Hans Scharer was born at Wadenswil (near Zurich), Switzerland, in 1904. After his school years, he was trained for (Protestant) mis sionary work at the Missionshaus in BiHe. For seven years, 1932-1939, he lived among the Ngaju in southern Borneo; first with the Ngaju speaking people of the Katingan river area, later, for a shorter period. with those living along the Barito. He was granted European leave in 1939, and spent the years 1939-1944 studying Ethnology (as it then was called) under Professor J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong at Leiden University. He went home to Switzerland in 1944, but returned to Leiden in 1946 to complete his studies and defend his Ph. D. thesis on Die Gottesidee der N gadju Dajak in Sud-Borneo. It is this thesis which. published by E.J. Brill, Leiden, in 1946, is now being re-issued in English translation. Soon after, he left once more for the Ngaju territory, as Praeses of the Baseler Mission in south Borneo. He died there suddenly on December 10th, 1947, of blood-poisoning. These few biographical data are not merely of some slight historical interest: they help us to understand the man and his work. The present book is Scharer's only major work to have been published, and for Scharer himself it was, in a way, an experiment.
This ethnographic study shows how the Ngaju Dyaks, rain forest dwellers of Central Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) are responding to modernity. It depicts how they are attempting to fashion a modern identity for themselves, especially by remodelling their indigenous religion.
In this overview of popular religion in Southeast Asia, Robert L. Winzeler offers an interpretative look at the nature of today’s indigenous religious traditions as well as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity and conversion. He focuses not on religion as it exists in books, doctrine, theology, and among elites and dominant institutions but rather in the lives, beliefs, and practices of ordinary people. Popular Religion in Southeast Asia employs a broad view of religion as involving not just the usual Western notions of faith but also supernatural belief in general, magic, sorcery, and practical concerns such as healing, personal protection, and success in business. Case studies and concrete examples flesh out the discussion, demonstrating how popular religion relates to historical and contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic developments in the region.
This multidisciplinary study is the first book devoted entirely to the critical interpretation of the writings of Mircea Eliade on myth. One of the most popular and influential historians and theorists of myth, Eliade argued that all myth is religious. Douglas Allen critically interprets Eliade's theories of religion, myth, and symbolism and analys
Religion is commonly viewed through the lens of the world's religious traditions, stressing the differences, and often the conflicts, among them. The author of this book instead presents religion as a common and universal human phenomenon, based deeply in a human nature shared by all. In this view, the underlining and unifying principle of religion is a particular affirmative attitude toward life, which he presents as the Ultimate Value, and as such the key cultural constituent and defining factor of all religion. This Ultimate Value finds its expressions in various civilizations, and results in a variety of forms; these are what we know as the world's religious traditions. By analyzing the roles of both culture and civilization in their attitudes toward life, the author places religion beyond religious traditions, and shows how the latter, regardless of whether they are theistic or atheistic, draw their principles from the former, mainly by promoting the Golden Rule in its applications.
Small Sacrifices is an ethnographic study of Ngaju Dayaks, rain forest dwellers of the remote interior region of Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. Like many indigenous peoples throughout the world, the Ngaju have recently been affected by exposure to world religions, by improvements in transportation and communication, by new demands on family-based production, and by other factors pertaining to their growing incorporation into an expanding state system in an era of rapid political and economic change. The Ngaju response to these pressures, Anne Schiller contends, is most clearly seen in the religious sphere. Over the past two decades, many Ngaju have taken to recasting and reinterpreting their indigenous religion, known formerly as Kaharingan, and now as Hindu Kaharingan. Paradoxically, this process of religious change involves the codification of religious belief and the standardization of ritual. It also includes efforts to distinguish "religious practices" from other "customs." These developments figure importantly in the construction of modern Ngaju identity. The author focuses especially on the form and content of tiwah, an elaborate ritual of secondary treatment of the dead, with multiple and complex meanings for Hindu Kaharingan Ngaju, as well as for those who have converted to Christianity or Islam.
First Published in 2004. States of spirit possession, in which believer's feel themselves to be 'possessed' by the deity and raised to a new plane of existence, are found in almost all known religions. From Dionysiac cults to Haitia voodoo, Christian and Sufi mysticism to shamanic ritual, the rapture and frenzy of ecstatic experience forms an iconic expression of faith in all its devastating power and unpredictability. Ecstatic Religion has, since its first appearance in 1971, became the classic investigative study of these phenomena. Exploring the social and political significance of spiritual ecstasy and possession, it concerns the distinct types of functions of mystical experience - in particular, the differences between powerful male-dominated possession cults which reinforce established morality and power, and marginal, renegade ecstatics expressing forms of protest on behalf of the oppressed, especially women. I. M. Lewis's wide-ranging comparative study looks at the psychological, medical, aesthetic, religious and cultural aspects of possession, and covers themes including soul-loss, ecstatic trance, divination, erotic passion and exorcism. Probing the mysteries of spirit possession through the critical lens of anthropological and sociological theory, this fully revised and expanded Third Edition is of crucial importance for students of psychology, sociology, religious mysticism and shamanism.
People all over the globe are experiencing unprecedented and often hazardous situations as environments change at speeds never before experienced. This edited collection proposes that anthropological perspectives on landscape have great potential to address the resulting conundrums. The contributions build on broadly phenomenological, structuralist and multi-species approaches to environmental perception and experience, but they also argue for incorporating political power into analysis alongside dwelling, cosmology and everyday practice. The book’s 13 ethnographically rich chapters explore how the material and the conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, but it also looks at how these processes unfold at many scales in time and space, involving different actors with different powers. Thus it reaches towards new methodologies and new ways of using anthropology to engage with the sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations. Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives builds substantially upon anthropological work by Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing and Philippe Descola and on related work beyond, which emphasises the ongoing and open-ended, yet historically conditioned ways in which humans and nonhumans produce the environments they inhabit. In such work, landscapes are understood as the medium and outcome of meaningful life activities, where humans, like other animals, dwell. This means that landscapes are neither social/cultural nor natural, but socio-natural. Protesting against and moving on from the proverbial dualisms of modern, Western and maybe capitalist thought, is only the first step in renewing anthropology’s methodology for the current epoch, however. The contributions ask how seemingly disconnected temporal, representational, economic and other systemic dynamics fold back on lived experience that are materialised in landscapes. Foremost through studying how socially valued landscapes become irreversibly disturbed, commodified or subjected to wilful markings or erasures, the book explores a number of approaches to how landscapes are entangled in the ways people gather and organise themselves. Mindful of troubling changes in Earth Systems, all the authors argue from empirics. They show that processes of landscape change are always both habitual and laden with choices. That is, landscape change is political. Undoubtedly, landscape politics is bound up not just in how nature has been imagined, but in long histories of consumption. Today, an alarming quest for raw materials and energy continues to change both political and geological formations. Meanwhile dominant socio-political aspirations mean the exploitation of staggering volumes of cheap resources like fossil fuels in order to sustain economic processes that are as taken-for-granted as they are unsustainable. Like anthropology generally, this book attends to the contextual details buried in such planet-scale pictures. Building on traditional anthropological strengths, many authors consider the details of how the past is brought into the present – or erased from it – in material flows and sensory awareness, as well as in narratives that are explicitly linked to particular landscapes. Colonial identity formation and the different ways that it links with how landscape is viewed and managed (for instance for resource development for a global market), whether in Southern Africa, Israel/Palestine, the Canadian arctic or Indonesia, is a particularly striking example of how to talk about landscape is also to talk about past, present and future. And as the idea that we inhabit the Anthropocene becomes commonplace, the discipline can meaningfully discuss the current era as one of disavowed ruins as well as of poorly understood multispecies relations. To think of landscape as historically produced across multiple scales, does not mean ignoring its sensuous qualities let alone its role in cosmological systems. On the contrary, the analyses in the collection attend to the ways people’s movements through the landscape produce it as a material and conceptual resource. Taken together, the book’s ethnographic analyses take on board the unprecedented conditions under which people everywhere are having to make sense and forge relationships to the worlds they inhabit. Since landscapes are not what they used to be, neither can anthropology be.
