ANTHR101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 16: Melford Spiro, Copyright Collective, Edward Burnett Tylor
6 Apr 2015
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Religion: any set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices pertaining to supernatural power, whether that power rests in forces, gods, spirits, ghosts, or demons. Supernatural powers: believed to be not human or not subject to the laws of nature. The line between the natural and the supernatural varies in a society according to what people believe about the causes of things and events in the observable world. Evidence of ritual treatment of the dead suggests that early people believed in the existence of super- natural spirits and tried to communicate with, and perhaps influence, them. Herodotus made fairly objective comparisons among the religions of the 50 or so societies he traveled to from his home in. He noted many similarities among their gods and pointed out evidence of diffusion of religious worship. Most think that religions are created by humans in response to certain universal needs or conditions. We consider five such needs or conditions here: the need to understand:
