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San2 Anthropology of Religion - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Emile Durkheim's 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life's framework for study of religion: two categories of beliefs (opionions) and rites (outward, material actions) , sreligion and society constatnly reinforcing themselves with religion expressing a sacred image of the society that followed it , information and beliefs translating into real-world effecs
      - Radcliffe-Brown's 1952 Structure and Function in Primitive Society's study of totemism and totemic rights as there to 'reaffirm, renew and strengthen those sentiments on which the social solidarity depends' with function of reaffirming group solidarity
    - - Talal Asad's crticial view and takedown of Geertz' conceptualisation in 1993 Genealogies of Religion
  - - - Rodney Needham's 1972 Belief, Language and Experience said belief so definitionally problematic that we should simply discard it,disconnect between word and experience makes it unclear what is being described and other terms outside English ones, too variable to be a solid anthropological category
      - MIchael Ruel's 1997 Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion exploring idea that the term belief has fundamentally Christian connotations so anthropologists are unwittingly importing Christian assumptions into attempt to understand non-Christian worldviews leading to fallacies: belief central to all religions, belief of a person fundamental in shaping their actions, belief an interior state, belief more important than relations and structures around the believer in terms of religious experience
      - Talal Asad's 1983 Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category arguing against Geertz' belief that religion could be separated from other aspects of society, a modern, privatised Christian notion of belief
        
        Andreas Bandak's 2012 Problems of Belief: tonalities of immediacy among Christians of Damascus showing belief comes and goes and is not always the definining feature of life or even religion, and belief must be embedded in wider contexts
      - Jon & Hildi Mitchell 2008 For Belief: Embodiment in Catholicism and Mormonism showing material stuff matters in belief, 'practical faith'
      - Zora Neale Hurston 1938 Tell my Horse: Voodoo and life in Haiti and Jamaica challenged ongoing portrayals of voodoo and despire own theory did not claim people to be wrong
      - Liana Chua 2011 Soul Encounters: Emotions, Corporeality, and the Matter of Belief in a Bornean Village, body states an embodied, relational form of belief not j inner state but tangible reality
      - Paul Stoller 1987 In Sorcery's Shadow, became believer instead of remaining ambiguous
  - - - religious as a divisive force, creating others, Luz 2020 showing religious devisions not always overt and violent but w gradual and subtle forms to the point that division becomes naturalised e.g. Tomb of Rachel taken as accepted reality where a famous Rabbi buried, draws on documents to show it was first a Muslim shrine taken over by a Jewish faith-based organization ,& gradually reworked to its current form, certain objects, decorations, signs added to show miracles and donations took place there and mould to fit vocabulary of Jewish shrines, also physically erasing all previous traces of Muslim prescence
  - - - influential notion of possession as therapeutic throughout 70s- Ganath Obeyesekere looking at Alice Nona suffering emotional trauma around familial experiences and recent death of father being regularly possessed by her dead father in law, people question why this happens, recognise it is happening and try to cure it, becomes culturally shared, cathartic process. But he has been criticised for imposing western psychiatric categories and explaining away the reality of possession
      - Janis Boddy looking at Zar spirit possession in Northern Sudan women unable to live up to ideas of female selfhood, allow woman to dissasociate herself from the provlem and attribute it to the spirit, also allowing a moment to recosnider selfhood in a context that would not normally allow this
    - - have to undersand how witchcraft reforming itself, not just old traditions applied to new conditions but becoming intrinsic to modernity- Shaw 1997, Gerchiere 1997, but Shaw asking if its useful to look at it as repurposing for modern phenomenon as this takes for granted an authentic, original practice there from the start