Anthropology and Religion: Culture

[path_of_one]

Hi, All-

So we’re at that time again, another installment of anthropology and religion. J This week, I thought I’d delve into a discussion of culture- as briefly as I can describe how anthropologists define culture and some basic information about it. Religion is, of course, seen by anthropologists as a part of culture. So by defining culture, we get closer to an anthropological definition of religion.


As we find with defining religion, anthropology has many definitions of culture. (Ah, the joys of social science!) My favorite is a very basic one. Culture is: learned and shared behaviors and ideas. Or you could say it in a fancier way: culture is traditions and customs that govern behaviors and beliefs, transmitted by learning. But it’s all saying the same thing. “A” culture is a group of people who share this stuff. It’s obvious, of course, that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing. This is because culture isn’t really a thing. It’s a concept used to describe socially learned stuff. We always have to keep in mind that in any culture (and religions themselves have a culture too, especially the world religions), there is a lot of internal variety. This, as we’ll see, is because people are not programmed robots. We shape culture, use it, manipulate it… as well as are conditioned by it.


So, let’s break some of this stuff down…
Culture is learned, first of all. There are some things all humans share because it’s how our brains and bodies work, and that stuff isn’t cultural. Culture is stuff we have to learn. But most people think some stuff is “natural” or “innate” and it isn’t- it was learned, but so early in their lives and so subconsciously that they don’t remember learning it. Things like gender roles and how we relate to our environment often feels like this. Learning can happen in many ways: formally (like we have in schools) or informally, through observation or participation, directly or indirectly. We are little sponges when we are young, so we pick up most of the stuff in our first culture without much effort or analysis (generally speaking- I was an odd child that struggled with this, but those of us that are like that are more unusual statistically). This first culture generally feels comfy and cozy to us, and “natural.” This is why most people in the world have been ethnocentric- their own culture feels so right. Subsequent cultures we might need to learn due to immigration or business or vacations are more difficult to learn and often come with a sense of shock, confusion, and discomfort.


Culture is transmitted through symbols- through language, but also through signs and behaviors that are symbolic. Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary. Religion generally uses lots of symbols. Much of mythology is symbolic and religion generally includes ritual, which is symbolic action. When we consider religious ritual, such as baptism, we see these are ways for us to behave symbolically. There is no natural connection of dunking a person in water and attaining or acknowledging salvation. We have extended our thoughts about bathing and the cleansing quality of water to our ideas about spiritual purity.


Now, most of us would like to think we could get away from culture. Especially in the sciences, we want to believe we can approach things objectively. This is the positivist ideology. But, in reality, we can’t. None of us can help that we see our world through the lens of culture. All people do this and it is part of how our brain functions. What is hopeful is that we can analyze our own assumptions and understand our own biases, so although it will always color our perception of the world around us, we will be aware of how it is doing so. This is why I sometimes say things like atheism and theism are not too different on some level. People, no matter who they are, have biases and unfounded assumptions that they trust simply because everyone is culturally conditioned. This is not to say that “reality” doesn’t affect us. Obviously, we bump into things that don’t fit our assumptions. But what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain. Sometimes, though, the dissonance becomes too great (or we’re one of the oddball people that overthinks everything) and we end up changing- either we seek to change or manipulate our culture, or we seek entry to a different culture, or we reinterpret our culture to fit our new ideas. In religion, as I’ll discuss later, this has relevance for both individual changes (such as conversion) and social changes (such as revivals and the origins of new sects and religions).


Culture is not only learned, it is shared. Religion, as a part of culture, is a shared thing. While it may impact individuals, you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion. Religion is a group thing. Culture, and more specifically religion as a part of culture, unifies a group through providing common experiences. Sharing behaviors and ideas helps to limit uncertainty in our lives and makes us more predictable to each other, which helps society function smoothly and limits our individual and collective stress. The common experience we have together generates a common understanding (cultural knowledge), through which we view future events. In this way, we use culture to interpret our lives and to make our decisions. Some parts of culture, everyone learns- things like foodways. Other parts are specialized knowledge and we rely on a smaller pool of people for these behaviors and ideas. Some parts are mostly in our minds, but other parts are embodied- ways of moving (walking, sitting, facial expressions) that become so second nature to us and are so deeply embedded that they feel innate.


Culture is all-encompassing. It is not limited to anything in our lives. If you do it or think it, it is probably at least influenced by your culture. Since culture encompasses our technologies, economy, food… pretty much everything… it’s inescapable. Furthermore, culture is deeply held. Certain core values, basic central values that integrate each culture and distinguish it from others, are very important and generally “right” feeling to members of the culture. This clearly is also applicable to religions. You could say that religion is both a part of a culture (all religions originate in a culture) and are cultures in and of themselves, interacting with other cultures (such as national, ethnic, etc.). Much of what we consider to be “me” is actually culturally conditioned.

Culture is integrated. This is an incredibly important concept to study religion from an anthropological perspective. All parts of culture are intertwined and work together. Changes in one part of culture alters other parts. As I’ll explore later, this has particular relevance for how culture relates to religion- we find that religious structure and key attributes such as authority are in relationship statistically to political and economic structures.


A final key point is that culture is actively and creatively used by people. Culture is not a program that we receive and obey. People individually avoid, manipulate, subvert, and change the rules and patterns of their own culture in an attempt to conform them to their own interests. People interpret the same symbols differently. People band together in subcultures that might attempt to change the larger cultural group’s patterns. And now, with global communication and transportation, some people choose to leave their culture of origin completely. All this is also true for religions. Some religions build in the capacity for people to interpret the symbols differently, for them to contest and change things. Other religions do not.

[path_of_one]

There are a few other basic ideas about culture that are helpful. All cultures experience a disjunction between what could be termed “ideal” and “real” culture. Ideal culture is what people say they should do, and sometimes what people say they do when asked. Real culture is what people actually do (as recorded by an observer). The classic US examples are things like eating fast food and exercising. Most people will falsely represent to a survey how little they exercise and how often they eat fast food. When observed, this becomes clear. It’s easy to say people are lying, but that wouldn’t get into the complexity of how culture works. Generally, people deceive themselves, perceiving their actions differently than they actually are so that they are more aligned with how they think they should be. This has obvious implications for religion as well.

Culture can exist at various levels, and almost all people now belong to multiple cultures at once, particularly in the first world. The modern world religions qualify as international cultures of their own, which overlap with people’s national, ethnic, and other cultures. Some religions are also subcultures of individual larger cultures, such as the Amish being a subculture of the United States. Cultural traits also exist at various levels of inclusion. Universals (common to all humans, but still learned and shared) are very rare, and include things like food sharing (obviously favored by evolution). Generalities are shared by multiple disparate cultures, but not all of them. These are things like nuclear families or polygamy. Particularities are the little details that are found in only individual cultures and make that culture distinctive. Cultures that share many of the same traits often have a history that explains these commonalities, either a history of contact or a similar history of independent invention under similar economic and environmental circumstances. We find similar cultures arise from similar constraints and resources, but there is plenty of diversity to show the capacity of humans for innovation. Likewise, we see the same things with religion.

Culture can be maladaptive or adaptive. Because of the human capacity to misrepresent reality, to ignore evidence, and to maintain cognitive dissonance, cultures can continue for quite some time even if they have deleterious traits. The famous example is Easter Island, but we find this everywhere, including in the modern first world. People making bad decisions individually and collectively abound. Likewise, religions can be very adaptive, allowing people to uphold social justice, environmental sustainability, and all sorts of wonderful human traits… or they can be very maladaptive, increasing suffering, encouraging poor resource management, and reinforcing the worst drives in people.

How do anthropologists deal with cultural diversity in our studies? Ethnocentrism is using the values, norms, and ideals from one’s own culture (or religion) to judge and interpret a person’s behavior or ideas from another culture. It is a human universal and seems to build group solidarity. The downside is that it makes us lousy and interpreting other people (not from our culture) and causes discord between cultures in the modern global context. Obviously, anthropologists try to be diligent about understanding their own ethnocentrism and overcoming it in their research. Some, but not very many, anthropologists go in the extreme opposite direction and are cultural relativists, asserting that cultural values are arbitrary and so there can be no global ethical standards. But most anthropologists are not comfortable with this. There is a long history in the field of working for human rights, and this requires a sense of global ethics- the idea that some rights ought to be universal and unalienable. There is tension between human rights and another thing many of us work toward- cultural rights. Cultural rights means that every culture should be able to preserve their cultural traditions. However, there can be discord between human rights and cultural rights. Some cultures practice slavery, forced marriage, infanticide, etc. What to do about that? There are no easy answers and it is a tricky thing, because most anthropologists are, to some degree, activists. We not only seek to understand others, but we seek social and environmental justice. We want to make the world a better place. So our work is difficult, because we not only must try to understand social processes, but we sometimes seek to change, preserve, or otherwise impact them.

How we get around this (though decision-making can still be quite difficult) is that many of us are analytic relativists. This means that we seek to understand another culture on its own terms, without imposing stereotypes or our own culture’s assumptions, norms, or standards. We are not moral relativists (refusing to judge other cultures according to anything but their own standards), because we want to work for human rights as well. But first, we must understand a culture on its own terms. This provides a solid grounding for both scientifically understanding social processes and therefore for having a clearer vision of how to affect them in positive ways.

Why have culture at all? Why bother with all these moral codes? Why is culture a universal feature of the human species? Well, our survival depends on our living in a group. We are social creatures. Unfortunately, we have individual tendencies that are linked to our self-interest such as greed, sex, and violence that threaten to rip apart the social fabric. So culture steps in to teach us how to cooperate together in some reasonable fashion, to give us predictability and get us to act in ways that are beneficial for the continuity of the group. This is a basic necessity for our species’ survival, as we are not biologically that great at survival without culture and group living. We are puny, slow, have little covering against cold and heat, and our babies take forever to mature and are helpless for a long time. We need groups and culture so we can co-create our environments with the natural world so that we can survive. So we have to maintain these groups and not have them fall apart due to conflicting individual interest, and culture- particularly religion- steps in to do this.

More later on why religion is particularly adept at it…

Peace,
Kim

[Netti-Netti]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

More later on why religion is particularly adept at it…

Looking forward to seeing that. I have some theories of my own on the subject.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

that every culture is kind of a fuzzy thing.

I *did* get that much out of Levi-Straus. Culture is not solidly definable, there is no solid line of demarcation. It is really difficult to say "this culture ends here and across the street is a different culture." Even within a recognized culture, there are so many variables that "facts" can only be given in general terms, because for every rule there are so many exceptions.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Culture is learned, first of all.

Well, since we're at religion and culture, is morality learned? This is the age old philosophical saw, "is morality objective or subjective?," so its a bit of a trick question, but it would be interesting to get your take.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Symbols are signs that have no natural connection to the things they stand for. Take a stop sign, for example. Nothing about a red octagon really says STOP. The association is arbitrary.

Not to be argumentative, but I would be inclined to question this assertion. From what I gather about the development of alphabets, specifically Hebrew, the symbols *originally* were associated with what they represented. Now, I can agree that as the symbols gained new meanings and symbol combinations developed to expand writing to include far more meanings, then the original associations often became lost. The flip side is that in those cultures where symbolic representations did not gain as much combination, the result was an "alphabet" that sometimes includes in the neighborhood of 4000 common characters I think it is in the case of Chinese or Japanese. And then there is hieroglyphic Egypt, and what a mess that alphabet is!

Originally Posted by path_of_one

what is clear is that people can hold a great deal of cognitive dissonance and people have a great capacity for ignoring information, so we generally can trip happily down the trail of our assumptions despite evidence to the contrary. We either alter the evidence in our mind to support our assumptions, or we ignore it, or dismiss it, and sometimes even hold it as true and also its opposite case as true simultaneously. Such is the nature of the human brain.

Hallelujah! Preach it, sister!

Originally Posted by path_of_one

you can’t have a religion of only one person. You can have spirituality and (I’d argue) philosophy, but you can’t have religion.

I could trend to easily mince semantics. One may call it spirituality, or spirit quest, or faith walk, or whatever name one might wish...but the end result is the expression of the religion of the individual person. I think William James was pretty emphatic about that, from what little I've read.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Religion is a group thing.

And the way I understand W. James to have clarified this is by adding the qualifier "institutional" to the front of the term religion when it is in the group context. That is how one can distinguish between individual and group expressions of religion. At least, it works that way for me...

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Obviously, anthropologists try to be diligent about understanding their own ethnocentrism and overcoming it in their research... There is a long history in the field of working for human rights, and this requires a sense of global ethics- the idea that some rights ought to be universal and unalienable.

Ummm, isn't this a glaring contradiction? Working for human rights, while a noble cause, should be differentiated from scholarship. How can one be aware of one's own biases, and yet wish to impose those biases in the name of "human rights," or whatever *seemingly* noble aspiration?

I mean this in the gentlest way, but this sounds to me like the title "anthropologist" is a subversive cover for a nosey nellie cultural elitist looking to impose her ideals on someone else's culture. I guess in that sense I am a cultural relativist. At the very least I believe in "live and let live." And not just to my own personal standards.

To clarify, were I in a position where *an individual case* presented itself, I might step in, say to give food to someone hungry or medical care to someone in need. But to be a social activist in another culture, hiding behind my scholarly credentials, to me is disingenuous.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

There is tension between human rights and another thing many of us work toward- cultural rights. Cultural rights means that every culture should be able to preserve their cultural traditions.

I think that is where the US in particular, and the West in general, get themselves into a lot of deep doo-doo with other cultures. We pay lip service to cultural rights, while we step in in an attempt to impose what we feel are human rights.

Don't get me wrong. If activism is the modus operandi, then by all means exercise political activism...but don't hide behind a fascade and call it scholarship. Goodness knows how many cultures have been obliterated by well-meaning but short sighted powers in the past.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

We are social creatures. Unfortunately, we have individual tendencies that are linked to our self-interest such as greed, sex, and violence that threaten to rip apart the social fabric.

I'm pretty sure I missed something..."sex...threatens to rip apart the social fabric?" This is 2008, right? I didn't fall into a time warp and end up at a suffragette meeting in 1908, just in time to kick off prohibition?

Thanks for everything, Kim. I hope you know the ribbing is good natured, but I hope you also see some of the conflict I see with the traditional presentation.

BTW, are you a structural-functionalist, a conflict theorist, or some other?

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Well, since we're at religion and culture, is morality learned? This is the age old philosophical saw, "is morality objective or subjective?," so its a bit of a trick question, but it would be interesting to get your take.

I'd say both. I believe human beings are born with a conscience. This is part of my own spiritual beliefs.

However, this conscience is without much specificity. We can feel suffering and empathy for others' suffering, and we understand that causing suffering is wrong. We know we should love others.

Culture steps in and tells us how to effectively do that, plus a whole lot more, in our given society. A lot of moral rules that are culturally given are really kind of arbitrary when you think about them. But they work to sustain social life in that particular culture, and most people don't question their values until they come up against other, very different cultures.

Not to be argumentative, but I would be inclined to question this assertion. From what I gather about the development of alphabets, specifically Hebrew, the symbols *originally* were associated with what they represented.

There is certainly a fuzziness between symbol and non-symbol. But even the hieroglyphic languages are highly stylized and so symbolic, which is why it takes people time to translate and figure them out. Art is also like this- how much of art is just transferring images and how much of it is symbolic? Culture is different from other animals' social norms in that all cultures use symbols, and other animals do not seem to use symbols. However, at least some of them are capable of understanding and using symbols, even if they don't come up with it on their own. Other primates, of course, but also dogs, horses, dolphins...

I could trend to easily mince semantics. One may call it spirituality, or spirit quest, or faith walk, or whatever name one might wish...but the end result is the expression of the religion of the individual person. I think William James was pretty emphatic about that, from what little I've read.

Exactly. There is a social phenomenon and then there is the individual phenomenon within that social context (or not, as the case may be).

And the way I understand W. James to have clarified this is by adding the qualifier "institutional" to the front of the term religion when it is in the group context. That is how one can distinguish between individual and group expressions of religion. At least, it works that way for me...

I think that works on one level, but the problem is that most people never read James and so you have this "I'm spiritual but not religious" thing in the US. I think there is also an issue there in that the process of someone's personal religion within an institutional religion may be different than the process of someone building a syncretic spirituality (for all intents and purposes, a person who has no religious social group who pulls from various traditions to create something highly individualized and new). I think this was highly uncommon until after globalization opened up a virtual marketplace (literally, now with the internet) of religious traditions. People used to have few options, so they might come to some very interesting personal experiences and ideas, but most people would still be tied to a single tradition. Now, people can and do go to the religion grocery store and just fill up the cart from a variety of aisles.

I'm not sure what the best way is to describe that phenomenon and I haven't studied it professionally to evaluate how similar or different it is to individualization within religions.

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Ummm, isn't this a glaring contradiction? Working for human rights, while a noble cause, should be differentiated from scholarship.

Why? I would hope that scholarship would inform us of how to better assure people have access to food, clean water, basic health care, and the ability to live without fear of violence or slavery. I think that's how most of us look at it. Working toward human rights without studying and understanding how a culture works and what is likely to occur seems dangerous. Studying a culture (often 3rd world) and making money off doing it while doing nothing to assist people who face great challenges seems selfish.

How can one be aware of one's own biases, and yet wish to impose those biases in the name of "human rights," or whatever *seemingly* noble aspiration?

I would say there are biases and then there are biases. But then, I am informed first by my spirituality and then by my discipline. I'm not a robot of science. It may be a bias that I think people should not be enslaved or raped or murdered, that I disagree with genocide, and that I think all people should get basic health care, food, shelter, and clean water. But I think it's a bias most of the world shares, and I rarely see the person who is raped or enslaved saying that they think it's great and yes, please support this aspect of our culture so that it happens to my children, too.

Bias is a matter of perspective. There is no one right answer. We have to study the conflict within cultures as well as between, and then ask ourselves if we are supporting people decrying a practice from outside the culture or if we are supporting people who would otherwise be voiceless from within the culture. Even then, there are some issues that come up- the debates that rage about female circumcision come to mind.

I mean this in the gentlest way, but this sounds to me like the title "anthropologist" is a subversive cover for a nosey nellie cultural elitist looking to impose her ideals on someone else's culture. I guess in that sense I am a cultural relativist. At the very least I believe in "live and let live." And not just to my own personal standards.

But what you have to remember is that we are generally not speaking about our personal standards. We are speaking about the conflict and inequality inherent in societies. We can choose to ignore such inequality and exploitation, and so support the elite who perpetrate it. Or we can choose to support those who are exploited. By doing nothing, we make a choice just the same. Ethics in anthropology is a very difficult matter and a struggle for every person in the field. It's easy on the outside to make these sorts of generalizations, but I could give you dozens of scenarios that, when you picture yourself in them, you see how difficult the ethics become. It's all well and good to say "live and let live." But when you are somewhere and you see that one person's way of living harms another person's... there is the dilemma, right? We could all just ignore such injustices, but I don't feel free to personally, such as my commitment to Christ is. So I get the additional layer of my spirituality, which informs my passion for social action. But I want informed social action where I understand what is going on and what the consequences will be.

To clarify, were I in a position where *an individual case* presented itself, I might step in, say to give food to someone hungry or medical care to someone in need. But to be a social activist in another culture, hiding behind my scholarly credentials, to me is disingenuous.

In most of our cases, we are presented with many "individual cases." We live in these societies and groups, sometimes for very extended periods of time. People in some of these societies are killed, raped, enslaved, or live in extreme poverty. Anthropologists watch babies die from basic illnesses that would be a non-issue in their home country. They watch people get arbitrarily kicked off their land. They watch governments make people disappear. They watch people starve. But we are individual people. We don't have the ability to go out into the field with enough food, enough medical supplies... for everyone. So what do we do?

What people fail to realize is that most of the time, anthropologists act in accordance with what the people, as a whole, want. Others will criticize an anthropologist for teaching a community English or setting up a health care center. But we are told to ask the community what it would like for us to give back in exchange for the privilege of their time and information and patience. If the community wants to learn English or have a new health center, then isn't it just as condescending as not for an anthropologist to refuse community-wide help, telling them "Oh, no- you do not know what is good for the continuity of your culture. You should stay just the way you are indefinitely." Some communities want larger help still- they demand social action and to have their story told to the world community.

The ethics are about as complex as it gets... lots of players, conflict, serious issues.

We pay lip service to cultural rights, while we step in in an attempt to impose what we feel are human rights.

In any case, cultural rights and human rights are often at odds.

If activism is the modus operandi, then by all means exercise political activism...but don't hide behind a fascade and call it scholarship. Goodness knows how many cultures have been obliterated by well-meaning but short sighted powers in the past.

We are taught now that we should listen to those in the culture we study for information about how they would like us to assist, if anything.

I don't see any line between activism and scholarship in pretty much any discipline. I do see it in individuals, and it tends to make their scholarship unrealistic, ungrounded, and dry. Activism without scholarship is even worse. Lots of action and no informed decisions.

I'm pretty sure I missed something..."sex...threatens to rip apart the social fabric?" This is 2008, right? I didn't fall into a time warp and end up at a suffragette meeting in 1908, just in time to kick off prohibition?

No, you heard me right. First off, it's only in our modern first world with our paternity tests and our rights for women, and jobs for nearly everyone, that allows people to have single-parent families and be unconcerned with inheritance. This stuff is really important in other parts of the world, and a sex free-for-all is really problematic in those contexts.

Secondly, even in our society, it is more than apparent that sex is still a rather emotionally invested activity and linked to lots of issues with familial and social stability. Perhaps because we are not socialist and people struggle to pay for raising children and having a household, we are not to the level of Iceland in our sexual freedom. We talk a good line in the US, but at the end of the day, there's a whole lot of jealousy, rape, domestic violence, assault... We use sex to sell stuff through making people feel bad about their bodies. We have serious issues. Is this sexual freedom?

Thanks for everything, Kim. I hope you know the ribbing is good natured, but I hope you also see some of the conflict I see with the traditional presentation.

Oh, absolutely! I laughed a lot and these are things that usually are discussed if in a face-to-face group, so they ought to be discussed! Much of what you're picking up on is the same stuff that (within the discipline) we debate about.

BTW, are you a structural-functionalist, a conflict theorist, or some other?

I'm a bit of a lot of things. Why limit myself to one theory when I can use several?

In all seriousness, the stuff I deal with you simply can't adequately approach through single theoretical paradigms.

Theoretical perspectives that I heavily lean on are functionalism, conflict/Marxism and variants of this, cultural model theory, and integrating theories on personality and learning style from psychology and education.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I'd say both. I believe human beings are born with a conscience. This is part of my own spiritual beliefs.

However, this conscience is without much specificity. We can feel suffering and empathy for others' suffering, and we understand that causing suffering is wrong. We know we should love others.

Culture steps in and tells us how to effectively do that, plus a whole lot more, in our given society. A lot of moral rules that are culturally given are really kind of arbitrary when you think about them. But they work to sustain social life in that particular culture, and most people don't question their values until they come up against other, very different cultures.

OK, I can see that. I agree in the sense that there is some abiguity as one looks farther back in time, but I suppose that is an occupational hazard related to the lack of written language. Still, it is a longstanding puzzle to me why on earth neolithic cultures would go through the motions of developing religious rituals if there were no valid reason to do so?

In my mind, this totally negates any atheist tendency. If to an unspoiled and uncrowded mind, and perhaps eyes better able to see "spiritual things," religious ritual was deemed a necessity; then there must be something more to the story...a something more that maybe cannot be quantified or qualified in the traditional academic manner. I always struggle with trying to make this point, so if it seems unintelligible, just ignore it.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

There is certainly a fuzziness between symbol and non-symbol. But even the hieroglyphic languages are highly stylized and so symbolic, which is why it takes people time to translate and figure them out.

Stylization seems to me a necessary evil to creating a symbolic set to build a language from...it would be kinda silly to reinvent the wheel at every turn, wouldn't it?

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Art is also like this- how much of art is just transferring images and how much of it is symbolic?

Agreed. It never ceases to amaze me how lifelike the cave paintings are, some are so "real" they look like they could step right off the wall. Yet, one of the next major art sets we have, that of Egypt, is so stylized as to be almost comical. It certainly demands an acquired taste to fully appreciate it, perspective and proportion are so distorted. I wonder sometimes if Picasso took his hints from early Egypt (was it cubism?).

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I think that works on one level, but the problem is that most people never read James and so you have this "I'm spiritual but not religious" thing in the US.

I am of the opinion that James was perhaps the most influential thinker nobody knows about. At best he is a footnote, usually, but the people he has influenced! Freud and Jung, just to name two.

I think a part of the problem surrounding James is the nature of the subject matter. I mean, how much interest can religion elicit in an atheist academic environment? Then, when you step out onto the street and approach the average person to whom religion is a significant and substantial subject, and they typically are firmly entrenched in what they believe..."this is the way it is and I have no desire to consider anything that says otherwise." So religion as a social study kinda gets relegated to an interesting aside, but not really pertinent in any more than a philosophical or theoretical way.

Then too, there is the close historical relation with politics, which leaves some consideration. Academically, politics is easier to trace. At the same time, politics and religion are both delicate taboo subjects that have to be handled tactfully. I think some researchers have a hard time distinguishing the difference between a surgeon's scalpel and a machete.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I think there is also an issue there in that the process of someone's personal religion within an institutional religion may be different than the process of someone building a syncretic spirituality (for all intents and purposes, a person who has no religious social group who pulls from various traditions to create something highly individualized and new). I think this was highly uncommon until after globalization opened up a virtual marketplace (literally, now with the internet) of religious traditions. People used to have few options, so they might come to some very interesting personal experiences and ideas, but most people would still be tied to a single tradition. Now, people can and do go to the religion grocery store and just fill up the cart from a variety of aisles.

Oooops, looks like I might have got a little sidetracked with James. OK, smorgasbord religion...frankly I think this is a disturbing trend, for a variety of reasons. I also think it predates the internet in earnest by at least a generation. Maybe it takes getting away from the left coast to be able to more fully appreciate the immersion in multi-culturalism.

There were movements in the States as much as a hundred years ago and more, ladies' garden circles or tea clutches, that were willing to explore the diversity of religion. I read somewhere that the earliest Hindu "church" in the US was in Southern Cal in the 1920's I think it was. Even if I am mistaken, Hinduism was available for a lot longer than just the last 20 years or so. And then you have the Eastern traditions of China and Japan that have been in California since the Gold Rush. Look at all the Coolies that built the railroads...so Buddhism and its variants as well as Taoism have been in California for even longer than Hinduism.

By the time we get to Woodstock, religions are a half a million strong...sorry, couldn't resist. But the whole Beat and Hippie movements, endorsed and promoted by such as the Beatles, did a great deal to promote alternate religious exploration. The 60's were a time when Satanism and various Pagan expressions "blossomed" so to speak, witchcraft came on the scene with Gardner in Britain in the 40's and made some pretty serious inroads in the 60's in Calif.

Now, I agree the internet has made it easier to explore alternate religions...but what of the quality of the material being discovered?

I've discussed many times elsewhere in other threads why I have reservations with this concept of "spiritual without religion," so I'll not dwell on it here. But I do think it is a disservice to each religion so...commercialized? Smorgasbord religion pretends that profound teachings can be had for the picking and choosing and the mere swiping of a credit card...

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Why? I would hope that scholarship would inform us of how to better assure people have access to food, clean water, basic health care, and the ability to live without fear of violence or slavery. I think that's how most of us look at it. Working toward human rights without studying and understanding how a culture works and what is likely to occur seems dangerous. Studying a culture (often 3rd world) and making money off doing it while doing nothing to assist people who face great challenges seems selfish.

Why? Because scholarship should be as neutral as possible if it is to even be considered as genuine scholarship.

You mean to tell me it is possible to earn money for studying another culture? Sign me up! I mean no disrespect, but that is another consideration as to why I haven't put more effort into chasing a sheepskin...what the heck to do with it once I've spent all those student loans to get it? Teach? Not that there's anything wrong with teaching, but it sure seems that the potential to earn an income to feed a family is considerably broadened with a degree in...oh...business, medicine, engineering, law...practically any other field it seems.

Sorry, "Good Will Hunting" flashbacks...

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I would say there are biases and then there are biases. But then, I am informed first by my spirituality and then by my discipline. I'm not a robot of science. It may be a bias that I think people should not be enslaved or raped or murdered, that I disagree with genocide, and that I think all people should get basic health care, food, shelter, and clean water. But I think it's a bias most of the world shares, and I rarely see the person who is raped or enslaved saying that they think it's great and yes, please support this aspect of our culture so that it happens to my children, too.

But we have to be careful with what we think is "better." Let's say I agree with you, for the sake of argument. (At this point I haven't said whether I do or not agree with you, and that is intentional) I enter a culture to study it, and I bring with me my preconceived notions of what human rights entail. And, over time, I do what I can to instill these new ideas into this culture. (No culture I am familiar with believes murder or rape to be acceptable behavior, within the group. Towards an outgroup that may be different, but if you are "in" you are safe) This isn't leaving me much to work with...OK, we'll try slavery. Let's say there is some form of indentured servitude traditional and socially accepted. Does Nepal come to mind? If it is indeed traditional, then it has been going on for generations, and both the slaves and the masters understand their positions in society...what roles they fill, what is expected of them, etc, for social cohesion and stability. Now, in I come and I undo this element of social cohesion, I manage through some super-human feat to purge this social ill from the whole of that society.

I have just ruined that society. How can I possibly speak of cultural rights with a straight face after *personally* tinkering with and adulterating that culture? I am no longer suited to *impersonal and unbiased* observation of that culture.

Now, let's carry this one more step...I go in with the *trained* assumption that it is my moral duty to change that culture to what I feel are "human" rights. It doesn't stop with the biggies; rape, murder, slavery, child abuse, etc. It becomes my moral imperitive to impose my ideals of decorum on everything I can influence...sound familiar? It is called "Westernization."

I'm sorry but, I see what you are describing as the social activist equivalent of the JW doorknocker...the end result is cultural proselyzation.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Bias is a matter of perspective. There is no one right answer. We have to study the conflict within cultures as well as between, and then ask ourselves if we are supporting people decrying a practice from outside the culture or if we are supporting people who would otherwise be voiceless from within the culture. Even then, there are some issues that come up- the debates that rage about female circumcision come to mind.

"Bias is a matter of perspective." LOL OK, not to seem impertinent, but, yeah-and the point is? I'm sorry, I'm still having a good chuckle at the overstatement of the obvious.

I see it a lot in various academic circles...they preach the mantra "no bias allowed." Or, if there must be bias then account for it and leave it at the door. You said as much elsewhere.

But what I am seeing in practice, and you allude to it here, is that what is preached is not what is practiced.

There are a lot of cultural ideosyncrasies that anyone can find distasteful...some cultures eat dog soup. If I find it personally offensive to eat dog, is it mine to impose my social preferences on that culture? I can excuse my POV by any means I like...animal rights, health issues, what ever. But cannot that culture look at me and say, "but you eat that nasty old swine!" What's more, you eat it all ground up and chemically processed into some unnatural form and boil it in water for way too long and serve it at amusement parks and baseball fields-and we find THAT offensive.

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

But what you have to remember is that we are generally not speaking about our personal standards.

Oh? Would that I could be so sure...

Originally Posted by path_of_one

We are speaking about the conflict and inequality inherent in societies. We can choose to ignore such inequality and exploitation, and so support the elite who perpetrate it. Or we can choose to support those who are exploited.

We already make those choices. Some of those choices are out of our hands, in which case our choice is to go to that country or not. By going to France, do I not choose to support the elite of that nation according to what you say here? I certainly doubt any sociologist or anthropologist going to France would go out of their way to defy the French government on behalf of the homeless of Paris...

Yes, I chose an extreme example. Somehow I don't see much difference if we end up trading Zimbabwe for France. "The poor ye have with you always." But no single person can stand against a government, not without a whole lot of outside intervention...which is what creates a lot of diplomatic problems.

Tao and I had a discussion a little while back, after the tsunami hit Burma. He wanted military backing to enforce giving aid to the displaced people. While I applaud his noble goal, I could not get him to see the fallacy in his solution...it would be a provocation of war to use the military to *force* aid that was not wanted, irrespective of the implied need.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

By doing nothing, we make a choice just the same. Ethics in anthropology is a very difficult matter and a struggle for every person in the field. It's easy on the outside to make these sorts of generalizations, but I could give you dozens of scenarios that, when you picture yourself in them, you see how difficult the ethics become.

I would love the exercise such would provide. I will not discount that being on the outside I am free to make these generalizations, but theory and philosophy must begin somewhere. I understand practical application can get messy, that is not lost on me. But I still feel we are (or should be) talking of two entirely different things...academics and activism.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

In most of our cases, we are presented with many "individual cases." We live in these societies and groups, sometimes for very extended periods of time. People in some of these societies are killed, raped, enslaved, or live in extreme poverty. Anthropologists watch babies die from basic illnesses that would be a non-issue in their home country. They watch people get arbitrarily kicked off their land. They watch governments make people disappear. They watch people starve. But we are individual people. We don't have the ability to go out into the field with enough food, enough medical supplies... for everyone. So what do we do?

Not to sound callous (which will be impossible even though it is not intended), but people are born and die every day in every culture. People live in poverty in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. People still deal with institutionalized legal prejudicial treatment in this country...I know from personal first hand experience. Seems to me we need every bit as much to look at ourselves before we start passing judgement on others.

Tragedy is a part of life. I wish it wasn't, but suffering is universal. I suppose the next level of argument is that of degree...sure, I live in an air conditioned concrete block home, not in a stick and mud hut. But you have to admit as an anthropologist that if I did live in a stick and mud hut in this culture I would be an aberration, and probably ostracized for it. So it is not something I should feel guilty for, being born into the culture that I have.

Having said that (so that I can defuse any accusation of insensitivity), were I observing in a stick and mud hut culture, I could not reasonably expect to live in a concrete house...nor should I demand that concrete houses be built for the natives I am observing. Presented with a specific instance of hardship over which I could aid and assist, yes that would be the human thing to do. If I have extra food, if I can bandage a wound or help dig out a collapsed house or help dig a new latrine...of course, this is nothing to upset the cultural balance, and it is not imposing my cultural preferences on another.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

What people fail to realize is that most of the time, anthropologists act in accordance with what the people, as a whole, want. Others will criticize an anthropologist for teaching a community English or setting up a health care center. But we are told to ask the community what it would like for us to give back in exchange for the privilege of their time and information and patience. If the community wants to learn English or have a new health center, then isn't it just as condescending as not for an anthropologist to refuse community-wide help, telling them "Oh, no- you do not know what is good for the continuity of your culture. You should stay just the way you are indefinitely." Some communities want larger help still- they demand social action and to have their story told to the world community.

This would be a new wrinkle. If asked for that would be another matter. I would still hold reservations about how it is asked for though...as in how much were they pressured and how much propaganda was used to sway them. If it is entirely the idea and request of the natives, then I have no disagreement. Even the slightest "helpful" suggestion would tip that agreement in my mind.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

In any case, cultural rights and human rights are often at odds.

Yes.

Originally Posted by path_of_one

Oh, absolutely! I laughed a lot and these are things that usually are discussed if in a face-to-face group, so they ought to be discussed! Much of what you're picking up on is the same stuff that (within the discipline) we debate about.

Well, I'm doing my bit to give you a discussion. I could use some help from others though, I don't want to seem like I'm hogging the show, or your attention.

(I can hear the whispers in the back of the room..."teacher's pet"...and they aren't saying it nicely)

Originally Posted by path_of_one

I'm a bit of a lot of things. Why limit myself to one theory when I can use several?

In all seriousness, the stuff I deal with you simply can't adequately approach through single theoretical paradigms.

Theoretical perspectives that I heavily lean on are functionalism, conflict/Marxism and variants of this, cultural model theory, and integrating theories on personality and learning style from psychology and education.

OK, makes sense. I guess that's why sociology and its variants are considered "soft" sciences.

[path_of_one]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Still, it is a longstanding puzzle to me why on earth neolithic cultures would go through the motions of developing religious rituals if there were no valid reason to do so?

To the best of my knowledge, most anthropologists consider religion to have social functions and belief in supernatural agents (such as they are usually called) to be due to the way the brain works in humans. They don't think we're responding to something real that is outside ourselves, but rather something within ourselves- in our thought patterns as human beings. Hence, these things are more or less universal (along with art and music, other stuff that seems little tied to evolutionary benefit until it is used socially).

Obviously, I would disagree on the basis of my own spiritual experience, but that is neither here nor there scientifically.

Agreed. It never ceases to amaze me how lifelike the cave paintings are, some are so "real" they look like they could step right off the wall. Yet, one of the next major art sets we have, that of Egypt, is so stylized as to be almost comical. It certainly demands an acquired taste to fully appreciate it, perspective and proportion are so distorted. I wonder sometimes if Picasso took his hints from early Egypt (was it cubism?).

What is interesting to me is that people seemed to have the stylized and symbolic stuff down more or less from the beginning (Venus statue, anyone?) but it took us a looooong time to develop realism in our art. There is something inherently fascinating about that.

I think a part of the problem surrounding James is the nature of the subject matter. I mean, how much interest can religion elicit in an atheist academic environment?

Well, it generates lots of interest in psychology and comparative religion. Not as much in anthropology. I think part of that is where the jobs are. I'd love to study religion, but I need work and jobs come from the more applied stuff- environmental/natural resources, war/violence, gender, medicine.

I think some researchers have a hard time distinguishing the difference between a surgeon's scalpel and a machete.

I entirely agree. It is difficult to gain trust and a good rapport with your informants if your basic belief system (atheism) is entirely against theirs. It is difficult to participate adequately if you can't participate in the way they do. It is a topic I have a problem with in anthropology in general. We all talk a good line about being open to what the "natives" think and participating with them, but when the natives are our next door Baptist neighbors...

I also think it predates the internet in earnest by at least a generation. Maybe it takes getting away from the left coast to be able to more fully appreciate the immersion in multi-culturalism.

That's probably true (about the left coast) . I sometimes forget I was raised in a very multi-cultural environment and only remember this distinction when I go elsewhere and realize how aw