive interpretation of veiling as
the quintessential sign of women’s unfreedom, even if we object to state imposition of
this form” and that “we must take care not to reduce the diverse situations and attitudes
of millions of Muslim women to a single item of clothing” (2002: 786).
On the other hand, women may refract or resist religion in both traditional and
modern ways. Lara Deeb describes the activities of the Hizbullah Women’s Committee in
Lebanon, whose members participate in “social welfare organizations” offering services
to their neighbors “from the provision of basic needs (e.g. food, medicine, blankets,
clothing) for poor families to leading educational seminars on topics ranging from
hygiene to Qur’anic interpretation to how best to approach the religious court system”
(2010: 110). Sometimes they characterized themselves as “outspoken, Muslim, committed,
and educated” women (111) and criticized simplistic and idealistic notions of “the liber-
ated Western woman” (114). Throughout the Islamic world, women have transformed
the drab veil or burqa into a personalized fashion statement (see for instance Emma
Tarlo [2010] Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith or religion scholar Elizabeth Bucar
[2017] Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress).
Mass communication and social media technology has allowed women to express
themselves and sometimes rethink or escape religious roles and restrictions. We pre-
viously mentioned radio (see Chapter 4). Muslim women also print or read a number of
glossy magazines, such as American Muslim Women Magazine (amwomenmag.com),
Sisters Magazine, the “Magazine for fabulous Muslim Woman” (www.sisters-magazine.
com), The Muslim Woman (www.themuslimwomanmagazine.com), and Azizah, “The
Voice for Muslim Women” (see blog at azizahmag-blog.tumblr.com). Then there are the
young women of Indonesia, who use the internet to circumvent the segregation of the
sexes and chat with boys; these anak gaul (sociable and fashionable youths) seek curhat
or curahan hati (“to pour out one’s heart”) with open emotional talk and want young
men to do the same—which presents new opportunities and expectations for Muslim
males too (Slama 2010).
Box 9.1 Women and Islamic television talk shows in Pakistan

As in all modern societies, religion has crept into popular culture in Pakistan, including
onto television where “Geo Television channel has surpassed all other channels in
featuring innovative religious content and in producing the most widely watched reli-
gious programs in urban Pakistan” (Kazi 2018: 524). No doubt this station and others
like it in the country aspire to increase and improve the population’s piety. However,
the effects of a popular program like ‘Alim (Muslim scholar) Online are multiple and
unpredictable. The very facts that the show brings together speakers from various
schools of thought and presents them in an entertaining and relevant manner “trans-
form the ways in which people engage with Islam and religious authority as both come
to be increasingly vested in the viewers’ everyday concerns and their regard for their
existential realities” (524). Most profoundly, because of what they hear, Pakistani
women “are increasingly willing to contest the privileged place of Islamic values in
defining their lives and ideas” (525). First, exposure to multiple and differing religious
opinions naturally leads to uncertainty: if they ever assumed that Islam spoke with a
single unified voice on crucial matters, they discover quite the opposite. They are
therefore inevitably thrown back on their own judgment as to which authorities to
follow and what constitutes Islamic authority. Other women viewers interpret and
apply religious norms through their own everyday experience and other (often extra-
Islamic) beliefs and values. In what Taha Kazi calls “selective piety,” women express a
“willingness to reconsider and critique Islamic concepts that seemingly resist being
integrated into the practitioners’ contemporary lifestyles and value systems” (531),
particularly when those women are middle-class, professional, and (comparatively)
dedicated to “the values of human rights, individual autonomy, and citizen equality”
(530). She concludes that the relationship between women and Islam can range from
submission and conventional piety to “downplaying the importance of, resisting,
challenging, or delaying conformance to certain Islamic norms and practices” (532)—if
not threatening to leave the faith altogether.
Islam in majority non-Muslim societies

Islam is not and never has been restricted to the Middle East or “Islamic” societies. Islam
was carried soon after its formation to North Africa, Central Asia and India, Southeast
Asia, and Europe. Spain was controlled by Muslims for almost a millennium, and Islam
traveled to the Americas with African slaves and later African, Middle Eastern, and
Asian immigrants. Islam has won converts/reverts among African Americans (for exam-
ple, the Nation of Islam) but also among white Americans and Europeans. Anna
McGinty’s (2006) study of female converts/reverts finds them in both the United States
and Sweden.
Islam in societies where the majority is non-Muslim presents a fascinating subject for
anthropology, as well as a vexing problem for the majority populations and governments
not to mention for Muslim minorities. Translocal religions that claim universal truth and
seek new members are almost inevitably suspicious of and competitive with each other;
even if universal claims are not in competition, religious and social differences can cause
tensions. Add hostility toward Islam as an alleged source of terrorism, and inter-religious
coexistence can be understandably difficult. In the United Kingdom, the English Defence
League (www.englishdefenceleague.org) was formed to resist “Muslim extremists” and
the threat of “Islamization” of British society. Some Americans have voiced similar
dismay at the prospect of Islamization in the form of shari’a courts, mosques, Islamic
centers, and practices like the veil, honor killing, and female genital mutilation. Debra
McDougall reported that the small Muslim minority in the Solomon Islands (around 1
percent of the population):
is seen as a threat by church leaders and Christian politicians. … Solomon Islands

Muslims are called “terrorists” when they wear their distinctive white robes and
caps. Some Solomon Islander Christian leaders worry, moreover, that Islam threatens
the national unity that results from a shared Christian faith and may undermine
postconflict reconciliation work that is being carried out in Christian idioms.
(2009: 483)
In nearby Papua New Guinea, some Christian organizations have openly demanded a ban
on Islam in the form of a constitutional amendment “curtailing freedom of religion”
(Flower 2012: 205). (See supplemental reading “The Politics of Muslim Conversion in
Pakistan and Papua New Guinea.”)
Tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims have exploded into real political and
physical struggle and violence, not the least of which resulted in the partition of colonial
India into two states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Irfan Ahmad
(2009b) chronicled the Indian Jamaat-e-Islami (Party of Islam) from its founding to its
contemporary transformation. Organized by Syed Abul Ala Maududi in 1941 with the
goal of carving an Islamic state out of colonial India, the party originally practiced a
“political Islam,” mixing religion with twentieth-century state politics. Another innova-
tion was a school, the Darsgah-e-Jamaat-e-Islami (Jamaate-e-Islami School), which began
as a separatist and factional institution but gradually joined the mainstream, changing its
name to something less political, broadening its curriculum, altering its internal culture,
and most dramatically affiliating with the previously hated government education system.
In Ahmad’s estimation, the party itself moved from rejecting secular democracy (see
Chapter 12) to accepting and participating in it, even establishing a Forum for Democ-
racy and Communal Amity.
Meanwhile, inside India as elsewhere, Muslims have sometimes been the victims of
violence: for instance, the Babri Mosque was destroyed by Hindus in 1992 and reclaimed
as the site of temple to Ram Llala. Such violence has radicalized Muslims in some places,
but it has encouraged others to strive for peace, often in the name of Islam. Raphael
Susewind (2013) identifies four kinds of Muslims working for peace in India, including
not only the “secular technocrats” but additionally the “doubting professionals” who
appreciate the ambiguity of Islam, the “emancipating women” whose personal journey
through Islam leads them to assist and liberate other women, and the “faith-based
actors” who take religion and scripture as the source of their peacemaking activities.
Muslims in majority non-Muslim societies also face the problem of how to relate to
the wider society and how to practice Islam when dominant laws and institutions are not
Islamic. Such Muslims face dilemmas such as whether they should vote, attend the local
schools, apply for a bank loan, and generally integrate into the dominant society. At the
same time, host states enact varying policies toward their Muslim minorities. Ahmet
Yükleyen (2012) compares Turkish Muslims in two European states—Germany and the
Netherlands—and finds a range of attitudes and institutional forms, including:
1 Diyanet—an “official” form of Islam, controlled from Turkey by the Diyanet Isleri
Baskanligi (Directorate of Religious Affairs)
2 Milli Gorus—a “political” form of Islam, seeking to promote the recognition of
Islam in Europe
3 Süleymanli—a “mystical” form of Islam that focuses on learning the Qur’an and
performing rituals
4 Gülen Community—a “civil” form of Islam with schools located around the world
5 Kaplan Community—a “revolutionary” form of Islam that is currently banned for its
insistence on the merger of religion and state
Issues of coexistence are especially acute in societies that are officially secular, like
France with its policy of laïcité (see Chapter 12). Muslims living in France must answer
the question, “what forms of Islamic ideas and institutions enable those Muslims wishing
to practice their religion to do so fully and freely in France?” (Bowen 2010: 5). Multiple
answers have arisen, shaped by “the active role played by the state and by certain muni-
cipalities in seeking to organize religious life for Muslims” (32) and “to build and control
a French Islam” (27). Two obvious sites for constructing a French Islam are mosques and
schools, which themselves have offered an array of solutions and services for Muslims,
from “cathedral mosques” to small neighborhood institutions that provide lessons, lec-
tures, and public forums. The attitudes of Muslims toward Islam vary too, from Islam as
“a set of absolute rules” that are as binding in France as anywhere, to Islam as “one
Figure 9.1 Grande Mosquée de Paris, France. Photo by Bruno DE HOGUES/Gamma-Rapho via
Getty Images.
among several legal traditions,” to Islam as “a set of principles based on Scripture” that
can be interpreted in the local French context (63). The ultimate question is “whether
there should be distinctive Islamic norms for France (and by extension for Europe)” or
whether Islam is a single universal way that applies in all countries (136). Muslims and
their non-Islamic neighbors will be dealing with these alternatives for years to come.
Box 9.2 The Muslims of Texas, USA

The Houston, Texas neighborhoods of Hillcroft Avenue and Sugar Land are home to a
large population of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, embodiments of modern
“transnational flows of religious ideologies” (Afzal 2015: 14). The first thing that Ahmed
Afzal notes in his ethnography of these communities is their exception from many
stereotypes of American immigrants. Rather than poor, rural, and marginal, many were
employed by the major energy company Enron before its dramatic collapse, entering
into the high-tech corporate culture of Texas. Rather than a drain on the local econ-
omy, Afzal insists that they are a valuable asset. At the same time that they participate
actively in Houston’s economy and culture, they also construct a distinct “transna-
tional Muslim heritage economy,” providing services such as restaurants, shops, and
gas stations in their neighborhoods. Understandably, religion continues to play a pro-
minent role in this system:
The incorporation of Islam in public and everyday life, the inscription of public
places of business with religious meanings, and the mass circulation of religious
commodities indicate the significant cultural transformations that are taking place
in the practice of Islam globally.
(103)
Afzal portrays individual business owners or workers to convey the fact that their
“pursuit of the American dream, reworked as individual effort and success in the
service of family rather than the self, reveals agency and resilience that coexist
with experiences of racism, marginality, discrimination, and abjection” (123). And
Houston’s Pakistani Muslims practice their translocal culture in two other interest-
ing ways. The city’s Pakistan Independence Day Festival has grown into a major
public event “that represents long-distance nationalism and diasporic place
making” (155) and figures prominently in the heritage economy. Finally, as for many
other ethnic and minority groups, radio is a crucial medium of communication and
community-building, which Afzal calls “a ubiquitous presence in Pakistani public
life in Houston” (178). Surveying its history, he also learns that it has become
unexpectedly profit-driven, not just a community voice but a “business enterprise”
(192), which has fostered divisions and occasional hostilities between stations and
listeners.
At the extreme, some Islamic congregations, especially in the West, strive to accom-
modate gender diversity including gay, lesbian, and transgender Muslims. Katrina
Thompson invites us to American and Canadian mosques in the “progressive Muslim
movement” which welcomes “secular Muslims, significant numbers of women, queer,
trans, and nonbinary Muslims, and a handful of non-Muslims” (2020: 878). At the
Toronto center, worshippers enter through a non-gendered door and listen to indivi-
duals of all genders speak. Furthermore, visitors sit and stand together in a single space,
often shoulder to shoulder—“men, women, children, cis, trans, and nonbinary Mus-
lims” (884). They acquire through their very bodies new habits and understandings of
diversity and inclusion; not everyone is comfortable, at least at first, but “even among
those initially uncomfortable with gender-integrated prayer, experiencing it often
changes their minds” (887).
All of these cases prove, as Stephanie Dobson writes in her study of New Zealand
Muslim women, that Islam “is not a monolith of homogenous belief and essentialized
situations of gendered patriarchy, but is constituted by individual ‘third spaces,’ in which
women’s varying histories and current contexts intertwine and move into the future”
(2013: 241).
The anthropology of Christianity
“Perhaps surprisingly, Christianity was the last major area of religious activity to be
explored in ethnographic writing,” marveled Fenella Cannell in 2006 (8). In fact, three
years earlier Joel Robbins announced that he did not think that an anthropology of
Christianity was yet “a going concern” (2003b: 191), citing “the success of the anthro-
pology of Islam” as proof “that it is possible to construct a viable comparative enterprise
around the study of a world religion” (192).
Despite the fact that, as examples throughout this book have illustrated, anthropologists
have described Christianity in many societies around the world for many years, Cannell felt
that “Christianity is still an occluded object,” even a repressed one. She and other anthro-
pologists have pondered a number of reasons for the delayed development of an anthro-
pology of Christianity. One reason, reckoned Chris Hann in an opinion shared by many, is
that Christianity has seemed inauthentic to anthropologists, “an alien intrusion that under-
mines a local cosmology” (2007: 384). That is, because anthropologists have specialized in
societies where Christianity was not indigenous but was introduced (and quite recently),
Christianity has been viewed as obscuring the “traditional culture” that we hoped to
describe. Two factors have changed this attitude, though. First, anthropologists have turned
their attention to areas like Europe, where Christianity has been present for centuries (e.g.
Jeremy Boissevain [1965] Saints and Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta or
Charles Stewart [1991] Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Cul-
ture). Second, as Webb Keane wrote in his important study, Christian Moderns, “Chris-
tianity has become ‘our’ religion for a large part of the non-Western world and is not seen as
foreign” (2007: 45). In other words, Christianity has become an indigenous religion, just as it
became indigenous to Europe after being introduced from elsewhere.
But Cannell, Robbins, and others recognize greater problems. Cannell claimed that
anthropologists (like other scholars) have tended to exaggerate the “ascetic” and other-
worldly quality of Christianity, neglecting the lived experiences of Christians and the
links between the religion and the wider society and culture. Alternately, we have
assumed that Christianity’s “meanings are ‘obvious’ because they are part of the culture
from which anthropologists themselves are largely drawn” (2005: 340). But Joel Robbins
diagnosed a deeper obstacle, latent in the culture of anthropology itself: Christianity
emphasizes the radical, even total, break with the past that we noted above in the dis-
cussion of conversion—what Robbins called “discontinuity thinking”—whereas anthro-
pology is characterized by “continuity thinking,” “the kind of thinking that sees change
as slow and conservative” (2007: 16). If he is correct, anthropology and Christianity are
foreign worldviews to each other.
Christianity, colonialism, and modernization

Anthropologists and other scholars of Christianity have frequently if not adamantly
emphasized that the religion arrived in many locations as part of the colonial experience,
both part of the grander project of modernization. For colonizers from Europe, Chris-
tianity was seen and offered as the modern religion and as key to having a modern society
and to being a modern person. In his aptly named Christian Moderns, Webb Keane
related proselytization by Dutch Calvinists in Southeast Asia to “colonialism and its
postcolonial wake,” which speaks to “the idea of becoming modern, with all the pro-
mises, threats, and paradoxes this involves” (2007: 38).
Accordingly, the spread of Christianity cannot help but be connected to more all-
encompassing processes of culture change (which is why, many argue, anthropologists
eschewed the study of the religion). John and Jean Comaroff paid special attention to
these processes. Colonialism, wherever and whenever conducted, involved changes to and
supremacy over the political and economic aspects of subject societies, together with
religion and other cultural habits like dress, speech, marriage, gender roles, and so on. All
of these forms and practices, and not merely religious doctrines and rituals, carried mes-
sages about what is true, good, important, and possible. In fact, as anthropologists have
increasingly realized, much of cultural and even religious “knowledge” is not explicit and
formal but implicit and informal, embedded in the big and little things we do all day
everyday—what Jean Comaroff called “the signs and structures of everyday life” (1985:
80). Therefore, the missionization process was designed to effect a change in these signs
and structures, a “revolution in habits,” “a quest to refurnish the mundane: to focus
human endeavor on the humble scapes of the everyday, of the ‘here-and-now’ in which
the narrative of Protestant redemption took on its contemporary form” (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1991: 9). They also dubbed this struggle “an epic of the ordinary” and “the
everyday as epiphany”:
it was precisely by means of the residual, naturalized quality of habit that power
takes up residence in culture, insinuating itself, apparently without agency, in the
texture of a life-world. This, we believe, is why recasting mundane, routine practices
has been so vital to all manner of social reformers, colonial missionaries among
them.
(31)
The Comaroffs examined a number of cultural realms in which European/Christian

habits of mind and body took root. An important one was economics, literally farming
techniques. Missionaries offered a model for “civilized cultivation” in the form of the
“mission garden”; a major aspect of this new model was a reversal of traditional gender
roles, in which women had done the bulk of horticultural work. The plow became a
potent symbol of Western-style farming; fences introduced conceptions of “enclosure”
and property; and inequality of output, related to intensity of labor, generated Western-
style differences in wealth and status as their reward. But economic change went beyond
horticulture to new institutions like markets and money. Modern labor and cash were
part of a new “moral economy,” stigmatizing idleness and “primitive production” and
promoting “the kind of upright industry and lifestyle that would dissolve [tradition’s]
dirt” (1991: 189).
Yet more mundane areas like clothing and household practices were valued for their
civilizing and Christianizing potential. Clothes not only covered heathen nakedness but
taught locals the proper wear and care of these articles; native clothing, it seemed to
colonists, was dirty, too “natural,” and lacking the necessary markers of social—espe-
cially gender—distinctions. For this purpose, used garments were shipped from England
to cover, and thereby transform, the pagan body, instilling shame and pride at the same
time. And as already suggested, proper (that is, Western/Christian) gender behavior was
essential: women needed to be dressed modestly and re-assigned to the home. Home
became a “domestic” sphere, which became the woman’s sphere, where she would lit-
erally sit, sew, and serve. But the traditional native house would not do; the house and
the community had to be transformed from what the Europeans perceived as “a wild
array of small, featureless huts scattered across the countryside” (282). Missionary houses
and buildings again set the model: with right angles, specialized spaces (e.g. a room for
eating, a room for sleeping, etc.), doors and locks for privacy, and modern furniture, the
mission structures “became a diorama” for how people should live (292). The collection
of residences that became the “town” differentiated public from private spaces, all set in a
universe of square blocks and broad streets. In these and many ways, the foreigners were
doing much more than bringing a new religion; they were “teaching [them] to build a
world” (296), one in which civilization itself was expressed “in squares and straight lines”
(127).
Despite all of these efforts, Western Christians could not assure the acceptance of the
religion nor its specific local formations. In a classic analysis, Michael Taussig found that
rural folks in Colombia, introduced to the modern concept of money as interest-bearing
capital, were baptizing their money by intercepting baptisms intended for children and
redirecting that spiritual force to their cash. The baptized bill even received the Christian
name “that the baptismal ritual was meant to bestow on the child” (1977: 137), which
allegedly made the money lively and potent (depriving the child of the same benefit).
Elsewhere people have reinterpreted, invented, or resisted Christianity. Donald Pollock
researched early Catholic activities in Brazil, where Tupi and Guarani peoples were
contacted by Jesuits in 1549. Jesuit missionaries were not the first Europeans met by the
natives, so in this case, priests were welcomed by the locals, “who sought refuge from
brutal Portuguese and Spanish soldiers and merchants” (1993: 167). As a consequence,
“Indians were happy to perform meaningless rituals in return for protection from the
colonists, gifts from the missionaries, and the supernatural benefits of the powerful Eur-
opean shamans” (167). Much more recently, the Siriono accepted Protestantism for
similar reasons—not out of commitment to Christian doctrines or love of Christian
missionaries, but “as a means of strengthening social and cultural boundaries between
themselves and non-Indians” (173). Conversely, the Kraho of central Brazil firmly resisted
Protestantism for its hostility to traditional religious and cultural practices but accepted a
few elements of Catholicism, such as baptism and “ritual sponsorship” (the “godparent”
relation), which resembled their own practices (174).
In the case of the Uiaku, a Papuan community, Anglican contact beginning in 1891
resulted in a segregated system and the “continuing coexistence of two social environ-
ments, the mission station and the village” (Barker 1993: 199). The missionaries typically
sought to incorporate the people into the religious and colonial project of the West,
through education and schools, employment, and political authority. Despite these more
or less successful efforts, the physical fact that the mission was located outside the village
meant that village life could persist along more indigenous lines. The outcome was a dual
cultural and religious universe, in which locals inhabited a tradition-oriented village but
“also grew up attending school and church and modeled their roles (if not always their
moral attitudes) on the teachers and on their ideas of Europeans” (209). Only a few
actually converted or had “more than the vaguest notion of church doctrine; most villa-
gers are firmly convinced of the reality of local bush spirits and sorcerers; and individuals
frequently disregard church strictures on marriage and divorce” (209). When they did
think about Christianity, they inevitably thought about it through traditional lenses. For
instance, Christian spiritual beliefs did not displace local ones; traditional village beliefs
became the “microcosm” which people could know and experience directly, while
Christian beliefs represented a “macrocosm” that was revealed by missionaries. The
entire relationship between villagers and missionaries was understood through traditional
social concepts like the kawo/sabu relation, in which kawo or higher-ranking groups had
rights but also obligations to look after sabu or lower-ranking groups, who owed their
superiors respect but could expect care in exchange. So the locals exchanged church
attendance, labor, and support in the form of food and money for the rituals, baptisms,
and knowledge that the church provided (212).
One of the most noteworthy and enduring ways in which Christianity interjected a
vision of modernity was in its impact on other religions. Presented as the epitome of
modern religion, authorities of other religions often sought to modernize and reform their
religions, especially in the mold of Protestant Christianity, emphasizing monotheism,
scripture, individual piety over purportedly “empty” ritual, and of course “belief.” In
places like colonial Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), Buddhist intellectuals honed their
debating skills with Christians, in the process reforming their Buddhism to meet Chris-
tianity. Anthropologists like Asad (1993) have gone so far as to contend that the very
concept of “religion” is Western/Christian—which was adopted by many non-Western/
non-Christian cultures.
Box 9.3 Denominational disputes and the sociality of schism in Papua

New Guinea
For many Christian leaders and laypeople, the bane of existence is denominationalism,
that is, the constant fracturing of Christianity into rival sects. The Christian imagination
tends to envision two interdependent levels of religious life—the pious but isolated
individual and the universal church. However, the Guhu-Samane of Papua New Guinea
demonstrate that the “experience of religious transformation is irreducibly social” and
that schism “is an integral part of Protestant religious practice” (Handman 2015: 3–4).
Conversion may be a private individual occurrence (but then it may not), but religious
life is necessarily collective and congregational, forming and operating through
groups. And each split represents a critique of the ideas and practices of previous
groups, “a critical practice centered on remaking social life and not just individual
selves” (17). Courtney Handman goes so far as to reason that Protestantism—itself
born of a radical split from Catholicism—“seems to demand both a militant critique of
others through separation and a similarly militant union with others through worship”
(44). The Guhu-Samane were originally missionized by Lutherans; however, Lutheran
monopoly was broken when the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) introduced its
Guhu-Samane translation of the New Testatement in 1975 (Handman argues that SIL
had to invent a distinct Guhu-Samane language and ethnic identity “so that they could
become Christian” [119]). Like Martin Luther’s vernacularization of the Bible from Latin
to German, a native-language translation had significant cognitive and organizational
consequences. For instance, translator Ernest Richert made the fateful decision to link
Christianity to the traditional men’s house, assuming that “[g]etting the domestic feel
of the translation right, with local language idioms and borrowings from traditional
culture, meant turning on the salvational light bulb for Guhu-Samane people” (92). But
he did not understand the role of the men’s house or how its practices differed from
Christianity. The traditional men’s house was a “cool” place of minimal talk; Chris-
tianity was comparatively “hot” and extremely verbal; in Christianity, “everyone now
seems to want to talk” (175) but ends up saying quite different things. So in 1976 a
local man and his family began to have religious visions, sparking a “revival” that
coalesced into the Bilip Grup (Belief Group):
praying on mountain tops, requesting signs (often cargo-based signs) from God,
and communicating with heaven via noncanonical media, like flashlight messages
in Morse code. It took about five years before the differences with the Lutherans
finally seemed insurmountable, and the revivalists decided to start their own
church, New Life Bible Church.
(124)
New Life promoted village Christianity in an intense and permanent state of “spiritual
heat.” Its services were noisy, with traditional drums played by men and cacophonous
simultaneous talk, exclusively in Guhu-Samane language. Rejecting this style of wor-
ship, the Reformed Gospel Church split off in 1994, with a much “cooler” style. Tra-
ditional drums were prohibited, replaced by modern guitars; men’s loud voices were
replaced by a chorus of young girls; and services were conducted in Tok Pisin (the
national pidgin language) and English along with the native tongue. Handman advises
that we think of such denominations as “remnant churches”—and that they think of
themselves as such—that is, “churches that claim both the universality of the Christian
message and a recognition of the partiality of its realization on earth” and thus inevi-
tably “proliferate difference” and construct groups (218).
Pentecostalism
One of the most startling developments in the realm of global Christianity is the rise of
Pentecostalism, especially in societies and countries where Catholicism has historically
dominated. Pentecostalism sheds interesting light on questions of modernity and tradi-
tion, of the local and the global, and of class and gender. Yet Hefner reveals that a pro-
gram to study Pentecostal Christianity in 1985 was met “with a mixture of skepticism
and bewilderment” because, once again, “most anthropologists found global Christianity
inauthentic and uninteresting” (2013a: vii). However, anthropologists began to change
their attitude within a decade.
Pentecostalism is not a sect or a religion so much as a style of Christianity, stressing
the “gifts of grace” (also known as “charisma,” hence Charismatic Christians) and the
presence of the “Holy Spirit” in such forms as speaking in tongues, prophecy, faith-
healing, and exorcism of evil spirits. An organized movement usually associated with the
Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, California in the early twentieth century, it quickly
became an international missionary movement, with churches in Chile, China, England,
India, and Norway by 1907, in Brazil by 1908, in Russia by 1911, and in Mexico by 1914
(Hefner 2013b: 3). However, there is not one but many sources of Pentecostalism (there
were even signs of such a revival movement in India in 1860) and ultimately not “one but
many Pentecostalisms” (2).
Two prominent characteristics of Pentecostalism are its organizational structure and
its gender dimension. First, in the spirit of the Protestant religious entrepreneurialism,
Pentecostalism frequently takes the shape of small independent house churches and store-
front churches managed by anyone seized with the Holy Spirit. Second, although the
leadership of Pentecostal churches is almost invariably male, and Pentecostalism
promotes decidedly conservative gender roles, women comprise the majority of members,
up to 75 percent. Whether in China (Cao 2013), India (Shah and Shah 2013), Africa, or
Latin America, women flock to Pentecostalism, where they are widely believed to have
greater spiritual gifts than men and where they can benefit in numerous ways from partici-
pation in such churches. David Cooper’s ethnography of Nicaraguan Pentecostalism explains
some of the appeal. One of the main goals of the rural churches is to combat vicio or vice,
which includes “non-Christian” behavior such as “drinking alcohol, taking drugs, commit-
ting adultery, living in conjugal or sexual union without having married, wearing immodest
or inappropriate clothing or make-up, dancing, and participating in parties, or fighting and
being violent” (2019: 869). While these sins can afflict both genders, Cooper notices that
sinful conduct is particularly associated “with arenas of social prestige designated as male
prior to conversion” (872). Pentecostalism, in encouraging a tranquil and happy home life by
avoiding the temptations of the world and subordinating the fuerza (force, energy) of men to
the power of the Holy Spirit, helps domesticate troublesome masculinity. Concludes Cooper,
“If rigid moral management of women’s sexuality can be viewed as one means of attempting
to rein in the volatile bodily force integral to domesticity, the language of vicio provides an
equivalent handle upon male misbehavior” (883).
Another key characteristic of Pentecostalism is its relation to traditional culture and
“the past.” Many commentators stress that, while Christianity generally promotes dis-
continuity and a radical break with the past, Pentecostalism takes this approach espe-
cially seriously. Joel Robbins applied his aforementioned continuity/discontinuity model
to Pentecostalism, arguing that it is “rich in disjunctive discourses and practices aimed at
making ruptures with the past” (2003a: 224). More than most brands of Christianity,
Pentecostalism “set[s] up ritual practices designed continuously to create or defend the
disjunctions those discourses construct” (224), including condemnations of their old lives
and cultures as well as exorcisms of the evil demons of those lives and cultures.
Birgit Meyer (see Chapter 3) found Pentecostal leaders in Ghana explicitly command-
ing followers to “make a complete break with the past” (1998: 316). For them, tradition
and local culture were satanic, so while their religion was in Africa it was not of Africa:
“Pentecostalization was opposed to Africanization” (319). A crucial aspect of the church
was “deliverance” from the evils of past and local religions, including the individual
biographical past, the ancestors, the “occult” (which encompassed animism as well as
Islam, Buddhism, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and various African Christian
churches), and of course evil spirits. Indeed, Pentecostalism and Protestantism generally
do not deny traditional spirits but demonize them; a main attraction of the new religion
is its supposed power over those wicked beings. Reporting more recently from Australia,
Akiko Ono says that Aboriginal Pentecostals in New South Wales were also told to
“throw away culture,” although this mandate did not apply to every single aspect of pre-
contact culture—only those teachings, practices, and places that “have the potential to
summon up evil spirits” (2012: 78)—nor interestingly only to pre-contact culture. On the
standard list of behaviors to avoid are:
adultery, fornication, divorce, remarrying, marrying with a non-Christian, alcohol

and drug abuse, cigarette smoking, gambling, watching football and doing sports,
dancing, listening to worldly music, watching “immoral” TV and cinema, gossiping,
coveting, involvement in the issues related to cultural heritage, traditional beliefs,
and Aboriginal arts and crafts.
(80–81)
Significantly, as Pentecostals break the ties to their past lives and local cultures, they
forge ties with new modern lives and translocal cultures, joining an imagined nonlocal
and universal Christian community.
Anthropologists among others have commented that Pentecostalism is an especially
embodied and sensuous religious style. Returning to Ghana, Marleen de Witte shows
how Pentecostals take the “touch” of the Holy Spirit seriously, experienced and chan-
neled through worship and healing practices like laying on hands and anointing with oil.
Furthermore, during services the church-goer:
observes and mimics (whether consciously or unconsciously) how and when to sit, …
stand, raise one’s arms, kneel, fall down, jump, pray in tongues, dance and clap to
the music and how to “trample on the Devil” with one’s feet or stretch out one’s
hand to “receive a miracle.”
(2011: 504)
She calls religious conversion and membership “an ongoing bodily process that ‘tunes’ the
senses to specific sensory experiences” (491), urging us to augment our concept of dis-
cursive or doctrinal knowledge with “theosomatic knowledge” or “knowledge of God or
spirit being(s) gained through and stored in the body” (506).
Finally, Pentecostalism is not a static and unchanging version of Christianity but
already displays signs of evolution. Some Pentecostal congregations have achieved tre-
mendous success and growth, morphing into “megachurches” and sometimes shedding
their most extreme beliefs and practices in favor of “evangelical” trappings and “pros-
perity gospel” teachings. Hefner states that so-called neo-Pentecostal churches tend to
make peace with aspects of modernity, for instance skillfully using “modern electronic
media, both to accompany religious services and to disseminate worship events through
live or recorded broadcasts” (2013b: 24). Theologian Donald Miller (2009) suggested the
term “progressive Pentecostalism” for the (still minority of) Pentecostal churches that
engage in social activism such as food and clothing programs, divorce and addiction
counseling, and community development.
Other Christianities: Eastern Orthodox and Catholic

This section has dealt almost exclusively with Protestantism, which accurately but unfortu-
nately reflects the preeminence of Protestantism in Western scholarship. But Catholicism, the
largest single religious organization in the world, predates Protestantism, and Chris Hann
and Hermann Goltz remind us in their comparatively rare discussion of other Eastern
Orthodox Christianity, “Eastern traditions of Christianity nowadays have large congrega-
tions (number well over 200 million), but they have attracted little scholarly attention to date
from Anglophone anthropologists” (2010: 2).
Before there was Western Christianity, there was Eastern Christianity; indeed, Americans
and Western Europeans too easily forget that Christianity was born an eastern religion and
that western versions like Catholicism and Protestantism appeared much later. While the
Roman Church asserted primacy, eastern Christianity based in Greece and Byzantium never
accepted this claim, and the official split or schism between the two Christianities, over
doctrinal and political differences, occurred in 1054. Since then, Eastern or Orthodox Chris-
tianity has taken a more “national” approach, consisting of more or less autonomous
national churches, such as Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and so on.
One reason for the neglect of Orthodox Christianity is the Western origin of most
anthropologists and of anthropology as a discipline. Another reason is that Orthodox
Christianity mostly resides in societies where anthropology had little interest or access
until recently (Russia and its satellites being off-limits during the Cold War). Today,
however, an anthropology of Christianity cannot afford to ignore its eastern bloodline,
and Hann and Goltz insist that:
the Orthodox churches can stake a strong claim to be more global in the original
Christian sense of church unity: they form a global structure of local churches, as
distinct from the ‘globalization’ of a local church, be it the West Roman, the Wit-
tenbergian [i.e. Lutheran], or the Genevan [i.e. Calvinist].
(3)
Even more, many assumptions about Christianity are sorely tested by Orthodox
Christianity.
Two such assumptions go to the heart of the anthropological analysis of Christianity
and to the heart of some cutting-edge anthropological theorizing on religion. The first,
as Cannell warned, is an overemphasis on asceticism and otherworldliness, and the
second, according to Robbins, is the perceived Christian discontinuity or radical tem-
poral break. Orthodox Christianity disrupts both assumptions. Eastern Christianity,
various observers claim, has never stressed asceticism like Catholicism or Protestant-
ism. Furthermore, contra Robbins, “Eastern Christians tend to emphasize continuity in
their self-representations. Their basic notions of time seem (at any rate among certain
intellectuals in certain periods) to be quite different from Western temporalities” (Hann
and Goltz 2010: 7).
On the issue of asceticism, Alice Forbess contends that Western Christianity’s
otherworldliness flows from a dogma that “God’s ‘withdrawal’ has left man ‘in a state
of incompleteness that can be resolved only at death’” (2010: 132). In contrast, even in
the Eastern monastic tradition, monks and nuns are “more concerned with indumne-
zeirea (divinization)—the feat of becoming God-like while still in the flesh, as the saints
are thought to have done” (132–33); thus, Eastern Christianity is arguably not as alie-
nated from and at war with the world and the flesh as Western Christianity. This dif-
ference is reflected in the Eastern tradition of relics and other physical manifestations of
divinity (although Western Christianity is no stranger to relics: in November 2013 the
Catholic Church displayed some bone fragments attributed to Peter, and Western
Christians continue to be fascinated by the Shroud of Turin, the Holy Grail, and
Noah’s Ark).
Bridging these points and the second assumption are the Eastern reverence for icons or
visual representations of saints, Jesus, or God. This second assumption is expressed in
Harvey Whitehouse’s influential dichotomy between “imagistic” and “doctrinal” modes
of religiosity (see Chapter 1). Whitehouse considered imagistic religiosity to be lower in
frequency and generally less appropriate to stable, established, and modern religions than
the doctrinal alternative. However, Eastern Orthodox churches use images frequently and
intensely and have attained great stability. Hann and Goltz conclude that “it might be
argued that Eastern Christians confound Whitehouse’s dichotomy, which is left with at
most a limited heuristic value” (2010: 16). In a more damning assessment, they continue:
“What is clear is that neither he nor any of the other protagonists in the current cognitive
debates have looked at Eastern Christianity in any depth” (16).
Figure 9.2 Orthodox priest at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Courtesy of the Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
While not all Orthodox Christians believe in icons equally (if it is accurate to say that
they “believe in” icons at all), these painted or gilded objects are central to Orthodox
religious practice. The use of icons evokes the ideas of Alfred Gell concerning material
objects and distributed personhood (see Chapter 3). Icons are not idols worshipped by
Orthodox Christians; instead, they are residues, presences, of holy persons and holy
power. As Gabriel Hanganu explains in the case of a Romanian icon of Saint Anna,
physical matter is also potentially holy, and human handiwork is part of the “work of
transforming nature” to realize its spirituality:
People are asked to add their contribution to the logoi God originally implanted in
the constitutive materials of the objects and to the flow of divine energies keeping the
whole world in existence. By virtue of their free will they can make and use objects
either toward or against the fulfillment of nature’s sacred potentiality. … Religious
objects comprise a particular category of objects that are meant to be employed for
prompting and facilitating people’s relationship with God. Their “proper” use can
open up invisible channels by means of which spiritual energies are directed to the
various realms to the benefit of animated and unanimated elements of the cosmos. …
In addition to being material objects produced and employed in the visible world,
they are also images providing representations of the invisible spiritual realm.
(2010: 45)
Yet one more reason why Orthodox Christianity is overlooked by anthropology is that
Orthodox Christian societies were not as actively involved in colonialism and therefore
did not transplant their religion as widely in the non-Western world. This is not to say
that Orthodoxy did not travel with eastern Christians. A fascinating site of colonial
Orthodox Christianity is Alaska, where Russian explorers and colonists carried their
religion. The leading chronicler of Orthodox Christianity in the American Northwest is
Sergei Kan (1999), who researched Russian Orthodoxy among the Tlingit. Later, Medeia
Csoba DeHass studied the Sugpiaq of Alaska, who were not only missionized by Russian
Orthodoxy but who “interpreted and integrated the once foreign Russian Orthodox reli-
gion into their stock notions of what ‘Sugpiaqness’ ought to be” (2007: 208). In a chal-
lenge to standard anthropological categories, DeHass called the Sugqpiaq “the most
‘traditional’ people in the area” (208) while also being thoroughly Orthodox. It is,
DeHass acknowledged, “impossible to find concrete information on pre-Christian beliefs
and practices, as everybody in the community is Russian Orthodox, and they proudly
declare it to be their original religion” (209). Even so, one can “recognize aspects of cur-
rent Sugpiaq Russian Orthodoxy that correspond with pre-Christian ideas, and which are
incorporated through the process of indigenization of Russian Orthodoxy” (210).
Meanwhile, in a special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (June 2017)
devoted to Catholicism, Bernardo Brown and Michael Feener lament that anthropologists of
Christianity “have paid relatively little attention to the ethnography of Catholic commu-
nities” and that their analyses and models “have tended to take shape around the character-
istic dynamics of Protestant religious formations” (2017: 1). This is not to say that
anthropology has utterly neglected Catholicism: four of the ten chapters of Cannell’s seminal
volume dealt with Catholic societies, and sufficient literature existed to assemble a reader in
the anthropology of Catholicism in 2017 (Norget, Napolitano, and Mayblin 2017).
Part of the anthropological aversion to Catholicism, Brown and Feener maintain, is its
purported attachment to “musty traditions, tired rituals and old-fashioned theologies of
austerity and remorse” (2017: 5)—which is ironic given the discipline’s historical com-
mitment to traditions and ritual, and besides, theologies of austerity and remorse are as
interesting and relevant as any other theologies. But ethnographies of Catholic practice
have been as important and informative as those of Protestantism or of Islam. For
instance, Rebecca Lester’s fieldwork in a Mexican convent chronicled how the nuns
navigated the duality of time and eternity and practiced skills to “read the self” and
“evangelize the self,” alerting anthropologists to “how individual people learn to make
sense of their own lives” within religious systems (2003: 218). Jeremy Jammes explores a
Benedictine monastery in mid-twentieth-century Vietnam from which nuns sought to
convert the local population, causing ruptures in the culture but also in received notions
of evangelization and relation to the Church. Furthermore, he insists that viewing
“monastic establishments as static, exclusive and enclosed spaces, however removed from
the world, seems both unrealistic and ineffective” (2017: 222).
But the anthropology of Catholicism does not only dwell on the formal institutions of
the Church, as crucial and unique as they are. Like every subject we approach, we are
ultimately concerned with how real people understand, practice, resist, and modify
Catholicism. One key component of Catholic thinking is the “saint,” and Maya Mayblin
emphasizes how the humanity of saints contributes to the personalization of official faith.
In her case, the fact that Brazilian saints are “people like us” allows an intimacy and
“passionate identification with or fascination for divine figures” (2014: S273). More
interesting still is the role of gender in Catholic sainthood: while both men and women
may be saints, “the pursuit of holiness often destabilized binary conceptions of gender”
(S278). Perhaps like ritual transgression generally (see Chapter 6), the crossing and vio-
lation of gender norms and boundaries is a sign or effect of nearing sacredness; certainly
she concludes that “definitions of masculinity, femininity, and their attendant erotic
associations become blurred the holier a body becomes” (S278).
Finally, the Catholic Church’s formal policy of inculturation, which “calls for the
Gospel to be adapted to culture” (Bautista 2018: 152) even as the Gospel transforms
culture, is a fascinating topic for anthropology and a valuable lens for observing the
struggle of religion with the ambient culture. The resulting forms do not always please
the Church, like the self-crucifixions performed by Filipino penitents (see Chapter 11),
which are denounced as “fanaticism” but also recognized as serious acts of personal
commitment. The introduction of inculturation after the 1960s Second Vatican Coun-
cil also creates a natural comparison between missionization before and after. Prior to
the policy, Catholic priests did not live directly among the Wari’ (Brazilian Amazon),
and their “emphasis was on changing customs rather than religious proselytism,”
hoping “to transform the Indian into ‘citizens’ in a short time span” (Vilaça 2014:
S326). With inculturation, priests and missionaries redirected their efforts from culture
change to cultural preservation, openly claiming that indigenous peoples like the Wari’
tradition “contains many things of great Christian value” and that the natives “were
actually closer to Christian ideals than Euro-Americans” (S328). (See supplemental
reading “Comparing Catholics (Pre- and Post-Vatican II) and Evangelicals in
Amazonia.”)
Conclusion
Translocal or “world” religions are among the most conspicuous and the most influential
forces on the international stage today. They often claim, aim, or attempt to impose
consistency and orthodoxy across their zones of influence. However, as we have learned,
it would be misleading to take their claims—or aspirations—of homogeneity too literally.
The reality is that translocal religions like Islam and Christianity are highly diverse, an
assortment of disparate local groups, doctrines, and practices linked by a discursive and
scriptural tradition. Thus, translocal religions become local religions, making them
amenable to and important for anthropological research. Even more, translocal and
global religions interact and integrate with particular cultures and populations, and
people adapt their everyday lives to religion even as they adapt religion to those everyday
lives. Ultimately, no religion regardless of how strict, hierarchical, or bureaucratic—not
Islam nor Catholicism nor Pentecostal Protestantism—is rigid or static; rather, they are
dynamic and ever-evolving.
1 What are the differences between “traditional”/local religions and “translocal”/world
religions? What are the social conditions that promote these differences?
2 Why is “conversion” not necessarily an appropriate term and model for studying the
relation of individuals and societies to translocal religions?
3 Why has the study of Islam been plagued by “orientalism,” and how is the emerging
anthropology of Islam different from previous analyses of the religion?
4 Why has an anthropology of Christianity been so late in forming? What new direc-
tions is anthropology taking—and should it take—in the study of Christianity?
5 Why is studying Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Christianity essential for under-
standing Christianity, and perhaps other religions as well?
Hinduism and Buddhism as Translocal Religions
Back to Africa: Traveling with Vodún
The Politics of Muslim Conversion in Pakistan and Papua New Guinea
Why Have the Akha Resisted Christian Conversion?
Comparing Catholics (Pre- and Post-Vatican II) and Evangelicals in Amazonia
10 Religious fundamentalism
A politically active American Christian fundamentalism coalesced in the late 1970s,

embodied in organizations like the Moral Majority. Figures like Jerry Falwell, Ralph
Reed, and Pat Robertson rose to prominence with a new agenda and attitude. Susan
Harding conducted fieldwork inside Falwell’s ministry in the 1990s, describing a move-
ment that “broke old taboos constraining [fundamentalists’] interactions with outsiders,
claimed new cultural territory, and refashioned themselves in church services” (2000: ix).
Most emphatically, a youth minister told her, “We don’t practice stay-at-home Christianity.
We’re militant and aggressive in getting out Christ’s message” (4). Unexpectedly to some
critics of fundamentalism, Harding encountered “no big political meetings, no direct actions,
no public political debates, no heated political conversations, and no partisan politics worth
shaking a stick at” (9). Yet Falwell told his flock that “God wanted fundamentalists to
reenter, to reoccupy, the world” and to use modern social and political tactics to achieve
their goal. What was especially intriguing about Falwell’s brand of fundamentalism (soon to
be adopted by others) was the role of the preacher and the organizational structure of the
church. Preachers like Falwell “‘stand in the gap’ between the language of the Christian Bible
and the language of everyday life,” translating biblical talk:
into local theological and cultural idioms and placing present events inside the
sequences of the Biblical stories. Church people, in their turn, borrow, customize,
and reproduce the Bible-based speech of their preachers and other leaders in their
daily lives.
(12)
Precisely because preachers and congregants spoke the same fundamentalist language, the
church did not have to enforce a rigid centralized structure; instead, Falwell’s organiza-
tion “was managed by loose, fragmentary pastoral networks or weak denominational
structures,” leaning heavily on “parachurch organizations” (274). The result was contrary
to the stereotype of fundamentalism: “heterogeneity not homogeneity, hybridity not
purity, fluidity not fixity, characterized the movement at every level” (274)—producing
what Harding called a kind of “flexible absolutism” (275).
Recent decades have shown that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the death
of religion were greatly exaggerated. Religion survived the onslaught of modernization
and secularization (see Chapter 12), demonstrating its characteristic and almost infinite
capacity to adapt to and absorb extra-religious influences. Not only did religion not
quietly fade away, but it has (re-)surfaced with a vengeance as a global social force—with
fundamentalism as the most vengeful.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-10
Religious fundamentalism 229
Fundamentalism is not a religion per se, nor is it a sect or denomination of religion.
Rather, in Richard Antoun’s words, it is “an orientation to the world, both cognitive
and affective. The affective, or emotional, orientation indicates outrage and protest
against (and also fear of) change and against a certain ideological orientation, the
orientation of modernism” (2001: 3). Fundamentalism is not even exclusive to religion,
let alone Christianity; one can be fundamentalist about politics, economics, race,
gender, or football. For example, John Sorenson and Atsuko Matsuoka documented a
case of “Abyssinian fundamentalism” in Ethiopia which advocated “a return to tradi-
tional norms and values” as means to “a new revival of the national spirit”—all of
which was intended to deny the independence claims of secessionist Eritrea as inau-
thentic, a product of colonial “false consciousness, a betrayal of Ethiopian identity
rooted in the ancient past” (2001: 44–45). Finally, while fundamentalism almost by
definition harkens back to an early time—ideally, the original founding time of the
religion or whatever subject—it is ultimately a profoundly modern phenomenon, with
practical social and political goals.
The anthropology of fundamentalism

Religious fundamentalism derives its name (and much of its energy) from the notion of
“fundamentals,” those elements—beliefs, behaviors, organizational structures, and/or
moral injunctions—that are felt to be most essential and central, the oldest, deepest, and
truest aspects of the religion. The popular and often scholarly view is dominated by
Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms: historian George Marsden, for instance, defined
a fundamentalist as “an evangelical Protestant who is militantly opposed to liberal
theologies and to some aspects of secularism in modern culture” (1990: 22). By this
unsatisfactory definition, there would be no such thing as Catholic and Orthodox fun-
damentalism, let alone Islamic or other non-Christian fundamentalisms.
Social-scientific approaches to religious fundamentalism highlight a number of
common points. First, religious fundamentalism is for something, promoting what it
perceives to be crucial and uncompromising elements of its faith, which constitutes
the truth for devotees. In the case of Christianity, these fundamentals typically
include the Bible as a literal and inerrant document and source of knowledge; the
exclusion and sometimes condemnation of others (even other Christians) as corrupt
and lost; a sharp distinction between religion and “the secular,” the latter of which is
inferior or evil; an eschatology in which the end-time is near and only they will sur-
vive into the new kingdom; an uncompromising morality; and increasingly, a will-
ingness to participate in politics to institutionalize all of the above, including a more
or less conscious desire to dismantle the separation of church and state. Other reli-
gions obviously have their own programs based on their own “fundamentals”: a
scriptural religion like Islam finds its fundamentals in the Qur’an, while other types
of religions base it elsewhere.
Second, religious fundamentalism is against something. Virtually all of the commenta-
tors stress the exclusivist, agitated, and even militant attitude of fundamentalism. As
Marsden emphasized, fundamentalists “must not only believe their evangelical teachings,
but they must be willing to fight for them against modernist theologies, secular human-
ism, and the like” (23). Religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, architects of
the influential comparative Fundamentalism Project, stated that fundamentalists see
themselves as fighting, specifically fighting back:
It is no insult to fundamentalisms to see them as militant, whether in the use of
words and ideas or ballots or, in extreme cases, bullets. Fundamentalists see them-
selves as militants. This means the first word to employ in respect to them is that
they are reactive.
(1991: ix)
They are, in their words and often enough in their works, at war with the world.
The anthropological perspective on fundamentalism asks, in the words of Harding,
“how ‘fundamentalism’ was invented, who speaks it, what are the categories, assump-
tions, and trajectories implicit in its narrative representations” (1991: 374). Harding
insisted that fundamentalists “do not simply exist ‘out there’ but are also produced by
modern discursive practices” (374). Central to the invention of fundamentalism, she
argued, is secularism, which strives to define “proper religion” and to constrain religion
within its proper sphere—ideally the church and private life but certainly not the public
square (see Chapter 12). Religious actors who refuse these secularist limitations become
“a category of persons whose behavior defies reasonable expectations and therefore needs
to be—and can be—explained” (374). In other words, “fundamentalism” becomes a cul-
tural category, and a repugnant category at that, because “modern voices represent fun-
damentalists and their beliefs as an historical object, a cultural ‘other,’ apart from, even
antithetical to, ‘modernity,’ which emerges as the positive term” in the struggle between
secular modernity and religion (374).
Judith Nagata endorsed and extended Harding’s argument, noting that “fundamental-
ism” originally referred to religion but, as a “metaphor of choice,” has been applied “to
an everwidening range of ideas and behaviors” (2001: 481) including nationalism, ethni-
city, language, politics, and even the market and the environment. Nagata posited that
fundamentalism or traditionalism was a reaction to uncertainty, to the “excess of open-
ness and choice” that accompanies modern life; it is “a way of setting boundaries, an
‘anti-hermeneutic’” which intends to end uncertainty by ending interpretation (“herme-
neutics” is the study and practice of interpretation), (re-)establishing the putatively ori-
ginal or true belief. But precisely because they take this decidedly non-modern stance,
“fundamentalist” becomes “an epithet for the Other, invariably negative, the archenemy,
one whose position is to be dismissed or vilified, and the goal is demonization, regardless
of ideological, political, religious or moral substance” (489). Nagata called the label
“fundamentalist” a kind of “verbal ammunition” (489), a tactic to discredit and margin-
alize the people and their position. Such a strategy is interesting and often effective poli-
tically, but as Harding stressed, it is destructive anthropologically, serving to “blot out
fundamentalist realities” and paint all traditionalists into “aberrant, usually backward or
hoodwinked, versions of modern subjects,” confirming the rational modern person “as
the neutral norm of history” (1991: 374).
Varieties of fundamentalist experience

Given this anthropological analysis, it is appropriate to apply concepts previously applied
to religion to fundamentalism as well. First, just as religions are diverse and relative to
their surrounding culture and society, so are fundamentalisms diverse and relative; like
multiple modes of religiosity (see Chapter 1), we can think of multiple “modes of fun-
damentalism,” not all political and not all violent. Second, fundamentalism can and must
be subsumed under the broader heading of revitalization movements, which Wallace
defined as efforts to create a more successful and satisfying culture (see Chapter 8). In
fact, we mentioned fundamentalism as a cognate or synonym for “nativist” revitalization
movements, aimed at restoring traditional culture and religion and resisting or expelling
“foreign” influences—including, in the fundamentalist mind, modern or secular influences.
Finally, like all religion, indeed all culture, fundamentalism is not merely scriptural, con-
ceptual, or linguistic but is fully realized through embodiment (with a special preoccupation
with the female body, as we will see soon), materialization, and institutionalization.
To begin, then, there are many types of fundamentalism, not all militant or violent.
Among fundamentalists, moral and ideological purists are probably the most common
and least extreme type; they merely take their religion particularly seriously, in a way
that is exceptional and odd to modern secular society, and let it pervade and shape more
or less every aspect of their lives. While all fundamentalists are exclusionary to an extent,
some groups and sects take this notion of boundaries further, becoming peaceful separa-
tists like the Amish, whom Egon Larsen (1971) called “quiet fanatics.” These groups
reject the modern and outside world to greater or lesser degrees and hold to their con-
victions by not only ideologically but physically withdrawing from the wider society.
There are often certain practices that can only be followed in a separatist setting, such as
polygamy among the Fundamentalist Mormons of the southwestern United States.
Groups or sects willing or eager to engage the wider society, to bring that society into
line with their own beliefs and values, can be regarded as activists. The Moral Majority
and the Christian Coalition, among other religiously and culturally conservative agencies,
represent such an effort: they want not only to live their moral and ideological principles
Figure 10.1 Amish life in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
but to urge (if not impose) them on the rest of society and are willing to wield political
(including electoral and governmental) tools to achieve their goals. Legislating and insti-
tutionalizing religious principles are among their techniques. More uncompromising are
the reconstructionists who seek a total transformation or re-invention of society in con-
formity with their religious convictions. At the extreme, then, are the militants, who are
willing to employ force against their perceived enemies—which may include the govern-
ment and the general population—in pursuit of their religious agenda. These are the
groups that fly airliners into towers (e.g. al-Qaeda), drive truckloads of explosives to
federal buildings (e.g. American right-wing extremists), or kidnap school children as
future soldiers or wives (e.g. Boko Haram in Nigeria).
Fundamentalisms are clearly diverse. But whatever their local form, Gabriele Marranci,
an anthropologist of Islam, insisted that they share:
the effort to remain pure in a morally polluted world; the quest for authenticity in a
world marked by relativity; the need for certainty in a continually changing world; a
reaction to the incoherence that the local has today in a globalized world; selective
modernization and carefully controlled acculturation in a world marked by a tota-
lizing secularization; and the hope for a resurrection of a mythical past in an anti-
traditional present.
(2009: 37)
Fundamentalism as a cultural system
Fundamentalisms are not, any more than new religious movements, other social move-
ments, or modernity itself, purely negative programs. Each sees itself as a project to
create a good and true religion as part of a larger project to create a good and true
society. Fundamentalisms, then, are engaged in the venerable practice—indeed, the
essentially human practice—of world-making, or what Antoun called “traditioning.” By
traditioning he meant the active process in which “traditions” are chosen and modified
(though not admittedly so), interpreted, and sometimes outright invented to give birth to
the movement (see Chapter 8). These “traditioned” traditions are then advanced as the
fundamentals of their faith, through which members are supposed to view and under-
stand their past, their present, and most critically their future. Invariably, though,
modern ideas and practices are embedded in the fundamentalist campaigns, including
political parties, technology (for instance, few fundamentalists are averse to the internet
and most are keen users of it), and weapons such as guns and bombs.
Fundamentalisms are thus not only cultural but cultures or potential cultures. And,
based on everything we understand about culture, fundamentalisms do what all religions
do: they offer not only a model of the world but a model for the world, one in which
beliefs and values match lived experience. They generate “consonance” (see Chapter 6)
between religion and other aspects of life and, in a certain and sometimes extreme sense,
eliminate the modern “separation” of religion and society.
Part—indeed an inherent part—of the fundamentalist program is the construction of
institutions, religious and otherwise but necessarily authorized and legitimized by reli-
gion. The details of the institution-construction vary from religion to religion, from
society to society, and from historical period to historical period. Nevertheless, a few
elements of this process are fairly standard. Fundamentalists, as Marty and Appleby put
it, “are boundary-setters: they excel in marking themselves off from others by distinctive
dress, customs, and conduct” (1993: 4). These distinctions are of course one dimension of
their culture, whether it is earlocks for orthodox Jews, beards for orthodox Muslims, or
“WWJD” bracelets for orthodox Christians. As for the boundaries, the group they
enclosed can be a single congregation, a movement or entire religion, an ethnic group, a
society, or a state. One of the more interesting things we observe is the easy concatena-
tion of religion and nationality or nationalism, as with Hindutva in India or Buddhism in
Sri Lanka (see below).
The relation between fundamentalisms and the state is a problematic one, as our
examples will show. Depending on their theology and politics, a fundamentalist move-
ment may be opposed to any state at all (God or religion being the sole source of
authority and law) or adamantly pro-state (viewing the government as the mechanism for
achieving religious rectitude on earth). In more than a few cases, fundamentalist groups
have attempted, occasionally successfully (e.g., Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or the Tali-
ban in Afghanistan), to seize the government and use political power to implement their
religious plans. Some scholars have asked whether one can reasonably speak of a funda-
mentalism-in-power, since fundamentalism is characteristically oppositional, but the
question is wrongly asked: a fundamentalist movement is not in opposition to power (in
a direct way, each seeks power) but to modern or foreign influences on society. There-
fore, a fundamentalism-in-power still has much to oppose, including competition from
modernized/secularized members of society, not to mention all non-members of the
movement. A more serious question is whether a fundamentalism-in-power must neces-
sarily make concessions to secularism: when a religious movement attains political power
and runs the state, it must participate in areas of society that it never did before—thus
redefining religious institutions and practices (like Muslim shari’a law) in original ways—
and at least partly submit religious principle and authority to pragmatic and worldly
concerns. In other words, when a religion becomes a government, it must deliver the
mail, pick up the trash, and command the army.
The culture of fundamentalism brings with it other troublesome ingredients. Experience
has shown that fundamentalism tends to be “essentially antidemocratic, anti-accommoda-
tionist, and antipluralist and that it violates, as a matter of principle, the standards of human
rights defended, if not always perfectly upheld, by Western democracies” (Marty and
Appleby 1993: 5). This attitude, not unique to fundamentalism (we find it in both right-wing
and left-wing absolutist and idealist movements), flows from the superhuman authority of
the system: power and sovereignty do not lie with the demos but with the divine. Also, all
other positions, even loyal oppositions, are necessarily and completely wrong if not evil.
Thus, the legitimation of the movement and its resulting institutions and (if successful)
regime almost inevitably entail the delegitimation, if not demonization, of all possible alter-
natives and rivals. This attitude can lead to violence.
Besides pluralism and popular sovereignty, other aspects of modern social life are
questioned or rejected by fundamentalisms. One is the self-critical and uncertain nature
of modernity or postmodernity, the collapse or failure of all “grand narratives” of human
life and social meaning. Sociologist Peter Berger contended that modernity “undermines
all the old certainties; uncertainty is a condition that many people find very hard to bear;
therefore, any movement (not only a religious one) that promises to provide or to renew
certainty has a ready market” (Berger 1999: 7). Sociologist Nancy Ammerman (1987), in
her ethnography of a fundamentalist congregation, repeatedly cited their impulse to cer-
tainty; inerrancy of their authorities (scriptural, human, and institutional) is typically the
first principle of the movement. (See supplemental reading “Fieldwork among Funda-
mentalists: The Southside Gospel Church.”)
A second aspect of modernity that is disparaged is the separation of the religious and
the secular or the confinement of religion to “the private” apart from public and political
life. Fundamentalist religion is not merely private, not merely a matter of choice or feel-
ing; therefore, it can and must be institutionalized. Religion, from this point of view, is
the very ground and source of society. This leads, as one might expect, to a perspective
on religion that is diametrically opposed to the one that secularism (or anthropology)
takes. While secularists call religion “symbolic” and “social” and “functional,” funda-
mentalists insist that it is literal and true, public and effective. In other words, the fun-
damentalist worldview “rejects the widespread modern idea that religion … really
doesn’t mean what it actually says” (Gellner 1992: 2). A clear example is the televangelist
James Kennedy, who dismissed the symbolist approach when he argued that aside from
obviously metaphorical parts of the Bible (like “faith of a mustard seed”) the rest is to be
taken literally. For him, Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, Adam was a real
person, and Jesus truly walked on water. There is no interpretation, no symbolic analy-
sis: “In living, explaining, or defending our faith, we are most likely to say, ‘The Word of
God says ….’ As believers, that settles the matter, no matter what the matter may be”
(1997: 20). For these reasons, some observers have proposed that “literalist” might be a
preferable alternative to “fundamentalist.”
Finally, fundamentalists, like all culture-makers, must put their plans into action. This
may mean penetrating and “colonizing” the existing institutions of a society. Often the
primary institutions in contention between fundamentalists and the rest of society are
government, education, and media. Fundamentalists, in the United States and elsewhere,
have been active and overt in attempting to dominate these segments of society. They
have often, due to their minority status or their perceived extremism, been defeated in
these initiatives. However, given their confidence and their energy, defeat is seldom the
end of their culture-making efforts: as Ammerman pointed out, “Whenever fundamen-
talists have lost a battle, they have responded by withdrawing to establish their own
alternative institutions” (1987: 211). At the extreme, like the Amish, they segregate and
live in a world-within-a-world of their own design. More commonly, if they cannot
control the public schools, for instance, they establish private schools or home schools
where they can teach their own curriculum. The Catholic Church has long operated an
extensive system of schools parallel to the public system; Muslim societies often depend
on religious schools or madrasas, and Protestant sects have increasingly exploited the
notion. Recently, fundamentalist movements have opened their own colleges (e.g. Liberty
University or Bob Jones University) and law schools, as well as creating their own radio
and television stations (e.g. Christian Broadcasting Network, Trinity Broadcasting Net-
work, and Daystar), printing their own curricula and textbooks, publishing their own
journals and newspapers, organizing their own political-action groups, and so on.
Fundamentalism and gender

Religious fundamentalism, in most if not all of its manifestations and perhaps by defini-
tion, reacts to a society that it regards as impure and in dangerous decline. As the Moral
Majority’s name implies, no dimension of social decline offends fundamentalists more than
the erosion of morality or “values,” which often means primarily sexual morality/values. In
his Encyclopedia Britannica entry on fundamentalism, Henry Munson (2019) explains that
American Christian fundamentalists were particularly aggrieved by 1960s and 1970s social
change like “the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement” as well as “the
relatively permissive sexual morality prevalent among young people” and “the legal right to
abortion.”
Not surprisingly, as Lionel Caplan stressed in an early anthropological study of fun-
damentalism, “one of the most obvious concerns of the fundamentalists is to reverse the
trend of contemporary gender relations which are seen as symptomatic of a declining
moral order” (1987: 18). Part of the solution to modern immorality falls on men, which
we clearly see in the mission of the so-called Promise Keepers (promisekeepers.org),
which seeks “to reunite, re-imagine, and inspire the hearts of men” to transform them
into “godly husbands, fathers, and leaders.” This of course entails a return to “tradi-
tional” gender roles (e.g. man as the head of household), which necessarily implicates
women as well. Thus Caplan added that women “appear to assume a symbolic poignancy
in fundamentalism—their dress, demeanor and socio-ritual containment providing elo-
quent testimony to what is regarded as the correct order of things” (19).
Perhaps because fundamentalisms almost inevitably valorize an old if not ancient cul-
ture and social order, they tend to display “a single profile,” according to Maxine Mar-
golis in her comparative study of Jewish, Mormon, and Pashtun (Afghan/Muslim)
fundamentalisms, which features “the obedient submission of girls and women” to male
authority (2020: 4) under what she calls “fierce patriarchalism.” In these three cases, and
broadly across the spectrum of fundamentalisms, there is profound and anxious concern
about women’s bodies and behavior. Women are often subjected to strict segregation
from men and to dress codes that emphasize “modesty.” At the extreme, women are
banished from public spaces and sequestered in the home; on milder occasions they are
burdened with long skirts or coats (including the infamous Islamic burqa) and veils or
scarfs (or for traditionalist Jews, wigs). They are often forbidden from using makeup.
They are almost always excluded from positions of leadership and are commonly denied
access to education: “educated women are seen as dangerous because of their potential to
disrupt the status quo” (4). (Hasidic Jewish women are an exception, since, as we will
explore later, they are expected to support the family while their husbands devote them-
selves to religious study and contemplation.)
At the root of all these pressures and constraints, Margolis contends, is a fundamen-
talist imperative for reproduction or what she calls “women’s role in unending procrea-
tion” (2); fundamentalist women are, in one word, “broodmares.” Although
fundamentalists are hardly unique in desiring large families and rapid population growth,
women’s almost sole association with wifely and motherly duties “impacts their lives
across multiple domains and limits their participation in many spheres—social, eco-
nomic, political, and religious—limitations that are reinforced by doctrines suggesting
women’s innate unsuitability for participating in these spaces” (2).
Christian fundamentalisms
While fundamentalism in Christianity is especially noteworthy in the present moment, it
is not entirely unprecedented in this moment. The sixteenth-century Protestant Refor-
mation can well be seen as a fundamentalist movement. Martin Luther’s purpose was to
dispense with the accretions of time and tradition and to return to a simpler, purer, and
therefore truer Christianity, one without priests and sacraments but with only the
believer and the Bible. Even before that, we could regard such dissent movements as the
Free Spirits of the twelfth century as a kind of fundamentalism, which took its inspira-
tion from a literalist reading of (some parts of) scripture for their beliefs and lifestyles.
And even further back, unitarian and other such challenges to Catholic orthodoxy can be
seen as attempts to dip directly from the source and to restore a lost original orthodoxy,
a “primitive church” as in Jesus’ own time. Finally, many if not all ascetic and monastic
traditions are attempts to create an oasis of right belief and conduct in a desert of chaos
and corruption.
The rise of modern fundamentalism

Although reform and revivalism are timeless Christian traditions, the terms “funda-
mentalism” and “fundamentalist” did not enter the English vocabulary until shortly after
the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of publications titled
The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth appeared. Out of this effort emerged an
organization, the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by William B.
Riley in 1919, and the new terminology. In 1920 the editor of the Northern Baptist
newspaper Watchman Examiner, Curtis Lee Laws, described a fundamentalist as a
person who is willing to “do battle royal” for Christian fundamentals.
There were five key points to the early fundamentalist position: the absolute truth and
inerrancy of Christian scriptures, the virgin birth of Jesus, the atonement of sin through
the substitutive sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the bodily resurrection and future second
coming of Jesus, and the divinity of Jesus and/or the reality of the miracles he performed.
Of these, the anchor is clearly the inerrancy of the Bible, which is the source (and alleged
proof) of the other four claims. A more interesting question is why fundamentalism
appeared at this particular hour in social history. There have been various revivals or
“awakenings” in American history, and some of the most successful and respected
denominations in the country, like the Methodists and the Baptists, started as energetic
revivalist movements with “circuit riders” traveling the countryside preaching a version
of the religion that ordinary people could understand and digest.
So “old time religion” is nothing new. But while the specifics of these and other similar
movements differ, on some general points they were in substantial agreement. All
invoked the purity and perfection of scripture. Each looked out upon not just a physical
world but even a spiritual world that had “gone wrong” somehow; as nineteenth-century
evangelist Alexander Campbell wrote, “The stream of Christianity has become polluted”
(quoted in Hatch 1989: 168). And each saw itself as representing authentic Christianity.
Each imagined itself—and only itself—as the restoration of religion. Accordingly,
Campbell penned a column titled “A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things,” in
which he set the agenda to “‘bring the christianity [sic] and the church of the present day’
up to the standards of ‘the state of christianity [sic] and of the church of the New Tes-
tament’” (quoted in Hatch 1989: 168). Other churches were corrupted at best, false or
satanic at worst.
However, there were other menaces afoot. A sinister one was science and its attendant
secularization; Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, after all, appeared in 1859. Humanistic
philosophies and social sciences were also advancing. The Bible itself was increasingly
treated as literature rather than literal truth, to the point of questioning the authenticity
of some of its passages or the historicity of Jesus. Finally, American society was chan-
ging, under the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration; as early as the
1840s, Roman Catholics comprised the largest Christian denomination in the country,
which they continue to do today, displacing any single Protestant sect (although Protes-
tants collectively still outnumber Catholicism by nearly three-to-one). Within Christianity
itself, there were “modernizing” forces at work, attempting to accommodate scientific
and social realities with religion.
By the late nineteenth century, while liberal Christians were making peace with cul-
tural change and modernity, conservatives were consolidating their opposition. Charles
Hodge, in his 1873 book Systematic Theology, argued that every word of the scriptures
was true, not allegorical or symbolic; he followed with What is Darwinism?, where he
wrote that religion “has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men.” By 1875
conservative Christians in the United States were organizing Bible conferences and other
gatherings for preachers and teachers. For instance, 1875 saw the founding of the
Believers’ Meeting for Bible Study (which became in 1883 the Niagara Bible Conference).
In 1886 what would become the Moody Bible Institute opened, followed in 1909 by the
Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and any number of books, newspapers, newsletters, and
magazines.
The resurgence of fundamentalism in the late twentieth century

American fundamentalism hit its high point in the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial in Ten-
nessee, in which John Thomas Scopes was charged (and convicted) for the crime of
teaching evolution. For several decades fundamentalism fell into disrepute and was
replaced by the more benign and less political “evangelicalism” best represented by Billy
Graham; the goal was to save souls, not change society. Even Jerry Falwell subsequently
maintained that fundamentalists:
are not interested in controlling America; they are interested in seeing souls saved
and lives changed for the glory of God. They believe that the degree to which this is
accomplished will naturally influence the trend of society in America.
(quoted in Pinnock 1990: 50)
However, cultural developments in the second half of the twentieth century exhausted
fundamentalists’ patience with this natural trend and spurred more political activism.
First, the civil rights movement of the 1950s aggravated cultural conservatives, as can be
seen from the anti-integration activities of the Ku Klux Klan and many Southern politi-
cians. In the 1960s, minorities of all sorts—feminists, “hippies” and anti-war activists,
and even gays and atheists—supposedly trampled on “traditional values” and conven-
tional definitions of family and society. The school prayer cases of the early 1960s and the
struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment were two rallying causes. But the last straw
was the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion rights. To some,
this was tantamount to legalized murder and state Satanism. From that date, it only took
a few years for organized fundamentalism to crystallize. That these are precisely the
issues that preoccupy fundamentalists is evidenced by the litany of complaints featured in
Tim LaHaye’s influential 1980 book The Battle for the Mind, including the ERA, prayer
in school, abortion, gay rights, and the general philosophy of “secular humanism,” as
well as such grievances as the limitation of corporal punishment for children, certification
requirements for Christian schools, and investigations into church finances.
Outside the “mainstream” of American fundamentalism, other more adamant groups
and movements dwell. We referred earlier to separatist types like the Amish who have
successfully created a society-within-a-society where they can practice their religion and
traditions untroubled by the outside, modern world. Falwell similarly announced a plan
to establish a Christian community in Virginia where a person could be born, go to
school, work, retire, and die without ever stepping foot outside. And a movement known
as Christian Exodus goes further; as they state clearly on their website (christianexodus.
org):
God preserves a remnant of people for himself who refuse to bow the knee to the
demonic idols of oppression. When local officials righteously refuse to comply with
unjust orders, this is what we call the interposition of the lesser magistrate. This
might be a Sheriff, Mayor, Judge, Pastor or Father who simply says no to an intol-
erable evil, and takes a stand against the oppressor.
We seek to grow a network of independent Christian communities, where people
can live and work together with others of like mind. We welcome large families who
homeschool their children, and try to live by their own initiative, free from consumer
debt and government assistance.
Their express mission, then, is to migrate en masse to a relatively small state (South
Carolina is their selection), vote themselves into office, and inaugurate a society based on
their religious principles. These principles include prohibition of abortion and gay mar-
riage, institutionalization of prayer and the Christian Bible in schools, the elimination of
evolution from the curriculum, the public display of the Ten Commandments, and the
right to own weapons, among others. As they intimate in their statement above, if the
federal government interfered with their effort to build a Christian society (no mention is
made of the non-Christians or non-Christian-Exodus Christians in South Carolina), they
are prepared to secede from the Union. (See supplemental reading “The Hyper-Christian,
Hyper-Modern Children of God.”)
Further along the fundamentalist scale is the Christian Reconstruction movement. It
aims to do for the entire country what Christian Exodus aims to do for one state: insti-
tute a religious society and a religious government. Also known as Dominionism and
Theonomy, Christian Reconstructionism advances the following agenda:
The reformulation of civil law in accordance with biblical, specifically Torah/Old

Testament standards, including the death penalty for adultery, blasphemy, heresy,
homosexuality, idolatry, and witchcraft
The banning of any congregation or religion that does not accept Mosaic law,
including of course all non-Christian religions
The return of women to their ancient subordinate status
The elimination of income taxes and the prison system (the death penalty pre-
sumably rendering jail mostly unnecessary)
The criminalization of abortion, also punishable by death
The rationale behind this agenda was clarified by R.J. Rushdoony, one of the founders of
Christian Reconstructionism: “The law is therefore the law for Christian man and Christian
society. Nothing is more deadly or more derelict than the notion that the Christian is at lib-
erty with respect to the kind of law he can have” (1973: 8–9). And by law, they mean ancient
Hebrew law; as another prominent figure in the movement, Gary North, wrote:
The New Testament teaches us that—unless exceptions are revealed elsewhere—

every Old Testament commandment is binding, even as the standard of justice for all
magistrates (Rom. 13:1–4), including every recompense stipulated for civil offenses in
the law of Moses (Heb 2:2). From the New Testament alone we learn that we must
take as our operating presumption that any Old Testament penal requirement is
binding today on all civil magistrates. The presumption can surely be modified by
definite, revealed teaching in the Scripture, but in the absence of such qualifications
or changes, any Old Testament penal sanction we have in mind would be morally
obligatory for civil rulers.
(1986: 242)
In other words, and unusually openly, Christian Reconstructionism seeks to reshape the
future in the image of the (ancient) past. Equally overtly, North elsewhere reformulated
the fundamentalist struggle, which we tend to imagine pits religion against moderniza-
tion. The battle for the mind, which others like LaHaye also acknowledge:
some fundamentalists believe, is between fundamentalism and the institutions of the

Left. This conception of the battle is fundamentally incorrect. The battle for the
mind is between the Christian reconstruction movement, which alone among Pro-
testant groups takes seriously the law of God, and everyone else.
(1984: 65–66)
Not only is modernity wrong, but all other religions are wrong as well.
Near the far end of the scale, the “Christian Identity” movement is a loose affiliation of
various groups and agendas, from Anglo-Israelists to white supremacists to some “militia
movements.” Anglo-Israelism is a doctrine inspired by the Englishman John Wilson’s
1840 “Lectures on our Israelitish Origin,” which asserted that Caucasians, specifically
Anglo-Saxons, are the direct and true descendants of Israel. It was first promoted in the
United States by Howard Rand, who founded the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America in
1930. However, the movement received a major boost when Wesley Swift joined in the
1940s; coming from a Christian and politically right-wing position, he introduced
“demonic anti-Semitism and political extremism” to the religious mix (Barkun 1997: 61).
Swift started the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation in California, which eventually
became the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. He was succeeded in 1970 by Richard
Butler who also established the Aryan Nations in Idaho (See Figure 10.2).
According to the watchdog organization ReligiousTolerance.org, the beliefs of Chris-
tian Identity groups, while various, share some basic factors, including “a very con-
servative interpretation of the Bible,” leading to condemnation of homosexuality and
members of other religions; the superiority of the whites as the “Adamic race,” that is,
the real descendants of Adam, who was a white man; derogation of non-whites as
“Satanic spawn,” subhumans and “mud people” who corrupt and threaten God’s true
people; racial separation or, in the extreme, racial extermination; an absolute ban on
interracial marriage or “racial adultery”; and more or less complex conspiracy theories,
often with Jews at the center. At least some Christian Identity groups have syncretized
fundamentalist religious views and racial ideologies with American patriotism, producing
a volatile blend of religious conviction and political extremism. As journalist Richard
Abanes reported:
Long before today’s militias, these white supremacists/Christian Identity Movement

followers were calling themselves “patriots.” One Aryan Nations newsletter (c. 1982),
Figure 10.2 Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations officiates a wedding at his Aryan Nations
compound in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 1998. Evan Hurd/Alamy Stock Photo.
for instance, lists Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and racist leader Dan Gayman
as “Christian patriots.” … Several racist fundraising letters from the 1980s, such as
those produced by KKK Grand Wizard Don Black, were addressed to fellow “White
Patriots.” … By the 1980s, white “patriots” were also forming paramilitary groups
similar to militias. For example, in the mid-1980s a militia-like group of racists called
the Arizona Patriots were arrested and convicted of plotting to bomb several targets,
including federal buildings in Phoenix and Los Angeles.
(1997: 31–33)
The potential for violence shows not only in the company that the Christian Identity
movement keeps, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, and
the Posse Comitatus, but also the actions of its adherents, including the 1996 Atlanta Olympic
and abortion-clinic bombings of Eric Rudolph and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by
Timothy McVeigh. (See supplemental reading “Jesus.com: Internet Fundamentalism.”)
Fundamentalisms in cross-cultural perspective
Other religions have their own formations of the fundamental. The modes of funda-
mentalism differ by religion (obviously, what counts as “fundamental” is not universal
across religions), by society or country, and by specific group or movement within the
religion, society, or country. More importantly, the cross-cultural analysis of fundamen-
talist religion exposes the fact that many of the assumptions about fundamentalism do
not apply in every case—not all, for instance, are obsessed with “scripture” and certainly
not all are irrational or violent—and that the very term “fundamentalist” may not be
appropriate in every instance.
Jewish fundamentalisms
In ancient times, Hebrew prophets and other devotees were constantly urging the people
back to the right worship of their god; they repeatedly admonished the community to
abandon false gods or “baals” and return to their own national god. Conquest of Israel
by Greeks and then Romans generated a new fundamentalist dynamic; now they were
faced with cultural as well as religious assimilation and syncretism. As in every case of
culture contact, some Israelites adopted the culture of the outsider, for prestige or as
defiance of traditional Jewish authority; some mixed old and new cultures and molded
something locally unique. But some held firmly to the “old religion” and became militant
champions of orthodoxy against internal and external challenges alike. As we will see in
Chapter 11, many were willing to die for their religious truths.
The Essenes and the Maccabees are two examples of “restorationist” groups in ancient
Judaism. After centuries of foreign rule, Judas Maccabeus led a revolt and temporarily
established a Jewish state in the late 60s CE. And the Essenes, a monastic separatist fac-
tion, seem surprisingly modern in their attitudes, including their denunciation of the
priests of Jerusalem “as being hopelessly corrupted by their accommodation to Gentile
ways, and by collaboration with the Roman occupiers,” as well as their doctrines “of
repentance and God’s coming judgment [which meant that] Jews must separate them-
selves from such polluting influences and return to strict observance of God’s law”
(Pagels 1995: 18).
Modern Jewish fundamentalism can be traced to the early 1700s as a response to
modernist or “enlightenment” shifts in Jewish culture. This is one major distinction
between Christian fundamentalisms and the non-Christian ones to be discussed below: in
the non-Christian cases, modernity seems not only secular but foreign, a force or cul-
ture of the alien West, often entangled with colonialism and racism. Among early
modern Jews, the modernist/Westernist members—the maskilim or enlightened men—
were opposed by traditional religious teachers or rabbis as well as a new breed of more
orthodox leaders who called themselves zaddikim (“righteous men”) or rebbes. These
men founded the movement known as Hasidism, an ultra-orthodox form of Judaism
attributed to Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good
Name). Janet Belcove-Shalin held that the movement arising in Poland “sought to
transform rabbinical Judaism from what was perceived by its followers as a rigid,
overly scholastic faith into a teaching and lifestyle based on egalitarianism, charismatic
leadership, and ecstatic devotion to God” expressed often through song and dance
(1995: 4).
Hasidic Judaism was opposed by mainstream or “normative” Jews, who rejected their:
insular lifestyle, contempt for the Torah [the very antithesis of scripturalism],
unseemly shouting, singing, and dancing during prayer, excessive feasting and mer-
rymaking, the “cult of the rebbe,”—as well as of the frivolous innovations in the
liturgy, prayer sequence, and the method of ritual slaughter.
(6)
Equally predictably, the movement split into distinct and often rival factions or “courts”
including the Satmar, originating in Hungary and well represented in the United States;
according to Margolis, the Satmar “are probably the most separatist and bellicose of Hasidic
sects. They are resistant to almost all behaviors, activities, styles, and contacts that would lead
them to even the slightest accommodation with mainstream American culture” (2020: 26),
segregating themselves in a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. They are also vehemently
opposed to the state of Israel. Indeed, Jonathan Webber opined that fundamentalist—which he
preferred to call “ultra-orthodox”—Judaism is the part of the religion that aspires “to remain
unassimilated” or claims “a steadfast refusal to assimilate,” although he insisted that it is not
biblical scripture but rabbinic law (halacha, “the way”) to which they are tightly bound (1987:
102). (See supplemental reading “The Hasidim of Boro Park, Brooklyn.”)
In the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement launched efforts to (re-)establish a
Jewish state. The movement grew until it succeeded, after World War II, in creating the state
of Israel. While it might seem that all Jews would welcome this development, some of the
more traditionalist elements did not. One reaction came in the form of the haredim (literally,
“those who tremble”), which is not a single unified group but a collection of like-minded
organizations and communities. All such groups, including Neturei Karta and Toldot
Aharon, share some ideas and values, like a strict observance of all religious laws and a
theological opposition to Zionism and the secular state of Israel. They have attempted to
purge foreign, secular learning from their religious schools (yeshiva) and to purify their cul-
ture, as much as possible withdrawing from the wider society. They interpret the formation
of Israel as a betrayal of eschatology, an indication that divine history is not progressing but
is veering in the wrong direction. They are a small segment (less than 3 percent) of a gen-
erally much more secular society, but they have been very vocal and influential.
Other groups and movements share contemporary Israel, with varying agendas and
strategies. A small (perhaps twenty thousand active members) but effective group is Gush
Emunim (The Bloc of the Faithful), which emerged in the early 1970s following the Israeli
victory in the Six-Day War in 1967. Adherents of Gush Emunim saw this event as apoc-
alyptic, a sign of God’s involvement and approval. Originating as a student movement
out of the yeshiva of Rabbi Abraham Itzhak Hacohen Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda
Kook, they tend to be younger, better educated, and higher in social class than haredim
members—products of the modern age. Another difference is their attitude toward the
state of Israel: they are not hostile to it but rather seek to expand it, ideally “from the
Euphrates River in Iraq to the Brook of Egypt” (Aran 1991: 268). They have therefore
been particularly active in the settlement movement in the occupied territories of Gaza
and the West Bank. Michael Feige’s (2009) ethnography of Gush Emunim settlers in
occupied lands described their lives and faith and their interpretation of history and
memory to justify their “Great Israel” ideology. Feige reminded us that a religious Zio-
nist assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
A third and final Jewish fundamentalist example is the movement associated with
extremist rabbi Meir Kahane (see Figure 10.3). Kahane rose to prominence in 1968 with
his New York-based Jewish Defense League and his angry rhetoric against Israel and
Figure 10.3 Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a press conference in New
York (1981). Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images.
non-Jews alike. The state of Israel, he taught, was sinful and its leadership secular and
corrupt. Judaism, he further instructed, was not an individualistic religion but a collective
one, such that all Jews must collectively obey Torah commandments. He also expressed
deep animosity toward all gentiles and regarded the state of Israel not as a gift to the
Jews but as revenge against non-Jews. Eventually his thinking crystallized into a violent
ideology embodied in the group Kach (Thus!), which saw all oppressions and humilia-
tions of the Jewish people as sacrilege against God. His group advocated and perpetrated
violence and terrorism against Arabs and even against other Jews.
Box 10.1 Male piety in an ultra-orthodox yeshiva

According to Nurit Stadler, Haredi are distinguished by their “resistance to modernity,
scripturalism, the massive institution building of fundamentalist institutions in Israel,
and separatism” (2009: 7). Her fieldwork focused on institutions, specifically the yes-
hiva where “students are taught to become virtuous through the expert study of the
Talmud and its commentaries”; however, she added that these religious schools are
“an institution exclusively for men” (4) and the inculcation of male piety. Curiously but
importantly, she noted that, with all the interest in fundamentalism’s impact on
women, “neither male piety nor the construction of models of religiosity for Jewish
fundamentalist men has received as much attention” (12). Beginning to fill this gap,
she first emphasized the embodied discipline to which yeshiva men are exposed. They
adopt a standard uniform of “formal black overcoats over white open-necked shirts,
and wide-brimmed black hats” (18). Further, they are instructed to conceive of their
religious education as “a courageous fight, overcoming hardship and realizing a heroic
studious asceticism” which entails “learning how to overcome bodily desires” like lust,
to be sure, but also more mundane needs like hunger and sleep (30). They also learn
that ordinary work is beneath them, disparaged as “corporeal” and “bodily” and dis-
tracting from their studies (likewise, they are exempted from military service in Israel).
This means, as mentioned earlier, that Haredi wives are left to support the family
financially which, unlike many fundamentalist sects, pushes women into the public
work world. Most interestingly, Stadler found that while yeshiva students did not
question the ascetic expectations of scholarship or the norms of sexual morality, they
were rethinking other aspects of masculinity. Some aspired to join the army, moder-
nizing “the codes of manly piety” in accordance with “the image of the heroic combat
soldier” (29); it is worth noting that the discipline and self-denial of the yeshiva is not
unlike that of the barracks. Further, some Haredi men were “reinterpreting family and
gendered behavior … to provide aid and emotional support to their wives and chil-
dren” and spend more time at home (32). Some went so far as to perform voluntary
community service beyond the yeshiva and beyond the Haredi world itself, in organi-
zations like ZAKA (an acronym for “identification of victims of disaster”), offering
search-and-rescue services and “treatment of bodies after unnatural death such as
from terrorism, traffic accidents, and murder, in accordance with Jewish rites” (33).
Islamic fundamentalisms
For most people, the very epitome of fundamentalism in the modern world is Islamic; cer-
tainly the most dramatic instances of recent violence have been associated with it. The Ira-
nian revolution, the Taliban (Afghanistan), al-Qaeda, Boko Haram (Nigeria)—these are
often the face of religious fundamentalism, if not of Islam altogether. Islam, many observers
have decided, is unusually prone to fundamentalism if not inherently fundamentalist: no less
a light than the eminent anthropologist Ernest Gellner made the eminently un-anthro-
pological pronouncement that Islam is “secularization-resistant” (1991: 2) and incapable of
changing along with modernity. Granted, Islam is officially opposed to bid’a or “innova-
tion.” However, as we seen throughout this book, Islam has adapted and still adapts in
diverse ways in and to the modern world, and it is always dangerous and misleading to take
a monolithic and essentialist perspective on any religion or culture.
Throughout its history, Islam has produced many purist and reformist movements.
One might consider the origin of Islam itself as a kind of nativist movement, the recovery
and re-establishment of an original and pure monotheism perpetuating but perfecting
earlier revelations in Judaism and Christianity. The first purist movement within Islam
concerned the successor (caliph) to Muhammad, leading to the split between the Sunnis
(mainstream or “traditionalists”) and the Shi’ites (the Shi’a Ali or the “partisans of Ali,”
a kinsman of Muhammad who was denied the role). Thus, Shi’ites immediately tended to
see themselves as the purifiers and reformers of a “misguided” Islam.
Despite a history of struggle and schism perfectly typical of translocal religions (see
Chapter 9), Islam has been singled out as different from other religions. Gabriele Marranci,
ever the astute analyst of modern Islam, following Mahmood Mamdani in the aptly titled
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004), blamed
this mentality on “culture talk,” a presumption that culture—or in this case religion—
“shapes a person’s identity as a bottle shapes the water it contains” (Marranci 2009: 2). Just
as Schielke in the previous chapter maintained that there is too much Islam in the anthro-
pology of Islam, so Mamdani and Marranci critiqued culture talk for assuming that “not
only do the holy texts, through its symbols, provide the blueprint behind the actions of
Islamic movements and individuals, but it also dictates them. In other words, the ‘funda-
mentalist’ becomes the embodied tradition” (2). Such a conclusion necessarily overlooks the
fact that, whatever the scriptures say, some individuals become fundamentalists and some do
not; further, some societies and eras produce more fundamentalist movements than others,
and those movements have widely varying features.
To develop these points, the Islamic movements—some call them fundamentalism, or
Islamism, political Islam, Islamic extremism, jihadist (from jihad, struggle) Islam, etc.—
that have arisen over the past few centuries cannot be understood apart from the contest
against, on the one hand, local non-Islamic beliefs and practices and, on the other, Wes-
tern colonialism and ongoing domination. Wahhabism is one of the more familiar and
important branches. Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), living in what would
become Saudi Arabia, led a purist movement distinguished by:
opposition to popular superstitions and innovations, his insistence on informed

independent judgments over against the role reliance on medieval authorities, and his
call for the Islamization of society and the creation of a political order which gives
appropriate recognition to Islam.
(Voll 1991: 351)
Specifically, this entailed a return to the textual fundamentals of the Qur’an and the
other main Islamic scripture, the Hadith or “traditions.” Wahhabism is influential in
present-day Saudi Arabia, but Jean-Loup Amselle (1987) for instance argued that
Wahhabism was embraced in Bamako (capital of Mali) by merchants who embraced
it to assert their independence from and equality with local aristocrats and not out of
burning religious zeal.
Islam was a medium of discourse, response, and resistance in all Muslim societies
penetrated by Western colonialism and culture, from Africa to Asia. Some local rulers
attempted to absorb modernization, including Muhammad ‘Ali in nineteenth-century
Egypt, if only for their own interests; scholars like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and
Muhammad Abduh likewise aspired to cultivate a distinctly modern Islam. Traditionalist
and “counter-reformation” movements arose in reaction, although since no Arabic
equivalent for “fundamentalists” existed at the time they were simply called “radicals”
(Ramadan 1993). One of the most influential examples was the Muslim Brotherhood
founded by Hasan al-Banna in the late 1920s to defend Islam against foreign contamina-
tion. The Brotherhood rejected the separation of the religious and temporal worlds and
called for an Islamic society and government, arguing that political neutrality was a crime
against Islam. Eventually a secret military wing was established to defend the group and
hopefully to someday seize power; they even attempted to assassinate the Egyptian leader,
Nasser. The Muslim Brotherhood spawned other movements in Egypt, like Sayyid Qutb’s
takfir approach, which accused all existing Muslim societies of atheism (takfir literally
means “branding with unbelief” or “excommunication”) and therefore rejected their
legitimacy.
A contemporary of al-Banna, Syed Abul Ala Maududi, living in the context of an
anti-Muslim colonial India (see below), taught that Islam is the state and that Allah
is the ruler and legislator of the political as well as religious domain (Ahmad 2009a:
S155). To pursue this ideal, he founded Jamaat-e-Islami (Assembly/Congregation of
Islam) in 1941. But as Irfan Ahmad depicted in his extended study of the Jamaat in
India, even such “Islamism is not a static, fossilized entity, immutably locked into a
dead end” (2009b: 8). Remarkably, although some members radicalized, others even-
tually made peace with secular democracy in India and even founded a Forum for
Democracy and Communal Amity to promote religious neutrality and inclusiveness.
Marranci made a second salient point when he insisted that “few studies have
been based on actual interaction with ordinary members of Islamic fundamentalist
movements, supporters and groups” (2009: 2). It is not always easy, or even safe, to
do ethnography with extremists, but anthropologists have increasingly made the
effort. Antoun himself interviewed a Jordanian “fundamentalist” for his 2001 book,
and James Peacock documented the purist Muhammadijah movement in Indonesia in
1978. Although Peacock claimed that it, like such reform movements, “calls for a
simplification of current practice in order to return to the uncorrupted condition of
the system at the time of its origin” (2017: 8)—an attitude sometimes known as
salafiyyah or the way of the righteous ancestors in Arabic—still it challenged many
of our expectations of Islamic “fundamentalism.” For one, the founder, Kijai Hadji
Achmad Dahlan, opened an Islamic school for women and encouraged them to
organize and to speak in public. The women’s affairs division (‘Aisjijah) “built
numerous kindergartens, women’s Islamic schools, and by 1938 had mobilized two
thousand female missionaries” (52). Nor were its activities all religion-oriented; it also
established technical schools, clinics, pharmacies, labor unions, farming cooperatives,
and factories (53). At a Muhammadijah “training camp” he noted encouragement of
devotion to the movement but “comparatively little emphasis on Muhammad, the
Qur’an, and the pilgrimage” (101)—the subjects that one would expect in classic reli-
gious fundamentalism.
As noted in various previous chapters, many of the activities that have been dubbed
“fundamentalist” in Islam might better be conceived as pietist, that is, intended to instill
(proper, as understood by the movement) belief and practice. We have discussed Saba
Mahmood’s celebrated work on women’s piety movements (see Chapter 6) and seen
other cases of individual and collective striving to be “better Muslims.” Many cases of
fundamentalism are essentially preaching campaigns, exhorting and inviting (da’wa,
invitation, often construed as proselytization) people to live the faith. Some of these
groups admittedly use confrontational tactics, like Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants) in the
UK. Others, like Ja’amah Tabligh (tabligh refers to mission or outreach) in Malaysia and
Indonesia eschew politics in favor of missionary work. (A distinctly modern, Rasta form
of Tabligh in Gambia was introduced in Chapter 9). Kamaruzzaman Bustamam-Ahmad
describes the khuruj (missionary travels) of members as they circulate through the
region, eating and sleeping communally, mastering the art of bayan (Islam speaking/
rhetoric), and progressing “on a spiritual journey that will enable them to evolve from
being an ‘animal’ to a ‘human in the model of the ‘perfect man,’ the Prophet Muham-
mad” (2015: 216).
Box 10.2 Women and fundamentalism in Yemen

“Chador Barbie” is a name Anne Meneley gave to a doll she discovered in a market in
Yemen: contradictorily, while the doll wore a chador or cloak typical of Yemeni
women, the garment was open, exposing a tight dress underneath, just as the lithma
or face veil was lowered, showing her “shameful” lipstick. Meneley noticed that
Chador Barbie’s “purportedly pious garb coyly reveals what it is supposed to conceal”
(2007: 219–20), leading her to reflect on the contradictions in contemporary Yemen.
Returning to the town of Zabid several years after her previous fieldwork, she found
unexpected changes like younger women preaching to older ones—a violation of tra-
ditional norms—at women’s house gatherings, where women do much of their socia-
lizing in the absence of men. In the interim, the Islahi movement (at-Tajammu’u al-
Yamanı- lil-Is.la-h. or Yemeni Congregation for Reform), with its project to reform “all
aspects of life on the basis of Islamic principles and teachings,” had spread across the
country. Most visibly, Meneley contended, its effects were felt in public places like
schools and hospitals, where women wore veils, but they also extended to women-
only spaces such as house gatherings: even in single-sex company, Islahist women
donned not only the traditional veil but new “Islamic socks and gloves.” Meneley told
that during her prior research, women were never veiled in the interior of the house,
but perhaps surprisingly some younger Islahi were now “attempting to shift ideas
about what is ‘naked’ and what kind of exposure is possible and to whom” (230).
Equally surprising was the pushback against these enthusiasts and reformers:
Most of the older women, and many of the younger ones, thought this escalation
of veiling to be not only barely tolerable physically but also piously pretentious.
Plenty of women do not agree that exposed hands and feet constitute an infrin-
gement of modesty (istihya’).
(230)
These observations raised the perennial questions of whether Islamist movements

were “empowering women or enlisting them in their own subordination” (233). For
instance, Islahi women were more confident public speakers; some had even claimed
the right to divorce a “philandering, drunken husband” or to choose a spouse in the
first place. Ultimately, though, Meneley concluded that Islahism sought less to reform
the public mixed-gender sphere than women’s same-gender sphere “and the ways in
which honor and Muslim virtue are created through accepting and offering generous
hospitality” (235).
None of this minimizes or excludes the violent terrorist impulses in contemporary

Islam. But anthropologists like Scott Atran realize that religious extremism and terrorism
cannot be explained solely in religious terms. Along with foreign domination and inter-
vention (Osama bin Laden, for instance, was particularly aggrieved over American troops
in Muslim lands), Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood often react to
corrupt and oppressive domestic regimes, including Iran under the Shah (eventuating in
the 1979 Shi’ite revolution) or Egypt under Hosni Mubarak. In a 2004 essay, Atran stated
“a direct correlation between US military aid to politically corroded or ethnically divided
states, human rights abuses by those regimes, and the rise of terrorism” (2004: 74). In
some instances, “radical Islamic” groups like Hamas intercede where political leaders fail,
providing “more and better educational, medical, and social welfare services than gov-
ernments do” (84). Similarly, David Edwards (2002) put the rise of the Taliban in the
wider context of modern Afghani history. We will return to the subject of terrorism in
Chapter 11 but suffice it to say now that religious identities and ideologies interact with
historical and contemporary grievances to spark Islamic fundamentalist violence.
Hindu fundamentalisms
While monotheisms are particularly prone to fundamentalism, other religions are by no
means immune. Any religion can develop fundamentalist tendencies, especially when
syncretized with other volatile social ideas and forces like race and nationalism. In the
context of India, tradition and modernization collided through European colonialism. As
historian Robert Frykenberg explained, there had never been a unified continental Indian
society or state prior to the English colonial Raj; instead, society had always been diverse,
decentralized, and weakly integrated, “a carefully arranged hierarchy of ranked social,
political, and religious contracts” (1993: 235). Not only was there no pre-colonial
“national” integration of the modern “state” sort, but there was no “national” identity.
In particular, there was no such thing as “Hinduism”; what we think of as Hinduism was
(and largely is) a “mosaic of distinct cults, deities, sects, and ideas” (237). Not surpris-
ingly, the formalization and advancement of “Hinduism” paralleled the formalization of
the bounded, inclusive “society” and “state” of India, essentially an achievement of
modernization and colonialism. “The ‘Hinduism’ promulgated by mass mobilizations—
the rising ideal of an all-embracing monolithic ‘Hindu community’—is, accordingly, a
recent development” (237).
Part of this accomplishment, as in Sri Lankan Buddhism, came from practices of Brit-
ish administration, both political and scholarly. The need to name the local culture and
society, in distinction from Muslim or Christian, etc., led to the adoption of the term
“Hindu.” At the same time, Western scholars like Max Mueller actively studied and
codified Asian cultures and traditions, providing order, attention, and legitimacy to those
traditions; with efforts like the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East edited by Mueller,
there was now an “official Hindu literature.” The Parliament of World Religions in 1893
made Hinduism a household word and a world religion.
The other part of the coalescence of Hindu culture and identity came from indigenous
sociocultural initiatives. In 1871 the All-India Congress introduced a classification of
religious and communal categories, including “Hindu.” Shortly thereafter, in 1875, the
Arya Samaj or Society of Aryas appeared as a Vedic fundamentalist organization, obser-
ving strict adherence to the oldest of Hindu texts (the Vedas) and dismissing “much of
later Hindu tradition as degenerate practice that is best forgotten” (Gold 1991: 534). In
1915 the All-India Hindu Mahasabha was created in association with the Indian National
Congress and as a cultural reaction to the Muslim League.
Out of such initiatives rose an ideology known as Hindutva, discussed in the 1923/24
publication of Vinayak Damadar Savarkar by the same name. Meaning essentially
“Hindu-ness” or “Hindu nationalism,” its principles included the idea that Hindus were
not only a single nation (rashtra) but the authentic indigenous nation of the subcontinent.
All true natives of the land, regardless of their caste or sect or language, were Hindu; the
“fundamentals” of Hindu identity and belief were literally in the blood. Therefore, all of
India was not only a home but a sacred home to Hindus. This ideology was institutio-
nalized in the 1925 movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS or National Union of
Volunteers/Servants) led by Kesnar Baliram Hedgewar. This new understanding called
for a radical personal transformation, a conversion or re-conversion to one’s true Hindu-
ness. The RSS recruited “volunteers” or “self-servants” (swayamsevaks) to defend and
advance the cause—an elite cadre, trained in kshatriya values and organized into military
regiments.
By 1939, there were sixty thousand active RSS members and by 1989 1.8 million
trained swayamsevaks in twenty-five thousand national branches (Frykenberg 1993). The
movement became quite influential on Indian politics in the late twentieth century and
was best summarized by Madhav Sadashir Golwalkar who wrote in his 1938 We, or Our
Nationhood Defined:
The non-Hindu peoples in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language,
must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea
but glorification of the Hindu race and culture: i.e., they must not only give up their
attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-old tradi-
tions, but most also cultivate a positive attitude of love and devotion instead … in a
word, they must cease to be foreigners, or must stay in this country wholly sub-
ordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any
preferential treatment, not even citizens’ rights.
(quoted in Frykenberg 1993: 243)
As Kalyani Devaki Menon portrayed it, the national re-conversion sought by Hindutva
often demands reversing Christian conversion and retrieving people who “have been
tricked by missionaries or … seduced by offers of material remuneration” (2003: 43).
From the Hindu nationalist perspective, the proselytization of other religions “is part of a
conspiracy to destroy ‘Indian’ culture and to destabilize the ‘Indian’ polity” (43). As such,
the conversion of Indians to foreign religions, and their successful re-conversion to their
true and native religion and identity, “is not seen as simply an individual expression of
faith but rather as a political choice that necessarily implicates questions of national
allegiance, patriotism, and cultural determination” (51).
Box 10.3 Hindutva and the “Hinduizing” of Christian North India

Hindutva claims all of India as a Hindu homeland, which poses a problem in northern
hill states like Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland where nearly ninety percent of
people are Christians. Of course, as Arkotong Longkumer explains, this frontier of the
subcontinent was never part of any precolonial Indian state and was only integrated
into India by British colonialism. As recently as the 1990s, the RSS and the Vishva
Hindu Parishad (VHP or Universal Hindu Council), a right-wing Hindu nationalist orga-
nization, opened a campaign of “Hinduization” or deconversion of tribal Christians
(2016: 208), many of whom decline the invitation to be Hindus and cling to their
Christianity or revive their non- and pre-Hindu beliefs. Longkumer reports that a Hindu
mission project called Vivekananda Kendra (vrmvk.org) operates some thirty schools in
the region, promoting its goal of “transforming our people’s inherent God-wardness
into the right spiritual urge rising out of the teaching of the Upanishads” for the
purpose of “national reconstruction.” VHP also runs a hostel for tribal youths to (re-)
introduce them to their mother religion. As one RSS worker told Longkumer:
Hindu means those who are following indigenous faith, eternal religion and culture
(sanatan dharma). They are taken as a Hindu. Hindu means—every way of life
originated from the son of the soil, having different way of worship, having differ-
ent name of god—all included into a Hindu faith. Hindu is a way of life; it is not a
way of worship. Christianity and Islam are a way of worship.
(213)
That is, non-Hindu religions are mere—and foreign—“beliefs” and not authentic and
native lifeways. This attitude is also apparent in the magazine Heritage Explorer (www.
heritagefoundation.org.in), the objective of which is “to promote and strengthen indi-
genous Eternal Faith and Culture of the different ethnic communities of the Northeast
Bharat [India] in accordance with their respective faith and beliefs.” Such initiatives
actually celebrate the flexibility and diversity of “Hinduism,” which distinguishes it from
the rigid worship systems of Western monotheisms. Hindutva protagonists in the area
teach that “Hindu” is not (or at least not merely) a “religion” but “a nationalistic and
civilizational identity that has little to do with ‘worship’” (219). It is “the ‘soul’ of the
nation—it is the eternal and natural way of life” (220). When peoples like the Nagas
understand and accept their true and inalienable Hinduness, it “will enable them … to
be more nationalistic, instead of anti-national and divisive” (222)—divisiveness or
sectarianism being one of the great fears of modern India (see Chapter 12).
Hindutva achieved power in India when Narendra Modi, a former RSS swayamsevak
and nominee of the Bharatiya Janata (India People’s) Party, rose to the office of prime
minister in 2014. Two decades prior, Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri mosque in
the city of Ayodhya, the purported birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, and Hindutva
advocates have taken an increasingly hard line against the Muslim minority, often
erupting into riots. The discriminatory National Register of Citizenship is set for imple-
mentation in 2021, potentially depriving many Indian Muslims of their citizenship, and
there are reports of detention centers for illegal residents and immigrants, as early as 2008
in the border region of Assam (Singh 2021). (See supplemental reading “Sikh Funda-
mentalism in the Punjab.”)
Buddhist fundamentalisms
The popular impression of Buddhism is a religion of moderation and peace and therefore
not one susceptible to extremism, fundamentalism, and violence. However, in reality,
although perhaps not as regularly, it too has demonstrated fundamentalist tendencies. In
the mildest cases, as documented by Sherry Ortner in Nepal, such phenomena take the
form of movements to improve, enforce, or purify religious belief and practice. Sherpa
Buddhism features monasteries staffed by married monks, a habit set in the late 1600s.
However, the early twentieth century saw efforts to establish a more orthodox institu-
tion, “the first celibate Buddhist monasteries among the Sherpas of Nepal” (1989: 3). And
the founding of the monasteries was only the first stage in a process of re-orthodoxifica-
tion: “Once the Sherpa monasteries were built, a whole new process was set in motion:
the monks launched a campaign to upgrade popular religion and to bring it into line with
monastic views and values” (3).
In other instances, Buddhist restorationism has been more muscular but also more
“modern” and syncretistic, particularly in contemporary Myanmar (colonial Burma). As
in many parts of the world, the impetus originated from the colonial experience: by the
1800s, some religious authorities championed a return to and purification of Buddhism
against the Christian threat, which involved a “new exegesis of the Tripitaka, the Bud-
dhist scriptures, and a stricter adherence by monks to the ‘discipline’” (Keyes 1993b: 368).
When the Great Depression of the 1930s impoverished many Burmese, millenarian
movements like Saya San emerged, aimed at the expulsion of the British and the return of
the Buddhist monarchy. More modernized Burmese acquired a heightened self-identity as
Buddhists along with a more activist and “political” agenda. One of the key figures was
U Ottama, who advocated a militant and “fundamentalist” style, with a political role for
monks. Even more significant was U Ba Swe, who consciously blended Buddhism with
Marxism, seeing Marxism as the temporal, practical counterpart to Buddhism. The
political coup of Ne Win in 1962 brought to power a regime committed to just such
“Buddhist socialism,” at the same time aggrandizing religion and achieving state control
over religion, e.g. leadership of the sangha or religious community was shifted to the
Burma Socialist Program Party.
Sri Lanka provides the best case of a politically powerful and militant Buddhism.
Sri Lanka is an island containing two main ethnic or religious/identity groups, the
majority Sinhalese (Buddhists) and the minority Tamils (Hindus). The Sinhalese also
claim to be the original and rightful inhabitants, and at various times in the past
strong Buddhist kingdoms existed, especially under the Sinhalese Buddhist culture
hero Dutthagamani who legendarily vanquished a non-Buddhist king in the name of
Buddhism. From that time, if not before, Buddhist monks (bhikkhus) were politically
important, exercising their right and duty to preserve and promote the religion and
the kingdom.
Immediately after becoming a British colony in 1802, Christian missionaries flooded
the island. Within decades Buddhist samagamas (associations) were formed, such as Sar-
vagna Sasanabhivruddhi Dayaka Dharma Samagama in 1862, to “protect and develop
Buddhism,” and Buddhist spokesmen like Gunananda contended with Christianity, even
holding public debates. Interestingly, the American-based Theosophical Society played a
part in encouraging Buddhist self-identity, and Sinhalese newspapers like Lankapakaraya
and Lak Mini Kirula (both established in 1881) and journals advanced Buddhist identity
and interests. Probably the single most significant figure in nineteenth-century Buddhist
fundamentalism, though, was Anagarika Dharmapala, who endorsed an exclusive Sinha-
lese/Buddhist identity and hegemony for the island:
The island of Lanka belongs to the Buddhist Sinhalese. For 2455 years this was the
land of birth for the Sinhalese. Other races have come here to pursue their commer-
cial activities. For the Europeans, apart from this land, there is Canada, Australia,
South Africa, England and America to go to; for the Tamils there is South India; for
the Moors … Egypt; the Dutch can go to Holland. But for the Sinhalese there is only
this island.
(quoted in Dharmadasa 1992: 138)
As independence approached in the 1940s Buddhist elements became more active, like
the political bhikkhus who formed the Lanka Eksath Bhikkhu Mandalaya (Ceylon Union
of Bhikkhus) to defend Buddhism, by overthrow of the colonial government if necessary.
In 1956, the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress issued a report titled “The Betrayal of Bud-
dhism” complaining about the condition of Buddhism, government, and society; it
demanded discontinuation of aid to Christian schools and the re-establishment of unity
between state and sangha. Not surprisingly, the same year the dominant political party,
the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, turned more pro-Buddhist and pro-Sinhalese, promulgating
laws to advantage the Buddhist religion and the Sinhalese language, which eventually so
outraged Tamils that an ethno-religious civil war broke out between them (see Chapter
11).
Conclusion
No religion is beyond fundamentalist tendencies, especially in a modern world of reli-
gious and cultural pluralism, rapid social change, and invigorated religious belief and
sentiment. All fundamentalisms share a certain reactionary or defensive nature—even
militancy—although they also vary significantly not only between religions and between
societies/states but also within religions. Although fundamentalism is not utterly unique
to modern times, appearing in all times of change and threat—which are almost all
times—contemporary fundamentalisms are conspicuously modern. They are ultimately
one of the recurring forms of “revitalization movements” that emerge in all societies (and
not only in religious institutions) during moments of turmoil and (real or perceived)
social decline.
Fundamentalism is thus not “bad religion” nor is it “true religion” but rather one of
the many possible and likely variations of religion in particular historical and social cir-
cumstances. The fact that these very circumstances are sure to persist and even intensify
in the future suggests that fundamentalisms are likely to persist, and it also proves con-
clusively that “modernity” is not the death of religion but may rather give it new and
energetic life. Finally, fundamentalisms are a perfect illustration of the multiple forma-
tions or modes of religion (and irreligion), of the vernacularization of religions, and of
the value of an anthropological perspective on religions.
1 How is the anthropological perspective on fundamentalism different from that in
other disciplines or in the popular press and media?
2 What does it mean to speak of “formations of the fundamental”? How is funda-
mentalism constructed in and by secular society, and why does Harding call it the
“repugnant other”?
3 What are the varieties of fundamentalism? Do all of them advocate violence—or
even political action?
4 How and why did fundamentalism emerge in the United States? How do funda-
mentalisms in other religions and countries resemble and differ from American
Christian fundamentalism?
5 How is fundamentalism in other countries and religions—from Judaism and Islam to
Hinduism and Buddhism—different from the Christian variety, and how is it related
to local history, culture, and politics?
Fieldwork among Fundamentalists: The Southside Gospel Church
The Hyper-Christian, Hyper-Modern Children of God
Jesus.com: Internet Fundamentalism
The Hasidim of Boro Park, Brooklyn
Sikh Fundamentalism in the Punjab
11 Religious violence
The Venezuelan religious movement dedicated to the legendary figure María Lionza fea-
tures spirit possession, but recently the usually peaceful religion has witnessed an inten-
sification of violence, specifically self-inflicted injury. The pantheon of spirits embodied
by mediums includes indigenous people from the colonial era, heroes of the independence
struggle, minorities such as “Egyptians” and “Cubans,” and “celestial beings,” but Fran-
cisco Ferrándiz observed a predominance of “African” and “Viking” spirits among
younger male mediums. Men possessed by these spirits displayed “an extremely forced
and rather unusual corporality, expressed in contorted—almost skeletal—body move-
ments” (2009: 49), attributed to the warlike and abject qualities of the spirits. In their
previous lives, these spirits fought and suffered, and present-day mediums shared “the
intensity of heir excessive, wounded and mutilated corporeal” experience (51), literally
their “rage, fury, frustration, courage, daring, valor, fierceness” (52). However, the med-
iums not only felt the wounds and angers of the past but of their own current lives with
the poverty, crime, social disorder, and violence of shantytown existence—a world where
the malandro (delinquent) regards “wounds and scars as style and prestige markers” (47).
The violence and the values are reflected in their religious extremity toward “self-inflicted
injury of various types—cuts with knives or razors, piercings with needles, ingestion of
limited amounts of glass or toxic liquids such as kerosene” not practiced by older María
Lionza devotees; in fact, the self-harm has escalated lately “as the needles used in pier-
cings are larger, the knife-wounds deeper, closer to more sensitive parts of the body, and
new tools of self-mutilation are introduced” (49). Ferrándiz concluded pointedly that the:
wounds inflicted by the spirits during trance are fused and mixed with the marks left
on their bodies by urban abandonment, poverty and malnutrition, the inadequacy of
health services, street fights, prison and police repression, and by the aesthetical
manipulations of youth subcultures. The blood that runs from the bodies of med-
iums is but another small effluent in the river of blood that runs every day down the
streets of the barrios. Like history, the rituals and the streets share the same wounds
and scars.
(56)
In the early twenty-first century, it is impossible to ignore the link between religion and
violence. For example, according to terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp (2003), the
number of extremist religious movements around the world tripled from the mid-1960s to
the mid-1990s. At the same time, the number of religiously inspired terrorist groups grew
from zero to about one-quarter of all known terrorist organizations. In the period from
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-11
Religious violence 255
1970 to 1995, religious groups accounted for over half of the total acts of world terror-
ism—all this before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Not surprisingly, a virtual industry of literature on religious violence has sprouted.
However, these treatments, valuable as they are, suffer from three limitations. First, they
tend to examine a limited variety of religions, usually only Christianity and Islam, with
some mention of Judaism. Second, they tend to consider a limited variety of violence,
mostly “terrorism” and “holy war.” Third, they tend to adopt one of two positions on
the relationship between religion and violence, either blaming religion for violence or
excusing religion from violence.
Anthropology appreciates the issue of religious violence as more diverse and more
complicated. A thorough study of the violence that flows from religion requires a more
comprehensive examination of religions. Furthermore, although terrorism and religious
war are vital issues, they hardly exhaust the range of religion-inspired violence; rather,
they are comparatively rare forms. Finally, it is crucial to accept that violence is neither
inherent in nor incompatible with religion. Rather, violence is a culturally constructed
behavior, which arises out of specific social conditions that are not unique to, but are
common to, religion.
The anthropology of violence

Understanding religious violence demands that we first understand violence. Yet many
people think that violence requires no understanding, that it is simple and obvious, or
that to understand it is somehow to condone it. The latter is particularly problematic
since a dominant attitude is that violence is always intolerable. However, the near-
Figure 11.1 Walking over hot coals in Agia Eleni. © Pixelstock/Alamy.

universality of violence, the plethora of forms it takes cross-culturally, and the diversity
of reactions to and evaluations of it make the anthropological approach to violence more
complex.
There are two main difficulties confronting those who would explain violence. The
first is the notion that violence is by definition disordered, disruptive, indeed anti-social.
Max Gluckman was one of the first anthropologists to redirect attention away from the
presumed order and stability of culture toward internal division and conflict. Many if not
all societies, he stressed, are “elaborately divided and cross-divided by customary alle-
giances” that pit members of the society against each other in numerous ways (1956: 1).
He considered this differentiation and low-grade conflict to be integrative rather than
disintegrative, since:
these conflicting loyalties and divisions of allegiance tend to inhibit the development of
open quarrelling, and … the greater the division in one area of society, the greater is likely
to be the cohesion in a wider range of relationships—provided that there is a general need
for peace, and the recognition of a moral order in which this peace can flourish.
(25)
Whether or not it is good for society, violence is indisputably a part of society. The
second problem then is the notion that violence is an objective, absolute, and unitary
thing. Such thinking should lead to a neat definition of violence, but such a definition—
especially cross-culturally—has been notoriously evasive. Instead, violence “is a slippery
concept—nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. … [It] defies easy cate-
gorization. It can be everything and nothing; legitimate or illegitimate; visible or invisible;
necessary or useless; senseless and gratuitous or utterly rational and strategic” (Scheper-
Hughes and Bourgois 2004: 1–2). There is little that all violent acts share and that dis-
tinguishes them from other acts; in fact, the exact same act can be labeled as violence in
one context and not as violence in another.
This raises the salient point that violence is not so much an objective quality of an act
or actor as a judgment. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philip Bourgois went on to say:
violence is in the eye of the beholder. What constitutes violence is always mediated
by an expressed or implicit dichotomy between legitimate/illegitimate, permissible or
sanctioned acts, as when the ‘legitimate’ violence of the militarized state is differ-
entiated from the unruly, illicit violence of the mob or of revolutionaries.
(2)
In fact, they contended that:
most violent acts consist of conduct that is socially permitted, encouraged, or

enjoined as a right or a duty. Most violence is not deviant behavior, not disapproved
of, but to the contrary is defined as virtuous action in the service of generally
applauded conventional social, economic, and political norms.
(5)
From this vantage, violence is not only a cultural judgment but a political one, that is,
who gets to label—and therefore condemn—an act or actor is a matter of social position
and power. As David Riches put it:
violence is very much a word of those who witness, or who are victims of, certain
acts, rather than of those who perform them. … [W]hen a witness or victim invokes
the notion of violence, they make a judgment not just that the action concerned
causes physical harm but also that it is illegitimate.
(1986: 3–4)
And the verdict of violence is a cultural and therefore a contestable one: a person, group, or
society may call an act violent, while another person, group, or society—or the same person,
group, or society at another time—may deem it otherwise. For instance, some years ago,
spanking a child was not considered violence, but for many Americans today it is.
“Violence” as a label, then, is relative and constructed. It is also one among a variety
of social categories available to assess and condemn or condone behavior. The English
language has a field of terms with differing but overlapping meaning, such as “conflict,”
“competition,” “aggression,” “hostility,” “abuse,” and so on. All such words/concepts
carry negative connotations but different definitions. At the same time, there is a parallel
discourse—often applied to the same actions—that conveys a positive message, such as
“self-defense,” “justice,” “right,” “duty,” and so on. Killing in self-defense is better than,
more legitimate than, killing in aggression, even though the victim is equally dead.
Finally, research, along with popular opinion, has tended to focus on sudden, extreme,
and exceptional “outbreaks” of violence—which are least representative and least infor-
mative. Exceptional violence distracts us from the “violence of the everyday,” what has
been called “structural violence” or “symbolic violence,” or merely from the routine,
taken-for-granted practices and values that contribute to those outbreaks. Carolyn
Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin (1992) insisted that it is naïve and dangerous to believe
that violence only occurs when people are killing each other and ends when the killing
stops; peace is not simply the absence of violence. Violence, like all other cultural phe-
nomena, is “practiced,” and it emerges from concrete circumstances, shaped by norms,
beliefs, and values, that are embodied by real-life individuals in particular situations.
The anthropological perspective suggests that violence is not exclusively something
that “bad people” do but something that ordinary people do in certain social situations.
To test this hypothesis, social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963) arranged a classic
experiment, asking average people to administer painful and potentially lethal electric
shocks to other normal people as part of an alleged teaching study. He reported that two-
thirds of the subjects were willing to deliver the highest level of shock, even though the
“victim” screamed in pain and then went silent. Of course, there was no actual victim or
even actual shocking, but the subjects believed there was. His finding was that regular
people will knowingly hurt others in certain circumstances, specifically where some
authority urges them to do so and absolves them from responsibility.
Based on this and other research, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo (2000) suggested
that social factors are much more important than psychological ones in performing vio-
lence. He identified six factors that are effective in making good people do bad things:
1 Indoctrination into a thought-system that rationalizes or legitimizes violence

2 Obedience to authority, with no opportunity for dissent
3 Anonymity and deindividuation (e.g. getting lost in a crowd or having your indivi-
dual decision-making powers taken or suppressed)
4 Diffusion of responsibility (e.g. “just following orders” or dividing the violent beha-
vior among a group of people)
5 Gradual escalation of violence
6 Dehumanization of the enemy or the victim
Of these six, blind obedience to authority was the most hazardous.

One consistent finding from these studies is that an essential ingredient for perpe-
trating injury is a lack of empathy for potential victims. In empathy, I feel your suffer-
ing; it really does “hurt me as much as it hurts you.” If one can inflict pain without
experiencing pain, it is much easier. And if one thinks that the other deserves pain, or
does not even feel pain, or is beneath concern or contempt (“dirt,” “a worm,” “gar-
bage,” or otherwise subhuman), one can actually feel good while harming the other—or
feel nothing at all.
Religion as explanation and justification for violence

Religion and violence are equally components of culture. It is almost inevitable, then, that
religion and violence would become entangled. Two particular ways in which religion
meets violence are as explanation and as legitimation. That is to say, religion must help
people make sense of the immanent and undeniable violence in the natural and social
world, and it can itself also serve as a reason and justification for violence.
As discussed in the first chapter, one common theory of or approach to religion per-
ceives it as solving problems and answering questions. And one of the recurring questions
that humans ask is, Why do bad things happen? Why is there evil, violence, and mis-
fortune, etc. in the world? And more personally, why does it happen to me and mine?
Since the reality of pain and struggle is irrefutable, no religion would be taken seriously
that did not offer some insight into—and some remedy for—these undesirable happen-
ings (see e.g. Chapter 7 on religion and sickness). Also, as a model of and for the world,
religion can offer explanations and answers in ways that no other human thought-system
can.
The religious explanations of violence are as myriad as religion itself. The explanation
that a religion offers will depend on the beings, forces, concepts, and specialist roles that
it posits. One familiar reason for violence is humans themselves. In the Christian tradi-
tion, human “free will” is the cause of much suffering: humans are free to help or harm
and frequently choose to harm. Human failings can even be used to explain “natural evil”
like predation, aging, and death: according to Judeo-Christian teachings, there was no
death in the world until humans disobeyed and subsequently brought death and pain
down upon themselves and the natural world as well. In Greek mythology, opening
Pandora’s box unleashed endless misery on the world. In other words, all of reality pays
for the foibles of humanity.
There are also various kinds of especially powerful and pernicious humans, such as
witches and sorcerers. Some societies attribute almost all hardship and misfortune to
such human operators, like the Azande (see Chapter 3) who ascribed everything from
crop blights and hunting failures to bad moods and infertility to witchcraft; “any failure
or misfortune … upon anyone at any time and in relation to any of the manifold activ-
ities of his life … may be due to witchcraft” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 19). Sorcerers and
witches used an array of natural and supernatural substances and forces to do their dirty
work and often aimed it at those who had offended or violated them in some way.
A common, probably universal, aspect of religion is the assertion that harmful or at
least capricious nonhuman beings or “spirits” abound (see Chapter 2). Some of these
beings plague humans because it is their nature and pleasure to do so, like Spiro’s thirty-
seven nats in Burma. An infinity of demons, ogres, devils, and such stalk the religions of
the world. In addition to malevolent spiritual beings, there are the animistic spirits of
plants, animals, and even places and objects that demand the attention and respect they
deserve as “persons”—like the “spirit-owning beings” of Ainu religion—and may inflict
harm on humans for failure to treat them properly. Deceased humans or ancestors, too,
can cause trouble for the living. !Kung or Ju/hoansi ancestors (//gauwasi or //gangwasi)
were the direct bearers of much misfortune, and Tallensi ancestors determined a person’s
“evil destiny.”
In other religions, impersonal supernatural forces often account for the misery of
humans. From the ancient Greek notion of fate to Pacific mana and Chinese chi, such
forces influence or set the course of one’s life, for good or ill. The Hindu-Buddhist con-
cept of karma means that the wrong that one does comes back to haunt the person, in the
next life if not sooner; this supernatural cause-and-effect explains a person’s fortunes or
misfortunes. Buddhism perhaps most elaborates this view and makes it central to the
religion, in the idea of dukkha or suffering/brokenness. In fact, the first of the Four Noble
Truths is that existence simply and inexorably is dukkha; the subsequent truths offer the
cause (attachment or desire), the cure (detachment or extinguishing desire), and the
method to implement the cure. However, the religion does not promise the alleviation,
much less the elimination, of suffering but merely an acceptance and overcoming of it.
Finally, in religions with gods, the gods themselves may be the architects of human ill.
For instance, one or more gods may specialize in tribulation, such as a god of war or
disease or a trickster god. Suffering may be divine punishment or justice for wrongdoing,
if the gods take a moral interest in humans. On other occasions, adversity could be a
warning. And some gods are malevolent by nature. Christianity emphasizes the positive
qualities of its god, overlooking the fact that he stated, “I make peace, and create evil: I
the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). In other traditions, the trouble that befalls
humans comes from the struggle between a good god and an evil god or being, with
humans caught between them. It may have been an evil god/being who let loose suffering
on the world in the first place, as in Zoroastrianiam’s claim that Angra Mainyu—a kind
of “anti-creator” god—introduced the serpents, plagues, “plunder and sin,” unbelief,
“tears and wailing,” and the 99,999 diseases into the otherwise perfect creation of Ahura
Mazda, the good god.
Not only does religion explain why violence and other burdens exist in the world, but
it also frequently explains why such things are necessary, good, even noble. Many reli-
gions see certain kinds of violence on certain occasions against certain entities as toler-
able, moral, or obligatory. From the smallest and most “traditional,” religions make
room for some forms of sanctioned and sanctified violence, as we will explore in more
depth below.
For instance, religions that accept the reality of witches may deem it acceptable and
admirable to hunt or execute them. Individuals who violate religious taboos, break sacred
moral injunctions, or deny or blaspheme religious truths may be subject to penalty
including death. However, there can be no doubt that the translocal religions have pre-
sented more extensive and elaborate justifications for violence and have practiced it on an
unprecedented scale. A concept like “holy war” would make little sense to most local
religions. Christianity and Islam particularly established a dualism of believers versus
non-believers that renders violence possible if not inherent: groups that feel themselves in
possession of the “one true religion” have little sympathy or tolerance for divergent
groups. Clearly, the god of the Hebrew Scriptures ordered violence against other societies
as well as disobedient or disbelieving members of his chosen people:
And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they
slew all the males. …
And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little
ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their goodly castles, and all their
goods. …
[Moses said] Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill woman
that hath known man by lying with him.
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep
alive for yourselves.
(Numbers 31:7–18)
Islam, too, inheriting the monotheistic absolutism of Judaism and Christianity, ordains
violence in the name of religion:
So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you
find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every
ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their
way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
(Qur’an, sura 9:5)
O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them
find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
(sura 9:123)
Like many ideologies that tolerate violence, the perpetrators of religious violence can
see themselves as victims of abuse or persecution and their acts therefore as self-defense.
They also demonize the enemy, who deserves no better treatment.
[P]ersecution is graver than slaughter; and they will not cease fighting with you until
they turn you back from your religion, if they can; and whoever of you turns back
from his religion, then he dies while an unbeliever—these it is whose works shall go
for nothing in this world and the hereafter, and they are the inmates of the fire;
therein they shall abide.
(sura 2:217)
While monotheisms are particularly prone to this outlook, they are not alone. Hindu-
ism, for instance, justifies violence and war through its concepts of dharma, karma, caste,
and reincarnation. The classic statement comes in the Bhagavad Gita, in which the war-
rior Arjuna contemplates the upcoming battle where he will face friends and kinsmen in
the opposing army. Prepared to throw down his weapons in despair, his chariot-driver,
the god Krishna, clarifies why war and killing are both necessary and moral: Arjuna is a
kshatriya, born into the caste of warriors, as are his enemies. To kill is his duty, his
dharma, as it is theirs. It cannot be immoral to do one’s spiritual duty; rather, it would
be immoral not to fight and kill. Even more, since humans are really spiritual beings and
not material bodies, no harm can come to any combatant; a warrior can only kill the
body, not the spirit, and such a death benefits the spirit, which has died well and duti-
fully. How will you grieve for what cannot be destroyed, Krishna admonishes Arjuna,
since the spirit is “unharmed, untouched, immortal”? Birth, death, and duty are all
ordained, so why feel sadness or guilt?
The diversity of religious violence

Religion and violence are compatible but not identical. Religion is complex and modular,
and violence is one of its modules—not universal but available. As a conceptual and
behavioral module, violence is by no means exclusive to religion; it is neither essential
nor exclusive to religion. Nor is all religious violence alike. There are numerous mani-
festations and motivations of violence in the name or the service of religion. Any religion
may condone some and condemn others. And virtually every form of religious violence
has its non-religious counterpart.
We can identify six types of religious violence, organized into two major categories—vio-
lence against a victim (who/which is, from the perpetrator’s perspective, innocent and unde-
serving of harm) and violence against an enemy (who/which is guilty or threatening and
therefore deserving of harm). Although there is some overlap between these two categories, in
the class of violence against a victim we will include sacrifice, self-mortification, and crime/
abuse, while the class of violence against an enemy contains persecution, ethno-religious con-
flict, and war and terrorism. This chapter will focus on the five more collective expressions of
violence; a discussion of religious crime and abuse, usually more individualized, is located in a
supplemental reading (see supplemental reading “Religious Violence: Crime and Abuse”).
Sacrifice
Since it has occupied such a central place in theories of religious violence but received so little
attention in mainstream commentary on contemporary violence, it is sensible to start with
the topic of sacrifice. Many more beings, human and nonhuman, have suffered and died in
sacrifice than in religious wars and terrorist acts. The word means “to make sacred” (from
the Latin sacer, “holy” or “sacred” and facere, “to make or do”) and classically entails the
damage or destruction of a living being for a supernatural purpose. In one of its first socio-
logical analyses, published originally in 1898, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, colleagues of
Durkheim, defined it as “a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies
the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which
he is concerned” (1964: 13). In Durkheimian style, they saw sacrifice as mediating between
the poles of profane and sacred, represented by the sacrificer and the supernatural entity to
which he/she sacrifices. In the process, the object is removed, literally, from the profane
world and “sacralized” so that it can be transferred to the sacred world in a sort of super-
natural communication and exchange.
Other theorists have presented rival views. Tylor saw sacrifice as a gift to the divine,
while Frazer interpreted it as ritual control of death and Robertson Smith as pre-
dominantly a communal meal. Meyer Fortes argued that sacrifice “is more commonly a
response to a demand or command from supernatural agencies or else a rendering of a
standard obligation, than a spontaneous offering”; it entails “an element of demand,
certainly of persuasion, on the donor’s side” (1980: xiii–xiv).
Probably the dominant theory of sacrifice and of religious violence generally for the past
four decades comes from René Girard’s 1977 Violence and the Sacred. Girard (sometimes
called an anthropologist but really a literature scholar and Christian apologist) posited that
religion is intimately and causally linked to violence but in a counterintuitive way: religion
does not produce violence, but violence produces religion. Humans as social creatures, he
insisted, unavoidably experience tensions and conflicts with each other. The source of this
problem is “mimetic desire”: members of society learn to value and desire the same things
and thus compete over them. Culture invariably turns people into rivals and obstacles to
each other, breeding hostility and violence. Allowed to proceed unchecked, in-group violence
would tear society apart through fights, feuds, vendettas, civil wars, and so on. Religion
provides a solution through the projection of violence away from the real rival and onto a
substitute victim, a “scapegoat.” Girard ended up fallaciously equating religion to sacrifice as
a control system to prevent the spread of violence. Therefore, he predicted that we should see
sacrifice in the earliest societies—especially ones without political or penal institutions—and
that it should diminish as social complexity and centralization increase. Both predictions are
contradicted by the evidence.
In the best anthropological tradition, the interpretation of sacrifice entails taking seriously
local variations in practice and discourses of ritual killing—or lack thereof. The first and
paramount fact is that the most ancient societies, hunter-gatherers or foragers, typically did
not perform sacrifice. Renowned religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith asserted that sacrifice
“appears to be, universally, the ritual killing of a domesticated animal by agrarian or pas-
toralist societies” (1987:197), which decisively refutes Girard’s claim that sacrifice is the root
of religion and culture. Further, like other religious terms (see Chapter 1), “sacrifice” is a
Western/English word that may not fit in all cultural and historical contexts; other religions
may not think of their ritual-killing actions as “making sacred,” nor may they conceive of
such behavior as substitutive, the victim taking the place of the sacrificer. (Incidentally, in the
classic formulation of the scapegoat, the animal is not killed but is allowed to escape—hence
escape-goat—bearing the sins of the people into the desert; see Leviticus 16:21–2.) The idea
of substitution further comes from the biblical story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abra-
ham, known as the Akedah or Aqedah (“binding,” not sacrifice), and of course from the
biography of Jesus who, at least in some understandings (though not Girard’s), gave his life
in substitutive justice for humanity’s life.
Even in the Hebrew scriptures, the terminology and regulations for ritual killing are
complex and diverse. There is no single word for “sacrifice” but an array of terms and
practices, the most central or paradigmatic of which according to Bible scholar James
Watts (2006) was ‘olah (literally, “that which goes up”) or burnt offering, the total
destruction or immolation of an animal by fire. The most generic term for sacrifice was
korban, which emphasized not the act but its effect—“to bring near” the people and their
god. Under this heading was a wide range of practices and purposes, from sin offerings
and guilt offerings to peace offerings, wave offerings, and ordination offerings. Of special
interest are the meal offerings (minhah) which involved flour, bread, fruit, or frankin-
cense in addition to or instead of animals.
Evans-Pritchard studied sacrifice among the Nuer cattle-herders of East Africa, where
it was a regular practice. There it had nothing to do with scapegoating but rather seemed
to occur in two circumstances. The first related to “changes of social status and the
interaction of social groups” such as male initiation into adulthood. The second con-
cerned “situations of danger arising from the interventions of Spirit in human affairs”
which threatened “the moral and physical welfare of the individual” (1954: 21). The key
quality of sacrifice for the Nuer was “the efficacy of the rite,” its actual effects on people,
property, and spirits which were “regarded as physical and immediate” (25).
Another great sacrificial tradition is Hinduism; like Hebrew sacred writings, the Hindu
Vedas provided intricate instructions for sacrificial action. However, religion scholar
Kathryn McClymond maintained that in Vedic sacrifice death was less significant than the
fact that “killing makes the animal ritually available for the elaborate manipulation, division,
and distribution that follow” (2008: 53), including, as in many religions, the blood. More,
Hindu sacrifice sometimes did not require killing at all, and most importantly sacrifice did
not always involve animals but rather plant matter—again, typically domesticated plants—
like grain or the soma plant which was “killed” to release its sacred-psychoactive juice.
(Evans-Pritchard also remarked that the Nuer might substitute cucumbers for cattle.)
A third great sacrificial tradition, and the most prodigious case of human sacrifice,
emerged in Central America. Mayan and Aztec sacrifices transpired in highly complex
societies and were particularly “political.” Following from and re-enacting mythical
events, and at least in some constructions based upon a belief that the sun was a tired
and hungry god who needed a constant supply of blood to rejuvenate him, Mayan and
Aztec emperors proclaimed their political and military prowess by presiding over vast
sacrifices, often of defeated enemies, in a theater of absolute power over life and death.
(See supplemental reading “Predicting Human Sacrifice: A Cross-Cultural Survey.”)
This political dimension of sacrifice cannot be overestimated. In the African kingdom
of Dahomey the living king and the spirits of dead kings demanded sacrifice on such
occasions as a royal death, the erecting of a new palace, the initiation or conclusion of a
war, the opening of a new market, and the ceremonies to feed his ancestors (Herskovits
1938). Similarly, in the Hawaiian kingdom, the king was the chief sacrificer, feeding the
gods with victims (including human) while displaying his social supremacy. His god-like
power over life and death “gives him authority over men, since it makes his actions more
perfect and efficacious than theirs”; the king was, “in sum, the point of connection
between the social whole and the concept”—both political and supernatural—“that jus-
tifies it” (Valeri 1985: 142). In other locations, like ancient Egypt, people might be
slaughtered as “retainer sacrifice” to serve the pharaoh in the afterlife.
If we peruse the variety of ritual killing practices, and the variety of occasions in which
they happened, a pattern comes into focus that not only sheds light on sacrifice but
reveals the critically important principle that underlies it and much of religious behavior.
Early and overlooked anthropologist E.O. James in 1933 reckoned that sacrifice is not
about death at all but about life:
In the ritual of shedding blood it is not the taking of life but the giving of life that really
is fundamental, for blood is not death but life. The outpouring of the vital fluid in
actuality, or by substitute, is the sacred act whereby life is given to promote and preserve
life, and to establish thereby a bond of union with the supernatural order.
(1971: 33)
In other words, the constant across the diversity of sacrifice is death as “a means of lib-
erating vitality” (256) in an economy of life, a sort of conservation of life-energy.
Humans cannot create life or vitality; we can only move it from one site to another, and
killing is one method—but only one—for permitting humans to circulate and redistribute
life. James Faubion grasped the message when he referred to “the vitalistic economy,” the
motivation of which is “the acquisition or recovery of one’s appropriate share of the
vital, the quest for more of the vital, the quest for union with the vital in its full, para-
disiacal or infernal plenitude” (2003: 81), the source of fertility and potency. Malcolm
Ruel said it well (ironically, in his study of non-sacrificial ritual killing; think for example
of Jewish kosher or Muslim halal): among the Kuria (Africa), the idea behind sacrifice “is
not the life of the animal … but the life in the animal” (1990: 332). For the Kuria, not the
blood but the chyme (digestive content) of the victim is “the ‘life’ or ‘well-being,’ obo-
horo, of the animal … [and the] action of taking the chyme can then be seen as one of
taking the life of the animal, to confer or transfer it elsewhere” (330)—depending on the
society, to a sinful person, an initiate, an altar, a garden, a building, a treaty or vow, or a
king. (See supplemental reading “The Circulatory Cosmos of the Runa of Andean Peru.”)
Box 11.1 Loving cattle, killing cattle among the Suri of East Africa
In Suri pastoral society, cattle were “virtually a part of human society if not its essential
precondition” (Abbink 2003: 342). It is no surprise, then, that cattle were a sort of ritual
currency and that people had ambivalent feelings about “spending” that currency by
killing their herd. Killing stock animals could be “beneficial” ritually because of “the
perception of the self-generating, procreative power that they are seen to have” (346).
Specifically, in various sacrificial acts, “their blood is seen as substitution energy on
behalf of sacrificers” (349); animal blood “is the emblem and source of vitality, the life
force” and “is ritually used on human bodies to remove pollution, or on objects to
ward off detrimental effects for humans, for instance smearing it on the entrance gate
of a ritual chief’s compound” (350). Yet despite the fact that cattle were ritually sig-
nificant—and more, were appreciated “as part of the kinship group”—they were not
considered “sacred in any sense” (346). Indeed, Abbink insisted that “Suri life is
marked by the absence of any explicit religious activity referring to the supernatural”
(347). Instead, the efficacy of ritual killing was direct and immediate, not aimed at a
spirit or deity who might grant favor or remove sin. Bluntly put, some “supernatural
referent is … of much less importance than the secular, praxis-directed one” (351). To
comprehend the Suri rationale, first we note the occasions for cattle sacrifice, such as
“a marriage ceremony, burial, age-group initiation, a rain-ceremony, the installation (or
burial) of a Suri ritual leader or komoru, at a major public debate, and sometimes in
case of serious illness” (351). All of these constitute rites of passage or similar
manipulations or transformations of individuals or social relationships, and all are best
effective when reinforced with whatever energy is at human disposal. Killing released
such energy: “the life force of a live being, once killed ritually, is deflected from the
animals towards humans, i.e. utilized for their purposes” (351). These purposes inclu-
ded also the purification of a murderer, which required not cattle but sheep and not
blood but chyme: the poor animals were slit open while alive and their stomach con-
tents “thrown on the killer and on some close relatives of the victim. … This purifica-
tion ceremony (called mèdèrè-níkíddá, sheep’s washing) ‘cleanses’ the killer (who was
a fugitive before) and is the last stage of his return to normal life” (352).
Self-mortification
While sacrifice is very common cross-culturally, the most universal expression of religious
violence is self-mortification, any of the thousands of ways in which humans deprive,
injure, or even kill themselves for spiritual reasons. Its very universality makes it
incredibly diverse, with many variations and many justifications. Self-mortification con-
tains three escalating subtypes—voluntary self-injury, asceticism, and martyrdom.
Virtually all religions, including the oldest hunter-gatherer traditions, featured prac-
tices of ritual self-injury, in which ordinary members of society indulged occasionally or
regularly. Australian Aboriginal societies circumcised and subincised (making a cut along
the underside of the penis) young men during initiation, periodically opening the wounds
throughout a man’s life to draw blood for ritual use; some groups also cut scars, pierced
the nasal septum, and knocked out a tooth. During initiation a Nuer boy was scarred
with deep cuts (gar) across the forehead, while some Melanesian peoples incised ornate
patterns of cuts across a man’s back, crafting totemic designs with significant pain and
bleeding. In North America, the Sun Dance impelled dancers to pierce their chests with
skewers and pull or hang on tethers, sometimes until they tore the skin.
Ritual self-injury is especially associated with shamans and with royalty. The path to
shamanic power was often paved with pain. Amazonian shamans-in-training might be
exposed to bites and stings of poisonous insects while desperately deprived of food and
sleep and dosed with drugs. An Inuit shaman, to facilitate communication with spirits,
was symbolically killed and henceforth encouraged “to see himself as a skeleton” (Eliade
1964: 62). Performing shamanic cures was also often painful, as among the !Kung or Ju/
hoansi (Kalahari desert) whose shamans endured the agonizing sensation of spiritual
force boiling up their spines. Similarly, shamans of the Kaniyan (Tamil Nadu, India)
offered their own blood during ceremonies for the god Sudalai, whose name was also the
term for a graveyard or charnel ground. The shaman drew blood from his hand or
tongue, which was blended with bananas and consumed by another spirit-possessed par-
ticipant; followers of Sudalai “believe that these blood offerings will satisfy Sudalai so
that he will not disturb their lives” (John 2008: 133). Sacrifice in Mayan and Aztec
societies was accompanied by “autosacrifice” by priests, nobles, and kings. Blood flowed
primarily from the tongue and ears as well as the arms, legs and thighs, lips, nose, fin-
gers, eyelids, and genitals by implements like obsidian blades, reeds and thorns, or, in the
case of nobles, eagle and jaguar bones; noblemen in particular would run ropes or thorny
vines through the holes to enhance the bleeding and the pain. In addition to bleeding,
they subjected themselves to many trials and injuries such as “fasting, vigils, sexual con-
tinence, … flagellation; wearing clothes made of nettles, chewing obsidian blades and
holding torches whose dripping resin burned the arms” (Graulich 2005: 307). An over-
arching concept in these societies was spiritual debt, which was repaid if not by pounds
of flesh then by ounces of blood. (See supplemental reading “Self-Mortification and Self-
Discipline in the Indian Wrestler.”)
Christianity has a well-developed tradition of ritual self-injury, from self-flagellation
(whipping) to self-crucifixion, not to mention asceticism and martyrdom, as detailed
below. “Penitential” (self-punishment) flagellation was performed in medieval Europe and
persisted in movements like the Penitente Brotherhood in New Mexico, which practiced
it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in some areas may still. Sociologist
Michael Carroll (2002) claimed that self-flagellation was introduced to Spanish colonies
as a technique of Christian conversion, as a sort of “social disciplining”—a “theatricality
of blood” that evoked a strong emotional reaction and commitment to Catholicism. The
behavior eventually institutionalized into the “Brothers of Blood” with roles and ranks of
discipline and self-mortification. More dramatically, some Filipino Catholics choose the
via crusis (way of the cross) in emulation of Jesus, allowing themselves to be nailed to a
cross during the Easter Passion (suffering) ritual; as one man playing the role of Christ
explained, “I made a vow (panata) to follow Jesus … to give thanks to God. I really
don’t know how long I’ll continue doing this, but I won’t stop until the vow I made to
God is fulfilled” (Bautista 2017: 153).
For the person who wants to devote him/herself to a life of discomfort or pain, asce-
ticism is an option. From the Greek verb askein (to work/exercise), ascetics are virtuosos
or athletes of self-mortification. In Hinduism, asceticism is an ideal life stage for old age:
after completing the work of husband and householder, a man may embark on the career
of a sannyasin, one who has “renounced all material possessions and is no longer
encumbered by social and ritual obligations”; living virtually outside of society, “he must
go through life naked, alone, wandering, celibate, begging, fasting, and silent” (Alter
1992: 318), focused on his own spiritual perfection. Other men enter this life early as a
calling and vocation, accepting the solitary burden of a sadhu (holy man). Sondra Haus-
ner, who conducted fieldwork with sadhus, described them as:
naked, or clothed in only a loin-cloth, or covered in ash from funeral pyres. Their
matted dreadlocks would hang long, covering their bodies, or be wrapped tightly
onto their heads, into turbans of human hair. They might speak only praises to God,
or remain mute out of a vow of silence. …
[T]hey might display the fruits of religious labor in a show of physical strength or
austerity. They might keep one arm perpetually raised, for example, letting their
fingernails pierce their own atrophying flesh, or lift heavy stones with their penises to
display the ability of their bodies to manipulate the material world at will.
(2007: 1)
In Hindu and related traditions, it was generally thought unseemly for a woman to
adopt the life of a renouncer, although some opportunities existed for a female sannyasin
or sannyasini. Likewise, sociologist Manisha Sethi chronicles female ascetics or sadhvi in
Jainism, a religion that imposes hardships on all its members. However, in much of India
(and elsewhere) the life of a wife and mother can be more unpleasant and burdensome
than the life of a renouncer; in their culture, a Jain woman “can be individuated only
through renunciation” (Sethi 2012: 130). Nor is the choice entirely selfless or self-
destructive: “Jain sadhvis are firmly embedded in a web of social relations” (186), invol-
ving them in the lives of laywomen through receiving gifts of food and offering in
exchange sermons, instruction, ritual leadership, and social services “that undertake
welfare activities in the field of health and education” (186)—“an ethic of care” (188) that
is consistent with a woman’s social role.
Box 11.2 Asceticism, monasticism, and discipline in medieval Christianity

In a classic study of medieval European monasticism, Talal Asad got to the heart not
only of asceticism but much of religious violence and religion itself in recognizing it as
a set of “disciplinary practices” intended to “regulate, inform, and construct religious
subjects” (1987: 159). The monastic way appeared early in Christianity, with hermits
like St. Anthony abandoning society for a lonely life in the desert. This so-called “ere-
mitic” or solitary tradition gradually evolved into a communal or “cenobitic” lifestyle
centered on the monastery, an enclosed, corporate, and institutionalized version of
asceticism. Many of these groups obeyed strict rules laid down by their founders
Benedict, Francis, and Dominic, among others, demanding labor, poverty, silence, and
long hours of prayer, etc. Asad opined that the fundamental lesson for the aspiring
monk was obedience, which was, ironically, an act of will against the will: the monk
“who learns to will obedience … is a person for whom obedience is his virtue” (159).
Monasticism, with its confinement and continuous monitoring of the monk, aimed at
“forming or re-forming moral dispositions” through highly controlled “physical and
verbal practices” (165) which are different only in degree from the basics of religion.
Specifically, the reconstructed self was built by way of distinctive emotional states—
“desire (cupiditas/caritas), humility (humilitas), remorse (contrition)—on which the cen-
tral Christian virtue of obedience to God depended” (166–67). Because sin, most
immediately experienced through the emotions and cravings of the body, was a con-
stant problem, asceticism functioned as “techniques of self-correction” (192). A proper
Christian life could perhaps be lived in society, but a fully disciplined Christian self
“was attainable only within such communities” (168).
At the extreme, a devotee may take or give her life for a religious cause. Such martyr-
dom is relatively rare across religions and most associated with Abrahamic monotheisms
(Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). From the Greek martys (witness), the martyr bore
witness to his god and society about the truth, goodness, and power of religious convic-
tions. To relinquish one’s beliefs amounted to betrayal of the divine, a life worse than
death. There are attested examples of martyrdom in the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish
history, most spectacularly the nearly one thousand suicides on the hilltop stronghold of
Masada in 73 CE. Early Christian history is replete with martyrs who died willingly
rather than abandon their faith and god, and numerous church fathers like Tertullian
commended believers to seek to die as martyrs.
Islam too has a tradition of martyrdom (shahada, witness), as evidenced by the
Qur’anic verse, “And whoever obeys Allah and the Apostle, these are with those
upon whom Allah has bestowed favors from among the prophets and the truthful and
the martyrs and the good, and a goodly company are they!” (sura 4:69). While Mus-
lims have not sought martyrdom as eagerly as Christians have, it is still a noble
destiny, and both Iranians during their 1980s war with Iraq and Islamic terrorists
have promoted martyrdom as a motivation to fight and die. For at least some Mus-
lims, martyrdom follows the historical model of Hussein or Husayn, who was killed
in the early days of the religion, which encourages Shi’ite Muslims to acts of self-
mortification. In the festival of Asura, the devout flagellate themselves across the back
with blades attached to whips to taste martyrdom (see Figure 11.2). Although women
were not free to join the men, Mary Elaine Hegland confirmed that women found
their own way to inflict pain by beating their chests and heads. During a re-enactment of
the death of Hussein:
the women started rapidly hitting their heads with the hands in agitation. They
cried out their grief to Zuljinnah [Hussein’s riderless horse] in verse with louder
voices. The reverberation of their fists knocking their heads rang out sharply,
replacing the hollow sound made by the thump, thump, thump of hundreds of
palms whacking chests.
(1998: 246)
Figure 11.2 A Shi’ite Muslim man, sitting by the side of the road, wearing white clothing with
blood stains, holding a long, bloody sword that is used for self-flagellation, during the
Day of Ashura. © Guido Dingemans, De Eindredactie/Getty Images.
Persecution
It can be argued that sacrifice and self-mortification are perpetrated against an innocent
victim, although sometimes individuals hurt themselves precisely because they believe that
they are guilty or sinful or that their mind or body deserves abuse. On the other hand,
some forms of violence explicitly depend on a conception of the guilt or malevolence of
an enemy. The first of these is persecution (from the Latin per, through and sequi, follow,
related to prosecution). There is no single definition, or single practice, of persecution,
although political asylum attorney Robert Jobe (2007) defined it as “the infliction of suf-
fering or harm upon those who differ (in race, religion, or political opinion)” in a way
regarded as offensive by the persecutors. As this characterization implies, religion is not the
only basis for persecution; indeed, the list of offensive or objectionable qualities in the eyes of
persecutors could and should include ethnicity, class, language, gender, sexual orientation,
and many others. Methods of persecution are also very diverse, from residential restrictions,
job discrimination, ridicule and insults, and public harassment to economic privations, sur-
veillance, interrogation, arrest, deportation, torture, and execution.
Two other features of persecution separate it, and religious war and ethno-religious con-
flict (to be discussed next), from the previous types of religious violence. First, persecution is
ordinarily if not necessarily group-on-group; individuals are subjected to it because they
belong to a group or share traits with a group. Every religion of course creates a community
of believers, which in turn creates a community of non-believers, essentially everyone else.
Religion, then, provides an inherent us-versus-them dynamic. However, not all religions
promote this dichotomy equally, and not all act on it aggressively. Most small-scale local
religions never expected that all humans would share their beliefs and practices; geo-
graphically and socially limited beings, forces, rituals, and symbols shaped their religious
reality. But other religions—especially translocal ones with universal, totalistic, absolute
claims to truth and morality—are prone to religion-based intolerance and conflict.
Second, persecution almost by definition depends on a power differential—typically if
not necessarily the subjects of persecution are a racial or ethnic or religious minority that
does not control the government or the mechanisms of violence like the police, prisons,
or military—and therefore it is inevitably political in nature. Religious persecution thus
stands at the confluence of religion and politics. For instance, early Christians were per-
secuted less for their doctrines than for their refusal to conform to Roman imperial
norms like sacrificing to the emperor and the gods; in consequence, many Christians died
as martyrs. Once Christianity came to power in the Empire, it returned the persecution,
both against non-Christians (“pagans”) and against heterodox Christians. That is, once
religious orthodoxy was settled by the Council of Nicaea in 325, all dissenting views
became heresy. In 380 Theodosius established penalties for religious deviation, from fines
and loss of property to banishment, torture, and death; in 385 Spanish bishop Priscillian
and six of his followers earned the honor of being the first put to death (by decapitation)
under the new edicts.
The Inquisition, founded in the 1200s, was the most institutionalized and legalistic
form of European religious persecution, aimed first at dissident (“protesting” or Protes-
tant) Christian sects and eventually at Jews and Muslims. Non-Christians who did not
convert to Christianity, or who converted but were suspected of “backsliding” or secretly
following their old religion, were often tortured and killed. Martin Luther, who barely
escaped the Inquisition himself, was no champion of tolerance: in 1530 he called for
imprisonment, torture, and death for other heretics like Anabaptists and accepted the
persecution of Jews, who have been singular targets of persecution throughout Western
history, for a variety of reasons. They have been the most populous and prominent group
of non-Christians in generally Christian societies. They sometimes held coveted positions
of wealth and power. And of course, they were often accused of being the “murderers of
Christ.” Across Europe they were segregated into ghettoes, made to wear identifying
clothing, barred from certain occupations or social positions, accused of salacious crimes
like the “blood libel” (using Christian blood in rituals), and periodically uprooted or
terrorized. And, of course, the very archetype of modern religious persecution and geno-
cide, the Nazi Holocaust, was only and overtly the “final solution” to what had been
perceived as a problem by many Western Christians for many centuries.
Other religions have conducted or suffered their persecutions. As the new religion of
Islam spread beyond Arab lands, it encountered and attacked local religions. In Persia,
Zoroastrian temples were looted, followers were expelled or forced to flee, and sacred
fires were extinguished. Arriving in India, Hindu temples and icons were destroyed (per-
secution also extends to the destruction of property and objects, since religion, as we now
understand, is very much materialized). To this day, Hindus and Muslims persecute each
other on both sides of the India–Pakistan border (see e.g. Chapter 10 on Hindutva).
Meanwhile, the religion of Sikhism in Kashmir was born, and became militarized, amidst
religious clashes on the Muslim/Hindu frontier. To dislodge the intolerable religion of
Buddhism from its territory, the Afghan Taliban demolished massive statues of the
Buddha in Bamiyan in 2001. In other Islamic lands, Baha’i, Hazara, Ahmadiyya, and
Yezidi minorities, not to mention Christians like Copts in Egypt and non-religious people
(atheists and secularists), have found themselves exposed to persecution.
As European Christians spread around the world during the colonial era, they sup-
pressed and persecuted local indigenous religions, confiscating and burning religious
objects, banning religious practices, and undermining religious beliefs. For some Western
Christian colonizers, those native religious beliefs and practices were intolerable, while
for others they were simply obstacles to colonial rule. Indeed, much resistance against
colonialism took the form of new religious movements, so colonial administrations
rightly feared indigenous belief and authority. With the rise of communist regimes in the
twentieth century, religions of all kinds were persecuted by governments in the Soviet
Union, Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere (see Chapter 12). In the
attempt to purge society of religion, functionaries of every faith were defrocked, some-
times forced to marry, publicly ridiculed and “re-educated,” and more than occasionally
killed; religious properties were seized for secular uses or simply destroyed. China con-
tinues to monitor and constrain religion inside its borders, from Christianity and new
religions like Falun Dafa (see Chapter 8) to minority ethnic religions such as Tibetan
Buddhism and Hui and Uyghur Islam—partly for their unacceptable dogmas and partly
for the political and security threat they allegedly pose.
Box 11.3 The persecution of Uyghurs in contemporary China

In 2014, China inaugurated a program of sending majority ethnic Han Chinese people
into the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang to live with local Uyghur (sometimes spelled
Uighur) inhabitants. The goal of this project, according to Darren Byler, was to “teach
culture” to the ethnic minority—and Muslim—Uyghurs and, at least as important, to
conduct surveillance on them. Since the start of the initiative, more than one million
Chinese civilians have joined the effort:
to aid the military and police in their campaign by occupying the homes of the
region’s Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, and undertaking programs of
indoctrination and surveillance, while presenting themselves as older siblings of
the men and women they might then decide to consign to [prison and re-educa-
tion] camps.
(2018: 2)
A stated rationale for placing Chinese “relatives” among the Uyghur is the supposed
threat of Islamic “terrorism, ethnic separatism, and religious extremism” in the region
(2). Accordingly, these agents of Chinese culture and power observe, take notes on,
and report to authorities the activities of their little brothers and sisters, down to see-
mingly harmless but indicative behaviors like using a Muslim greeting (saying Assa-
lamu Alaykum or “peace be upon you”), owning a Qur’an, praying on Friday or fasting
during Ramadan, or, in the case of women, wearing a dress that is too long and
modest. Chinese visitors also test them by offering them cigarettes or beer, attempting
to shake the hand of the opposite sex, asking them to play cards or watch movies, or
serving them meat without identifying the source (which violates Islamic halal dietary
rules). Whether or not Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are a terror threat, they are
certainly an impediment to Chinese power and to unbridled economic development,
and Byler recognizes this present-day persecution—which includes detention and
allegedly torture in prison camps—as a kind of internal colonialism and “violent
paternalism, a type of state-directed ‘care’” that effects the “colonial eradication of
unwanted difference. It invaded the most intimate aspects of Uyghur and Kazakh life,
fractured relationships between neighbors and inside homes” (11). Remarkably, this
policy that he also calls “terror capitalism” and “human engineering” is favored and
praised by Han big brothers and sisters, who believe they are offering the wonders of
Chinese culture and secular modernity to the backward natives, which is “an unques-
tioned good” (7).
A 2020 report by the Pew Research Center concludes that the incidence of governments
imposing restrictions on religion is on the rise. Most of the restrictive states are in Asia,
the Pacific, or the Middle East, including 90 percent of the latter. The countries with the
highest scores on religious restriction are China in first place followed by Iran, Malaysia,
the Maldives, and Tajikistan. Myanmar (Burma), in tenth position, has pursued a parti-
cularly high-profile persecution of its Muslim minority Rohingya people since 2017, who
have been reduced to “subhuman life” characterized by killing, rape, and destruction of
homes and property, according to anthropologist and Fellow of Oxford University’s
Refugee Studies Center, Nasir Uddin (2020). Such policies and practices are almost
guaranteed to radicalize victims and instigate further violence and terrorism.
Ethno-religious conflict
As a modular social phenomenon, religion easily becomes intertwined with other iden-
tities and interests. For many peoples and societies, their religion is intimately linked, if
not coterminous, with their ethnic identity, and in multi-religious and multi-ethnic states
this can pit them against members of other religions and ethnicities, especially if power,
wealth, and other social resources are unevenly distributed. Ethno-religious differences
can foster segregation or competition, but they can also burst into open conflict. In such
cases, although religion is part of the issue and religious groups form the competitors or
combatants, it would be simplistic to assume that religion is the cause of the trouble or
that the parties are “fighting about religion.” Ethno-religious conflicts are seldom about
differences in religious doctrine and practice alone, although partisans may criticize and
condemn each other’s faith. Religion in these circumstances is more a marker of the
antagonists than the real point of contention between them.
Nevertheless, religion is an element in some of the main ethnic conflicts of the twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries. Catholic versus Protestant in Northern Ireland,
Christian versus Muslim in Bosnia, Hindu and Muslim versus Sikh in Kashmir, Hindu
versus Buddhist in Sri Lanka, Sunni versus Shi’ite in Iraq—in all these cases, the belli-
gerents are distinguished by religion. Still, it would be more accurate and useful to view
these conflicts as clashes of communities and of interest groups rather than of churches.
A clear example is the sectarian violence since 1969 in Northern Ireland. Protestants and
Catholics were locked in conflict occasionally verging on civil war for almost three dec-
ades but not over matters of religion. In fact, they were not different religions but
denominations of the same religion; in the United States and elsewhere, Protestants and
Catholics coexist without collapsing into sectarian strife. Since the same doctrinal differ-
ences hold in Northern Ireland as in the United States, those differences were not the
major or real source of friction. Rather, being Protestant or Catholic in the Northern
Irish context made a critical difference in terms of economic and political interests. For
one, Protestants—a two-thirds majority in the region—tended to be “unionists,” that is,
preferring to maintain the union of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom; Catholics
tended to favor disassociation from the UK and integration with the Republic of Ireland.
One obvious reason for hostility was that Catholics composed a majority of the Republic
but a minority in Northern Ireland; conversely, Protestants, a two-thirds majority in
Northern Ireland, would become a minority in a unified Irish state. In addition, Protes-
tants occupied most of the positions of power and controlled most of the wealth in the
north. Catholics perceived themselves as an underclass, with segregated neighborhoods,
schools, etc., based on their religion. What originated as a “civil rights” struggle, after a
failed attempt at secession from the UK, eventually escalated and transformed into an
“ethnic” conflict.
Not every ethnic conflict has a prominent religious component—the genocide of Tutsis
by Hutus in Rwanda in the 1990s did not—but many do, and in such cases the escalation
and hardening, if not the outright invention, of “ethnic” claims and identities is the usual
course. In Kashmir, a contested region north of India, Sikh nationalists hoped for a Sikh
homeland, but both Indian/Hindu and Pakistani/Muslim authorities claimed the area as
their own. Antagonisms led eventually to an Indian attack on the Sikhs’ Golden Temple
at Amritsar in 1984, which led subsequently to the assassination of India’s prime minis-
ter, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards, which predictably led to anti-Sikh riots
across India in late 1984. In the Middle East, tensions between Jews and Muslims have
seethed since the nineteenth century, as Jews began immigrating to re-occupy their his-
torical homeland. When the state of Israel was declared, local Arab-Muslims (because
not all Arabs are Muslims, nor are all Muslims Arabs) launched a campaign to crush the
state, sparking a series of wars and the formation of various violent extremist groups like
the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Hezbollah dedicated to the destruc-
tion of Israel. In this case, issues of sovereignty, land, wealth, and political power blend
with historical religious differences and hatreds.
Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia, is another site where religious differences contributed to
ethnic conflict. Many Bosnians had been Muslim since the Turkish invasions of the four-
teenth century, while Serbs held tightly to their Eastern Orthodox faith and Croats to the
northwest kept their Catholicism. The state of Yugoslavia, created in 1918, attempted to
minimize “national” and “ethnic” differences, but by the 1990s Yugoslavia began to disin-
tegrate along national lines. Five “nations”—Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, and
Macedonians—were recognized, but Muslims were not considered a nation. Even so, Mus-
lims were allowed to establish some religious institutions, like the office of Reis-ul-Ulema
(the national head of Muslims) and vaqf (charitable) organizations. With the emergence of
Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and elsewhere, Christian Yugoslavs suspected Bosnian
Muslim sympathies and motives. The Serb thinker Dragos Kalajic insisted that Muslims did
not belong to “the European family of nations” but were culturally and genetically the pro-
duct of foreign invasion and race mixing. Fears increased such that in 1983 Alija Izetbegovic
(later the President of Bosnia) and twelve other Muslims were put on trial for “conspiring to
transform Bosnia into an Islamistan,” and all were found guilty. When the wealthier repub-
lics of Croatia and Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s with fairly little
resistance, Bosnia decided to follow, declaring independence in 1992. However, the “ethnic
composition” of Bosnia—roughly 45 percent Muslim, 34 percent Serb, and 17 percent
Croat—made it largely ungovernable. With Izetbegovic as president, both Serbs and Croats
dreaded Bosnia as a Muslim polity with a captive Serb or Croat minority, so Bosnian Serb
and Croat militias formed their own autonomous regions. Between the ethnic militias and
the Yugoslav army (which was basically an instrument of Serbia by this time), a policy of
clearing Muslims (and sometimes Croats and other minorities) out of once or future Serb
land was adopted, a policy known as “ethnic cleansing.” The outcome was not only a near-
genocide but the near-destruction of a country and a culture. (See supplemental reading
“Ethno-Religious Conflict in Sri Lanka.”)
Religious war
As some of the previous examples attest, the boundary between ethnic conflict and war is
vague and porous. Ideally, war differs from ethnic conflict in that both parties to war are
governments or states (although in an ethnic conflict, frequently at least one party is the
government/state). War then tends to refer to a prolonged, coordinated contest between
states via their military institution (an army) to conquer, often to occupy the land of, and
sometimes to vanquish or even exterminate each other. Not all societies have been orga-
nized politically into states, so it is controversial whether war is a universal form of
violence; it is virtually universal, and may be a defining trait, of states, though. And, since
medieval times at least, states have been closely associated with translocal religions,
especially monotheistic religions.
Both state politics and translocal/monotheistic religion are usually centralized and
exclusionary, clearly demarcating an “us” and “them.” As the supposed sole possessor of
the truth and therefore in mortal competition with all other religions (local and translo-
cal), such religions find themselves in alliance with or possession of the apparatus of
state, including the military. Islam is the religion most closely linked by most people with
the doctrine of holy war or jihad, but the Christian concept of crusade means the same
thing. Both extend the ancient Hebrew doctrine of milhemet mitzvah or commanded/
obligatory war, in which their god ordered them to battle, making such war not only
mandatory but holy. Like later Islamic practice, ancient Hebrew war required an offer of
peace to the enemy, which of course meant surrender and servitude; if the foe refused the
“peace offer,” the godly army could destroy them or enslave them righteously. Unlike
some later versions of holy war, the ancient Hebrew variety was not meant for conver-
sion but for eliminating “abomination” and keeping the religion integrated and pure
against foreign influence.
Jihad, the widely known word for Islamic holy war, actually does not mean “war” in
Arabic (which is qital) but rather “struggle,” including struggle against one’s own
immoral self and against the enemies of religion. On occasion, jihad can and does employ
real weapons and cause real death, and the history of Islam is full of wars, from the early
skirmishes of Muhammad and his companions (like the ill-fated Battle of Karbala) to
conquests across North Africa and east into India. Muslims frequently found themselves
at war with Christianity, capturing the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Con-
stantinople (renamed Istanbul), in 1453 and threatening Vienna in 1683. As with perse-
cution, in many instances Islamic combatants saw military violence as defensive, namely
defense against persecution, for instance defending themselves from invasion during the
Christian Crusades (which the Christians also saw as defensive).
The Sikhs of Kashmir and Punjab valued war in the name of the faith. Sikhism (from
the Hindi word for “disciple”) was born in struggle, specifically the struggle between
Hindus and Muslims in sixteenth-century India; a guru named Nanak proffered a new
religious vision and movement that accepted aspects of both. However, first Muslim
rulers and later Hindu authorities opposed and suppressed the religion, martyring the
guru Arjan in 1606. In 1699, the last human guru, Gobind Singh, commissioned a military
wing of religious purists, the Khalsa or “company of the pure.” As a contemporary Sikh
website expressed it:
Readiness for the supreme sacrifice or of offering one’s head on the palm of one’s
hand to the Guru is an essential condition laid down by the Gurus for becoming a
Khalsa Sikh. Seeking death, not for personal glory, winning reward or going to
heaven, but for the purpose of protecting the weak and the oppressed is what made
the Khalsa brave and invincible. This has become a traditional reputation of the
Khalsa. Right from the times of the Gurus till the last India-Pakistan conflict (1971),
the Sikhs have demonstrated that death in the service of truth, justice and country, is
part of their character and their glorious tradition. They do not seek martyrdom,
they attain it. Dying is the privilege of heroes. It should, however, be for an approved
or noble cause.
(Gateway to Sikhism 2005)
Many religions in addition to Sikhism have not only justified war but instituted their
own warrior classes, like the various orders of knights in Christendom. Many of these
orders were formed by the Church for or during the Crusades, such as the Order of St.
John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta, the Teutonic Knights, and the famous Knights
Templar. In medieval Japan, groups of fighting Buddhist monks (sohei or “priest war-
riors”) were created. Wars between monks and monasteries broke out in the tenth cen-
tury, for which the temple of Enryakuji assembled the country’s first standing army of
monks. Perhaps the greatest of these Buddhist armies was the Ikko-Ikki (Ikko meaning
“single-minded” or “devoted” and Ikki meaning “league” or “mob”), which conquered an
area around Kyoto in the 1500s. As military historian Tristan Dugdale-Pointon (2005)
described it, “With their belief in a paradise waiting for them the warrior monks of the
Ikko-Ikki were fearless and eager warriors proving very useful to whichever side they
were aiding at the time. In battle they would often use mass chanting (nembutsu) to
strike fear into their enemies and improve their own morale.”
Of course, each religion defines its notion of religious war consistent with its other reli-
gious principles. According to legal scholar Surya Subedi, “there is no justification in Hin-
duism for any war against foreigners or people of other faiths” (2003: 339). Yet, in keeping
with the Hindu concept of dharma, there was a distinction between dharma yuddha or
righteous war (war that follows dharma) and adharma yuddha or unrighteous war. Right-
eous war obeyed a number of rules, including a formal declaration; prohibitions against
certain weapons; bans on harming women, children, the elderly, or soldiers in retreat; and
standards of humane treatment of prisoners. Most distinctively, Hinduism furnished a war-
rior caste, the kshatriya (like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita tale above), and only that military
class should make war, thus limiting war’s size and scope. In other words, what made war
“righteous” in classical Hinduism was not that its cause was holy but that it conformed to
expectations of righteous behavior, in particular “to prohibit inequality in fighting and to
protect those who exhibit helplessness” (357). War was not to be waged “to spread the
Hindu religion or to contain the spread of another religion” (346).
In today’s world, especially when extremist religious groups seldom control the state
and its machinery of war, religious warfare on the scale of the Crusades or the religious
wars of seventeenth-century Europe is rare. Instead, religion more often figures in what
scholars call “small wars,” asymmetrical confrontations in which one side (ordinarily the
religious antagonist) is smaller, weaker, and less well-armed than the other (ordinarily
the domestic state or a foreign state). From the perspective of the larger, stronger, and
better-armed party, such aggression is often branded as “terrorism.” Although there is no
single authoritative definition, the great terrorism scholar, Walter Laqueur, defined it as
“the use of covert violence by a group for political ends” (1987: 72), while the US State
Department designated it as “politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-
combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to
influence an audience” (Ruby 2002: 10).
What these two definitions share is an emphasis that terrorism is political but also in
some way illegitimate. Proper war is declared and fought by legitimate authorities (again,
governments or states) and follows legitimate rules (e.g., no targeting of civilians, no
torture of prisoners, no use of forbidden tactics like roadside bombs or hijacked airliners,
and so forth). This raises the important anthropological point that war is rule-bound but
also that these rules are someone’s rules, that other groups and societies may not accept
the supposed rules or the terms of war (for instance, they may define “combatant” and
“civilian” differently or not make the distinction at all).
For these and other reasons, terrorism is less a technical term than a cultural judg-
ment. That is, if the fundamentalist is the repugnant other (see Chapter 10), then the
terrorist is the deadliest and most repugnant other. Terrorism, especially in the form of
suicide attacks, seems to lack all sense and sanity. It is imperative to understand at the
outset that terrorism is neither exclusively Muslim nor exclusively modern. During the
Roman occupation of Jerusalem, Jewish activists known as sicarii (for the short swords
they carried) assassinated Roman soldiers and officials and Jewish collaborators,
hoping to dishearten the occupiers. The first explicit appearance of the term “terror-
ism” occurred among French revolutionaries in the 1790s, who deployed frightening
force in pursuit of a republic of virtue. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ter-
rorists from the political left shot and bombed targets (mostly political officials) in
campaigns to radically reform society; examples include Shining Path (Peru), Revolu-
tionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, Colombia), and the Red Brigades and
Baader Meinhof Group (Europe), which were predominantly secular. By the late twen-
tieth century, the political right adopted similar tactics, including governments in
Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Perhaps most influential was asymmetrical and surreptitious violence in the cause
of independence or liberation. Algerians used bombs and shootings against French
colonial occupiers in the 1950s; the Irish Republican Army (IRA) did likewise against
the British when The Troubles started in 1969, as did the Tamils of Sri Lanka against
the Sinhalese. The latter two examples finally evince a religious connection, although
religious identities were very much enmeshed with political, economic, and territorial
issues.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, historical amnesia made terrorism seem the
monopoly of Islamic fundamentalists. Further, for good reasons, anthropological research
into Islamic violence is difficult and dangerous. First, fundamentalist/terrorist organiza-
tions are unlikely to welcome academic researchers. But second, as Lebanese-Australian
anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2003) warned, there is strong pressure in times of war not
to understand the enemy and not to acknowledge the common humanity between us and
them (what he called exighophobia or fear of explanation and homoiophobia or fear of
being the same).
Even so, Hage pointed the way toward an anthropology of religious terrorism (speci-
fically, suicide bombing), suggesting that we begin with “an examination of the processes
of recruitment, including the structure of the organizations and their recruiting and
selection methods” (2003: 70). We would also investigate:
the technology of violence used in suicide bombings; manufacturing, distribution,

and modes of training; the art of handling, wearing, and detonating explosives; how
to infiltrate Israeli territory, what networks of infiltration exist, and the art of pas-
sing as a Jew; how to target and approach one’s target; the art of staying cool as the
time for detonating the explosives approaches; and so forth. It is likely that this
whole process is grounded in an exceptionally masculine culture that also needs to be
examined.
(70)
Finally, we need to recognize the political nature of the behavior and of the groups “for
whom terrorism is a core political practice” (70–1) in circumstances of profound imbal-
ance of power.
More than anything, an anthropology of religious terrorist violence demands
attention to the culture and the lived experience out of which it grows. In the case of
Palestinian suicide bombers, this means “the daily horrors, humiliations, and degra-
dations that constitute colonized Palestinian society” which lead them to develop “a
‘brutish,’ dehumanized, abstract conception of Israeli human beings” (75). Nasser
Abufarha went deeper, plumbing the “cultural poetics” of Palestinian “human
bombs.” Naturally, the perpetrators did not speak of “terrorism” or “suicide bomb-
ing” but instead of ’amaliyyat istishhadiyya or “operations of martyrdom” (2009: 2).
Just as ascetics see their path as discipline or exercise, so “strapping oneself with
explosives and blowing oneself up in a crowd of the ‘enemy’ is referred to in Pales-
tine as al-’amal alistishhadi (the work of martyrdom)” (11). Abufarha clearly appre-
ciated the affinity between terrorism on the one hand and martyrdom or (self-)
sacrifice on the other. Earlier we explored how sacrifice is about converting death
into life, liberating and circulating fertility and potency. For Palestinian martyr-mur-
derers, the “taking of their own lives in the performance asserts their independence
and self-reliance”; in response to the degrading, dehumanizing conditions of their
existence: “the death of the sacrificer is conceived as a form of life or a better life
that makes death in sacrifice not something to be feared but rather an aspired form
of living. In this view, death is about living, not dying” (3)—and about saving the life
of their culture, their land, and their nation.
Anthropologists have done similar, although seldom so eloquent, analyses of other
Islamic “terrorist” groups. Patricia Omidian (2011) did fieldwork in Afghanistan under
the Taliban, and Amineh Ahmed related the group (taliban in Arabic simply means
“students”) to the culture of the Pukhtun (usually called Pashtuns), specifically their
code or way of life known as Pukhtunwali. The four crucial aspects of Pukhtunwali
according to Ahmed are honor, revenge, hospitality, and offering refuge—all of which
were highly irritated by the region’s history of “unmercifully incessant periods of tur-
moil and devastation” (2000/2001: 88) from ancient invasions to British colonialism and
Russian occupation and culminating in American conquest. Such history, and the
mobilization of local resistance, cannot be overestimated in the formation of extremist
groups.
To mention just one more example, history, culture, and contemporary conditions con-
spire in West Africa to produce the so-called Boko Haram movement. Roundly condemned
for taking school girls hostage, Boko Haram (popularly translated as “Western education is
forbidden” but more accurately known as ahl al-sunna wa-l-jama’a wa-l-hijra or “the people
of the tradition and the community and the escape [from the wicked secular society],”) is
“deeply rooted in northern Nigeria’s specific economic, religious and political develop-
ment” and likely to persist as long as “social injustice, corruption and economic mis-
management do not change” (Loimeier 2012: 137). In an extended study of the
background of Boko Haram, Scott MacEachern (2018) relates it to two centuries of
Islamic activism starting with the Sokoto caliphate of the early 1800s, through British
colonialism with its modern secular schools; the influence of Saudi Wahhabism, al-
Qaeda, and al-Shabaab (“the youths,” a movement in Somalia); and a weak and corrupt
government. Mohammed Yusuf transformed the so-called Nigerian Taleban into an
insurrectionist movement that attacked police stations and gradually absorbed the prac-
tices of improvised explosives, suicide bombings, and mass kidnappings—all in the name
of a more authentic and moral society.
Conclusion
Much good comes from religion; much harm comes from it too. And much harm
also comes from sources other than religion. However, we find that the character-
istics of religion—its group nature, its authority structures, its identity aspects, its
practical interests, and its specific ideologies—can be and have been particularly
productive of violence. And not only producing but justifying, valorizing, and vir-
tually demanding violence. As the not-at-all anti-religious philosopher Blaise Pascal
once said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.”
Violence, aggression, and destructiveness are not only part of the human condition but
part of the natural condition. It is no surprise that religion would take notice of it—and
would more than occasionally take advantage of it. Religion is diverse, ambiguous, cul-
tural, and modular, and violence is equally so. Alloyed as they can be, they produce a
stunning and alarming array of religion-inspired and often enough religion-sanctioned
violence. Some of this violence afflicts “innocents,” namely sacrifice, self-mortification,
and some kinds of crime and abuse; other religious violence punishes the guilty and
deserving, such as persecution, ethno-religious conflict, and war and terrorism. Violence,
therefore, is neither innate nor inimical to religion. Rather, both violence and religion are
native to humans, and they often find their way together.
1 How and why do anthropologists consider violence to be culturally constructed?
2 What does it mean to say that sacrifice is an “economy of life,” and how does this
help us to understand it—and religion in general—in a new light?
3 What is self-mortification? What diverse forms does it take, and what individual and
collective functions does it serve?
4 How is religious persecution a kind of pursuing and punishing a religious “enemy”?
5 How do religious, political, economic, and ethnic variables become entangled in
instances of religious war and ethno-religious conflict?
Religious Violence: Crime and Abuse
Predicting Human Sacrifice: A Cross-Cultural Survey
The Circulatory Cosmos of the Runa of Andean Peru
Self-Mortification and Self-Discipline in the Indian Wrestler
Ethno-Religious Conflict in Sri Lanka
12 Secularism and irreligion
There is a definite stigma against non-belief in Islam, which labels it as kufr (denial,
rejection, faithlessness) and ilhad (deviation) and which may “not only evoke strong
condemnation but can have severe social and legal consequences and even be punishable
by death” (van Nieuwkerk 2019: 3). Yet, despite these pressures and the certainty of
Ernest Gellner and others that Islam is invulnerable to secularization, Karin van Nieuw-
kerk finds that over the past decade the number of Egyptians identifying as “not reli-
gious” increased from 3 percent to 11 percent (4). And these dissenters and disbelievers
have become more public. There are YouTube channels of Egyptian atheists like Black
Ducks (equivalent to the English phrase “black swans”) and Free Mind, as well as Face-
book pages including “Egyptians without Religion,” “Egyptian Atheists Community,”
and “Arab Atheists Magazine.” Nor is this development brand new: van Nieuwkerk
relates that Isma’il Adham published an essay in 1930 titled “Why I am an Atheist” and
Farag Fuda and Naguib Mahfonz were prominent secularists in the 1990s (both tragically
murdered for their convictions). Particularly since the Arab Spring movement (2010–12)
against corrupt and dictatorial governments, non-religion has intensified: along with
“political values such as freedom of expression, democracy, [and] freedom of thought and
conscience,” a growing number of young people “demanded the separation of state and
religion” (11). Further, religious leaders were tarnished in the eyes of many protesters
“because ‘they had chosen the wrong side of the revolution’ by supporting the regime”
(12). Intellectual and political freedom had other consequences for religion: some Egyp-
tians “contest religious authorities and the idea of God. They perceive contradictions in
the Qur’an, entertain doubts about the exemplary character of the prophet Muhammad,
and point at scientific theories that totally contradict religious explanations” (13).
Women are attracted to non-belief, especially as repudiation of unequal gender relations
emanating from religion, although escaping religion remains “much more difficult for
women” (27) because of the accusation of immorality that accompanies it. Being la dini
(non-religious) is facilitated by other social changes such as higher education and sharing
apartments with other young people rather than living at home, freeing them from par-
ental supervision.
While religion continues to exert force (sometimes literally; see Chapter 11) in con-
temporary society, many people are “losing their religion” as societies undergo various pro-
cesses known as secularization. According to a 2020 global survey, those avowing no religion
represented the majority in twelve countries, such as China (86.8 percent), Estonia (78.9
percent), Czech Republic, Vietnam, Japan, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, and
Hungary (Balazka 2020). Lack of religious affiliation is also correlated with education and
urbanization but is relatively stable across age groups. Collectively, men are more likely than
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-12
women to disavow religion, and—as the partial list indicates—Europe has some of the
highest levels of religious indifference, so much so that the continent is sometimes referred to
as “post-Christian.” Even the stubbornly religious United States has witnessed a surge in
non-religion: in 2019, 26 percent of Americans were unaffiliated with a religion, although still
only 4 percent called themselves atheists (Pew Research Center 2019).
The scale and social significance of irreligion or secularism would seem to make it an
urgent subject for anthropology, which has certainly investigated groups and subcultures
of much less than 26 or even 4 percent of a population. Yet, Talal Asad admonished us
that “anthropologists have paid scarcely any attention to the idea of the secular” (2003:
17). As proof, he cited a survey of syllabi for anthropology of religion courses conducted
by Andrew Buckser for the American Anthropological Association, showing that the
topic of secularism “makes no appearance in the collection. Nor is it treated in any of the
well-known introductory texts” (22). Still Asad insisted, “Any discipline that seeks to
understand ‘religion’ must also try to understand its other” (22).
Things are not as bleak as they were at the time of Asad’s pronouncement, nor even at
the time of the first edition of our textbook. Along with the anthropology of Christianity
and of Islam (see Chapter 9), calls arose for an anthropology of secularism (e.g. Cannell
2010), and in 2011 The Australian Journal of Anthropology published an entire issue
dedicated to the topic of secularism.
An anthropological perspective on secularism or irreligion or atheism (which are not,
as we will see shortly, synonymous) is important not only because there is a lot of it in
the world. Just as anthropology has insisted that “religion” is not a single simple thing,
so an anthropological angle on non-religion reveals that it is complex and diverse, as well
as holistically related to other aspects of society. Additionally, if the concept or category
of “religion” is socially constructed, then not only is the concept or category of “non-
religion” or “anti-religion” equally constructed, but the two concepts or categories are
mutually constructed. That is to say, by identifying or creating an object or space called
“religion,” an accompanying object or space of “non-religion” appears, and, as the case
of Egypt illustrates, secularism or irreligion may emerge in relation to or reaction against
the state.
The anthropology of secularism

There are various reasons why the non-religious component of society has been com-
paratively ignored. One is that it has not tended to form a distinct localized community,
so the idea of doing fieldwork has been challenging. It has also been presumed that the
component is so small that it merits little attention, but this is conspicuously untrue and
would be anthropologically irrelevant. Worse, it has been presumed that religion is the
default position of any society and of humanity as a whole; at best, irreligion is nothing
more than a lack of religion with no social qualities of its own, and at the worst, again as
in Egypt, non-belief is judged as unnatural, antisocial, or literally inconceivable. If it
exists at all, it is something to be eliminated by proselytization and conversion, if not by
persecution and holy war.
Despite all of these obstacles and occlusions, the social sciences including anthropology
have been attentive to non-belief. As early as 1971 sociologist Colin Campbell introduced a
“sociology of irreligion.” It took another twenty-five years for Jack Goody to emphasize that
secularism, including “explicit forms of skepticism and agnosticism (even atheism)” (1996:
667), is not unique to the modern West. We can find secularist/skeptical ideas in ancient
Secularism and irreligion 281
Greece, which “already had a concept of agnostos” (that about which knowledge is una-
vailable or impossible, from a- for no/without and gnosis for knowledge), and “God himself
belonged in this category” (668). One of the first to express such thoughts was the sixth-
century BCE poet Theognis, who was troubled by the apparent injustice in the world. Xeno-
phanes struggled with a similar problem: how could the gods, authors of all good and right,
act so decidedly badly in myths? “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all sorts of
actions which when done by men are disreputable and deserving of blame—such lawless
deeds as theft, adultery, and mutual deception” (quoted in Wheelwright 1966: 33). One
possible though disturbing answer was that the myths and the poets were wrong.
In addition to problems of justice, pre-Socratic “natural philosophers” began to ponder
how the universe might work—even how it might have originated—without reliance on
religion. Their aim was “systematically to explain nature in terms of nature, instead of
referring to the supposed will or caprice of supernatural beings” (Wheelwright 1966: 41).
But ancient Greek society was no more tolerant of such musing than modern Egyptian:
Anaxogoras (fifth century BCE) was the first man in recorded history to be indicted for
atheism, and a law was drafted around 438 BCE to “denounce those who do not believe in
the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky” such as planets or
meteors (quoted in Hecht 2003: 10). It was the fate of Socrates to be the only Athenian
victim of capital punishment for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth” by asking too
many impertinent questions.
After the conquest of the Greek cities by Alexander and then the rise of Rome, a new
cosmopolitan society and lifestyle emerged, with new philosophies such as Cynicism, the
distrust of all authority and often the flouting of all convention, and Stoicism, a philo-
sophy that combined rationality with tough uncomplaining resignation to the tribulations
of life. Epicureanism, commonly associated with mindless pleasure-seeking, taught that
people could be happy in the present world if they were freed from error, mistaken
beliefs, and fears. The founder, Epicurus, posed one of the most enduring questions in the
history of religion: if there is an all-powerful, all-good god, why does he allow evil and
suffering? Finally, Skeptics like Pyrrho and his successor Carneades argued that indivi-
duals should avoid firm beliefs and values. Certainty was impossible, since the opposite
case was always possible; nothing could really be known, so one should suspend or avoid
all decisions or judgments. Carneades went further, effectively debunking most of the
classic arguments for god(s), including personal experience, design, tradition or common
belief, and the “goodness” of god(s).
But Goody did not stop with the Greeks. He noted that the potential for unbelief was
acknowledged, although condemned, in the Hebrew scriptures: Ecclesiastes reads some-
thing like an epicurean or stoic text. Goody also located skepticism in Babylonian and
Egyptian writings, in non-Western traditions, and in tribal societies. He cited a medieval
Indian author, Madhavacarya, who speculated that there “was no God, no soul, and no
survival after death” (673), reckoned that Confucius was agnostic about the supernatural
realm (and that the Buddha expressed disinterest in gods), and claimed that Evans-
Pritchard found “faith tempered by skepticism” among the Azande (677).
The language of secularism

The social-scientific study of secularism entails the same activities as the study of religion,
among which are organizing typologies, clarifying terminology, and, particularly for
anthropology, describing and analyzing the diversity of lived and embodied experiences.
For instance, there is a common distinction between “negative atheism” (disputing the
proofs advanced by theists for their gods) and “positive atheism” (offering proofs for the
non-existence of gods). Psychologist and religion scholar Christopher Silver et al. in 2014
expanded this classification to six types of “non-belief”—intellectual or academic atheists,
activists, seeker-agnostics, anti-theists (who are not only without but opposed to religion),
non-theists (those disinterested in religion altogether, sometimes dubbed “apatheist”), and
ritual atheists who participate in religious activities without “belief.”
There have been other proposals for typologies, but the very business of categorization
highlights the issue of the terminology of secularism—that is, first and foremost, that
atheism and secularism are not synonymous. Indeed, the word “secular” did not origin-
ally mean “non-religious” or “worldly” in contrast to “spiritual.” From the Latin saecu-
lum, secular refers not to “place” (like the physical world versus heaven) but time;
modern statisticians for instance use the phrase “secular trend” to describe long-term
processes, with no religious connotations. The Catholic Church also uses the phrase
“secular clergy” for parish priests and other office-holders who do not adopt the ascetic
life of the monastery (see Chapter 11) but minister to the everyday needs of their flock;
Eastern Orthodoxy likewise calls their married priests and deacons “secular clergy,” as
opposed to their celibate monks. Obviously, “secular” does not necessarily require
absence of religion or hostility to religion.
Secular in its current sense was coined only in the mid-nineteenth century by George
Jacob Holyoake, a British non-believer, who characterized secularism as a:
series of principles intended for the guidance of those who find Theology indefinite,
or inadequate, or deem it unreliable. It replaces theology, which mainly regards life
as a sinful necessity, as a scene of tribulation through which we pass to a better
world. Secularism rejoices in this life, and regards it as the sphere of those duties
which educate men to fitness for any future and better life, should such transpire.
(1871: 11)
Another term available for centuries in the West is freethought, which like secularism
did not initially equal irreligion. Rather, a freethinker came to her own conclusions about
religion, for instance how to interpret the Bible. By extension, of course, one might come
to the conclusion that the Bible or all religion is “indefinite, inadequate, or unreliable,”
and freethought today tends to be a euphemism for religious disbelief.
Yet a third term is humanism, which came into use during the Renaissance (fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries) and entered English in the 1500s. By no means intrinsically anti-reli-
gious, Renaissance humanists like Erasmus (an ordained Catholic priest) and Petrarch read
and promoted classic Greek and Roman literature, devoted themselves to practical matters
and the study of nature, and tended to support religious tolerance. Humanism in the twenty-
first century, as defined by the American Humanist Association (americanhumanist.
org/what-is-humanism) and its third Humanist Manifesto, is “a progressive philoso-
phy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and
responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater
good.” It further insists that knowledge “is derived by observation, experimentation,
and rational analysis” instead of religious authority and ethics and morals evolve
“from human need and interest as tested by experience.”
As seen previously, skepticism is an ancient term for a questioning attitude, a desire to
verify claims for oneself; it does not demand the rejection of all knowledge claims, and
one can be skeptical about any subject, not only religion. Later, Thomas Huxley, a con-
temporary and defender of Darwin, invented the term agnosticism, which many people
wrongly think means indecision or the impossibility of knowledge. Forged in 1869 out of
the Greek gnosis, knowledge, Huxley explained his intention thus:
Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous
application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as, in
matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other
considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend the con-
clusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a
man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce
evidence which logically justifies that certainty.
(1902: 245–46, emphasis added)
In this sense, agnosticism is not an intermediate position between belief and disbelief but
is virtually identical to skepticism and to reason itself—the process by which we gather
our facts and arrive at our conclusions.
Atheism (a-, no and theos, god) in modern parlance means literally and solely the
absence of belief in god(s). There are two important provisos to this definition. First, in
the strictest sense, it only disputes god(s); it would be logically consistent, although not
common, to disbelieve in god(s) but still believe in spirits, dead ancestors, or other reli-
gious beings or forces. In fact, many of the religions discussed in prior chapters of this
book lack a god-concept (in favor of animistic spirits, ancestral spirits, animatistic forces,
and/or other beings). Second, contemporary Western atheism, operating in a theistic/
Christian environment, tends to oppose god(s), while many religions merely lack god(s).
It is controversial but valid to class both as a-theistic, since the term does not assert
antagonism to or “disbelief” in god(s) but equally embraces unawareness of the very idea.
More than a few other terms circulate too, as scholars and activists struggle to orga-
nize a field of research and of social and political action. Religious partisans may call
non-believers unchurched, presumably on the notion that those non-believers have not
been subjected to sufficient religious education; meanwhile, various non-religious
partisans proposed to call themselves universists or, condescendingly, brights. Some
researchers have suggested the term nones for those who acknowledge no affiliation
to a particular religion, recognizing that not belonging to a religion is not equivalent
to rejecting religious beliefs. Materialism holds that only matter exists in the world
and that “spirit” does not exist (or is perhaps some quality of matter); rationalism
insists that our ideas and conclusions should be guided by reason and evidence and
that any claim that fails by those standards (including and primarily religious claims)
should be dismissed. Non-religion and, for Colin Campbell, irreligion are two more
ungraceful options. And a plethora of scholars have gathered around the term unbe-
lief, as with the Understanding Unbelief project at the University of Kent (research.
kent.ac.uk/understandingunbelief) which sponsored van Nieuwkerk’s Egypt work.
Gordon Stein in The Encyclopedia of Unbelief characterized it as an umbrella term
for “heresy, blasphemy, rejection of belief, atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and
rationalism” (1985: xv), which covers a lot of ground—too much, as “heresy” is an
unorthodox belief from the perspective of orthodoxy, and most heretics would recoil
at the accusation that they lack belief. (See supplemental reading “A Secular Bible
Movement in the United Kingdom.”)
Secularization theory
Despite the debates and mutual disdain surrounding secularism and religion, seculariza-
tion has been a hallmark of sociological and anthropological thinking for more than a
century. The French philosophes of the eighteenth century were already intensely critical
of religion and expected and desired, even plotted, its decline and demise. The early
sociologist Auguste Comte divided human history into three epochs, with the “theologi-
cal” stage being the first and most primitive, followed by the “metaphysical” stage of
philosophy and rational inquiry. Comte felt that by the mid-1800s the third “positive”
stage had arrived, distinguished by science and the pursuit of facts, which would dispense
with any lingering theological or metaphysical speculation. (See supplemental reading
“Formations of the Conflict between Science and Religion: Unification Church, ISKCON,
and Heaven’s Gate.”)
Karl Marx advanced the most confident if not militant secularization theory. In his
dialectical materialist view of history, each society is a formation founded upon its
material/economic base. Religion is an effect of those basic material/economic forces,
shaped by them but also legitimating them. As seen in Chapter 1, Marx held that religion
was a distorted or inverted reflection of society, a false consciousness that obfuscated
rather than elucidated the real workings of the social formation. It was the sigh of the
oppressed masses and, while it pointed to true suffering of the people, it did nothing
practical to ameliorate that suffering. Logically, Marx predicted that when economic
inequality and exploitation ended (in an inevitable and perfect communist order), religion
would not even need to be combatted; like the state itself, religion would simply wither
away without a function.
The late nineteenth century was a time of great secular expectation. The philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche in 1888 announced that “God is dead.” In a series of writings, parti-
cularly his 1927 The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud also diagnosed religion’s
expiration, calling it an illusion without a future; akin to a neurosis, when humans solved
their psychological problems, they would not need the symbolic salve of religion. For
social scientists, the leading statement on secularization came from Max Weber, who saw
it as part—and a virtually integral part—of the more general process of modernization.
In the past, in social contexts like those described by Redfield and Gellner before the
“great transformation” (see Chapter 9), any society’s religion was ubiquitous and taken
for granted, a kind of moral glue that held the society together. When social relations and
the ethos or “feel” of society changed, the nature and function of religion changed as
well. And when that change was modernization, religion would find no home in society.
Weber regarded the central features of modernization to be rationalization, indus-
trialization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and finally secularization. Industrialization
and urbanization describe the conditions under which people work and live, in factories
and cities. Rationalization means that social goals, and the methods to achieve them,
become more “practical” and results-oriented as opposed to “moral” and “religious.”
Efficiency of action and cost, division of labor, market exchange relations, and technolo-
gical imperatives replace personal and spiritual concerns and relations. Bureaucratization
means that social organization becomes more formal, differentiated, hierarchical, and
“integrated,” with “managers” far removed—physically or socially—from the site of
production. Also, institutions like “the factory” or “the market” or “the government” or
“the family” are functionally detached from each other, occupying separate social spaces.
Altogether, the experience of society is more complicated, more diverse, more fragmented
(i.e. the people you interact with in the factory are not the same ones you interact with in
the family, the neighborhood, etc.), and more “private.” Modern society, Weber expected
and grieved, would undergo “disenchantment,” losing its spiritual and magical features.
The fundamental premise of secularization theory, as sociologist Steve Bruce subse-
quently explained it, is “that modernization creates problems for religion” (2002: 2).
Along Marxist lines, we can conceive of religion as growing in the soil of the society;
different soils produce different religions—and some soil is inhospitable to religion alto-
gether. Thus, as society evolves rational, industrial, bureaucratic, and urban traits, reli-
gion is estranged or vanquished. Religion at best contracts into just another “institution”
in the society, unplugged from its multiple social and moral functions and sites; it trans-
forms into something you “do” on Sundays in a specialized building, one corner of a
complicated modern life. Or religion may be transformed—or restricted—into a private
matter, a personal choice and practice, not a public presence at all. In fact, it may become
impolite or divisive to be publicly religious. For some ultimately, it simply diminishes in
importance or is ignored completely, as insignificant or impractical or false, or in favor of
other activities that compete with it in a busy secular schedule, like football season.
Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, like so many others, claimed to
detect the declining power and influence of religion in “the progressive autonomization of
societal sectors from the domination of religious meaning and institutions” (1966: 74). In
other words, as various actions, roles, and institutions “free” themselves (become
“autonomous”) from religion, religion’s impact on society must wane. A critical aspect of
this evacuation of religion from society is diversity, taking two forms. First, as societies
began to encompass multiple racial, ethnic, linguistic, and of course religious commu-
nities, no religion unified them all, and they no longer comprised a “moral community.”
Bluntly, the pluralism of modernity threatened religion as much as any other force: Bruce
argued that the “separation of church and state was one consequence of diversity” (2002:
17). Second, in a religion like Christianity and eventually in all religions including the
“traditional” ones, schism and syncretism led to a proliferation of alternative and com-
peting “religions” or religious movements; the Catholic monopoly in pre-modern Europe
largely prevented this development, but the triumph of the Protestant Reformation gen-
erated a new dynamic of religion which “was extremely vulnerable to fragmentation
because it removed the institution of the church as a source of authority between God
and man” (Bruce 2002: 10), leaving the individual to voluntarily choose between or
“convert to” any of the religious offerings. The result is a “consumer approach” to reli-
gions in which the individual as a free and private agent “may choose from the assort-
ment of ‘ultimate’ meanings as he sees fit” (Luckmann 1970: 99).
As powerful and pervasive as this modernization process is, its religious outcomes are
diverse. Even within a paradigm of secularization, sociologist Bryan Wilson foresaw an
array of possible consequences for religion, such as:
the sequestration of political powers of the property and facilities of religious agen-
cies; the shift from religious to secular control of various of the erstwhile activities
and functions of religion; the decline in the proportion of their time, energy and
resources which men devote to supra-empirical concerns; the decay of religious
institutions; the supplanting, in matters of behavior, of religious precepts by demands
that accord with strictly technical criteria; and the gradual replacement of a specifi-
cally religious consciousness (which might range from dependence on charms, rites,
spells, or prayers, to a broadly spiritually-inspired ethical concern) by an empirical,
rational, instrumental orientation; the abandonment of mythical, poetic, and artistic
interpretations of nature and society in favor of matter-of-fact descriptions, and with
it, the rigorous separation of evaluative and emotive dispositions from cognitive and
positivistic orientations.
(1982: 149)
Ultimately, sociologist José Casanova (1994) boiled secularization theory down to three
primary propositions. The first is structural differentiation: religion separates from other
domains of society and isolated in a “religious institution” (like “the church”) from other
institutions (like “the state”). The second is privatization: religion becomes something that
individuals do inside their homes, heads, and hearts without wider public impact. The third
is absolute decline: people spend less time and energy in church attendance, prayer, and such
religious behavior, contributing to the diminution and disappearance of religion in society. In
2006 Casanova revisited his theory and restated that the “functional differentiation and
emancipation of the secular sphere—primarily the modern state, the capitalist market econ-
omy, and modern science—from the religious sphere” was and remains “the defensible core
of the theory of secularization” (2006: 12–13).
Box 12.1 Teaching secularism in the Soviet Union

Fenella Cannell assessed that there is no such thing as “an absolutely secular
society … or a perfectly secular state of mind” but nevertheless that “the secular is a
historically produced idea” (2010: 86). The practice of state secularism in the former
Soviet Union vividly illustrates the attempt to produce just such a society and the
limitations of implementing an absolutely secular society. Inspired by Marx’s economic
and social theory, the Communist regime that seized power in 1917 immediately
separated religion from the state and removed education and other functions from the
church. The secularization campaign soon turned to persecution of religion and pro-
motion of “state atheism.” In 1925 the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was
arrested and the League of Militant Atheists was founded to advance anti-religious
attitudes. A 1925 law banned religious activities and instruction beyond basic services
in sanctioned buildings; an “anti-religion five-year plan” promulgated in 1931 predicted
the imminent erasure of religion from society. To speed the process, religious holidays
were replaced with seasonal and patriotic celebrations, and many religious buildings
were shuttered or converted to secular uses. Sonja Luehrmann reflected that the
“violent anti-religious campaigns in the 1920s and ’30s destroyed the institutional
power of the Russian Orthodox Church” (2011: 1), but they also revealed much about
Soviet society and about religion in general. First, Bolshevik enmity toward religion
was partly theoretical but also practical and political: religion was perceived as a
source of boundaries that divided citizens into religious-ethnic enclaves, so the
destruction of religion was a change of individual and group identities and a con-
struction of a new collectivity. “By making the shift from trusting in God to trusting the
state, Soviet citizens declared allegiance to a new, overarching social body in which
older particularities lost their force” (4). In other words, secularization, like religion
itself, was not merely individual or private but intensely social. Second, the devastation
of “institutional power” did not equal the end of religion: deprived of church settings
and ordained leadership, religion survived (and was tolerated) in informal contexts like
the home, where “religious expertise became a more heavily feminized domain” (9).
During World War II, the government even revived religion to mobilize and motivate the
population. After the war, Soviet efforts turned to education, as in the 1947 Society for
the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, the principle of which was that
“confrontation with the discoveries of modern science was the most effective tool for
weaning people from reliance on supernatural agents” (9). The government trained and
deployed teachers, lecturers, and scientists to spread the gospel of science and
secularism among the masses, inventing a new social role, the metodist or methodi-
cian, “an expert in designing, organizing, and moderating didactic [teaching and
learning] events” (61). Always a society oriented toward the future—understanding
secular communist society as a goal, not a fact—Soviet education projects offered the
“promise of making both teachers and students into something they currently are
not—more proficient, more skillful, more informed, more responsible,” and more god-
less (96). And with a sophisticated understanding that religion is material and visual,
Soviet secular propaganda incorporated nagljadnye posobija (visual teaching aids), the
adjective nagljadnyj meaning “visual” but also “intuitively persuasive” (144). As Lenin
himself taught: “The art of every propagandist lies precisely in this, to influence a given
audience in the best possible way, making a known truth as convincing for it as pos-
sible, as easy to assimilate as possible, as nagljadnaja and impressive as possible”
(144)—perhaps especially when the lesson concerns religion.
Luehrmann and others could not ignore the fact that, when the Communist regime fell
in the Soviet Union, religion came roaring back. In the Volga republic of Mari El, a
religiously diverse region of Christians, Muslims, and “pagans,” the proportion of athe-
ists dropped from 32 percent (with another 38 percent declaring indifference to religion)
in 1985 to 16.6 percent in 2004, while believers rose from 13.5 percent to over 68 per-
cent—essentially a complete reversal (18). More remarkable still, many of the new clergy,
ritualists, and study leaders “had belonged to professional groups that were required to
profess and promote atheism” (13) and exploited many of the same teaching skills.
The global revival (if it is a revival) of religion has spurred most scholars to pronounce
secularization theory a failure. In his revisitation, Casanova granted that, although he
held to the differentiation thesis of religion, his other two theses—the privatization and
absolute decline of religion—“are not defensible as general propositions either empirically
or normatively” and therefore are not inevitable consequences of modernization (2006:
13). Many observers, instead, call the present global culture not secular but post-secular,
in two senses. First, religion did not die but survived, flourished, and in some (not alto-
gether positive) ways intensified; religious fundamentalism (see Chapter 10) and religious
violence (see Chapter 11) are two illustrations. Second, scholars like anthropologists have
restored religion to a place of prominence in their research, for without attention to
religion much of the modern world makes no sense.
Secularization was probably always a phenomenon more of intellectuals than ordinary
folks. But, as fundamentalism and violence forebode, post-secularism is no panacea, any
more than secularism is. Returning to the post-Soviet setting, Mathijs Pelkmans finds some
people, even religious people, nostalgic about Communist secular policies. Noting that
atheism never displaced religion—joking that official secularism amounted to “they pretend
to eradicate religion, and we pretend not to practice religion” (2014: 439)—Pelkmans
recounts how the new “freedom of religion” (itself a secular concept) poses many problems,
like highlighting and hardening ethnic and religious identities. In the Republic of Georgia,
“the return of religion to public life made it problematic to be simultaneously Muslim and
Georgian” (440), for example, as Georgian nationality is automatically equated to Orthodox
Christianity. For everyone, post-secularism brings pressure to act appropriately to their
avowed faith, setting higher expectations for religious behavior. And of course liberalization
of policies toward religion invited more religious competition, including an influx of foreign
religions and missionaries. Some arrived in the guise of nongovernmental organizations (see
below), like evangelical Christians bearing “micro-loan projects, orphanages and centers for
children, cultural nongovernmental organizations promoting ‘mutual understanding,’ and
even evangelical Internet cafés” (444). Such groups conducted religious work under the cover
of secular operations. Smaller and often local religions cannot compete with the wealth and
connections of these initiatives and many locals see the surge of religions as corroding tra-
ditional culture and identity.
Two final points can be made. First, post-secularism is still secular after a fashion: not
only is it very much “of the present time,” a product of and reaction to inexpungible
religious pluralism, but it leaves any particular religion as one choice among many and
typically “formulates (and indeed in some cases imposes) a code of tolerance between
different religions and denominations” (Yalçin-Heckmann 2001: 335). Religious intoler-
ance violates secular values and earns condemnation as “fundamentalism.” Second, Bruce
Kapferer was probably correct that anthropology itself is “a practice of secularism”
(2001: 344), demanding a rational—some would say, with justification, an outsider’s—
perspective to religion. This was extremely so in the past, when anthropologists might
brand witchcraft or animism as false, irrational, or primitive. While anthropology need
not and should not be disrespectful, it must be neutral toward religion, awkwardly but
productively “combining radical doubt with the suspension of disbelief … as a rigorous
knowledge practice” (344).
Formations of the secular

The seminal recent anthropological contribution to the study of secularism is Talal
Asad’s 2003 Formations of the Secular. As he did for religion in his 1993 Genealogies of
Religion and for Islam in his 2009 “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Asad called
for “an anthropology of secularism” that would examine secularism as a social and
political practice and “the secular” as a cultural concept or category (2003: 1). He insisted
that any “discipline that seeks to understand ‘religion’ must also try to understand its
other” (21).
Like the concept of “religion” and other conventional terms and categories, Asad con-
tended that “the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity”;
in other words, both “the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are not essentially fixed categories”
(25). Indeed, as the study of translocal religions and new religious movements has shown,
what is or is not “religion” is not evident or consistent; different societies construct the
category of religion differently—or not at all—and those constructions vary over time.
But as the understanding and range of “religion” varies, so too does “secular,” if we think
of “secular” as that which is not religion.
Asad held that secularism and “the secular” as understood today are essentially a
Western Christian mode of thought, and admittedly almost all of his discussion dealt
with Western experience, where Christianity drew a line between “religion” and “the
world,” between “spirit” and “matter,” between “sacred” and “profane.” Western social
sciences largely absorbed these culturally specific categories; consider Durkheim’s asser-
tion that religion is essentially about “sacred things.” The conclusion from this line of
analysis is that other societies would define “the secular” differently—if they define it.
And “the secular,” rather than the opposite of “religion,” is intimately entangled with
religion.
But Asad’s argument went much further. Beyond a concept (the secular), Asad char-
acterized secularism as a political doctrine, even an ideology. We might say that secular-
ism is a project, and he tied the secular project tightly to the projects of modernity and of
the modern state. The modern state project, he posited, “aims at institutionalizing a
number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral
autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of
the market—and secularism” (13). Specifically, the state claims for itself the authority to
dictate how society is organized: it creates the disparate institutional realms of “econ-
omy,” “household,” and of course “religion.” The individual, moreover, owes her pri-
mary allegiance to the state, although the state may co-opt religion for its own
legitimation. But even when the state “is said to be ‘under God,’ it has its being only in
‘this world’—a special kind of world. The men and women of each national society make
and own their history” (193).
The modern state “requires clearly demarcated spaces that it can classify and regulate:
religion, education, health, leisure, work, income, justice, and war” (201). Within each of
those spaces, the state determines its structures, norms, and acceptable forms. “From the
point of view of secularism,” Asad opined:
religion has the option either of confining itself to private belief and worship or of
engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life. In either case such religion is
seen by secularism to take the form it should properly have.
(199)
In a word, as modern society and politics circumscribed religion, they both created and
depended on a notion of “the secular”—and secularized religion.
Varieties of secular experience

One clear implication of Asad’s analysis of the secular as a historical and cultural
formation is that it may—indeed, it will—take diverse forms. This is an invitation
for anthropologists to bring their premier method, ethnography, to the study of
secularism, or what we might more wisely call secularisms. As Cannell urged more
than a decade ago, “anthropologists must surely contribute to the expansion of the
repertoire of ethnographic studies of actual, lived situations (in the West and outside
it) in which local peoples enact their understandings of, interests in, or perhaps total
indifference to the secular and the religious”; she added, happily, “Ethnographies of
particular forms of secularism are now gradually increasing” (2010: 97). Anticipating
this call nine years sooner, David Gellner mentioned a tantalizing few:
in India we have people asserting a Hindu identity while not worshipping; in Japan
we have people worshipping while denying any religious identity; and in Nepal we
have people demanding secularism at the level of the state while continuing to assert
a religious identity at the personal and community level. All these cases can only be
understood by tracing ethnographically the meanings of secularism for the people
concerned.
(2001: 339, emphasis added)
This is the project of the remainder of this chapter.
Societies without religion?

It is frequently asserted that religion is a human universal, even that humanity without
religion is inconceivable. This claim naturally depends on how one defines religion, and it
is often intended as an argument in favor of religion. Whether there are societies without
religion is a controversial but important question. (See supplemental reading “The Secu-
larist/Atheist Movement in the United States and Beyond.”)
As far back as 1936, J.H. Driberg cautioned us about applying Western-Christian
religious concepts to traditional African societies. “‘Worship,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘offerings,’
‘prayer,’ ‘shrine,’ and even, though to a slightly different degree, ‘soul’ are all words with
a specialized significance in English, and their application to the ancestral system of the
Africans is both a linguistic and a cultural offence,” he wrote, recommending instead that
ancestor worship “is in fact a purely secular attitude” (1936: 6). For example, “no African
‘prays’ to his dead grandfather any more than he ‘prays’ to his living father” (6), and
what we are wont to call the ancestor’s “shrine” is simply a miniature house in which the
dead person dwells. Likewise, “the so-called ‘sacrifices’ that the dead receive … are
identical with and part of the tribute received and transmitted by the living elders, and
they are offered to the dead in recognition of their advice to the living” (11). What we fail
to grasp, Driberg insisted, is that age is “the most important criterion of classification to
be found in African societies” (9), and since living elders deserve respect and special
treatment, the much older dead elders deserve the same or better respect and treatment.
Therefore, the supposed religious attitude toward ancestors “is nothing sacred, but a
social recognition of the fact that the dead man has acquired a new status and that … he
is still one with” the society of the living (7).
The Hua (Papua New Guinea) described by Anna Meigs seemed concerned only with
pollution, and the nu that carried purity or pollution was part-spiritual but also imma-
nently material, present in bodily substances, in footprints and shadows, but especially in
food. Beyond this pollution system, Meigs reported nothing that resembled “religion” in
the familiar Western/Christian sense. Colin Turnbull’s account of the Mbuti people of
the Congo rainforest discovered little that feels like religion either. For the Mbuti, their
forest was roughly a sentient being and a benevolent one at that; Turnbull marveled at
the “complete faith of the Pygmies in the goodness of their forest world” (1961: 93), but
to call the forest divine or sacred goes too far. Certainly misfortune sometimes befell the
Mbuti, but their answer was that “the forest is sleeping and not looking after its chil-
dren”; the proper course of action was, “We wake it up. We wake it up by singing to it,
and we do this because we want it to awaken happy. Then everything will be well and
good again” (92). For this purpose, the Mbuti sang songs and played a horn or trumpet,
both named molimo. We might be tempted to call this a “ritual,” but Turnbull insisted
that molimo music “is not concerned with ritual or magic. In fact, it is so devoid of
ritual, expressed either in action or words, that it is difficult to see what it is concerned
with” (80). Turnbull confessed his dismay at the lack of seriousness or reverence, of
religious sensibility, with which the Mbuti performed their songs and lived their lives.
In Fredrik Barth’s classic ethnography of Basseri mountain pastoralists in Iran, religion
did not even merit its own chapter. The absence of religion among these putatively
Muslim people vexed Barth sufficiently to compel him to address it in an appendix of the
book, where he wrote:
Only few references have been made to ritual in this account of the Basseri—hardly
any ceremonies have been described, and the behavior patterns have been discussed
in terms of the pragmatic systems of economics, or politics, and hardly ever in terms
of their meanings within a ritual system. This has followed from the nature of the
material itself, and is not merely a reflection of the present field worker’s interests or
the analytic orientation of this particular study. The Basseri show a poverty of ritual
activities which is quite striking in the field situation; what they have of ceremonies,
avoidance customs, and beliefs seem to influence, or be expressed in, very few of
their actions. What is more, the different elements of ritual do not seem closely
connected or interrelated in a wider system of meanings; they give the impression of
occurring without reference to each other, or to important features of the social
structure.
(1961: 135)
Although avowing Shi’ite Islam, Barth claimed that they took little interest in it. They
were self-consciously “lax” in their religion and “indifferent to metaphysical problems.”
They lacked ritual specialists of any sort, although they might invite a village holy man to
perform marriages or other ceremonies. They observed some rituals surrounding key life
events like birth, marriage, and death, but these were more social and political than
religious; the supernatural seemed to play little or no role. Even funerals were “relatively
little elaborated” (142), and no ritual specialists presided. They did not pray regularly,
and there was “no communal gathering of worshippers within a camp or even within a
tent” (136). Their religious concerns amounted to not much more than concepts of luck
and the “evil eye.” Perplexed at how to “explain” the Basseri’s “lack of religion,” Barth
suggested that the society “invested its values” in their economic activities, especially their
herds and their cyclical migrations.
Finally, our modern tendency to imagine indigenous and non-Western peoples as naïve
and credulous believers overlooks their sometimes open doubt and skepticism about their
religious practices and practitioners. Iban or Dayak (Kalimantan, Indonesia) religion
featured ancestor spirits and shamanism, but some Iban people admitted that “the sha-
man’s performance may involve deceit” such as sleight of hand (Wadley, Pashia, and
Palmer 2006: 44), and rival shamans accused each other of trickery and fraud. Moreover,
skepticism toward shamans was socially motivated: people might accept or rationalize
deceit as intended to fool the spirits when they wanted to support a particular shaman,
“yet they may use a seemingly insignificant flaw in an otherwise excellent performance to
reject another shaman” (44). A similar problem appeared in Nepal, where some people
disparaged or laughed at their dhamis (shamans). Denunciation of shamans usually
occurred in two circumstances: some doubters displayed their “modern consciousness” by
assigning shamanism to backward culture and andhabiswas (blind belief), while others
eventually gave up on shamans because supposed shamanic cures bore no results. Insofar
as Nepali villagers persisted in believing in shamans, Stacy Leigh Pigg concluded that they
transform themselves “into ‘modern believers,’ people who believe in shamans skepti-
cally” (1996: 191).
Secular religious Japan
Japan is often presented as a highly secular, even non-religious, society. John Nelson cites
the Japanese General Social Survey data that 70 percent of the population has no reli-
gious affiliation while 22 percent affiliate with Buddhism and less than 1 percent with
Shinto- (2012: 50). Yet the Dictionary of Sacred Places in Japan lists “thousands of
shrines, temples and natural features that have supernatural connections, festival impor-
tance or other manifestations of legend” (Somers 2013: 219), including the sacred Mount
Fuji, and Japan has been an incubator of new religious movements since the nineteenth
century. Japan scholar Ian Reader added that contemporary Japanese people assert “that
they are not religious, even whilst performing acts of an overtly religious nature such as
praying at a shrine or walking a pilgrimage” (1991: 1).
The apparent paradox can be partially solved by carefully considering terms like
“religious affiliation” or “religion” itself, with their distinct meanings and genealogy in
Japan. The word ordinarily translated as religion in Japanese, shu-kyo- (shu-, sect and kyo-,
teachings) was introduced in the 1850s after contact with the West and established itself
in the language two or three decades later. This was an era of modernization and nation-
building—and therefore of sorting out what was Japanese and what was not. Shinto-
(“way of the gods”) was formalized (if not invented) by the government and advanced as
“Japanese culture” (bunka) in contrast to “religion” (shu-kyo-), which at best implied
organized religion or creed and at worst foreign belief (especially Buddhism and Chris-
tianity), superstition, and fanaticism. In a word, according to Chika Watanabe, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Shinto- and its concomitant veneration of
the emperor as the descendant of divinity “were not religion but a moral pillar of the
Japanese ‘national body’ (kokutai)” (2019: 64).
The distinct formation of Japanese secularism (sezoku) depends on this recent history, but
it also has a longer pedigree. If secularism is not (or not merely) the suppression but the
definition and control of religion by political authorities, then the practice began well before
modern times in Japan. As early as the eighth century, when the power of Buddhist monks
was great, the empire “imposed strict regulations for their ordination and conduct, and
restricted their mobility to leave the monastery and circulate in society” (Nelson 2012: 39).
Christian missionaries were expelled from the country and Christianity banned early in the
Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867); simultaneously, all Buddhist temples were commanded
to align with a recognized sect, and all individuals were required to register with or belong to
a temple, contributing financially to and receiving their funeral from their official temple.
Returning to the modern period, the Constitution of 1889 promised freedom of reli-
gion, or more accurately freedom of religious belief (shinkyo- no jiyu-), both shinkyo-
(belief-teaching) and shu-kyo- bearing the connotation of subversive or false knowledge or
education (Horii 2018: 58). The gulf between culture and religion was furthered by the
creation in 1900 of two agencies, the Shrine Bureau and the Religions Bureau, the former
administering Shinto- and the latter the three “officially recognized shu-kyo-: namely, Bud-
dhism, sectarian [unofficial] Shinto-, and Christianity” (58), which were disparaged as not
part of authentic Japanese culture.
Secularization (sezokuka) of Japanese society was accelerated under the American
occupation after World War II. The Constitution imposed by the Americans guaranteed
freedom of religion and separation of religion and state, Article 20 confirming:
No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State nor exercise any
political authority. No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious acts,
celebration, rite or practice. The State and its organs shall refrain from religious
education or any other religious activity.
(quoted in Nelson 2012: 41)
The courts were also instrumental in Japanese secularization, the Supreme Court ruling
in 1977 that a particular Shinto- ritual was “a secular activity” and that if priests “did not
preach or proselytize, they were considered to have not engaged in a religious activity”
(46). (A similar concept of ceremonial deism informs American jurisprudence, in regard
to things like Christmas trees and the Pledge of Allegiance.)
The concept of shu-kyo- also continued to evolve. Expanding beyond the three “foreign”
or unofficial religions, it grew to embrace the explosion of new religious movements in
the country after the freeing of religion, as well as what had formerly been categorized as
pseudo-religions and “evil cults” (Horii 2018: 60). For that very reason, shu-kyo- retained
and retains associations with extreme, bizarre, and even dangerous religious movements
like Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for poison gas attacks on Japanese subways in 1995.
Yuki Shiose also judged that the local aversion to “religion” results from pre-war
experience of state-enforced Shinto- and the association of religion with political indoc-
trination: for Japanese people today, the “choice of non-declaration of religiosity could
be understood as an astute if non-deliberate move of citizens wary of the meddling of Big
Brother (state intervention)” (2000: 325). Lastly, as Nelson observed, there is an absolute
decline in formalized “religious” behavior like attendance at Buddhist temples, much of it
driven not by changes in devotion but in demographics, as the population gets older and
more urban, leaving many temples with shrinking congregations.
Two quick ethnographic cases exemplify the diversity of Japanese secularism. Wata-
nabe investigated a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Organization for
Industrial, Spiritual, and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), which, according to its website
(www.oisca-international.org), “serves humanity through environmentally, socially, cul-
turally and economically sustainable development.” However, as its name suggests, it
mixes a dose of “religion” with agricultural and such projects. The initiative grew out of
the new religious movement Ananaikyo-, whose founder propounded the vision of a
“world united through a connection to [a] Great Spirit, an energy that runs through
nature and the universe and thereby through all life-forms, including humans” (2019: 39).
Like all religions, Ananaikyo- and OISCA are committed to “making persons” (hito-
zukuri), that is, to building personal capacity through “the transfer of technical skills”
like farming but also “through fostering of mutual understanding within an inter-
dependent (so-go izon) global community” (47). This “Shinto- environmentalism” is
exported to other countries (Watanabe’s research focuses on Myanmar) “as a worldview
that can revolutionize people’s interactions with nature and the nonhuman natural world
and thereby solve the world’s global environmental crises” (72). Obviously, they did not
accept the split between science and spirituality customary in Western secularism: for
OISCA, “religion and secularism are not in opposition,” and the organization “sought to
sidestep the category of the secular as well as religion” (36).
In its campaign to become a global religion (sekai shu-kyo-) and a super-religion
(chöshükyö), the Kagamikyõ movement undertook a project of what Isaac Gagné calls
“reflexive secularization,” that is, transformation of “religious elements including teach-
ings, symbols, rituals, and rhetoric in response to external factors, which include public
perceptions of religions, challenges in attracting new members, and interaction with other
religious and with nonreligious discourses and practices” (2017: 155). Breaking from the
Church of World Messianity in the 1970s and emphasizing the practice of johrei or
channeling healing energy to purify the mind and body, by the 1990s the movement faced
stagnating growth and public disdain of such heterodox faiths. To overcome the limita-
tions of its Japanese audience, it announced plans to open a New York City head-
quarters, where it would be known by the scientific-sounding moniker Paradise on Earth
Research Institute, while converting its Japanese base to Paradise on Earth Theme Park,
complete with “tennis courts, basketball courts, a swimming pool, and other sports
facilities; an art museum, sculpture garden, library, and movie theater; and a natural
foods restaurant and market where people could dine and purchase organic foods and
flowers” (161). It simplified its terminology and ritual, purging many elements that were
perceived as “too Japanese” and changing the titles of religious offices to resemble cor-
porate titles, all to conform to secular and global tastes (sekai kijun) (162).
Box 12.2 Learning to be secular among Japanese interfaith chaplains

Japanese religious institutions confronted a natural and social crisis after the 2011
tsunami that damaged so much of the country. Michael Berman tells how a priest from
the Sendai City Buddhist Association offered to recruit volunteers “to chant sutras and
offer prayers” for the dead, but government officials “balked at the prospect of violat-
ing the separation of religion and state mandated by Japan’s Constitution” (2018: 230).
In order to contribute to Japan’s practical and emotional recovery from the disaster—
and to gain access to public resources—religious figures were required “to suppress
‘religious sounding speech,’ ‘prayer,’ or anything that anyone could interpret as an
effort to proselytize” (229). Instead, they had to offer kokoro no kea (care for the heart),
acting as generic religious professionals without presenting or representing any spe-
cific religion. These “secular chaplains” openly referred to the demand on their reli-
gious identity as shu-kyo- wo koeta shu-kyo- (religion overcoming religions). “Translating
suffering and pain” from the language of religion “into medicalized, nonreligious lan-
guage has been an important part of the development of the secular” (231) in this
Japanese instance and throughout global modernity. Understandably, Buddhist and
Shinto- priests and Christian ministers had to undergo training before providing service
to victims and survivors, practical training as well as training on how to separate their
religious vocation from their volunteer work. For more than a few of the participants,
this was their first personal encounter with religious pluralism:
the first time that they had heard, let alone spoken, prayers from some of the
other religions involved in the training, and the differences being overcome in their
very performance did not go unnoticed. Participants were explicitly reminded
during the training that the Buddhist, Christian, and Shinto- priests sitting around
them and the words coming out of their own mouths came from sects or religions
with which they have deep-seated disagreements.
(232)
But this was no occasion for religious debate and conversion; instead—and this is the
key secularizing process—they were forced to “overcome personal discomforts and
historical antagonisms between religions and sects to create a more general form of
religion” (233). Prepared by this training to mourn the dead and assist the living “as a
normal person” rather than a religious official, the interfaith chaplains converted
themselves “into universalized humans subject to government strictures on speech
and comportment” (233). But while the state determined their religious display, this
was not anti-religion; it was overcoming the institutional formalization of religious par-
ticularity in the formation of a neutral “public religion.”
State secularism in France

France is rare if not unique in the world for being officially secular; its current Con-
stitution, adopted in 1958, declares unequivocally (Part One, Article 2) that France is “an
indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic.” The term used for secular in the
Constitution is laïque, and the French term for secularism is laïcité.
French society has a long history of struggle with religion. In the eighteenth century,
the philosophes of France like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot were openly critical of
religion or of the clergy and of religious fanaticism and intolerance. Many denounced
priests as useless and hypocritical and distrusted the conventional notion of God, pre-
ferring instead a deistic belief of an impersonal creator-god. Paul-Henri Thiry, the Baron
d’Holbach, went so far as to defend atheism in his 1761 Christianity Unveiled and 1770
The System of Nature.
Hostility to religion climaxed during the French Revolution, starting in 1789. As the
great historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed:
One of the earliest enterprises of the revolutionary movement was a concerted attack
on the Church, and among the many passions inflamed by it the first to be kindled
and last to be extinguished was of an anti-religious nature.
(1955: 5)
Initially, the revolutionary government attempted to bring the Catholic priesthood under
secular control through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. By 1793, with radi-
cal elements driving the revolution, a new calendar was promulgated, detaching time-
keeping from Christianity and setting Year One to 1792; the seven-day week was elimi-
nated, and Sunday disappeared. In what historian J.M. Thompson called a “de-christia-
nizing campaign,” churches were vandalized, church bells were melted into coins or guns,
and priests were jailed, deported, and occasionally executed; the Christian god was
ridiculed as “jealous, capricious, greedy, cruel, implacable” (1962: 115). In 1794 Max-
imilien Robespierre introduced a non-theistic Cult of the Supreme Being and of Nature,
complete with national secular holidays, but his secular religion died with him in the
Terror.
By the nineteenth century, laïcité was imprinted on French political discourse, entailing
freedom of social institutions, primarily schools, from Catholic authority. Official state
secularism in regard to education was confirmed in the 2013 Charter of Secularism at
School, which begins with a re-statement of the country’s constitutional position on
religion and adds articles promoting separation of religion and the state and freedom of
conscience (i.e. freedom “to believe or not believe”). Further, the Charter insists that
secularism “assures to students the access to a common and shared culture” (Article 7) as
well as promoting “the condition to forge their personalities” free from “all prosely-
tizing and from any pressure that would prevent them from making their own choices”
(Article 6). The curriculum is explicitly secularized: “no subject is a priori excluded
from scientific and pedagogic questioning,” and students cannot use religion to “dispute
a teacher’s right to address a question on the syllabus” (Article 12). Finally and most
controversially, the school is established as a secular space, where students cannot
endorse “religious membership by refusing to conform” (Article 13) and where “wear-
ing signs by which students ostentatiously demonstrate a religious membership is for-
bidden” (Article 14).
France is thus a perfect example of Asad’s notion of the state using secularism to
define and constrain religion and to construct a common public culture. Yet, although
the target of laïcité was originally Catholicism, more recently it has fallen hardest on
Islam. While France accommodates Islam in various ways, with prayer spaces set aside
for Muslim observance and working conditions adjusted to allow time for prayer, it
engages in the kind of micro-management of religion noted above. For instance, in 2002
Nicolas Sarkozy (at the time the Interior Minister, later the President) created the
French Council for the Muslim Religion, bringing together Muslim organizations under
government watch; Sarkozy also saw to it that the president of the Council was the
head of the Paris Mosque, which “had long been a favored partner of the state” (Bowen
2010: 26).
The most contentious aspect of laïcité is the 2004 law prohibiting “conspicuous reli-
gious signs” in schools, which many have seen as targeting the Muslim practice of the
veil. Mayanthi Fernando illustrates how the specific French formation of the secular
makes life difficult for Muslims, noting the French distinction between “the right of
conscience” (to believe or not) and “the right to expressions or manifestations of con-
science, which can be subject to restriction” (2010: 19). On the familiar Western premise
that religion is “private” and “internal,” supporters of the ban justify it because it does
not constrain belief, only behavior. Fernando rightly points out that such an interpreta-
tion depends on “a specific, secular understanding of the relationship between belief and
practice”: “if religious practices are neither as integral to religion as are beliefs nor con-
stitutive of belief, then a restriction on practice would not, by this logic, constitute a
violation of religious liberty” (26). However, this approach is inconsistent with Muslim
women’s understanding of the veil (or headscarf), which many regard as a personal
decision but one crucial to their religious identity. French laïcité has no such conception:
the veil, like all religious behavior, is categorized “either a choice or an obligation” (27);
worse still, “any external pressure … diminishes the right of individuals to choose freely,
violating their freedom of conscience” (29). To secular ears:
framing the headscarf as both a personal decision and a religious obligation con-
stituted, and continues to constitute, a kind of “double talk” … representative of
either an incoherent subjectivity or an insidious plot to mask a “fundamentalist”
agenda with liberal-republican language.
(30)
In short, Muslim women are forced to speak the secular language of laïcité, defending the
scarf as a choice—which is thereby subject to regulation.
Figure 12.1 Woman wearing Islamic clothing despite its ban in France. Photo by: BSIP/Universal
Images Group via Getty Images.
Secularization, modernization, Westernization in Turkey

The modern state of Turkey was born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, long the
political epicenter of Islam. In the 1700s, as Ottomans began to sense a decline in
imperial power, they pushed for reforms. In 1731 Ibrahim Muteferrika wrote a book
about “rational politics” featuring democracy, parliamentary government, and popular
representation, not to mention Western military science. In the most dramatic early-
modern reform, Mahmud II instituted the Tanzimat or “re-ordering” in the 1830s, which
envisioned the Ottoman state as “composed of peoples of diverse nationalities and reli-
gions, based on secular principles of sovereignty as contrasted with the medieval concept
of an Islamic empire” (Berkes 1998: 90). A secular council was appointed to decide judi-
cial questions outside the Seriat (Turkish for shari’a), and the jurisdiction of Seriat courts
was diminished; Western science was encourageed, education (at the primary level) was
made compulsory, and modernization of language and literature was begun, including a
new secular vocabulary including “freedom of expression,” “public opinion,” “liberal
ideas,” and “natural rights.”
As a system to raise the Empire to the level of its European rivals, the Tanzimat failed,
but it represented a marked step in the secularization of society. It was one facet of
extensive social change marked by a growing urban working class, “the breakdown in
several traditions, habits, tastes, and attitudes” (273), and the emergence of an educated
professional class, with their newspapers and other Western-style literature. Change
brought new “modes of psychological states, feelings of conflict, doubt, anxiety, and,
above all, the practice of philosophizing and moralizing, both of which were the signs of
secularization in mind and morality” (280).
The “Young Turk” movement that emerged in the early nineteenth century advocated
a French-style secularism; the Turkish term for state secularism, laiklik, was derived from
French and denoted “state control over religion and a strong state role in keeping religion
out of the public sphere” (White 2013: 28). For the modernizers, including Mustafa
Kemal who became the leader of Turkey after World War I, “religion was a dangerous,
divisive force in society that could not be eliminated and so had to be kept under the
thumb of the state” (28). In addition to dangerous and divisive, religion was backward
and non-modern.
Kemal (known as Ataturk or “father of the Turks”) abolished the two premier Islamic
offices of the old empire, the sultanate and the caliphate. Seriat courts were closed;
medreses (religious schools), tariqas (Muslim brotherhoods), and turbe (tombs and
shrines of saints) were all terminated, as was the Ministry of Seriat and some religious
roles and titles. A new code of civil/family law was promulgated, which “signified the
unmitigated secularization of civil life. The men of religion lost their function, not only in
civil procedure, but also in the administration of the law” (Berkes 1998: 472), including
the area of marriage, which was entirely secularized. Even dress was secularized: the
traditional headgear for men (the fez) was circumscribed, and women were heavily dis-
couraged from wearing the traditional veil or headscarf. Ultimately, religion was brought
under the authority of the state, which opened its own schools for the education of
imams (religious specialists) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. In 1924 a
Department of the Affairs of Piety was created “to manage the administrative affairs of
religion” (484).
Justifiably, as in Japan and France as well as India (see below), Yael Navaro-Yashin
reasoned that in Turkey:
a study of secularism cannot be dissociated from a study of the state, for secularism
is the state’s preferred self-representation or selected idea about itself. Secularism is
not a neutral paradigm, but a state ideology, as well as a hegemonic public discourse
in contemporary Turkey.
(2002: 6)
This secular ideology and self-image, whether in regard to public displays of religion,
education, or the bodies of Turkish men and women, “has been closely connected with
the staging and representation of modernity in Turkey” (Zencirci 2012: 96) and with
Turkey’s desire for closeness with Europe. Yet laiklik for many years was largely an
“authoritarian” (107), top-down, elite-driven initiative. Kabir Tambar added that “secu-
larism continues to lack a popular base” in Turkey and that “secularist organizers failed
to ‘popularize their message’” (2009: 522). Lately, though, secularists have literally taken
to the streets to protest the rise of Islam in culture and politics (see Figure 12.2) and the
threatened desecularization of the country. In a 2007 demonstration against the ruling
Justice and Development Party, secularists defending Kemal’s vision for the society
insisted, “Turkey is secular, and it will remain secular” (Tambar 2009: 519). Conse-
quently, “the public experience of secularism has shifted from an authoritarian, solemn,
and orderly outlook to a site where enjoyment and pluralistic, voluntary participation
have become central in its emotional appeal” (Zencirci 2012: 107)—what we might
rightly call secular populism. (See supplemental reading “Secularism and Modernization
in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Islam.”)
Figure 12.2 Ataturk poster, Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey on June 9, 2013. Photo by Raphael
Fournier/Sipa USA/Alamy Stock photo.
Secularism for national unity in India

David Gellner related an anecdote about an Indian man in the United Kingdom who
labeled himself a “secular Hindu,” which led Gellner to reflect that one cannot imagine
British citizens “describing themselves as a ‘secular Christian,’ yet that is, of course, what
most of them are” (2001: 338). This apparently contradictory self-identification makes
sense, Indian reformist Ashgar Ali Engineer explained, because secular “in the Indian
context does not mean ‘this-worldly,’ it is difficult to divide Indians into believers and
unbelievers,” and neither of the country’s main religions, Hinduism and Islam, “has any
church-like structure, so there was never any struggle between secular and religious
power structures”; instead—and this is crucially important—the “main struggle has
always been between secularism and communalism” (2007: 152) or religious and ethnic
separatism.
Before British colonialism, India was never a unified society or state. Once melded into
a single polity, the main problem was to prevent animosity between ethnic and religious
groups, which was managed through scrupulous neutrality and equanimity toward reli-
gions. Fortunately, this policy was entirely consistent with the Hindu tenet of sarva
dharma sambhava, literally “all truths/ways (dharma) are equal or harmonious.” Yet,
political scientist Rajeev Bhargava held that Indian secularism was neither simply Wes-
tern secularism transplanted on the Indian subcontinent or traditional sarva dharma
sambhava updated for the modern world but something “distinctive” that “uniquely
combines an active hostility to some aspects of religion with an equally active respect for
its other dimensions” (2010: 69).
As independence approached in 1947, India’s leaders faced hard choices, especially with
the threat (and eventual reality) of the secession of the north and east as a separate Islamic
state (East and West Pakistan, the former later becoming Bangladesh). In her foundational
essay on the anthropology of secularism, Fenella Cannell reminded readers that Mahatma
Gandhi, no enemy of religion, believed that “faith-based respect for all religions was the best
foundation for tolerance and peace in India,” insisting that “the state should not support any
religious organization and that it should govern on areas of common citizen interest, per-
mitting the free expression of religious practices” (2010: 94). Jawarharlal Nehru, India’s first
prime minister, went further, arguing that “India could be ruled only by a government that
afforded equal protection and respect to all faiths and none” (94).
Accordingly, Indian secularism is enshrined in the Constitution, which assures freedom
of religion (although not explicitly establishing religion/state separation); the word
“secular” was not included in the original document but was, significantly, inserted in
1976 as a latter-day reaffirmation of official religious neutrality. But, in the context of a
scale of religious and ethnic diversity unknown in relatively homogeneous Western/
Christian countries, Indian secularism is oriented less along the lines of disestablishment
of religion—and certainly not, as we will see, of disputing the existence of god(s)—and
“more on the lines of peaceful co-existence” between potentially fractious communities;
economist Aanchal Anand (2012) proposes that “inclusivism” might be a more suitable
term than “secularism.”
Lingering at the level of law a bit longer, legal anthropologist Deepa Das Acevedo
judges that India is not really secular at all, if by secular we mean both disestablishing
religion and separating religion from the state. The Indian state, Acevedo says, very much
intervenes in religious matters, ironically perhaps more so in regard to Hinduism. The
state exercises “control of Hindu religious institutions,” and this governmental “regula-
tion of religious institutions goes well beyond the establishment of tax exemptions or
annual support and the work of ensuring that institutions do not violate core constitu-
tional principles” (2013: 146). Not only, for instance, does the state of Kerala administer
public temples through regional boards which must approve all actions of the temples,
but courts often get involved in the sticky business of settling legal cases by reading and
interpreting sacred scriptures like the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita—virtually unim-
aginable in Western secular states (152). This odd interventionist secularism has ironi-
cally driven some Hindu nationalists (see Chapter 10) to demand “true” secularism on the
premise that under current “pseudo-secularism” Hindu “institutions and practices are
subject to a far higher level of state control than those of minority religions” (144). But,
as in the post-Soviet case above, “true” Indian secularism would advantage one religion
(the Hindu majority) over others.
Of course, secularism does not automatically guarantee governmental hands off reli-
gion; from modern France and Turkey to Tokugawa Japan, it can also mean government
management of religion. Additionally, there is more to secularism than law but also
locally articulated struggles over religious belief and practice. Here, too, India is dis-
tinctive. For example, even India’s secularist organizations follow different agendas than
their Western counterparts. Johannes Quack’s fieldwork at the Andhashraddha Nirmoo-
lan Samiti (ANiS or Organization for the Eradication of Superstition) in Maharashtra
depicts it as quite different from similar groups in Europe and the United States. To be
sure, the Indian atheist movement “is based on the explicit intent to challenge belief in
magical powers of irrational efficacy, as well as the influence of charismatic gurus, so as
to tackle the harm and injustices the rationalists see as resulting from such belief”; put
another way, Indian atheists want “to show their fellow Indians a way out of their
enchanted world toward a rational, this-worldly way of life” (2012a: 3). But the Atheist
Center in his study does more than argue about god(s); it is active:
in the realm of promoting environmental consciousness and ecological awareness; it

collaborates with socio-psychological rehabilitation centers for former criminals,
promotes sex education, health education, birth control, and family planning, and
supports other areas of social work. Finally, the Atheist Center also launched what it
calls “comprehensive rural development programs.”
(2012b: 71)
Contrast was most glaring at an international conference organized at the Atheist Center
with the theme “Atheism and Social Progress,” where the papers presented by Western
atheists “hardly address the conference topic” (78) and instead carry on about the non-
existence of gods.
Gods are not even the mortal enemies of science in India, as Renny Thomas discovers.
The Indian scientists he interviewed might call themselves atheists, agnostics, skeptics, or
non-theists, but many “still lead a life based on their religious or cultural ethos”:
They participated in various religious festivals and celebrations and perceived it as

cultural. The usage “cultural” in the Indian context is never independent of its reli-
gious and caste affiliations. Thus, even though they called themselves atheists, the
Hindu scientists, for instance, did not find much contradiction in following the life-
styles or their rules of religion. This meant that they practiced vegetarianism, wore
the sacred thread (in the case of Brahmins), admired classical songs in praise of
Hindu gods and goddesses, and participated in traditional life cycle and seasonal
rituals.
(2017: 59)
Like the Japanese above, what Westerners see as “religion” they see as “culture.”
Box 12.3 Among secular humanists in the UK

Although it is not always easy to find a site to study secularists, who tend to be a
diffuse and decentralized bunch, Matthew Engelke located one in the British Humanist
Association. The BHA, he explains, is the country’s leading unbelief organization, with
twelve thousand members at the time of his research, which “supports people who
seek ‘an ethical and fulfilling non-religious lifestance involving a naturalistic view of the
universe.’” Its social and political goals include prohibiting bishops of the Church of
England from sitting in the House of Lords and ending state finance of faith-based
schools while also replacing religious rituals like funerals and weddings with secular
substitutes. Since secularists and humanists necessarily wrestle with the local religion,
Engelke expects “humanism in Britain to be articulated in relation to Western Judeo-
Christian traditions” (2014: S294), and in many ways, while distancing itself from reli-
gion, it exhibits consistencies with its religious alter ego. Perhaps the most prominent
and informative similarity is that, like Christians (especially Pentecostalists) around the
world, humanists “want to break with the past” (S293), except for them “the past” is
the religious heritage of the country. Many humanists are also converted or awakened
to their humanism through social contact and learning in a process that Engelke calls
“realization”: “Many people only recognize themselves as humanists after reading
about it or talking to someone else who is” (S296). The contrast is that, once their
break occurs, they see themselves of course not as Christians but as:
enlightened moderns … who have harnessed the power of their innate rationality
and thrown off the shackles of superstition (thinking, that is to say, which is
guided by a belief in or commitment to the supernatural or unknown, especially
when that commitment contradicts empirical evidence to the contrary).
(S296)
And, having been liberated from it, “all the humanists I got to know had something
critical to say about religion” (S297), particularly about “stupid” belief. Finally, although
dedicated to rationality, humanists possess all of the ordinary human needs and
aspirations, including community and celebration, and organized humanism provides
such experiences otherwise available to Christians in church. Humanist meetings,
drawing up to fifty or sixty people, mostly middle-aged or older, are opportunities “to
interact with ‘like-minded people’” (S298), usually to learn, often to argue, always to
talk. Engelke stresses that humanism involves a lot of talk, but our previous examina-
tions of Christianity showed that it is also largely verbal. Most importantly, though,
Engelke recognizes that humanists operate with the same assumptions about religion
that many religionists—and scholars—do, namely that religion is essentially “belief,”
that to “be religious is to be a believer” (S299), and therefore to be a humanist is to
abandon belief.
(See supplemental reading “The Birth of an Atheist Church? The Sunday Assembly.”)
Conclusion
Just as Christian societies construct “religion” in a particular way, so they construct
“the secular” in a particular way. These different cultural constructions are what Talal
Asad called “formations of the secular.” Anthropologists, accordingly, have become
attentive to the role of culture in producing certain visions of the secular and to the role
of the secular as a project of modern states in producing certain types of societies and
subjectivities. Further, while the secular has a prominent place in modern Western
societies, the secular is not unique to modernity or to the West. There have been secular
alternatives in earlier history, and other societies, from Japan and France to Turkey to
India, have developed their own formations of the secular. Even more, many cultures
and religions have not divided the world between religion and non-religion, and, as in
African “ancestor worship,” the imposition of Western-Christian thinking on other
societies may lead us to see “religion” where the local people do not. Clearly, then, “the
secular” is not necessarily the absence or the opposite of “the religious.” There are of
course individuals, organizations, and governments that are openly hostile to religion.
But more often, secularism is one (quite mixed and ambiguous) effect of modernization
on religion.
1 What are some of the key terms or labels in secularist discourse? How are they dif-
ferent? What are the specific terms operating in your own culture?
2 What did Talal Asad mean by “formations of the secular”? How is “the secular”
shaped by social notions of “religion” as well as by modern state governments? Why
does “the secular” not simply mean “no religion” or “anti-religion”?
3 What is “secularization theory,” and how has contemporary religion challenged the theory?
4 What are some specific “formations of the secular” around the world, and how do
terms like “secular” or indeed “religion” not fit all cultures equally well?
5 How is secularism sometimes social opposition to religion, sometimes governmental
management of religion, and sometimes religious assimilation of “non-religious”
culture? Give some examples.
Formations of the Conflict between Science and Religion: Unification Church, ISKCON,
and Heaven’s Gate
A Secular Bible Movement in the United Kingdom
The Secularist/Atheist Movement in the United States and Beyond
Secularism and Modernization in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Islam
The Birth of an Atheist Church? The Sunday Assembly
Glossary
Below are basic definitions for some important terms in the anthropology of religion.
Other terms are too complex or controversial for simple definitions, such as “ritual” or
“secularism” or “belief,” and it would defeat the purpose of anthropology to attempt to
settle the professional debate in a glossary. Other key terms have sections or entire
chapters devoted to them, and readers are urged to consult those pages for discussions
and debates about terminology.
Affect theory An approach to religion and culture that emphasizes how it influences the
ways that we feel, the things we want, and how our bodies inhabit the world
Agency The capacity to act on the basis of one’s own subjectivity, desires, or intentions,
rather than as an object of someone else’s intentions
Agent A being that has its own subjectivity and can act upon its own desires or inten-
tions; something that is more than a mere passive object
Agnosticism As formulated by Thomas Huxley out of the Greek a- for no/without and
gnosis for knowledge, the position that we should not claim to have knowledge unless
we can demonstrate the reasons for our knowledge—not, as commonly understood,
that knowledge is impossible or an intermediate position between believing and not-
believing
Anglo-Israelism A Christian movement that claims the English-speaking peoples (parti-
cularly the British and Americans) to be the true Christians and inheritors of God’s
covenant with Israel
Animatism The religious conception that impersonal spiritual forces exist in the world
and affect human life and behavior
Anti-syncretism Resistance to mixing new or foreign elements in religion
Animism The religious conception that natural objects (animals, plants, hills, lakes,
moon, etc.) and forces (wind, rain, etc.) have spiritual components that interact
socially with humans
Asceticism A form of religious discipline that involves self-deprivation, the rejection of
comforts, and sometimes the deliberate infliction of pain
Atheism From a- for no/without and theos for god, the absence of a concept of god(s)
or belief in god(s); in conventional thinking, the rejection of the existence of god(s)
Bid’a The Arabic term for illicit innovation or novelty in religion
Biomedicine A term for conventional Western scientific medicine, which seeks to
explain illness in terms of states of the individual physical body
Canon The set of standardized, official writings or doctrines and practices of a religion
DOI: 10.4324/9781003182825-13
Glossary 305
Christian Exodus An American Christian movement to relocate a large number of
Christians to a state (for instance, South Carolina), where they can institute a Chris-
tian culture
Christian Identity A Christian movement that attributes true Christianity to the white
race, going so far as to brand other races “the spawn of Satan” or sub-human “mud
people”; see also Anglo-Israelism
Cognitive evolutionary theory The approach to religion (and other complex behaviors)
that suggests that specific cognitive and social characteristics developed during human
evolution which make such complex behaviors possible and likely
Communitas In Victor Turner’s ritual model, the condition of undifferentiated and
structureless existence; the unity that characterizes the state of liminality, when the
ritual actor is between social statuses
Contagious magic The belief and practice that objects that come in contact with each
other have some supernatural connection with each other
Conversion Used most commonly in Christian parlance, the allegedly sudden and
complete break with the past and the adoption of a new religious belief and identity
Cosmogony Notions about the origin of the universe
Cosmology Notions about the order or structure of ultimate reality
Costly signaling theory The idea that religions feature difficult and difficult-to-fake
actions because those actions demonstrate social commitment and cooperation
Cultural relativism The part of the anthropological perspective that insists that we
understand and judge the behavior of another culture is terms of its standards of good,
normal, moral, legal, etc. rather than our own
Da’wa Arabic for “inviting,” often understood as a synonym in Islam for conversion
Deism The religious idea of a god that created the universe but takes little interest in
humans and does not intervene in human affairs
Diaspora The dispersion of a social group from its historical homeland (often applied
specifically to the Jewish community)
Diffusion The spread of items of culture from one society to another
Diffusionism The nineteenth-century ethnological or anthropological position or theory
that Culture, or specific cultural practices, objects, or institutions had appeared once
or at most a few times and spread out from their original center
Discursive tradition For Talal Asad, discourses or ways of talking and interpreting that
seek to instruct religious practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a
given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history
Distributed personhood The idea, associated with Alfred Gell, that a person can be
“distributed,” that is all of his or her “parts” need not be physically attached but can
be located in other persons, places, and objects
Divination The use of religious techniques to “read” information from the supernatural
world
Diviner A religious specialist who uses one of many techniques to “read” information
from the supernatural world
Eschatology Notions about the end of the world
Ethnography A written account or description of a particular culture, usually including
its environment, economic system, kinship arrangements, political systems, and reli-
gious beliefs, and often including some discussion of culture change
Ethno-religious conflict Violence between ethnic or identity groups which has religion
as one of its elements of identity or of conflicting interest
306 Glossary
Euhemerism The notion that the idea of gods or spirits derives from modified or exag-
gerated accounts of actual people and events
Folklore The “traditional,” usually oral, literature of a society, consisting of various
genres such as myth, legend, folk tale, song, proverb, and many others
Functionalism The method, and eventually the theory, that a cultural trait can be
investigated for the contribution it makes to the survival of individual humans, the
operation of other cultural items, or the culture as a whole
Fundamentalism A type of cultural/revitalization movement in which members attempt
to address perceived social problems or disadvantages by restoring the perceived
“fundamentals” or oldest, most important, and most “genuine” elements of culture
Ghost A religious or spiritual being, generally regarded to be the disembodied spiritual
part of a deceased human
Gush Emunim The Bloc of the Faithful, an extremist Jewish group that emerged in the
early 1970s following the Israeli success of the Six-Day War in 1967, supporting the
state of Israel and eager to expand its territory to include all of ancient Israel’s land
Haredim Literally “those who tremble,” a collection of like-minded Jewish organiza-
tions and communities, including Neturei Karta and Toldot Aharon, that share some
ideas and values, like a strict observance of all scriptural laws and a theological
opposition to Zionism and the secular state of Israel
Hasidism An ultra-orthodox form of Judaism distinguished by egalitarianism, charis-
matic leadership, and ecstatic devotion to God
Hierophany An appearance of the sacred amidst the profane or mundane
Hindutva A form of Hindu nationalism in India, which asserts Hinduism as the true
religion of all Indians and the Indian subcontinent as the sacred homeland of Hindus
Historical materialism The theory, associated with Karl Marx, that material or eco-
nomic conditions shape society, so that each particular society is a formation based on
the material conditions and relations of the particular moment in history
Holism The part of the anthropological perspective that entails consideration of every
part of a culture in relation to every other part and to the whole
Honor killing The killing, usually of females, when their behavior has brought shame
or dishonor on a family through her behavior, such as premarital sex or “dating”
outside the preferred categories
Humanism A rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated
by compassion; a philosophy which places humanity as the highest principle
Ideological ritual According to Anthony Wallace, a type of ritual that aims at social
control, in which individuals, groups, or society in its entirety are moved, influenced,
and manipulated
Inculturation An official policy of the Catholic Church, intended to inject religion into
the wider society and as well as to inject the local culture into religion, resulting in
multiple local Christianities
Innovation The invention or discovery of new cultural items
Interaction code According to John Skorupski, a specialized set of behaviors that
establish or maintain (or destroy) an equilibrium, or mutual agreement, among the
people involved in an interaction as to their relative standing or roles, and their reci-
procal commitments and obligations
Irredentism From the Italian irredenta for unredeemed, a type of revitalization move-
ment to reclaim and re-occupy a lost homeland
Glossary 307
Jihad The Arabic term for “struggle,” including both struggle with oneself and violent
struggle against others
Laïcité The official French policy of state secularism
Laiklik The Turkish term for state secularism
Liminality Most associated with the work of Victor Turner, the condition of being “in
between” or “on the margins” of social roles, in particular of being in transition (as
during ritual) between one social role and another
Liturgy The most formal, fixed, and weighty of rituals, in which the exact gestures,
objects, and words must be used in the precisely correct ways in order for the ritual to
“succeed”
Mana A supernatural force or energy recognized by some Pacific Island societies, which
gives its human bearers power or efficacy
Martyrdom Giving one’s life for a cause, including but not limited to a religious cause
Material religion The physical forms taken by religious ideas, practices, and institu-
tions, such as statues, objects, buildings, and so forth that allow devotees to perceive
and interact with religious beings and forces
Mediatization The encoding or transformation of religious ideas and practices into
various “media” including physical objects, images, photographs, movies, and internet
sites, through which people can experience religion with any or all of their senses
Medical anthropology The subfield of anthropology that investigates concepts and
practices of health and healing across cultures, as well as studying health-related
practices, roles, and institutions in modern societies
Medical pluralism The coexistence of multiple healing traditions and practices in the
same society, in which case individuals may seek assistance from one or more systems
sequentially or simultaneously
Megachurch A modern (sub)urban form of Christianity, featuring large church facil-
ities, multiple religious and social activities aimed at specific niches, and often very
mild forms of worship
Messianism Based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, a type of revitalization movement
that insists that a messiah or “anointed one” will appear (or has appeared) to lead the
society to salvation and happiness
Millenarianism A type of revitalization movement aimed at preparing for and perhaps
bringing about the end of the “present era,” however that era is understood, and
replacing it with a new and better existence
Modernism A type of revitalization movement intended to adopt the characteristics of a
foreign and “modern” society, in the process abandoning some or all of the “tradi-
tional” characteristics of the society undergoing the movement; see also vitalism
Modes of religiosity The idea, associated most closely with Harvey Whitehouse, that
there are two distinct forms or modes of religion, one based on doctrine and the other
based on images and emotion-laden experience
Monolatry The devotion to one god among the many gods acknowledged to exist
Monotheism The religious position that one and only one god exists
Nativism A type of revitalization movement aimed at perpetuating, restoring, or reviv-
ing “traditional” cultural practices or characteristics, which are thought to be the
source of the group’s strength and to be threatened or lost
Ontology Ideas about what kinds of things (beings, forces, etc.) exist
308 Glossary
Oracle A religious specialist (or any religious object or process) with the power to
forecast the future or answer questions through communication with or manipulation
of supernatural forces
Orientalism Most associated with Edward Said, the claim that Western thinking and
research on Islam (and the wider “Eastern” world) has been based on assumptions
that render Islam and non-Western societies exotic, incomprehensible, anti-modern,
and inferior—the complete “other” of Western society
Paganism A loose assortment of religious or traditionalist movements or religions that
celebrates local or pre-Christian ideas and identities
Pantheism A form of theism in which it is claimed that “everything” is god, that the
universe and all of the material world is the same thing as god, that god is “imma-
nent” in and co-extensive with the physical world
Participant observation The anthropological field method in which we travel to the
society we want to study and spend long periods of time there, not only watching but
joining in their culture as much as possible
Pentecostalism A form of Christianity, usually Protestant, that emphasizes “gifts of the
spirit” such as speaking in tongues, ecstatic experiences, and religious healing
Pilgrimage Movement or travel to religious sites or for religious purposes, involving
moving out of everyday space and into and through religious/sacred space
Political myth Narratives that establish the origins or principles of political power and
office; such narratives may or may not be factually true, and they may or may not have
a religious component
Political ritual Ritual activity that tends to reflect and reinforce political relations and
realities, such as the coronation of a king; such ritual may or may not have a religious
component
Pollution Those substances, objects, actions, and perhaps thoughts that cause a person
to be “unclean”
Polytheism The religious position that two or more gods exist
Post-secular A term for the impression that religion has not disappeared and will not
disappear in modern society but instead that religion survives or returns as a social
and political force; also, the perception among anthropologists and other social scien-
tists that religion must be included in our analyses of contemporary society
Prayer A form of linguistic religious behavior in which humans speak and interact with
supernatural beings
Priest A religious specialist, often full time, who is trained in a religious tradition and
acts as a functionary of a religious institution to lead ritual and perpetuate the reli-
gious institution
Primitive mentality The assumption, associated with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, that tribal
peoples (and certain other humans) think in a distinctive and inferior way
Prophet A human who speaks for or receives messages from spirits
Prosociality The performance of action that benefits others at a personal cost
Reconstructionism Also known as Dominionism, a Christian movement aimed at
“reconstructing” modern society in conformity with Christian (specifically Old Testa-
ment) values and institutions
Revitalization movement According to Anthony Wallace, the deliberate, organized, and
self-conscious effort by members of a society to create a more satisfying culture
Rite of intensification A form of ritual in which members of the society are brought
into greater communion, in which social bonds are intensified
Glossary 309
Rite of passage A form of ritual intended to accompany or accomplish a change of
status or role of the participants, such as initiation (change from youth to adult) or
marriage
Ritual efficacy The idea that ritual is not merely communication or symbolism but is
intended and assumed to have observable, often practical, effects
Ritual failure Any of the ways in which a ritual may not reach its expected conclusion
or results, including interruption, errors in ritual performance, refusal to participate,
or perception of the ineffectiveness of the behavior
Ritual process According to Victor Turner, the common structure of ritual actions,
which involve separation from everyday life and roles, liminality, and then transfor-
mation and re-integration into society
Sacrifice A ritual behavior in which something is destroyed or killed, as a form of
offering to or communication with supernatural beings, which is usually believed to
affect the social or spiritual condition of the sacrificer
Salafism From the Arabic salafiyyah for “the ancestors” or “the early years,” a form of
Islam that stresses the piety and practices of the founding generation of Islam and
their original (and thereby authoritative) religion
Salvation ritual According to Anthony Wallace, the type of ritual that seeks to cause
change of personality
Sannyasin A Hindu male who renounces home and family and embarks on an itinerant
spiritual life
Secular From the Latin saeculum for the present era or generation, that which is dis-
tinctive of a particular time period rather than eternal, or that which relates to the
present everyday world as opposed to the eternal spiritual world
Secularization theory The nineteenth- and twentieth-century position that modern
society is incompatible with religion, leading to an inevitable decline in the presence or
importance of religion
Self-mortification Any of a variety of practices aimed at inflicting discomfort and pain
on the self, up to and including death
Shahada The Arabic term for martyrdom (literally “witness”)
Shahid The Arabic term for a martyr
Shaman A religious specialist, usually part time, who has personal power, based on
unique life experiences or apprenticeship to a senior shaman, to communicate, inter-
act, and sometimes struggle, with supernatural beings or forces, often to heal
Shari’a Islamic law
Sicarii An ancient Jewish sect of knife-bearers, active during the Roman occupation,
who attacked enemies in broad daylight and killed them with a short sword
Social drama A public, symbolic scenes (usually ritualized) in which the conflicts or
disharmonies of society are played out
Sorcerer A religious specialist who uses techniques, including spells and potions, etc., to
achieve supernatural effects
Sorcery The use of religious techniques to achieve supernatural effects, usually malevo-
lent ones
Soul A religious concept of a non-material component or components of a living
human. It is widely believed that a soul survives the death of the body, at least tem-
porarily, and continues in another form of existence
310 Glossary
Spiritism A religious and medical system associated with Allan Kardec and particularly
popular in Brazil, which combines biomedical ideas and practices with notions of
possession by disembodied spirits
State secularism The official promotion of secularism (perhaps even anti-religion) by the
government
Structural functionalism The theory that the function of a cultural trait, particularly an
institution, is the creation and preservation of social order and social integration
Structuralism The theory, associated most closely with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the
significance of an item (word, role, practice, belief) is not so much in the particular
item but in its relationship to others. In other words, the “structure” of multiple items
and the location of any one in relation to others is most important
Symbol An object, gesture, sound, or image that “stands for” some other idea or con-
cept or object. Something that has “meaning,” particularly when the meaning is arbi-
trary and conventional and thus culturally relative
Symboling According to Leslie White, bestowing meaning upon a thing or an act, or
grasping and appreciating meanings thus bestowed
Sympathetic magic The idea and practice that objects that have something in common
with each other (e.g. same shape or texture) have some supernatural connection with
each other
Syncretism A type of revitalization movement in which elements of two or more cul-
tural sources are blended into a new and more satisfying cultural arrangement
Taliban Literally “students” in Arabic, a fundamentalist Islamic movement that seized
power in Afghanistan in 1996 and ruled until being ousted by the United States in
2001, then returning to power in 2021
Televangelism The use of modern mass media (especially television) to practice evan-
gelism or spreading of the Christian message
Theism The religious position that at least one god exists
Theodicy The practice of explaining the source or cause of suffering or evil in the
world, especially in religions that posit a powerful and good god
Totemism A term, not widely used today, for the religious conception that human
individuals or groups have a symbolic or spiritual connection with particular natural
species, objects, or phenomena
Traditionalization (also traditioning) The more or less intentional effort to establish
ideas, practices, and institutions as “traditions” and to have those things transmitted
or handed down, typically by attaching them to “the past” in some way
Translocal religion Sometimes labeled “world religion,” a religion that coexists in
multiple locations around the world; while it may consider itself a single religion, its
local forms are often quite divergent
Vernacular religion Religion in the “local language,” or more broadly, religion that
conforms to the ideas, practices, and relations of ordinary people and everyday cir-
cumstances, as opposed to official, orthodox, or elite religion
Visual religion The inscribing of religious ideas and practices into a form that can be
seen (images, photographs, movies, television programs, websites), rendering the
“spiritual” into the “visible”
Vitalism See modernism
Wahhabism An Islamic movement founded by Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who
advocated a purist form of Islam distinguished by opposition to popular superstitions
and innovations and the Islamization of society based on scriptural Islam
Glossary 311
Witch A religious specialist, often conceived as a human with a supernatural ability to
harm others, sometimes through possession of an unnatural bodily organ or an unna-
tural personality; sometimes viewed as an antisocial and even anti-human type who
causes misfortune out of excessive greed or anger or jealousy
Witchcraft The use of the powers of a witch, typically to cause misfortune or harm
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Index
Abbink, Jon 264 Muslims in 208, 212, 214–15; occupation of

abominations of Leviticus 130 Japan 292–93; Orthodox Christianity in 225;
abortion 173, 235, 237–38, 240 paganism 195; right-wing extremists 232;
Abu-Lughod, Lila 210 Theosophical Society from 251; unaffiliated
Abufarha, Nasser 276 280; see also Native American
Abyssinian fundamentalism 229 American Anthropological Association 280
Afghan(istan) 233, 225, 244–45, 248, 269, 276 American Humanist Association 282
Africa(n) 1, 37, 204–5, 251, 254; African American Muslim Women Magazine 211
American 208; ancestor worship in 290; Amish 63, 231, 234, 237
Azande of 4; Ammerman, Nancy 233–34
Bagandu of 61; Boko Haram in 277; Dahomey Anabaptists 269
of 141, 263; Dinka of 45; Dogon of 81; Islam ancestor spirit 31–32, 45, 70, 107, 291
in 212, 245, 273; Islamic videos in 65; Islamic ancestor worship 290
women’s radio programs in 77; Kaguru of Andes 61, 156, 166
45; Khoisan of 157; Kuria of 264; Lemba 201; Anglo-Israelism 239
Mandinko of 46; masks in 63; Mayotte of Angra Mainyu 44, 259
159; Nuer of 27, 63, 262; Pentecostalism in animatism 39–40, 283
221; Rastafaris in 194; in Russian political animism 12, 34, 182, 197, 221, 259, 283, 288
myth 83; Suri of 264; Swazi of 69, 143; Anthony, Saint 72, 266
Tallensi of 32; visual Christianity in 66; anthropological perspective 3–4
|Xam of 87; Yoruba of 87 anti-syncretism 188
agency 21–22, 30–1, 39, 59, 71, 80, 111, 117, Antoun, Richard 229, 232, 246
125, 135–36, 142, 159, 197, 215, 217 Apache 40, 73, 147–48
agnostic(ism) 280–3, 301 Aqedah (Akedah) 262
Ahmad, Irfan 212–13, 246 Arabic 59, 99, 245–46, 273, 276
Ahura Mazda 44, 259 Arikara 87–88, 93–94, 97
Ainu 35, 45–46, 259 Arjuna 45, 260–1, 274
Akedah (Aqedah) 262 Arya Samaj 248
al-Banna, Hasan 245–46 Aryan 82–83, 195; Aryan Nations 239–40
al-Qaeda 232, 244, 277 Asad, Talal 24, 54–55, 209–10, 219, 266–67,
al-Wahhab, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd 245 280, 288–89, 296, 302
Alaska 225 Asahara, Shoko 192
Alcorta, Candace 23 ascetic(ism) 71–73, 216, 223, 236, 244, 265, 282;
Allah 37, 59, 246, 260, 267; Allahu akbar 90 in medieval Christianity 266–67; Palestinian
Allerton, Catherine 59, 189 suicide bombers as 276
Amaterasu-Omikami 141 Asura 267
Amazon 35, 41, 43, 62, 68, 70, 95, 137, 226, 265 atheism/ist 237, 269, 279–83, 287, 295; Egyptian
America(n) 10, 19, 63, 83, 92, 124, 147, 190, 279; Indian 300–1; state atheism in Soviet
191, 202, 222, 226, 247, 257; Anglo-Saxon Union 286; takfir (Arabic) 245
Federation of 239; charismatic Christians Atran, Scott 22, 247
159; Christian fundamentalism in 228, 234, Aum Shinrikyo 181, 188, 192, 293
226–37; conquest of Afghanistan 276; Aupers, Stef 197
Hasidic Jews in 242; mega churches 197; Austin, J. L. 98
Index 337
Austin-Broos, Diane 207 Bolivia 156
Australia 17, 171,202, 251 Book of Mormon 64, 92
Australian Aboriginal 4, 17, 32, 45, 62, 119, Borneo 27, 29, 40, 63
178, 201; body modification among 63; Bosnia(n) 166, 193, 271–72
health and sickness ideas of 161, 163, 167; Bourdieu, Pierre 135
invention of tradition among 179; knowledge Bourguignon, Erika 118, 159
as property among 98, 142; male initiation Boyer, Pascal 21–22
117, 265; myth 80; non-conversion among Brahma 48
207; Pentecostals 221; shamans 68, 163 Brahman 37
Avestas 64 brahmin 69, 108, 130, 140, 301
Ayurveda/ic 153, 169 Branch Davidian 181, 192
Azande 4, 37, 45, 70, 74, 153, 161–62, 208, Brazil(ian) 41, 68; carnivale (also carnival) 121,
258, 281 144–45; Cashinahua of 157; Catholicism in
Aztec 141, 263, 265 225–26; Kraho of 218; Makushi of 161;
Azusa Street Revival 220 Pentecostalism in 220; Spiritism 159, 163,
165, 169; Tupi and Guarani of 218; Xangô
Babri Mosque 213, 250 71; Yanomamo of 41
Bagandu 61 bricolage/bricoleur 15, 85
Baha’i 36, 64, 204, 269 British Humanist Association 301
Bahir Far Fistula Center 171 Brueggemann, Walter 178, 197
Bakhtin, Mikhail 144 Bubandt, Nils 75
Bakossi 89 Buddha 32, 88–89, 198, 269, 281
Bali(nese) 63, 111, 120–1 Buddhism/ist 4–5, 44, 64, 72, 92, 140, 176, 204,
baptism (ritual) 206–7, 218–19 221, 259, 269; and 183; Aum Shinrikyo and
Baptist 182, 236 188; Burmese 32, 74, 118, 251; Cao Dai
Barabaig 70 and 188; chant 88; Falun Dafa and 183;
Barfield, Thomas 104 fundamentalism in 250–1; Japanese 198, 274,
Barrett, Justin 22 292–94; Sherpa 250; Sinhalese 167, 219, 233,
Barth, Fredrik 291 248, 251–52, 271; Thai 100, 136, 201, 207;
Bascom, William 86–87 Tibetan 64, 270; warrior monks in 274;
Basseri 291 Zen 64
Bashada 102, 111 Bulbulia, Joseph 23
Bastian, Adolf 14 Buli 75
Beattie, John 70, 73, 82 Bunyoro 70, 73, 82
Beckeranta 192 Burma/ese 27, 32–33, 74, 118, 251, 259, 271
Beidelman, T. O. 37, 45, 70, 142, 147 Butler, Richard 239
Bell, Catherine 104, 114, 116
Bell, Diane 98 Calvinism/ist 216, 223
Berger, Peter 233; and Thomas Luckmann 285 Campbell, Alexander 236
Berti 55, 64, 100 Campbell, Colin 280, 283
Bhagavad Gita 42, 45, 260, 274 Campbell, Joseph 54
Bharatiya Janata (India People’s) Party 250 Canada 146, 215, 251
bhikkhu 251–52 Cannell, Fenella 216, 223, 225, 280, 286,
Bible 5, 61, 64, 135, 170, 182, 204, 219, 228, 238, 289, 300
239; Bible reading in America 92–93; Cao Dai 188, 204
freethought and 282; fundamentalism and capitalism/ist 133, 183, 271, 286
229, 234–37; Gutenberg 197; Jerry Falwell Caplan, Lionel 235
and 228; Moody Bible Institute 237; New cargo cult 23, 114, 180, 188, 191–92
Life Bible Church 220 carnival 121, 124, 144–45, 147
bid’a 244 Casanova, José 286–87
Bielo, James 92 Cassaniti, Julia 136
Bin Laden, Osama 247 caste 18, 26, 45, 130, 138, 140, 144, 146, 248,
biomedicine 151–53, 155, 166, 168–69, 174 260, 274, 301; brahmin 69, 130, 140
Bloch, Maurice 8, 141 Catholic(ism) 16, 59–60, 92, 99, 103, 118, 173,
Bob Jones University 234 177, 181, 220, 222–26, 229, 236, 285; in
Boddy, Janice 150 Bosnia and 272; on Bougainville Island ix;
Boko Haram 232, 244, 277 Cao Dai and 188; carnival and 145;
338 Index
charismatic 165, 169; conversion 218–19; and and 301–2; violence in 255, 258–60, 262, 265;
206; in Dolina 63; French secularism and visual anthropology of 66, 197, 199; see also
295–96; inculturation in 226; Israeli security Catholic(ism; Pentecostal(ism); Protestant
wall and 142; mass 106; Northern Ireland (ism); Orthodox Christian(ity)
and 271–72; school 234; secular clergy in 282; Christian Broadcasting Network 234
self-flagellation in 265; syncretism and 188–9; Christian Coalition 231
in Walsingham 123–4 Christian Exodus 238
Caudill, William 151 Christian Identity 239–40
Chagnon, Napoleon 41 Christian Reconstructionism 238–39
charisma 181, 192–94, 220, 241, 300; Christian Science 64, 116, 169–70
charismatic Christian 159–60, 165, 169 Church of England 6, 301
charter 9, 18, 79, 99, 127, 148 Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 199
Charter of Secularism at School 295 Church of Jesus Christ Christian 239
Chewa 156 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Chile 36, 220 181, 192; see also Mormon(ism)
China 83, 220; atheism in 279; City God circumcision 63, 112, 117, 201, 265; female 63
Temple in 198; cultural-bound syndrome in cognitive evolution 21, 23, 30
158; Falun Dafa in 182–83; funerals in; Nusu colonialism 23, 143, 183, 217, 224, 241, 245,
of 31; official atheism in; Pentecostalism in 248–49, 270, 276–77, 299
220–1; persecution of religion in 270–1; Comaroff, Jean 75, 217
persecution of Uyghurs in 270; Taiping Comaroff, John and Jean 75, 217
Rebellion in 180, 190; Wa of 33 communism/communist 17, 82, 182–83, 195,
Chinese 32, 40, 64, 138–39, 141, 188, 190, 198; 270, 284, 286–87
chi 40, 259; Falun Dafa 182, 191; Han 270; communitas 113, 124
mandate of heaven 18; medicine 153, complementary and alternative medicines
169, 183 (CAM) 169
Christian(ity) 9, 51, 54–55, 106, 139, 176–77, Comte, Auguste 11, 284
195–96, 201–9, 212, 216–26, 244, 271–72, Confucian(ism) 138, 188
280, 283, 287–90, 299, 300; anti-ritualism in Confucius 64, 281
103; asceticism in 72, 265–67; Australian Congo 290; Democratic Republic of 65
Aboriginal 167–68; belief in 27–30, 93; consonance 138, 184, 232
carnival and 145; charismatic 159–60; comics contagious magic 116
199; cosmology 41; Christian god 36; conversion ix, 135, 201, 205–7, 216, 219, 221–22,
colonialism and 217–18; conversion 248–49, 265, 273, 280, 294; deconversion 249; in Hindu
251–52, 265; cults and 182; eschatology 47–8; nationalism 249; to Islam 65; modernism as
evangelical 10, 92–93, 173, 222, 229, 196; Polynesian iconoclasm and 175
237, 288; French secularism and 295; cosmogony 9, 41, 80; Dogon 81
fundamentalism 228–29, 234–41; god in 38, cosmology 41–43, 59, 78, 80, 216; African 205;
98, 259; healing and 116; holy war in 273; Desana 81; Dogon 138
Japan 292, 294; Judeo-Christian 59, 71, costly signaling theory 23
80–81, 98, 127–29, 139, 178, 258; language x, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches 18
4–5, 30, 99, 114; martyrdom 266–67; mes- Crusades 273
sianism 192; millenarianism 190; monasti- Csordas, Thomas 159, 165–66
cism 266–67; morality 127–29; non-Christian Cubeo 70, 83
106, 206, 219, 221, 229, 238, 241, 269; in curandera 108, 116, 165
North India 249–50; Palestinian 142; in cultural relativism 3–4, 24
Papua New Guinea ix, 171–72, 212, 219; Cynicism 281
Pentecostal 65, 135, 220–22; persecution 267,
269–70; pilgrimage 121, 124, 166; in Dahomey 141, 263
Polynesia 175; possession in 118, 159; Dalit 140, 147
post-Christian 280; prayer 10, 90, 92; Dani 32
pre-Christian 195, 225; prophets in 71; Dao(ist) 183, 188; see also Tao(ism)
Roman Empire and 141, 143, 181; sacred Darwin, Charles 11–12, 131, 133,
space 58–59, 166; scriptures 16, 37, 64, 81, 236–37, 283
92, 127, 139, 178; soul in 31–32; structural deism 37, 293
study of 15; syncretism 188–89, 285; Thai Delphi 70
136; theodicy 43–4; UK secular humanists Desana 43, 81
Index 339
dharma 89, 183, 199, 250–1, 260, 299; dharma English Defence League 212
yuddha 274; adharma yuddha 274 Enlightenment 133; Japanese 196; Jewish 241
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 158 entoptic images 16
diffusion 11, 48, 176, 179, 191, 204; diffusionism Enuma Elish 64
12; of responsibility 257 Epic of Gilgamesh 64, 92
Dinka 45, 138, 176–77, 201 Equal Rights Amendment 237
discontinuity thinking 216, 221, 223 eschatology 47–8, 190, 229, 242
distributed personhood 57, 224 Essenes 241
divination/diviner 70–1, 89, 155–56 Ethiopia 11, 27, 102, 160, 171, 194, 229
divine epithet 90, 99 ethno-religious conflict 271–73
divine right of kings 18, 120, 141 ethnography 3–4, 25, 33, 38, 75, 103, 134, 143,
djuluchen 31 165, 214, 221, 225, 233, 242, 246, 289, 291; of
Dogon 63, 81, 138 speaking 94
Dome of the Rock 143 ethnomedicine 152–53, 174
Douglas, Mary x, 17, 20, 63, 197; Natural etiquette 106, 128, 138, 146
Symbols 138; Purity and Danger 129–30 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 144, 162, 208; on Azande
Driberg, J. H. 290 4, 37, 45, 74, 153, 161, 258, 281; on Nuer 28,
dream 13, 34, 35, 40, 48, 85, 88; American 215; 38, 61, 127, 129, 176, 262–63
Australian Aboriginal 179; of curandera Euhemerus 11
165 for Europe(an) 18, 32, 141, 197, 216, 222, 248, 285,
Freud 13, 51; for Jung 52; in new religious 297; carnival in 145; colonialism 216–18, 248;
movements 185; of paye 83; shaman’s 68; culture contact 180, 191, 194; leftist violence
Trobriand 34; in Tylor’s theory 13 in 275; medieval asceticism 266; native faith
Dreaming or Dreamtime 4, 179–80; see also movements in 195; Muslims in 208, 210,
jukurrpa 212–14, 272; pilgrimage in 121, 124;
Droogers, André 186,189 persecution in 269–70; religious war in 274;
druid 42 Russian political myth and 83; secularism in
dukkha 44, 140, 259 280, 300; self-flagellation in 265; Turkey and
Dumont, Louis 130, 140 297–98; women’s tantric retreat 155;
Dundes, Alan 86–87 Zionism in 193
Durkheim, Émile 16–17, 22, 105, 138, 178, 261; Eveny (Siberia) 31
definition of religion 6, 19, 26, 137; on expiation 118
morality 127, 130–1, 183, 203; on ritual 108,
132, 135; on sacred 119, 129, 289 Facebook 65, 279
Dussart, Françoise 179–80 Falwell, Jerry 228, 237
Dusun 40, 46 Falun Dafa (also Falun Gong) 182–83, 191, 270
Fielding, Henry 5
Eastern Orthodox see Orthodox Christianity Firth, Raymond 39, 51, 103
economy of life 263 folklore 86–87; Xiamen Folklore Association
Ecuador 35, 172–73 Forest of Symbols, The 53
Edda 48 Formations of the Secular 288
Eddy, Mary Baker 64, 170 Fortes, Meyer 32, 40, 134, 261
effervescence 17, 108, 132 France 166, 213–14, 279; secularism in 24, 213,
Egypt(ian) 11–12, 59, 72, 83, 141, 194, 242, 245, 295–96, 298, 300
247, 251, 254, 263, 280; Book of the Dead 64, Frazer, James G. 4, 14, 84; definition of religion
92; Christian Copts in 269; modernization in 6; on magic 116
245; Muslims 135; non-belief in 279–80, 283 Freud, Sigmund 6, 13, 18, 51–52, 165, 284
elaborating symbols 56–57 functionalism 19
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The 16–17 fundamentalism x, 114, 183, 194–95, 228–52,
Eliade, Mircea 57, 67, 78, 122, 265 272, 275, 287–88, 296; Buddhist 250–52;
Elliot Smith, G. 12 Fundamentalism Project 229; Hindu 248–50;
England 217, 220, 251; Church of 6; Glastonbury Islamic 244–48; Jewish 241–44
60; secular humanism in 301; Walsingham
123–24; see also UK Galiwin’ku 167
English 4–5, 27–28, 36, 39, 59, 94, 103, 123, Gambia 210, 246
128, 179, 220, 236, 257, 262, 279, 282, 290; Gandhi, Mahatma 300
colonial Raj 248 Ganges River 59, 166
340 Index
Gardner, Gerald 64 habitus 135
Garhwalis 111 Hadith 64, 140, 245
//gauwasi (or //gangwasi) 32, 68, 259 Hage, Ghassan 275–76
Geertz, Clifford 99; on Bali 120–1; definition of hajj 113, 121
religion 6, 20, 131–33, 135; on Islam 209; on halal 137, 264, 270
ritual failure 111; on symbols 52–54, 56, 79, 86 Hallowell, A. Irving 8
Gell, Alfred 57, 224 Hamas 272
Gellner, David 289, 299 Hann, Chris 216; and Hermann Goltz 222–23
Gellner, Ernest 203–4, 208, 234, 244, 279, 284 Hannukah 114
“Genesis as Myth” 15, 86 Harding Susan 228, 230
Georgia, Republic of 288 haredi(m) 242–44
German(y) 51, 213, 219 Harris, Marvin 18
Ghana 66, 171–72, 221–22 Hasidism 235, 241–42
ghost 5; ghost sickness 158; Holy Ghost 123; Hawaii(an) 141, 263
Kaguru 45–46; Navajo 32, 91 Heaven’s Gate (TELAH) 180, 188, 284
Ghost Dance 13, 188, 191, 194 Hebrew 16, 37, 39, 69, 71, 92, 128–29, 137, 193,
Gill, Sam 41, 90–1, 93 241, 260, 281; Lemba as 201; martyrdom 267;
Girard, René 261–62 Reconstructionism and Hebrew law 238;
Gisu 112 religious war 273; sacrifice 262–63
Glastonbury Goddess 60, 166 Hefner, Robert 206, 220, 222
Gluckman, Max 143, 148, 256 Hegel, Georg 11
gods x–xi, 8, 10, 29, 70, 94, 114, 116, 122, 139, Herodotus 4, 11
241; ancient Greek 36, 44, 281; atheism Herzl, Theodor 193
disputing the existence of 282; of Azande 37; Hezbollah 272; see also Hizbullah
Buddhist disinterest in 281; distinguished hierophany 57, 78, 122
from spirits 30; divination and 115; divine Himalaya 38, 111
epithets for 90; Durkheim on 17; Euhemerus Hindu(ism) 36–37, 42, 48, 51, 63, 204, 259;
on 11; Hawaiian sacrifice to 263; Herodotus asceticism in 73, 266; Aum Shinrikyo and
on 11; Hindu atheism and 301; Hindu 188; caste system 18, 140; changing gods in
depictions of 65; Homeric golden age of 11; 38; eschatology in 48; European construction
Karl Marx on 18; Korean 68; mana from 39; of 24; fundamentalism in 248–50; leftover
misfortune caused by 147, 259; moralizing food in 137; mandala 59; mantra 88; priests
138; nonsecular medical anthropology and 69, 108,111; mental illness in 167; persecu-
154; Norse 42, 48; not all religions have 126; tion by Islam 269; righteous war in 274;
in Polish native faith 196; Polynesian 175; sacrifice in 263; scriptures 64, 92, 263;
Richard Swinburne’s definition of 36; rituals sectarian violence in 212–13; secularism in
errors and 111; Robertson Smith on 16; 289, 299–301; soul in 31; symbols in 56, 59;
Roman sacrifice to 269; of Semai 37; Shintō Tamils in Sri Lanka 251; temples 60; in
way of the 292; statues of 59–61; of Tewa United States 212, 301; violence in 260,
38; of Ulithi 37; of western Himalayas 38; 271–73; visuality in 65
work of the 103; Xenophanes on 11, 281; Hindutva 233, 249–50, 269
Zoroastrian 44 Hirschkind, Charles 135
Golden Bough, The 4, 84 Hizbullah Women’s Committee 210; see also
Goldman, Irving 83, 97 Hezbollah
Goody, Jack 78–79, 104, 280–1 Hobbes, Thomas 12
Gough, Kathleen 140 Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger 177
Grabner, Fritz 12 Hodge, Charles 237
Graham, Billy 237 Hofriyat 150, 158–60
Greek 4, 11, 16, 32, 41, 63, 186, 204, 241, 258, holism x, 3, 24
259, 266, 267, 282, 283; Catholic 142; Holocaust 269
Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Holy, Ladislav 55, 64
Modern Greek Culture 216; gods 36, 44, 60; Holy Grail 223
oracle 70; Orthodox 222; skepticism 281 Holy Spirit 160, 220–2
Green, Maia 206–7 holy war ix, 255, 259, 273, 280
Guhu-Samane 219–20 Holyoake, George Jacob 282
Gush Emunim 194, 242 honor killing 212
Guthrie, Stewart 21 Hopi 63, 107
Index 341
Horton, Robin 7, 107, 204–5 Lemba as lost tribe of 201; Meir Kahane
Houston 214–15 against 242–43; religious war in 260; suicide
How to Do Things with Words 98 bombing in 276; yeshiva in 243–44; Zionist
Hua 137, 290 movement for 242
Hubbard, L. Ron 64, 192
Huichol 70, 121 Jain(ism) 127, 266
Hungary 242, 279 Jamaat-e-Islami 212–13, 246
Huron 46 Jamaica 194
Hussein 267 James, E. O. 263
Hymes, Dell 93, 178 James, William 20–1
Hyperborea 82 janneying 146, 148
Japan(ese) 35, 59, 63, 141; Buddhism in 198,
Ihanzu 1, 110 274; culture-bound syndrome in 158;
Ikko-Ikki 274 modernism in 196; new religious movements
illocutionary 98–99, 112 in 181, 188, 192, 199; pilgrimage in 122;
imitative magic 73, 116 secularism in 279, 289, 292–95, 298, 300–1;
inculturation 226 Shintō 60, 293
India 18, 24, 59, 83, 251, 274; Bangalore 197; Java 42, 111
caste system in 130, 140; Christianity in Jedi 199; Jedi Church 199; Temple of the Jedi
220–1; culture-bound syndrome in 158; Order 199
dividual in 57; goddess marriage in 26; Jehovah’s Witnesses 173, 181, 221
Hindu fundamentalism in 233, 246, 248–50; Jerusalem 58, 121, 143, 241, 274–75
Islam in 212–13, 246, 269, 273; Jains in 127, Jesuit 218
266; Kaniyan of 265; mental illness in 170–1; Jesus 48, 58, 139, 223, 234, 236, 262; on
pilgrimage in 166; ritual in 103, 111, 144, Bougainville Island ix; burial shroud of 32;
147, 160; Sathya Sai Baba in 192; secularism Christian Science and 170; healing in the
in 281, 289, 298–301; Sikhs in 272–73; name of 166; as messiah 192; self-crucifixion
visuality in 65 in imitation of 265–66; in Taiping Rebellion
Indian (American) 191, 218, 226 190; visual images of in Ghana 66
Indonesia 59, 75, 94, 111, 208–11, 246, 291 Jew(ish) 58, 60, 63, 100, 143, 166, 233,264;
Ingold, Tim 3, 29 Christian Identity and 239; dietary laws 130,
Inquisition 269 137; fundamentalists 235, 241–44; Islamic
interaction code 104–7, 125, 131 suicide bombing and 276; Lemba as 201;
International Society for Krishna Consciousness martyrs 267; in Russian political myth
(ISKCON, or Hare Krishna) 136 83; persecution of 269; scriptures 64;
Iran(ian) 65, 233, 267, 271–72; Basseri of 291; terrorism 275; Zionism and
revolution 244, 247 193–94, 272
irredentism 193–94 jihad 245, 273; jihad rap 210
Irish Republican Army 275 Judaism 36, 48, 58, 59, 93, 202, 204, 255;
Islam 36–37, 59, 63–65, 93, 99, 176, 196, 202, fundamentalism in 241–44; holy war in
204–15, 221, 225, 250, 255, 288; Basseri 291; 260, 273; Lemba and 201; martyrdom in
divine epithets in 90; in France 213–14, 296; 267; in Russian political myth 195;
fundamentalism in 229, 232, 235, 244–48; ultra-orthodox 241–43
halal food in 137; in Indian secularism Ju/hoansi 32, 68–69, 259, 265; see also !Kung
299–300; modernization of 198; non-belief in jukurrpa 4, 28, 179; see also Dreaming
279; orientalism and 208; pilgrimage 121; Jung, Carl 14, 51–52
prayer 90; purity of 189; sacred sites in 58; in
Spain 24; in Texas 214–15; in Turkish Ka’aba 59
secularism 297–98; veneration of saints 32, Kaguru 37, 45–46, 70, 142, 147
59; violence in 259–60, 267, 269–70, 272–73, Kahane, Meir 242
275–77; women in 210–11; women’s piety Kali 48
movement 135; women’s radio programs in Kalinga 71
77; women and television in Pakistan 211–12; Kagamikyõ 293–94
see also Muslim Kan, Sergei 225
Islamophobia 208 kanaima 161–62
Israel(i/te) 18, 142, 166, 193–94, 241; karma 136, 140, 207, 259–60
Anglo-Israelism 239; Arab wars against 272; Kapauku 73
342 Index
Kardec, Allen (Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail) Maccabees 241; Judas Maccabeus 241
159, 165, 169 Madagascar 8, 141, 159
Kashmir 269, 271–73 madrasa 234
Keane, Webb 51, 54, 92, 99, 216 magic 1, 4, 14, 21, 73–75, 78, 89, 94, 113–16, 155;
Kemal, Mustafa (Ataturk) 298 anti-Trump 110; computer programming as
key scenario 57 197; counter-magic 61; Ghost Dance and 191;
Keyes, Charles 207, 251 hospital and 173; Indian atheist movement
Khalsa 63, 274; see also Sikh(ism) against 300; Mbuti and 290; Medicine, Magic,
Khomeini, Ayatollah 233 and Religion 151; Miskitu sexual 109–10;
Kiowa 61, 80 Murngin “black” 161; nativistic movements
Kleinman, Arthur 153; and Robert Hahn 153 194–95; secularization and 285; Taiwanese
Kluckhohn, Clyde 80 Red-Head Master of 99; Trobriand Island
Knights Templar 274 34, 105
Konyak Nagas 144 Mahabharata 42, 64
Kook, Rabbi Abraham Itzhak Hacochen 242 Mahmood, Saba 135, 210
Koresh, David 192 Makushi 161–62
kosher 137, 261, 264 Malaysia 29, 31, 37, 160, 246, 271
Kraho 218 Mali 77, 210, 245
Krishna 45, 199, 260–1; International Society Malinowski, Bronislaw 12, 14, 18–19, 33, 119,
for Krishna Consciousness or Hare 127, 133; on magic 116; on myth 54, 79, 99;
Krishna 136 on “uncontaminated Native” 176–77
kshatriya 45, 140, 240, 260, 274 mana 8, 21, 39, 113, 141, 259
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 237, 240 mandate of heaven 18, 141
Kuna 94, 106, 164 Mandinko 46
Kunapipi 179 Manggarai 59, 189
!Kung 32, 68–69, 259, 265; see also Ju/hoansi Maori 194
Kuper, Hilda 69, 143, 148 Mapuche 36, 47
kwoth 28, 38, 129, 176 Mardi Gras 121, 144
Kyrgyzstan 207 Marett, R. R. 102
Mari El 287
La Barre, Weston 13, 51 Margolis, Maxine 235, 242
Labrador 146, 148 Marranci, Gabriele 232, 244–46
LaHaye, Tim 237, 239 Marriott, McKim and Ronald Inden 57
laïcité 213, 295–96 Marsden, George 229
laiklik 298 Marty, Martin and R. Scott Appleby 229,
Lakota 191 232–33
Langer, Suzanne 19, 52–53 martyr(dom) 122, 265, 267, 269, 274, 276
Laqueur, Walter 275 Marx, Karl 6, 11, 17–18, 133, 284, 286
Latin 34, 36, 39, 61, 99, 100, 112, 142, 177, 190, Marxism 251, 285
219, 261, 268, 282; Latin America 158, 221 Mary ix–x, 123, 142; Hail Mary 118
Lawrence, Peter 180, 192 Masada 267
Leach, Edmund 15, 86, 104, 151 Maududi, Syed Abul Ala 241, 246
Lebanon 211 Maya 190, 263, 265
Lemba 201 Mayotte 159–60
Left Behind 199 Mbuti 290
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15–16, 83–4, 89, 91, 118 McFarland, H. Neill 181
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 6, 14 McVeigh, Timothy 240
Liberty University 234 Mecca 58–59, 113, 121
liminal(ity) 107, 112–13, 122, 144, 186 medical pluralism 151, 168–69
Linton, Ralph 194–95 medium (spiritual) 38–39, 66, 71, 118, 147,
Lionza, María 65, 254 153–54, 160, 165, 254
liturgy 106, 242 mega church 197
Londono Sulkin, Carlos David 137 Meiji 196
Lord of the Rings, The 41 Melanesia(n) 57, 126, 191, 265
Luhrmann, Tanya 10 melodrama 65–66
Luther, Martin 235, 269 Meneley, Anne 247
Lutheran 92, 219–20, 223 Menomini 40, 71, 148
Index 343
messianism 114, 182, 192 Bosnia 63; women’s groups in Mali 77;
Methodism/ist 206, 236 women’s piety movement 135; Yemeni
Meto 89, 115 women 247; see also Islam
Mexico 70, 84, 107, 108, 116, 121, 158, 220, 225 Muslim Brotherhood 245, 247
Meyer, Birgit 55, 57–58, 66, 221 Muslim League 248
Middle East 63, 83, 208, 212, 271–72 Muslim Society 208
Milgram, Stanley 257 Myerhoff, Barbara 121
milhemet mitzvah 273 mysticism 21,
millenarian(ism) 114, 190–2, 251 mytheme 85
Miskitu 109–10
modernism 196, 229, 241 Nadel, S. F. 55
modernization 209, 228, 239, 245, 248, 284–85, Nagata, Judith 230
287, 292; Christianity, colonialism, and Napo Runa 95–96
216–17; selective 232; Turkish 297 Native American 13, 59, 84, 158, 191
modes of religiosity 23, 223, 230 nativism 114, 194, 196
modular nature of religion x, 20–1, 25, 66, nativist(ic) movement 194, 231, 244
261, 271 Natural Symbols 138
Mongolia(n) 50, 68, 74 Navajo 27, 32, 41; Pentecostalism among
monk 71, 113, 223, 267; Buddhist 72, 88, 100, 118, 189–90, 199; prayer 90, 93; ritual therapy 166
207, 250–1, 274, 292; Eastern Orthodox 282 Nazi(sm) 51, 269
monotheism 12, 36, 219, 244, 248, 250, 260, Ndembu 50, 53, 57–58, 109, 116
267; religious war and 273 Ne Win 251
Moody Bible Institute 237 Needham, Rodney 27–28
Moon, Sun Myung 192 Nepal 59–60, 67, 111, 142, 158, 250, 289, 291
moral community 6, 17, 127, 131–32, 183, Neturei Karta 242
203, 285 New Guinea 32, 73; see also Papua New
Moral Majority 228, 231 Guinea
Morgan, David 64–65 new religious movement (NRM) 23, 114, 180–4,
Mormon(ism) 181, 192, 221, 235; Book of 64, 190, 202, 232, 270, 273, 288, 292–93
92; fundamentalist 231; see also Church of New Testament 219, 236, 238–39
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints New Zealand 109–10, 194, 215
Morocco 208–9 Niagara Bible Conference 237
Morphy, Howard 180 Nicaragua 221
Mount Fuji 59, 292 Nietzsche, Friedrich 127, 133, 284
Mount Hikurangi 194 Nigeria 65, 232, 244, 277
Mount Meru 42 nonsecular medical anthropology 154, 172
Mount Olympus 36, 42 Norse 42, 48
Mueller, Max 12, 248 North America 265; Kiowa of 61; Menomini of
Muhammad 58, 64, 71, 139, 244, 246, 273, 279 40; Yupik of 61
Muhammadijah movement 246 North, Gary 238
Muinane 137 Northern Ireland 271–72
Mundurucu 62 Nuer 27–28, 38, 61, 63, 70, 127–29, 138, 176–77,
Murphree, Marshall 206 201, 208, 262–63, 265
Muslim 59, 63, 198, 201–2, 233–35, 245, 248, n/um 68
250, 264 269, 273; becoming better 136; Bos- Nunavik 160
nian 271; brotherhoods 298; in colonial India Nunavut 166
246; Egyptian 135; female radio preachers
197; folk healers in 171; fundamentalism 229; Obeyesekere, Gananath 56
Israel and 272; jinn in 150; in majority non- obsession (spiritual) 159, 165–66, 169
Muslim societies 212–15; in Mari El 287; occult economies 75
martyrdom 267; non-Arab 208; ordinary Oedipus 13, 85
lives of 209–11; orientalism and 208–9; Old Testament 16, 238–39
Pakistani 272; pilgrims 113, 124, 166; in Ojibwa 8
Republic of Georgia 288; reverence of “On Key Symbols” 56
Muhammad 71, 139; scriptures 64, 204; in Ong, Aiwa 160
Spain 24; terrorism 275; Uyghurs of China ontology 22, 26, 29, 40, 68
270–1; veil in France 296; women of Dolina, Oodlání 189–90
344 Index
oracle 70 Hasidic Jewish 242; Japanese Buddhist 294;
Organization for Jewish 58, 63; monastic Christian 267;
Industrial, Spiritual, and Cultural Muslim in France 296; Navajo Pentecostal
Advancement 293 190; in Qur’an 260; school prayer cases 237;
orientalism 208–9 Spanish charismatic Catholic 169; Toronto
Orthodox Christianity 59–60, 171, 222–25, 229, Muslim 215; warriors 142
272, 282, 286, 288 priest(hood) ix, 5, 10, 24, 30, 38, 60, 69–70, 83,
Ortner, Sherry 6; on key symbols 56; on 97–99, 110, 171, 204, 235, 295; anti-priest
Sherpas 61, 250 144; Balinese 111, 121; Brahmin 108, 130,
Otto, Rudolf 6, 12 140; Buddhist 198, 274, 294; Catholic 124,
Ottoman 297 206, 226, 282, 295; Catholicism as priestcraft
Our Lady of the Wall 142, 166 103; doctors as 173; Egyptian 83; Hebrew 69,
241; Hopi 107; Jesuit 218; Mayan and Aztec
Pacific 39, 73, 175, 191, 259, 271 265; Nuer 70; Polynesian 175; Shintō 293,
pagan(ism) 195; technopaganism 197 294; in Tanzania 207; women in Polish
Pakistan 211–12, 214–15, 269, 272, 274, 300; native faith 196; of Yellamma 26
ritual clown in 107 Primitive Culture 6
Palestine/Palestinian 142, 166, 276; Palestine primitive mentality 6, 12, 14
Liberation Organization 272 Promise Keepers 235
Pali 64, 100 prophet 71–72, 77,113, 122, 140; Hebrew 241;
Papua New Guinea ix, 23; Guhu-Samane of Joseph Smith 192; Muhammad 58, 64, 71, 77,
219; Hua of 137, 290; Islam in 212; Madang 246, 267, 279; in new religious movement
Hospital in 171–2; Rawa of 126; Sambia of 181, 185, 192, 194; Wovoka 191; Zarathustra
62; Trobriand Islands in 33; Uiaku of 218 or Zoroaster 44
Parks, Douglas 87, 93, 97 Protestant(ism) 5, 55, 60, 102, 171, 177, 181,
Parliament of World Religions 248 218–19, 221–23, 225, 234, 236, 271–72;
Pashtun 235. 276; see also Pukhtun anti-ritual attitude of 103; Bible reading 93;
paye 70, 83 colonialism and 217; fundamentalist 229,
Penitente Brotherhood 265 239; Inquisition against 269; Pentecostal 220;
Pentecostal(ism) 65, 135, 171, 181, 220–22, 301; Reformation 123, 235, 285; schism in Papua
in Ghana 221; in Kyrgystan 207; Navajo New Guinea 219
189–90, 199 proverb 1, 78, 86; Book of Proverbs 92
perlocutionary 98–99 Pukhtun 276; see also Pashtun
persecution 260–1, 268–71, 273, 280; in Islam Purity and Danger 129
260; of religion in Soviet Union 286
Persinger, Michael 16 qigong 182–83, 188
personal symbols 56 Qollahuaya 156
Petalangan 94 Quack, Johannes 300
Peyote Hunt 121 Quechua 166
philosophes 284, 295 Qur’an 24, 64, 71, 92, 171, 198, 204, 211, 213,
Philosophy in a New Key 52 229, 245, 246, 260, 267, 270, 279
Piaroa 44
pilgrim(age) ix, 58, 70, 108, 113, 121–24, 142, Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 17, 19, 79, 138; on ritual
166, 246, 292 54; on structural functionalism 19, 119,
Pintupi 179 131–32
Pitjantjatjara 207 Radin, Paul 6
Poirier, Sylvie 179 Raelianism 180–1
political ritual 115, 118, 120–1 Ragnarok 48
Polish native faith movement 195–96 Rappaport, Roy 133
pollution 128–30, 137, 140, 144, 264, 290 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 249
Polynesia(n) 103, 141; iconoclasm 175, 179 Rastafari(anism) 177, 194; Rasta Sufis 210, 246
polytheism 12, 36, 59, 195 Rawa 126, 139, 148
possession see spirit possession Redfield, Robert 202–4, 284
prayer 3, 21,32, 78, 86, 88, 90–3, 98–100, 113, Reed, Ralph 228
165, 285–86, 290; American evangelical resonant rupture 189–90
Christian 10; faith-based healing 173; revitalization 114, 183–86, 195, 230–1, 252
fundamentalist Christian 238; Ghana 171; rite of intensification 115, 118
Index 345
rite of passage 109, 111–12, 114, 116–18, 295–96; humanists in UK 301–2; Indian
122, 264 299–300; Japanese 292–93; post-secularism
ritual clown 106–7 287–88; teaching in Soviet Union 286–87;
ritual process 103, 111–12; The Ritual Turkish 297–98
Process 144 secularization theory 197, 284–87
ritualization 103, 105–6, 115, 143 self-flagellation 265, 267
rituals of affliction 109, 116 Semai 37
rituals of rebellion 121, 143–44 Serb(ia) 193, 272–3
rituals of reversal 144, 146 Seventh-day Adventism 116, 169, 181, 192
Rivers, W.H.R. 151 shahada 267
Roberts, Elizabeth 153–54, 172–73 shaman(ism) 9, 19, 61, 67–69, 73, 109, 112,
Robertson, Pat 228 116–17, 148, 218; Arikara 97; Australian
Robertson Smith, William 16, 261 Aboriginal 68; in British Guiana 192;
Robbins, Joel 216, 221, 223 Bunyoro 70; Cubeo 83–84; dark 162; Dayak
Roe v. Wade 237 291; healing 153–54, 157, 162–64; Huichol
Roman 16, 107, 141, 143, 181, 223, 241, 269, 70; Kalinga 71; !Kung or Ju/hoansi 68;
273, 282; carnival 145; occupation of Menomini 71; Mongolian 50, 74; Napo Runa
Jerusalem 95; Nepal 291–92; Nusu 31; Petalangan 94;
275; Roman Catholic 222, 236 psychoanalysis and 164–65; ritual self-injury
Romanian 224 among 265; Yanomami 68–69; Yupik 115
Rome 59, 145, 281 shapori 68–69
root metaphor 57 shari’a 212, 233, 297
Ruel, Malcolm 264 Shaw, Rosalind and Charles Stewart 186–89
Runa 35, 95–96 Sherpa 60, 250–1
Rushdoony, R. J. 238 Sherzer, Joel 94, 97
Russia(n) 82–83, 144, 220, 222–23, 225, 276, 286 Shi’a/’ite 65, 244, 247, 267, 271, 291
Rwanda 272 Shilluk 120, 143
Ryle, Gilbert 53 Shintō 60, 292–94
Shnirelman, Victor 82
sacrifice 9, 13, 19, 21, 23, 68, 104, 111, 113–15, Shona 206
118, 120–1, 129, 132, 140, 170, 261–64. shroud of Turin 32, 223
268–69, 290; of Jesus 236; Mayan and Aztec sicarii 275
265; nonviolent 167; Nuer 70; Roman 141; Sidamo 160
self-sacrifice 115, 131, 166; Sikh Khalsa 274; Sikh(ism) 3663–64, 204, 269, 271–74; see also
suicide bombing as 276; Suri cattle 264; Khalsa
Trobriand 34; in western Himalayas 38 sin x, 44, 118, 129–30, 207, 236, 259, 262,
sadhu 266 264, 267
sadhvi 266 Sinhalese 167, 193, 251–52, 275
Sahlins, Marshall 8,133, 139 Siriono 218
Said, Edward 209 skeptic(ism) 38, 220, 280–3, 291–92, 301
salafiyyah 246 Skorupski, John 105, 107
Sambia 62 Smith, Jonathan Z. 262
Samoa 117, 159 Smith, Joseph 192
sannyasin 73, 266 Society for Medical Anthropology 152
sannyasini 266 somatic poetry 95
Satmar 242 sorcery/sorcerer 19, 44, 61, 64, 70, 73–74, 116,
Sathya Sai Baba 192 126, 139, 147–48, 153–54, 161–63, 167, 171,
Saudi Arabia 245, 277 218, 258; Yolgnu 167–68
Saussure, Ferdinand de 15 Sosis, Richard 23
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Margaret Lock 156 soul x, 14, 20, 27, 29, 31–32, 34, 37, 40, 45–47, 50,
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Philip Bourgois 256 59, 68, 71, 74, 129, 165, 173, 237, 290; “Comics
Schielke, Samuli 209, 245 for the Soul” 199; no soul 281; soul flight 116,
Schmidt, Father Wilhelm 12 162–63; soul loss 109, 114, 158, 166
Scientology 64, 180–1, 188, 192 South Africa 87, 201, 251
Scopes “monkey” trial 237 Soviet Union 270, 286–87, 300
secularism 229–30, 233–34, 280–2, 284, 287–90; Spain 23–24, 144, 212
Formations of the Secular 288; French Spanish 23, 169, 218, 265, 269
346 Index
Spencer, Herbert 12 Tedlock, Dennis 95
Sperber, Dan 54, 103 TELAH (Heaven’s Gate) 180, 188
Spinoza, Baruch 37 Ten Commandments 139, 238; The Ten
spirit possession 70–1, 114, 118, 138, 159; Commandments 65
in Brazilian Spiritism 159, 165, 169; in terrorism 212, 243–44, 247–48, 254–55, 261,
Christianity 159, 166; correlation with cul- 270–1, 275–77
tural variables 139; among Dalit women 147; Tertullian 267
among Hofriyat women 150, 160; of Tewa 38, 46, 59
Malaysian female factory workers 160; in Thai(land) 100, 201–2, 207; self-formation in
María Lionza cult 254; of Sidamo men 160 136, 140
Spiritism 159, 165–66, 169 theater state 120–1
Spiro, Melford 27–28, 32, 74, 259 theism 37
Sri Guru Granth Sahib 64, 92 theodicy 43–44
Sri Lanka 167, 193, 219, 233, 248, 251–52, Theosophical Society 251
271, 275 Tibet(an) 64, 270
Srinivas, Tulasi 197 Tikopia 39,103
Stadler, Nurit 166, 243–44 Tocqueville, Alexis de 295
Staal, Frits 108 Torah 92, 238, 242–43
Stoicism 281 Toronto 215
structural functionalism 18–19 totem(ism) 13, 15, 17, 34, 81, 84, 177, 265
structuralism 15–16, 84, 86, 93 Totem and Taboo 13
Sudan 5, 55, 74, 120, 150 traditioning 178, 187, 197, 232
Sufi 208, 210; Sufi Comics 199 trickster 37, 88, 259
Sugpiaq 225 Trinity Broadcasting Network 234
summarizing symbols 56–57 Trobriand Island(ers) 12, 33–34, 45, 105, 137
Summer Institute of Linguistics 219 Trump, Donald 110, 116
Sunni 244, 271 Turkey 213, 297–98, 300
Suri 264 Turnbull, Colin 290–1
susto 109, 158, 165 Turner, Victor 20; on carnival 144–45; on
Swazi 69–70, 143, 148 Ndembu 50, 53, 55, 57, 109, 116; on
Swinburne, Richard 36 pilgrimage 121–24; on ritual 102–3, 109,
sympathetic magic 116; see also imitative magic 111–14, 116, 144, 186; on symbols
symbolic inversion 144, 146–48 56–57, 86
syncretism 114, 177, 181, 186–90, 209, 239, 241, Tylor, E. B. 6, 12, 13, 26, 29, 34, 102, 126, 261
248, 251, 285; anti-syncretism 189
UFO 188
Tabligh Jama’at (Gambia) 210, 246 Uiaku 218
taboo 21, 39, 48, 111, 113–14, 119–20, 134, 137, Ulithi 37, 73
159, 228, 259; incest taboo 13; ritual clowns Unification Church 192, 284
breaking 107 United Kingdom (UK) 166, 212, 246, 272, 279,
Tahiti 175 299, 301; see also England
Taiping Rebellion 180, 190 United States 51, 127, 144, 166, 172, 173, 271;
Taiwan(ese) 94, 99 fundamentalism in 234, 237, 239; fundamen-
takfir 245 talist Mormons in 231; Hasidic Jews in 242;
Taliban 233, 244, 248, 269, 276 Hopi of 107; Menomini or 71; Muslims in
Tallensi 32, 40, 134, 259 208, 210, 212; Navajo of 90, 189; secularism
Tambiah, Stanley 3; on ritual 103; on Thai in 280, 300; white nationalism in 195; Yaqui
Buddhism 100 of 84; Zuni of 95; see also America(n); US
tantric retreat 155 Upanishads 64, 249
Tao Te Ching 40, 64 Urantia Book 64
Tao(ism) 4–5, 40, 94; see also Dao(ist) US 38, 169, 248, 275
Tamil 71, 193, 251–52, 275; Tamil Eelam 193; Uyghurs 270–1
Tamil Nadu 265 Uzendoski, Michael 95
Tanzania 1, 70, 206–7
Taussig, Michael 208 van Nieuwkerk, Karin 278, 283
tawhid 37 Vatican 59; Second Vatican Council 226
technopaganism 197 Vedas 64, 92, 248, 263, 300
Index 347
Venezuela 41, 44, 68, 161; Maria Lionza cult in Witches 18; Ghana 66, 171; Kaguru 46,
65, 254 70,147; Mapuche 36; Menomini 71, 148;
Vietnam 188, 225, 279 Miskitu 109; Navajo 90, 189; New Zealand
Vishnu 48 109; Swazi 148witch doctor 67, 162
visual piety 64 Womack, Mari 154, 162–63
vitalism 196 Worsley, Peter 192
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 35 Wovoka 191
voodoo (Vodun) 177
Xangô 71
Wahhab(ism) 245, 277 Xenophanes 11, 16, 21, 281
Wallace, Anthony F. C.139, 194; building block
approach 20, 113; definition of religion 6; on Yahweh 42, 44, 59
revitalization movements 184–86, 230; on Yanomamo (also Yanomami) 41, 68–69
ritual 26, 103–4, 113, 115–16, 118, 121 Yaqui/Yoeme 80, 84, 106–7
Walsingham 123–4 Yemen 247
Wawilak sisters 179 yeshiva 242–44
Warlpiri 4, 32, 34, 103, 178–80, 201 Yolngu 167–68
Weber, Max 192, 284–85 Yugoslavia 193, 272–73
Wheelwright, Philip 11, 281 Yupik 61–62, 115
White, Leslie 51
Whitehouse, Harvey 23, 223 zâr 150
Wicca(n) 42, 64 Zarathustra 44
Wierzbicka, Anna 4–5, 21 Zimbardo, Philip 257
witch(craft) 1,4, 9, 19, 21, 44, 74–75, 87, 113, Zion 194; Zionism/Zionist 193, 242; Zionist
116, 119, 139, 161, 238, 259, 288; anti-Trump Occupation Government (ZOG) 195
110; Apache 147; Azande 153, 258; Bagandu Zoroaster/Zoroastrian(ism) 44, 64, 259, 269
61; Bakossi 89; Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Zuni 95

Introducing Anthropology of Religion

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Introducing Anthropology of Religion

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Introducing Anthropology of Religion

Jack David Eller is a retired Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Community

Jack David Eller

ISBN: 978-1-032-02303-8 (hbk)

1 Studying religion anthropologically: Deﬁnitions and theories 1

2.1 Guardian angel. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and

1.1 The “language” of God in English and beyond 4

Christianity, speciﬁcally Catholicism through the missionary Society of Mary (also

The structure of the book

An ethnographic vignette to open each chapter

New to the third edition

Some of the changes and enhancements to the new edition include:

A note on verb tenses

Studying religion “anthropologically”

Box 1.1 The “language” of God in English and beyond

Studying “religion” anthropologically

James Frazer: “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are

That is to say, religion is an extrapolation of culture, to include in society and as cultural

1 Filling individual needs, especially psychological or emotional needs. Religion can

Box 1.2 Learning to have a religious experience

Furthermore, as Tanya Luhrmann has emphasized in a series of inﬂuential publica-

“Studying” religion anthropologically

Primitive mentality versus psychic unity

Durkheim: Social classiﬁcation and the sacred

The “building block” approach: Wallace

Cognitive evolutionary approaches

It is a bet because the world is uncertain, ambiguous, and in need of interpretation. It

Box 1.3 Religion and the modern state: A contemporary controversy

The anthropology of belief

Religious ideas: Beings and forces

dress in a physical aspect as an animal, plant, or other natural phenomenon in order

Box 2.2 Changing of the gods in the western Himalayas

Clearly, worshippers do not “believe” in the god with unquestioning credulity.

Religious ideas: The universe and human existence

Cosmology and cosmogony

Box 2.3 The gendered cosmos of the Desana

The central preoccupation of Desana religious thinking is the control of human

Theodicy: Explaining evil

Human conception, birth, and death

Figure 2.3 Graves in an urban Japanese cemetery. Courtesy of the author.

End of time: Eschatology

The anthropology of symbolism

Table 3.1 Langer’s comparison of language and symbolism

Has vocabulary and syntax Has no vocabulary—cannot be broken into

The concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one. Believing … that

(How) do symbols mean?

On these grounds, therefore, I consider it legitimate to include within the total

Religious symbols and objects, or religion objectiﬁed

Statues, idols, and divine abodes

Charms, amulets, and ritual objects

The human body

Pictures and images

Box 3.1 Picturing God in Ghana

Box 3.2 The multiple personhood of the Yanomami shapori

Figure 3.6 Buddhist monks in Thailand. Courtesy of the author.

A sorcerer is a person who wants to kill people. He may do it by blowing med-

If blight seizes the ground-nut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is vaingloriously

Box 3.3 Witchcraft and doubt in Indonesia

Despite its conventionality, there is considerable resistance to female lecturers, on the

Myth as religious language

In other words, myth:

Therefore, he concluded, myth should not be treated as explanation or as symbol but

Types and themes of myth

Box 4.1 Hyborea: A Russian nationalist political myth