Great American Smoke Out

1. Thursday November 20th 11:00 am – 2:00 pm Campus Mall Come get all the facts to quit smoking and help others on their journey!! University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire Colleges Against Cancer Great American Smoke Out

2. Religion • What Is Religion? • Origins, Functions, and Expressions of Religion • Religion and Cultural Ecology • Social Control

3. Religion • Kinds of Religion • Religion in States • World Religions • Religion and Change • Secular Rituals

4. What Is Religion? • Religion – belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces (Wallace) • Not an adequate or unanimously definition

5. Animism • Animism is seen as most primitive • Belief in souls that derives from the first attempt to explain dreams and like phenomena • Tylor first studied religion anthropologically and developed a taxonomy of religions

6. Animism

7. Mana and Taboo • Polynesian mana and related concept of taboo related to the more hierarchical nature of Polynesian society • Melanesian mana defined as sacred impersonal force that is much like the Western concept of luck • Mana – belief in immanent supernatural domain or life-force, potentially subject to human manipulation

8. Magic and Religion • May be imitative (as with voodoo dolls) or contagious (accomplished through contact) • Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims

9. Wendell the nail biter

10. Anxiety, Control, Solace • Magic an instrument of control, e.g. baseball • Religion serves to provide stability when no control or understanding is possible • Malinowski saw tribal religions as being focused on life crises—birth, puberty, marriage, death

11. Rituals • Rituals convey information about culture of participants and, hence, participants themselves • Rituals inherently social, and participation in them necessarily implies social commitment • Formal social acts, performed in sacred contexts

12. Rites of Passage • Religious rituals that mark and facilitate person’s movement from one (social) state of being to another • Separation –withdraws from group and begins moving from one place to another • Liminality – period during which participant(s) has left one place but not yet entered the next • Incorporation – participant(s) reenters society with a new status having completed the rite

13. Rites of Passage • Liminality part of every rite of passage and involves temporary suspension and even reversal of everyday social distinctions • Communitas – collective liminality, characterized by enhanced feelings of social solidarity and minimized distinctions

14. Totemism • Totemism uses nature as model for society • Unity of human social order enhanced by symbolic association with and imitation of natural order • Totemism is religion in which elements of nature act as sacred templates for society by means of symbolic association

17. Totemism • Totems are apical ancestor of clans • Members of clan did not kill or eat their totem, except once a year when the members of the clan gathered for ceremonies dedicated to the totem • In totemic societies, each descent group has an animal, plant, or geographical feature from which they claim descent

18. Religion and Cultural Ecology • Ahimsa is Hindu doctrine of nonviolence that forbids the killing of animals • Western economic development experts often use this principle as example of how religion can stand in the way of development • Hindus also raise scraggly and thin cows, unlike the bigger cattle of Europe and the U.S. • Sacred Cattle in India

20. Religion and Cultural Ecology • Cattle play important adaptive role in Indian ecosystem that evolved over thousands of years • Hindus use cattle for transportation, traction, and manure • Bigger cattle eat more, making them more expensive to keep • Sacred Cattle in India • Views of experts are ethnocentric and wrong

21. Social Control • The power of religion affects peoples’ actions • Religion can be used to mobilize large segments of society through systems of real and perceived rewards and punishments

22. Social Control • Function as leveling mechanisms to reduce differences in wealth and status between society members • Many religions have formal code of ethics that prohibit/promote certain behaviors • Religions also maintain social control by stressing the fleeting nature of life • Witch hunts play important role in limiting social deviancy

23. Kinds of Religion • Religious forms vary from culture to culture • Correlations exist between political organization and religious type • Wallace developed four categories of religions: Shamanic, Communal, Olympian, and Monotheistic

24. Religious Practitioners and Types • Shamanic religions – shamans part-time religious intermediaries who may act as curers – these religions are most characteristic of foragers • Communal religions – have shamans, community rituals, multiple nature gods; more characteristic of food producers

26. Religious Practitioners and Types • Olympian religions –appeared with states, have full-time religious specialists and have potent anthropomorphic gods who may exist as a pantheon • Monotheistic religions – have attributes of Olympian religions, except pantheon of gods subsumed under a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent being (chiefdoms/early states)

27. Athena and Apollo

28. Zeus

29. Congregations

30. Congregations

31. Protestant Values and the Rise of Capitalism • Independent • Entrepreneurial • Hard working • Future-oriented • Catholics emphasis on immediate happiness, security, and priest mediation did not fit well with capitalism • Weber linked spread of capitalism to values central to the Protestant faith:

32. Calvin

33. Religions of the World, by Estimated Number of Adherents, 2005 • Source: Adherents.com. 2005. http://www.adherents.com/Religions_by_adherents.html.

34. Religions of the World, by Estimated Number of Adherents, 2005

35. Classical World Religions Ranked by Internal Religious Similarity • Source: Adherents.com. 2005. http://www.adherents.com/Religions_by_adherents.html.

36. Major World Religions by Percentage of World Population 2005 • Source: Adherents.com. 2005. http://www.adherents.com/Religions_by_adherents.html.

37. Religion and Change • Religious leaders also may seek to alter or revitalize their society • Revitalization Movements • Social moments that occur in times of change • The colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake is example of revitalization movement • Religion helps maintain social order

38. Syncretisms • Voodoo, santeria, and candomlé • Cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea are syncretisms of Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs • Often emerge when traditional, non-Western societies have regular contact with industrialized societies • Cultural mix, including religious blends, that emerge when two or more cultural traditions come into contact

39. Location of Melanesia

40. Antimodernism and Fundamentalism • Barber contends that tribalism and globalism are two key –opposed and equally forceful– principles of our age • Antimodernism – rejection of the modern in favor of what is perceived as an earlier, purer, and better way of life

41. Antimodernism and Fundamentalism • Assert an identity separate from the larger religious group from which they arose • Seek to rescue religion from absorption into modern, Western culture • Strive to protect distinctive doctrine and way of life and of salvations • Many fundamentalists are politically aware citizens of nation-states • Fundamentalism – antimodernist movements in various religions

42. Religious Composition (in Percentages) of the Populations of the U.S., 1990 and 2001, and Canada, 1991 and 2001