Q: EB Tylor , like F. Max Muller, believes that in order to find the origin of religion, anthropologists must appeal only to divine revelation and sacred scriptures.
Q: Freud would agree that mature people are guided by a combination of faith and reason.
Q: Freud proposes that there are three levels of consciousness in the human mind. These
Q: Freud's personal stance was one of complete rejection of religious belief.
A: the belief that nature or the cosmos is divine.
Q: Those who believe in magic, from the anthropological point of view, believe that magic is a rational effort to influence the world.
Q: E.B. Tylor claims that the "lower races" have no conception of morality at all.
For example, theorists having examined the secondary literature around Geertz discovered that between 1966 and 1996 his essay, Religion as a Cultural System, was cited at least five hundred times in journals of religion or anthropology (4). Geertz has often therefore served as a basis for understanding religion or the meaning of religious symbolism.
Non-religious phenomena, including philosophy, social ideologies, politics, and more, contain systems of symbols that establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men (and women). These too clothe their conceptions with an aura of factuality.
Geertz claims that although definitions themselves establish nothing they do provide an orientation, an effective way of developing and controlling inquiry. As such, his definition provides only “a useful orientation, or reorientation of thought” that can develop and control a novel line of inquiry.
For Geertz, the pathway to religion is culture which he defined as a “historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols” and “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (2).
When religionists and devotees act together they begin to accept the group’s symbolic interpretations of the world as if they are real. People believe that they are participating meaningfully in an intelligible universe and this meaning is given through the religion’s cosmology or philosophy.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) is a well-known name within Religion Studies for his understanding of religion being a “cultural system.”. This he articulated in his essay Religion as a Cultural System (1966) where he examined anthropological approaches to religion. Anthropologist Talal Asad claims that Geertz provided “the most ...
2. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. p. 89.