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Borrowings go Round and Round. Transcending Borders and Religious Flexibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nathalie Luca
Nathalie Luca*
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris
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Extract

‘Siberian hunters have never been able to get used to our insistence on pressing our God on everyone else, nor to our way of abasing ourselves before him when they see us as masters of all - conquering the bear and the elk with our rifles, using our knowledge and power to conquer the indigenous people, who have always been determined to hang on to what little they have. How crazy the shaman would be to put his penny in the collection during mass without knowing whether it would be effective or not, whether the ritual would “work” this time - since only the result, here and now, matters to him. Why thank the priest and his God, why let them prosper, when in the end the famine did take hold and the sick did die?’

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 47 , Issue 187 , September 1999 , pp. 3 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 1999

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References

Notes

1. Robert N. Hamayon, L'éternel retour du chacun pour soi chamanique. Fable, pp. 82-91. We would particularly like to thank Roberte Hamon for the ideas she contributed to this issue and to place on record that the first part of the title for this introduction was suggested by her.

2. Ibid., p. 84. We should stress here that the expression ‘each has his own gods' should be understood as meaning ‘each has his own spirits'. Indeed there is no transcendent god with unlimited power but rather powerless spirits equal to human beings. This lack of power is the basic reason for the absence of political centralization in shamanic societies.

3. Daniel Dubuisson (1998), L'Occident et la religion. Mythes, science et idéologie (Paris, Editions Complexe).

4. This topic is expanded in my book (1997), Le salut par le foot. Une ethnologue chez le messie coréen (Geneva, Labor et Fides).

5. In this connection see the volume edited by Noriyoshi Tamaru and David Reid (1996), Religion in Japanese Culture. Where Living Traditions meet a Changing World (Tokyo, Kodansha International).

6. Jean-Pierre Bastian (1997), La mutación religiosa de América Latina: para una sociología del cambio social en la modernidad periférica (Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura Económica).

7. Christian Parker (1996), Popular Religion and Modernization in Latin America. A Different Logic (New York, Maryknoll, Orbis Books).

8. Roberte N. Hamayon, op. cit., p. 84.

9. As noted by Danièle Hervieu-Léger, cited in Nathalie Luca and Frédéric Lenoir (1998), Sectes, mensonges et idéaux (Paris, Bayard), p. 94.

10. Patrick Michel (1994), Politique et religion: la grande mutation (Paris, Albin Michel), p. 154.

11. See the author's article on ‘Pentecostalisms in Korea' (1999) in Les Archives de Sciences sociales des Religions, no. 105, January-March.