Role Of Ancestors Research Articles

The Role of Ancestors in Iban Traditional Religion

Cross-cultural studies of religion have consistently treated ancestor worship as a specific, narrow practice that is found in many traditional societies but far from all of them. In contrast, Steadman, Palmer, and Tilley (1996) have proclaimed that ancestor worship was a universal behavior in traditional, small-scale societies and that the practice is found in societies where it was previously thought to be absent. In this paper, we describe one such society, the Iban, whose religious practices are often claimed to not include the worship of ancestors, despite ancestors being central to their religion. We demonstrate that many of the gods and spirits of the Iban supernatural pantheon are most clearly understood as ancestors. Furthermore, we argue that the Iban example may not be an outlier, and that ancestor worship may be prevalent in many more societies than previously claimed. We end by describing the weaknesses of some of the common reasons used to downplay the ubiquity of the practice in previous ethnographic treatments and cross-cultural studies.

Relating to the Whole Community in Akan and East Asian Ancestral Traditions

Ancestors play crucial roles in the cultural consciousness of diverse traditions, many maintaining ritualistic practices related to commemorating the dead. Ancestor commemoration reinforces cohesion within traditional as well as modern societies, directing a group’s focus to past accomplishments of its cultural heritage whilst providing a unifying narrative of the values that bring and hold a community together. The West African Akan tradition values those who honor their ancestors and, by leading a moral life, seek to become ancestors themselves: persons whose lives enjoy standing in the community beyond their own death. This short paper explores ideas about the role of ancestors as (symbolic) constituents of enduring moral communities by comparing traditional Akan belief to traditional East Asian conceptions of ancestors. The aim is to consider the metaphysical, social, and moral dimensions related to ancestors, highlighting continuity and communal concerns.

LAKU IN ATTAINING PERFECTION OF LIFE ACCORDING TO JAVANESE MANUSCRIPT “NGELMI PANGRUCAT”

Abstract: Laku in Attaining Perfection of Life According to Javanese Manuscript “Ngelmi Pangrucat”. Life tranquility is something which is always wanted by everyone. The last purpose of tranquil life achievement is to reach the perfection of life in this world and hereafter. However, not everyone is aware of behaving well to attain the life tranquility. Regarding to this, the role of ancestors’ writings in the form of Javanese manuscript is very important to deepen human understanding in achieving the perfection of life in which the contents contained remain relevant to be used as life guidance. How is laku? This article explains about manners (laku) to reach life perfection based on Javanese manuscript entitled Ngelmi Pangrucat. This study employed descriptive method by using modern philology theory approach. The result of the study is the text on Ngelmi Pangrucat manuscript with latin characters which are correct. Additionally, sentences were found containing the steps of Ngelmi Pangrucat in the form of laku in order to attain the tranquility and perfection of life on earth and hereafter.

The Belief System of Christianity and Tribal Religion in Hukurila’s Ritual

This study aimed to describe the belief system between Christianity and Tribal religion in Hukurila’s ritual. The data descriptions were based on the Washing Country as a physical act of traditional rituals and combined with their beliefs as Christians. The object of this research was the Hukurila community, South Leitimur District, Ambon City, especially in the practice of washing the country ritual. This study used hermeneutic analysis as the text result was positioned as an ontology fact. Furthermore, the text was an ontological fact by objectifying its structure to look at forms in community values. The results showed that the Washing country not only taught about the role of ancestors in the history of the children of the Hukurila country but also revealed critical reasoning that highlighted the role of humans in nature conservation. The Washing Country promoted environmental preservation as a part of social piety.

Initiation into the mysteries of Augustus: the Liberalia and Forum Augustum

The paper uses the theoretical framework of cultural memory to explain Augustus’ construction of Forum Augustum. The construction of Forum Augustum was a central project in the princeps; programme as it presented his own version of Roman history giving a special place to his family and generals closest to this vision of the ideal Roman. At the same time, the evidence for Augustus’ religious reforms shows a decisive ruler who was very involved with the intricacies of Roman religion. Based on a passage of Dio we are able to see that Augustus also initiated a change in the festival of the Liberalia so that boys transitioning into manhood are inspired to great deeds by seeing his version of the great men of the past in his new Forum. The place had not only a commemorative function but also a prospective one as young men were expected to imitate the glory of their ancestors and hence a special role was given to Gaius and Lucius as principes iuventutis. Finally, the role of ancestors in initiation rites finds parallels in male initiations worldwide and shows Augustus’ clever manipulation of Roman tradition to his own personal ends.

‘These people who dig roots in the forests cannot treat HIV’: Women and men in Durban, South Africa, reflect on traditional medicine and antiretroviral drugs

ABSTRACTRelatively few empirical investigations of the intersection of HIV biomedical and traditional medicine have been undertaken. As part of preliminary work for a longitudinal study investigating health-seeking behaviours among newly diagnosed individuals living with HIV, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 urban South Africans presenting for HIV testing or newly enrolled in HIV care; here we explored participants’ views on African traditional medicine (TM) and biomedical HIV treatment. Notions of acceptance/non-acceptance were more nuanced than dichotomous, with participants expressing views ranging from favourable to reproachful, often referring to stories they had heard from others rather than drawing from personal experience. Respect for antiretrovirals and biomedicine was evident, but indigenous beliefs, particularly about the role of ancestors in healing, were common. Many endorsed the use of herbal remedies, which often were not considered TM. Given people’s diverse health-seeking practices, biomedical providers need to recognise the cultural importance of traditional health practices and routinely initiate respectful discussion of TM use with patients.

Promoting Ancestry as Ecodomy in Romanian Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Role of Ancestors in Contemporary Romanian Orthodox Rhetoric

For the most part, contemporary Romanian Orthodox spirituality is still heavily based on a rhetoric which builds on the notion of ancestry with the intention not only to provide Romanians with a safe comfort zone, but also to secure its privileges and influence over most of today’s Romanian society. In attempting to go back in history to demonstrate that the ancestry of Romanians is sufficient proof for their full and unconditional adherence to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in its local Romanian version as the Romanian Orthodox Church, most of today’s representatives of Romanian Orthodox spirituality—notably Dumitru Stăniloae, Ioan Rămureanu, and Teoctist, the former Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church—focused on a rhetoric that, on the one hand, takes Romanians back to their Thracian, Dacian, and Roman ancestors, while on the other hand, seeks to inculcate the idea that an unflinching adherence to this specific ancestry, which is described as Christian by nature and birth, must be kept at all costs. Thus, this specific kind of rhetoric attempts to build a protective fence around Romanians, who are taught that they need to preserve their Eastern Orthodox Christianity and their allegiance to the Romanian Orthodox Church mostly because, since their ancestors were Christians, they are in fact born Christian. The process of building this protective wall around Romanians is described by means of the term ‘ecodomy’ and, unlike its general use in contemporary debates as focusing on positive aspects, the particular focus of the Romanian Orthodox Church on ecodomy based on the idea of ancestry is going to be revealed mostly through a chain of negative connotations. Thus, the contemporary rhetoric of the Romanian Orthodox Church based on the notion of ancestry as ecodomy—one may even call it negative ecodomy—is going to be explained in connection with three fundamental aspects, namely church, nation, and culture, all intended to preserve not only the influence of the Romanian Orthodox Church in nowadays Romanian society, but also a set of privileges in its relationship with the state.

Promoting Ancestry as Ecodomy in Indigenous African Religions

This paper is an attempt to offer a concrete contribution to the study of indigenous African religions and in particular to the support of creating a set of traditions from whose perspective one could engage in the study of indigenous African religions as well as of African spirituality in general. Bearing in mind that one of the most prominent features of these studies is the constant effort to decolonize the field in order to move beyond former imperialistic interpretations into specifically africanized postcolonial hermeneutics based on the recognition of distinctive African identities, I suggest a methodology which focuses not so much on the decolonization or post-colonization of the study of indigenous African religions, but rather on a unifying theme which has an evident constructive potential. Combining two notions, ancestry and ecodomy, this methodology seeks to support the development of current efforts to build African traditions in the study of indigenous African religions by pointing not only to an aspect which is common to most African religions, namely ancestry and the role of ancestors, but also to the need for a more positive tendency which is able to instill a constructive trend [as different from if not opposite to deor post-colonization hermeneutics] in the study of indigenous African religions by using the notion of ecodomy. Defined in terms of a constructive process, ecodomy seeks to provide families and communities with a common element, that of ancestors, which is not only specific to African spirituality but also potentially capable of strengthening and improving the life of African people. Thus, this methodology based on working with ancestry as economy is applied to four distinct scholars and their specific approaches to indigenous African religions: John S. Mbiti, who believes that ancestors have mainly social, not religious roles; Issiaka P. Laleye, for whom ancestors make a connection between the social and religious aspects of life; Jacob K. Olupona, who restricts ancestors to religion, and Israel Kamudzandu, in whose philosophy ancestors can provide African societies with the possibility of moving beyond their indigenous religions into accepting other religious beliefs, such as those provided by Christianity.

The Place of Healers-Diviners (Ombiasa) in Betsileo Medical Pluralism

This article is concerned with the training and curing practices of Betsileo ombiasa (‘healers-diviners’), and their relationships with biomedical practitioners and Christian healers, in particular Fifohazana exorcists. We first give an account of what we think is characteristic in the process of becoming an ombiasa, highlighting in particular the role of ancestors and other spiritual entities. We then give a brief description of the ombiasa’s healing practices and the kind of remuneration they usually ask for. In the last part of the article we discuss their collaboration and conflicts with other health practitioners, showing how ombiasa are constantly adapting their practice to avoid open confrontations with their competitors, accommodate their patients’ expectations and continue to carve out a niche for themselves within Betsileo medical pluralism.

‘Inhuman voices’: reflections on the place of ancestors in the work of Frantz Fanon

At first sight, Fanon seems entirely to reject the idea that ancestors have a determining effect on individual and collective identities. This is particularly obvious in the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes ancestral voices as ‘inhuman’. However, this article will argue that Fanon's discussion of the ancestral should be read as part of his wider analysis of the colonial world, where the colonizer plays the role of ancestor. In The Wretched of the Earth, which I characterize as a rewriting of Freud's myth of the origin of man, Fanon seeks to avoid reproducing this colonizing ancestor in the new, postcolonial nation. In the process, he offers us a description of the ancestral which is radically different from that of Freud, and of the colonizer. It is therefore on the basis of a reconceptualization, rather than a straightforward rejection, of the figure of the ancestor that Fanon aims to found a new kind of community, and a ‘new man’. This has important and wide ranging implications for how we think about genealogy, origination and creativity, the nation state, psychology, and our relationship to the past and to tradition.

I classici come enciclopedia culturale e come antenati: l’insegnamento del latino nella scuola superiore italiana

Italy is one of the last European countries in which Latin is still regularly taught in the majority of high schools. Should this tradition be interrupted, as some people wish, or should it be maintained? If we make the first choice, we have to expect a brisk fracture in the cultural encyclopedia shared by the country; if we make the second one, a change in the pedagogical and didactical teaching patterns of the discipline will be needed. The moment has come in which the ancients would play not only the role of ancestors, as they have so far, but also the role of others.

Winning Back Our Good Luck: Bridewealth in Nowadays Maputo

Previously translated as “bridewealth”, south Mozambican lobolo is often reduced to an archaic economical transaction that vilifies the woman and regulates descent. A case recently observed in Maputo rather presents it as a “traditional” toll which allowed the couple to overpass problems arising from innovative conjugality, by manipulating ancestors’ spirits’ role. Departing from this case and from the historical and synchronic variation of lobolo, it emerges as a polysemic institution, adaptable to very different and changeable needs. It’s also seen as a dignification source to individuals and their families, presenting unique abilities of descent legitimation and control over uncertainty – factors that reinforce its continuity, regardless of what will happen to the hegemonic gender ideology. By the end of 2003, a Maputo friend invited me to take part in his lobolo, as one of his family representatives. I mean in his marriage, because lobolo is the name given in Mozambique and South Africa to that institution which anthropology usually calls “bridewealth”. Of course, I considered this participation an honour and a rare opportunity to understand a little better the local conceptions and ways of living; but, since my studies use to focus in the domestication of aleatory and danger, I assumed that the occasion wouldn’t have much to do with my research interests. I was wrong. As for most of us, I got the habitude to think about bridewealth just as an abstract matter of descent regulation, “wives exchange” and gendered power relations. Even if, by that time, I already heard that ancestors are the ultimate lobolo receivers and notaries, and even if I knew that Mozambican women organizations discovered, by the middle 1980s, that the State struggle against “traditional marriages” was weakening the wives’ actual rights (Arnfred, 2001), I wasn’t indeed aware of the real importance those matters represent to real people. However, I was lucky enough to take part in a lobolo crossed by several visible tensions and opposed interests, and to discuss with the involved people their motivations and the reasons for the details which called for my attention. The ceremony become thus, to me, an enlightening example of what Max Gluckman (1987 [1958]) called a “social situation”. Both the detailed description of that lobolo and its complete analyse as a social situation are available elsewhere (Granjo, 2005). Here, I would rather like to present you the various meanings, aims and instrumental potentialities assumed by this institution, together with the motivations of the people involved in the case I took part. By doing so and by taking into account relevant historical changes and variations of lobolo, I’ll try to show that this is a polysemic and very plastic institution, which can easily change its form according to people’s needs and social constraints, and is able to answer to very different motivations and 1 I will use here, instead, the less ideological local expression and the verb “to lobolate”, a straight translation from the current Portuguese spoken in Mozambique. “Lobolo” means, simultaneously, this kind of matrimonial institution, the ceremony itself and the goods that are paid there. 2 Attribution of sense and causality to aleatory and uncertainty that make them be seen as cognoscible, regulated, explainable or even dominated by human beings (Granjo, 2004). Wining back our good luck: bridewealth in nowadays Maputo – Paulo Granjo 2 expectations. By considering an issue that is often underestimated – the role of ancestors’ spirits on lobolo and daily life – we’ll see that it is even able to provide solutions to new problems and worries, arisen from innovative and “modern” ways of living the conjugality. Lobolo will therefore appear as an institution that supplies unique answers to specific needs of urban population from both genders (besides those also given by other kinds of marriage), and isn’t jeopardised by “modernisation” processes and values.

Continuity and change in the Gwembe Tonga family and their relevance to demography's nucleation thesis

AbstractRecent criticisms of demographic theory and methodology have pointed,inter alia, to the need to take on board advances in cognate disciplines. This case study of the Gwembe Valley Tonga of Zambia highlights the important methodological contribution that social anthropology can make to the sub-discipline of family demography. It provides evidence of the empirical invalidity of the ‘family nucleation’ paradigm, which holds that a shift towards conjugal marriage and nuclear household residence patterns is an inevitable consequence of globalisation, and a precursor of the social and economic changes necessary for the fertility transition. According to nucleation theory, evidence of increased conjugality will be reflected in the reduced symbolic importance of the lineage and ancestors; greater marriage stability; the demise of polygyny and widow inheritance; reduction in the size and significance of bridewealth payments; increasing age of first marriage for women, and decreasing age differentials between spouses. The case study therefore focuses on recent changes in the matrilineal kinship system, notably the emergence of localised lineages, and the extent to which these changes reflect family nucleation (largely but not exclusively in terms of increased conjugality). By analysing household structure and marital residence patterns, including the role played by the husband/father in family affairs, nuptiality (notably bridewealth, divorce and polygyny), inheritance and the role of ancestors, the case study demonstrates that changes in the family and kinship structure in response to local social and economic transformation can be equated not with nuclearisation but with the emergence of a modified form of family and kinship, quite distinct in structure and meaning from the nuclear family.

The Universality of Ancestor Worship

A professional malpractice of anthropologists to exaggerate exotic character of other (Bloch 1977:285) has been detrimental to study of cultural universals. This highly regrettable because universals not only exist but are important to any broad conception of task of anthropology (Brown 1991:5). Further, in anthropological study of indigenous religions, a focus on differences has caused an apparently universal aspect of religion to be overlooked: claim that ancestors influence living and/or are influenced by living. We argue here that such claims of communication between dead and their descendants are universal and may be key to understanding universality of belief. Claims of interaction with living have not been recognized as universal because anthropologists' stress on differences has caused them to be overly narrow in their definitions of both ancestor and Hence, they have tended to overlook fundamental similarities between religions that have worship and those that are said to lack it. This division theoretically significant because even when worship found in a majority of cultures used in a study (e.g., Swanson 1964), its nonuniversality requires it to be explained in terms of unique aspects of certain cultures (see Swanson 1964:97-108). If worship were recognized as a universal aspect of religion, its explanation would offer a deeper understanding of behavior. One reason for inability to recognize universality of worship that term often reserved for those societies where dead are explicitly called by a term that translated as ancestor, thus excluding societies whose practices concern ghosts, shades, souls, totemic plants and animals, or merely dead. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [a] major problem with Spencer's argument [that worship was first religion] that many societies at hunting-and-gathering level do not practice worship. The Arunta of Australia, for example, worshiped their totemic plants and animals, but not their human ancestors. Distinguishing between ancestors and totemic plants and animals questionable since totems are clearly ancestral in that they identify a person with a line of ancestors (e.g., one's father, father's father, etc.). Indeed, Harris (1989:405) points out that Australian form of totemism is a form of diffuse worship . . . [because by] taking name of an animal such as kangaroo ... people express a communal obligation to founders of their kinship group. The role of ancestors also obscured in many descriptions of societies whose religions are based on more general, and hence, supposedly nonancestral, spirits or gods. An example of this hunters and gatherers living in Kalahari who are often referred to as !Kung. Although Lee (1984:103) does state that !Kung's religious universe inhabited by a high god, a lesser god, and a host of minor animal spirits, he also states that the main actors in [the !Kung's religious] world are //gangwasi, ghosts of recently deceased !Kung (Lee 1984:103). The failure to see connection between ancestors and spirits or gods often causes societies to be excluded from worship category. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [w]hen living dead are forgotten in memory of their group and dropped from genealogy as a result of passing of time (four or five generations), they are believed to be transformed into nameless spirits, non-ancestors. . . . Similarly, Tonkinson (1978:52) claims that Mardu lack worship because they cannot remember names of specific distant ancestors, despite fact that their rituals focus on Ancestral Beings. …