The Faith Instinct (34 page)

The principal crop is rice, but the paddies also produce eels, frogs, fish and ducks. The farmers’ main problem is pest control, which is achieved by flooding fields, as well as burning them after harvest and by letting the ducks graze for insects. The flooding, to be effective, must take place over a very large area or the pests will simply migrate from one farmer’s fields to another’s.

To achieve large-scale flooding, and to manage the water supply, the farmers are organized into associations, called
subaks,
membership of which includes all who depend on a specific irrigation canal.

The basic unit of the system is the weir that supplies water to several canals. Each weir has a shrine beside it and, usually several kilometers below, a temple to which belong members of all the
subaks
served by the weir. These are large organizations. The Ulun Swi temple in central Bali has seven
subaks
with 1,775 members who farm 558 hectares of rice fields.

It is at the temples that the farmers meet and decide the irrigation and planting schedule for the area served by their weir. The
subaks
agree to stagger their planting times and to flood the fields where pests are worst.

The local temples are all subject to the Temple of the Crater L
ake, the lake at the heart of Mount Batur in central Bali. The temple has 24 priests
, chosen in childhood by a virgin priestess to be lifelong serv
ants of the goddess of the lake, Dewi Danu. The high priest, kn
own as the Jero Gde, was chosen by the priestess in a trance when he was a boy of 11
. He wears his hair long and is always dressed in white, the color of purity. By day
, he offers sacrifices to the goddess of the Crater Lake on behalf of all the
subaks
under his sway, and by night he may rece
ive guidance from the goddess in his dreams, Lansing reports.
²⁷¹

It is the Jero Gde who decides water allocations over his vast domain in the name of the goddess. He also oversees disputes between temples and their member
subaks.
Even though he directly controls only central Bali, he is in effect the high priest of the water cult for the whole island, since all irrigation systems are believed to be connected to his lake.

The farmers acknowledge the Jero Gde’s sway because they are linked to him through a hierarchy of shrines and an elaborate set of rituals. In each field a farmer owns, at the corner where it receives its irrigation water stands a shrine to the rice goddess. Holy water from the Crater Lake is used in ceremonies at local water temples. Frequent festivals and sacrifices knit the farmers together in a shared system of religious belief. It is from this that the Jero Gde derives his authority to manage the island’s vital water resources.

The practical domain of the goddess of the Crater Lake extends across political boundaries. Her high priest regained at least informal control over the water distribution system after the Green Revolution’s agricultural engineers came to understand the superior efficiency of the goddess’s system.

A striking instance of how religion can be applied to managing resources comes from the Maring, who live by farming in the Bismarck mountain range in east-central New Guinea. Their lives are governed by a multiyear religious cycle that serves in essence to readjust the human population, and that of its domestic pigs, to the carrying capacity of the land.

The Maring plant temporary gardens in forest clearings where they grow sweet potatoes and other crops. The sexes live somewhat separately: men reside in communal houses and the women live in individual houses with their children and pigs. Each pig has an individual stall entered from outside the house but can poke its nose through the inside to be petted or fed scraps.

The pigs do not breed very fast because all males are castrated as piglets, leaving the females to be inseminated by wild pigs. These are hard for them to encounter because the Maring live at a high altitude, above the usual range of wild pigs. But though the domestic herd grows slowly, after a while the pigs become very burdensome. A woman can grow enough sweet potatoes to feed only 5 or 6 animals and the pigs have to forage for the rest of their food. They soon take to raiding neighbors’ gardens, causing fights between their and the gardens’ owners. The women complain bitterly to their husbands. Tension in the community rises, and the men eventually agree it is time for a
kaiko.

The
kaiko
is a series of dances that brings the Maring’s ritual cycle to its culmination. At various points during the
kaiko,
most of the pigs are sacrificed to the red spirits that inhabit the upper forest, and war is declared on neighbors to avenge those whom the neighbors killed in the last cycle.

These wars can evolve into deadly affairs. The Maring number about 7,000 people, divided into some 20 groups. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport studied the Tsembaga, one of these groups, which numbered about 200 people. In one battle the Tsembaga lost 18 people, 6 of whom were women or children.

The pigs fared even worse. Only 75 survived out of a herd of 169. The rest were sacrificed to the red spirits, with the Tsembaga consuming a third of the meat and the rest being given to allies who came to fight on their side.

After a series of battles, the warring parties declare a truce, which is marked by the ritual planting of a special species of tree known as a tanket, and the retirement of the sacred fighting stones which lie in a special hut during times of truce but are hung high on a pole when a battle has been agreed on.

The philosopher Giambattista Vico may have erred in saying that all history proceeds in a cycle, but his thesis applies perfectly to Maring history. After the fighting stones are retired and the tanket tree planted, the Maring cannot look forward to permanent peace, only to the renewal of the cycle. The populations of people and pigs start to grow again and after a period, which averages 10 years but ranges from 5 to 25 years, the carrying capacity of the land is eventually pushed toward its limit.

Once a surplus of pigs and people has built up, however, the Maring can afford to go to war again. They are now able to repay in pig sacrifices the debts they incur both to allies who come to their aid in the ax battle, and to the red spirits of the upper forest. The red spirits are the souls of those who die in battle.

Talk begins of renewing warfare. The Maring unwrap fighting sto
nes from the fight ash house. The fighting stones come in pairs
, which the Maring designate as male and female. Found occasion
ally in the ground of the Maring people’s territory, these sacred relics are in fa
ct the mortars and pestles of a long-vanished culture. They have a different signifi
cance for the Maring: hanging them on the hut’s pole is in effect a declaratio
n of war. “By hanging up the fighting stones, a group places itself in a posit
ion of debt to both allies and ancestors for their assistance i
n the forthcoming ax fight,” Rappaport writes.
²⁷²

The tanket tree is uprooted, preferably by the man who planted it many years before. The men then prepare for a
kaiko
dance by decking themselves out in plumes and shells. The dance serves several purposes. The people from other groups who come and dance at the
kaiko
thereby pledge to be allies in the impending round of ax warfare. Since the Maring have no leaders, the turnout on the dance floor is the best way the hosts have of assessing their likely numerical strength in battle. All the men of the district are on display on the dancing floor and the wom
en, who take the initiative in courtship, can judge whom they fancy. And the assembly of so many groups is also an occasion for trading.

Before battle the men spend much of the night chanting while their shamans, enjoying a tobacco high, make contact with a powerful supernatural being known as the smoke woman. They ask her which of the enemy’s men are likely to be most easily killed, and who of their own members are vulnerable. Some of the men may carry magical fight packages containing the skin or nail clippings of enemy men they hope to kill; these objects will have been sent by people in the enemy village who would like to see the owners eliminated, perhaps because they have bad personalities, or are too successful as gardeners.

The Maring fight with axes, bows and arrows, and enormous shields. They have set-piece battles, on a specially prepared fighting ground, and line up in formations several ranks deep. The opponents stand toe to toe, with no tactical maneuvering being attempted. These ritual combats may not seem too serious. Occasionally a man is felled by an arrow, and opponents rush to finish him off with axes. Casualties seem light, even after battle has been continued every day for weeks.

But this stability is deceiving. Each side depends on its allies turning up every day in order to maintain its battlefield strength. Sooner or later, the allies on one side or the other get tired of the fight and fail to show. As soon as the larger group realizes it has a numerical advantage, it charges, and the side that is routed will suffer many casualties.

The Tsembaga, Rappaport reports, do not necessarily understand the function of their ritual cycle. Presumably they see it as an essential interaction between the living and the dead. But in the anthropologist’s analysis, the ritual cycle accomplishes many essential ecological tasks. It brings back into balance the relationship between pigs, people and their gardens. It allows fields to revert to fallow. It helps conserve wild fauna, many of which are placed under taboo during the cycle and cannot be eaten. It redistributes land among the various groups. And although the cycle culminates in a large battle, it reduces the overall severity of fighting by restricting it to a single period of a long cycle.
²⁷³

If the Maring people do not understand the ecological implications of their religion, as Rappaport says is the case, they presumably did not design it for its observed functions. The design could have emerged because groups with religions that failed to bring their pig population and their own numbers into balance with the environment eventually perished, while the Maring, with a more effective ritual, survived.

The religion of the Maring may seem a long way from that of modern societies. But it is very relevant to understanding the role that religion played for thousands of years until the modern era. It is evident from the case of the Maring, and indeed of many other primitive societies, that the role of religion was pervasive. Almost every aspect of Maring life is governed by ritual, from which foods are taboo to when to go to war.

Durkheim argued that religion separates the sacred from the profane but it is only modern societies that may make such a distinction. Elsewhere Durkheim called religion “a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members,” and this is the description that seems more appropriate to the Maring.

Their ritual practices may seem strange and arbitrary—pigs to be sacrificed to the red spirits of the upper forest must be cooked in ovens above ground but pigs for another category of spirits, the fertility spirits who dwell in the lower parts of the territory, must be cooked below ground. But the arbitrariness is irrelevant. So too, no doubt, is the existence or otherwise of the red spirits and the fertility spirits. What is relevant is that in performing these rituals participants maintain or strengthen their emotional commitment to each other and to the belief system invoked by the rituals. In so doing, they bind themselves to behave in the ways their religion requires.

With the Maring, as with other primitive societies, religion has become a comprehensive guide to life, presumably because all socially required actions have been integrated into ritual practice over the course of time. The Maring, who have no chiefs or other source of authority, have successfully devised a ritual that keeps everyone marching to the same drum and placing society’s needs above their own interests.

In modern economies, the state now performs, with varying degrees of success, many social functions that used to be the province of the church, such as educating the young, ministering to the sick, and looking after the poor. Pigs are killed without sacrificial ceremony, and according to market demand, not the blood thirst of spirits. For the most part, people no longer look to supernatural explanations for earthquakes, hurricanes or epidemics, since all now have generally more consistent scientific explanations. Religion is no longer a comprehensive guide to daily life. People in modern societies make the distinction noted by Durkheim between the sacred and the secular. Time and place are now predominantly secular, with the sacred often pushed into a tiny corner of both.

Yet religion continues to play many of its former roles, even if less obtrusively than in the past. None is more important than in preparing people for an especially difficult behavior that is vital to survival, the waging of war.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
²⁷⁴

‘Ω παιδες
’Eλληνων ỉτε ‘Eλληνων ỉτε
Go, sons of Hellenes
ἐλευθερoυτε πατριδ’, ἐλευθερoυτε δε
Free your fatherland, free
παιδας, γυναικας, θεων τε πατρῳων ἐδη
Your families, the altars of ancestral gods
θηκας τε πρoγoνων:
And the graves of your fathers
νυν ὑπερ παντων ἀγων
. Now is the fight for everything
The paean sung by Greek warriors as they sailed to meet the Persian fleet at the battle of Salamis in 480 a.c.

 

 

R
eligion evolved as a response to warfare. It enabled groups to commit themselves to a common goal with such intensity that men would unhesitatingly sacrifice their lives in the group’s defense. Because this remarkable behavior has become engraved in human nature, people throughout history have died in defense of their religion and their fellow believers, putting their own and their family’s interests second to what they considered a higher cause.