URBAN ENCOUNTERS WITH GOD: When God Lends a Hand

Abstract

The early socio-cultural anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazier, et al were not directly concerned with religion in as much as they were interested in what they perceived as the ‘cultural other’ whom they encountered in their explorations. They were also obsessed with finding ‘rationalistic’ explanations of the (‘supernatural’) phenomena in the worldview of the so called ‘native’, all of which appeared to them radically different from the monotheistic Christian religion of Victorian British England. The early anthropological gaze in the social sciences was thus almost voyeuristic and offered theoretical commentary in evolutionary terms on practices that were termed animistic and ‘savage’. Later ethnographic interest in what was perceived as ‘primitive religion’ reveals the anthropologists’ intrigue in religious expressions like trance, shamanic visions, and dreams as events of altered states rather than mystical experiences. Much later the term ‘mystical experiences’ comes to be used within the context of the overtly theistic traditions that spoke to ‘personal’ and ‘direct’ religious experiences with God in terms of the normative frameworks of those particular religious traditions themselves.