ANTH245 2007-09-10

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ANTH 245: Lecture for SEPT 10 2007

SESSION 1: Rappaport on the Ritual Cycle of the Tsembaga and What it Does

Business

1. Readings to be posted on Blackboard
2. Blogging can take place after the class

Review of Bateson

The Social Context

1. Relationships exist at a "wider" level
2. The social context of a message is part of the code
3. e.g. Who is saying this? Can they be trusted?
4. Confers validity to the message

"Purposive Mind" and "Greater Mind"

1. The unconscious mind is the location of "codes"
   • Purposive Mind perceives messages
2. The unconscious mind connects the "purposive mind" to the Greater Mind
   • The purposeive mind normally perceives "arcs" within wider circuits

Communication and Schismogenesis

1. Complementary vs Symmetrical interaction
2. The difference is in the code
   1. Complementary entails mutual understanding
   2. Put another way, synchronized codes with a shared social map

Overview of Cybernetic Theory

Implications

1. All communication involves control
   1. Decoding
   2. Learning
   3. Evolution
2. Blurred distinction between between meaning and causality
3. The code is in the message

Rappaport

Background: the Anthropology of Religion

1. Functionalism -- explaining irrationality
   • Given that the beliefs are not true, and the the actions are not practical, what is going on?
   • Marxist, Freudian, Nietzschian, etc. responses
   • Weber and "verstehen"
   • Durkheim and the superorganic
2. Rappaport's "cultural materialism"
   • Religion is both practical and rational, even though intellectually, from the point of view of "cognitive models" alone, it is non-sensical
   • Ecology is the broadest horizon of interpretation (Rappaport's religion, by his own admission)
3. Definition of religious ritual

... the prescribed performance of conventionalized acts manifestly directed toward the involvement of nonempirical or supernatural agencies in the affairs of the actors. 

... part of the behavioral repertoire employed by an aggregate of organisms in adjusting to its environment.

The Tsembaga of New Guinea

1. Basic facts

SESSION 3

Back to Bateson

1. Control hierarchies are levels of "Greater Mind"
2. The sacred as a context of trust
3. Purposive mind and cognitive models