Terms and Definitions

Question 1

Substantive Definitions

Answer 1

Looks at what religion is - Tylor’s belief in supernatural beings

Question 2

Functional Definitions

Answer 2

Looks at what religion does - Gertz’s system of symbols

Question 3

Sacred

Answer 3

Things that are set apart and forbidden

Question 4

Profane

Answer 4

The ordinary and everyday

Question 5

Supernatural

Answer 5

That which is beyond the natural

Question 6

Ethnocentrism

Answer 6

Evaluating a culture through your own cultural lens - Evaluation and Interpretation

Question 7

Enculturation

Answer 7

The process of learning and integration into a culture

Question 8

Ethnography

Answer 8

Crosscultural analysis

Question 9

Emic Perspective

Answer 9

Insiders perspective

Question 10

Etic Perspective

Answer 10

Outsiders perspective

Question 11

Cultural Relativism

Answer 11

Understanding cultures through their own cultural lens

Question 12

Critical Cultural Relativism

Answer 12

Understanding cultures through methodological relativism only

Question 13

Absolute Cultural Relativism

Answer 13

Understanding cultures through moral and methodological relativism

Question 14

Culture

Answer 14

Shared ideas, values and beliefs that people use to interpret experience and generate behaviours

Question 15

Symbols

Answer 15

Model for and of social and psychological reality - reflect and reinforce

Question 16

Ritual

Answer 16

Patterned, repetitive, something that you do which brings the body in

Question 17

Ritual healing effect

Answer 17

James McClenon’s theory of religion as having a placebo effect

Question 18

Geards definition of culture

Answer 18

Historically transmitted system of meaning embodied in symbols