Remenabila, vol de bovidés et magie

L'on s'étonne de constater la triste réalité vécues par la population du sud. Je ne peux que réagir à mon niveau. Depuis presque trois mois, "remenabila" est en passe de devenir le produit journalistique de l'année.

anthropological studies : religious analysis

Anthropological studies of religion have long constituted some of the most important thinking in the development of religious studies as a field; to some extent, all major theorists of religion can be considered "anthropological," as they all in some way seek to compare and understand "religious" phenomena of various cultures. The anthropology of religion has often centered on those sociocultural elements that could be identified as “religious”: myths, rituals, magic, beliefs about gods and divine beings, taboos, and symbols. Introducing the Anthropology of Religion The history and theory of a number of movements in the anthropology of religion—including the theories of Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim—are detailed in Brian Morris’s Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text. It may be useful to investigate writings by some of the other major anthropologists of religion that Morris discusses in his book, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, who critiqued studies of totemism and developed theories of myth; E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who argued that “religion” could not be understood apart from its social milieu; Mary Douglas, who discussed the ways in which cleanliness and uncleanliness reflected the structure of a culture; and Victor Turner, who developed famous theories about the ways in which rites of passage help to regulate cultures. Other introductory texts in anthropology of religion include Fiona Bowie's The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction and Michael Lambeck's A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Religion as an Anthropological Category In the early 1970s, noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz used symbolic anthropology and his own interpretive anthropological method to develop what he considered to be a universal theory of religion. Some twenty years later, anthropologist Talal Asad famously critiqued Geertz’s theory, and further declared that because “religion” itself is a product of specific Western discourses, there can be no transhistorical, transcultural definition of a sui generis phenomena called “religion.” This view is widely held by secular scholars of religion today. Critique of Ritual Theory Another highly notable critique, Catherine Bell’s Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, proposed the discarding of “ritual” as a unique phenomenon, sugggesting instead that “rituals”—and, logically, “religions”—be considered instead as part of the wider continuum of human discourses and practices. In developing her own theory of embodied, "ritualized" human behavior, Bell drew upon a number of important social theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Bell’s work is one of the most significant attempts to bridge the gap between “reductive” social and anthropological approaches, and approaches that attempt to take “religious” or “supernatural” phenomena on their own terms.