Binary Oppositions And Its Impact On The Context Of Culture

Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane analyzes a wide variety of components that are found within various world religions. Eliade uses the history of religion to support his ideas as the the book itself is a brief introduction to religion as a whole, particulary the religions of primitive societies. Nonetheless, when looking to the past one can see that mankind’s desire to associate itself with the sacred has been occuring for thousands of years. From temples to passages of intiation, religious man is a unique microcosm that follows and repeats the structure of the religious macrocosm, the creation of the cosmos. One can conclude that Eliade views religion as the “paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis.” (p210) and

In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas weaves her analysis of religion and society around a very simple topic, one of which I honestly took for granted: dirt. Dirt, Douglas argues, plays a massive role in the formation of society and how societies understand their worldviews and conceptions of sacredness. With this constant pushing and pulling of purity and impurity, meanings can be assigned to all patterns inside and outside the symbolic classification system of a society. Unity of the sacred and the filthy is then achieved through these purity and impurity rituals (3). In this essay, I will discuss the paradoxes of her book, modern approaches with understanding ritual, and my insecurities over the “Primitive Worlds” chapter.

Intra-cultural relations are historically filled with conflict; and to deal with this conflict: Gloria Anzaldua’s concepts of opposing cultures and language barriers, John Locke’s Equality theory, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s global citizenship theory explores the issue and works towards better relations. According to Anzaldua, people are not of one culture, but in several cases, several clashing, distinct cultures. Anzaldua argues that language is part of our identity, and it is a barrier between cultures, sometimes even our own. While Locke argues, we are all created equal, we may not be treated equal. Once society can deal with these problems, it can move forward towards Kwame Anthony Appiah’s global citizenship theory.

The era of the 1920s has been depicted as the Roaring Twenties, a time of glamour and glitter with the rise of parties, the dance of the “flappers,” the culture of the Jazz Age, and the consumption of pleasures and indulgence in leisure. But the 1920s were more than just the trend of looking good or listening to the blues, it was also a time of conflict, the fight and struggles of women and race, amongst others. By reading two distinct focuses of the after war era, the period could be thoroughly discussed and presented for what it really was, what events really followed, from the excitement of the envisioned grand parties to the underlying issues that lay beneath the “roar” of the twenties.

As I grew it up, I trusted my parents to tell me what was right. I tried to live up to their expectations, so I can be the good daughter. I was raised playing soccer, a sport I did not even like; I followed through and tried to get better so I could earn the scholarship. Although culture does affect the way people view at the world, there’s a limit. At the end of the day, you just have yourself.

“The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all distorted and systematically disguised,” writes Sigmund Freud. Joseph Campbell’s, Hero with a Thousand Faces has 418 pages in it. The purpose of this book is to see mythology, religion, and beliefs in a more depth understanding. It also teaches us to explore a wide variety of history and philosophy. PROLOGUE:

The identities that each person possesses is influenced according to their attitudes, values and beliefs embedded in their culture. When people hear the word cult, the images of satan worshipping, animal sacrifices and evil, pagan rituals automatically come to mind. However, in reality, the majority of cults do not involve these things and are in fact simply a religious system with alternate beliefs. The word though refers to an unorthodox sect whose members distort the original doctrines of the religion. Heaven’s Gate is a cult that is centred in California, founded by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles in 1993. They are a UFO based ‘destructive doomsday’ cult who believed that evil space aliens called ‘Luciferians’ had kept

Ozick describes that stories “proliferate in their scores of languages, out of continents leafy or arid, out of furious histories and agitated moral persuasions.” Myths have existed and exist all over the world, in various languages, and with different motives. Yet, every myth plays an important role in any specific culture by connecting its members. Every myth includes symbols and lessons that give worth to human existence and connects all humans, or humans of a specific culture, to a transcendent order that lets them act as a people. Contrary to popular belief, myth and history do not oppose each other, but are linked together. Myth dates back thousands of years and permeates through all of human existence, and yet the stories still hold true. For example, in the Myth of Daedalus and Icarus, Icarus disobeys his father, flies to close to the sun and meets his demise. (Ovid) Although this story was written thousands of years ago, little boys still constantly disobey their father’s wishes. In addition, Daedalus has a love for invention and progress. (Ovid) Current societies are obsessed with the progression of invention and technology. Furthermore, in Brueghel’s painting Fall of Icarus, man’s ignorance toward suffering is represented by the unfazed Sheppard and fishermen. This lack of compassion from humans still astonishingly true today. Humans have become increasingly desensitized to human suffering because of the constant war, tragedy, and hardships in everyday

The Near Eastern Gnostic myth “The Creation According to Mani,” focuses on the constant battle between good and evil. On the side of Light stands creation, in that creation contains goodness, and the fundamental principles that accompany both Heaven and Earth. The Father of Greatness exists as the original creator of man because Primal Man stands as his follower and warrior in the fight against Darkness. The success of Primal Man reflects directly on the power and strength of the Light. With the Light also are the Sh’kinas –embodiments of Intelligence, Knowledge, Thought, Deliberation, and Resolution. They are what separate the primitive from the enlightened –essentially the difference between the Light and the Darkness. The depravity of

Rather than describing totemism as an early form of religion, as Durkheim argues (1915), Levi-Strauss conceptualizes totemism as essentially a system of classification by which preliterate peoples organize their relationships to the natural environment. He asserts that theorists such as Durkheim and Frazer arbitrarily combined several “heterogeneous beliefs and customs” under the headings of totemism, then incorrectly interpreted these beliefs and customs through the lens of Judeo-Christian religions. He further argues that the castes of aristocratic societies, which are based on myths of a common ancestry, are equivalent to the myths of kinship clans in egalitarian tribal

On Key Symbols Author(s): Sherry B. Ortner Reviewed work(s): Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 75, No. 5 (Oct., 1973), pp. 1338-1346 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/674036 . Accessed: 05/09/2012 09:42

A current cultural conflict taking place in America today is religious. Many Americans discriminate against the Islamic faith and there have been countless acts of mistreatment of Muslims in the work place, at school, in public, and in the media. Negative feelings and acts toward Muslims have become so prevalent that in 1991 the Runnymede Trust Report coined a term for it. The report defined the “unfounded hostility toward Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims” as “Islamophobia” (Defining “Islamophobia”). There has always been some religious cultural conflict with Muslims in the United States, but since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, conflict has escalated significantly.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who believed that the myths created and told by a society could be a window into the beliefs and conflicts of that society. As a Structuralist, Lévi-Strauss saw stories as language and sought to understand their underlying grammar. This he believed centered on pairs of opposite ideas, held by the culture, but creating tension within it — the raw and the cooked, the sacred and the profane, and so on.

Zeus hurls his thunderbolt and the world trembles. Odin invites fallen warriors in the halls of Valhalla for a drink. Jesus Christ spreads the words of his father and gathers disciples. Buddha sits and meditates the meaning of the universe. Across the world there have always been mythological stories. From the first civilization to modern times, mythologies help explain the vents of the world and attempt to provide answers for unanswerable questions. Though every mythology appears different, if one looks close enough, commonalities appear. Joseph Campbell spent his life studying mythologies and religions along with compiling the commonalities amongst them. This study on the works of Joseph Campbell focuses on the following areas:

Idols of the tribe do the most damage to man’s outlook of the world: man tends to make decision’s based on his emotions rather than logic, man clings to his first impressions, and man often twists facts to support those impressions.