Defining Religion
What are the three primary definitional strategies in religious studies?
Essentialism, functionalism, and family resemblance
This thinker said religion is "the opium of the people."
Karl Marx
What are "insiders" and "outsiders"?
Insiders are practitioners of a religion, while outsiders study religion from the outside.
United States v. Seeger (1965) asked what question?
What counts as "religion" under U.S. law?
What is the insider-outsider problem?
The gap between participants and non-participants (evident across a wide number of academic disciplines); the observer is challenged to devise ways either to overcome it or account for it
What does it mean to study religion "critically"?
Not about being negative; about analyzing assumptions, power, and context rather than accepting claims at face value.
Which thinker distinguished between the sacred and the profane?
Émile Durkheim
What is animism, according to Tylor, and how has it been critiqued?
Belief in spirits our souls; critiqued as overly simplistic and evolutionary/ethnocentric.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story" illuminated what critique of essentialism?
Reducing traditions to a single essence erases complexity and diversity.
Study about religion is permissible, but religious instruction is not
Why does McCutcheon compare defining religion to deciding whether tomatoes are fruits or vegetables?
He wants to demonstrate that definitions and categories are constructed, not natural or neutral.
This thinker conducted a thought experiment about dreams to develop his theory of animism.
Edward Tylor
Durkheim described the powerful feeling generated in crowds and communal rituals with this phrase
We analyzed the documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) through the lens of which method?
Thick description / symbolic anthropology
What is the end-time apathy hypothesis?
Belief in imminent apocalypse that reduces concern for environmental issues.
Which terms are frequently translated into English as "religion" or "piety" despite having non-Latin roots?
Sanatana-dharma, eusebeia, li
This thinker argued the function of religion is to manage deep psychological tensions.
Sigmund Freud
What are the three approaches to human identity (in terms of bodily composition)?
Materialism, dualism, and psychosomatic unity
What did the Sufi whirling dervishes demonstrate about embodied religion?
Physical acts are forms of religious devotion; the body creates an opening to the sacred
What is the risk of scholars immersing themselves too deeply in the communities they study?
They may risk "acting as guests in other people's cultural houses" -- careful not to offend and hesitant to ask critical questions. The danger is that scholarship becomes purely descriptive instead of analytical.
What is the World Religions Paradigm (WRP), and what are its core assumptions?
A Western, Protestant Christian framework for categorizing religions. Presents religions as distinct, timeless, and bounded to set beliefs and practices -- assumptions that oversimplify and reflect Protestant Christian/Western biases.
Who defined religion as "a system which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic"?
Clifford Geertz
What is the difference between thin and thick description?
Thin = surface account; purely observational. Thick = interprets meaning and context.
What are the two main characteristics of kosher land animals?
Split hooves; chews its cud
What are the 3 Es we discussed in our class on embodiment, and what do they mean?
Embodied (lived with and through the body), emplaced (happening in, shaped by, and giving meaning to specific places), enacted (made real by doing).