Here is a collection of articles on the subjects you requested. I
hope they meet your needs.
Sincerely,
Wonko
"The anthropology of religion involves the study of religious
institutions in relation to other social institutions, and the
comparison of religious beliefs and practices across cultures. In the
19th century, cultural anthropology was dominated by an interest in
cultural evolution; most anthropologists assumed that there was a
simple distinction between ?primitive? and ?modern? religion and tried
to provide accounts of how the former evolved into the latter. In the
20th century most anthropologists rejected this approach. Today the
anthropology of religion reflects the influence of, or an engagement
with, such modern theorists as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile
Durkheim, and Max Weber. They are especially concerned with how
religious beliefs and practices may reflect political or economic
forces; or the social functions of religious beliefs and practices."
"Anthropology of religion" Wikipedia (April 1, 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology_of_religion
"Economic anthropology is a linking between economic and social life.
Similar to evolutionary psychology in that it attempts to use one
branch of scientific theory and thought to explain another. In this
case, it is an attempt to describe anthropological characteristics as
rooted in economic factors."
"Economic anthropology" Wikipedia (March 23, 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_anthropology
"Political anthropology concerns the structure of political systems,
looked at from the basis of the structure of societies."
"Political anthropology" Wikipedia (May 2, 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_anthropology
These elements (religion, economics, and politics) are social
institutions that influence behavior, thereby playing important roles
in the development of culture. Interestingly, European social
anthropologists acutely focused on these items when studying cultures.
In contrast, American anthropologists focused on art and myths.
"Cultural anthropology" Wikipedia (April 29, 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_anthropology
"A myth is often thought to be a lesson in story form which has deep
explanatory or symbolic resonance for preliterate cultures, who
preserve and cherish the wisdom of their elders through oral
traditions by the use of skilled story tellers."
"In sociology, however, a myth may be historical or fictional without
altering its nature as myth, because the power of myth lies in the
meaning and broader truth it conveys, rather than the historicity of
the story."
"All cultures have developed over time their own mythology, consisting
of legends of their history, their religions, and their heroes. The
great power of the symbolic meaning of these stories for the culture
is a major reason why they survive as long as they do, sometimes for
thousands of years. "
"Myth" Wikipedia (May 1, 2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth
"Anthropologists use the term [culture] to refer to the universal
human capacity to classify experiences, and to encode and communicate
them symbolically."
"By the late 19th century, anthropologists had adopted and adapted the
term culture to a broader definition that they could apply to a wider
variety of societies. Attentive to the theory of evolution, they
assumed that all human beings evolved equally, and that the fact that
all humans have cultures must in some way result from human
evolution.... They argued that through the course of their evolution,
human beings evolved a universal human capacity to classify
experiences, and to encode and communicate them symbolically. Since
these symbolic systems were learned and taught, they began to develop
independently of biological evolution (in other words, one human being
can learn a belief, value, or way of doing something from another,
even if the two humans are not biologically related)."
"Anthropologists view culture as not only a product of biological
evolution but as a supplement to it, as the main means of human
adaptation to the world."
"This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive functions,
and which varies from place to place, led anthropologists to conceive
of different cultures as defined by distinct patterns (or structures)
of enduring, arbitrary, conventional sets of meaning, which took
concrete form in a variety of artifacts such as myths and rituals,
tools, the design of housing, and the planning of villages. "
"Culture" Wikipedia (April 29, 2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture |
