People, gods, and goddesses

1
People, gods, and goddesses

• Anthropological approaches to religion.

2
The Duo Donggo and Bimanese

• Duo Donggo are egalitarian subsistence farmers
  who worship nature and ancestor spirits. They
  propitiate a mountain spring to bring rains.
• The Bimanese are lowland agriculturalists
  governed until recently by a Sultan. They view
  Allah as a supreme being that pervades all
  reality. Propitiate Allah in order to encourage
  rains.
• Religion and society are both models for each
  other and there is a complex relationship between
  the type of society and religious values.

3
Early Approaches Durkheim and religion

• He tried to find the most basic elements of
  sacred phenomena. It could not be the existence
  of gods, because some religions did not have gods
  or goddesses.
• He found that all societies divided all social
  phenomena into two basic realms
• i. sacred.
• Ii. Profane.
• It was the sense of the sacred that was the
  common element of all religions.
• Studied totemism among Australian aboriginal
  societies
• Each clan had a series of animal, plant or
  natural totems.
• The churinga was especially sacred.
• Clan totems were surrounded by taboos.
• Marriage and hunting were determined by the
  classification of clan totems, all clans had to
  be exogamous and could only marry into clans with
  unlike totems.
• Durkheim believed that totemism provided a
  conceptual and moral model for aboriginal
  societies in short that religion was the power
  of society writ large.

4
Religious Ritual Rites of Passage

• Arnold van Gennep
• Society could be viewed as a house, with the
  rooms representing different life stages.
  Rituals and religious beliefs helped people move
  from one stage to another. The rituals occurred
  at the threshold stage.
• Victor Turner all rites of passage have three
  major stages
• Separation symbolic death of the old state
• Liminality equality of participants, betwixt and
  between period.
• Incorporation rebirth into a new state.

5
Religion, science and witchcraft

• Malinowski religion provides a charter of
  meaning that explains that which is unexplainable
  and difficult, e.g. the fact that we all die.
  Magic is more akin to science, in that it starts
  where empirical knowledge ends and relieves
  psychological anxiety.
• Evans-Pritchard Witchcraft and magic for the
  Azande explains what we would call misfortune,
  e.g. witchcraft does not explain why a granary
  collapsed, but why it collapsed on a particular
  individual.

6
Religious movements

• Anthropolgists have studied those religious
  movements that arose as a result of catastrophic
  changes that a given worldview cannot
  accommodate, e.g. colonialism.
• Long house movement ( seneca of north america)
• Cargo cults (melanesia)
• These later became routinized and became
  political movements.

7
Charisma and routinization

• Religious prophets often arise during periods of
  societal crises.
• Whether or not a charismatic movement becomes a
  stable religion depends on the degree to which it
  becomes routinized, i.e. bureaucratically
  organized. Example, the Mormon Church Joseph
  Smith (charismatic prophet) and Brigham Young
  (routinizer).