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A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or revered objects. [1] [2] Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, but not defined, by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.
Rituals allow group members to experience the power of the group over the self. Additionally, ritualization in the form of punishment for deviance serves as a potent method for curbing deviant behavior in traditional societies. By enforcing moral boundaries, ritual punishment helps to preserve social cohesion and unity within the group.
Leaving the sphere of historical religions, the ritual-from-myth approach often sees the relationship between myth and ritual as analogous to the relationship between science and technology. The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor is the classic exponent of this view. [ 6 ]
The challenge for the psychology of religion is essentially threefold: to provide a thoroughgoing description of the objects of investigation, whether they be shared religious content (e.g., a tradition's ritual observances) or individual experiences, attitudes, or conduct;
The relationship between religion and myth depends on what definition of "myth" one uses. By Robert Graves's definition, a religion's traditional stories are "myths" if and only if one does not belong to the religion in question. By Segal's definition, all religious stories are myths—but simply because nearly all stories are myths.
Traditions, an 1895 bronze tympanum by Olin Levi Warner over the main entrance of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past.
He associated tradition with "civilization," but he did not include the modern civilization in his definition. He also emphasized the contrasts between two types of traditions: religious and metaphysical. Religion requires the involvement of an element taken from the sentimental order, whereas the metaphysical point of view is solely intellectual.
Cultural psychology is often confused with cross-cultural psychology.Even though both fields influence each other, cultural psychology is distinct from cross-cultural psychology in that cross-cultural psychologists generally use culture as a means of testing the universality of psychological processes rather than determining how local cultural practices shape psychological processes. [12]