ANTH 209 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Formal System, Ninety-Five Theses

• School: McGill University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 209
• Professor: catherinelemons

Document Summary

All religious beliefs display common feature: real or ideal things conceived profane & sacred. Sacred is dangerous if you"re not ritually prepared, must be elaborate initi approach o. Moments of heightened social awareness in which everyone present. People are transformed as a unified whole, this emotion is a response. Ritual and practice comes from rites, not beliefs. Religion: a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that forbidden - beliefs and practices unite into one single moral community called them. What is sacred" is relative, created by all societies w/o recognition of wha. This produces a representation of the idea (concept, norm, symbol, myth) o. Something is sacred" if it has been deemed so by society. Totemism: which features most clearly the elementary forms of religion life, rev might think of as divinity is in fact society itself conceived symbolically. The thing they set apart as sacred is what they choose to represent thems.