The Role of Religion in Societies: Types, Changes, and Secular Rituals

1. This presentation discusses the role of religion in a variety of societies. It focuses on the types of religion and the situations in which religions can change rapidly. It concludes with a discussion of secular rituals and the way in which a trip to Walt Disney World might be studied as a secular ritual. Religion

2. Introduction • Religion (Wallace) • belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces. • So defined, religion is a cultural universal. • Neanderthal mortuary remains • earliest evidence of what probably was religious activity.

3. Animism • Animism is seen as the most primitive form of religion • defined as a belief in souls that derives from the first attempt to explain dreams and like phenomena.

4. Animatism • Animatism is the belief that all animate and inanimate objects are infused with a common life force • the assignment to inanimate objects, forces, and plants of personalities and wills, but not souls.

5. Mana and Taboo • Mana is defined as belief in an imminent supernatural domain or life-force, potentially subject to human manipulation. • Melanesian mana • a sacred impersonal force that is much like the Western concept of luck. • ***Examples in your own life? • Polynesian mana and the related concept of taboo • related to the more hierarchical nature of Polynesian society.

6. Magic and Religion • Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims. • Magic may be imitative (as with voodoo dolls) or contagious (accomplished through contact). • ***Have you tried this?

7. Anxiety, Control, Solace • Magic is an instrument of control, • Religion serves to provide stability when no control or understanding is possible.

8. Rituals • Rituals are formal, performed in sacred contexts. • Rituals convey information about the culture of the participants and, hence, the participants themselves. • Rituals are inherently social • participation in them necessarily implies social commitment.

9. Rites of Passage • Rites of passage which mark and facilitate a person's movement from one state to another • Rites of passage have three phases: • Separation – the participant(s) withdraws from the group and begins moving from one place to another. • Liminality – the period between states, during which the participant(s) has left one place but has not yet entered the next. • Incorporation – the participant(s) reenters society with a new status having completed the rite.

10. Rites of Passage • Liminality is part of every rite of passage and involves the temporary suspension and even reversal of everyday social distinctions. • Communitas refers to collective liminality, characterized by enhanced feelings of social solidarity and minimized distinctions.

11. Totemism • Rituals play an important role in creating and maintaining group solidarity. • In totemic societies, each descent group has an animal, plant, or geographical feature from which they claim descent. • Totems are the apical ancestor of clans. • The members of a clan did not kill or eat their totem, except once a year when the members of the clan gathered for ceremonies dedicated to the totem.

12. Totemism • Totemism is a religion in which elements of nature act as sacred templates for society by means of symbolic association. • Totemism uses nature as a model for society. • Each descent group has a totem, which occupies a specific niche in nature. • Social differences mirror the natural order of the environment. • The unity of the human social order is enhanced by symbolic association with and imitation of the natural order.

13. Totemism

14. Religion and Cultural Ecology: Sacred Cattle in India • Ahimsa is the Hindu doctrine of nonviolence that forbids the killing of animals. • Western economic development experts often use this principle as an example of how religion can stand in the way of development. • Hindus seem to irrationally ignore a valuable food source (beef). • Hindus also raise scraggly and thin cows, unlike the bigger cattle of Europe and the U.S.

15. Religion and Cultural Ecology: Sacred Cattle in India • These views are ethnocentric and wrong as cattle play an important adaptive role in an Indian ecosystem that has evolved over thousands of years • Hindus use cattle for transportation, traction, and manure. • Bigger cattle eat more, making them more expensive to keep. • Another example: pig taboo in Middle East

16. Social Control • The power of religion affects action. • Religion can be used to mobilize large segments of society through systems of real and perceived rewards and punishments. • Witch hunts play an important role in limiting social deviancy in addition to functioning as leveling mechanisms to reduce differences in wealth and status between members of society.

17. Social Control • Many religions have a formal code of ethics that prohibit certain behavior while promoting other kinds of behavior. • ***Examples in your society? • Religions also maintain social control by stressing the fleeting nature of life.

18. Kinds of Religion • Religious forms vary from culture to culture, but there are correlations between political organization and religious type. • Religious Practitioners and Types • Wallace defined religion as consisting of all a society’s cult institutions (rituals and associated beliefs) and developed four categories from this. • Shamanic religions • shamans are part-time religious intermediaries who may act as curers--these religions are most characteristic of foragers.

19. Kinds of Religion (continued) • Communal religions • have shamans, community rituals, multiple nature gods, and are more characteristic of food producers than foragers. • Olympian religions • first appeared with states, have full-time religious specialists whose organization may mimic the states, and have potent anthropomorphic gods who may exist as a pantheon. • Monotheistic religions • have all the attributes of Olympian religions, except that the pantheon of gods is subsumed under a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being.

20. Christian Values • Max Weber linked the spread of capitalism to the values central to the Protestant faith: independent, entrepreneurial, hard working, future-oriented, and free thinking. • The emphasis Catholics placed on immediate happiness and security, and the notion that salvation was attainable only when a priest mediated on one’s behalf, did not fit well with capitalism.

21. Revitalization Movements • Religious movements that act as mediums for social change are called revitalization movements. • The colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake is an example of a revitalization movement.

22. Syncretisms • A syncretism is a cultural mix, including religious blends, that emerge when two or more cultural traditions come into contact. • Examples include voodoo, santeria, and candomlé. • The cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea are syncretisms of Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs. • Syncretisms often emerge when traditional, non-Western societies have regular contact with industrialized societies. • Syncretisms attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior and symbols.

23. A New Age • Since the 1960s, there has been a decline in formal organized religions. • New Age religions have appropriated ideas, themes, symbols, and ways of life from the religious practices of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and east Asian religions.