UU150 Study Guide - Final Guide: Syncretism
These behaviours are what Robbins, Cummings, and
McGarry (2017) call symbolic actions (also called
symbolic practice) which they define as “the activities (…)
that dramatically depict the meanings shared by a
specific body of people” (95). Although religion might be
the most familiar example of what might constitute a
worldview, others have argued that we should conceive
of religion as different from other worldviews because it
includes understandings of things beyond this world, for
example, the afterlife, supernatural entities, the role of
checks and balances that depend on various criteria, etc.
Yet, those who originally made these claims approach the
idea of religion from their own understanding of the
world, that is, their own Western culture world view. The
issue with taking such an approach, argue Lavenda and
Schultz (2012), is that these observers made the
distinction between “natural” and the “imagined” world
because it made sense to them and thus dismissed the
importance of a supernatural world because it did not
make sense to those observers (300). Therefore, it is
important to take the inductive and iterative approach
originally discussed in Module 3 where research about
religious traditions begins with wherever the participant
begins.
Syncretism and the Importance of
Change
In section 4.4 of the textbook this week, the authors
discuss what happens when local worldviews are
confronted by the religions of European colonizers. This is
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Document Summary
Mcgarry (2017) call symbolic actions (also called symbolic practice) which they define as the activities ( ) that dramatically depict the meanings shared by a specific body of people (95). Yet, those who originally made these claims approach the idea of religion from their own understanding of the world, that is, their own western culture world view. The issue with taking such an approach, argue lavenda and. Therefore, it is important to take the inductive and iterative approach originally discussed in module 3 where research about religious traditions begins with wherever the participant begins. In section 4. 4 of the textbook this week, the authors discuss what happens when local worldviews are confronted by the religions of european colonizers. This is a very important question to understand how things change, otherwise, one might assume that the way something is now is the way that it has always been.
