| Read old news. Why
read old news? The pages contain Notes and Questions on material
previously assigned, and thus can serve as review on texts and
themes with which you might need greater familiarity. If you
feel like you're not in the game (which you need to be for the
midterm), these will help you. |
| 1-08-01 1-15-01 1-22-01 1-29-01 |
In brief:
| Tuesday, Feb
6: |
Thursday,
Feb 8 |
 ERes Sharpe,
pp. 203-219 (Jung, Campbell, Eliade
Pals, Chapter
5 (Eliade) |
Group
work on:
ERes Lévi-Strauss,
"The Effectiveness of Symbols"
ERes Crossan, "In
the Beginning Is the Body"
ERes, Douglas, "The Abominations
of Leviticus" has been unassigned. I will say about something
about Mary Douglas' groundbreaking work on the logic of the Israelite/Jewish
dietary laws, unless someone in the class would like to do a
peer teaching on this material (which doesn't necessarily have
to be on Feb. 8). |
| |
MIDTERM QUESTIONS HANDED OUT IN CLASS |
Links above are not to ERes but to Notes,
Questions, etc., elsewhere on this page.
| Having
trouble with ERes? Remember that all readings except for the
MSWord files (such as the LePier article) are available on regular
print reserve. You can photocopy them. |
Introduction
to a lot of the material from the rest of the course (!)
There is a general impression (partly true) that the readings
that come after the theorists are actually "case studies"
of the theorists we have looked at so far. Yes and No. The material
from here will illustrate some of the theories we have looked
at and will also illustrate some theorists we haven't studied.
Yet the articles and book chapters will do something else: they
will present different approaches to the study of religion that
perhaps are not formal theories but do suggest new methods
to look at religion. We could then take these approaches
and use them elsewhere if we wanted. Odd, you might think, but
in fact this is one of the ways that theory happens. When Christian
theologians tried to make sense of non-Christian religions, this
is precisely what they were doing. You might say this is inappropriate
but turn it around and you've got something exciting. What would
Christianity look like, for example, if approached the way an
anthropologist approaches a shamanic community? Doctrine might
be de-emphasized, even invisible, while modes of healing and
"soul" restoration at the forefront. |
See
last week's News for material on Jung and Campbell
Eliade
(Sharpe, pp. 213-219.)
[Transitional
from Jung to Eliade: All of the theorists we have studied so far
see an "archaic" or "vestigial" element in
contemporary human experience, something remaining from a more
primal time. Do you see this same notion operating in Jung? How
so?]
ARCHÉ
-beginning, origin
-the person or thing that commences, the first person or thing
in a series, the leader
-that by which anything begins to be, the origin, the active
cause |
Mircea Eliade
(pronounced Meer-cha Ay-lee-A-duh) is a staggeringly important
figure in Religious Studies. Some feel that there would be no
discipline called Religious Studies, that is, the study of religion
as opposed to theology, without him. He himself called his discipline
the "history of religions," although we shall see that
his notion of history was cosmic and experiential rather than
linear. For many years he was the presiding deity at the University
of Chicago Divinity School and either directly trained or profoundly
influenced an entire generation of scholars of religion. Though
many have problems with the way he universalizes the patterns
of religious experience, there can be no doubt that he definitively
moved the study away from the reductionism of some of the social
scientists. In his opening up to religious experience, taking
religion on its own terms, he was guided not only by Jung but
by his initiation into esoteric yoga by Himalayan teachers, and
the wellsprings of the earthy folk Christianity of his native
Romania.
Sharpe only scratches the surface of Eliade,
mostly placing him in the context of his relationship to Jung.
Even so, from the material in Sharpe, how do you see Eliade's
relationship to Jung? to Frazer?
What does Sharpe present as Eliade's central religious concern,
that is, what do people want or need from religion? If we can
answer this question in any way, does that make Eliade a "functionalist."
At the end of his Eliade section, Sharpe makes
a bit of a mention of structuralism and Lévy-Strauss, asserting
that structuralist thinking made little impression on comparative
religion. This is probably an overstatement.
Eliade
(Pals, Chapter 5)
The thought of Mircea Eliade is so
rich that even though this chapter is probably one of Pals' best,
some feel it doesn't do justice to Eliade's ability to carry readers
into the world of the "archaic man" who is not a passive
observer of religious forms but an active participant in the life
of the cosmos.
Q: What's the difference between "archaic" and "primitive"?
Q: Where's the "history" in "history of religions"?
Q: How does Eliade's "sacred" differ from Durkheim's?
Q: If Eliade's notion of the sacred is influenced by Rudolph Otto's
das Heilige (pp. 165-165), is it a valid notion for the
study of religion?
Q: Just like Jung, Eliade is interested in myth and symbol as
tapping into the "depth element of experience." What
then is the difference between Jung and Eliade?
Q: Eliade sees the religious symbols of a culture organizing themselves
into a structure, then sees those symbols as existing in a hierarchy--some
are more important than others. By the logic of this principle,
Eliade, the adept in kundalini yoga, describes Christianity as
deeper and more profound than some other religions. Whatever your
views about Christianity, do you agree with the principles behind
Eliade's argument?
Note: In his discussions both on p. 168 and p. 179, Pals misses
an important element of Eliade's description of the religious
life of the archaic person: desire to participate in the
life of the cosmos. We'll discuss this more in class.
Q: For Eliade, the transition from archaic religion to Jewish/Christian/Islamic
historical religion and then to modernity does not represent a
an evolutionary scheme, such as that from magic to science to
religion, or from savagery to barbarism to civilization, or from
simple to complex societies, or from industrial capitalism to
revolution. Why would he argue that he really is not presenting
another 19th or 20th century "progress story"?
Q: Big question for readers of Eliade: Is Eliade claiming that
archaic persons are discovering the sacred through reading
nature, or constructing it? What's the difference?
| Eliadean
terms you should know |
| autonomy of the sacred |
| history of religions |
| the archaic |
| archaic man, homo religiosus (i.e. "religious
man") |
| eternal return |
| cosmogony; relation to myth and ritual |
| the sacred, defn. of, different from Durkheim;
sacred vs. profane |
| chaos vs. cosmos |
| imago mundi |
| rupture of plane |
| hierophany |
| axis mundi |
| i illo tempore |
| desacralization |
| cosmic Christianity |
Group Session 1
The preparation
you do for the Group work on Thursday will lay the foundation
for your take-home midterm. Read about expectations for Group work on the Course Responsibility
Q & A Page. Here's how to prepare for Thursday. For each
of these articles bring at least a page of notes that will help
you get down to work soon. This group work cannot be done without
prior preparation. Unlike a more general discussion where you
can learn something with less than good preparation, you will
be of little value to your group unless you prepare. For this
reason, I will be checking to see if you've brought notes on the
readings. The idea is that the group work should be taken seriously.
This is actually a great opportunity to get a massive head start
on the midterm.
The point is that
you are here to do a task.
Each group will appoint
(a) a facilitator who will insure that everyone contributes and
that the task(s) are completed within the time allotted, and
(b) a recorder/reporter who will take notes and summarize the
group's work to the class as a whole.
The roles of facilitator and recorder/reporter
will rotate among the group members, perhaps even during a single
group work session for different parts of the task, so that by
the end of the course all group members will have had a chance
to perform in at least one if not both of the roles. As part of
your final exam, everyone in the class will write up a report
on his/her group with specifics about the various sessions, emphasizing
his/her contribution to them, so it behooves you to keep some
sort of notes on the sessions or ensure that the recorder/reporters
make notes available to the entire group.
The questions below will help
you prepare for the class group sessions. The questions you work
on in class will be related to these. You will also work on questions
on general topics of theory, also in preparation for the midterm.
Orientation to the texts: These two texts have
to do with healing in traditional contexts. In different ways,
both are about shamans. We met the figure of the shaman before
in the video "Between Two Worlds," and we'll be meeting
shamans again in the Native American tradition. If you were absent
on the first day of class, you'll want to look at this video in
the library.
Claude
Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols"
Note: Levi-Strauss is one of the great names in 20th century anthropology;
he is especially known for his role in forming the structuralist
approach to the study of myth and religion. Although this article
was written during a time when Freud loomed large in any discussion
of psychological matters--and Levi-Strauss's comparisons between
shamanic healing and the "talking cure" of Freud are
certainly here--there are other, I believe deeper, dynamics at
work in the process. This article is a bit technical at times,
especially in the beginning, but if you persist you will be rewarded
with a fascinating glimpse of shamanic healing and much food for
thought. See especially the interpretation beginning on p. 321.
Reading the abstract at the beginning will provide a good orientation.
The following may or may not be the questions you will be working
on in your groups, but they will certainly help you prepare.
Q: What is the organization of the article? How does Levi-Strauss
construct his argument?
Q: What is the nele doing for the ill woman?
Q: How does the nele draw on communal symbols for his work?
Q: What conceptualizations of his own does he draw on?
Q: What do you think of the connections does Levi-Strauss make
with the activity of psychoanalysis?
Note: One controversial
element that Levi-Strauss employs(which is also mentioned in
the beginning abstract) is that shamanic healing (and psychiatry)
are effective because everyone's mind contains a universal, unconscious
symbolic function (organically based!) that permits it, even
encourages to operate on the mythic (symbolic) level, as well
as on the literal level.
Q: Based on what we have done in the course
so far, what evidence pro or con do you see for this kind of function--either
as innate or learned?
Q: What assumptions is Levi-Strauss bringing to his analysis?
Q: What other theoretical tools that you have learned in
this course could you apply to the material Levi-Strauss works
on, and how would you apply them?
Crossan,
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Chapter Four, "In the Beginning
Is the Body. . ."
Note: Dom Crossan,
a former member of the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul,
has done extensive research on Christian beginnings--the environment
in which Jesus lived and worked. Crossan's thesis is that Jesus'
world was one in which all relationships were brokered, or mediated
by social rules and distinctions. Jesus was radical in that he
preached a brokerless kingdom--the Kingdom of God. The following
may or may not be the questions you will be working on in your
groups, but they will certainly help you prepare. If you're used
to Jesus the miracle worker, get ready for something quite different.
Q: What is the organization of the article?
How does Crossan construct his argument?
Q: What theoretical tools, concepts and methods does Crossan bring
to bear on his study?
Q: What are the rules in Jesus' world and how does the way he
breaks them reveal the nature of his healing?
Q: How does Crossan bring in cross-cultural issues to explain
how Jesus deals with demonic possession in Gospel healing stories?
Q: Important: How are social and political elements involved in
Jesus' healing?
Q: What other theoretical tools that you have learned in
this course could you apply to the material Crossan works on,
and how would you apply them?