Cultural complexity and religion: Persistent interaction and conceptual order in Mekeo society, Papua New Guinea

摘要

Although there have been attempts to question the notion of the world of non-Western people as essentially religious and symbolic, there has simultaneously been a widespread tendency to study these in terms taken from a religious vocabulary such as mana, taboo, totemism, magic and sorcery. Using the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea as an example, this article suggests that we see culture as a complex dynamic system in which persistent interaction produces emergent properties that are symbolically elaborated. Thus, there are no universal contents of categories, but only universal principles of relating simple rules to emergent properties. Every system creates its own reality as a praxis-space inscribed into the environment. From this, it is concluded that we move comparisons from categorical content to conceptual principles. Doing so we find that 'sorcery' is about transcending the limitations imposed by locally defined categories on everyday life.