The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy

Lambek, Michael

doi:10.1086/300143

Cited by 123 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…A recent exception, with respect to MacIntyre, is the interesting paper by Lambek (2000). 2 Williams ( Boas (1928) and his followers, especially Benedict (1935;1967[1946); Herskovits (1948;1972) and Mead (1928), are the most commonly cited authors, but more recently Cook (1999), Geertz (1984), Hatch (1983), and Shweder (1989) have continued the tradition.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

Laidlaw

2002

Royal Anthropological Inst

454

300

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There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest -hitherto largely absent from anthropology -in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.The argument I present here begins from the observation that despite the interest shown in the matter by some of the very greatest anthropologists our discipline has not developed a body of theoretical reflection on the nature of ethics. I shall assume that this is a deficiency, and that it would therefore be an advance if it could be rectified. And my claim will be that in order to do so we shall need a way of describing the possibilities of human freedom: of describing, that is, how freedom is exercised in different social contexts and cultural traditions. However, freedom is a concept about which anthropology has had strikingly little to say. Malinowski was an honourable exception here -both in his insistence, in Crime and custom (1926), that the Trobriander in particular and the 'savage' in general is not an unthinking slave of custom but a free agent exercising his own judgement and choice; and also in his posthumously published book, Freedom and civilisation (1947), where he considers the social conditions of political freedom. As Ernest Gellner remarked (1998: 141), the case of Malinowski illustrates that it is possible to be a believer in freedom -in its existence and in its value -without necessarily subscribing to an atomistic social ontology, and without denying the importance of the social or cultural in human flourishing.

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confidence: 99%

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

Laidlaw

2002

Royal Anthropological Inst

454

300

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“…Why does it retain such a powerful hold on us as a descriptive or even explanatory concept, particularly when strong arguments can be made that the concept as we use it contributes instead to fragmentation (Lambek 2000)? We address the first question because the outcome guides inquiry into the material manifestations of the Spanish Conquest and the changes that took place at the time of the Maya collapse.…”

Section: Cautions That a Pragmatic Archaeological Approach Should Askmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Spanish conquest and the Maya collapse: how ‘religious’ is change?

Graham¹,

Simmons²,

White³

2013

World Archaeology

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The phenomenon of the Spanish Conquest of the Maya region suggests strongly that, in the process of socio-cultural transformation, 'religion' has no meaning as a concept with its own particular dynamic. There is no such thing as 'religious' change that is not also tied to other sorts of changes and indeed to continuity. One dramatic change was the adoption by whole communities, or large segments of communities, of Christian burial practice in which the body was placed in the supine position, head to the west, facing east. Christian burial is seen to represent 'religious conversion' but it was one of a broad sweep of changes in how power was gained and wealth appropriated, and the way in which killing was socially sanctioned through warfare. Evidence is accumulating from sites in Belize that a significant change in burial practice also took place at time of the Maya collapse in the ninth and tenth centuries. The question that remains to be answered is whether or not the new interment practices were part of a pattern which, like the burials of the Conquest period, reflected broader socio-cultural transformations.

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“…The usefulness of a moral perspective has been increasingly recognized by many anthropologists in recent years (Carrithers 2005;Heintz 2009), and in the study of Muslim societies as well (for example Lambek 2000;Marsden 2005). The moral perspective is concerned with the dynamics between transcending values and lived practice, when the locus is morality as a state of the person and exercised in the flow of life rather than a set of timeless rules (pp.…”

Section: History and Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journey to Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Henig

2011

History and Anthropology

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The Anthropology of Religion and the Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy

Cited by 123 publications

References 13 publications

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

The Spanish conquest and the Maya collapse: how ‘religious’ is change?

Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journey to Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

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