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Mana. Energy, or supernatural force, a kind of sacred power. Lucien Levy-Bruhl. “Primitive mind” is pre-logical and immersed in a mystical frame. Totemism.
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Mana • Energy, or supernatural force, a kind of sacred power.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl • “Primitive mind” is pre-logical and immersed in a mystical frame.
Totemism • The particular religious practices centered around animals, plants, or other aspects of the natural world the group is intimately connected with.
Totemism • For Malinowski, totemism is a form of magical thinking and practice. • Totemism’s goal is to supply the tribe with abundance. • In order to do so, totemism implies the setting up of taboos: prohibitions to kill and to eat certain species.
Durkheim • Social behaviour cannot be explained by psychological or biological factors.
Social phenomena are Social Facts: • Manners of acting, thinking and feeling that are external to individuals, and that are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which their exercise control over them.
Although social facts are independent of individuals, and endure over time, they become effective only when internalized.
Durkheim • First and foremost proponent of understanding religion as a form of validation of the social order.
The earliest religions were based on clans, each expressing its solidarity through the emblem of its respective totem.
Totem • An object, an animal species or a feature of the natural world that is associated with a particular group or clan. The totem is held to be ancestral or to have other intimate relationship with the group.
Totemism for Durkheim • Uses nature as a model for society.
In worshipping totems, members of the group were in effect celebrating their own existence and continuity and giving concrete expression to it.
Totemic principle: • In worshipping the sacred, people worship the society they belong to.
Totems carry with them a kind of energy or supernatural force, a sacred power described as mana.
Melanesians of the South Pacific used the word mana to describe the sacred, impersonal force that exists in the Universe. This religious power or energy can be concentrated in objects, people, plants or animals.
Taboo • A collective prohibition. • Things that are set apart as sacred, and are off-limits to ordinary people.
Totemism • Does not include a belief in a supernatural being. • All we have is mana, an impersonal force contained in sacred things.
Durkheim • The very thing that defines religion is the distinction between the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane.
Durkheim • The distinction between what is natural and what is supernatural is a recent construction of the positive sciences.
Durkheim • Contests the idea that religion is defined by the existence of divinity.
Durkheim • Religion is a system made up of parts, and can only be defined in relation to its parts: myths, dogmas, rituals and ceremonies. • Two fundamental categories: beliefs and rituals.
Durkheim • All religious beliefs have one characteristic. They presuppose a classification of all things, real and idea, into two classes of opposed groups: THE SACRED and THE PROFANE
The sacred thing par excellence is that which the profane should not touch, and cannot touch with impunity.
Church • A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and who translate these common ideas into common practices.
Religion • The unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things which unite into one single moral community (a Church) all those who adhere to them.
