The Many Functions of Religions
There is a long history of assessing — and attempting to explain — religion in a functional manner. Marx and Engels figured that the function of religion was to disguise the realities of the...
View ArticleBourdieu & Symbolic Power: The Archaeology of Proto-Religion
I just finished reading David Swartz’s superb article, “Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power” (open access), and must recommend it not only...
View ArticleMaking Religious Babies: A Cultural Phenomenon
As I noted in A Tale of Two Religion Scholars, Dr. Michael Blume’s research (which you can find at Homo religious) shows that religious groups out-reproduce their secular counterparts. The data are...
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Crazy Corn Children & Ritual Form
In 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids...
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Animism as Mode of Production
Over the summer I belatedly got round to reading Robin Ridington’s Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (1990). Ridington is an anthropologist who has done extensive...
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