Culture and Human Nature by Horace Kallen Melford E. Spiro

Author:Horace Kallen, Melford E. Spiro [Horace Kallen, Melford E. Spiro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781000668599
Google: fdHTDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 52542882
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

6

Religious Systems as Culturally Constituted Defense Mechanisms

SINCE THE RANGE of beliefs, values, and rituals related to supernatural beliefs and events is enormous, it is obvious, as Durkheim observed long ago, that no belief, value, or ritual is intrinsically identifiable as “religious.” Since the “religious,” on the contrary, is a quality capable of being attached to almost any instance of these three dimensions of religious systems, the latter, to use a modern idiom, are in large measure projective systems. It is this characteristic of religion that poses a problem which has long confronted its students, and which comprises the problem of this chapter: If religious systems are indeed projective in character, how can we be sure that religious behavior is not abnormal behavior, requiring psychiatric, rather than sociocultural, analysis?

Anthropology, as is well known, has adopted a fairly uniform stance with respect to the cross-cultural variability which characterizes notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This stance, so far as the normal-abnormal distinction is concerned, was given classic expression by Benedict (1934), who maintained that judgments concerning abnormality are necessarily relative to intracultural standards. What is judged to be abnormal in one cultural setting may be properly characterized as normal in other cultural settings. This relativistic approach continues to provoke somewhat heated controversy, not only within the anthropological fraternity, but within the social sciences in general.

In a series of seminal papers Professor Hallowell has offered us important conceptual vehicles by which we can avoid the Scylla of nihilistic relativism and the Charybdis of ethnocentric absolutism. His concept of a “culturally constituted behavioral environment” (Hal-lowell 1955: chapter 8) allows us to view behavior relative to its cultural setting and, at the same time, to assess its functional consequences in terms of pancultural scientific criteria. I should like to examine the relationships between religion, abnormality, and relativism in the light of these conceptual tools. Although only these concepts are explicitly taken from Hallowell, this entire paper is heavily indebted to his work. Indeed, it is difficult to say when his ideas end and mine begin.

The persistent controversy over cultural relativism has been confounded by implicit disagreements concerning its proper antithesis. Some scholars conceive of (what I shall term) “universalism” to be the antithesis of relativism, while others take (what may be termed) “absolutism” to be its antithesis. The logic of relativism is quite different, depending upon which of these two alternative conceptions is taken to be its antithesis; indeed consensus concerning one or the other antithesis would mitigate, if not resolve, the controversy. I should like to propose absolutism as the valid antonym for relativism, and universalism as the antonym not for relativism, but for what might be called “particularism.”

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