Part 1 - Definitions and Death
Malinowski regarded death as the origin of all religion, while Baumann said that culture originated from the fear and denial of death.
Why is death so important?
- validation and confirmation of cultural norms: death throws into relief the most important cultural values by which people live their lives
- social relationships: structures and hierarchies
- universal fact; incredible diversity in how it is conceptualised and dealth with
Intellectual approaches
- religion is a matter of beliefs and 'way of explaining events'
- Tylor (1870) 'belief in spiritual beings':
'The Tongans supposed the soul to exist throughout the whole extension of the body, but particularly in the heart. On one occasion, the natives were declaring to a European that a man buried months ago was nevertheless still alive’ (Tylor 1958: 26)
- criticisms: focus on intellectual approach disregards social context of customs and beliefs; do social and ritual elements depend on intellectual factors (rationality, morality, practice..)?
- Aristotle, not Tyor, should be our baseline: the importance of 'reasoned moral practice' in history (Lambek 2000)
Emotionalist approaches
- religion as a response to emotional stress, relieving fears and anxieties
- bottled-up feelings need to be released - catharsis
- Malinowski: biological finctionalism
- Freud: psychoanalytical theory
Structuralist approaches
- universal psychology with a genetic basis
- deconstruction of myths demonstrate the limited ways in which humans interpret the world - see Lévi-Strauss
- criticisms: unconcerned with historical development or tradition; too speculative
Cognitive approaches
- sociobiological: cognitive mechanism adaptive in fostering survival
- religion as a delusion: explanation for beliefs and ritual in the way minds work
- indigenous theories and cosmologies devalued (as they are whittled down to human traits and tendencies?); little room for human agency or human social life to be considered as factors
Interpretative approaches - reaction against structural-functionalism
- religion offers both world view and ethos: it is a cultural/symbolic system
- "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" Geertz (1973: 91)
- key criticisms of Geertz's view: idealist and subjectivist; over consistent view of religion groups
more concerned with actions and feelings (generalised ethos), uninterested in the actual meanings for particular people
Phenomenological approaches
rather than looking at the bigger picture, the sociology of hierarchy, say, focus is on relationships and people's decisions to place themselves in a particular position/role
Religious studies:
- neutral description of human exp.
- epoche - suspension of prior judgements
- eidetic intuition - discovering through intuition the essential phenomena
Anthropology
- unify theorising on the self, the body, emotions, exp and agency
- evoke empathetic response in the reader
- criticisms: absence of politics and economics as acting factors, disregards different ideas and experiences of the subject
- 'To focus on the subject is to acknowledge that, no matter what constituting power we assign the impersonal forces of history, language and upbringing, the subject always figures, at the very least, as the site where these forces find expression and are played out' (Jackson 1996:22).
Sociological approaches
- Durkheim, Marx, Weber: religion as a social phenomenon, so it would need to be understood in its socio-cultural context
"A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden – beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” Durkheim (1965:62 [1912])
- criticisms: lack of engagements with drama and intensity of ritual, and does not take seriously 'truth' status of religious concepts; dismisses participants' experiences
Holistic approach
- religion as a category that is fluid and contextual; religion is seen as being linked with linked to other practices (e.g. agriculture, kinship, politics, magic, medicine, law)
- begins with the terms of the people/practisers themselves - biases in our approach must be recognised
The Natural and the 'Supernatural'
- can we take spirits seriously?
- Lohmann: supernatural not simply product of human imagination
- can we combine emic and etic models of the supernatural?
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