Women, Possession Trance Cults, and the Extended Nutrient‐Deficiency Hypothesis
(1977) has shown more clearly than I did, in Egypt and elsewhere where it occurs this cult is often associated with the embourgoisement of men and women--involving a curtailment of the latter's freedom (see also Ferchiou 1972:66; Lewis, forthcoming). Finally, while I have no quarrel with Kehoe and Giletti's characterization of my interpretation of possession cults as "political," I have never advocated a monocausal explanation of such protean phenomena. By the same token and contrary to their assertions, I have explicitly pointed out (Lewis 1966:325) that in this context the concepts "center" and "periphery" are relative and ambiguous. If authors choose to recycle the reductionist "explanations" of Marvin Harris and his school, they might at least take the trouble to get their facts right.
Defining Religion: Death and Anxiety in an Afro-Brazilian Cult
This dissertation clarifies the anthropological concept of religion by crafting the most useful scientific definition. The first chapter illustrates the confusion surrounding this term, and argues that the comparative method of anthropology requires that this imprecision be removed. Reviewing the four types of definitions of religion extant in the literature -Content, Behavioral/Performative, Mental, and Functional -Chapter 1 concludes that the best definition will be a generative functional definition. The second chapter supports this conclusion by finding that an independent discipline, American constitutional law, has arrived at the same understanding. Chapter 3 details the nature of definitions and the method of their proper construction, and uses these insights to define of religion based upon its function to alleviate death anxiety. Chapter 4 examines whether an inverse relationship between religiousness and death anxiety actually pertains, while Chapter 5 argues that the discerned relationship is not merely correlational, but in fact technically functional. The sixth chapter demonstrates the superior utility of the proposed definition as compared to content definitions by considering which generates better hypotheses about religious conversion. The remaining chapters anticipate possible criticisms of the proposed definition. Perhaps because the highlighted inverse relationship is not supported unanimously by the empirical evidence, it is unsuitable for a definitional criterion. But Chapter 7 counters that imperfect results arise from a faulty methodological equation between personal religiousness and professions of institutional affiliation. To illustrate the independence of theisms and religiousness, instances of theistic nonreligions (superstitions, folktales) and nontheistic religions (political and scientific religions) are discussed. The universality of the proposed definition could be more forcefully argued if the relationship between religiousness and death anxiety were tied to other human universals such as the psychobiological substratum of possession mediumship. Chapter 8 first shows that the most popular sociological interpretation of mediumship, that by I.M. Lewis, inadequately fits the data for Brazil. Chapter 9 supplements Lewis' model by linking mediumship to genetic talents for dissociation. Such links, if they exist, would serve as support for the underlying premises which predicted the results, and thereby the probable universality of the proposed definition of religion. © Copyright by James M. Donovan, 1994 All Rights Reserved
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mental Disorder among the Polar Eskimos of Northwest Greenland
Mental health, in both industrialized and underdeveloped societies, is coming to be recognized as one of the world's leading social problems. In order to bring more varied skills to bear on this challenging issue, scientific institutions are encouraging re search in several fields other than those traditionally cultivated by psychologists and psychiatrists, particularly in chemical, bio logical, and social sciences. Hope is expressed that such inter disciplinary efforts may result in a break-through in the under standing of the nature of mental disorder (see Wallace 1960 for anthropological review of the historical development of research). Unfortunately, however, many of the research pro jects in those new areas have been conducted in effect by single disciplines with little or no integration with their sister sciences, even where the representatives of the several disciplines sit to gether at a seminar table. Interdisciplinary investigations in the mental health area are faced with the problem of multiple causal and contributing factors. Although single factors have often been isolated and studied separately with the hope that these were causally sufficient variables, such uni-disciplinary studies have not been notably successful in dealing with mental illness.