No abstract

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org "nobody seems to know what [religion] is." Nadel (1954), Eister (1974), and Machalek (1977), among others, doubt the possibility of a definition. Eister (1974:2), for example, says that religion has defied social scientific consensus and may "not be definable in general terms." Of theories themselves, Evans-Pritchard wrote in 1965 that to date "either singly or taken together, [they do not] give us much more than common-sense guesses, which for the most part miss the mark [and] of the many attempts [none] is wholly satisfactory" (1965: 120-21). Geertz said the following year that the anthropology of religion was in a "general state of stagnation" and that there was no "theoretical framework. .. to provide an analytic account of religion" (1966:1-4). Despite Geertz's contribution and others, there is some consensus that anthropological theory of religion has "lagged" (Saliba 1976: 189) and that there still is no theory for "normal" research in the science of religion (Buchdahl 1977). I shall not review present theories here (Saliba 1976 gives a recent short review), but shall mention relevant aspects of several major ones. I agree with Tylor, Durkheim, and Freudotherwise sharply divergent on religion-that it anthropomorphizes the world in some significant way; with Geertz (1966), Bellah (1964), and Spiro (1966) that the use of symbols, characteristically human, is especially characteristic of religion; and with Horton (1960,1967, 1973a) and Spiro (1966) that belief in the human-like beings of religion is based in experience. I disagree with Malinowski (1948) that religion is primarily wish fulfillment. Tylor, who defined religion substantively as the "belief in Spiritual Beings" (1979 [18731:10), was in my view right to define it as a kind of conception of the world. He was also right to say that religious conceptions may be reasonable attempts to understand the world at large and that they attribute humanlike features such as language and ethics to nonhuman natural phenomena. Tylor's weakness is not so much his intellectualism or even individualism as his overestimation of two phenomena (dreams and death) as topics for human thought and therefore as sources of religious notions. His "spiritual beings" are composed of the ideas of the "phantom" and the "life force" that respectively arise from each person's experience of dreams and of ...

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The scientific community is increasingly concerned with cases of published "discoveries" that are not replicated in further studies. The field of mouse behavioral phenotyping was one of the first to raise this concern, and to relate it to other complicated methodological issues: the complex interaction between genotype and environment; the definitions of behavioral constructs; and the use of the mouse as a model animal for human health and disease mechanisms. In January 2015, researchers from various disciplines including genetics, behavior genetics, neuroscience, ethology, statistics and bioinformatics gathered in Tel Aviv University to discuss these issues. The general consent presented here was that the issue is prevalent and of concern, and should be addressed at the statistical, methodological and policy levels, but is not so severe as to call into question the validity and the usefulness of model organisms as a whole. Well-organized community efforts, coupled with improved data and metadata sharing, were agreed by all to have a key role to play in identifying specific problems and promoting effective solutions. As replicability is related to validity and may also affect generalizability and translation of findings, the implications of the present discussion reach far beyond the issue of replicability of mouse phenotypes but may be highly relevant throughout biomedical research.