"Earnest idolators make earnest Christians"?

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."

Reading Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer'

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

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!

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

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.