Eight theories of religion second edition
Theories of Primitive Religion
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Theories of Primitive Religion Early in the 1960s, Evans-Pritchard was invited to give a short series of lectures at the University College of Wales. He took the occasion as an -249- opportunity to revisit several issues first raised in the conclusion of Nuer Religion and expand them into a general discussion of theories of primitive religion. In 1965 the lectures were published as Theories of Primitive Religion, one of Evans-Pritchard’s shortest but most engaging books—a work whose pages not only sparkle with clear analyses and penetrating criticisms but are often adorned with choice exhibits of his stinging wit. In addition, by way of its judgments on others, the analyses in this book indirectly say much about his own fully ripened views on the matter of explaining religion. Though we have space here to look at this work only briefly, we can at least trace the general lines of its argument. Evans-Pritchard opens Theories of Primitive Religion with a word of caution and some candid comments about earlier approaches to the subject. Most of the interpretations he considers were developed at a time when little was known and a great deal was misunderstood about the actual facts of primitive religion. Few people who addressed the issue had even seen a primitive culture, let alone studied one. But not for a moment, he declares, did that stop them from writing on the subject, with all the confusion and distortion one would naturally expect in the process. He further observes that nearly all of these thinkers start with the premise that most of religion, like most of magic, is something quite strange to modern people, who think scientifically, but quite normal to primitive people, who have no difficulty accepting absurd and incredible ideas. They see primitives as “quite irrational” people, “living in a mysterious world of doubts and fears, in terror of the supernatural and ceaselessly occupied in coping with it.”19 The challenge they thus find themselves facing is to give a reasoned and plausible explanation of why early peoples held these beliefs, and why, despite the progress of science, so many other people still do. The explanations they propose, which include those considered or mentioned in our own earlier chapters, are of two main types: psychological and sociological. Those taking the path of psychological explanation include Müller, Tylor, Frazer, Freud, and others. Numbered among the sociological theorists are Marx and Durkheim, naturally, as well as Durkheim’s disciples, Lévy-Bruhl, and a sequence of others. In framing their psychological accounts of religion, Evans-Pritchard notes that theorists have almost without exception resorted mainly to clever guesswork. Each has simply asked himself how he, an educated Westerner, might have come to hold a religious or magical belief if he were walking in the footsteps of some primitive person who one day put his hand to his chin to reflect upon the world around him. Müller, a sentimental and romantic gentleman, says he would have been dazzled and intrigued by nature’s great displays of power; accordingly, he finds the origin of religion in nature worship. Tylor, a flinty rationalist, thinks he would have been puzzled by the human figures -250- he sees in dreams; so he produces the animistic theory. Frazer, both a rationalist and evolutionist, thinks he would have started with magic, then changed to religion, and finally adopted science. Being intellectuals, they all offer psychological explanations we can call intellectualist. They think that primitive people, like themselves, wanted to explain everything and so settled upon religious beliefs as a way of showing how the world works. Other psychological interpreters, alert to the fact that while not all people are thinkers, all do have feelings, have put forward a type of theory best called emotionalist. Freud, for example, imagines that early people were gripped by anxieties and fears that could be eased only by concluding there was a divine Father above them. The English scholar Marett and the anthropologists Lowie and Malinowski suppose that primitives felt a certain profound awe and wonder about life and took this as a sign of some awesome Being or Power who had created it. Regardless of the specifics, however, one common feature is apparent in every one of these theories: They are pure speculation. EvansPritchard calls them examples of the “If-I-were-a-horse” mistake. Because these interpreters do not really know how a primitive person thinks, they imagine he or she would think as they do. Some make matters even worse by supposing that they can actually reconstruct the thoughts not just of today’s primitives but of the very people who thousands of years ago first created religion, even though these ancient believers have left us not a single written word about anything in their lives, let alone their thoughts about a god or gods! Needless to say, the unsparing verdict Evans-Pritchard renders on such psychological theories is that they are for the most part worthless. Sociological thinkers, Evans-Pritchard continues, have done a somewhat better job, but not by much. The most important theories framed along these lines are those of Robertson Smith, the French scholar Fustel de Coulanges, and of course Émile Durkheim. These scholars have noticed, quite correctly, that however primitive people think, they do not do it on their own, any more than civilized people do. They are part of a culture, a society, which shapes their language, values, and ideas. Yet even with this insight at their disposal, sociological theorists have been no less inclined to guesswork than their psychological rivals. Because none of them actually knows a real primitive society, each simply chooses to create one in his imagination out of the scraps of evidence about totemism, sacrifice, or some other custom that happens to float in conveniently from Australia or other remote parts of the globe. As a result, even the most brilliant of the sociological theorists, Durkheim, constructs a theory that, however fascinating, begins to crumble the moment new evidence comes along to show that totemism is something very different, and much more diverse in kind, than he thinks it is. For all their promise, then, sociological theories come in the end to something only slightly better -251- than psychological ones; they still tend toward the fallacy that begins, “If I were a horse.” By contrast with these efforts, Evans-Pritchard finds it refreshing to note the achievement, limited as it is, of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He, too, scarcely left the comfort of his study, and he was mistaken to think that the primitive mind is prelogical while the modern mind is not. But he was a penetrating thinker, who, almost alone among modern theorists, recognized the crucial principle that we cannot understand the culture or religion of primitives until we concede that their whole world may be a very different one from ours, and that this world cannot be properly explained until we have worked very hard and very long to understand how it functions from the inside. With so many failures and only Lévy-Bruhl to admire, one is inclined at this point to ask whether even attempting to explain religion is any longer worth the effort. Interestingly, and despite the record, Evans-Pritchard very much thinks it is. He believes, in fact, that more explanation, not less, should be offered, so long, of course, as theorists are ready to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors. There is, after all, at least a grain or more of truth in these earlier theories. There can be no question that religion involves the intellect, that it engages the emotions, and that it is closely associated with social organization. But it cannot be explained by any one of these factors alone. It must be explained comprehensively, in terms of its relations with all other factors and activities in a given society. In addition, though the guesswork of the past has compelled current anthropology to turn toward careful, specialized studies of specific cultures like the Azande and the Nuer, interpreters do need to move beyond specialized work. At some point, theorists need to “take into consideration all religions and not just primitive religions.”20 In this connection, Evans-Pritchard notes, one promising general path of inquiry has already been charted by the Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and the German sociologist Max Weber, all of whose writings seem to converge on a common theme. Instead of regarding religion and magic as forms of primitive thought, while science is assumed to be modern, they suggest that these two types of thinking are perhaps best seen as complementary configurations—forms of understanding that are clearly different but equally necessary in all human cultures, primitive and modern alike. No society can survive without something like science and something like religion; all cultures will always need both science’s constructs of the mind and religion’s “constructs of the heart.”21 Evans-Pritchard does not completely commit himself to this last view, but he does suggest that it ought to be pursued as a hypothesis and that it should be confirmed or disproved through further work in the comparative study of religion, which has been sadly lacking to date. Moreover, such study should -252-
center not on theological writings, which carry the ideas of elites and leaders, but on encounters with ordinary people, on religious faith as it is actually lived and practiced. That is a difficult enterprise, he notes in conclusion, and the scholar without any personal religious commitment is unlikely to succeed in it. For the study of religion is not entirely like other disciplines. Scholars who reject all religion will inevitably be looking for some explanation that reduces it, some theory—biological, social, or psychological—that will explain it away. The believer, on the other hand, is a person much more likely to see religion— including other people’s religions—from the inside and to try to explain it on terms that are its own. Analysis One way to measure Evans-Pritchard as a theorist of religion is to place his work next to that of Eliade, who is almost his exact contemporary. Both men began their work in the decades between the two world wars, at a time when functionalist interpretations were dominant and when, in European culture as a whole, reductionist Freudians and the followers of Marx were regarded as the most impressive thinkers of the age. Both men came to reject this dominant perspective and anchor their work in a more sympathetic approach to the religion of primitive (in Eliade’s word, “archaic”) peoples. Both also insist that there must be no more lapses into evolutionary thinking, which is useless for the study of human cultural activities; besides, it never fails to put primitives at the bottom and beginning of history while Western culture is placed at the end and the top. Finally, both men—it is not irrelevant to add— exhibit a natural sympathy for religion that arises out of personal heritage or commitment: Eliade to Romanian “cosmic” Christianity, Evans-Pritchard to Catholic Christianity after his conversion in 1944. Agreed as they are against certain attitudes of the age, Eliade and EvansPritchard nonetheless choose to carry out their programs of opposition in quite different ways. Starting from a resolute rejection of all reductionism, Eliade sets out to draw a global portrait of “the religious mind” in all, or at least most, places and times. He is also a man of the library, who thinks religion can still best be understood through its recorded history and mythology. EvansPritchard’s course is quite noticeably different. He too comes to reject functionalism, at least in its more extreme reductionist form, and the whole thrust of his research is to show that there really is no need for it. After all, if primitive magical and religious systems are in their terms just as rational as ours, we certainly do not need a reductionist theory to explain why people believe irrational things. At the same time, he is not nearly so emphatic about all of -253-
this as Eliade, especially in the case of sociologically functional approaches to religion, which played a strong role in his training and earlier work. He opposes any sociological determinism, to be sure, but, as we have seen, he also has the keenest appreciation for the merits of the French school—for Durkheim and especially Lévy-Bruhl. In addition, he has no wish to make claims about “the archaic mind” on some sort of worldwide, all-embracing scale. In his view, theories of that sort give us just another instance of “If-Iwere-a-horse” speculation. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with the ideal of a broad, general theory embracing all of religion. At the close of Nuer Religion, Evans-Pritchard describes his own work as a step toward “building up a classification of African philosophies” that will make for the even wider comparisons needed to construct a theory of religion as a whole.22 But to be done right, such things take time, patience, and a great deal more research. They simply cannot be done as effortlessly as theorists like Eliade, and those of the past century, have supposed. Nor can they be done in the same way. Regardless of whether it is a world religion or primitive cult one studies, EvansPritchard insists that in the future the real work must be done outside of libraries and theological texts. A valid theory will have to explain religion as it is lived by ordinary people, not as it is taught by priests and theologians. That is where the real source of its power and remarkable resilience will ultimately be found. If we draw a comparison with economics, we can see that EvansPritchard’s great achievement lies on the plane not of macro- but micro-theory of religion. In his detailed account of Nuer belief and practice, he is able to show, just as he did for Zande magic, how religion “makes sense” for a specific people, in a specific kind of tribal society, at a specific point in time. He shows how this religion is intellectually coherent, how it “fits together” within itself. And he shows that it is culturally connected; it fits into the patterns of Nuer life in ways that answer both personal and social needs. When we compare Evans-Pritchard’s own very solid, small-scale achievement in Nuer Religion with the grand, theoretical balloons he floats by us from the past, puncturing them as he writes, it is not hard to see which kind of work, in his eyes, carries the greater weight. On the issue of how best to construct theories that reflect a true “science” of religion, his work represents an unmistakable turning point. No subsequent interpreter can afford to ignore his achievement. Critique As Freud’s theory of religion depends in part on the strength of his psychology, so the value of Evans-Pritchard’s theory rests in part on the nature and quality of his anthropology. As we have noted above, the judgment of most -254- anthropologists on the value of his fieldwork and his interpretation of cultures is extraordinarily high. He is regarded by some as the greatest ethnographer ever to have worked in the field. Though there have been criticisms of him, the most important ones do not seem to bear on the religious dimensions of his work.23 So we can perhaps pass over these and note for our purpose the following points, which more specifically address his approach to religion. 1. Assessments of Other Theories There are places where Evans-Pritchard shows considerably less patience with the theories of his fellow scholars than he does with the thought of the Azande and the Nuer. In discussing Nuer sacrifice, for example, he criticizes as “inept” those thinkers—like Rudolf Otto—who find the origin of religion in a distinctive emotion of awe or solemn wonder. The crowds at Nuer collective ceremonies show all kinds of emotions: attention, indifference, solemnity, amusement, whatever. Having said this, however, Evans-Pritchard in the very same context also points out that these collective sacrifices occur on occasions that are barely religious at all; they are largely social events, where one would expect a great variety of emotions, including, of course, at least a few serious moments. When, on the other hand, he discusses personal sacrifices, which by his own account are more purely religious occasions, the emotional state of the participants seems to be quite different. They are expected to show a sincerity and solemn disposition that seem not at all unlike the emotions Otto calls religious. They show a mood of solemnity and awe, a sense—one might almost say—of the numinous. This is not to say that Nuer religion offers a confirmation of theories like Otto’s; it is meant only to suggest that when dealing with other theorists, Evans-Pritchard shows an occasional rush to judgment. The same tends to be true when he demolishes other theories with his favorite hammer: the “If-I-were-a-horse” fallacy. In a sense, the method of “If-I-wereso-and-so” is the only one we have when we wish to understand the motives and actions of other people, just as the detective does when trying to rethink the actions of a person who has committed a crime. The real problem with this kind of argument, which Evans-Pritchard does not strive very hard to detect, is not that it is used (we really have no other) but how it is used, especially when people merely guess about how tribal peoples think instead of carefully reconstructing their thought on a solid foundation of evidence. 2. The “Primitive” Mind Evans-Pritchard’s great achievement has been to give theorists of both religion and human society a greater appreciation of what we can call “the -255- normality” of the primitive mind. In the light of his work, we can say that the world of non-Western, tribal thought seems to make sense; it seems to us no longer absurd or childish, as it once seemed to Tylor, Frazer, and others. But even so, we can legitimately ask whether Evans-Pritchard has solved as much of the problem of the primitive mind as he may seem to think. It is interesting, in the case of the Azande, for example, that after analyzing a particular item of witchcraft, he will write something on the order of the following: “Azande have little theory about their oracles and do not feel the need for doctrines.”24 Or in another connection he will observe that the idea of testing general beliefs against actual experience is simply foreign to them. On reading this, the question that naturally comes to the mind of the reader is: Why not? Why do the Azande fail to test their beliefs? Evans-Pritchard’s answer to this question is well known. He says magic is something too fundamental, and too important, in Zande life ever to be questioned—as are some of the inconsistent and seemingly illogical notions that many ordinary people hold in our culture as well. In short, they and we are the same, neither of us being in the sum of things either fully rational or wholly irrational. But here there is a further question to be asked. We and they do not seem to be exactly the same, for our culture is quite clearly a divided one. Some people in it— scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, even philosophical theologians—do stress theoretical understanding of the world, while others of us do not. Zande culture, on the contrary, seems curiously undivided. In it, we seem unable to find anyone who wants to defend theoretical knowledge and testing, or anyone who believes in critical, logical, and experimental thought. In that sense, this society is different, and we would very much like to know why. Evans-Pritchard does not really pursue this question, even though it is clearly important to the defense of his view that our culture and theirs stand on intellectually equal footings. 3. The Need for Theory The last complaint we might bring against Evans-Pritchard is in some ways the most obvious and important—and yet the one to which he would most readily plead guilty. He does not really have a full theory of religion, or even of primitive religion, but only a theory of a religion—that of the Nuer—along with a few suggestions as to how thoughtful scholars might begin to work so as one day actually to arrive at something more general. Far better, he tells us, to do the small-scale foundational work that in the future will yield a solid general theory than to rush once again into the groundless speculations that were the trademark of theories past. This is a point no one can dispute. Yet true as it may be, Evans-Pritchard himself recognizes that this is not an entirely -256- satisfactory way to leave things. A revealing comment comes in the concluding pages of Theories of Primitive Religion: During [the] last century … general statements were indeed attempted … in the form of evolutionary and psychological and sociological hypotheses, but since these attempts at general formulations seem to have been abandoned by anthro- pologists, our subject has suffered from loss of common aim and method.25 We could almost wonder, in light of these comments, whether EvansPritchard’s weakness is just the opposite of his predecessors’. Could the study of religion have been done an even greater service if someone as well grounded as he in the evidence were perhaps more willing to generalize— even if only on the order of suggestion and hypothesis? Could he not himself have possibly contributed something to this much-needed “common aim and method”? At the very least, a book from his hand with a title such as “Notes Toward the Construction of a General Theory of Religion” would certainly not have gone unread. Even without such an effort, however, Evans-Pritchard’s influence on thought about religion, especially in anthropological circles during the latter half of the past century, has been enormous. We shall see an instructive parallel to it in the next and last of our theorists, Clifford Geertz, the contemporary American advocate of interpretive anthropology.
1. Mary Douglas, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Modern Masters Series (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 93. 2. There is no complete biography of Evans-Pritchard. T. O. Beidelman offers a brief account in “Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1902–1973: An Appreciation,” Anthropos 69 (1974): 553–67. There is also a measure of biographical information in a critical study, noted above, by anthropologist Mary Douglas, who has been strongly influenced by Evans-Pritchard; see her Edward Evans-Pritchard, pp. 1–22 et passim. 3. John Middleton, “E. E. Evans-Pritchard,” The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1987), 8: 198. 4. Beidelman, “Appreciation,” p. 556. 5. See his comments in Social Anthropology and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, [1951] 1962), pp. 51–53; also in Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 53–69, where he is, however, also severely critical. 6. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 13. 7. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, pp. 299–312. 8. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 63. 9. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 338. -257- 10. Douglas, Evans-Pritchard, pp. 91–113, points out that Evans-Pritchard prepared himself for writing on Nuer religion by reading extensively in the Western theological literature he found in his father’s parsonage study. She adds that the description of Kwoth nhial as a god of selfless love seems to draw upon Agape and Eros (1936), a classic study of the concepts of love in Western religious thought by the Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren; Evans-Pritchard acknowledged this book and its influence in other works. 11. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press), pp. 51–52. 12. To those familiar with the mystical theology of the early and medieval Eastern church, the Nuer hierarchy of spirits reflecting God, but not identical to him, resembles the modalistic language used by the theologian Sabellius to explain the Trinity. Their beliefs about the kuth nhial also bear a likeness to the mystical doctrine of the heavenly angelic hierarchy as presented in the widely read early medieval treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. 13. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 121. 14. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, pp. 121–22. 15. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 154. 16. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 199. 17. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 239. 18. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 281. 19. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 10. 20. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 113. 21. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 115. 22. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 314. 23. For a discussion of some of these criticisms, see Adam Kuper, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 88–98. 24. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 314. 25. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 114. Directory: rstc -> a.pazeraite -> files -> 2014 2014 -> Bringing Ritual to Mind Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms Download 1.65 Mb. Share with your friends:
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