Classification of Religions

Lecture 3 Prof. Park, Kwang Soo Wonkwang University, Korea <3> Classification of Religions The attempt to systematize and bring order to a vast range of knowledge about religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. The classification of religions involves: (1) the effort to establish groupings among historical religious communities having certain elements in common or; (2) the attempt to categorize similar religious phenomena to reveal the structure of religious experience as a whole. Morphological classifications of Religions 1) Animism 2) Totemism 3) Shamanism 4) Anthropomorphic polytheism 5) Henotheism 6) Monotheism * (Question) How could we define Asian religions and other religious traditions? Morphological Classifications Morphological classification refers to how religious forms and types of beliefs and rituals have developed throughout human history The pioneer of morphological classifications was Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist, whose Primitive Culture (1871) is among the most influential books ever written in its field. Tylor developed the thesis of animism, a view that the essential element in all religion is belief in spiritual beings. Morphological classifications According to Tylor, the belief arises naturally from elements universal in human experience, (e.g., death, sleep, dreams, trances, and hallucinations) and leads through processes of primitive logic to the belief in a spiritual reality distinct from the body and capable of existing independently. Tylor’s Classification of Religions Ancestor worship: prevalent in ancient societies, respects and believes in the spirits of the dead, and the after-death. Fetishism: the belief that some objects have magical or supernatural potency, which comes from the association of spirits with particular places or things, and leads to idolatry, in which the image is viewed as the symbol of a spiritual being, or deity. Animism : In the development of the idea, this reality is identified with the breath and the life principle; thus arises the belief in the soul, in phantoms, and in ghosts. At a higher stage, the spiritual principle is attributed to aspects of reality other than man, and all things are believed to possess spirits that are their effective and animating elements; for example, primitive men generally believe that spirits cause sickness and control their destinies. Tylor’s view of Animism For Tylor, the concept of animism was an answer to the question, “What is the most rudimentary form of religion which may yet bear that name?” He had learned to doubt scattered reports of peoples “so low in culture as to have no religious conceptions whatever.” He thought religion was present in all cultures, properly observed, and might turn out to be present everywhere. Far from supposing religion of some kind to be a cornerstone of all culture, however, he entertained the idea of a pre-religious stage in the evolution of cultures and believed that a tribe in that stage might be found. To proceed in a systematic study of the problem, he required a “minimum definition of religion” and found it in “the Belief in Spiritual Beings.” If it could be shown that no people was devoid of such minimal belief, then it would be known that all of humanity already had passed the threshold into “the religious state of culture.” Tylor's theory of the nature of religions Totemism, the belief in an association between particular groups of people and certain spirits, that serve as guardians of those people, arises when the entire world is conceived as peopled by spiritual beings. At a still higher stage, polytheism, the interest in particular deities or spirits disappears and is replaced by concern for a “species” deity who represents an entire class of similar spiritual realities. Tylor's theory of the nature of religions By a variety of means, polytheism may evolve into monotheism, a belief in a supreme and unique deity. => Tylor's theory of the nature of religions and the resultant classification were so logical, convincing, and comprehensive that for a number of years they remained virtually unchallenged. 1. What is Animism? The term animism has been applied to a belief in many animae (spirits) and is often used rather crudely to characterize so-called primitive religions. In evolutionary theories about the development of religion, that were particularly fashionable among Western scholars in the latter half of the 19th century, animism was regarded as a stage in which the forces around man were less personalized than in the polytheistic stage. Animism In actual instances of religious belief, however, no such scheme is possible: personal and impersonal aspects of divine forces are interwoven; e.g., Agni, the fire god of the Rgveda (the foremost collection of Vedic hymns), is not only personified as an object of worship but is also the mysterious force within the sacrificial fire. While none of the major world religions are animistic (though they may contain animistic elements), most other religions -e.g., those of tribal peoples-are. For this reason, an ethnographic understanding of animism, based on field studies of tribal peoples, is no less important than a theoretical one, concerned with the nature or origin of religion. The term animism denotes not a single creed or doctrine but a view of the world consistent with a certain range of religious beliefs and practices, many of which may survive in more-complex and hierarchical religions. Animism Modern scholarship’s concern with animism coincides with the problem of rational or scientific understanding of religion itself. After the age of exploration, Europe’s best information on the newly discovered peoples of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania often came from Christian missionaries. Animism While generally unsympathetic to what was regarded as “primitive superstition,” some missionaries in the 19th century developed a scholarly interest in beliefs that seemed to represent an early type of religious creed, inferior but ancestral to their own. It is this interest that was crystallized by Tylor in Primitive Culture, the greater part of which is given over to the description of exotic religious behaviour. Modern views of Animism To the intellectuals of that time, profoundly affected by Charles Darwin’s new biology, animism seemed a key to the so-called primitive mind—to human intellect at the earliest knowable stage of cultural evolution. Present-day thinkers consider this view to be rooted in a profoundly mistaken premise. Modern view of Animism The lesson of the study of animism is perhaps that religion did not arise, as some of Tylor’s successors believed, out of Urdummheit (“primal ignorance”) or delusions of magical power but out of humanity’s ironic awareness of a good life that cannot, by earthly means, be grasped and held. Since at least the mid-20th century, all contemporary cultures and religions have been regarded by anthropologists as comparable in the sense of reflecting a fully evolved human intelligence capable of learning the arts of the most-advanced society. Agni ritual (불 의례) (Indra god신– Soma 신god) Agni ritual (인도 힌두교) Agni Ritual Hindu Ritual -Brahmacarya- 범행기 Sacred Plant Animism-new Additional Reading The original and classic study of animism is Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vol. (1871, reprinted 1994). Animism-new Additional Reading The “pre-animism” thesis is discussed in R.R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (1909, reissued 1997). A discussion of the relation of animism to modern worldviews is presented in Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005). Native American art Hopi kachina of Laqán The Wish Tree on Calton Hill, Edinburgh 2. What is Totemism The system of belief in which humans are believed to have kinship with a totem or a mystical relationship is said to exist between a group or an individual and a totem. A totem is an object, such as an animal or plant that serves as the emblem or symbol of a kinship group or a person. The term totemism has been used to characterize a cluster of traits in the religion and in the social organization of many primitive peoples. What is Totemism (con’t) In English, the word totem was introduced in 1791 by a British merchant and translator who gave it a false meaning in the belief that it designated the guardian spirit of an individual, who appeared in the form of an animal— an idea that the Ojibwa clans did indeed portray by their wearing of animal skins. The term totem is derived from ototeman from the language of the Algonkian tribe of the Ojibwa(in the area of the Great Lakes in eastern North America); it originally meant ‘his brother and sister kin.’ The grammatical root, ote, signifies a blood relationship between brothers and sisters who have the same mother and who may not marry each other. Totemism It was reported at the end of the 18th century that the Ojibwa named their clans after those animals that live in the area in which they live and appear to be either friendly or fearful. The first accurate report about totemism in North America was written by a Methodist missionary, Peter Jones, himself an Ojibwa, who died in 1856 and whose report was published posthumously. Totemism According to Jones, the Great Spirit had given toodaims (“totems”) to the Ojibwa clans, and because of this act, it should never be forgotten that members of the group are related to one another and on this account may not marry among themselves. Totemism Totemism is manifested in various forms and types in different contexts, especially among populations with a mixed economy (farming and hunting) and among hunting communities (especially in Australia) It is also found among tribes who breed cattle. Totemism can in no way be viewed as a general stage in human cultural development; but totemism has certainly had an effect on the psychological behaviour of ethnic groups, on the manner of their socialization, and on the formation of the human personality.

Load more