Anthropological approaches to 'primitive' religions
Sophia 48 (2) (2009)
| Abstract | The study of religion by social anthropologists, as distinct from the classical philosophical approach of the Greeks and their medieval heirs, began in the late 19th century with Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871). Tyler’s approach was completely a priori in style in that it did not rest on systematic field work or empirical observation. The same approach characterized James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough (1891). Baldwin Spencer, the founding father of Australian anthropology, was persuaded by Frazer to see the sophisticated religious beliefs and rites of the Aboriginal groups he studied in central Australia as mere ‘magic’. By the 1960s, a new generation of anthropologists, influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and English thinkers like E. Evans Pritchard, had arrived on the scene. This new ‘turn’ in anthropology led a number of contemporary scholars to the radical position that Western anthropology itself is a socio-cultural phenomenon that can be investigated in a broadly anthropological way. To see what this involves, it is worthwhile examining a number of crucial misunderstandings of Australian Aboriginal beliefs and practices that have been the artefactual result of various anthropological approaches. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesPaul Schollmeier (2004). Toward a Rhetoric of Anthropology. Social Epistemology 18 (1):59 – 69.
I. C. Jarvie (1984). Anthropology as Science and the Anthropology of Science and of Anthropology or Understanding and Explanation in the Social Sciences, Part II. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984:745 - 763.
James L. Peacock (2001). The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus. Cambridge University Press.
Mark Goodale (ed.) (2009). Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader. Wiley-Blackwell.
James William Lett (1987). The Human Enterprise: A Critical Introduction to Anthropological Theory. Westview Press.
Jeremy Coote (ed.) (1994). Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics. Clarendon Press.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-04-22Total downloads13 ( #87,931 of 549,088 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,317 of 549,088 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
