W3C1: class and religion

Question 1

Three major theories on social class:

Answer 1

• Marx
• Max Weber
• Pierre Bourdieu

Question 2

Marxism

Answer 2

Base:
- Means of productions: factories, land, materials
- Relations of productions: capitalists, bourgeoisie, proletariat
Relations between actors. Capitalists buy other people’s labour

Superstructure/ideology: religion, education, media, culture

Several modes of productions:
- Primitive communism
- Asiatic mode of production
- Antique modes of production
- Feudalism
- Capitalism: those who own the means of productions are called capitalists. Those who own nothing (only Labour or children) -> proletariat
- Communism

• Each mode is decided by the relations of productions, deterministic
• Base and superstructure interact with each other

There may be important interrelationships between economic change and cultural change. Wolf describes two systems in Puerto Rico, as a cultural conflict: capitalist (purchase, sale and interest) versus traditional (based on subsistence production). New capitalist model led to four different classes.

Question 3

Max Weber’s theory on social class

Answer 3

‘the theory of social stratification […] is associated with Max Weber. Weber […] argued that there were several, partly independent criteria which together gave a person a specific rank and that property was not necessarily the most important one. Political power and intellectual prestige could, for instance, be just as important in a given society’ (Eriksen 2023: 188).

• It’s not just about economics/property, but also education, political power.
• Class is therefore the sum of income, education and status

Question 4

Conspicuous consumption:

Answer 4

buying expensive things to signal to others (Thorstein Veblen)

Question 5

Pierre Bourdieu on social class

Answer 5

‘Sociology treats as identical all biological individuals who, being the products of the same objective conditions, have the same habitus. A social class [… is] a class of biological individuals having the same habitus’ (Bourdieu 1990: 59).

Differences in taste express ‘objective class differences’.

Question 6

Habitus

Answer 6

Bourdieu […] uses the term “habitus” […] to describe enduring, learned, embodied dispositions for action. The habitus is inscribed into the bodies and minds of humans as an internalised implicit programme for action. […] Through habitus, the socially created world appears as natural and is taken for granted’ (Eriksen 2023: 115).

Not natural, it’s learned. Implicit, not aware of it. It’s embodied: the way you walk, behave, gesticulate. Difficult to change

So: multiple forms of capital, endured, learned and embodied dispositions for action. And how they repeated themselves. People who grow up in the same conditions have shared habitus.

‘But isn’t it just culture?’
A culture is more broad. Everyday, embodied behavior is habitus. Kinship schedules are for example culture, but not habitus

Question 7

Forms of capital according to Bourdieu:

Answer 7

• Economic
• Cultural
• Symbolic
• Social

Question 8

Cultural capital

Answer 8

• Things you need to know to get around in a certain social class
• Food you eat, entertainment you enjoy, music you listen: there’s a hierarchy in this. Music: classical higher than pop. But even within classical music there is a hierarchy. Mahler > Mozart.
• Depends on the environment: not always higher class.

Question 9

Symbolic capital

Answer 9

• Markers of your class: like a noble title, bmw’s, university degrees
• Can also be buildings (Burj Kalifa, Empire State Building)

Question 10

Social capital

Answer 10

• Having a network/connections to people who can do something for you
• Nepotism -> part of social capital.

Question 11

Two important points regarding class differences:

Answer 11

Anthropologists don’t have to accept classifications and class differences

Capital is something you invest -> you can transfer economic capital into cultural capital by taking classes

Question 12

The rule of cumulation:

Answer 12

A general principle in studies of stratification, class and social differentiation. This rule holds that if someone is economically wealthy, he or she probably has a good education, good health and secure employment.

Related is the theory of intersectionality by Crenshaw

Question 13

Caste system:

Answer 13

• Social system in the largest country of the world. Basic ideas of how the caste system works is more than important to know
• The caste system can be defined as a system dividing all of Hindu society into endogamous groups with hereditary membership, which are simultaneously separated and connected with each other through three characteristics: separation regarding marriage and contact; division of labour in that each group […] represents a particular profession; and finally hierarchy (Eriksen 2023: 179-180).
• Four casts (Varnas): Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and kings), Vaishyas (merchants) and Shudras (artisans and workers). Dalits are separate, also called untouchables.
• System is based on notions of ritual (im)purity, which serve to justify the segregation and division of labour between the castes. High castes tend to abstain from meat and alcohol.

Question 14

We think of caste as the most rigid social system you can imagine, but there are ways to climb to social ladders. Three ways:

Answer 14

• Manipulate caste background
• Whole caste (Jati) somehow gets richer and gets up the hierarchy
• Rejecting the whole caste system

Question 15

Jajmani system:

Answer 15

• The real unit of the caste system is not one of the four varnas but jāti, which is a very small endogamous group practising a traditional occupation and enjoying a certain amount of cultural, ritual and judicial autonomy’ (M.N. Srinivas, quoted by Eriksen 2023: 180-181).
• ‘The traditional jāti -based division of labour in Indian villages was called the jajmani system. It consisted of a set of traditional rules about the exchange of products and services between the members of different castes’ (Eriksen 2023: 181).
• Traditionally, little money circulated through the jajmani system, which largely consisted of complementary exchanges of goods and services.
• Monetary economy, new occupations and incorporation of small valliges into larger capitalist markets and state bureaucracy have made it impossible to make the jajmani system function according to traditional practice

Question 16

Caste system, definition & characteristics

Answer 16

a system dividing all of Hindu society into endogamous groups with hereditary membership, which are simultaneously separated and connected with each other through three characteristics:

1. separation regarding marriage and contact;
2. division of labour in that each group represents a particular profession;
3. finally hierarchy, which ranks the groups on a scale dividing them into high and low castes.

Question 17

Religion, most important conclusions:

Answer 17

• Religion and rituals (and certainly symbols) remain important to humans, but in new disguises: We tend to think of religion as something that’s losing relevance. However: anthropologists of religion (and secular rituals) are convinced it will stay important but in a different way. We have our own secular rituals
• Scholars have focused on either explaining or understanding religion and rituals.
  Some have focused more on explaining: why does it exist (Marx, Durkheim -> religion reflects social structure of society)
  Some have focused more on understanding
  Or: looking at it as an identity marker
• Different research paradigms result in different analyses of the same phenomenon (and you cannot say one is clearly better than the other).
• Religion, rituals and symbols are usually ambivalent and fluid.
• The ambivalence and fluidity of rituals and symbols can cause conflict or facilitate social integration (because a fight can break out over an interpretation, or a latent conflict can be ignored because of different interpretation of the symbols involved).
  Can result in fights, but also in coherence. The ambivalence gives room for multiple interpretations and leads to social integration
• A holistic, contextualizing approach to the study of religion leads to the richest results.

Question 18

Four anthropological approaches to religion:

Answer 18

• Max Weber: wrote about the disenchantment and related secularisation
• Karl Marx: religion is the opium of the people, legitimizes relations of production
• Durkheim: function of religion is social cohesion, structuralist
• Geertz: You need to look at what religion means to people, how it helps to make sense of the world and how it gives meaning and direction to human existence. We should study religion itself, not its social causes

Question 19

Geertz on religion

Answer 19

• Religion offer models for the world (ontology) and models for action (morality)
• Defines religion as ‘“(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions which such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”

Question 20

There is a difference between written religion and oral religion

Answer 20

Written religion: based on a sacred text, are often described as religions of the book, are linked to a sacred text or a collection of sacred texts and the believers are expected to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the contexts of the works.

Oral religion:
Usually more locally confined, gods are physically associeted with places in the tribal area,
Embedded in the social practices of society, whilst written religions are more detached from other social institutions

Redfield: little and great traditions. Some parts of religion can exist next to each other.

Question 21

The logic of ancestor worship

Answer 21

• Deals with the problem of continuity: There is no rigid boundary between life and death in this scheme, rather a gradual transition to another phase, which begins long before death.
• As with other religious phenomena, the respect paid to ancestors also has a politically legitimating and socially stabilising effect.
• One may perhaps state that any religion must simultaneously legitimate a political order and provide a meaningful world view for its adherents, such as reconciliation with one’s own inevitable death.

Question 22

Rituals: the social aspect of religion

Answer 22

• If we may define religion as systems of notions about the supernatural and the sacred, about life after death and so on (with its obvious political implications), then rituals are the social processes which gave a concrete expression to these notions.
• Rituals are rule-bound public events which in some way or other thematise the relationship between the earthly and the spiritual realms.
• One influential perspective emphasises that rituals simultaneously legitimate power, and are thus important vehicles of ideology, and give the participants strong emotional experiences; another perspective focuses on the ability of rituals to give people an opportunity to reflect on their society and their own role in it.

Question 23

Leach on the spiritual world as mirror-image of society;

Answer 23

• Rituals – which largely consist of private and public sacrifices – are chiefly indirect and oblique ways of talking about society.
• There is an intrinsic relationship between the myths (religion or the cognitive aspect of religion) and the rituals, since the rituals dramatise the myths. Leach showed with his example of the Kachin that myths and rituals can positively encourage a lack of stability, since they offer themselves to conflicting interpretations.

Question 24

Symbols are multivocal:

Answer 24

Symbols are central to rituals, and studies of ritual symbols must not merely investigate which symbols are being used, but must also look into their mutual relationship and their meanings (what they symbolise). Rituals both say something and do something. Moreover, many symbols are ambiguous.

Symbols have to be multivocal or ambiguous to create solidarity: since persons are different, the symbols must be capable of meaning different things to different people. This can be said of rituals too.

Question 25

Dominant symbols have the following characteristics:

Answer 25

• first, they are condensed, that is to say many different phenomena are given a common expression.
• Second, a dominant symbol amounts to a fusion of divergent meanings. In this way – otherwise different people can sense likeness and express solidarity through these symbols – such as flags in nation-states, which mean different things to different people and so are able to give who are otherwise different a sense of shared identity.
• Third, dominant ritual symbols entail a polarisation of meaning. At one pole (the ideological), there is a set of meanings to do with the social and political order of society. At the other pole (the sensory), physiological and biological meanings are expressed. (To this, we would probably add emotional meanings today).

Question 26

Rituals of modernity

Answer 26

• Although ritual is frequently seen as enacted religion, it must be kept in mind that the most famous analysis of a single ritual, namely Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight, concentrates on an entirely secular ritual;
• Modern rituals are for example the world cup football. The unpredictability of the game contributes to blurring the boundary between football, religion and witchcraft
• Concerns identity, expressing national identity, political views and is increasingly global with even Manchester United is the home team of Singapore
• There is also the closer relationship of ritual and theatre and dance