Lecture 12: Religion, Ritual and Language Flashcards
wallace
belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces
reese
bodies of people who gather together regularly for worship
communitas
intense feeling of social solidarity
animism
belief in spiritual beings
polytheism
belief in multiple gods
monotheism
belief in a single, all-powerful deity
magic
supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims.
evidence early religious activity
neandertal burials and representations of shamans on European cave walls.
evolving of religion through stages
- animism
- polytheism
- monotheism
ritual
formal—stylized, repetitive, stereotyped behaviour, often based on a liturgical order. Rituals convey information about participants and their culture. Rituals are social acts.
totem
animal, plant, or geographic feature associated with specific social group, to which that totem is sacred or symbolically important. Members of each totemic group believed themselves to be descendants of their totem. Uses nature as a model for society.
cosmology
system, often religious, for imagining and understanding the Universe. Totemic principles continue to demarcate groups.
religious figures
All societies have religious figures
shamans
part-time magic-religious practitioner
usage of religion
Religion can be used to mobilize by instilling hatred or fear. Many religions have formal codes of ethics to prohibit or promote certain behaviours. Leaders have used religion to promote and justify their views and policies.
religion and social order
Religion helps maintain social order –> religious leaders also may seek to alter or revitalize their society
revitalization movements
social movements that occur in times of change.
syncretisms
Cultural, especially religious, mixes, emerging when two or more cultural traditions come into contact. These are things like voodoos etc. Religious responses to expansion of the world capitalist economy.
cargo cults
syncretic revitalization movements arising in colonial situations that attempt to achieve success magically by mimicking European behaviour and symbols
trend religion now
the number of people giving no religious preference is growing rapidly in western societies. Sociological research suggests that levels of religiosity in western societies have not changed much in the past century.
anti-modernism
rejecting modern in favour of what is perceived as earlier, purer, and better way of life, e.g. to salvage planet earth.
secular rituals
Include formal, invariant, stereotyped, earnest, repetitive behaviour, and rites of passage taking place in nonreligious settings.
linguistic diversity
Regional diversity, generational differences, gender differences, social diversity and cultural diversity
language
primary means of communication (spoken or written)
origins of language
A mutated gene, FOXP2
kinesics
study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions
several levels of organization in the study of spoken language
- phonology
- morphology
- lexicon
- syntax
phonology
study of speech sounds
morphology
forms in which sounds combine to form morphemes
lexicon
dictionary containing all morphemes and their meaning
syntax
arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences
speech sounds
- phoneme
- phonetics
- phonemics
phoneme
a sound contrast that makes a difference or differentiates meaning
phonetics
the study of human speech sounds in general
phonemics
studies only the significant sound contrasts of a given language
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
grammatical categories of different languages lead their speakers to think about things in particular ways
Focal vocabulary
specialized sets of terms and distinctions that are important to certain groups
Semantics
language’s meaning system
Ethnosemantics
study of lexical (vocabulary) categories and contrasts
Sociolinguistics
investigates relationships between social and linguistic variation, or language in its social context.
Style shifts
varying speech in different contexts
Diglossia
regular style shifts between “high” and “low” variants of same language
differences language between men and women
Men and women have differences in phonology, grammar, and vocabulary as well as in body stances and movements that accompany speech. Traditional Japanese women tend to adopt artificially high voice, for politeness. Women’s speech tends to be more similar to standard dialect than is men’s speech.
Honorifics
terms of respect; used to honour the recipients
Historical linguistics
examines long-term variation of speech by studying protolanguages and daughter languages
Daughter languages
languages that descend from same parent language that have been changing separately for hundreds or even thousands of years
Protolanguage
original language from which daughter languages descend
Subgroup
languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related
