Training Humans: Better Living Through Religious Indoctrination
Today’s title riffs on the seventh installment of William Saletan’s Slate series on the memory researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. In several places in the article, one could simply replace words or...
View ArticleThe “Sin” of Sodomy and Demographic Imperatives
When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method. So...
View ArticleGuns & Decline of Hunting Magic
This statement from an Inuit elder reveals the logic of hunting magic: Now that we have firearms it is almost as if we no longer need shamans, or taboo, for now it is not so difficult to procure food...
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Seabiscuit and Taboo
There once was a time when anthropologists (and sociologists) struggled mightily to explain taboos — they come in such a variety of shapes and sizes that this proved a difficult task. Though often...
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RR Marett’s “Pre-Animistic Religion”
Over Spring Break, I went diving in the Caribbean dove into the often neglected work of Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943), yet another classicist (like James George Frazer) who ditched literature for...
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“First American” Religion
Books don’t usually sit untouched on my night stand for very long, but Ruth Underhill’s Red Man’s Religion: Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico (1965) is an exception. It has been...
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