Why has millenarianism been an important subject for the anthropology of religion and/or political anthropology?

Why has witchcraft been an important subject for the anthropology of religion and/or political anthropology?

'Rituals do not represent the world, they create it.' Discuss.

'Witchcraft is just a way of explaining misfortune, it has few social effects.' Discuss.

'Mllenarian movements are just political movements in disguise, their religious elements are irrelevant.' Discuss.

'Rituals are primarily ways of getting things done int he world, they do little to share the way people understand their lives.' Discuss.

'Emotions and doctrines are of equal importance to religious life.' Discuss.

'the anthropology of nonhumans is insufficiently attentive to politics.' Discuss.

how have anthropologists accounted for one or more of the following? a) magic and witchcraft b) spiritual experience c) asceticism d) millenarianism

'the distinction between belief and practice is problematic, but nonetheless productive for ethnographic analysis.' Discuss.

'witchcraft expresses anger at misfortune but perpetuates the status quo.' Discuss.

What do anthropologists of religion gain or lose by adopting a position of 'methodological atheism' (BERGER)

somewhat like what happened to kinship, quotes Wilfred Cantwell Smith as saying 'the peculiarity of the place given to belief in Christian history' has meant 'that unsuspecting Westerners... have been liable to ask about a religious group other than their own as well, 'What do they believe?' as though this were the primary question, and certainly were a legitimate one'

defined by context but 'now 'belief' is essentially a word that relates and defines'

'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'

in/that - 'a distinction made frequently today is between 'belief in' (trust in) and 'belief that' (propositional belief). The distinction may clear our minds today but it confuses history, for the point about Christian belief, reiterated by theologians... is that it was both at once'

belief seperates from Hebrew trust where 'for Christians there is the added confidence or conviction about an event 9the resurrectiona nd alll that it signifies) that had actually taken [lace. The belief is not just open-ended, oriented to what God may or can do: it is rooted firmly in what God has done'

'baptism acts 'not only as a rite of passage for individual Christians but also as the act by which the church identified with the risen Christ, is perpetually re-constituted'

disagreement of Arius & supporters marked shift in which ''belief' now comes to define not merely the Christian from the non-Christian, but the true Christian from the false (the true believer from the heretic)'

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'

Needham 1971: 'the notion of belief is not appropriate to an empirical philosophy of mind or to an exact account of human motives and conduct. Belief is not a discriminable experience, it does not constitute a natural resemblance among men, and it does not belong to 'the common behaviour of mankind'- Ruel criticises lack of contextual considerations in his accounts after focusing on this

'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'

1. 'that belief is central to all religions in the same way as it is to Christianity'

2. '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'

3. 'that belief is fundamentally an interior state, a psychological condition' (Evans-Pritchard on this esp. quote of Schmidt

4. '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

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'

'from being a concrete set of rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, 'religion' has come to be abstracted and universalised'

what then of 'pious learned Chrsitians of the twelfth century, for whom 'knowledge' and 'belief' were not so clearly at odds'

'for far too long the well-known but increasingly unsatisfactory distinction between technical (or instrumental) action and expressive (or symbolic) action has determined the major orientation of anthropological studies of religion'

his own experience- he found difficult 'to understand what was 'happening' when I saw church prophets fight witchcraft by exorcising evil spirits' and 'wonder if I could only comprehend these phenomena if I shared, in some sense, a blief in the supernatural'

'belief is a subjective, and therefore personal, experience. But subjectivity makes understanding religion as simply a 'social fact' dfficult'

Ashforth states that 'the secrecy of witchcraft can never be penetrated'

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'

for EP & T, 'religious conviction became a tool in their anthropological projects, a way of bridging the distance between themselves and 'the other'

'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?

'everything in the world is ultimately related to everything else, but unless we make abstractions we cannot even commence to study phenomena'

'I hope the present volume will be of service to political officers, doctors, and missionaries in Zandeland, and later to the Azande themselves'

'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'

different to Suharto? 'they are unusually intelligent, sophisticated, and progressive, offering little opposition to foreign administration, and displaying little scorn for foreigners', though royal class do 'detest their European conquerors'

under Anglo-Egyptian control and now 'the new legal codes which refuse to admit witchcraft as a reality, will not accept evidence of oracles, and will not permit vengeance, have also considerably altered social behaviour'

'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'

'when a Zande speaks of witchcraft he does not speak of it as we speak of the weird witchcraft of our own history. Witchcraft is to him a commonplace happening and he seldom passes a day without mentioning it'

'I learnt the idiom of their though and applied notions of witchcraft as spntaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant'

Kisanga 'used to harangue me about the spite and jealousy of his neighbours. When I used to reply that I thought he wast mistaken and people were well disposed towards him he used to hold the spit bow or stool towards me as concrete evidence of his assertions'

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?'

'their philosophy is explicit, but is not formally stated as a doctrine'

breaches of taboo will be blamed b4 witchcraft and often 'the man who suffers the misfortune is likely to say that it is due to witchcraft, but others will not say so'

'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'

'considers an uncanny feeling experienced during fieldwork in Malta, and examines indigenous explanations of this'

argues that 'feelings are both produced by, and give meaning, to religious belief'

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'

anthropologists analysed mind & body but 'less willing to interroagate a similar duty between cognition and emotion'

centres 'social memory', he defines as 'not a body of knowledge, but as a set of cultural competencies or dispositions that enable people to live in a social setting'

cultural context 'both generates feelings and provides a framework for their interpretation'

! 'religious belief is particularly convincing as an explanation for unusual expereinces because it not only prvides a doctrinal context within which attribution can b made, but also creates expereinces which are explained a priori'

" 'the most important features of Maltese religion, as it was actually experienced, were 'emotional'

when cleaning a statue of Christ crucified 'an intense feeling of excitement came over me, one that I am sure went beyong the dimple claustrophobia. My stomach tightened and I began to shake. My heart pounded, and alhtough iI did not faint, I did feel lightheaded'

'there is no difference in kind between our feelings and our explanations of particular experiences'- 'in feelings, consciousness traps us, defeating all attempts to respond to emotional situations'

adopted an 'appropriate mode of cognition regarding crucifize- 'soon began to see them as precious objects charges with some sort of power'

'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'

of confirmation, 'the most memorable part, for my informants, was the moment when he laid his hand on thier forehead'- all described 'a kind of shock, or tingling' ('significant here that their descriptions of the feeling were very similar'- 'the individual memory of a particular feeling was collectivized... establishing a common explanation'

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'

'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'

'the morities of fieldwork do not exist in a social vacuum. because we learn in a social setting, our memories of that setting are also social'

'we are encouraged to look at priests' sermons, the content of doctrine lessons and people's verbal accounts of what religion means to them. But hese accounts are often confused, because the real nature of this meaning is gained through practical and emotional knowledge, not through semiotic knowledge'

memories make moral people and 'to take account of all three elements' (semiotic, practical, emotional) 'is to give a fuller picture of the way people live their lives, and of the way we conduct our research'

anthropologists against belief because of 'attachment to a linguistic model of religion that sees the job of the anthropologist of religion as being one of translation'

Needham 1972: 'I just did not know what was their psychic attitude toward the personage in whom I had assumed they believed'

'both popular Catholicism and Mormonism are characterized as much by immanence as they are by transcendence'

'we suggest that belief be seen as a process through which primarily non-linguistic knowledge is produced and reproduced to generate a distinctive orientation to the world'

'while Ruel focuses on the professional and propositional nature of belief statements within Christianity, he eschews an analysis of the language of belief- and indeed of belief as a whole- as performative'

stating 'I believe' an act of believing? 'stating 'I promise' is not representing or describing a promise; it is promising'

''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'

'our model of an embodied process of belief is a universalist one, capable of being applied across Christian and non-Christian contexts alike'

'the category of belief as we use it is a confluence of different concepts and meanings, and the analyst adopting the category must first be clear about which of them she or he sets our to employ'

''believing in'- that is, putting confidence or trust in or having faith in someone or something can designate a qualification of a bond and pertains to emotion more than to cognition'

'the verb 'to believe' expresses doubt as well as assurance, affirmation of statement as well as distancing from it'

one view that 'the conjoining in one term of three semantic aspects of belief (to recognize as fact, to accept as a representation, and to have confidence or trust in the source) is achieved in cultures that have roots in religions of a certain kind, namely, in those where the object of belief is located in a different order of reality than that of the world of creation'

Christian 'loving trust in the person of Jesus Christ' is 'more than an emotional attitude- it is a mode of existence'

''belief' as trust, as conviction about the rightness of one's actions and adherence to one's affiliations and identifications, is rather more recognizable across cultures'

'Anderson (2003: 124), exploring conversion to Christianity in Iceland, challenges the theological exclusivity implied in the assumption that people must abandon one set of beliefs to substitute another'

'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 Sowetans do no distingusih between witchcraft and sorcery

'wilfully disregarding the rules of 'cultural' precedure the taboos exposes you to the risk of ancestral wrath, in much the same way you might expect punishment from God for committing a sin'- so same amphasis on belief too or just ritual? connected?

'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'

people 'must create and recreate systems of interpretation for themselves as individuals and members of social groups'

though witches operate in secrecy, 'the witches are much more accessible to the experience of ordinary SOwetans than the scientists in white coats'

'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'

'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

'the true witch will appear to be particularly pious, for that way she can deflect attention form her evil intents'

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'

'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'

again reflection of political vilence, 'in MArch 1996, in a far northeastern village, a baboon taken to be a witch in disguise, was killed by 'necklacing', the infamous way in which collaborators were fealt with durig the late apartheid years'

'the practice of mystrical arts' not a retreat into tradition but 'a mode of producing new forms of consciousness' expressing discontent w modernity

'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'

'widespread anxiety about the production and reproduction of welath, an anxiety that freuwently ranslaties into a bitter general oppostion'

political meaning of old lady 'the youthful comrades forged their assertiveidentity agaisnt he foil of a sinister, secretive, gendered gerontocracy; significantly, thos ttacked were referred to as 'old ladies', even wehn they were men'