71102.pdf

of society that we develop very early. Hirschfeld's developmental stud- ies show how even young children have some expectations ...

see. For instance, people are members of particular clans or villages. It appears to everyone that these groups were not created ...

from initiation camp as full-grown men, then it seems that the ritual did give them a new identity. If everybody treats the newl ...

intuition that your relations with the newlyweds will now be different, and that this may be the case for other participants too ...

crazed believers inebriated by loud drumbeats and mind-altering sub- stances. There are rituals like that; but many others—indee ...

are indeed "incomplete" or "unfinished." But they have no idea why this is so. The causal link is obvious but its mechanism is d ...

This empty slot in our representation of ritual in many cases remains empty. This is very much what happens for many male initia ...

ritual sequences. If we have a ceremony to ask the gods for good crops, this specifies for instance that we will say things to t ...

gods and spirits are themselves said to be doing things—are per- formed rather rarely, in fact, generally only once for a given ...

ple becoming a couple, by children getting born, by people growing up to adulthood and dying. These changes by nature happen onl ...

believers. What matters to rituals and makes them relevant is that one construes the social effects as the resultof the actions ...

again in the same specific way. The explanation for the cultural success of rituals is to be found in processes that are not rea ...

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8 WHY DOCTRINES, EXCLUSION AND VIOLENCE? Here is a simple scenario: People in a group tend to have a similar description of supe ...

ONE DOCTRINE TOO FEW No question, it seems, could be more straightforward than this: What is your religion? Many people will rea ...

Buid would not assume that practicing mediumship makes them members of a wider community. Whether other people in the world have ...

by Sufi cults. The real mix of influences is in fact even more complex than that. For some Indonesians, the mystical Javanist cu ...

taught the differences between religions. The people who perform a slametanor attend various Muslim rites or visit Hindu temples ...

All these facts are fairly complex and interconnected, so I will start with an apparently naive question: Why are there religiou ...

a great uncertainty in people's attitudes toward such specialists. It is not absolutely clear that they do have the special qual ...