Abstract
Sensitivity to the ways of life and thought of a non-Western people from their points of view—what they experience and find meaningful within their world view, language, cultural metaphors, values, and knowledge—demands that the researcher reflect on the terms and analytical categories s/he uses to describe those people. For a researcher to not question the biases implicit in her or his descriptive terms and conceptual categories makes the researcher susceptible to “naive realism”: the unconscious projecting of one’s own Western, professional, cultural, and personal subjectivities, including abstract categories and ideas that seem “natural” and “universal”, upon another people as their cultural world view, logic, values, and understandings (see Toelken 1976:9–24 for an excellent example). As Hallowell emphasized, “projecting upon [a people] categorical abstractions derived from Western thought” “is not adequate for presenting an accurate description of [them]” because those categories are simply “a reflection of our cultural subjectivities” (Hallowell 1960:21). Thus, critical and deliberate selection among alternative, possible descriptive categories goes hand in hand with the concern for authentic cross-cultural translation.
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Acknowledgements
I, Christopher Carr, am very thankful for my formal and informal teachers, Professor Ken Morrison, Professor Elizabeth Brandt, and Dr. Rex Weeks for introducing me to a wide swath of literatures in the fields of religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and Native American studies, which form the intellectual and ethnical foundations for this book. Ken, Betsy, and especially Rex also took my understanding of cultural relativism from an intellectual concept I had learned in Cultural Anthropology 101 and an experience I had lived growing up in a bicultural family to a richer and deeper analytical and experiential level with regard to Woodland Native American thought and practice through introducing me to the formal notion of naïve realism, vivid examples of it, and writings on it. I am grateful to Ken, Betsy, and Rex for making me a better anthropologist and human being.
I, Rex Weeks, in my experience, find that collaborative efforts seem to yield the best results. In this regard, I am especially grateful for professors Elizabeth Brandt, Christopher Carr, Carol Diaz-Granados, Kenneth Morrison, and Peter Welsh, whose influences continue to rigorously challenge and thoughtfully encourage me as a scholar. My humble thoughts are inspired often and much through the enduring wisdom of indigenous tribal elders, particularly Desert Little Bear and Gene Gold. Should I achieve anything novel in writing, it comes with the earnest support of my parents Earlene Gold and Rex Weeks. Foremost, I thank the readers for the privilege of their time in a modest endeavor to honor the ancestors forthwith in perpetuity.
Notes
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1.
Definitions of the five topics, as given by Webster’s (1997), are as follows. “Ontology” is the study of the nature of being or existence. The topic includes notions of personhood, self, and otherness. “Cosmology” is the study of the origins and structure of the universe, especially time, space, and causality. Cosmology includes two topics. “Cosmography” addresses the structure of the universe (e.g., dualities). “Cosmogany” concerns the story of origin and development of the universe (e.g., origin myths). “Eschatology” is any system of doctrines pertaining to last or final matters, including the death process, judgment (in some cultural systems), and an afterlife. “Epistemology” is the study of the origins, nature, and limits of knowledge (scientific, religious, philosophical, or otherwise). “Axiology” encompasses the subjects of ethics, values, purpose/meaning, and aesthetics.
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2.
Eliade is contradictory in the terms he used to describe the experience of a hierophany and the relationship of the sacred and the ordinary in such an experience. The thing or act that becomes sacred in a hierophany is sometimes said to be in this world and sometimes described as being raised to a higher plane above ordinary reality. Suggesting the former situation, Eliade wrote: “The most elementary hierophanies … are nothing but a radical ontological separation of some object from the surrounding cosmic zone; some tree, some stone, some place, by the mere fact that it reveals that it is sacred, that it has been, as it were, ‘chosen’ as the receptacle for a manifestation of the sacred, is thereby ontologically separated from all other stones, trees, places …” (Eliade 1962:32; italics in original). Suggesting the latter situation, Eliade continues by pointing out that the chosen receptacle “occupies a different supernatural plane” (ibid., 32). Elsewhere he also talks about a thing or person being raised to a higher plane: “he [the experiencer] fears he may lose [his own reality] completely if he is totally lifted to a plane of being higher than his natural profane state …” (Eliade 1958:17–18); and again, “… on the plane of magico-religious experience …” (ibid., 425); likewise, “… every act is liable to become a religious act, just as every natural object is liable to become a hierophany. In other words, any moment may be inserted into the Great Time and thus project man into eternity” (ibid., 460). Still different, Eliade describes a hierophany as an experience on both a plane of ordinary existence and a plane of the sacred: “Human existence therefore takes place simultaneously upon two parallel planes: that of the temporal, of change and of illusion, and that of eternity, of substance and of reality” (ibid., 460).
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3.
Possibly in like manner, the historic Tuscarora compared things by their degrees of orenda. One shaman’s orenda might be greater than another’s. Or the orenda of an unsuccessful hunter might be less than that of an elusive game animal (Hewitt 1902:38–39). However, the precise translation of such statements is debated (Radin 1914:349–350 in Tooker 1979:19). See Note 5.
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The dichotomy, supernatural versus natural, is one of a large suite of dualities that are irrelevant to many non-Western peoples and that anthropologists, religious studies scholars, and other social scientists have critiqued. Others include nature versus society (Latour 1993 [1991]); nature versus culture (Descola 2013); self versus other, individual versus collective, internal versus external, male versus female, and structure versus agency (Strathern 1988); sacred versus profane (see text: Religion); purity versus pollution (Churchill 2000); and civilized versus uncivilized/savage (Morrison 1984:42–71).
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5.
The interpretation that Woodland and Plains Indians recognized an impersonal, supernatural force and thought it to be the cause of unusual events or the unusual power of an object or a person became very popular among professional ethnographers of Woodland and Plains Indians and other anthropologists at the turn of the 20th century. One rendition of this notion was British ethnologist R. R. Marett’s (1909) generalizing of it in his concept of “animatism” (Hallowell 1960:44; Tooker 1979:22). Marett proposed that the earliest religion of humankind was animatism—the attribution of supernatural powers or life to inanimate objects. As examples of such powers, he pointed to the Algonquian category, manitou, the Iroquoian category, orenda, and the Siouan category, wakan. In this intellectual context, William Jones, a Fox Indian anthropologist, interpreted the Algonquian category, manitou, as an “active”, “impersonal essence, a supernatural virtue”, a “cosmic, mysterious property which is believed to be existing everywhere in nature”, a “cosmic substance”, “intangible”, “without form and without feature” (Jones 1905:183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190). “The effect [of manitou] is in the nature of a pleasing thrill, a sense of resignation, a consolation. This effect is the proof of the presence of the manitou” (ibid., 189). Likewise, Alice Fletcher translated the Omaha and Ponca Siouan term, Wa-kan-da, as a “mysterious power or permeating life … pervading all things … of one kind … possessed of a quality similar to the will of man” and imply[ing] “the power to bring to pass” (Fletcher 1896:477). Fletcher characterized it as not physical, itself, but “manifested in concrete form through the medium of Vision” (ibid., 487). She said that Wa-kan-da was associated with the idea of the continuity of life (ibid., 478). Concurrent with Jones and Fletcher, J. B. N. Hewitt interpreted the Iroquoian concept of orenda to be a “mystic potence of diverse efficiency and purpose … [and] the paramount motive underlying the operations of diverse bodies … action or motion [being] a manifestation of [it] … [and] the efficient cause of all phenomena” (Hewitt 1902:33, 35). One being dominates over another because it has more orenda, “just as a wealthy person [has] … an abundance of money” (ibid., 39, 43). Hewitt described that orenda is put forth by singing, as in shamanistic chants. Significantly, he pointed out that in the various Iroquoian languages, it is a word fully different from those that mean mind, soul, life, ghost, the brain as a locus of a soul, and bodily, muscular strength, suggesting to him that orenda is not a spiritual, psychic, or biotic activity (ibid., 45). Boas interpreted the Salish word, sulia, the Kwakiutl word, naualak, and the Chinook word, tamanoas, to mean “a magic power … inherent in the objects of nature which is more potent than the natural powers of man … [as] expressed by our term ‘wonderful’” (Boas 1912:366). Benedict summarized the above interpretations of manitou, orenda, and wakan in a chapter in a general anthropology textbook as “supernatural power in the abstract or a Supernatural Power…. It has other extensions of meaning … a holy man, a religious practitioner … [and] in ordinary speech the term is constantly recurring, in the sense of ‘wonderful’, ‘surprising’ … [like] a traveler coming upon fine high-bush cranberries on the prairie” (Benedict 1938:628–629).
Jones (1905:184, 188) and Benedict (1938:629) pointed out that the same term, manitou, is used for both the supernatural power and the object or human being it inhabits. Similarly, the term, wakan, is used for both the supernatural power and as an adjective that describes the object or person bearing the power (Benedict 1938:629). Thus, in practice, the power and the object are confounded. In this regard, Jones’s and Benedict’s interpretations of a supernatural power move toward Hallowell’s and Radin’s view that the Algonquian Ojibwa and Siouan Winnebago lived in a world of persons, not of impersonal, nonphysical power.
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Codrington translated the Oceanic concept of mana as an invisible “power or influence … [which] attaches itself to persons and to things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation” (Codrington 1891:118–119).
There are, however, instances of non-Western peoples who do posit and experience an impersonal universal force. One example is the Kalahari !Kung San’s experience of n/um, or “boiling energy”. It is said to be a universal energy that rests in the base of the spine and bottom of the stomach and that can be activated and painfully raised up the spine to the base of the skull by dancing, leading to the ecstatic trance state of Kai, in which medicine persons can heal others (Katz 1982; Marshall 1969). An analogous concept in the Hindu yogic tradition is kundalini, though emphasis is on energy within an individual’s body more so than the energy’s connection to a universal impersonal power. A third example is the Chinese and broader Asian concept of qi. It is experienced as a life force or moving energy that flows through everything, connecting all.
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Carr, C., Weeks,, W.R. (2021). Religion, Sacred, and Other Quandaries: Writing in Culture-Relevant Categories. In: Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44917-9_3
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