Religion Final Exam
Ideal Typus
An ideal type is a general concept, but it is different from what is known as generalization in natural science. Generalizations identify a single trait or characteristic common to a group, as when we say, "All kings have a country."
Biographical: Max Weber
Born in Germany, University of Berlin, Weber's major works deal with rationalization in sociology of religion, government, organizational theory, and behavior. His most famous work is his essay "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," which began his work in the sociology of religion. One of the leading scholars and founders of modern sociology.
Biographical: E.E. Evans-Pritchard
Born in Sussex, studied history at Oxford, Roman Catholic, His first fieldwork began in 1926 with the Azande, a people of the upper Nile, and resulted in both a doctorate (in 1927) and the birth of his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (in 1937), Evans-Pritchard continued to lecture at the LSE and conduct research in Azande and Bongo land until 1930, when he began a new research project among the Nuer. Edward Evans-Pritchard was one of the foremost anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century. The son of an Anglican clergyman, who near the end of the second world war, in 1944, converted to Roman Catholicism.
Who Impacted (how and why): Mircea Eliade
Carl Jung, Eliade-Radulescu, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim,
Who Impacted (how and why): Max Weber
Mark, Durkheim, and Freud
Historical Materialism
Marx's view of history
Who Impacted (how and why): E.E. Evans-Pritchard
R. R. Marret, Bronislaw Malinowski and Charles Gabriel Seligman.
Weber thesis
The monopoly on the legitimate use of violence (Gewaltmonopol des Staates, also known as monopoly on legitimate violence and monopoly on violence) is the definition of the state expounded by Max Weber in Politics as a Vocation, and has been predominant in philosophy of law and political philosophy in the twentieth century. It defined a single entity, the state, exercising legitimate authority or violence over a given territory as territory was also deemed by Weber a characteristic of state. Monopoly on the simple use of violence, as discussed below, is different.
Dialectical Materialism
The tension between the two is then resolved by yet the third event - synthesis, which blends events of both, only to serve as the new thesis for yet another sequence of opposition and resolution.
Events which prompted work: Clifford Geetz
Traveled to island of Java in Indonesia and Bali and Morocco.
Mary Douglas
a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
John Maynard Keynes
a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century.[2][3][4][5] His ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.
R. R. Marett
a British ethnologist. An exponent of the British evolutionary school, his work focused primarily on anthropology of religion. In this field he modified the theories of E. B. Tylor.
Charles Gabriel Seligman
a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a Professor at London School of Economics and was highly influential as the teacher of such notable anthropologists as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes all of whose work overshadowed his own.
David Ricardo
a British political economist. He was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill.[2][3] He began his professional life as a broker and financial market speculator. He amassed a considerable personal fortune, largely from financial market speculation and, having retired, bought a seat in the U.K. Parliament, Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage attempted to prove, using simple mathematics, that industry specialization and international trade always produce positive results. This theory expanded on the concept of absolute advantage which does not advocate specialization and international trade in all cases.
Michael Foucault
a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault ultimately rejected these labels, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential for both academic and activist groups.
Charles Fourier
a French philosopher. An influential thinker, some of Fourier's social and moral views, held to be radical in his lifetime, have become mainstream thinking in modern society. Fourier is, for instance, credited with having originated the word feminism in 1837
Baron de Montesqueiu
a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He did more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon, and may have been partly responsible for the popularization of the terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.
Emile Durkheim
a French sociologist, social psychologist and philosopher. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Pre-romanticism, General will, amour-propre, moral simplicity of humanity, child-centered learning, civil religion, popular sovereignty, positive liberty.
The Communist Manifesto 1848
a short 1848 publication written by the political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world's most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League's purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
Capitalism
a social system based on the principle of individual rights. Politically, it is the system of laissez-faire (freedom). Legally it is a system of objective laws (rule of law as opposed to rule of man). Economically, when such freedom is applied to the sphere of production its result is the free-market.
Bureaucracy
a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.
Hermeneutics
a term derived from the Greek word ἑρμηνεύω (hermeneuō), meaning 'to translate' or ' to interpret,' and is of uncertain origin. Traditional hermeneutics involves interpretation theories that concern the meaning of written texts.
Structuralism
a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology, linguistics and semiotics positing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure.
Thick Description
a thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, in such a way that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.
Ecstatic States
a trance induced by intense religious devotion; does not show reduced bodily functions that are typical of other trances.
Myth of Eternal Return
according to the theories of the religious historian Mircea Eliade, a belief, expressed (sometimes implicitly, but often explicitly) in religious behavior, in the ability to return to the mythical age, to become contemporary with the events described in one's myths. It should be distinguished from the philosophical concept of eternal return.
Trade mark habits of Evans-Pritchard
acid tongue, drinker, dressed poorly, shy
Materialism
all of reality is based on matter, including the human brain which is itself a result of the organization of matter in a particular way. In this view, the abstract idea of "tree" was developed by humans from their experience of actual trees. "It is not consciousness that determines being," wrote Marx, putting it another way, "but social being that determines consciousness."
Events which prompted work: Max Weber
brought up learning=leisure, visited by Berlin's political and intellectual elite, joined fraternity, childless, sexless marriage, guilt over fathers death.
Proletariat
citizens of the lowest class
Charisma
compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others, a divinely conferred power or talent.
Thin Description
describes only the wink itself, and a thick description, which explains the context of the practices and discourse within a society.
Talcott Parsons
developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism and the epistemological principle of analytical realism. The theory attempted to establish a balance between two major methodological traditions: the utilitarian-positivist and hermeneutic-idealistic traditions. For Parsons, voluntarism established a third alternative between these two. More than a theory of society, Parsons presented a theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the "drives" and directions of world history. Parsons analyzed the work of Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto and evaluated their contributions through the paradigm of voluntaristic action. Parsons was also largely responsible for introducing and interpreting Max Weber's work to American audiences.
Functionalism
developed largely as an alternative to both the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. Its core idea is that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role - that is, they are causal relations to other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs.
Protestantism
encompasses forms of Christian faith and practice that originated with doctrines and religious, political, and ecclesiological impulses of the Protestant Reformation, against what they considered the errors of the Roman Catholic Church.
Events which prompted work: Mircea Eliade
hired by newspaper at 18, sunlight through green curtain incident, studied in India, military service, affair with mentor's daughter.
The Great International Centre of Feudalism
the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed.
Ethnology
the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationship between them.
Phenomenology
the comparative study of things in the form, or appearance, they present to us.
Field Work
the gathering of anthropological or sociological data through the interviewing and observation of subjects in the field.
Idealism
the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.
Terror of History
the idea that the human adventure as a whole might be merely pointless exercise, an empty spectacle with death as its end - that is a prospect no archaic people can endure.
Wealth of nations
the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. Through reflection over the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity and free markets.
The role of religious leaders in a community
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Zande Magic
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Functionalist Reductionism
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Newer British School of Fieldwork Anthropology
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Older Victorian Anthropology
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The French Tradition of Interpreting Human Affairs
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Who Impacted (how and why): Clifford Geetz
Boas, Kroeber, and Benedict
Events which prompted work: Karl Marx
College at age 17, read romantic literature and saint-simonian politics, hard time finding publishers due to radical views, expelled from France, became communit
Biographical: Clifford Geetz
Considered a founder of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology, analyzed and decoded the meanings of rituals, art, belief systems, institutions and other "symbols," as he defined them, anthropology staff of the University of Chicago (1960-70), then became professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from (1970 to 2000), and eventually emeritus professor.
Alienation
Entfremdung (estrangement) is Karl Marx's theory of alienation. Entfremdung describes the social alienation (estrangement) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, "species-essence") as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social classes
Henri de Saint Simon
French social theorist and one of the chief founders of Christian socialism. In his major work, Nouveau Christianisme (1825), he proclaimed a brotherhood of man that must accompany the scientific organization of industry and society.
Who Impacted (how and why): Karl Marx
Georg Whilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frederick Engles, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri de Saint Simon and Charles Fourier, Ludwig Feuerbach
Verstehen
German for understanding
The Essence of Christianity
German: Das Wesen des Christentums) is a book by Ludwig Feuerbach first published in 1841. It explains Feuerbach's philosophy and critique of religion.
Acephalous societies
In anthropology, an acephalous society (from the Greek ἀκέφαλος "headless") is a society which lacks political leaders or hierarchies.
Sigmund Freud
In creating psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the mechanisms of repression as well as for elaboration of his theory of the unconscious as an agency disruptive of conscious states of mind. Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt. In his later work Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.
Methodological Individualism
Its advocates see it as a philosophical method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals. The term was originally coined by Joseph Schumpeter (1908, 1909).
Biographical: Karl Marx
Large Jewish family, Rhineland city of Trier, atheist, University of Berlin, revolutionary communist, German philosopher, political economist, historian, sociologist, humanist, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Polish anthropologist, one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists. He has been also referred to as a sociologist and ethnographer. He was also widely regarded as an eminent fieldworker and his texts regarding the anthropological field methods were foundational to early anthropology, for example coining the term participatory observation. His approach to social theory was a brand of functionalism emphasizing how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs, a perspective opposed to Radcliffe-Brown's Structural functionalism that emphasized the ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole.
Biographical: Mircea Eliade
Romanian born, American religious historian, died in Chicago, son of Romanian army officer, changed his name from Ieremia to Eliade due to his admiration for the writer Eliade-Radulescu. Eliade was one of the world's most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and one of the world's foremost interpreters of religious symbolism and myth. In 1956 Eliade joined the faculty of the University of Chicago and remained in the United States until his death on April 23, 1986.
New Historicism
a school of literary theory that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.
Martin Luther
a German monk, Catholic priest, professor of theology and seminal figure of the 16th-century movement in Christianity known later as the Protestant Reformation. Luther taught that salvation and subsequently eternity in heaven is not earned by good deeds but is received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin and subsequently eternity in Hell. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge from God and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with these, and all of Luther's wider teachings, are called Lutherans even though Luther insisted on Christian as the only acceptable name for individuals who professed Christ.
Ludwig Feuerbach
a German philosopher and anthropologist best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity which strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including both Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. An associate of Left Hegelian circles, Feuerbach advocated liberalism, atheism and materialism. Many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of religion. His thought was influential in the development of dialectical materialism, where he is often recognized as a bridge between Hegel and Marx.
Georg W. F. Hegel
a German philosopher, and a major figure in German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism. Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
Karl Marx
a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought.[4][5][6][7] He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894).
Adam Smith
a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. Smith is cited as the "father of modern economics" and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today.
Levi Strauss
an American businessman of German Jewish descent who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm, Levi Strauss & Co., began in 1853 in San Francisco, California
Milton Friedman
an American economist, statistician, and writer who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" (as opposed to New Keynesian) theory[4] began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function, and he became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies.
Joseph Schumpeter
an Austrian American economist and political scientist. He briefly served as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Schumpeter popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.
John Calvin
an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536. Calvin was influenced by the Augustinian tradition, which led him to expound the doctrine of predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation of the human soul from death and eternal damnation.
Non-reductionism
at least some moral properties are sui generis. Their natures cannot be explained in any other terms; they are not identical to any other kind of property. Non-reductionists in ethics are like dualists in the philosophy of mind, who maintain that at least some mental properties cannot be explained in non-mental terms.
Radcliffe-Brown
influenced by Durkheim, brought French sociology (namely Émile Durkheim) to British anthropology, constructing a rigorous battery of concepts to frame ethnography, structural functionalism
H. Aarm Veeser
notes some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse.
Homo Religious
religious beings
Projectionism
someone puts their own issues on someone else, i.e. it is when a person attributes his/her own thoughts/feelings/behaviors to/on to another person, and a/or a group of ppl, and an/or an organization
Symbolic Anthropology
studies how people create meaning out of their experiences or construct their own concept of reality through the use of shared cultural symbols, such as myths or body language. A culture's unique combination of cultural symbols — and their meanings — creates meaning for the individual, which in turn prompts that individual to react in culturally specific ways to symbolic behavior and communication.
Homo Symbolicus
symbolic beings
Reformation
the religious revolution that took place in the Western church in the 16th century. Its greatest leaders undoubtedly were Martin Luther and John Calvin. Having far-reaching political, economic, and social effects, the Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity.
Anthropology
the study of humankind, past and present, that draws and builds upon knowledge from social and biological sciences, as well as the humanities and the natural sciences.
Events which prompted work: E.E Evans-Pritchard
traveled to Sudan regions (convinced by tutors), served in British army, converted to Roman Catholicism.
