Page-by-Page notes for ANT 466: The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft

Page 1

• Title information: Magic & the Supernatural: ANT 466
• The Anthropological Study of the Supernatural: The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft
• Third Edition by Rebecca L. Stein and Philip Stein
• Appears to set the course for the study of religion, magic, and witchcraft within anthropology

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• Goals of Anthropology:
  • Study various societies in depth
  • Discover possible human universals and what it means to be human

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• The Anthropological Perspective:
  • An approach that compares human societies worldwide (contemporary and historical, industrial and tribal)
• Anthropology:
  • The study of humanity
  • Differs from other disciplines by being an integrated, holistic field
• Holism:
  • The approach to study human societies as systematic sums of their parts, as integrated wholes

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• Four-Fields Anthropology:
  • Archaeology
  • Linguistics
  • Physical Anthropology
  • Cultural Anthropology

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• Physical Anthropology (also called Biological Anthropology):
  • The study of human biology and evolution
  • Includes the evolutionary origins and neurobiology of religious experience

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• Archaeology (also called Anthropological Archaeology):
  • The study of people known primarily from physical and cultural remains
  • Provides insight into lives of now-extinct societies
  • Distinct from archeology in some contexts

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• Linguistic Anthropology:
  • Studies language and communication
  • Includes symbols, grammatical/conceptual structures, mythology, and cognition

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• Cultural Anthropology:
  • Study of contemporary human societies; largest area of anthropology
  • The study of religion is generally considered within cultural anthropology

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• History of Fieldwork:
  • 1870s: Armchair approach
  • Early 1900s: Verandah approach
  • Today: Participant observation

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• Holistic Approach in Anthropology:
  • Holism is the study of human societies as integrated wholes
  • All aspects of society are interconnected
  • Data gathered through observation and fieldwork

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• The Holistic Approach: Universals
  • When examining universals, anthropologists look at ranges of variation
  • Descriptions of hundreds of societies are compared

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• Participant Observation:
  • A technique requiring the anthropologist to live within the community and participate in daily life while observing
  • Early fieldwork often started with small foraging bands, horticultural villages, or pastoral nomads

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• Ethnography and Related Terms:
  • Ethnography: descriptive study of human societies
  • Ethnographer: person who produces an ethnography
  • Ethnographic Present: discuss groups in the present tense as first described by ethnographers

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• Culture Areas:
  • Geographical regions where societies share many culture traits
  • Organized also by subsistence strategy (how they make a living)
  • Examples: foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, agriculturists

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• Subsistence (Food Getting) Strategies:
  • Foragers
  • Food collectors: Hunting, Fishing
  • Pastoralists: Animal husbandry
  • Horticulturists: Farming with simple hand tools
  • Intensive Agriculturalists: Farming with advanced technology

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• Two Ways of Viewing Culture:
  • Etic Analysis: outsider perspective using concepts developed outside the culture
  • Emic Analysis: insider perspective using concepts from within the culture

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• Using the Etic Perspective:
  • Advantages include identifying patterns members may overlook and applying a consistent analytical framework across cultures

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• Ethnocentrism:
  • The tendency to judge other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture
• The Anthropological Perspective includes Cultural Relativism

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• Cultural Relativism:
  • An approach to describe and understand people’s customs and ideas without judging them
  • The goal is to study beliefs in their own context and derive meaning rather than truth claims

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• Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights:
  • Question: Are there universal basic human rights and standards?
  • Despite questions, cultural relativism remains important
  • First approach: understand a culture’s beliefs and behaviors in context to learn its meaning from their viewpoint

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• Approaches to Cultural Relativism: POSTMODERNISM
  • Modernity emphasizes rationality, objectivity, reason, science as paths to knowledge
  • Postmodernism challenges the idea of a single true knowledge and highlights multiple viewpoints

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• Postmodernism (cont.):
  • Denies the possibility of universal true knowledge
  • All knowledge is a human construction to be deconstructed
  • Emphasizes limitations of science, the whole as more than the sum of its parts, multiple viewpoints and biases

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• Modernity & Postmodernism (summary):
  • Modernity: rationality, objectivity, science as a means to knowledge
  • Postmodernism: subjectivity, reflexivity, knowledge as a human construct

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• What is Culture?
  • Culture comprises beliefs and behaviors learned, transmitted, and shared by a group
  • Culture is transmitted through symbols
  • Symbol: a shared understanding about the meaning of words, attributes, or objects; something that stands for something else

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• The Anthropological Perspective: The Concept of Culture
  • Culture as a society’s body of behaviors and beliefs
  • In anthropology, culture is a technical term, not limited to arts or high culture
  • Culture is learned and transmitted; human behavior is complex and variable

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• Symbols and Culture:
  • Culture is based on symbols
  • Learning occurs primarily through symbols

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• Viewing the World through Culture:
  • Culture involves more than describing activities
  • People hold different beliefs, perceptions, and understandings
  • Culture gives meaning to reality

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• The Study of Religion: Attempts at Defining Religion
  • Supernatural: things that are above the natural
  • Sacred: attitude of reverence and respect
  • Animism: belief in spirit beings

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• Defining Religion: Common characteristics
  • Belief in anthropomorphic supernatural beings (spirits/gods)
  • Focus on the sacred or supernatural as reverent and awe-inspiring
  • Presence of supernatural power in beings and objects

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• The Domain of Religion:
  • Religion may be restricted to specific activities, places, and times
  • Emic studies may not have an exact equivalent term for religion
  • Religion is not isolated from other life dimensions but integrated into beliefs and behavior

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• Defining Religion (definitions):
  • Operant Definition: definable terms that are observable and measurable
  • Analytic Definitions: focus on how religion manifests in culture
  • Functional Definitions: based on the role religion plays in society
  • Essentialist Definitions: focus on the essential nature of religion

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• Additional Defining Aspects of Religion:
  • Rituals manipulating sacred objects to communicate with supernatural beings or influence events
  • Narratives and worldviews articulating a moral code
  • Religion creates and maintains social bonds and provides social control and explanations for the unknown and a sense of personal control

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• Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Religion: Evolutionary Approach
  • Focus on when and how religion began
  • Emerged in the late 1800s with emphasis on science, logic, and monotheism
  • Emphasis on empiricism; knowledge beyond science seen as impossible
  • Animatism introduced as a basic, ancient supernatural force arising from human emotion toward nature
  • Many contemporary anthropologists use an evolutionary approach

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• The Evolutionary Approach and Animatism (continued):
  • Animatism described as a precursor to more personified beliefs

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• The Marxist Approach to Religion:
  • Religion is a construction of those in power designed to divert people from the miseries of life
  • Religion reflects society; criticizing religion is critiquing society
  • Religion can function as compensation and as a means to get people to accept capitalist structures

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• The Marxist Perspective (continued):
  • Religion does not reflect true consciousness but a false consciousness
  • It serves to maintain social order and ideological control under capitalism

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• The Functional Approach (Overview):
  • Core question: What does religion do in society?
  • Key researchers: Emile Durkheim, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski, Melford Spiro
  • Religion as an integrative force that promotes social cooperation
  • The concept of the Collective Conscious and collective representations (symbols)

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• The Functional Approach Details:
  • Religion provides explanations for the unknown and a course of action
  • Religion helps maintain social cohesion and integrates individuals into the social structure

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• The Functional Approach: Religion as a Charter of Culture
  • Religion is a cluster of symbols that articulate a culture's ideas, values, and way of life
  • Symbols provide interpretive frameworks for viewing the world
  • Geertzian perspective emphasizes religion as a system of meaning

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• The Interpretive Approach in Religion:
  • Anthropologists seek to interpret culturally specific webs of significance
  • Detailed ethnographic descriptions are used to uncover these webs of meaning

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• Further on the Interpretive Approach:
  • Religion described as a cluster of symbols forming a charter for a culture's ideas and values
  • Understanding through the interpretive lens of symbol systems and meanings

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• The Psychosocial Approach:
  • Focus on the relationship between culture and personality and between society and the individual
  • Related figures: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung
  • Emotions are projected at the cultural level in various ways

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• The Psychosocial Approach (details):
  • Examines how individual emotions shape and are shaped by culture

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• Summary of Psychosocial Approach:
  • Culture and personality linkage helps explain religious behavior

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• The Biological Basis of Religious Behavior:
  • Human perception of reality is brain-based
  • Question: Do brain-created realities resemble other realities we call true or false?
  • Answer suggested: yes, biology contributes to religious experience; aligns with holistic anthropology

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• Beliefs in Spirit Beings:
  • All human religious systems share concepts of anthropomorphic causal agents within their environment
  • Anthropomorphic means human-like in form or behavior

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• Theory of Mind (ToM):
  • The ability to know or infer what is going on in another person’s mind
  • Allows explanation of others' behavior and prediction of actions; essential to complex social patterns

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• The Evolution of Religion via Biological Cognition:
  • Religion may be a by-product of how the brain works rather than an adaptation with a function
  • Some scholars view cognition as a driver of religious beliefs and experiences

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• Cognition and Religion: Further ideas
  • Tendency to overextend social understanding and infer purpose where there is none
  • Agnosticism: the view that the nature of the supernatural is unknowable
  • Neither proving nor disproving the supernatural is possible in principle

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• Ethnographic Example: The Fore of New Guinea
  • A group of horticulturists in the eastern highlands observed for study
  • The medical problem: Kuru, causing jerking movements and body shaking; about 200 people die annually
  • Determined to be caused by an infectious agent called a prion

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• Fore and Kuru Case:
  • Prion transmission occurred through cannibalistic funeral rituals
  • Government banned cannibalism; kuru eventually disappeared
  • The Fore attributed illness to sorcery, using a divination ritual to identify the sorcerer
  • This shows the interaction of scientific explanation and indigenous beliefs in a real-world ethnographic context