One of the fantastic and daunting things about a project which seeks to comprehend “religion” in its historical entirety and cultural variety is that it’s impossible to read everything. The field for this kind of project is enormous and is touched upon, in one way or another, by nearly every discipline in the academy. This [...]
Tags:ecological anthropology·economic anthropology·Julian Steward·Native Americans·Plains Indians·ritual variation·Ruth Benedict·vision complex·vision quest
The discovery that two events, symbols, thoughts or texts, while so utterly separated by time and space that they could not “really” be connected, seem, nevertheless, to be the same or to be speaking directly to one another raises the possibility of a secret interconnection of things that is the scholar’s [...]
Tags:Crow Indians·dispositional optimism·Micheal Scheier·Peter Nabokov·Plains Indians·spirit helper·Two Leggings·vision quest·William Wildschut
Scholars have long been fascinated by the idea that something like the primordial or original religion existed until recently and may in fact be curated by a few people even today. If such “religions” could be identified, scholars hoped they could sketch the historical development or genealogy of religions. For old-time cultural evolutionists this amounted [...]
Tags:Aboriginal·Australian religions·Bushmen·dreaming·Edwin Wilmsen·Emile Durkheim·Max Charlesworth·Mircea Eliade·primitive religion·primordial religion·San
I have a confession to make. I’ve long denigrated claims that what we today call “religion” originated during the Upper Paleolithic because early supernaturalism fostered altruism. When this argument makes an appearance, it’s often in the service of an evolutionary theism which assumes that because God is behind evolution, religion is the designed outcome of [...]
Tags:altruism·animism·animist·cosmic economy of sharing·evolutionary theism·foragers·Marshall Sahlins·Nurit Bird-David·Original Affluent Society·relational epistemology·relational rituals
This provocative Spiegel interview with Czech moral economist Tomas Sedlacek nicely dovetails with the conversation surrounding David Graeber’s work on debt. The issues are framed as religious allegory:
SPIEGEL: Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?
Sedláček: Mankind’s oldest stories tell us [...]
Tags:Adam and Eve·David Graeber·Edenic myth·greed·Marshall Sahlins·Tomas Sedlacek
CultureLab has posted an interview with sociologist William Sims Bainbridge, who in the past has done a great deal of work on religions in general and “cults” in particular. He now focuses on virtual realities and gaming. To research his most recent book, he spent 2300 hours playing World of Warcraft (WoW).
When asked about the [...]
Tags:animism·genealogy of faith·Nurit Bird-David·relational epistemology·William Sims Bainbridge·World of Warcraft
At the start of my anthropology of religion course, I ask students to “explain” religion: Why do you think it exists? What do you think it does? The majority will usually give answers along existential lines: “Religion provides purpose and consolation. It gives meaning to life and relieves fear of death.”
These answers aren’t surprising given [...]
Tags:afterlife·Ernest Becker·existential angst·fear of death·immortality·Irvin Yalom·Ivan Ilyich·Leo Tolstoy·meaning of life·mortality·nihilism·purpose of life·Stephen Cave
In 1976, the polymathic Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is one of those rare books which is mostly wrong but is filled with so many penetrating and provocative insights that it still deserves to be read. It’s a big idea book that aroused [...]
Tags:auditory hallucination·bicameral mind·consciousness·introspection·Julian Jaynes·lateralization of function·left-right brain·racism·split brain
Over the past decade there has been a sea change in the way we assess moral reasoning, judgment, and behavior. The old view, developed and championed largely by introspective philosophers, was that people actually reason about choices before making decisions that have moral or ethical impacts. While some decisions are in fact made this way, [...]
Tags:ethics·evolution of morals·innate morality·intuitive morality·John Rawls·Jonathan Haidt·Kant·moral judgment·moral psychology·moral reasoning·prosociality
Creation myths do psychological and cultural work. Because all known societies have creation myths, the number and variety is staggering. There are entire encyclopedias of creation myths and even dictionaries for creation myths. Given this seemingly endless variety, it is unsurprising there have been several kinds of efforts to impose order on the mass. Folklorists [...]
Tags:Anna Birgitta Rooth·archetypes·creation myths·cultural diffusion·earth diver·Edenic myth·North American Indians·structural-functional·transformer·Ymir
