Summary Introduction to Anthropology of Religion (A07A9A) item (s) - Notes on Tylor \'s work or Primitive culture PDF

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Notes on Tylor\'s work of Primitive culture...

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Readings Religion in Primitive Culture – Edward Burnett Tylor - Developing the notion of animism in 1871, one of anthropologies earliest concepts, it is a representation within a positivistic spiritual/materialist dichotomy of the 19th century design in direct opposition to materialist science - Lewis Henry Morgan argument: Religion deals so largely with the imaginative and emotional nature, and consequently with such uncertain elements of knowledge, that all primitive religions are grotesque and to some extent unintelligible - Tylor’s definition of religion is the belief in spiritual beings. - Animism speaks today to reflections on the mind/body problem and conceptualizations of the person, to the relations between humans and other species, especially in hunting societies, and to conceptualizations of death and the centrality of both mortuary ritual and sacrifice in human societies. - Levy-Bruhl argument: If primitives are not rational, neither can they be said to be in error with respect to their conclusions. - Rationalism perspective ignores the emotional side of religion and the intellectualism ignores the collective, symbolic, representational dimension. - Tylor begins with the rational and questioning nature of all people to try to understand the human situation and our place in the world, and that religious ideas are adequate to the worlds they describe and shift as the horizons of those worlds shift. - Tylor’s basic argument is against those who saw in smaller-scale societies either a degeneration or a borrowing from large-scale ones. He defends that the rationalism and creativity of all humans suggestively reimagine aspects of mystical participation through ideas of embodied knowledge and experience. However, Durkheimian or culturalist understandings of the way society and language shape collective representations and individual experiences are critical. - Religion is constantly evolving and changing according to different people - The relation of morality to religion is one that only belongs in its rudiments, or not at all, to rudimentary civilizations - The comparison of savage and civilized religions bring into view, by the side of a deep-lying resemblance in their philosophy, a deep-lying contrast in their practical action on human life. The popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of natural religion does not apply to the savage religion, which can stand as a natural religion, and thus falls to the ground. - Animism and ethics are thus different - Among religions greatest powers from a political point of view have been its divine sanction of ethical laws, its theological enforcement of morality, its teaching of moral government of the universe, its spplanting the

“continuance doctrine” of a future life by the “retribution-doctrine” supplying moral motive in the present. **this does not apply to every religion, it belongs almost or wholly to religions above the savage level, not to the earlier and lower creeds. - We must see how much more the fruit of religion belongs to ethical influence than to philosophical dogma. “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology – Nurit Bird David -Animism is projected in the literature as simple religion and a failed epistemology because it has hitherto been viewed from modernist perspectives. - animistic ideas operate within the context of social practices, with attention to local constructions of a relational personhood and to its relationships with ecological perceptions of the environment. - A reformulation of their animism as a relational epistemology is offered. - Animism since Tylor has been represented as enigmatic because the logic underlying it is today questionable. It is depicted by diverse sources as an “object” in-the-world. - How we get to know things is nested within culture and practice and takes multiple forms. - Primitive animism is a relational personhood concept and a relational perception of the environment. Previous theories of animism, taking modernist personhood concepts and perceptions of the environment as universal, have grossly misunderstood animism as simple religion and a failed epistemology. - The scientific way is neither good for studying everything nor the only way of studying everything. - Relational epistemology enjoys authority in Nayaka culture and the particular issue is one of authority – whether authority is given to relational ways of knowing (how, where, when, how much, by whom etc) in particular cultures/times/places. Paper suggests that these ways rank very high in certain hunter-gatherer’s cultures, where they constitute the mainstream dogma, lying at the core junction of religious, economic, and social life. This cannot be said for modern societies, although people in them do animate drawing a complex pattern of common features and differences between them and us....