Ethnography of Ethiopia

1. Chapter 3
Religious entities and concepts
The Anthropology of belief
 Melford Spiro…. American cultural anthropologist
specializing in religion....defined belief ...
 … any cognition concerning human beings, society, or
the world that is held to be true.
 “religious belief -any belief that directly or indirectly relates
to beings who are held to possess greater power than
humans and animals,
 with whom human beings sustain relationship (interactions
and transactions), and who can affect human lives for good
or for evil.
 ,“religious” beliefs are beliefs related to supernatural
beings.

2. Cont...
 Spiro .. affirming the conventional view that
religious beliefs are beliefs about supernatural
beings.
 But more interestingly for our purposes, he
proposes that belief is not unique to religion;
religious beliefs are a subset of beliefs in
general.
 What is distinctive about beliefs in general is
that they are “cognitions”… developed in
the mind) and that they are “held to be true”
by those people who have such cognitions.

3. Cont....
 Rodney Needham. ..Brtish social
anthropologist.. an extended analysis of belief in a
cross-cultural context.
 belief is a much fuzzier concept… than we
realize and that it is a much more culturally
specific, rather than culturally universal, concept
than we think.
 He discusses, for instance, a wide variety of
cultures and languages in which the word for
and experience of belief are very complex and
not necessarily like our everyday notions of them.

4. Cont...
 A further problem with the belief concept in cross-
cultural studies is that it has both “objective” and
“subjective” aspects.
 In other words, “belief” has a propositional and a
psychological nature.
 As an objective, propositional issue, a belief
constitutes a “truth claim,” an assertion about
something “real” in the world.
 If a person is said to “believe” something—or to
“believe in” something—that means that the
person takes it to be true.

5. Cont...
 As a “subjective” or psychological issue, beliefs are
additionally and necessarily construed as mental states of
individuals.
 Spiro’s response is that the psychological element of belief is
not one-dimensional but multidimensional, yielding at least
five levels of personal belief:
 acquaintance or familiarity with the belief,
 understanding of the belief in the conventional way
(…with faith,
 advancing the belief as “true,”
 holding the belief as important or central to the believer’s
life, and
 following the belief as a motivational or guiding force

6. Cont...
 Even in vernacular English, “belief” is a
word with three quite distinct senses.
 1st it can be used in the propositional
sense, to claim that a proposition is true,
such as “God exists
 2nd , it can be used in the sense of
“confidence” or “trust,” as in “I believe my
wife will pick me up from the airport”; here,
the existence of my wife and the airport are
not the issue.

7. Cont...
 3rd , it can be used in the sense of
“commitment” or “value,” as in “I
believe in democracy,”..
 in which one is not disputing the
existence of democracy but the goodness
of it.
 These senses can be conjoined or
disjoined in any particular language or
religion, and their interrelation can change
over time.

8. Religious entities ( bodies) : Beings & Forces
 religious entities : energies or principles that
underlie the world.
 beings and forces
 “supernatural
 “supernatural entities are quite “natural,” or on
the borderline between natural and not, from other
religions’ perspectives.
 Spiritual beings
 Human Spirits
 Non Human Sprit
 Spiritual Forces

9. Spiritual beings
 Most, religions have notions about more or less
well-known spiritual beings.
 Spiritual beings are different in some (but not
every) way.
 In some versions they do not have physical
bodies, or
 they might not occupy space or
 might be able to coexist in the same space as
physical bodies, or
 they can move and act in ways that defy
natural law, or
 they do not age or do not die.

10. Cont..
 That leaves a great deal of room for diversity, but
the one thing that spiritual beings have in common
is that they are beings, that is,
 that they are individuals with wills and
“minds” and “personalities” of their own.
 Some observers have attempted to distinguish
“spirits” from “gods.”
 Levy, Mageo, and Howard defined…, spirits and
gods stand at opposite ends of “a continuum of
culturally defined spiritual entities ranging
from well defined, socially encompassing
beings at one pole, to socially marginal,
fleeting presences at the other” (1996: 11).

11. Cont...
 Apparently, gods are intended to be the
former, spirits the latter.
 They offer four variables by which gods and
spirits differ—
 structure
 personhood,
Experience and
morality.

12. Cont...
 Structure; gods are the focus of more
detailed social institutions, including
priesthoods, shrines, and festivals, as well as
specific territories;
 spirits are not the subject of such elaboration,
being more “fluid,” “emergent, contingent,
and unexpected” (Levy et al. 1996: 14).
 Personhood: gods are more physically
and socially human,
 while spirits are “vague [. . .] only minimally
persons” (Levy et al. 1996: 15).

13. Cont....
 Experience: gods are actually less directly
experienced
 whereas spirits are more commonly encountered
and often more immediately the objects of human
concern.
 Morality: gods are more likely agents and
paragons of moral order than spirits, who tend to
be “extramoral” or evil.
 Gods, they argue, “are clear models for social
order” (Levy et al. 1996: 21) who establish and
sanction human morality, but
 spirits “are threats to order and frequently must
be purged so that order may be re-established”

14. Cont...
 Spirits may be the objects of extremely
involved cultic behavior,
 while gods (especially distant “high gods”) may
be so abstract and remote as to invoke little
human interest and activity.
 Also, spirits, since they are more immediate,
are often better known and actually more like
social persons than gods.

15. Cont...
 It is probably more apt to consider “spirit” the
most general level of classification, with
“god” as a subset of this category.
 In other words, “gods” are a particular kind of
“spirit,” a kind that may not exist in all
religious systems.
 Indeed, most religions depend on the notion
that humans are or have a “spiritual”
component too—or primarily.

16. Human Spirits
 One of the most persistent and “natural” ideas
across cultures is that humans have a spiritual
part or parts, which cohabit(s) the world with the
body to some extent and which survive(s) the
body (for a time at least) after death.
 In the Christian tradition, this is called the “soul.”
 In Hinduism, it is known as the atman.
 It has not only different names but different
qualities and dispositions in different societies.
 The crucial thing is that humans, even now, are
spiritual beings in a manner of speaking.

17. Cont..
 Again in the Christian tradition, it is
asserted that this spiritual-human part is
implanted in us from outside (it was originally
“breathed into” the first created human),
 dwells in our body in some obscure way, and
 detaches from the body at death to continue
its existence in some other form.

18. Cont..
 The precise characteristics of the human
spirit—alive or dead—vary widely from culture
to culture.
 The notion that we are most familiar with is a
single, permanent, integral soul, not situated
in any particular part of the body, which
preserves our “personality” or individuality in
its single, permanent, integral destination
(namely, heaven or hell).
 That is not a universal notion. Some cultures
tell of multiple souls or a soul with multiple
parts.

19. Cont...
 The Tausug of the Philippines believed that humans
are composed of four parts:
 The body, the mind, the “liver” or emotion, and the
soul.
 The soul itself is composed of four parts:
 The transcendent soul, which is all-good and always
in the spiritual realm, even while you are alive;
 the life-soul, which is related to the blood and
attached to the body but which wanders from the body
in dreams;
 the breath, which is the essence of life and always
attached to the body; and
 the spirit-soul, the person’s “shadow” (Kiefer 1972).

20. Cont..
 The Nupe of Africa identified three “soul-
like entities” in addition to the body:
 The rayi was the life force,
 The fifingi was the “shadow” which remained
visible after death and occasionally haunted
people physically or in their dreams, and
 The kuci was the “personal soul” that entered
the body at birth and gradually integrated with
it.

21. Cont....
 Of course, the ultimate “spiritual” fate of
former humans also varies from society to
society.
 Even in our own age and society, many people
believe that souls can become ghosts, at
least temporarily.
 Ghosts are spiritual parts of dead humans that
continue to exist and participate in the human
world, usually to our detriment.

22. Cont...
 Ghost ….remain around the house or village
and haunt its living inhabitants;
 These bad ghosts camped on the edge of the
village, especially near burial grounds,
 Other, if not most, societies also fear or worry
about their dead.
 The Dani of New Guinea too claimed that
most ghosts were malevolent and tended to
attack living adults, usually from the front
(Heider 1979).

23. Cont...
 One Christian belief is that dead souls become angels, either
disembodied or embodied spirits in another, “heavenly”
dimension or reality.
 Sometimes these angels interact with humans, as in
“guardian angels”;
 Finally, in some religions or sects of religions, especially
pious and virtuous former humans can become saints, who
also may continue to act on behalf of humans, protecting
travelers and the like.
 In Islam, the veneration of saints is common, particularly in
certain “popular” sects and interpretations, and prayers,
rituals, and vigils may be held at their tombs or shrines.
 An ancestor spirit is the nonphysical aspect of a dead kin-
group member that continues to inhabit the area around the
family and to interact with them, for better or for worse.

24. Nonhuman Spirits
 Many other kinds of spiritual beings never
were and never will be humans.
 Perhaps the most common of these are the
“nature spirits,” the spirits that “are” or “are
in” plants and/or animals and/or natural
objects and/or natural forces.
 This was the observation that led Tylor to
formulate what he termed animism.

25. Cont...
 Animism, derived from the Latin anima for
soul, or more literally “alive” or “moving,”
 is the general conception that nonhuman
beings can and do have spiritual parts too.
 Some entire animal and plant species are
spiritually important, and others are just
natural beings

26. Cont...
 This relationship between humans and nonhuman
material objects is sometimes called totemism, a
term not much in current usage.
 The idea behind totemism is.. an individual human
or a group (family, clan, village, etc.) of humans
has a unique spiritual relationship with a
particular species or object, such that this
species or object is the person’s or group’s
“totem.”
 The relationship should result in some special
behavior toward the totem, such as not eating
it;
 however, some societies do eat their totem

27. Cont...
 The Ainu of northern Japan, for example,
claimed that plants, animals, and even man-made
objects were “spirit-owning” or “spirit-bearing”
beings who had to be treated accordingly.
 In “life” there were restrictions on how humans
could interact with them, and even (and
perhaps mainly) in death these restrictions held;
 for instance, they had to maintain a separate
location for the disposal of each type of spirit-
owning being, called keyohniusi, and
 negligence of their duties toward these beings
could bring sickness or worse (Ohnuki-Tierney
1974).

28. Cont...
 the spirits of or in natural objects or places like
hills, rocks, ponds, and whirlpools.
 many societies also recognize spirits that are not
attached to any specific material forms but have
their own independent “reality.”
 These beings may be good, bad, or indifferent
to humans;
 they may be helpful, harmful, mischievous, or
unaware of their effect on humans.
 Such beings include demons, devils, and any of
a wide array of culturally local characters …jinns
or genies (in Arabic cultures) and many others.

29. Cont......
 Of the nonhuman spiritual beings, the greatest
are the gods.
 There is no perfect, universal definition for
gods….,
 but we tend to think of them as extremely
powerful, mostly moral or beneficent,
usually creative, and utterly “other” spiritual
beings;
 by “utterly other” we mean that they are not
part of nature or in nature nor do they always
interact directly with humans.

30. Cont...
 Richard Swinburne, a prominent Christian
philosopher, has defined god as
 “a person without a body (i.e., a spirit)
present everywhere, the creator and
sustainer of the universe, able to do
everything (i.e., omnipotent),
 knowing all things, perfectly good,
 a source of moral obligation, immutable,
eternal, a necessary being, holy and worthy
of worship” (1977: 2).

31. Cont...
 However, this is not so much a definition of god as a
description of a particular god, namely the Christian
one.
 It does not fit all cases.
 Among the ancient Greek gods, for instance, there
were gods who were good, or bad, or both, or
neither.
 Some were more or less eternal, but many were born
of other gods (or humans) and many died.
 Some played no part in creation, as creation was all
in place by the time they came along.
 Often, each had his or her “domain” in a
supernatural “division of labor”—i.e., a god of the
sea, a god of war, a god of love, a god of wine, etc.

32. Cont...
 Many societies that recognize gods do not
attempt to communicate or relate directly with
them but rather through lower-level spiritual
intermediaries, like saints or ancestors or other
lower spirits.
 A religion that not only includes but focuses on
god(s) is called a theism …..
 Atheist: someone who believes that God or gods
do not exist atheist
 There may be in any particular theism one or
more (sometimes many more) than one god, and
there may be—and always are—other spiritual
beings as well.

33. Cont...
 A theistic religion that contains many gods is
known as a polytheism,
 while a theistic religion that contains one god is
known as a monotheism.
 Ancient Greek religion is a familiar example of a
polytheism, with its “pantheon” (from pan- for all
and theo- for god) residing on Mount Olympus.
 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam constitute the
dominant monotheisms in the world.
 Some versions of Christianity posit a “trinity” of
God,
 while Islam insists that God is one (the doctrine of
tawhid)—no son, no trinity, and nothing like God.

34. Cont...
 Monolatry refers to the worship of one particular god
without necessarily denying the existence of others;
 Monolatrism refers to the belief that there may be more
than one deity (God) , but that only one is worthy of being
worshiped.
 Finally, some thinkers have come to the conclusion that god
is everything and everything is god, a belief known as
pantheism.
 a doctrine which identifies God with the universe, or regards
the universe as a manifestation of God
 Pantheists holds that whatever exists falls within God.
 Pantheism is the view that the natural universe is divine,
 Ancient Israel is best example

35. Cont...
 Within these major classes there is incredible
diversity in ideas about gods.
 Some gods are creators, others are not.
 Some are moral guarantors and arbiters, others are
not.
 Some are near and well known, others are not.
 The Konyak Nagas, for instance, referred to a sky god
called Gawang or Zangbau who was a highly
personal being and the creator of the universe.
 he was the protector of morality and punished
wrongdoing.
 Between these extremes are all sorts of complex
variations on the god theme.

36. Spiritual Forces
 Not all religions include “beings” at all, and not all
of those that do have beings have exclusively
beings.
 There is also a regular occurrence of claims
about impersonal spiritual forces—ones that
are not associated necessarily with any particular
living thing nor have an individual “mind” or
“will.”
 Often these forces are more like “spiritual
water” or “spiritual electricity”—a
(super)naturally-occurring power that exists in
and flows through nature, giving it the qualities
that we find there.
 Many cultures are organized around belief in an
impersonal supernatural force, a type of

37. Cont...
 The usual name given to religions that
highlight these forces over beings is
animatism.
 Animatism is the belief that supernatural forces
reside in everyday things
 is a belief that disembodied and impersonal
powers exist in the world,
 Animatism is the belief that inanimate,
magical qualities exist in the natural world.
 A religious system organized around a belief in
an impersonal supernatural force.

38. Cont...
 mana: A form of supernatural energy in Polynesian
religion that inheres in things or people is The classic
example of a spiritual force .
 Mana is an energy or power that presents itself in
material objects, including people, but is not
inherent in them;
 that is, it is a separate “thing” from them and can
come and go.
 It is in the interest of a person to know, use, and
accumulate mana if possible, since luck, strength,
virtue, and many good results come from having or
controlling it.
 power that manifested itself in extraordinary
phenomena and abilities

39.  In a certain sense, the Hindu-Buddhist notion of
karma is animatistic, although in a way it is not a
force at all.
 It might be more appropriate to think of it as a
principle of “spiritual cause and effect”—what
we do in this life has spiritual consequences for
the next life
 deity: A preternatural or supernatural human or
non-human being or entity, or an object that
possesses miraculous or supernatural attributes,
powers or superpowers (e.g. a god or goddess).
 Is a supernatural being thought of as holy, divine
or sacred

40. Religious Conceptions: The Universe and
Human Existence
 While beliefs about beings and forces underlie
all religions and probably constitute the
bedrock and central preoccupation of most if
not all traditions, there are many other things
that those traditions teach about.
 These include origins and ends, reasons
and relations, health and sickness, and
virtually any topic that might come to the mind
of humans.

41. Cosmology and Cosmogony
 Nearly all religions offer a view of what the universe is “really
like”—what it is made of, what “parts” or “layers” it has, and
how all of this relates to humanity.
 Cosmology deals with the order or structure of ultimate
reality,
 whereas cosmogony deals with the origin of that structure
or order.
 Both words derive from the Greek root kosmos for
“universe” or “order” (as opposed to “chaos”), and
 the former has been picked up by science to name
astronomical and physical theories about the universe,
 while the latter has not found any scientific application.

42. Cont...
 The cosmologies and cosmogonies of different
religions vary extensively.
 The Christian version tells of a fundamentally three-
layered reality,
 with a heaven (above) and a hell (below)
sandwiching an intermediate world inhabited by
humans and other material beings (interestingly but
not surprisingly, contemporary fictional cosmologies,
like that of The Lord of the Rings, echo this same
design, with a “Middle Earth” where humans and
hobbits reside).
 Many religions and cosmologies view the universe as
round or circular, with the territory of the particular
society as the “center” of the world.

43. Theodicy: Explaining Evil
• It is immanently clear in all places and times that
bad things happen to people, even good people.
• Humans look for explanations for these
developments, as well as ways potentially to
control or prevent them.
• No matter what the precise form of explanation, it
tends to have an “intentional” or even
“personal” source.
• Theodicy is the Christian term for explaining evil
or suffering, especially in a world made and ruled
by an omnibenevolent God.

44. Cont...
• Christian theodicy represents the general solution of
“dualism” for the problem of evil, that is, that there
are two distinct and opposing forces or beings, the
clash between which results in visible evil.
 Buddhism finds suffering or brokenness (dukkha) to
be an inherent quality of physical reality.
 The ancient Greek poets never pretended that their
gods were all good.
 The gods, like humans, were good and bad, grand
and petty, full of all the emotional and intellectual
foibles that a being can exhibit. They were arbitrary
and capricious, doing what they will. In some religious
views, the world is simply dangerous.

45. Human Conception, Birth, and
Death
 Human birth and death are commonly
regarded as spiritual or religious
phenomena, hedged about with beliefs,
rituals, and moral value.
 Death in many religions is the transition from
a mundane to a spiritual condition;
 birth may be such a transition as well
(especially if the religion entails that humans
preexist in some supernatural way).

46. Cont...
 Among the Azande, for instance, conception was
understood to follow from sexual intercourse,
semen or nziro containing the soul of the unborn
child.
 In the womb male and female “soul-stuff” mixed,
and
 whichever parent’s part was stronger determined
the sex of the child.
 A fetus was regarded as “a soul with an
undeveloped body, and even when the child is
born the soul has not become completely and
permanently attached to its abode,” making it
susceptible to “flying away” and death (Evans-

47. Cont...
 The Dinka said that men and women give birth
jointly, with divine intercession to “create” the
child and the ancestors’ assistance to protect it
from evil forces.
 In other words, two supernatural media (god and
ancestor spirits) met with humans to make life and
guard it against a third supernatural medium (evil
powers) (Deng 1972).
 Ainu asserted that conception and birth were not
caused by sex at all but by the god Aynu
Sikohte, since humans do not have the power to
make life.

48. Cont...
The Kaguru of East Africa (Beidelman 1971)
had one of the most interesting takes on
human birth.
According to their religion, when a human
died, he or she went to the land of the dead
or the ghosts.
However, when a human child was born, that
person was born out of the land of the
ghosts, such that a human birth was a ghost
death.

49. Cont..
 Once birth has occurred, not all societies consider this a
completion of the making of a human, certainly not
“socially” and sometimes not even physically.
 Newborns are widely held to be particularly vulnerable
to supernatural threats, whether from demons,
witches, or spirits; accordingly, they are often
subjected to periods of ritual seclusion.
 The Konyak Nagas closed the house of a newborn to
strangers for six days out of concern for evil effects. But
beyond this, infants must not only physically but socially
mature into real humans.
 Many religions understood death as a kind of journey
between worlds that can, literally, take time and involve
challenges and obstacles.

50. End of Time: Eschatology
• Many but not all religions have some conception
of the “death of the world,” of an end at least of
the present age if not of all of creation.
• This is the area of eschatology, from eschaton
for “end” or “last” or “farthest.”
• Christianity is a highly eschatological religion,
• warning of a final confrontation between good
and evil in which evil is defeated and consumed,
• the Earth as we know it destroyed, and
• the final victory of God enshrined in a new earth
where Jesus rules supreme.

51. Cont...
 Eschatological views are not particularly
common among the small-scale,
“traditional” religions of the world.
 Most appear to have a more continuous
notion of existence, in which things persist
much as they are.
 However, as we will see, eschatological ideas
have diffused around the modern world and
penetrated many religions, generating new
beliefs and new movements of great historical
and cultural importance.

52. Chapter 4
Religious Change and new Religious
Movements
 Religion is often perceived as a mainly or even totally
conservative force.
 seems—or claims—to establish an order of things
and a system of meaning and
 morality that is settled and closed once and for all
and
 to sustain and guarantee that order and system
against all threats and innovations.
 since it was set down in the paradigmatic acts of the
past.
 Continuity with this past, and a human moral
obligation to be faithful to this past and to perpetuate
its models of life, lie near the heart of religion.

53. Cont...
 However, it is also immanently clear that religion
changes and that it always has.
 And we are very aware of the proliferation of
religions in the modern world;
 according to one source, two or three new
religions are invented every day (Lester 2002:
38).
 Some of these religions appear to be created
almost out of thin air,
 but much more often they are branches off the
tree of an existing religion or amalgamations of
available religious resources.

54. Cont..
 And being a modular phenomenon, many types of
resources contribute to the ongoing invention of
religions—
 elements from other religions certainly, but also
elements from nonreligious sources, from politics to
popular culture to technology.
 Rather than seeing religion as a static and strictly
conservative force,
 we should see it as a dynamic and basically adaptive
one.
 The dynamics of religion, as of all culture, may
reproduce the ideas, moods, relationships, and
institutions that produced it.

55. Cont..
 Changing social, technical, or even
environmental circumstances may alter the
practices, and
 the simple passing of generations may bring new
ideas or new interpretations of old ideas.
 Even “traditional” religions were dynamic,.
 many religions consisted of religious fields in
which multiple religious ideas and practices
interacted in various ways, from cooperation to
conflict.
 Currently because the more general processes
of cultural change have accelerated, the
processes of religious change have accelerated,

56. The Anthropology of Religious Change
 Anthropology has often been burdened by—and
burdened itself with—
 the impression that it is the science of “traditional
cultures” or,
 worse, of original and untouched cultures.
 If this were true, then anthropology would be
finished,
 because all cultures, no matter how remote, have
been touched by outside or even global cultural
forces, and the pace of this contact has only
accelerated in recent decades.

57. Cont...
 As Malinowski noted long ago, “The figment
of the ‘uncontaminated’ Native has to be
dropped from research in field and study.
 The cogent reason for this is that the
‘uncontaminated’ Native does not exist
anywhere” (1961:2).
 Therefore, scientific anthropologist must be the
anthropologist of the changing Native”
(Malinowski 1961: 6).

58. Cont....
 In the realm of religion, the scientific
anthropologist will then be the anthropologist
of changing religion.
 This means that religious change is a species
of cultural change in general….
 which Malinowski defines as…
……“the process by which the existing order
of a society, that is, its social, spiritual, and
material civilization, is transformed from
one type to another” (1961: 1).

59. Cont.....
 The significance of this appreciation is two fold:
 that changes in religion will be holistically
related to changes in other aspects of culture,
and that the same basic change processes will be
operative in both.
 In religion specifically and culture generally, the
two most basic change processes are innovation
and diffusion.
 In the former, an individual or group within the
society invents or discovers some new idea,
object, or practice—

60. Cont..
 in the case of religion, a new entity to believe in,
a new myth to tell, a new symbol to use, a new
ritual to perform, etc.
 In the latter, an idea, object, or practice from
another society is introduced into the first society,
which entails further cultural processes such as
contact, migration, intermarriage, invasion, or
conquest.
 Whichever is the ultimate source of novelty, the
course of change only begins with the
appearance of the new item.

61. Cont..
 the forms and outcomes of religious and cultural
change….
 The result may be addition of an item to the
preexisting repertoire.
 Evans-Pritchard comments, for instance, that
several aspects of Nuer religion appeared to
come from outside Nuer society, specifically from
their Dinka neighbors.
 Conversely, deletion may occur when an item is
dropped from the repertoire, as when a society
stops performing a certain ritual.

62. Cont..
 versions of the reinterpretation, include
elaboration,
 in which a preexisting notion or practice is
extended and developed,
 sometimes in quite unprecedented directions;
 simplification, in which a preexisting notion or
practice is trimmed of detail (not explained
extensively) or sophistication; and
 purification, in which members attempt to
purge (from their point of view) false or
foreign elements and to return to the “real”
or “pure” form.

63. Cont...
 One of the most common and well-studied
change processes is syncretism…
 in which elements from two or more
cultural/religious sources are blended,
more or less intentionally, to create a new
culture or religion.
 The result may not be a simple combination of
sources but a truly original and creative
product;

64. Cont..
 For any number of reasons, the consequence
of religious processes may be
schism(breakeup) or fission(division) ,
 the speciation or proliferation of religions
by branching from prior beliefs and traditions,
leading to “sects” and “denominations” and,
ultimately, entire religions;
 Sects.. a group of people with somewhat
different religious beliefs from those of a
larger group to which they belong.

65. Cont...
 Denominations…d/t branchs with one religions
faith.
 a classic example would be the schism of
Protestantism from Catholicism in
Christianity.
 In some cases, the result of all of these
processes may be the abandonment of a
religion and its replacement or
 substitution by a new or foreign one,
leading, perhaps at the extreme, to the
extinction of the former religion.

66. The Invention of “Traditional” Religion
 An important popular and sometimes academic
prejudice is that “traditional religions” were static
and resistant to change,
 while “modern religions” are dynamic and open
to change.
 This picture cannot be sustained on either count:
 Our contemporary understanding of pre modern
religions shows their lively and evolving
nature, and
 many modern religions are hostile to at least
some aspects of change, leading to the
phenomenon known as “fundamentalism”.

67. Cont...
 In fact, Durkheim used them explicitly as his
model for “elementary religion”—the
simplest, oldest, most unchanging, and,
therefore, “purist” religion.
 In reality, Aboriginal religions (derives from
the roots aborigine for “from the beginning”)
have been remarkably flexible and have even
included “traditional” methods of innovation
and change.
 Innovation and change are traditional religious
traditions.

68. Cont...
 There were 3 processes by which novelty could be
introduced into traditional religions
1. Revelation
 the Aboriginal view was that there were always more
spiritual truths to know.
 One obvious doorway through which new knowledge
could come was dreams.
 “night-time dreams” “seeing” a previously unrevealed
piece of the Dreaming.
 Humans could also discover previously unknown
religious sites or objects.
 At the same time, old content could be dropped
out.

69. Cont...
2. Diffusion and Exchange.
 Micha (1970) finds evidence of trade and
diffusion of different types of stone, of
techniques like tool-making, and of cult objects,
myths, and rituals.
 exchange of knowledge and ceremonial forms,
long, multistage process of ritual exchange
between two groups
 one moment in “an ongoing process that
involves the participation of various groups
from different cultural areas, and
 circulation of “traditional” religion was the norm.

70. Cont..
 3. Social distribution and interpretation of
religious knowledge.
 Poirier notes that religious forms “are ‘open,’ and
that new sequences and elements can be
added to an already existing corpus” (1993:
758),
 just as older material “might pass into oblivion
(disrespect) (1993: 772).
 In other words, one society could and almost
certainly would and must adjust the ceremonies
and attendant mythology to their own
circumstances,

71. From Religious Change to Religious
Movement
 Even for the native indigenous people today,
religious (and other cultural) change comes faster
and diverges more greatly from traditional
patterns.
 In other words, indigenous Aboriginal cultural
processes did not create completely new
religions but organization of recognizably
“traditional” forms.
 At a certain point, however, a notaicable new
kind of religion enters the picture, which is
widely referred to as a “new religious
movement.”

72. Cont...
 The study of new religious movements (NRM)
is even more problematic than the study of
religion in general.
 For one thing, what does “new” mean?
 It is unclear how recent in time and how
unique in doctrine a religion must be to qualify
as a “new religion” and, therefore, when a
religion ceases to be “new” and becomes
“established” or “orthodox.”

73. Cont...
 Many NRMs also express nonreligious as well
as religious goals, including political,
economic, and personal/psychological ones.
 NRMs are not conceived merely as religions
but as religious “movements.”
 As such, they represent a class of social
movements or even “mass movements,”
which tend to have certain common features.

74. Cont....
 It needs to “to explore the dynamic relations
between these religious movements and
the emergent society” in which they occur).
 Primary among them is the social condition
out of which they emerge.
 NRMs arise as responses, accommodations,
or protests to new and unsatisfactory social
circumstances.

75. Cont...
 In other words, each movement is a unique
product of various social factors
 including the particular society where it
transpires,
 the particular external forces that impinge on it
and
 the particular ways in which those forces are
manifested,
 the particular individual(s) who offer the
response, and
 the particular intersection of all of these
factors.

76. Cont...
 Despite their diversity, NRMs in the modern world tend
to share some qualities.
 McFarland finds 7such qualities in Japanese new
religions, which are more or less typical:
A. Charismatic leadership, with a founder or prophet
who claims or is endowed with supernatural authority
and/or power;
B. Concrete goals, or a program for improving individual
or collective life, including health, happiness, success
and wealth, etc
C. Community identification, which often involves
seeking recruits among the “hopeless and lonely,” the
“disinherited” of society, and forming them into a new
group;

77. Cont...
D. Highly centralized organization, frequently
quite controlling and “undemocratic”;
E. Ambitious construction projects, such as
headquarters for the movement;
F. Mass activities, not the least of which are
aimed at proselytization (changing religion)
G. Syncretism, mystery, and novelty, such as
a sense of chosenness or possession of a
special revelation or message or
responsibility.

78. Cont..
 Finally, the ways in which the general public, and
often enough the academic community, talks about
such movements tends to evidence two prejudices:
 1st , a negativity toward such groups and,
 2nd , a distinctly Western/Christian bias.
 NRMs, which are usually small and almost by
definition “unorthodox,” often receive the
designation of “cults,”
 with accusations of “brainwashing,”
 abuse, exploitation, extremism and
 antisocial tendencies, and even violence, and of
course sheer falsity and delusion.

79. Cont....
 Christianity was a cult to the ancient Romans,
and early Protestantism was a cult (or a collection
of cults) to the Catholic Church.
 It should be obvious that “cult” is not a technical
term but a judgment.
 In popular language, it is a pejorative (Negative)
term used to indicate disapproval of certain
kinds of “strange” or “unacceptable” or “bad”
religion.
 Nobody ever describes their own religion as a
cult; it may be unorthodox, but it is not
spurious from their perspective.

80. Cont...
 The academic treatment of cults has too often
and closely followed the popular one, which
itself is dominated by sectarian opinions.
 The Christian apologist Jan Karel van Baalen
literally named a cult “any religion regarded
as unorthodox or spurious(false)” (1956:
363),
 Not surprisingly, he equated orthodoxy to
mainstream Christianity.

81. Cont...
 Walter Martin makes his definition even more
dependent on Christianity, calling a cult “a
group of people gathered about a specific
person or person’s interpretation of the
Bible,” such that cults “contain not a few major
deviations from historic Christianity” (1976: 11).
 Under this definition, most cults would not be
considered cults at all, since they have little or
nothing to do with Christianity—and many or
most Christian groups would be considered
cults.

82. Cont...
 The great sociologist Max Weber associated cults with pre-
and non-Christian religions, which were antirational and
mystical.
 William Mann in Sect, Cult, and Church in Alberta
characterized cults as groups or movements that “blend
alien religious or psychological notions with Christian
doctrine” to create “a more adequate, or modern faith”
(1955: 6).
 Finally, Stark and Bainbridge (1985) regard cults as
deviant religious organizations with their own novel
beliefs and practices that are not derived or split from
some already-existing religion;
 this much narrower definition would exempt from cult
status any new religion based on, say, Christianity, no
matter how deviant.

83. Cont..
 Things are not much better with terms like “sect”
and “denomination” and “church.”
 Benton Johnson (1963) saw a sect as a religious
group that rejects the social environment in which
it exists, either a deviant group or a
countercultural group.
 Probably the most useful definition of a sect is the
one adopted by Religioustolerance.org, which
calls it “a small religious group that is an
offshoot of an established religion or
denomination.
 It holds most beliefs in common with its religion of
origin, but has a number of novel concepts
which differentiate them from that religion.”

84. Cont...
 As such, they notice that sects are a normal
phenomenon in the process of religious change
and evolution.
 In fact, to go further, it might be true to say that all
religions beyond a certain size are or consist of
sects, that is, sections or subsets of a general
religious thought-system.
 Religions like Christianity are not monolithic and
homogeneous but internally diverse, and the
unit of diversity is the sect; all of the units have
some things in common but other things that
distinguish them.

85. Cont...
 Denominations, from the Latin for “to name,” are
often distinguished from sects.
 More established than a sect but less universal
and exclusivistic than a church,
 a denomination was one religious organization
among others within a greater religious tradition
that shared and coexisted within a given location.
 Thus, Baptism and Methodism would be
denominations of a more general Christian
tradition.
 Also, a denomination would be somewhat more
acceptable than a sect.
 . is a distinct religious body within Christianity

86. Cont...
 In reality, probably the most important difference
is that a sect could be within or outside of an
established tradition,
 while a denomination is necessarily one “form”
or “community” within such a tradition.
 A “church” was a believing community, as in
Durkheim’s usage: The church is all of the people
who share a certain belief.
 More specifically, for Weber, a church is a
religious institution that is universal and
inclusive; hypothetically, it would claim to include
the entire population within its territory

87. Religion and Revitalization: using religion to
bring society back to life
 Anthropologists such as Anthony F. C. Wallace
first employed the term revitalization
movement in 1956.
 Wallace explained that when members of a
society feel that their needs are not being
satisfied,
 this process enables them to reorganize and
reestablish a more fulfilling culture.
 A movement would arise because of the
complete disorganization and conflict within
a society and the need for reform and
transformation

88.  Wallace defines "revitalization movements" as
"deliberate, conscious, organized efforts by
members of a society to create a more satisfying
culture" (1956, 279; 1966, 30).
 Leaders of societies deliberately and consciously
seek some type of revitalization when their basic
needs are not being met.
 A more satisfying culture is created out of this
organized effort to revitalize disintegrating culture.
These revitalization movements occur under two
related conditions (1956, 179).

89. Cont...
 Throughout history, societies and their
religions have found themselves in crises of
various kinds—
 wars, disasters, contact with hostile or
merely different peoples and religions, and
the like.
 Sometimes they have simply discovered that
their expectations did not match reality or
that their predictions or their practices did not
produce results.

90. Cont...
 new questions were thrust upon them.
 Even more profoundly, individuals and
societies have often found themselves
exposed to forces well beyond their control
and their comprehension,
 world-historical forces like urbanization,
colonialism, capitalism, industrialization,
and “detribalization

91. Cont...
 Their “moral communities” may be
smashed( broken) and atomized(
destroyed), or at least mixed and remixed,
by these forces.
 Humans in these situations may feel a
disconnection, a sense of loss, a cultural
(and often enough literal) death of their way of
life, their people, and their very world.

92. Cont...
 They may experience “deprivation”—deprivation
of independence, of meaning, of wealth, of
control, of life itself.
 Many individuals have been absorbed into larger,
“modernizing” entities—cities, states, mass
movements, world religions, etc.
 However, there is always the possibility and hope
of new life, new community, and new meaning.
 This is why many religious (as well as
nonreligious) movements take the form of some
type of “revival” or “revitalization.”

93. Revitalization Movements
 for reasons of contact, conquest, disaster,
globalization, and so on,
 a period of increased individual stress
begins; changes in the real-life,
 on-the-ground conditions no longer match the
traditional worldview or beliefs.
 People may continue doing what they always
did but with diminishing or no effect.

94. Cont...
 Their traditions are clearly failing them, and
their world does not quite make sense.
 This is followed by a phase of cultural
distortion,
 where the prolonged and serious stress of
cultural failure may lead to negative responses
 like alcoholism, depression, violence,
neurosis, suicide, and the breakdown of
social institutions.
 People perceive that things are going wrong
fast, but most do not know how to respond

95. Cont...
 Many give up, perhaps integrating into
another social system,
 for instance, after conquest by Rome, ancient
Israelites sometimes chose to collaborate with
Rome or even become Roman citizens.
 However, in more than a few instances in
human history, a response has emerged; this
is what Wallace calls the period of
revitalization.

96. Cont...
 This phase of cultural or religious innovation
has several significant sub phases:
1. Cultural/psychological reformulation:
Existing elements of society and/or new
elements are put forth by a creative
individual, a prophet or a leader.
 It is extremely noteworthy that the innovator
usually is a single individual,

97.  He begins to picture his society in a new and
different way.
 his personal perspective on his culture's
worldview--no longer correlates with
mainstream interpretations.
 Whether the movement is religious or secular,
 the reformulation seems to depend on a
restructuring of elements and subsystems which
have already attained currency in the society and
 may even be in use, and which are known to the
person who is to become the prophet or leader.

98.  What kind of person is prone to such
experiences?
 The potential revitalizer is a person in crisis,
perhaps someone given to visions and
dissociative breaks.
 He or she is very often someone who suffers a
serious, even life-threatening illness or other
personal failure.
 But, whatever the impetus for the experience, they
“come back” with some specific “content”—some
suggestions for what to do, what to believe, and
how to live.

99. Cont...
2. Communication:
 This cultural innovator becomes a prophet,
communicating his new interpretation of
reality to his people
 must express and spread his or her vision of
things to come:
 What is wrong, why is it wrong, and what must we
do to remedy it?
 The prophet may achieve a kind of prestige from
having survived the illness—having “come back
from death’s door.”

100.  The dreamer starts to preach his revelations to
people, in a prophetic or messianic spirit.
 Thus he becomes a prophet.
 The preaching may take many forms (e.g.,
mass buzz word vs. quiet individual advice)
and
 may be directed at various sorts of audiences
(e.g., the elite vs. the oppressed).

101. Cont...
3. Organization.
 The prophet establishes an organization, which will
give continuity to his cultural perspectives.
 Usually, a small number of converts becomes the
core of the new movement; often this is the
family of the prophet.
 This organization will be constituted by three
orders of personnel: the prophet; the disciples;
and the followers
 A basic organizational structure emerges: leader,
“inner circle” of disciples or apostles, and the

102.  Often enough, effective leadership of the
movement may pass into the hands of “men of
action,” practical “political” leaders who act for
or in the name of the spiritual messenger.

103. Cont...
4. Adaptation.
 The organization must adapt to the struggle that it
is bound to encounter.
 Like any instance of culture change, a
revitalization movement may not and most likely
will not remain the same—doctrinally,
behaviorally, or organizationally—over time.
 It will encounter resistance, incomprehension
and miscomprehension, challenges and
failures, and rivals and threats, since there may
be more than one revitalization effort in any
society at any time.

104.  The movement, if it achieves any growth at all,
will employ a variety of adaptations,
including “doctrinal modification, political
and diplomatic maneuver, and force” among
others and in various combinations (Wallace
1956: 274).
 Modifications may adjust it to the tastes,
preferences, and preconceptions of the
believers as well as to changes in the social
context since the movement first appeared.

105. Cont...
 Thus the modification actually serves the interest
of the groups and makes it more acceptable to
special interest groups.
 Often enough, hostility from some or all of the
society (and forces outside the society) radicalize
the movement, transforming it “from cultivation of
the ideal to combat against the unbeliever”
(Wallace 1956: 275).
 Those who resist or fight the movement, or
simply fail to join it, may be branded as demonic
or subhuman.

106. Cont...
5. Cultural transformation:
 A cultural transformation occurs when a significant
part of the population embraces the new religion.
 If the movement achieves sufficient proportions, a
new cultural pattern is created by and around
it.
 When the whole or a controlling portion of the
population comes to accept the new religion with
its various commands, a visible social revitalization
occurs.
 A sense of excitement, of reversal of fortunes

107.  The previous deterioration seems to have
ended.
 However, this new plan and culture “may be
more or less realistic and more or less
adaptive:
 some programs are literally suicidal; others
represent well conceived and successful
projects for further social, political, or
economic reform; some fail, not through any
deficiency in conception and execution, but
 because circumstances made defeat
inevitable” (Wallace 1956: 275).

108. Cont...
6 Routinization: If the movement survives all of
the traps and pitfalls above,
 it will and must eventually settle into a routine
pattern.
 Revitalization movements affect "various
economic, social, and political institutions and
customs" in a process that Weber calls
"routinization" (1956, 275).
 The initial “revolutionary” spirit cannot be
sustained for ever, and probably should not be
(recall Turner’s warnings of the dangers of
liminality).

109.  Organizational structures are put into place,
lines of succession are established, and
doctrines are worked out and formalized.
 If the movement is sufficiently successful, it
can even become the “new orthodoxy.”
 What was once innovative and radical
becomes familiar and mainstream.
 Having passed through all of these stages,
 the final destination of a revitalization
movement is the new steady state

110. Cont...
 in which the movement has not only
institutionalized itself but also matured into a
culture and worldview that solves the problems
it set out to solve,
 giving people that sense of security, certainty,
and satisfaction that they so palpably lacked in
the premovement era.
 However, Wallace maintains that the vast
majority (99%) of such movements fail, that the
most likely place to fail is the “cultural
transformation” phase, and

111.  that most of those that survive remain small
segments in their respective societies, not
dying out completely, but stalling as minority
or alternative systems—“sects,”
“denominations,” or even “cults”—in a
greater religious field.
 It stays on the “fringe” of society as yet one
more religious and social alternative.

112. Types of Revitalization Movements
 Anthropologists have distinguished a variety of
different “types” of revitalization movements, based on
their aims and methods.
 But, as in all of the typologies we have examined
above, these types are not pure or mutually
exclusive types.
 An actual movement can and generally does show
qualities of two or more of these categories;
 it may also not show all of the qualities of any one
category.
 They are also not exclusive to religion. Still, the
categories are analytically useful.

113. Syncretism
 Syncretism (from the Greek syn for “with” or “together
with”)
 refers to an attempt to mix or blend elements of two or
more cultures or belief systems to produce a new, third,
better culture or system.
 In syncretism, an individual or group devises a particular
mixture of cultural elements and offers it to the wider
society as the “new way.”
 In a very real sense, all culture, and certainly all religion, is
syncretistic.
 It might even be argued that the most basic and universal
cultural and religious process is syncretism:
 Humans are forever borrowing from various sources and
combining them in ways to produce whatever it is we call
“our culture” or “our religion.”

114. Cont...
 Of course, this borrowing and combining is not always as
deliberate or as clearly perceived as we are describing here,
 but no culture, religion, or any other human activity is “pure”
or “original” in any significant or meaningful way. All of us
live in a melting pot of culture.
 Religious syncretism can obviously draw from diverse
religious sources.
 Cao Dai, a new religion that originated in Vietnam in the early
twentieth century, overtly incorporated conceptual and
organizational elements from Buddhism, Chinese religions
(especially Confucianism and Taoism), and Christianity
(especially Catholicism
 Syncretism, even in religion, can and often does draw upon
other nonreligious sources too, which can contribute
modules to a new religion.

115. Millenarianism
 Millenarianism (from the Latin mille for
thousand) is a familiar concept to those versed
in Christianity, which is an inherently
millenarian religion.
 the belief that there will be a 1,000-year period in
the future in which Christ will literally rule on earth.
 Christianity teaches that at some point in the
future, the world as we know it will end.
 any belief in a future period of ideal peace and
happiness
 Opinions about the specific order of events, and
what is to follow, vary between denominations
and sects, but


116.  it is generally agreed that the transformation will
not be easy or painless.
 It is the belief that a fundamental transformation
of society is coming,
 one that will bring a golden age of peace and
prosperity. any belief in a future period
of ideal peace and happiness
 So the point of millenarianism is not literally the
thousand-year period but the notion that the
world proceeds through historical or spiritual
periods, the current one of which will end—and
often soon.

117. Cont...
 Thus, millenarianism as a general cultural
phenomenon is a type of movement based on
the conception that the present age of the world
(an inferior, unhappy, or wicked one) is about to
end and that a superior age is about to begin.
 The followers of the movement must either
prepare for the coming change (which may be
opposed by the forces of evil and darkness or by
the human forces of power and wealth) or act to
set the change in motion.
 Although not universal, millenarianism is a
surprisingly common dimension of NRMs.

118. Messianism
 Messianism is another term drawn from the
Judeo-Christian tradition,
 which believes that a messiah or “anointed one”
will appear (or has appeared) to lead the
society to victory and happiness.
 As such, it is probably either a subtype of
millenarianism or a concomitant of it:
 When the millennium comes, a messianic figure
will be the one who ushers out the old and
ushers in the new.


119. Cont...
 Perhaps one of the key traits of a messianic
movement is the belief that some individual will
appear to found and/or lead the movement.
 This figure may not always be a messiah but is
generally a prophet or innovator or founder of
some sort.
 Various characters, ancient and modern, have
claimed or have been seen as messianic
figures.
 In Christianity-inspired movements, the messiah-
figure is often believed to be an incarnation of
Jesus;

120. Irredentism
 Irredentism (from the Italian irredenta for
unredeemed) is another recurring, if less
familiar, feature of movements.
 Irredentist movements are efforts to
reclaim and reoccupy a lost homeland;
 not all are religious in nature, but religion can
serve as a mighty justification for the
movement.
 They are at the heart of many of the ethnic
conflicts in the modern world.

121. Cont...
 The Sinhalese/Tamil struggle over Sri Lanka is a
sort of irredentist movement:
 The Tamils claim to be fighting for their former
homeland, Tamil Eelam,
 which they justify on the basis of their distinct
culture, their prior occupation, and their present-
day majority status.
 intent and “covenant” (the “promised land”),
prior occupation and political control (the
ancient kingdom of Israel), right of conquest (the
biblical Hebrews under Moses and Joshua had
fought to take the land they were promised),

122. Modernism/vitalism
 Modernism or vitalism seeks to import and
accept alien cultural ways, in part or in
total.
 Modernism does not always take the form
of religion.
 For instance, when Japan was finally
“opened” to the West in 1854, it began to
adapt itself to this new contact by
appropriating much from the Western world.
 Technology, military organization,
language, and styles of dress and music
were absorbed.

123.  By 1868, a “revolution” known as the Meiji
(Japanese for enlightenment) was underway.
 A modern constitution was written, establishing
the emperor as the head of state.
 The feudal system was abolished, mass
state-sponsored education was put in place,
and
 concentrated efforts to industrialize and to
modernize the army were made.

124. Cont...
 The most complete version of modernism is
conversion,
 the wholesale acceptance of a foreign set of
beliefs, values, and practices, and, in the
realm of religion, this means conversion to a
foreign religion, especially a “world
religion” and proselytizing religion like
Christianity or Islam.

125.  Indigenous religions can also modernize
themselves by incorporating aspects of new
and foreign religion and culture,
 in particular, beliefs in a single god or in an
apocalyptic end-time, or values and practices
like monogamy or avoidance of alcohol.
 Members may go so far as to condemn and
reject their traditional religion and
associated practices and institutions (often
under the nfluence of foreign agents of
change like missionaries).

126. Cont...
 At the same time, probably all movements show
some quality of modernism, even if only in the
adoption of modern technologies to preserve and
propagate old beliefs and practices; many
indigenous societies, for instance, maintain web
sites and use cell phones, automobiles, and
airplanes.
 Thus, modernism/vitalism is not a total
phenomenon; rather, ordinarily we find a
combination of old and new—and new seen
through the eyes of old—in unique and
surprising ways.

127. Nativism/Fundamentalism
 At the opposite end of the revitalization spectrum are
nativist or fundamentalist movements.
 Nativism or fundamentalism is a form of movement
that emphasizes indigenous or traditional culture
and resistance to or even expulsion of alien
culture.
 Linton defined a nativistic movement as “any
conscious, organized attempt on the part of a
society’s members to revive or perpetuate
selected aspects of its culture” (1943: 230).
 This is a significant definition, since it indicates that
nativism or fundamentalism is not merely “tradition” but
tradition selectively and intentionally revived or
perpetuated.
 Thus, it can never be entirely traditional, in spirit or in
content:

128. Chapter 5
Religious Fundamentalism
 Fundamentalism is not a religion, nor is it a sect or
denomination of religion.
 Following Thomas Meyer (2000), we might more accurately
refer to it as a “style” of religion.
 It is not the only style of religion, of course:
 There are other styles, from liberal and syncretistic to
conservative and traditionalistic.
 it is also not exclusive to any particular religion:
 There is a fundamentalist Christian style, a
fundamentalist Muslim style, and a fundamentalist Hindu
style, and on and on.

129. Cont...
 In fact, fundamentalism is not exclusive to religion
at all: Meyer calls it a “style of civilization” (2000:
29), which can occur in any area of culture.
 Thus, fundamentalism is a cultural concept with
multiple cultural contexts.
 It is not a single, simple fact but a diverse and
ambiguous construct and practice.
 Even more, we must be careful with the use of the
term as an analytical device, since the attribution of
“fundamentalism” to a group or position is often not
neutral but pejorative:
 For many people, “fundamentalist” means “bad,” “

130. 5.1 The Anthropology of Fundamentalism
 Religious fundamentalism derives its from the
notion of “fundamentals,”
 those things—beliefs, behaviors, organizational
structures, and/or moral injunctions
 that are felt by members to be most essential
and central, the oldest, deepest, and truest
aspects of it.
 popular dominated by impressions of Christian
and Muslim fundamentalisms

131. Cont..
 George Marsden, defines a fundamentalist as
“an evangelical Protestant who is militantly
opposed to liberal theologies and to some
aspects of secularism in modern culture
 Most inclusively of all, Meyer describes it as
 “a political ideology of the 20th century that
recruits members on their shared ethno-
religious characteristics”
 fundamentalism seeks to attack the basic
structures and consequences of the culture of
the modern era.

132. Cont..
 it projects itself as a political ideology which
poses a for the most part religious and less
frequently secular-ideological ethic as a
politically absolute answer to the crises of
modernization [emphasis in the original].
 First, religious fundamentalism is for
something, namely, what it perceives to be the
fundamental and crucial elements of its
faith,

133. Cont...
 In Christianity, these fundamentals typically include a focus
on the Bible even as a literal and inerrant document and
source of knowledge;
 a certainty that their path is the true path and,
 therefore, the exclusion and sometimes condemnation of
others (even other Christians) as corrupt and lost;
 an eschatology in which the end-time is near and only they
will survive into the new kingdom,

134. Cont...
 that is, an apocalyptic view and a sense
of being “chosen”;
 A belief that the world is headed towards a
catastrophic event or series of events
that will result in widespread destruction
and possibly the end of civilization as we
know it.

135. Cont...
 natural disasters, global pandemics, nuclear war,
ecological collapse, or other existential threats.
 A scriptural religion like Islam finds its fundamentals
in the Qur’an, while other types of religions find it
elsewhere.
 2nd , religious fundamentalism is against something.
 As Marsden proceeds to argue, fundamentalists
“must not only believe their evangelical teachings,
 but they must be willing to fight for them against
modernist theologies, secular humanism, and the
like” (1990: 23).

136. Cont...
 At the extreme, then, are the militants, who are
willing to employ force against their perceived
enemies which may include the government and
the general population in pursuit of religious
agenda
 So, fundamentalism is not a single monolithic
phenomenon or movement either.
 Not all religious fundamentalisms have the same
goals nor do they adopt the same methods.
 And, of course, not all fundamentalisms are
religious at all.

137. Fundamentalism, “tradition,” and
modernity
 Fundamentalism is a type of movement, it
overtly appeals to “the past” or to “tradition.”
 The fundamentals necessarily hark back to an
earlier time, a time closer to the origin of the
religion, when religious belief and practice
was supposedly more perfect.
 Fundamentalisms, therefore, often take the
form of revivals, restorations, and
reconstructions and necessarily as religious
movements.

138. Cont..
 All traditions had their origins (i.e., at one point
they were not “traditional” but innovative), and
few, if any, contemporary beliefs and practices
are, or could conceivably be, “traditional.”
 As movements, then, fundamentalisms stand in
an ambiguous relation to modernity.
 They overtly and vociferously reject many
aspects of modern or foreign (or both) attitudes
and practices and values—“the modern world” or
“the outside world” is usually the express
enemy—even while they accept or even embrace
other aspects.

139. Fundamentalism as a cultural
system
 Fundamentalist program is the construction of
institutions, religious and otherwise, but
necessarily authorized and legitimized by religion.
 The details of the institution-construction will vary
from religion to religion, from society to society
and from historical period to historical period.
 Fundamentalists, as Marty and Appleby put it, “are
boundary-setters: they excel in marking
themselves off from others by distinctive dress,
customs, and conduct” (1993: 4).

140. Cont..
 These distinctions are, of course, one
dimension of their culture, whether it is ear
locks for orthodox Jews, beards for
orthodox Muslims, or “WWJD” bracelets for
orthodox Christians
 As for the boundaries, the group that is enclosed
by them can be a single congregation, a
movement or entire religion, an ethnic group, a
society, or a state

141. Cont...
 Depending on their theology and politics, a
fundamentalist movement may be opposed to any
state at all (God or religion being the sole
source of authority and law) or adamantly pro-
state (seeing the government as the mechanism for
achieving religious rectitude on Earth).
 Example, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or the Taliban
in Afghanistan), to literally seize the government
and use political power to implement their religious
plans.

142. Fundamentalisms in cross-cultural
perspective
 Fundamentalism, as a term and concept, is often
associated with religious movements that
emphasize strict adherence to traditional
beliefs and practices.
 It is a common phenomenon to all religious
denominations in some degree, differing in
intensity at different time and in different
places, depending largely on social and political
conditions.

143. Cont...
 While it originated within Christian contexts, the
concept of fundamentalism has been applied to
various religious, cultural, and ideological
movements across different societies and
traditions
 Cross-cultural perspectives on fundamentalism
acknowledge that fundamentalist movements can
be found in different religious traditions, including
Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism,
among others.

144. Cont...
 These movements often share certain
characteristics, such as a desire to preserve
traditional values, a rejection of modernity or
secular influences, and an emphasis on strict
adherence to religious texts or teachings.
 Fundamentalist movements arise within specific
cultural and historical contexts and are shaped by
various factors such as colonialism,
globalization, political developments, and
social change.

145. Cont..
 Fundamentalist movements often intersect with
political and social issues.
 They may seek to influence or challenge existing
power structures, advocate for specific policies, or
promote social and cultural norms rooted in their
religious beliefs.
 Fundamentalist movements are often seen as
responses to perceived challenges posed by
modernity, secularism, and globalization.
 They may reject or resist certain aspects of modern
culture, technology, or values, seeking to maintain or
restore traditional religious and cultural practices.

146. Cont...
 Fundamentalist movements can have a significant
impact on society, ranging from influencing public
discourse and policies to affecting personal
freedoms and human rights.
 Their influence can vary based on factors such as
political power, societal support, and the
degree of interaction with other social and
religious groups.
 Each clings to and elevates its own
“fundamentals” and seeks to restore its own
version of the past. Within this diversity,
fundamentalism is a recurrent theme in human
life.

147. Christian Fundamentalism
 Christian fundamentalism is a conservative
religious movement within Christianity that
emerged in the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
 It is characterized by a strict adherence to
traditional Christian beliefs and practices, as
well as a resistance to perceived liberal or
progressive influences within the church and
society.
 Christian Fundamentalists assert the belief in the
inerrancy( with out error) and infallibility of the
Bible.
 They view the Bible as the inspired word of God
and consider it to be without error in its original
manuscripts.

148. Cont....
 Christian fundamentalists adhere strongly to core
Christian doctrines, such as the deity of Jesus
Christ, the virgin birth, the atoning death and
resurrection of Jesus, and the belief in
salvation through faith in Christ alone.
 They often see these doctrines as non-
negotiable and essential to true Christianity.
 They uphold traditional values on topics like
sexuality, marriage, abortion, and gender roles,
often grounded in their interpretation of biblical
teachings.

149. Cont..
 place a strong emphasis on evangelism and the
mission to convert others to their
understanding of Christianity.
 Certain Christian fundamentalist organizations,
such as Answers in Genesis and the Institute
for Creation Research, promote a literal
interpretation of the biblical account of creation
and actively challenge the theory of evolution.

150. Cont...
 They don’t accept the theory of evolution and
some of them believe in the so called
premillennial eschatology which says that world
is doomed till Jesus returns and defeats the
antichrist.
 came into existence as an anti-modern
movement in modern era, in a sense it was
rejecting the modern ideological products.

151. Jewish fundamentalisms
 refers to a religious ideology and movement
within Judaism that emphasizes strict
adherence to traditional Jewish beliefs,
practices, and laws.
 It is characterized by a literal interpretation of
sacred texts and a desire to preserve and
promote what is perceived as authentic
religious tradition.
 This is prevalent in Israel.
 make effort to establish strict adherence to
orthodox Jewish culture and Jewish Law
(halacha) in all aspects of Israeli life.

152. Cont...
 can be found within various branches of
Judaism, but it is particularly associated with
Orthodox Judaism, which places a strong
emphasis on the observance of Jewish laws
and traditions.
 often interpret the Torah (the Five Books of
Moses) and other sacred texts as the literal
word of God.
 They believe that these texts contain timeless
truths and commandments that should be
strictly followed.

153. Cont...
 Jewish fundamentalists place great importance on
observing the commandments and rituals
prescribed in the Torah and other Jewish legal
texts. T
 his includes practices such as Sabbath
observance, dietary laws (kashrut), prayer, and
study of religious texts.
 Jewish fundamentalists often prioritize the
preservation of Jewish identity and the
continuity of the Jewish people. They may view
assimilation into wider society as a threat to
Jewish traditions and work to maintain distinct
religious and cultural practices.

154. Islamic Fundamentalisms
 is a term used to describe a conservative and
often politically motivated interpretation of Islam
that emphasizes strict adherence to traditional
Islamic beliefs and practices.
 It emerged in the late 20th century as a response
to perceived challenges posed by modernity,
secularism, and perceived foreign influence on
Islamic societies.
 also known as Islamists, generally share certain
core beliefs, although there is diversity within the
movement.
 These beliefs can include the following:

155. Cont...
1. Literal Interpretation of the Quran:
 typically emphasize the literal interpretation of
the Quran as the primary source of guidance
and authority.
 They view the Quran as the unaltered word
of Allah (God) and consider it the ultimate
source of religious, moral, and legal
principles.

156. Cont..
2. Adherence to Sharia:
 Sharia refers to the Islamic legal framework
derived from the Quran and the Hadith
(sayings and actions of the Prophet
Muhammad).
 advocate for the implementation of Sharia
as the basis for personal and societal
conduct, encompassing areas such as
governance, family law, criminal justice, and
economic practices.

157. Cont...
3. Rejection of Secularism:
 often express opposition to secularism, advocating for the
integration of religion into all aspects of life, including
politics.
 They may view secular values, institutions, and laws as
incompatible with Islamic teachings and seek to establish
an Islamic state or governance system based on their
interpretation of Islamic principles.
4. Moral Conservatism:
 promote conservative moral values based on their
interpretation of Islamic teachings.
 This can include strict codes of behavior regarding gender
segregation, modesty, family structures, and sexual
morality.

158. Cont...
5. Opposition to Western Influence
 express concerns about perceived
Western cultural, political, and economic
domination and see it as a threat to
Islamic identity and values.
 They may reject Western ideologies,
institutions, and cultural practices,
advocating for the preservation of Islamic
traditions and the rejection of perceived
foreign influences.

159. Cont...
 One of the early Islamic Fundamentalist was Ibn Taymiyyah
(13th century) who not only initiated a reform movement but
also triggered a Jihad against Mongols.
 However, the modern Islamic fundamentalism originated in
19th century as an Arabian (Wahabi Movement)
fundamentalist movement and got nurtured with the overt and
covert support of western powers.
 The western powers (UK & US) nurtured them as potential
hedge against expansion of Soviet Union.
 Among the most influential Islamic fundamentalist
movements in modern times are the Islamist movement,
the Wahhābī movement, the Salafi movement, the Principlist
faction in Iran, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Taliban in
Afghanistan

160. Hindu Fundamentalism
 a religious and political ideology that
emphasizes a strict adherence to Hindu
religious beliefs, practices, and values.
 It is associated with a conservative and
traditionalist interpretation of Hinduism and a
desire to protect and promote what is
perceived as the authentic Hindu cultural and
religious heritage.
 can be found within various Hindu
organizations and political movements.

161. Cont..
 These groups often advocate for the primacy
of Hinduism in India's social and political life
and may seek to assert Hindu identity in public
institutions and policies.
 often promote the idea of Hindutva, which is a
Hindu nationalist ideology that seeks to
establish India as a Hindu nation.
 They may view Hinduism as the cultural and
spiritual foundation of Indian society and
advocate for policies that prioritize Hindu
interests.

162. Cont..
 seek to protect what they perceive as Hindu
values, traditions, and customs from
perceived threats, including religious
conversions, Western influences, and the
erosion of traditional Hindu practices.
 mpush for the implementation of laws based
on Hindu scriptures and traditions, such as the
protection of cows (considered sacred in
Hinduism) and the promotion of Hindu rituals
and festivals.
 One of its manifestations is the campaign
against "foreign influences" in India.

163. Buddhist Fundamentalism
 a conservative and rigid interpretation of Buddhist
teachings and practices, often characterized by a
strict adherence to traditional beliefs and a
resistance to modern influences.
 Like fundamentalism in other religions, Buddhist
fundamentalism can lead to a range of attitudes
and behaviors, including the rejection of
alternative interpretations, intolerance towards
other religious or cultural practices, and a
desire to preserve what is perceived to be the
true and authentic form of Buddhism.

164. Cont..
 The followers of these religions exhibit little
fundamentalism due to peace and non-violence
being their basic tenets.
 This is partly because Buddhism is often regarded
as a peaceful and tolerant religion,
 there have been reports of instances where
religious tensions and conflicts involving
Buddhist fundamentalist groups have arisen in
certain regions
 particularly in countries with significant Buddhist
populations such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and
Thailand.

165. THE END