UNDERSTANDING SACRED OBJECTS. TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY OF RELIGIOUS MEANING (original) (raw)
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Religion as a System of Symbols: An Interpretation
2021
Some facets of anthropological understanding of religion as cultural symbols can be comprehended with the example provided by Clifford Geertz on the Balinese theatrical performance.He takes this example to elucidate how cultural performances, a term introduced by Singer, integrate the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religion. For the participants of these performances, Geertz observes these religious cultural recitals are a realization of their religion and their own life itself. This is especially apparent in how the performers and participants interact during the performance of the combat between "Rangda and Borang" symbolically a clash between malignant and comic. Here Geertz observes that participantsjoin the performance as supporting actors, this happens when the participant enters another realm apart from their commonplace existence,here they are possessed by one or the other demons. The untranced here controls excessive activities of the possessed by throwin...
The Symbolism in Rituals; the Function of the Mind (under cultural perspectives)
At the following paper I am going to discuss about the creation of symbols and about the role and the symbolism of the body in rituals and generally in human societies. It is generally known that the members of human societies communicate with each other with symbols that are formed in proportion with the cultural environment in which they live and stay. Definitely the creation and definition of symbols does not mean a procedure that can accept changes, but it composes a continuous movement, negotiation in public and private field that takes a lot of different forms according to the cultural and historical environment 2 .
One of the intriguing features of language interaction with society and culture is the position of certain words as sacred within that society. Thus, it is important to analyze the social process through which sacred words present their particular features. In this paper, we show how sacred words gain their symbolic prominence. Furthermore, we propose a cognitive-semantic model based on the hypothesis of historic automaticity chain that explains well the reason behind the loss of semantics of the sacred words. In this paper, we compare some sacred words across many Indo-European languages and analyze how the very same sacred words lost ground to other words and became almost empty of semantics and word origin, while still preserving the symbolic notion. This study brings the notion of abstraction to the sacred word framework and clarifies the ways the mind processes sacred semantics. In order to support our hypothesis, we performed two small-scale psycho-linguistic experiments and the results confirmed our hypothesis. Sacredness of words has always been a vehicle to transfer values and moralities from one culture to another, from one faith to another, and so on. However, there is a clear evidence of the difficulty to translate sacred words. It is therefore important to investigate the reasons behind this apparent loss of words while translating sacred words from one language to another. It is even more interesting when the basic sacred words are hard to explain for their followers and the semantics seems missing in the whole definition. Most often sacred words have obscure origin and linguists after years of research still have hard times to find the very origin of such words used in a daily fashion by millions. When we look at the sacred context, rituals and religious ceremonies present us with a realm of sacred words which semantics seem hard to explain and to define. Tambiah (1968) investigates the importance and position of words in ritual contemporary anthropology and analyzes the intelligibility of sacred words to cultures wherein these words were first formed. Veal and Hao (2008) investigate metaphor as a phenomenon that manipulates the conventions of semantic description, and present a computational model that is as flexible as the metaphor in order to interpret and generate metaphors in the language context. Comparative analysis of the semantics and grammar in the sacred context is of importance and many aspects of the difficulty dealing with the sacred words are better understood in a comparative context. Tournadre (2010) puts emphasis on the irregularities of describing grammar rules between cultures of different religions and analyzes the classical Tibetan cases and their trans-categoriality based on the treatises and grammars written specially for sacred books. White (1944) investigates the claim that certain words in American Indian languages are archaic and do not have any meaning. He reanalyzes these words and gets to the conclusion that these archaic words were the ceremonial vocabulary among Indian Pueblos, which have lost their meaning through the passage of history. Wardlaw (2008) investigates the meaning in terms of conceptualization, using a cognitive-semantic basis in the literary context. He uses the canonical analysis to semantically investigate the word God in Hebrew.
Religion And Religious Language A Religious Symbolism For Nonreligious Purposes
Ri'ayah: Jurnal Sosial dan Keagamaan, 2018
Religion is a very important thing in the people's lives. They need religion because of their weaknesses and limitations to face something outside themselves. Their limitations, especially in spiritual and metaphysical aspects, hence the people search for references which are considered hits, it is the religion. The spirit of religion in the collective life is to create the beneficiaries for the adherents. But, the religious symbolism is no less important than religion in life, so that religious symbols are greatly needed by the people. Moreover, religious symbolism is sometimes treated more than to the religion itself. Maybe public passion towards religious symbols more powerful than passion towards religion itself. Because it's not uncommon religious symbols are used for a variety of interests outside the religious interests, for example economic interests, political interests, and so on.
Commun(icat)ing Bodies. The Body as Medium in Religious Communication Systems
2014
As a basic medium of human interaction, the body is fundamental to socio- cultural communication systems, in particular the communication system «religion». Over time, religious traditions – in all their various cultural and historical forms and incarnations – have developed elaborated symbolic systems with body at their centre. This volume proposes to study these sys- tems and the role that body plays in their organisation through the perspec- tive of the concept of body as a medium and by drawing on media and com- munication theory. The papers collected in this volume explore this perspective in relation to different religious traditions, historical periods and theoretical as well as theological themes. They work with specific theoretical frameworks in order to discuss the scope and limitations of thinking of the body as a medium in religious symbol systems. Topics covered range from ancient mythology to contemporary Parsi rituals to the boundaries between body and technology.
FROM BODILY RITUALS TO SPIRITUAL LANGUAGE; COMMUNICATIONAL LOOP IN ART AND MYTH
1st International Scientific Researches Congress on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2016
In this study, transformation of the " language " that is created by physical rituals to spiritual ideas throughout the human history has been analyzed. The questions that lie within the very basis of existence come from the forms of expressions made by human body within space and the relation of human body with another. Artworks are the most significant reflections of this human-specific language within this transformation. Poems, myths and the paintings are the centuries old examples of these reflections. The codes that are deeply rooted inside the human mind can only become explicit through these reflections. The main characteristic of human being is awareness. The transformation of the notion, which is called " awareness " or " cognition " , shows itself within the body as desire, ambition or faith. In time, these desires are lyricized as songs or psalms in accordance with the feelings of absence, restraint and sorrow towards the spiritual one. The object of desire passes to the psyche through the body. In this study, it's aimed to make these comparisons along with analyzing examples of transformation. In the context of communication, the body and the faith represent two realms of existence that both destroy and complete each other. Thus, two different languages appear before us: physical one and spiritual one. Independent from these both languages, art shows the object its form just with aesthetical concerns.
Arguments for a Symbol Theory of Embodied Religion: A Response to Mark Wynn
2013
Within a scientistic view of the world, rituals and sacraments are suspect. They are often invoked as proof of the incompatibility of religion and modernity. Mark Wynn employs important theoretical and phenomenological arguments against this widespread view. These arguments allow for a non-reductionist understanding of everyday and religious experience. In my reply I reconstruct these considerations in the context of a symbol theory that incorporates insights of philosophical anthropology and the contemporary theory of emotion. In this light, metaphorical language about rituals and sacraments as embodiments of God or religion can be approached with interpretative strategies that can take criticisms into account.
Religious Symbols from the Point of View of Visual Semiotics
The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2020
This paper focuses on the visual symbols of religions. I would like to analyze three religious symbols from the viewpoint of how they can be used to express religious-philosophical and theological theories. The first example is a tribal symbol of a shaman drum from Central-Asia, the second is a Medieval Christian motif with the main animal symbols of Christianity in a concentric circle-structure and the third is the Chinese Taoist symbol of Bagua with the eight octagonal trigrams and the Yin and Yang motif in its center. All of them have a central geometrical structure and a complex visual content. Naturally, they have different cultural-religious background, subject matter and themes, as we can understand their precise meanings during their semantic examination. However, when they are submitted to a syntactic analysis, the similar visual logic in their compositions is clearly visible. According to the syntactic analyses, with the help of the theory and method of visual semiotics and iconography, we can analyze the common cognitive schemes in different religious symbols. Keywords: Religious symbol, Geometrical structure, Visual Semiotics, Semantic and Syntactic analyses
papers.ssrn.com
Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spirituality reach certain states by means of personal or collective rituals, such as prayer, meditation, and bodily procedures involving discipline, as is the case of fasting or re-understanding pain. When they then communicate certain religious and spiritual concepts, they are revealing a great deal about themselves and their world and the way they interact with it. Concepts dealing with people’s system of beliefs are very “meaningful” for the individual, and the more entrenched a frame of mind is, the less plastic it is, a fact confirmed by the neurosciences which claim that it is difficult to break down and reconstruct certain synaptic structures of the brain. But how do people who have had such awesome experiences represent these supernatural encounters and their states of being? What is the relationship between the concepts of body and soul in devotees who torture their bodies, who have out of body experiences or who describe a body possessed by other spirits? What does the language they use say about the individuals’ concept of themselves and their world? I will present some of my own research data containing conceptual metaphors and blends collected in various sacred texts and during a series of interviews of people who claim to have had such supernatural experiences. The data includes linguistic expressions as well as gesture. Moreover, the interviewees were asked to draw on paper certain experiences of spiritual nature and then to describe their pictures. My investigation will try to shed new light on the phenomenology of spiritual experiences and personhood, using cognitive linguistics as a prime tool of analysis.