The Universality of Ancestor Worship

Abstract

A professional malpractice of anthropologists to exaggerate exotic character of other (Bloch 1977:285) has been detrimental to study of cultural universals. This highly regrettable because universals not only exist but are important to any broad conception of task of anthropology (Brown 1991:5). Further, in anthropological study of indigenous religions, a focus on differences has caused an apparently universal aspect of religion to be overlooked: claim that ancestors influence living and/or are influenced by living. We argue here that such claims of communication between dead and their descendants are universal and may be key to understanding universality of belief. Claims of interaction with living have not been recognized as universal because anthropologists' stress on differences has caused them to be overly narrow in their definitions of both ancestor and Hence, they have tended to overlook fundamental similarities between religions that have worship and those that are said to lack it. This division theoretically significant because even when worship found in a majority of cultures used in a study (e.g., Swanson 1964), its nonuniversality requires it to be explained in terms of unique aspects of certain cultures (see Swanson 1964:97-108). If worship were recognized as a universal aspect of religion, its explanation would offer a deeper understanding of behavior. One reason for inability to recognize universality of worship that term often reserved for those societies where dead are explicitly called by a term that translated as ancestor, thus excluding societies whose practices concern ghosts, shades, souls, totemic plants and animals, or merely dead. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [a] major problem with Spencer's argument [that worship was first religion] that many societies at hunting-and-gathering level do not practice worship. The Arunta of Australia, for example, worshiped their totemic plants and animals, but not their human ancestors. Distinguishing between ancestors and totemic plants and animals questionable since totems are clearly ancestral in that they identify a person with a line of ancestors (e.g., one's father, father's father, etc.). Indeed, Harris (1989:405) points out that Australian form of totemism is a form of diffuse worship . . . [because by] taking name of an animal such as kangaroo ... people express a communal obligation to founders of their kinship group. The role of ancestors also obscured in many descriptions of societies whose religions are based on more general, and hence, supposedly nonancestral, spirits or gods. An example of this hunters and gatherers living in Kalahari who are often referred to as !Kung. Although Lee (1984:103) does state that !Kung's religious universe inhabited by a high god, a lesser god, and a host of minor animal spirits, he also states that the main actors in [the !Kung's religious] world are //gangwasi, ghosts of recently deceased !Kung (Lee 1984:103). The failure to see connection between ancestors and spirits or gods often causes societies to be excluded from worship category. For example, Lehmann and Myers (1993:284) state that [w]hen living dead are forgotten in memory of their group and dropped from genealogy as a result of passing of time (four or five generations), they are believed to be transformed into nameless spirits, non-ancestors. . . . Similarly, Tonkinson (1978:52) claims that Mardu lack worship because they cannot remember names of specific distant ancestors, despite fact that their rituals focus on Ancestral Beings. …

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