Small gods,rituals, and cooperation: The Mentawai water spirit Sikameinan

Cognitive and evolutionary research has focused on the powerful deities of large-scale societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. In a study of the water spirit Sikameinan of the Mentawai people (Siberut Island, Indonesia), we address three questions: (1) Are smaller gods believed to enforce cooperation, especially compared to bigger gods in larger-scale societies? (2) Do beliefs in these deities encourage people to engage in behavior otherwise perceived as costly? and (3) Does ritual reinforce beliefs in these deities? Drawing on interview responses, data from healing ceremonies, and ethnographic observation, we show that Sikameinan is believed to punish people who violate meat-sharing norms and that people ‘attacked’ by Sikameinan pay shamans to conduct healing rituals. The public nature of rituals, involving prestigious individuals apologizing to Sikameinan for the patient's stinginess, reinforce onlookers' beliefs about Sikameinan. The most widely shared beliefs about Sikameinan are represented in rituals while beliefs not represented vary considerably, indicating that ritual may be potent for cultural transmission. These results suggest that moralizing supernatural punishers may be more common than suspected and that the trend in the cultural evolution of religion has been an expansion of deities' scope, powers, and monitoring abilities.     

Potlatch and the articulation of modes of production: revisiting French Marxist Anthropology and the history of central Africa

This essay seeks to understand the potlatch as indicative of a wider category of exchange. Looking at the similarity in wild exchange rituals between northwestern America and central Africa the article argues that potlatch ritual is not as an archaic remnant but a product of the interaction between capitalist and ‘human’ modes of production. In this dynamic ‘human modes of production’ (see anon) did not become capitalist, but rather there was a ritual escalation related to a series of non-capitalist imperatives based in rights in people and theatrical displays of authority. In constructing the theoretical structure used to make this case I draw on and seek to rehabilitate the work of French Marxist Anthropologists working in central Africa, above all Georges Dupré and Pierre-Philippe Rey.     

A relational approach to a Papua New Guinea male ritual cycle

The article analyses the male ritual cycle of the Ankave‐Anga in Papua New Guinea. In the 1980s, male initiations in this region were interpreted as institutions for the reproduction of male domination. And yet, looking at the ritual gestures performed at the same time by the men in the forest and by the women in the village, it becomes possible to offer another interpretation, one that, following Marilyn Strathern, underscores a relational dimension. But, whereas Strathern saw these rituals as times when boys went from a ‘cross‐sex’ state to a ‘single‐sex’ state capable of reproduction, following a process of extraction, the article argues that the Ankave ritual cycle can be read as an ordered series of transformations of the relations between the boys and their mothers and sisters, in the presence of these female relatives. At the heart of these initiations lies the boys' accession to the capacity to act for others. Such an analysis of specific ethnographic Melanesian material makes possible a critical appraisal of the Strathernian notions of partibility and detachability, which have often been taken as given by researchers outside the region.     

Shown but not Shared,Presented but not Proffered: Redefining Ritual Identity among Warlpiri Ritual Performers, 1990–2000

Little has been written on the construction and projection of indigenous social identity in public (‘non‐restricted’) ritual among Aboriginal Australians. Elsewhere, I have analysed nearly half a century of such public rituals (1946–1990) among the Warlpiri of Yuendumu in Central Australia, concentrating on the shifting forces of gender and kinship. This paper focuses on the key moments motivating senior Warlpiri women, since the 1990s, to reconfigure their ritual participation and roles in inter‐indigenous ceremonial events. I analyse how these women participate in inter‐Aboriginal performances, exhibiting the iconic and sensory virtues of the Dreaming and weaving new forms of political identity, shaped by the pressures of neo‐colonialism, with female ambassadors of other Aboriginal groups. I argue that in this performative process women are reconfiguring the meanings of Aboriginalities and rearticulating their connectedness to one another, a connectedness rooted in their beliefs and responsibilities towards the Dreaming.     

Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual

Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in the context of the Thaipusam Kavadi, a collective ritual performed by Tamil Hindus worldwide that involves body piercings and other costly activities. We show that participants' relative position in the social hierarchy systematically affects the form of ritual signaling. Specifically, we found that low-status participants are more likely to engage in signaling modalities that require somatic and opportunity costs in the form of body piercings and cumulative effort, while high-status individuals are more likely to use financial capital, in the form of more elaborate material offerings to the deity. Moreover, signaling in each particular modality is stronger among individuals who participate in more public (but not private) rituals, corresponding to their long-term commitment to the community. In sum, our results demonstrate that social hierarchies exact unequal requirements on ritual participants, who in turn modify their signaling strategies accordingly.     

The consumption of ritual and the changing values of filial piety in ancestor worship

Ancestor worship is regarded as the key element of the Han people's belief system across most of China. However, the rituals pertaining to death, such as in funerals and annual ancestor worship, vary from place to place. For decades, the state has made tremendous efforts to reform and standardise funerals consistent with its path to modernization by insisting on more socialist practices rather than those that are perceived as ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’, such as burning paper and incense or performing rituals. I argue that despite regulating the use of funeral materials or memorial types, the state has failed to reform the essence of death rituals, that is, the duty of filial piety and people's conception of the afterlife. In addition, funerals and other rituals related to death contribute to individual's social reputation.     

Syncretic Persons: Sociality,Agency and Personhood in Recent Charismatic Ritual Practices among North Mekeo (PNG)

This paper explores the syncretic accommodations made by North Mekeo (PNG) villagers arising from recent historical encounters with Catholic (Sacred Heart) missionaries over issues of ritual authenticity and effectiveness, personhood, and agency in a wider field of Christian evangelism and globalisation. Through a careful examination and comparison of pre‐existing ritual notions and practices (e.g., sorcery techniques, mortuary ritual performance, gender rituals) and the recent trends of commodification and enthusiastic Catholic charismatic performance, what might appear to be incongruous religious beliefs and practices are shown to possess numerous remarkably compatible similarities at the level of explicit cultural categorisation and ritual enactment. In accord with long‐standing anthropological arguments, recent North Mekeo syncretism thus consists of an integrated, albeit transformed rather than ‘confused’, mixing of indigenous and exogenous religious elements. Further, in this analysis of recent Melanesian religious change syncretism implies a novel conceptual convergence between syncretic processes and the dynamics of personhood, sociality and agency as construed in the framework of the ‘new Melanesian ethnography’.     

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.     

How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation?

Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors.     

Do we know enough about vegetation dynamics to manage fire regimes in central Australia?

Ecologists have long been concerned that contemporary fire regimes of central Australia have poor consequences for some plant species, vegetation communities and the native animals they support. Fire frequency, size and intensity (the ‘fire regime’) have all been implicated in the decline of native biota and in vegetation changes that potentially constitute ecological drift. However, not all perceived declines and changes are quantified or proven. The fire regimes themselves defy quantification and are arguably unknowable. We examine the relationships between fire, vegetation and the physical landscape and consider the adequacy of available knowledge for guiding fire management. Devising targeted ‘fire management regimes’, which take into account vegetation type and management objectives such as pastoral production, conservation and cultural observance, and which actively use fire to achieve those objectives, is a more realistic goal than controlling unquantifiable fire regimes in spatially diverse landscapes.     

The Materiality of Relational Transformations: Propositions for Renewed Analyses of Life-Cycle Rituals in Melanesia and Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces this special issue and analyses Papua New Guinea and Australian initiation and death rituals as moments of relational transformations. Although the general argument is not completely new, it has often remained an undemonstrated statement. The paper hence focuses on the specific ways people make these changes effective and express them in their rituals. It is suggested that an invariant modus operandi is in play in which, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted. Towards the end of the ritual, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted through a manifestation of the form the relation takes after the ritual. The paper suggests that a relationship cannot be transformed in the absence of the persons concerned. The relational components need to be either directly present, such as in initiations, or mediated through objects, such as in death rituals.     

Alternating Ontologies: Exchange and Ritual in Anganen History

In this article I examine the changing social and historical context of exchange and ritual amongst the Anganen of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, a neglected theme in Highland ethnography. I focus primarily on the history of the incorporation of one spirit cult ritual, rimbu, and its relationship to the other major spirit cult, kabit, and just how these two cults inter-relate with two major categories of exchange—the ceremonial pig kill (yasolu) and the more ‘mundane’ forms of exchange associated with such events as marriage and death. It is the structural parallels, differences and interconnections between these two exchange categories and the two ritual types which have guided much of the historical development of local social structure until colonisation. This has resulted in a substantial, though not necessarily stable, integration of ritual and exchange which has been ‘played out’ over the approximately fifteen-year periods between yasolu pig kills. I argue that it is this set of oppositions that provides the structural basis for different potentialities for male capacity. On occasion these may be so graphically distinct that they may be called differing social ontologies, different baselines for being and action. Different aspects of rimbu were adopted from around the turn of the twentieth century until colonisation some 50 years later when both kabit and rimbu were abandoned under mission pressure. However, to talk about the adoption of rimbu and the changes to Anganen social structure which it helped to produce as ‘pre-colonial’ history is misleading to the extent that much of the impetus for change was bound up in the efflorescence of trade caused by the Australian pearling industry in the Torres Strait. I call this period ‘ante-colonial’ in order to highlight the impact of the Australians and the irony that what the Australians indirectly helped create, rimbu as a central feature to Anganen social life, was destroyed with the direct colonial presence and missionisation.     

How is Afflictive Possession ‘Learned’? Gender and Motility in South India

This paper examines forms of affliction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afflictive because they are experienced as ‘coming out of nowhere’. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afflictive possession is ‘learned’ is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the point at which diagnosis occurs. This paper traces such learning to early forms of socialisation into gender, focusing on motility and bodily comportment, as central to the way in which the lived body of gender moves between different practical environments. In an environment that includes spirits and deities, female movement acts as guarantor, not only of social stability, but of cosmological order and disorder.     

Dialectics of the Bowerbird: An Interpretative Account of Ritual and Symbolism in the Udabe valley,Papua New Guinea

The association of men and women with birds, as expressed in dance, is a common theme in Melanesian ritual. Often, this is seen as a means by which humans attain some relation with a transcendental reality. But this is only part of the picture. Pigs, in contrast to birds, represent an opposite sort of reality. It is argued here — by an interpretation of the gab — that through such rituals, men and women symbolically situate themselves between the two. The rituals are performed to overcome the precarious nature of human sexuality, appearance and aging associated with the life-cycle process, which contrast with that of both birds and pigs.     

Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250–900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch’ahb’ that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.

No longer can evolutionists dismiss such works [of ritual sacrifice] as scholarly, but irrelevant, esoterica–explorations of the bizarre but insignificant elements of Precolumbian culture…we must address this ideological data base with the same interest that we would give to studies of settlement patterns, subsistence systems, or political institutions [1].

     

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.     

The Interdiction of Music in Islam

There is no authorisation in the Qur'an for the interdiction on music. That interdiction, when it is voiced, is the product of a conviction among some Muslims, supported by hadith (just as it is opposed with hadith) that Islam does not countenance music. In a country such as Pakistan, with a strong tradition of devotional music which (taken with the poetry, with which it is always associated) has become entwined with the identity politics of the provinces or sub‐‘nations’ which make up the vaster nation, a comprehensive ban on music would be impossible to enforce, though there are ‘ulamā’ and sectarian parties who desire it. This paper focuses on an instance where music is even harder to extricate from an accompanying text: the recitation of the Qur'ān. In the eyes of Muslims, Qur'anic recitation is not music. This denial raises further questions about the nature of music and, in particular, its involvement with the ‘extramusical’. Adorno's observations on the relation of music to language, and the anthropologist Friedson's complaint that ethnographers focus on text, at the expense of music, are examined in the light of the circumstance that the world over, music is associated with texts of one kind or another. Even when, as in the case of the ‘curing’ ritual described by Friedson, words are unimportant, or missing, music is seldom a phenomenological whole. Music ‘leans’, or is ‘leant on’: it lends its unrivalled ‘eloquence’ to many a cause, from commodity marketing to the structured working out of ritual, or, among lovers, to the remembered quality of experience. All these potentialities of music are relevant to the question of its interdiction and to the Muslim denial that the recitation of the Qur'ān is music.     

Establishing mutual misunderstanding: a Buryat shamanic ritual in Ulaanbaatar

This article discusses a strange case of shamanic ritual performed for a Buryat family in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar. This performance not only differs from those described in the regional literature, but it also seems to challenge some of the models used to account for ritual efficacy. Indeed, while the cathartic use of Buryat traumatic history to deal with a patient's misfortune in shamanic rituals is quite well documented, this performance stands out for the uncompassionate hopelessness with which spirits spoke of the family's fate as exiles in Mongolia. Meanwhile, the ever‐growing tension between participants, which culminated in an open crisis, would be a sure sign of a ritual failure had it not been the clear result of the shaman's own efforts to establish mutual misunderstanding between the spirits, the patients, and herself. Drawing on a pragmatic approach to ritual efficacy, this article ponders on the specific purpose of a performance which seems to be aimed at creating a context of miscommunication between participants.     

‘Signs of the times’: confession and the semiotic production of inner truth

How is it that confession – a highly ritualized, dialogically structured speech act – appears to transparently reflect and reveal the inner states of confessants? This article explores this question by closely engaging select post‐Vatican II defences of the Sacrament of Penance, which lay out the requirements of ‘modern’ confession in striking detail. A close reading of these theological texts demonstrates that felicitous confession is the product of three correlated (meta‐)semiotic processes: (1) the figuration of the pentinent memory as a storehouse for sin; (2) the management of ritual time into discrete stages of ‘private’ meaning‐making and ‘public’ pronouncement; and (3) the erasure of the social scenery of the confessional utterance. In concert, these processes render indexical signs as iconic ones and, in so doing, naturalize confession as the cathartic revelation of inner truths, already constituted as such.     

Syncretism and the Politics of the Tingkeban in West Java

For the rural Sundanese of West Java who identify with Nahdatul Ulama Islam, the tingkeban is considered a mandatory ritual to be conducted for a woman who is seven months pregnant. However, like other local practices around birth, the tingkeban has come under state and urban modernising influences that have attempted to displace some of its elements as ‘culture’ rather than ‘religion’ and to discredit many of these as superstitious and backward. This paper examines the ritual elements of the tingkeban that produce and reinforce local cosmological and ontological ideas about the nature of personhood and society, and, in particular, how the ritual highlights the ambivalent status of the villagers within broader relations of power such as the Indonesian State and other forms of Islam existing in Indonesia. The paper also explores how the assumptions within the ideology of modernisation propagated under the last years of the Suharto regime coincide with assumptions in scholarly work such as those underlying Geertz's depiction of the syncretic nature of Javanese religion.