In our last couple of reading I have developed an interest in the role women have in popular religion. It is obvious from the readings that these communities are strongly male dominated. Women are rarely mentioned and if they are it is only briefly. After reading our next essay topic I wanted to explore this interest more fully, specifically in the way that this patriarchal society has not changed over the span of time this these works were written.
In Meri little is mentioned of women. When speaking about saints he talks about all of the different types of saints and their abilities, but only mentions the possibility of women saints in passing. They clearly aren’t typical saints– this shows how women weren’t shown as leader or capable of having power. He goes on to talk about women more when talking about shines and how women would visit shrines and pray for fertility. Other than these two examples there isn’t much about women in Meri’s work.
Grehan continues Meri’s concept of women saints when he talks about “Magic Men” saying, “[Saints were] a cult of miracle-workers– of magic men (and occasionally women) who wielded their cosmic knowhow for the good of humanity…”. Woman saints are an afterthought. Grehan continues this, speaking about how much power and importance saints have in these societies. This gives the impression that the reason there aren’t many woman saints is because they are incapable of possessing such an important role.
This patriarchal thought process is continued in Westermarck’s writing about jnun. Here he talks about how woman have jnun within them (giving them to potential to be witches), while men don’t. This concept of women having an inherent evil allows for men to blame uncontrollable women on an outside force. This idea can easily be applied to marriages where a woman is not obedient to her husband so her husband blames her behavior on the jinn within her and therefore can leave her. In this example the jnun are used as a scapegoat that reinforces the patriarchal culture in which it is found.
All of these examples exhibit the role of woman in society and how this role hasn’t changed much over the 1000 years that these writings were written. I am excited to develop this idea of inequality of gender when it comes to popular religion in my second essay.