Religion & Identity
What’s really real
Reading
- Authoritative definition of religion is hard to come up
- Includes conceptions of non0human and superhuman beings and forces that are in social and cultural relationships with humans
- Religion is a loose system of different kinds of concepts, roles, and behaviours, each includes
- “Spiritual” being(s) and/or force(s)
- Roles for human specialists
- Behavioural or “ritual” activity
- Language or religious speech as part of - or itself being - ritual activity
Anthropological attitude to religion
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Goal: not to judge or to establish truth or falsehood
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Recognize the nature and role of religion in its cultural and social context
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Discover what “religion” might mean as a general characteristic of human society
- Religious is a characteristic of human [in some kind: everyone is religious]
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Can an anthropologist be religious (yes)
Spirituality & secular society
- ==①organized religion; ②religious beliefs or texts; If don’t accept ① or ② (spiritual but not religious)==
- What is or not religious is a matter of arbitrary definition
- None of the following exists in all religions
- Dogma - principles that are authorized as true
- A holy text
- Natural history (origin and evolution of Nature)
- “faith”, “god”, “the victory of good over evil”
- Secular - not religious
- As a belief
- God as described in religion and/or some other as a historical and personal force in the world
- God is an approximated signifier for the ineffable (cannot be believed or not believed)
- Religion functions in social and historical context
- ==Religion as a means to transcend culture and society==
Judging other religions (identifying “wrong” forms of religion)
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A major concern in abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)
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Superstition - aims to obtain favourable result from the sacred sphere (from outside Lacanian “reality”) [迷信]
Ex. Believe in lucky numbers that will bring good luck
- 19th century Christians emphasized the difference between religion and superstition
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Idolatry - worshipping signifiers of God as if they were God (the signified) [崇拜]
- Confusing the signifier and the signified
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Blasphemy - invoking the presence of God through signs (icons or symbols) in an unauthorized manner, deemed as an insult [亵渎]
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Charges of superstition, idolatry, and blasphemy are levelled at other religions (bad things)
Relation to science, law, education, politics
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Science - based on scientific method vs. Faith - based on witness the experience
- Faith is not supported by scholars that faith has the equal weight of faith
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Fundamentalism - a literalist belief in the correspondence between a holy text (signifier) and God/the truth/the Real (believe that the holy text tells facts)
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==Religion != Fundamentalism==
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Galileo believes the if there is a contrast between science and religion, then there is a misunderstanding of the Bilbo
Evolution vs. Creationism
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(Secular) law can conflict with religious law:
Abortion, drawing cartoon of Prophet Muhammad (Religion law vs. Law of rights)
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Religion often supports power arrangements (politics)
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Religion extends social relations to be sacred
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The Divine;
God: father king
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Lacan’s “The Real” and Religion
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Lacan refused to discuss the relationship between his psychoanalysis and religion. Yet, Real-reality relationships recalls that between the divine and “the world”
“For the war against Satan’s army and against the world and sin. He (Jesus) has enlisted you.” (Music by Johann Sebastian Bach)
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==Double Belief - “I do not believe in God, but I don’t want him to know that” (disenchanted world)==
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Enchanted world — where Reality is infused with (signifers of) the Real
God and God’s presence of the world
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Bruno Latour: the modern mindset is not free of enchantment
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Its possible to believe and not believe (at the same time) in enchanted entities or forces
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Ritual
- Clifford Geertz - “Religion is what is really real”
- ==Old meaning of faith - ”loyalty“==
- Balinese kingdoms were organized to produce plays, everyone participates (civic duty)
- In ancient Greeks and Rome also requires participating in rituals as a duty
- Dutch painter Rembrandt (1609 - 1669) got fined for not going to church\
Rite of Passage
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Victor Turner: ritual rites of passage transition form one status to another
- Liminality - a powerful, possibility dangerous state at the threshold
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Inherent challenge to naturalized social categories (child, adult)
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Religious rituals are liminal between the ordinary world and what is beyond: they (re)link reality and the real
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Sprit Possession[ritual]: the spirits are liminal between human culture and society(reality) and the (ineffable unsymbolized) real
Trance dance in Bali
- Bali - island in Indonesia with its own religion, related to Hinduism
- Spirits position (powerful spirits, enter people)
- Rangda (mostly evil) and Barong (mostly good) - the order of the universe depends on the balance between such forces
- Rangda (often a women-like monster) puts men in a trance and orders them to stab themselves with daggers
- The men oblige, but Barong (often a lion, thought of as male) stops them from harming themselves
Are they really in a trance, or are they faking it? (Trance is part of reality for the participating Balinese)
Religious identity
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Religious identity - a source of cohesion, emotional support, that leads to holy community
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Groups defined by religion find themselves in conflict with others
- Religions intolerance is essentially political intolerance
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Freedom from religion
- Freedom of religion connects to divorcing or distancing religion from the state (in West)
- 19th to 20th, religion is private, the state either multi-religious or not religious
- Separation of church and state (USA 1776-1702), Canada is never quite separated
- Freedom of religion connects to divorcing or distancing religion from the state (in West)
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Spirituality - now often means religion without religious identity
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Unmarked religious identity (Religious privilege)
- “Christian” countries recognizes other religions in their own right, not as versions of “religion”
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Religion and Nation can be bring together by
Divine right of kings; the chosen nation; Israel and the New Israels and New Jerusalem
Identities as imagined community
- ==Identity: demands loyalty (religion, nation, kin)==
- All identities are political and it must be practice to function
- Are constructed, imagined, and they change all the time
- Identities are multiple, flexible, and changing all the time
- Imagined Community - a groups who feel and act like a community but don’t now each other face to face - Benedict Anderson
- Identity often refers to an imagined community (ex. religions, nation communities)
Nation
- The imagined concept “Nation” fosters unity over class and ethnic divisions (depoliticizes community), its cuts out units of continuity and diversity (Reality out of the Real)
- Its a transcendental signifier - on attempt to signify the Real (Slavoj Zizek)
- The homogeneous nation - an impossible construction, always in the making
- The idea of the “nation” suggests homogeneity and borders
- Ethnoationalism - based on imaged common descent (imaged group with common descent)
- Civic nationalism - based on residence, citizenship (a country or similar political unit)
- ==Jus sanguines(blood)(descent) vs Jus soli citizenship(soil)(territory)==
- Most citizenship is mixed, but tends towards one fo them
- Canada has mostly jus soli
Who is “Canadian” (not about citizenship)
- Canada is a multicultural nation
- Multiculturalism (multi-ethnic identity) is used to create national unity in English Canada
- However, ordinary language shows that not everyone is “equally ” Canadian
- Canadian = a matter of degrees
- While would be defined as the “default” Canadian, while other races were not