4/4/2012 7:03:00 AM Tambiah touches upon the question of mystical thinking vs. scientific thinking.

We have our own notions about magic. Associated with something supernatural. At least looks like it. Zande magic is very much focused on medicine. The essence of Zande magic is a combination of physical objects and incantations/spells. Magic is often practiced in private. E.P. Plants are cook and eaten to counter magic and witchcraft. You concoct the medicine to kill the witch in private with your kinsmen. It is important to talk to them. In Azande, they are commands/imperative. The idea here is not that they are helpless beings but instead the Azande think of them are things that do the stuff if directed. vengeance medicine is good. It only kills somebody if the person is a witch. If you send it to an innocent person, it comes back. Sorcerers stone are stupid. They cant judge whether the person they are doing magic is innocent. Medicine and magic have a very strong moral element to it. You just try medicine first and if you dont get better, then its witchcraft. So, magic is not clearly as we think of the term. Tambiah is picking up on the question how do we understand the attachment to an object which is kinda logical but not really. He begins with challenging Azande mystical thinking and scientific thinking. Because it presumes that it serves the same purpose. Tambiahs main point is that if Zande has the same interest in causality. Then, we fall into the same pit that Frazer did that there is causality therethey see connections between stuff. Tambiah argues that magic and religion use different kinds of analogical thought but science uses different type of analogical thought. In science, if A and B are related in a certain manner and we wanna find out the relation between C and D. We use known relationship to find out new relaionshipHypothesizing and then experimenting! Tambiah says that this is analogical thinking. Tambiah says that there is another way to use analogical relationship. compression shorts in Lightroom We can use analogy in a persuasive manner e.g. Dartmouth family is a metaphor its not an actual family but rather, it tells you to think of it as a family. This is different than saying that A and B are related in causal/mechanical way.

There are other ways to make analogies for a certain purpose. Transfer of feelings and emotions from the known. They are not imputing that the medicine will solve the problem. But they are transporting the wishes and desires of the people in the certain object e.g. Azande uses creeper to teach lepers skin..creeper sheds its skin when it grows. You administer it to the person so, it can emulate the creeper who is growing instead of the leper who is degenerating. Tambiah argues that we desire to transfer the qualities of the creeper into the leper. We want the person to heal and grow! You express the desire with the help of concrete objects. You are symbologically expressing their desire. We dont think of commands as true or false. Rather than subjecting imperatives to their truth values. We evaluate them according to their appropriateness. If magic is being used appropriately, if not it wont work. We see that Azande dont ask inapprop things from magic. You cant ask magic to build the house. Magic comes into play in places of uncertainty. Often comes in as supplemental to the proper knowledge. You dont ask magic to build a house/canoe. Put bricks/know what is the best wood. But you may use it to help the house to prosper. So, Tambiah says that we should not view the magic as locutianary acts but rather illocutionary/performative act (where saying something is more important than doing something) We dont just use words to describe stuff. You can change stuff in the world..making promises, taking oath, give a command. Magic, then, is much more heightened use of changing the world. Is magic one of those three categories? Still doesnt answer the question about why Azande talk to things as if they were people? If Tambiah is right, we have an even more interesting analogy in the way people work. Advertising. Think of different commercials that you see. We dont pay attention to them but those images keep coming back to us. What does sex have to do with toothpaste, deodorant etc. Having this thing maeks you more attractive. We know this does not happen in real life! what would a Martian anthropologist say? These people believe in magic. They think foolishly that they can become the person in ad if they buy the product. Now, we know that we dont believe but we still buy the product! This helps us understand magic. While it doesnot consrain our view, it still changes it.

Magic becomes a real

Two lessons to draw from our encounter with Azamde. We might be talking about a metaphor about social our job as anthropologists is not to judge whether its true or not. but what are the people doing when they do it. and try not to make presumptions about what is going on. And always what is going on is not what we think is going on.

The point of all that is to understand the world maintaining religion.

Fundamental transformation in Europe from agrarian to industrial.

Political changes are happening as well.

It is from that change that modern sociology emerge. What is happening?

Why are we changing?

Modern thinking such as postivism by Auguste Comte that is real

knowledge is things that you can feel, touch etc. Durkheim makes the famous assertion that society is made of social facts and social facts are tangible things.

The society is a thing in its own rite. society makes social contract.
Society emerges out of individual positions. Society is much larger and transcends individual interests. It is before and after the time of individual. Society is not simply reducible to individual interest/ psychology/ emotion/ desires. Society is more than the sum of its individual members.

Society is external to me. Durkheim is not arguing that society exists

independent of all individual. Society exists independent of any particular individual.

Society is a set of interacting individuals. Society is a force because it exerts an

external force on an individual. Society can be experienced by the coercive force it exerts on individual.

We are constantly being reminded like a tantrum child that we can not
change social rules and norms. Social rules come from interaction between individual. Nobody can change the rules of society just by themselves and have to persuade other people about the new way of thinking.

These are the two evidence that Durkheim uses to prove that social facts
are actual things.

Societal forces are always act as a constraint but as positive attachments.

As, children we get rewarded for conformation.

This process of learning to conform to expectations Conscience collective is what Durkheim uses. Conscience collective is the
shared moral standards. Conscience also refers to consciousness awareness of being a social being.

Conscience collective results in collective representation. They are ways

of expressing conscience collective. Mangu is a collective representation. It is

a word/image that expresses the share perspective of how the world works.

What happens to the society when it moves from agrarian to industrialized nation? For
our purposes, Durkheim thinks that religious idea are central to the idea of conscious collective. Durkheims interest in religion was because he thought that it was a way of representing of the conscience collective.

Elementary Forms First published in 1915. What makes religious collective representation different
than other forms of collective representation.

He wants to understand the given conditions of human that religion is

built upon.

Religion exists everywhere. So, it has to have a solid basis. He rejects

Tylors idea of dreams and misguided attempts at explaining stuff. His strategy is to what religions mean to the society.

He goes for the simplest religion he can find and that is Australian totemism.
What is disticitve about the idea of totemism is that it posits a relationships between a plant or an animal between a social group of people e.g. kinship. Religious stuff is based on this relationship.

When he says simple, he is not assuming that it is simplistic or outlandish

or primitive/crude. He is also not saying that it is the form of which all the other religions emerge.

He is not making evolutionary assertions or making value judgement. Durkheim got

mislead by the Australian aboriginals. They have a simple living and yet, as ethnogrpaher, they had an extremely complex kinship system e.g. marriage rules. Also, extremely complex religious ideas and mythology.

Given this, what are the elementary forms that are expressed in Australian totemism?
Religion exists of social interactions and rituals.

He draws distinction between sacred and profane. Religion works with

only the sacred. Everything else is profane.

Sacredness is not within objects. Some clans hold a particular kangaroo,

even a snake or insignificant. Durkheim argues that sacredness is never the intrinsic qualities as objects but in the rules that come to be associated with them.

Profane things are every

Things that do not fit are very dangerous to the culture that we are trying to establish. One way in which cultures handle them is to make them taboo. The big question is how do we account for these differences between the differences in the idea of pollution? Why do we have different ways of classifying and associating stuff? Pritchard says that Azande witches can never exist. Magic and miracle o the main point in the chapter is that she is arguing that magical thought in primitive societies is not that different from our societies. o Why si it that we overdraw the distinction between our culture and magical thought? Some of it is because the religious history of Europe. Emergence of Protestantism. One of the critique of Protestantism was the critique of rituals and emphasis of interior belief/faith. Douglas is right in saying that European societies influenced by Protestantism leads us to be suspicious about them. Frazer/Tylor tend to take that anti-religious bias and project them in different ways. We see primitives doing stuff and are wary of the about the ritual. But at he same time, if we assume that is a religion, it should have an inner genuine sentiment. This raises the issue that if they are doing the ritual, they must believe the stuff. Doing the rain dance must bring rain! Douglas thinks that we are therefore the source of the problem. Someitmes, unconscious bias that we have sometimes affects our way we perceive other cultures. Pritchard never says that but it is always there in his mind. One way to overcome that is to think what ritual actually is! Ritual in our lives infuse our lives as it does in some more primitive religions.

She argues that ritual pervades our social life. More oftent hat not, these rituals are secular but they are rituals nonetheless. They actually do things. They make changes in the world. They help us control and define lives as Durkheim . Rituals are routines. Brushing teeth in the morning. Douglas argue that we should see these as what they are. Rituals are creative acts they frame experience and draw boundaries around things e.g. I wear coat and pants on days I am teaching. Spring cleaning .Writing a paper you get a coffee etc..have a defined ritual. They shape our life and give meaning to it. It focuses our attention brings us to get our stuff done. What does a batsmen and a bowler do before batting a bowling. Running or tapping bat gets you in the habit of doing the act that we are supposed to do. She is trying to shift our attention from not just . . Rituals are The dinka do the rain dance. If we walk in, we presume that they do it for the rain to come. But they do the rain dance during the rain season. They are not dumb! Its a reenactment of what effect it has supposed to have. Through imitative magic, as Frazer would say, we are reminding ourselves that this is when and how the rain would come. These acts, therefore, are not supernatural because we are imitating what would naturally happen. They are saying that let the rain season happen as it is supposed to happen. Hence, it is invoking natural forces! She uses the example money as a ritual example. Money used to be worth it was made. Now, we are on a fiat-based money. We use the money without even thinking. Currencies are only valued in relation to other

currencies. There is a huge sense of symbolic reality of society; it has Durkheimian.. Douglas suggests that having that money only works when you have faith in money. We want it to work. It changes the world, It makes the world work! Rituals are ways that express assumptions and Rituals can serve as a comparative ground about how. They have a creative power to them. It presents an overlap between out societies and theirs. But there is still difference between our rituals and theirs

o Chapter 5 o Comes with a Durkheimian perspective o She goes back to another difference primitive societies are pollution prone societies. We are less concerned with taboos and stuff. o So, she is making the point that these differences are not representative of o it is pernicious because it implies that primitive systems are trivial. o bELLAH ARGUES THAT WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES AND MODERN SOCIETIES ARE DEGREES OF DIFFERENTIATION. Our large societies means that we have to have division of labor. o This complex social difference is also reflected in their worldview. In more differentiated societies, we are constantly having to meet people with differences and situate ourselves within them. With this comes a greater self-consious of similarities and differences. We are not the center of the world. Douglas argues that we are so aware and exposed to different cultures, we can a more generalized language and conception to accommodate all and become more objective. o The thinking, she argues, that everything become smore objective and abstract to accommodate everything. In societies

that are less diverse, it is easy to presume a more subjective, ego-centered world view. o She refers to the undifferentiated societies as pre-Copernicus. We do have pre-Copernican remnants o It is difficult to see outside from their provincial point of view. They are always interpreted in peoples good or bad luck. They are much more ego-centric. When things happen for a reason, homogeneous views can build up relationship between the person and things. Possessions are things that have a connection to possessor. You are giving a part of yourself when you give a gift. She says on pg 109, Persons are not completely intervenes to . o These ways of thinking emerge not because somebody thinks xthem all up. Far from being irrational, these emerge when people try to explain things around us and provides mechanisms for controlling things around us. These are not proof of illogical thought but a product of continuous process of symbolic menas to the end of coping with everyday life. o They arent systematically thought out processes but emerge piecemeal as explanations of resolving social, moral and scientific life. o For bellah, religious evolution is not progress to betternement. Religious systems have a tendency to becomes more complex. Also, look at the distinctions he draws between primitive and archaic religions .. o Archaic religions dreamtime thoughts and ideas differentiated into more anthropomorphic figures. But same as primitive, the cosmos and mythological world is the same.