Wykad 8

Last time we talked about

The social and psychological functions of religion Why in the era of science and technology we observe a surge in religious activity Major deities, ancestral spirits, other spirituals beings and powers Animism (other-than-human persons) Animatism (impersonal spiritual powers, e.g. mana) Pilgrims of the Plymouth Plantation and the supernatural world The shaman and faith healer as religious specialists and entrepreneurs.

Rituals, liminality, and witchcraft

Emile Durkheims notion of the sacred and the profane Arnold van Genneps concept of liminality Victor Turners notion of communitas Pilgrimage as liminality Magic, Witchcraft

Emile Durkheim (1857-1917)

The elementary forms of the religious life (1912) Religion is something eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of assembled groups and which are destined

The sacred and the profane

Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them (1968:62). What makes religion distinctive is its focus on the sacred, which is itself a social contruction. There is nothing inherently sacred or profane in the world

The sacred and the profane

The sacred encompasses all that exists beyond the everyday, natural world that we experience with our senses. It is regarded as ultimately unknowable and beyond limited human abilities to perceive and comprehend.

Rituals
A means through which persons relate to the sacred. They reinforce a groups social bonds and relieve tension Anthropologists have classified several types of rituals celebrating events and dealing with crises: Rites of passage which pertain to the individuals

Rites of intensification
Rituals of crisis in the life of the group In reaction to Lack of rain that threatens crops

Funerary ceremonies Arnold Van Gennep The Rites of Passage (1960)

French anthropologist Arnold van Genneps concept of the rites of passage: rituals, often religious, in nature, marking important stages in the lives of individuals, such as birth, puberty, parenthood, marriages and funerals; confirmation, bar mitzvah or first communion, retirement from work. van Gennep divided ceremonies for all of these life crises into three stages: 1. Preliminal separation (removal from society) 2. Liminal - transition (isolation) 3. Postliminal states incorporation (reincorporation into society

Australian aborigines: male initiation rites

Boys taken from the village (separation) when women make a ritual The climax of the ritual: A symbolical act of killing the novice either by circumcision or the knocking out of a tooth The trauma of the occasion ensures he will learn and remember everything an effective teaching method in non-literate societies On return to the village he is welcome with ceremonies and enjoys a new status with all his rights and duties

Victor Turner (1920-1983)

Liminality

Rites of passage as dramatized public events Isolation from the society: strict rules of conduct Temporary suffering, trials and deprivations of participants: circumcision Two major models of human relationships
The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politicolegal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of more or less. The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society society as an unstructured and undifferentiated communitas, community, or even communion of equal

Communitas and its properties

The properties of communitas versus structure can be expressed through binary oppositions: transition/state, equality/inequality, silence/speech, absence of status/status

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (14th century) Pilgrimage A recurrent metaphor in Christian literature
Chaucers The Canterbury Tales, the most famous pilgrimage in English literature

Pilgrimages are liminal phenomena Is communitas possible in the post-industrialized society?

weaker community ties an overriding emphasis in individuality supra-hierarchical society with its

Liminality and disability: Rites of passage and community in hypermodern society

In hypermodern society individuals with disabilities are in the potentially unending, liminal stage of a symbolic rite of passage. This type of society

Magic, religion and witchcraft

MAGIC: rituals and formulas believed to coerce and command the supernatural powers to act in certain ways for good or bad purposes Magic and practical work

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)

Imitative magic like produces like. For instance, whatever happens to an image of someone will also happen to them. Voodoo dolls in the folk tradition of Haiti: if someone sticks a pin into the stomach of the doll, the person of whom it is a likeness will be expected to experience a simultaneous pain in his or her stomach. Contagious magic beings once in contact can influence one another after being separated (treasuring objects touched by special people)

In Nigeria magic and witchcraft are accepted as realities

Mother of one of Team Nigerias athlete, Mrs Glory Udoh who came to the Olympic Village yesterday said that it was so glaring that spiritual forces were at work against Witchcraft: a belief that certain individuals possess an innate psychic power of causing harm, including sickness or death; an ideology for providing a scapegoat for explaining misfortune.

Witch trials
Salem, Massachusetts Feb. 1692-May 1963 Two young girls As more young women exhibited signs of affliction, the flight A belief in witchcraft serves a function of social control. Witchcraft provides