Spirits in Culture, History and Mind

Jeannette Mageo, Alan Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415913676
• eBook ISBN: 9781136758522
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Spirits in Culture, History and Mind reintegrates spirits into comparative theories of religion, which have tended to focus on institutionalized forms of belief associated with gods. It brings an historical perspective to culturally patterned experiences with spirits, and examines spirits as a locus of tension between traditional and foreign values. Taking as a point of departure shifting local views of self, nine case studies drawn from Pacific societies analyze religious phenomena at the intersection of social, psychological and historical processes. The varied approaches taken in these case studies provide a richness of perspective, with each lens illuminating different aspects of spirit-related experience. All, however, bring a sense of historical process to bear on psychological and symbolic approaches to religion, shedding new light on the ways spirits relate to other cultural phenomena.

1 Gods, Spirits, and History

A Theoretical Perspective

Robert l. levy
Jeannette Marie Mageo
Alan Howard

When one compares spirit-related phenomena, interesting similarities and variations—explainable in terms of social structure, local history, missionization, and so forth—are evident. We suggest that not only similarities and variations in the form and status of spirits, but even their latter-day attenuation or efflorescence, can be better understood by comparing the roles they play with those of gods. To facilitate analysis, we offer a set of propositions contrasting the implications of gods and spirits for social structure, personhood, personal experience and morality. Before exploring this comparative framework, however, a discussion of terminology is necessary to minimize confusion.

TERMS AND CONCEPTS

We find it useful to contrast “spirits” and “gods,” while, at the same time, postulating 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. If we were to arrange spiritual beings along this continuum, the distribution would result in a clustering toward the former pole of entities to which we ordinarily apply the label “gods,” while those we ordinarily label “spirits” would cluster toward the latter pole. This is not to say that every locally defined spiritual being can be neatly categorized as one or the other. Indeed, as several essays in this volume make clear, some beings defy categorization; on certain occasions what we take to be godlike qualities are attributed to them, and on other occasions their attributes are unmistakably spiritlike. Even the loftiest god can take on spiritlike qualities for some people on some occasions, while the most obscure of spirits can, on occasion, be idiosyncratically worshiped as a god. In some religions special classes of gods, such as the dangerous deities of Hinduism, display characteristics otherwise associated with spirits or demons (Levy 1990).

There are also many strange beings—giants, gnomes, fairies, phoenixes and the like—that fit uneasily into such a continuum because they have qualities we associate with neither gods nor spirits. They are on the fringes of the ordinary, at the edges of an uncanny zone, but unlike other strange creatures such as the orangutan cannot be captured, caged, and made, after a fashion, banal. As a general category, ghosts also present an attributional problem. The ghosts of powerful ancestors often attain the ritual potency of high gods, while the ghosts of disvalued people may roam only the darkest, most obscure corners of the social world.

In these domains, bounded solely by the limits of imagination, varieties of local terminology would seem wide open to cultural invention. Yet it is this relative freedom from contextual constraints (say, in comparison with fishing techniques and the universal reinvention of hooks, nets, and poisons) that makes the transcultural similarities that do come to our attention—the navigability of this realm to outsiders—particularly interesting.

In common parlance, the English terms “gods and spirits”are normally understood to distinguish different types of spiritual beings, with the term “spiritual ”implying nonmateriality. The idea that gods and spirits are nonmaterial is supported by Cartesian dualism, but it is far from universally accepted. Robert Lowie’s observation many years ago remains definitive:

By common agreement spiritual represents the opposite of material existence. The difficulty is that if we insist on the notion of completely incorporeal being there are probably no examples to be found on primitive levels…. Nevertheless, some of these [examples given] belong to a different order of existence from that of men, beasts, and rocks. They are not, indeed, immaterial, but they are certainly less grossly material than the bodies of ordinary physical objects; and it is this subtler mode of corporeal existence that may be called“ spiritual” in an ethnological sense. (Lowie 1970:99–100, emphasis added)

In most, perhaps all, communities, various categories of phenomena are distinguished from common sense reality and are associated with an extraordinary realm of uncanny mind-bearing beings. These beings’ powers, logical status, and relation to space and time are different from those of humans in the ordinary social world. We assume, in contrast to the assertions of, for example, Levy-Bruhl (1931), that people everywhere distinguish the natural from the extra-natural, although the relations, boundaries, and ontological status of the two worlds may differ from place to place.

Returning to the problem of transcultural conceptualizations, the danger of ethnocentric bias in consideration of spiritual beings is by no means confined to the concept “spiritual.” Anthropologists have also argued against the cross-cultural use of concepts such as “supernatural” (Hallowell 1960, Saler 1977), “witchcraft” and“ sorcery” (Crick 1979, Fisiy and Geschiere 1991), and even “belief” (Needham 1972). Usually the argument attacks a particular term rather than the phenomenon it was meant to denote. Hallowell, for instance, suggested that “other-than-human” be substituted for “supernatural,” while Van Baal (1985) offered the cumbersome phrase “referring to a non-empirical reality” as an alternative. Fisiy and Geschiere (1991) would replace “witchcraft” and “sorcery” with “occult powers. ”The concepts of “deity” and “god” have been less troublesome to anthropologists, in part, perhaps, because they are less pejorative—less pejorative because the West has continued to retain a place, however distant, for its gods.

Given that none of the neologisms for supernatural seems appropriate, we adopt the term “numinous,” following Rudolph Otto (1923), as an adjective to describe places and events that generate perceptions of potentially sacred, or at least spooky, beings, and to describe a realm more or less separated from the natural or ordinary. We further suggest the term “numinal” to refer to the various kinds of beings associated with numinous places and experiences¹—the beings we have awkwardly been calling “spiritual beings.” Numinous beings and human beings, however, do not generally exist in two absolute, discrete realms, but move between realms of experience: spirits enter the human world in possession; shamans enter the spirit world in trance and dream.

Within the general category of numinals we postulate a continuum anchored by ideal types in Weber’s sense—that is, heuristic devices, never fully actualized empirically, but acting as points of reference and orienting guidelines against which observations can be compared. For convenience, one end of the continuum can be labeled “godlike” and the English term“ god” used in reference to the corresponding ideal type; the other end can be labeled “spiritlike” and the English term “spirit ”used to designate an opposing type.

To intermediate types are attributed more complex characters. They may roam free at times, perhaps at the margins of the domesticated world, but may also invade the human world in possession; they may be actively drawn into the moral order through rituals or other priestcraft in which they are temporarily bound and made use of when circumstances demand. The boundaries between spirits and gods blur when beings initially conceived of as unbound are increasingly constrained by concrete representations (such as sculptures, masks, medicine bundles), and by ritual and prayer. Indeed, spirits can be transformed into “gods” in such instances.² Likewise, gods freed from social-moral constraints, as when a priesthood crumbles, can become very spiritlike in character. These ideal types thus not only call attention to salient features of the inhabitants of numinous realms and the phenomena clusteredaround them. They also provide an interpretive approach to deviations from the characteristics of those types.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GODS AND SPIRITS

We now present some propositions about the structural, psychological, experiential and moral aspects of numinous realms and their inhabitants in the hope of suggesting dimensions along which numinal beings tend to vary, of stimulating comparison, and of inviting productive disagreements.³

Structure. Gods are the foci of more elaborated social institutions than spirits. The attendants and mediators of gods, always necessary, are high-status “priests.” The attendants and mediators of spirits, required only on special occasions, are people of low status, often socially suspect or ambivalently viewed.

Gods are related to and mark clear-cut divisions of space and time. They have territories, calendrical festivals, and often, fixed homes in shrines or temples. Spirits are more fluid, and are related to and mark emergent, contingent, unexpected occasions. Being more fixed in time, space and nature, gods can be bounded and conveniently contextualized. Their proper places and times can be clearly demarcated as belonging to the realm of the sacred. In contrast, spirits lack social boundedness, and are thus uncanny; they are difficult to bind and fix.

Although spirits in their free forms are dangerous to people and have the potential to enter, possess, and contaminate human beings, like the diseases with which they overlap conceptually, they can be bound through acts of power. They can be forced to enter into magic circles, shamans, material objects and masks. These bindings make it possible for humans to control spirits’ power. While their power is often said to be used by those who control them for selfish and evil ends, it can also be put to community use. When spirits are successfully bound, new types of entities become possible; they can even be transformed into gods. A bound spirit, put to community use, therefore has to be distinguished from a free, or unbound, spirit.

The binding of a spirit is often done through the agency of a medium, shaman, or spirit doctor. This may be for the purpose of overcoming trouble caused by a spirit. Such control moves spirits closer to the clearly formulated and controlled arenas of cultural interpretation. Spirits may also be called upon to perform specific services for good or evil. They may drift into sharper sociocultural focus by providing omens or other socially relevant information. Where mediumship is institutionalized, spirits may be experienced in well-defined cultural frames, since mediums roles may be central to a social system. Thus Tikopia mediums, differentiated from priests, were prominent figures “during certain religious rites of a public and very sacred kind ”(Firth 1970: 263). They also performed on occasions such as the completion of major projects, the loss of a person at sea, and during grave illness or other crises (Firth 1967, 1970).

Personhood. Gods are conceived as being more like social persons, usually idealized ones. Their appearance is often canonically standardized, and they inhabit a humanlike world of social relations with humans and other gods. They are central to the cultural order and exist in times, spaces and causal chains closer to common sense reality. Gods can be manipulated through interpersonal moral techniques such as praise, supplication and gift giving—just as high-status humans can be. Spirits are vague forces; their appearances are difficult to discriminate. They are only minimally persons, closer to the kind of person exemplified in the dreamer or madman. They exist at the margins of the human order in a dreamlike world of shifting categories, vague motivations, and amorphous relations with other beings.⁴ Spirits are either avoided or manipulated through devices of direct “magical” power. The relation between gods and spirits is representative of the relations between the center and the margins of the social order and has much to say about these relations.

We may note here that members of communities of gods making up pantheons often are thought to have humanlike familial relations and moral relations of friendship, competition and antagonism. Domains of spirits are often, perhaps usually, classified by features other than those of humanlike social relations—features having to do with appearance, power, and the ability to transform themselves into a number of forms.

Insofar as they operate in the realm of humans, gods act—usually in legendary time—in relation to heroes, seers, and saints.⁵ Spirits are, in contrast, often experienced by people without much power or status, who are locally perceived as being weak; or they may be experienced by stronger people in marginal places or states (in the forest or bush, in the twilight or dark, entering or waking from sleep), and notably more often by women. They not only trouble, but at times assist, the “weak.”

Experience. Gods and spirits have different ontological status and do different kinds of social, cognitive and psychodynamic work. Gods generally represent forces of social order but are characteristically more distant from sensual experience. Their acceptance is more likely to be grounded in doctrine or “faith.” Spirits, while they can be made use of for social order, more often represent and give form to poorly socialized psychological and social processes. They are more directly experienced; people know they exist through the sensory warrant of their own experience or from accounts by people like themselves. Beliefs based on doctrinal authority and faith have different vulnerabilities than beliefs based on personal experience; hence gods and spirits are differentially affected by historical change. Local gods ordinarily disappear long before local spirits. Since Christianity does not provide a well-defined frame for experiencing spirits, it collapses them into a Christian demonic realm, which is much vaguer than spirits’ traditional classification. So when old religions go (and with them former gods), spirits become even more unbounded, chaotic and shadowy.

Gods’ distance from sensory experience, and their particularistic relation to specific communities or to segments of a community, means that they are known through the exercise of faith. In consequence, local gods, and the community-bounded forms of faith that create and sustain them, can be used to mark a particular population as a community of faith against outsiders who have different faiths. The way these commitments of faith are achieved in the course of education and ritual is an important part of socialization and social order. The social reconstruction of gods from generation to generation is therefore of a different kind than the social reconstruction of spirits.⁶In contrast, spirits are experienced in similar forms throughout wide areas, and do not serve to create or sustain the local social distinction of a community from other communities. Belief or involvement with particular spirits may, however, differentiate social and psychological cohorts within a community.

Morality. Gods and spirits have contrapuntal relations to the moral order. Being more personlike in conception and nature, gods are central to representing, responding to and sanctioning a community’s moral order through socially adequate rewards and punishment. Spirits are vague and fleeting; they are often conceived as dangerous flesh-eaters or destructively seductive incubi or succubi. They represent the contents and logics of worlds of desire, dream, and fantasy—worlds in which morality is tangential at best—existing at the periphery of the work-a-day moral world of common sense. Spirits are related, typically, to people's bodies; gods, to people’s consciences and to moral personhood.

Spirits are extra-moral, or, if they represent an antiworld in which community morality is irrelevant and thus negated, they are “evil.” They function in relation to social control by representing the dangers of leaving the social domain, of passing beyond its boundaries.⁷ Horrified by their encounters with “evil spirits,” people retreat to the often tedious safety of the social and moral arena. Whatever it is that generates the cultural and personal presence of spirits, and whatever cognitive and expressive forces form them, they support social order in a quite differ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Gods, Spirits, and History: A Theoretical Perspective
• 2 Continuity and Shape Shifting: Samoan Spirits in Culture History
• 3 They Loved Her Too Much: Interpreting Spirit Possession in Tonga
• 4 Heteroglossic Discourses on Nukulaelae Spirits
• 5 Spirit Encounters on a Polynesian Outlier: Anuta, Solomon Islands
• 6 Speak of the Devils: Discourse and Belief in Spirits on Rotuma
• 7 Local and Foreign Spirits in Kwaio, Solomon Islands
• 8 Apparitions, Orations, and Rings: Experience of Spirits in Dadul
• 9 Spirit Possession in Chuuk
• 10 Cultural and Experiential Aspects of Spirit Beliefs Among the Toraja
• 11 Afterword: Spirits and Their Histories
• References
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index