David Parkin's (1972) study of the Giriama of Kenya has become a classic analysis of the balance between social relationships and material accumulation. Parkin argued that Giriama palm growers who wished to accumulate material wealth were faced with a challenging problem. To accumulate capital, palm growers had to distance themselves from community expectations that they would redistribute their wealth in the form of feasts involving large amounts of meat and palm wine. At the same time, access to land depended on social support. For palm growers to accumulate material wealth, they had to avoid redistributing their wealth while maintaining the social ties necessary to ensure their access to land. In Parkin's study, conversion to Islam enabled farmers to solve this problem. Islam prevented men from drinking palm wine and eating meat slaughtered by non-Muslims and allowed them to be more selective about their engagement in relations of reciprocity. Therefore religion provided a justification for refraining from expending one's wealth on shared consumption without being exposed to accusations of selfishness.That is from Daniel Mains's Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment and the Future in Urban Ethiopia. Hat tip to my desk mate Stefano, who often makes me feel guilty about how little of the ethnographic literature I have read.
Perhaps you should be more cautious about always treated religion as exogenous in that regression you just ran.
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Too true, and it's not always strictly economic stimuli that affects this. My brother-in-law Alan Strathern has written a lot about the process of religious conversion, and in particular on how it has been affected and in turn effects political power and balance, including with external forces (e.g. colonisers). Very interesting stuff, and the complexity of the causal mechanisms should give us extensive pause for thought.
fascinating, and at the other end, people changing religion to avoid cultural aspects of oppression, like dalits in India converting to Christianity