RELIGION AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM

CLIFFORD GEERTZ, THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE

SUNDAY 14TH DECEMBER, 2008

Study about religion in the university Religion as an academic subject like geography or

psychology or physics.

?

Religion first school

1. A particular kind of experience

2. sacred, holy, ultimate, infinite, and transcendent

3. Religion need not refer to any supernatural being or higher power

4. Anything can be experienced as sacred, ultimate, etc.

5. Any experience that has this quality counts as "religious." Someone who has a religious experience may feel convinced that it is an experience of God or some other higher power. But a religious experience can also be evoked by the Grand Canyon, or making love, or even an unusual rock sitting on the ground.

6. No two scholars agree exactly on the features or characteristics that make an experience sacred, ultimate, etc

7. But this group of scholars agrees that religion refers to a special, extraordinary kind of experience

Key point

For scholars who take this approach, it is the quality of the individual's inner experience,

not the source of the experience that serves to define what counts as "religion" and

"religious."

Religion second school

They focus on societies, or groups of people, rather than individual experience.

For these scholars, religion is primarily the overall framework a group uses to understand its world and guide its life

This overall framework shapes every moment of the group's experience. It is not something extraordinary; it does not transcend everyday life. Rather it is the constant foundation of everyday life.

This "everyday" approach to defining "religion" is generally favored by social scientists.

social scientific approach to religion

Key point

One of the most influential figures in this social-scientific

approach to religion is the anthropologist

Clifford Geertz

Geertz's definition gives us a starting place for

understanding religion in this social scientific way.

According to Geertz, Religion is

According to Geertz, religion is 1. A system of symbols

2. which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men

3. by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

4. clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

5. the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." He goes on to explain each of these five points in detail.

culture

An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, 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.

Key point

A religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

(1) a system of symbols which acts to…

symbol: a vehicle for conception cultural patterns have an intrinsic double

aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.

(2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by

Motivation: a persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in certain sorts of situations.

Moods

(3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

Transcendent truths The will to believe Dealing with chaos, uncanny Analytical capacities

Powers of endurance: problem of suffering As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is,

paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer.

Problem of meaning are a matter affirming the ultimate explicability of experience, the more affective aspects are a matter of affirming its ultimate sufferableness.

Moral insight

Myth of Dinka The problem of meaning is a matter of

affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole.

(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that

The meaning of belief Placing the religious perspective against the

background of three of the other major perspectives in terms of which men construe the world—the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic

Acceptance and faith vs. action upon reality Commitment vs. analysis Actuality vs. factuality Persuasive authority In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as

imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms.

(5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

The movement back and forth between the religious perspective and the common-sense perspective.

Bororo as parakeet Ritual sense Common-sensical perspective

Key points

For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them.

Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience—intellectual, emotional, moral—can be given meaningful form.

Big Four

Time frame

Malinowiski April 7, 1884 – May 16, 1942 Max Weber April 21, 1864 – June 14, 1920 Émile Durkheim April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917 Sigismund Freud May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939 Mircea Eliade March 13, 1907 – April 22, 1986 Clifford James Geertz August, 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006

Thanks