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Anthropology of Religion
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Religious Beliefs and Symbols

Chapter Summary

  1. Different social conditions create cause different stresses to be typically experienced by members of each society. One reason for the diversity of religious forms is that religions have characteristics that help their followers cope with the stresses that they commonly experience. So religions tend to differ in different societies and among members of different parts of the same society.
  2. The feelings aroused by sacred things paradoxically involve both attraction and fear or dread. This allows the religious experience to be a source of psychological catharsis for its participants. Catharsis allows people to discharge the tensions associated with the distressful emotions of fear, guilt, grief, shame, and anger and to replace this distress with a positive emotional experience.
  3. Trance states are a psychological response to stress. They also play a role in religious rituals. There are two types of religious trances -- spirit possession trances and visionary (or spirit travel) trances. Spirit possession trances are more common in socially stratified than in egalitarian societies. They are also more likely to employ female than male practitioners. In addition, they are also more common in societies in which child socialization stresses the importance of compliance. Visionary trances are more common in nonstratified societies, especially those with foraging, hunting, and simple gardening economies. They are more often practiced by men and in societies in which child rearing stresses self-reliance.
  4. Dreams are commonly used as a source of knowledge in societies in which males leave home when they marry and live near their wive's families. The reliance on dreams may function to replace the network of support from their kin that men must give up when they marry.
  5. Religious innovators often experience a hallucinatory trance following a period of social and personal stress. During this trance state, the formulate a new world view that accounts for the problems of their society. This hallucinatory experience has similarities with the reactive schizophrenic process, although they differ in that religious innovators formulate new world views that are meaningful to others within their own societies, while the new ideas of reactive schizophrenics are not likely to seem meaningful to others.
  6. Research indicates that in western cultures religious people as a group are somewhat more likely to be dogmatic and to show prejudice against other groups than are nonreligious people. Otherwise, religiosity correlates positively with a variety of measures of good mental health and positive social functioning.
  7. Some of the conditions treated in shamanic curing ceremonies would be classified as mental disorders by western psychiatrists, and shamanic curing practices have some similarities with western psychotherapies.
  8. The psychological functions of religion include helping people to (1) make sense out of parts of their environment that they cannot explain in nonreligious terms, (2) to overcome indecisiveness and emotional distress, and (3) to be motivated to cooperate with others when the nonreligious rewards for doing so are not great enough to have the same effect.