Transforming Worldviews

An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change

Hiebert, Paul G.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441200983
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In the past, changes in behavior and in belief have been leading indicators for missionaries that Christian conversion had occurred. But these alone--or even together--are insufficient for a gospel understanding of conversion. For effective biblical mission, Paul G. Hiebert argues, we must add a third element: a change in worldview. Here he offers a comprehensive study of worldview--its philosophy, its history, its characteristics, and the means for understanding it. He then provides a detailed analysis of several worldviews that missionaries must engage today, addressing the impact of each on Christianity and mission. A biblical worldview is outlined for comparison. Finally, Hiebert argues for gospel ministry that seeks to transform people's worldviews and offers suggestions for how to do so.

1

The Concept of Worldview

The concept of worldview has emerged during the past two decades as an important concept in philosophy, philosophy of science, history, anthropology, and Christian thought. It is one of those fascinating, frustrating words that catches our attention. Its ambiguity generates a great deal of study and insight, but also much confusion and misunderstanding. There is no single definition agreed upon by all. At best we can examine the history of the concept along with some of the definitions and theories that have emerged. We can then develop a model that helps us understand the nature of our mission as Christians in the world.

Origins of the Concept

The concept of worldview has several roots. One is in Western philosophy, where the German word Weltanschauung was introduced by Immanuel Kant and used by writers such as Kierkegaard, Engels, and Dilthey as they reflected on Western culture.1 By the 1840s it had become a standard word in Germany. Albert Wolters notes:

Basic to the idea of Weltanschauung is that it is a point of view on the world, a perspective on things, a way of looking at the cosmos from a particular vantage point. It therefore tends to carry the connotation of being personal, dated, and private, limited in validity by its historical conditions. Even when a worldview is collective (that is, shared by everyone belonging to a given nation, class, or period), it nonetheless shares in the historical individuality of that particular nation or class or period. (1985, 9)

In the nineteenth century, German historians turned from the study of politics, wars, and great persons to the study of ordinary people. Because they could not examine the lives of every individual or event, they focused their attention on whole societies, looking for broad cultural patterns. For example, Jacob Burckhardt in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy sought to explain such diverse things as festivals, etiquette, folk beliefs, and science in Renaissance Italy in terms of one paramount theme, individualism. Oswald Spengler traced how cultures selectively borrowed traits from other cultures and how they reinterpreted these traits commensurate with their own underlying worldviews. For example, he showed how the Egyptians had a “deep” concern for time. They kept detailed records of past events and built large monuments for the dead to remind people of their great past. The Greeks, on the other hand, had a “shallow” concept of time and lived essentially in the present. Their historians argued that no important events had occurred before their age. They were interested not in past history but in the structure and operation of the world around them. Wilhelm Dilthey explained different periods of history in terms of their Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the times.”

From the perspective of history, this examination of everyday human activities raised new questions. How do cultural patterns emerge, how do they spread from one region to another, and why do some die out while others persist for centuries and millennia? For example, the cultures of the West were deeply shaped by the Greco-Roman world from which they emerged. They are shaped more by Greek than by Hebrew and Indian philosophies, and more by Roman than by Confucian concepts of law and social order. The German historians used the term Weltanschauung to refer to the deep, enduring cultural patterns of a people.

Another root of the concept is found in anthropology. Anthropologists empirically studied peoples around the world and found deep but radically differing worldviews underlying their cultures. The more they studied these cultures, the more they became aware that worldviews profoundly shape the ways people see the world and live their lives.2 They found that some cultures have similar traits, while others are radically different from one another. This led to the theory of cultural cores and diffusionism, which held that cultural patterns often spread from one group of people to another. Franz Boas, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, and especially A. L. Kroeber used diffusionism to develop the idea of cultural areas made up of societies that share common culture complexes. This notion generated the idea that each culture has a basic configuration, or Volksgeist.

As anthropologists studied different cultures more deeply, they found that below the surface of speech and behavior are beliefs and values that generate what is said and done. They became aware of still deeper levels of culture that shaped how beliefs are formed—the assumptions that people make about the nature of things, the categories in which they think, and the logic that organizes these categories into a coherent understanding of reality. It became increasingly clear that people live not in the same world with different labels attached to it but in radically different conceptual worlds. This growing awareness led to investigations of deep culture and the use of words such as “ethos,” “zeitgeist,” “cosmology,” “cosmos within,” “outlook on life,” “world event,” “world metaphor,” “world order,” “world theory,” “world hypotheses,” “world making,” “world picture,” “cultural core,” “root paradigms,” “collective unconscious,” “cultural unconscious,” “plausibility structure,” “the whole universe seen from the inside view,” and “worldview.”

Like the other words in this list, “worldview” has many problems associated with it. First, because of its roots in philosophy, it focuses on the cognitive dimensions of cultures and does not deal with the affective and moral dimensions, which are equally important, nor with how these three dimensions of being human relate to one another. Second, it is based on the priority of sight or view over hearing or sound. All cultures use both sight and sound, but in most, sound is the dominant sensory experience. Spoken words are more immediate, relational, and intimate than printed ones. Written words are impersonal, detached from specific contexts, and delayed. Scripture says that in the beginning God spoke and the world came into being. In many societies spoken words have the powers of magic and curse or blessing. A third problem with the term is that it applies both to individuals and to communities. A. F. C. Wallace notes that while individuals have their own “mazeways,” the dominant worldview in cultures is shaped greatly by power and the social dynamics of the community (1956). Despite these problems, we will use the term “worldview” because it is widely known and because we lack a better, more precise term. We will, however, define the concept as we use it in this study as the “fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives.” Worldviews are what people in a community take as given realities, the maps they have of reality that they use for living.

Because this study is done in the theoretical framework of anthropology, it is important to trace some of the roots of the concept in that discipline.

History of the Concept in Anthropology

The concept that gave birth to the idea of worldview in anthropology was that of “culture.” Early anthropologists used the term “civilized.” They placed human societies on a scale ranging from “primitive” to “civilized,” from prelogical to logical. Franz Boas and his successors rejected this ranking of societies as ethnocentric and arrogant. They introduced “culture” for the different sets of beliefs and practices of any people, beliefs and practices that make sense to the people who live in them. As they studied other cultures deeply, they realized that there were many standards by which to compare the lifeways of different people, and that no one is superior to the others in all or even most measures.

Franz Boas and his disciple, A. L. Kroeber, were largely responsible for introducing the concept of “culture” into American anthropology. By “culture” they meant the patterns of learned beliefs and behavior that order human activities. Clark Wissler, one of Boas’s students, used the concept to map distinct culture areas among North American Indians by looking at deep, underlying similarities and differences between tribes. Implicit in this view was the notion that a culture is not a random assortment of traits but an integrated coherent way of mentally organizing the world. In other words, an underlying “pattern” or “configuration” “gives to any culture its coherence or plan and keeps it from being a mere accumulation of random bits” (Kroeber 1948, 311). Moreover, culture has depth. While surface traits may change rapidly, certain deep, underlying patterns persist for long periods of time. This view was summed up by Edward Sapir, another of Boas’s students, who defined culture as a “world outlook” that embraced in a single term “those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its distinctive place in the world. Emphasis is put not so much on what is done and believed by a people as on how what is done and believed functions in the whole life of that people, on what significance it has for them” (Sapir 1949, 11).

Ruth Benedict

One of the earliest anthropologists to look deeply at the integrating structures beneath explicit culture was Ruth Benedict, a student of Boas and a novelist-turned-anthropologist. She argued that cultures are not simply collections of traits and that an underlying pattern links traits into a coherent whole. Therefore, cultural traits should be understood in the light of a culture in its entirety. In her classical study of three cultures, Patterns of Culture (1934), she sought to understand their underlying “ethos” or spirit, by first looking at the whole rather than the parts.

Drawing on her earlier work as a novelist and poet,3 she used three Greek mythical figures to characterize the tribes. The Zuni of New Mexico, she said, are Apollonian in nature. They stress an ordered life, group control, emotional reserve, sobriety, self-effacement, and inoffensiveness above all other virtues. They distrust individualism. They have priests who perform rituals as these have always been done.

The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island are the opposite. They value violent, frenzied experiences to break out of the usual sensory routine and express personal emotions with great abandon, seeking ecstasy through fasting, torture, drugs, and frenzied dance. In their ceremonies the chief dancer goes into a deep trance, foams at the mouth, trembles violently, and is tied up with four ropes to keep him from doing damage. The most sacred Kwakiutl cult was the Cannibal Society, whose members ate the bodies of ritually killed slaves. Benedict labeled them Dionysian after a hero in Greek mythology. They accumulated enormous amounts of subsistence goods and destroyed them to demonstrate their wealth, gain prestige, and shame their rivals.

The Dobuans of Melanesia are different from the other two. Their highest virtues, Benedict noted, are hostility and treachery. They practice sorcery, and if anyone has a good crop of yams, it is assumed he performed sorcery against those whose yams did not grow well. The Dobuans live in a state of perpetual fear of one another and, Benedict argues, regard this as normal. Alan Barnard notes, “So, what is normal for the Zuni is not normal for the Kwakiutl. What is normal in Middle America is not normal for the Dobuans, and vice versa. In Western psychiatric terms, we might regard the Zuni as neurotic, the Kwakiutl as megalomaniac, and the Dobuans as paranoid. In Dobu paranoia is ‘normal’ ” (2000, 104).

Benedict sought to give us a “feel” of different cultures in terms of deep affective themes that shape people’s view of the human order.

Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas explored the relationship between cultural beliefs about purity and pollution, two poles along a continuum (1966). She points out that cleanliness has as much to do with order as with hygiene. Dirt is anything that is out of place in the cultural classification system. She writes,

Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; outdoor-things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on. (1966, 48)

In some cultures, such as India, concepts of purity and pollution define the moral order. Sin is not the breaking of impersonal laws, nor the breaking of relationships, but defilement. Restoration to righteousness calls not for punishment prescribed by laws, nor reconciliation with those one has offended, but for purification rites that restore the moral order.

Later Douglas explored the relationship between individual actions and cultures (1969). She postulates two axes to examine this: grid and group. By grid she means cultural freedom and constraint. Low-grid people have the freedom to interact with others as equals. To be high-grid is to be constrained by strong, sharply defined cultural norms that must be obeyed. By group she means people doing things together (high group) or acting as autonomous individuals (low group). Combined, these form a two-dimensional grid that helps us understand different types of situations, individuals, and even cultures.

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf

Before Boas’s work, it was thought that all languages were essentially alike. Their words used different sounds but referred to the same things. Their underlying grammars were the same. Benjamin Whorf showed that this is not the case. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf argued that people who speak different languages have different ways of looking at the world. In other words, there are many different forms of thought, each associated with a particular language that embodies its way of seeing reality. They pointed out that so-called primitive languages, such as Hopi, are more sophisticated in some ways than English.

Robert Redfield

Robert Redfield is another anthropologist who has made a major contribution to our understanding of worldviews (1968). He was influenced more by British social anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, than by American cultural anthropologists like Boas. Malinowski had written, “What interests me really is the study of the native, his outlook on things, his Weltanschauung, the breath of life and reality which he breaths and by which he lives. Every human culture gives its members a definitive vision of the world, a definite zest of life” (1922, 517).

Redfield was concerned with the question, what are the universal ways in which all people look outward on the universe? He defined worldview as “that outlook upon the universe that is characteristic of a people. . . . It is the picture the members of the society have of the properties and characters upon their stage of action. . . . [Worldview] attends specifically to the way a man, in a particular society, sees himself in relation to all else. It is that organization of idea which answers to a man the questions: Where am I? Among what do I move? What are my relations to these things? . . . It is, in short, a man’s idea of the universe” (1968, 30, 270).

Redfield focused his attention on the cognitive dimensions of culture, arguing that while humans see the world differently from one another, they all live in the same world, and they all must deal with certain worldview universals. These, he said, include conceptions of time, space, self, other humans, the nonhuman world, notions of causality, and universal human experiences such as birth, death, sex, and adulthood.

Redfield’s goal was to compare worldviews and formulate a general worldview theory. His universal cognitive categories are helpful because they provide us with a grid to study all worldviews. These categories also enable us to compare these worldviews and to build larger ethnological theories regarding the nature of worldviews in general.

Redfield’s model has it limitations. Because it focuses on the cognitive dimensions of cultures, it has no place for feelings and values. Moreov...