What can the study of religious specialists tell us about power relationships in a society?

Résumé du document

Priests, Prophets, Shamans, and Diviners, seers, mediums, witches, sorcerers and magicians: what can be the links between all those social functions? First of all, they are all religious specialists in their respective cultural and social context. All of them have a special rank, status and function, that gives them power upon the other members of their society. To be more precise, we can offer a simple definition of what is a religious specialist, thanks to Anthropological Studies. In his study of religious specialists, Victor W.Turner tries to give us a definition of this phenomenon in order to show that all the religious specialists share their main characteristics with respect to society. One of those characteristics is the ability to "manipulate the supernatural to their own or society's ends" and (more important) the fact that they all have a culturally defined status coming from a social recognition. His simplest and more useful definition of what is a religious specialist would be: "one who devotes himself to a particular branch of religion or, viewed organizationally, of a religious system". Thanks to this definition, we see how the specific status of the religious specialist is connected with the society he lives in.

Extraits

[...] That's why we can find some basic and regular sources of power in every society. The simplest example would be the fact that a society always needs an entity that would regulate it, need an instance to take decisions and to organize the actions of all the members. That's why in every anthropological study there will be an independent part of the society that would dedicate his time to that role (chief, king, prophet, warlord . However, each society will organize differently this necessary instance of power. [...]

[...] But those elements are at the end judged by the society. Social relationships come from social interactions: you have power if the other members of the society give you the recognition to fit in this social category. I would distinguish two steps at least in the process of the establishment of power relationships. First you obtain a social status during your socialisation ( or integration in the society) . This status can give you power or domination as it is the case with religious specialists. [...]

[...] However, can we say that power relationship is only constituted by context specific elements? We have seen that religious specialists exist because they have a social function, so can't we find essential underlying functions existing in all societies? Obviously those underlying functions exist and we will try to define them as universal origins that can explain partly the power relationship existing in a given society. To study the different sources of power in a society I think that we can use Michel Crozier's work in L'acteur ET le système. [...]

[...] They correspond to the Weber's approach of ideal type that is to say that they are formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.'' Those artificial'' categories are useful to make some distinctions but they reveal themselves not so efficient to study power relationships. The main difficulty with those categories is the fact that they hide that all those different authorities can be mix and are often interconnected. One of the best example of that interconnection would be the distinctions done by Victor Turner first between the priest and the shaman and then between the Shaman and the Medium. [...]

[...] Why and to what the status of religious specialists extends is culturally defined? But what will be the core of our study is the following question: how specific individuals succeed or are chosen to occupy this function and to have this power? Then, we have seen that the religious specialists have a specific power upon the other individuals of the society. How can we define this power, where does it come from, how is it justified? Finally , by studying the phenomenon of religious specialists I will try to illustrate the power relationships is societies , how and why do some individuals are able to have power to take decisions for others and to obtain some things from the others. [...]