Home The Belief Machine Syllabus Links
PREFACE
(1988)
A number of years ago I began teaching a course in the anthropology of religion. It was to be a general anthropological survey of phenomenon such as magic, witchcraft, divination, ritual and ceremony. Students enjoyed it, but for me it became an unsettling experience. Each time I taught the course I confronted the same dilemma: how can one introduce to students the beliefs of other cultures, which at first sight seem so strange, without denigrating those beliefs and faulting them for failing to live up to the standards we apply? How can you build respect for the beliefs when they seem so inadequate measured against the standards of the belief system we call "science?" And when I tried to correct for ethnocentric bias, I confronted the relativistic dilemma that said that all beliefs are somehow perfectly adequate in their context, and that witchcraft, ritual sacrifice, self-mutilation, and the rest are perfectly comprehensible if only we put aside our cultural prejudices and try to understand these beliefs and practices from the perspective of those who engage in them. In its weak form this argument is not all that controversial; it even appeals to students to compare ritual tatooing with what people in our societies do in beauty shops or the offices of cosmetic surgeons, or to compare African ritual with American sports events. Where the real dilemma arises is when you try to apply the same approach to all our beliefs, even the ones we call science. In other words, if we are going to try to understand why people believe in witchcraft, we must also try to explain why they believe in DNA, black holes, polar fronts, and a whole host of other concepts for which empirical evidence is scant, but which they accept because they are "scientific."
And so the dilemma; on the one hand either we try to explain the beliefs of other cultures, assuming throughout that theirs, and not ours, need explaining, or we can adopt the position that all beliefs have same status as beliefs, and that we need to explain why our own beliefs, as well as those of others, are held. If one adopts the former position one is subscribing to a sort of high order, or even arrogant ethnocentrism; if one follows the latter course then it is easy to lapse into a kind of naive relativism that says that we are helpless to reach a judgment that one set of beliefs is better than others, or that all beliefs are true within their context. Yet obviously, a simplistic relativism that holds that all beliefs are true (and I don't know any anthropologists who say that, although some philosophers like to think they do) just won't do.
These are the kinds of problems that thinking about the beliefs of others inevitably lead to. As I taught the course I discovered that they were the kinds of dilemmas that were arising in various fields in addition to anthropology, including philosophy, the sociology of knowledge, psychology and the history of science. I was fortunate also to spend a six-month period studying with members of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh whose work in the sociology of knowledge has represented the most direct confrontation with the dilemmas I mentioned. It was in Edinburgh that I discovered that anthropologists involved in the study of belief systems had made little use of research on beliefs done in the fields of the history of science and the sociology of knowledge. This book, then, is an outgrowth of a number of things; an interest in other cultures, a dilemma arising from trying to explain the beliefs and practices of these cultures to undergraduates, and an interest in tying together strands of thought that are interwoven through various academic disciplines.
What I have attempted to do is provide a somewhat different perspective on the study of belief systems by tying together some of literature in anthropology, the history of science, the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge, and to make issues that cross-cut these fields comprehensible to professionals in these areas, to a general reading audience, and to advanced undergraduate students. At one level the book is in the nature of a less than comprehensive review of what anthropologists, philosophers, historians of science and sociologists of knowledge have said about why people believe what they do. Consequently I have tried to avoid writing a "technical" book because I think it is important to make the issues I'm referring to accessible to a general reader. Instead the book is also an attempt to further an interdisciplinary dialogue between different points of view, and to warn of the consequences of foreclosing dialogue, as I think we are wont to do.
The book is also an attempt to encourage (as most anthropological books should) a dialogue among cultures and historical epochs, for as members of a specific culture with its own point of view we are also wont to either ignore or misunderstand the messages contained in other perspectives on the world. Yet now, more than ever, we need to be able to bracket our understandings, and open ourselves up to what others are seeing and saying.
The main question addressed in the book is why are people so certain that their view of things is correct while others are wrong. I'm going to approach this question by examining the importance of our social and cultural settings for what we believe about the world. I will begin with a description of some of the paradoxes regarding how people think they experience the world and how they must actually experience it. I will do this but outlining the necessary components of a belief machine, one that generates meaning from experience.
The book continues by describing a theory of knowledge construction based on the idea of the metaphor; the theory leads us to assume that everything we know must be based on something we already know, and that the metaphor is the main component of belief. Chapter two will involve, in effect, a review of what people have said about metaphor and its role in human thought.
If our knowledge of the world is built around a metaphoric process, and if there are serious drawbacks to a metaphorical view of knowing, as the theory maintains, then there must be some social or cultural processes that take the metaphors through which we interpret experience, and give them a taken-for-grantedness quality. This I argue in Chapter Three is the function of ritual, and things associated with ritual such as myth, humor and magic.
In Chapter Four I argue that, if all belief systems are full of anomalies and contradictions, that when these anomalies are made explicit, there must be ways that persons can adjust their beliefs to explain away these contradictions. Some of the ways this is done are listed, using illustrations from our own and other cultures. Then, to illustrate in detail how a belief system is constructed and protected against falsification, I analyze the witchcraft beliefs of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries along with the witchcraft trials that accompanied them, and try to demonstrate that the beliefs were not "irrational" or "paranoid", as some have argued, but, instead, a reaction by the adherents to orthodox faith to the beliefs of members of heretical movements.
After providing a framework to understand how beliefs are constructed, given a taken-for-grantedness quality, and protected against falsification, in Chapter Five I examine the social factors that reinforce the use of certain metaphors rather than others. At this point I argue that the complete description of a belief system requires the delineation of the metaphors that persons use to translate experience into meaning, the ways the metaphors are rendered in ritual expression, the ways the meaning generated by the metaphors are protected against anomaly and contradiction, and a description of the social factors that commit people to certain metaphors rather than others.
In Chapter Six I return to an issue raised in the first chapter; how can knowledge be determined solely by social or cultural factors, when our way of knowing that we call "science", seems to work so much better than traditional ways of knowing? The issue is directly related to the philosophic debates concerning objectivism and relativism, and is an issue that anthropologists have not dealt with well. The chapter examines some of the attempts by anthropologists to distinguish between traditional modes of thinking and modern or scientific ways of knowing. I argue that these distinctions are inadequate, and that we do not need to posit two different ways of thinking, one to generate traditional, the other scientific knowledge, but instead that a single mode of thought is capable of generating all "kinds" of knowledge. I maintain that the differences that appear in ways of knowing are differences created by the different social, cultural and technological settings in which beliefs are created.
I conclude with a discussion of the dangers inherent in assuming that there is a single way of arriving at truth.