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When anthropologists in the twentieth century went looking for it, what they found was the exact reverse: an amazing diversity of subtle and unique understandings of the world based on close observations of nature. In contrast to the majority of humanity, they were the independent thinkers. The religions of the independent thinkers had no theologians; instead, they were woven into the fabric of everyday life. That first-hand reporting on the independent thinkers should have only begun so very late in the day was absurd. By the end of the twentieth century, this project of documentation had run its course. There can be no discussion of human nature that does not take into account the worlds of the independent thinkers.

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In a remote corner of the western Pacific, there is an island about two miles in diameter, with a single mountain. Ocean swells break constantly along its rocky northern shore, and there is no safe anchorage for large vessels. The nearest neighbours are 200 miles away. The island is called Tikopia, and it is inhabited by people of Polynesian descent. When the New Zealander Raymond Firth went to study their way of life in 1928 there were about 1,200 Tikopians, the majority still following their indigenous religion. That was remarkable because by that date all the other Polynesians across the entire Pacific were Christian, and most had been for generations. Many were converted by the London Missionary Society, an interdenominational alliance of Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.

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No chapter abstract available.

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The way that Firth went about studying the Tikopia became characteristic of anthropology in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, however, when the discipline first established itself, it had different goals and different methods. The Great Project was not yet what anthropology was about, and the first generation of scholars saw no good reason to go chasing off to remote corners of the globe. Instead, as they saw it, there was already a wealth of material ready to hand on library shelves. Before the sixteenth century, Europe had been a peripheral region on the great Eurasian land mass. The Moslem world that surrounded Europe was more central to world trade and far more sophisticated. Then, suddenly, Europeans were travelling everywhere. Cook’s efforts were also subverted by his own men. Before making landfall, Cook had announced a strict set of rules.

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The word primitive has a broad range of meanings, all derived from Latin primus, ‘first.’ The Oxford English Dictionary gives this list: (i) of or belonging to the first age; (ii) mental processes that apparently originate in unconscious needs and desires and have not been affected by objective logical thinking; (iii) conformed to the pattern of the early church; (iv) simple, rude or rough; (v) relating to groups whose culture, through isolation, has remained at a simple level of social and economic organisation. In the late nineteenth century, anthropology took shape around the notion of the primitive. Antiquity was the most accessible element, since all educated people, by definition, knew something about the Greek and Roman classics. Sensational discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia pushed antiquity further back and planted archaeology firmly in the public imagination.

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As the Great Project gathered momentum in the twentieth century, the whole raison d’etre of anthropology changed. This was clear to its practitioners, but not to the wide audience that Frazer had reached. By comparison to the eclat of The Golden Bough, the Great Project began quietly. The immediate task was the accumulation of case studies like that of Firth in Tikopia. That seems only reasonable, but the irony is that anthropology achieved its greatest public impact before anything much had been done in the way of research. Instead, Frazer’s generation was content to follow the advice of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: Verdict first! Evidence after! Spencer St. John was British Consul General to the Sultan of Brunei in 1856 and took the opportunity to make a couple of expeditions upriver, into regions beyond the control of the Sultan.

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No chapter abstract available.

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The Comparative Method set out to reconstruct human prehistory, and there were two variables used to sort higher and lower. The most obvious was technological evolution. In the scale developed by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, Middle Savagery was defined by knowledge of the use of fire. Since no human population was ever discovered that lacked the knowledge of fire, the preceding category of Lower Savagery was an empty box. Perhaps Homo sapiens had always used fire; perhaps fire was tamed by pre-human hominids. Middle Barbarity was achieved by the domestication of plants or animals, and Upper Barbarity was heralded by the use of iron. Civilisation was the seventh and final stage. The sequence seems plain enough, but it unleashed endless debate among scholars.

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If Americans are asked why they play baseball the usual response is: it’s our national game! In the nineteenth century, travellers to remote places often received much the same response. Grilling a native about some strange practice – through an interpreter of course – the standard response was no response. All they could elicit was: it is the custom of our ancestors. From this, anthropologists of Tylor’s era concluded that such people were the ‘slaves of custom.’ For them, this state of affairs was anyway evident from their primitiveness, which in itself was enough to prove that their customs had stayed the same for thousands of years. In particular, people do not generally sort their everyday activities into those that are ritual and those that are not. In many of the languages that ethnographers deal with, there is no word that could be glossed as ritual. In Tikopia, ritual was simply another kind of ‘work’.

Pages: 38

No chapter abstract available.

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Starting with an ethnographic detail from Borneo, Tylor re-constructed to his own satisfaction an entire stage in the evolution of religion. The implication was that ancestor worship had been practiced everywhere at some time or other, and only later had concepts arisen of an abstract god, or gods. These later beliefs were also irrational, but they were at least not ‘primitive.’ Having deduced this chronology, primitive religions could then be sorted through to see how many were still passing through the ancestor worship stage. The indigenous religions of Australia were important to the development of anthropology for two distinct reasons. First, the Aborigines had already been nominated as the most primitive peoples on earth. Second, there was already at the beginning of the twentieth century an impressive ethnographic record. This was the result of the efforts of two remarkable men, F.J. Gillen and Baldwin Spencer.

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The anthropologists of Sir James Frazer’s generation were preoccupied by magic. That was because it represented for them the very earliest stage of human mental evolution, back before religion had been invented. Religion constituted an advance because humans finally noticed that magic didn’t always work. After thinking that over for a millennium or two, they decided that there was something out there that interfered with their magic, so that it worked sometimes and not others. The most obvious of those non-human agencies was the ancestors, whose existence had already been deduced from the mysterious but universal experience of dreaming. After that, human creativity produced gods and demons in vast profusion. In its latest stage of evolution, the higher religions had converged towards an abstract notion of a single God. This refinement was to be applauded, but it remained an illusion. The true liberation from error awaited the advent of the natural sciences.

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Aborigine religions were often dismissed in the nineteenth century as mere “nature cults,” as contrasted to proper religions, which had gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their pantheons, and the religions of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex were monotheistic, but Aborigine religions were about nothing more than animals and plants. In that sense, of course, biology and botany might also have been classified as nature cults. At the same time, it was argued, Aborigines had so little grasp of reality that they were blatantly lost in the supernatural, the alcheringa and its heroes, who travelled underground and had no origin except that they “sprang up.” All religions, of course, revolved around supernatural things, angels and ghosts and saviours and such, but the Aborigines presented a particularly egregious example. The problem is that “normal experience and knowledge” and the “known forces of nature” were precisely what Aborigine ritual was about.

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No chapter abstract available.

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The great technique of nineteenth-century anthropology – the Comparative Method – was designed to conjure evidence where there was none. Since little or no archaeology had been done anywhere outside Europe, prehistory everywhere else was a complete blank. The premise of the Method was that existing primitive societies provided all the evidence needed to reconstruct previous stages of social evolution. Religion was particularly interesting because it showed the gradual evolution of rationality through various stages of irrationality. The response of twentieth-century anthropology was to deny that there is any such thing as fossil religions or societies. Each and every one of them has a history reaching from the first population of Homo sapiens through to the present day. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Albert Michelson, using a machine called an interferometer, produced the counter-intuitive result that light travelled at the same speed relative to an observer regardless of how fast the observer was going.

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With few exceptions, religions prescribe what their adherents must do, not what they must think. It follows that an ethnographer cannot expect to simply be told the meanings of rituals. For the participants, the question does not arise. It would be like asking a motorist with a flat tire what was the ‘meaning’ of car jacks. Rituals, like car jacks, have uses, not meanings. Freud’s student Karl Jung saw something else in dreams. What struck him was their resemblance to the myths of primitive peoples. Myths, he noticed, unfolded through the same irrational leaps in which heroes did impossible things, and humans morphed into animals and back again. He concluded that myths had in them the same kind of hidden meanings as dreams, leading directly to the unconscious. Henderson cites a wide range of examples, including Davy Crockett, Hercules, Superman, Buddha, and King Arthur.

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No chapter abstract available.

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As an item invested with multiple symbolic associations, the mudyi tree has a restricted geographical range. One can hardly expect it to be found outside the region where mudyi trees grow. Before Turner arrived in Zambia, he had never seen a specimen of Diplorrhyncus condylocarpon, so he could have had no pre-conceived idea about its meaning. When he was shown one, it took no great powers of observation to notice that its sap was a milky white. Indeed, in English, it is called the milk tree. Beyond that, however, Turner had to piece together the associations that the mudyi tree had for Ndembu people by carefully noting its use in ritual, quizzing his informants, and then sifting repeatedly through his accumulated data. By contrast, there are things that are part of everyone’s experience, wherever they live.

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Mukanda was one among many Ndembu rituals, the most common of which were aimed at healing – both for medical problems and social ones, which were anyway indistinguishable for the Ndembu. People who underwent treatment became adepts themselves, that is, they were initiated into a healing cult. A kadiwu is a gourd container; the ifwili side of the lodge is the one facing away from the circumcision site. There are familiar items of liminal symbolism: the initiates are naked, they are bossed around, and they are beaten. The small wounds they receive are reminiscent of circumcision, but produce scars that can be seen, indeed displayed.

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No chapter abstract available.

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In the twentieth century, the Great Project in anthropology turned away from Tylor’s program of deducing the mental prehistory of humankind. Instead, the goal was to see, as far as possible, how the world appeared to other peoples. In that context other peoples’ beliefs could not be pronounced wrong – that would simply stop the game before it had begun. They might prove incomprehensible, but that would only indicate our failure to get the job done. The change in ethnographic conventions does not, however, mean that Evans-Pritchard’s dilemma has gone away. Imagine, for instance, how a woman anthropologist would have been situated in fieldwork among the Azande. Meanwhile, witchcraft beliefs also presented the colonial regime with a conundrum. The legal codes adopted in the Sudan took no account of it, on the grounds that there was no such thing.

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Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic has been criticised for forcing Azande thought into Western rationalist models. But it is possible to extract the principles of their thought from dozens of situations in which witchcraft is called upon to explain happenings and from dozens of other situations in which failure is attributed to some other cause. Their philosophy is explicit, but is not formally stated as a doctrine. Evans-Pritchard says that Azande philosophy regarding witchcraft is not stated as doctrine, and this is consistent with the general proposition argued that people generally do not, or cannot, put into words their most fundamental understandings of the world. In the period after the Second World War, there were Grand Theorists, including sociologists, psychologists, economists, and yes, anthropologists, who claimed to be laying the groundwork for a positive science of human behaviour.

Pages: 36

No chapter abstract available.

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From the Azande point of view, the bad things that happened to them were the result of witchcraft. Their first response was to identify the witch, and the final confirmation of that was the poison oracle. The next step was to confront the witch, who was often willing to recall any unintentional witchcraft by blowing water from the mouth. Meanwhile, protection was available through magic, and there was a vast range of it, for everything from curing illness to delaying sunset. To use magic required the preparation of what Evans-Pritchard calls “medicines,” some drunk, others rubbed on or sprinkled about. The medicines were concocted from herbs and needed no spells, although they might be urged to work properly just as was the poison oracle. Recipes for medicines were inherited, or purchased from reputed adepts. People had confidence in their medicines but knew they were not infallible.

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Divergence in the meaning of mana is all the more likely given the range in size of Polynesian islands. At the top end, the Hawaiian Islands had dense populations and intensive agriculture making use of irrigation. At the time of Captain Cook’s visit it had a rigid hierarchy of rank that radically separated chiefs from commoners, and a variety of priesthoods attached to different deities. There were large temple compounds where a cycle of rituals were performed in front of images of the gods sanctified by human sacrifice. In Tikopia, there was none of this – just a tiny island so remote as to have been overlooked by missionaries until the twentieth century. Instead, it was geared to a set of relationships between people, having to do with marriages and birth order, so that, in Firth’s striking phrase, “nature does not operate independently of man”.

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A large part of the Great Project of twentieth-century anthropology was to assemble detailed studies of particular independent religions, but that does not mean that there were no general results. For ethnographers what ‘primitive religion’ translated into was the diverse understandings of the world of the peoples who had retained a measure of cultural independence, that is freedom of thought and action beyond the political, economic, or religious domination of any of the Old World empires or civilisations. In many places, ethnographers arrived too late, or at best only in the nick of time. At the beginning of the Great Project, no one knew how diverse the independent religions were, and what that might show about the breadth of the human imagination. The reader is in a position to make a judgment about that for him or herself. The religion of the Bororo of Brazil had neither witchcraft nor deities.

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Religion, it turns out, is a surprisingly slippery concept. The more we know about it the harder it is to pin down. From this I draw two conclusions: first, we’ve evidently got the wrong word. Second, to claim to ‘explain’ religion is childishly simplistic.