3 Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Ritual and Belief in Non-Western Societies

Meghna Arora

Below we look at some of the key ideas and debates that emerged on the topic of anthropological approaches to ritual and belief in non-Western societies. It has been widely noted, including in auto-critiques of the discipline, that the location of the anthropological author has shaped the literature and themes of the field. It is certainly shaped by the imbalances of power that are rooted both in the history of the discipline and the world. To begin with, a stereotypical understanding that grew from practices in the discipline was that ‘Non-Western’ society implied pre-literate or small-scale societies in contrast to the Euro-American West, from which the anthropologists usually hailed. This baggage is reflected in the language of several theorists, especially evolutionary anthropologists who believed that cultures passed through stages of evolution with modern western society as the most advanced stage. So what is today called pre-industrial or small-scale or ‘indigenous’ was then called ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ as opposed to ‘advanced’ and ‘modern’. I have retained the terms as used by the thinkers.

A. Evolutionary Anthropologists’ ‘Intellectualist’ Understanding of Belief Edward Burnett Tylor on Beliefs as Mistaken Inferences in ‘Primitive’ Culture

A leading figure of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, Edward Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1871), argues that the study of culture and civilization allows for the understanding of the general laws of human thought and action. Just as one finds uniform laws in the realm of nature, one can apply the same principle to civilizations. According to Tylor, the job of the student of culture is to find general principles of human action.

One can embark on this study by analyzing “survivals”, those elements in the present that are carried over from the past, reflecting beliefs, customs and conditions of an older time. Survivals include traditional games, popular sayings, customs, and ‘superstitious belief’. According to Tylor, many parallels have been observed between ancient human tribes and the existing savage tribes and hence, by studying the present-day ‘savage-tribes’, one could learn about this story of civilization.

He discusses several aspects of primitive culture, including language, mythology, proverbs, poems, and magical powers, as well as the “origins” and development of religion ideas in primitive societies. We can look his discussion on magic and animism, especially because this leads to an important, long-running debate in anthropological literature: whether non-literate (largely ‘Non-Western’) societies are marked by rationality of beliefs. Tylor emphasized that nothing was arbitrary and that a reasonable (rational) explanation must be sought for things that seem strange among the “educated” in advanced societies. However, he asserts that primitive people mistook association for causation, falsely positing a causal relationship between natural events with had some resemblance or continuity. He gives an instance of this: “…the modern clairvoyant professes to feel sympathetically the sensations of a distant person, if communication be made through a lock of his hair or any object that has been in contact with him…In Orissa, the Jeypore witch lets down a ball of thread through her enemy’s roof to reach his body, that by putting the other end in her own mouth, she may suck his blood.” (1920: 117)

He applies similar reasoning while looking at the “origins” of religious ideas in the form of animism. The “belief in spiritual beings,” or the idea of a soul, developed from trying to make sense of the two different states of the body, living and dead, as well as the mystery of human shapes in dreams. “Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious inference that that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom.” (1920: 428)

Tylor didn’t take these beliefs to be ‘real’; in fact, he saw them as erroneous, and his explanation of rationality takes fallacy into account. Even though, according to his evolutionary scheme, advanced societies will have less erroneous reasoning than primitive ones, he admits that ‘revivals’ of older beliefs may take place even in modern societies; this admission underscores the fact that Tylor viewed beliefs as mental processes that were essentially the same across time and space.

Sir James Frazer on the difference between Magical Beliefs and Religious Beliefs

In his two-volume work The Golden Bough (1890), James Frazer attempts to construct a theory of the development of magic, religion and science. Unlike Tylor, Frazer makes a stark distinction between magic and religion. Compared to Tylor, he gives a much more schematic explanation of the logic of magic. He says, “If my analysis of the magician’s logic is correct, its two great principles turn out to be merely two different misapplications of the association of ideas.” (1922: 20a)

Frazer emphasizes that magical logic errs by drawing a mystical link between two things that are merely associated with each other. The belief in magic, however, persists because magic is not entirely ‘unreal’. More precisely, magic tries to bring about processes that actually do occur in nature; for example, a magician may try to bring rain to his village. Thus, for Frazer, the ability to observe causal sequences in nature is part of the working of magic. In this, there is a similarity between magic and science. They both view events of nature as occurring in an coherent and constant order without the role of any personal agent. Science differs from magic only in terms of the validity of the concepts it applies and in the degree of its effectiveness.

In the religious domain, by contrast, spirits exert control over natural forces. This is a “plastic and variable nature,” as opposed to the immutable laws of both magic and science. Frazer says, “In so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science.” (19–: 130)

He then asserts that magical beliefs are foundational for the human race. One can draw this conclusion, he says, from data that shows how the essence of magical beliefs are basically the same anywhere they are observed, whereas religious beliefs take multitudinous forms in different societies. Frazer’s emphasis on magic has implications for how we view religion in contrast to modern-day science, which has emerged from a pre-existing, non-religious way of thinking.

Critique of the Psychological and Intellectualist Interpretation of Belief by E.E. Evans Pritchard

In his book Theories of Primitive Religion (1965) E.E. Evans-Pritchard critiques the theories of evolutionary anthropologists. The way both Tylor and Frazer argue is a form of a priori speculation. It proceeds by imagining oneself in place of a person living in primitive conditions and recreating the logic that would lead one to uphold primitive beliefs. “A logical construction of the scholar’s mind is posited on the primitive man, and put forward as an explanation of his beliefs.” (1965: 24-25) It is possible that this is how ‘primitive’ beliefs came about, but there is no way to verify it.

Evans-Pritchard also criticizes Frazers’s assertion that the scientist and the magician perform their duties with the same psychological certainty. He says Frazer makes a mistake when he compares modern science with primitive religion. Instead, methodologically, a more sound analysis would involve comparing empirical and magical practices and techniques in the same cultural conditions.

And lastly, “neither Tylor nor Frazer explained why people in their magic mistake, as they supposed, ideal connexions for real ones when they do not do so in their other activities. Moreover, it is not correct that they do so. The error here was in not recognizing that the associations are social and not psychological stereotypes, and that they occur therefore only when evoked in special ritual situations which are also of limited duration.” (1965: 29)

B. Towards Collective Representations, Cults, Structure and Function: A more Sociological approach to Belief and Ritual

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of primitive mentalities

One can juxtapose the work of Lévy-Bruhl with that of Tylor and Frazer. While all three use an evolutionary approach, Lévy-Bruhl contests the idea of a universal rationality. The main thrust of his work is that rational thought doesn’t apply to ‘primitive’ societies. Questions of logic are central to his two main works How Natives Think (1926) and Primitive Mentality (1923).

For Lévy-Bruhl, every type of society has a distinctive mentality. His evolutionary classification was broad and controversial: a) primitive and b) the civilized. According to Lévy-Bruhl, those in Europe have many more centuries of rigorous intellectual speculation which makes them more logically oriented. In contrast, primitive thought has a distinctive character and is aligned towards the supernatural.

Lévy-Bruhl also explains how primitive people perceive reality differently. “The mystical perception is immediate… We can best understand Lévy-Bruhl’s view if we say that, in his way of looking at the matter, beliefs only arise late in the development of human thought, when perception and representation have already fallen apart…” (Evans-Pritchard 1965: 84)

In his study of Azande witchcraft, one his most famous works, E.E. Evans-Pritchard grapples with an important methodological problem in ethnography, arising one could say more explicitly from debates on ‘belief’. He stresses that witchcraft is a fairly normal occurring in Azande social life, being discussed in as part of everyday conversation and while the belief in a supreme creator and ancestral gods holds importance (more so in a domestic context), the belief in medicines (magic) and witchcraft hold primacy. He also approaches the question of belief in intellectual terms when he asks why the futility of magic wasn’t quite recognized in cases when it seemed evident? He states that for them witchcraft and magic is an intellectually coherent system. He infact analyzes how the Azande belief in witchcraft didn’t contradict empirical knowledge. It instead provided a “missing link” to the chain of events. “For witchcraft theory provides an explanation as to why these people were sitting under this particular granary at the particular moment when it collapsed.” (Morris 1987: 194)

Evans-Pritchard notes that Lévy-Bruhl’s work exaggerates the difference in these patterns of thought to the extent that any interaction between people from different kinds of societies seems impossible. Ever more importantly, he doesn’t delve into why objects which have a mystical value for some people don’t have the same for others. Are mystical representations always evoked by objects (supposedly supernatural in nature) or do objects take on a different meaning in different situations (for instance during a ritual)?

Emile Durkheim and the relationship of belief and ritual to the cult

Durkheim’s theory had an immense impact on the debates around belief and ritual. We can focus on excerpts from Elementary Forms of Religious Life to examine the same(1995 [1912]). Durkheim was also an evolutionist. However, he didn’t attempt to trace origins historically. Instead he posed the question in a structural manner by searching for “the ever-present causes upon which most essential forms of religious thought and practice depend.” (Lambeck 2002: 34) For Durkheim, the most unheard of rites and seemingly unintelligible myths express some human need or aspects of life. They have real reasons for their existence, and it is the job of science to uncover them.

Durkheim also sought to intervene in philosophical debates. According to Durkheim, the first articulations about the world were through systems of representations that were religious in origin. “If philosophy and the sciences were born in religion, it is because religion itself began by serving as philosophy and science…” (Durkheim 2002 [1912]: 38) (It is worth comparing this line of thought with Frazer’s, for whom religious ideas and scientific ones had an entirely separate trajectory.)

An important theme discussed in philosophy, taken up by both Aristotle and Kant, is categories of understanding. Some of these are notions of space, time, number, cause, substance, and personhood, which are seen as universal categories of thought. Thought itself doesn’t seem to be possible outside of these categories. Durkheim states that when primitive religious beliefs are studied methodically, one also finds principle categories. But religion itself is a notably social thing, lived out through rites where collective representations of a group are maintained and reenacted. This means that the principle categories themselves must be social things, “products of collective thought”. For instance, time and space are deeply framed by social life. Our private experience of time is always framed by categories of time which are the same for “men of the same civilization…The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc. corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals, and public ceremonies at regular intervals.” (Durkheim 2002 [1912]: 39)

For Durkheim, beliefs and rites are the two basic categories under which religious phenomena fall. The former are “states of opinions and consist of representations” and the latter are “particular modes of action”. Rites are distinctive because of the special nature of their object, which can only be characterized in relation to beliefs. Durkheim theorized that religious phenomena assume a bipartite division of the universe into mutually-exclusive categories that subsume all things. “Sacred things are things protected and isolated by prohibition; profane things are things to which the prohibitions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred. Religious beliefs are those representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they have with other sacred things or profane things. Finally, rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things.” (Durkheim 2002 [1920]: 43) This classification doesn’t exist intrinsically in objects, as the scope of what it is sacred may vary. But while what constitutes sacred/profane may play out differently in different religions, the basic fact of this duality is universal.

Durkheim critiques those who define religion in rational terms, stressing ideas over rites. This does not do justice to how people view religion in their day-to-day lives. People don’t see the function of religion as something that adds to their know-how. The person, having communed with god, has not gained new knowledge, but has become capable of something more. However, an idea in itself does not have the power to do this. The energies needed to strengthen our inner life come from performing acts and reenacting those acts to keep renewing their effects. “From this standpoint, it becomes apparent that the set of regularly repeated actions that make up the cult regains all its importance.” (Durkheim 2002 [1920]: 47)

However, people’s experience of faith is distinct from a causal, scientific explanation of that faith. Andfor Durkheim, the underlying cause of the religious experience is society. Only through common and cooperative action can society affirm its existence: “thus it is action that dominates religious life, for the very reason that society is its source.”

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown: Functional (and Structural) Explanations of Belief and Ritual

Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942) goes back to the distinction between magic and religion, as well as magic and science. His work emerges as a critique of those who do not demarcate a scientific approach from a magical one within primitive society. According to Malinowski, it is not possible to carry on everyday life without sound generalizations and logical reasoning, which are needed for normal activities and are the basis of production. However, no matter how extensive one’s knowledge, there will always be limitations, and it is never possible to completely eradicate an unexpected turn of events. He traces the need for, and existence of, a special type of ritual activity (known as magic) in both modern and primitive society, where one realizes the impotence and limits of knowledge. Ordinary work and skill is never replaced by magic, which shows that science doesn’t develop out of magic (as Frazer had claimed). The force of magic can only be produced within a traditionally-defined dramatic and emotional milieu, which creates the atmosphere of the supernatural. He emphasizes the functional nature of magic in terms of individual psychology and its cultural and social value.

One finds a different kind of functionalism in Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955), who also draws on the structuralism of Durkheim. In his influential work, The Andaman Islanders, he examines different types of social action and devotes significant attention to “ceremonial customs.” In interpreting these customs, he shows how “every custom and belief of a primitive society plays some determinate part in the social life of the community, just as every organ of a living body plays some part in the general life of the organism.” (Radcliffe-Brown in Morris 1987: 124) According to Morris, Radcliffe-Brown’s interest is not in historical origins of social institutions, but in the interpretation of their “meaning,” or their function. For example, weeping on several occasions is observed as a custom amongst the Andamanese; it is not associated only with sadness, but with a renewal of social relations which have been interrupted. “Weeping is the affirmation of a bond of social solidarity.” (Morris 1987: 124) Ritual value is attributed to something not because the object is important in itself but symbolically stands for certain aspects of social life. He also examines ancestral cults and totemism and finds parallels in lineage structures and other aspects of society to show a close correspondence between religious beliefs and rituals and social structure.

C. Ritual in terms of Rebellion, Communitas and Mystification

Rituals of Rebellion or periodic relaxation of social rules?

When theorizing ritual, Max Gluckman’s work and subsequently Edward Norbeck’s critique pose an interesting question. Durkheim’s idea of ritual as confirming group solidarity didn’t quite fit for Gluckman, who in his work on South East Africa looked at examples of certain rites where people in a subordinate position performed a reversed role in the ritual. For instance, women would assert dominance over men in a certain rite. Gluckman called these “rituals of rebellion” embedded in a “repetitive social system”, where the act of rebellion had rebels but no revolutionaries, and ritual eventually supported the same structure. Edward Norbeck in his critique suggests that instead of rituals of rebellion, these could be seen as simply part of a larger category of rituals that allow for a momentary relaxation of social rules. Thus, ritual could be seen as exaggerating “real conflicts” but affirming unity despite conflict. (Morris 1987: 248-251)

Rites of Passage

The terms ‘rites of passage’, usually associated with initiation rituals, came into usage more broadly as a concept when developed by Arnold van Gennep. The term depicts transition and change of status through ritual. The ritual can be for different occasions such as marking a new stage in a person’s life or change of seasons or rituals associated with territorial movements, initiation into groups etc. All rites of passage have an underlying pattern with three phases: the first stage is a separation from the previous state, place, time or status. Then comes an in-between stage, which is neither like the state before, nor the one coming after, i.e. a final state where one reintegrates, but in a transformed state.

Liminality and Communitas

Victor Turner builds on van Gennep’s concept of rites of passage and especially discusses the middle stage, liminality, and what implications it has for the general structure or society in which the ritual takes place.

The characteristics of the liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since they cannot be identified with the web of classifications that normally persist. This ambiguity is expressed in diverse ways. It may include subjecting the liminal entities to nudity or disguising them as monsters,inflicting some arbitrary punishment, expecting humble behavior, erasing distinctions of rank or status or rendering them uniform. “It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new situation in life.” (Turner 2002. [1969]: 359)

What Turner finds interesting about liminality is the space it produces, characterized by lowliness and sacredness, allowing for homogeneity and comradeship. In such rites, one is presented with a momentary image of a generalized social bond that has ceased to exist and yet it is about to be classified into a variety of hierarchical, structural bonds. According to Turner, the liminal phase is not simply a distinction between “sacred” and “secular”; rather, “this ‘sacred’ component is acquired by the incumbents of positions during the rites de passage, through which they changed positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness goes over, and tempers the pride of the incumbent of a higher position or office.” (Turner 2002[1969]: 360). Turner states that this isn’t simply about giving legitimacy to existing social structures but is rather a recognition of an “essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society”.

Liminal situations are also almost everywhere attributed to magico-religious properties and often accompanied by ideas of danger, inauspicion, pollution, taboo etc. Turner suggests that this should seen from the perspective of maintaining the status quo, and thus the form of the communitas must appear as dangerous or anarchical and have to be surrounded by conditions and prescriptions.

Ritual as Mystification

Peter Van Der Veer compares Maurice Bloch’s approach towards studying rituals to Clifford Geertz’s, for whom symbols, as vehicle, allow for meaning to be communicated. These symbols constitute the worldview of a society, and ritual does the significant job of retaining this worldview by making it seem real. While society actually changes over the course of time, ritual action retains the traditional worldview. (Peter Van Der Veer in Barnard & Spencer 2012: 608)

Bloch, also interested in studying symbols, critiques the functionalist, intellectualist and the symbolist approach for assuming that rituals are as they are in order to fulfill one particular function, that is explanation. According to Bloch, even a less simplified approach like Turner’s which brings together the symbolic, emotional and sociological aspects of ritual doesn’t quite situate the symbolic in the social. This, he states, is not possible to do on a short-term scale. He thus attempts to study the circumcision of the Merina in Madagascar as a symbolic system being created in history. (Bloch 1986:8)

Because ritual content refers to the other-worldly, it distances itself not only from the everyday, but also from history. Bloch’s study also captures the role of domination and power, something which Geertz’s work misses. An important aspect of ritual is its dual and incomplete nature. Ritual is never fully a statement and never fully an action. Since ritual is closed to the normal discursive processes of argumentation and contradiction, “it allows its message to be simultaneously communicated and disguised.” (Bowie 2000: 158) He also argues that “the archetypal form of ritual is to demonstrate the power of the transcendental over the everyday.” He maintains Turner’s three-phase model but doesn’t give as much primacy to the liminal state because “Bloch merely sees it as part of an overall process that involves people entering the transcendental only to return to and conquer the vital, through the use of literal or symbolic violence.” (Mitchel in Barnard & Spencer 2012: 618)

D. Conclusion: Towards tracing the Genealogy of Ritual and Belief

Post-colonial scholars such as Talal Asad have emphasized that the very categories of “ritual” and “belief” in anthropological literature developed in particular historical and political contexts. Asad particularly stresses how anthropologists had taken on assumptions and definitions that drew on modern (post-Reformation) Christianity. For example, the category of religion as distinct from domains of power and politics drew heavily on modern Christian ideas of the separation of Church and State.

He critiques Geertz, who he sees as representative of modern-day anthropology, for stressing the primacy of an individualized idea of belief: “Geertz’s treatment of religious belief…is a modern privatized Christian one because and to the extent that it emphasizes the priority of belief as a state of mind rather than as constituting activity in the world.” (Asad 1993: 47) He similarly shows that the anthropological concept of ritual as symbolic behavior grew from modern Western separations of mind and body and ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience.

Asad’s intervention is an important reminder that anthropological understandings of belief and ritual in the the ‘Non-West’ have largely been shaped by Europe’s own imperial history in relation to the Non-West and the history of modern-day disciplines’ origin in the West, where Christianity was pre-dominant.

Reference bibliography

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