ANT 101: INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY

Lecture 18: Religion, Society and Culture

Dr. Bulbul Ashraf Siddiqi

Associate Professor
Dept. of Political Science and Sociology
DEFINING RELIGION
 The word religion derives from the Latin religare, “to tie, to
bind
 The anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace defined religion as
“belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers,
and forces” (1966, p. 5).

 Another definition of religion (Reese 1999) focuses on bodies

of people who gather together regularly for worship. These
congregants or adherents subscribe to and internalize a common
system of meaning. They accept (adhere to or believe in) a set
of doctrines involving the relationship between the individual
and divinity, the supernatural, or whatever is taken to be the
ultimate nature of reality.
DEFINING RELIGION
 Anthropologists have stressed the collective, shared, and
enacted nature of religion, the emotions it generates, and the
meanings it embodies.

 In studying religion cross culturally, anthropologists pay

attention to the social nature and roles of religion as well as to
the nature, content, and meaning to people of religious
doctrines, acts, events, settings, practitioners, and
organizations. We also consider such verbal manifestations of
religious beliefs as prayers, chants, myths, texts, and statements
about ethics and morality
ORIGINS OF RELIGION

 Animism

 Mana and Taboo

 Magic and Religion

ANIMISM

 For Tylor, animism, the earliest form of religion, was a

belief in spiritual beings.

 Tylor concluded that attempts to explain dreams and

trances led early humans to believe that two entities
inhabit the body: one active during the day and the other
—a double or soul—active during sleep and trance
states. Although they never meet, they are vital to each
other. When the double permanently leaves the body, the
person dies. Death is departure of the soul. From the
Latin for soul, anima, Tylor named this belief animism.
ANIMISM
 Tylor proposed that religion evolved through stages,
beginning with animism. Polytheism (the belief in
multiple gods) and then monotheism (the belief in a
single, all-powerful deity) developed later. Because
religion originated to explain things people didn’t
understand, Tylor thought it would decline as science
offered better explanations.
MANA
 A sacred impersonal force existing in the universe is
called Mana. Mana can reside in people, animals, plants,
and objects.
 Such a conception of the supernatural is particularly
prominent in Melanesia, the area of the South Pacific
that includes Papua New Guinea and adjacent islands.
 Objects with mana could change someone’s luck. For
example, a charm or amulet belonging to a successful
hunter might transmit the hunter’s mana to the next
person who held or wore it. A woman might put a rock in
her garden, see her yields improve dramatically, and
attribute the change to the force contained in the rock.
TABOO
 Sacred and forbidden; prohibition backed by supernatural
sanctions.

 Because high chiefs had so much mana, their bodies and

possessions were taboo (set apart as sacred and off-limits
to ordinary people). Contact between a high chief and
commoners was forbidden. Because ordinary people couldn’t
bear as much sacred current as royalty could, when
commoners were accidentally exposed, purification rites
were necessary.

 The beliefs in spiritual beings (e.g., animism) and

supernatural forces (e.g., mana)
MAGIC AND RELIGION
 Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish
specifi c aims. These techniques include spells, formulas, and
incantations used with deities or with impersonal forces. Magicians
use imitative magic to produce a desired effect by imitating it. If
magicians wish to injure or kill someone, they may imitate that effect
on an image of the victim. Sticking pins in “voodoo dolls” is an
example. With contagious magic, whatever is done to an object is
believed to affect a person who once had contact with it.

 Sometimes practitioners of contagious magic use body products from

prospective victims—their nails or hair, for example. The spell
performed on the body product is believed to reach the person
eventually and work the desired result.
 We fi nd magic in cultures with diverse religious beliefs. It can be
associated with animism, mana, polytheism, or monotheism. Magic is
neither simpler nor more primitive than animism or the belief in
mana.
FUNCTIONS AND EXPRESSIONS OF RELIGION

 Anxiety, Control and Solace

 Rituals

 Rites of Passage

 Totemism
ANXIETY, CONTROL AND SOLACE

 Religion and magic don’t just explain things and help people
accomplish goals. They also enter the realm of human
feelings. In other words, they serve emotional needs as well
as cognitive (e.g., explanatory) ones.

 For example, supernatural beliefs and practices can help

reduce anxiety. Magical techniques can dispel doubts that
arise when outcomes are beyond human control. Similarly,
religion helps people face death and endure life crises.
 According to Malinowski, magic is used to establish control,
but religion “is born out of . . . The real tragedies of human
life” (1931/1978, p. 45). Religion offers emotional comfort,
particularly when people face a crisis.
RITUALS
 Rituals are formal—stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped.
People perform them in special (sacred) places and at set
times. Rituals include liturgical orders— sequences of words
and actions invented prior to the current performance of the
ritual in which they occur.
 Rituals convey information about the participants and their
traditions. Repeated year after year, generation after
generation, rituals translate enduring messages, values, and
sentiments into action.
 Rituals are social acts.

 However, just by taking part in a joint public act, the

performers signal that they accept a common social and moral
order, one that transcends their status as individuals.
RITES OF PASSAGE

 Rites marking transitions between places or stages of life.

(customs associated with the transition from one place or stage of
life to another.

 All rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and

incorporation.
 In the first phase, people withdraw from the group and begin
moving from one place or status to another.
 In the third phase, they re-enter society, having completed the
rite.
 The liminal phase is the most interesting. It is the period between
states, the limbo during which people have left one place or state
but haven’t yet entered or joined the next (Turner 1969/1995).
TOTEMISM

 Rituals serve the social function of creating temporary or

permanent solidarity among people— forming a social
community. Totemism has been important in the
religions of Native Australians. Totems can be animals,
plants, or geographic features. In each tribe, groups of
people have particular totems. Members of each totemic
group believe themselves to be descendants of their
totem. Traditionally they customarily neither killed nor
ate a totemic animal, but this taboo was lifted once a
year, when people assembled for ceremonies dedicated
to the totem.
RELIGION AND CULTURAL ECOLOGY
 Sacred Cattle in India
SOCIAL CONTROL
KINDS OF RELIGION
 Considering several cultures, Wallace (1966) identified
four types of religion:

 Shamanic: A part-time magicoreligious practitioner.

 Communal: Based on community rituals, e.g., harvest
ceremonies, passage rite.
 Olympian: State religions with professional priesthoods.

 Monotheistic: Worship of a single supreme being.

Major World Religions by Percentage of World Population, 2005.
Classical World Religions Ranked by Internal Religious
Similarity
RELIGION AND SOCIAL CHANGE
 Revitalization Movements

 Syncretisms

 Antimodernism and Fundamentalism