Lecture Notes on the Study of Religion as a Cultural System in Sociocultural Anthropology , Study notes of Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Download Lecture Notes on the Study of Religion as a Cultural System in Sociocultural Anthropology and more Study notes Introduction to Cultural Anthropology in PDF only on Docsity! ANT 101: Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology Spring 2004, M,W,F 8:30 — 9:20, Chambers 2084 Prof. Eriberto P. Lozada Jr. Office Hours: M, W, F 10:30 – 11:30 am Office: Carnegie 01 T, Th 10:00 – 11:15 am or by appointment Telephone: 704-894-2035 Email: erlozada@davidson.edu Web: http://www.davidson.edu/personal/erlozada Lecture Notes, 14 March 2004 Fieldwork Project: Reminder, due in class Monday 5 April – Fieldnotes and short essay Anthropological Study of Religion Some definitions of religion: • Religion [is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience • The study of religion is the study of persons. Of all branches of human inquiry, hardly any deals with an area so personal as this. Faith is a quality of men’s lives. “All religions are new religions, every morning. For religions do not exist up in the sky somewhere, elaborated, finished, and static; they exist in men’s hearts.” Wilfred Cantwell Smith • Religion as society worshipping itself; religion gives society cohesion through shared symbols and group rituals. Emile Durkheim • Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. Clifford Geertz Geertz’s Essay on Religion as a Cultural System • remember our previous discussion of Geertz: emphasis on meaning, “reading social life as a literary text,” but in a way grounded in fieldwork (interpretive anthropology) • for Geertz, the anthropological study of religion is two- fold: “an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion” and “the relatingof these systems (of meaning) to social-structural and psychological processes.” • Geertz’s essay structured along his definition of religion Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. symbols: • anything which signifies something else? (pictures, words, text, things) • symbols as “extrinsic sources of information” – information about belief, cosmology, etc. that are outside individual psychology, but interact with individual psychology through society and culture • symbols as “models of and models for reality” model of reality in that symbols are an interpretation of reality for human thinking (i.e., theory of hydraulics explain how water will interact with the dam), symbols represent reality; model for reality in that symbols manipulate reality, structure social systems (i.e., theory of hydraulics is used to construct the dam) Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. • religion structures social life by “explaining the meaning of life,” basis for ethical codes, source for social structure, socialization, • when reading Myerhoff, think of the interrelationship between Judaism and the social life of the senior center Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. • religion explains things; Max Weber and theodicy: "the vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil"; why people suffer (we will be reading Evans-Pritchard, the granary issue, later); keep this in mind when reading Myerhoff • religion provides a worldview, the big picture: Mircea Eliade: “The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.” • science explains things as well, but this is another story for next semester (Geertz distinguishes the religious perspective, one that moves beyond the realities of everyday life, from the scientific perspective, institutionalized scepticism that uses probabilistic hypotheses to understand reality) Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. • the problem of studying belief; how does someone from outside a particular religious tradition make sense of people’s beliefs? • how? through ritual: “consecrated behavior”; patterned forms of behavior that have to do with the supernatural realm (from Miller) • another definition: Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition). S.J. Tambiah • think of all the cultural ideas associated with the performance of ritual: authority, hierarchy, life cycles, etc.