1. RELIGION AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM
CLIFFORD GEERTZ, THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURE
SUNDAY 14TH DECEMBER, 2008

2. Study about religion in the university
Religion as an academic subject like geography or psychology or physics. ?

3. Religion first school A particular kind of experience
sacred, holy, ultimate, infinite, and transcendent
Religion need not refer to any supernatural being or higher power
Anything can be experienced as sacred, ultimate, etc.
Any experience that has this quality counts as "religious." Someone who has a religious experience may feel convinced that it is an experience of God or some other higher power. But a religious experience can also be evoked by the Grand Canyon, or making love, or even an unusual rock sitting on the ground.
No two scholars agree exactly on the features or characteristics that make an experience sacred, ultimate, etc
But this group of scholars agrees that religion refers to a special, extraordinary kind of experience

4. Key point
For scholars who take this approach, it is the quality of the individual's inner experience, not the source of the experience that serves to define what counts as "religion" and "religious."

5. Religion second school
They focus on societies, or groups of people, rather than individual experience.
For these scholars, religion is primarily the overall framework a group uses to understand its world and guide its life
This overall framework shapes every moment of the group's experience. It is not something extraordinary; it does not transcend everyday life. Rather it is the constant foundation of everyday life.
This "everyday" approach to defining "religion" is generally favored by social scientists.
social scientific approach to religion

6. Key point Clifford Geertz
One of the most influential figures in this social-scientific approach to religion is the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz

7. Geertz's definition gives us a starting place for understanding religion in this social scientific way.

8. According to Geertz, Religion is
A system of symbols
which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men
by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." He goes on to explain each of these five points in detail.

9. culture
An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.

10. Key point
A religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

11. (1) a system of symbols which acts to…
symbol: a vehicle for conception
cultural patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.

12. (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by
Motivation: a persisting tendency, a chronic inclination to perform certain sorts of acts and experience certain sorts of feeling in certain sorts of situations.
Moods

13. (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
Transcendent truths
The will to believe
Dealing with chaos, uncanny
Analytical capacities

14. Powers of endurance: problem of suffering
As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer.
Problem of meaning are a matter affirming the ultimate explicability of experience, the more affective aspects are a matter of affirming its ultimate sufferableness.

15. Moral insight Myth of Dinka
The problem of meaning is a matter of affirming, or at least recognizing, the inescapability of ignorance, pain, and injustice on the human plane while simultaneously denying that these irrationalities are characteristic of the world as a whole.

16. (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
The meaning of belief
Placing the religious perspective against the background of three of the other major perspectives in terms of which men construe the world—the common-sensical, the scientific, and the aesthetic

17. Acceptance and faith vs. action upon reality
Commitment vs. analysis
Actuality vs. factuality
Persuasive authority
In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms.

18. (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
The movement back and forth between the religious perspective and the common-sense perspective.
Bororo as parakeet
Ritual sense
Common-sensical perspective

19. Key points
For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them.
Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience—intellectual, emotional, moral—can be given meaningful form.

20. Big Four

21. Time frame Malinowiski April 7, 1884 – May 16, 1942
Max Weber April 21, 1864 – June 14, 1920
Émile Durkheim April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917
Sigismund Freud May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939
Mircea Eliade March 13, 1907 – April 22, 1986
Clifford James Geertz August, 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006

22. Thanks