Religions in Practice

An Approach to the Anthropology of Religion

John R. Bowen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315411071
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religions in Practice provides a comprehensive and primarily theme-based overview for students of the anthropology of religion. Whilst covering traditional topics such as magic, witchcraft, and spiritual healing, the book addresses key contemporary subjects including migration, transnationalism, nationalism, secularism, and law. It offers an issues-oriented perspective on everyday religious behaviors and examines small-scale societies as well as major, established religions. Throughout the text Bowen engages with ongoing debates concerning the place of religion in public life. He successfully balances the presentation of theory and concepts with rich case study examples, integrating theoretical discussion with a wide range of cross-cultural ethnographic material.

This seventh edition has been updated throughout. The opening section now focuses more clearly on the question of what is 'religion' and on approaches to studying religion. There is more on materiality as well as a new final chapter on religious mobilizing and violence. Further resources are available via a comprehensive companion website.

Part I

Theories and authority

Chapter 1

Studying religion through practice

In this book, we examine a wide range of social phenomena, from the rise of the Japanese state and diverse forms of state secularism, to practices of healing and harming, and of shaping speech and selves, to large-scale movements and transformations of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. In each case we look at religious practices, a focus that I explain and justify in the rest of this chapter. I claim for all of this book an anthropological perspective, but I draw on work in sociology, politics, history, law, and religious studies. My interest is in processes and practices, micro-level interactions and long passages of time, as these scales and approaches help us to better understand how people construct and understand the religious.

Unfortunately we all sometimes misunderstand how religion works in other people’s lives, and I begin now with an example, unfortunately one of mass murder, in order to reflect on how difficult it is to relate religions to practice. In this case, the task is harder because it concerns someone who committed unfathomable acts.

Attributing religious motives

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a young American security guard, killed 49 people in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, before he was shot dead by police. He was a Muslim and he told a negotiator that he was shooting because the United States was bombing Muslims in Syria and Iraq. Do religious beliefs explain the shooting? It’s not so clear. Mateen claimed allegiance both to Hezbollah and to al-Qaeda – a highly implausible claim because the two are sworn enemies of each other and because he did so only right before the killings. Moreover, the FBI found no evidence of ties to terrorism. Things become still murkier. Pulse is a gay club, and the victims were largely LGBT people; that night the club was holding Latin Night, and the victims were mainly Hispanic. Witnesses said that they had seen Mateen at the club on earlier occasions, and that he had blamed a gay, Hispanic man for an illness.

Some were quick to assume the Islamic motive. Presidential candidate Donald Trump said the shooting showed he was right about “radical Islamic terrorism” and (mistakenly) claimed that Mateen was an immigrant. But virtually all American religious groups, including the major Muslim associations, quickly denounced the massacre as an attack on LGBT people. The United Nations Security Council condemned the shooting for “targeting persons as a result of their sexual orientation,” as did such largely Muslim countries as Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The only American religious groups to sound a sour note were Christian extremists, such as the Baptist pastor in Sacramento who said his only regret was that the shooter “didn’t finish the job.” These remarks were quickly denounced by many in his church and by other pastors (McPhate 2016).

It is difficult to know what motivates mass killers. When in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway, most of them youth members of the Norwegian Labor Party, he had released a long statement espousing hatred for all those whom he saw as destroying a properly Norwegian way of life (Bangstad 2014). Among his most despised targets were Islam and the multicultural politics of the elite. For years he had drenched himself in the writings of far-right, anti-Islam activists in the United States and Europe, and he planned his killing spree as a way of saving Christian Europe from Islam. We could liken the role of anti-Islam writings in his case to the role of jihadists’ calls for violence in that of Omar Mateen – not as sufficient explanations of their actions but as sources for their fatal turn to destruction, perhaps as final self-justifications. The difficulty of fully understanding what motivates such people should caution us against overly rapid labelling. If no one called Breivik’s massacre “radical Christian terrorism,” despite what he said, then we should not ascribe a similar label to Mateen’s terrible acts. Indeed, a 2013 study by the Homeland Security Center of Excellence found that during the period 1970–2011, of all groups committing acts labeled by the government as “terrorist,” only 7 percent were motivated by religious beliefs (START 2013). And, whatever was going on in the minds of Breivik, Mateen, or the murderous truck driver in Nice in 2016, it surely was not about leading a life of religious devotion.

In less anguishing moments as well, misplaced assumptions about Islam motivate actions of some Americans. For example, when in 2010 Muslims in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, decided to build a new mosque, some of their neighbors became alarmed that the new mosque would bring in shariah law. “It’s creeping in,” said one leader of the anti-mosque faction (CNN, “Unwelcome: The Mosque Next Door,” March 27, 2011). Local contractors boycotted the mosque project, and someone torched the building equipment. The lawyer representing them in court claimed that Muslims mistreat women and that therefore Islam was not a real religion. But others urged the town to support the Muslims’ constitutional rights to religious freedom, and a judge backed them and approved the mosque.

In the Murfreesboro story appear some of the challenges faced in countries where citizens practice many different religions. We may feel uncomfortable with new people and their beliefs, even fearful, and fear can lead us to accept arguments that justify our discomfort (Muslims beat their women, shariah is coming to America). Blindly accepting such arguments can contribute to violent actions, as in the case of Anders Behring Breivik. Laws and constitutional principles proved to provide the best bulwark against hate speech.

But even when Muslims win their rights in court, they continue to encounter suspicions that they, unlike others, base all their actions on their sacred texts and, so, cannot be accepted as citizens. We should question this premise. If we assume that Muslims shape everything in their lives around sacred texts, then we could legitimately read those texts to understand Muslims’ actions. But Muslims draw on their scriptures in much the same ways as Christians, Jews, and Buddhists draw on theirs. Some pay close attention to their holy books; others don’t read them at all. Some worship frequently; others never do. And, as with Christians, Jews, and others, Muslims interpret their scriptures in varying and changing ways. Moreover, even most highly religious people have a lot of secular aims in their lives: eating well, holding down a job, bringing up children, and so on.

I begin on this note because of the sense of immediacy I have about the importance of correctly understanding the role religion does and does not play in modern public life, and the contributions the anthropology of religion can make to this understanding. The issue arises most pressingly with regard to contemporary armed conflicts, from those in the Balkans in the 1990s, through the continuing struggles in Myanmar, Kashmir, Syria, and Palestine, to the post-9/11 security debates about Islam in the United States and Europe. Are people fighting because of their religion? Does their religion shape how they think and act? Or is it just a way of mobilizing support? How far can religions be stretched to adapt to new ways of life? These basic questions are posed less often than answers are simply assumed.

What is “religion”?

Ask anyone in Chicago, or Nairobi, or Jakarta, what is meant by “religion,” and they will probably give you an answer that will reflect both a common modern experience and their own particular commitments. People will probably mention features that correspond to what we find in the major, large-scale religions: shared beliefs and books, bounded spaces and set times for worship, trained ministers and scholars. They will add that the beliefs and books, and the worship and scholarship, have to do with God or, perhaps, gods. Our respondents are less likely to mention witchcraft, astrology, or healing, although these practices might be found among many practitioners of large-scale religions. You will find a “modern religion package” of features whose broad distribution reflects several centuries of commercial expansion and colonial rule, post-colonial state formation, and the role played in both those processes by certain modern European assumptions about religion.

Many of us are so used to this modern model of religion that we will spontaneously expect religions to conform to it. But it is a product of particular historical forms and forces, as we will see in subsequent chapters. To take it in a straightforward way as offering a definition of “religion” risks leaving out practices that we might not want to leave out – those that have no books, or do not deal with gods or even spirits. Put more generally, definitions of religion carry with them sets of theoretical commitments – and perhaps also political histories.

Consider the problems we encounter if we start by defining religion in terms of a core set of beliefs. This approach certainly fits the modern religion package. It privileges precisely those religions that we often call “theistic,” meaning based on belief in the existence of God or gods. It also implies the existence of a boundary between those who subscribe to those beliefs and those who do not. Of course, Christianity and Islam fit this model. Political and intellectual leaders of Christian or Muslim background saw the rest of the world through the lens of religion as constituted by doctrine and boundaries. They instituted corresponding regimes of religious authority in their imperial projects, across much of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. From the idea of boundaries follows the idea of exclusivity – you cannot simultaneously be a member of two religions. This idea underwrote the modern mapping of peoples in terms of bounded, religion-and-legal communities. You were a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Protestant, but only one of these. Furthermore, both the affiliation of people to religions and the sharp boundaries between them were defined in terms of beliefs, books, and the worship of deities.

In those societies strongly shaped by modern Christianity or by Islam, people do indeed tend to think of religion in these terms. But the idea of a separate religious sphere is recent, even in the West. In other societies, people define the world in different ways, treating as a natural part of everyday life certain actions and ideas that we usually include in a cross-cultural category of religion. Consider the practices of the Azande people of the southern Sudan that ethnographers have labeled “witchcraft” (discussed further in Chapter 9). According to the Azande, some people carry in their bodies a substance called mangu. This substance is inherited, and it sends out emanations when the person feels jealousy, anger, or other negative emotions toward another person. The substance causes things to happen, and it fits into everyday ways of explaining misfortune: “I tripped at a place where I never trip; it must be witchcraft that caused me to trip.” When the person causing a particular misfortune is discovered (by using oracles), he or she is asked to blow water from his or her mouth and say: “If I was doing harm, I certainly did not mean to, let it be gone.” And that is the end of the matter. The Azande do not concentrate on blame or intentions, but on the particular problem at hand and how to solve it. Indeed, they believe the substance sometimes acts on its own without the person’s knowledge.

What do we make of these practices? From a Western point of view, they refer to a set of objects and processes that lie beyond the immediately verifiable, and thus we may legitimately include them in the comparative study of religions. The Azande, on the other hand, see mangu and oracles as ordinary aspects of reality. Indeed, some Azande who have converted to Christianity continue their use of oracles and accusations of mangu precisely because they do not see those activities as part of a separate religion, but more in the way that an American Baptist or Catholic might regard the use of an astrological chart.

Let’s go one step further. Even among those Western theorists of religion who seek to take into account societies and cultures outside the modern package, competing theories rest on distinct and incommensurable definitions of religion (as we will find in Chapter 2). Those who see religion mainly in cognitive terms define it as a set of beliefs. Those who focus on its social dimension may define it as a set of boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and from this perspective beliefs are secondary to the ritual practices that generate the sense of the sacred. Others point to feelings of awe, of the occult, of a transcendent realm, and for them these feelings pick out what is distinctive about religion; for them a relatively inchoate “spirituality” is included, even in the absence of any fixed beliefs.

Let’s take stock. In different societies we will find distinct ways of cutting up the world. In some there will be an idea of a religious domain; perhaps not in others. But we do need a sense of what it is that we are talking about throughout this book. (It is not enough to throw up our hands and, with Hent de Vries [2008, 8], call religion a “semantic black hole.”) So we can begin by noting that there is a set of features that most students of religion point to, whichever features remain their favorite, and that this set includes the positing or presumption of spirits, forces, beings, substances that transcend the everyday visible world, the emotional and cognitive sense of these other realms, and also the practice of interacting with them to accomplish certain ends, or because of a sense of obligation or power greater than themselves. That’s long-winded and disparate, but that is precisely the sort of encompassing definition that we need at the beginning.

It also helps us to distinguish between religion, on the one hand, and other domains on the other. Consider science. Science may and perhaps usually does contain references to the unseen, as when one refers to the Big Bang, which we have not yet seen, or “strings” as in string theory in physics. Both are theoretical constructs that some scientists posit as a way to account for things that they do see in laboratories. We might find these constructs similar to Azande notions of witchcraft or Baptist notions of God’s plan. But science defines itself as a mode of inquiry, with distinct disciplines, pursued by developing research methods and tests. Debates about creationism nicely bring to the fore these distinctions, as creationism models its claims about the world as a set of refutations of evolutionary theory. Formally, creationist claims resemble scientific claims. However, creationism does not have a set of research methods. Religion also may be compared to nationalism or to other forms of ideology (see Brubaker 2015). In particular, modern nationalisms can be seen as akin to religion in that they offer a world view that identifies one particular people as special, and provides a script as to how they will develop. Nationalism may be religious, that is, it may claim a divine mandate for a nation. Many in the United States would make such a claim, without this making the United States into a theocracy. But unless a nationalism is itself religious, it differs from religion in not positing a divine or extra-worldly basis for the existence of the nation.

Once we find a definition that is broad enough to work for a wide range of societies, then we can ask how people in each time and place we study think about domains of life, whether they have a notion of “religion” as a separate sphere. The diversity of ideas about what constitutes a particular religion places any student of religion in a difficult position. If I write about a particular religion as the symbols, statements, and practices of a particular group of people, I will almost inevitably differ with some of them as to what their religion is. The perspective of an outside observer, who wishes to include a wide array of opinions and activities, may be much broader than that of a practitioner, who may insist on his or her own view of what properly lies within the boundaries of the religion in question.

I have frequently met with objections to the way I define “Islam” when describing certain Sumatran village practices to Indonesian Islamic scholars. For example, many villagers gather at ritual meals to ask ancestral spirits for help in healing the sick or in ensuring a good rice crop. These practices may have their origins in pre-Islamic times, but villagers view them as consistent with their understandings of Islam and they explain them in terms of prophets and angels. Much as Catholics ask saints to intercede for them because they are presumably closer to God, these Muslims ask pious ancestors to do so. For this reason, I include them in my own writings about Sumatran Islam. But for Islamic scholars, these practices conflict with proper understandings of Islam. “Those practices are what we try to teach them to throw aside,” they say. For some of them, my own writing could become part of the very problem they are trying to solve, that is, an overly broad idea of Islam.

How do we respond to these challenges? My own response has been to realize that definitions of religion are not just academic matters but part of the very social reality we are studying. Indeed, the boundaries of “religion” are no clearer when we look closer to home. Some people living in the United States would consider modern forms of witchcraft to be a religion; indeed, the Rhode Island state legislature passed a law making it so in 1989. People continue to debate about the limits the state should place on religious freedom, no more so than in cases of Christian Scientists denying medical treatment to their children. (Until August 1996, treatment given by Christian Science practitioners was considered “medical” for purposes of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, on grounds that to deny them that category would be to violate their religious freedom.) What we call religion may look quite different from one society to another – in the relative importance of a shared belief system, in the degree to which religious practice involves strong emotions, and in the social functions and contexts associated with religious practices.

Do Japanese have “religion”?

Let’s look at this issue through a case to which we will return in the future, that of Japan.

In practice, the Japanese freely blend elements from indigenous practices, state-inspired Shinto, and the traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, with a bit of Christianity thrown in from time to time. Few would argue for maintaining boundaries between these religions. Indeed, most people speak of a division of labor among the religions; a common saying sums it up as “born Shinto, die Buddhist,” referring to the daily appeals to Shinto spirits during one’s lifetime and the Buddhist priest...