Anthropometamorphosis

"The Mystery of Printing and the Magnet"

2009-05-21T19:51:00.006+01:00

I've recently discovered a really excellent blog called Early Modern Whale, from Royal Holloway lecturer Dr Roy Booth. Dr Booth blogs about 17th century English texts, and he has a habit of ferreting out sources which make the period sound really quite surreal.

(Some examples:
A 1674 pamphlet graphically arguing that coffee causes men to become impotent and 'Frenchified'

A wonderfully petty-sounding squabble between two professional astrologers

A pamphlet relating the "true discourse" on one Stubbe Peeter, alleged werewolf and demonologist

More astrology plus, in the comments, the following gem:

"'Arise Evans had a fungous nose, and said, it was revealed to him, that the King's hand would cure him, and at the first coming of King Charles II into St. James's Park, he kissed the King's hand, and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him'." -John Aubrey)

But since I've been looking at missionary history lately, I'm more specifically interested in this passage. This is from A Collection of letters and poems: written by several persons of honour and learning, upon divers important subjects, to the late Duke and Dutchess of Newcastle (published 1678). Specifically, it's from a letter which Joseph Granvill wrote to the Duchess as part of an attempt to persuade her of the reality of witchcraft. In response to the Duchess' counterargument that witches go unmentioned in the New Testament, Granvill replies:

"Negative Arguments from Scripture use not often to be of any great signification or validity. Our Saviour spake as he had occasion, and the thousandth part of what he said, or what he did, is not recorded, as one Evangelist intimates. He said nothing of those large unknown Tracts of America, gives no intimations of the Existence of that numerous People, much less any instructions about their Conversion. He gives no particular account of the affairs and state of the other World, but only that general one, of the happiness of some, and the misery of others. He makes no discovery of the Magnalia of Art, or Nature, no not of those whereby the propagation of the Gospel might have been much advanced; viz. The Mystery of Printing, and the Magnet. [...] I confess the omission of some of these particulars is pretty strange and unaccountable, and an argument of our Ignorance of the Reasons and Menages of Providence, but I suppose of nothing else"

I'm guessing, though not certain, that the 'mystery of the magnet' refers to the invention of compasses, and hence the means to navigate to the Americas. But I guess I hadn't really considered the difficulty that early missions to the Americas would have faced in trying to adapt Biblical evangelism to their new situation. I wonder whether Granvill ever reached any conclusions about why the gospels had opted to remain silent on the topic.

"Earnest idolators make earnest Christians"?

2009-05-21T15:34:00.004+01:00

I've been flicking through William John Townsend's biography of Robert Morrison. The latter was a Protestant missionary to China from 1807-1834, and Townsend's biography of him was written around 1890. Since CSR often stresses the role of doctrine in Christianity, I thought this passage (from p.266-7) was interesting.

"At the same time, women form a very important element of society. Their influence in the household, as in England, counts for a great deal. Having far less knowledge, they are far less under the influence of Confucian ideas, the most conservative ideas in the Empire. Their nature is much more religious than that of the men. The men trifle with their beliefs; the women are in earnest. They are capable of a practical faith, the men much less so. As a rule, the male part of the family are Confucian, the women Buddhists or Taoists. [...]

When the men pretend to worship them [the Chinese pantheon] they only play at it. But the zeal of the women has kept alive the faith in these grotesque and senseless deities, and supplied the impulse which from time to time has reconstructed their broken shrines and renovated their falling habitations. On this account they make much better Christians than the men. The men are satisfied with the cold abstractions and moral maxims of Confucianism, are interested in nothing higher than the earth or wider than the bounds of human life; the women must have something warmer and more emotional- they have deep cravings for the spiritual and the eternal. The men talk about their religion much, but practise [sic] it little; the women feel their religion, and thus practise it. The men can do without worship; the women cannot. Earnest idolators make earnest Christians. The affectations and aspirations which clung around and sanctified imaginary and superstitious beings, transferred to a living Christ and a god of eternal love, are the impulse to a new and holy life. Indifferent heathens make indifferent Christians. The habits of insincerity and practical scepticism which through a lifetime have been associated with a false faith are too often, on their conversion, retained in connection with the true.

Until woman, as the ruling power in the home and the influential factor in moulding the successive generations of China, is grasped and sanctified by the spirit of Christ, the work of the missionary will be largely in vain; but as in other great onward Christian movements, let the women be drawn into the Church, and the conquest of Empire will be chiefly accomplished."

Ramblings about the role of knowledge in doctrinal religions

2009-05-13T18:19:00.004+01:00

So I was talking to Bunny the housemate the other day about some of the CSR (cognitive science of religion) stuff I've been reading lately. Bunny is originally from Hong Kong, and we were talking about Robert F. Campany's essay 'Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice'. Campany describes the views on ritual held by the Chinese philosopher Xunzi (a Confucianist or group of Confucianists from sometime around the 3rd century BCE). Xunzi apparently believed that ritual was a very important part of every day life, but disagreed with the opinion (mainstream within his own society) that it was important primarily because it appeased gods, spirits, ancestors and other supernatural beings. Xunzi argued that although his society's rituals contained numerous appeals to supernatural beings, their main purpose was not to appease these beings but to help cultivate and civilise the human participants, by providing a "model" for behaviour (see p.207, 211).

Anyway, we were talking about this, and Bunny mentioned something I thought was interesting: as far as she knows, the concept of "forbidden knowledge" doesn't really exist within traditional Chinese culture. She thinks that in general, the assumption seems to be that more knowledge can only be a good thing (both in the sense that it provides opportunities to better your material position, e.g. by passing exams to get a better job, and also in the sense that it potentially brings you closer to spiritual enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, or Taoist immortality).

Whereas in Western culture, the idea of "forbidden knowledge", "that which man was not meant to know", etc, seems to be pretty pervasive. I don't know if there's actually a continuous line of intellectual descent between the idea as it currently exists and, say, the Tree of Knowledge in the original Genesis account, but it seems like you could plausibly argue at least for continuity in medieval attitudes towards demonology and the more recent image of the "mad scientist" (both being examples of someone who's believed to so hungry for knowledge that they're willing to sacrifice their humanity to get at it).

More recently we've had Lovecraft, and the general idea that progress in ANY field of knowledge will inevitably lead to you learning something terrible which you'll be unable to live with comfortably (obviously Lovecraft was a fiction writer rather than a philosopher or theologian, but his ideas do seem to have resonated with a fair number of people). So while Western culture also frequently endorses the idea that more knowledge is a good thing (e.g. by encouraging greater and greater numbers of people to pursue tertiary education), there are definite contexts in which people become uncomfortable with that idea.

We were wondering whether the roots of this distinction might lie in the Christian idea that your relationship with God is paramount, and everything else is secondary (so that knowledge is good if it brings you closer to God, bad if it threatens to distract you or lead you astray). This would seem to be opposed to the traditional Chinese concept of deities who make certain demands on their followers, but don't seem to assume that they will or should be the immediate focus of anyone's attention 24/7. You further seem to have the concept that spiritual development based purely on knowledge is possible, rather than having a personal connection to a specific being be a necessity for the process.

I hasten to add that these perceived distinctions are highly speculative, and so are probably Just So Stories- I know virtually nothing about Chinese culture. I guess the relevant question is: can anyone here think of a Chinese story or belief system which seems to draw on the concept of "forbidden knowledge"? And if so, does that seem to be a borrowing from Western culture, or something that Chinese culture has traditionally found intuitive?

Frederica Mathewes-Green on Eastern Orthodoxy

2009-04-16T14:06:00.005+01:00

I've just added Frederica Mathewes-Green to the 'Food for Thought' list on the right sidebar. It's a list I've set up for people who I mostly don't have an awful lot in common with, but who I think are engaging and good at articulating how/why they reached their current opinions. Mathewes-Green is a writer, public speaker, pro-life activist and a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She doesn't have any ethnic heritage from the communities we tend to associate with Eastern Orthodoxy (Greece, Russia, etc)- she was originally a mostly-agnostic person who went through a period of identifying as Hindu. Then she and her husband converted to Christianity, and she accompanied him to seminary and helped him establish himself as an Episcopalian pastor. Eventually she and her husband got disillusioned with Protestantism, and so they both converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and established their own church in Baltimore (where he's pastor and she's Khouria, or Mother of the church).

Here are some quotes from her essays which I thought were interesting:

Excerpted from her book At the Corner of East and Now:

"Though westerners tend to think of Protestant and Roman Catholic as the two opposite poles of Christian faith, in eastern eyes this quarreling mother and daughter bear a strong family resemblance. The two circle around questions of common obsession, questions which often do not arise in the east: works versus faith, scripture versus tradition, papacy versus individualism. This very context of habitual argument creates a climate of nitpicking, and every theological topic that can be defined, and some which are beyond definition, gets scrutinized in turn. As a result, the east sees in the west an unhelpful tendency to plow up the roots of mystery."

"Since there is no locus of power where the [Eastern Orthodox] faith may be tailored to fit current fashion, it doesn’t change in any significant way–not over long centuries nor across great geographical distances. The faith of the first century is the faith of Orthodox today. When we meet in this little stone church outside Baltimore, we celebrate a liturgy that is for the most part over fifteen hundred years old. We join in prayers that are being said in dozens of languages by Orthodox all over the world, prayers unchanged for dozens of generations."

"Also, he [her husband] began to believe that the compromising flaw lay at the very heart of Anglicanism. The beloved doctrine of “comprehensiveness” suggested, “Let’s share the same prayers, the same words about the faith, but they can mean different things to you than to me.” Not a common faith, but common words about the faith— mere flimsy words. A church at peace can survive this way; a church attacked by wheedling heresies must tumble into accommodation reducing orthodoxy to shreds."

"The constant experience of doctrinal disagreements contributed to a Western tendency to make the Christian experience more about ideas than about heart-driven living faith, more what you think than what you do; more assensus than fiducia, more ideas about God than surrender to him. The Orthodox Church, escaping this sort of discord, could admire a butterfly without having to pin its head to a board. [...] For example, rather than over-defining Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, or tossing out the concept entirely, Orthodox are content to say that the bread and wine become his body and blood simply because they “change.”"

From her book Facing East:

"A kaleidoscope of images flashes through my mind. The textures, the scents, the music of the liturgy, a continuous song of worship that lifts me every week. The Great Fast of Lent, a discipline far more demanding than I’d ever faced in my Christian walk. Kneeling on Holy and Great Thursday and listening to the hammer blows resound as my husband nailed the icon of Jesus’ corpus to the cross; seeing my daughter’s shoulders shake with sobbing. Easter morning giddiness and champagne at sunrise."

I thought this was quite interesting in terms of the CSR debate over what role doctrine plays in Christianity. I don't know much about Eastern Orthodoxy- maybe I should go look up some stuff.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-03-30T14:10:00.005+01:00

As always with films, I'm a bit late to the party, but I can highly recommend Slumdog Millionaire. I know virtually nothing about actual Indian slums, but it at least feels like it strikes a very good balance between sanitising poverty and dehumanising the protagonists. It's also one of those films I love because it feels like every shot is crammed with fascinating bits of setting detail (Apocalypto is still the best example I've seen of this, but Slumdog does pretty well and arguably edges ahead on the versimilitude front, due to being filmed on location rather than in constructed sets).

Johnathan Foreman has an interesting article on it in Standpoint magazine. I was especially intrigued by this:

"Krishna and his British partner at Reality Tours run a school in Dharavi. He told me that the children liked Slumdog Millionaire - they saw the Hindi version - but hated the name "slumdog", as do slumdweller organisations. This is understandable. The term was invented by the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy, who seems to have ignorantly assumed that it would be believable as a derogatory but semi-affectionate nickname for young slumdwellers. But even "slumrat" might have been less offensive. You won't ever hear the word "dog" used affectionately in India. Unlike monkeys, elephants and of course cows, dogs have no religious significance and are disliked by both Muslims and Hindus. There are stray dogs everywhere you look in most Indian cities; though rarely dangerous, they are feared and persecuted. In 2007 the city of Bangalore sponsored the mass killing of tens of thousands of them."

Wikipedia elaborates:

"Tapeshwar Vishwakarma, a representative of a slum-dwellers' welfare group, filed a defamation lawsuit against the film's music composer A.R. Rahman and actor Anil Kapoor, alleging that grim depiction of slum dwellers violated their human rights. Vishwakarma's filing argued that the very title of the movie is derogatory, and he was particularly displeased that Indians associated with the film did not object to the use of word "slumdog." Nicholas Almeida, a social activist working in Mumbai, organized a protest against the film on the grounds that it intentionally exploited the poor for the purposes of profit, also arguing that the title Slumdog Millionaire is offensive, demeaning, and insulting to their dignity. The protesters were Mumbai slum dwellers who objected to the film's title and held up signs reading: "I am not a dog."

Reading Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer'

2009-03-25T10:38:00.006Z

Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653

So, cards on the table: I really like this essay, and I agree with a lot of the things Barth says here. But the more I think about this topic, the more I think that the issues Barth brings up here need to be addressed in a much more thorough and rigorous way. This isn't a criticism of Barth per se- I think this essay's meant to be more about asking the first few speculative questions, so while there are areas where he's not as clear as I'd like, I don't think it's an insult to say that these ideas need to be taken up and developed further. One of the people who's done a lot to try to develop these ideas is Harvey Whitehouse. I have some disagreements with Whitehouse's approach, so I'm going to try to express those in a later post, but I think it's worth starting off by going and looking at the person who kickstarted an important part of the debate.

Barth, unlike most social anthropologists, has done fieldwork in several different countries. In this essay, he tries to articulate some of the differences between his fieldwork with the Baktaman of Papua New Guinea vs his experience of Bali and Bhutan. He proposes that some of the differences between these societies comes from the fact that the transmission of religious knowledge is based around very different sets of assumptions. He proposes that the mode of transmission used in Bali and Bhutan could be referred to as the 'Guru' mode, whereas that found among the Baktaman is the 'Conjurer' mode.

The basic difference between the two modes hinges on different strategies of cultural transmission. In the Guru system, people gain prestige by continuously broadcasting religious information (theology, religious history, discourses on ethics, etc) in a verbal form to anyone willing to listen. You see this happening in religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity.

By contrast, in the Conjurer system, people gain prestige by having a reputation for knowing many great secrets. This means that, rather than publically broadcast their knowledge, religious experts will only impart their wisdom slowly to a selected few (who are often first required to undergo some sort of taxing initiation ritual in order to prove their worth). This knowledge is often not conveyed in a verbal format, but via ritual, or visual symbols.

These differences have consequences for the way the religion develops. As Gurus compete with each other for prestige, they strive to portray themselves as erudite, learned and logically consistent. This leads to the kind of material that we usually think of when we use the word 'theology': complicated verbal arguments about the relationships between text, or how to apply a particular text to a specific situation. By contrast, a Conjurer may not have spent a great deal of time working out the minutiae of their beliefs about the divine, and if they have then they may not share this with anyone else. There's a good chance that they haven't ever articulated their beliefs in a specifically verbal way, rather than in terms of the associations between specific symbols (like, say, totem animals). This leads to a religious system which doesn't look much like how Western people generally expect it to.

Another upshot of this is that Gurus are much better at invading* populations of Conjurers than vice versa. This is because Gurus have gotten into the mindset whereby they see it as a good thing for them to spread their knowledge to as many people as possible, therefore it's relatively easy to persuade them to start travelling around and infecting* new populations. Also, broadcasting verbal information is a pretty efficient way of reaching a large number of people. By contrast, if a Conjurer for some reason decided that they wanted to convert a new population to their belief system, then any initiation requirements would make it a much slower process with a higher degree of initial commitment required from converts. Also, the Conjurer would probably struggle to convey the largely non-verbal elements of this religion to people who came from a different cultural context. As a result, religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity have spread around the world, whereas religions like the Baktaman initiation system have stayed very local.

I think this is a really interesting idea, particulary because if it's true then it has big implications for ethnography. Since Westerners frequently assume that absence of verbal information means absence of information, period, this theory implies that in cultures like the Baktaman ethnographers are frequently going to miss what's going on with the local religious system.

It's also interesting in terms of what it implies for religious history. I'm wondering whether anyone's tried making an AI model of something similar to see if it seems to capture the sort of behaviour you see in real life conversion situations.

One thing I would have liked to see Barth clarify, though: he never specifies what sort of scale he sees most individual Gurus and Conjurers as working on. In his initial examples of Gurus (p.642), he seems to be describing people who focused on preaching to entire communities whenever they got the chance. But elsewhere (e.g. p.643) he describes Gurus as "mystifying" things in order to make his students feel more dependent on him, and to "exclude outsiders from the circle of disciples". The latter strategy doesn't sound like a particularly good way to convert new populations. I'm wondering whether Barth is using the term 'disciples' to refer specifically to the closest students of a guru who also preaches to the masses (as was the case with Jesus), or whether he's describing two strategies which are distinct from a transmission perspective but may be used interchangeably by members of one culture depending on the situation. Either way, I think it would help if he'd clarified what sort of numbers we're talking about in terms of the number of 'disciples' a Guru is likely to have, versus the number of 'initiates' per Conjurer. I expect Barth elaborates on the latter in one of his books, but it would have been helpful to get some idea of what sort of approximate transmission rates we're talking about.

My other criticism is that the paper's a bit androcentric- by which I mean: I think it's fine to decide that you want to focus exclusively on the ways in which men in some cultures transmit information (particularly if you're talking about religious transmission in a context where women don't usually become preachers/ ritualists/ etc), but I think you ought to make a point of saying explicitly that this is your focus. Otherwise you risk giving the impression that when you talk generically about 'people', you actually mean 'men'. It's possible, of course, that the cultures he's referring to have both male and female Conjurers and Gurus, in which case I've jumped the gun, but that's not the impression I've gotten from my (admittedly non-specialist) reading.

*When I say 'invading' or 'infecting', I'm stealing the terms from population genetics, where they're used to talk about how a genetic variant arises in one population and then spreads to another one. I'm not intending to imply that an 'invasion' or 'infection' of Gurus is necessarily going to be military, unfriendly or damaging.

Reading List: Richard Hamilton's 'The Social Misconstruction of Reality'

2009-03-23T14:18:00.009Z

“Men will fight for superstition as quickly as for the living truth – even more so, since superstition is intangible, you can't get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.”
-Hypatia, quoted p.43 of Hypatia: mathematician, inventor and philosopher.

It's worth mentioning that Hypatia's concept of 'truth' probably diverges quite a bit from mine, what with the fact that she lived hundreds of years ago and seems to have been a pretty hardcore Platonist. Having said that, I think this quote is a decent suggestion for why hypothesis-testing doesn't seem to have caught on in the social sciences (not that I'm biased or anything...)

There's a book which I want to get my hands on at the moment called The Social Misconstruction of Reality, by Richard F. Hamilton (who I'm guessing is probably a different Richard Hamilton to this one, although I prefer to believe that he isn't, because that allows me to maintain the mental image of him coming back from the dead to lecture us all on epistemology before disappearing away on his government-funded UFO).

I should stress that I haven't read The Social Misconstruction of Reality (or anything else by Richard 'not really the retired agent in Men In Black' Hamilton), so for all I know I might violently disagree with him if I actually read it, but from review articles written by other people, it sounds like he's arguing that in the social sciences and humanities there's sometimes a tendency for the following to happen:

someone proposes a tentative hypothesis for some social phenomenon, without flagging up the fact that it's tentative and doesn't yet have much evidence to support it.
the hypothesis sounds plausible and so a lot of academics endorse the idea
the idea becomes an 'established fact'
someone subsequently comes up with evidence refuting the hypothesis
everyone ignores this evidence because it clearly contradicts established facts.

Obviously this is something which potentially could happen in any academic field if people are willing to fudge the facts to make them fit their theories (and people are inevitably going to do this to some extent, cf Lakatos). But it sounds like Hamilton's arguing that it's more of a problem in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences (presumably due to the fact that hypothesis-testing is at least a theoretical goal for most natural scientists, whereas it's not for most other academics). Hamilton focuses on three theories which he thinks have been particularly resistant to contradictory evidence. These are:

the 'Protestant work ethic' explanation for capitalism
the idea that Hitler's rise to power in Germany was largely due to the support of the lower middle class
Foucault's theory (as proposed in Discipline and Punish) that the transition from corporal punishment to prison sentences in the West was not a sign that the state was becoming more humane. Rather, it was a symptom of a shift from big obvious expressions of state power (like public maimings) to more subtle and insidious methods of control based largely around intense surveillance of civilian populations.

Interestingly (because I'm pretty sure they're coming at this from pretty different angles) Hamilton seems to have reached a similar conclusion to The Kugelmass Episodes when they say:

"For dedicated opponents of psychoanalysis, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it is simply impossible for a psychoanalytic argument to be valid: the writer is spinning his wheels, and that is all. No matter how elegantly scientific citations, anecdotes, literary examples, and so on are woven together, the premise is wrong. In many cases, the very elegance and density of a piece becomes a reason to suspect that the author has filtered out reality and built castles in the air.

[...] As long as false premises create opportunities for displays of intelligence, and as long as those displays are worth money, we will never be rid of the falsehoods themselves: we’re just too grateful for them. That’s why liberalism that prides itself on the simple desire for intelligence accomplishes nothing besides staged debates with conservatives. It’s also why “anti-philosophers” turn into philosophers who mix critiques of Kant with paeans to his intelligence."

So now I need to go chase up the critique of Weber, at least (since that's the most directly relevant to my field).

Review of 'King Leopold's Ghost' by Adam Hochschild

2009-03-13T16:44:00.008Z

(2006 [1998], London: Pan Macmillan)

There are a lot of really interesting things about King Leopold's Ghost (no, really, there are. Go read it now and you'll see. I don't mind; I'll wait here until you're done). But I think that maybe the message which I'm getting most strongly from the story is that human outrage is a really surprisingly unpredictable and inconstant thing. I don't know if that's the message which Hochschild intended people to take away from the book, but I think it's one worth discussing here.

Here's a quick summary of the history that unfolds in the book. The people who live in the area around the Congo river mouth were first encountered by Europeans in the 15th century. The Portuguese introduced them to Christianity, at the same time that they started taking huge numbers of them captive so that they could be sold into slavery in the Americas (I may go back to this in another post, because it's an interesting story). However, it was not until the 19th century that Europeans started seriously exploring inland. By engaging in a series of impressively complex political machinations, King Leopold II of Belgium was able to secure control of a very large stretch of land around the Congo river. Leopold gained a reputation for being a humanitarian who was sinking huge amounts of his own personal wealth into 'civilising' the Congo and ensuring that its native inhabitants were protected from the predations of Arab slave traders.

Flash forward to roughly 1897. A man named Edmund Dene Morel is working for a Liverpool shipping company named Elder Dempster. By the standards of Victorian society, Morel isn't particularly educated or well-off, but he's fluently bilingual (his father was French). His job therefore involves helping to supervise the Belgian end of Elder Dempster's operations. This territory is quite important to Elder Dempster, since they've managed to get ahold of a lucrative monopoly on cargo between Belgium and the Congo. Morel makes regular trips to Antwerp and Brussels to keep an eye on things.

Morel starts to notice something weird. Firstly, Elder Dempster's statistics on all the cargo carried between Belgium and the Congo do not match the trade statistics made public by the 'Congo Free State'.

Secondly, the Secretary of State for the Congo seems to get extremely twitchy when someone offhandedly mentions to the Press that cargo going to the Congo includes guns and ammunition.

Thirdly, when you look at the cargo manifests, the Congo Free State is not just receiving occasional shipments of arms- it's receiving virtually nothing else. And in return, it's getting back shipments of rubber and ivory, in amounts worth far more than the profits officially declared by the Congo Free State. But this doesn't make sense- if Belgium was trading with the Congo Free State, then surely they'd have to ship out goods to trade with? Unless the Congo Free State doesn't pay its labourers anything... at which point, the regular shipments of arms start looking a lot more ominous.

So Morel investigated further, and it turned out that King Leopold had a lot more control over the 'Free State' than he was admitting (he was also making a lot more profit from it than he cared to admit to his creditors or the Belgian government). Large numbers of Congolese people were effectively getting worked to death. You could call it a type of slavery, except that in my mental image of 'slavery' the slaves generally at least get fed by the slavemasters*. This stands in contrast to the system of rubber extraction in the Belgian Congo, whereby villages were given quotas of rubber they had to supply before a certain date. To ensure that the quotas were fulfilled, the European officials often took the local women hostage (holding them captive in stockades where food was scarce and the women were frequently raped). Since the rubber quotas were set high enough to require the male population to work more or less constantly, this left hardly anyone free to gather food to sustain the village (especially since the Europeans were frequently also looting all the domestic animals as soon as they arrived). If people tried to resist, they could be beaten with a chicotte (a whip made from hippo hide), or shot en masse until local people got the message. Large numbers of people were also mutilated, especially by having their hands cut off. (p.161-5).

Hochschild notes that it's very difficult to estimate the precise number of deaths resulting from this. But the sources he quotes seem pretty confident that the population of the Congo dropped by about 50% between 1880 and 1920. If the 1924 census is accurate, this would indicate a death toll of approximately ten million people (p.253).

Morel blew the whistle to Elder Dempster, but the company proved unsurprisingly reluctant to publicise the fact that their valuable and respected client was committing mass murder. Morel received offers from various people hoping to pay him to keep his mouth shut. Despite the fact that he had a family to support and could really have used the money, Morel refused the bribes, quit his job and dedicated his life to campaigning on behalf of the Congolese. Morel was not the first or the only person to conclude that something very, very wrong was going on in the Congo (various people, most of them missionaries, had raised questions already), but he was an extremely skilled campaigner who was able to get the issue placed on the public agenda in a way which forced formerly-apathetic politicians to make a decision about whether they wanted to officially endorse Leopold's behaviour or not. The result was a movement that Hochschild calls "the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera" (p.4).

Morel was successful in networking with many people who seemed to have turned up in the Congo and decided quite quickly that the Belgian policies were immoral (even though they were surrounded by people who treated the slavery and death as a matter of course). He was also successful in reaching members of the public who were initially apathetic, and then persuading them to develop a sense of moral outrage over the whole thing. Morel therefore comes across as one of the few historical figures who I'm inclined to admire both in terms of his political ability and in terms of how much we have in common morally-speaking.

Morel ultimately succeeded in turning the Western world against Leopold and his policies. Hochschild could easily have gone off and written the book as a story of the triumph how the Western public's innate sense of injustice triumphed over Leopold's tyrannical greed. But as Hochschild shows, the story's actually a bit more complicated than that. As I say, Morel and many of the other people in the protest movement seem to have concluded fairly quickly that Leopold's policies were unjust and needed to be opposed. This initially seems like a fairly straightforward process, but the picture gets a bit more complicated when we pan out to consider the geopolitical context.

As Hochschild notes, Leopold's policies were by no means unique. Very similar policies were adopted by the colonial rulers of other African countries in areas where the ecosystem was suitable for rubber production. Parts of the French Congo, the German Cameroons and Portuguese Angola all used forced labour for rubber production (in the case of the French Congo, which is best document, there seems to have been a 50% death toll in rubber-producing areas, just as with the Belgian Congo). The major difference seems to have been less that Leopold was unusually tyrannical and more than he controlled more of the rubber territory than anyone else did (p.280).

I don't really want to get into the debate over the definition of 'genocide', but some people would argue that what Leopold did wasn't 'genocide' because it wasn't specifically aimed at wiping out any Congolese ethnic groups (Leopold was pushing to extract the maximum amount of rubber possible from Congolese rubber vines in the window before rubber tree plantations owned by other nations matured and so reduced his market share- so it was in his interests to push for a massively high rate of rubber production in the short tem, even if that meant enormous death tolls. But he wasn't actively aiming to wipe out the Congolese- after all, he needed them as an ongoing source of labour). The outcome was that Leopold wiped out 'only' 50% of Congolese people in rubber-growing areas.

By contrast, when the Herero people of Germany's South West Africa (now Namibia) rebelled against the colonial government in 1904, Germany ordered that "within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, shall be shot [...] No male prisoners will be taken." This meant that the Herero population within German territory dropped from 80,000 in 1903 to less than 20,000 in 1906. The others had been shot, bayoneted or beaten to death with rifle stocks (to save on bullets), or driven out into the desert to die of thirst (the Germans poisoned the waterholes) (p.282).

There were some protests in Germany, but the international community was silent. This is interesting, given that at this point the anti-Leopold Congo campaign was in full swing. Hoschschild notes: "Morel and other Congo reformers paid so little attention that five years later John Holt, the businessman who was one of Morel's two main financial backers, could ask him, "is it true that the Germans butchered the Hereros- men, women and children? ...I have never heard of this before." Similarly, there was no mass movement to protest American action against Filipinos and Native Americans, or British massacres of Australian Aborigines (p.282).

Morel did attempt to campaign against forced labour in the French Congo, but met with little success. Hochschild argues that this was because Belgium was a minor player in European politics, and so was a safe target- by contrast, Britons were reluctant to criticise France because they could see they would be valuable ally in the shifting conflict of allegiances that would eventually result in WW1 (p.283).

Also, after Leopold II's death, control over the Congo passed to the Belgian government. Reports of specific atrocity incidents (maimings, mass deaths, etc) became much less frequent, but the new taxation system meant that the amount of forced labour being imposed on the Congolese effectively increased, which led to mass famines during WW1 (p.278).

I should clarify that I don't mean this as a personal criticism of Morel- he dedicated decades to the anti-Leopold campaign, and it sounds like during that time he had very little time for anything else (see p.214-6). Also, his public reputation was seriously damaged after he became part of the anti-WW1 movement (although he was not strictly speaking a pacifist: he argued that he would fight if Britain were directly attacked, but could not endorse the conflict in Europe). In 1917 he was arrested and sent to jail for six months, on the basis that he'd violated an obscure law that banned sending antiwar literature to neutral countries. This sentence seems to have pretty much broken his health (p.289-90). Meanwhile, Roger Casement (one of his key allies in the Congo protest movement) became a passionate proponent of Irish republicanism. He went to Germany, attempted to secure German support for an Irish militia, and then was arrested shortly after returning to Ireland via German submarine. He was sent to Pentonville prison and then executed (p.284-7).

So the message here seems to be that mass moral outrage isn't something that 'just happens' in response to an incident- without at least one charismatic and politically-savvy person networking to drum up support for protests, there doesn't seem to be much public reaction. Put like that, it sounds kind of trite and like something which should have been obvious previously, but I don't think I'd ever really considered the issue in exactly this way before.

*To be fair, the stereotypical "chain them up and force them to labour for you directly" type of slavery was also extensively practiced by Europeans in the Congo, e.g. as a source of porters (p.119)

Reading: Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship'

2009-02-27T16:46:00.004Z

There's been a bit of a delay in posting while I carefully lower my expectations of colonialist morality (I'd thought they were pretty low already, actually, but it seems I was being unduly optimistic). The first reason for this is Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. So far it's excellent and should probably be mandatory reading for anyone who's the slightest bit interested in European imperialism.

The second reason is Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan' (2007, Africa, 77: 4, pp.535-558). Let's kick off with some anecdotes:

"Without any preliminary enquiry, the sheikh was seized and severely beaten, the Officer himself taking a leading part in belabouring the unfortunate man on the head, back or legs, indiscriminately. Having been thus treated he was ordered to show where the game was to be found." (p.544)

When Belgian soldiers arrived in the early 20th century, many local people ran and hid in local caves. Awate, wife of the local rain chief, went out with her child to confront the Belgians. Possibly she believed that a female negotiator would be more likely to be treated peacefully. She was held hostage for a while, but her husband negotiated her release. She went back to her community with a dead child and both hands amputated. It's not clear why the Belgians did this (p.545).

Lasu was a chief from the early twentieth century who is still famous in the area today for his courage and 'stubbornness' (this apparently means his commitment to resisting the demands of the colonial authorities). Leonardi interviewed a Headman about the outcome of one altercation between Lasu and the authorities (although it's not clear what the cause of the disagreement). The Headman reported that "when the French [Belgians] came they were beating Lasu, and they smeared his face with honey and burnt it with fire, but still he persevered." (p.545)

Taking that into consideration- Leonardi's essay is mainly about some modern-day local politics involving the question of what it means to be a chief in Southern Sudan. Chiefs have been criticised by some observers who would prefer a form of local government which is more democratic and/or more sympathetic to values like women's rights (p.538, 553). They've also been criticised on the basis that they're an artefact of colonialism (since the person who colonials decide must be the 'chief of the local natives' is rarely the person who actually held the leading political position before the colonials showed up, and since the chiefs generally strive to pass their office on to their descendants, the upshot is that the lineages which are currently politically powerful are quite different to those who were politically powerful in the time pre-colonial period) (p.536). In addition, many chiefs have played some role in assisting the SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement) in torturing political opponents (e.g. by allowing their own houses to be used as torture chambers) (p.535, 543).

But, as Leonardi points out, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. The role of chiefs, in general, has been to mediate between ordinary villagers and whichever set of people are currently in charge of Sudanese government (the latter being referred by villagers as the gela- the word used to mean 'white people', but now it also encompasses anyone associated with military, uniforms, offices etc. It sounds like generally it also implies 'urban person', but the rural SPLM guerrillas are referred to as 'the gela of the bush'. See p.540-1).

Basically, the ideal chief is often emically seen as someone who may not be able to make the gela go away, or convince them to stop enforcing hated policies, but who is at least able to reduce the amount of direct contact between the gela and the villagers (and hence reduce the amount of direct violence that the former are able to inflict on the latter). For example, chiefs may offer to personally collect food from villagers for SPLM troops, and then invite local SPLM leaders to dinner at their own house. As one interviewee explained to Leonardi, "if they [SPLM] came to you for food, you quickly collected the food from the people and gave it to them while they are seated with you, because if they entered the village, they would do damages, raping, robbing" (p.542).

But this direct contact with the gela is a double-edged sword for chiefs. On the one hand, it can sometimes bring them privileges, like the ability to take (limited) control of local politics and pass political office on to their sons. On the other hand, chiefs have often been assaulted or even killed by the gela. Also, even if local people agree in an abstract sense that their chief is a necessary buffer between themselves and the gela, they are unlikely to bear massively warm feelings towards the person who interacts with the gela so much, and who's personally responsible for collecting taxes and telling people that their sons have just been conscripted into the gela army (p.543).

This leads to a situation where the person who winds up being chief is often someone who was previously a pretty low-status figure. The pre-colonial political establishment figures were reluctant to sign up for a job which meant risking torture, so the responsibility gets passed on to someone lower-status (p.545). It sounds as though a similar process has been seen with Kenyan Kipsigis chiefs (p.548). Theoretically, this new chief can then establish their own hereditary lineage of political leaders- although in practice, their descendants are often reluctant to accept the job, since they've seen first hand how much danger it puts people in (p.546).

It sounds like at the time when Leonardi was interviewing, the level of violence had dropped down from where it had been a few years previously, and refugees were starting to return to their homes. This led to tension involving people who felt like the current 'chiefs' had served their purpose as a short-term emergency buffer against the SPLM, and so the village could return to being led by the descendants of older ruling lineages (lineages founded by a previous generation of chiefs). Others argued that the current chiefs deserved to keep their positions, since their power had been 'bought in blood'. One elderly woman offered a challenge to anyone who wanted to claim the leadership role for themselves: "Count out your dead people who were slaughtered, through whom the chiefship was obtained! Count your dead ones, your blood poured!" (p.546). Leonardi refers to this as a conflict between "blood descent or blood poured" (p.548) as models of political succession.

(Oh, and while we're on the topic- Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, has just been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. It sounds like he's unlikely to actually get prosecuted in the near future. He's also a candidate in the presidential election that's been scheduled for this year- planned as Sudan's first democratic election with multiple parties participating for nine years.)

'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' part 2

2009-02-18T18:51:00.005Z

Leonardi makes a really nice point here by stressing the fact that knowledge-dissemination is sometimes going to be perceived in a morally negative light. By which I mean: I get the impression that when it comes to magic practiced by colonised populations, the tendency is just to say that "magic = political resistance" (often with an implicit "and resistance to imperial authorities is always something that we as academics should sympathise with" tacked on). I think the 'magic as resistance' viewpoint is an interesting one, but it's an idea that needs to be developed a bit rather than just being the throwaway comment that it sometimes ends up being. In particular, we need to clarify what section of the colonised population is trying to use any particular type of magic to improve their position, and whether this is something which other sections of the colonised population approve of.

Caveat: off the top of my head, I can't think of any specific sources which I would say suffer from this problem, so I may be exaggerating the issue.

Leonardi argues that poisoning during the colonial period was something which may have been emically linked to colonialism (i.e., it sounds like the Kuku people of colonial-era Kajo Kaji may have seen poisonings as somehow being linked or similar to the disruptive practices of the colonial authorities). For example, she notes a 1939 case in which a poisoning attempt seems to have involved writing an Islamic charm on something, then washing the ink back into the ink bottle and painting it onto the body of a sleeping victim (p.44, 47). Leonardi argues that "the colonial economy was thus generating new opportunities for earning wealth, embodied in the new medium of cash, and which required and imparted new kinds of knowledge. The alleged poison in the ink bottle from the police station was a powerful symbol of such knowledge."

Leonardi also thinks that the problems which accompanied colonialism may have been emically interpreted as a type of poisoning. For example, it sounds like human and animal fertility rates may have fallen under colonialism, due to several colonial policies (in particular, the practice of relocating entire indigenous settlements in order to reduce the risk of sleeping sickness- but also other stuff like the economic changes which encouraged individual men to move away from their home settlements, increasing the chances that they would get STDs, etc.) (p.43, 46). In addition, the colonial authorities responded to outbreaks of sleeping sickness and meningitus with medical exams and treatments that were often very painful (e.g. lumbar punctures, or atoxyl injections- the latter carries a risk of blindness and death). Colonial sources from this period report that some members of the indigenous population linked these procedures to poison (p.43). Under these conditions of falling fertility, Leonardi thinks it's interesting that women who refused to inherit their mother's poisoning practices were said to be threatened with sterility (p.46). You could see this as an emic perception that as the community's overall fitness level falls, individual people will become more willing to be ruthless in pursuit of their own fertility (although I'm not sure if there's any data to support that idea).

I'd personally like a bit more information about the extent of our knowledge of emic attitudes from this period (e.g. do we know whether any Kuku explicitly linked the 1937 poisoning case to the idea that the poisoner had been influenced by his participation in the new wage-economy? Obviously there were space constraints on this essay, ) But it's an interesting counterpoint to the assumption that magical techniques must be age-old traditions (or at least represent a sort of resistance to modernity).

Another really interesting point made here by Leonardi is the stress on the fact that knowledge-dissemination is often going to be seen in a morally neutral light. She notes that knowledge "has been shown to be a key resource in older political economies of pre-colonial patronage and survival... [This risks treating] knowledge as a positive resource without exploring its moral ambiguity and the debates over its composition within a community" (p.36).

I'm reminded here of Barth's really great paper on the idea of 'gurus' and 'conjurers' as different models of knowledge acquisition*. He argues that, basically, there are some cultural contexts where knowledgeable people gain prestige by trying to disseminate their knowledge to anyone who will listen. This is the dominant model in the modern West, seen in various forms (like Christian preaching, academia, the mass media, etc). But there are other cultures which have traditionally been dominated by the conjurer model, where knowledgeable people gain prestige by hoarding their knowledge and only doling it out slowly to a select few students (who are often expected to endure difficult initiation rituals). If people from a guru-dominant culture run across people from a conjurer-dominant culture, then we can expect tensions (e.g. anthropologists persuade a local religious specialist to teach them the details of some secret rituals. The ritualist assumes that the anthropologist will automatically see the benefits of keeping this knowledge secret from all except a select few- when in fact, the action which benefits the anthropologist most is actually to run off and publish the ritual in order to demonstrate to their colleagues how learned they are).

From Leonardi's description (and the stuff which Evans-Pritchard wrote about Zande 'secret societies'), it sounds like pre-colonial Sudanese cultures probably leaned closer towards the 'conjurer' end of the scale with regards to poison and magic (but not as close as the New Guinean societies which Barth uses as his archetype of a conjurer-dominant culture). That is, magical knowledge was seen as something secretive which always carried a price, but that price was relatively low (i.e. it was something that people could buy relatively easily, without having to go through years of arduous study or multiple painful initiations- not if I'm remembering Evans-Pritchard right, anyway).

It sounds like this meant that specific poisons and magical techniques were in higher demand when they were known by fewer people. This then creates an incentive for people to import exotic new poisons from foreign cultures (p.37-8).

One question: if people were interested in importing foreign poisons, and believed that the colonial authorities were in some sense 'poisoning' the people of Kajo Kaji, then is it worth asking whether anyone tried to acquire the knowledge of British-style poison for themselves? For example, if British medical procedures were seen as potentially poisonous, did anyone try to appropriate these poisons for use against their enemies? Leonardi does mention that "an overturned fertilizer lorry has rendered one [Sudanese] village notorious for poisoning" (p.35).

A few other random interesting points:

The idea of witch hunts as an 'irrational' response to community stress was an emic belief of the colonial officers, as well being as a popular etic theory today (p.43)

There are some parallels between the Kuku fear of poisoners and the fear which other communities have experienced over cannibals (which was also present at Kajo Kaji, but not as strong). Leonardi speculates that this is because Kajo Kaji had experienced relatively few problems with slave traders- so their fear was less that people would be abducted and 'eaten', more that their young men would go away to earn a wage and come back with some sort of dangerous knowledge (like new poisons, or like the kind of skills which were in high demand from the colonial authorities and so could be used to displace the authority of people with traditionally high-prestige skillsets, like the rain priests) (p.46).

The fact that the secular colonial authorities were unwilling to support the idea of poisonings (for fear of endorsing superstition and thereby causing mass hysteria) may have helped push some Kuku people towards Christianity- on the basis that many missionaries were at least willing to seriously engage with the idea of hidden evil lurking within communities (in the form of Satanic influence) (p.50).

*Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653

Reading: 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' by Cherry Leonardi

2009-02-12T15:59:00.012Z

Leonardi, Cherry, 2007, 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle: poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:1, pp.34-56

This is a really interesting article, but it's a lot to assimilate at once (I think this is probably because it's from the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and so makes the reasonable assumption that people reading it already have a decent grasp of Eastern African history- that probably makes it easier to chunk the rest of the argument).

The article's a response to the body of work surrounding the idea that colonised peoples will often attempt to use magic as a means of political resistance. This is an interesting way to look at the issue, and Leonardi gets a lot of mileage out of it- but she also notes limitations in the way the idea is typically applied, and suggests a new angle we could consider.

Let's start off with Evans-Pritchard's witchcraft vs sorcery framework. Evans-Pritchard (also working in Sudan, though with different ethnic groups and time periods than Leonardi) argued that some cultures draw an important distinction between two kind of magic, which for convenience he labelled 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery'. He defined 'witchcraft' as being basically psychic-style powers which come from within the witch (e.g. the Azande, one of the ethnic groups he studied, held that certain people are born with a special organ inside them, and this gives them the ability to curse people). Conversely, he defined 'sorcery' as magical techniques which involve using tools or substances external to the individual (as with traditions like alchemy and herbalism). These definitions are an endless source of frustration to those of us sad people who grew up on stuff like Pratchett and Dungeons and Dragons (which define 'sorcery' as something very much internal to the individual and 'witchcraft' as something which usually benefits from external tools); but as academic terms they're a useful starting point.

Obviously, as with any other binary dichotomy in the social sciences, it's going to be more complicated than that in practice. For example, in Kajo Kaji (the part of Sudan Leonardi studied), people don't seem to have been very worried about Azande-style witchcraft (i.e., the idea that if someone feels resentful enough towards you, they can somehow cause you to suffer from bad luck even if they don't consciously choose to hurt you). Instead, they were concerned about poisoners: people who take some dangerous external substance and apply it to someone else's food or skin in order to kill them.

So, on the face of things, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of 'sorcery'. But the waters are muddied by the fact that the local Kuku people apparently believed that the propensity to poison is to some extent inborn or fixed- that is, certain individuals or families just have a sort of inbuilt tendency to try to poison people. Such people were thought to be mostly women- so, while men were sometimes also accused of poisoning, it was believed "that certain women have, and pass on to their daughters, a propensity to poison which is inborn, involuntary and indiscriminate". Such women, however, were believed to require access to means and opportunity in order to satisfy this inbuilt tendency- one British DC reports that Kuku women learned to poison after hearing "tales about the Relli, a tribe away to the south,notorious for their poisonous sorceries" (p.37). Other reports state that knowledge of the art of nyanya poisoning was passed from mother to daughter, "with the threat that if a daughter refused to practise she would become infertile" (p.45).

This is interesting, and I'm wondering how this set of beliefs was perceived by the British (given that we're concerned with the 1930s, and so the idea that certain families or ethnic groups just had an inborn tendency towards malice was kind of a hot topic at the time). Leonardi reports that reports written by the colonisers "largely accepted that women at least intended to poison", even if they were sceptical that local poisoning techniques really worked (p.37). Leonardi goes on to say that this attitude "is unsurprising in the context of the belief among officials that native women were ‘whores at heart’ [...] Female poisoners were reported to poison only the ‘menfolk’, using this threat in the ‘battle of the sexes’. Officials puzzled by their apparent willingness to confess to poisoning recognised that, ‘the power wielded by a reputed poisoner is a bait she cannot resist’." (p.42)

Kuku poisoning cases are an ambiguous category in another way too- while they seem to fill pretty similar social niches as 'sorcery' (and to some extent 'witchcraft' as well), they're not always an overtly 'magical' thing. This made it difficult for the colonial legal system to work out how to deal with them. In the West, we're used to drawing the distinction between 'real' poisons (which can be recognised via forensic analysis) and 'magical' substances (which are said to harm people by means outside any known scientific principle). The legal system is very interested in accusations involving the former, not interested at all in accusations involving the latter. This distinction doesn't seem to have existed in traditional Kuku cultures. This created ambiguity over the role of the colonial courts.

Lots more stuff going on here, so I think I'll shunt responsibility onto my future self. Tune in for part 2!

Reading: 'Mao: the Unknown Story'

2009-02-11T11:05:00.004Z

So I've managed to snag a copy of Mao: the Unknown Story (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, 2005, London: Random House) from some very nice people who are allegedly trying to downsize their library. It's an 800-page monster, so I'm chipping away at it quite slowly right now. First impressions of Part 1: pretty good. Most of it feels meticulously researched, drawing on a really wide range of sources (it did take a decade to write, so that seems reasonable). It does a good job of highlighting areas where the evidence they've uncovered seems to deviate significantly from the official Chinese Communist Party version. Given that there do seem to be a significant number of Maoists around in the world today, I'd like to think that this book would give some of them food for thought (although in practice, I doubt that many of the pro-Communist people in South Asia or Peru are likely to have access to a copy in a relevant language).

One concern I have at the moment is that whenever the author's are analysing Mao's own opinions on anything, they always seem to leap to the interpretation which shows him in the worst possible light (I realise that this may sound like a bit of a weird statement given that we're talking about the guy who may have broken the record for "greatest number of own citizens dead during peacetime"). My take on this is that if we're going to properly engage with Mao's regime then it makes sense to consider the possibility that he had some positive traits (I'm not going to say 'redeeming traits' here, because I don't think that 'killed millions of people' is something one can really consider a personality trait on the same scale as 'was nice to his secretary and liked dogs a lot'. But I do think that it makes sense for a biography of Hitler to consider both of these things- I think the film 'Downfall'/'Der Untergang' does this quite well).

An example of this in the first few chapters is Mao's attitude towards violence. From what Chang and Halliday say, Mao was initially a relatively moderate political activist (as in, when fellow members of the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suggested that they should try to spark open conflict between peasants and landlords, Mao argued against this. He's quoted here (p.37) as saying that when this approach had been tried in other parts of China, the landlords had quickly re-established control and banned the local Communist organisations, leading the local peasantry to conclude that Communism was good for nothing but stirring up pointless trouble. He's also reported to have argued that "there is nothing to be done among the poor peasants and it is necessary to establish ties with landowners and gentry" (this is a paraphrase of Mao's views, as quoted from a primary source written by another Communist). This attitude got him into a certain amount of trouble with the CCP's Russian financial backers, since it was counter to Soviet policy (p.39).

However, Mao's position seems to have suddenly shifted in early 1927, when he went on a brief trip to the Hunan countryside, where he met grassroots peasant activists who had begun publically assaulting and humiliating local landowners and gentry (sometimes going as far as beating them to death). At this point (as Mao himself later acknowledged), his attitude changed dramatically- he said that witnessing the violence made him feel "a kind of ecstasy never experienced before... It is wonderful!" When he was asked what should be done over the fact that people had been killed, his response was "one or two beaten to death, no big deal." (p.41) When he returned from the countryside, he was active in encouraging rural agitators to adopt violent tactics (the teaching text he used, which he may well have written himself, suggested slicing people's ankle tendons or cutting their ears off if they were "stubborn"). This pleased the Soviets but angered some of the leading Chinese Communists (p.43).

Chang and Halliday's interpretation of this is as follows:

"What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule." (p.41)

There's a similar implication in Chang and Halliday's explanation for why Mao chose to stick with the CCP when the violent crackdown against Chinese Communism began in earnest. They note that Mao himself was on the list of wanted criminals, but also point out that Mao had close contacts in the Nationalist party, who were at that point rising in power and distancing themselves from Communism- he could theoretically have jumped ship. So what explanation do they offer for this risky choice?

"Quite apart from all this, to stay with Wang [Nationalist leader and Mao's mentor]would mean having to become a moderate, and respect social order. Mao was not prepared to do this, not after he had discovered his fondness for brutality in rural Hunan." (p.47)

I should start by saying that the authors know vastly more about Mao than I do, so maybe they're onto something here. There's also a chance that I'm just acting on an interpretive tic peculiar to anthropologists ('if someone attributes something to an individual personality quirk, twitch violently and immediately insist that it must actually be a product of their cultural context'). But I'm not terribly happy with the automatic assumption that if someone expresses approval for political violence, then this is likely to be an expression of their inherent sadism, rather than anything to do with their sociopolitical context.

I think Chang and Halliday would argue that Mao's support for violence was definitely not motivated by any desire to improve the lot of the peasantry or Chinese society in general. They repeatedly argue that Mao was indifferent to the position of Chinese peasants. However, at least some of the stuff that they cite in support of this seems to be equally easy to read as saying that Mao wasn't very good at mimicking the style of peasant-related propaganda which was then popular in the USSR (e.g. see p.39, 43). Some of the other stuff they cite to support this involves the argument that Mao later fabricated a story about meeting the leader of a local peasant rebellion, and that as a young man he doesn't seem to have expressed any particular sympathy for the peasant situation (instead arguing that it was relatively easy for peasants to become well-off, and so intellectuals had it harder). In addition, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he dwelled on or thought about any of the tragedies affecting his local peasantry (e.g. the severe famine which hit Changsha when he was living there in 1921) (p.9). He also doesn't seem to have shown any particular enthusiasm for his early roles in the CCP (running a Communist bookshop and organising labour unions- he was apparently so incompetent at the latter that he failed to get invited to the Second Party Congress) (p.20, 29, 31).

This certainly doesn't sound like my normal mental image of someone so driven by their hardcore commitment to a specific ideology. But I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the argument that Mao stayed committed to the CCP because his experience in Hunan had awakened a kind of latent sadism in him. This is partly because 'sadism' is a bit of a vague word which seems like it might be descriptive rather than predictive. By which I mean: if they're just saying "Mao enjoyed watching people getting beaten up in Hunan because he was a sadist", then does this mean anything more than just: "Mao enjoyed watching others' pain because he's the sort of person who enjoys watching others' pain"?

Chang and Halliday make the interesting point (p.42) that the incident where Mao reassured the Hunan rebels that a few deaths were "no big deal" was probably the first time when Mao had literally held someone else's life in his hands. This is one of the areas where I wish the book had a bit more sociohistorical context (yes, I know it's already 800 pages long and I should probably come back and be picky after *I've* finished a ten-year research project- but I think it would have been more convenient for me personally if they'd split Mao's life into two or more parts and then published a series of books with more fleshed-out context). Specifically, I'm now wondering: what sort of general attitude did this part of China have towards violence at this point? E.g. did Mao grow up in the sort of place where it was relatively normal for people to beat or execute criminals in a public place? I have no idea. But that seems like a relevant bit of information if we're trying to think of what sorts of jobs a hypothetical latent sadist would be attracted to (and whether 'CCP member' would be likely to be at the top of the list).

Another thing which I'm still uncertain about: from what Chang and Halliday say, both the CCP and the Nationalists had member bases with mixed opinions about the role of violence in politics. Chang and Halliday seem to be arguing that when the anti-Communist crackdown started, Mao weighed up the options and decided that although the CCP was currently on the losing side, it was the longterm better option for someone who wanted the power to order beatings and executions. But at this point the Nationalists were increasing in power, and even if Wang was relatively moderate as far as executions and beatings went, they were still attempting a military uprising. It feels to me as though that sort of thing would be quite attractive to a hypothetical sadist. Or at least, more attractive than the idea of being a wanted man tied to a party which was tiny in relation to the Nationalists, doesn't seem to have had any immediate prospects of victory at this point, and also seems to have contained a significant number of influential people who were opposed to the idea of political violence.

Probably I'm making some sort of really basic mistake in my armchair analysis of the situation- but it would have been interesting to see Chang and Halliday go into more detail over this sort of stuff. I'll have to report back if it comes up later in the book.

Another random interesting thing:

"Anyone could be arrested, and killed, simply on the charge of being a Communist. Many died proclaiming their faith, some shouting slogans, others singing the 'Internationale'." (p.47)

For some reason, this image feels very similar to the idea of Christian martyrdom (and martyrdom in some other creedal faiths, no doubt). I wonder whether anyone has looked at the old doctrine vs praxis debate in the context of supposedly secular ideologies? Especially in relation to the idea that doctrinal religion tends to be associated with exposure to one of a relatively small number of cultural centres (the West being one of them).

Reading: 'The Material Roots of Rastafarian Marijuana Symbolism'

2009-02-06T13:11:00.004Z

(by Akeia A. Benard, 2007, History and Anthropology, 18:1, pp.89-99)

Short but interesting article on Jamaican history, tracing the beginnings of cannabis use. Apparently hemp was first introduced to Jamaica by Europeans who wanted to use it as a source of fibre (presumably for stuff like rope), but that idea fell through and it became an invasive weed. During the period where black Jamaicans were slaves, there's no evidence of anyone smoking it (it's possible that the type of hemp growing in Jamaica at this point didn't even contain high enough THC levels for it to be worth smoking anyway). (p.95)

Then slavery ended and black Jamaicans became officially free people. Understandably, they refused to go back to work for their former masters. From 1845 onwards, the white landowners responded by replacing them by shipping in indentured labourers from India.

Cannabis-smoking has a long history in India. The Rig-Veda (written earlier than 1000 BCE) describes 'ganja' or 'gaja' as a gift to humanity from the god Indra, who wanted humanity to “attain elevated states of consciousness, delight in worldly joy, and freedom from fear”. It was also used as a treatment for a very wide range of health problems. The Indian arrivals may have recognised the wild hemp, and probably brought their own varieties of marijuana with them too. Benard reckons that Rastafarian ideas about vegetarianism, each nation having its own God-King and the relationship between caste/class and colour may also have been heavily influenced by this contact with Hinduism (even though there were presumably also tensions between the black population and the Indian labourers who'd been brought in to take their jobs) (p.95).

However, when the practice of cannabis-smoking was transmitted from Hinduism to black Jamaicans, religious meanings were not immediately transmitted along with it. Initially, black Jamaicans used cannabis as a 'drug-food' (that is, as something that doesn't actually have any nutritional value, but is almost like a food because people need it in order to make it through the day. Nicotine and caffeine are common examples. Drug-foods are often good news for business-owners, because it means their employees can keep doing exhausting work for longer) (p.95-6).

Then in the 1930s, shifting economic conditions led to many black Jamaicans migrating to Kingston looking for work. However, when they got there they often found it very hard to find decent jobs. Many ended up squatting on government-owned property ('yards') and living off stuff they'd found in rubbish heaps. Some Kingston yards ended up forming 'camps': places where people (usually men) could buy, sell and smoke cannabis. These camps were also often places where people could hold 'sessions': meetings to discuss politics and religion (collectively referred to as 'reasoning'). It was out of these sessions that central tenets of Rastafarianism emerged (e.g. devotion to the contemporary Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, aka Ras Tafari, and the idea that European society was the 'Babylon' described in Revelations) (p.92).

People who accepted this philosophy started making commitments to oppose Babylon (e.g. by refusing to take jobs in white-owned factories). The adoption of dreadlocks was a symbol of this commitment- since whites felt dreads looked disreputable, they were effectively a statement saying that you didn't care if you couldn't get hired for a factory job. This was also backed up by reference to the story of how Sampson lost his strength after Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair (p.93-4).

However, although cannabis was used during sessions, it was not initially seen as a religious object in and of itself. Benard argues that "when marijuana was criminalized in Jamaica in 1954 at the urging of the United States, it became necessary to make it a sacred form of resistance" (p.97, emphasis hers). She has a citation for this (Rastafari and other Afro-Carribbean worldviews, ed. B. Chevannes, p.84), so maybe she's onto something, but I would have liked to see her flesh out this idea a bit more- what does she mean by 'necessary'? As in, politically necessary, in the sense that calling it a 'religious' practice makes it harder to prosecute? (cf something like the debates over whether peyote should be illegal for secular use but legal for people who belong to specific religious organisations like the Native American Church). I have no idea if the act of calling cannabis a religious sacrament had any effect at all on how willing the Jamaican government was to prosecute users, though. Wikipedia says that the US and UK governments don't consider religious use of cannabis to be legal.

(Incidentally, from the same Wikipedia link, here's an interesting bit of legal logic:

"On January 2, 1991, at an international airport in his homeland of Guam, a US territory, Ras Iyah Ben Makahna (Benny Guerrero) was arrested for possession and importation of marijuana and seeds. He was charged with importation of a controlled substance. The case was heard by the US 9th Circuit Court November 2001, and in May 2002 the court had decided that the practice of Rastafari sanctions the smoking of marijuana, but nowhere does the religion sanction the importation of marijuana. Guerrero's lawyer Graham Boyd pointed out the court's ruling was "equivalent to saying wine is a necessary sacrament for some Christians but you have to grow your own grapes."")

Part 3 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

2009-02-02T11:28:00.002Z

Interesting blog post from someone who's a Western shamanic practitioner:

http://therioshamanism.com/2007/12/05/this-may-be-blasphemous-to-some/#comment-813

I'm not an expert on Michael Harner's work, but I think I agree with pretty much all of the issues Lupa raises regarding core shamanism (at least, from a theoretical perspective- I have no idea how the two compare from the perspective of people who are actually interested in practicing shamanism and are trying to decide which approach would work best for them).

I've had a look at Henri-Paul Francfort's Introduction to the Prehistoric Section in The Concept of Shamanism (p.31-49). Francfort kicks things off (p.31-2) with a really useful summary:

"Fundamental to the theory of universal shamanism are four assumptions or claims:

A universal spirit present in the brain and neuropsychological system of Homo sapiens sapiens is demonstrated by his/her ability to attain "altered states of consciousness" (trance);
A universal primitive original religion of Mankind is based upon this universal capacity for trance and upon the subsequent concept of a universal "entoptic" visionary sequence, leading from simple geometric forms to reversible transformations human <=> animal;
A universal internal capacity to express the above-mentioned "entoptic" visionary sequence directly and immediately in art forms is displayed.
The special function of "shamans" as creators of art.

The papers presented here strongly question the validity of such an idea of shamanism and artistic creation. They argue by demonstrating:

-contingency and current fashion: this "shamanism" is a product of a contemporary trend (new-age, postmodernism, post-processual archaeology) originating in Western societies;

-the inconsistencies in the definitions and uses of this "shamanism", in spite of the more or less explicit claims for its cross-cultural nature and for the universality of the human spirit;

-the problematic character of the supposed psychologically universal entoptic vision sequence and of the subsequent spontaneous, direct, immediate materialisation into works of art;

-the diversity of cultural activities that can lie at the origin of the creation of art;

-the very limited number of prehistoric images and artefacts that can be related to "shamanism" and their questionable interpretation;

-the variety of rock art expressions and artistic motivations;

-the variability of meanings in rock art;

-the historicity of "shamanism" and its variability through space and time in various cultures;

-the diversity of the individuals and functions subsumed under the general term of "shaman";

-finally the vacuity of a general, shallow, blanket concept of "shamanism for prehistory."

Other things:

p.35- Francfort argues that theories which connect shamanism and rock art are often tautological- "prehistoric shamanism is deduced from cave art only, and the shamanic interpretation of art is inferred from the previous conclusion." For example, in The shamans of prehistory, Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that "although the art of the San is very different to that of the Upper Paleolithic, it is analogous to it because it too is associated with a form of shamanism." (p.188-9 of French edition, Francfort's translation).

p.36- Francfort notes that the identifying evidence for shamanism in prehistoric rock art is dodgy, since most of these theories are unfalsifiable. Clottes and Lewis-Williams argue that art doesn't need to be unified either stylistically or thematically for it to count as evidence for shamanism, because Christian art is a recognisable genre despite the fact that it occurs in multiple cultural contexts, with a wide range of art styles and a large variety of images depicted. But Christian art is unified by the fact that it all ultimately references stories which art historians can study separately from the art (e.g. by reading the scriptures). We don't have these supporting references when it comes to prehistoric shamanism, so any arguments based on their belief systems are going to have to be much more tentative.

p.37- Francfort remarks offhandedly that Australia, PNG and the Andaman islands have no indigenous shamanic traditions. What does that actually mean, given how massively vague the normal use of the word is?

p.38- Francfort also remarks offhandedly that "it is well-known, for instance, that the concept of god appeared sometimes after the Neolithic." What? Well-known by who? He does cite a source, however (J. Cauvin's The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture), so I may have to go and check that out.

He notes that we've rejected the Marxist idea that art style is linked to a society's economic mode in any sort of way that's obvious to the observer (except in the sense that the content's going to differ in some cases, I guess- non-farmers are much less likely to draw people ploughing, or whatever).

p.41- He notes that anthropologists have rejected the art theory idea that non-Western cultures have a tendency to produce art which is in some way more spontaneous or childlike than traditional Western art. Most non-Western art is produced according to relatively strict schemas or mental plans- it only looks rules-free or spontaneous if you're not familiar with the rules system being used. This includes art which is produced with the aid of drugs or other sorts of ASC.

p.42- even if we look specifically at art produced by Westerners, there probably isn't any way to reliably tell the difference between art inspired by ASCs (whether induced by drugs, mental illness or shaman-style vision quests) and art that's just produced by people who have active imaginations.

Clottes and Lewis-Williams suggest that in prehistory, children who showed artistic talent were directed towards training in shamanism. This seems to imply that they don't think 'art' and 'shamanism' are intrinsically linked (i.e. they'll only be linked within a culture if people are specifically socialised to see a connection). If this is the case, then why assume that a random culture which we know very little about really DID link shamanism and art in this way?

p.44- we also need to recognise that the idea of self-expression in art is not a concept which is necessarily found in non-Western cultures.

Part 2 of 'The Concept of Shamanism'

2009-02-01T14:46:00.004Z

Just realised that there's some stuff from Hamayon's essay that I missed last time due to it being in the endnotes:

p.24- the definition of shamanism in the work of Mircea Eliade (an influential writer who had a somewhat Golden Bough-ish approach to comparative mythology) was basically phenomenological. Cards on the table: I really don't get what phenomenology IS, as a philosophical movement. Wikipedia seems to be saying it's basically about trying to describe how people experience stuff like consciousness in a way that's anti-reductionist and based on philosophical intuitions (i.e., phenomenologists aren't happy to settle for approach which attempts to teach us something about consciousness by focusing on description of how human neural impulses work- they would prefer to go for an approach which involves philosophers discussing the issue from first principles without relying on empirical research).

Unless I'm misreading the summary, it sounds like there isn't much that phenomenologists could possibly do to make me disagree with them more (at least, not unless they started arguing that our aperception of the subjectivity within another lived-body can only be fully intuited once we radically come to terms with the noema of our lifeworld by killing kittens with flamethrowers). So I wouldn't be massively surprised if you could see a similar line of thought in Eliade, because I'm not a big fan of Eliade either.

Hamayon argues that Eliade's definition of shamanism is "composed of a mere addition of features from which no operative definition can be made". Eliade apparently also wrote in his diary that he hoped his writings on shamanism would be "read by poets, playwrights, literary critics, painters. Would they not better benefit from this reading than orientalists and historians of religions?" (I wouldn't have a problem with this, if only we could just agree to call him a poet or a metaphysical philosopher or something, instead of pushing his writings as stuff which is meant to provide an etic description of what different cultures actually say about shamanism in practice). Hamayon reckons that Eliade only became popular by influencing non-specialists whose ideas then trickled back into academia (rather than by directly convincing researchers that he was onto something). Don't know if that's true.

p.25 Hamayon notes that shamanism is often symbolically linked to hunting (even in cases where the individuals or cultures who practice shamanism don't actually hunt very much these days). Hamayon argues that this is because both shamanism and hunting are linked to a specific type of "relation to the world" (by which I think she means a particular kind of social organisation based on a particular kind of subsistence strategy). I'm leaning towards the idea that subsistence strategies might have more impact on Westerners' views of a culture than they have on the culture itself, but I don't yet know enough about the topic to be confident about making a definitive statement to that effect.

Also, useful quote:
"The contributors of the present book rightly criticise any trance-based understanding of shamanism. I have also done so, on the ground [sic] of the following arguments: "Trance" is used to cover a full range of modes of behaviour that go from convulsions to lethargy, as well as a full range of states of mind that go from loss of consciousness to focused awareness. In native languages the shaman's behaviour is defined as a rule by reference to his meeting spirits, i.e. in terms of symbolic representations. In the multifarious uses of 'trance', a link is implicitly made between physical behaviour, a state of mind and a cultural attitude. This link presupposes a determinist standpoint that is unacceptable as such to most scholars. In addition, the idea that a a given pattern of behaviour implies a given state of mind and vice versa would make social life impossible!"

Hamayon is also dubious about the idea (which I've seen in several places) that people in many cultures share the idea of a tripartite universe- that is, a world where living humans live on one plane, in between a heaven/overworld and a hell/underworld (where the different levels may or may not be assumed to imply a moral hierarchy. Sometimes there's also some sort of World Tree or Axis Mundi or something connecting the different levels). Hamayon thinks this sort of mental image is less universal than some argue. For example, in the Tungus culture that gave rise to the word 'shaman', they apparently haven't traditionally believed in any sort of vertical organisation of planes. According to Hamayon's book La chass a l'âme, when Siberian shamans talk about visiting different "floors" or "levels" of the world, they're usually just talking about nomadic journeys to different bits of the steppe. She reckons that any Siberian shamans who DO talk in terms of an underworld and overworld do so because they're trying to reconcile their indigenous belief systems with Russian Christianity and/or Chinese Buddhism (in a way which other people in their societies often don't find very convincing). I obviously haven't read the original source here, due to having abysmal French, but I'd be interested to see if anyone else backs this up.

p.29- Also she uses the word 'experiential', which is useful because I was trying to think of what the word for something like this yesterday and failed to come up with anything. " 'Experiential' is neither empirical (the fruit of observation) nor experimental (the results of laboratory experiment'. 'Experiential' refers strictly to what the individual feels at the moment and sometimes reports afterwards."

Video of the Day: Korean mudang (shamans) being possessed by changun (warrior-general spirits)

2009-01-29T14:45:00.005Z

Interesting thing about this one: the mudang being interviewed about how they stand on the edges of chaktu (a type of knife) describe how doing this makes them feel "very good". They don't seem to be talking about what I would normally think of as a stereotypical sort of 'ecstasy' state. They just look cheerful, which is unexpected (by which I mean, unexpected for me, someone who has extremely limited experience when it comes to standing on knives. At least if we're talking about doing it intentionally.)

Also: damn, that armour's pretty.

Review of 'The Concept of Shamanism: uses and abuses' (part 1)

2009-01-28T22:28:00.006Z

(edited by Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon in collaboration with Paul G. Bahn, 2001, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó)

So I'm currently reading two different books on shamanism. They take different approaches- Piers Vitebsky's Shamanism is an image-heavy book which feels like it probably works better as an intro book for someone without a social science background (in that it's interesting and well-written and very very pretty, but not as thoroughly referenced as I'd like). The Concept of Shamanism, on the other hand, is an essay collection with a very analytical approach. So far I'm enjoying the latter one more.

If you take a Popperian view of science (which I do), the vast majority of ethnographies are non-scientific studies. Ethnographic data is usually presented in a way that makes it impossible for anyone else to try to test or replicate it. There are many reasons for this. Obviously there's a major issue in that ethnographers tend to work alone and focus very much on local variation (so if someone else feels your ethnography doesn't sound plausible, then even if they have considerable knowledge of the culture in question it's often possible to just say "well, my understanding is very specific to the individuals I spoke to and the time period when I was there. If the study had been done in a slightly different place, at a different time, or with a different researcher, then differences in interpretation would be inevitable."

This sort of attitude would seem to make the idea of reliable replication of results pretty problematic (although it is sometimes possible to go back and re-interview the specific people who acted as informants for an earlier anthropologist, and see if their statements still seem to support the original researcher's conclusions. Derek Freeman's research with Margaret Mead's informants would be an obvious example, although I'm not massively familiar with his work and I'm aware that some people feel he ends up resorting to ad hominems against Mead- I'll have to go read it properly sometime).

However, I think that even if we accept the methodological limitations of research on human belief systems, there are ways in which it's possible to pursue scientific research by phrasing your theories in terms of testable predictions. Not many people actually seem interested in doing this- which is fair enough, and if researchers are interested in a pursuing a humanities approach rather than a scientific one then it makes total sense. What REALLY annoys me, though, is when someone advances a theory which seems to involve testable hypotheses, but then when you actually engage with their research it often turns out that their hypotheses aren't really testable. Or worse, they're testable as initially phrased, but any apparently contradictory evidence is met by attempts by researchers to redefine terms or otherwise move the goalposts in order to save the theory from falsification. That just seems to render the entire debate completely pointless.

Caveat: I'm not totally up to date on the theory that's under question in this book. I read Clottes and Lewis-Williams' The Shamans of Prehistory (1998) about three years ago, but I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert on that book and I haven't read more recent stuff like Lewis-Williams and David Pearce's Inside the Neolithic Mind (2005). So I'm basically going on the reviews presented by the various essay authors in The Concept of Shamanism (who were published in 2001, so theoretically Lewis-Williams & co. could have penned a devastating rebuttal by now for all I know). So that aside: here's a summary of what I understand to be the core theory that's being proposed:

'Shamanism' is a word which applies to customs practiced in a very broad range of cultures throughout human history. 'Shamanism' here seems to mean localised belief systems inspired by certain kinds of altered states of consciousness (ASCs) experienced on a regular basis by individual ritual practitioners.
These ASCs are often induced by drugs, but they can also be caused by other things such as sensory deprivation.
There are certain types of vision/hallucination which frequently arise from shamanic ASCs, regardless of the cultural context. This is because all humans share the same sort of brain structure and visual system, and these can internally generate certain kinds of images (e.g. entoptic phenomena).
Shamanic ASCs often inspire certain types of artwork (thus leading to certain patterns of images which can be found in art from a broad range of cultures).
Therefore, if we find art which fits these patterns, we can infer that the culture which produced it practiced shamanism.
European Paleolithic cave art and San rock art show these patterns. Therefore the (long-dead) people who created these works were shamans.

The contributors to this volume are archaeologists and anthropologists who are sceptical of this theory.

The anthology kicks off with 'Shamanism: symbolic system, human capability and Western ideology' by Roberte Nicole Hamayon (p.1-27). Hamayon instantly earns my love by starting off with a quote from Unended Quest (I am a Popper fangirl). The quote in question goes:

"Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of facts and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses, the problems they solve and the problems they raise." (cited p.1).

This is an especially important point in discussions on 'shamanism', where there's rarely a clear consensus over exactly what the word means, and so you tend to wind up with a series of overlapping but non-equivalent definitions plus a substantial number of researchers who don't really care whether the word has a precise definition as long as it can be used in a sort of broad, common-sense, "but at least everyone knows roughly what I mean by this" sort of way (see p.5, 8).

Hamayon is concerned that popular interest in shamanism (from Western subcultures like the New Age and Pagan movements, or people interested in experimenting with drugs) is in danger of distorting research on shamanism in other cultures (by providing an incentive for people to attach the shamanism-label to a very wide range of practices, and then only emphasise the elements of those practices which accord with the vague mental image which non-specialists have of 'shamanism').

A couple of key quotes here:

"At the risk of oversimplifying the debate, we may put it in the straightforward manner it was initially put no matter how obsolete this may appear today: Is shamanism basically and ultimately the expression of a type of religion or worldview or of a type of personality or inner innate disposition? If the former, is it characteristic of certain types of societies and cultures or an elementary constituent of religious systems in general? If the latter, is it specific to a certain type of individuals or inherent in human beings?" (p.4)

"On the basis of this [Korean shamanism] and other similar examples, it has come to be largely admitted that shamanism is inherently oral, not as a reflection of illiteracy and backwardness but as a condition for its specific practice. According to tradition, shamanic efficacy comes from being in 'direct contact' with spirits and acting under their inspiration. It is precisely for this reason that shamanic practice is claimed to be an object of personalised performance exclusively, basically incompatible with the very idea of doctrine and, more broadly, with the idea of fixed ways of expression." (although written songs have been used to train beginner Korean shamans, established Korean shamans argue these songs lack efficacy and so an experienced shaman should only sing songs they have learned directly from their spirits). (p.10)

Hamayon thinks 'shamanism' appeals to some modern Westerners for the following reasons:

it sounds 'exotic' and 'primitive', and therefore represents a rebellion against Western culture
people feel it's connected with 'nature' and therefore environmentalism
it sounds relatively vague and non-culturally specific. Therefore a commitment to 'shamanism' does not not necessarily imply a commitment to any particular culture or way of life (which is good from a memetic transmission perspective, because a definition of 'shamanism' which implied that to be a 'shaman' one must be a hunter-gatherer, for example, would make it much harder for Westerners to participate).
shamanism is conceptualised as a phenomenon which encompasses a wide range of cultural variation but has some universal features (such as a specific type of ASC which humans from any culture can learn to induce). This implies that if you want to become a shaman, it's not strictly necessary to learn about specific types of non-Western cultures, or be initiated into an existing non-Western tradition. You can theoretically tap into the universal features of the shamanic experience from the comfort of your own home and culture.
sometimes these universal features of shamanism are speculated as being connected to universal features of the human brain. This relatively vague reference to neurology helps reassure some people that 'shamanism's efficacy has scientific backing.
'shamans' are conceived as individuals, working outside of any institutional structure, who are capable of 'mastering' spirits. This means that, compared to some other religious options on offer to Westerners, 'shamanism' seems to make fewer demands which might conflict with individual's existing desires or moral beliefs (p.12-13)

Hamayon then goes on to argue that members of the Western counter-culture are using the concept of 'shamanism' as a tool to reshape Western culture into a form which they find more compatible with their own interests. In some areas, they have been remarkably successful in doing so- for example, concern for the environment and for individual health and well-being are values which began mainly as features of the counter-culture, but have since become widely accepted by mainstream Western society. Hamayon states quotes Bernard Dupuy: "mysticism is the form taken by a religion when new tendencies refuse to break out of the shell of the old religious system to create a new one but instead remain confined within its limits." (cited p.13).

Hamayon believes that the type of shamanism practiced in the West is more individualistic than non-Western 'shamanisms', more internalised within individuals (due to Western conceptualisations of 'ASC' and 'trance' rather than an emphasis on ritual performance), and less focused on spirits (especially spirits with specific roles, such as embodiments of discrete aspects of the natural environment, or of individual ancestors) (p.14). I agree that the Western shamanic movement seems a lot more individualistic than non-Western shamanisms- I can't really comment on the other two points, since I don't know enough about Western shamanism to say what would count as 'typical'.

This leads to my one major area of concern with Hamayon's very intriguing essay: she doesn't make it very clear how much direct experience she's had with the Western shamanism movement. Has she done any textual research, interviews, or participant observation? If not, then does she have a good reason why we should take her arguments on trust? Her description of Western shamanism feels relatively plausible to me, but I'm definitely not an expert and so I'm not convinced that 'plausible to me' is good enough.

For example, she cites Weber's comment that ecstatic states, spirit possession, and ASCs caused by drugs or dancing play the same role for 'peasants' that 'mysticism' plays for intellectuals (see p.14). Setting aside the fact that my level of respect for many of Weber's generalisations is not terribly high, I'm not convinced that this statement really applies to much of the Western shamanism movement. It sounds like it might be a reasonable argument in relation to most of Western history (although I'm not a historian so I don't really know), but it seems to me that most of the people who are drawn to the Western shamanic movement are attracted by the idea that it involves ASCs and/or drugs and/or dancing and physical ritual- this is something which serves to distinguish it from most of the other options on offer. I also don't understand what Weber's supposed to be implying by the word 'mysticism' in this context- earlier we had a quote from Dupuy which seemed to be saying that 'mysticism' is basically just any attempt to radically reform a religious tradition from the inside, rather than starting a whole new tradition in order to achieve the sort of religious framework that you want. Where does that imply 'intellectualism' or a lack of emphasis on ASCs and dancing? Possibly Weber has a narrower definition of 'mysticism' that addresses these questions, but if so it would have been helpful for Hamayon to mention it.

All in all, though, it's an interesting essay- definitely food for thought.

Reading 'On Spiritual Edgework' by David G. Bromley

2009-01-06T23:07:00.011Z

Bromley, David G., 2007, 'On Spiritual Edgework: the logic of extreme ritual performances', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 46, 3, pp.287-303

A rough paraphrase of Bromley's concept of 'spiritual edgework' might be 'rituals in which participants deliberately do things that people in their cultures would normally consider dangerous, in order to publically demonstrate that their spirituality enables them to transcend normal human limitations' (p.289). He illustrates this with two examples: Christian snake-handling and New Age firewalking. I think this make sense, but I had a couple of issues with the way Bromley goes about explaining this concept.

First of all, there's Bromley's explicit definition of the concept: in spiritual edgework, "practitioners challenge the presumptive safe limits of human activity by regularly and deliberately engaging in ritual practices that apparently risk certain physical or psychological injury or even death" (p.289). Bromley further clarifies that his definition of 'edgework' excludes cases where the practitioner actually "goes over the edge", as with martyrdom (p.301).

Most of this is reasonable, but I'm curious as to what he means by 'risk of psychological injury'. What's a 'psychological injury'? Is Bromley thinking in terms of specifically medical labels, like PTSD? Is it meant to be an emic judgement? Or is he just assuming it should be 'common sense' for us to define etically what this means? Guessing the answer to these questions is made harder by the fact that he may not intend this part of his definition to apply to either of his two examples. Or at least, snake-handlers and firewalkers don't seem to feel that their practices are likely to cause psychological harm, and I don't recall ever seeing any of their detractors argue that either (that is, there are obviously people who think that snake-handlers and firewalkers "must be crazy", but it seems like the usual argument is that they must already be psychological unstable in order to want to participate in rituals in the first place- not that the rituals seem likely to cause psychological harm).

Another problem with the vagueness of the 'psychological injury' issue is that if you start picking religious practices at random, you can probably always find somebody SOMEWHERE who would argue that they're potentially psychologically damaging. For example, it's not too hard to find people who argue that Catholicism instils a sense of pathological guilt (for the record, I'm not arguing that it does, but this is a claim which you do see cropping up fairly often). Does that imply that going to Mass is a type of spiritual edgework? I doubt Bromley would label it as such, but if he doesn't like a definition of 'psychological injury' that includes basic Catholic doctrine then that does raise questions about whose definition he would prefer to apply.

My other main issue with this paper is Bromley's frequent use of the word 'empowering'. Bromley doesn't define this word, so I'm kind of left to guess at what he means by it. I've always assumed that the word implies a value judgement. It's hard for me to imagine someone applying the word to a practice which they don't actively agree with (unless they were being sarcastic, or making it clear they were using it in the context of emic views- "some participants argue that this ritual is empowering", etc). Maybe it's just me, but if the word is generally assumed to carry a value judgement, then I don't think it's appropriate to use it in the context of etic statements in an academic article.

It's possible that Bromley just meant it as a value-neutral way to say "things that people believe give them power", but if so then I think it would have been helpful to state it explicitly. It's also possible that Bromley feels that the groups he's discussing have been the target of so many negative value judgements that it's necessary for him to use positive value judgements to compensate. Bromley discusses criticism of these groups on p.288. Small point- as evidence that snake-handlers have "often been treated derisively" even by academics, he quotes Williamson and Pollio: "unfortunately, most analyses of this practice tend to decontextualize it as pathological or characterize it in functional terms, that is, as mitigating the difficulties of life. For example, La Barre (1962/1992), a psychoanalytically trainedanthropologist, cast his unfortunate subject, Beauregard Barefoot, as a compulsive snake handler who attemptedthrough ritual to resolve the sexual conflicts of his childhood life." While I agree that these approaches to snake-handling don't sound massively helpful, it's worth pointing out that functionalists tend to describe EVERYTHING as functional, and followers of some psychoanalytic tend to describe EVERYTHING in terms of dysfunction resulting from childhood sexual conflict- it's not helpful, but it's not necessarily a sign than snake-handlers suffer from any special prejudice either.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that the first sentence in the entire paper states that "religion as a social form is constructed to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment and control" (p.287). I have no idea what Bromley means by this, or whether he's speaking in the context of religion in general or just religion in the modern West. I also don't know what he means by the word 'constructed'- is he thinking in terms of top-down or bottom-up models? That is, is he thinking in terms of the motives of people who start religious movements (or push for major changes within them)? Is he saying that these people are motivated by the desire to make the religion better at 'empowering' ordinary worshippers? Or is he thinking from the perspective of ordinary worshippers themselves? Is he arguing that they're always trying to find a way to make their religion more empowering for themselves personally? That would make more sense, assuming Bromley would be happy with this statement applying equally to pretty much every kind of social system (not just religion).

Although, weirdly, on p.289 he seems to be saying that some religions/spiritualities are more concerned to provide adherents with a sense of empowerment than others are ("The [New Age] movement is concerned withtranscending the apparent limits of human capacity through a diverse array of methods for personal growth and transformation. One common characteristic of many New Age quasi-religious therapies (Greil and Robbins 1994), therefore, is a ritualized means of enhancing a sense of individual empowerment and control.") Unless there's some nuance here I've missed (maybe New Age stuff stresses INDIVIDUAL empowerment whereas many other religions/spiritualities mainly discuss empowerment in a group context?), this seems to kind of contradict the idea from p.287 that providing adherents with a sense of empowerment is a function of religions in general.

On p.289, Bromley states that "while there is a substantial literature exploring the nature of ritual as a social form and different types of ritual (Bell 1997; Grimes 1995; Turner 1969), there is little inquiry into the issue of how ritual empowerment, particularly in its more radical forms, is socially constructed" (p.289). Maybe there's actually a substantial amount of academic literature examining the issue of empowerment in a descriptive way, and I've missed it (obviously the term gets used by consciously partisan academics like feminist activists and psychiatrists trying to find a way to enhance clients' self-esteem, but those are fields that have made a deliberate decision to use normative rather than desciptive terms, so it's a different thing). If so, then I've obviously missed it (entirely possible)- but at the moment, I suspect that maybe Bromley feels that there's "little enquiry" into the issue because he's using an idiosyncratic term and hasn't come across people who are using synonyms for whatever it is he means by it.
Final quibble: I don't understand why this paper was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion when it's not a scientific study (I'm not trying to be snarky and use 'scientific' as a generic word for 'good' or 'intellectually rigourous'- I mean it's non-scientific in the sense that it doesn't involve any hypothesis testing. There are plenty of good non-scientific journals of religious studies out there, so I would have assumed that this particular journal would stick to scientific stuff).

So that's all the stuff I didn't like- what about the rest of the article? Distaste for the word 'empowerment' aside, I'm intrigued by what Bromley seems to be saying here:

"A foundational assumption of classic sociological interpretations of religion- that the transcendent is socially constructed is critical to the issue of empowerment and control. If the transcendent is socially constructed as an autonomous source of power, independent of humans,then it can be potentially both constraining and liberating, as has been noted in formulations of the holy (Durkheim 1965; Otto 1923). It follows that groups determine, through the way the transcendent is constructed, the extent of constraint/liberation to which they are subject and the means through which the transcendent can be apprehended and influenced. In fact, this is a common theme in sociological theory and empirical work on religious groups." (p.287)

On the one hand, I'm a little leery of the fact that he's apparently coming right out and saying "let's start with the assumption that religion is 'socially constructed as an autonomous source of power'" (I'm of the opinion that social scientists of religion should be really cautious about taking sides on this issue- reflexive passages where they explain their personal views on the matter are fine, but I feel their actual analyses should do their best to describe emic belief or scepticism without passing judgement. But obviously not everyone feels this way (and obviously one could argue it's kind of convenient for someone who's personally agnostic to endorse professional agnosticism as best practice). And I guess Bromley isn't coming right out and saying "I'm an atheist", or anything he's just stating the fact that most social science analyses start with the assumption that we can describe a religious system entirely in terms of human efforts, so I guess if you don't plan on doing anything differently then arguably it's better to just say that straight off rather than dance around the issue.

If I understand Bromley correctly, he's going on to say that cultures are to some extent 'choosing' the constraints or restrictions which they're prepared to abide by (particularly in terms of supernatural prohibitions, although obviously pretty much the same argument would apply to systems of secular law). Therefore, if we come across a group which abides by something that looks like a particularly harsh imperative (e.g. a commandment to handle venomous snakes), it's relevant to ask why the group has generally accepted this (even if some individuals have rejected the idea). If anyone here has read the Sandman graphic novel (that's an expensive comic book, for those of you who aren't as pretensious as me), I can see 90's-era Neil Gaiman really going for this idea.

So in the context of edgework, then, he's saying that communities accept the idea of doing stuff they'd normally consider dangerous because they believe that a higher power will enable them to transcend their normal limitations. When people make it through the ritual unscathed, they feel like they've achieved something miraculous, and so get a sense of empowerment. Bromley reckons that from this perspective, firewalking and snake-handling are both practices which are really well-suited for edgework (he argues this is why they've been picked up by multiple cultures- see p.291). There are several features of these rituals which make them especially suitable.

Firstly, they're both genuinely dangerous, in that it's possible to point to real examples of people who've been injured or died as a result of participating. This is particularly true of snake-handling, since it's apparently emically accepted that anyone who handles snakes on a regular basis is going to get bitten eventually, even if they're a faithful Christian. It's thought that snake-handling has killed around 75 people, presumably during public services with a lot of witnesses (thus potentially making the whole thing more obviously scary than if they'd died alone in their homes). With regard to fire-walking, it's not too uncommon to get blistered feet. Occasionally people get seriously burned, and there are a few documented cases of people dying because they tripped and fell onto the coals. So, most fire-walkers probably won't have personally witnessed a death or serious injury, but most fire-walking workshops will mention the possibility in their introductory talks (p.294, 299, 302).

However, Bromley reckons that neither ritual is actually as dangerous as it might appear at first. People can and do get through these rituals uninjured on a fairly regular basis (p.301). This is often true even if people behave in a way that looks pretty reckless to observers (e.g. just reaching into a box of snakes and grabbing one without checking if they seem about to bite you, or practicing firewalking until you can spend quite a long time on the coals- see p.297, 298).

"Both firewalking and serpent handling are regarded as a confirmation and not a test of
[practicioners'] beliefs" (p.299). That is, if someone engages in one of these rituals and comes away unharmed, that's seen as proof that they've been mystically sustained by God or your higher self. However, if someone DOES get burned or bitten, that's not usually emically seen as something that contradicts the validity of the ritual. Harm sustained during rituals can be blamed on several possible factors, such as:

the injured person was foolhardy and refused to take proper instruction
the injured person was too prideful, and was thus in need of a reminder of their human limitations
it was necessary that participants' faith should be tested and thereby strengthened
the ritual was disrupted by harmful forces, such as demonic interference (p.300)

In other words "in the cases of firewalking and serpent handling, the empirical probabilityof success is considerably higher than it appears to be, and the definition of successful outcomes is expanded while the definition of failure is narrowed, so that even injuries or deaths in limited numbers are confirming events" (p.302).

Reading: 'The God Delusion', chapter 1

2009-01-03T20:05:00.002Z

(2006, London: Bantam press)

Cards on the table: I'm not a big fan of Richard Dawkins' views on religion. I think The Selfish Gene is one of the best introductory biology books ever written, and I think his ideas about memetics are also pretty interesting. But I find his writings about religion to be frankly obnoxious. I don't see why theists should feel obliged to engage in debate with someone who doesn't seem to prepared to refrain from ad hominems. If the point is that the origins of religion should be an object of scientific study (not just theology), then said scientific studies should do their best to maintain some level of neutrality, even if the researchers also have pretty strong personal opinions too. It's the same way as how a biologist can get very passionate about conservation work, but if they publish a scientific journal article about cheetah ecology, then I don't expect them to write something like "the cheetah is a proud and noble beast and the lions who eat their cubs are evil monsters who make me feel sick whenever I look at them" (even if that's what they believe). Some scientists who study religion are actually pretty good at this, but many aren't, and it's really frustrating for those of us who are interested in the topic to have to explain that science + religion doesn't equal "fan of Dawkins who thinks we'd all be better off if religion ceased to exist".

So, speaking as a fence-sitting agnostic, I'm not exactly predisposed to like this book much (although I appreciate the fact that he's at least written an entire book on religion, rather than a book which is mostly about biology but keeps getting sidetracked by discussions of atheism). I'm going to do my best to take his arguments seriously, but if I start misreading him then hopefully someone will point it out.

Chapter 1 is basically Dawkins arguing that 'religion' implies 'theism', by definition. Therefore, feeling a sense of awe at the beauty of the Milky Way is not a religious experience unless the person in question consciously links the feeling to their belief in God. This is important, because Dawkins frequently gets accused of being secretly 'religious' because he talks about getting these feelings of awe in response to natural phenomena. I can see how it must be incredibly irritating to be told you secretly believe the opposite of what you claim to believe. I also agree that Dawkins probably isn't 'religious' by the Western layman's definition of 'religious' (still not sure what I think of 'belief in one or more gods' as an academic definition of religion, although it's probably more useful in some contexts than in others).

Dawkins' definition of 'God', incidentally, appears on p.13: "a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'" (cf Steven Weinburg). At first, I didn't like this definition very much. 'Supernatural' is a notoriously hard word to define cross-culturally. Not all gods are creators, and when they are, that aspect often isn't stressed heavily by their worshippers. Also, I'd want to know whether he's got a definition of 'worship'. It seems like many definitions would apply equally to the behaviour some people display towards kings and rockstars (in which case this definition threatens to make Mick Jagger a 'god'). You could obviously fix that by saying "worship is behaviour directed at a god", but in that case, defining "God" as "beings that people worship" seems a bit tautological.

But then I rethought it, and I decided that most people in the West would probably be happy with that definition, so it's probably workable as long as he's not planning on applying it to cross-cultural contexts.

Dawkins thinks that many scientists have a tendency to use the word 'God' to mean 'the universe', in a kind of pantheistic way. Example: Einstein made various comments like "God does not play dice", then got very irritated when people read those as indicating that he believed in a personal God. Dawkins thinks this sort of use of the word 'God' is just confusing, and should probably be avoided. I can see his point, although I don't agree with his argument that using the word 'God' in depersonalised sense constitutes "an act of intellectual high treason" (p.19).

Something I've never quite understood is why Dawkins seems happy to invest huge amounts of time into talking about religion, but doesn't seem particularly interested in doing much reading on the topic (I could be totally wrong about this, but the kind of people he cites generally seem to give the impression of someone who's middle-class and generically well-read, but not someone who goes out of his way to systematically read through specialist books). There's a quote on p.16 which sheds some light on this:

"The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist' on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings."

I can kind of see what he's talking about here- I don't think that someone needs to have completed a theology course before they're allowed to call themselves an atheist or enter into casual debate about religion. But a major part of Dawkins' career seems to be built on making sweeping claims about religion. For example, Dawkins seems to believe quite strongly that religion has a tendency to increase the frequency of wars (based on the fact that when wars happen, the clergy often refer to them as necessary in order to uphold divine will)- see p.1, for a start, I expect there'll be more later. I suspect that in many or most cases, it's actually the other way around- the war is going to happen anyway, due to local political tensions, and so the clergy are expected to fall into line and say that God is also backing the plan. Now, I could be wrong about this, but I think that if Dawkins wants to keep pushing his argument, then it couldn't hurt for him to do some reading up on 'religious wars' in different historical periods, to see whether there's any way to speculate what would have happened if everyone involved had hypothetically been atheists instead.

Even if Dawkins is 100% certain that God doesn't exist, he's presumably aware that religion exists and that some people have put quite a lot of effort into studying it. If he wants, he can opt not to read things written by people who are consciously trying to promote religion, but even then, there's been quite a lot of stuff written by atheists who are doing their best to understand and accurately describe religious beliefs.

Even if we assume, as Dawkins seems to, that religious people are basically all unstable schizophrenics, it seems a bit stupid to believe that 'fairyology' is thereby rendered irrelevant. For example, if some fairyologists believe that fairies are basically kind and gentle, others believe that they're mischevious but can be persuaded to help people, and then others believe that they are wrathful creatures which support the stoning of unbelievers- well, I'd have thought Dawkins would have an interest in knowing roughly what percentage fall into the third category.

Reading: 'Quest Religion, Anti-Fundamentalism, and Limited Versus Universal Compassion'

2009-01-02T23:04:00.004Z

Batson, C. Daniel, Drew M. Denton, Jason T. Vollmecke, 2008, 'Quest Religion, Anti-Fundamentalism, and Limited Versus Universal Compassion', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47, 1, pp.135-45

'Quest religion' is religion pursued as an open-ended journey towards spirituality, with the assumption that there is no one true path. Obviously these people are more likely than most to disapprove of 'religious intolerance', so this leads to the question: does it make sense to describe followers of quest religion as being intolerant of intolerant people? That is, do they just get annoyed when people are actively trying to promote 'one true way' religion, or do they also personally dislike anyone who believes in a 'one true way'?

Batson et al. conducted an experiment to explore this idea. Undergraduate students were asked to take part in some research on the effects of disclosing information about yourself. They were also told that they'd been randomly selected as 'recipients' and would be receiving notes from other undergraduate students who'd been selected as 'disclosers'. In fact, the notes from the dicloser were all standardised and written by experimenters.

The recipients then got given two pieces of paper with randomly generated numbers on them. They were told to circle a specific number whenever it came up (e.g. every time they saw the numbers 13 and 47). They had two minutes to do this, and could decide which of the two pages they wanted to focus their efforts on. They were told that if they did well at finding all the target numbers on page 1, the discloser they'd been paired with would be entered into a raffle to win a $30 gift certificate. If they instead focused on circling numbers on page 2, the raffle ticket would go to an unknown student.

The subjects were split into three groups. Group 1 got notes saying that their imaginary discloser had been worried about starting college and making new friends, but really hoped they'd win the gift certificate because they'd been saving every penny so that they could afford to go to Dallas and visit their grandparents. Group 2 got the same note as Group 1, except it also said that the main reason the discloser had been worried about making friends was that they were a fundamentalist Christian who believed very strongly that their faith was the only true religion, and they weren't sure how the people at their college would react to that. Group 3 got the same note as Group 2, except that the reason they gave for needing the money was to go to a Dallas rally for evangelical fundamentalists.

So, basically, subjects were able to decide how much they wanted to help the person who they thought was writing to them. If they felt like their discloser deserved a chance to win a $30 gift certificate, they could opt to focus on circling numbers on page 1. Alternately, they could choose to help the unknown student instead, by circling numbers on page 2.

In experiments like this, people normally choose to help the discloser rather than an unknown student. So if it's true that people into quest religion dislike fundamentalists on a personal level, then we'd expect such people to opt to help the unknown student more often when the discloser says they're fundamentalist. If, however, followers of quest religion are ok with fundamentalists as people even though they may dislike their belief systems, then we'd expect them to help the fundamentalist discloser when they need money to visit grandparents (although they might still choose not to help them when they wanted money to go to a fundamentalist rally).

The subjects were also asked to complete psychological questionnaires called the Quest Scale, the Balanced Quest Scale, and the Fundamentalism Scale. I haven't read any of these, so I don't know how sensible they look. The Quest Scale is meant to measure the extent to which someone is a follower of Quest Religion. The Balanced Quest Scale is a different test which is meant to do the same thing, but Batson et al. suspect it may actually be measuring how anti-fundamentalist you are (and someone may be hostile to fundamentalism without being a fan of quest religion). The Fundamentalism scale is a measure of how fundamentalist someone is. Batson et al. reckon these scales only really make sense when you're studying people with a Christian background, so of their 60 undergraduate subjects, there were 21 Protestants, 25 Catholics, and 14 with Christian backgrounds but no current religious affiliation. Also, all subjects had scored 4 or higher when asked to rate how interested they were in religion (on a scale of 1 to 9).

Results: scores for the Balanced Quest Scale had a fairly low positive correlation with results from the Quest Scale (r=0.5), but a very high negative correlation with results from the Fundamentalism Scale (r= -0.81)- which reinforces Batson et al's sense that it's more of measure of how much you hate fundamentalism than how much you like quest religion. People who scored low (i.e. below the median) on the Quest Religion Scale tended to help the discloser about 70% of the time, regardless of which note they got. People who scored high also tended to help the discloser about 70% of the time if they got the note saying that didn't mention the discloser's religion.

So, did people who score high on Quest Religion opt to deny help to fundamentalists? If the dicloser said they were going to the fundamentalist rally, then followers of quest religion chose to help them about 50% of the time (which is still higher than it might be). If, however, they said they wanted to see their grandparents, then followers of quest religion chose to help them about 90% of the time- even more often than they chose to help non-fundamentalist disclosers (although the difference between the two wasn't statistically significant). So, the only statistically significant difference here was that between helping the fundamentalists visit their grandparents vs helping the fundamentalists go to the rally (p < 0.005, via ANOVA). I suspect that this is partly because, like many otherwise interesting psychological studies, the sample size is smaller than I'd like. Some of the cells in the ANOVA have less than 10 subjects in them.

Something else that may be worth filing in the 'quirks specific to psychology' column: on p.143, Batson et al. remark that "ever since the classic work of Allport (1950, 1966), religious orientations have been conceived at a theoretical level in terms of psychological process rather than religious content." I'm assuming there's meant to be an invisible "within psychology" caveat on that (I don't know if this is a psychology-specific journal- from the title, I'd assumed that it would also attract quantitative sociologists, at least, but maybe I'm wrong). In any case, Batson et al. don't think religious content is totally irrelevant (that's why they argue that Quest Religion scale is derived from research on people with Christian backgrounds, and therefore we shouldn't just assume that it can be applied to people from other backgrounds without any change in results. Given the amount of time I spend bitching about psychologists who seem to start off with the assumption that culture is irrelevant, I approve of this.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today', part 2

2008-12-25T21:55:00.009Z

Picking up from where we left off...

Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)

Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.

A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).

Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).

Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).

Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).

Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.

Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).

There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.

One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).

So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:

-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures

*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today' by Jane Monnig Atkinson (Part 1)

2008-12-25T14:02:00.005Z

(1992, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, pp.307-30)

I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.

Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).

However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).

Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)

There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).

So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).

There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).

Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).

Some fun quotes from 'Adam, Pre-Adamites, and Extra-Terrestrial Beings in Early Modern Europe' by Philip Almond

2008-12-23T23:40:00.010Z

2006, Journal of Religious History, 30, 2, pp.163-174

Almond's article is about the way in which geographical exploration and conquest led some 17th-century European intellectuals to speculate about how the peoples of the 'new world' fit into existing beliefs about humanity (e.g., how they'd arrived on distant continents without large ships, why they looked and acted differently to Europeans, etc). In particular, it focuses on the arguments that maybe indigenous Americans were descended from someone other than Adam (which potentially explained where Cain's wife came from, but raised a whole host of other questions about whether this meant Native Americans were subject to Original Sin, whether they were included in Christ's Atonement, even whether they were fully 'human').

Around the same kind of time, the development of heliocentric astronomy (and thus, the conclusion that the Earth wasn't necessarily all that special astronomically speaking) led some people to start speculating about life on other planets (and thus about the theological status of aliens).

Some random emic quotes I liked:

"All the Australians are of both Sexes, or Hermaphrodites, and if it happens that a child is born but of one, they strangle him as a Monster."

-Gabriel de Foigny, 1693, A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, quoted p.163. According to a quote from one of de Foigny's imaginary informants, this also meant that they lived "without being sensible of any of these Animal Ardours one for another, and we cannot bear them spoke of without horrour: Our Love has nothing Carnall, nor Brutall in it." Instead, children grew inside them like fruit.

“the different Soyls, or various Modifications of Matter in several parts of the World, [produce] Men of different Colours and Complexions.”

-Thomas Robinson, 1694, The Anatomy of the Earth, quoted p.170

An interesting theory of Lamarckian runaway selection in Ethiopians:

"in a Generation or two, that high degree of Tawniness became the nature, and from thence the Pride of the Inhabitants; the men began to value themselves chiefly upon this complexion, and the Women to affect them the better for it; from thence by the love to the Male so complexioned, the daily conversation with him and the affectation of his hew, there was caused a considerable Influence upon the Foetus’s which the females were pregnant with; so that, upon this account, the Children in Aethiopia became more and more black, according to the fancy of the Mother."

-William Nicholls, 1696, A Conference With a Theist (quoted p.170)

"Now can any one look upon, and compare these Systems together, without being amazed at the vast Magnitude and noble attendance of these two Planets, in respect of this pitiful little Earth of ours? Or can they force themselves to think, that the wise Creator has so disposed of all his Plants and Animals here, has furnish’d and adorn’d this Spot only, and has left all those Worlds bare and destitute of Inhabitants, who might adore and worship him; or that those prodigious Bodies were made only to twinkle to, and be studied by some few perhaps of us poor fellows?"

-Christian Huygens, 1698, The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, quoted p.171

"God therefore may have joined immaterial souls, even of the same class and capacities in their separate state, to other kind of bodies, and in other laws of union; and from those different laws of union there will arise quite different affections, and natures, and species of the compound beings. So that we ought not upon any account to conclude, that if there be rational inhabitants in the moon or Mars, or any unknown planets of other systems, they must therefore have human nature, or be involved in the circumstances of our world."

-Richard Bentley, quoted p.173

Reading: '"Why Are You Mixing What Cannot Be Mixed?" Shared Devotions in the Monotheisms', by Dionigi Albera

2008-12-20T16:50:00.005Z

(2008, History and Anthropology, 19, 1, pp.37-59)

A major chunk of this essay is focused on responding to arguments made by R.M. Hayden in his 2002 essay 'Antagonistic tolerance: competitive sharing of religious sites in South Asia and Balkans' (Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 205–231). Unfortunately, I haven't read this essay, so I don't know how accurate Albera's critique is. So here's an attempt at a third-hand summary: some people argue that if you have a shrine at which people from two different religious traditions worship side by side, then this is evidence of religious tolerance*. Hayden argues that in fact, shared shrines can be vehicles for conflict between the two traditions (he uses the phrases 'competitive sharing' and 'antagonistic tolerance'). For example, shared use of a shrine may be something that happens when one side pragmatically decides that they can't get away with totally repressing the other side's rituals, and so their best bet is just to take control of them themselves (p.39).

Albera thinks that Hayden is overstating his case, to the extent that "syncretism, in his view, is always a more or less disguised form of competition. The tolerance is under no circumstances genuine. [...] From this point of view, even the crossing of the borders between the groups is only tactical ground recognition of another’s domain, a temporary form of compromise tolerated by a weak minority, or accepted by a majority momentarily blocked in its will to dominate. The direction is clear: in the end a group is bound to triumph over the others and to impose its monopoly of the sacred site." (p.39)

Hayden apparently also applies Barth's theories of ethnicity to religion. I assume this means he's arguing that when analysing religions, we should be focusing on the way in which religious groups emically define the borders between themselves and other religions (and asking: under what cirumstances do people try to cross those borders?). This strikes me as a reasonably sensible idea- at least, it seems to work with ethnicity (or at any rate, it seems more productive than, say, trying to make a definitive list of all the key properties of a particular ethnic group). However, Albera argues that it's not necessarily helpful to think of religious groups as having 'borders' in this way (p.39).

Hayden apparently does acknowledge that there are likely to be differences between the way in which ordinary people see the relationship between different religions in their everyday local environment, vs the way in which religious or political leaders talk about these relationships (apparently Nandy called this the distinction between 'religion as faith' and 'religion as ideology', but I'm not convinced I like those terms. 'Ideology' and 'faith' are words that sound conceptually slippery and not especially value-neutral). But Albera thinks Hayden doesn't follow this up enough, leading to the impression that he sees 'Hindus', 'Muslims' etc as undifferentiated blocs (p.39).

Albera also thinks Hayden needs to be clearer about when he's referring to syncretism in the sense that there's one shrine which is used for rituals from multiple religious traditions, or in the sense that the rituals themselves contain elements from more than one tradition (p.39). This seems like an important point. Albera points to Fredrik Hasluck's set of three categories: "conversion, intrusion and identification. The circulation of a series of legends may suggest that a saint belonging to religion A was in fact secretly converted to religion B; that the mausoleum of a saint of religion B also housed the tomb of a saint of religion A; that the holy person of religion A was actually the transfiguration of a saint of religion B." (p.51 in Albera; original reference is Hasluck, F. W. (2000), Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, ed. Margareth M. Hasluck, The Isis Press, Istanbul (originally published by Clarendon Press, New York, 1929, p.457-8). Albera further stresses that we need to think in terms of "a range that can go from a simple proximity to imitation, borrowing and blending." (p.55)

Albera's decided to illuminate this issue by looking at the Meditteranean. Most people assume that there's a major fault line in this area between Christianity and Islam (cf Huntington's Clash of Civilisations). This view is backed up by obvious examples from places like Kosovo. There's also the fact that both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic and hence relatively exclusivist. Both religions tolerate a certain amount of syncretism between their own rituals and the 'pagan' traditions of convert populations (e.g. by converting formerly worshipped deities into saints), but it's harder to picture a way for either religion to compromise when faced by a rival monotheism (p.40). Having said this, Bahá'í seems to cope ok- but maybe that's a sign that in order to officially syncretise two or more creedal monotheisms, you need to expend a lot of effort on explaining how you intend to integrate their doctrine. Most of the stuff Albera discusses in this essay involves popular religion rather than top-down initiatives (the fact that most Abrahamic syncretisms seem to be local popular worship rather than officially sanctioned stuff may also explain why women often seem to be heavily involved in syncretic worship- see p.52).

There's some evidence for syncretism between Judaism and some early Christian churches (e.g. Christians attending synagogues in Antioch, Thessalonia's Basilica of Saint Anthony attracting Christians, Jews and pagans) (p.41). For some reason, though, later Christians don't seem to have co-worshipped with Jews very much at all- and when they do, Muslims tend to be involved too- e.g. at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. As Albera notes, you'd expect to see more Christian-Muslim syncretism than Christian-Jew or Jew-Muslim even all religions were equally willing to syncretise with each other, purely because the number of Jews in the world is smaller. But this can't be the idea story, because rates of Muslim-Jew syncretism seem relatively high (p.44). There's also the fact that, in general, Islamic nations have been more open to allowing resident communities of religious minorities than Christian nations have been- so the opportunities for closer interactions are higher (p.42).

Having said all this, you still have situations of exclusively Muslim-Christian shared sites, like 15th century Mount Sinai. The Christian pilgrim Felix Fabri records that he and his companions prayed at Sinai chapel in 1483 and found Muslims worshipping in the adjacent mosque. This didn't seem to perturb them, since Fabri calmly notes that “men of all rites and all sects flocked here from all parts of the world” to venerate Moses. However, Fabri further notes that neither Muslims nor Christians would tolerate the presence of Jews at the site (p.45). After the emergence of Islam, churches and mosques sometimes shared the same courtyard (or even the same building- there's evidence that the shift towards more geometric motifs in the mosaics of the Church of St Stephen in Jordan happened so that strongly aniconic Muslims using the building to worship wouldn't be offended by art depicting living beings (p.42).)

Sometimes when historical Muslim writers describe visiting Christian churches, it sounds like they were mainly there as tourists attracted by their hospitality and tranquil gardens. At other times, it sounds like churches represented a kind of forbidden fruit, by offering the opportunity to consume alcohol or "the prospect of establishing relationships with Christian women or with young monks (one of the most famous Muslims poets, Abu Nuwas, who lived between the eighth and the ninth century, sang in his verses of his desire for a young monk)" (p.42). But sometimes they were also drawn to churches for religious reasons- some Muslims attended Christian festivals or even services, worshipped icons and relics, sought healing or made vows.

Random interesting quote: "There is in Algiers, rue Sainte, a small synagogue on an old marabout: when the last Muslim oukil, Sheikh Khider died in the last century, without a successor, he left, by title deed, the local to a rabbi friend, with the clause that Muslims would be allowed to come. The curious fact is that Muslim women continue to come, when a thâleb told them that this could help to cure sterility or avoid repudiation. They revolve seven times around the teba, the podium of the readers of the Torah, which is roughly in the middle of the room and that even during the office, without troubling the assistants and without the latter troubling them." -recorded by Emile Dermenghem, 1954, quoted p.50

"Sometimes homonymy has been the vehicle of assimilation, as in the case of the cult of Saint Thecla in Istanbul, which after the Turkish conquest was replaced by that of Toklu (orDoghlu) Dede (see Hasluck 2000: 66)." (p.51) (quoted because it will amuse Bunny).

A small thing that seemed a bit odd to me- in Albera's conclusion, he makes the offhand remark that "even in their most intransigent constituent—behaviour related to religion—civilizations appear contradictory and inhabited by diversity" (p.54). Is Albera using the word intransigent to mean 'uncompromising'? If so, I'm not sure I understand why he thinks religion is civilisations' most intransigent constituent- there are lots of things civilisations are unwilling to compromise over (e.g. their political and economic systems)- I'm not sure why he seems to be saying that religion is necessarily more fixed and inflexible than anything else.

One other interesting quote: "This inspired the famous observation of Pierre Bayle (1740: 265): “Mohammedans, according to the principles of their faith, are obliged to use violence to destroy other religions, and still they tolerated them for several centuries. Christians have received order to preach and educate, and nevertheless from immemorial time they exterminate by iron and fire those who are not of their religion.” -Pierre Bayle, 1740, from Brunel's Dictionnaire historique et critique (quoted p.56). This strikes me as one of those quotes which are pithy but rather oversimplified- still, it might be interesting to see if there's a proper critique from anyone who knows more about the topic than I do.

* On the surface of things, this seems like a fairly reasonable assumption- I was somewhat confused when Hardacre didn't seem to find it plausible when she was discussing the relationship between Shinto and Buddhist priests at shared shrines in pre-Meiji Japan (she definitely wasn't citing Hayden to support this, because she was writing well before 'Antagonistic tolerance' was published, but she might have been drawing on a similar argument from someone else).

Reading 'Shinto and the State: 1868-1988', Introduction and Chapter 1

2008-12-04T18:34:00.000Z

(Helen Hardacre, 1989, Princeton: Princeton University Press)

I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).

If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.

Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).

Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.

Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?

Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.

I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.

I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?

The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).

Phase One of Operation Expel The Western Barbarians seems to have involved a lot of fighting fire with fire. The plan basically seems to have been: let's capture Christianity, clone it, drain off all the theological content, and then shove Shinto into the vacant structure, bending it into whatever shape it needs to be in order to fit (the result looking maybe kind of like Krang and his robot suit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or maybe some sort of cyborg Wicker Man. Whatever the case, it should definitely be drawn by Keith Thompson). This process is apparently known as the Great Promulgation Campaign, which I can only hope sounds catchier in Japanese.

I can't imagine that many religions would survive this process well, but Shinto seems like a particularly stupid choice. The National Learning goal was to end up with a belief system that was very focused on doctrine- specifically, on an integrated set of doctrines under central control, and phrased in such a way as to make them sound militaristic and authoritarian (in the sense of focusing attention on the national government and its Strong Leader). In particular, they were expected to exalt the virtues of Japanese soldiers who had died in war. The priests of this new religion were also expected to adopt a pastoral role, moulding the lives of ordinary Japanese subjects (as well as preaching the standard theology to their congregations).

In other words, Shinto priests were expected to adopt a role which they were almost uniquely ill-suited to. Most of them had very little experience in public speaking, pastoral work, or disseminating doctrine to the public. This was the sort of thing that Buddhist priests specialised in- and Buddhist priests abandoned the Great Promulgation in droves as soon as it became apparent that the endgoal was to render them obsolete (although there were some who stuck around, using their superior preaching experience to subtly insert Buddhist doctrines into campaign sermons and so convert government-backed projects into stealth Buddhist evangelism drives. It didn't help that preachers were expected to fund these programmes themselves- the Buddhist clergy could depend on generous donations from long-standing parishioners, while the smaller Shinto shrines seriously struggled to fund their speakers. See p.45-6).

This is all in addition to the fact that Shinto priests were now suddenly supposed to be actively competing with Buddhists for the right to conduct funerals, and thus were effectively expected to ignore Shinto death taboos in order to perform rituals which many felt were beneath their dignity (although apparently the fact that funerals were a good source of income helped soften the blow for some. See p.47, 35). The general upshot seems to have been that the Campaign got mocked a lot for fermenting religious tension while trying to make Shinto priests do Buddhism's job (p.44). This impression was presumably not improved by bizarre incidents like the one where the Campaign's Great Teaching Institute moved into a building which had previously been a Buddhist temple patronised by the Tokugawa family. For some reason which I'm still struggling to grasp, the installation ceremony involved getting Buddhist priests to do a Shinto ritual while disguised as Shinto priests (using wigs and robes). The Institute itself soon came to be known as the Bureau of Indecision, or the Siesta Office (p.44).

The whole thing seems particularly badly-planned since it doesn't even seem to have made a serious attempt to capitalise on Shinto's existing support base. The Japanese public seems to have viewed Shinto priests as people whose job was performing a set of necessary rituals which required a certain amount of specialist liturgical knowledge. The exact form which these rituals took varied fairly widely from shrine to shrine. If you were really intent on turning Japan into an industrialised authoritarian state, then I'm sure there must have been SOME way to convert these familiar local rituals into a propaganda tool. Instead, Great Promulgation tried to abolish variation in favour of a nationally standardised system which most priests and worshippers seem to have found shallow, dull and confusing.

For example, the new state pantheon emphasised the role of the Three Deities of Creation. Only one of these deities (Amaterasu, in the form of Tenshōdaijin) had any kind of popular following. There was also a kind of official creed, in the form of the Three Great Teachings (which were apparently meant to reassure Buddhist priests that the Campaign had a solid doctrinal basis and hence was worth their participation). The three tenets were:

patriotism and respect for the gods
"making clear the principles of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man"
reverence for the emperor and obedience towards the imperial court

Which is fair enough, but if you're trying to indoctrinate people en masse, it helps NOT to try using an ideology which has no existing basis in popular thought. This is especially true if you really suck at explaining the ideology to the people who are expected to be propagating it. It doesn't help that the whole philosophical system seems to have boiled down fairly quickly into a list of religious duties for the pious citizen (including exciting responsibilities like paying your taxes, supporting conscription and accepting various aspects of Western culture in the name of "civilisation"). See p.43-4.

As a final added bonus, the Campaign succeeded in pissing off the priests at Izumo shrine (one of the nation's most important Shinto centres) by refusing to include their patron deity in the new core pantheon (as the official god of the underworld). This sparked off a row which split Shinto into factions and ended up encouraging most priests to believe that they should be trying as hard as possible to avoid discussing theology (since it only seemed to cause trouble). In the end, the Great Teaching Institute wussed out of making a formal decision on whether Izumo's god (Ōkuninushi no Mikoto) should be made official lord of the underworld or not. They just announced that Shinto priests above a certain rank were henceforth banned from ministering directly to parishioners. This meant that people like Izumo's top priests were now officially prevented from conducting funerals. The logic was apparently that if they weren't conducting funerals, they'd have no opportunity to make public pronouncements on which deity (if any) was in charge of the underworld. See p.49.

It's apparently incidents like this one which have led some Shinto-supporters to argue that Shinto is not a religion (since they feel that 'religion' implies a focus on doctrine, plus undignified stuff like funerals and prayers for the this-worldly benefit of parishioners). The argument seems to be that Shinto is, by contrast, a system of necessary rituals which transcends mere religion. Priests, it seems, should be striving to limit their performance of mere religious rituals to the bare minimum necessary to secure enough support from parishioners to keep the shrine running and funded (see p.34-5).

This is interesting, because it suggests a worldview very different to the one which drives the tension that sometimes gets described by Western theologians as doctrine vs praxis. It also suggests a big difference from the argument (often voiced by Western humanists) that various East Asian belief systems are not really 'religions' since they don't prioritise god-appeasing rituals clearly enough (thus making them secular philosophies by default). I'll have to see if I can find anything that elaborates further on the issue.

Religions of Rome: part 4

2008-11-25T11:59:00.003Z

I'll get back to how much I disagree with Dusek soon, honest- but first, quick post to get the last bit of 'Religions of Rome' out of the way.

The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).

Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.

Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.

However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.

Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.

On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).

Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).

Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).

The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).

Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).

The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.

There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.

Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).

It's probably also significant that most elective cults don't seem to have had a distinct emic name for their own followers. For example, Mithras-worship has the names for different initiation grades, but no generic word for 'Mithras-worshipper'. 'Mithraist' is a word created by later scholars with no precise Latin equivalent- except possibly 'sacratus' (devotee) or 'syndexios' ('he who has performed the sacred handshake'). 'Judaeus' (Jew) is a common Latin word, but it was an ethnic descriptor as well as a religious one. The Isis cult sometimes used the word 'Isiacus' to mean 'Isis-devotee', but it doesn't seem to have been a very common word (p.307).

Christianity was clearly unusually exclusive, in that so many prominent Christians argued that one could not be a Christian AND a worshipper of other cults (we have no evidence of the other cults doing anything similar). However, we should clarify that there were probably at least some Christians who were less hardline on this issue than the famous Christians were (e.g. Christians who aren't famous martyrs because they decided to go along with imperial sacrifices and hope God didn't mind). There are also the Naassenes, who explicitly argued that the Magna Mater cult was actually worshipping the Christian God, and so it was ok for Christians to go to their rituals (although the Naassenes didn't castrate themselves as Magna Mater's priests did). They seem to have been declared heretical pretty quickly (p.311).

(Incidentally, wiki notes something else interesting about them:

"The Naassenes (from the Hebrew word na'asch meaning snake) were a gnostic Ophite sect from around 100 A.D. The Naassenes, the Sethians, the Mandaeans, the Perates, and the Borborites are the known Ophite sects. Naassenes worshipped the serpent of Genesis as the bestower of knowledge. The Ophites' point of view on the biblic perception is this: The serpent is the hero, the one that calls himself God is called Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas. Yaldabaoth was seen as the creator of the material world, but not as God, but as the will of God.[citation needed] Samael can be compared to the angel of death or the Devil. Saklas means 'fool' in the ancient language of Aramaic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naassenes )

Final interesting thing: we've apparently found copies of a message that the Roman governor of Egypt circulated, informing the province that the Emperor Claudius did NOT want the Alexandrians to worship him as a god. This message was complicated by the fact that it was attached to a covering edict referring to him as "our god Caesar". Not sure what the precise word was, though (presumably this was all written in Latin?) See p.313. Similarly, one high-ranking Roman apparently wrote approvingly that at least one German tribe worshipped Augustus (before his death), and that their leader had crossed the Elbe in a canoe so that he could touch Augustus' heir Tiberius, who they also saw as divine (p.352).

Sadly, Beard et al. don't really get into the topic of pagan monotheism in the classical period. They briefly mention that some Isis-devotees explicitly argued that Isis was the same being as the goddesses worshipped under names such as 'Venus', 'Minerva' and 'Magna Mater' (p.281). I guess I'll have to go chase this up properly at some point.

So, follow-up questions:

-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?

-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?

-Early Christianity was distinctive in several ways. It was exclusive (it banned its members from joining other cults). It was extremely evangelistic, in that it sought to systematically convert the world. It was very concerned with writing texts for worshippers to learn from, and then vetting these texts for possible error. It was also very concerned with writing texts to persuade others to convert (apologetics and polemics against other faiths). And it was unusually centralised. To what extent are all these traits linked? For example, was it centralised BECAUSE Christians felt they needed a central authority to make decisions on which texts were heretical?

-If we look at people following religions which DON'T stress the idea of a happy afterlife for devotees, how do they tend to respond when they encounter members of religions which do? Assuming they don't convert, do they tend to dismiss the idea as wishful thinking, or just not as anything worth thinking about too much, or what? In the long term, does regular contact (or competition) with religions that promise a happy afterlife tend to make other religions develop a Heaven-concept of their own?

'Sociobiology Sanitised' by Val Dusek

2008-11-11T16:39:00.003Z

I've finished Hardacre's Shinto and the State, and I'd meant to stick a review up today. But then someone forwarded me a link to this article and consequently made me angry enough to put the kami on hold. So congratulations, Val Dusek, I guess you're the lucky guy whose work I'm going to be regurgitating today.

My biggest problem with 'Sociobiology Sanitised' is that it violates Hume's guillotine, aka the is-ought distinction, aka "not losing sight of the distinction between scientific descriptions of what is currently the case and speculations about what implications this might hypothetically have for human conduct, ethics and the Meaning of Life.)

For some reason, this only seems to get violated in relation to studies of human behaviour and/or evolution. For instance, I don't recall ever hearing that announcements of the discovery of the Ebola virus were immediately met by protests that Western-trained virologists were trying to maliciously portray Sudanese and Congolese people as filthy and disease-ridden. If a scientist predicts that Vesuvius could erupt soon, people don't write long essays about how this is the same as saying volcanic eruptions are 'natural', which is the same thing as saying that anyone living on the slopes of Vesuvius now should just stay where they are, suck it up and quit whining about the risk of possible incineration. Why, then, do people so often confuse the two when it comes to human genetics?

Admittedly it's unfair to lay all the blame on Dusek in this case- I'm guessing that all or most of the people he cites on both sides have committed the same fallacy at least once (even Pinker seems to be guilty of it- for example, at one point in The Blank Slate he seems to be saying that anyone who stresses the importance of culture is basically a pessimist who thinks we're all automatons. I'll try to find the page reference, but it kind of jumps out because throughout most of that book Pinker gives the impression of being someone who's got a pretty good grasp of the role culture plays in the human species). I also realise that Dusek is probably aware that he's mixing science and politics in this discussion, and doesn't consider this to be a weakness so much as a sign of integrity. I'm not sure that I can currently articulate why I think this is a bad idea, so I think the plan is to critique his essay point-by-point and then see if I can come up with anything more convincing than "I think he's wrong".

I should also state that I'm going to be skimming over a couple of bits of Dusek's essay, on the grounds that I know approximately nothing about neuroscience or the Minnesota twin studies. Feel free to assume that this fatally undermines my position if this will make you feel happier about the whole thing.

Dusek begins by informing us that he was present at the famous incident in which protestors hurled water at sociobiologist E.O. Wilson while he was attempting to give a speech at a convention, apparently because they believed that sociobiology is inherently racist. The Blank Slate gives a description of this, along with several other incidents where people have done their best to prevent various biologists speaking in public (on the grounds that they might say something evil). Personally, I found this rather worrying (from a censorship perspective, if nothing else).

Dusek argues that the people repeating accounts of this incident neglect to report that Wilson "responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine". I've certainly never heard that detail before, and when I've finished bitching on the internet I should probably go and see if I can find anywhere else that mentions it. Having said that, I don't think this really excuses the fact that they threw water on him in the first place. Unless it was magic water which makes people reveal their secret racist thoughts when you throw it on them. That would be so cool. If I had magic racism-revealing water then you can bet that I'd be throwing it on people, like, ALL THE TIME. I'd be breaking into conferences on topics I knew nothing about, just so I could throw it at the keynote speaker and see if they responded with an unpleasant slur about my genetic ancestry. I'd be a vigilante, just like Batman, except I wouldn't live in a cave or own cars or harpoon guns. It would still be pretty sweet, though.

Where was I? Oh. Yes. Racism is wrong, kids. Don't let the misguided ramblings of a postgrad with a questionable sense of humour persuade you otherwise.

Dusek goes on to address the question of whether there's any difference between 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary psychology' except that the latter term is currently more fashionable. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major differences, but then I'm not an evolutionary psychologist and God knows that academics will fight to the bitter end to defend their right to self-define disciplinary boundaries that are frequently invisible to people outside the discipline in question, so I can't really offer an opinion on this one. However, I thought this statement of Dusek's was somewhat odd:

"I believe part of the difference [between sociobiology and EP] is a tactical retreat from some of the more belligerently ideological and sexist pronouncements of the past which attracted criticism and condemnation."

Call me a cynic, but I can't help but feel like this is one of those irregular verbs. You know- "I respond well to peer input; you pay attention to constructive criticism, he just enacts a tactical retreat from the belligerent sexism of the past." Where I come from, if a group of scientists start backing down from a position on the grounds that it's chauvinist, feminists usually see that as a reason to celebrate. It seems a bit weird to watch people abandoning an argument which you find offensive, and then use that as an argument that this proves nothing except that they're evil hypocrites.

"Wilson has more recently allied himself with the fellow Harvard professor Thernstrom in forming an organization to dismiss and denigrate (without any actual investigation) the academic quality of Womens Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. Dawkins, on the other hand, does not make explicit social policy pronouncements."

Sorry- I just want to pause a moment to contemplate the idea of a world where Richard Dawkins steers well clear of debates on social policy. The essay was written back in 1998, when atheists were quiet and respectful folk, beer was a shilling a bottle, and we all let children play in the street without worrying that they would be viciously labelled as 'Christian' by the mainstream media. Of course, Dusek has to go ahead and ruin this daydream by stating that:

"Dawkins' work is ideology in an even stronger sense that E. O. Wilson's precisely because none of it is explicit. Dawkins can present himself as the pure scientist in contrast to Gould and Lewontin precisely by feigning political unconsciousness and indifference."

This comment is an example of a sentiment which seems to come up quite often in a certain kind of humanities and social science theorising. I think the reason why you see this in those fields is because they're disciplines which spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that words have power. This seems to lead some people to the conclusion that attempts to communicate effectively are inherently oppressive, since they basically involve tricking or seducing your listeners into doing what you want. Some people who hold this opinion seem to make their peace with it (I get the impression that Foucault was one of them, although I haven't read enough of his original material to be sure). Others just seem to reach the conclusion that the only way to fight oppression is to find someone who looks like they endorse an influential point of view, and then spend your time incessantly telling them to shut up and go away. It's not enough just to critique the speaker every time they say something you disagree with; for all we know, even their apparently innocuous comments could actually be subliminal rhetoric designed to spread the tyranny; therefore "shut up and go away" is the only safe counterargument.

I say these people 'seem to' believe this, because I can only assume that this isn't the way it looks from an emic-insider perspective to this academic subculture. Unfortunately my empathy detector is failing to come up with alternative interpretation of how people like Dusek perceive the issue; if anyone could explain it more convincingly, I'd much appreciate it.

Since this post has gone on for more than long enough already, I think I'll just cut it off there. Tune in for more diatribe tomorrow.

Fun with Bestiaries!

2008-11-06T19:48:00.005Z

Bunny the Landlord is a medieval studies postgrad, and she has found a thing of wonder.

"The dove is associated with Christ and the Holy Spirit. God sent his spirit in the form of a dove to gather mankind into his church. As there are many colours of doves, so there were many ways of speaking through the laws and the prophets. The meanings of the colours of the dove are:

red- the predominant colour because Christ redeemed man with his blood
speckled- the diversity of the twelve prophets
gold- the three boys who refused to worship the golden image
air coloured- the prophet Elisha, who was taken up into the air
black- obscure sermons
ash coloured- Jonah, who preached wearing a hair shirt and ashes
stephanite- Stephen, the first martyr
white- John the Baptist and the cleansing of baptism."

There are several things here that make intriguingly little sense. What does "obscure sermons" mean in this context? Where on earth did he get the idea that doves could be red, black or gold, let alone 'stephanite'? (I wikied it- stephanite is a silvery-black mineral, although wiki seems to think that the earliest mention of it is Georgius Agricola, who came along a few hundred years after the sources mentioned on the bestiary page). Who are the three boys who refused to worship the golden image? Do they mean the golden calf? I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm looking at Exodus 32 now, and I can't see anything about three boys who refused to worship it (unless they were among the Levites who subsequently agreed to kill 3000 Israelites after Moses found out).

But I think the most bizarre point on the list is the air-coloured dove. Like, a completely translucent one? Or did the writer in question just live in Victorian London?

And then there's the quote from Bartholomaeus Anglicus:

"The culvour [dove] is forgetful. And therefore when the birds are borne away, she forgetteth her harm and damage, and leaveth not therefore to build and breed in the same place. Also she is nicely curious. For sitting on a tree, she beholdeth and looketh all about toward what part she will fly, and bendeth her neck all about as it were taking avisement. But oft while she taketh avisement of flight, ere she taketh her flight, an arrow flieth through her body, and therefore she faileth of her purpose, as Gregory saith."

(PS- The Biologist Housemate says that he's calling dibs on the dissertation title Effects of Plant Pheremones on Imaginary Vertebrates).

Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' part 2: magicians, prophets and priests

2008-11-05T19:57:00.006Z

The main reason I wanted to read this book (apart from wanting the opportunity to bitch about it on the internet) is Weber's description of a framework for categorising different kinds of religious specialist.

Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.

Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.

Notice that I said 'often'.

I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).

This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:

Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.

Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).

Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.

'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).

I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?

It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.

*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)

Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)

Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)

A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.

Reading: Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' (Ch 1-3)

2008-11-03T13:13:00.009Z

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.

Religions of Rome, part 3: restrictions on religious activity

2008-10-29T15:39:00.001Z

Chapter 5 is particularly nice, because it outlines the limits of what Romans were prepared to tolerate in their religion. Emic attempts to do this are generally quite illuminating, particularly if the boundary ends up somewhere very different to where the reader would personally draw it. In this case, it's also interesting because it feeds into the debate on orthodoxy vs orthopraxy- that is, the debate over the extent to which different religions stress the importance of 'right belief' and 'right practice'. This is an important one, because if it turns out that a religion emically stresses correct observance of rituals much more than it stresses adherence to a specific creed or belief system, then expecting adherents to consistently agree on every aspect of their theology is only going to lead to tears (or, more specifically, to people getting accused of hypocrisy or stupidity for failing to pay attention to an aspect of their culture which they may not see as all that relevant to their everyday lives).

I'm not going to go into a full analysis of Harvey Whitehouse's modes framework now (I spent half an MA dissertation doing that, so it would get more longwinded than usual). Suffice to say that if you place a high importance on people memorising an intricate set of doctrines and then repeating them consistently (with deviations being flagged up and punished as heresy), then it helps if everyone involved is fully literate. Literacy (including printing) arguably makes consistency easier and deviations easier to spot. However, this clearly isn't the same thing as saying that literacy and stress on orthodoxy are invariably found together, so Classical Rome makes an interesting case study. Here's a society where upper-class men were pretty highly literate, but you don't seem to see very much emic stress on orthodoxy. That being the case, what kind of attitudes did they hold towards religious practice?

Beard et al. kick the chapter off with a welcome announcement:

"We shall stress too, in this chapter in particular, that traditional Roman paganism was not, as has been claimed, "completely tolerant, in heaven as on earth" [cf R.MacMullen's Paganism in the Roman Empire]. The fact that there was a plurality of gods did not necessarily mean that religion had no limits, or that (apart, of course, from Christianity), 'anything went'. Polytheistic systems can be just as resistant as monotheism to innovation and foreign influence. And, although Roman religion was marked throughout its history by religious innovation of all kinds, there were, at the same time, clear and repeated signs of concern about the influence of foreign cults; there were also specifically 'religious crimes', categories of religious transgression liable (as in the case of the unchastity of Vestals) to public punishment. Rome was never a religious 'free for all'." (p.212)

This is followed up by a really nice emic quote:

"If you truly desire to become immortal, do as I advise. In addition, not only must you yourself worship the divine everywhere and in every way according to ancestral custom and force everyone else to honour it; but you must also reject and punish those who make some foreign innovation in its worship, not only for the sake of the gods (since anyone despising them will not honour anyone else) but also because such people who introduce new deities persuade many people to change their ways, leading to conspiracies, revolts and factions, which are most unsuitable for a monarchy. So you must not allow anyone to be godless or a sorceror. The art of divination is necessary, and you should certainly appoint some as diviners from entrails and birds, to whom those wishing a consultation will go. But magicians should be absolutely banned, for such people, by speaking far more lies than truths, often cause many disturbances." -3rd century writer Cassius Dio (book LII.36.1-3). He presents this as advice given to Augustus by his friend Maecenas.

Later, the discussion of Christian persecutions provides a good example of a clash between two ways of conceptualising the doctrine/praxis issue. Pliny apparently wrote to Emperor Trajan for guidance on whether merely professing Christianity was in itself a crime, or whether the person in question had to have committed "associated criminal actions" before punishment was necessary (p.237, quote from Beard et al. rather than Pliny). Pliny himself offers his take on the issue:

"If they claimed [Christian faith], I repeated the question a second and third time, threatening them with capital punishment; those who persisted I ordered to be executed. For I had no hesitation... that that stubbornness and rigid obstinacy should certainly be punished."

150ish years later, Emperor Decius legally required all his subjects to offer a great sacrifice to the gods, and also to formally swear that they had sacrificed regularly throughout their lives (if they did so, they got a certificate signed by two officials. Kind of like a swimming certificate, I guess, but for sacrifices and with higher stakes than those generally entailed by failure to complete the 100m butterfly) (p.239).

"We should note, however, that Decius did not specify which gods were to be the recipients of the sacrifices- and it would seem that local gods were as acceptable as specifically Roman ones. In this case the demand was not that Christians should worship specifically Roman deities, but that they should participate in the sacrificial system as a whole with its offering of incense poured libations and and tasting of sacrificial meat. Sacrifice (not particular gods or festivals) here delimited and paraded the true subjects of Rome." (Beard et al. p.239)

Tacitus reports that the public had a mixed reaction to the executions of Christians. On the one hand, he notes that Christians were "hated for their vices". On the other hand, some pitied them- not because they thought they were innocent, but because they were killed "to gratify one man's cruelty, rather than serve the public good." (p.237)

Another useful thing about this chapter: it presents us with an emic binary dichotomy. These are brilliant for roleplayers (and, more generally, anyone who wants to convincingly fake an understanding of a foreign culture based on a strictly minimal level of research). Just look at the isfet / ma'at dichotomy. Anyone trying to describe some sort of fictionalised quasi-Ancient Egyptian culture can cheaply milk that one for months. (Etic binary dichotomies don't generally seem to work as well, which is possibly why Levi-Strauss never produced a successful rpg).

The framework presented here is that of religio vs superstitio. This apparently is not the same as religion vs superstition, or at least not in the modern sense of true worship vs delusionary beliefs (or not in pagan writings, anyway- apparently some Latin-speaking Christians used them in that sense. See p.216). From the sound of it, an approximate definition of a religiosae person might be "someone who is pious in the sense that they observe respectable rituals scrupulously but don't get carried away". Superstitio, meanwhile, sounds something like "the tendency to take part in rituals which involve getting overexcited and doing disreputable things, perhaps whilst in the company of foreigners". Women were thought to be more prone to superstitio than men.

It sounds as thought the question of whether a ritual counted as superstitio was to have been independent of the question of whether it actually worked (or whether the gods would hypothetically be pleased by it). Thus "excessive commitment" to worship could itself be a kind of superstitio (p.217). For emically-defined examples of superstitio, Seneca mentions the following:

stories which describe the gods committing incest
ritual self-mutilation
"displays of grief at the death of Osiris"
"various Jewish practices"
excesses in the worship of the Roman gods- "go to the Capitoline [temple] and you will be ashamed of the madness on display... one servant informs Jupiter of the name of those who visit him, another tells him the time, one is his bather, another his anointer- at least he makes an empty gesture with his hands to indicate anointing." (1)
vegetarianism

(1) Seneca's words, quoted p.218. Everything else quoted or paraphrased from Beard et al. p.218 and 229

The Elder Pliny also used the word in relation to magic, arguing that magic's falsehood had been extensively demonstrated by the amount of money which Nero had lavished on it with no obvious payoff (p.219). And in case you wondered, Christianity was respectively described by Tacitus and Pliny the Younger as "a deadly superstitio" and "a degenerate superstitio carried to extravagant lengths" (p.225).

Christianity wasn't the only superstitio to be illegal in some cases. For example, Tacitus records that Pomponia Graecina, wife of a prominent senator, was tried for superstitio (p.228). Meanwhile, Isis-worship was banned within the pomerium (sacred border of the city of Rome), and later within any place within a Roman mile of the city. This didn't prevent an AD 19 scandal, in which a high-status Roman lady and Isis-worshipper was tricked into having sex with a jilted suitor (he was disguised as Anubis at the time). Tiberius responded by destroying the temple in which the deception took place, crucifying the man's priest accomplices, and throwing a statue of Isis into the Tiber. Beard et al. also state that the Roman tendency to denigrate foreign religions (e.g. by referring to them as superstitio) picks up after the second century AD, maybe because Romans perceived a growing need to differentiate themselves from the provinces (p.221).

Certain types of astrology were also illegal in some periods (e.g. consultations that took place without witnesses, or attempts to predict someone's death- in particular, attempts by slaves to predict their masters' deaths). These potentially carried heavy punishments, although this was quite hard to enforce. Tacitus was of the opinion that astrologers in Rome "would always be banned and always retained" (p.230-2).

The Greeks apparently had a similar sense of respectable vs dodgy religious practice- for example, Plutarch advises that the good wife will avoid excessive ritual and foreign 'superstition', and only worship those gods whom her husband accepts (p.222). However, they don't seem to have a word which was a catch-all term for 'undesirable worship' in the same way that superstitio seems to have been- the word Plutarch uses is Deisidaimonia, literally "fear of the gods", and referring to "excessive or demeaning behaviour". Other words used by Greek writers to translate 'superstitio' included mataiotes (vanity) and atheotes (atheism). (p.225)

A final random thing- apparently "the number of surviving Latin curses (often scratched on lead tablets, and so preserved) increase greatly in number under the empire, and the Greek magical papyri from Egypt are most common in the third and fourth centuries AD." I wonder if anyone's tried any kind of quantitative studies on this sort of thing?

Religions of Rome, part 2

2008-10-29T09:06:00.001Z

Religions of Rome keeps on giving. A couple of nice tidbits:

p.126-8
Obnuntiatio was an established convention whereby someone could legitimately prevent the process of legislation by claiming that he had seen bad omens (or perhaps simply that he would be watching for bad omens; the surviving texts aren't clear). However, the standard procedure for this involved making an official statement to the magistrate that you would be watching the skies (de caelo spectare). This caused a certain amount of legal confusion in 59 BC, when the consul Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus apparently became unable to leave his house for fear of being beaten up by Julius Caesar's henchmen (instead staying home and repeatedly sending messages that he was still watching the sky and so passage of Caesar's land redistribution plan should be halted immediately. Leonard Nimoy would be proud).

p.130
"Throughout his account of these events [Clodius' trial] in his letters to Atticus, Cicero huffs and puffs- deriding (as he had to) almost every aspect of the procedure, from the mistaken tactics of his own allies to the failure at one stage in the voting proceedings to produce any ballot papers with the option 'yes' on them."

More generally, the book is turning out to be interesting in the context of the debate over whether 'religion' is valid as an etic term. A lot of effort has been put into this debate over the course of the 20th century, so I'm not going to do it justice properly here- but the basic point is that it appears to be very very difficult to come up with a definition of 'religion' which:

covers all human cultures

is not tautological

excludes everything which most Westerners are uncomfortable labelling as 'religious' (e.g. Marxism, humanism, science)

includes all the things which most Westerners want to label as 'religious' (e.g. Confucianism, Buddhism)

Several people have had a go at this game, but so far no one has succeeded in fixing their definition as the standard for academia (although arguably this says more about the social sciences and its aversion for fixed terms than it does about religion per se, and admittedly some people like Spiro and Geertz have at least produced definitions which are widely drawn on). Basically, the problem seems to boil down to the fact that while Western culture has a relatively clear distinction between stuff that is 'religious' and stuff that is 'secular', other cultures don't appear to. This leads to the argument that 'religion' is a word which only makes sense in relation to the West and cultures which have been significantly influenced by the West (although admittedly the number of people in the latter box is increasing these days).

One book which makes this argument pretty well is Peter Beyer's Religions in Global Society (2006, London: Routledge). His view is that the concept of 'religion' as a distinct social sphere did not exist in most cultures until extensive contact with the West happened, and that nowadays the debate over whether something is or is not a religion is less a definitional issue and more of a political and legal one (i.e. asking a social group "are you a religion?" is not really asking them "do you fulfil some well-defined abstract criteria?" -it's more a case of asking things like "do you want to qualify for certain kinds of tax break? Do you want to appeal to the kind of people who regard themselves as atheists?")

A nice example of this is Shinto- Beyer argues that since the West led Japan to adopt the idea of 'religion' as a concept distinct from other aspects of society, there's been an ongoing debate between Shinto-supporters who want it defined as a religion and those who don't. To some extent, this is a question that can be rephrased as: "to what extent do we want Shinto to resemble Christianity in the modern West?" E.g. "is state support for Shinto compatible with postwar Japanese laws of separation of religion and the state? Does labelling it as 'religion' imply that it's possible for someone to renounce it, and if so, is this the message we want to be sending people? On the other hand, does calling it 'religion' stress the idea that it's worthy of a kind of default respect which a 'secular' philosophy might not be?" (see also John K. Nelson's excellent ethnography Enduring Identities: the guise of Shinto in contemporary Japan. Beyond this and Beyer, I don't actually know very much about Shinto, so I may be misrepresenting the emic debate. I'm currently borrowing a copy of Hardacre's Shinto and the State, which apparently goes into the issue in more detail, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet).

So I've frequently seen the argument that 'religion' is a distinctively Western concept, but so far I haven't read anything that attempts to trace the concept's genesis in any great detail (this is probably because I haven't specifically gone looking yet; it seems like an obvious thing for someone to go write about). As such, looking at what we now term 'religion' in pre-Christian Rome seems like a good idea. So, does Beard et al.'s book give the impression that 'religion' existed in Rome as an emic concept?

So far the answer seems to be 'no'. Granted, Beard et al. haven't yet tackled the question head on (although I'm only up to the section on the early imperial period). I'm also sure that there's a source somewhere which attempts to answer this question from the perspective of someone who's actually studied Classics (unlike me). But the impression I'm getting at the moment is that the sort of rituals which my society would normally label 'religious' in Rome were pretty tightly bound up with stuff that I'd normally be inclined to label as 'secular politics'. One example of this is the stuff I mentioned in my previous post over the extent to which the modern concept of 'priest' is applicable in Ancient Rome. Since then, Beard et al. have mentioned other things which feed into this debate. Some examples which I need to think about:

"It would have made no sense in Roman terms to have claimed rights to political power without also claiming rights to religious authority and expertise." (p.135, stated in relation to the plebeians' struggle to gain places in the pontifical and augural colleges- in other words, to gain access to what we might today see as high-status 'priesthoods').

"Crucially, there is no sign in any Roman political debate that any public figure ever openly rejected the traditional framework for understanding the gods' relations with humankind. Political arguments consisted in large part of accusations that 'the other side' had neglected their proper duty to the gods, or had flouted divine law. It was a competition (in our terms) about how, and by whom, access to the god was to be controlled- not about rival claims on the importance or existence of the divine. So far as we can tell, no radical political stance brought with it a fundamental challenge to the traditional assumptions of how the gods operated in the world. There were, to be sure, as there always had been, individual cults and individual deities that were invested (for various reasons) with a particular popular resonance. The temple of Ceres, for example, as we have seen, had special 'plebeian' associations from the early Republic; likewise the cult of the Lares Compitales (at local shrines throughout the regions (vici) of the city) was a centre of religious and social life for, particularly, slaves and poor (and was later to be developed by Augustus precisely for its popular associations) [...] There was always likely to be choices and preferences of this kind in any polytheism. But if these cults did act as a focus for an entirely different view of man's relations with gods, no evidence has survived to suggest it." (p.139)

"The honours granted to Julius Caesar immediately before his assassination suggest that he had been accorded the status of a god- or something very like it: he had, for example, the right to have a priest (flamen) of his cult, to adorn his house with a pediment (as if it were a temple) and to place his own image in formal processions of the images of the gods. Shortly after his death, he was given other marks of divine status: altars, sacrifices, a temple and in 42 BC a formal decree of divination, making him divus Julius. Ever since the moment they were granted, these honours- particularly those granted before his death- have been the focus of debate. If you ask the question 'had Caesar officially become a Roman god, or not, before his death? Was he, or was he not a deity?" you will not find a clear answer. Predictably both Roman writers and modern scholars offer different and often contradictory views." (p.140-1)

Sidenote: I've always been given to understand that Caesar was killed because people were scared he was trying to turn himself into a king. Possibly this is a popular misconception- if not, it makes the whole thing even harder to get my head around, since it seems to suggest that people at the time were more uncomfortable with the idea of King Julius than with Julius the Living God. Anyone have any insight on this?

"Traditionally religion was deeply embedded in the political institutions of Rome: the political elite were at the same time those who controlled human relations with the gods; the senate, more than any other single institution, was the central locus of 'religious' and 'political' power. In many respects this remained as true at the end of the Republic as it had been two or three centuries earlier. But at the same time, we can trace- at least over the last century BC- the beginning of a progression towards the isolation of 'religion' as an autonomous area of human activity, with its own rules, its own technical and professional discourse. In this section we shall look at two particular aspects of this process: first, the development of more sharply defined boundaries between different types of religious experience: between the licit and the illicit, between religion and magic." (p.150)

"In the late Republic, in other words, we begin for the first time to hear of practices designated as 'magical'. Many of these practices had, in fact, been part of religious activity at Rome as far back as you could trace; what was new was precisely their designation as 'magical' and the definition of magic as a separate category. [...] magic is not a single [cross-cultural] category at all, but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call 'magic' lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time." (p.154, emp. mine)

"We have almost no evidence at all for the circumstances that led to the destruction of the shrines of Isis in (probably) 59, 58, 53, 50 and again in 48 BC; nor, for that matter, for those that led to the expulsion of the astrologers (Chaldaei) from Rome in 139 BC. But we can make a plausible guess at one or two factors that may have lain behind such an action. The cult of Isis, with its independent priesthood and its devotion to a personal and caring deity could represent (like the Bacchic cult) a potentially dangerous alternative society, out of the control of the traditional political elite. Likewise astrology, with its specialised form of religious knowledge in the hands of a set of religious experts outside the political groups of the city, necessarily constituted a separate (and perhaps rival) focus of religious power. Although it did not offer a social alternative in the sense of group membership, it represented (as we have seen in other areas before) a form of religious differentiation which threatened the undifferentiated politico-religious amalgam of Roman practice." (p.161)

Finally, there's an interesting source from a contemporary Greek writer named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who apparently argued that the Romans were more Greek than the Greeks (on the grounds that they had taken "the best customs in use among the Greeks" while rejecting "all the traditional [Greek] myths concerning the gods, which contain blasphemies and calumnies against them." He elaborated that by 'blasphemies and calumnies', he meant:

theogonies (stories in which the gods fight for supremacy- e.g. the story of how Zeus overthrew Kronos)

stories in which gods warred with mortals or were subjugated by them (e.g. the bit in the Iliad about how Apollo briefly served as a herdsman to the mortal King Laomedon)

rituals which made reference to gods dying, or which required worshippers to behave disreputably (e.g. the mysteries of Dionysius or Persephone)

Wikipedia says he died some time relatively soon after 7 BC- that's a shame; I would have liked to see what he made of Christianity.

I've still got just under half the book to finish. If I decide to keep trawling ancient Roman stuff, I might have a look for readable translations of Cicero, since Beard et al. make him sound like an interesting guy (although I'd probably have no idea who he was if I hadn't read Allan Massie's fictional autobiography of Augustus, ages and ages ago- quite a good book for getting your head around the period, although like almost all autobiographies it suffers from a lack of neat character arcs). While I remember: I should also attempt to track down a library copy of CS Lewis' The Problem of Pain, because I skimmed the first part in Waterstone's the other day and it looks like he's come up with a theodicy which I hadn't heard of before.

Reading: Religions of Rome, by Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price (1998, Cambridge: CUP)

2008-10-25T17:45:00.000+01:00

This is a nice intro for people (like me) who have a certain amount of vague general knowledge about Ancient Rome, but know very little about the specifics and so need to be walked through each historical period with a Classicist holding their hands and making sure they don't get lost.

So far I've only covered the introduction and the pre-imperial chapter, but I was surprised by how teacherite1 many of the priestly collegia seemed. There seems to be a general willingness to accept a lot of vagueness in terms of stuff like which gods were which and how they related to each other- but the attitude towards religious practice is interestingly legalistic. Some examples:

If things were going badly, the Senate could hold an inquest to find out if it was because someone had messed up a religious ritual (emic term: to see if anyone had committed a vitium, or religious mistake). This involved getting in the augures, who normally didn't actually perform rituals themselves (that was the job of various politicians), but acted kind of like an auditing agency who kept the regulations on how things were meant to be done and so could come in and start checking if everything was being done to proper standards. Then they submitted a report to the Senate, acting sort of like an expert witness (i.e., they stated their expert opinion on the issue, then the Senate officially ruled on whether a vitium had been committed, and if so, whose fault it was) (p.29).

The pontifices were, from our society's perspective, a sort of amalgam of priest and lawyer- they were experts on the rituals involved in private issues like adoptions and inheritances, which meant that they could adjudicate in disputes between private citizens. They were responsible for maintaining the calendar (which meant informing the Senate of which days were not appropriate for Senate meetings/ court cases/ committee meetings). They were also required to keep track of all the important news of the day and write it on a big public whiteboard (these eventually went into a permanent record that other people could check) (p.25).

“Thus, for instance, the pontifices in 222 BC prevented Marcus Claudius Marcellus from adding the cult of Virtus to an existing temple of Honos, on the ground that it was essential for each of the deities to have their own chapel (cella)- so that, it was argued, in the event of a lightning stroke it would be clear who was the offended deity to whom the appropriate sacrifices should be made.” (p.105)

If you wanted the gods to do something, then you could publically ask for their help and promise to sacrifice to them if they did so. The gods might or might not accept your offer (so, legally speaking it's not a divine contract so much as an invitation to treat)- but the conditions for acceptance and the nature of the sacrifice are very very clearly specified.

For example, during the Hannibalic War, Rome promised the gods an unusually large sacrifice in exchange for military aid. The record of the vow specifies that if the gods kept Rome safe against both the Carthaginians and the Gauls of North Italy for a period of five years, then they would receive a sacrifice of every domestic animal born during the spring of that year (with the period that constitutes 'spring' being clearly defined). It further specifies that the sacrifice would still count if someone made a mistake during the ritual and that if any of the animals were stolen, then blame would fall on the thief and not the animal's owner or Rome. (p.82)

The Hannibalic War also seems to have been a period in which Romans devoted an unusual level of attention to Juno-worship. This may have been because she was seen as the equivalent of Astarte, the protective goddess of Carthage, and thus someone who could have a major influence over the war. According to Servius, writing some time after the fact, attempts to 'summon out' Juno from Carthage (evocata) failed during the war and were only eventually successful in 146 BC. However, he states that they did at least succeed in 'placating' her (exorata). (p.82)

Sadly, the book is also giving me the impression that the study of Classics has attracted a certain number of people fixated on the idea that there was some period or culture which counts as 'authentic' ancient Rome, meaning that if you come across any historical detail which seems to offend your aesthetic sensibilities then it must be some kind of foreign import or sign that the Ancient Ways had become corrupt and degenerate. The upshot is that Religions of Rome occasionally has to pause to acknowledge arguments which, on the the face of things, seem utterly ridiculous.

For example, it sounds as though our concept of 'priest' lacked an exact analogue in ancient Rome- i.e. there were various people whose fulltime job involved maintaining a temple or a set of 'religious' rituals, but there was no sharp line between these and secular admin jobs. Also it sounds like there was little or no emic sense that pontifices and augures and Salii and Vestals and haruspicers and so on constituted a single category of occupation who were more like each other than they were like any other professional group. There are apparently theorists who argue that, on the contrary, this superficial diversity masks a sort of deep-down schema of 'priests' as a separate class of people who absolutely had to be kept separate from 'secular society' (p.28-9). However, the impression I'm getting from Beard et al. is that this opinion rests pretty much on the argument from absence- if anyone else knows anything about it, I'd appreciate being chucked a reference.

1 See: here">http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/campaign/teacher.asp?NavID=40>here. The setting is fictional and is thus going to err on the side of Eurocentrism for the sake of accessibility, but anyone who's heard my rants against the State of the World Today is aware that I find these labels useful, though not entirely serious.