Middle East Technical University

Sociology Department
Week 5.1 SOC 132 Chapter 8

Worldview

“The more I study religions the more I

am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself.”

Instructor

Dr. Besim Can ZIRH

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 189
01 August 2017

Text Book: Schultz, Emily A. and Roberth H. Lavenda (2012), Cultural anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

What Is a Worldview?
Human beings use culture to construct rich understandings of everyday experiences.
Question How human beings use cultural creativity to make
sense of the wider world on a comprehensive scale?
No set of cultural beliefs or practices is perfectly integrated and without contradiction
BUT culture is not just a hodgepodge of unrelated elements.

The direction in which cultural BUT

creativity goes may differ widely in any particular society, culture tends to be
from one group to the next patterned, and an individual’s everyday attempts
to account for experience are not isolated efforts.
Members of the same society make use of shared assumptions about How the world works.
As they interpret everyday experiences in light of these assumptions, they make
sense of their lives and their lives make sense to other members of the society.
The encompassing pictures of reality that result are called worldviews.

HOW worldviews are constructed

HOW people use them to make sense of their experiences in the broadest contexts.
SOC 132 Chapter 8
How Do Anthropologists Study Worldviews?

People everywhere devise symbols to remind themselves of

their significant insights and the connections between them.
A symbol is something that stands for something else.
Symbols signal the presence and importance
of meaningful domains of experience.
Summarizing Symbols
represent a whole semantic domain and invite
us to consider the various elements within it.
sum up, represent, represent for people “in an emotionally
powerful… way that the system means to them.”
Elaborating Symbols
represent only one element of a domain and invite us Algeria Soldier Saluting the French Flag
to place that element in its wider semantic context. (referenced by Barthes in Mythologies)

are essentially analytic. They allow people to sort out and

label complex and undifferentiated feelings and ideas into
comprehensible and communicable language and action.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

What Are Some Key Metaphors for Constructing Worldviews?

Worldviews are comprehensive pictures of reality.
What must the world be like for my experiences to be what they are?

Unfamiliar worldviews become more comprehensible to us if we

are able to grasp the key metaphors on which they are founded.
“concerned above all to show order, regularity
and predictability where primary theory has
failed to show them.”

Robin Horton argues people who construct a worldview are

We search for key metaphors, therefore, they look at

those areas of everyday experience that are most
associated with order, regularity, and predictability.
Key Metaphors: Metaphors that serve as the foundation of a worldview.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

How to understand Worldviews?

New worldviews based on different metaphors can emerge under changed
circumstances if they provide insight when old understanding fails.
Societal In some societies, where human social relations provide great order,
Metaphors regularity, and predictability, the model for the world is the social order
Organic Organic metaphors to analyze the life histories of languages or civilizations
Metaphors in terms of birth, youth, maturity, reproduction, old age, and death.
Technological Machines made by human beings are used as metaphorical predicates
Metaphors to explain human societies.
FOR Freud conceived of emotional stress building to inside people like a steam
EXAMPLE in a boiler what would explode unless a social safety valve were available
to release the pressure without causing physical damage.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

What Is Religion?
For many of us, the most familiar form of worldview is probably religion.
A description of a certain domain of Western culture?
Argument a religion differs from other kinds of worldviews because it
assumes the existence of a supernatural domain.
BUT the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” was originally made by
non-religious Western observers in order to distinguish the real “natural”
world from what they took to be the imaginary “supernatural” world.

Many anthropologists who study

different religious traditions believe
that it is less distorting to begin with
their informants’ statements about
what exists and what does not.
In this way, they are in a better position to
understand the range of forces, visible
and invisible, that religious believers
perceive as active in their world.
SOC 132 Chapter 8
“ideas and practices that postulate
What Is Religion? reality beyond that which is
John Bowen argues that religion is immediately available to the sense”

In individual societies, this may mean beliefs in

spirits and gods, or awareness that ancestors
continue to be active in the world of the living.
In other cases, people may posit the existence of
impersonal cosmic powers that may be
compelled to intervene in human affairs following
the correct performance of certain rituals.
This definition of religion encompasses both
practices (actions) and ideas (thoughts).
SOC 132 Chapter 8

What Is Religion?
Wallace proposed a set of “minimal categories of religious behavior”
that describe many of the practices usually associated with religions.

Sacrifice
Prayer

Physiological Exercise Feast

Taboo
Exhortation
Mana

Ainu bear sacrifice. Japanese scroll painting, circa 1870.

Iomante (イオマンテ?) is the name of an Ainu ceremony. The word literally means "to
send something/someone off", and generally refers to the Ainu brown bear sacrifice.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Religion and Communication

Those who are committed to religious worldviews are convinced of the existence
and active involvement in their lives of beings or forces that are ordinarily invisible.
Some of the most highly valued religious practices (rituals)
produce outer symptoms that may be perceived by others;
BUT their most powerful effects can be experienced only by
the individual who undergoes them personally.
WHAT IF
You wanted to know what it felt like
to experience religious ecstasy?
You were someone who had
had such an experience and
wanted to feel others about it?
You were convinced that the
supreme power in the
universe had revealed itself to
you and you wanted to share
this revelation with others?
everyday metaphors
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Religion and Communication

Societal Metaphor Members of many religious traditions apparently conceive of the
universe as being the same as the structure of their society.
Societies organized in strong groups based on kinship usually
conceive of a universe peopled with the spirits of powerful ancestors
figures who take an interest in the lives of their living descendants.
By contrast, members of societies run by vast and complex bureaucracies, as was the
Roman Empire, are apt to picture the universe as being run by an arm of
hierarchically ordered gods and spirits, all of which may be supervised by a chief god.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Religious Organization
The most important entailment
that follows from the societal
metaphor is that forces in the
universe are personalized.
«When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I
me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time
begin, and where does space end? Isn't life under the sun just a dream?
Isn't what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the
world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil?
How can it be that I, who am I, wasn't before I was, and that sometime I,
the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?» (Damiel)

THUS people seeking to influence those forces must handle

them as they would handle powerful human beings.
Communication is perhaps
the central features of HOW
we deal with human beings.
When we address each other, we expect a response. The
same is true when we address personalized cosmic forces.
Maintaining contact with invisible cosmic
power is a tremendously complex undertaking. Wings of Desire (1987)
THEREFORE
In other word, religion becomes
It is not surprising that some societies institutionalized. Social positions are
have developed complex social practices created for specialists who supervise
to ensure that it is done properly. or embody correct religious practice.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Religious Organization: A Shaman

A part-time religious practitioner who is believed to have the power to
contact invisible powers directly on behalf of individuals or groups.

Shamans are often thought to be able to travel to the cosmic

realm to communicate with the beings or forces that dwell there.

A religious specialist who has the ability to enter into

direct contact with spiritual beings and guardian
spirits for the purposes of healing, fertility,
protection, and aggression, in a ritual setting.

Someone who contacts such beings for positive

benefits may also be able to contact them to
produce a negative outcome like disease or death.
Shamanic activity takes place in the trance séance, which
can be little more than a consultation between shaman and
patient, or it can be a major public ritual, rich in drama.
It is said that the shaman has no choice but
to take on the role; the spirits demand it.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Religious Organization: A Priest

A priest is skilled in the practice of religious rituals, which are carried
out for the benefit of the group or individual members of the group.
Priests do not necessarily have direct contact with cosmic forces.

Often their major role is to mediate such

contact by ensuring that the required ritual
activity has been properly performed.

Priests are found in hierarchical societies,

and they owe their ability to act as priests to
the hierarchy of the religious institutions.

Status differences separating rulers and

subjects in such societies are reflected in the
unequal relationship between priest and laity.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Coping with Misfortune: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
How Azande beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft,
oracles, and magic are related to one another?
How Azande use witchcraft beliefs to explain
unfortunate things that happen to them?

How they employ oracles and magic to exert a

measure of control over the actions of other people?

Evans-Pritchard was impressed by the

intelligence, sophistication, and skepticism
of his Azende informants.

For this reason, he was all the more

struck by their ability to hold a set of
beliefs that many Europeans would
regard as superstitious.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Coping with Misfortune: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
The Azande believe that mangu (witchcraft) is substance in the body of witches,
generally located under the sternum, inherited and gradually developed.
Witchcraft is a completely natural explanation of events.

Mangu

Misfortunes are also commonly attributed to witchcraft unless the victim has broken a taboo,
has failed to observe a moral rule, or is believed to be responsible for his own problem.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Coping with Misfortune: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
The Azande employ oracles to expose the witch.
People accused of witchcraft are usually astounded; no
Azande thinks of himself or herself as a witch.

Mangu

Misfortune M Accusation
C
The accused witch is Otherwise, the witch
grateful to the family of would surely be killed by
the sick person for vengeance magic.
letting this be known. O

Poison
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Coping with Misfortune: Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
Are There Patterns of Witchcraft Accusation?
Evans-Pritchard suggests that practices such as witchcraft
accusation can sometimes keep societies together.
Mary Douglas: two basic types of witchcraft.
In some cases, the witch is an evil outsider, in
others, the witch is an internal enemy, either the
member of a rival faction or a dangerous deviant.
These different patterns of accusation
perform different functions in a society.
If the witch is an outsider, witchcraft
accusation can strength group ties.
If the witch is an internal enemy, accusations of witchcraft can
weaken in-group ties; fractions may have to regroup, communities
may split, and the entire social hierarchy may be ordered.
If the witch is a dangerous deviant, the accusation of
witchcraft can be seen as an attempt to control the
deviant in defense of the wider values of the community.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Maintaining and Changing a Worldview.

What makes a worldview stable?
Why is a worldview rejected?
These questions are related to
general questions about persistence
and change in human social life.
Anthropologists recognize that culture
change is a complex phenomenon, and they
admit that they do not have all the answer.
Changes in worldview must, first of all, be related to the practical
everyday experiences of people in a particular society.
Stable, repetitive experiences reinforce the acceptability of any traditional
worldview that has successfully accounted for such experiences in the past.
When experiences become unpredictable, thinking people in
any society may become painfully aware that past
experiences can no longer be trusted as guides for the future

AND traditional worldviews may be undermined.

SOC 132 Chapter 8

How Do People Cope with Change?

Drastic changes in experience lead people to create new
interpretations that will help them cope with the changes.
Sometimes the change is an outcome of local or regional struggles.
In Guider, lone rural migrants to town frequently
abandoned old religious practices and took on urban
customs and a new identity through conversion to Islam. HOWEVER
the conflict between new and old need not necessarily lead to conversion.

Sometimes the result is a creative synthesis of old religious

practices and new ones, a process called syncretism.
FOR EXAMPLE Under the pressure of Christian missionizing indigenous people of
Central America identified some of their own pre-Christian,
personalized superhuman beings with particular Catholic saints.
When groups defend or refashion their own way of life in the face of outside
encroachments, anthropologists sometimes describe their activities as revitalization.
Some nativistic movements expect a messiah or prophet, a
process often called revivalism, millenarianism, or messianism.
 SOC 132 Chapter 8

How Are Worldviews Used as Instruments of Power?

Within any particular cultural tradition, different worldviews coexist.
How then does a particular picture of reality become the “official” worldview for a given society?
AND And once that position is achieved, how is it maintained?
To be in the running for the official picture of reality, a worldview must be
able to make sense of some people’s personal and social experiences. HOWEVER
Sometimes it may seem to some members of society that barely credible views
of reality have triumphed over alternatives that seem far more plausible.
THUS
something more than persuasive
ability alone must be involved,
and that something is power.
When one worldview is backed by the powerful in society and
alternative worldviews are censored, many social scientists
would start to call the dominant worldview an ideology.
An ideology can be defined as a cultural product of conscious
reflection, such as belief about morality, religion, or metaphysics.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

How Are Worldviews Used as Instruments of Power?

An ideology is a worldview used to

explain and justify the social This propaganda
poster portrays Juche
arrangements under which people live. as a quasi-religion.
Certain religious
Karl Marx argued that rules consolidate research sites argue
their power by successfully persuading their that Juche is, in fact,
subjects to accept an ideology that portrays the world's 10th
largest religion.
domination by the rulers as legitimate.
When such persuasion is difficult, rulers may Dominated people may be unable to dislodge
use coercive measures to silence their critics. the official worldview of their society.
They can refuse to accept the imposition of someone else’s
worldview and develop an unofficial worldview based on
HOWEVER metaphors that reflect their own condition of powerlessness.
1 A symbol can be used to refer to self-evident truths when
people in power seek to eliminate or impose certain forms of How can worldviews
conduct. Holy books, like the Qur’an, may be used in this way. be mobilized as
instruments of
2 A symbol may be under the direct control of a power and control?
person wishing to affect the behavior of others.
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Is Secularism a Worldview?

The European Enlightenment of the eighteenth

century gave birth to a new worldview that has
come to be called secularism.
The development of secular ideas and
practices profoundly transformed the religious
and political institutions that had dominated
European society in the Middle Ages.
Earlier generations of anthropologist took secularism for
granted, as the expected outcome of cultural evolution.
HOWEVER

More recently, anthropologists have been led to reconsider the nature

of both the Enlightenment and of secularism, when resistance to the
secular institutions of Western nation-states emerged.
This challenge came both from some immigrant groups living
within those states and by groups in non-Western nation-states
who insist that citizenship and religious identity belong together.
SOC 132
Muslim Headscarves in France: A Case Study.
ISLAM
Headscarves as a religiously required mode of dress
necessary to protect female modest in public.
Some students also refuse to attend biology
classes, on the grounds that studying
biological evolution contradicted their
religious beliefs, or to attend coed physical
education classes, since they were immodest.
ISLAM
If certain groups within the system
should be allowed to argue that
they are in some way fundamentally
different from all other citizens,
especially if the difference is defined
as religious, the resolutely secular
identity of the French state is called
into question.
BUT
Chapter 8
STATE
requires all her citizens, whether
students or employees of the state,
refrain from drawing attention in
public to their religious affiliations.
BUT Catholic students
were allowed to wear
necklaces with
Catholic crosses.
STATE
state grants full citizenship rights to the
children of immigrants, but in return, the
“social contract” assumes that the children
will be educated to be culturally French.
“Putting on jeans is an act of freedom;
putting on the scarf is an act of submission?”
SOC 132 Chapter 8

Secularization

Secularization in the Modern World is an illusion?

The opponents of the concept argue that
religion remains a significant force, albeit often
in new and unfamiliar forms.
«Ama bir medeniyete karşı savaştıklarını AND
söyleyebiliriz. Nedir bu medeniyet? Belli bir
yaşam biçimi olduğunu düşünüyorum, The popularity of new religious movements
medeni kelimesinde bir kent var, kent presents a challenge to the secularization thesis.
yaşamı. Çünkü bu saldırıları sahiplendikleri
metni okuduğunuz vakit bunu açıkça BECAUSE The diversity and dynamism of new religious
söylüyorlar, kör bir atış değil.» movements indicate that religion and spirituality
16.11.2015, HÜRRİYET BUT remains a central facet of modern life.
The participation in a new religious movement
appears little more than a hobby or lifestyle choice.
«Bu kadar tantana koparmasını eğlenceli buluyorum... Burkanın
hatırlattıklarını, burkanın karanlığının rahatsız ediciliğini
seviyorum, düşündürürcülüğünü seviyorum. Unutmak istediğimiz
ama burkanın hatırlattığı bir şey var: Mahremiyet ve her şeyin
görünür olamayacağı... Işık modernitenin bir parçası, ama o kadar
Nilüfer Göle çok ki, bazen çok göz alıyor, gölge, loş alan bırakmıyor... İşte bu 1992
noktada Burka kavgası bize kaybettiğimiz şeyleri hatırlatabilir...» 25.05.2010, TARAF
SOC 132 Chapter 8

How to understand Worldviews?

Worldviews represent comprehensive ideas about the structure of the world
and the place of one’s own group, or one’s own self, within that world.

The ethnographic record offers a

broad array of different
worldviews, each testifying to the
imaginative meaning-making
cultural capacity of humans.

These models of the world,

moreover, do not exist apart from
everyday social practices or
political relations.

When entangled beliefs, social practices, and differences in power provoke a crisis,
humans struggle to make the crisis appear meaningful and therefore manageable.
We are meaning-making, meaning-using, meaning-dependent organisms, and
that is nowhere more clear than when a meaningful way of life is under assault.
 Reality Worldview Secularism
Power
Week 5.1 SOC 132 Chapter 8
Prayer Taboo
Physiological exercise Worldview
Exhortation
Summarizing
Mana symbols
Feast
Sacrifice Elaborating

Witchcraft
Institutional
Syncretism
Thank you for your participation
“The more I study religions the more I key societal
am convinced that man never
worshipped anything but himself.” Metaphors
technological
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890).
Instructor organic
Dr. 01
Besim Can
August ZIRH
2017
Revitalization Religion