ANTHROP 2R03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Old Testament, System On A Chip
15 Nov 2013
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Document Summary
Smith argued that rituals don"t reflect people"s beliefs, but rather beliefs are incidental to the significance of ritual in religious practice. Rituals are performative they make the world: any activity that people perform together (collectively) By performing that activity collectively they create a society. Religious ritual then is fundamentally about the group worshipping itself. Imbues in individuals a sense of social obligation to others. Lectures on the religions of the semites: how the ritual group was progressively enlarged over time. In the earliest social forms in nomadic soc. Sacrifices performed by the male family head. See slide* stages of religious dev graph: traced the dev of religion from earliest forms to modern forms. What we notice in studying ancient religion is that the ritual remains pretty much the same, what changes is the belief the explanation: what remains eternal in religious practice is the ritual core. This for smith was a paradigm for how all cultural forms evolved.
