Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;
Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;
H to show hint;
A reads text to speech;
70 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
|
Natural Religion:
|
- understood as a pure and ancient religion of nature thathad been embraced by all human being in its earliest development. “naturalreligion” is suddenly broken down into categories such as fetishism, totemism,shamanism, anthropomorphism, animism, ancestor worship, etc. hume throws awaythe idea that religion is some kind of original humaninstinct, exactly the same everywhere, and says thatreligion comes from something else in the human experience which is hope andfear, whose unknown causes are personified through imagination
|
|
|
Social Evolution:
|
- Tylor All societies, he reasoned, pass from a savage stage, to a barbaricstage, and then to a modern stage.
|
|
|
-Survivals:
|
“Processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved.”
|
|
|
-Animism and the Savage philosopher:
|
A mistaken interpretation of death and dreaming by the ‘savage philosopher’ (which resulted in the idea of a soul or animating spirit…. animism…. Which was then applied to all phenomenon in the natural world) • This provides the basis for his universal definition of religion : belief in Spiritual Beings. the next step in this logic was the idea that behind all phenomenon was a trope of good and bad spirits (like gods of Greece and Rome) helping to animate the whole world, disconnected from any specific objects or people.
|
|
|
Social Facts (Durkheim):
|
-the social and behavioral rules that exist before an individual is born into a society and which that person learns and observes as a member of that society. “A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations. — Émile Durkheim ***Social facts can be material (physical objects) or immaterial (meanings, sentiments, etc.), but are ultimately objective, beyond the individual (even suicide, love, etc.)
|
|
|
--- Collective Consciousness:
|
-collective consciousness: a force arising from participation in a shared system of beliefs and values, which mold and control human behavior. This originates in the communal interactions and experiences of members of a society. Collective Consciousness: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.” — Emile Durkheim *emotional attachment to norms, cultivated through social interaction and familiarization with social facts, over-rides our egoism and integrates us into society.
|
|
|
Structural Functionalism:
|
-macro-level analysis -concerned with describing how parts of society function to promote solidarity, stability and complexity. -how do norms, customs, traditions, and institutions function as constituent elements to maintain the structure of society? -**like organs in the body
|
|
|
-Contagious magic:
|
Contagious magic: “part effects part”, for instance when a shaman gets ahold of someone’s hair or clothing and can then exert control over them.-pragmatism and the study of religion
|
|
|
-Imitative magic:
|
Imitative magic: “like affects like”, mimicking the sound of thunder to bring rain, drawing a deer kill in order to make it come about in real life, etc.
|
|
|
What is the driving force per Tylor Muller etc?
Tylor, Frazer, and Müller all assumed that each society passedthrough specific stages of evolution (uni-lineal social evolution)in their own time |
the Intellect |
|
|
Most basic form of intellect driven explanations?
|
Animism
|
|
|
-sacred vs. profane
|
(Durkheim): ‘first criterion of religious belief’ -all known religious beliefs display these common oppositions, which divide the world into two domains. -all religions, beliefs, myths, dogmas etc. are representations that express the nature of sacred things (and their relationship to profane things). -sacred things are held on a higher order than the profane, and on a higher order than humans as well.
|
|
|
reductive approach to religion (religion defined as the outcome of a more fundamental set of factors and conditions)
|
. • religion is a misguided science (ie. a wrong way of knowing the world) • Religion is the debris of language use • religion arises in response to a feeling of awe for nature and natural processes • Religions serves a functional purpose to make socially cohesive individuals and communities
|
|
|
-Protestant ethic:
|
weber -a founding work in religious studies, sociology and socioeconomics. -laid out his thesis that the Protestant Work ethic, which had developed in Northern Europe after the Reformation, contributed to the organization of labor which cause the rise of capitalism. -Protestant ethic: something which motivated adherents to work hard, be successful in business and reinvest their profits in further development rather than in frivolous pleasures.
|
|
|
-Protestant Revolution:
|
• Weber traces this capitalist spirit to a new Christian ethic in the Reformation • Martin Luther and John Calvin • Their teachings and the communities they inspired helped create modern capitalism • The profit motive, free market, commerce, wealth acquisition, reinvestment • This is an inductive, not reductive theory of religion!
|
|
|
-Worldy Asceticism:
|
-Worldy Asceticism (or calling): each individual had to take action in order to be saved; just being a member of the Church was not enough. Salvation shown through material success.
|
|
|
- Id, Ego, and Super-ego
|
: Id: this is the dark realm of our unconscious, where our repressed urges, memories, images lie. It is the only part of the personality that is present from birth. Its an-social tendencies (sex and violence) need to be repressed and balanced with the superego by the ego, in order to live stable, happy, fulfilled human lives. The personality and neurosis: • Superego: the internaliza-on of society's rules and conven-ons, which we originally receive from our parents. This is the “reality principal”, where we eventually internalize the parent’s (and teachers, etc.) norma-ve voice. This is our conscience, and is in direct opposi-on to our Id. The personality and neurosis: • Ego: this is the part of us that acts according to the reality principal. The ego must constantly sa-sfy the demands of the Id and the superego, or reality. This is what we o`en call reason and common sense. It is our conscious planning, memory, strategizing mind.
|
|
|
-Oedipus Complex:
|
• …Forbidding the killing of the totem/father, and the prohibi-on of sexually possessing his wives/incest. • Basic point: religion enforces taboos that help keep at bay our all too human violent and sexual urges. • As with theorists such as Marx and Durkheim, religion is reduced to its role in keeping social order.
|
|
|
The Invention of “World Religions”
|
the important point about the invention of world religions and academic knowledge about them is that they were tied very clearly to questions of 19th century power
|
|
|
Very broadly, what was the problem of human difference that Tylor, Müller, Frazer, and (to a certain extent) Durkheim were using ‘religion’ to understand?
|
Historical differences (ie. social evolution)Differences across contemporary societies (between England and Japan in 1891, for example)Differences within a given society (peasant beliefs in rural Spain compared to scientific lectures in Barcelona)These all place the question of difference, and the concept of religion, within a social evolutionary framework.
|
|
|
Social Evolution: So in this sense all of the scholars we have encounter early on.....
|
used “religion” as a way to chart change and human difference To understand manifestations of religion in light of their putative originsTo associate those origins with natural phenomenonTo assume that patterns of evolution take place according to natural lawsAdopted a reductive approach to religion (religion defined as the outcome of a more fundamental set of factors and conditions”.>> religion is a misguided science (ie. a wrong way of knowing the world) >> religion arises in response to a feeling of awe for nature and natural processes
|
|
|
Tylor:
|
the “savage philosopher” death & dreaming Survivals animism root of all religion
Tylor wants us to identify animism as a primitive, superstitious, misguided was of knowing the world. |
|
|
Imagining The Origins of Religion: Müller.....
|
the “disease of language”In this way, Müller is emblematic of a scholarly approach which attempts: To understand manifestations of religion in light of their putative originsTo associate those origins with natural phenomenonTo assume that patterns of evolution take place according to natural laws
“[Ancient man], as soon as he began to observe, to name, and to know the movements and changes in the world around him, suspected that there was something behind what he saw, that there must be an agent for every action, a mover for every movement.” (from “Outcome of Physical Religion”)Rain >>> rainer, thunder >>> the thunderer, measure>>> the measurer |
|
|
Frazer:
|
the “primitive magician” In 1890 he published The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion Frazer argued that primitive peoples had tried to develop a way of controlling the world (not just explaining it) that had to do with two types of “magical” influence: Imitative magic: “like affects like”, mimicking the sound of thunder to bring rain, drawing a deer kill in order to make it come about in real life, etc. Contagious magic: “part affects part”, for instance when a shaman gets ahold of someone’s hair or clothing and can then exert control over them
For Frazer, religion explains the failure of magic, and science in turn explains the failure of religion. This is his evolutionary framework, still rooted in the centrality of knowledge (truth claims about the world and methods to intervene and control nature). |
|
|
Secularism.....
|
is usually defined as a principle that has two embedded ideas:1) all public institutions and political power are separated from religious actors and institutions2) all religious identities and practices are equal before the law
BUT -Secular law and public institutions only recognize particular kinds of religious affiliations, identities, and practices. -Secularism is actually a theory of history and of desired futures!-The lines between a public sphere “purified of religion” and the rights of individuals and groups to practice their religion always require policing and inspire resistance. |
|
|
We must understand that the spaces that secularism assigns to religion (private, individual, a state of mind etc.) are
|
at the root of of the flattening of populations that are central to modern nation-states (everyone is a citizen, a legal individual, before they are a Doaist, a Muslim, a Zoroastrian).
More troubling, the “imagined community” of the nation is always based in the invention of “a people” that have existed for eternity and are united by shared language, territory, customs, and very often, religion. |
|
|
How religion interacts with ‘real’ institutional structures in the contemporary world:
|
religion and national identities (and national imaginaries)political power
state ideology capitalism socialism |
|
|
Public Sphere according to Jürgen Habermas:
|
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere where private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.”
|
|
|
Public Sphere:
|
an area of social life where individuals come together to debate and identify social problems. The idea is that this public forum (which is essential to any democracy) is a space that links the private sphere and the sphere of authority (politics, police, ruling class, police etc.). It functions to regulate social authorities, and to represent collective interests in a functioning democracy. It is where a ‘public’ identity is formed, which then articulates its needs to authority.
but But in practice, of course, the public sphere has only ever been open and available to particular individuals. |
|
|
secularism and religion overlap |
secularism as an idea doesn’t actually describe any modern secular societies because the categories ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ turn out to overlap and implicate each other more than we thought!constitutions and law may attempt to keep religion in the private sphere, but does this actually describe reality?the objects, sites, bodies, practices, identities of religious people are also simultaneously secular by virtue of having citizenship, being subject to the law etc.
|
|
|
Durkheim: -
|
Along with Max Weber and Karl Marx, provides us with the basis for the modern study of society -Primary question was how societies could maintain their coherence in modernity (when traditional social tied were being undone, or so it was assumed) and when new institutions were taking over from the old
-religious phenomenon as social -the intimate connection between function and meaning in religious ritual and representation -the connections between religion and social order. -holistic, institutionally-focused, positivist approaches to the study of culture and identity |
|
|
Durkheim defines religion as:
|
“a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (p. 44) Later, Durkheim nuances his definition: “first and foremost, [religion is] a system of ideas by which men [sic] imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it” (p. 227).
|
|
|
Why does Freud still influence, despite his biases?:
|
1) His ideas are the basis for our modern idea of thepersonality (the unconscious, neurosis, the tensionbetween internal states and social constrain, etc.)2) Freud’s theories deeply embed religion in thehuman psychosexual experience3) Freud still influences because he and his followerspresume that “society’s dramas mirror those of theindividual”; that our cultural forms, economicsystems, social behavior, political formations etc.are all, like religion, expressions of a personality intension
|
|
|
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)
|
not history, but a meditation on the psyche -original religious moment in human experience is the totem sacrifice -Like animism for Tylor, and magic for Frazer, however for Freud it is neurosis and illusion, not misplaced rationalism -the totem is the substitute for the absent father figure -Freud interpreted the emotional ambivalence of children in his own day to their fathers as the evidence for a childish ambivalence in all times and places -this is externalized into a belief in a supernatural Father figure (God, etc.) -elaborates based an ancient case of patricide and incest, whose emotional legacy of guilt, fear and memory
Our moral complex, social organization, and religious attitudes are for Freud founded in a moment of intense hatred and guilt in relation to the father • This is exactly the same story he heard from his neurotic patients; of the repressed urges and memories he identified as emanating from the unconscious of those suffering from neurosis. • So, what is the hatred guilt all about, in the end? Craving for power and sexual desire! |
|
|
The personality and neurosis:
|
• based on the analogy of childhood development through a neurotic phase into the relatively balanced, fulfilled life of an adult, because we still have religion our own society must be caught in some middle phase of evolution! • Why is this noteworthy? • Freud is the first scholar whom we have examined who doesn’t assume that the worldview of a white, privileged, European male is the culmination of all history!
|
|
|
Future of an Illusion (1927)
|
Future of an Illusion (1927) -because religion has psychological origins, of course! -religious beliefs do not come from experience or reason. They promise to fulfill our own deepest wishes (individually and collectively). -for that reasons, they are illusions (but not en-rely false!)
|
|
|
–Worldy Asceticism (or calling):
|
each individual had totake action in order to be saved; just being a member of theChurch was not enough. Salvation shown through material success.
|
|
|
marx as revolutionary theorist of history • What are the most fundamental aspects of our human condition for Marx (and Engels)? • What is our most base, formative interaction as human animals? |
|
|
|
Marx- historical materialism
|
" or the "materialist conception of history" is based on Hegel's claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces. Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a world of appearances, and true reality is an ideal.
for marx, basically different social classes have competed for the surplus products of labor master/slave, capitalist/worker |
|
|
Marx base and superstructure |
|
|
|
False consciousness |
is a concept derived from marxist theory of social class. the concept refers to the misrepresentation of dominant social relations in the consciousness of subordinate, majority classes members of a subordinate class such as workers, peasants, serf, suffer from false consciousness in that their mental representations of the social relations around them conceal or obscure the realities of subordination exploitation and domination they naturalize or sacralize social inequality religion acts effectively as false consciousnes because it taps in to suffering, dismay, frustration, etc |
|
|
• William James (1842-1910)
|
was an American philosopher, psychologist and physician. • Opened first course in psychology in North America at Harvard. • Help found the pragmatist philosophical tradition in the US • In The Meaning of Truth, James put forward his radical empiricist position that experience must be studied as both a set of particulars and the relations between them that give a subject a sense of meaning, intentionality, and value.
|
|
|
Pragmatism |
According to James’ pragmatism, psychologists and philosophers needed to examine the function and effectiveness of religious experiences (ie. not the validity of their truth claims, their closeness to scientific knowing, their sociopolitical function, etc.). • The question is not whether religious experiences are real or not… the assumption is that they are real in the sense that they affect the formation of an individual. • That functional relationship (between experience and subject formation) is what we should be studying.
|
|
|
Asad |
• He says universal and essentialist definitions of religion should be rejected- he says that these are simply the “historical product of discursive processes”
• Asad says that category of ‘religion’ appears to be: – Transcultural – Transhistorical * And so, we define it on this basis. Asad argues that this is not a viable definition of religion, because: • Its elements and relationships are historically specific • The definition of religion is itself the historical product of discursive processes. Asad says: -we have to look at the exercise of power in order to understand how some things are understood and experienced as religious and some are not. ”thus, what appears to anthropologists today to be self-evident, namely that religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings linked to ideas of general order (expressed through either or both rite and doctrine), that it has generic functions/features, and that it must not be confused with any of its particular historical or cultural forms, is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history”. (p. 122) |
|
|
Ashon Crawley: •
|
“I use the phrase ‘circum-religious performance of queer(ed) identity’ based on Joseph Roach’s notion of the ‘circum-Atlantic’ to discuss the ways in which black queer(ed) individuals continually cycle between moments of sexual repression and others of expression based on religious rhetoric. I will sketch the contours of the queer(ed) black body as one which dissents from, disorients and complicates norms and that by the real or imagined physical journey of this subject.”
• “As the body stands both at the center and at the boundary of the production of religious meaning, there is superabundance, a suprafascination with how the body behaves in Christian discourse. Since desire is materialized through bodies, desire ‘is an essentially religious problem. Every religion has its own logic of desire’ which it tries to locate, examine, institutionalize and sanitize” • What is the body as an mechanism of cultural production/ performance, mediation, and force of world making? • What does this mean for queer(ed) black bodies within the religiocultural imaginary of the Black Church tradition? |
|
|
Aesthetic formations--birgit meyer |
Meyer’s key question: how do “imaginations become tangible by materializing in spaces and objects, and by being embodied subjects.” (5-6)
• imagination isn’t just a mental representation, but it becomes embodied and instantiated as “real” in the world through media and acts of mediation: • the result, because they have become embodied and incorporated, evoke and produce new shared experiences, emotions, and affects. • aesthetic formations are different than imagined communities because: • imagined > aesthetic • community > formation • here Meyer’s move is to get away from the idea of community as something fixed, identifiable, static. • she would rather that we consider community as a process. • for that reason, she wants us to think with the word “formation”, which is open ended, encompassing, and dynamic. |
|
|
Sensational Forms (Birgit Meyer)
|
• So here comes her slightly radical proposition: religion is mediation! • Religion both posits and tries to bridge a distance between human beings and the sacred.
• Religion can best be analyzed as as a practice of mediation, to which media, as technologies of representation, employed by human beings, are essential. Sensational Forms (Birgit Meyer) • Here we are not just talking about media as cell phones, computers, or newspapers • Meyer also wants us to see incense, music,, sacred books, holy rocks and mountains, pilgrimage points, and even the human body itself as media. Sensa?onal Forms (Birgit Meyer) • The sacred is not a self evident category, but must be revealed by mediating processes • This is so because media and practices of mediation invoke (or produce) the transcendental in particular ways, at particular times, and in reference to other aspects of identity (political power, identity, institutional affiliation, etc.) |
|
|
Cultural acts
|
the construction, apprehension and utilization of symbolic forms which instill certain dispositions in individuals.1) an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up a religion 2) relating these systems to social-structural and psychological processes
|
|
|
what is the "other' of psychoanalysis? |
the subconscious |
|
|
• out of guilt and fear comes what Freud calls the “Two taboos of totemism and of the Oedipus complex”: what are they? •
|
…Forbidding the killing of the totem/father, and the prohibition of sexually possessing his wives/incest.
|
|
|
• Freud's Basic point:
|
religion enforces taboos that help keep at bay our all too human violent and sexual urges.
|
|
|
Indo-Aryans and the Science of Religion
|
-Aryans (Hindus, Persians) and the Semitic (Arabs, Hebrews) Müller provides a vast picture of book-religions and thosereligions without such a book (mostly indigenous and aboriginalcommunities in the Americas, the Pacific, and Sibeia)As a philologist, Müller used the “science of language” toimagine the form of a “science of religion.”The basic mistake of religion has to do with language, and withthe misuse of what Kant called the necessity of causality inrational thought
|
|
|
Occult Science or Association of Ideas
|
-“Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition […] attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we can no see to have only an ideal significance.”
|
|
|
Positivism:
|
-human society follows laws, just like the natural laws of physics or biology, which can be discovered and studied by empirical observation.
|
|
|
Structural Functionalism: -
|
macro-level analysis -concerned with describing how parts of society functions to promote solidarity, stability and complexity. -how do norms, customs, traditions, and institutions functions as constituent elements to maintain the structure of society? -**like organs in the body
|
|
|
Species being-
|
the final product of our human work is ourselves and the nature of our mutual relations
|
|
|
Historical Materialism-
|
A theory of history that responded to Idealism (hegel), that the main driver of historical change and evolution was ideas and an abstracted Spirit (Geist), Materialism- (Feuerbach), which saw religion and all other flights of cultural fancy as being firmly rooted in human beings
|
|
|
Healthy-mindedness:
|
tendency to see all things as good (involuntary immediacy and/or systematic selection of one aspect of things or a general abstraction that excludes evil from its field of vision)
|
|
|
Mysticism (James)-
|
Features of Mystic Experience 1) Ineffability (anti-intellectual, more like feeling).2) Noetic quality (like feeling but experiences as states ofknowledge/insight) 3) Transiency4) Passivity “It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-materialistic, and harmonizes best with twice-borness and so called other-worldly states of mind” (190)
|
|
|
“Methods in Ethnology” (1920) defines cultural relativism.
|
1) Cultural aspects of human behavior are not biologically based or conditioned. They are acquired solely through learning. 2) Cultural conditioning of behavior is ultimately accomplished through habituation and thus acts through unconscious processes rather than rational deliberation, although secondary rationalizations are often offered to explain cultural values. 3) All cultures are equally developed according to their own priorities and values; none is better, more advanced, or less primitive than any other. 4) Cultural traits cannot be classified or interpreted according to universal categories appropriate to "human nature”. They assume meaning only within a particular cultural context.
|
|
|
asad.... |
Asad is not only challenging topics like belief, but of religion itself. • He says universal and essen6alist definitions of religion should be rejected- he says that these are simply the “historical product of discursive processes” • What does this mean? ***cough cough *** Foucault Asad argues that this is not a viable definition of religion, because: • Its elements and relationships are historically specific • The definition of religion is itself the historical product of discursive processes.
|
|
|
Symbolic/interpretive anthropology:
|
-For Clifford Geertz and the many who he influenced, religion is studied within a broadly cultural/symbolic domain. -The anthropological study of religion is therefore a two-stage operation: 1) an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols, which make up a religion 2) relating these systems to social-structural and psychological processes.
|
|
|
genealogy -
|
a technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by showing alterna6ve and subversive histories of their development. -In general, it aims to expose the historical rela6veness of these beliefs and to understand the power rela6ons through which these beliefs developed.
|
|
|
Post Structuralist-
|
way from a symbolic anthropological approach toward a post-structuralist approach. Which means ,he is sensitive to power, discipline, and the formation of religious subjects. We are challenged to understand:1) the ways dominant discourses and structures have marginalized (“othered”) those outside its self definition2) And to try and recover their experiences and subjecthood on their own terms. That is how we move forward intellectually and as a society.
|
|
|
savage magician
|
-primitive other of the enlightened, modern scientist and his prestigious science
|
|
|
Natural Religion-
|
-denotes everything from ‘religious beliefs and practices based on somekind of universal rationality’-to a more comparative definition as ‘that which is held in common to allthe different faiths in the world.’1) he throws away the idea that religion is some kind of original human nstinct, exactly the same everywhere, and says that religion comes fromsomething else in the human experience. – 2) that “something else” is hope and fear, whose unknown causes arepersonified through imagination
|
|
|
Social Evolution-
|
Through the optics of his comparative, social science, Tylor thought he had uncovered the laws that governed human social evolution and progress. • All societies, he reasoned, pass from a savage stage, to a barbaric stage, and then to a modern stage. The intellect (ie. More or less rational ways of knowing the world)
|
|
|
A feminist hermeneutics of suspicion
|
is first and foremost a consciousness-raising activity that requires one to take into account the influence of culturally determined gender roles and attitudes on whatever is being examined. It is concerned with bringing to consciousness the effects of male bias and ideology on understandings of the wider whole of meaning. A feminist hermeneutics of suspicion is concerned not only with critical engagement about what is said about women that may diminish their full human dignity, but also with the silences that presume women's secondary status by ignoring their experiences of the divine.
|
|
|
age of exploration |
an explosion in anthropological sciences due to the "new" information being brought back from the new world and asia. |
|
|
mythology, the “disease of language”
|
Muller: He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as originally active forces ofnature, only later personified as divine personages.• From this claim Müller derived his theory that religion andmythology is "a disease of language". thunder- the thunderer etc |
