In this investigation, Balinese Hindus were interviewed to explore the impact of ritual practice on the flexibility and pattern of afterlife beliefs. Adults from communities where ancestral ritual practices are widespread were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. Prior research with the ancestor-worshiping Malagasy Vezo revealed that their responses to such questions varied depending on narrative context (tomb vs. corpse scenario) and which conception of death they subsequently deployed: A religious conception, wherein death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence, or a biological conception, wherein death terminates all living processes (Astuti & Harris, 2008). No studies to date have looked at the narrative effect in a culture having close proximity to altars dedicated to ancestors and frequent rituals to honor them. To explore the cross-cultural replicability of the narrative effect, an adaptation of Astuti and Harris’ experiment (Study 1, 2008) was conducted with Balinese Hindu adults. Participants heard one of two death scenarios and were asked about a deceased person’s capacities. Results revealed that Balinese adults were not influenced by narrative context. While they ascribed more mental than bodily capacities to the dead, they attributed comparatively more capacities overall than the Vezo. A distinctive Balinese pattern of capacity attribution was found, notably high attributions of an enduring spirit and real-time perceptual capacities. Findings suggest that the proximity and high frequency of rituals directed toward ancestors serve to shape, strengthen, and stabilize religious conceptions of death, while weakening the salience of solely biological conceptions.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Astuti, R. (1994). Invisible objects: mortuary rituals among the Vezo of western Madagascar. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 25, 111–122.
Astuti, R. & Harris, P. L. (2008). Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 32, 713–740.
Astuti, R. (2007). Weaving together culture and cognition: an illustration from Madagascar. Intellectica: revue de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive, 46/47, 173–189.
Barrett, H. C. & Behne, T. (2005) Children’s understanding of death as the cessation of agency: A test using sleep versus death. Cognition, 96, 93–108.
Barth, F. (1993). Balinese worlds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Basset, C. (1990). Bali Abianbase: Côté cour, Côté jardin (Sisi Istana, Sisi Desa). English title: Bali Abianbase: Stage right, stage left. Jakarta, ID: Total Indonésie.
Bek, J., & Lock, S. (2011). Afterlife beliefs: category specificity and sensitivity to biological priming. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1, 5–17.
Bering, J. M. (2002). Intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds: The natural foundations of afterlife beliefs as phenomenological boundary. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, 263–308.
Bering, J. M. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 453–498.
Bering, J. M., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40, 217–233.
Bering, J. M., Hernández Blasi, C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). The development of ‘afterlife’ beliefs in secularly and religiously schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 587–607.
Bloch, M. E. F. (1998). How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory and literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Cohen, E., Burdett, E., Knight, N., & Barrett, J. (2011). Cross-cultural similarities and differences in person-body reasoning: Experimental evidence from the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon. Cognitive Science, 35, 1282–1304.
Emmons, N. A., & Kelemen, D. (2014). The development of children’s prelife reasoning: Evidence from two cultures. Child Development, 85, 1617–1633.
Emmons, N. A., & Kelemen, D. A. (2015). I’ve got a feeling: Urban and rural indigenous children’s beliefs about early life mentality. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 138, 106–125.
Fox, R. (2015). Why do Balinese make offerings? On religion, teleology and complexity. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 171, 29–55.
Geertz, H. & Geertz, C. (1975). Kinship in Bali. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Guermonprez, J.-F. (1987). Les Pandé de Bali: La formation d’une caste et la valeur d’un titre, Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient.
Guermonprez, J.-F. (1990). On the elusive Balinese billage: Hierarchy and values versus political models. Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 24, 55–89.
Guermonprez, J.-F. (2001). La religion balinaise dans le miroir de l’hindouisme. Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Etrême-Orient, 88, 271–293.
Harris, P. L. (2011). Conflicting thoughts about death. Human Development, 54, 160–168.
Harris, P. L., & Giménez, M. (2005). Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143–164.
Hobart, M. (1978). The path of the soul: The legitimacy of nature in Balinese conception of space. In G. B. Milner (Ed.), Natural symbols in south east Asia (pp. 5–28). London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
Hodge, K. M. (2011). On imagining the afterlife. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 367–389.
Hodge, K. M. (2012). Context sensitivity and the folk psychology of souls: Why Bering et al. got the findings they did. In D. Evers, M. Fuller, A. Jackelen, & T. Smedes (Eds.), Is religion natural (pp. 49–63). New York: T&T Clark International.
Huang, J., Cheng, L., & Zhu, J. (2013). Intuitive conceptions of dead persons’ mentality: A cross-cultural replication and more. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 23, 29–41.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ipsos/Reuters (2011). Belief in a supreme being strong worldwide: Reuters/Ipsos poll. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-beliefs-poll-idUSTRE73O24K20110425.
Lane, J. D., Zhu, L., Evans, E. M., & Wellman, H. M. (2016). Developing concepts of the mind, body, and afterlife: Exploring the roles of narrative context and culture. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 16, 50–82.
Legare, C. H., Evans, E. M., Rosengren, K. S., & Harris, P. L. (2012). The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations across cultures and development. Child Development, 83, 779–793.
Mellars, P. (1990). The emergence of modern humans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Méric, A. (2016). La fabrication des offrandes à Tenganan Pegeringsingan (Bali) et la mise en mouvement du monde. Moussons. Recherche en sciences humaines sur l’Asie du Sud-Est, 28. Retrieved from http://moussons.revues.org/3674
McBrearty, S. (2007). Down with the revolution. In P. Mellars, K. Boyle, O. Bar-Yosef, & C. B. Stringer (Eds.), Rethinking the human revolution (pp. 133–151). Cambridge, UK: MacDonald Institute.
Nyhof, M., & Clark, K. J. (2015). Afterlife beliefs in Chinese populations: The influence of culture and cognitive development. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Philadelphia, PA.
Ottino, A. (1994). Origin myths, hierarchical order, and the negotiation of status in the Balinese village of Trunyan. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 150, 481–517.
Ottino, A. (2000). The universe within: A Balinese village through its ritual practices. Paris: Karthala.
Picard, M. (2011). From Agama Hindu Bali to Agama Hindu and back – Toward a relocalization of the Balinese religion? In M. Picard & R. Madinier (Eds.), The politics of religion in Indonesia: Syncretism, orthodoxy, and religious contention in Java and Bali (pp. 117–141). New York: Routledge.
Piette, A. (2013). L’origine de la croyance. English title: The origin of belief. Paris: Berg International.
Rosengren, K. S., Miller, P. J., Gutiérrez, I. T., Chow, P. I., Schein, S., & Anderson, K. N. (2014). Children’s understanding of death: Toward a contextual perspective. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 79, 1–141.
Sebestény, A. (2012) Kakasvér és virágszirom – egy év Bali szigetén. English title: Flower petals and rooster blood – One year in Bali. Budapest, HU: Szkarabeusz Editions.
Sebestény, A. (2013). L’offrande domestique à Bali – Un ancrage quotidien dans le monde. English title: The domestic offering in Bali – A daily anchoring in the world. In F. Hatchuel (Ed.), Transmettre? Entre anthropologie et psychanalyse, regards croisés sur des pratiques familiales (pp. 97–128). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Sebestény, A. (2014). Création collective d’une entité immatérielle: la crémation à Bali. English title: Creating an immaterial entity: The cremation in Bali. In Valentin F., Rivoal I., Thévenet C. & Sellier P. (Eds.), La chaîne opératoire funéraire: ethnologie et archéologie de la mort (pp. 40–41). Paris: De Boccard.
Sebestény, A. (2015). Les offrandes domestiques à Bali (Indonésie) comme point d’ancrage de la cohérence cérémonielle balinaise. English title: Domestic offerings in Bali (Indonesia) as the anchoring point of Balinese ceremonial coherence. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Nanterre University, Paris, France.
Sebestény, A. (2017a). Les funérailles à Bali – un calme émotionnel construit. English title: Balinese funerals: A constructed emotional calmness. Internationale de l’Imaginaire, 30, 169–190.
Sebestény A. (2017b). Bali – The island of the thousand temples, the thousand rice-fields and the million tourists: A successful encounter between international tourism and local culture. In T. Novák (Ed.), Go Hungary—Go Indonesia: Understanding culture and society (pp. 33–60). Budapest: University of Applied Sciences.
Slaughter, V., Jaakkola, R., & Carey, S. (1999). Constructing a coherent theory: Children’s biological understanding of life and death. In M. Siegal & C. C. Petersen (Eds.), Children’s understanding of biology and health (pp. 71–96). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 971 | 257 | 17 |
Full Text Views | 564 | 18 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 306 | 31 | 2 |
In this investigation, Balinese Hindus were interviewed to explore the impact of ritual practice on the flexibility and pattern of afterlife beliefs. Adults from communities where ancestral ritual practices are widespread were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. Prior research with the ancestor-worshiping Malagasy Vezo revealed that their responses to such questions varied depending on narrative context (tomb vs. corpse scenario) and which conception of death they subsequently deployed: A religious conception, wherein death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence, or a biological conception, wherein death terminates all living processes (Astuti & Harris, 2008). No studies to date have looked at the narrative effect in a culture having close proximity to altars dedicated to ancestors and frequent rituals to honor them. To explore the cross-cultural replicability of the narrative effect, an adaptation of Astuti and Harris’ experiment (Study 1, 2008) was conducted with Balinese Hindu adults. Participants heard one of two death scenarios and were asked about a deceased person’s capacities. Results revealed that Balinese adults were not influenced by narrative context. While they ascribed more mental than bodily capacities to the dead, they attributed comparatively more capacities overall than the Vezo. A distinctive Balinese pattern of capacity attribution was found, notably high attributions of an enduring spirit and real-time perceptual capacities. Findings suggest that the proximity and high frequency of rituals directed toward ancestors serve to shape, strengthen, and stabilize religious conceptions of death, while weakening the salience of solely biological conceptions.
All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 971 | 257 | 17 |
Full Text Views | 564 | 18 | 3 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 306 | 31 | 2 |