The Aftereffects of Hajj and Kaan Buat

religious backgrounds the aftereffects of ritual in terms of the deference-entitlements which are enhanced through ritual. Deference is "a way of expressing an assessment of the self and of others with respect to 'macro-social' properties" (Shils 1968 :105). The deferential person expects he will get something he lacks or wants or needs from the person to whom he defers. To be the recipient of deference from others requires some kind of deference-entitling properties : occupational role and accomplishment, wealth, income and the mode of its acquisition, style of life," level of educational attainment, political or corporate power, proximity to persons or roles exercising political or corporate power, kinship connections, ethnicity, locality, nationality, religious adherence or affiliation, a title or an emblem, etc. The distribution of deference entitlements varies among societies. Generally speaking, modern developing countries are struggling to maintain their national identity by reshuffling the traditional deference system to cope with the world-wide process of modernization, typically symbolized in the transformation of the economy through technology and the greater intensity and extent of bureaucratization (cf. Berger et al 1973). In these societies, it is very important to understand the changing position of religion, which has been a locus of the overall structure of meaning and thus an important source of deference-entitlements. I would like to deal with a small segment of complex religious phenomena in developing countries, i.e., specific rituals which accord a practitioner a higher deference-position after their accomplishment. The rituals chosen are pilgrimage in Malaysia and entering the Sangha in Thailand. Before I proceed to the main dis cussion, I shall briefly outline a larger frame of reference behind this problem. An anthropologist's primary data has been considered as the 'natural' behavior, discourse and artifacts of the people studied. By 'natural' is meant an ideally undis turbed course of events in every day life, although the existence of the anthro pologist itself often disturbs the natural attitude of the people. This is supposed to be a life-world, i.e., that universe of experience, presumably understood, partly explained, and mostly taken-for-granted by the individual members of a society. At the same time, the anthropologist is exposed to various interpretations of this life-world from the point of view of the outgroup of observers, and from the point of view of experts including theologians, politicians, or philosophers (cf. Schutz 1964: 243-249). The problems of an expert, it is true, originate in his theoretical or specific interest and many elements of the social world that are scientifically relevant are irrelevant from the view point of the actor on the social scene. Nevertheless, the expert's constructs for the solution of his problem, I maintain, have to contribute to a better understanding of his or another's life-world. The difference of the expert's interpretations from those of in- or out-group actors is that the former are equipped with a highly abstracted frame of reference. Every society presumably has a stock of knowledge which may be classified under various categories, e.g., religion, philosophy, or science. These frames of reference prevailing in a society may be