religion-1

Well, Anthropologists  have wrestled with the questions of what religion is since 1800s. So it’s been an issue --it’s been around for a long long time now. And the big problem is that religion is so extremely diverse that we just often rely on our intuition when we go to a foreign society with very different customs ,and as an anthropologist or social scientist we are really interested in and trying to figure out what is that intuition is grasping or hold of ,are we recognizing something religion, rather than simply an art performance , or a political ritual and so on. So, this first chapter of the text is gonna talk about different ways anthropologists have tried to define religion. Now I would like to flush that out a little bit for you.
 

1.1. Recognizing Religious Beliefs
Actually the whole question of defining religion is not as straightforward as it might seem to most American students or European students , for the word religion has been around since long before they were born. We use the word throughout our lives and we take it for granted that we know what it is. But in fact , if you look at the different kinds of  things people believe in, in the religions of the world, they include very diverse set of beings and powers, gods who may or may not be supreme in their power, spirits, ghosts, demons,goblins, fairies,  on that a whole list, might even include things that you yourself might have a hard time deciding whether that really is what I call religious or not, for instance  Santa Claus, clearly shares many qualities and common with the idea of spirits or  ghosts--the  characteristics that lead Santa Claus to be believable to children, and later you (learn) know that that’s something we just talk about.
      

 [2:19]Another difficulty in trying to define religion is the fact that most  languages of the world don’t have the word either for religion itself, or for  the common  distinction we made in Europe and America  between the natural and the supernatural as if they were clearly separate things that can be  easily distinguished. For instance ,in most societies people tend to regard what we called religion as part of daily life, it’s interwoven with day to day activities—like make a bow and arrow , you want it to work technologically well, use the best science you know how to make it. But you may pray over it, before you go on and use it. You may also decorate it by the way, so art and religion and science get woven together in day to day routine. Most religions that anthropologists study don’t have a special day of worship that segregate religion into a special time so that people are likely to have a word for it. And in fact the only languages that I know of actually have a word that mean “religion” in English are those languages spoken by people who follow one of the 5 or 6 major religions in the world that found in places that have full-time religious specialists like priest, therefore  need the word for what they do. The Shoshone(肖松尼族人，美国西部的一种印第安人) language has the word “religion”; the Bento language ….Many languages in the world that don’t have that kind of specialization  in religion just don’t need the word for it. So we can’t walk up to somebody and say ”Hey，is that ceremony you are doing over there religious, unless they have learned the English language and the distinctions we make in our language.  But for anthropologists it isn’t a convenient way to finding out whether something is religious. you need to have someway of looking at what your god may say, seems awful a lot like what we call religion back home. But just what it is that it just has to have it in order for me to say “yes that’s what it is”  For instance, if you look at an old video film or ,actually tape films of  Nazi   rituals, with thousands of people in unisons, making the same gestures, speaking the same words ,and in response to their leader furiously , speaking words might have many parallels  between what people think of are as dumb as part of a responsive reaction to the congregation to their religious leader, and if you didn’t know European history, you might wonder “are these Europeans doing something religious here?”
       

[5:04] it’s no easy task to recognize whether something is religion especially if you are an outsider the way an anthropologist is, doing research in a non-Western culture . For instance if you imagine yourself as a foreign visitor to America, would you consider the following things to be part of the America religion: how about Bigfoot, UFOs, the Lock Ness Monster, are those part of the American religion? As an outsider it might be difficult to decide. They have some qualities in common with things that Americans call religious: religious ideas--for instance we don’t have any photographs of them, at least not any good ones I know of , so they are difficult to demonstrate any existence for them the way scientists, or biologists or sociologists might like to. Flying saucers  are often spoken about in ways that sounded a lot like an intervention of very powerful beings from out there .Santa Claus has been mentioned before - how about that one- is that part of American religion? For children maybe “yes”, so don’t give me a quick “no” on that. ,maybe that things aren’t just clear cut as you often think.

 1.2 Shoshone Water Baby - Recognizing Religious Beliefs 
I’d like to give you an example to illustrate this point--I’m taking it from Shoshone Indians, where I did my field work, on a small reservation out in Nevada probably 40 years ago now. One of the things I learned out there was a creature they call ” Water Baby” in English, direct translation of their own word. The Water Baby to the Shoshones, they described it like, a little creature about the size of a human baby; and it looks like a human baby; it even cries with the sound just like a human baby crying. It lives off in the wild, especially like to spend time around rivers, creeks springs, places where there is plenty of water, that's its natural habitat. Sometimes, there were a lot of stories as a matter of fact, about times when a woman might come to the river or to the spring to wash clothes,  and if she wasn’t very wise, she might leave her own baby unattended, while she’s doing her work. After a while the Water Baby seeing the human baby laying there unprotected, might steal up and snatch it, Take it away. Might also go over to the cradle board where the baby was and climb into it and begin to cry , sounding just like a human baby. And then the mother, hearing a baby cry, thinking it’s her own baby, go over and pick it up to still it, put it to her breast, but the Water Baby has this really sharp fang-like teeth, and would latch onto her breast, suck the blood from her until she died. My first reaction was "aha, I’ve learned a religious story from the Shoshone", need to collect that and included it what I'm writing about -- in a chapter that I was writing about Shoshone religion. Might sound that way to you too. But I discovered when I asking Shoshones about Water Baby, since they have learned the American distinction between religious stories and secular(世俗的) stories, they were surprised that I thought it was a religious idea. Their reaction was “no, this is not like the stories we tell about Coyote, who was one of the creators, but it is just an animal that lives out there. So suddenly the story of water baby had to be moved from the chapter on religion to the chapter on Shoshone understanding of the living world around them—Shoshone zoology. it’s not always apparent if there’s something religious or not, so the ultimate question for anthropologists to deal with for over a hundred years was :can we find anything in all the diverse religions of the world that they all have in common, that would allow us to say : here are some defining features” that we’ll find in any religion.

5 Building Blocks of Religion, Anthropology of Religion Ch. 1

There are in fact 5 common building blocks that are found in religions all over the world.  They can be a rough and ready way of looking at how religions were organized.  So I'd like to list them for you now, and then talk about each one in turn. 

The first of these is, there are some distinctive characteristics to the beliefs that people have in religious settings.  The second is, religion always involves bringing out important feelings for people.  Thirdly, when people are doing religious things, when they're behaving religiously, those behaviors are often rituals, things that are done carefully in the same way each time.  Fourthly, when people do religious things, they sometimes do them alone, but then all the religions that we've studied around the world, they sometimes come together into congregations, especially for the purpose of talking about their religious beliefs, and performing rituals.  And then finally, all religions can be looked at in terms of the symbolic meanings any part of the religion has for the people.  Symbolism is the last but not the least.  Symbolism not just in the spoken words or in the beliefs but symbolism that shows up in many other places such as in religious architecture, or the meaningfulness of the behaviors that are performed in rituals.

1) Distinctive Beliefs

The distinctive beliefs.  Just what they consist of has been debated for over a century by anthropologists.  As a matter of fact, the arguments about whether the beliefs are religion have been so intractable that some anthropologists have even taken the position that it’s impossible to define anything special about the distinctive beliefs are religion.  I’m one who asserts that there is, and that religious beliefs do have one important quality in any part of the world.  It’s a quality that is referred to as anthropomorphism.  In religion, we tend to talk about things that we recognize are not human, but we talk about them using human-like metaphors.  We speak about things that are not human as if they have human qualities.  For instance, in the Western idea of god, supreme being who’s the author of all existence other than his own, is spoken of in very human terms when it comes to emotions, talking love, feel mercy, exact justice, hear and understand spoken prayers in any language, I suppose, and make decisions about whether he will act on those requests or give a ‘no’ as an answer.  And so god in Western concepts, even though he may be commonly excised of human physical characteristics in most Western religions, still has human-like personality qualities, human ability to think, reason, make decisions.  And that’s what I mean by anthropomorphism.  You’ll see anthropomorphism, I believe, in any religion.  For instance, if you go to the southwestern desert of the United States, you’ll find the Paleo Indians.  They lived, in earlier times, by gardening.  In a desert environment that’s not always the most secure thing to be doing.  Whether those rains will come and water the gardens or not, especially since the folks who lived down there didn’t have major irrigation projects to channel water from distant places.  So they spoke to the clouds, gave prayers to the clouds, treating clouds as if they have the quality to respond to human language, asking the clouds to drop the rains at appropriate times. 

Religious ideas though don’t always have to be ideas about ‘beings’, such as gods, or spirits, or ghosts, or witches.  They can also be more abstract.  Religious beliefs sometimes speak about supernatural power or spiritual power.  We anthropologists refer to this idea as ‘mana’.  Actually the idea of ‘mana’, a spiritual power, a sacred aura, sacredness to things, is also found in all religions.  So it took central important part of a religion that may not have as great an emphasis on supernatural beings as you and I might be accustomed to.  ‘Mana’ is an idea that is found though in every religion, even those that do have gods and other spiritual beings.  Basically it’s something to think of as analogies to electricity but it’s not a mundane power.  It’s a spiritual power.  Well, what makes the difference?  The difference is basically this: it’s treated with rituals, to manipulate it, rather than treated in matter-of-fact, secular ways.  But the real difference is that although it’s not a being who thinks and reasons, mana responds to symbols anyway.

I do have an example that I’d like to give you from the same reservation I mentioned before among the Shoshone.  One of my Shoshone friends told me the story about how to make love magic.  In this, no spirits were involved but just materials that were used in the ritual being dealt with spiritual power to have an influence.  Basically this involved obtaining the heart of a weezle.  A weezle, being a beautiful little animal, was appropriate to the idea of creating attraction between people.  The heart, being the powerful part of the weezle, was the part that would be very relevant, strong feelings, strong emotions.  Taking a very small piece of the heart of the weezle, mix it with face paint clay, ….  Grind it together, and then apply to a small rock about the size of your fingernail.  Take it out and speak words to this material, in English we call medicine. And then it will endow it with power to do what you wanted it to do.  Even though it didn’t have the human or human-like ability to reason and decide to either say yes or no, it was manipulated by speaking to it.  And it too has an anthropomorphic quality.  Unlike electricity, that’s manipulated with wiring, and fuses, and screwdrivers, ‘mana’ is manipulated by treating it as if it could respond the way humans do.

All these contrast quite strongly with the way we think in non-religious settings where we’re being more matter-of-fact, pragmatic and mechanical in how we look at the world.  Particularly strong contrast with how science talks about things where anthropomorphism tends to be eliminated.  Matter-of-fact in science, the common practices to typically take the human out of, rather than see the human in.  Where religion anthropomorphizes, just as art often does, science tends to … the world or mechanofies the world.  Even when we talk about humans, biologists might talk about your heart as being like a pump, your lungs as being like bellows, your veins being like pipes that carry liquid.  There is a distinctive quality to religious thought, one that sees the human in the non-human, in contrast to our more matter-of-fact way of talking about how machinery operates or even about ourselves when we’re thinking in non-religious terms.