Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

Precisely because of the prevalence of redistributive mechanisms and ideologies stressing luck or magic, "tribal" religion has often

been regarded as perhaps motivating production but necessarily as restricting accumulation—hence thwarting economic development (e.g., Goode 1951:136). The same view has been promulgated with regard to Cordilleran Paganism. In the 1960s, for example, Tadaoan (1969:247) expressed the concern of the Commission on National Integration that "pagan beliefs and practices . . . were the root-cause that retarded economic and educational projects."

Specific sects of the universalizing religions, by contrast, have long been believed to inculcate the very spirit of capitalist enterprise. Observing the Protestant affiliation of most European leaders of industry at the turn of the century, Max Weber (1904 [1930]) argued that Calvinistic "worldly asceticism" had been the ideological font of capitalism itself. The Protestant businessman, he argued, would rather invest capital than squander it in sinful pleasures, thus confirming his divine election through his pecuniary success.

Weber's followers have since found a similar ethos in the faiths of other entrepreneurial groups, including Jodo and Zen Buddhism in Japan, Santri Islam in Java, and Jainism and Zoroastrianism in India (Bellah 1968:243). Yet such assertions are rarely made for any but the so-called high religions. As Eisenstadt (1968:18) writes:

It has been claimed that the more "magical" or "discrete" a religious system is, the less it is likely to facilitate the development of more continuous secular activities. The multitude of dispersed religious rituals found in most "primitive" religions were shown to inhibit the development of such sustained effort.

Indeed, converts to universalizing religions have often formed entrepreneurial islands within "tribal" societies.^[3] Legitimating their actions by reference to their new ideologies, market-oriented converts can free themselves from onerous social demands. In Kapepa, Zambia, for instance, most successful commercial farmers are Jehovah's Witnesses who use their beliefs "to justify the repudiation of certain social relationships" (Long 1968:239).

In Buguias, the situation is reversed. Here, Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians are distinctly less entrepreneurial than are traditionalists; in Buguias it is communitarian Paganism that inculcates both a strong business drive and a remarkable work ethic.

And unlike the people of Kabylia, Algeria (Bourdieu 1977), those of Buguias do not disguise or "socially repress" the connection between social actions and economic gains. The linkage of ritual and accumulation is not only recognized but constitutes the subject of frequent debate.

The symbiosis of religion and capitalism is if anything more tightly forged in Buguias Paganism than in radical European Protestantism. Where early modern Calvinists interpreted wealth as a sign of election, riches for Buguias Pagans are the necessary means to obtain spiritual favor. Far from being fatalistic, their belief is interventionist to the last. "Worldly asceticism," however, quickly evaporates in Buguias's rituals, replaced by an otherworldly hedonism that Weber's bourgeois businessman would find utterly sinful. But the Buguias traditionalists revel in such extravagance only so long as it remains in a ritual context—and Weber may have exaggerated the asceticism of the Calvinist burgher in any case (see Schama 1988:334, and Leroi Ladurie and Ranum 1989:113, 114).