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Chapter5. Religion as Expressive culture 1.0 Introduction Chapter 5 is about the role of religion in what we Anthropologists call expressive culture. (0:20)Religion is not just about ideas and symbols, it’s also about feelings. (0:26)Feelings are very important to human beings just as ideas are important and there are many parts of life in which feelings are very prominent, these include religion as well as some other institutions that have many characteristics that make them similar to religion in important ways. These other institutions where feelings were important, the other parts of expressive culture include things like fantasy play in childhood, where one can be enraptured by how one feels about the game; the enjoyment of the playing, the enjoyment of treating inner ideas as they are really going on out there as you play. (1:09) Expressive institutions also include recreation for adult which is how fantasy play evolves in human lives; becomes more socially organized, the little more like the way religion tends to be socially organized rather than idiosyncratic fantasy one plays in young childhood. (1:33)Expressive culture also includes all those customs that have to do with courtship and love, coming close to other people emotionally. (1:43)Art, play, religion, fantasy life, courtship and love are all areas where both emotion and other similarities exist between religion and these other institutions. For instance, all of the one I have listed tend to have sometimes in which the behaviors rather ritualized. Play in childhood can evolve very repetitive movements, pushing a little car around on a map to pretend like you driving can go on for, maybe not hours but a lot longer than I have the patience for as an adult. Children can engage in ritual behavior pretending to do things they don't actually have adult’s skills to have, but are often things they need to develop skills at. (2:36)Love. The old day’s people actually talk about the rituals of courtship. They are a little less formally organized; maybe don't find them written out them Attica books today, the one live in Victorian times. But there are plurally rituals that we engage in when we are becoming emotionally connected to someone else. (2:57)Similarly, art is often created to manifest rituals. For instance, the scripting of a play where the performance of the actors can be thought of as being peril of to the performance of a priest in a religious ceremony, responding and interacting with other players in that ceremony acolytes some in congregation each responding according to the religious script in that case. But not only that, the very production of art can sometimes involve ritual behaviors, some of the part of the artists getting into the right status of mind to do that creative work. (3:41)Finally, all these areas involve trance states. Religion does when people experience themselves as connected to another world spiritually. That kind of involves trance state psychologically. The idea that during the trance state my spirit may leave my body and explore the world out there will be best thought of by social scientists or psychologists as a fantasy state of mind in which a trance is an experience as if it were a real external experience. Similarly, artists sometimes report themselves going into a state of creative revelry that we thought of is a trance state. And certainly all of you experienced that a state of mind that you might recognize as being trance-like in which the distinction between self and not self, self and other seems to blend and merge into a fuzzy boundary or boundary that might even entirely disappear where you feel one with your partner almost able to understand your partner's very thoughts and feelings and a way that is not the ordinary state of mind. So trances, rituals and a prominent role for feelings are common in all parts of expressive culture and religion is one of these. (5:09)The close similarity between religion and these forms of expressive culture has two implications I'd like to mention to you: one is that all of theories like mentioned: love, play, art and religion are institutions in human lives that have long been thought of as very difficult in even define in a scientific way. Perhaps partly because it involves things like very prominent role for emotions or trance state makes it some difficult to define in an objective ways, even though many people perhaps most people experience the states involve subjectively. (5:53)Number two, these different institutions are often brought together and combined in a single setting. For instance art is often brought into a religious setting to enhance a religious experience. Thus examples like the Artistry of the Sixteen Chapel are definitely not unique to the religion from which it comes. All religions tend to beautify ceremonies to the use of art as a way of enhancing the spiritual experience. (6:30)Finally all these institutions have fuzzy boundaries; they tend to overlap a great deal. And the same behavior may be religious at one time or playful at another. The different forms of expressive culture grayed in each other, and it’s difficult sometimes to clean line to separate one from another since they share so many components. 2.0 Feelings in religion In terms of religion it self, feelings are very prominent and important part of religious life. Those feelings are not simply emotions but all of the internal experiences we have, you can probably call feelings. The sense of your hair standing on in on the back of your neck may be interpreted as spiritual experience. Experience in which spiritual beings are present making you feel that way. (0:34)Emotions so are also very prominent in religious settings. You will see emotions especially in ritual performances where the ritual itself makes use of symbolism that calls forth particular emotions. Often these can be emotions that are distressful in secular life but are experienced in a safe way through the ritual structure that surrounds some in a religious activity. (1:09)For instance, in some Christian denominations where people are costumed to live in large groups, cities, of tens or twenties, thousands, living with strangers next door. I have noticed the role of expression of grief and sadness sometimes being very important as a way of indicating that life is sometimes lonely but here in this congregation I feel fulfilled. Caring is supposed to crying in a sense of sobbing, tearing that sense of being in touch with isolation but in a safe way that makes it ok because I have transcend the grief that is at the rid of that emotion. (1:59)All of us sometimes engage in practices that help us cope with unpleasant emotions in life. For instance, in child hood, fears common emotion that young people have to learn to cope with because they are not very powerful yet. And in yet childhood experiences fear may crave the roller coaster wide of the affair, something that stimulates fear in a safe setting. (2:27)Individuals sometimes engage in recreation stimulates emotions that would be stressful out side that recreational setting. Going to movies stimulate fear when you watch one of those old movies like Jaws or one the Friday movies. Fear that can be saved because you can grip these armrests on your chair and remind yourself this is only a movie theater. (2:56)Religion can have that kind of cathartic affect in stimulating emotions that people may have difficulty in dealing with in day-to-day life, but by doing in a safe setting, a ritual setting that is highly structured and predictable can allow the person to experience a safe level of that emotion and that’s coming to turns with a more effectively. (3:19)Very often the result of this kind of cathartic experience is the unpleasant emotions of life is superceded by a pleasant emotion that transcends it that pushes out the unpleasant. Fear is replaced by exaltation, grief by feeling loved in one with the others of the congregation (3:43)Religion in other words stimulates emotions both unpleasant and pleasant in a way that allows people to emotionally function at a better level of if they didn’t have that out loud.
2.1 Yanomamo Healing Ritual Many western religious rituals seem to meet to evoke anxieties pertain to the immorality of other people who may do harm to us. Crime, being worried about walking through the park late at night, being mud in the street, those kinds of worries. Worries about will people break the rules of life in a way that may eventually come back to do harm to me. Many western rituals involve purification from a tendency to break rules. Using religious language: purification from sinfulness. Washing in water through baptism or through mikvah, for instance, as a way of achieving purity again. Very appropriate in societies in which rule - braking is a source of stress to people in day- to- day life.
2.3 Values, Piety and Morality A final area of feeling life in religion is the area of values. Religion often reinforces and supports those values that are important for a success of a social life. Providing motivations to the followers of religious traditions to live by feelings about how and ought to behave that carry over into a social life in ways that benefit the social group as a whole by having people motivated to pull together and work in predictable ways rather than being only ways are self-serving. Values are important parts of many religious traditions. Those that are likely to be universal are values that particularly have to do with feelings about how followers of a religious tradition ought to relate to the spiritual world itself. In your text, these kind of religious values once that are quaint to the centrally religious and that they are found in all religions and are always found in religion are referred to as piety values.
Piety values are the most diverse kinds of
values. They are so diverse that they are almost impossible to predict unless
you know a lot about a religion so that you have some sense of what are the
pattern usually followed in a system of ideas, then you may be able to predict
some of them. But piety values involve requirements and behaving parties in the
spiritual round in ways that outsiders would often see it strange and
unpredictable. In ways that outsiders might not have any way of knowing “what
does that mean when you behave that way.” Piety values are so diverse that it
can be wildering the outsiders. So examples of piety values, and remember these are values that have nothing to do with other human beings, but are all based on the principle “I need to do it this way because it is either pleasing to the spiritual, pleasing to the gods, or its not pleasing to them, will have some spiritual consequence if I don’t do it this way.” Examples of piety values will include a lot of those things that are very distinctive in setting one religion off from another. For instance, Dahaji in Islam or pilgrimage as a spiritual requirement. Ramadan, a requirement of fasting for series of days and an entire month to show piety will be an example of values that relate one’s relationship to the spiritual as a pause to the relationship with other human beings. In Hinduism treating the sidhu cow with veneration will be an act of piety, with that cow is a symbol of spiritual values. The attendance of worship services in any religion that has community of worship services would be an act of piety. For Sikhs the wearing of special clothing, the head covering, the beard in traditional Sikh religion, the carrying of a symbolic knife and other things of that kind that are done, not because they affect your relationship with other people, but because they are spiritual requirements. In Judaism, keeping a Kosher home will be an act of piety. The studies of Torah, learning the Talmud are pious acts as a pause to affect the relationships with other people. Lighting candles on the Sabbath is gone for spiritual reasons. For conservative Christians who oppose dancing on the Sabbath or on Sunday that would be holding a behavior that might be acceptable other days of a week; on that one special day is an act of piety.
2.3.1 Story of Apache Piety I was one time hiking the Superstition Mountain down in Arizona with an acquaint of Minal (?) Apache Indian, and in his traditional religion there was in pious act to step over any dead animal including the bones of an animal. And he accidentally did that not having the notice that there was a dead eagle or the bones of the eagle that were half buried in the sand. And when I called it to his attention, he very carefully undid the act by walking backwards over the skeletal remain of that dead eagle and then very pointedly walking around it to show that in pious act has been accidental evident intentional. 2.4 Values, Piety and Morality (Continued) Pieties found in every religion rules that set one group apart from another. For Jews have the rule of kosher, Mormons have the rules that they referred to as the word of wisdom that forbids alcohol, tobacco and certain other things to be used. Since actual piety don’t necessary have any conscious practical implication they can be wildering in their multiplicity particularly to outsiders who may seem no rhyme or reason enough. Other values that can be important are once that I mentioned in the last chapter, when I talked about moral values being sometimes a religious issue. Now as I said at that time that in many societies the violation of moral rules can be, nother effectively dealt with by the community in a way that does not leave moral rules being source of tremendous stress or worry. Where they are however, morality often becomes a set of values that are religious concern along side of and in addition to piety values.
Last Modified 8/15/07 10:54 AM |
