Week 1 & 2

Who are you?
What do you want?
Why are we the symbolic species?
What is the symbolic moment?
What is significant and signified?
What is magic?

A foundation in the sacred and profane.
We are genetically predisposed to think symbolic and super-naturally.
1. dreaming
2. watching someone else dream (their body is here while their mind is elsewhere
Witchcraft among the Azande
Mangun: Inherited by blood, it's magic works over short distances, you don't mean to cause harm. There are no accidents. You can't see it, and it lives in your belly.
Rule of Law: Based on truth or innocence
Rule of Blood: answers found in ancestors - truth is not important. It provides order.
People who pursue pure pleasure never get what they want (they only keep chasing new pleasures).
What are the means to get what you want? 
In a patriarchal society there is hard power (man privilege) and soft power (practiced by women) 
Hard Power: Can dictate in a public way of what will happen.
Soft Power: Can be seen as manipulative, but only way women can dictate what will happen (such as gossip).
Religion provides a map of social relationships. 
This type of religion makes you a good person (You didn't know you had Mangun, you have no control over it).
The best way to be safe in this society is to fly low - you don't want to be accused of being a witch. 

Week 3

Reading: finish Intro
Functional viewpoing - how it came to be in Africa. 
Struggle between two churches and folklore/spiritual practitioners
Sub-Saharan missionaries saw it as their job to save people from hell, and Witchcraft practices were proof of going in the wrong direction, where Africans saw witchcraft as being moral or amoral and ethical. 
Their purification ritual was their form of dead beat dad, binding their family together in witchcraft - like a baptism, giving the child an official place in the community by blood.
In headistic  and agricultural societies, wealth flows up
1. European colonization in Africa
2. Missionaries & colonization
​3. Africa's witch children & Pentecostalism
4. Decolonization, tribalism,   the nation-state, disease, civil war, debt, and economic exploitation (cash crops) resources, local economic structures, and the link to the former colonial powers.
Book Recommendations
Mints, Sydney - Sweetness and Power
Erick Wolf
Robert Edgerton
Jery Diamond - Guns, germs and steel
Margarine Shostak - N!isa
Joseph Henrich
The world court system
​Francis Fukuyama - The end of history and the last man
Franz Boas moved anthropology in a different direction - humans are uniquely uniform in genetic make-up. Only what we perceive is different, what we are socialized to be.
  • ​Historical Particulatism: developing from our history and adapting to environment.
  • Cultural Relationism: Other groups around you are evolving - you do not get to judge.
Joseph Henrich
  • Know the history from viewpoint of people that have to live it everyday and allow locals to do it themselves.
Unilinial culture evolution- social Darwinism 
  •  Savagery
  • Barbarianism
  • Civilization 
Why is there religion and non-religion?
What is Modernity? It's reason? The Scientific revolution, the enlightenment. The breaking of monarchical rule. 
  • Galileo and the watchmaker universe.  God isn't making the watch work.
  • The splitting of the way things happen - not by god. 
  • Explanation that god did it no longer accepted - we look for other ways.
  • Look for logic, reason, beginning. 
  • Question each aspect of the world. 
​Modernity ends on 9/11.
​Where are humans really going?
Quoted
"Keep your hands off my culture, it doesn't belong to you"

"Sacrificing another person's life is not a sacrifice"

"The moment you start judging someone else, you are claiming to be superior"

"Who here can judge her?"

"If you don't have a sense of humor, this is going to be a very grim class"

"god weeps" "If he weeps, then he'd so something about it"

"god laughs"
​
"No, not play-doh. Plato!"

Week 4

Readings
The world before yesterday
​Imagined communities
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
​Mary Douglas - Purity and Danger
There is nothing materially different from a motivated body to a non-motivated body. 
Something inside of you that doesn't connect to you, and when you die, it goes away for good.
From Animism, to polytheism, Emperor Worship to Christianity. 
"I vow"
traditional societies worried about "ghosts" spirits. Our ancestors demand things don't change. 
"I it"
​You must recognize it's power. Political hierarchy 
Taboo
  • Prohibition that automatically gains punishment.
  • Religious prohibition decreed by some deity/spirit
  • The sophisticated & the primitive
  • Edicts of chiefs & priests with are supported by superior mana or by their temporal or spiritual forces - to maintain power. Class, systems of inequality. 
  • Prohibition against theft or trespass, sanctions are specific spells (harry potter)
  • Embarrassment 
Mana
A spiritual power that gets caught in certain people and objects, and categorizes them. 
charisma - mana - fetish
Function of Taboo: Social control in Hierarchical societies. 

Week 5

King/Leader/Divine 
Are there universal taboos?
Society vs the individual, more westernized, less tolerance.
1. How we place/use bodies in private/public.
2. What bodies produce and go in/out
   A. Sex (key/lock) women are the default. Asex changed to create more variation
   B. Birth - fetal viability
   C. Incest - lethal recessives [froid - edipus complex]. Electra complex. sublemation
   D. Hierarchy rules
   E. Death
​   F. Poop