ANTHRO

• Worldview


  Making sense of their experience in the ways that link them meaningfully to the wider world
• Worldview


  An encompassing picture of reality based on a set of shared assumptions about how the world works
• Worldview


  • Established symbolic framework that highlight certain significant domains of social experience while downplaying others
  • Multiple worldviews may coexist in a single society, or a single worldview may dominate
• Religion


  Ideas and practices that postulate reality beyond that which is immediately available to the senses
• Supernatural


  The invisible beings or the realm they inhabit, most contemporary anthropological writing on religion avoid this term because it imposes on other societies a distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" worlds that those societies don't often recognize
• Religion


  • A way people deal with uncertainty
  • A way to provide meaning to life
  • Explain the unexplainable
  • Create social solidarity
• Animism


  A term used by E.B. Taylor to refer to traditional religion, others use "traditional religion" to avoid persisting implications that animism is something that "more advanced" societies have evolved away from
• Ancestor Religion


  Relatedness do not end with death, ancestors are believed to maintain strong interest in the lives of their descendants, ancestors act to maintain social order by sending sickness or other misfortune when the rules by which people are supposed to live are violated, most senior people are the ones who gain power as they are closer to becoming ancestors
• Gods


  Existence of sentient and personified forces that are less local and more powerful
• Polytheistic Religions


  Multiple gods, have many personal attributes including gender, have children
• Mana


  A Melanesian term in 19th century to designate a cosmic force whose only humanlike attribute is the ability to respond to human beings who use the correct symbolic formulas when they want to harness or channel this force for their own purposes
• Oracle


  An invisible force capable of understanding questions addressed to it in human language willing to respond truthfully using symbolic means that human beings with the proper cultural knowledge can interpret, may speak through people, animals, plants, or objects
• Dogma or Orthodoxy


  Truths that may not be questioned, correct belief
• Myth


  Stories that recount how various aspects of the world came to be the way they are, integrate personal experiences about the way society operates, highly developed verbal art form, recited for purposes of both entertainment and instruction, have social importance as they tell about our past, present and future
• Origin Myths


  Myths that explain the creation of the world or particular features of the landscape or of human beings
• Official Myth Tellers


  The most powerful\respected groups in society
• Myths


  • Malinowski argued that myths are charters for social action: the beings and places who figure in the myths can be referred to by living people in order to justify present-day social arrangements
  • Levi-Strauss showed that the very structure of mythic narratives are meaningful and worth studying in their own right, myths are cognitive tools for resolving logical contradictions that goes beyond what humans know, myths are attempts to deal with oppositions, offer an imaginative realm in which alternative possibilities and their consequences can be explored
• Ritual


  Use to identify certain repetitive social practices, many of which have nothing to do with religion, is composed of a sequence of symbolic activities, set off from the social routines of everyday life, recognizable by members of the society as a ritual, and closely connected to specific set of ideas that are often encoded in myth
• Religious Rituals


  Regularly involve attempts to influence or gain sympathy of a particular personified cosmic being
• Prayer


  A religious ritual addressing personified forces in human speech, while holding the body in conventional posture of respect
• Sacrifice


  Offering something of value to the invisible forces
• Congregation


  When members of a religious tradition come together in processions, meetings, or convocations
• Orthopraxy


  A style of religious practice, correct practice, some religious traditions aim to ritualize traditions virtually every waking act that adherents perform
• Rite of Passage


  Occurs when one or more members of a society are ritually transformed from one kind of a social person into another, follows a 3 part sequence: separation, transitional state, and reaggregation
• Liminal Period


  The transitional state in rites of passage, when people are on the threshold, they are "betwixt and between", neither in nor out
• Communitas


  An unstructured or minimally structured community of equal individuals that develops during the liminal period of rites of passage
• Magic


  Ritual practices that do not have technically or scientifically apparent effects but are believed by the actors to have an influence on the outcome of practical matters
• Magic


  • Malinowski suggested that all living societies have developed effective knowledge and practical techniques in dealing with the world, but realized that their practical control over the world has limits, when the outcome is uncertain, regardless of the skill and insight people may have, they are likely to resort to magic, using magic in these cases has the practical function of reducing anxiety
• During the popularity of unilineal evolution in late 19th century, magic and religion were thought to be separated stages in progressive evolution of human thought that culminated in science</b>
• Later on, it was made clear that magic, religion, and science may coexist in the same society and may even be used by the same people who resort in different ways of coping
• Witchcraft


  • E.E. Evans-Pritchard demonstrated that the beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft, oracles, and magic were perfectly logical if one accepted certain basic assumptions about the world, among the Azande, witchcraft involves the performance of evil by human beings believed to possess an innate, nonhuman, "witchcraft substance" that can be activated without the individual's awareness, witchcraft tend to explain misfortune when other possibilities have been discounted
• Patterns of Witchcraft Accusation

  • Witches are either evil outsiders that will strengthen in-group ties as they unite to oppress the witch, or internal enemies that can weaken in-group ties, or internal deviants that the accusation might be an attempt to control the deviance in defense of the wider values of the community
• The witchcraft accusations provided a relatively nondestructive way to restore the community to the proper size for a kinship-based political system
• Shamans


  Part-time religious specialists commonly found in small-scale egalitarian societies, they are believed to have the power to contact powerful cosmic beings directly on behalf of others, sometimes through travelling to the cosmic realm, in other cases, shamans enter an altered state of consciousness to seek and remove the cause of an illness, it is believed that they have no choice in taking on the role as the spirit demands it, the training they go through is long and demanding
• Practices


  • Not merely the by-products of idiosyncratic individual invention
  • Products of collective cultural construction, performing social and cultural tasks that involve far more than tending to the spiritual needs of supporters
• If not the elders, other societies assign spiritual specialists
• Shamans


  Part-time religious specialist commonly found in small-scale egalitarian societies
• Shamans


  • The term itself came from Siberia
  • Believed to have the power to contact powerful cosmic beings directly on behalf of others, sometimes through travelling to the cosmic realm
  • In other cases, shamans enter an altered state of consciousness to seek and remove the cause of an illness
  • Believed to have no choice in taking on the role as the spirit demands it
  • The training they go through is long and demanding and may involve a powerful psychotropic substance
  • Feared as someone who can intervene for good, can intervene for ill
  • Once a shaman, they will serve the society for the rest of their life
• Priests


  • Skilled in the practice of religious rituals which are carried out for the benefit of others
  • Found in hierarchical societies in which status differences between rulers and subjects are paralleled in the unequal relationship between priest and laity
  • Do not have direct contact with cosmic force, rather their major role is to mediate the contact successfully for their people by ensuring that the required rituals have been properly performed
• Change in religious systems

  1. When people encounter change, they seek for new interpretation that will help them cope with these changes

  2. This could result to them adopting an entirely new worldview, frequently a religious system in the process of conversion