All these facts are fairly complex and interconnected, so I will start
with an apparently naive question: Why are there religious specialists
at all? Nothing in the representation of supernatural agents makes
specialists a necessary feature of religion. The agents' powers are such
that they affect everybody, and it would not in principle be difficult to
assume that everyone has the required capacities to handle interaction
with them, as the Buid seem to do. As it turns out, the fact that there
are specialists, and the special way in which they organize themselves
as a group, have important consequences for the creation of "religion"
as something one can "believe in" and "be a member of."[ 2 7 0 ]
LOCAL SPECIALISTS
To anyone brought up in the context of world religions, the presence
of specialists such as priests, ministers, ulema, rabbis and monks goes
without saying. But priests or scholars recruited, trained and sanc-
tioned by a special institution are not a universal feature of religion.
In many contexts a specialist is just someone who, more than others,
is thought capable of handling the delicate relations people entertain
with spirits and gods.
Consider the Fang situation, in which a major concern of all people
is to avoid witchcraft attacks. Some people are said to have the internal
organevurthat flies away at night and performs various magical tricks
to damage its victim's goods and health. Many cases of misfortune are
interpreted as the result of such attacks, and in such cases one should
resort to a specialist called a ngengang.Now this person also carries an
evur,but he or she is supposed to use it for the common good in fight-
ing witches. Often, people become ngengangas the result of an illness
or a tragic accident in their youth. They are then treated by a special-
ist who identifies the source of their problems: Their evuris much too
powerful and possibly out of control. They go through special rituals
in order to channel the evur's power to the benefit of the group. They
can cure or protect others after completing a specific apprenticeship,
as such specialists must be competent in both ritual and medical
knowledge.
This kind of notion is quite common, apart from the Fang case: the
very problems that lead to a specialist's intervention are the ones that
make a person capable of helping others, and the same capacity that is
involved in witchcraft is used in anti-witchcraft. This naturally leads toRELIGION EXPLAINED