Link to online version of the book, although the version I'm actually reading (and referencing) is the 1965 Methuen & Co. edition, translated by Ephraim Fischoff from the German fourth ed.
This one is a bit disappointing so far. Maybe this is anthropologist-spite surfacing again, but I can't help but make unflattering comparisons with Malinowski's Argonauts. The latter is a book which turned out to feel a lot less dated than I expected it to, in that large parts of it read very much like an ethnography which could have been written decades later (admittedly this is punctuated by passages which reveal their age by stopping to explain that ethnography is an entirely new and untested method which just might pay off if we give it a chance. Or by casually noting that Dobu is a great island because the natives look like funny little gnomes and make excellent servants. See p.41 of the 2002 Routledge edition). After a while, the unexpectedly contemporary feel of much of Argonauts starts to get a bit depressing- has standard ethnographic methodology has really progressed so little since the 1920s? By now, shouldn't we be sneering at his silly primitive ur-ethnography while we fly around in our jetpacks and drink violently fluorescent cocktails on our top-secret communist moonbase?
I've never forgiven 1960s sci-fi for raising my hopes like that, so in today's spirit of frustrated academic Oedipalism I guess I'll blame that on Malinowski too. Bloody Malinowski. It's your fault that we're not all wearing improbably orange latex jumpsuits and letting our children be raised on robot kibbutzes.
Anyway, I'd somehow acquired the impression that The Sociology of Religion featured a similar kind of depressingly cutting-edge-sounding insight, of the kind which makes you want to curl up on the sofa and despair at later social scientists' sad inability to properly bash Daddy's head in, Primal Horde-style, so that the rest of us would have at least some chance of getting on with the important business of trading women and developing more interesting neuroses. Oh, there were giants then.
Sadly, Weber has so far come across less like Malinowski and more like James Frazer. Perhaps that's inevitable, given both authors' ambitious goal of describing the entire human species without letting any trifling distractions getting in the way (such as empirical research, or citations). It doesn't help that he seems to be upholding a linear evolutionist view of religion (i.e. one of the ones where the author starts from the assumption that primitive societies start all start off with a particular view of the supernatural, such as animism/magic/naturalism, and then painstakingly work their way up to something more sophisticated, like monotheism/atheism/social science funding. This is not a paradigm which I am particularly sympathetic to, especially since it now means that any use of the word 'evolution' in a social sciences paper needs to be surrounded by a bodyguard of anxious caveats in riot gear (with radios and teargas to show they mean business).
Furthermore, he persists in using the R-word, which has been a bad idea in the social sciences since the Rationality Wars of a few decades ago (I keep meaning to go and check whether anyone actually won those; currently my impression is that an impasse was reached and so everyone declared a ceasefire in order to creep back to their respective departments and lick their wounds. It looks as though one of the key terms in the subsequent peace treaty was that no one should ever use the word 'rationality' in academic discourse, except when shouting at economists). Weber pre-dates that particular academic conflict by several decades, which may be why he doesn't seem inclined to define what he means by the R-word. On p.1, he seems to give the impression that he's going to be speaking in terms of what we'd now call bounded rationality:
"Furthermore, religious or magically motivated behaviour is relatively rational behaviour, especially in its earliest manifestations. It follows rules of experience, though it is not necessarily action in accordance with a means-end schema. [...] Thus religious or magical behaviour or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic."
It's a bit of a simplistic statement, but I'm reasonably happy with what he's saying. However, he goes on to use the word in ways which don't seem to back this up (for example, he refers to the "incredible irrationality" of certain taboos, without elaborating (p.38)). In some cases, we can speculate that he's drawing on his 'rationalisation' argument, so that by 'irrational' he actually means 'bad for capitalism' (e.g. when he refers to the 'irrationality' of Chinese funeral rites on p.6). It's still irritating, though.
This means that for the most part, this feels less like a reliable theoretical framework, and more like an interesting grab-bag of eccentric intellectual arguments, based on data which may or may not be accurate. Some random questionable highlights include Weber's arguments that:
- funeral rites and belief in ghosts developed because Early Man was scared of corpses. (p.6)
- concepts such as 'fire god' are a relatively recent innovation; originally fire itself was worshipped as a god. Allegedly we find this view still present in the Vedas; I'd be interested in knowing if there's anything to that claim. (p.10)
- the major reason why religions prohibit adultery is that in ancient times it raised the possibility that the male-line ancestors of the clan might start receiving sacrifices from someone who wasn't related to them by blood. (p.15)
- when a religious system evolves to accord greater precedence to one god over the others, the god who is so exalted is likely to be a sky or star god (apparently because these deities usually "evinced the greatest regularity in their behaviour").(p.21)
- "almost everywhere a beginning was made toward some form of consistent monotheism", but in most cases this was stymied by the fact that the polytheist priests wanted to cling to power, while the commoners clung to the idea of gods who had distinct and recognisable spheres, could be represented iconographically, and were weak enough to be coerced by magic. (p.24)
- in Athens, a man who had no household god could not hold public office. Sadly he doesn't elaborate as to exactly what implications this had in practice. (p.18)
- Weber argues that there's a tension between the fact that, on the one hand, a low-caste Hindu sees his own vocation as a sacred duty entrusted to him by the gods themselves- but on the other hand, their reward for doing it properly is to be reborn as a higher-caste person. I know very little about caste, so I have no idea if this is in any way accurate. (p.42)
- there's a brief mention of the fact that some gods are emically held to be bound by some sort of impersonal super-divine force, like 'fate' in the case of the Greeks (p.36). This is interesting, because I seem to remember Laidlaw saying something similar about Jain gods and karma in Riches and Renunciation. I suppose you might also be able to draw a parallel ith variants of Christian theology which argue that God would have liked to just automatically forgive humanity, but regrettably couldn't do this except by way of the crucifixion (admittedly I can't think of any sources which explicitly spell out this view, although it's what CS Lewis' description of Narnian Old Magic seems to be driving at).
Weber also brings up the evocation rituals which I mentioned in my trawl through Religions of Rome. He mentions that it was attempted by some dude named Camillus in relation to the Veji. He then adds that:
"The gods of one group might be stolen or otherwise acquired by another group, but this does not always accrue to the benefit of the latter, as in the case of the ark of the Israelites which brought plagues upon the Philistine conquerors."
I'm unconvinced that it's actually a sensible idea to consider the Philistine example the same thing as the Roman evocations, but it's an interesting idea.
Also contained in this section is the first mention of Weber's typology of different kinds of charismatic leader, which leads into a discussion of priests, prophets, magicians, etc. This is more immediately relevant to me, for reasons that take a certain amount of explanation. I'll try to discuss that properly in another post.
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