CLASS280 Lecture 1: myth and religion (ppt lecture notes and in class notetaking)
4 Aug 2015
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Greek referring to the culture, not the geographic in the ancient times. An institutionalized system of rituals, system of rules, and membership of a group. An institution is a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world (durkheim, 1965: 476). A belief in forces that exist outside of space and time but that can act within those domains. Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar positivism would have it, it describes the social order but because it shapes it (geertz 1973, 119). The social function of myth is to bind together social groups as wholes or, in other words, to establish a social consensus (halpern 1961, 137). Classical greek: an unsubstantiated claim ( said that is not supported ) Myth is defined as a complex of traditional tales in which significant human situations are united in fantastic combinations to form a polyvalent semiotic system which is used in multifarious ways to illuminate reality (burkert 1985: 120).
