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Understanding a (Secular) Primitive Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Berel Dov Lerner
Berel Dov Lerner
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel
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Extract

In her essay entitled ‘Heathen Darkness’,1 the anthropologist Mary Douglas has exposed one of the most prevalent modern misunderstandings of ‘primitive’ societies, the myth of primitive piety:

It seems to be an important premise of popular thinking about us, the civilised, and them, the primitives, that we are secular, sceptical and frankly tending more and more away from religious belief, and that they are religious, (p. 73)

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 303 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 In her Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 73–82.Google Scholar

2 Winch, Peter, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 307–24Google Scholar and The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (second edition) (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992).Google Scholar

3 , E-P, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937).Google Scholar

4 , E-P, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 322.Google Scholar

5 , E-P, ‘The Morphology and Function of Magic: A Comparative Study of Trobriand and Zande Ritual Spells’, American Anthropologist XXXI (1929), 619–41.Google Scholar Here cited as reprinted in John, Middleton's (ed.) Magic, Witchcraft, and Curing (New York: Natural History Press, 1967), pp. 1–22.Google Scholar Present quotation, p. 20.

6 , E-P, ‘Zande Theology’ in his Social Anthropology and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1962), pp. 288–329,Google Scholar here p. 300.

7 Habermas, Jurgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (McCarthy, Thomas, translator) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 149.Google Scholar

8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (translated by Rhees, R.) (Nottinghamshire: The Brynmill Press, 1979), p. 5e.Google Scholar

9 I wish to thank Professor Jacob Joshua Ross for discussing with me the issues dealt with in this paper.