Value Assertion and Stratification: Religion and Marriage in Rural Jamaica: Part I Author(s): Michael M. J. Fischer Source: Caribbean Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Apr., 1974), pp. 7-33, 35-37 Published by: Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25612588 . Accessed: 18/10/2014 17:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Institute of Caribbean Studies, UPR, Rio Piedras Campus is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Caribbean Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:56:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions L ARTICLES VALUE ASSERTION AND STRATIFICATION: RELIGION AND MARRIAGE IN RURAL JAMAICA * Michael M. J. Fischer PART I Introduction The following article is intended as a note towards two continuing research themes, one substantive and one methodological, in the study of the meaning and social uses of religion (and ideology or culture in general). Substantively, it is concerned to describe the role of religion in a small rural Jamaican community, paying attention to the ways religion is used to separate people as well as to bind them together. Marriage is given a similar secondary attention: mar riage, being a religious sacrament, interdigitates the sphere of family and kinship with that of religion; but even more centrally, marriage is the classic subject of discussion in the Caribbean literature on the articulation of norms or expressed values with actual behavior, a subject central to religion as well. These substantive concerns raise several theoretical and methodological issues. First of all, the debates over plural society (M.G. Smith et al. versus R.T. Smith et al.) and common value orientation (Parsonians versus Marxists) in the Caribbean seem to have become overly gen eralized, dogmatic and insensitive to social options as presented to * Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. This article is based on three months fieldwork, July-September 1968. Financial support came from an NIMH Predoctoral Fellowship (5-F01-HM-35, 70-72) and a research assistantship in the University of Chicago Family under the direction of Professor T. Smith. Further Study " Raymond ethnographic details and inter view material may be found in my Opposite Sets and Selected Masques from a Rural Jamaica Point of View" (1969 unpublished), on file in the Library of the Department of Anthropology of the Univer sity of Chicago, and in the Library of the Institute of Social and Economic Research of the University of the West Indies. The second part of this article will be published in a later issue. This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:56:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8 I. ARTICLES individual participants. Already in classical sociology (Marx, Weber) the relation between objective and subjective socio-economic position an versus (viz. Klassen sich Kassen fiir sich) was seen as an empirical ly changing mode of social integration. Evaluation of such modes of integration require not merely analytic categories (classes, cultural sections, subcultures, etc.), but elicitation of native conceptualization and consciousness, and this latter need not be as static as too often (for political purposes) are the former. For instance, the issues of racial polarization and class conflict in the Caribbean are forms of cons ciousness which can be mobilized or defused according to the changing states of the economy and political organization. To take a seemingly clear case, it is a commonplace critique of Guyanese politics to note that racism is currently on the increase due to the competition for scarce jobs and that while class consciousness remains blunted because of the racial directions into which this competition is channelled, the continued deterioration of the economy is tending towards a sorting of civil service (including Government controlled business enterprise) interests versus estate labor, small farming and small business inte rests. The emphasis on the trends ?increase? and ?tending? is an important element of changeable reality which often gets lost in sociological analyses. It is, in part, as a step towards working out these problems of evaluation that this article is intended. The community to be described was studied in the summer of 1968 and was observed to divide itself through religious behavior into two classes, a phenomenon which paralleled a number of the empirical descriptions both of sectarian histories and of the place of different religious groups in industrial and agricultural settings in the U.S.A., and which therefore fit the sociological theories of Max Weber as developed by Ernst Troeltsch, H.R. Niebuhr, Bryan Wilson, and others. These theories stressed two things: a) the correlation between type of religious group and socio-economic position of the members; fe) the differential efficacy of different forms of sect organization for socio economic mobility. The methodology of the 1968 studywas informed by the concerns of the University of Chicago Family Study (under the direction of Professors R.T. Smith and D.M. Schneider) to elicit from participants in any social system under investigation the range and articulation of their modes of conceptualizing their social universe. This methodology required that one observe how people utilize such statements as ?Christians must not live in sin? rather than merely relating such statements directly to theological formulation of Calvin, Luther, Wesley, et al The result is to meld an outsider's perspective of sociological organization with an insider's perception of meaningful options and barriers, a step closer to Weber's ideal of Verstehen This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:56:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CARIBBEAN STUDIES / VOL. 14, NO. 1 9 (rather than his constructive or ?ideal type? Verstehen).1 By empirical ly eliciting participants' understandings one can engage in a dialectical correction of analytic ideal types so that they are made more realistic without losing their explanatory utility. To reiterate, the following ?analytic ethnography? is intended as a demonstration and further step in this dialectic. This methodological procedure incidentally aids another theore tical issue: the definition of religion. ?Religion? as a technical term has never been adequately defined for reasons quite similar to the reasons consensus has not been achieved on the ?existance? or identification of classes, subcultures, etc. The two traditional polar ? ? definitions of religion may be represented by Spiro and Geertz. Spiro gives the ?substantivist? approach, which defines religion in terms of particular doctrines and institutions, a typical formulation, which however is still quite narrow: ?I shall define "religion" as an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings? (1965: 96).2 At the other pole is the approach which equates ?religion? with ?the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality?, thus making of the religious perspective an all-inclusive, self-confirming system in which ?the world-view (notions of how reality is put together) is believable because the ethos (the way things are done) which grows out of it is felt to be authoritative; the ethos is justifiable because theworld-view upon which it rests is held to be true? (Geertz 1968: 97-98). The tension between these two poles is the central problematic issue of this article; that is, the tension between the relatively easy identification of churches, balm-yards, pocomania, obeah, etc., and the relatively difficult identification of what people ?really believe? and why they behave the way they do. The resolution suggested is a model of differential usage of religious symbolism by different socio-economic status groups and classes, a model which metaphorically fits Levi Strauss' image of symphonic variations on similar themes,3 but one which demands sociological (and social-psychological) explanations 1. Weber was concerned with meaning to actors as part of social explanation, but conceded the great difficulty in achieving such understanding. As a stop-gap for the immediate needs of social evaluation and political action, he proposed one construct ?as if? ideal types. ? ? 2. He thereby excludes the more gnostic forms which regard the terms and their symbols ?God,? ?Spirit,? ?Ormazd-Ahirman,? etc., as allegorical ?yantras? and ?mantras? (visual and verbal aids to meditation) expressing relations of self-society-universe. 3. Cf. the chapter headings of his Le Cm et le Cuit. Ogden notes that when one plays music backwards (as became possible with the invention of the phonograph) one can recognize that ?musical is reversal really a variation and not a mere inversion.* Ogden, Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis, p. 38. This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:56:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 10 i. articles rather than remaining content with describing systematic formal variations. This article is organized into several sections beginning with a preliminary Vocational analysis? and a consideration of social strati fication; then follows a consideration of two religious styles, followed by a brief parallel consideration of marriage; finally the conclusion considers some conceptual difficulties. Location The relevance of economic and geographic ecology to the thesis scene? of this article extends beyond the common-sense ?setting of the and tying of the argument to a concrete example.