Download Chapter 11 Religion: Ritual and Belief Chapter Outline

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Chapter 11
Religion: Ritual and Belief
Chapter Outline
How Should We Understand Religion and Religious Beliefs?
Understanding Religion Version 1.0: Edward B. Tylor and Belief in Spirits
Understanding Religion Version 2.0: Anthony F. C. Wallace on Supernatural Beings, Powers,
and Forces
Understanding Religion Version 3.0: Religion as a System of Symbols
Understanding Religion Version 4.0: Religion as a System of Social Action
Understanding Suicide Bomber Attacks
What Forms Does Religion Take?
Clan Spirits and Clan Identities in New Guinea
Totemism in North America
Shamanism and Ecstatic Religious Experiences
Ritual Symbols That Reinforce a Hierarchical Social Order
Polytheism and Monotheism in Ancient Societies
World Religions and Universal Understandings of the World
How Does Atheism fit in the Discussion?
How Do Rituals Work?
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Magical Thought in Non-Western Cultures
Sympathetic Magic: The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion
Magic in Western Societies
Rites of Passage and the Ritual Process
How Is Religion Linked to Political and Social Action?
The Rise of Fundamentalism
Understanding Fundamentalism
Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Examining Rites of Passage
Learning Objectives for the Student Reader
A Note for the Instructor: To support student learning, we developed specific learning
objectives for each chapter. As the instructor you may find it useful to include these
learning objectives in your syllabus, handouts, or other course materials and in the
preparation of your lectures and course activities.

Understand how anthropologists have approached the study of religion and its role
in human societies

Identify a useful definition of religion that helps us understand human experience

Apply anthropological understandings of religion to explain events such as suicide
attacks and events like September 11, 2001
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
Describe the diverse forms religion takes, and assess how those forms are related to
factors like the scale of a society

Demonstrate examples of magical thinking in ordinary American life

Clarify how politics relates to religion
 Analyze how ordinary American rituals operate as rites of passage
Key Terms and Definitions
Animism: An early theory that primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as
trees, rocks, cliffs, hills, and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings.
Fundamentalism: Conservative religious movements that advocate a return to
fundamental or traditional principles.
Fundamentalist: A person belonging to a conservative religious movement that advocates
a return to fundamental or traditional principles.
Holy struggle: A conflict that believers see as justified by doing God’s work.
Interpretive approach: A kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and
cultural interconnections within a society.
Magic: An explanatory system of causation that does not follow naturalistic explanations,
often works at a distance without direct physical contact.
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Monotheism: A belief in a single god.
Polytheism: A religion with many gods.
Religion: A a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals and other aspects of
social life.
Rite of passage: Any life-cycle rite that marks a person’s or group’s transition from one
social state to another.
Secular worldview: A worldview that does not accept the supernatural as influencing
current people’s lives.
Shaman: A religious leader who communicates the needs of the living with the spirit
world, usually through some form of ritual trance.
Speaking in tongues: The phenomenon of speaking in an apparently unknown language,
often in an energetic and fast-paced way.
Spirit Familiar: A spirit that has developed a close bond with a shaman.
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Sympathetic magic: Any magical rite that relies on the supernatural to produce its
outcome without working through some supernatural being such as a spirit, demon, or
deity.
Totemism: A system of thought that associates particular social groups with specific
animal or plant species called “totems” as an emblem.
Trance: A semi-conscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and
singing, or hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote.
World religions: Religions that claim to be universally significant to all people.
Worldview: A general approach to or set of shared unquestioned assumptions about the
world and how it works.
Chapter Summary
Introduction

The civil rights–era story about Jonathan Daniels and Sheriff Tom Coleman that
opens Chapter 11 illustrates the power of deeply held beliefs and their potential for
motivating both violence and altruism.

Chapter 11 asks, Why do people believe things that others consider wrong? And
within this broader question
o How should we understand religion and religious beliefs?
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o What forms does religion take?
o How do religious rituals work?
o How is religion linked to political and social action?

Anthropologists understand that religious beliefs offer a roadmap for behavior and
create meaning for people through the use of powerful rituals and symbols.
How Should We Understand Religion and Religious Beliefs?

Anthropologists study religion to understand people. And the range of religious
beliefs encountered by nineteenth-century scholars, both at home and abroad, made
people seem inexplicable.

Anthropologists, working in small-scale societies with relatively simple lifeways and
simple technology, assumed that local religious beliefs were also simple. Deeper
investigation gradually revealed the complexity and diversity of beliefs held
throughout the world—and the difficulty of defining “religion” cross-culturally.

In this section, we will compare the approaches taken by Edward Burnett Tylor
(1871), Anthony F. C. Wallace (1966), and Clifford Geertz (1966) as well as a fourth
approach that builds upon these previous definitions.

From 1871, anthropologist Edward Tylor introduced animism: an early theory that
primitive peoples believed that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks, cliffs, hills,
and rivers were animated by spiritual forces or beings.

Tylor proposed that religion evolved in stages from animism to polytheism to
monotheism (an ethnocentric view since he came from a largely monotheistic
culture). Tylor took this progression a step further, arguing that humans would
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eventually yield to pure reason and abandon deities altogether—something that has
not yet happened.

In the twentieth century, Anthony F. C. Wallace studied the changing religious
ceremonies and rituals (stylized performances involving symbols that are associated
with social, political, and religious activities) of the Seneca, one of the Iroquois tribes
(1956, 1970). His definition of religion became standard in anthropology: “beliefs
and rituals concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces” (Wallace, 1966,
p. 5).

For Wallace, the characteristic that ties all religious beliefs together is the
supernatural. But he recognized the many different forms of supernatural belief:
from animism to gods and spirits to more amorphous supernatural forces like the
mana of native Hawaiians: a belief that sacred power inheres in certain high-ranking
people, sacred spaces, and objects.

Wallace’s approach to religion can be criticized for not doing enough to explain
religious change, for treating religious groups and individuals as intellectually
impaired, and for not explaining the overwhelming fervency of religious believers.

Clifford Geertz wanted to explain why people could believe the peculiar ideas that
anthropologists had observed around the world. He thought religion could be best
understood as a system of symbols:
o “Religion is (1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful,
pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating
conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these
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conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and
motivations seem uniquely realistic” (1966, p. 4).

This definition emphasizes symbols that seem intensely real and factual to believers.
What, to outsiders, appear to be mythological parables are often, to insiders,
historical fact.

Regardless of the historicity of these symbols, they create purpose and meaning and
help motivate behavior. Religious symbols are a central part of a worldview: a
general approach to or set of shared unquestioned assumptions about the world and
how it works.
o Symbols describe a ‘model of’ how the world is, as well as a ‘model for’ how
the world (morally) should be.

Many anthropologists employ Geertz’s definition of religion as part of an interpretive
approach: a kind of analysis that interprets the underlying symbolic and cultural
interconnections within a society.

Geertz’s approach to religion has been criticized for assuming that people have a
basic need for meaning and for making sense of the world, for not adequately
distinguishing religion from other domains (science, aesthetics, common sense, or
law), for not understanding the emotional experience of belief, and for viewing
religion as a personal, rather than a social, phenomenon.
o Beliefs are powerful because they are socially enacted repeatedly through
rituals and other religious behaviors. By acting together, the community of
believers begins to accept the group’s symbolic interpretations of the world
as if they were real rather than merely interpretation.
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
The approach to religion used in this textbook views religion as a system of social
action. A solitary nun and millions of believers joining the pope for mass are both
practicing Catholicism. Both experiences are interpreted as being different from
everyday life.

Here, we define religion as a symbolic system that is socially enacted through rituals
and other aspects of social life, including these four elements:
o The existence of things more powerful than human beings. Although in many
societies it takes the form of some supernatural force, we prefer to think of it
as a worldview or cosmology that situates the place of human beings in the
universe.
o Beliefs and behaviors surround, support, and promote the acceptance that
those things more powerful than humans actually exist.
o Symbols that make these beliefs and behaviors seem both intense and
genuine.
o Social settings, usually involving important rituals, that people share while
experiencing the power of these symbols of belief.

We can apply this approach to religion to understanding its contemporary
consequences. Suicide bombings have become a part of daily life in some areas of
the Middle East. How can a behavior that is unthinkable to most of the world be so
commonplace in this region?

This question was not academic to Americans in the wake of 9/11, when that
behavior was exported to the United States. Events like this are the most difficult
times (even for anthropologists) to apply cultural relativism. Our immediate
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reaction is to label such acts of violence as irrational evil and leave it at that. But the
hijackers did not consider themselves irrational or evil. We are challenged to
understand, however contemptible, what they were thinking.
o The 9/11 hijackers were members of Al-Qaeda, founded by Osama bin Laden
(now deceased) to wage a holy struggle (or jihad, in Arabic) against those
perceived as oppressing Muslims.
o Jihad (which means ‘struggle’) has a broader meaning is Islam, most
commonly referring to the personal struggle to follow God’s will. Bin Laden
“radicalized” hundreds of disaffected young men in training camps to view it
as nothing but holy war (another definition of jihad) and physical violence
against Saudi Arabia and the West. Men without purpose found it in sharing
Bin Laden’s hatred of the West—with tragic and ongoing consequences.
What Forms Does Religion Take?

Early anthropological scholars of religion viewed technologically primitive people as
being primitive in all respects, even religion. Today, anthropologists don’t rank
people or religions on an evolutionary scale of complexity. But there are clear
correlations between political organization, mode of subsistence, and religious
practices.

In Papua New Guinea, the significance of clan membership is reflected in religious
systems.
o The Ningerum live in low–population density forests and view their
traditional clan lands as inhabited by a range of spirits with human emotions
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and motivations. These spirits must be appeased with offerings of gifts and
pig feasts.

Early anthropologists documented how some Native American clans identified with
particular animals, often claiming to be descended from them. These animals are
sometimes called totemic species as part of a system of thought that anthropologists
call totemism that associates particular social groups with specific animal or plant
species called “totems” as an emblem.
o Both Native American clan totems and sports team emblems act as totems
(the former spiritual, the latter secular). As we saw in a previous chapter, this
has created conflict between groups competing to “own” Native American
mascot imagery.

Beginning in the 1500s, European travelers encountered Siberian shamans: religious
leaders who communicate the needs of the living to the spirit world, usually through
some form of ritual trance or other altered state of consciousness.

More recently, anthropologists have paid particular attention to this state of trance:
a semiconscious state typically brought on by hypnosis, ritual drumming and
singing, or hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline or peyote.

This focus on altered psychological states reveals shamanism to be a widespread
phenomenon, not limited to Siberia.
o Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch’s (1973) film Magical Death shows the
Yanomamo ritual of shamanic healing, in which a shaman attempts to heal
his family by ingesting hallucinogenic snuff made from a local plant. The
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shaman is supernaturally assisted by a spirit familiar: a spirit that has
developed a close bond with a shaman.
o Closer to home, Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions engage in
rituals like snake handling and speaking in tongues: the phenomenon of
speaking in an apparently unknown language, often in an energetic and fastpaced way (called “glossolalia” by linguists).

Religious symbols can unify people around a shared identity but also reinforce
social hierarchies.
o For example, in the former kingdom of Benin, the Oba was considered divine
and symbolized by a leopard. The Oba’s palace was an architectural model of
the cosmos. Leopard imagery in the palace, arts, and festivals depicted, and
maintained, the social order.
o Egyptian pharaohs were also viewed as earthly manifestations of the gods,
along with many others in their polytheistic system. Each of these gods had
to be appeased in its own way to maintain the environmental conditions
necessary for agriculture in the Nile River valley.

Nearly all ancient societies in the Mediterranean and Middle East were polytheistic
like Egypt. The ancient Hebrews diverged from this norm by proclaiming Yahweh
(who likely began as a local deity within a polytheistic pantheon) as the one true
God, prompting a long-term shift toward monotheism that persists to this day.

As opposed to locally variable deities, monotheistic systems present themselves as
world religions: religions that claim to be universally significant to all people. The
monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all became state religions,
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whose religious message and ritual supported the government of the state. These
three “Abrahamic religions” effectively share the same deity, but
o Muslims feel that God’s message was most accurately received by the
Prophet Mohammad, not by Christians and Jews. In much the same way
many Christian faiths believe that Jews were not given the full faith until
Jesus arrived.

World religions of Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism, are polytheistic and nontheistic,
respectively.
o Hinduism shares many traits with the polytheistic systems of the Middle
East: religious specialists and political leaders maintaining cosmic and social
order by seeking the intervention of local deities.
o Just as Jesus challenged the sociopolitical order of Judaism in the Mideast,
Siddhartha Gautama (born between the fourth and sixth centuries BCE in
northern India) challenged orthodox Hinduism. Taking the name “Buddha”
(meaning “awakened one”), he taught a path of compassion and selflessness.

Many anthropologists view atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers as having a
worldview just as Christian, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists do. The details of their
worldviews are usually secular, but they are nevertheless built around symbols.
How Do Rituals Work?

There are plenty of everyday secular rituals (e.g., tooth brushing). What sets
religious rituals apart from these? Part of it depends on our perception of them—
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very few see brushing our teeth as spiritually significant. Another distinction is that
religious rituals are often described as “magical” in some sense.
o In anthropology, magic refers to an explanatory system of causation that
does not follow naturalistic explanations, that often works at a distance
without direct physical contact.

This definition differs from our everyday sense of magic as an intentional illusion.
To believers in magical powers, these forces are very real and consequential.
Whether we, as anthropologists, believe in magic is beside the point. We seek an
emic understanding of magic and its role in our informants’ lives. (Further,
Americans are not immune to magical thinking—consider Gmelch’s (1978) study of
baseball magic.)

Anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer coined the term sympathetic magic: any magical
rite that relies on the supernatural to produce its outcome without working through
some supernatural being such as a spirit, demon, or deity.

Frazer conducted a cross-cultural analysis of sympathetic magic, identifying two
principles: the laws of similarity and contagion.

Frazer’s law of similarity (imitative magic) encompasses things like voodoo dolls—
harming an imitation or effigy of a real person is believed to harm that person.
Likewise, harming a representative object “contaminated” by a person is believed to
harm the person via the law of contagion.

These laws are not mutually exclusive; they can, and do, co-occur in religious rituals.
For example, Catholic communion combines them with its symbolic wafer and wine.
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
One of the most common forms of ritual worldwide is the rite of passage: any lifecycle rite that marks a person’s or group’s transition from one social state to
another. These rituals are probably evident in many of the events students have
experienced.
o See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Examining Rites of Passage”

Anthropologist Victor Turner (1967, 1969) focused on the links between ritual and
symbols. Ritual symbols can consist of
o Objects (wafer and wine)
o Colors (white = purity or grief, depending on context)
o Actions (moving like an emu totem)
o Events (rituals that reenact mythic events)
o Words (any number of ritual recitations of sacred texts)
How Is Religion Linked to Political and Social Action?

In 1966, Time magazine questioned if religious identification would decline in the
United States as it had in Europe. Despite a recent increase in Americans who don’t
associate with any religious tradition, religious affiliation has remained stable and
even risen in some categories since 1966.

Why does the United States remain so unique among Western industrialized nations
in terms of its religiosity (contrary to Time’s prediction)? Why is a secular worldview
(that does not accept the supernatural as influencing current people’s lives)
relatively rare in the United States?
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o There are complex historical and political answers to this question. One
factor is that science and reason have not replaced religious belief, as Time
speculated they might.

The combination of political and religious authority was something of a norm for
much of our species’ history. America’s decision to formally separate church and
state marked a revolutionary departure from this norm. But religion and politics
have never been completely separate in the United States.

Religion, politics, and social change remain intertwined, especially with the rise of
fundamentalists: people belonging to conservative religious movements that
advocate a return to fundamental or traditional principles.

The post-1960s rise in Christian fundamentalists in the United States was paralleled
by increasing Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East.

The term “fundamentalism” is sometimes used pejoratively to imply, at best,
scientific illiteracy and, at worst, violent extremism. Here, we use fundamentalism to
mean conservative religious movements that advocate a return to fundamental or
traditional principles (i.e., not inherently ignorant or violent).

In the 1990s, the Fundamentalism Project at the University of Chicago explored
fundamentalism across a wide range of religious groupings (many not traditionally
associated with fundamentalism): Christianity, Islam, Zionist Judaism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, Confucianism, and Sikhism. The project identified key themes common to
all groups:
o All are threatened by secularization and perceive themselves as fighting to
return to “proper” gender roles, sexuality, and education.
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o They derive meaning and purpose from political and military efforts to
defend their beliefs about life and death (especially those issues related to
the beginning and end of life).
o Fundamentalists define themselves in relation to what they are not:
outsiders, modernizers, and moderates.
o They are zealous, committed, and firmly convinced that they have been
chosen to carry out the will of a deity.

What’s most interesting about fundamentalism from an anthropological standpoint
is how it differs from religious expression in smaller communities. In small-scale
societies, religion often supports the existing social order. Fundamentalism in larger
societies sets itself up in opposition to the social order.

This process of belonging and the social action associated with group membership is
bolstered by important symbols—anthropologists have known about this for a long
time.
Conclusion

Worldviews are built up of systems of symbols about how the world ideally should
be. Whether the worldview of Jonathan Daniels or Tom Coleman, whether the
worldview of Osama bin Laden or the Dalai Lama, they are all in a sense arbitrary
and always incomplete understandings of the world.

But while most religious worldviews are constructed of symbols that feel intensely
natural, they are anything but arbitrary.
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Key Controversies Discussed in This Chapter
A Note for the Instructor: We understand anthropology as a living science. At the end of
every chapter in the textbook, there is a table that reviews for the student reader both what
we as a discipline know about the topics covered in the chapter as well as issues that
remain unresolved. The goal here is not simply a reprise of what is presented in the
textbook but an expansion on some of those issues and others that are more latent but that
we nevertheless consider important for you to have as background for your teaching.
Religion and kinship are among the oldest topics that anthropologists have studied.
Religion was always fascinating to nineteenth-century anthropologists because the peculiar
rituals that they observed and recorded seemed to demonstrate how “primitive” these
societies were, a theme encouraged by the crude models of cultural evolution promoted by
Morgan, Tylor, and Frazer. For anthropologists in the twentieth century, religion was a
category of culture they expected to find in every society so that religion, magic, and
sorcery (or witchcraft) were topics found in all of the classic monographs from the 1920s
to the 1960s. Although all of these ethnographies demonstrated the diversity of religious
ideas, they were largely descriptive rather than attempts to explain the persistence of these
beliefs. Wallace summarized two generations of research when he defined religion as
beliefs and behavior related to the supernatural, a notion of religion that encouraged
typologies of different kinds of religions or different kinds of society. But at essentially the
same moment Geertz attempted to provide an understanding of religion that explained
why people might hold onto these peculiar ideas about the supernatural that had so little
empirical evidence to support them. For Geertz, religious meaning was created by the
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symbols of religion, an idea that Turner noted was especially embedded in ritual. For the
next several decades, anthropologists explored the use of ritual symbols in particular
societies and specific religious traditions, but the study of religion had almost ceased to be
an exciting area for anthropologists to study. But with the rise of political fundamentalism
in the Middle East and the United States religion began to attract new attention in the
1990s, especially after the events of September 11, 2001.
What We Know: Old Controversies Now Largely Resolved
(a) Is religion fundamentally about the supernatural? In many societies anthropologists
have found that religious practices and beliefs are about dealing with the supernatural. But
while the supernatural is part of many people’s religion, it is not a part of a growing
number of Europeans’ and Americans’ worldviews. Since Geertz’s classic essay “Religion as
a Cultural System,” most anthropologists have accepted that the manipulation of ritual
symbols is central to anything that most anthropologists would consider religious. Thus,
religion is about creating meaning through the manipulation of ritual symbols. The authors
of this text contend that it is social action around the public ritual that gives these symbols
their power to help individuals make sense of the world around them. To paraphrase
Claude Lévi-Strauss, symbols are good to think with, but they are easier to think with if
everybody is using the same symbols in their public lives.
(b) Are some religions really more primitive than other religions? In the nineteenth century
most anthropologists believed that peoples with simple technologies were more primitive
than people in societies with more complex technologies. They also believed that religion
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similarly evolved through a series of stages from simpler to more complex. The problem
with this analysis is that societies with the simplest technologies, such as the hunter–
gatherer Aboriginal peoples of Australia, who even lacked the bow and arrow, had very
complex myth cycles that were reenacted in their elaborate rituals. Other societies, like
some of the neighboring horticultural peoples of New Guinea, had much simpler religious
ideas and rituals focused on very basic ideas about spirits. As a result, anthropologists
generally accept the view that religious beliefs and rituals often reflect the social, economic,
and political systems of the community.
(c) Is magic evidence of irrational thought? Magic is not a set of irrational beliefs but is
based on a certain logic that makes sense if you understand its underlying assumptions.
The two key features of magic are that magic makes sense to people because it relies
largely on the law of similarity or the law of contagion. Although very different from a
naturalistic worldview, a magical worldview often accepts many naturalistic principles but
supplements them with magical ones. Even the most rational and modern of people rely in
part on magical thinking because so much of magical thought is associational and is not
consciously worked out.
(d) How do rituals create meaning for participants? Since Geertz’s classic essay “Religion as
a Cultural System,” anthropologists have generally felt that rituals provide a context for the
construction or creation of shared public meanings. Many rituals use magical principles to
construct their meanings. Rituals often juxtapose contradictory imagery to resolve the
eternal contradictions of life and death.
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(e) Why has political fundamentalism been on the rise in recent decades? Political forms of
fundamentalism have arisen in many Muslim countries of the Middle East in recent years,
but similar forms of fundamentalism have also emerged among some Christians in the
United States, among some Jews in Israel, and even among Sikhs and Hindus in India.
Although some scholars and pundits had predicted that a secular worldview would
gradually displace more traditional religions as societies modernize, the persisting power
of fundamentalist symbols continues to resonate with people who are displaced or left out
of modern economic developments.
Issues to Be Resolved: Controversies that Continue to Attract the Attention of
Anthropologists
(a) Can anthropologists ever really understand how people in other cultures think, feel, and
believe? Many anthropologists accept that we can learn a great deal about the worldviews
of the peoples we study, but not all anthropologists believe that we can fully understand
the internal states of other people. One anthropologist, Talal Asad, also contends that the
very notion of religion as an internal state is a Western one that does not appreciate crosscultural variation in ideas about how people come to believe things. Rituals may suggest
the broad structure of a worldview and how that worldview is linked to the social
institutions of society. But no participant in a ritual must agree consciously with all of the
meanings supported by the ritual, and it is not clear whether we can ever understand how
diverse opinions may be within the community. For example, it seems unlikely that all
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nineteen of the 9/11 terrorists acted for exactly the same reasons, even though all of them
were deeply committed to the project.
(b) Are monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam more complex than the
polytheistic religions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and classical Greece and Rome? Most
anthropologists do not focus on whether one religion is simpler than another. But the
monotheistic religions of the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) seemed to be
an exception since they appear have evolved in reaction to the polytheistic religions of
ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. We know that some new religions have arisen from
others, but for the most part there is little reason to believe that these monotheistic faiths
are superior to any other form of religion. Others, however, have argued that monotheism
is superior to polytheistic religions because it is more evolved. The most compelling
evidence in support of this argument is that these religions have survived while nearly all
of the polytheistic religions aside from Hinduism have died out. But others argue that this
reading of religious history is biased and ethnocentric because our own European and
American societies were profoundly monotheistic.
(c) What environmental, political, and economic conditions shape certain kinds of religions?
Because anthropologists have not been able to observe the emergence of most existing
religions around the world, they don’t know very much about how particular religions have
changed and evolved into their current forms. Anthropologists have suggested a variety of
causal relationships between various environmental, political, and economic factors and
certain religious forms; but no consensus has emerged.
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(d) Why do people seem so ready to believe things that are hard to support with empirical
evidence and that seem preposterous to people in other traditions? Anthropologists have
observed in many settings that once certain religious ideas are accepted within a society, it
is hard to get people to abandon these ideas, even when there is empirical evidence to
disprove them. It is not clear why seemingly non-empirical ideas emerge in the first place,
even though we can see how ritual and routine practices can reinforce them once they have
emerged.
(e) Can political institutions shape religious symbols, rituals, and worldviews?
Anthropologists generally acknowledge a certain amount of harmony between certain
kinds of political organizations (whether clan organizations, monarchies, or other political
forms) and the kinds of religions found in these societies around the globe. Various
hypotheses have been suggested to clarify these relationships, but none of them have been
accepted except in the most general and nonspecific ways.
Blog Roll and Web Resources
Reading anthro blogs is a great way to keep up with the latest developments and
discoveries in the field, to get a sense of the most important debates and controversies, as
well as to find out what anthropologists think about world events. There are literally
hundreds of blogs maintained by professional anthropologists from all the subfields (a
quite comprehensive list can be found at http://anthropologyreport.com/anthropology-blogs2014/).
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1. Anthro, Religion, Media (http://anthro-rel-media.blogspot.com/)
This blog run by Garrison offers video clips about religion with an emphasis on the
many forms of Islam.
2. CLOSER (http://religionresearch.org/martijn/)
Run by a Dutch anthropologist who goes by the name Martijn, this site offers reactions
to the forms of Islam in European communities. The text is in both English and Dutch.
3. Cultural Admixtures (http://culturaladmixtures.wordpress.com/)
This blog by Alex K. Gearin (currently a PhD student) is about culture and psychoactive
substances and includes thoughts on the social, sensory, and ethical dimensions of
shamanic practices and alternative religion. His entries are substantial essays rather
than brief snippets.
4. Genealogy of Religion (http://genealogyreligion.net/)
Anthropologist Cris Campbell developed this site as a research database and play space
for ideas about religion and religious symbols and behavior.
5. Anthropology Beyond Good and Evil (http://marranci.com/)
Anthropologist Gabriele Marranci’s blog addresses wide-ranging topics with an
emphasis on Islamic topics, including Islam as practiced outside the Middle East.
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6. Anthrocybib (http://anthrocybib.net/)
The Anthropology of Christianity Bibliography Blog is a site containing reviews,
abstracts, and book notices of anthropological books that deal primarily with
Christianity and the impact of missions around the world.
Other Web Resources
Religion and Society: Advances in Research: journals.berghahnbooks.com/air-rs/
The Oxford Bibliographies site includes entries on magic, religion, secularization, Victor
Turner, and witchcraft:
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo9780199766567-0051.xml?rskey=sjcLal&result=68
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo9780199766567-0060.xml?rskey=9Gslfw&result=91
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo9780199766567-0078.xml?rskey=9Gslfw&result=93
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo9780199766567-0074.xml?rskey=c2oAcu&result=101
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo9780199766567-0029.xml?rskey=c2oAcu&result=108
Society for the Anthropology of Religion: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/sar/
“‘Nones on the Rise”: www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/
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In-Class Activities and Project Assignments
Ritual Symbols on Campus
Have your students describe one of the rituals peculiar to your campus. Ask them to
consider how this ritual fits or does not fit the definition of a rite of passage. Ask them what
symbols are used to give meaning to the ritual. This assignment can be written up and
graded or used as the centerpiece of a classroom discussion.
Religious Symbols Project
A previous project suggested that “symbols are everywhere.” Religious symbols are
probably the most powerful and meaningful symbols that people interact with. They must
be understood from an emic perspective. The simplest religious icons, sometimes unknown
to outsiders, can speak volumes to insiders.

For this project you will be interpreting symbols associated with world religions
and developing one of your own.

Choose common symbols associated with Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam,
and Judaism. Research these symbols online.

Describe the meaning that each symbol has to members of that particular religion.
What ideas or reminders do they spark in the minds of practitioners? How could
these symbols be misunderstood by an outsider who didn’t understand them in
context?

After this exercise, you should have some ideas about what makes an effective
religious symbol. Using that knowledge, can you design a symbol of your own?
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Choose something that is personally meaningful to you (it can be anything). Design a
simple symbol that conveys the depth of meaning behind it.
Identifying Religious Symbols in Local Religious Services
Have your students attend a religious service they are not familiar with, to observe the use
of religious symbols in the ritual. Have them describe the structure of the ritual and the
apparent meaning of one or two of the prominent symbols they have observed. We
recommend that you encourage your students to treat this as an observation exercise,
although in many churches people may want to recruit your students to become members.
We recommend that you advise students that their interest in this congregation will
prompt many older adults in the congregation to recruit them as many smaller churches
are always eager to get new members. Students may go to a service in small groups and
present their findings to the class or write up an individual or joint report. We discourage
your students from interviewing members of the congregation about the ritual symbols
because they will generally hear standard interpretations and miss what symbolic
messages were being presented. In New England, for example, one of our students attended
a Unitarian Universalist church in a rural community, with no stole or robes, no stained
glass, and a very plain interior—the pastor wore a simple dark suit. The one exception was
at the moment of the collection when an old and elegant bag of fine black velvet on a pole
was moved up and down each pew. The elegance of the velvet bag contrasted sharply with
the otherwise stark interior of the church, an observation that would have been lost if the
student had interviewed the pastor. Have students write a report or use the material in a
class discussion.
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Creating Your Own Ritual Symbol
This exercise works equally well for all class sizes. About a week before you discuss the
anthropology of religion, institute a daily ritual in your class. At the beginning of class have
everyone be silent, and when they are silent draw some symbol on the board with some
solemnity and care. The symbol can be anything at all, from a simple triangle to a more
complex symbol like the singer Prince’s former name, a glyph he briefly used in the 1990s.
Turn to the class and announce that it is the “center of knowledge in the universe” or
something equally vague that might have a deeper underlying meaning. At the end of the
class period have the class be silent again and erase your symbol with solemnity. Every day
at the beginning of class put the symbol up on the board and end class by erasing it as
before. After a few days, you may want to ask one of the students to erase your symbol and,
later still, have a student draw it on the board.
After a couple of weeks, this ritual will be part of your classroom routine; and because of
the social participation in applying and erasing it, your symbols will come to have meaning
for your students. When you begin discussing religion and ritual symbols during the
semester, ask students what meaning this symbol had and how this meaning came to be
associated with your unique symbol.
In the Name of God Activity
Show the film In the Name of God (1992), which chronicles the events leading up to the
destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India, by a Hindu nationalist mob. The
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documentary explores the dangerous intersection of religion and politics, particularly
within the traditional Indian caste system. Have the students discuss the intersection of
politics and religion in this case and how it is similar to or different from how religion and
politics intersect in the United States.
Magical Death Activity
The film Magical Death, cited in this chapter, covers religious rituals and beliefs that
probably seem strange to non-Yanomamo students. But based on the definitions proposed
by Tylor, Wallace, and Geertz they meet all the criteria of religion.

For this activity, view the documentary Magical Death by Napoleon Chagnon and
Timothy Asch (about 30 minutes long).

Review the study guide at www.der.org/resources/study-guides/magical-death-studyguide.pdf

After viewing Magical Death as a group, spend some time discussing the ways that
the Yanomamo rituals depicted in the film illustrate attributes of religion. How do
these rituals compare, in form and function, to those students are more familiar
with?
Class Discussions
Functions of Religion
Anthropologists spend a lot of time exploring what religion is and also what religion does
for individuals and groups. What do you see as some universal functions of religion?
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The Essence of Religious Beliefs
What are the strengths and limitations of the definition of religion offered by Geertz? What
does Geertz’s definition offer that Wallace’s definition does not?
Is Magic Restricted to “Primitive” Societies?
Does magic occur only in “primitive” non-Western societies, or are there ordinary practices
in mainstream American communities in which we can find examples of magical thinking?
Monotheism
Nobody believes they have the one true language, but many people believe they have the
one true religion. What are the positives and negatives of this certainty? What sets religion
apart from other aspects of culture?
Rites of Passage
Rituals that can be described as “rites of passage” exist throughout the world, past and
present. What explains the universality of the rites? What rites of passage have you passed
through? Which ones do you expect to pass through in the future?
Secularism
Two of the most popular arguments for the recent decline in religious belief are that (1)
advancements in scientific knowledge provide more convincing explanations for the
origins of life and the nature of the universe and (2) modern technology has undermined
one of religion’s traditional incentives for belief: the promise of a comfortable afterlife. Yet
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such reasons fail to explain why religion shows little sign of abatement in the United States,
especially compared to western European nations. Have the students consider other
anthropological reasons for belief or nonbelief or possible historical reasons why
Americans remain more committed to traditional religion than Europeans.
The Separation of Church and State
In the United States we often talk about the separation of church and state. But in many
places around the world there is no similar separation. In the United States is there really a
separation between the two, or are they more intertwined than the phrase “separation of
church and state” suggests?
Does Anthropology Add to Our Understanding of Religion as it Exists in the World
Today?
Which of the anthropological approaches to religion are useful for understanding religion
as people practice and live it? Do anthropological approaches offer any advantages over
other disciplines?