Introduction: The Occult

Anthropology intro (same as other classes)

  • Goals: To study various societies in depth and discover possible human universals and what it means to be human

Etic Analysis

  • Outsider's perspective

  • The study of a society using concepts that were developed outside of the culture

Emic Analysis

  • Insider’s perspective

  • The study of society through the eyes of the people being studied

Ethnocentrism

  • Using one’s own culture as the basis for interpreting and judging other cultures

  • The tendency, or natural impulse, is to use our own society as a basis for interpreting and judging other societies

Cultural Relativism

  • An approach anthropologists use to attempt to describe and understand people’s customs and ideas, but not to judge them

    • THE GOAL IS TO STUDY WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE, NOT WHETHER OR NOT IF WHAT THEY BELIEVE IS TRUE

Supernatural

  • A term that refers to things that are “above the natural”

Sacred

  • A term added to the definition of religion that denotes an attitude wherein the subject is entitled to reverence and respect

Animism

  • A belief in spirit beings

DEFINING RELIGION

  • Operant Definition

    • Using definable terms so that they are observable and measurable and therefore can be studied

  • Analytic Definitions

    • Focus on the way religion manifests itself or is expressed in culture

  • Functional Definitions

    • Are based on the role that religion plays within the society

  • Essentialist Definitions

    • Look at the essential nature of religion

Theoretical Approaches to the study of Religion

The Evolutionary approach

  • Centered on the questions of when and how religion began

    • Developed in the late 1800s, when the focus was on the concepts of science, logic, and monotheism as pinnacles of human achievement

    • Scholars emphasized empiricism, saying that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge; any knowledge beyond that is impossible

  • It was thought that religion naturally evolved from the simple to the complex and that this evolution was a natural consequence of human nature

  • Animatism

  • A more basic and more ancient supernatural force, that grew out of human emotional reaction to the power of nature

  • Many contemporary anthropologists use an evolutionary approach

The Marxist Approach

  • Marx was critical of religion, however he did not criticize the logic of religion

  • He felt that religion reflected society so that any criticism of religion must therefore also be a criticism of society

  • Marx saw religion as being a human construction, more specifically as a construction of those in power

  • Marx felt that religion did not reflect the true consciousness of people but a false consciousness designed to divert people’s attention from the miseries of their lives

  • Religion is a natural consequence of the human experience of distress

  • Religion is seen both as a means of compensation and as a way of getting people to go along with a capitalist culture that is not in their best interest

The Functional Approach

  • Ask the question: What does religion do? What role do religion play in a society

  • The Collective Conscious: A system of beliefs that act to contain natural selfishness of individuals and to promote social cooperation

    • Collective representations, or symbols, are a reflection of the collective conscious

  • Religion is seen as an integrative force in society

Interpretative Approach

  • The idea that cultural systems are understood by studying meaning

  • Religion is a cluster of symbols that provides a charter for a culture’s ideas, values, and way of life

  • Religious phenomena function to provide answers and explanations and to provide a course of action

  • Critics of functional school

  • Religion specifically is described as a cluster of symbols that together make up a whole and provides a charter for a culture’s ideas, values, and way of life

  • The set of symbols provides ways to interpret the world

  • Stages of the study of religion according to Geertz

  • Anthropologists need to seek to interpret the culturally specific “webs of significance” that people both create and are caught up in

  • Interpretive anthropology can discover and interpret these webs of meaning through detailed ethnographic descriptions

Psychosocial Approach

  • Is concerned with the relationship between culture and personality and the connection between the society and the individual

  • Sigmund Freud and defense mechanisms

  • Psychosocial anthropologists believe that individual emotions also get projected at the cultural level

  • An approach to the study of religion that is concerned with the relationship between culture and personality between society and the individual

The Biological Basis of Religious Behavior

  • What we perceive and think of as our reality is actually a creation of our brain

  • Does our brain create realities that are indistinguishable from “reality”, whatever that means?

    • Could religious experiences be brain-created realities? They could be

  • Considering biological influences is a part of anthropology’s holistic approach

Beliefs in spirit beings:

  • Another aspect of the biological basis for religion is the impact of the way the human mind works

  • All human religious systems seem to share in common concepts of supernatural anthropomorphic causal agents within their environment

    • Anthropomorphic: Refers to things that are not human hut have human like characteristics and behave in humanlike ways

  • One explanation for the development of a belief in spirit beings is based on the concept of theory of mind

  • Theory of Mind: Refers to the idea that people know, or think they know, what is going on in other people’s minds

    • This is what allows people to explain other peoples’ behavior and to predict what others will do in a particular situation; it is essential to the development of complex social patterns

The evolution of religion

  • If humans have a biological mechanism for religion, why did it evolve?

  • To fulfill social needs or emotional needs

  • Other theorists have focused on the nature of human cognition as an explanation for the origin of religious beliefs and experiences

  • Religion is seen not as existing to serve a purpose but rather as an accidental by-product of the way the human brain works

  • The second way in which cognition feeds into the evolution of religion is the human tendency to overextend our system of social understanding and infer purpose, goals, intention, and design even where there is none

  • Agnosticism: Agnostics say that the nature of supernatural is unknowable, that it is as impossible to prove the nonexistence of the supernatural as it is to prove its existence

The Fore of New Guinea: An Ethnographic Example

  • A group of horticulturists living in the eastern highlands of New Guinea

  • The problem that brought the Fore to the attention of the Western world was a medical one

  • Kuru: The illness that was causing 200 people to die on an annual basis; the most obvious symptom characterizing this illness are jerking movements and shaking

  • The medical team determined kuru to be the result of an infectious agent called a prion

  • They discovered that the kuru prion was transmitted from one individual to another through cannibalistic practices employed in funeral rituals

  • The government eliminated the practice of cannibalism and kuru eventually disappeared

  • The Fore did not accept the scientific explanation of the disease; they believed it was a result of sorcery

  • A divination ritual was used to reveal the identity of the sorcerer causing the illness