ANTH 103 Lecture 12 Religion
ANTH 103 Lecture 12 Religion
ANTH 103 Lecture 12 Religion
Religion
Lecture 12
What is Religion?
Features:
1) A belief in powers or deities whose abilities
transcend the natural world.
2) Myths and stories about the meaning and
purpose of life.
3) A set of ritual activities that reinforce or
instill these collective beliefs.
4) A symbolic system used in religious practice
that represents key aspects of the religion or
tenets of faith.
5) Identifiable specialists in the religion who
assist or instruct the average believer,
6) Institutions that preserve, explore, teach,
and implement the religion’s beliefs.
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Religious Beliefs
• Beliefs are ideas about:
– The spirit world
– Beings and forces that have spiritual power.
– The ways in which the universe was created and
continues to be organized.
• Social Control
• Rumspringa
• Rite of passage (adolescent) where an Amish
teenager can experience the outside world and
see if they want to return to Amish community
• 85-90% return
Functions of Religion
• Economic Adaptation
• Anthropologist Roy Rappaport
• Tsembagas of New Guinea
• horticulture and animal
husbandry.
• Ritual slaughter of pigs.
• Maintains ecological balance.
• Symbiotic relationship between
pigs and humans.
What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
Émile Durkheim: The Sacred and the
Profane.
Australian Aborigines.
Sacred = practices, people, or objects that
are considered holy by a religion.
Profane = unholy practices, people or
objects.
Religion = a unified system of beliefs and
practices relative to sacred things.
Durkheim viewed ritual as a powerful
social tool to bind society together
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What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
Karl Marx: “The Opiate of the Masses”
Marx views religion within the framework of
his larger view of economy and society.
Infrastructure = “the base” referred to the
economic realities of the world in which
people lived (the environment may dictate
that plants that people could grow).
Proletariat = needed religion the most
because they had a harsh life.
Religion functioned to reinforce social
stratification and numb the poor. Religion
is the opiate of the masses
Do you agree with Marx?
What Tools do Anthropologists Use
to Understand How Religion Works?
Religion and Ritual
What kinds of religious rituals
are you familiar with?
– Trance states
• Make contact with the spirit world, express honor and respect
for spirit beings, obtain blessings, health, success and
achiever personal or communal goals.
Prayer and Sacrifice
• Prayer: Religious speech or thought through which
believers transmit messages to spirit beings.
Three stages:
1.) Separation (symbolic) (enter as a novice)
2.) Transition (liminal phase)(no status)
3.) Reincorporation
Communitas =
• liminal phase of a ritual rite of passage
• Novices bond on common ground.
• Heighted sense of intimacy and connectedness.
• Surrender of prior status (etopian idealism)
Rites of Passage
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B3Abpv0ysM
Puberty vs.
Funerary Rites
• Puberty Rites:
Rituals performed to • Funerary Rites:
mark the passage of Rituals performed to
an individual from mark a person’s
childhood to death and passage to
adulthood; also called the afterworld
initiation rites
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Religious Practices
• Social Control
• Economic Adaptation
Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Revitalization Movements:
Prophets