Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

San2 Religion (Witchcraft and Belief) - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 'I am not anxious to define witchcraft, oracles and magic as ideal types of thought, but desire to describe what Azande understand by mangu, soroka and ngua'
    - - 'I learnt the idiom of their though and applied notions of witchcraft as spntaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant'
    - - 'witchcraft beliefs also embrace a system of values which regulate human conduct', been 'plainly stamped on law and morals, etiquette and religion'
      - 'there is no niche or corner of Zande culture into which it does not twist itself'
      - 'the Zande attributes all these misfortunes to witchcraft unless there is strong evidence, and subsequent oracular confirmation that sorcery or one f those evil agents has been at work, or unless they are clearly to be attributed to incompetence, breach of a taboo, or a faillure to observe a moral rule'
    - - 'Zande philosophy can supply the missing link'
        
        e.g. in coincidences (the granary incident), 'in Zandeland sometimes an old granary collapses. There is nothing remarkable in this.'- they know it is because of termites. but once collapsed whilst people under it, why? 'that it should collapse is easily intelligible, but why should it have collapsed at the particular moment when these particular people were sitting beneath it?'
    - - 'witchcraft has its own logic, its own rules of thought, and that these do not exclude natural causation'
        
        'Azande undoubtedly perceive a difference between what we consider the wrkings of nature on the one hand and the wroking of magic and ghosts and witchcraft on the other hand, though in the absence of a formulated doctrine of natural law they do not, and cannot, express the difference as we express it'
    - - 'their response is action and anlysis'
  - - - 'Muki, his wife, and Bukhori, his son, were beaten and hacked to death and then hung up on display'- many arrested released and all in village 'rejoiced at these murders'
    - - 'the destruction of the television set in order to disengage from the force of the witch suggests a power vaguely associated with the new witchcraft whose source includes not only the traditional world of Javanese spirits', 'television in rural Java fascinated', bringing foreign in
    - - 'how did such a change come about? We can look for a first answer in the history of the Suharto regime'
        
        New Order 'narrowed and rationalized national identity'
        
        'the pressures for consumption were felt without a space being made for them'
        
        violence repressed but remaining in Indonesians cultural memory
        
        'the first degense was to find someone else responsible- 'witch', rather tha 'communist' or 'criminal' was the form that accusation took'
        
        'there is no greater mass of unmourened dead in Indonesia than the communists killed in 1965-66 and none more firt to return to haunt the living once state repression had been lifted'
      - 'the defenses against sorcery have disappeared. The implication is that witches today have another source of power, one proceeding from outside the world of Javanese spirits'
      - jealousy of wealth & lifestyle- 'Udi was certaint hat the ency he detected in his aggressors came from their misinterpretation of th skills he had learnt in Jakarta'
        
        but still 'the poor and the desperately poor were also attacked,a dnthose who had no connection witht he world outside the village except through television were attacked as well'
    - - showing 'how violence during the Suharto regime took on a hidden atttraction'
      - Javanese revolutionary practice of Keroyokan, taking the law into one's own hadns int he form of a mob, always against an outsider, as witch is an outsider under the guise of beign a neighbour, making them more dangerous
      - 'the wich is sought out as the hoped-for local counterpart of the possessed mob'
  - - - but not j experience it (mostly how explain it)- 'by examining my informants explanations of an experience I had during fieldwork in the city of Valletta, Malta, I hope to show how the Maltese find alterntive explanations of peculiar experiences more or less convincing'
    - - cultural context 'both generates feelings and provides a framework for their interpretation'
    - - 'what is remembered is as much the mood that a passage evokes as the passage itself'
      - 'not only do Maltese learn to believe through words, they also do so through their engagement with physical objects such as statues and their emotional experiences of these engagements'
    - - Anton also told him story of a small girl who shouted look out just before a buss passed him, 'a feeling of total calm came over him, adn he was then sure that the girl who saved him was an angel'
        
        of both of these stories anf explanations, amongst the men 'all recognized the validity of each explanation'
    - - 'significant is the fact that they are written, and hence physically present in the Bible, which is an artefact of social memory'
    - - 'taking the host is the ultimate act of incorporation' Christ's passion 'ingested and becomes one wiht the believer. The act mediates between the social memry of the Passion as inscribed in the Bible and embodied in the Host, and the personal momery of expereinceing a peculiar feeling as the practice is performed'
        
        'Maltese Catholics can employ the memory of the feeling evoked by the ingestion of the HOst to gauge the new feeling of the archbishops hand on their forehead'
  - - - 'political consequences of the everyday transposition of interpretative frameworks from the worlds of unseen powers such as ancestosr, spirits, deities and eitches to the unseen powers of the stae and economy'
      - 'a world full of unseen powers' causing 'spiritual insecurity' 'lie at the very heart of the relatiosnhips constituting politics in that place, from the household to the state'
    - - 'most families in Soweto are headed by women , thus compounding the anxieties of masculinity and the formation of sexual idetnties amongst families with female 'breadwinners' in a society stressing the norms of male dominance'
    - - most Sowetans do no distingusih between witchcraft and sorcery
    - - 'reflecting transformations in social power structures, in many female-headed households, women take the elading role in ritual which were formerly goverened by men'
    - - since apartheid ended, 'the most significant obkects of envy are to eb found close at hand inthe neighbourhood'
    - - 'most of the people, black and white, who write in critique of witchcraft beliefs live in suburbs' but int erms of protection 'the suburban route will only work if you cut all ties witth your family and place of origin'
      - 'the true witch will appear to be particularly pious, for that way she can deflect attention form her evil intents'
    - - though witches operate in secrecy, 'the witches are much more accessible to the experience of ordinary SOwetans than the scientists in white coats'
    - - 'when witches are publicly denouned in Soweto, as they are periodically, their assailants are likely to be young people acting in a mob following procedures which they call 'democratic' and which are almost identical to those used during the height of the SStruggle against supsected spies, informers and collaborators'- like Siegel looking at Suharto
    - - Rev. Kgotsupo Liputu, committee memebr of Azanian People's Organisation said' there is no future for a nation that believes anything that went wrong is casued by witchcraft and witches'
      - 'now that the SOuth African state is democratic and is supposed to be responsive to the needs of all the people, witchcraft automatically becmes a question ofpublic policy'
        
        'upon taking office in 1994, the ANC-led government of teh Northern Transvaal province appointed a commission to inquire into witchcraft'
        
        'the question for politics is whether the secrecy of power is normally presuemd good or vil... the power of witches derives from their secrecy'
  - - - mm! 'anthropologists tend to assume that apparently 'strange beliefs' such as witchcraft are in fact ationally believable with respect tot ehir particualr cultural contexts' but 'unclear how such a fundamentally undertain phenomenon could be used to make Westen societies, a foreing and mostly unkown world, more intelligible'
      - 'western wralth is said to be witchcraft that was revelealed and nautralized when Western society became Christian' but 'Auhelawa seem to be really reflectign on their own expereinces trhough this imagery of western welath, rather than the other way around'
    - - view criticised 'becasue it treats modern wtichcraft beliefs as the deveopment of a citical stance towards modernity, without oany regad for the cultural specificty of those beliefs'
    - - ;modern wtichcraft... merely th same process of making society throught he imagination wtih neew symbolic elements,but otherwise signals no real change in the belief (or imaginative act) itself'
      - 'Christianity reframes witchcraft in terms of its own partcualr epostemology, altering the grounds fr what is rational and irrational about witchcraft itslef'
  - - - 'the state, both past and present, had failed to shield ordianry citizens from malignity, leaving them little recourse but to protect themselves'
      - 'th majoriyt of black police believe in witchcraft, making them reluctant to intervene when suspects are attacked'
    - - 'the practice of mystrical arts' not a retreat into tradition but 'a mode of producing new forms of consciousness' expressing discontent w modernity
    - - 'widespread anxiety about the production and reproduction of welath, an anxiety that freuwently ranslaties into a bitter general oppostion'
- - - - defined by context but 'now 'belief' is essentially a word that relates and defines'
    - - his 'stress on the inward totality of Christian belief, the faith of the believer'
      - Luther 'a paradigm of the person who possesses belief by being possessed by it'
    - - 'Paul writes of 'when we first believes' (Romans 13:11) in the sense of 'when we were first converted''
      - also 'the noun pistic denotes the 'belief' held collectively by the early Christians as a common conviction, a shared confidence that both distinguished and united them as a community'
    - - 'Smith documents in Belief and History the changes in the meaning of the verb 'to believe from the end of the middle ages to the present time, where the sense has shifted from 'recognising what is true' to 'proposing what is in doubt'
    - - greatest contrast w Judaism, most similar to Islam
    - - 'that belief is central to all religions in the same way as it is to Christianity'
      - 'that the belief of a person or a people forms the ground of his or her behaviour and can be cited therefore as a sufficient explanation for it'
      - 'that belief is fundamentally an interior state, a psychological condition' (Evans-Pritchard on this esp. quote of Schmidt
      - 'that the determination of belief is more important than the determination of the status of what it is that the object of the belief'
  - - - so he is tracing 'how and why historically specific forms of 'religion' have come to be presented, mistakenly, as having a paradigmatic status'
      - 'Geertz' enterprise is to formulate a universal, a-historical definition of religion'
    - - Asad takes issue with this definition of culture on the grounds that though it means culture 'enables people to communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and thier attitudes twards lif' it does not give us a 'concept of the relationship of culture so conceived to 'life' itself, or to the material coniditons and activities for maintaining (or changing) life' so later it 'will be isolated from social practices and discourses, and regarded primarily in terms of consciousness' obviously leaving out possibility of examing impact of conditions/ studying power
    - - Asad claims he also has a confused conception of symbols
    - - e.g. medieval church sought 'the subjection of all practice to a unified authority, to a single authentic source which could tell truth from falsehood'
      - as science developed, 'the Churches would also be clear about the need to distinguish 'the religious' from 'the secular', shifting as they did so, the moods and motivations of the believer. Social discipline would in this period, gradually abondone religious space, letting 'belief', 'faith' and 'conscience' take its place. But theory would still be needed to define religion'
    - - 'his claim is to a particular state of mind, not to a corpus of knowledge'
        
        what then of 'pious learned Chrsitians of the twelfth century, for whom 'knowledge' and 'belief' were not so clearly at odds'
  - - - when he aw a light he concluded that it 'was possibly a handful of grass lit by someone on his way to defecate'- 'it could be explained away, in other words, without recourse to the supernatural. But this is a question he left open'
      - 'Evans-Pritchard tried to show how the supposedly 'irrational' beliefs of the Azande followed a logic that made perfect sense in their terms, and that witchcraft could be understood throught he anthropological lens as an idiom for explaining misfirtune'
    - - 'For Evans-Pritchard, scientific enquiry is linked to religious practice through the concern for relations- a concern which can only be understood if it is in some sense shared'
    - - 'we might ask with Ruel (1997) if their understanding of belief and the 'inner life' is a specifically Christian- even Catholic- viewpoint', focussing on this rather than appreciating participants reality?
  - - - ''for us, the host is the body of Christ not a symbol'. Their purpose was to emphasize the difference between their own Catholicism and Protestant Christianity'
      - 'as Evans-Pritchard noted of the Nuer, they do not 'believe in' God; he is simply there'
    - - 'while Mormon Chapels are used for Sunday worship and are open to all, Mormon Temples are only used for the performance of 'sacred ordinances' and are open only to 'worthy' asult members' through a Temple recommend
      - 'Garments endure that the experience of the Temple is fet at all times, through the feel of the garment fabric on the skin and through the consquent restrictions on behaviour'
      - 'this embodied belief- or 'coming to know'- increases in significance when we consider that speaking about the Temple rituals is forbidden outside its walls', 'embodied feeling rather than language and symbol'