The Anthropology of Religion Part I: Definitions

But what about secular ritual, particularly those associated with politics?

Ritual is a major feature of religion, but it isn't confined to religion.

Though this begs the issue that religion and the rest of society have only recently been considered distinct...
 
path_of_one said:
But what about secular ritual, particularly those associated with politics?

Ritual is a major feature of religion, but it isn't confined to religion.

Though this begs the issue that religion and the rest of society have only recently been considered distinct...
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You're right. I was thinking about military ritual in a very similar context. There's a lot of overlap with these sorts of social mechanisms. They seem to share components.

Chris
 
That is one of the big difficulties in social science. It all overlaps.

I think that's partly because it's a recent phenomenon to separate religion from other stuff. For example- with military- most traditional societies overlap religion and warrior societies big time. In some tribal societies, all able-bodied men are initiated at some point through religious ritual into being a warrior- it's like a life stage that they have for a while and then progress out of when they grow older and settle down into a householder stage.

In my head I am picturing one of the ethnographic films I own, in which the warriors' initiation involves all kinds of masks and body painting with spiritual meaning and warriors dance into a frenzy until they are in trance states. Not a whole lot of distinction between secular and religious there.
 
path_of_one said:
That is one of the big difficulties in social science. It all overlaps.

I think that's partly because it's a recent phenomenon to separate religion from other stuff. For example- with military- most traditional societies overlap religion and warrior societies big time. In some tribal societies, all able-bodied men are initiated at some point through religious ritual into being a warrior- it's like a life stage that they have for a while and then progress out of when they grow older and settle down into a householder stage.

In my head I am picturing one of the ethnographic films I own, in which the warriors' initiation involves all kinds of masks and body painting with spiritual meaning and warriors dance into a frenzy until they are in trance states. Not a whole lot of distinction between secular and religious there.
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Right. And as societies get more complex the political, religious, and military institutions begin to diverge, but the core socio-cultural mechanisms remain intertwined.

Chris
 
China Cat Sunflower said:
I'm all for personal and micro religion! Still, it seems that the point is to participate in some sort of commonly held spiritual continuum. Even a one person religion has to in some sense beg, borrow, or steal from what's already out there.
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I would say that the spiritual continuum is not purely organizational or institutional. Nor is it purely doctrinal.

I've had a chance to be around some fairly powerful religious personalities. What impressed me most was not their bookish learning or their ability to represent the meaning of scriptures. It was who they were. By who they were, they taught me more about G-d and what it is to be human than any advanced studies in theology or psychology.

This raises the basic question: does religion reside in a text or in a church building? Or does it live in the Becoming?

As far as I can tell, social forms of religion -- like ritual, education, evangelism, and pot lucks -- provide some basic guidelines. What the individual does with them can -- and often does --transcend them. The social forms are cultural and historical artifacts, not the living experience which I believe is at the core of religion.
 
Netti-Netti said:
I would say that the spiritual continuum is not purely organizational or institutional. Nor is it purely doctrinal.

I've had a chance to be around some fairly powerful religious personalities. What impressed me most was not their bookish learning or their ability to represent the meaning of scriptures. It was who they were. By who they were, they taught me more about G-d and what it is to be human than any advanced studies in theology or psychology.

This raises the basic question: does religion reside in a text or in a church building? Or does it live in the Becoming?

As far as I can tell, social forms of religion --like ritual and education --provide some basic guideliness. What the individual does with them can -- and often does --transcend them
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Hi Netti!

I understand what you're saying. What I'm trying to emphasize in my conversation here with you and Kim is that an overall definition of religion can't be just about philosophical ephemerality. Here's another area where language has become sloppy and inadequate. There should be a different word for the "becoming", personal quest part of religion to distinguish it from the institutional part of the definition.

Chris
 
That's very enlightening, Netti, and I have similar experience. I think part of the question is how much we wish to separate religion from spirituality- or if we can really make such a distinction between social and individual. Is religion the stuff that is on the social surface: the ideas, the practices, the community... or is religion the transformation of individuals and community? I think anthropology generally argues the former, and comparative religion often argues the latter. I don't know that there is necessarily always a difference- for example, there is the social practice of taking Eucharist, but this is supposed to be a transformative practice (the belief) and I (among others) have felt that transformation...
 
China Cat Sunflower said:
I understand what you're saying. What I'm trying to emphasize in my conversation here with you and Kim is that an overall definition of religion can't be just about philosophical ephemerality. Here's another area where language has become sloppy and inadequate. There should be a different word for the "becoming", personal quest part of religion to distinguish it from the institutional part of the definition.
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*Raises hand* Ummm, ummm, ummm.

Didn't William James already address this about a hundred years ago?

I mean, I thought I was being profound when I made the distinction between personal and institutional religion...only to have one of my profs point to James, and deflate my bubble.

Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
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William James - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James's "radical empiricism" is distinct from his "pure experience" metaphysics. It is never precisely defined in the Essays, and is best explicated by a passage from The Meaning of Truth where James states that radical empiricism consists of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a conclusion. The postulate is that "the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience," the fact is that relations are just as directly experienced as the things they relate, and the conclusion is that "the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience"
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William James (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
William James - Biography, Chronology, and Photographs
Since for James it was the consequences of believing that matter, he argued in "The Will to Believe" (1897) that belief must remain an individual process and that we may rationally choose to believe some crucial propositions even though they lie beyond the reach of reason and evidence. This position has important implications for religious convictions in particular, which James explored in detail in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
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James
William James Society
 
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I figured we'd get to James at some point... LOL. You guys are too good at bringing up the future topics! :p

James is one of the best resources we have on the topic, and I am not sure if it is more telling of the validity of his work or the lack of good work in the last 100 years that has resulted in his Varieties of Religious Experience being regarded as one of the best authorities on the subject.

That said, I am not entirely sure I buy into James' statement that institutions are the result of experience. As I'll bring up in this weekend's topic #2, ideas shape experiences and vice versa. We have a constant dialogue of individual and society, and of institution and experience. Our culture does shape our perceptions- even the types of experiences that we recognize and allow to happen. While there are certainly exceptions, it doesn't negate that social institutions do shape individual experience- for some more than others.

Individual religious experience gets complicated indeed- not only by social impacts but also arguably by personality type and learning style, both of which appear to be at least partially genetic.
 
path_of_one said:
Individual religious experience gets complicated indeed- not only by social impacts but also arguably by personality type and learning style, both of which appear to be at least partially genetic.
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There has been some research comparing the religiosity of twins.
 
path_of_one said:
I figured we'd get to James at some point... LOL. You guys are too good at bringing up the future topics! :p

James is one of the best resources we have on the topic, and I am not sure if it is more telling of the validity of his work or the lack of good work in the last 100 years that has resulted in his Varieties of Religious Experience being regarded as one of the best authorities on the subject.

That said, I am not entirely sure I buy into James' statement that institutions are the result of experience. As I'll bring up in this weekend's topic #2, ideas shape experiences and vice versa. We have a constant dialogue of individual and society, and of institution and experience. Our culture does shape our perceptions- even the types of experiences that we recognize and allow to happen. While there are certainly exceptions, it doesn't negate that social institutions do shape individual experience- for some more than others.

Individual religious experience gets complicated indeed- not only by social impacts but also arguably by personality type and learning style, both of which appear to be at least partially genetic.
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How about relating this to coffee or tea? Consciousness is the water, ideas are the coffee beans or tea leaves, (influenced or dictated by culture,) philosophers are the roasters/grinders who process the ideas, institutions are the coffee makers and coffee filters, the hearts of individuals are the coffee cups, and God is the barista.
Drinking the coffee is the religious experience. (Why do so many people insist on decaf coffee or caffeine pills these days? ;) )
 
juantoo3 said:
OY! Only in the land of Starbucks could coffee substitute for culture...

Luv ya, Seattlegal! :D
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{Hmm, upon further reflection, I don't think it is appropriate to limit God only to the roll of the barista. Perhaps the barista represents your relationship with God...}
Have you hugged your barista lately? :D
 
path_of_one said:
James is one of the best resources we have on the topic, and I am not sure if it is more telling of the validity of his work or the lack of good work in the last 100 years that has resulted in his Varieties of Religious Experience being regarded as one of the best authorities on the subject.
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Didn't Carl Jung have a bit to say about religion? Or is that getting a bit ahead of ourselves too?

I'm trying to remember the name of the French Jesuit...it'll come to me...but his ideas were really out there.

Teilhard de Chardin, that's it. Thank goodness for Google. Of course, he was peripherally implicated with the Peking man fraud too. OK, found it:

In his posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard writes of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal driven way. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe (see Gaia theory). Such theories are generally termed teleological views of evolution.
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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's this "noosphere" stuff that lost me...but explained like this quote, Tao Equus ought to have a good time with it, with the reference to Gaia theory.
 
seattlegal said:
Drinking the coffee is the religious experience. (Why do so many people insist on decaf coffee or caffeine pills these days? ;) )
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Knocking back an espresso may be described as "...a blissful realization where a person's inner nature, the originally pure mind, is directly known as an illuminating emptiness, a thusness which is dynamic and immanent in the world." The Japanese word for this is "kensho." ;););)

s.

PS What is the point of decaf?
 
Netti-Netti said:
Pure Land has been the single most popular kind of Buddhism - even today - so maybe a broad sweep is warranted by the numbers involved.
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McDonalds may be the single most popular kind of food, but I wouldn't want to extrapolate its, er, features to all food.

s.
 
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