Thinker
Origins and approaches
Religion is meaning, group, power and sometimes a market — not only ‘belief in God’.
- Tylor animism (dreams, death, soul). Freud primal horde / guilt. Durkheim: totem is the clan worshipping itself.
- Comte’s stages; James’s varieties; Geertz symbols against suffering and evil.
- David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: cafeteria religion, sacred in the mall.
Key points
Forms
- Basic vs exclusive monotheism; dualism (Zoroastrian teaching pair).
- Naturism / personification; totemism (Durkheim vs Frazer).
- Rites of passage (van Gennep/Turner) vs intensification in crisis. Elkin on Australian circumcision as separation–liminal–return.
- Myth vs ritual: Tylor (myth first) vs Robertson Smith / later ‘ritual first’.
Case
Specialists, witch, sect
- Shamanic complex (Lewis, Eliade): healer, patient, public belief — placebo as social fact (Cannon on sorcery and stress).
- Witch: innate, thought-power, feared. James Brain: accusations stick in sedentary forced neighbours, not in easy-exit nomads.
- Weber: sect as protest of the pure against a corrupt church. Cults grow in insecurity and patronage.
- Secularisation: loss of church monopoly vs public religion’s return — both sentences, not one.
Key points
Magic, science, religion
- Malinowski: magic at the edge of uncertainty; science as open, testable (Popper; Merton CUDOS).
- Religion closed/faith; magic instrumental closed rite; science revisable — three columns in the answer.
Magic
- Rite to coerce
- Closed recipe
- Anxiety tool
Science
- Test and fail
- Open community
- Emotion-cool ideal
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