Browsing by Author "Louhenkilpi, Antti"

In this thesis, I take a close look at sasna, or religion, in the Praych Doung village at Kandal Province of Central Cambodia. More specifically, I analyze the religious behaviour and religious rituals of Praych Doung villagers who were ethnic Khmers, both men and women, with rather poor and uneducated backgrounds aged approximately from 25 to 45 years. I conducted a six-month-long field trip at Praych Doung village for this purpose. My aim is to illustrate what their religious behaviour is in practice, and to answer the question of why they do need/have religion, religious behaviour, and religious ritual, to name a few. I also examine the nature of belief for the Praych Doung villagers, as I seek to understand how and in what ways they believe in spirits and in other religious or supernatural forces and entities. For instance, I seek answers to the question of can the Praych Doung villagers´ belief in spirits be compared to belief in god in Western societies? The focus, then, is rather general, perhaps, but my point is to narrow the focus on one village at rural Cambodia and to report as well as I can about sasna and its intricacies there. The 'target people' of this study thus serves as the specific (or narrow) aspect of the focus, and I try to analyse the whole of religiosity of that people from their own perspective, which is to say from the local perspective, as I witnessed and experienced it. In Chapter 2, I pay attention to psychological functionalism of religion along the lines of both Bronislaw Malinowski (1925) and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1979), who talked about religion providing for psychological needs and religion serving as an explanatory framework for workings of nature respectively. I will relate to these theories in Chapter 2 in analysing the Praych Doung villagers through a notion of 'causal explanation' of religion. In Chapter 3, I discuss the social functions of religion in the Praych Doung village, mostly focusing on moral matters, as I argue it is a shared morality and shared comprehension of religion that sustains the Praych Doung villagers´ social life and that creates social viability. I focus on this through Joel Kupperman´s analytical division of religious ethics into religious morals and religious supramorals. According to Kupperman, religious morals are moral codes and norms that incite feelings of guilt when transgressed (examples being not to kill or not to to steal), while the religious supramorals incite feelings of regret or inadequacy (examples being not to neglect the elderly or not to withdraw from joining shared rituals). If religioun sustains any kind of social viability, it is sustained within the realm of religious supramorals and not within the realm of religious morals, because it is within the realm of religious supramorals that the Praych Doung community is more fragile and suspect to change. It is not expected that the Praych Doung villagers would suddenly start killing each other (which would obviously alter the social equilibrium), but it is highly possible that the young start neglecting the elderly (because of a difference in their religious preoccupations) or the economically successful get less interested in the economically unsuccessful when it comes to shared rituals. I analyze the individual aspects first and the social aspects after in a bid to point out that, at least in Praych Doung village for the villagers I interviewed and encountered, religious life fundamentally reflects individual matters, problems, and life crises, and that the social functions of religion are an extension of these individual matters as they relate to other people´s individual matters in the moral context. Social cohesion is most fundamentally a balance of individuals´ relations and a shared understanding of each others´ – both religious and unreligious – actions. In Chapter 4, the last chapter, I analyze Maurice Bloch´s ideas on different contexts within people´s lives in which they act and orient themselves in different ways according to different meanings and conceptions that are embedded in the different contexts. I do this in the last chapter because, in my opinion, it serves as a decent background for everything discussed in earlier chapters. Are the ideas and arguments made in earlier chapters merely plausible in the religious context but not in the practical every day context? If it was so, it would surely change the meaning of the whole thesis, as it would render sasna less significant for the Praych Doung villagers. Is sasna merely a habitual ritual which is forgotten when the morning comes, the roosters crow, and one heads to the rice fields? Or is sasna somehow brought to the rice fields as well, making it an all-encompassing set of ideas for the Praych Doung villagers, affecting every aspect of Praych Doung humanity? Bloch namely discusses two important contexts, the religious context and the practical every day context, arguing that people might perceive the world in different ways within the different contexts. He further argues that an anthropologist would be mistaken to argue that a certain perspective in any given cultural group that the anthropologist observes is the culturally-specific perspective of that given group, because that perspective might merely belong to one context but not to another. For instance, it could be true that the Praych Doung villagers believe in spirits in the religious context but at the same time know that there are no spirits within the practical everyday context. If it were so it would reductionism to state that the Praych Doung villagers believe in spirits. In Chapter 4, I argue that the Praych Doung villagers do not have such abstract and analytical divisions of reality or perception into different conseptual contexts, and that sasna thus permeates the whole of the Praych Doung ethos. One of the main findings of the thesis, then, is the fact that the Prayh Doung villagers are deeply invested in sasna on the individual level, with sasna providing explanation for several life-crisis events and individual problems that the Praych Doung villagers experience in their lives. On the social level, religion offers them merely a kind of understanding on moral terms that other people are invested in religious matters, which sustains the community in the sense that there are no contradictory social ideas or understandings that could create animosities. The Praych Doung villagers are living in rather poor and uneducated conditions, which means their lives are not easy and comfortable and thus they have a need of causal explanation for the problems that they face in their every day lives. This is simply because they need to believe to be in control of their own lives, so that they could at least try to engage in protective measures when it comes to such things as diseases or misfortune. This gives the Praych Doung villagers feelings of hope and consolation. Also, the Prayh Doung villagers have never been familiar with Western kind of philosophical matters such as ontology and the nature of spirits (which they believe in). They do not have the same kind of analytical and abstract division of their lives into different categories, or contexts, than what Maurice Bloch suggested in the case of Indonesians. The question for the Praych Doung villagers is not so much about whether or not the spirits exist, or in which contexts. The spirits for them are more like a conceptual methodology of how they perceive themselves living in the world and controlling their own lives in it. Thus the spirits, for the Praych Doung villagers, do not either exist or not exist but, instead, they are either used or not used as conceptual tools.