Structuralism

What do they believe? What do you think? Talk about religion as it exists today.

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Clive
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Structuralism

Post by Clive »

Levi - Straus ......became fascinated with myth and legend. He believed that if you analysed myth around the world , you would understand how human cognition worked.
the silo effect Gillian Tett p 38

I propose xianity is best studied From the perspective of historical anthropology, looking at its effects on how we think about and understand the universe.

It is the ritual stupid!
His theory, called "structuralism" posited that the human brain has a tendency to organise information in patterns, marked by binary oppositions .... And these patterns are expressed and reinforced in cultural practices, such as myths or religious rituals
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Clive
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Re: Structuralism

Post by Clive »

Anthropos - the study of man ( and how he becomes a god?) :-)
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Clive
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Joined: Sun Aug 17, 2014 2:20 pm

Re: Structuralism

Post by Clive »

Description
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity.
The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms.
Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
About The Author(s)
Fenella Cannell is Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-anthropo ... ristianity

I propose there is a big gap in current thinking about xianity - myth, and many of the arguments about the Jesus myth stem from a strangely old fashioned privileging of xianity as reducible to non mythic cores. And the Jesus myth ideas are also strangely anthropology free zones!
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Structuralism

Post by neilgodfrey »

The Christ myth(s) that we read in the Gospel(s) have been restructured and retold by scholars of Christian origins. Levi-Strauss showed how a myth took on many variants to meet the respective needs of each culture. Ancient scholars who chose to rationalize their myths were in fact relaying new versions of the myths. Ditto for the rationalizations of the Gospel narratives by today's "historians". They are all new variants of the myth.
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