Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion by Winkelman Michael & Baker John R

Author:Winkelman, Michael & Baker, John R. [Winkelman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317343721
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-09-03T21:00:00+00:00

While modern biomedieine sees disease as a result of microbial activity or some type of organic defect, in most cultures and times the causes of illness have been attributed to the spirit world. Most cultures attribute illnesses to these “personalistic” factors, the consequence of the personal actions of humans or supernatural agents. In a cross-cultural study, anthropologist George Murdock (1981) found that most cultures’ central concepts of illness causation included supernatural notions; that is, that a willful human or spiritual entity caused illness in the victim. These universal expressions of perceptions of willful actions by an “other” find their expression in theories of spirit aggression and in human supernatural aggression (e.g., sorcery or witchcraft). Murdock also found other supernatural causes as well, including those based on concepts of guilt and sin (e.g., taboo violation, mystical retribution). The universality of cultural beliefs about the roles of supernatural powers in causing illness suggests that these beliefs, too, have derived from biological influences.

The most generic form of supernatural health effects involves spirit aggression. Spirit aggression beliefs take many forms, including concepts of illness caused by ghosts or spirits inhabiting the person’s body and taking over that person’s will and behavior through possession. Spirits may also attack people by sending darts, worms, insects, or other entities into their bodies. One universal supernatural explanation of illness involves theories of human supernatural causation in which a malicious person—such as a sorcerer or witch—causes negative effects upon another person’s health. These effects can result from overt actions—such as spells—and from the inadvertent effects of emotions, particularly envy or jealousy. In sorcery, illness is the result of an intentional and aggressive use of magic, whether a product of the individual’s power alone or through assistance provided by a specialized sorcerer or spirits. (In later chapters we address questions regarding these assumptions of supernatural punishment as adaptive mechanisms that put into effect a moral order.) These are also potential functions of other supernatural theories of illnesses that involve forces other than humans and spirits, such as “mystical illnesses” that are thought to involve the “automatic consequence of some act or experience of the victim mediated by putative impersonal causal relationships rather than by the intervention of a human or supernatural being” (Murdock 1981, p. 17). These mystical illnesses may be the automatic consequences of taboo violations and other effects of impersonal forces. A principal form of mystical causation involves mystical retribution, in which illness is a consequence of a forbidden act that violates a taboo or moral injunction. In most cultures, the major taboos are prohibitions on food, drink, or sex, as well as etiquette, ritual, property, and verbal taboos. Some behaviors may cause illness directly (that is, illness is an automatic consequence of them), such as contagion illness, which results from contact with polluting objects such as menstrual blood, corpses, or some other defiling substance. In Chapter 7 we examine the adaptive functions of contamination beliefs.

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