Village Religion Research Articles

Ritual frames of mind

Gesch, Patrick F. Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo‐Cult Type Movement in the Sepik against its Background in Traditional Village Religion. St. Augustin, West Germany: Anthropos Institute, 1985. xv + 347 pp. including appendices, references, plates, and index. DM 68.00 paper. MacAloon, John J., ed. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Philadelphia: ISHI Publishers, 1984. viii + 280 pp. including chapter reference notes. $32.50 cloth. Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. xiv + 342 pp. including chapter reference notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 cloth. Volkman, Toby Alice. Feasts of Honor: Ritual of Change in the Toraja Highlands. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985. xi + 216 pp. including appendices, glossary, bibliography, and index. $21.50 paper.

REVIEW

Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo‐Cult Type Movement in the Sepik Against its Background in Traditional Village Religion. By P.F. Gesch St. Augustin: Studia Instituti Anthropos. 1985. Pp. xv + 347 + plates. Price: DM 68.

Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult‐Type Movement in the Sepik Against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion. PATRICK F. GESCH

<i>Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult‐Type Movement in the Sepik Against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion</i>. PATRICK F. GESCH

Book Review: Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion, An Introduction to Melanesian Religions

Book Review: Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion, An Introduction to Melanesian Religions

: Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion . Patrick F. Gesch.

: Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion . Patrick F. Gesch.

Initiative and Initiation. A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion

Initiative and Initiation. A Cargo Cult-Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion

“We are born in each others' houses”: communal and patrilineal ideologies in Druze Village religion and social structure

Druze religion establishes an ideological representation of social reproduction in terms of Druze unity, religious initiation, the differential religious statuses of young men and old men and of men and women, and also in terms of a doctrine of transmigration of souls. This ideology is contradicted by political conflict which has its own ideological representation in patrilineal particularism. The paper considers the competition between these ideologies at the level of the village and in the relationship between the Druze people and the Israeli state. [Middle East religions, ideology and social structure, ethnicity, Druze religion, Palestinians, age and gender roles]

FROM FIELD TO FACTORY: COMMUNITY STRUCTURE AND INDUSTRIALIZATION IN WEST BENGAL

From Field to Factory explores the impact of a modern factory on a Bengal agricultural village and the impact of the village's social and ideological systems on the factory. Morton Klass provides ethnographic data on life and work in both the village and factory and assesses theories of community, caste, village religion, and industrialization. This book will interest sociologists and anthropologists interested in South Asia, community structure, caste, village-level religion, and the anthropology of work. Previously published in 1978 by the Institute for the Study of Human Issues.

Toward a Model of the Hindu Jajmani System

Over the past dozen years, Indian, British and American social anthropologists have studied more than a score of Hindu villages in India. Their reports have been descriptions of caste, leadership, government, factionalism, economic and social change. There have been a few studies also of village religion, family life, kinship, and personality.

Shamanism in South India

F ROM THE VIEWPOINT of the anthropologist all too little of the voluminous writings on Hinduism describes what is often called popular Hinduism as opposed to the epic and philosophic Sanskritic tradition. An intensive survey of the ethnological literature pertaining to Mysore State revealed surprisingly little information about village religion.2 Of the sources that were helpful several discuss village-guarding spirits who protect, or under some circumstances harm, the inhabitants of a locale.3 But the sources that deal with popular religion scarcely even hint at the elaborate shamanistic complex centering around disease that is found in various parts of South India, including the Malnad or hilly region in Shimoga District of Mysore State, where the particular type of shamanism described in this paper exists. The fact that shamanism has been written about so little is surprising considering the reputation the Malnad has as a place filled with spirits. Referring to shamanism, there appears in the 1931 Census of India the following comment: On the smallest provocation they [the inhabitants of the Malnad] resort to the quack who utters manthras and make sacrifices to the chowdi or to other jungle deity.4' There are several possible reasons for this lack of knowledge about shamanism. One is that Western authors writing on the Malnad have generally not had a special interest in folk religion. Many of the best accounts of non-Sanskritic religion in South India come from the writings of missionaries, such a Ziegenbalg, Caldwell, Whitehead, and Dubois, but the Malnad region has been an area into which few missionaries have gone, and about which none have left accounts of native life. I believe that a much stronger reason for the lack of written literature on shamanism is the reticence of informants to volunteer knowledge of the