ANTHRCUL 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Million Man March, Fraternities And Sororities, Seneca People

• School: U of M
• Department: Anthropology, Cultural
• Course: ANTHRCUL 101
• Professor: Andrew Shryock

Document Summary

Anthropologists don"t like the term religion anymore, think it is a sloppy concept as a result of changes in the 19th century. A standard approach emphasizes the supernatural, as if to imply that spirits, divinities, magic, gods, and souls are not real, are not really part of nature, are imaginary or make believe. Whether you agree with this implication or not, such approaches are flawed, since the term supernatural refers to different things in different cultural settings. In some societies, spirits and witches are assumed to be real. They are as much a part of nature as the wind or the human body. So at best, attempts to equate religion with the supernatural are ethnocentric and biased toward what we think is real. This is why most of you would not consider democracy or voting religious, even though they involve beliefs about human nature and morality and involve ritual activity (elections).