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Religion, Belief and Action: The Case of Ngarrindjeri ‘Women's Business’ on Hindmarsh Island, South Australia, 1994–1996
Author(s) -
Weiner James F.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/j.1835-9310.2002.tb00190.x
Subject(s) - bridge (graph theory) , royal commission , commission , state (computer science) , religious belief , belief system , epistemology , sociology , law , history , philosophy , archaeology , political science , medicine , algorithm , computer science
The question of what role beliefs play in the description of a culture or a religious system, and whether beliefs as such can be ‘tested’, arose during a dramatic State Royal Commission into an Aboriginal sacred site claim in South Australia in 1995 focused on the proposed Hindmarsh Island‐Goolwa bridge. In this paper I examine some aspects of the legal and anthropological defence of the claim and suggest that insufficient distinction was made between belief as an interior subjective state, and as a gloss on a certain disposition to behave that is conventionally defined. Further, the issue of the social testing of belief statements was obscured by re‐phrasing the Royal Commission as an attack on the Aboriginal claimants' right to religious belief. Appealing to Needham, Sperber and Quine, and utilising comparative analysis of a similar court case in North America, I suggest an anthropological approach to belief that side‐steps some of the critical problems in the anthropology of religion created during the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission.