Meaning And Rationality Of Social Life

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Rites de passage- Van Gennep

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The way through which people are transferred from one social category to another.
Point of RDP is to facilitate a smooth transition- functionalist influence.
1. rites of separation
2. rites of transition
3. rites of incorporation/aggregation

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Gluckman

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Manchester School- Durkheimian influence, argued that ritual/religion take same pattern as social organisation, they are rooted in the structure of society.
Looked at rituals of rebellion amongst Zulu and Masai Mara

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Gluckman

Zulu agriculture rite

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Performed by women in honour of spirit of fertility.
Noted they did things normally tabooed- dressed as males, danced naked. Normally modestly dressed and politically subdued.
Gluckman: a ritual show of rebellion.

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Gluckman

Masai Mara

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When boys grow up, they slowly replace their fathers as head of the family, meaning they have to be in charge of the women of the house.
Rituals: teasing and making fun of their mothers, making them drink liquid fat, a mock battle with joke accusations of incest etc.
Gluckman: society is not harmonious, stable, coherent or homogenous. It is full of tensions generated by the very social relations that make up society.

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Turner

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Also Manchester school.
Argued that conflict and contradiction endemic to society.
Ndembu of Zambia: matrilineal so key relationship between son and mother's brother.
But influential may try to subvert the system and feel a loyalty to their children rather than their other family. So will try to keep their sister's children in the village as well as their own children.

Ritual of becoming a chief:
During transition phase he is portrayed as a slave, has to act submissively. Due to view that to be high, you have to experience being low.
Can fit with VG's liminality stage: quality of communitas. All people brought to the same level. Therefore communitas opposite to social structure; eases tensions momentarily.
Important moment in anthro as focus on human experience rather than just on the outside; a move away from functionalism.

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Structuralist approaches to ritual

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Basic analogy with language: it is put together from various elements which are placed together according to laws of grammar and syntax. Society the same- put together according to specific rules.
No inherent meaning unless in relation to other words.
People engage in ritual to transmit collective messages to themselves, rather than to strengthen social cohesion (RB) or to manage tensions (Gluckman).

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Leach

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Rituals say things, a process of transmitting info to each other. A way of bridging the world and the other world.
At best these systems of logic only vaguely apprehended by members of the society themselves.
Sacrifice: used to mark this bridging. Analogous to the funeral, a transition phase.
Donor and object: sacrifice is a metonymic symbol = an identification between the two.
E.g. Aaron:
- To be purified, a scapegoat is slaughtered. Supposed to contain his imperfections.

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Criticisms of Leach's approach to ritual

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We cannot say authoritatively what these communications are, or for whom.
Question over whether anthros have the authority to go beyond what the natives tell them (Mead vs Freeman).
Broader issue of interpretation in general.

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Luc de Heusch

Thonga of southern Africa

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Argues that myth and ritual the same part of the cultural code- we should look at the context of the practices.
Thonga: at birth child perceived to be a well-fired pot. Therefore during pregnancy mother makes small incisions to let 'heat' out. Women's substances seen to be dangerous.
Rituals: death of children: if death is before initiation ritual then child buried in humid ground and if very early then in a pot.
Smoking ritual: child immersed in fumigation. Only then can child come out of mother's hut.
Yandla or moon rite: child presented to moon. Mother holds burning torch and throws towards moon, grandmother throws baby and then places on the ashes. Only then can father hold baby.
Biyekata: steam bath. mother and child shut in enclosure and covered in cloth, then steamed. Said to remove impurities and encourage growth in child.
Boha purl: integration where father's semen rubbed onto child's leg. Prior to that parents did not have intercourse due to danger of heat. Child now thought to be part of man's lineage.
Argues there are 2 processes: biological maturation (associated with women) and social maturation (associated with men).
One can see a series of elements in binary opposition: nature/culture, men/women, biological/social.

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For and against structuralist approaches to ritual

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For:
Power of analysis rests on the discovery of patterns and structures.
Not always possible for natives to express their ideas and dispositions, it takes an outsider (e.g. colour)

Against:
Structuralist knowledge discoverable by reason- assumption of an objective source of knowledge.
No room for ambiguity or not being sure- structuralists always assume there is one unitary answer.
Leave out notions of sentiment and emotion, seen to be a system of thought rather than a system of feeling.

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Gilbert Lewis

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Interpretation of rituals should stay as close to the locals as possible.
Method: rather than firing questions, he left his recorder on while people spoke about rituals.
Studied the Gnau:
No term for ritual, rather it is 'doing things'. Does not demand interpretation/meaning because the focus is on performance and the opinions of others.
Penis bleeding:
Happens after first menstrual period for girls, boys taken to place where older relative bleeds him. After that boy bleeds himself semi-regularly. After ritual, relatives and friends chew a nut and spit on them (red colour).
Gnau reject the possible explanations that it is a symbolic form of rebirth or that it is a symbolic form of female menstruation.
Lewis: not always formal logic.
Ritual, like art, has no commonly agreed definition. Both express something but not sure what, both involve performance and audience.

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Problem of interpretation

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Do we confine ourselves to what natives tell us or does that prevent from seeing things we cannot? (Marx, colour).
E.g. Crapanzano, 1985. Just recorded native white's views in South Africa which was a justification for the apartheid regime.

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Intellectualist approach to religion

Edward Tylor

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Humans ask questions about their existence.
Early religion arose as basic responses to psychological and biological problems.
How do we explain death and freedom? We posit the idea of a human soul and spirits.
Coined animism as most basic form of religion, then polytheism, then monotheism.
Conclusion: religion arises from intellectual reflections by humans on the world.

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Intellectualist approach to religion

James Frazer

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Argued that the procedures of magic are scientific, logical and rational.
Called magic the "bastard sister of science".
Magico-religious phenomena are based on ideas that sprang from the rational and intellectual endeavours of humans to understand and experience the world around them.
Like science, magic classifies things but gets it a little wrong.
Frazer's evolutionary process: magic --> religion --> science.
Both Tylor and Frazer saw a progressive development of rationalism in different stages of civilisation.

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Neo-intellectualism

Robin Horton

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Part of a "back to Frazer movement" (Beattie).
Argument: fundamental similarities between magic, religion and science. African religion thought best understood as a theoretical activity.
Does not argue, like Frazer, that religion is primitive science. Rather, both are theoretical and express their theories with reference to different terms and idioms.
Theoretical explanation a quest for unity and order in the face of apparent diversity.

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Horton

Kalabari, Nigeria

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3 kinds of spirits: lineage ancestors (aid family), community heroes (aid community) and water and nature spirits (regulate human-nature relationships).
"Like molecules and atoms, the gods serve to introduce unity into diversity, simplicity into complexity, order into disorder, regularity into anomaly"
Theory places things in a causal complex broader than that of common sense.

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Horton

Differences between African traditional religious thought and science

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1. African traditional religious thought are closed systems, tenets are absolute and specific to certain societies. Science is an open theory predicated on idea of progress of thought.
2. Secondary elaborations: when confronted with failures in magic, explanations are given like spell was faulty, correct spirit not diagnosed, medium incompetent. Science's success based on proof and corroboration; failure leads to abandonment of theory.
3. Difference of idiom. African idioms of the spirit are personal idioms; linked to taboos, cultural rules etc. that operate between you and others. Idioms related to social disturbance, individual affliction. Science is amoral.

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Contextualist approaches

Levy-Bruhl

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'How Natives Think' (1910).
An ethnologist = never did fieldwork.
Argued 'primitive thought' wholly different from the West's.
Different "not in nuance or degree, but in kind".
Mysticism was "pre-logical", got in the way of seeing the world correctly rather than being on an evolutionary path to science.

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Contextualist approaches

Evans-Pritchard

Azande witchcraft

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In Western civilisation, there is a set separation between entities: Church holy, home not.
Azande: they are on the same level.
Each household has a shrine which when not used for special occasions is used like any other homely object.
EP: context important.
Witchcraft = mangu.
Thought to be a physical substance, a bodily poison. But whether it is active or not depends on the person.
Witchcraft associated with misfortune. If family is subject to constant misfortune, they seek an oracle.
Rubbing board oracle, termite mount oracle, but poison oracle the highest.
Can be disagreement: person may think they are subject to witchcraft, others may say it is their fault, that they have broken some taboo.

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Contextualist approaches

Evans-Pritchard

Azande theories of causation

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Granaries:
Kept on stilts for airing and free from insects. People sit underneath them for shade but they can collapse.
Explanation: both witchcraft and recognition that it is due to weight, termites etc.
But witchcraft more than just a theory of causation, an opportunity for action: humans held responsible for certain action.
EP: "contextual rationality": witchcraft a rational explanation so long as you take certain contextual assumptions on board: humans can injure each other without physical actions, oracles can reveal the truth, fate and chance are personalised.

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Symbolist approach

John Beattie

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Attacks Horton's intellectualism for ignoring the fact that religious thought and ritual are expressive, not just a difference in idiom.
Comprehending ritual is like understanding art (similar to Lewis).
"The constellations of make-believe" (Beattie).
Asking questions about cause and how 'real' Azande beliefs are comes from a scientific way of thinking, like asking if poetry is real.
Rather, they have 'social' truths: people act on them.
2 levels of relativism:
- Epistemological relativism- the way people come to know the world is radically different
- Cultural relativism- cultures are so different and have such different ways of thinking we can never understand them.
Mistake to suppose that others elsewhere are less rational than ourselves and to suppose that "their thinking in the context of the symbolic side of their culture can and must be assimilated to scientific and rational thinking" (Beattie)

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Symbolist approach

Steven Luke

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2 kinds of rationality:

Universal rationality- shared by all. Denies the acceptability of beliefs that go against empirical reasoning.

Contextual rationality- from certain assumptions, the principles that follow are rational.