Anthropology and Religion: Culture

[path_of_one]

Hi, All-

So we’re at that time again, another installment of anthropology and religion. J This week, I thought I’d delve into a discussion of culture- as briefly as I can describe how anthropologists define culture and some basic information about it. Religion is, of course, seen by anthropologists as a part of culture. So by defining culture, we get closer to an anthropological definition of religion.


As we find with defining religion, anthropology has many definitions of culture. (Ah, the joys of social science!) My favorite is a very basic one. Culture is: learned and shared behaviors and ideas. Or you could say it in a fancier way: culture is traditions and customs that govern behaviors and beliefs, transmitted by learning. But it’s all saying the same thing. “A” culture is a group of people who share this stuff. It’s obvious, of course, that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing. This is because culture isn’t really a thing. It’s a concept used to describe socially learned stuff. We always have to keep in mind that in any culture (and religions themselves have a culture too, especially the world religions), there is a lot of internal variety. This, as we’ll see, is because people are not programmed robots. We shape culture, use it, manipulate it… as well as are conditioned by it.


So, let’s break some of this stuff down…
Culture is learned, first of all. There are some things all humans share because it’s how our brains and bodies work, and that stuff isn’t cultural. Culture is stuff we have to learn. But most people think some stuff is “natural” or “innate” and it isn’t- it was learned, but so early in their lives and so subconsciously that they don’t remember learning it. Things like gender roles and how we relate to our environment often feels like this. Learning can happen in many ways: formally (like we have in schools) or informally, through observation or participation, directly or indirectly. We are little sponges when we are young, so we pick up most of the stuff in our first culture without much effort or analysis (generally speaking- I was an odd child that struggled with this, but those of us that are like that are more unusual statistically). This first culture generally feels comfy and cozy to us, and “natural.” This is why most people in the world have been ethnocentric- their own culture feels so right. Subsequent cultures we might need to learn due to immigration or business or vacations are more difficult to learn and often come with a sense of shock, confusion, and discomfort.


Culture is transmitted through symbols- through language, but also through signs and behaviors that are symbolic. Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary. Religion generally uses lots of symbols. Much of mythology is symbolic and religion generally includes ritual, which is symbolic action. When we consider religious ritual, such as baptism, we see these are ways for us to behave symbolically. There is no natural connection of dunking a person in water and attaining or acknowledging salvation. We have extended our thoughts about bathing and the cleansing quality of water to our ideas about spiritual purity.


Now, most of us would like to think we could get away from culture. Especially in the sciences, we want to believe we can approach things objectively. This is the positivist ideology. But, in reality, we can’t. None of us can help that we see our world through the lens of culture. All people do this and it is part of how our brain functions. What is hopeful is that we can analyze our own assumptions and understand our own biases, so although it will always color our perception of the world around us, we will be aware of how it is doing so. This is why I sometimes say things like atheism and theism are not too different on some level. People, no matter who they are, have biases and unfounded assumptions that they trust simply because everyone is culturally conditioned. This is not to say that “reality” doesn’t affect us. Obviously, we bump into things that don’t fit our assumptions. But what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain. Sometimes, though, the dissonance becomes too great (or we’re one of the oddball people that overthinks everything) and we end up changing- either we seek to change or manipulate our culture, or we seek entry to a different culture, or we reinterpret our culture to fit our new ideas. In religion, as I’ll discuss later, this has relevance for both individual changes (such as conversion) and social changes (such as revivals and the origins of new sects and religions).


Culture is not only learned, it is shared. Religion, as a part of culture, is a shared thing. While it may impact individuals, you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion. Religion is a group thing. Culture, and more specifically religion as a part of culture, unifies a group through providing common experiences. Sharing behaviors and ideas helps to limit uncertainty in our lives and makes us more predictable to each other, which helps society function smoothly and limits our individual and collective stress. The common experience we have together generates a common understanding (cultural knowledge), through which we view future events. In this way, we use culture to interpret our lives and to make our decisions. Some parts of culture, everyone learns- things like foodways. Other parts are specialized knowledge and we rely on a smaller pool of people for these behaviors and ideas. Some parts are mostly in our minds, but other parts are embodied- ways of moving (walking, sitting, facial expressions) that become so second nature to us and are so deeply embedded that they feel innate.


Culture is all-encompassing. It is not limited to anything in our lives. If you do it or think it, it is probably at least influenced by your culture. Since culture encompasses our technologies, economy, food… pretty much everything… it’s inescapable. Furthermore, culture is deeply held. Certain core values, basic central values that integrate each culture and distinguish it from others, are very important and generally “right” feeling to members of the culture. This clearly is also applicable to religions. You could say that religion is both a part of a culture (all religions originate in a culture) and are cultures in and of themselves, interacting with other cultures (such as national, ethnic, etc.). Much of what we consider to be “me” is actually culturally conditioned.

Culture is integrated. This is an incredibly important concept to study religion from an anthropological perspective. All parts of culture are intertwined and work together. Changes in one part of culture alters other parts. As I’ll explore later, this has particular relevance for how culture relates to religion- we find that religious structure and key attributes such as authority are in relationship statistically to political and economic structures.


A final key point is that culture is actively and creatively used by people. Culture is not a program that we receive and obey. People individually avoid, manipulate, subvert, and change the rules and patterns of their own culture in an attempt to conform them to their own interests. People interpret the same symbols differently. People band together in subcultures that might attempt to change the larger cultural group’s patterns. And now, with global communication and transportation, some people choose to leave their culture of origin completely. All this is also true for religions. Some religions build in the capacity for people to interpret the symbols differently, for them to contest and change things. Other religions do not.

 

[path_of_one]

There are a few other basic ideas about culture that are helpful. All cultures experience a disjunction between what could be termed “ideal” and “real” culture. Ideal culture is what people say they should do, and sometimes what people say they do when asked. Real culture is what people actually do (as recorded by an observer). The classic US examples are things like eating fast food and exercising. Most people will falsely represent to a survey how little they exercise and how often they eat fast food. When observed, this becomes clear. It’s easy to say people are lying, but that wouldn’t get into the complexity of how culture works. Generally, people deceive themselves, perceiving their actions differently than they actually are so that they are more aligned with how they think they should be. This has obvious implications for religion as well.

Culture can exist at various levels, and almost all people now belong to multiple cultures at once, particularly in the first world. The modern world religions qualify as international cultures of their own, which overlap with people’s national, ethnic, and other cultures. Some religions are also subcultures of individual larger cultures, such as the Amish being a subculture of the United States. Cultural traits also exist at various levels of inclusion. Universals (common to all humans, but still learned and shared) are very rare, and include things like food sharing (obviously favored by evolution). Generalities are shared by multiple disparate cultures, but not all of them. These are things like nuclear families or polygamy. Particularities are the little details that are found in only individual cultures and make that culture distinctive. Cultures that share many of the same traits often have a history that explains these commonalities, either a history of contact or a similar history of independent invention under similar economic and environmental circumstances. We find similar cultures arise from similar constraints and resources, but there is plenty of diversity to show the capacity of humans for innovation. Likewise, we see the same things with religion.

Culture can be maladaptive or adaptive. Because of the human capacity to misrepresent reality, to ignore evidence, and to maintain cognitive dissonance, cultures can continue for quite some time even if they have deleterious traits. The famous example is Easter Island, but we find this everywhere, including in the modern first world. People making bad decisions individually and collectively abound. Likewise, religions can be very adaptive, allowing people to uphold social justice, environmental sustainability, and all sorts of wonderful human traits… or they can be very maladaptive, increasing suffering, encouraging poor resource management, and reinforcing the worst drives in people.

How do anthropologists deal with cultural diversity in our studies? Ethnocentrism is using the values, norms, and ideals from one’s own culture (or religion) to judge and interpret a person’s behavior or ideas from another culture. It is a human universal and seems to build group solidarity. The downside is that it makes us lousy and interpreting other people (not from our culture) and causes discord between cultures in the modern global context. Obviously, anthropologists try to be diligent about understanding their own ethnocentrism and overcoming it in their research. Some, but not very many, anthropologists go in the extreme opposite direction and are cultural relativists, asserting that cultural values are arbitrary and so there can be no global ethical standards. But most anthropologists are not comfortable with this. There is a long history in the field of working for human rights, and this requires a sense of global ethics- the idea that some rights ought to be universal and unalienable. There is tension between human rights and another thing many of us work toward- cultural rights. Cultural rights means that every culture should be able to preserve their cultural traditions. However, there can be discord between human rights and cultural rights. Some cultures practice slavery, forced marriage, infanticide, etc. What to do about that? There are no easy answers and it is a tricky thing, because most anthropologists are, to some degree, activists. We not only seek to understand others, but we seek social and environmental justice. We want to make the world a better place. So our work is difficult, because we not only must try to understand social processes, but we sometimes seek to change, preserve, or otherwise impact them.

How we get around this (though decision-making can still be quite difficult) is that many of us are analytic relativists. This means that we seek to understand another culture on its own terms, without imposing stereotypes or our own culture’s assumptions, norms, or standards. We are not moral relativists (refusing to judge other cultures according to anything but their own standards), because we want to work for human rights as well. But first, we must understand a culture on its own terms. This provides a solid grounding for both scientifically understanding social processes and therefore for having a clearer vision of how to affect them in positive ways.

Why have culture at all? Why bother with all these moral codes? Why is culture a universal feature of the human species? Well, our survival depends on our living in a group. We are social creatures. Unfortunately, we have individual tendencies that are linked to our self-interest such as greed, sex, and violence that threaten to rip apart the social fabric. So culture steps in to teach us how to cooperate together in some reasonable fashion, to give us predictability and get us to act in ways that are beneficial for the continuity of the group. This is a basic necessity for our species’ survival, as we are not biologically that great at survival without culture and group living. We are puny, slow, have little covering against cold and heat, and our babies take forever to mature and are helpless for a long time. We need groups and culture so we can co-create our environments with the natural world so that we can survive. So we have to maintain these groups and not have them fall apart due to conflicting individual interest, and culture- particularly religion- steps in to do this.

More later on why religion is particularly adept at it…

Peace,
Kim

 

[Netti-Netti]

More later on why religion is particularly adept at it…

Looking forward to seeing that. I have some theories of my own on the subject.

 

[juantoo3]

that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing.

I *did* get that much out of Levi-Straus. Culture is not solidly definable, there is no solid line of demarcation. It is really difficult to say "this culture ends here and across the street is a different culture." Even within a recognized culture, there are so many variables that "facts" can only be given in general terms, because for every rule there are so many exceptions.

Culture is learned, first of all.

Well, since we're at religion and culture, is morality learned? This is the age old philosophical saw, "is morality objective or subjective?," so its a bit of a trick question, but it would be interesting to get your take.

Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary.

Not to be argumentative, but I would be inclined to question this assertion. From what I gather about the development of alphabets, specifically Hebrew, the symbols *originally* were associated with what they represented. Now, I can agree that as the symbols gained new meanings and symbol combinations developed to expand writing to include far more meanings, then the original associations often became lost. The flip side is that in those cultures where symbolic representations did not gain as much combination, the result was an "alphabet" that sometimes includes in the neighborhood of 4000 common characters I think it is in the case of Chinese or Japanese. And then there is hieroglyphic Egypt, and what a mess that alphabet is!

what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain.

Hallelujah! Preach it, sister!

you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion.

I could trend to easily mince semantics. One may call it spirituality, or spirit quest, or faith walk, or whatever name one might wish...but the end result is the expression of the religion of the individual person. I think William James was pretty emphatic about that, from what little I've read.

Religion is a group thing.

And the way I understand W. James to have clarified this is by adding the qualifier "institutional" to the front of the term religion when it is in the group context. That is how one can distinguish between individual and group expressions of religion. At least, it works that way for me...

 

[juantoo3]

Obviously, anthropologists try to be diligent about understanding their own ethnocentrism and overcoming it in their research... There is a long history in the field of working for human rights, and this requires a sense of global ethics- the idea that some rights ought to be universal and unalienable.

Ummm, isn't this a glaring contradiction? Working for human rights, while a noble cause, should be differentiated from scholarship. How can one be aware of one's own biases, and yet wish to impose those biases in the name of "human rights," or whatever *seemingly* noble aspiration?

I mean this in the gentlest way, but this sounds to me like the title "anthropologist" is a subversive cover for a nosey nellie cultural elitist looking to impose her ideals on someone else's culture. I guess in that sense I am a cultural relativist. At the very least I believe in "live and let live." And not just to my own personal standards.

To clarify, were I in a position where *an individual case* presented itself, I might step in, say to give food to someone hungry or medical care to someone in need. But to be a social activist in another culture, hiding behind my scholarly credentials, to me is disingenuous.

There is tension between human rights and another thing many of us work toward- cultural rights. Cultural rights means that every culture should be able to preserve their cultural traditions.

I think that is where the US in particular, and the West in general, get themselves into a lot of deep doo-doo with other cultures. We pay lip service to cultural rights, while we step in in an attempt to impose what we feel are human rights.

Don't get me wrong. If activism is the modus operandi, then by all means exercise political activism...but don't hide behind a fascade and call it scholarship. Goodness knows how many cultures have been obliterated by well-meaning but short sighted powers in the past.

We are social creatures. Unfortunately, we have individual tendencies that are linked to our self-interest such as greed, sex, and violence that threaten to rip apart the social fabric.

I'm pretty sure I missed something..."sex...threatens to rip apart the social fabric?" This is 2008, right? I didn't fall into a time warp and end up at a suffragette meeting in 1908, just in time to kick off prohibition?

Thanks for everything, Kim. I hope you know the ribbing is good natured, but I hope you also see some of the conflict I see with the traditional presentation.

BTW, are you a structural-functionalist, a conflict theorist, or some other?

 

[path_of_one]

Well, since we're at religion and culture, is morality learned? This is the age old philosophical saw, "is morality objective or subjective?," so its a bit of a trick question, but it would be interesting to get your take.

I'd say both. I believe human beings are born with a conscience. This is part of my own spiritual beliefs.

However, this conscience is without much specificity. We can feel suffering and empathy for others' suffering, and we understand that causing suffering is wrong. We know we should love others.

Culture steps in and tells us how to effectively do that, plus a whole lot more, in our given society. A lot of moral rules that are culturally given are really kind of arbitrary when you think about them. But they work to sustain social life in that particular culture, and most people don't question their values until they come up against other, very different cultures.

Not to be argumentative, but I would be inclined to question this assertion. From what I gather about the development of alphabets, specifically Hebrew, the symbols *originally* were associated with what they represented.

There is certainly a fuzziness between symbol and non-symbol. But even the hieroglyphic languages are highly stylized and so symbolic, which is why it takes people time to translate and figure them out. Art is also like this- how much of art is just transferring images and how much of it is symbolic? Culture is different from other animals' social norms in that all cultures use symbols, and other animals do not seem to use symbols. However, at least some of them are capable of understanding and using symbols, even if they don't come up with it on their own. Other primates, of course, but also dogs, horses, dolphins...

I could trend to easily mince semantics. One may call it spirituality, or spirit quest, or faith walk, or whatever name one might wish...but the end result is the expression of the religion of the individual person. I think William James was pretty emphatic about that, from what little I've read.

Exactly. There is a social phenomenon and then there is the individual phenomenon within that social context (or not, as the case may be).

And the way I understand W. James to have clarified this is by adding the qualifier "institutional" to the front of the term religion when it is in the group context. That is how one can distinguish between individual and group expressions of religion. At least, it works that way for me...

I think that works on one level, but the problem is that most people never read James and so you have this "I'm spiritual but not religious" thing in the US. I think there is also an issue there in that the process of someone's personal religion within an institutional religion may be different than the process of someone building a syncretic spirituality (for all intents and purposes, a person who has no religious social group who pulls from various traditions to create something highly individualized and new). I think this was highly uncommon until after globalization opened up a virtual marketplace (literally, now with the internet) of religious traditions. People used to have few options, so they might come to some very interesting personal experiences and ideas, but most people would still be tied to a single tradition. Now, people can and do go to the religion grocery store and just fill up the cart from a variety of aisles.

I'm not sure what the best way is to describe that phenomenon and I haven't studied it professionally to evaluate how similar or different it is to individualization within religions.

 

[path_of_one]

Ummm, isn't this a glaring contradiction? Working for human rights, while a noble cause, should be differentiated from scholarship.

Why? I would hope that scholarship would inform us of how to better assure people have access to food, clean water, basic health care, and the ability to live without fear of violence or slavery. I think that's how most of us look at it. Working toward human rights without studying and understanding how a culture works and what is likely to occur seems dangerous. Studying a culture (often 3rd world) and making money off doing it while doing nothing to assist people who face great challenges seems selfish.

How can one be aware of one's own biases, and yet wish to impose those biases in the name of "human rights," or whatever *seemingly* noble aspiration?

I would say there are biases and then there are biases. But then, I am informed first by my spirituality and then by my discipline. I'm not a robot of science. It may be a bias that I think people should not be enslaved or raped or murdered, that I disagree with genocide, and that I think all people should get basic health care, food, shelter, and clean water. But I think it's a bias most of the world shares, and I rarely see the person who is raped or enslaved saying that they think it's great and yes, please support this aspect of our culture so that it happens to my children, too.

Bias is a matter of perspective. There is no one right answer. We have to study the conflict within cultures as well as between, and then ask ourselves if we are supporting people decrying a practice from outside the culture or if we are supporting people who would otherwise be voiceless from within the culture. Even then, there are some issues that come up- the debates that rage about female circumcision come to mind.

I mean this in the gentlest way, but this sounds to me like the title "anthropologist" is a subversive cover for a nosey nellie cultural elitist looking to impose her ideals on someone else's culture. I guess in that sense I am a cultural relativist. At the very least I believe in "live and let live." And not just to my own personal standards.

But what you have to remember is that we are generally not speaking about our personal standards. We are speaking about the conflict and inequality inherent in societies. We can choose to ignore such inequality and exploitation, and so support the elite who perpetrate it. Or we can choose to support those who are exploited. By doing nothing, we make a choice just the same. Ethics in anthropology is a very difficult matter and a struggle for every person in the field. It's easy on the outside to make these sorts of generalizations, but I could give you dozens of scenarios that, when you picture yourself in them, you see how difficult the ethics become. It's all well and good to say "live and let live." But when you are somewhere and you see that one person's way of living harms another person's... there is the dilemma, right? We could all just ignore such injustices, but I don't feel free to personally, such as my commitment to Christ is. So I get the additional layer of my spirituality, which informs my passion for social action. But I want informed social action where I understand what is going on and what the consequences will be.

To clarify, were I in a position where *an individual case* presented itself, I might step in, say to give food to someone hungry or medical care to someone in need. But to be a social activist in another culture, hiding behind my scholarly credentials, to me is disingenuous.

In most of our cases, we are presented with many "individual cases." We live in these societies and groups, sometimes for very extended periods of time. People in some of these societies are killed, raped, enslaved, or live in extreme poverty. Anthropologists watch babies die from basic illnesses that would be a non-issue in their home country. They watch people get arbitrarily kicked off their land. They watch governments make people disappear. They watch people starve. But we are individual people. We don't have the ability to go out into the field with enough food, enough medical supplies... for everyone. So what do we do?

What people fail to realize is that most of the time, anthropologists act in accordance with what the people, as a whole, want. Others will criticize an anthropologist for teaching a community English or setting up a health care center. But we are told to ask the community what it would like for us to give back in exchange for the privilege of their time and information and patience. If the community wants to learn English or have a new health center, then isn't it just as condescending as not for an anthropologist to refuse community-wide help, telling them "Oh, no- you do not know what is good for the continuity of your culture. You should stay just the way you are indefinitely." Some communities want larger help still- they demand social action and to have their story told to the world community.

The ethics are about as complex as it gets... lots of players, conflict, serious issues.

We pay lip service to cultural rights, while we step in in an attempt to impose what we feel are human rights.

In any case, cultural rights and human rights are often at odds.

If activism is the modus operandi, then by all means exercise political activism...but don't hide behind a fascade and call it scholarship. Goodness knows how many cultures have been obliterated by well-meaning but short sighted powers in the past.

We are taught now that we should listen to those in the culture we study for information about how they would like us to assist, if anything.

I don't see any line between activism and scholarship in pretty much any discipline. I do see it in individuals, and it tends to make their scholarship unrealistic, ungrounded, and dry. Activism without scholarship is even worse. Lots of action and no informed decisions.

I'm pretty sure I missed something..."sex...threatens to rip apart the social fabric?" This is 2008, right? I didn't fall into a time warp and end up at a suffragette meeting in 1908, just in time to kick off prohibition?

No, you heard me right. First off, it's only in our modern first world with our paternity tests and our rights for women, and jobs for nearly everyone, that allows people to have single-parent families and be unconcerned with inheritance. This stuff is really important in other parts of the world, and a sex free-for-all is really problematic in those contexts.

Secondly, even in our society, it is more than apparent that sex is still a rather emotionally invested activity and linked to lots of issues with familial and social stability. Perhaps because we are not socialist and people struggle to pay for raising children and having a household, we are not to the level of Iceland in our sexual freedom. We talk a good line in the US, but at the end of the day, there's a whole lot of jealousy, rape, domestic violence, assault... We use sex to sell stuff through making people feel bad about their bodies. We have serious issues. Is this sexual freedom?

Thanks for everything, Kim. I hope you know the ribbing is good natured, but I hope you also see some of the conflict I see with the traditional presentation.

Oh, absolutely! I laughed a lot and these are things that usually are discussed if in a face-to-face group, so they ought to be discussed! Much of what you're picking up on is the same stuff that (within the discipline) we debate about.

BTW, are you a structural-functionalist, a conflict theorist, or some other?

I'm a bit of a lot of things. Why limit myself to one theory when I can use several?

In all seriousness, the stuff I deal with you simply can't adequately approach through single theoretical paradigms.

Theoretical perspectives that I heavily lean on are functionalism, conflict/Marxism and variants of this, cultural model theory, and integrating theories on personality and learning style from psychology and education.

 

[juantoo3]

I'd say both. I believe human beings are born with a conscience. This is part of my own spiritual beliefs.

However, this conscience is without much specificity. We can feel suffering and empathy for others' suffering, and we understand that causing suffering is wrong. We know we should love others.

Culture steps in and tells us how to effectively do that, plus a whole lot more, in our given society. A lot of moral rules that are culturally given are really kind of arbitrary when you think about them. But they work to sustain social life in that particular culture, and most people don't question their values until they come up against other, very different cultures.

OK, I can see that. I agree in the sense that there is some abiguity as one looks farther back in time, but I suppose that is an occupational hazard related to the lack of written language. Still, it is a longstanding puzzle to me why on earth neolithic cultures would go through the motions of developing religious rituals if there were no valid reason to do so?

In my mind, this totally negates any atheist tendency. If to an unspoiled and uncrowded mind, and perhaps eyes better able to see "spiritual things," religious ritual was deemed a necessity; then there must be something more to the story...a something more that maybe cannot be quantified or qualified in the traditional academic manner. I always struggle with trying to make this point, so if it seems unintelligible, just ignore it.

There is certainly a fuzziness between symbol and non-symbol. But even the hieroglyphic languages are highly stylized and so symbolic, which is why it takes people time to translate and figure them out.

Stylization seems to me a necessary evil to creating a symbolic set to build a language from...it would be kinda silly to reinvent the wheel at every turn, wouldn't it?

Art is also like this- how much of art is just transferring images and how much of it is symbolic?

Agreed. It never ceases to amaze me how lifelike the cave paintings are, some are so "real" they look like they could step right off the wall. Yet, one of the next major art sets we have, that of Egypt, is so stylized as to be almost comical. It certainly demands an acquired taste to fully appreciate it, perspective and proportion are so distorted. I wonder sometimes if Picasso took his hints from early Egypt (was it cubism?).

I think that works on one level, but the problem is that most people never read James and so you have this "I'm spiritual but not religious" thing in the US.

I am of the opinion that James was perhaps the most influential thinker nobody knows about. At best he is a footnote, usually, but the people he has influenced! Freud and Jung, just to name two.

I think a part of the problem surrounding James is the nature of the subject matter. I mean, how much interest can religion elicit in an atheist academic environment? Then, when you step out onto the street and approach the average person to whom religion is a significant and substantial subject, and they typically are firmly entrenched in what they believe..."this is the way it is and I have no desire to consider anything that says otherwise." So religion as a social study kinda gets relegated to an interesting aside, but not really pertinent in any more than a philosophical or theoretical way.

Then too, there is the close historical relation with politics, which leaves some consideration. Academically, politics is easier to trace. At the same time, politics and religion are both delicate taboo subjects that have to be handled tactfully. I think some researchers have a hard time distinguishing the difference between a surgeon's scalpel and a machete.

I think there is also an issue there in that the process of someone's personal religion within an institutional religion may be different than the process of someone building a syncretic spirituality (for all intents and purposes, a person who has no religious social group who pulls from various traditions to create something highly individualized and new). I think this was highly uncommon until after globalization opened up a virtual marketplace (literally, now with the internet) of religious traditions. People used to have few options, so they might come to some very interesting personal experiences and ideas, but most people would still be tied to a single tradition. Now, people can and do go to the religion grocery store and just fill up the cart from a variety of aisles.

Oooops, looks like I might have got a little sidetracked with James. OK, smorgasbord religion...frankly I think this is a disturbing trend, for a variety of reasons. I also think it predates the internet in earnest by at least a generation. Maybe it takes getting away from the left coast to be able to more fully appreciate the immersion in multi-culturalism.

There were movements in the States as much as a hundred years ago and more, ladies' garden circles or tea clutches, that were willing to explore the diversity of religion. I read somewhere that the earliest Hindu "church" in the US was in Southern Cal in the 1920's I think it was. Even if I am mistaken, Hinduism was available for a lot longer than just the last 20 years or so. And then you have the Eastern traditions of China and Japan that have been in California since the Gold Rush. Look at all the Coolies that built the railroads...so Buddhism and its variants as well as Taoism have been in California for even longer than Hinduism.

By the time we get to Woodstock, religions are a half a million strong...sorry, couldn't resist. But the whole Beat and Hippie movements, endorsed and promoted by such as the Beatles, did a great deal to promote alternate religious exploration. The 60's were a time when Satanism and various Pagan expressions "blossomed" so to speak, witchcraft came on the scene with Gardner in Britain in the 40's and made some pretty serious inroads in the 60's in Calif.

Now, I agree the internet has made it easier to explore alternate religions...but what of the quality of the material being discovered?

I've discussed many times elsewhere in other threads why I have reservations with this concept of "spiritual without religion," so I'll not dwell on it here. But I do think it is a disservice to each religion so...commercialized? Smorgasbord religion pretends that profound teachings can be had for the picking and choosing and the mere swiping of a credit card...

 

[juantoo3]

Why? I would hope that scholarship would inform us of how to better assure people have access to food, clean water, basic health care, and the ability to live without fear of violence or slavery. I think that's how most of us look at it. Working toward human rights without studying and understanding how a culture works and what is likely to occur seems dangerous. Studying a culture (often 3rd world) and making money off doing it while doing nothing to assist people who face great challenges seems selfish.

Why? Because scholarship should be as neutral as possible if it is to even be considered as genuine scholarship.

You mean to tell me it is possible to earn money for studying another culture? Sign me up! I mean no disrespect, but that is another consideration as to why I haven't put more effort into chasing a sheepskin...what the heck to do with it once I've spent all those student loans to get it? Teach? Not that there's anything wrong with teaching, but it sure seems that the potential to earn an income to feed a family is considerably broadened with a degree in...oh...business, medicine, engineering, law...practically any other field it seems.

Sorry, "Good Will Hunting" flashbacks...

I would say there are biases and then there are biases. But then, I am informed first by my spirituality and then by my discipline. I'm not a robot of science. It may be a bias that I think people should not be enslaved or raped or murdered, that I disagree with genocide, and that I think all people should get basic health care, food, shelter, and clean water. But I think it's a bias most of the world shares, and I rarely see the person who is raped or enslaved saying that they think it's great and yes, please support this aspect of our culture so that it happens to my children, too.

But we have to be careful with what we think is "better." Let's say I agree with you, for the sake of argument. (At this point I haven't said whether I do or not agree with you, and that is intentional) I enter a culture to study it, and I bring with me my preconceived notions of what human rights entail. And, over time, I do what I can to instill these new ideas into this culture. (No culture I am familiar with believes murder or rape to be acceptable behavior, within the group. Towards an outgroup that may be different, but if you are "in" you are safe) This isn't leaving me much to work with...OK, we'll try slavery. Let's say there is some form of indentured servitude traditional and socially accepted. Does Nepal come to mind? If it is indeed traditional, then it has been going on for generations, and both the slaves and the masters understand their positions in society...what roles they fill, what is expected of them, etc, for social cohesion and stability. Now, in I come and I undo this element of social cohesion, I manage through some super-human feat to purge this social ill from the whole of that society.

I have just ruined that society. How can I possibly speak of cultural rights with a straight face after *personally* tinkering with and adulterating that culture? I am no longer suited to *impersonal and unbiased* observation of that culture.

Now, let's carry this one more step...I go in with the *trained* assumption that it is my moral duty to change that culture to what I feel are "human" rights. It doesn't stop with the biggies; rape, murder, slavery, child abuse, etc. It becomes my moral imperitive to impose my ideals of decorum on everything I can influence...sound familiar? It is called "Westernization."

I'm sorry but, I see what you are describing as the social activist equivalent of the JW doorknocker...the end result is cultural proselyzation.

Bias is a matter of perspective. There is no one right answer. We have to study the conflict within cultures as well as between, and then ask ourselves if we are supporting people decrying a practice from outside the culture or if we are supporting people who would otherwise be voiceless from within the culture. Even then, there are some issues that come up- the debates that rage about female circumcision come to mind.

"Bias is a matter of perspective." LOL OK, not to seem impertinent, but, yeah-and the point is? I'm sorry, I'm still having a good chuckle at the overstatement of the obvious.

I see it a lot in various academic circles...they preach the mantra "no bias allowed." Or, if there must be bias then account for it and leave it at the door. You said as much elsewhere.

But what I am seeing in practice, and you allude to it here, is that what is preached is not what is practiced.

There are a lot of cultural ideosyncrasies that anyone can find distasteful...some cultures eat dog soup. If I find it personally offensive to eat dog, is it mine to impose my social preferences on that culture? I can excuse my POV by any means I like...animal rights, health issues, what ever. But cannot that culture look at me and say, "but you eat that nasty old swine!" What's more, you eat it all ground up and chemically processed into some unnatural form and boil it in water for way too long and serve it at amusement parks and baseball fields-and we find THAT offensive.

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander.

But what you have to remember is that we are generally not speaking about our personal standards.

Oh? Would that I could be so sure...

We are speaking about the conflict and inequality inherent in societies. We can choose to ignore such inequality and exploitation, and so support the elite who perpetrate it. Or we can choose to support those who are exploited.

We already make those choices. Some of those choices are out of our hands, in which case our choice is to go to that country or not. By going to France, do I not choose to support the elite of that nation according to what you say here? I certainly doubt any sociologist or anthropologist going to France would go out of their way to defy the French government on behalf of the homeless of Paris...

Yes, I chose an extreme example. Somehow I don't see much difference if we end up trading Zimbabwe for France. "The poor ye have with you always." But no single person can stand against a government, not without a whole lot of outside intervention...which is what creates a lot of diplomatic problems.

Tao and I had a discussion a little while back, after the tsunami hit Burma. He wanted military backing to enforce giving aid to the displaced people. While I applaud his noble goal, I could not get him to see the fallacy in his solution...it would be a provocation of war to use the military to *force* aid that was not wanted, irrespective of the implied need.

By doing nothing, we make a choice just the same. Ethics in anthropology is a very difficult matter and a struggle for every person in the field. It's easy on the outside to make these sorts of generalizations, but I could give you dozens of scenarios that, when you picture yourself in them, you see how difficult the ethics become.

I would love the exercise such would provide. I will not discount that being on the outside I am free to make these generalizations, but theory and philosophy must begin somewhere. I understand practical application can get messy, that is not lost on me. But I still feel we are (or should be) talking of two entirely different things...academics and activism.

In most of our cases, we are presented with many "individual cases." We live in these societies and groups, sometimes for very extended periods of time. People in some of these societies are killed, raped, enslaved, or live in extreme poverty. Anthropologists watch babies die from basic illnesses that would be a non-issue in their home country. They watch people get arbitrarily kicked off their land. They watch governments make people disappear. They watch people starve. But we are individual people. We don't have the ability to go out into the field with enough food, enough medical supplies... for everyone. So what do we do?

Not to sound callous (which will be impossible even though it is not intended), but people are born and die every day in every culture. People live in poverty in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. People still deal with institutionalized legal prejudicial treatment in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. Seems to me we need every bit as much to look at ourselves before we start passing judgement on others.

Tragedy is a part of life. I wish it wasn't, but suffering is universal. I suppose the next level of argument is that of degree...sure, I live in an air conditioned concrete block home, not in a stick and mud hut. But you have to admit as an anthropologist that if I did live in a stick and mud hut in this culture I would be an aberration, and probably ostracized for it. So it is not something I should feel guilty for, being born into the culture that I have.

Having said that (so that I can defuse any accusation of insensitivity), were I observing in a stick and mud hut culture, I could not reasonably expect to live in a concrete house...nor should I demand that concrete houses be built for the natives I am observing. Presented with a specific instance of hardship over which I could aid and assist, yes that would be the human thing to do. If I have extra food, if I can bandage a wound or help dig out a collapsed house or help dig a new latrine...of course, this is nothing to upset the cultural balance, and it is not imposing my cultural preferences on another.

What people fail to realize is that most of the time, anthropologists act in accordance with what the people, as a whole, want. Others will criticize an anthropologist for teaching a community English or setting up a health care center. But we are told to ask the community what it would like for us to give back in exchange for the privilege of their time and information and patience. If the community wants to learn English or have a new health center, then isn't it just as condescending as not for an anthropologist to refuse community-wide help, telling them "Oh, no- you do not know what is good for the continuity of your culture. You should stay just the way you are indefinitely." Some communities want larger help still- they demand social action and to have their story told to the world community.

This would be a new wrinkle. If asked for that would be another matter. I would still hold reservations about how it is asked for though...as in how much were they pressured and how much propaganda was used to sway them. If it is entirely the idea and request of the natives, then I have no disagreement. Even the slightest "helpful" suggestion would tip that agreement in my mind.

In any case, cultural rights and human rights are often at odds.

Yes.

Oh, absolutely! I laughed a lot and these are things that usually are discussed if in a face-to-face group, so they ought to be discussed! Much of what you're picking up on is the same stuff that (within the discipline) we debate about.

Well, I'm doing my bit to give you a discussion. I could use some help from others though, I don't want to seem like I'm hogging the show, or your attention.

(I can hear the whispers in the back of the room..."teacher's pet"...and they aren't saying it nicely)

I'm a bit of a lot of things. Why limit myself to one theory when I can use several?

In all seriousness, the stuff I deal with you simply can't adequately approach through single theoretical paradigms.

Theoretical perspectives that I heavily lean on are functionalism, conflict/Marxism and variants of this, cultural model theory, and integrating theories on personality and learning style from psychology and education.

OK, makes sense. I guess that's why sociology and its variants are considered "soft" sciences.

 

[path_of_one]

Still, it is a longstanding puzzle to me why on earth neolithic cultures would go through the motions of developing religious rituals if there were no valid reason to do so?

To the best of my knowledge, most anthropologists consider religion to have social functions and belief in supernatural agents (such as they are usually called) to be due to the way the brain works in humans. They don't think we're responding to something real that is outside ourselves, but rather something within ourselves- in our thought patterns as human beings. Hence, these things are more or less universal (along with art and music, other stuff that seems little tied to evolutionary benefit until it is used socially).

Obviously, I would disagree on the basis of my own spiritual experience, but that is neither here nor there scientifically.

Agreed. It never ceases to amaze me how lifelike the cave paintings are, some are so "real" they look like they could step right off the wall. Yet, one of the next major art sets we have, that of Egypt, is so stylized as to be almost comical. It certainly demands an acquired taste to fully appreciate it, perspective and proportion are so distorted. I wonder sometimes if Picasso took his hints from early Egypt (was it cubism?).

What is interesting to me is that people seemed to have the stylized and symbolic stuff down more or less from the beginning (Venus statue, anyone?) but it took us a looooong time to develop realism in our art. There is something inherently fascinating about that.

I think a part of the problem surrounding James is the nature of the subject matter. I mean, how much interest can religion elicit in an atheist academic environment?

Well, it generates lots of interest in psychology and comparative religion. Not as much in anthropology. I think part of that is where the jobs are. I'd love to study religion, but I need work and jobs come from the more applied stuff- environmental/natural resources, war/violence, gender, medicine.

I think some researchers have a hard time distinguishing the difference between a surgeon's scalpel and a machete.

I entirely agree. It is difficult to gain trust and a good rapport with your informants if your basic belief system (atheism) is entirely against theirs. It is difficult to participate adequately if you can't participate in the way they do. It is a topic I have a problem with in anthropology in general. We all talk a good line about being open to what the "natives" think and participating with them, but when the natives are our next door Baptist neighbors...

I also think it predates the internet in earnest by at least a generation. Maybe it takes getting away from the left coast to be able to more fully appreciate the immersion in multi-culturalism.

That's probably true (about the left coast) . I sometimes forget I was raised in a very multi-cultural environment and only remember this distinction when I go elsewhere and realize how awkward it feels to see little ethnic and religious diversity. Also, it is true it predates the internet by quite some time. Back in the 1700s you already had movements of people interested in the mystery traditions and reviving Paganism in Europe, and spiritualism and so forth were in full swing by the 1800s. Plus all the stuff you said...

I think the diversity is wonderful, if approached in a respectful manner. Unfortunately, the smorgasbord approach is such that a lot of people tend to borrow from religions without trying to understand the original context- it is kind of a "assemble a religious salad" but combined with intellectual laziness so all the symbols and stories are reinterpreted without people even realizing they are reinterpreting them.

Now, I agree the internet has made it easier to explore alternate religions...but what of the quality of the material being discovered?

That's definitely the case. I think the hope is that people will continue their investigation in person, though it doesn't always work that way. But sometimes it does. A lot of Quaker blogger sites explain that much of the increased numbers of Quakers were people who had formed Quaker ideology on their own and then stumbled across them on Beliefnet or Religious Tolerance, then found a Quaker organization through Quaker Finder online. Some religions, by necessity, are primarily online. Druidry isn't big enough in most areas to have groves, so you get online forums with Druids from all over the world discussing the text.

I think so long as there is a community of people (online or not), it remains a bit better so that there is discussion, exchange of ideas, a community aspect to religion that is important.

What is alarming is how many people just pick up this or that concept from Joe Schmoe's website on whatever and don't question it.

But I do think it is a disservice to each religion so...commercialized? Smorgasbord religion pretends that profound teachings can be had for the picking and choosing and the mere swiping of a credit card...

http://www.touchoftao.com/images/cartoon.gif​

 

[path_of_one]

Why? Because scholarship should be as neutral as possible if it is to even be considered as genuine scholarship.

We generally separate theory and practice. Neutrality is necessary for research, but no one can be neutral and apply anything. But research and theory is not useful unless it is applied. So, the field as a whole (historically and now) advocates relativism for research and then applicaton. I can offer up some references to good articles on the subject if you're curious. Also, a good reference is the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA).

More than 50% of the anthropology job market is in the applied field. It's an integral part to the discipline just as psychology has clinical work and sociology has social work.

You mean to tell me it is possible to earn money for studying another culture?

Yes, but I didn't say how much money. What can I say, I guess my financial ambitions are not very great.

But we have to be careful with what we think is "better."

It's not about what I think is better. It's about what the people I am studying think is better.

I enter a culture to study it, and I bring with me my preconceived notions of what human rights entail. And, over time, I do what I can to instill these new ideas into this culture.

LOL- we don't have that kind of power. We are just one person, generally seen as an odd, goofy kind of person that makes dumb mistakes like a child. Cultures the world over have now long been impacted by colonialization and globalization- those are the real drivers of new idea adoption, not anthropologists.

(No culture I am familiar with believes murder or rape to be acceptable behavior, within the group. Towards an outgroup that may be different, but if you are "in" you are safe)

That is simply untrue. Tons of governments legally commit genocide and murders/rapes against minority groups. Within many cultures, even small-scale ones, the murder and rape of women by certain people (notably their husbands) is accepted. Girl infants are often killed in some cultures. The disabled and mentally ill are killed in some cultures.

Now, in I come and I undo this element of social cohesion, I manage through some super-human feat to purge this social ill from the whole of that society.

I have just ruined that society.

So we should uphold slavery, even though slaves don't want it, for fear their society might change to something they do want? Take India- excellent example with the caste system. The global community put economic pressure on India to rid themselves of the caste system, which caused inherited inequality to an extreme degree. They have gradually been getting rid of it, yet they still manage to be India and Hinduism still survives. Yes, the culture is changing. But I haven't heard reports of untouchables that wish to remain in structural inequality.

Who gets to qualify what is "ruined" and what is "improved"? Me? You? The people in that culture? Which people in that culture?

How can I possibly speak of cultural rights with a straight face after *personally* tinkering with and adulterating that culture?

Cultures haven't been "pure" for... geez, who knows how long. Even before colonialization, there was borrowing from others. What is adulterating a culture? How do we define the cultures solidly enough to show adulteration? We can speak of change, but I don't think we can really speak of adulteration. That implies that the people in that other culture are mindless drones who we need to protect from our harmful infuence-- which is another form of patronizing them. By trying to actively work to avoid culture change in another culture, we treat them like living museum specimens- we want them to remain different from us, so let's keep them under glass.

This viewpoint treats other people as if they are children and incapable of their own decisions about what they want. It is also self-serving, having the bonus side effect of keeping most of the world's resources for the first/developed world and allowing us to travel to those "primitive" cultures for research and entertainment. Others understand the global processes at work and how to play them better than you'd think. "Cannibal Tours" is a great ethnographic film demonstrating this.

Now, let's carry this one more step...I go in with the *trained* assumption that it is my moral duty to change that culture to what I feel are "human" rights.

We're not trained in this. In fact, that's one of the complaints- we're trained as if half the field wasn't working in applied anthro. At any rate, we are trained to do research from the standpoint of relativism.

I'm sorry but, I see what you are describing as the social activist equivalent of the JW doorknocker...the end result is cultural proselyzation.

That would be true if we imposed our ideals. But generally speaking, we aren't. We are responding to other people's expressed needs.

Furthermore, anthropology is a drop in the bucket when it comes to cultural change. The media and global market already thoroughly proselytized most/all of the world.

"Bias is a matter of perspective." LOL OK, not to seem impertinent, but, yeah-and the point is? I'm sorry, I'm still having a good chuckle at the overstatement of the obvious.

Sorry. LOL It happens.

Or, if there must be bias then account for it and leave it at the door. You said as much elsewhere.

But what I am seeing in practice, and you allude to it here, is that what is preached is not what is practiced.

This gets back to the theory/practice issues. We do more than one thing. We wear more than one hat. It is possible.

There are a lot of cultural ideosyncrasies that anyone can find distasteful...

I'm not speaking of ideosyncracies. I'm speaking of violating humans' basic needs. Anthropologists tend to find the ideosyncracies interesting. What I find problematic are things that violate people's basic needs (i.e., to eat, to be free from physical harm, to control their own body, to have a shelter suitable for the environment they are in) and things that cause unsustainability.

I certainly doubt any sociologist or anthropologist going to France would go out of their way to defy the French government on behalf of the homeless of Paris...

The third world is much less safe, and some anthropologists do face disease, violence, and prison to do their work. You'd be surprised at how much defiance goes on. Notably, our current ethical codes through the AAA were developed out of the US government's use of anthropologists in the Vietnam war. I personally know people who have lost organs due to cancers developed in the field in impoverished factory communities (due to poisonous air/water) and who have faced our government harrassing them because they would not disclose the names of people associated with political movements in the third world. Many of these academics are braver than you'd think.

But no single person can stand against a government, not without a whole lot of outside intervention...which is what creates a lot of diplomatic problems.

We band together and work with other institutions to become effective. It may cause diplomatic problems, but it also causes improvements to oppressed people's lives. Banding together for change is how we end things like slavery, child prostitution, and so forth. I can't really imagine just kicking back and watching these things happen, and saying "Eh, oh well." Nor can I imagine jumping into the fray with no data or understanding of what's going on.

I could not get him to see the fallacy in his solution...it would be a provocation of war to use the military to *force* aid that was not wanted, irrespective of the implied need.

There are certainly faulty methods. And faulty goals. But in this case, my first question would be- who didn't want aid? The government, the people, or both? In much of the world, the government does not speak for the people.

People live in poverty in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. People still deal with institutionalized legal prejudicial treatment in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. Seems to me we need every bit as much to look at ourselves before we start passing judgement on others.

I see no distinction between self and other. I see poverty and exploitation everywhere, and everywhere I think we should work diligently to reduce the violations of people's basic needs. Here, there, everywhere.

So it is not something I should feel guilty for, being born into the culture that I have.

I never adovacate guilt, as I find it useless as an emotion. People either change things or they don't, but sitting around feeling guilty is useless. I'm not for accepting wholesale what my culture gives me. We're all born into cultures, but culture is just a fancy way of saying "the fuzzy stuff we share." We can change it, use it in new ways, etc. I question everything my culture gives me.

Presented with a specific instance of hardship over which I could aid and assist, yes that would be the human thing to do.

But what if we have the knowledge and capacity to aid and assist in a structural, processual manner rather than an individual one? Should we never attack the structural inequalities and oppression that exists?

Before the Civil War, should people have just helped individual slaves but never attacked the institution of slavery? After all, it was the South's culture. It was the basis of their economy! So, we should uphold cultural integrity at the expense of others' basic human needs?

If I have extra food, if I can bandage a wound or help dig out a collapsed house or help dig a new latrine...of course, this is nothing to upset the cultural balance, and it is not imposing my cultural preferences on another.

This assumes there is a cultural balance... and that change and conflict only come from the outside.

how much were they pressured and how much propaganda was used to sway them.

LOL- how much power do you think we have? We don't have that much interest in forcing people to want stuff. Most of us just go out into the field with the idea of doing some research, and then we get bombarded with huge large-scale issues and people suffering in various ways, and then we think "How the heck do I deal with this?" and "What in the world can I do?" I think you're thinking about it backwards. There is no real grand plan in anthropology for anything much. Sure, like most people, we support human rights. We don't want people to face slavery and genocide and rape. We'd like people to have a modicum of health care, food, and water. That's about the sum total of our preconceived notions. We tend to be a lot that is pretty adaptable and enjoys diversity- which is why we do what we do. We don't personally want cultures to change into a conglomerate of McDonaldized, strip malled, English speaking clones. Human rights isn't about all the details- it's the basics. Can someone live in control of their own body (i.e., not forced to work for another, not forced to have sex with another, not killed)? Can someone eat food on a regular basis and have clean water? These are our issues.

Even the slightest "helpful" suggestion would tip that agreement in my mind.

So if the ranchers I work with ask me if I, given that I talk to ranchers all over and study this stuff, have an idea about how to shore up their economic stability... I should lie and say no? Because I'm protecting them from myself and the big bad Culture Change Monster?

Or should I treat them like an adult human being and speak with them as equals?

(I can hear the whispers in the back of the room..."teacher's pet"...and they aren't saying it nicely)

LOL

 

[juantoo3]

To the best of my knowledge, most anthropologists consider religion to have social functions and belief in supernatural agents (such as they are usually called) to be due to the way the brain works in humans. They don't think we're responding to something real that is outside ourselves, but rather something within ourselves- in our thought patterns as human beings. Hence, these things are more or less universal (along with art and music, other stuff that seems little tied to evolutionary benefit until it is used socially).

Obviously, I would disagree on the basis of my own spiritual experience, but that is neither here nor there scientifically.

I would be inclined to disagree as well, but as you say that is neither here nor there scientifically.

What is interesting to me is that people seemed to have the stylized and symbolic stuff down more or less from the beginning (Venus statue, anyone?) but it took us a looooong time to develop realism in our art. There is something inherently fascinating about that.

OK, I can grant some of the venus figures are pretty stylized, Willendorf is pretty well exaggerated. And it is suggested that the...oversized anatomy...hints at sympathetic magic for human fertility. So on the one hand I can see what you are saying, but on the other I still see a remarkable degree of realism.

Look at the Lowenmensch...OK, stylized lion / man (actually I think it was a woman), but the details and proportions are remarkable for the realism. Some of the other venus figures are remarkable more for the use of a naturally occuring form and translating it into a figure. The use of natural forms to compliment the design is apparent in many cave paintings as well.

But now the Fumane sorceror, that I can agree was a very stylized symbolic form. Depictions of humans in general are stylized symbols in every cave I have looked at pictures of. That does raise a curious question, why so much effort into the animals, and so little effort is spent on depicting humans?

I think the diversity is wonderful, if approached in a respectful manner. Unfortunately, the smorgasbord approach is such that a lot of people tend to borrow from religions without trying to understand the original context- it is kind of a "assemble a religious salad" but combined with intellectual laziness so all the symbols and stories are reinterpreted without people even realizing they are reinterpreting them.

Yes, this is precisely the difficulty I see.

I think so long as there is a community of people (online or not), it remains a bit better so that there is discussion, exchange of ideas, a community aspect to religion that is important.

What is alarming is how many people just pick up this or that concept from Joe Schmoe's website on whatever and don't question it.

Even with the emphasis I place on the individual quest and faith walk, I would have to agree with you here. Questioning is important, but just as important is having a source of validation for answers.

The question might arise as to whether or not the answers themselves are valid...but the validation process is important to gelling a community / society.

 

[juantoo3]

I can offer up some references to good articles on the subject if you're curious. Also, a good reference is the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA).

I think that would be nice.

LOL- we don't have that kind of power. We are just one person, generally seen as an odd, goofy kind of person that makes dumb mistakes like a child. Cultures the world over have now long been impacted by colonialization and globalization- those are the real drivers of new idea adoption, not anthropologists.

Anthropologists are just the conductors (stewards)...

That is simply untrue. Tons of governments legally commit genocide and murders/rapes against minority groups. Within many cultures, even small-scale ones, the murder and rape of women by certain people (notably their husbands) is accepted. Girl infants are often killed in some cultures. The disabled and mentally ill are killed in some cultures.

While I can see where I might have missed something, I did qualify my remark; "within the group. Towards an outgroup that may be different," because inhumane behavior is often justified towards those outside of the ingroup as a historical norm. I am not making a judgement call at this point whether right or wrong, I am simply pointing to a historic norm.

Inhumane behavior within the group is "crime." While we like to think that we have outgrown inhumane behavior towards those outside of our group, in many ways great and small, subtle and not-so-subtle, these behaviors persist. Again, I am not endorsing, I am pointing.

So we should uphold slavery, even though slaves don't want it, for fear their society might change to something they do want? Take India- excellent example with the caste system. The global community put economic pressure on India to rid themselves of the caste system, which caused inherited inequality to an extreme degree. They have gradually been getting rid of it, yet they still manage to be India and Hinduism still survives. Yes, the culture is changing. But I haven't heard reports of untouchables that wish to remain in structural inequality.

Who gets to qualify what is "ruined" and what is "improved"? Me? You? The people in that culture? Which people in that culture?

OK, but I keep envisioning the Inuit tribes lost after the oil rush in Alaska. They didn't ask to lose their culture or to be overrun by oil-mad tycoons, they thought they were merely getting a little stipend to make life a bit easier. 1964 was a turning point for so many in our country...and it was the year so many Inuit tribes' ways of life disappeared. So, were these tribes' cultures ruined, or improved?

Cultures haven't been "pure" for... geez, who knows how long.

OK, I can see this.

This viewpoint treats other people as if they are children and incapable of their own decisions about what they want. It is also self-serving, having the bonus side effect of keeping most of the world's resources for the first/developed world and allowing us to travel to those "primitive" cultures for research and entertainment. Others understand the global processes at work and how to play them better than you'd think.

I have little doubt many have learned to play the game...they have to as a matter of survival.

We're not trained in this.

The point I am trying to make is that slippery slope of presumption...and I see it frequently in "social services" when dealing their handouts. The "strings attached" kind of thing. And I have seen more than I care to admit those who feel it is their moral imperitive to impose their POV on everyone else, "for the greater good," whatever that is supposed to mean. It can start with genuinely felt compassion to aid and comfort, and it ends up as dictating how to conduct life. I am not saying you are wrong...I am trying say there are clear lines across which it is not ours to step. That the real "self-serving" cultural arrogance makes itself known by crossing those lines using those very same "for the greater good" mechanisms to justify itself.

I'm not speaking of ideosyncracies. I'm speaking of violating humans' basic needs. Anthropologists tend to find the ideosyncracies interesting. What I find problematic are things that violate people's basic needs (i.e., to eat, to be free from physical harm, to control their own body, to have a shelter suitable for the environment they are in) and things that cause unsustainability.

For the sake of discussion, I will return to my dog soup analogy. Violating basic human needs...lofty sounding ambition-who wouldn't be against rape, murder, child molestation? But the attitude engendered extends beyond that...what about animal rights? Surely you (the foreign culture) can't eat dog soup because dogs have rights too! It is a slippery slope, but I have seen it more than once, by well-meaning but misguided people overstepping their bounds. And frankly, Americans are horrible at staying within bounds.

Look at the furor and the backlash from that misguided gal on tv a while back stopping a family from killing some dolphins, and the social snobbery she used to justify herself. What, is the poor family (who is culturally and traditionally accustomed to eating dolphin) supposed to go hungry to satisfy her sense of moral supremacy? I don't think she was an anthropologist, but if she were I would say she overstepped her bounds. "Oh, but the poor dolphins!" I could almost bet she doesn't get the same sense of moral outrage in front of a slaughterhouse in North Texas; so she can have her MickyD's and ground beef under cellophane and a clear conscience too.

Many of these academics are braver than you'd think.

This is encouraging to know.

There are certainly faulty methods. And faulty goals. But in this case, my first question would be- who didn't want aid? The government, the people, or both? In much of the world, the government does not speak for the people.

Because I never saw any direct request from the people *for* aid, I can't presume they wanted it anyway. By contrast the government, like 'em or not, *are* responsible for their people, and I did see news clips where the government stated they were not interested in the aid. I do believe a lot had to do with the way the aid was presented...use of military...and later aid offered through civilian channels was accepted. But dismissal of the government, and the role of government, seems to me counterproductive to the goal of affecting change.

But what if we have the knowledge and capacity to aid and assist in a structural, processual manner rather than an individual one? Should we never attack the structural inequalities and oppression that exists?

But is that the role of the anthropologist, or the activist?

Before the Civil War, should people have just helped individual slaves but never attacked the institution of slavery? After all, it was the South's culture. It was the basis of their economy! So, we should uphold cultural integrity at the expense of others' basic human needs?

Oh, I so want to go here, but it will get misconstrued. In short, the South wasn't quite the demon some would like to make it out to be. And yes, there was a lot of expense of others' basic human needs, black and white.

This assumes there is a cultural balance... and that change and conflict only come from the outside.

Perhaps.

Human rights isn't about all the details- it's the basics. Can someone live in control of their own body (i.e., not forced to work for another, not forced to have sex with another, not killed)? Can someone eat food on a regular basis and have clean water? These are our issues.

I understand, but I also understand the potential for abuse. Can that potential be denied?

So if the ranchers I work with ask me if I, given that I talk to ranchers all over and study this stuff, have an idea about how to shore up their economic stability... I should lie and say no? Because I'm protecting them from myself and the big bad Culture Change Monster?

If they came to you, freely of their own will, that is another matter. If you "just happen" to volunteer certain info that leads them to request your assistance...then you are meddling.

 

[path_of_one]

Anthropologists are just the conductors (stewards)...

My point is in contemporary times, we aren't. We mostly study the effects of what is happening as a result of the global market and media.

While I can see where I might have missed something, I did qualify my remark; "within the group. Towards an outgroup that may be different," because inhumane behavior is often justified towards those outside of the ingroup as a historical norm.

What I was pointing out is that it is also the historic norm in many societies to have violence against members within the group. This may be justified within the group based on gender, age, disability, etc.

The absolute relativist would say such violence against others is fine if the members of the group agree to it. Those working for human rights would say it is not fine. I'm in the latter category. Cultural norm or no, I'm not going to say it's OK to beat, rape, or kill someone because they are young or old, a woman, disabled, etc. That is unacceptable to me, and to support it (in my opinion) supports structural inequality that keeps a large number of people in misery, especially women and children, who generally have the fewest rights.

Inhumane behavior within the group is "crime."

No, it isn't. That is my point. The group determines what "crime" means- it means behaviors that go against laws or social standards. If the standards allow for beating, raping, or killing certain people within the group, it is not seen as a crime. This is the problem. People assume that all cultures see inhumane behavior as the same behaviors we do, and they don't. We are then faced with deciding if we support inhumane behavior in other groups by not trying to change it, or whether we support those who are being harmed by this.

OK, but I keep envisioning the Inuit tribes lost after the oil rush in Alaska. They didn't ask to lose their culture or to be overrun by oil-mad tycoons, they thought they were merely getting a little stipend to make life a bit easier. 1964 was a turning point for so many in our country...and it was the year so many Inuit tribes' ways of life disappeared. So, were these tribes' cultures ruined, or improved?

I think this is quite a different scenario than the caste system or slavery. As for ruined vs. improved- that is not for me to say. If I were trying to answer that question as an anthropologist, I would go interview a sample of people affected by this to find out their ideas on the matter.

I have little doubt many have learned to play the game...they have to as a matter of survival.

My point is- we all are affected by these processes. Most of us have no major role in it. To act as though these people are somehow in need of protection from the rest of us is at least as condescending to their own capacity for action and decision-making as the human rights agenda.

The point I am trying to make is that slippery slope of presumption...and I see it frequently in "social services" when dealing their handouts. The "strings attached" kind of thing. And I have seen more than I care to admit those who feel it is their moral imperitive to impose their POV on everyone else, "for the greater good," whatever that is supposed to mean. It can start with genuinely felt compassion to aid and comfort, and it ends up as dictating how to conduct life.

I understand. I would put forth, however, that anthropologists do not typically base their actions on presumptions. That is the whole point of applying anthropology- getting away from presumptions and using real data and analysis to inform decision-making. The processes that affect people are happening whether we get involved or not; we can either be bystanders and passively support whatever others are doing or we can be active in our role. I really don't believe there is a neutral ground. People who claim neutrality are passively supporting what is already happening.

Violating basic human needs...lofty sounding ambition-who wouldn't be against rape, murder, child molestation? But the attitude engendered extends beyond that...what about animal rights?

Does it? Must we mindlessly slide down the slope? And, even if we do, does that mean we should continue to passively support these inhumane behaviors that cause so much suffering, because we are afraid we might impact someone's way of life? Only fools rush in... But I would also put forth that the other extreme is similarly foolish, not to mention cruel.

And frankly, Americans are horrible at staying within bounds.

I choose not to generalize this way. With the right training, people can set boundaries and stay inside them.

I don't think she was an anthropologist, but if she were I would say she overstepped her bounds.

My point is, with proper training we have a better sense of how to act in a way that assists people in appropriate ways. If she wasn't an anthropologist, it's a bit irrelevant what she did in this context. If she was an anthropologist, I can definitively say she'd be an oddball one. We may recognize issues of ecological sustainability but there are generally ways to maintain cultural lifeways while restricting access by people without these traditional lifeways.

By contrast the government, like 'em or not, *are* responsible for their people, and I did see news clips where the government stated they were not interested in the aid.

Many governments do not act responsibly for their people. We can say they are responsible, but that really just shifts blame for the suffering of the people. It doesn't solve anything.

But dismissal of the government, and the role of government, seems to me counterproductive to the goal of affecting change.

I would not say the government is ever dismissed, nor is its role. But the governments are studied to reveal how they operate and who they benefit. It would be a faulty assumption to think the government will act in the best interest of all its citizens. Normally, we find the government favors certain people over others and structural inequality is not uncommon. In some cases, the government is one of the biggest perpetrators of violence and human rights violations.

But is that the role of the anthropologist, or the activist?

My point is, if you define activism as taking action... there has never been an appreciable difference between anthropologist and activist. Just as psychologists practice psychology and affect real, living people (not just theorizing about how they might do this)... so too anthropologists practice anthropology and affect real, living people. It has been the case from many of our foundational theorists and remains to this day, with more than half of anthropologists working in entirely applied settings (i.e., outside academic institutions) and many academic anthropologists involved with application as well.

We can say it should be different, but it simply isn't how the field ever has been. All the social sciences have always been tied to application.

In short, the South wasn't quite the demon some would like to make it out to be. And yes, there was a lot of expense of others' basic human needs, black and white.

I am aware it was not a clear-cut issue. But it still holds that there was an economy and culture built on structural inequality, and particularly the institution of slavery and particular trade exchanges. We could choose to uphold the existing culture under such circumstances, or to say that is unacceptable due to the violations of the basic rights of many people. Doing nothing supports the former automatically, by default.

I understand, but I also understand the potential for abuse. Can that potential be denied?

No. But I would put forth that practically everything humans do has the potential for abuse. We would never do anything if that was our ground for decision-making.

The interesting thing is that doing nothing about inequality and suffering is still making a decision that has the potential for abuse. By doing nothing we automatically support the way things are, thereby contributing to the suffering resulting from the ongoing structural problems that currently exist.

More later on the ethics dilemmas (I have an activity students do) and on applied anthropology articles (I have to dig up that list). Just returned from a long weekend with family.

 

[juantoo3]

Thank you Path, I look forward to more.

I hope your long weekend was enjoyable.

 

[path_of_one]

It was- and full of surprises! I will get out those materials ASAP- and the next installment. I'm so busy this week it may be a little late...

 

[juantoo3]

From what I gather about the development of alphabets, specifically Hebrew, the symbols *originally* were associated with what they represented. Now, I can agree that as the symbols gained new meanings and symbol combinations developed to expand writing to include far more meanings, then the original associations often became lost. The flip side is that in those cultures where symbolic representations did not gain as much combination, the result was an "alphabet" that sometimes includes in the neighborhood of 4000 common characters I think it is in the case of Chinese or Japanese.

Stumbled on this:
http://www.comparative-religion.com/forum/earliest-writing-found-in-china-126.html

 

[Tao_Equus]

Another great OP Path-of-One.

Such OP's are indeed a great way to set the table for a good discussion. Simple unambiguous clarity with just enough direction to lead the way.

I have often meant to start a discussion on how recent changes in technology have affected culture on the personal, local, national and international level and perhaps when this thread has travelled a little it might do so.

Jung said something like "to be a truly modern Man you cannot reject history". Our biggest questions are not immune from cultural influence. And the questions we never ask are likewise never free of cultural paradigms. Sometimes you can know a persons start point better by the questions they do not ask than the ones that they do. Language and culture can combine in a terminology that makes some questions nigh near impossible. So in a sense it is good to remember that every paradigm is in essence a set of loaded dice.

Rather than look at who was the first with each cultural innovation I think it would be interesting to look first at what all cultures share and why. It is there we will find our base, or foundation, of that which we might call our humanity. As I see it you really are required to view culture on at least 5 levels to begin to get a handle on the sometimes conflicting manifestations of cultural phenomena. The personal, micro (family), local, (immediate community), national and international level. I think we see greatest concord when we view the first and last together and the middle three is where it gets more complicated.

On the personal level culture is everything, it defines us from birth. We could not survive without the collective, we are a social species incapable of survival alone not just without each other but also the countless billions of other individual organisms our lives ultimately depend upon. The web of life itself on this planet is what gives the possibility of any culture. Even a yoghurt has culture which may be an old joke but none the less can be taken quite literally. So our personal culture is tied in with everything. It is internationalist, global in the most elemental ways. Yet to some, and especially the types that inhabit these pages, it has become extremely complex and very rarely logical. The capacity for reason is defined by those paradigms we adopt as a facet of our interaction on all levels of culture. They are never definitive to everybody on any level because self is, at least amongst thinking people, always in conflict or trying to harness culture to its own desires. Culture is in some sense a tool that we use to shape our goals as much as it shapes us.

To spin it round again there is philosophy, religion, science and art, the human contrivances to bring some meaning to the world in which we find ourselves. How each of them combine in the individual psyche is what determines an individuals paradigm. Some people have one that dominates, others draw more equally. There is cultural bias from the moment we are born that in the majority of individuals will in large part determine their life-paradigm. There are no cultures that do not incorporate some balance of these 4 faculties but like in the individual the balance can be far from even. And I think here lays the root of my opposition to religion. For what it is it does not deserve, by evidence, its lofty position in the individual and cultural (on every level), psyche. Religion is no more tangible than abstract art. It is useful only in philosophical musing and should never have achieved its dominance over the four. But the way our minds work, and the imperatives of evolutionary progression found it a useful tool for cultural self-interest. Religion has only in recent times seen the rise of science and it struggles like a bad liar to jump from one explanation to the other. For the first time in history scientific knowledge is shared by sufficient individuals for it to have a voice independent of culture. Philosophy, the primary cause of our individual desire to be on this page, only now has some chance to gain a different paradigm based on empirical proof rather than naive supernatural causations. Religions and those with a spiritual paradigm would love to paint science as a religion, to bring it 'into the fold' but science deals with empirical truths that will ever leave it in conflict with pure faith based philosophy. To make logical sense to oneself we will invariably make some illogical connections due to all the cultural influences upon us. Those we choose, or think we choose, and those that are more insidious, the fuzzy communal paradigms, define the degree to which science will influence our philosophy. Unfortunately science is the route of infinite dissection and religion cannot handle dissection very well. Philosophy can. Philosophy is as much about dissection as collectivisation. Collectivisation is what religions do. But they ignore empirical proof in stating their conclusions. Indeed religions are about conclusional paradigms for reality where as science only asks why and how or vice versa. Science separates itself from philosophy by its own intrinsic qualities and this is what makes it the superior tool in philosophical musings.

So where am I going with this? I would say the elevation of science on the back of its experiential and pragmatic usefulness will continue to gain respect until it is culturally accepted on every level as the superior approach to answering fundamental questions. This will continue till religious belief in the majority is seen in a radically different way to today, a way that will see the demise of all organised religions and "revealed truths". What is happening in the internationalist culture of the selfish (non-pejorative) atheist is growing into a movement supported by every internet terminal on the planet. this will change culture. The religions are no longer in charge of science and are reduced to minnows on the scale of the knowledge available to anyone online. Steadily over the coming centuries religion will be viewed as archaic and hopefully we all adopt a neutral philosophy instead.

tao

 

[path_of_one]

Our biggest questions are not immune from cultural influence. And the questions we never ask are likewise never free of cultural paradigms. Sometimes you can know a persons start point better by the questions they do not ask than the ones that they do.

Absolutely.

I think it would be interesting to look first at what all cultures share and why. It is there we will find our base, or foundation, of that which we might call our humanity.

Short answer: not much. There are so few human universals. Incredibly few. I mean, you can talk about broad swathes of stuff like: everyone shares food. Everyone lives in a family unit. Everyone has a language. But that stuff isn't tremendously helpful because there is an enormous amount of diversity there. What kinds of food? With whom and under what circumstances? Who is in a family? How is it formed and maintained? How does it function? Etc. For every "universal" there are hundreds if not thousands of variations on it.

What I find really interesting is the relationships between changes in one part of culture and changes in another, such that you get similarities in various aspects of culture based on economic/political similarities. Much more is shared by hunter-gatherers as a broad generalization, for example, than by all humans everywhere, and this is interesting to see how it stacks up against industrialized cultures, for example, and the stuff that they share. That kind of patterened, recognizable diversity is really fascinating to me.

One universal that was just too much fun was captured in Matt Harding's recent Dancing 2008 video. Basically, as one blog commenter summed it up: "I realize people everywhere like to dance like dorks." Now, THAT is interesting. What is it that allows people seemingly everywhere to recognize fun when they see it, and join in? Why are we dancing, singing, drumming animals? What's the purpose?

Yet to some, and especially the types that inhabit these pages, it has become extremely complex and very rarely logical.

Culture doesn't need to be logical because logic is not always the most beneficial thing for group survival. The purpose of culture is to allow our species to survive, which requires group survival. So, historically speaking, culture has been a way to get people to cooperate. It is a real struggle for a lot of people to cooperate based on logic, because it is not always immediately logical to cooperate if it involves sacrifice to the individual. This is the whole tragedy of the commons work, altruism, etc. What is often detrimental to the individual is advantageous for the group. It's the short-term/long-term planning horizon issue. Culture may provide us with all sorts of illogical stuff, but generally this is to give us short-term emotional payoffs for what is beneficial in the long-term for the group but is, logically, not immediately beneficial to the individual.

I have a lot of works in the reading list on this issue, and religion is a big player in that game. I'd recommend Gene Anderson's "Ecologies of the Heart" as a starting point, but there's a whole literature on the Tragedy of the Commons that is excellent and explains the value of religion in thwarting these issues.

Culture is in some sense a tool that we use to shape our goals as much as it shapes us.

Yep. Culture changes too. We manipulate it, it shapes us.

To spin it round again there is philosophy, religion, science and art, the human contrivances to bring some meaning to the world in which we find ourselves.

I don't think that's really how it works. There is some evolutionary payoff for this stuff, and that's why it is there. I don't think it's all about bringing in meaning to our lives and world. I mean, superficially, yes. But when you dig down, these things have purpose for group survival, generally speaking.

The fact that humans have a drive to seek meaning is itself interesting and noteworthy, since other social animals seem to get along just fine without this quality.

And I think here lays the root of my opposition to religion. For what it is it does not deserve, by evidence, its lofty position in the individual and cultural (on every level), psyche. Religion is no more tangible than abstract art. It is useful only in philosophical musing and should never have achieved its dominance over the four.

You may believe this, but the evidence says otherwise. I've listed some stuff on the reading list that goes into the details, but the evidence is that religion has historically been key to engendering cooperation and long-term planning in areas that would otherwise be like herding cats. And these things were necessary for group survival. Religion has evolutionary advantages that have allowed large-scale social cooperation, retention of ecological information, and other important advantages. It persists in part because science is lousy at making people care emotionally about what they should do, and most people make decisions based on emotions and not logic.

I'd recommend Atran's book "In Gods We Trust," Anderson's book, and then some of the ethnographies from cultural ecology-- they really demonstrate the complexity of environmental knowledge and decision-making in individual cultures and religion's role.

Unfortunately science is the route of infinite dissection and religion cannot handle dissection very well. Philosophy can. Philosophy is as much about dissection as collectivisation. Collectivisation is what religions do. But they ignore empirical proof in stating their conclusions.

First, I think some things are just not very amendable to dissection. Perhaps this is why science is lousy at making people cooperate for an end. In dissecting things, we lose emotion and many people become bored or apathetic. Not everyone is interested in dissection (in fact, most people don't seem to be interested in it). Many people I have met, whether religious or not, are not scientific. They just replace religion with some substitute that doesn't have gods but lacks all the logic and evidence-based analysis that science demands. This is why you can have very illogical, socially deleterious outcomes coming out of very atheistic philosophies.

Second, religions do not ignore evidence, but rather it is handled differently. I will try to explain. Take feng-shui as an example. It involves all sorts of religious/superstitious ideas- dragons and tigers in the mountains, the circulation of chi, ghosts, etc. Yet, it is feng-shui that enticed people to make very sound land use planning decisions for centuries. The explanation is illogical, but it gets people to have an emotional attachment to doing the right, beneficial actions for the community.

Contrast this with the US. Our land use planning is based in science. We don't talk about ghosts and dragons. We don't discuss circulations of energy. We have all the logical, "real" information about geology and urban planning and so forth. And, quite frankly, our land use planning sucks. Each year flooding washes away homes and landslides pile into the backyards of development tracts. We pave over our best agricultural land because that is cheap. The lack of any unified and emotionally relevant system means people just grab at whatever benefits them short-term and no one pays attention to what is best for the community or even themselves down the road. In short, the science is there and the explanations may be correct. But it simply reached all the same conclusions as feng-shui without any of the "bite" and so it is bulldozed by narrow-minded, short-term self-interest.

What good is having a logical system of understanding the world around us if its pragmatic ends are no different from the illogical, religious system-- and it is much worse at getting anyone to actually cooperate in beneficial action?

Unless people "grow up" and evolve to intrinsically desire cooperation, self-sacrifice, and long-term planning... science is no better off than religion is, and in many ways worse, for group survival. I heart science too, but I do recognize that it is science that has generated nuclear weapons and unsustainable agriculture. Technology and scientific knowledge without the underpinnings of emotion that lead to beneficial action is just as horrific as the way religion can be twisted.

 

[China Cat Sunflower]

One universal that was just too much fun was captured in Matt Harding's recent Dancing 2008 video. Basically, as one blog commenter summed it up: "I realize people everywhere like to dance like dorks." Now, THAT is interesting. What is it that allows people seemingly everywhere to recognize fun when they see it, and join in? Why are we dancing, singing, drumming animals? What's the purpose?

That's a splendid question. The fact that we like to get inebriated, pound out some sort of groove, and dance like dorks around a fire says so much about who we, as humans, are.

Chris