9 Magic, Science and Religion

Dr. Peter Mandaville, Professor of Government in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, served as a Senior Advisor in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S Department of State from 2015 to 2016. Prior to that, Dr. Mandaville was a member of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff where he assisted in creating the United States’ response to the Arab Spring, which “was a series of pro-democracy uprisings that enveloped several largely Muslim countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain” starting in 2011 with “the political and social impact of these popular uprising remain[ing] significant today, years after many of them ended.”[1] In 2017, one of the authors, Hughes Rinker, attended a lecture given by Dr. Mandaville at the university where he recalled his time serving as a Senior Advisor. In particular, he discussed one program that the State Department was developing that would encourage and support Muslim entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa. When he was brought into the conversation, he asked why the program was specifically targeting “Muslim entrepreneurs” in the region, why not just an initiative to support entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa? Dr. Mandaville asked the question of whether the State Department would create a program or dedicate funding to support “Christian entrepreneurs” in South America.  The answer he received was in fact, no. Why was the term “Muslim” being used to identify the recipients of support in this case? He suggested that by doing so it makes the beneficiaries seem “exceptional” and assumes that they are in need of particular types of resources and services rather than truly entrepreneurs. He explained that staff and colleagues at the State Department were taken back by his suggestion given that that he was brought in to serve as an expert on Islam, on Muslim majority countries, and on Muslim communities, as well as on international relations and politics. They assumed that he would agree with including “Muslim” in the program’s title as a way to prioritize the budding entrepreneurs’ needs in the Middle East and North Africa, but quite the contrary, he saw this as problematic and marginalizing. Moreover, it is important to remember that not everyone who identifies with the Middle East and North Africa is Muslim, and not all Muslims live in the region. In 2010, Asia-Pacific is where 62.1% of the global Muslim population lived and is projected in 2050 to still have 52.1% of the global Muslim Population. And in 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to be where 17.6% of the world’s Muslim population lives (up from 15.6% in 2010), which is just slightly behind the Middle East and North Africa at 20.1% of the global population (up just a little from 19.9%).[2]

After September 11, 2001 and the start of the decades long war in Afghanistan, anthropologist Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod, wrote the powerful journal article “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” (2002). In the article, she recounts how she was asked by a journalist to give insight for a broadcast on women and Islam, a topic that became heated and extremely popular after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. She writes about the experience: “The questions were hopelessly general. Do Muslim women believe ‘x’? Are Muslim women ‘y’? Does Islam allow ‘z’ for women? I asked here: If you were to substitute Christian or Jewish whenever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense?” (Abu-Lughod 2002, 784). Hughes Rinker had the opportunity to meet another anthropologist at a conference who previously worked in a health care setting who explained that the providers hoped they would help them create a “rolodex”[3] of how to treat patients who identified in particular ways: if they were Muslim the providers should do this but not that, or if they identified as a particular race or ethnicity, they should offer this treatment but not that one. The anthropologist stated they were frustrated with the situation and refused to make such gross overgeneralizations. Eight years after Abu-Lughod published her article, American news anchor Katie Couric (2010) interviewed Queen Rania of Jordan for Glamour magazine. Couric asked Queen Rania, “What do you think is the biggest misconception about Islam today?” The Queen responded, “That Islam preaches violence. I know the rich heritage of this religion. It preaches tolerance and compassion.” Then Couric asked, “How can you explain countries where there’s strict Islamic law, and women can’t go out alone or must cover themselves up? Women who see things from this country’s prism think that’s unfair. Is there a way to help them understand those customs?” Queen Rania cautioned against holding generalized assumptions about Muslim countries and groups of people, “First of all, in many Muslim countries women have incredible amounts of freedom, sometimes more than in some countries in Europe. So you cannot just make a generalized statement about women. Second, Islam is not the problem. It’s tradition. It’s culture. It’s age-old mind-sets that need to be changed.” Anthropologists have long rejected the idea that there is a coherent Islamic theology (coherent religious beliefs or systematic study of religion) and instead tried to make diverse religious beliefs and practices as well as the relationship among religion, culture, and globalization the empirical starting points of their research (Deeb 2006, Inhorn and Sargent 2006). Any religion is not monolithic (uniform that is solid and cannot be broken down) and practitioners are not homogenous (meaning the same) in terms of characteristics, identities, beliefs, or practices.

Religion, Sorcery, and Magic

Religion has long been a topic of anthropological inquiry and can be defined as, “a set of beliefs based on a unique vision of how the world ought to be, often revealed through insights into a supernatural power and lived out in community” (Guest 2016, 365). It is important to remember that religion is not always linked to a belief in a supreme deity. In the United States and places like Western Europe, religion usually refers to a particular faith like Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, but this is not the same everywhere. Bronislaw Malinowski (1922), credited with establishing the importance of participant observation in his fieldwork in the South Pacific among the Trobriand Islanders around the time of World War I, found that during excursions among the islands that were part of the kula, the Trobrianders called upon the supernatural to protect them against rough seas and weather and to lower their stress levels. The kula is an exchange among elites, mostly men and chiefs, of shell necklaces and armbands that resulted in the gaining of status when items were given away; they did not want to keep the items for a long period of time because giving the items away and having their name attached to them afforded them greater status. (In fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders in the 1970s, anthropologist Annette Weiner discovered that there was an equally important exchange of banana leaf bundles and skirts women, a form of wealth, which was part of mortuary ceremonies and played a key role in the Trobriand social organization, which was not included in the work of Malinowski.) Anthropology emphasizes the shared and collective nature of religion, as Malinowski found in the voyages during the kula, and pays attention to the social and cultural interactions given that religion does not exist in isolation from other parts of society.

Fei Hsiao-t’ung (or Fei Xiaotong) was a Chinese anthropologist (1911-2005) who studied with Malinowski at the London School of Economics. He is considered a pioneer in the social sciences because he “helped lay the foundation for sociological and anthropological research in China, through his pioneering studies of village life and ethnic minorities.”[4] His book, which began as his dissertation, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (1939) focuses on economic practices among Chinese peasants, including production, consumption, and distribution of wealth. Fei includes a hand-drawn map of the village and marks the location of two temples, which sit outside of the center towards the periphery. At first glance we may think that religion is not central to the villagers’ lives given the location of the temples, but he writes, “But the position of the temples does not mean that the religious life of the people is concentrated on the outskirts. In fact, their religious life is largely carried on in their own houses” (Fei 1939, 21). Belief in the supernatural and gods play an important role in the villagers’ lives. Science and magic figure into agriculture. Magic may be generally defined as “a set of activities and technologies intended to manipulate invisible or immaterial agencies and energies, not recognized by science, to an advantageous end” (Beunssi 2019). Fei documents that people in the region had a wealth of knowledge when it came to agriculture; they were highly skilled at growing rice in particular: “Science, however, only rules in so far that the natural factors can be successfully controlled by human effort. There are uncontrollable factors in nature” (1939, 166). Fei gives the examples of locusts coming or a lack or abundance of rain, both of which can be harmful to rice. He observed that people understood that there are legitimate explanations behind the locusts or the rain, but they know that “these natural phenomena are beyond human control…The recognition of human limitations gives birth to magic. But magic is not a substitute for science. It is only one means for combatting natural disasters…Science and magic go hand-in-hand to attain a practical end” (Fei 1939, 21). Through his detailed exploration of economics in village China, Fei also signals more broadly that religion, however it is practiced or defined in a society or community, is intertwined with the exchange and accumulation of wealth.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) was an English anthropologist well-known for his book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1976). The Azande, a term that references culturally diverse groups of people, live in central Africa, in parts of South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since the mid-19th century, the Azande have come under three colonial administrations: Belgian, French, and Anglo-Egyptian.[5] In the book, Evans-Pritchard details how the Azande explain sickness, death, and healing in mystical terms but they are also very accepting of physical causes. Among the Azande, “the concept of witchcraft provides them with a philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events” (Evans-Pritchard 1937, 18). Witchcraft is a widely understood concept. Evans-Pritchard describes witchcraft “as the innate, inherited ability to cause misfortune or death” (Niehaus 2018). In general, witchcraft is considered to be “a belief in the perpetration of harm by persons through mystical means” (Niehaus 2018). Evans-Pritchard defined witchcraft in contrast to sorcery, which based within the context of the Azande, refers to “the performance of rituals, the uttering of spells, and the manipulation of organic substances, such as herbs, with the conscious intent of causing harm” (Niehaus 2018). He documents the time when a boy cut his foot while walking along an overgrown path, and this was a common occurrence. He ended up cutting his toe. Unable to keep the cut clean, it became infected: “He declared that witchcraft had made him knock his foot against the stump…He agreed that witchcraft had nothing to do with the stump of wood being in his path but added that he had kept his eyes open for stumps, as indeed every Zande does most carefully, and that if he had not been bewitched he would have seen the stump” (Evans-Pritchard 1937, 20). The Azande understand that the boy’s cut became infected because it was not kept clean, but invoked witchcraft in their explanation of why he had hit his toe on the wood. They brought together mystical terms with empirical evidence to explain unfortunate events. Evans-Pritchard showed that while witches did not exist among the Azande, witchcraft was an integral part of society and culture, “it is so intertwined with everyday happenings that it is part of a Zande’s ordinary world” (1937, 19).

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), or E.B. Tylor, proposed that religion evolved in stages. Tylor, an English anthropologist, took an ethnocentric approach that followed from Charles Darwin’s concept of biological evolution, tracing cultures from the ‘primitive’ to the ‘modern.’ Scholarship on magic and religion sprung up after the publication of Darwin’s the Origin of Species (1859). Anthropologists were interested in the origins of religion and attempted to trace their evolution and eventual demise of practices and beliefs as they were phased out in favor of other more ‘advanced’ ones. Magic, according to Tylor, was a form of ‘survival’ and “belongs ‘in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization.’”[6] Tylor proposed that the first stage of cultural evolution is animism or the belief in spiritual beings. The second stage is polytheism, or the belief in multiple gods. And the third stage is monotheism, or the belief in one god—very much based on the fact that he himself was located in Western Europe. Tylor anticipated that eventually all people would back away from religion and deities and only follow pure reason and science, but as we see in today’s world, that has not happened yet. The boundaries between “religion” and related concepts, like science, magic, and spirituality are not always clear cut depending on the geographic and cultural contexts.

Rituals

From his experiences living in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski conceptualized religion as not developing out of “speculation or reflection, still less out of illusion or apprehension, but rather out of the real tragedies of human life, out of the conflict between human plans and realities” (1979, 78). When people feel they are in control of their situations, then there is not as much need for religion. In the kula, however, we can see that the Trobrianders were not in control of the winds and seas in the South Pacific and faced harm and even death as they made the voyages in their canoes. When there is uncertainty, people will engage in religious rituals, or a sequence of actions or a ceremony that has a series of practices performed in a particular order both done usually for symbolic value) in pursuit of a desired outcome. To Malinowski, these events were social in nature and reduced their anxiety and stress by enabling the participants to feel a sense of community and in control of the situation.

The philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose writings inspired communist regimes around the world, wrote, “Man makes religion; religion does not make man” (1982, 131). Marx goes on to describe religion as being “the opium of the people” (1982, 131). To make sense of this we have to consider Marx’s overarching view of the world. Marx countered contemporary capitalist society at the time that was dominated by the need to produce profits. The proletariat (working-class) was exploited for their labor in factories and they no longer were seen as human beings, but as economic pawns. Marx’s writings focused on the concept of alienation, in which the producer no longer owns the product they produce; they are separated from their fruit of their labor as it goes on to be sold, only to put money into the pockets of the wealthy factory owners. Religion could be a way for the proletariat to make sense of their exploitation and poorer living and working conditions, but it was not the ultimate solution to their problems. The only thing that could “save” them was coming together to revolt against the factory owners and to dismantle and then rebuild the structure of society. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong (1987) conducted research in electronics assembly plants owned by foreign companies (Japanese) in Malaysia. Many of the workers were younger Malay women who had migrated from the rural areas to work in the factory so they could help support their families. There was greater ambivalence surrounding women working in the factories because it changed gender roles and dynamics since women became the wage earners. The women did not work under the best conditions, such as having few breaks and facing harassment by managers. The tedious and repetitive work would lead to nervous breakdowns that were thought to the due to demonic attacks. Ong sometimes observed that hysteria would overcome an entire floor or section. What Ong found was that this proved the women had some agency and power within the factory since they had the ability to remove themselves from work or slow down the production, but ultimately, these demonic attacks served as a way to air frustrations with the work environment and did not actually change the working conditions. Similar to Marx, Ong observed that the belief in the demonic attacks did not change the structure or conditions of the factory, but only worked to dull the pain the women were feeling—similar to what opium does in Marx’s theorization of religion.

Victor Turner (1920-1983) and Edith Turner (1921-2016) conducted ethnographic research among the Ndembu of modern day Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) in the mid-twentieth century. The territory of the Ndembu was restructured by boundaries created by European countries that colonized and annexed parts of southern Africa in the early 1900s. Victor Turner poses that religion is key to understanding culture, and ritual is a critical part of religion and to maintaining society. Through rituals, people can express their beliefs about society and the world. Turner suggested that the social order depends on rituals because “rituals embody the beliefs, passions, and sense of solidarity of a group of people. They make beliefs come alive” (Guest 2016, 370). Turner in part built upon work by Audrey Richards (1899-1984), a British anthropologist (one of few women in a field dominated by men at the time), in which she documented a rite of passage that occurred among the Bembe in Zambia. A rite of passage is a ceremony or ritual that marks a shift in status or role of a person in society. Among the Bembe, Richards (1956) observed chisungu, an initiation ceremony for teenage girls that occurs after their first menstruation and is done in preparation for marriage. The ceremony marks the end of girlhood and the start of adulthood. It involves a succession of ritual acts, including singing and dancing. More importantly, Richards argues that the rite of passage is more than the girls just moving from one status to another, or from one age group to another, but rather, it is incredibly rich and speaks to kinship, reproduction, childbirth, the community, and respect of elders. Chisungu is very symbolic in nature and key to understanding the structures and values of the Bembe. Given this significance, Turner set out to examine why rites of passage and other rituals are so important to religion and culture, a line of inquiry continued by Edith Turner especially after his death.

Based upon his research in southern Africa in combination with cross-cultural comparisons, “Turner theorized that the power of ritual comes from the drama contained within it, in which the normal structure of social life comes from the drama contained within it, in which the normal structure of social life is symbolically dissolved and reconstituted” (Guest 2016, 370). Turner may be seen as the precursor to the development of Performance Studies, which is an interdisciplinary field that uses performances (broadly defined to include theater, music, dance, etc.) as a basis for exploring and analyzing cultures and the world. There are three stages in rites of passage, which were first defined by French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (1909). The first is separation in which the participant is isolated in some way from the rest of their group. This could be physically or symbolically: “The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group” (Turner 1969, 80). The second phase is what is termed the liminal phase, or a state of liminality. In the liminal phase, “the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 1966, 94). The person is in-between statuses or roles in society during this time. Turner writes, “this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (1966, 95). We can think of graduation as an example. As middle-class parents based in the United States, the authors of this resource remember going to their children’s pre-school graduations in which their children were moving from one educational setting to the next, and there was time in-between the graduation and when they would start kindergarten, the first year of ‘real’ school in the United States. Students will graduate from high school and move on to college with a period of transition in the summer. These are examples of a liminal state because students are moving from one group to another. They must prepare for something they have not experienced before and get used to new settings, peers, teachers, structures, and expectations. The third phase is incorporation in which the person having completed the rite of passage will assume their new status, role, and/or identity. This is usually accompanied by rituals and ceremonies. In a marriage, the incorporation happens after they couple has been officially announced as married, which can be accompanied by the community (or guests) offering gifts and celebrating together with a meal or dancing.

Turner, who built on van Gennep’s definition and observations of rites of passage, argued that they are counter to existing social structures and have the ability to create new roles, social relations, or identities in society since during them, participants are taken outside of their usual societal statuses and their routines. His thinking is evident in the sub-title of his book The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Turner saw rites of passage as having very important functions because they called attention back to the community. Through his work on ritual among the Ndembu in southern Africa, Turner also was recognized for defining the anthropological perspective on communitas, which is an important part of the liminal phase of rites of passage. Communitas is a feeling of solidarity and community among individuals. It is frequently “used to discuss intense feelings of ‘togetherness’ in a wide variety of social groups and social categories. Communitas means a sense of common purpose and communion” (Turner 1960, 95-97 cited in Letkemann 2002, 257). Research on hajj, a one-time obligation for all Muslims who are able to financially and physically afford to do so that involves gathering in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia once a year, has typically focused on how rituals will bring people together, whether they previously knew each other prior to the ritual or not (Caidi 2019). Hajj is an example of a pilgrimage, or “a religious journey to a sacred place as a sign of devotion and in search of enlightenment” (Guest 2016, 371).  Each year millions of Muslims from different parts of the globe will gather in Mecca over the course of five days. The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and includes walking in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the religion of Islam and who is believed by Muslims to have received messages from God over a period of time which became the Qur’an. Hajj is said to demonstrate “unity of division” and “is any Muslim’s single most symbolic ritual ac that reflects the ideal of unity. By requiring Muslims to don the same clothes [white in color], pray in the same spaces and perform the same rituals, the hajj can connect Muslims across national and class boundaries” (Chitwood 2017). Once a person completes the hajj, they are given the title of haji (masculine) or hajah (feminine). During the journey and performance of rituals at Mecca, diverse Muslims come together and create a sense of community through practice. The hajj can be described as a liminal state because while performing it, Muslims are taken out of their normal roles and routines and once they complete the hajj, they are given a new title, taking on a new identity.

The concept of communitas can be said to build on the notion of effervescence put forth by French sociologist Èmile Durkheim (1858-1917). Durkheim is said to be one of the founders of modern day Sociology. Early on in his work, Durkheim thought that societies could exist without religion. They can be entirely secular (not religious in nature, no religious basis), but later on, he posed that religion was an essential part of social life and was carried out in a community, not individually. Durkheim has explored ideas of the sacred, or holy, and the profane, or unholy. Have you ever heard the English word effervescent? It means bubbly, like carbonated water, when referring to something and it could also mean being lively, enthusiastic, or vivacious when referring to people: “Durkheim stressed religious effervescence, the bubbling up of collective emotional intensity generated by worship” (Gezon and Kottak 2012, 186). Holding similar thoughts and participating in the same action creates unity among the participants. You might say that a tremendous amount of energy may be felt or that electricity is created, which can lead the participants to feeling overcome with emotion and excitement. An example of effervescence (outside of religious worship) might be the 2023 Eras Tour by American recording artist Taylor Swift. One article’s title reads, “Sparks Fly as Taylor Swift Dazzles Denver in Sold-out Concert at Empower Field Friday Night.” Dedicated fans are called “Swifties,” who were “screaming along to every lyric word-for-word and dancing their hearts out.” The author recounts, “As the music built, so did the stadium’s anticipation. The dull roar erupted into screams and cheers when the megastar appeared on stage.”[7] Fans filled stadiums around the United States, sometimes more than 70,000 people gathered to watch the three-hour show. There was an extreme bubbling of energy and emotion that came about when they all sang along to Swift and danced to her songs in unison.

Durkheim’s interest in ritual stems in part from his concept of anomie, a social condition which occurs during times of political, social, or economic change in society when norms and values are weakened or disappear. It can be thought of as “normlessness.” It is a transition period in which norms and values from one time are not legitimate, but new ones are still in the process of being developed. We have to remember that Durkheim was writing from a Western European perspective during a period of industrialization and at the height of European colonialism. Rituals, particularly religious ones, are a way to create solidarity and cohesion and to bring stability to society even in times of change. It is through rituals that religious beliefs come alive.

Tanya Luhrmann, Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, in the book When God Talks Back: Understanding the Evangelical Relationship with God (2012) discusses a shift in American spirituality by detailing ethnographic research that she conducted at The Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church in Chicago, and then at another Vineyard in California. She tells NPR Fresh Air’s host Terry Gross in 2012, “So this is a Vineyard Christian Fellowship Church. It is an evangelical church, and it’s experientially oriented. It kind of represents the way that American spirituality has shifted since the ’60s towards a much more engaged, responsive, intimately experienced sense of the spiritual…Every person within a church has a somewhat different experience of God. But I thought that this represented something really important about American spirituality.”[8] Worshippers were taught how to relate to God “as a best friend” (Luhrmann 2012, 6). Luhrmann found there is a more “intimate, personal, and supernaturally present divine” (2012, 13), in other words, they experience a God who is present. Hughes Rinker conducted a small study on the use of religious apps for smart devices with four student research assistants at George Mason University (2016) among students who identified as Christian and Muslim. The student participants found communal religious gatherings to be far less desirable and feasible given the demands placed on them, often balancing school, work, and family at the same time, so they enjoyed the accessibility and ease of apps as well as the privacy they afforded them by allowing them to practice their religion outside of the public sphere. One student noted in an interview, “I like to just go on the app at my desk before class starts when I get there early, even just for five minutes.” For these students, religion was important to them and their identities, but how they defined and practiced it shifted given the daily demands placed on their time given societal and personal expectations for success.

Symbols

Going back to the collective energy and electricity produced by rituals, Durkheim said that this liveliness and emotion would be transferred to and come to be represented in a symbol, which is sacred. He balances the spiritual aspects of religion with the material. A symbol is an item that stands for something else that does not have a natural relationship between them, but rather one that is culturally defined. For Hindus, the cow is protected because it represents the virtue of ahimsa, or being thoughtful and practicing nonviolence towards all that is living. In “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1973), American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) makes observations of illegal yet popular cock fights in Bali (Indonesia) in the 1950s. The cock fight is symbolic in nature, located within deep cultural and social ideas of status, gender, power, and kinship. Those who put cocks up to fight are respected and politically involved, and men. Women did not attend the fights. The rules of the cockfights are handed down through the generations. It ultimately did not matter who won or lost the cockfight because winning or losing was not connected to a change in real status, but rather, was it was all metaphorical. Hildred Geertz (1927-2022), an American anthropologist, wrote on latah in Java, an island of Indonesia like Bali, which she described as, “An involuntary blurting of obscene words or phrases, compulsive imitation of the words or actions of others, and compulsive unquestioning obedience when ordered to perform actions which may be ridiculous, improper, or even dangerous” (Geertz 1968, 93-94). Hildred Geertz situated latah within the cultural context and social order of Java to suggest that the symptoms make sense if you look at them within the society, instead of from a universal perspective. She  writes, “The way in which culture could be said to ‘provide’ a ready-made set of symptoms to a psychologically disturbed person may be better understood if a symptom is viewed as a kind of symbol, as a symbolic act by means of which the ill person can express his psychological dilemmas outwardly. As a symbol, the symptom gives meaningful external form to inner conflict” (1968, 101). Luhrmann’s more recent project on the hearing of voices commonly associated with some psychotic disorders in three different geographic contexts shows that symptoms can be cultural representations. In the United States, she found that among participants, voices heard are negative and overwhelming, sometimes even violent, and usually of people unknown to the person, but in Ghana and India, the voices tended to be friendly and even familiar to the person hearing them, sometimes a loved one who had passed. Luhrmann hypothesized as to why this difference pointing to how this symptom is a representation of society’s values, “Europeans and Americans tend to see themselves as individuals motivated by a sense of self identity, whereas outside the West, people imagine the mind and self interwoven with others and defined through relationships.”[9] The voices are symbolic of how the individual is constructed in the United States, Ghana, and India and of the norms and values of society.

Edith Turner was an anthropologist born in England who moved to the United States in her thirties with her husband, Victor Tuner (previously discussed), and who taught for many years at the University of Virginia. In an interview, she recalled the significance of rituals to her fieldwork and the life of the Ndembu. Edith Turner recalls, “Rituals quickly became the focal point of all that we did. I remember that at the beginning of a twin ceremony once, my friend Nylakusa came out of her hut yelling cheerfully, ‘Let’s go!’” I can see her now” (Engelke 2000, 845). She goes on to say that she thinks anthropologists write about ritual to seriously and miss the fact that they can be joyous and momentous occasions for all those involved. Edith Turner notes in the same interview, “Ritual is fun, and her shout captured something. I don’t know what’s the matter with us anthropologists. For instance, as [Victor Turner] analyzed the twin ceremony in his writing, it was scholarly and showed the detail of symbolism. I myself would like to have described the ritual in a different way; to have shown something of the swing of the whole thing as a kind of great event” (Engelke 2000, 845).

Edith Turner talks about the influence of psychologist Sigmund Freud on the study of ritual and symbols, especially his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1913): “I, too, saw the curious imagery in dreams as echoing everywhere in Ndembu consciousness” (Engelke 2000, 846). Freud was interested in the analysis of symbols within dreams. Among the Ndembu, Victor Turner could not connect all rituals or the meanings of symbols to the social order and structure. So he drew metaphorically on the work of Freud to suggest that symbols can have various levels of meaning and that they can represent more than one thing or idea. One principal symbol can have various meanings and hold different representations depending upon the context. One example among the Ndembu is the mukula tree, which is viewed as a symbol that can represent matrilineal descent, menstrual blood, hunting, and animal meat. This is because the tree produces  red sticky gum that clots similar to blood: “In the Ndembu ritual Nkula, in which, as a ritual of affliction, a female patient’s reproductive or menstrual troubles are dealt with, portions of the mukula tree are used. This tree exudes a red gum, referred to by the Ndembu as the ‘blood of mukula.’ This ‘blood’ as used ritually refers at the same time to the orectic pole of childbirth, as well as to the normative pole of matriliny and all female things” (Turner 1968a:52-88 cited in Deflem 1991, 11). The mukula tree is used in initiation ceremonies for boys as well. After circumcision is performed, the boys are seated on a log of the mukula, which is a practice thought to help the clotting around the wound. It is also representative of masculinity since it is thought at some point, a man will shed blood during a hunt or as part of physical conflict. The tree has a wide range of meanings for the Ndembu, but all of these meanings are tied together through the theme of blood (the red gum).

Clifford Geertz, who is known for his fieldwork in Bali, Java, and Morocco, published “Religion as a Cultural System” in which he argues, “(1) A religion is a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (1973, 90). A ‘cultural system’ is made up of rituals, symbols, texts, and beliefs that gives society and our lives meaning. Religion is a system of ideas that surround one or more powerful symbols. These symbols will take on a level of significance for people that goes far beyond the actual material they are made of. For Christians, think about a cross. The cross may be made out of wood or plastic, for instance, but it holds a tremendous amount of meaning for Christians. The bread a wine served at communion for Christians are not just a food and drink; they reference the death and resurrection of Jesus. Geertz is known for symbolic (and/or interpretive) anthropology, which “studies the way people understand their surroundings, as well as the actions and utterances of the other members of their society. These interpretations from a shared cultural system of meaning—i.e., understandings shared, to varying degrees, among members of the same society.”[10]  From this approach, we would surmise that symbols create a sense of order and establish particular worldviews. The ideas or things they represent become matter-of-fact and what is truly real in people’s lives. This interest in symbols becomes clear in the work of Hildred Geertz (Princeton University’s first female department chair and only the university’s third tenured female professor),[11] has written on artwork and how Balinese art has changed through the decades with attention given to the impacts of increased tourism and economic development on the island and in the region.[12] Artwork has long-been thought to be filled with symbols and serving as a representation of the artist’s life and of larger societal structures, issues, anxieties, and struggles.

Anthropologists do not doubt the importance of symbols to individuals and the social order, but Talal Asad (1932-) levels a critique at Clifford Geertz conclusions about symbols. Asad is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Born in Saudi Arabia, he moved to British India before settling in Pakistan, where he was raised. Asad questions the power of religious symbols. Why do certain symbols become significant and powerful? Who or what gives them their authority? Asad rightfully notes that symbols tend not to have meaning in and of themselves. The object may not have a relationship to what it represents, and without being endowed with such meaning, the item would not be particularly special or important. His conception fills in a gap that Geertz ignores. Geertz does not give enough attention to how symbols obtain their meaning and become powerful in society. Asad asserts that they do so through complex historical and social developments. Asad is a renowned scholar of postcolonialism, which involves the study of colonialism and imperialism and their lasting effects. Sheila Nair comments on the use of “post” as a pre-fix: “The use of ‘post by postcolonial scholars by no means suggests that the effects of impacts of colonial rule are now long gone. Rather, it highlights the impact that colonial and imperial histories still have in shaping a colonial way of thinking about the world and how Western forms of knowledge and power marginalize the non-Western World” (2017, 69). Postcolonialism interrogates power relations and why some individuals or groups have come to hold power: Postcolonialism is not only interested in understanding the world as it is, but also as it ought to be. It is concerned with the disparities in global power and wealth accumulation and why some states and groups exercise so much power over others” (Nair 2017, 69). Asad’s question about how and why symbols gain power and authority follows a major premise of postcolonialism in that he argues that symbols take on meaning in society by being bestowed power by particular processes, events, and people. He claims that definitions of religion have been created by Western scholars and are based on Western ideas. As was stated early on in this chapter, we must not assume that religion is linked to a supreme deity (a notion that comes out of Western Christian ideals). We must be aware of the power that universal definitions of religion take on and how they can obscure local realties. What he points out that Geertz does not is that symbols (and religion) are developed over time and our job as anthropologists is to investigate what has given these expressions of religion power and has made them meaningful in society and people’s lives.

Religion, Politics, and Society

In the introduction to their edited volume, Religion, Politics, and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist state of the chapters included, “They add to the current understanding in the social sciences of just how mistaken were the claims of a generation and more ago that with modernization, religion withered away while much of the world’s people secularized, thereby becoming heirs of the Western Enlightenment” (2011, 1). This observation rings true with 2023 Supreme Court rulings in the United States in which the court has ruled in favor of religious rights in the workplace. Gerald Groff was a former United States Postal Worker who quit his job because he was being forced to deliver packages on Sunday, which violated his observance of the Sabbath. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “as amended, protects employees and job applicants from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.”[13]  The act “requires employers to reasonable accommodate an employee’s observance unless that accommodation imposes an ‘undue hardship’ on the business. In 1977, the court defined such a hardship as an accommodation that would place more than a minimal burden or ‘de minimis cost,’ on the company’s operations” (Marimow 2023). Groff and his lawyers asked that the court revise the standard since it allows them to deny accommodation requests based on religion if they would cause more than a minor burden on the business. The Supreme Court did not overturn the precedent but the justices did decide that “employers must meet a higher standard to reject a worker’s request related to religious observance,” meaning that “an undue hardship is ‘shown when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business” (Marimow 2023). This decision will make it more difficult employers to deny accommodation requests base on religious observances and force them to pursue different options for the employee. The concern from the Biden Administration is that this ruling could place more burdens on co-workers and employers. In the United States, there is to be a clear demarcation between religion and the state, but, this is just one example in which this boundary is blurred.

A second example also came in 2023 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a website designer from Colorado, Lorie Smith, who refused to make websites for same-sex couples. This came in despite of a law in Colorado that prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, and/or sexual orientation among other personal characteristics. The court voted 6-3 in favor of Smith citing that forcing her to create websites for couples who do not conform to her values, and thus applying the Colorado law to her business, is a violation of her first amendment rights to free speech. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the six justices in favor, ‘Countless other creative professionals, too, could be forced to choose between remaining silent, producing speech that violates their beliefs, or speaking their minds and incurring sanctions for doing so’ (quoted in Gresko 2023). Those justices against the ruling stated that this ruling can lead to wider discrimination and is a violation of LGBTQ+ rights. President Joe Biden was not in favor of the ruling stating that “weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations—including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women” (quoted in Gresko 2023).

Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2003) argue that in the United States historically there has not been a clear separation of church and state, especially when it comes to the rights and freedoms of those who do not conform to societal norms concerning gender and sexuality. A foundational ideal of the United States is that religion (read: Christianity and specifically Protestantism) and the government remain as two separate institutions. This is the groundwork for American democracy. However, they argue the Supreme Court will draw on theology in rendering rulings as much as it draws on case law even though this may not be overt or intentional. Part of it is in the process of how laws are established. Jakobsen and Pellegrini observe, “One of the most puzzling, yet persistent, features of public life int eh United States is how quickly talking about sex turns into talking about religion and conversely, how quickly talking about religion turns into talking about sex” (2003, 19). They are careful to clarify that the main framework for which morality is defined is Protestant, or that which comes from Western Europe. It is not simply enough to say that it is a religious or Christian framework as this does not capture the actual tradition that informed the development of U.S. values and laws.

In some parts of the world, religion and the state are intertwined. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which the Prime Minister leads the government and there are multiple political parties that are elected to parliament. Morocco was a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956. The first constitution was created in 1962 with a referendum in 2011 which included making Amazigh (spoken by indigenous communities in Morocco) an official language of the country as well as Arabic, requiring the King to select a Prime Minister from the party in parliament with the most seats, transferring rights and duties from the King to the Prime Minister, and enabling the parliament as well of the King to grant amnesty. In Morocco, 99% of the population is Muslim with the overwhelming majority being Sunni, the largest sect worldwide. The monarchy has actively informed and policed religion in Morocco because it is believed that the King is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, which grants him religious authority. Since September 11, 2011, Morocco has actively shaped Islam in the country in part to counter global discourses around Islamic extremism and terrorism. Tourism is a major industry for Morocco, attracting visitors from across the globe. Edmund Burke argues Morocco and the Maghrib inhabit an ambiguous space that is “not quite Africa, not quite Arab, not quite European” (2000, 17), and so the government would like to make Morocco a prime example of a moderate modernizing Muslim country. The Ministry of Religious Endowments and Islamic Affairs was established partly as a form of foreign policy in which Morocco proves that it is a moderate Muslim country that is working to end religious violence (Fakir 2021).  Ann Marie Wainscott writes in the book Bureaucratizing Islam: Morocco and the War on Terror about reform to religious policy in 2004 that included national religious TV and radio stations, revision to Islamic education in schools, and the creation of new institutions: “Collectively, these reforms have bureaucratized Islam in Morocco, placing critical decisions about religious practice and belief in the hands of people employed by the state. Many of these individuals do not possess training in classical Islamic sciences; they are better understood as bureaucrats” (2017, 1). Wainscott details that these reforms, which brough religion squarely under the state’s guise, were justified as a response to the global War on Terror. Although, Wainscott explains that it is more than just a response. The reforms are ways for the state to implement its “‘more sustainable’ strategy to control the religious sphere” long-term with “far less coercion” (Buhler 2019, 783).

In her work on reproductive health in Morocco, Hughes Rinker (2020) conducted research at a time when Morocco reoriented its approach to development from focusing on economic growth to human and social development, where the state invests in citizens and opens up opportunities for them to fulfill their potential. This included investing in infrastructure, education, health care, and jobs among other areas. Hughes Rinker investigated how these ideology was being passed onto women through practices associated with childbirth and childrearing in reproductive health clinics. Discourses surrounding reproduction and parenting in Morocco promoted by the state and institutions focused on notions of rights, personal choice, and active participation in society. A good example comes from a textbook from a school in Rabat, Morocco that was shared with her by a pre-teen girl. There are two hand-drawn images. One is of a family dressed neatly. The mother is in a dress and the father is in a suit. They have two children. It is raining and they all fit neatly under an umbrella to stay dry. Juxtaposed to this is an image another family that has six children. Their clothing looks worn. The mother wears a hijab (a head covering for women). The father is in a djellaba (a traditional Moroccan robe). They and their children do not all fit under the umbrella and some are getting wet from the rain. These images are included in the unit on female contraception. In the waiting room of one of the reproductive health clinics where Hughes Rinker did her fieldwork, there is a poster on the wall for oral contraception. The mother and father sit on couches. The two children are playing on the floor. In Arabic it reads, “The pill is easy to use and effective in protecting against pregnancy.” They are dressed nicely and appear to have a nice home, perhaps trying to portray that having fewer children will allow a family more money to invest elsewhere. Women who participated in Hughes Rinker’s fieldwork were mostly working-class. They wanted the same things for themselves as the state did: healthy pregnancies by keeping up with maternal care, healthy children by vaccinating them and taking them to the pediatrician, educated children by sending them to school with the proper supplies, and families who could support themselves and have all of their needs taken care of. Conversely, they did not frame these choices within the neoliberal logic of the state, but rather because of their nuanced interpretations if Islam. They explained that God wants them and their children to be burden-free. (A very general basis of neoliberalism includes reduction in state interventions, encouraging citizens to take care of themselves and their communities, active citizens who contribute to society, need for investments and profits, and privatization and removing trade barriers.) They can only be good Muslims if they are good mothers, which includes limiting or spacing children. They should keep themselves healthy and their children healthy, making sure that they are cared for properly and educated. Hughes Rinker updates a study done by Moroccan sociologist Rahma Bourqia (1995) in the south of Morocco in which women were hesitant to choose contraception due to the fact that being a mother gave them greater status in their community. Between 2005 and 2009, Hughes Rinker found that while the latter half of this remains true, status and their standing with Allah (Arabic word referring to God) is no longer about the quantity of children that women have, but rather, it is about how well they do at mothering and the success of their children.

This chapter has walked you through some of the many theories and concepts of religion dominant in anthropology. As with any topic, some of these approaches were popular at one historical time and then fell out of favor for another approach. Following a core value of anthropology that we must situate our analyses of ideas and things within context, it is important to remember that religion takes on many different meanings for people and communities that are contingent upon surrounding circumstances and should not be equated with a belief in a supreme being. When Hughes Rinker first started her research in the anthropology of religion, she was reminded by one of her dissertation advisors that yes, religion and belief can influence decisions and practices, but at the same time, everyday happenings can in turn cause people to reevaluate their beliefs, religious texts, of understandings of their faith—its cyclical in nature. In the spirit of this resource, this chapter provides you with a foundation upon which you can build and explore religion, faith, and belief in your own lives and in your communities.