Chapter 21 Flashcards
Which of the following is true about rites of passage?
Beliefs and rituals can, ironically, both diminish and create anxiety and a sense of insecurity and danger.
What is the term for the marginal or in-between phase of a rite of passage?
liminality
What is communitas?
a collective liminality
Totemism, one form of cosmology, is
a system, in this case a religious one, for imagining and understanding the universe.
Studies of how beliefs and rituals function as part of a group’s cultural adaptation to its environment are an illustration of
how religion can play a prominent role in cultural ecology.
Émile Durkheim, an early scholar of religion, stressed what he termed religious effervescence, which can be explained as
a bubbly kind of joy that religious people often exude.
Which of the following kinds of religion involves part-time religious specialists in foraging societies?
shamanistic religion
Which of the following kinds of religion involves full-time religious specialists?
Olympian religion
Like ethnicity and language, religion also is
associated with social divisions within and between societies and nations.
According to Edward Tylor, religion evolved from polytheism to animism to monotheism.
false
In Melanesia, mana is an essential sacred life force that resides in people, animals, plants, and objects.
true
According to Bronislaw Malinowski, religion provides people with emotional comfort during problematic times.
true
Who argued that religion would eventually disappear as science provided better explanations?
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
Animism, belief in souls or doubles, is thought by some to be the earliest form of religion.
true
Religion can be used as a powerful means of controlling society.
true
Witch hunts are an example of how religion can be used to limit deviant social behavior by instilling strong motivations to behave properly.
true
Animism, polytheism, and monotheism are the
stages, according to Edward Tylor, through which religion evolved.
What term refers to the manipulation of the supernatural to accomplish specific goals?
magic
________ magic is based on the belief that whatever is done to an object will affect a person who once had contact with it.
contagious
Religion and magic don’t just explain things and help people accomplish goals—they also enter the realm of human feelings. In other words,
they serve emotional needs as well as cognitive (i.e., explanatory) ones.
