The Concept of Causality in Revitalisation Movements
A survey of literature on revitalisation movements in tribal societies underscores the notion of social crisis or distress to understand the phenomenon. The element of social crisis is taken as a cross-cultural phenomenon in the revitalisation movements, and several ethnographic works have gone at length to prove the point.
Weston LaBarre (1972) goes to the extent of arguing that every religion has originated as a ‘crisis cult’, thus highlighting the dimension of social crisis in the founding of world religions. According to Wallace (1956:269), the social crisis may encounter the members of a society as “climatic, floral and faunal change; military defeat; political subordination; extreme pressure toward acculturation resulting in internal cultural conflict; economic distress; epidemics; and so on”.In the 19th century there were hundreds of tribal uprisings in various pockets of British India. Indian historians see the source of social crisis in the colonial expansionism that leads to exploitation at the hands of outsiders; notably, scholars see the rise of religious and charismatic leaders-leaders of messianic movements - as a unique characteristic of tribal uprisings. This phenomenon is usually attributed to deprivation and powerlessness among tribal communities that make them more receptive to belief in a messianic figure. In tribal societies the social conditions leading to messianic movements may be generalised, but the charismatic leaders, messiahs, prophets, and prophetesses have come in all shapes and sizes; more importantly, the revelations and divinity claims of these religious leaders show cultural variations and distinctive religious innovations.
According to Wallace, the term revitalisation movement denotes a very large class of phenomena, which may be applied in the context of understanding tribal movements in India: “nativistic movements” are characterised by a “strong emphasis on the elimination of alien persons, customs, values, and/or materiel from the mazeway”; “revivalistic movements emphasise the institution of customs, values, and even aspects of nature which are thought to have been in the mazeway3 of previous generations but are not now present”; “millenarian movements emphasise mazeway transformation in an apocalyptic world transformation engineered by the supernatural”; and “messianic movements emphasise the participation of a divine saviour in human flesh in the mazeway transformation” (Wallace 1956:267). The caveat is that these classes of revitalisation movements are not ‘mutually exclusive categories’ and often overlap, but they nevertheless have behaved as conceptual guiding posts in understanding an important socio-religious phenomenon. Socio-economic conditions and social distress have contributed to the tribal uprisings, but the revitalisation movements in tribal societies are effected by a distinct worldview and cultural experiences.
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