Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 RELIGION AND SCIENCE
- 2 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
- 3 JEWISH THOUGHT
- 4 THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
- 5 THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
- 6 FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION
- 7 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS
- 8 MAX WEBER AND GERMAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
- 9 ERNST TROELTSCH
- INDEX
7 - THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 RELIGION AND SCIENCE
- 2 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
- 3 JEWISH THOUGHT
- 4 THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
- 5 THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
- 6 FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION
- 7 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS
- 8 MAX WEBER AND GERMAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
- 9 ERNST TROELTSCH
- INDEX
Summary
Nineteenth-century anthropological attitudes
Naturally enough what nineteenth-century writers on anthropological topics thought and wrote about religion grew out of the arguments of their eighteenth-century predecessors but something of the more general anthropological background needs first to be explained.
Anthropologists study the diversity of man considered both as animal species and as products of civilisation (culture). Since human beings everywhere show a marked proclivity for finding reasons to think themselves superior to ‘those bastards over the hill who do not even know how to talk properly’, it could be held that anthropology of a certain prejudiced sort is as old as humanity itself but, as a field of serious scholarly inquiry, it only became clearly recognisable during the latter part of the eighteenth century.
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- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West , pp. 215 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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