@JLNobody,
Quote:Let me just say that the superstitious beliefs in all relgions (sic) are wrong
I will go out on a limb and say that things you would consider superstition or “rituals that rest on magical metaphysical beliefs “ would include things like augury (for example scapulimancy), or reading the constellations to predict short and long term rain, or worshiping cows in a nation whose history includes consistent wide-spread famine.
The Naskapi Indians live at carrying capacity in the Artic. They are the inland cousins of the maritime Eskimos. They use all type of augury for hunting, especially scapulimancy. F.G. Speck (1935) described living with the Naskaspi and noted the “superstitions” although he was surprised that hunts that started with divination to plan the hunt were significantly more successful than those hunts where divination was not used. One typical example (there were many over the time he spent there) was that for 19 hunts with divination 12 of 19 were successful. Non-divination initiated hunts stayed near the Gaussian average (9.5/19), or a bit lower. That is a huge difference when living on the edge (life and death of the tribe type of difference). Speck also noted that when things were at their most precarious augury was used the most often, at times exclusively. He noted the apparent inexplicable results found in the data, but simply remarked on the power of belief in human culture.
It was researchers at Princeton (most notably Moore) that took on the tradition of “superstition” as being basically how it is seen by veteran A2K’ers. It was shown from Speck’s observations and commentary, for example, how the Naskapi were probably using scapulimancy (without being aware of it) as a random number generator that kept the hunters from habituating areas and allowing animals to notice this and avoid those areas. Even compared with other animals humans are creatures of habit. Much research of this type has come out of Princeton on ”superstition” and “magic” especially in the late ’50s and ‘60s.
For decades international bodies and countries such as the U.S. had been trying to get the native nomadic pastoralists to change the way in which they raise and keep animal herds in their arid northern Kenya home. Humorous in the extreme when you consider that tribes like the Samburu keep milk!!! cows in a desert environment while here in the U.S. the most lush pastures are used for milk cows.
During the great drought starting in the 1980’s Paul Robinson lived with the Gabbra people while researching his PhD paper on the survival strategies used by the people of northern Kenya, the Gabbra specifically. To make a long story short those tribes who
gave up traditional strategies (largely reading astronomical signs and positioning to predict weather) did very poorly, nearly all ending up in U.N. feeding stations or dying on the way to them. As a side note, it was later determined that the Western strategies of husbandry that some of these tribes took up beforehand only made the disaster much worse. The tribes that
used the traditional “superstitions” did far better. For example, the tribe of Yatani Sorale (following strictly to “superstition”), while certainly suffering the effect of the drought, not only survived but were able to help restock some of the devastated tribes’ herds when the rains finally fell about 3 1/2 years from the beginning of the drought.
As this is getting too long, I’ll be brief here. The “superstitious” concept of the “Scared Cow” is still deeply ingrained with people as the archetype of religious or mythological stupidity -- even unto the deaths of millions. This contemporary or logical “belief?” “superstition?” has persisted although it has been 47 years since Marvin Harris’s seminal paper “The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle” demonstrated that not only was the strategy not stupid it was a long-developing and superb example of a process that solves many different issues at the same time. In addition, no other plausible available strategy considered would do as well, let alone better. Models of the most popular Western solutions all could be shown to be probable disasters. Not only was Harris’s paper almost universally praised for its methods and rigor, it was a major influence in the field in the use of a functional approach to this type of anthropological research.
These are just very brief example of much scholarly research on the subject.
So I ask someone who regularly sprinkles their responses with details of science up to and including quantum mechanics: what is one to do -- accept conclusions of what appear to be (and are accepted in the relevant scholarly disciplines) as valid observations and proper scientific method, or ignore them and find excuses when the results don’t fit with the things one -- “knows”? After all, the scientific method can be revived later when it supports those conclusions that one “knows” are correct. Right?
