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From Canada to U. Soft cover. Light wear, text unmarked. Condition: new. Next Post. Skip to content The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft This concise and accessible textbook introduces students to the anthropological study of religion. Don't use plagiarized sources. Get Your Custom Essay on. Order Essay.
Stein The right of Rebecca L. Contents Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1 The anthropological study of religion The anthropological perspective The holistic approach The study of human societies The Fore of New Guinea: an ethnographic example Two ways of viewing culture Cultural relativism Box 1. Religious symbols Box 3.
A classification of rituals A survey of rituals Technological rituals Social rites of intensification Therapy rituals and healing Revitalization rituals Rites of passage Alterations of the human body Pilgrimages Box 4. Box 5. Previous Post Cultural comparison paper on civilizations. Why we are the best. It requires a great deal of time—time to observe human behavior and time to interview members of a society.
Because of the necessity of having to limit the scope of a research project, anthropologists are noted for their long-term studies of small, remote communities. However, as isolated small communities become increasingly incorporated into larger political units, anthropologists are turning more and more to the study of larger, more complex societies.
Yet even within a more complex society, anthropologists maintain a limited focus. For example, within an urban setting, anthropologists study specific companies, hospitals, neighborhoods, gangs, clubs, and churches. Anthropological studies take place over long periods of time and usually require the anthropologist to live within the community and to participate to a degree in the lives of the people under study, while at the same time making objective observations. This technique of study is referred to as participant observation.
Students of anthropology are initially introduced to small communities such as foraging bands, small horticultural villages, and groups of pastoral nomads.
They become familiar with the lives of the Trobriand Islanders off. When we say small-scale, we refer to relatively small communities, villages, and bands that practice foraging, herding, or technologically simple horticulture. These familiar religions include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. They are similar in that the origins of these religions are based on the lives of a particular individual or founder, such as Moses, Christ, Mohammad, and the Buddha.
These religions have spread into thousands of different societies, and their adherents number in the millions. The small-scale societies that are more traditionally studied by anthropologists, by contrast, are usually not based on the lives of particular prophets or founders.
They tend to be limited to one or a few societies, and their adherents might number only a few hundred or a few thousand. If they involve only a very small number of people, then why study these small-scale religions? Among the many questions that anthropologists ask about humanity are the following: Are there characteristics that are found in all human societies, what we might call human universals? And when we look at universals, or at least at very widespread features, what are the ranges of variation?
Returning to the example of marriage, we could ask the following questions: Is marriage found in all human societies? And what are the various forms that marriage takes? We might ask similar questions about religion. To answer these questions, anthropologists go out into the field, study particular communities, and write reports describing these communities. Questions of universality and variability can be answered on the basis of descriptions of hundreds of human societies.
In addition, the goal of anthropology is to study the broad range of human beliefs and behaviors, to discover what it means to be human. This is best accomplished by examining religious and other cultural phenomena in a wide variety of cultures of different sizes and structures, including our own.
It is often said that the aim of anthropology is to make the strange familiar and the. Ethnography is the descriptive study of human societies. People who study human societies and write ethnographies about them are cultural anthropologists; they are sometimes referred to as ethnographers.
However, not all descriptions of human societies are written by ethnographers. For example, an archaeologist is someone who studies the physical and cultural remains of societies that existed in the past and are known today only from their ruins, burials, and garbage. Yet archaeologists can, to a limited degree, reconstruct the lives of people who lived in ancient societies. Although these descriptions are far from complete and objective, they do provide us with some information.
Although we will visit a few societies that are known solely from their archaeological remains, most of the examples in this book are from societies that exist today or have existed in the recent past.
Many of the societies we will discuss were first visited and described by anthropologists in the early to mids. Although these societies have changed over time, as all groups do, and although many of these societies have passed out of existence, anthropologists speak of them in the ethnographic present; that is, we discuss these groups in the present tense as they were first described by ethnographers. Throughout this book we will be presenting examples from the ethnographic literature.
These communities are found throughout the world, including some very remote areas. To better understand their nature and distribution, we can organize these societies into culture areas. A culture area is a geographical area in which societies tend to share many cultural traits.
This happens because these groups face similar challenges from the environment and often come up with similar solutions and because cultural traits that develop in one group easily spread to other nearby groups. The common traits that define a culture area tend to lie in the realm of subsistence activities and technology, a common response to the challenges from the environment, although some similarity in other facets of the society, including religion, may also be found.
For example, the California culture area, whose boundaries are somewhat different from the present-day political unit, includes a group of communities that exploit acorns. Acorns require processing that involves many steps and much equipment, but they provide a food resource that is plentiful and nutritious and that can be stored. These features permit the development of permanent and semipermanent communities, unlike those developed by most foragers.
All of the groups used as examples in this book are included. Many are located on the maps at the front of this book. Paiute, Shoshoni Acorn collecting, fishing, hunting of small game; small brush windbreaks, elaborate. Hunting of bison, some horticulture; tipi dwellings; transport by dog, later horse; absence of basketry and pottery, hide. Slash-and-burn horticulture; villages often consist of one communal dwelling located on rivers; bark canoes and dugouts, clubs and shields, bows and arrows, blow guns,.
Mediterranean Berbers Agriculture and sheep herding; marginal Near Eastern culture, towns and cities;. European Basques, Viking Mixed agriculture and animal husbandry; urbanization and industrialization; mainly. One commonly used scheme is to organize societies in terms of their subsistence strategy, focusing on how they make a living Table 1.
Commonly used categories are foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agriculturalists. Of course, these are not precisely delineated categories but divisions of a continuum. Foragers are peoples without any form of plant or animal domestication. They tend to live in small, isolated groups that are found today primarily in areas that are difficult to farm. Horticulturalists are peoples who garden in the absence of fertilization, irrigation, and other advanced technologies.
Pastoralists are peoples whose primary livelihood comes from the herding of domesticated animals. Peoples who plow, fertilize, and irrigate their crops are termed agriculturalists. The latter develop relatively large communities with more complex technologies. Societies that have the same subsistence strategy generally have other features in common, such as settlement patterns, population density, and the presence of specialists. In the preceding sections of this chapter we learned about some basic concepts of anthropology, such as holism, and we were introduced to the concept of ethnography.
Now let us turn our attention to a particular example to illustrate these ideas. The holistic approach sees human behavior as a complex set of interacting behaviors and ideas.
In examining a society, we might begin with a particular problem that interests us, but we soon realize that to truly understand this problem, we have to look at many other aspects of the society. An example of this was a study of the Fore, a group of about 14, horticulturalists living in the eastern highlands of New Guinea Melanesia culture area.
The problem that brought the Fore to the attention of the Western world was a medical one. The solution to the problem brought the Nobel Prize in Medicine to one of the investigators. When the Australian government first contacted the Fore in the s, a significant number of individuals were found to be suffering from a particular illness.
The illness was having a major impact on the population: about This illness is characterized by a variety of symptoms, but the most obvious ones are jerking movements and shaking, which make planned motor activity difficult. The course of the illness is about nine months. At the end the victim can no longer stand or sit up and can no longer eat or drink water and soon dies. The medical team that was sent in to deal with the disease sought the cause.
Because it appeared to be largely confined to the Fore, the team thought it might be genetic or due to a toxin in the environment. However, kuru was finally determined to be the result of an infectious agent called a prion. The major question was how the kuru prion was passed from one person to another. Was it passed on through contaminated water, through the air, or through sexual activity?
The answer to the puzzle was proposed by anthropologists: cannibalism. It was the custom of the Fore to eat the body as part of the funeral rituals— one aspect of their religious practices.
The body of the deceased was carried down to an abandoned field, where kin dismembered and cooked it. Close relatives then consumed the pieces. Because cooking does not destroy the prions, some of them entered the bloodstream through cuts and open sores and eventually entered the brain, where, many years later, the person began to show symptoms of the disease.
Because women and children, who have lower social status, were more likely to eat the brain, they were the most likely to develop the disease. The modern medical community now had an explanation for what caused the disease and knew how it was transmitted from one individual to another. As a result, cannibalism stopped, and kuru eventually disappeared, although this took some time because the disease has a long incubation period.
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