In its interaction with a changing environment, a cultural system may be defeated, or it may initially fall apart, but subsequently succeed in reassembling itself in a new way of imagining and believing, of religiously thinking the order of things in another way. The idea that religion means the preservation of the social balance cannot stand the test of the social sciences if the latter critically adopt the systemic paradigm.
Religions as systems are susceptible, by definition, to the pressures of a changing environment, so they tend to measure themselves with what changes in the latter exogenous change , sometimes autonomously making changes to their own internal layout endogenous change in order to adjust somehow to the social changes underway.
Just as the hypothesis of a linear decline of the sacred in modern society was hardly very convincing, the assumption that religion invariably serves the purpose of social integration and preservation is likewise open to question. The first concerns the idea that religion can be seen as a cultural system and therefore in much the same way as any other ideology configured as a complete, all-around view of the world.
In fact, Geertz basically continues to wonder about the function of religion in relation to the social order, be it stable or in the throes of change. The approach of belief systems theory departs instead from the assumption that it is more fruitful in cognitive terms to consider religion as a structure that has a specific function that cannot be readily absorbed by or reduced to other functions characterizing other structures or systems.
This particular function has little to do with the relationship between religion and social order religion guaranteeing order , and more with the highly-specific way in which a system of religious belief functions internally in order to interact with the outside social environment. This is the only way for a system of religious belief to withstand time despite profound and radical changes taking place outside in society, beyond its control in the sense that it can neither determine them, nor prevent them , from economics to science, from politics to communication media.
To withstand time, they must develop their own internal complexity, not just the capacity to filter the external complexity. A system of religious belief may be efficient in terms of performance not because it knows how to weather the storm of social change, but rather because it succeeds in creating its own internal elements and corresponding relationships between them, so as to be able to tolerate the external complexity -with a relative degree of autonomy in relation to the social environment and other social systems or subsystems- without necessarily having to undergo radical changes or any definitive replacement of the elements comprising its network of links be they symbolic, ritual, mythological, or whatever.
Second questio. The former made the mistake of taking a linear, and consequently causal approach to studying the relationship stated in a nutshell between modernization on the one hand and the decline of the sacred, or of religiosity on the other. In other words, they reduce the complexity of a belief system to its entrepreneurial capabilities.
Introduction to the economics of religion. Journal of Economic Literature, v. Religion, Economics of. In: Steven Durlauf; Lawrence E. Blume Ed. The new Palgrave dictionary of economics. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan Press, Salvation goods, the gift economy and charismatic concern. Social Compass, v. Salvation goods and religious market. Bern: Peter Lang, In both cases, the problem for a theory aiming to deal with the question , stubborn as a stone, facing the social sciences, lies in the more or less explicit assumption that we can only understand religion if we establish a link of cause and effect between religion and something else, i.
I therefore cannot answer the question of why religions persist. I might claim, as many have done before, that they intercept an anthropological need for sense, something that transcends ordinary life, and so on or a genetically-programmed need but, that being the case, it is hard to see why individuals believe differently, or even not at all , or a deep-seated layer of our neural structure.
All these approaches seek to find a place for religion from an observation point that is no longer mainly social, but biological, neurological, psychological or economic, as the case may be. From the methodological standpoint, this operation is in some ways rather bizarre for anyone wishing to analyze the religious phenomenon socially.
When social scientists analyze the phenomenon of religion, they cannot avoid taking the point of view of individuals who wonder about the sense of life, asking questions that human beings have recurrently asked themselves - presumably while looking empirically at the force that religions have always had in the past and present. In so doing, the sociologists deduce that, if religions persist and remain alive, it is because they and probably only they manage to specialize in providing reassuring answers to fears of death and hope of immortality.
With this, we grasp only a part of the truth, as anthropological and sociological research, as well as comparative studies on the history of religions have demonstrated.
But we do not give sufficient emphasis to the specialized function of this particular knowledge that religion itself, in its broadest sense, generates and represents. In other words, religions are expert systems, organized on the strength of their specific ability to develop an understanding of the final destiny of human beings and humanity. This expertise boasted by religions is something that other cultural systems do not have to the same degree, or with the same level of complexity.
If I grant religion this structure, then I can take another step and ask myself whether this very structure is the autonomous principle of religious belief systems. Religion in sociological perspective.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, Religion is a system that has continued to build and rebuild its relationship with the social environment, which changes with time; unless we focus on this inseparable relationship, we risk failing to understand the dynamics of the religious phenomenon;.
The process that constructs and defines the symbolic boundaries of a system of religious belief takes place in an environment crowded with religious symbols and other belief systems religious and others ; in defining itself, a religion has the problem of distinguishing itself from this environment and of increasing its internal complexity in the process; it consequently tends to withdraw within itself, emphasizing its own identity specifically in order to better interact with, and be open to, changing and multiple environments;.
According to Geertz this has hardly been investigated so there is little idea of how, in empirical terms, the formation of a cosmic order is accomplished. The anthropological study of religion, according to Geertz, should be a two-stage operation: first an analysis of the system of meanings embodied in the symbols which make up the religion, and, second, the relating of these systems to socio-cultural and psychological processes.
Geertz Banton Geertz dissatisfaction with contemporary anthropological works in religion is not that it concerns itself with the second stage but that it neglects the first Geertz This is a view that seeks to divide thought into two parts: a conceptual system that our mind or our language provides and preconceptual content that the world provides.
Davidson argues that this is unintelligible because recognizing a conceptual scheme as incommensurable would involve recognizing the incommensurable conceptual scheme as a conceptual scheme to compare with other conceptual schemes, but this indicates similarity and contradicts incommensurability.
Geertz assumes that religious symbols are intended to be representations that somehow picture or parallel or correspond to non-symbolic entities. By comparing religion with science, common-sense and aesthetic he is actually advocating relativism. Thus different languages or symbolic vehicles cope with, organize, or see reality in importantly different ways. Ariel et al. A consequence of this view is that it renders every philosophy which performs such a function into a religion, or alternatively, makes it possible to think of religion as a more primitive.
A less mature mode of coming to terms with the human condition. According to Talal Asad the suggestion that religion has a universal function is one indication of how marginal religion becomes in modern industrial society as the site of producing disciplined knowledge. Widati, S. WonokertoKabupatenPekalongan: Kajian Hakim, M. PerubahanBentuk Dan Fungsi. JPP, 1 2. Monarchism, national identity and social Ken, W. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 18 4 , Sartini, S. Ritual Bahari Indonesia: Antara KearifanLokal dan Hefner, R.
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PendekatanKuantitatif dan Indonesia and Islam. Sophia, 52 1 , Semarang: Koentjaraningrat, K. Kebudayaan Jawa. Universitas Negeri Semarang. Balai Pustaka. Burhani, A. Ethnic minority politics in Madjid, N. Islam Doktrin dan Peradaban: Interview with KRT. Kemanusi Musadad, A. The pilgrimage to Tembayat: Tradition and revival in Indonesian Islam.
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New York:. Harper and Raw. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Prosess. Related Papers. The effort behind religion is not to deny the undeniable, but to deny the inexplicable, through symbols. Religious belief involves a prior acceptance of authority which transforms that experience. The religious perspective is ''he who would know must first believe. The religious perspective differs from the scientific perspective in that it questions the realities of every day life in terms of non-hypothetical truths.
It differs from the aesthetic perspective in that it deepens concern with fact and seeks to create an aura of actuality. It is in ritual - consecrated behavior - that the conviction that religious directives are sound is generated.
It is in ceremonial form that moods and motivations which sacred symbols induce in men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate -- reinforce one another. Religious acts for participants are enactment's, materializations of religion -- not only models of what they believe, but also models for the believing of it. The acceptance of authority that underlies the religious perspective that the ritual embodies flows from the enactment of the ritual itself.
The movement back and forth between the religious perspective and the common sense perspective is actually often ignored by social anthropologists. Religious belief in the midst of ritual, where it engulfs the total person and as a remembered reflection of that experience in the midst of everyday life are distinct. Religion alters the whole landscape presented to common sense, alters it in such a way that the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seem themselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given the way things ''really'' are.
Hence, religion changes man and his common sense perspective. It is the particularity of the impact of religious systems upon social systems which renders general assessments of the value of religion in either moral or functional terms impossible. Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to prove a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experiences can be given a meaningful form.
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