Anthropologists are scientists who study culture through observation and other empirical (evidence based) methods. THE CONSTRUCTION OF RElIGION AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CATEGORY 123 keep clearly distinct that which theology tends to obscure: the occurrence of events (utterances, practices, dispositions) and the authorizing processes that give those events meaning and embody that meaning in concrete institutions. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1, 4–13. University of California Press, Berkeley. Language mediates much religious activity, ranging from spells to prayers to texts. For instance, the so-called Theory of Mind Mechanism can be seen as a cognitive tool enabling humans to interpret a living organism’s movements in terms of its inferred intentions: such construal of what is going on in other people’s brains is clearly an adaptive skill. Both in the past and the present, the ethnographic study of religion has contributed to numerous mainstream analytical concerns, ranging from classic approaches to rationality, symbolism, and social order to more recent studies of transnationalism, materiality, and both cultural and evolutionary change. But the concept of religion … Rappaport, R., 1999. Early anthropological study of religion was guided by social theory that was informed by evolutionary biology. Van der Veer, P. This development is a result of a number of factors: the shift of fieldwork toward more urban, plural contexts, where self-conscious religious identification is occurring; increasing interest in past encounters between Western missions and colonized peoples; a new focus on the affinities of different religious forms with ‘modernity’; the relative success of Islam and Christianity as missionary forces; and the self-conscious identification of many informants with religions that have transnational, including diasporic, referents. Information and communication technology (ICT) projects remain largely insensitive to these socio-anthropological dimensions. At the same time, a Durkheimian approach still raised questions as to (1) the worth of assuming that rigid distinctions between sacred and profane existed cross-culturally, (2) the focus on order and stability as a feature of social institutions such as religion, and (3) the universality of any characterization of religion. Religion in this sense can be seen as deploying spirits as explanatory principles much as a scientist might use atoms or molecules. While refuting Lévy-Bruhl’s view, Evans- Pritchard’s book also implies a comparison with Christianity: his discussion of Azande explanations of misfortune echoes biblical scholars’ attempts to explain the presence and direction of evil in the world. religion, although the reader may conclude that they are so vague or contra- dictory that the attempt has limited utility. anthropological and sociological studies of religion. Spirits are believed to be responsible for illness and misfortunes, as well as the provision of curative remedies and the calling of people to be diviners, … Saler, B., 2000. Csordas has presented a sense of the body as both ‘self ’ and ‘not-self, ’ both subject and object, but also the very grounding of the human experience of culture. The book assesses the logic and consistency of Azande modes of thought, and indicates how they might be translated into the understandings of a Western readership. Saler (2000: p. ix) asserts that “Religion is a Western folk category that contemporary Western scholars have appropriated.” A similarly skeptical view is maintained by Maurice Bloch, who notes (2010: p. 4): “‘Religion’ is a word that can only refer to a series of historically created situations which, although continually changing, have unique and specific genealogies closely linked to the Abrahamic religions. Religion An Anthropological Perspective Series: American University Studies H. Sidky. Bloch (1992) is also interested in the symbolic and literal violence involved in many rites of passage, but applies a broadly Marxist frame of interpretation, highlighting the coercive powers of ritual. California University Press, Berkeley. Durkheim’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalist approaches drew on a model of society as equivalent to a body, made up of interlinked and mutually dependent parts. The Practical and Ritual Dimension: what the adherents of a religion do as part of that religion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. This is widespread in Africa and has individual and communal dimensions. After a time of seclusion, they return to the village, shouting “bite, bite, bite.” They are now transformed beings. In contrast to the work of anthropologists who emphasize the historical contingency of any given definition of religion, researchers in this subfield have argued that there is a biological basis to religious activity. He notes that in Ndembu initiation rites in Zambia, circumcision of boys becomes a metaphor for killing, since it destroys the childhood status of the initiate (Turner, 1967). (RELIGION) * I - ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY (by Clifford Geertz) The anthropological study of religion has been highly sensitive to changes in the general intellectual and moral climate of the day; at the same time, it has been a powerful factor in the creation of that climate. Religious considerations permeate and influence all parts of a culture. (Eds. Lévi-Strauss, C., 1966. INTRAPERSONAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL INFLUENCE DIMENSION OF COM-MUNICATION ON THE DYNAMIC AND STRESS BEHAVIOUR OF PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES Marijan Spehnjak1, Mario Plenković2 Archdiocese of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia 1; University of Maribor, Faculty of Tourism Brežice and Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Maribor, 2Slovenia Abstract In this paper a man has … Dimensions of religious chastity such as charismatic, community, missionary, ecological, and ascetical; Religious chastity as a sign; 1. Needham, R., 1972. These are … sociocultural dimensions of religion [CITE 3 & 4] 01:070:308 – Anthropology of Religion – Spring 2017 - Assaf Harel 2 Key Texts: Pamela A. Moro. How religions contribute to the maintenance of social order. Academic Press, London, pp. Such analysis emphasizes the political implications of ritual experience in the service of order and hierarchy. Robbins, J., 2004. Anthropology as a science of culture was founded in an atmosphere of Comtism, utilitarianism, agnostic biblical criticism, and the beginnings of comparative religion in the nineteenth century, an environment which was unfavorable to religion. How religions contribute to the maintenance of social order. What part religions play in cultural and social transformation. Bloch, M., 1974. Naipaul to his deceased sister – an improvised response taking place thousands of miles away from the official funeral in the writer’s country of origin, and yet still capable of carrying significance. Lambek, M., 2002. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. The pigeon word ‘bilip’ is widely used by Urapmin, but it means something specific. The role of this sphere in the emergence of the ‘Arab Spring’ from the end of 2010 remains to be analyzed. All rights reserved. In: David, J. Similarly, the notion of religion as an autonomous activity is regarded as emerging from a unique, Western, post-Reformation history. HIDE THIS PAPER GRAB THE BEST PAPER 96.6% of users find it useful. The diversity of religions across cultures. Key issues in the contemporary debates on culture seem to be accompanied by the problem of meaning and the dynamics of it. Key issues in the contemporary debates on culture seem to be accompanied by the problem of meaning and the dynamics of it. In: Henn, A., Koepping, K.-P. A further implication of this argument is that symbols or actions that defy categories or bridge them may be seen as powerful, and under certain circumstances even sacred, rather than polluting. 2013. This is an important critique, which draws on what I have called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) approach to religion. ... pertnils the anthropological investigation of phenomena such as mag)', sorcery, curscs, and other practices rhat hold meaning for both prrlitcraie and literate socirties. Blackwell, Oxford. Bloch, M., 2010. CMA adds an anthropological dimension to traditional critical approaches, thereby avoiding a top-down perspective. To some degree anthropologists have turned their attention to secularism itself as a particular, historically constructed category. Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005) focuses on a women’s movement in the mosques of Cairo. Religious Chastity… 17 July 2014 36 Religious Chastity - includes the anthropological foundation of chastity based on the three levels of psychic life; 1. Religious anthropology was born in the second half of the nineteenth century ; unfortunately, at the beginning it posed a series of false problems : those of the origin, evolution or essence of religion ; hence the discredit from which it fell and from which it is only now recovering, through a change of perspective. Processes of globalization and migration, combined with tourism, have ensured that pilgrimage has become an increasingly visible dimension of religious activity in all faiths, and also one that has attracted more anthropological attention. (Eds. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. This work has blended the findings of evolutionary and cognitive psychology with those of anthropology. The best-known contributor to such debate has been Talal Asad (1993). The following highlights some of the most prominent themes in the anthropology of religion that have remained topics of interest throughout the discipline’s history. Wallace proposed four categories of religion, each subsequent category subsuming the previous. Tanya Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1991) examines the role of witchcraft – or Wicca – among middle-class Londoners in the light of theories of the sociology of knowledge as well as of conversion. More recent work has taken the opposite step of proposing that Western science has significant parallels with ‘traditional’ religious thinking. For him, a fundamental question is: What, if anything, is particular to religious language? Routledge, London. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. They discuss … We see here some characteristic Durkheimian juxtapositions, such as the sacred and nonsacred, and belief balanced by practice; but also the claim that religion must be seen as linked to a social formation, a ‘Church.’ This definition of religion as a certain kind of object of study therefore also points toward a specific method of study: the focus is on what can be physically observed, and eschews assessment of the truth value or otherwise of any given religion. A leading figure in the move toward a more phenomenological view of the body has been the American anthropologist Thomas Csordas (1997), in his studies of healing, language use, and spatial orientation among charismatic Catholics in America. European institutions, for example, rarely use the “four-field approach” of American anthropology. The key contrast here is with so-called symbolist approaches, which draw on a Durkheimian inheritance to emphasize how religion, and in particular ritual, should primarily be interpreted as made up of representations of the social order. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Cultures. Horton, R., 1970. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, traced magical and religious threads throughout history and weaved them into a pattern depicting the p… Religion has stood at the center of anthropological research since the discipline began in the mid-19th century, and its development has reflected trends in the discipline generally. Van Gennep argued that ritual has particular significance during critical periods of transition in the life-cycle, such as attainment of adulthood, marriage, and death. Like University of California Press, Berkeley. Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. Subsequent work on witchcraft from the 1940s onwards often examined it in the context of changing social relations and periods of communal stress. Theological foundation of chastity; 2. ), Rituals in an Unstable World: Contingency- Hybridity-Embodiment. Religious beliefs and practices, and why they change. Like Clifford Geertz's essay 'Religion as a cultural system' is perhaps the most influential, certainly the most accomplished, anthropological definition of religion to have appeared in the last two decades. (Ed. The second root is the anthropological study of syncretisms between two forms of religion on different levels of civilization, as for example the m6lange of African primitivism and Roman Catholicism that is in Haiti called "Voodoo," or the syncre-tism between Catholicism and native Indian religious beliefs and practices in Central and South America. Current Anthropology 48, 5–38. A major theme in the anthropology of Islam that has recently emerged relates to the emergence of ‘Muslim publics’ that have been energized by migration, challenges to Western hegemony, and access to new media technologies. Later work has examined the question of rationality and witchcraft under very different social conditions. Meyer, B., 1999. Roy Rappaport has also produced an influential discussion of ritual that sees it as primarily as “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts” (1999: p. 24). Anthropologists have often emphasized the importance of taking into account embodied, ritual activity. This syllabus is thus subject to a few minor changes. Religion, gender, and sexuality. In the light of social evolutionary models of human development, religious practice was perceived as providing a powerful index of the mental and moral levels of so-called primitive peoples. Another characteristic of obedience is human freedom. ), Religious Organization and Religious Experience. Originally published in I 966, it was reprinted in his widely-acclaimed The interpretation of cultures (I973). The Power Dimensions of the Christian Community: An Anthropological Model; Chapter 8. Separation rites and rites of incorporation expunge the initiate’s original vitality; but what Bloch calls the rebounding violence of transcendental conquest is contained in the return to everyday life, as the person is transformed from being prey into being a hunter – into a state where the powerful transcendent element inherited from the ritual dominates the person’s identity. dimension of religion. Since the early days of cultural anthropology, religion has been a topic of interest. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is the founding father of the anthropological study of religion. In contrast to Frazer’s evolutionary assumptions and reliance on scattered examples drawn from around the world, Evans-Pritchard focuses on a single African case study, showing interrelations among religious, social, and political aspects of Azande life. But even these criteria permit us to develop only a thin line of distinction. Swain, Trans.). Vertovec, S., 2000. Its immediate founders, Edward Tylor (1832–1917) and James Frazer (1854–1941), were firm believers in social evolution who saw religion as part of the evolutionary … Other authors in the Durkheimian school provided significant perspectives on the physical workings and symbolism of the body. notions of how the universe is organised and the role of humans within the world. The history of Shri Mata Mansa Devi temple … The Anthropology of Christianity. A further foundational strand in the anthropological study of religion has been the investigation of the relationship between religion and social order. While members cultivate embodied practices of personal piety that appear to submit to the patriarchal logic of certain forms of Islam, Mahmood indicates how informants are motivated by dissatisfaction with both secularization and Westernization. Hirschkind, C., 2006. Redefining Muslim publics. The study of religion remains in a vibrant state, even as scholars still wrestle with key questions of whether and how religion can be seen as an autonomous area of activity in its own right. Horton’s assumption is that religion is fundamentally about explanation, a so-called ‘intellectualist’ stance toward religion that places him in the genealogy of both Tylor and Frazer. In the 1970s, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz combined a Durkheimian understanding of religion as a collective social act with a more Weberian emphasis on meaning and experience. Yet something can be a religion and not include some of these dimensions. Since the early discussion by Edward Tylor, interest in the beliefs and rituals of distant, ancient, or simpler peoples has been shaped … Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner, a master shaman, who is believed to interact with a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The Popular Use of Popular Religion: Power and Meaning in Three Brazilian Popular Religions; Chapter 5. Anthropological Perspectives on Religion - Thesis Example. These approaches Henn characterizes as “normative,” “intelligible” and “dialectic,” respectively (Alexander Henn, 2008: p. 11). Hirschkind (2006) focuses on the role of the cassette sermon in promoting Islamic revival. Symbols, song, dance, and features of articulation or is religion a extreme form of traditional authority? More recently, focus has also been placed on the anthropologies of world religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism; on religion in relation to globalization and diaspora; and on cognitive approaches to the workings of the human mind. [1] Individualistic: most basic; simplest. Get this from a library! Columbia University Press, New York. Summary … Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing. Duke University Press, Durham. The use of religion as a key site for the examination of human rationality permeates E.E. Brought up in Pakistan, Asad spent some time working with Evans-Pritchard at Oxford before eventually moving to the United States. Summary … Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing. Chapter 4. Comaroff, J., Comaroff, J., 1999. For instance, in the Orokaiva ritual involving the initiation of children in Papua New Guinea, participants are told they are dead, and are then taught to play sacred flutes and bullroarers that represent the voices of the spirits. The global dimension of culture is today a significant factor of the mentioned transgression, especially when we speak of The witch represents an ‘impure’ challenge to social order as well as to physical well-being, and embodies some of the key anxieties of a given society. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Bloch on Bloch on ‘Religion’. Social theorists believed that religious ideas preceded scientific thought and practice. Anthropologists have worked more and more in urban and Western contexts often associated with deritualization and secularization, and with decreased need for common rites of passage to define accession to social roles. Have you ever wondered why people have faith or take part in religious customs? Product Dimensions : 5.08 x 0.44 x 7.8 inches; Publisher : Routledge; 1st Edition (March 26, 2015) Language: : English; Best Sellers Rank: #703,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1,053 in Sociology & Religion #1,866 in General Anthropology #1,896 in Anthropology (Books) Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 23 ratings. The truth is, religion is a large topic of interest for anthropologists - cultural anthropologists in particular. Indeed, it is in the apocalyptic texts that the word of God is most forceful, repudiating mistakes that are entirely the fault of humans, who are less and less inclined to acknowledge the mechanisms of their violence. What, however, of contexts where informants themselves maintain a strong and self-conscious sense of ‘belief ’? Douglas has little to say about the actual physical experiences of having a body that possesses senses and moves through the world. Christians as believers. Cannell, F. Eickelman and Anderson (1999: p. 1) refer to the emergence of a new sense of public throughout Muslim-majority states as well as Muslim communities elsewhere. It argues that a focus on such questions as rationality and ritual was central to the emergence of the discipline. Anthropologist Anthony F.C. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. The years following World War II have seen the reemergence of evangelical forms of Christianity in many parts of the world. In the following, I adopt another pragmatic, inductive approach, taking the anthropology of religion to be what scholars actually do, no matter what definition of the subject they endorse. In other words religion is not a natural kind, by which I mean a category that has a basis other than that given by an arbitrary definition.”. Boyer, P., 2001. In anthropological literature the Cargo cult has been described as a form of syncretism. The emphasis on observable reality also informed Bronislaw Malinowski’s stress not on the evolution of religion, but on the importance of fieldwork in discerning the contemporary societal and psychological rationale behind ritual and magic. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Coleman and Eade (2004) place anthropological studies of pilgrimage in the wider frame of analyzing physical and metaphorical aspects of movement. What are the cultural benefits of religion. ), 1991. Victor and Edith Turner’s seminal work, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), which deployed a rite-of-passage model to emphasize the idea that sacred shrines should be seen as liminal spaces, has been challenged by Eade and Sallnow’s (1991) argument that such shrines are in fact deeply enmeshed in everyday political and economic processes. Religious objects did have a cultural character but they also had a sacral and anthropological dimension. Nonetheless, the transformation and pluralization of ritual forms does not necessarily mean that they are disappearing. Seven Dimensions of Religions . The seven dimensions of religion, as expressed by Smart are ritual, material, doctrinal and philosophical, experiential and emotional, social and institutional, and the narrative and mythic . 9–31. Tomas Gerholm’s (1988) ‘postmodern’ view of a Hindu funeral ritual in Trinidad examines fragmentation of meaning and diversity of experience. Belief, Language, and Experience. Routledge, New York. Freedom and obedience are two complementary and interrelated qualities inherent in every person. Joel Robbins (2004, 2007) examines the conversion to Pentecostal Christianity of the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, and shows how even the apparent assimilation of Christian categories can conceal a more complex relationship to belief than might at first appear. Another book published in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage (1966: ‘The Savage Mind’), denies that non-Western mental abilities are inherently inferior to those of Western readers, even if attitudes toward abstract thought may differ. Since the early discussion by Edward Tylor, interest in the beliefs and rituals of distant, ancient, or simpler peoples has been shaped by an … The ‘adaptationist’ argument states that no human society can survive without language or religion, and so there must be both a language instinct and a religious instinct. Ethnos 53, 190–203. Indian University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. The history of Shri Mata Mansa Devi temple … He notes that both the original Greek verb pisteuo and the Hebrew root mn express ideas of trust or confidence in an agreement, indicating a fundamentally social orientation. Inculturation, the process of inserting the Christian message in society, requires scientific discernment to know which cultural traits are compatible with or contrary to the Christian faith, requiring anthropological training and active collaboration between theologians and professional anthropologists. This article traces the history of the anthropology of religion from the nineteenth century to the present. On ritual: a postmodernist view. Many analysts are still influenced by the work of a contemporary of Durkheim, Arnold Van Gennep. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. (Ed. More recently, the emergence of Christianity as an explicit object of study has contributed to and resonated with many current concerns of anthropology, including globalization, reflexivity, and postcolonialism. In religious contexts the sources of words, as well as the identity, agency, authority, and presence of nonhuman as well as human participants in an interaction, can be especially problematic. A particularly fertile strand of research has been a focus on materiality and its relationship with notions of both transcendence and modernity (Keane, 2007). The present study takes into account both these dimensions. 1–18. 1. The early studies of James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, Émile Durkheim, and others tended to focus on classifying religions and developing models of religious evolution. If Gerholm suggests that it is often difficult to locate the core of ritual practice in postmodern contexts, Catherine Bell’s highly influential approach in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) moves the focus away from seeing ritual as an autonomous activity, and proposes instead a notion of ‘ritualization’ that takes into account links with strategic activities in social life in general. We follow Azande investigating why misfortune appears to strike certain people at certain times, while accusations are linked to tensions in relations among equals. He agrees with Van Gennep concerning the existence of a basic grammar underlying ritual across cultures, and suggests that an irreducible core of the ritual process invokes a violent conquest of the present world by the transcendental, divine realm. His argument that listening to sermons links to ethical self-improvement forms a bridge to another significant theme in the analysis of Islam: the cultivation of piety. Frazer’s radical move in The Golden Bough was ultimately to juxtapose Christianity with science, and to suggest the incompatibility of the former with the latter. Religion has stood at the center of anthropological research since the discipline began in the mid-19th century, and its development has reflected trends in the discipline generally. Read Text. Anthropological Perspectives on Religion - Thesis Example. Eickelman, D., Anderson, J., 1999. The English term religion has no exact equivalent in most other languages. As a result of this skill, humans have perhaps also become prone to seeing intention in events, to see them as guided by a controlling force, such as a divinity. Continuity thinking and the problem of Christian culture: belief, time and the anthropology of Christianity. The comparative study of religion formed a central building block of anthropology as the discipline emerged in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Durkheim’s depiction of social order proved highly influential for the British anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who in the middle years of the century drew on such ideas in developing the notion of ‘structural-functionalism’ – a view of society as made up of, and stabilized by, interlocking and complementary components, including religious institutions. ’ religious thinking Book explores religious conversion in a Papua New, Guinea.. 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