Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Christopher Partridge ed. The book is clear that these are not just matters of long ago and far away but pertain to the contemporary world of today's news. This is an excellent book for courses on the anthropology of religion as well as for people who want to know what anthropologists have to say on the topic. In many years of teaching courses on the anthropology of religion, I have found no book to match it for comprehensive coverage.
Paul Durrenberger, Pennsylvania State University. Already a member? Log in. Winzeler is professor emeritus of anthropology, University of Nevada, Reno. Reviews This is an excellent review of the vast body of research anthropologists have done on religion around the world and through the history of our species. Add to cart. Buy Now. Free Shipping May exclude certain postcodes. Rent Anthropology Textbooks. User account menu. How to cover a book with newspaper. Btec first childrens care learning and development book.
Learning fast and slow book. Can you help donate a copy? When you buy books using these links the Internet Archive may earn a small commission. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive , a c 3 non-profit. See more about this book on Archive. This edition doesn't have a description yet. Can you add one? Previews available in: English. Add another edition? Copy and paste this code into your Wikipedia page. After a while the pilgrim was amazed to see a glow emanating from the shrine.
The tooth had taken on an aura of sacrality. The so-called fetishes and sacred objects of African peoples are more akin to the tabernacle that contains the consecrated elements the god , than the god itself.
The gap between Western and non-Western conceptions of the instances of spiritual forces in the material world is much narrower than many assume. Pilgrimage cults that gather around weeping or moving plaster statues of the Virgin Mary in contemporary Irish Catholicism, for instance, attest to not dissimilar beliefs in the embodied immanence of the supernatural. Like a shaman, a stigmatist uses his or her body as an inscription or container of divine presence.
Modes of Thought Anthropologists of religion have frequently returned to the question of modes of thought. Is there a conceptual dividing line between pre-scientific and scientific ways of thinking? If there are different mentalities, or ways of thinking, are they present in each one of us, in all societies, or in different measure in different societies? In their culture, in the set of ideas I then lived in, I accepted them; in a kind of way I believed them.
If one must act as though one believed, one ends in believing, or half-believing as one acts. Nineteenth-century evolutionary theorists such as Herbert Spencer, E. Tylor and J. Frazer shared three common assumptions: i the idea of progress, ii an unquestioned faith in the efficacy of the comparative method, and iii the notion of a psychic unity among all peoples. If left on their own, all societies would pass through the same stages of social evolution. The supposition was that eventually all societies would reach the same peak of rational, civilised thought and behaviour that characterised Victorian Britain.
He concluded that the formal rules of logic that governed rational thought did not actually apply in many simpler societies. The notion of faith in a Western context similarly depends upon believing something that cannot be proved and invokes the language of paradox and mystery as a way of dealing with contradictions. For Good, in contrast, there is a close relationship between science, including medicine, and religious fundamentalism.
He seeks to collapse the distinction between the realm of the sacred religion and profane science. The concept of belief as currently understood and used in English may be difficult or impossible to translate into other languages. The key difference between Mary Steedly and the Karobatak was the presence or absence of alternative views of the world. According to Mary Douglas , there is a difference between personalised and impersonal thinking.
As the New Zealand anthropologist Paul Gifford states, for Westerners: Reality is generally not experienced in terms of witches, demons and person- alised spiritual powers, and Christianity has changed to take account of this.
In Africa most Christians operate from a background little affected by the European Enlightenment; for most Africans, witchcraft, spirits and ances- tors, spells and charms are primary and immediate and natural categories of interpretation. We have already seen that Tylor, Malinowski, and others were wrong to assume that science would eventually put paid to both magic and religion.
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