The Religious “Alliance” Relationship, a Way of Socializing the World
As a continuation of “About Positions in Religious Alliance Relationship: ‘Husband’ of a Spirit, ‘Wife’ of a God” published in Médiations chamaniques. Sexe et genre (1998, Anthropologie et Sociétés, 22), this paper furthers the research started on the base of Siberian data on the implications of calling “alliance” a relationship to spiritual beings. Its aim is twofold. It aims at showing that there is a link between a mode of religious alliance relationship and a conception of the relation to the world and at analysing this link. Three cases taken from amongst Judeo-Christian traditions exemplify three variants of the reverse mode of alliance compared to that embodied in the ‘husband of a spirit’ status of the Siberian shaman : Yahve is held to be the ‘Husband’ of his people, Christ that of his Church. These traditions impose on the ‘Husband’ the duty to protect the goods of the legal entity endowed with a Wife’s status. This argument can apply to the Siberian shaman’s duty to symbolically safeguard the forest and the game animals that live in. It argues that analysing the religious use of ‘alliance’ as ‘metaphorical’ as defined by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) has both an explanatory and a heuristic value. It strives to put in light the cognitive role of the inferences derived from the metaphorical structuration of the underlying conceptual system. Actually, applying a sociological concept to a relationship intended to operate in the political or religious sphere makes it possible to assign such and such attribute of the sociological relationship to that in the other sphere.