On Geertz's Religion as a cultural system
Remedios Varo, 1908-1963
On Geertz's Religion as a cultural system
Remedios Varo, 1908-1963
宗教（Religion）は、超自然的、超越論的、あるいは霊的な要素に人間が関わりをもつ、行動と実践、道徳、世界観、テ キスト、聖なる場所、預言者たち、倫理、あるいは組織の社会文化的システムのこと であると、ここでは定義しておこう。宗教研究という学問が厳密になればなるほど、そこからこぼれ落ちる研究上のカテゴリーがある。つまり、本道の宗教研究 からは、副次的などと 判断されるジャンルに属するものがある。宗教の土着化はそういったもののひとつである。そしてこれは主に歴史研究が主なその論戦の場であったが、粗雑な進 化論や類推にもとづく伝播 の分類論などがそのパラダイムを占めており、その分析はまさに静態的か、その世界を生きている者のリアリティを欠いたものであったと言わざるを得ない（→宗教人類学）。文化人類学は、宗教現象のダイナミズムや、しばしば奇妙な社会現象と の節合、あるいはハビトゥスへの効果などに着目するために（特に私は） この種の宗 教研究にはなかなか食指が動いてこなかった。この解説は、宗教研究における以上のような「偏向」について修正・脱構築を試み、文化人類学の豊かな「奇妙 さ」の紹介と、その実践的解釈に むかうことになる。
「religion
と翻訳できるような印欧語族の諸言語に共通する言葉はありません」——ロドニー・ニーダム（1981）
| パラグラフ番号1 |
邦訳書ページ番号145 |
冒頭はサンタヤナ『宗
教における理性』 「特定の言語を話さずに話そうとする試みは、特定の宗教でない宗教を持とうと試みる のと同じように望みのないことである」 ・宗教とは特異的で個別なものだ。 ・第二次大戦以降の宗教研究は、たいしたものがないのは、なぜか？ ・四大ビッグネーム：デュルケーム、ウェーバー、フロイト、マリノフスキー |
Any attempt to
speak without speaking any particular
language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have
a religion that shall be no religion in particular
. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has a
marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special
and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation
gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries
it propounds are another world to live in; and another
world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly
over into it or no—is what we mean by having a religion. SANTAYANA,
Reason in Religion. Two characteristics of anthropological work on religion accomplished since the second world war strike me as curious when such work is placed against that carried out just before and just after the first. One is that it has made no theoretical advances of major importance. It is living off the conceptual capital of its ancestors, adding very little, save a certain empirical enrichment, to it. The second is that it draws what concepts it does use from a very narrowly defined intellectual tradition. There is Durkheim, Weber, Freud, or Malinowski, and in any particular work the approach of one or two of these transcendent figures is followed, with but a few marginal corrections necessitated by the natural tendency to excess of seminal minds or by the expanded body of reliable descriptive data. But virtually no one even thinks of looking elsewhere—to philosophy, history, law, literature, or the "harder"sciences—as these men themselves looked, for analytical ideas. And it occurs to me, also, that these two curious characteristics are not unrelated. |
87 特定の言語を話さずに語ろうとする試みは、特定の宗教ではない宗教を持とうとする試 みほど絶望的なものではない。このように、生きていて健全な宗教はすべて、顕著な特異性を持っている。その力は、特別で驚くべきメッセージ と、その啓示が人生に与える偏りにある。宗教が切り開く展望と、宗教が提唱する謎は、生きるためのもう一つの世界である。 第二次世界大戦以降に行われた宗教に関する人類学的研究を、第一次世界大戦の直前と直後に行われた研究と比較すると、二つの特徴があることに私は驚かされ る。ひとつは、理論的に重要な進歩が見られないことである。先人たちの概念的資本を利用して生きているのであって、経験的な充実を除いては、ほとんど何も 加えていないのである。もうひとつは、非常に狭義の知的伝統から概念を引き出していることである。デュルケーム、ヴェーバー、フロイト、マリノフスキーの ような超越的な人物の一人か二人のアプローチが、どのような作品においても踏襲されている。しかし、哲学、歴史学、法学、文学、あるいは「より困難な」科 学など、これらの人物自身が分析的アイデアを求めていたような他の分野に目を向けようとは、事実上誰も考えない。そして、この2つの不思議な特徴は、決し て無関係ではないだろう。 |
| 2 |
・芸術では著名な大家を模写することを
「アカデミズム」と呼ばれている。これが、本家のアカデミズムでおこるとヤバイ、という指摘。 |
If the
anthropological study of religion is in fact in a state of general
stagnation, I doubt that it will be set going again by producing more
minor variations on classical theoretical themes. Yet one more
meticulous
case in point for such well-established propositions as that ancestor
worship supports the jural authority of elders, that initiation rites
are
means for the establishment of sexual identity and adult status, that
ritual
groupings reflect political oppositions, or that myths provide charters
for social institutions and rationalizations of social privilege, may
well finally convince a great many people, both inside the profession
and out, that anthropologists are, like theologians, firmly dedicated
to
proving the indubitable. In art, this solemn reduplication of the
achievements
of accepted masters is called academicism; and I think this is the
proper name for our malady also. Only if we abandon, in a phrase of
Leo Steinberg's, that sweet sense of accomplishment which comes from
parading habitual skills and address ourselves to problems sufficiently
unclarified as to make discovery possible, can we hope to achieve work
which will not just reincarnate that of the great men of the first
quarter
of this century, but match it.1 |
||
| 3 |
147 |
・デュルケーム：聖なるものについての描
写 ・ウェーバー：理解的方法論 ・フロイト：個人儀礼と集団儀礼の並行関係 ・マリノフスキー：宗教と常識の区別の解明 |
The way to do this
is not to abandon the established traditions of social
anthropology in this field, but to widen them. At least four of the
contributions of the men who, as I say, dominate our thought to the
point of parochializing it—Durkheim's discussion of the nature of the
sacred, Weber's Verstehenden methodology, Freud's parallel between
personal rituals and collective ones, and Malinowski's exploration of
the
distinction between religion and common sense—seem to me inevitable
starting-points for any useful anthropological theory of religion. But
they are starting-points only. To move beyond them we must place them
in a much broader context of contemporary thought than they, in and of
themselves, encompass. The dangers of such a procedure are obvious:
arbitrary eclecticism, superficial theory-mongering, and sheer
intellectual
confusion. But I, at least, can see no other road of escape from
what, referring to anthropology more generally, Janowitz has called the
dead hand of competence |
|
| 4 |
148 |
・これから宗教の文化的分析だけをやる
（パーソンズとシルズ） 「文化は、象徴に表現される意味のパターンで、歴史的に伝承されるものであり、人間 が生活に関する知識と態度を伝承し、永続させ、発展させるために用いる、象徴的な形式に表現され、伝承される概念の体系を表している」 （148） |
In working toward
such an expansion of the conceptual envelope in
which our studies take place, one can, of course, move in a great
number
of directions; and perhaps the most important initial problem is to
avoid setting out, like Stephen Leacock's mounted policeman, in all of
them at once. For my pan, I shall confine my effort to developing what,
following Parsons and Shils, I refer to as the cultural dimension of
religious
analysis.3 The term "culture" has by now acquired a certain aura
of ill-repute in social anthropological circles because of the
multiplicity
of its referents and the studied vagueness with which it has all too
often
been invoked. (Though why it should suffer more for these reasons than
"social structure" or "personality" is something I do not entirely
understand.)
In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither
multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it
denotes
an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols,
a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life. Of course, terms such as
"meaning," "symbol," and "conception" cry out for explication. But
that is precisely where the widening, the broadening, and the expanding
come in. If Langer is right that "the concept of meaning, in all its
varieties,
is the dominant philosophical concept of our time," that "sign,
symbol, denotation, signification, communication . . . are our
(intellectual]
stock in trade," it is perhaps time that social anthropology, and
particularly that part of it concerned with the study of religion,
became
aware of the fact.4 |
|
| 5 |
II. 意味についてのパラダイム（論） | II. 意味についてのパラダイム（論） |
As we are to deal
with meaning, let us begin with a paradigm: viz., that
sacred symbols function to synthesize a people's ethos—the tone,
character,
and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood
—and their world view—the picture they have of the way things in
sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. In
religious
belief and practice a group's ethos is rendered intellectually
reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to
the
actual state of affairs the world view describes, while the world view
is
rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an image of an
actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to accommodate such a
way of life. This confrontation and mutual confirmation has two
fundamental
effects. On the one hand, it objectivizes moral and aesthetic
preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life
implicit
in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the
unalterable shape of reality. On the other, it supports these received
beliefs
about the world's body by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic
sentiments as experiential evidence for their truth. Religious symbols
formulate a basic congruence between a particular style of life and a
specific (if, most often, implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain
each with the borrowed authority of the other. |
|
| 6 |
・宇宙の秩序と宗教は反映するという主張
は新しくないが、それについて具体的に何がわかっているのか、というわけではない。 |
Phrasing aside,
this much may perhaps be granted. The notion that
religion tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects
images of cosmic order onto the plane of human experience is hardly
novel. But it is hardly investigated either, so that we have very
little
idea of how, in empirical terms, this particular miracle is
accomplished.
We just know that it is done, annually, weekly, daily, for some people
almost hourly; and we have an enormous ethnographic literature to
demonstrate it. But the theoretical framework which would enable us to
provide an analytic account of it, an account of the son we can provide
for lineage segmentation, political succession, labor exchange, or the
socialization
of the child, does not exist. |
||
| 7 |
・パラダイムを定義におきかえる |
Let us, therefore,
reduce our paradigm to a definition, for, although it
is notorious that definitions establish nothing, in themselves they do,
if
they are carefully enough constructed, provide a useful orientation, or
reorientation, of thought, such that an extended unpacking of them can
be an effective way of developing and controlling a novel line of
inquiry.
They have the useful virtue of cxplicitness: they commit themselves
in a way discursive prose, which, in this field especially, is always
liable to substitute rhetoric for argument, does not. Without further
ado,
then, a religion is: |
||
| 8 |
宗教の定義：「（1）象徴の体系であり、
（2）人間の中に強力な、広くゆきわたった、永続する情調(mood)と動機づけ
を打ち立てる。（3）それは、一般的な存在の秩序の概念を形成し、（4）そして、これらの概念を事実
性(factuality) の層をもっておおい、（5）そのために情調と動機づけが独特な形で現実的であるよう
にみえる」（ギアーツ 1987:149-150）。 |
(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 with
such
an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely
realistic. |
||
| 9 |
・（1）象徴の体系であり、 ・象徴についてのレクチャーがはじまる |
a system of symbols which acts to . . . Such a tremendous weight is being put on the term "symbol" here that our first move must be to decide with some precision what we are going to mean by it. This is no easy task, for, rather like "culture," "symbol" has been used to refer to a great variety of things, often a number of them at the same time. |
||
| 10 |
In some hands it is used for anything which signifies something else to someone: dark clouds are the symbolic precursors of an on-coming rain. In others it is used only for explicitly conventional signs of one sort or another: a red flag is a symbol of danger, a white of surrender. In others it is confined to something which expresses in an oblique and figurative manner that which cannot be stated in a direct and literal one, so that there are symbols in poetry but not in science, and symbolic logic is misnamed. In yet others, however, it is used for any object, act, event, quality, or relation which serves as a vehicle .for a conception— the conception is the symbol's "meaning"—and that is the approach I shall follow here.5 The number 6, written, imagined, laid out as a row of stones, or even punched into the program tapes of a computer, is a symbol. But so also is the Cross, talked about, visualized, shaped worriedly in air or fondly fingered at the neck, the expanse of painted canvas called "Guernica" or the bit of painted stone called a churinga, the word "reality," or even the morpheme "-ing." They are all symbols, or at least symbolic elements, because they are tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs. To undertake the study of cultural activity—activity in which symbolism forms the positive content—is thus not to abandon social analysis for a Platonic cave of shadows, to enter into a mentalistic world of introspective psychology or, worse, speculative philosophy, and wander there forever in a haze of "Cognitions," "Affections," "Conations," and other elusive entities. Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms, are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture. | |||
| 11 |
They are not, however, exactly the same thing; or, more precisely, the symbolic dimension of social events is, like the psychological, itself theoretically abstractable from those events as empirical totalities. There is still, to paraphrase a remark of Kenneth Burke's, a difference between building a house and drawing up a plan for building a house, and reading a poem about having children by marriage is not quite the same thing as having children by marriage.6 Even though the building of the house may proceed under the guidance of the plan or—a less likely occurrence—the having of children may be motivated by a reading of the poem, there is something to be said for not confusing our traffic with symbols with our traffic with objects or human beings, for these latter are not in themselves symbols, however often they may function as such.7 No matter how deeply interfused the cultural, the social, and the psychological may be in the everyday life of houses, farms, poems, and marriages, it is useful to distinguish them in analysis, and, so doing, to isolate the generic traits of each against the normalized background of the other two. | |||
| 12 |
So far as culture patterns, that is, systems or complexes of symbols, are concerned, the generic trait which is of first importance for us here is that they are extrinsic sources of information. By "extrinsic," I mean only that—unlike genes, for example—they lie outside the boundaries of the individual organism as such in that intersubjective world of common understandings into which all human individuals are born, in which they pursue their separate careers, and which they leave persisting behind them after they die. By "sources of information," I mean only that—like genes—they provide a blueprint or template in terms of which processes external to themselves can be given a definite form. As the order of bases in a strand of DNA forms a coded program, a set of instructions, or a recipe, for the synthesis of the structurally complex proteins which shape organic functioning, so culture patterns provide such programs for the institution of the social and psychological processes which shape public behavior. Though the sort of information and the mode of its transmission are vastly different in the two cases, this comparison of gene and symbol is more than a strained analogy of the familiar "social heredity" sort. It is actually a substantial relationship, for it is precisely because of the fact that genetically programmed processes are so highly generalized in men, as compared with lower animals, that culturally programmed ones are so important; only because human behavior is so loosely determined by intrinsic sources of information that extrinsic sources are so vital. To build a dam a beaver needs only an appropriate site and the proper materials—his mode of procedure is shaped by his physiology. But man, whose genes are silent on the building trades, needs also a conception of what it is to build a dam, a conception he can get only from some symbolic source—a blueprint, a textbook, or a string of speech by someone who already knows how dams are built—or, of course, from manipulating graphic or linguistic elements in such a way as to attain for himself a conception of what dams are and how they are built. | |||
| 13 |
154 |
・文化のパターンとはモデルである。モデ
ルは象徴の組み合わせである |
This point is
sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural
patterns are "models," that they are sets of symbols whose relations to
one another "model" relations among entities, processes or what-haveyou
in physical, organic, social, or psychological systems by
"paralleling,"
"imitating," or "simulating" them.8 The term "model" has, however,
two senses—an "of" sense and a "for" sense—and though these
are but aspects of the same basic concept they are very much worth
distinguishing
for analytic purposes. In the first, what is stressed is the
manipulation
of symbol structures so as to bring them, more or less
closely, into parallel with the pre-established nonsymbolic system, as
when we grasp how dams work by developing a theory of hydraulics or
constructing a flow chart. The theory or chart models physical
relationships
in such a way—that is, by expressing their structure in synoptic
form—as to render them apprehensible; it is a model of "reality." In
the second, what is stressed is the manipulation of the nonsymbolic
systems
in terms of the relationships expressed in the symbolic, as when
we construct a dam according to the specifications implied in an
hydraulic
theory or the conclusions drawn from a flow chart. Here, the
theory is a model under whose guidance physical relationships are
organized:
it is a model for "reality." For psychological and social systems,
and for cultural models that we would not ordinarily refer to as
"theories,"
but rather as "doctrines," "melodies," or "rites," the case is in no
way different. Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information
sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns
have
an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective
conceptual
form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves
to it and by shaping it to themselves. |
93. |
| 14 |
It is, in fact,
this double aspect which sets true symbols off from
other sorts of significative forms. Models for are found, as the gene
example
suggests, through the whole order of nature; for wherever there is
a communication of pattern, such programs are, in simple logic,
required.
Among animals, imprint learning is perhaps the most striking
example, because what such learning involves is the automatic
presentation
of an appropriate sequence of behavior by a model animal in the
presence of a learning animal which serves, equally automatically, to
call out and stabilize a certain set of responses genetically built
into the
learning animal.9 The communicative dance of two bees, one of which
has found nectar and the other of which seeks it, is another, somewhat
different, more complexly coded, example.10 Craik has even suggested
that the thin trickle of water which first finds its way down from a
mountain spring to the sea and smooths a little channel for the greater
volume of water that follows after it plays a sort of model for
function.
11 But models of—linguistic, graphic, mechanical, natural, etc.,
processes which function not to provide sources of information in terms
of which other processes can be patterned, but to represent those
patterned
processes as such, to express their structure in an alternative
medium—are much rarer and may perhaps be confined, among living
animals, to man. The perception of the structural congruence between
one set of processes, activities, relations, entities, and so on, and
another
set for which it acts as a program, so that the program can be
taken as a representation, or conception—a symbol—of the programmed,
is the essence of human thought. The intertransposability of
models for and models of which symbolic formulation makes possible is
the distinctive characteristic of our mentality. |
94. |
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| 15 |
157 |
・（2）人間の中に強力な、広くゆきわたった、永続する情調(mood)と動機づけを打ち立て
る…… ・ |
. . . to establish powerful, pervasive,
and long-lasting moods
and motivations in men by . . . So far as religious symbols and symbol systems are concerned this intertransposability is clear. The endurance, courage, independence, perseverance, and passionate willfulness in which the vision quest practices the Plains Indian are the same flamboyant virtues by which he attempts to live: while achieving a sense of revelation he stabilizes a sense of direction.12 The consciousness of defaulted obligation, secreted guilt, and, when a confession is obtained, public shame in which Manus' seance rehearses him are the same sentiments that underlie the sort of duty ethic by which his property-conscious society is maintained: the gaining of an absolution involves the forging of a conscience.l3 And the same self-discipline which rewards a Javanese mystic staring fixedly into the flame of a lamp with what he takes to be an intimation of divinity drills him in that rigorous control of emotional expression which is necessary to a man who would follow a quietistic style of life.14 Whether one sees the conception of a personal guardian spirit, a family tutelary, or an immanent God as synoptic formulations of the character of reality or as templates for producing reality with such a character seems largely arbitrary, a matter of which aspect, the model of or model for, one wants for the moment to bring into focus. The concrete symbols involved—one or another mythological figure materializing in the wilderness, the skull of the deceased household head hanging censoriously in the rafters, or a disembodied "voice in the stillness" soundlessly chanting enigmatic classical poetry—point in either direction. They both express the world's climate and shape it. |
95. |
| 16 |
They shape it by
inducing in the worshipper a certain distinctive set
of dispositions (tendencies, capacities, propensities, skills, habits,
liabilities,
pronenesses) which lend a chronic character to the flow of his activity
and the quality of his experience. A disposition describes not an
activity or an occurrence but a probability of an activity being
performed
or an occurrence occurring in certain circumstances: "When a
cow is said to be a ruminant, or a man is said to be a
cigarette-smoker,
it is not being said that the cow is ruminating now or that the man is
smoking a cigarette now. To be a ruminant is to tend to ruminate from
time to time, and to be a cigarette-smoker is to be in the habit of
smoking
cigarettes." 15 Similarly, to be pious is not to be performing
something
we would call an act of piety, but to be liable to perform such
acts. So, too, with the Plains Indian's bravura, the Manus'
compunctiousness,
or the Javanese's quietism, which, in their contexts, form the
substance of piety. The virtue of this sort of view of what are usually
called "mental traits" or, if the Cartesianism is unavowed,
"psychological
forces" (both unobjectionable enough terms in themselves) is that it
gets them out of any dim and inaccessible realm of private sensation
into that same well-lit world of observables in which reside the
brittleness
of glass, the inflammability of paper, and, to return to the metaphor,
the dampness of England. |
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| 17 |
So far as
religious activities are concerned (and learning a myth by
heart is as much a religious activity as detaching one's finger at the
knuckle), two somewhat different sorts of disposition are induced by
them: moods and motivations. |
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| 18 |
A motivation is a
persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform
certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in
certain
sorts of situations, the "sorts" being commonly very heterogenous
and rather ill-defined classes in all three cases: |
|||
| 19 |
（引用文） |
On hearing that a
man is vain [i.e.. motivated by vanity] we expect him to
behave in certain ways, namely to talk a lot about himself, to cleave
to the
society of the eminent, to reject criticisms, to seek the footlights
and to disengage
himself from conversations about (he merits of others. We expect
him to indulge in roseate daydreams about his own successes, to avoid
recalling
past failures and to plan for his own advancement. To be vain is to
tend to act in these and innumerable other kindred ways. Certainly we
also
expect the vain man to feel certain pangs and flutters in certain
situations;
we expect him to have an acute sinking feeling when an eminent person
forgets
his name, and to feel buoyant of heart and light of toe on hearing of
the misfortunes of his rivals. But feelings of pique and buoyancy are
not
more directly indicative of vanity than are public acts of boasting or
private
acts of daydreaming.16 ▲16 Ibid., p. 86. Quoted by permission of Barnes
& Noble Books and Hutchinson
Publishing Group Ltd. |
||
| 20 |
Similarly for any
motivations. As a motive, "flamboyant courage" consists
in such enduring propensities as to fast in the wilderness, to conduct
solitary raids on enemy camps, and to thrill to the thought of
counting coup. "Moral circumspection" consists in such ingrained
tendencies
as to honor onerous promises, to confess secret sins in the face
of severe public disapproval, and to feel guilty when vague and
generalized
accusations are made at seances. And "dispassionate tranquility"
consists in such persistent inclinations as to maintain one's poise
come
hell or high water, to experience distaste in the presence of even
moderate
emotional displays, and to indulge in contentless contemplations of
featureless objects. Motives are thus neither acts (that is,
intentional behaviors) nor feelings, but liabilities to perform
particular classes of act
or have particular classes of feeling. And when we say that a man is
religious,
that is, motivated by religion, this is at least pan—though only
part—of what we mean. |
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| 21 |
Another part of
what we mean is that he has, when properly stimulated,
a susceptibility to fall into certain moods, moods we sometimes
lump together under such covering terms as "reverential," "solemn," or
"worshipful." Such generalized rubrics actually conceal, however, the
enormous empirical variousness of the dispositions involved, and, in
fact, tend to assimilate them to the unusually grave tone of most of
our
own religious life. The moods that sacred symbols induce, at different
times and in different places, range from exultation to melancholy,
from
self-confidence to self-pity, from an incorrigible playfulness to a
bland
listlessness—to say nothing of the erogenous power of so many of the
world's myths and rituals. No more than there is a single sort of
motivation
one can call piety is there a single sort of mood one can call
worshipful. |
|||
| 22 |
The major
difference between moods and motivations is that where
the latter are, so to speak, vectorial qualities, the former are merely
scalar.
Motives have a directional cast, they describe a certain overall
course, gravitate toward certain, usually temporary, consummations. But
moods vary only as to intensity: they go nowhere. They spring from
certain circumstances but they are responsive to no ends. Like fogs,
they just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When
present
they are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems
dreary;
if one is gay, everything and everybody seems splendid. Thus, though a
man can be vain, brave, willful, and independent at the same time, he
can't very well be playful and listless, or exultant and melancholy, at
the same time.17 Further, where motives persist for more or less
extended
periods of time, moods merely recur with greater or lesser frequency,
coming and going for what are often quite unfathomable reasons.
But perhaps the most important difference, so far as we are
concerned, between moods and motivations is that motivations are
"made meaningful" with reference to the ends toward which they are
conceived to conduce, whereas moods are "made meaningful" with
reference
to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring. We
interpret motives in terms of their consummations, but we interpret
moods in terms of their sources. We say that a person is industrious
because he wishes to succeed; we say that a person is worried because
he
is conscious of the hanging threat of nuclear holocaust. And this is no
less the case when the interpretations are ultimate. Charity becomes
Christian charity when it is enclosed in a conception of God's
purposes;
optimism is Christian optimism when it is grounded in a particular
conception
of God's nature. The assiduity of the Navaho finds its rationale
in a belief that, since "reality" operates mechanically, it is
coercible;
their chronic fearfulness finds its rationale in a conviction that,
however
"reality" operates, it is both enormously powerful and terribly
dangerous.
18 |
|||
| 23 |
162 |
・（3）それは、一般的な存在の秩序の概念を形成し…… ・ |
. . by formulating conceptions of a
general order
of existence and . . . That the symbols or symbol systems which induce and define dispositions we set off as religious and those which place those dispositions in a cosmic framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise. For what else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of awe is religious and not secular, except that it springs from entertaining a conception of all-pervading vitality like mana and not from a visit to the Grand Canyon? Or that a particular case of asceticism is an example of a religious motivation, except that it is directed toward the achievement of an unconditioned end like nirvana and not a conditioned one like weight-reduction? If sacred symbols did not at one and the same time induce dispositions in human beings and formulate, however obliquely, inarticulately, or unsystematically, general ideas of order, then the empirical differentia of religious activity or religious experience would not exist. A man can indeed be said to be "religious" about golf, but not merely if he pursues it with passion and plays it on Sundays: he must also see it as symbolic of some transcendent truths. And the pubescent boy gazing soulfully into the eyes of the pubescent girl in a William Steig cartoon and murmuring, "There is something about you, Ethel, which gives me a sort of religious feeling," is, like most adolescents, confused. What any particular religion affirms about the fundamental nature of reality may be obscure, shallow, or, all too often, perverse; but it must, if it is not to consist of the mere collection of received practices and conventional sentiments we usually refer to as moralism, affirm something. If one were to essay a minimal definition of religion today, it would perhaps not be Tylor's famous "belief in spiritual beings," to which Goody, wearied of theoretical subtleties, has lately urged us to return, but rather what Salvador de Madariaga has called "the relatively modest dogma that God is not mad." 19 |
98-99 |
| 24 |
Usually, of
course, religions affirm very much more than this: we believe,
as James remarked, all that we can and would believe everything
if we only could.20 The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a
threat to
our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create,
grasp,
and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be
more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The
extreme
generality, diffuseness, and variability of man's innate (that is,
genetically
programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance
of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, not
merely a talented ape who had, like some underprivileged child,
unfortunately
been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind
of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of
selfcontrol,
a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions. Man depends
upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as
to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his
sensitivity
to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with
one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort
of
anxiety: |
|||
| 25 |
[Man] can adapt
himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope
with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic
function and
highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he
cannot
construe—the "uncanny," as it is popularly called. It need not be a new
object;
we do meet new things, and "understand" them promptly, if tentatively,
by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but
under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly
disorganized
and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets are
always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth,
in society,
and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung and
Lebensanschauung. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual
is incorporated
in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., as
well as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal
morale
and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian
Europe the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to
their knees,
to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts.21 |
|||
| 26 |
There are at least
three points where chaos—a tumult of events
which lack not just interpretations but interpretability—threatens to
break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the
limits
of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight.
Bafflement,
suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox are all, if
they become intense enough or are sustained long enough, radical
challenges
to the proposition that life is comprehensible and that we can, by
taking thought, orient ourselves effectively within it—challenges with
which any religion, however "primitive," which hopes to persist must
attempt somehow to cope. |
100 |
||
| 27 |
Of the three
issues, it is the first which has been least investigated by
modern social anthropologists (though Evans-Pritchard's classic
discussion
of why granaries fall on some Azande and not on others, is a notable
exception).22 Even to consider people's religious beliefs as attempts
to bring anomalous events or experiences—death, dreams, mental
fugues, volcanic eruptions, or marital infidelity—within the circle of
the
at least potentially explicable seems to smack of Tyloreanism or worse.
But it does appear to be a fact that at least some men—in all
probability,
most men—are unable to leave unclarified problems of analysis
merely unclarified, just to look at the stranger features of the
world's
landscape in dumb astonishment or bland apathy without trying to
develop,
however fantastic, inconsistent, or simple-minded, some notions
as to how such features might be reconciled with the more ordinary
deliverances
of experience. Any chronic failure of one's explanatory apparatus,
the complex of received culture patterns (common sense, science,
philosophical speculation, myth) one has for mapping the empirical
world, to explain things which cry out for explanation tends to lead to
a
deep disquiet—a tendency rather more widespread and a disquiet
rather deeper than we have sometimes supposed since the pseudoscience
view of religious belief was, quite rightfully, deposed. After all,
even
that high priest of heroic atheism. Lord Russell, once remarked that
although
the problem of the existence of God had never bothered him,
the ambiguity of certain mathematical axioms had threatened to unhinge
his mind. And Einstein's profound dissatisfaction with quantum
mechanics was based on a—surely religious—inability to believe that, as
he put it, God plays dice with the universe. |
|||
| 28 |
But this quest for
lucidity and the rush of metaphysical anxiety that
occurs when empirical phenomena threaten to remain intransigently
opaque is found on much humbler intellectual levels. Certainly, I was
struck in my own work, much more than I had at all expected to be, by
the degree to which my more animistically inclined informants behaved
like true Tyloreans. They seemed to be constantly using their beliefs
to
"explain" phenomena: or, more accurately, to convince themselves that
the phenomena were explainable within the accepted scheme of things,
for they commonly had only a minimal attachment to the particular soul
possession, emotional disequilibrium, taboo infringement, or
bewitchment
hypothesis they advanced and were all too ready to abandon it for
some other, in the same genre, which struck them as more plausible
given the facts of the case. What they were not ready to do was abandon
it for no other hypothesis at all; to leave events to themselves. |
|||
| 29 |
168 |
奇妙なキノコの例 |
And what is more,
they adopted this nervous cognitive stance with
respect to phenomena which had no immediate practical bearing on
their own lives, or for that matter on anyone's. When a peculiarly
shaped, rather large toadstool grew up in a carpenter's house in the
short space of a few days (or, some said, a few hours), people came
from miles around to see it, and everyone had some sort of explanation
—some animist, some animatist, some not quite either—for it. Yet it
would be hard to argue that the toadstool had any social value in
Radcliffe-
Brown's sense, or was connected in any way with anything which
did and for which it could have been standing proxy, like the Andaman
cicada.23 Toadstools play about the same role in Javanese life as they
do
in ours, and in the ordinary course of things Javanese have about as
much interest in them as we do. It was just that this one was "odd,"
"strange," "uncanny"—aneh. And the odd, strange, and uncanny simply
must be accounted for—or, again, the conviction that it could be
accounted for sustained. One does not shrug off a toadstool which
grows five times as fast as a toadstool has any right to grow. In the
broadest sense the "strange" toadstool did have implications, and
critical
ones, for those who heard about it. It threatened their most general
ability to understand the world, raised the uncomfortable question of
whether the beliefs which they held about nature were workable, the
standards of truth they used valid. |
|
| 30 |
Nor is this to
argue that it is only, or even mainly, sudden eruptions
of extraordinary events which engender in man the disquieting sense
that his cognitive resources may prove unavailing or that this
intuition
appears only in its acute form. More commonly it is a persistent,
constantly
re-experienced difficulty in grasping certain aspects of nature,
self, and society, in bringing certain elusive phenomena within the
sphere of culturally formulatable fact, which renders man chronically
uneasy and toward which a more equable flow of diagnostic symbols is
consequently directed. It is what lies beyond a relatively fixed
frontier
of accredited knowledge that, looming as. a constant background to the
daily round of practical life, sets ordinary human experience in a
permanent
context of metaphysical concern and raises the dim, back-ofthe-
mind suspicions that one may be adrift in an absurd world: |
|||
| 31 |
（ベイトソンからの引用）Another
subject which is matter for this characteristic intellectual enquiry
[among the latmul] is the nature of ripples and waves on the surface of
water. It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects
in the
world—are only patterns of waves. Indeed there seems to be some
agreement
about this, although it perhaps conflicts with the theory of
reincarnation,
according to which the ghost of the dead is blown as a mist by the
East Wind up the river and into the womb of the deceased's son's wife.
Be
that as it may—there is still the question of how ripples and waves are
caused. The clan which claims the East Wind as a totem is clear enough
about this: the Wind with her mosquito fan causes the waves. But other
clans have personified the waves and say that they are a person
(Konlummali)
independent of the wind. Other clans, again, have other theories. On
one occasion I took some latmul natives down to the coast and found one
of them silting by himself gazing with rapt attention at the sea. It
was a
windless day, but a slow swell was breaking on the beach. Among the
totemic
ancestors of his clan he counted a personified slit gong who had
floated down the river to the sea and who was believed to cause the
waves.
He was gazing at the waves which were heaving and breaking when no wind
was blowing, demonstrating the truth of his clan myth.24 |
|||
| 32 |
The second
experiential challenge in whose face the meaningfulness
of a particular pattern of life threatens to dissolve into a chaos of
thingless
names and nameless things—the problem of suffering—has been
rather more investigated, or at least described, mainly because of the
great amount of attention given in works on tribal religion to what are
perhaps its two main loci: illness and mourning. Yet for all the
fascinated
interest in the emotional aura that surrounds these extreme situations,
there has been, with a few exceptions such as Lienhardt's recent
discussion of Dinka divining, little conceptual advance over the sort
of
crude confidence-type theory set forth by Malinowski: viz., that
religion
helps one to endure "situations of emotional stress" by "open [ing] up
escapes from such situations and such impasses as offer no empirical
way out except by ritual and belief into the domain of the
supernatural."25 The inadequacy of this "theology of optimism," as
Nadel rather dryly called it, is, of course, radical.26 Over its career
religion
has probably disturbed men as much as it has cheered them; forced
them into a head-on, unblinking confrontation of the fact that they are
born to trouble as often as it has enabled them to avoid such a
confrontation
by projecting them into sort of infantile fairy-tale worlds where
—Malinowski again—"hope cannot fail nor desire deceive." 27 With
the possible exception of Christian Science, there are few if any
religious
traditions, "great" or "little," in which the proposition that life
hurts is not strenuously affirmed, and in some it is virtually
glorified: |
|||
| 33 |
（スミスとデールからの引用文）She
was an old [Ba-lia] woman of a family with a long genealogy. Leza,
"the Besetting One", stretched out his hand against the family. He slew
her
mother and father while she was yet a child, and in the course of years
all
connected with her perished. She said to herself, "Surely I shall keep
those
who sit on my thighs." But no, even they, the children of her children,
were
taken from her. . . . Then came into her heart a desperate resolution
to find
God and to ask the meaning of it all. . . . So she began to travel,
going
through country after country, always with the thought in her mind: "I
shall
come to where the earth ends and there I shall find a road to God and I
shall ask him: 'What have I done to thee that thou afflictest me in
this
manner?' " She never found where the earth ends, but though
disappointed
she did not give up her search, and as she passed through the different
countries (hey asked her. "What have you come for. old woman?" And the
answer would be. "I am seeking Leu." "Seeking Leza! For what?" "My
brothers, you ask me! Here in the nations is there one who suffers as I
have
suffered?" And they would ask again, "How have you suffered?" "In this
way. I am alone. As you see me, a solitary old woman; that is how I
am!"
And they answered. "Yes. we see. That is how you are! Bereaved of
friends
and husband? In what do you differ from others? The Besetting-One sits
on
the back of every one of us and we cannot shake him off." She never
obtained
her desire; she died of a broken heart.28 |
|||
| 34 |
As a religious
problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically,
not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical
pain, personal loss, wordly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of
others'
agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable.
It was in this effort that the Ba-Ila woman—perhaps necessarily,
perhaps not—failed and, literally not knowing how to feel about
what had happened to her, how to suffer, perished in confusion and
despair.
Where the more intellective aspects of what Weber called the
Problem of Meaning are a matter affirming the ultimate explicability of
experience, the more affective aspects are a matter of affirming its
ultimate
sufferableness. As religion on one side anchors the power of our
symbolic resources for formulating analytic ideas in an authoritative
conception of the overall shape of reality, so on another side it
anchors
the power of our, also symbolic, resources for expressing emotions—
moods, sentiments, passions, affections, feelings—in a similar
conception
of its pervasive tenor, its inherent tone and temper. For those able
to embrace them, and for so long as they are able to embrace them,
religious
symbols provide a cosmic guarantee not only for their ability to
comprehend the world, but also, comprehending it, to give a precision
to their feeling, a definition to their emotions which enables them,
morosely
or joyfully, grimly or cavalierly, to endure it. |
|||
| 35 |
Consider in this
light the well-known Navaho curing rites usually referred
to as "sings." 29 A sing—the Navaho have about sixty different
ones for different purposes, but virtually all of them are dedicated to
removing
some sort of physical or mental illness—is a kind of religious
psychodrama in which there are three main actors: the "singer" or
curer, the patient, and, as a kind of antiphonal chorus, the patient's
family and friends. The structure of all the sings, the drama's plot,
is quite similar. There are three main acts: a purification of the
patient
and audience; a statement, by means of repetitive chants and ritual
manipulations,
of the wish to restore well-being ("harmony") in the patient;
an identification of the patient with the Holy People and his
consequent
"cure." The purification rites involve forced sweating, induced
vomiting, and so on, to expel the sickness from the patient physically.
The chants, which are numberless, consist mainly of simple optative
phrases ("may the patient be well," "I am getting better all over,"
etc.).
And, finally, the identification of the patient with the Holy People,
and
thus with cosmic order generally, is accomplished through the agency of
a sand painting depicting the Holy People in one-or another appropriate
mythic setting. The singer places the patient on the painting, touching
the feet, hands, knees, shoulders, breast, back, and head of the divine
figures and then the corresponding parts of the patient, performing
thus
what is essentially a bodily identification of the human and the
divine.30
This is the climax of the sing: the whole curing process may be
likened,
Reichard says, to a spiritual osmosis in which the illness in man and
the
power of the deity penetrate the ceremonial membrane in both
directions,
the former being neutralized by the latter. Sickness seeps out in
the sweat, vomit, and other purification rites; health seeps in as the
Navaho
patient touches, through the medium of the singer, the sacred sand
painting. Clearly, the symbolism of the sing focuses upon the problem
of human suffering and attempts to cope with it by placing it in a
meaningful
context, providing a mode of action through which it can be expressed,
being expressed understood, and being understood, endured.
The sustaining effect of the sing (and since the commonest disease is
tuberculosis, it can in most cases be only sustaining), rests
ultimately on
its ability to give the stricken person a vocabulary in terms of which
to
grasp the nature of his distress and relate it to the wider world. Like
a
calvary, a recitation of Buddha's emergence from his father's palace,
or
a performance of Oedipus Tyrannos in other religious traditions, a sing
is mainly concerned with the presentation of a specific and concrete
image of truly human, and so endurable, suffering powerful enough to
resist the challenge of emotional meaninglessness raised by the
existence
of intense and unremovable brute pain. |
|||
| 36 |
The problem of
suffering passes easily into the problem of evil, for if
suffering is severe enough it usually, though not always, seems morally
undeserved as well, at least to the sufferer. But they are not,
however,
exactly the same thing—a fact I think Weber, too influenced by the
biases of a monotheistic tradition in which, as the various aspects of
human experience must be conceived to proceed from a single,
voluntaristic
source, man's pain reflects directly on God's goodness, did not
fully recognize in his generalization of the dilemmas of Christian
theodicy
Eastward. For where the problem of suffering is concerned with
threats to our ability to put our "undisciplined squads of emotion"
into
some sort of soldierly order, the problem of evil is concerned with
threats to our ability to make sound moral judgments. What is involved
in the problem of evil is not the adequacy of our symbolic resources to
govern our affective life, but the adequacy of those resources to
provide
a workable set of ethical criteria, normative guides to govern our
action.
The vexation here is the gap between things as they are and as they
ought to be if our conceptions of right and wrong make sense, the gap
between what we deem various individuals deserve and what we see that
they get—a phenomenon summed up in that profound quatrain: |
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| 37 |
||||
| 38 |
||||
| 39 |
176 |
・この詩は「オイディプス王」からの引用
か？ ・「雨は正しき者に降る／しかして不正なる者にも降る／されど多くは正しき者の上に／不正なる者は正しき者の傘を奪ってもつゆえに」 |
The rain falls on
the just And on the unjust fella; But mainly upon the just. Because the unjust has the just's umbrella. |
|
| 40 |
Or if this seems
too flippant an expression of an issue that, in somewhat
different form, animates the Book of Job and the Baghavad Gita,
the following classical Javanese poem, known, sung, and repeatedly
quoted in Java by virtually everyone over the age of six, puts the
point
—the discrepancy between moral prescriptions and material rewards,
the seeming inconsistency of "is" and "ought":—rather more elegantly: |
|||
| 41 |
・ジャワの詩 |
We have lived to
see a time without order In which everyone is confused in his mind. One cannot bear to join in the madness, But if he does not do so He will not share in the spoils, And will starve as a result. Yes, God; wrong is wrong: Happy are those who forget. Happier yet those who remember and have deep insight. |
||
| 42 |
・ディンカ |
Nor is it
necessary to be theologically self-conscious to be religiously
sophisticated. The concern with intractable ethical paradox, the
disquieting
sense that one's moral insight is inadequate to one's moral experience,
is as alive on the level of so-called primitive religion as it is
on that of the so-called civilized. The set of notions about "division
in
the world" that Lienhardt describes for the Dinka is a useful case in
point.31 Like so many peoples, the Dinka believe that the sky, where
"Divinity" is located, and earth, where man dwells, were at one time
contiguous, the sky lying just above the earth and being connected to
it
by a rope, so that men could move at will between the two realms.
There was no death and the first man and woman were permitted but a
single grain of millet a day, which was all that they at that time
required.
One day, the woman—of course—decided, out of greed, to
plant more than the permitted grain of millet, and in her avid haste
and
industry accidentally struck Divinity with the handle of the hoe.
Offended,
he severed the rope, withdrew into the distant sky of today, and
left man to labor for his food, to suffer sickness and death, and to
experience
separation from the source of his being, his Creator. Yet the
meaning of this strangely familiar story to the Dinka is, as indeed is
Genesis to Jews and Christians, not homiletic but descriptive: |
||
| 43 |
・リンハートの引用 |
Those [Dinka] who
have commented on these stories have sometimes made
it clear that their sympathies lie with Man in his plight, and draw
attention
to the smallness of the fault for which Divinity withdrew the benefits
of his
closeness. The image of striking Divinity with a hoe . . . often evokes
a
certain amusement, almost as though the story were indulgently being
treated as too childish to explain the consequences attributed to the
event.
But it is clear that the point of the story of Divinity's withdrawal
from men
is not to suggest an improving moral judgment on human behaviour. It is
to
represent a total situation known to the Dinka today. Men now are—as
the
first man and woman then became—active, self-assertive, inquiring,
acquisitive.
Yet they are also subject to suffering and death, ineffective, ignorant
and poor. Life is insecure; human calculations often prove erroneous,
and
men must often learn by experience that the consequences of their acts
are
quite other than they may have anticipated or consider equitable.
Divinity's
withdrawal from Man as the result of a comparatively trifling offence,
by
human standards, presents the contrast between equitable human
judgments
and the action of the Power which are held ultimately to control what
happens
in Dinka life. . . . To the Dinka, the moral order is ultimately
constituted
according to principles which often elude men. which experience and
tradition in part reveal, and which human action cannot change. . . .
The
myth of Divinity's withdrawal then reflects the facts of existence as
they are
known. The Dinka are in a universe which is largely beyond their
control,
and where events may contradict the most reasonable human
expectations.32 |
||
| 44 |
179 |
悪の問題 |
Thus the problem
of evil, or perhaps one should say the problem
about evil, is in essence the same sort of problem of or about
bafflement
and the problem of or about suffering. The strange opacity of certain
empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain,
and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross iniquity all raise the
uncomfortable
suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man's life in the
world, has no genuine order at all—no empirical regularity, no
emotional
form, no moral coherence. And the religious response to this suspicion
is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols,
of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account
for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and
paradoxes
in human experience. The effort is not to deny the undeniable—
that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls
upon
the just—but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life is
unendurable, and that justice is a mirage. The principles which
constitute
the moral order may indeed often elude men, as Lienhardt puts it,
in the same way as fully satisfactory explanations of anomalous events
or effective forms for the expression of feeling often elude them. What
is important, to a religious man at least, is that this elusiveness be
accounted
for, that it be not the result of the fact that there are no such
principles, explanations, or forms, that life is absurd and the attempt
to
make moral, intellectual, or emotional sense out of experience is
bootless.
The Dinka can admit, in fact insist upon, the moral ambiguities
and contradictions of life as they live it because these ambiguities
and
contradictions are seen not as ultimate, but as the "rational,"
"natural,"
"logical" (one may choose one's own adjective here, for none of them is
truly adequate) outcome of the moral structure of reality which the
myth of the withdrawn "Divinity" depicts, or as Lienhardt says,
"images." |
|
| 45 |
181 |
The Problem of
Meaning in each of its intergrading aspects (how
these aspects in fact intergrade in each particular case, what sort of
interplay
there is between the sense of analytic, emotional, and moral impotence,
seems to me one of the outstanding, and except for Weber untouched,
problems for comparative research in this whole field) it a
matter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of
ignorance,
pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously
denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a
whole. And it is in terms of religious symbolism, a symbolism relating
man's sphere of existence to a wider sphere within which it is
conceived
to rest, that both the affirmation and the denial are made.33 |
||
| 46 |
181 |
・（4）そして、これらの概念を事実性(factuality) の層をもっておおい…… ・ |
. . . and clothing those conceptions with
such an aura of
factuality that. . . There arises here, however, a more profound question: how is it that this denial comes to be believed? How is it that the religious man moves from a troubled perception of experienced disorder to a more or less settled conviction of fundamental order? Just what does "belief mean in a religious context? Of all the problems surrounding attempts to conduct anthropological analysis of religion this is the one that has perhaps been most troublesome and therefore the most often avoided, usually by relegating it to psychology, that raffish outcast discipline to which social anthropologists are forever consigning phenomena they are unable to deal with within the framework of a denatured Durkheimianism. But the problem will not go away, it is not "merely" psychological (nothing social is), and no anthropological theory of religion which fails to attack it is worthy of the name. We have been trying to stage Hamlet without the Prince quite long enough. |
|
| 47 |
It seems to me
that it is best to begin any approach to this issue with
frank recognition that religious belief involves not a Baconian
induction
from everyday experience—for then we should all be agnostics—but
rather a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that
experience.
The existence of bafflement, pain, and moral paradox—of The Problem
of Meaning—is one of the things that drives men toward belief in gods,
devils, spirits, totemic principles, or the spiritual efficacy of
cannibalism
(an enfolding sense of beauty or a dazzling perception of power are
others), but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs rest, but
rather
their most important field of application: |
|||
| 48 |
・マッキンタイヤの引用 |
We point to the
state of the world as illustrative of doctrine, but never as
evidence for it. So Belsen illustrates a world of original sin, but
original sin
is not an hypothesis to account for happenings like Belsen. We justify
a particular
religious belief by showing its place in the total religious
conception;
we justify a religious belief as a whole by referring to authority. We
accept
authority because we discover it at some point in the world at which we
worship, at which we accept the lordship of something not ourselves. We
do
not worship authority, but we accept authority at defining the
worshipful.
So someone may discover the possibility of worship in the life of the
Reformed
Churches and accept the Bible as authoritative; or in the Roman
Church and accept papal authority.34 |
||
| 49 |
This is, of
course, a Christian statement of the matter; but it is not to
be despised on that account. In tribal religions authority lies in the
persuasive
power of traditional imagery; in mystical ones in the apodictic
force of supersensible experience; in charismatic ones in the hypnotic
attraction of an extraordinary personality. But the priority of the
acceptance
of an authoritative criterion in religious matters over the revelation
which is conceived to flow from that acceptance is not less complete
than in scriptural or hieratic ones. The basic axiom underlying
what we may perhaps call "the religious perspective" is everywhere the
same: he who would know must first believe. |
|||
| 50 |
・宗教的パースペクティブ |
But to speak of
"the religious perspective" is, by implication, to
speak of one perspective among others. A perspective is a mode of
seeing, in that extended sense of "see" in which it means "discern,"
"apprehend," "understand," or "grasp." It is a particular way of
looking
at life, a particular manner of construing the world, as when we
speak of an historical perspective, a scientific perspective, an
aesthetic
perspective, a common-sense perspective, or even the bizarre
perspective
embodied in dreams and in hallucinations.35 The question then
comes down to, first, what is "the religious perspective" generically
considered,
as differentiated from other perspectives; and second, how do
men come to adopt it. |
||
| 51 |
If we place the
religious perspective against the background of three
of the other major perspectives in terms of which men construe the
world—the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic—its
special
character emerges more sharply. What distinguishes common sense
as a mode of "seeing" is, as Schutz has pointed out, a simple
acceptance
of the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they
seem
to be—what is sometimes called naive realism—and the pragmatic motive,
the wish to act upon that world so as to bend it to one's practical
purposes, to master it, or so far as that proves impossible, to adjust
to
it.36 The world of everyday life, itself, of course, a cultural
product,
for it is framed in terms of the symbolic conceptions of "stubborn
fact"
handed down from generation to generation, is the established scene
and given object of our actions. Like Mt. Everest it is just there, and
the thing to do with it, if one feels the need to do anything with it
at all,
is to climb it. In the scientific perspective it is precisely this
givenness
which disappears.37 Deliberate doubt and systematic inquiry, the
suspension
of the pragmatic motive in favor of disinterested observation,
the attempt to analyze the world in terms of formal concepts whose
relationship
to the informal conceptions of common sense become increasingly
problematic—there are the hallmarks of the attempt to grasp
the world scientifically. And as for the aesthetic perspective, which
under the rubric of "the aesthetic attitude" has been perhaps most
exquisitely
examined, it involves a different sort of suspension of naive
realism and practical interest, in that instead of questioning the
credentials
of everyday experience, one merely ignores that experience in
favor of an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in
surfaces,
an absorption in things, as we say, "in themselves": "The function
of artistic illusion is not 'make-believe'. . . but the very opposite,
disengagement from belief—the contemplation of sensory qualities
without their usual meanings of 'here's that chair', 'that's my
telephone'. . . etc. The knowledge that what is before us has no
practical
significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its
appearance as such." 38 And like the common sensical and the scientific
(or the historical, the philosophical, and the artistic), this
perspective,
this "way of seeing" is not the product of some mysterious Cartesian
chemistry, but is induced, mediated, and in fact created by means of
curious quasi objects—poems, dramas, sculptures, symphonies—
which, dissociating themselves from the solid world of common sense,
take on the special sort of eloquence only sheer appearances can
achieve. |
|||
| 52 |
・宗教的パースペクティブと常識的パース
ペクティブ ・really real (186) |
The religious
perspective differs from the common-sensical in that, as
already pointed out, it moves beyond the realities of everyday life to
wider ones which correct and complete them, and its defining concern is
not action upon those wider realities but acceptance of them, faith in
them. It differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions
the
realities of everyday life not out of an institutionalized scepticism
which
dissolves the world's givenness into a swirl of probabilistic
hypotheses,
but in terms of what it takes to be wider, nonhypothetical truths.
Rather
than detachment, its watchword is commitment; rather than analysis,
encounter. And it differs from art in that instead of effecting a
disengagement
from the whole question of factuality, deliberately manufacturing
an air of semblance and illusion, it deepens the concern with fact
and seeks to create an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the
"really real" upon which the religious perspective rests and which the
symbolic activities of religion as a cultural system are devoted to
producing,
intensifying, and, so far as possible, rendering inviolable by the
discordant revelations of secular experience. It is, again, the imbuing
of
a certain specific complex of symbols—of the metaphysic they formulate
and the style of life they recommend—with a persuasive authority
which, from an analytic point of view, is the essence of religious
action. |
||
| 53 |
Which brings us,
at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual—that is, consecrated
behavior—that this conviction that religious conceptions are
veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated.
It is in some sort of ceremonial form—even if that form be hardly
more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or
the
decoration of a grave—that the moods and motivations which sacred
symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of
existence
which they formulate for men meet and reinforce one another. In
a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the
agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same
world,
producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of
reality
to which Santayana refers in my epigraph. Whatever role divine
intervention
may or may not play in the creation of faith—and it is not the
business of the scientist to pronounce upon such matters one way or the
other—it is, primarily at least, out of the context of concrete acts of
religious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human
plane. |
|||
| 54 |
However, though
any religious ritual, no matter how apparently automatic
or conventional (if it is truly automatic or merely conventional it
is not religious), involves this symbolic fusion of ethos and world
view,
it is mainly certain more elaborate and usually more public ones, ones
in which a broad range of moods and motivations on the one hand and
of metaphysical conceptions on the other are caught up, which shape
the spiritual consciousness of a people. Employing a useful term
introduced
by Singer, we may call these full-blown ceremonies "cultural
performances" and note that they represent not only the point at which
the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life converge for
the believer, but also the point at which the interaction between them
can be most readily examined by the detached observer: |
|||
| 55 |
（シンガーの引用）Whenever
Madrasi Brahmans (and non-Brahmans, too, for that matter)
wished to exhibit to me some feature of Hinduism, they always referred
to,
or invited me to see, a particular rite or ceremony in the life cycle,
in a
temple festival, or in the general sphere of religious and cultural
performances.
Reflecting on this in the course of my interviews and observations I
found that the more abstract generalizations about Hinduism (my own as
well as those I heard) could generally be checked, directly or
indirectly,
against these observable performances.39 |
|||
| 56 |
Of course, ail
cultural performances are not religious performances,
and the line between those that are and artistic, or even political,
ones is
often not so easy to draw in practice, for, like social forms, symbolic
forms can serve multiple purposes. But the point is that, paraphrasing
slightly, Indians—"and perhaps all peoples"—seem to think of their
religion "as encapsulated in these discrete performances which they
[can] exhibit to visitors and to themselves." 40 The mode of exhibition
is however radically different for the two sorts of witness, a fact
seemingly overlooked by those who would argue that "religion is a form
of human art." 41 Where for "visitors" religious performances can, in
the nature of the case, only be presentations of a particular religious
perspective, and thus aesthetically appreciated or scientifically
dissected,for participants they are in addition enactments,
materializations, realizations
of it—not only models of what they believe, but also models for
the believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as
they
portray it. |
|||
| 57 |
・バロンダンスのバロン |
As a case in
point, let me take a spectacularly theatrical cultural performance
from Bali—that in which a terrible witch called Rangda engages
in a ritual combat with an endearing monster called Barong.42
Usually, but not inevitably presented on the occasion of a death temple
celebration, the drama consists of a masked dance in which the witch
—depicted as a wasted old widow, prostitute, and eater of infants—
comes to spread plague and death upon the land and is opposed by the
monster—depicted as a kind of cross between a clumsy bear, a silly
puppy, and a strutting Chinese dragon. Rangda, danced by a single
male, is a hideous figure. Her eyes bulge from her forehead like
swollen
boils. Her teeth become tusks curving up over her cheeks and fangs
protruding down over her chin. Her yellowed hair falls down around
her in a matted tangle. Her breasts are dry and pendulous dugs edged
with hair, between which hang, like so many sausages, strings of
colored
entrails. Her long red tongue is a stream of fire. And as she dances
she splays her dead-white hands, from which protrude ten-inch clawlike
fingernails, out in front of her and utters unnerving shrieks of
metallic
laughter. Barong, danced by two men fore-and-aft in vaudeville
horse fashion, is another matter. His shaggy sheepdog coat is hung with
gold and mica ornaments that glitter in the half-light. He is adorned
with flowers, sashes, feathers, mirrors, and a comical beard made from
human hair. And though a demon too, his eyes also pop and he snaps
his fanged jaws with seemly fierceness when faced with Rangda or other
affronts to his dignity; the cluster of tinkling bells which hang from
his
absurdly arching tail somehow contrives to take most of the edge off
his
fearfulness. If Rangda is a satanic image, Barong is a farcical one,
and
their clash is a clash (an inconclusive one) between the malignant and
the ludicrous. |
||
| 58 |
対位劇としてのバロンダンス |
This odd
counterpoint of implacable malice and low comedy pervades
the whole performance. Rangda, clutching her magical white
cloth, moves around in a slow stagger, now pausing immobile in
thought or uncertainty, now lurching suddenly forward. The moment of
her entry (one sees those terrible long-nailed hands first as she
emerges
through the split gateway at the top of a short flight of stone stairs)
is
one of terrific tension when it seems, to a "visitor" at least, that
everyone
is about to break and run in panic. She herself seems insane with
fear and hatred as she screams deprecations at Barong amid the wild
clanging of the gamelan. She may in fact go amok. I have myself seen
Rangdas hurl themselves headlong into the gamelan or run frantically
about in total confusion, being subdued and reoriented only by the
combined
force of a half-dozen spectators; and one hears many tales of
amok Rangdas holding a whole village in terror for hours and of
impersonators
becoming permanently deranged by their experiences. But Barong,
though he is charged with the same mana-like sacred power (sakti
in Balinese) as Rangda, and his impersonators are also entranced, seems
to have very great difficulty in being serious. He frolics with his
retinue
of demons (who add to the gaiety by indelicate pranks of their own),
lies down on a metallaphone while it is being played or beats on a drum
with his legs, moves in one direction in his front half and another in
his
rear or bends his segmented body into foolish contortions, brushes
flies
from his body or sniffs aromas in the air, and generally prances about
in paroxysms of narcissistic vanity. The contrast is not absolute, for
Rangda is sometimes momentarily comic as when she pretends to polish
the mirrors on Barong's coat, and Barong becomes rather more serious
after Rangda appears, nervously clacking his jaws at her and ultimately
attacking her directly. Nor are the humorous and the horrible always
kept rigidly separated, as in that strange scene in one section of the
cycle in which several minor witches (disciples of Rangda) toss the
corpse of a stillborn child around to the wild amusement of the
audience;
or another, no less strange, in which the sight of a pregnant
woman alternating hysterically between tears and laughter while being
knocked about by a group of gravediggers, seems for some reason
excruciatingly
funny. The twin themes of horror and hilarity find their
purest expression in the two protagonists and their endless, indecisive
struggle for dominance, but they are woven with deliberate intricacy
through the whole texture of the drama. They—or rather the relations
between them—are what it is about. |
115 |
|
| 59 |
It is unnecessary
to attempt a thoroughgoing description of a
Rangda-Barong performance here. Such performances vary widely in
detail, consist of several not too closely integrated parts, and in any
case
are so complex in structure as to defy easy summary. For our purposes,
the main point to be stressed is that the drama is, for the Balinese,
not
merely a spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted. There is
no
aesthetic distance here separating actors from audience and placing the
depicted events in an unenterable world of illusion, and by the time a
full-scale Rangda-Barong encounter has been concluded a majority,
often nearly all, of the members of the group sponsoring it will have
become
caught up in it not just imaginatively but bodily. In one of Belo's
examples I count upwards of seventy-Ave people—men, women, and
children—taking part in the activity at some point or other, and thirty
to forty participants is in no way unusual. As a performance, the drama
is like a high mass, not like a presentation of Murder in the
Cathedral:
it is a drawing near, not a standing back. |
|||
| 60 |
In part, this
entry into the body of the ritual takes place through the
agency of the various supporting roles contained in it—minor witches,
demons, various sorts of legendary and mythical figures—which selected
villagers enact. But mostly it takes place through the agency of an
extraordinarily developed capacity for psychological dissociation on
the
part of a very large segment of the population. A Rangda-Barong
struggle
is inevitably marked by anywhere from three or four to several
dozen spectators becoming possessed by one or another demon, falling
into violent trances "like firecrackers going off one after the other,"
43
and, snatching up krisses, rushing to join the fray. Mass trance,
spreading
like a panic, projects the individual Balinese out of the commonplace
world in which he usually lives into that most uncommonplace
one in which Rangda and Barong live. To become entranced is, for the
Balinese, to cross a threshold into another order of existence—the word
for trance is nadi, from dadi, often translated "to become" but which
might be even more simply rendered as "to be." And even those who,
for whatever reasons, do not make this spiritual crossing are caught up
in the proceedings, for it is they who must keep the frenzied
activities
of the entranced from getting out of hand by the application of
physical
restraint if they are ordinary men, by the sprinkling of holy water and
the chanting of spells if they are priests. At its height a
Rangda-Barong
rite hovers, or at least seems to hover, on the brink of mass amok with
the diminishing band of the unentranced striving desperately (and, it
teems, almost always successfully) to control the growing band of the
entranced |
|||
| 61 |
In its standard
form—if it can be said to have a standard form—the
performance begins with an appearance of Barong, prancing and preening,
as a general prophylactic against what is to follow. Then may come
various mythic scenes relating the story—not always precisely the same
ones—upon which the performance is based, until finally Barong and
then Rangda appear. Their battle begins. Barong drives Rangda back
toward the gate of the death temple. But he has not the power to expel
her completely, and he is in turn driven back toward the village. At
length, when it seems as though Rangda will finally prevail, a number
of entranced men rise, krisses in hand, and rush to support Barong. But
as they approach Rangda (who has turned her back in meditation), she
wheels upon them and, waving her sakti white cloth, leaves them
comatose
on the ground. Rangda then hastily retires (or is carried) to the
temple, where she herself collapses, hidden from the aroused crowd
which, my informants said, would kill her were it to see her in a
helpless
state. The Barong moves among the kris dancers and wakens them
by snapping his jaws at them or nuzzling them with his beard. As they
return, still entranced, to "consciousness," they are enraged by the
disappearance
of Rangda, and unable to attack her they turn their krisses
(harmlessly because they are entranced) against their own chests in
frustration.
Usually sheer pandemonium breaks out at this point with members
of the crowd, of both sexes, falling into trance all around the
courtyard
and rushing out to stab themselves, wrestle with one another,
devour live chicks or excrement, wallow convulsively in the mud, and
so on, while the nonentranced attempt to relieve them of their krisses
and keep them at least minimally in order. In time, the trancers sink,
one by one, into coma, from which they are aroused by the priests' holy
water and the great battle is over—once more a complete stand-off.
Rangda has not been conquered, but neither has she conquered. |
|||
| 62 |
One place to
search for the meaning of this ritual is in the collection
of myths, tales, and explicit beliefs which it supposedly enacts.
However,
not only are these various and variable—for some people Rangda
is an incarnation of Durga, Siva's malignant consort; for others she is
Queen Mahendradatta, a figure from a court legend set in eleventh
century Java; for yet others, the spiritual leader of witches as the
Brahmana
Priest is the spiritual leader of men. Notions of who (or "what")
Barong is are equally diverse and even vaguer—but they seem to play
only a secondary role in the Balinese' perception of the drama. It is
in the direct encounter with the two figures in the context of the
actual
performance that the villager comes to know them as, so far as he
is concerned, genuine realities. They are, then, not representations of
anything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they
become—nadi—themselves part of the realm in which those presences
exist. To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether he
thinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy. |
|||
| 63 |
The acceptance of
authority that underlies the religious perspective
that the ritual embodies thus flows from the enactment of the ritual
itself.
By inducing a set of moods and motivations—an ethos—and defining
an image of cosmic order—a world view—by means of a single
set of symbols, the performance makes the model for and model of
aspects
of religious belief mere transpositions of one another. Rangda
evokes fear (as well as hatred, disgust, cruelty, horror, and, though I
have not been able to treat the sexual aspects of the performance here,
lust); but she also depicts it: |
|||
| 64 |
・Kaperの魔女の解釈 |
（ベイトソンとミードの著作からの引用）
The fascination which the figure of the Witch holds for the Balinese
imagination
can only be explained when it is recognized that the Witch is not
only a fear inspiring figure, but that she is Fear. Her hands with
their long
menacing finger-nails do not clutch and claw at her victims, although
children
who play at being witches do curl their hands in such gestures. But the
Witch herself spreads her arms with palms out and her finger flexed
backward,
in the gesture the Balinese call kapar. a term which they apply to the
sudden startled reaction of a man who falls from a tree. . . . Only
when we
sec the Witch as herself afraid, as well as frightening, is it possible
to explain
her appeal, and the pathos which surrounds her as she dances, hairy,
forbidding, tusked and alone, giving her occasional high eerie laugh.44 |
||
| 65 |
And on his side
Barong not only induces laughter, he incarnates the Balinese
version of the comic spirit—a distinctive combination of playfulness,
exhibitionism, and extravagant love of elegance, which, along with
fear, is perhaps the dominant motive in their life. The constantly
recurring
struggle of Rangda and Barong to an inevitable draw is thus—for
the believing Balinese—both the formulation of a general religious
conception
and the authoritative experience which justifies, even compels,
its acceptance. |
|||
| 66 |
197 |
・（5）
そのために情調と動機づけが独特な形で現実的であるようにみえる。 ・シュッツの至高の現実 |
. . . that the moods and motivations seem
uniquely realistic But no one, not even a saint, lives in the world religious symbols formulate all of the time, and the majority of men live in it only at moments. The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality in human experience— paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question (however much we may question certain portions of it), and from whose pressures and requirements we can least escape.45 A man, even large groups of men, may be aesthetically insensitive, religiously unconcerned, and unequipped to pursue formal scientific analysis, but he cannot be completely lacking in common sense and survive. The dispositions which religious rituals induce thus have their most important impact—from a human point of view—outside the boundaries of the ritual itself as they reflect back to color the individual's conception of the established world of bare fact. The peculiar tone that marks the Plains vision quest, the Manus confession, or the Javanese mystical exercise pervades areas of the life of these peoples far beyond the immediately religious, impressing upon them a distinctive style in the sense both of a dominant mood and a characteristic movement. The interweaving of the malignant and the comic, which the Rangda-Barong combat depicts, animates a very wide range of everyday Balinese behavior, much of which, like the ritual itself, has an air of candid fear narrowly contained by obsessive playfulness. Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar positivism would have it, it describes the social order (which, in so far as it does, it does not only very obliquely but very incompletely), but because, like environment, political power, wealth, jural obligation, personal affection, and a sense of beauty, it shapes it. |
|
| 67 |
・レヴィ＝ブリュル批判（199） |
The movement back
and forth between the religious perspective and
the common-sense perspective is actually one of the more obvious
empirical
occurrences on the social scene, though, again, one of the most
neglected by social anthropologists, virtually all of whom have seen it
happen countless times. Religious belief has usually been presented as
a
homogeneous characteristic of an individual, like his place of
residence,
his occupational role, his kinship position, and so on. But religious
belief
in the midst of ritual, where it engulfs the total person, transporting
him, so far as he is concerned, into another mode of existence, and
religious
belief as the pale, remembered reflection of that experience in the
midst of everyday life are not precisely the same thing, and the
failure
to realize this has led to some confusion, most especially in
connection
with the so-called primitive-mentality problem. Much of the difficulty
between Lévy-Bruhl and Malinowski on the nature of "native thought,"
for example, arises from a lack of full recognition of this
distinction;
for where the French philosopher was concerned with the view of reality
savages adopted when taking a specifically religious perspective, the
Polish-English ethnographer was concerned with that which they
adopted when taking a strictly common-sense one.46 Both perhaps
vaguely sensed that they were not talking about exactly the same thing,
but where they went astray was in failing to give a specific accounting
of the way in which these two forms of "thought"—or, as I would
rather say, these two modes of symbolic formulations—interacted, so
that where Lévy-Bruhl's savages tended to live, despite his postludial
disclaimers, in a world composed entirely of mystical encounters,
Malinowski's
tended to live, despite his stress on the functional importance
of religion, in a world composed entirely of practical actions. They
became
reductionists (an idealist is as much of a reductionist as a
materialist)
in spite of themselves because they failed to see man as moving
more or less easily, and very frequently, between radically contrasting
ways of looking at the world, ways which are not continuous with one
another but separated by cultural gaps across which Kierkegaardian
leaps must be made in both directions: |
||
| 68 |
・キルケゴール的跳躍（200） ・シュッツの引用 |
There are as many
innumerable kinds of different shock experiences as there
are different finite provinces of meaning upon which I may bestow the
accent
of reality. Some instances are: the shock of falling asleep as the leap
into the world of dreams; the inner transformation we endure if the
curtain
in the theatre rises as the transition to the world of the stageplay;
the radical
change in our attitude if. before a painting, we permit our visual
field to be
limited by what is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial
world;
our quandary relaxing into laughter, if. in listening to a joke, we are
for a
short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a
reality in relation
to which the world of our daily life takes on the character of
foolishness;
the child's turning toward his toy as the transition into the
play-world;
and so on. But also the religious experiences in all their
varieties—for instance.
Kierkegaard's experience of the "instant" as the leap into the
religious
sphere—are examples of such a shock, as well as the decision of the
scientist to replace all passionate participation in the affairs of
"this world"
by a disinterested [analytical] altitude.47 |
||
| 69 |
201-203 |
・really real との出会い(201) ・「私はインコ」 ・「彼が指摘するように、ボロロ族は、自分を文字通り インコであると考えているというのはよくなく(なぜならボロロは他のインコとは交わろうとはしな い）、また彼らが言っていることは誤りか無意味であるというのもよくない(というのは、たとえば 「私はボロロである」という言葉が肯定も否定も可能であるようにどの種類のインコについてそうい え、あるいはいえないかについては明らかにしていない——あるいはしようとすらしないからであ る)。さらにまた、科学的には間違っているが、神話的には正しいというのも不充分で ある(なぜなら そういう言い方は、「神話」に真実を認めながらまったく同時にそれを否定するという自己矛盾した、 神話を実用的なフィクションとしてとらえる考え方につながるからである）」（ギアーツ 1987:201-202）。 ・宗教的パースペクティブと常識的パースペクティブの峻別 |
The recognition
and exploration of the qualitative difference—an
empirical, not a transcendental difference—between religion pure and
religion applied, between an encounter with the supposedly "really
real"
and a viewing of ordinary experience in light of what that encounter
seems to reveal, will, therefore, take us further toward an
understanding
of what a Bororo means when he says "I am a parakeet," or a Christian
when he says "1 am a sinner," than either a theory of primitive
mysticism
in which the commonplace world disappears into a cloud of curious
ideas or of a primitive pragmatism in which religion disintegrates
into a collection of useful fictions. The parakeet example, which I
take
from Percy, is a good one.48 For, as he points out, it is
unsatisfactory to
say either that the Bororo thinks he is literally a parakeet (for he
does
not try to mate with other parakeets), that his statement is false or
nonsense
(for, clearly, he is not offering—or at least not only offering—
the sort of class-membership argument which can be confirmed or refuted
as, say, "1 am a Bororo" can be confirmed or refuted), or yet
again that it is false scientifically but true mythically (because that
leads
immediately to the pragmatic fiction notion which, as it denies the
accolade
of truth to "myth" in the very act of bestowing it, is internally
self-contradictory). More coherently it would seem to be necessary to
see the sentence as having a different sense in the context of the
"finite
province of meaning" which makes up the religious perspective and of
that which makes up the common-sensical. In the religious, our Bororo
is "really" a "parakeet," and given the proper ritual context might
well
"mate" with other "parakeets"—with metaphysical ones like himself,
not commonplace ones such as those which fly bodily about in ordinary
trees. In the common-sensical perspective he is a parakeet in the sense
—I assume—that he belongs to a clan whose members regard the parakeet
as their totem, a membership from which, given the fundamental
nature of reality as the religious perspective reveals it, certain
moral
and practical consequences flow. A man who says he is a parakeet is, if
he says it in normal conversation, saying that, as myth and ritual
demonstrate,
he is shot through with parakeetness and that this religious
fact has some crucial social implications—we parakeets must stick
together, not marry one another, not eat mundane parakeets, and so on,
for to do otherwise is to act against the grain of the whole universe.
It
is this placing of proximate acts in ultimate contexts that makes
religion,
frequently at least, socially so powerful. It alters, often radically,
the whole landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a way
that the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seem
themselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given
the way things "really" are. |
|
| 70 |
203 |
・儀礼を通した飛び込み |
Having ritually
"lept" (the image is perhaps a bit too athletic for the
actual facts—"slipped" might be more accurate) into the framework of
meaning which religious conceptions define, and the ritual ended,
returned
again to the common-sense world, a man is—unless, as sometimes
happens, the experience fails to register—changed. And as he is
changed, so also is the common-sense world, for it is now seen as but
the partial form of a wider reality which corrects and completes it. |
|
| 71 |
・比較宗教学 |
But this
correction and completion is not, as some students of "comparative
religion" would have it, everywhere the same in content. The
nature of the bias religion gives to ordinary life varies with the
religion
involved, with the particular dispositions induced in the believer by
the
specific conceptions of cosmic order he has come to accept. On the
level
of the "great" religions, organic distinctiveness is usually
recognized, at
times insisted upon to the point of zealotry. But even at its simplest
folk
and tribal levels—where the individuality of religious traditions has
so
often been dissolved into such desiccated types as "animism,"
"animalism,"
"totemism," "shamanism," "ancestor worship," and all the other
insipid categories by means of which ethnographers of religion
devitalize
their data—the idiosyncratic character of how various groups of
men behave because of what they believe they have experienced is
clear. A tranquil Javanese would be no more at home in guilt-ridden
Manus than an activist Crow would be in passionless Java. And for all
the witches and ritual clowns in the world, Rangda and Barong are not
generalized but thoroughly singular figurations of fear and gaiety.
What
men believe is as various as what they are—a proposition that holds
with equal force when it is inverted. |
||
| 72 |
・「人が信じるものは、人がそれぞれ違う人間であるのと同じようにさま
ざまなである——これは逆に、つまり人の信ずるものがさまざまなあるのと同様に。人はさまざまであるというのと同じ説得力のある主張である」（204） ・「宗教について科学的に書くときの主な方法論上の問題点の一つは。村の 無神論者や説教師の言葉を、もっと洗練されたそういった人たちの語調と同じく排除してしまい、特 定の宗教的信仰のもつ社会的心理的意味がはっきりと、かたよりのない光の中に浮かび上がるように／ してしまうことである」（204-205） |
It is this
particularity of the impact of religious systems upon social
systems (and upon personality systems) which renders general
assessments
of the value of religion in either moral or functional terms
impossible.
The sorts of moods and motivations which characterize a man
who has just come from an Aztec human sacrifice are rather different
from those of one who has just put off his Kachina mask. Even within
the same society, what one "learns" about the essential pattern of life
from a sorcery rite and from a commensal meal will have rather diverse
effects on social and psychological functioning. One of the main
methodological
problems in writing about religion scientifically is to put aside
at once the tone of the village atheist and that of the village
preacher, as
well as their more sophisticated equivalents, so that the social and
psychological
implications of particular religious beliefs can emerge in a
clear and neutral light. And when that is done, overall questions about
whether religion is "good" or "bad," "functional" or "dysfunctional,"
"ego strengthening" or "anxiety producing," disappear like the chimeras
they are, and one is left with particular evaluations, assessments, and
diagnoses in particular cases. There remains, of course, the hardly
unimportant
questions of whether this or that religious assertion is true,
this or that religious experience genuine, or whether true religious
assertions
and genuine religious experiences are possible at all. But such
questions cannot even be asked, much less answered, within the
self-imposed
limitations of the scientific perspective. |
122-123 |
|
| 73 |
205 |
アイデンティティを(他者を含む)文化的イシューとして取り扱ってはじ
めて、社会的問題かつ真理的問題領域が拓ける ・「人類学者にとって宗教の重要性は、個人にとっても集団にとっても、宗教が次の二つのことの源泉 としてはたらきうるという点にある。つまり、一方では、世界と自己、そして両者の関 係についての 一般的ではあるが明確な概念の源——あるものについてのモデル——として、他方ではもっと深いと ころにあり同じように明確である「心的」性向の源——あるもののため のモデル——としてはたらい ている。そのような文化的機能から次に社会的、また心理的な機能が生じるのである」（205） |
III ? For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them, on the one hand—its model of aspect—and of rooted, no less distinctive "mental" dispositions—its model for aspect—on the other. From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychological ones. |
|
| 74 |
Religious concepts
spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts
to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide
range of experience—intellectual, emotional, moral—can be given
meaningful form. The Christian sees the Nazi movement against the
background of The Fall which, though it does not, in a causal sense,
explain
it, places it in a moral, a cognitive, even an affective sense. An
Azande sees the collapse of a granary upon a friend or relative against
the background of a concrete and rather special notion of witchcraft
and thus avoids the philosophical dilemmas as well as the psychological
stress of indeterminism. A Javanese finds in the borrowed and reworked
concept of rasa ("sense-taste-feeling-meaning") a means by which to
"see" choreographic, gustatory, emotional, and political phenomena in a
new light. A synopsis of cosmic order, a set of religious beliefs, is
also
a gloss upon the mundane world of social relationships and
psychological
events. It renders .them graspablc. |
|||
| 75 |
But more than
gloss, such beliefs are also a template. They do not
merely interpret social and psychological processes in cosmic terms—in
which case they would be philosophical, not religious—but they shape
them. In the doctrine of original sin is embedded also a recommended
attitude toward life, a recurring mood, and a persisting set of
motivations.
The Azande learns from witchcraft conceptions not just to understand
apparent "accidents" as not accidents at all, but to react to these
spurious accidents with hatred for the agent who caused them and to
proceed against him with appropriate resolution. Rasa, in addition to
being a concept of truth, beauty, and goodness, is also a preferred
mode
of experiencing, a kind of affectless detachment, a variety of bland
aloofness, an unshakable calm. The moods and motivations a religious
orientation produces cast a derivative, lunar light over the solid
features
of a people's secular life. |
|||
| 76 |
・「宗教の社会的心理的役割を探求することは、このように、特定の儀礼
行動と特定の社会的紐帯との
聞の相関関係を見出すことばかりではない——これらの相関関係はもちろん存在し、とくに、もしそ
れらについて何か新しいことをいうことができるようになるのであれば、探求を続ける価値は充分に
ある。それらの観念によって人びしかしそれ以上に人びとがいだく「本当に本当」なものの観念と、
との中に生み出される性向が表面に現われていないとしても、合理的なもの、実際的なもの、人間的
なもの、道徳的なものに対する彼らの捉え方をどのように色づけているのかを理解することなのであ
る」（207） |
The tracing of the
social and psychological role of religion is thus not
so much a matter of finding correlations between specific ritual acts
and
specific secular social ties—though these correlations do, of course,
exist and are very worth continued investigation, especially if we can
contrive something novel to say about them. More, it is a matter of
understanding
how it is that men's notions, however implicit, of the
"really real" and the dispositions these notions induce in them, color
their sense of the reasonable, the practical, the humane, and the
moral.
How far they do so (for in many societies religion's effects seem quite
circumscribed, in others completely pervasive), how deeply they do so
(for some men, and groups of men, seem to wear their religion lightly
so far as the secular world goes, while others seem to apply their
faith
to each occasion, no matter how trivial), and how effectively they do
so
(for the width of the gap between what religion recommends and what
people actually do is most variable cross-culturally)—all these are
crucial
issues in the comparative sociology and psychology of religion.
Even the degree to which religious systems themselves are developed
seems to vary extremely widely, and not merely on a simple evolutionary
basis. In one society, the level of elaboration of symbolic
formulations
of ultimate actuality may reach extraordinary degrees of complexity
and systematic articulation; in another, no less developed socially,
such formulations may remain primitive in the true sense, hardly more
than congeries of fragmentary by-beliefs and isolated images, of sacred
reflexes and spiritual pictographs. One need only think of the
Australians
and the Bushmen, the Toradja and the Alorese, the Hopi and the
Apache, the Hindus and the Romans, or even the Italians and the
Poles, to see that degree of religious articulateness is not a constant
even
as between societies of similar complexity. |
124-125 宗教の社会的・心理的役割を追跡することは、特定の儀礼行為と特定の世俗的な社会的結びつきとの間に相関関係を見いだすことよりも、もちろんこうした相関 関係は存在し、調査を続ける価値は大いにある。さらに言えば、「本当に実在するもの」に対する人間の観念が、たとえ暗黙的なものであったとしても、またこ うした観念が人間に引き起こす気質が、合理的なもの、実際的なもの、人道的なもの、道徳的なものに対する感覚をどのように彩るのかを理解することである。 宗教の影響がどこまで及ぶのか（多くの社会では宗教の影響はかなり限定されているように見えるが、ある社会では完全に浸透している）、どこまで深く及ぶの か（ある人、ある集団は、世俗の世界では宗教を軽んじているように見えるが、ある集団は、どんなに些細なことでも、その都度信仰を適用しているように見え る）、どこまで効果的に及ぶのか（宗教が勧めることと、人々が実際に行うこととの間のギャップの幅は、異文化間で最も多様である）--これらはすべて、宗 教の比較社会学と心理学における重要な問題である。宗教制度そのものが発展する度合いさえも、単純な進化論に基づくだけでなく、非常に大きく異なるよう だ。ある社会では、究極の実在に関する象徴的な定式化の精緻さのレベルが、並外れた複雑さと体系的な明確さに達するかもしれない。別の社会では、そのよう な定式化は本当の意味で原始的なままであり、断片的なバイ・ビリーフや孤立したイメージ、聖なる反射や精神的な絵文字の寄せ集めにすぎないかもしれない。 オーストラリア人とブッシュマン人、トラジャ人とアロレーズ人、ホピ族とアパッチ族、ヒンズー教徒とローマ人、あるいはイタリア人とポーランド人のことを 考えれば、同じような複雑さを持つ社会間であっても、宗教の明確さの程度が一定ではないことがわかる。 |
|
| 77 |
208 |
・「宗教の人類学的研究は、それゆえ、二段階の作業である。第一は、宗
教を宗教たらしめている諸象
徴に具体的に表わされている、意味の体系の分析である。そして第二
は、それらの体系を社会構造的、
心理的過程に関係づけることである」（ギアーツ 1987:208）。 ・「ただ、祖先崇拝、動物供犠、精霊崇拝、卜占、加入 儀礼が、宗教のパターンとして何であるかをきわめて一般的な常識的見方だけで扱おうとする試みは、 とくに将来性があるとは私には思われない。われわれがいま社会的心理的行為のために もっている理 論的分析に洗練さの上で較べられるぐらいの象徴行為の理論的分析を持つときにはじめて、われわれ は社会的心理的生活の諸相——その中で宗教(あるいは芸術、科学、イデオロギー)が決定的な役割を 演じている——を効果的に扱うことができるであろう」（ギアーツ 1987:209）。 |
The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation:
first, an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols
which make up the religion proper, and, second, the relating of
these systems to social-structural and psychological processes. My dissatisfaction
with so much of contemporary social anthropological work
in religion is not that it concerns itself with the second stage, but that it
neglects the first, and in so doing takes for granted what most needs to
be elucidated. To discuss the role of ancestor worship in regulating political
succession, of sacrificial feasts in defining kinship obligations, of
spirit worship in scheduling agricultural practices, of divination in reinforcing
social control, or of initiation rites in propelling personality
maturation, are in no sense unimportant endeavors, and I am not recommending
they be abandoned for the kind of jejune cabalism into which
symbolic analysis of exotic faiths can so easily fall. But to attempt them
with but the most general, common-sense view of what ancestor worship,
animal sacrifice, spirit worship, divination, or initiation rites are
as religious patterns seems to me not particularly promising. Only when
we have a theoretical analysis of symbolic action comparable in sophistication
to that we now have for social and psychological action, will we
be able to cope effectively with those aspects of social and psychological
life in which religion (or art, or science, or ideology) plays a determinant
role. |
第
一に、宗教を構成するシンボルに具現化された意味の体系を分析すること、そして第二に、これらの体系を社会構造や心理的プロセスに関連づけることである。
宗教に関する現代の社会人類学的研究の多くに対する私の不満は、第二段階に関心があることではなく、第一段階をおろそかにし、そうすることで解明すべきこ
とを当然のこととしていることである。政治的継承を規制する祖先崇拝の役割、親族関係の義務を規定する犠牲祭、農業慣習を計画する精霊崇拝、社会統制を強
化する占い、人格の成熟を促す入信儀礼について論じることは、決して重要でない試みではない。しかし、祖先崇拝、動物の生け贄、精霊崇拝、占術、入信儀礼
が宗教的なパターンとしてどのようなものなのかについて、最も一般的で常識的な見方しかできないまま、それらを試みることは、私には特に期待できないよう
に思われる。象徴作用の理論的分析が、現在の社会的・心理的作用の理論的分析に匹敵するほど洗練されて初めて、宗教（あるいは芸術、科学、イデオロギー）
が決定的な役割を果たす社会的・心理的生活の側面に効果的に対処できるようになるのである。 |
| 番外地 |
Religion As a Cultural System, "Two characteristics of anthropological work on religion accomplised since the second world war stricke me as curious when such work is placed against that carried out just before and just after the first. One is that has made no theoretical advances of major importances. It is living off the conceptual capital of its ancesters, adding very little, save a certain empirical enrichment, to it. The second is that it draws what concepts it does use from a very narrowly defined intellectual tradition"./ "Usually, of course, religions affirm very much more than this: we believe, as James remarked, all that we can and would believe everything if we only could.20 The thing we seem least able to tolerate is a threat to our powers of conception, a suggestion that our ability to create, grasp, and use symbols may fail us, for were this to happen, we would be more helpless, as I have already pointed out, than the beavers. The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man's innate (that is, genetically programmed) response capacities means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete, not merely a talented. ape who had, like some underprivileged child, unfortunately been prevented from realizing his full potentialities, but a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impUlses and vague emotions. Man depends upon symbols and symbol systems with a dependence so great as to be decisive for his creatural viability and, as a result, his sensitivity to even the remotest indication that they may prove unable to cope with one or another aspect of experience raises within him the gravest sort of anxiety (Geertz 1973:99)"
「文化システムとしての宗教」、「第二次世界大戦以
降に行われた宗教に関する人類学的研究の二つの特徴を、第一次世界大戦の直前と直後に行われた研究と比較すると、不思議な感じがする。ひとつは、重要な理
論的進歩を遂げていないことである。先人たちの概念的資本を利用して生きているのであり、経験的に豊かになっただけで、ほとんど何も加えていないのであ
る。ジェイムズが言ったように、私たちは信じられることはすべて信じ、信じられるものならすべて信じたいと思っている20。人間の生得的（つまり遺伝的に
プログラムされた）反応能力の極端な一般性、拡散性、可変性は、文化的パターンの助けなしには機能的に不完全であることを意味する。人間は象徴と象徴体系
に、彼の創造的生存能力にとって決定的といえるほど大きな依存性をもって依存している。その結果、象徴が経験のある側面や別の側面に対処できないことが判
明するかもしれないというわずかな兆候にさえ敏感に反応し、彼の中で最も深刻な種類の不安が生じるのである（Geertz 1973:99）」。
●シンギュラリティ時代の宗教
シンギュラリティ時代の宗教を考えるためには、ま ず、シンギュラリティ時代という時間のエポックを認めること。そして、そのエポックの前後で宗教あるいは宗教なるものがどのように変化しているのかを明ら かにすることが重要である。ただし、シンギュラリティというものが何を示しているか、この図には反映されていないので、追加の作図は必要かと思います。
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