Reading 'On Spiritual Edgework' by David G. Bromley

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

(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'

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

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)

(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

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, 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).