RELS 250 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Mircea Eliade, Sui Generis, Bronisław Malinowski
Document Summary
We have to go out and engage ourselves in cultures. He critiqued the (cid:532)arm-chair(cid:533) anthropology and promoted an engaged form of ethnography that aims to encompass both emit and etic perspectives = participant observation: can(cid:529)t just rely on just the insider(cid:529)s or outsider(cid:529)s perspective. Believed there is innate connection between myth and social organization = myth functions to justify the social order. Yes, particulars are important, but underlining it is the similarities between human life. Religion is a think unto itself that overlaps with other studies, but none of those disciplines can identify what religion is: to understand what he thinks of myth, we have to know what he thinks of religion. The study of religion is essentially about identifying the historical and comparative patterns that shape various religions . Symbolism is the language of the sacred; the sacred is ineffable. The full meaning of the sacred can never be disclosed, only approximated via symbols.
