In the worlds of Islam it started, hesitatingly, in the twentieth century, but yet has not become mainstream ideology. In South and East Asia it started later, but, again, became more general in the late twentieth century. In Europe, and, indeed, the West, this process started, slowly, in the eighteenth century, first among parts of the educated elites, and became more widespread in the second half of the twentieth century. Many feel that in our ‘modern’ world, non-religious, so-called rational or civic arguments-often presented as ingrained and indeed universally human-rightly and logically have replaced (older) belief systems as foundations of culture in general, and of power and politics in particular. 5 Ceremonies and rituals constantly serve to (re-) connect the (collective) emotions needed to create the permanence of a community, a society, or, even, a state by, amongst other things, taking care of and control over collective prosperity. Persons in power or seeking power will always try to use ritual to affect views within society, thus, inevitably, limiting individual autonomy. Ritual, to be understood as the more encompassing concept, is a mechanism, mostly in the form of dramatized cultural performance, that integrates thought-beliefs, ideas-and actions. They both are, I feel, forms of specialized behaviour meant to constitute-rather than only represent-hierarchical relations and thus to create power. 4Īlthough ceremony and ritual are not, strictly speaking, the same, I will use the words rather indiscriminately. ceremonial or ritual acts, often performed by, or with the help of, sacred men, or women, in sacred spaces and centring on sacred objects though it need not necessarily address concrete ‘gods’. It always expresses itself in sacred, i.e. Therefore, religion is neither an eminently individual and, even, solitudinal state-of-mind, nor a solely collective one, but a complex mixture of both. Thus, the ‘sacred’, in its multifarious, mostly visualized forms, becomes the condensation of a prevailing, dominant societal order, showing and prescribing what people are supposed to know, 3 to ‘believe’ as true, as normal. What is sacred is what a society feels it wants to remember, preserve, and transmit, including from one generation to another. ![]() 2 It materializes in sacred places, sacred objects, and sacred acts, and in people who, by their association therewith, also become sacred. 1 But it was, a few years later, Rudolf Otto who defined religion as the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’, the mystery of the forces that a given society feels are beyond its understanding and control. that religion was the prime motor of societal integration, concluding that most if not all representations of society will, on closer study, show the significance of religious culture. ![]() Yet, back in 1912, in his Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Emile Durkheim reiterated the notion he had expressed earlier, viz. ![]() Increasingly, Eurasians have difficulty in understanding (or making others understand) religion(s)-certainly deistic-fideistic religion(s)-as a central element in man’s thinking and acting.
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