Cris
MY BLOGS
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Genealogy of Religion
http://genealogyreligion.net/
Exploring the Origins, History, and Future of Religion
LATEST ARTICLES ( 560 )
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Bedevilment of Justice Scalia
Tongues are wagging today about the conversation that Justice Antonin Scalia had with New York writer Jennifer Senior. Most are focused on this particular... Read more
Posted on 07 October 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Evolutionary Exchanges
Among the many misunderstandings that surround evolution, perhaps the most pervasive is that “it” is always progressive. Aside from the fact that “evolution”... Read more
Posted on 02 October 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Chilling in Aboriginal Australia
Humans have lived in Australia for nearly 50,000 years. This is a truly incredible time-depth that is difficult to comprehend. Read more
Posted on 27 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Animism as Mode of Production
Over the summer I belatedly got round to reading Robin Ridington’s Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology (1990). Read more
Posted on 25 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Detectives as Shamans-Priests
Over at aeon, Jason Webster has written an essay suggesting that crime fiction filled a cultural void left by retreating religion:Throughout history, priestly... Read more
Posted on 20 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Anthropology’s Creation Myths
Having come to anthropology after a long and winding road, and having arrived at the destination only to find lots of dissension and bullshit, I find this... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Siberian “Shaman” Ethnohistory
In 1917, Berthold Laufter published an American Anthropologist article that traced the origins of the term “shaman” and concluded:There could never be a... Read more
Posted on 08 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Scientology Church Trap
Germans are of course expert on the issue of mind control and institutional enthusiasms, which makes all the recent Anglo-American griping about Germany’s borin... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Dynamic San-Bushmen “Religion”
Scholars have long been fascinated by the idea that something like the primordial or original “religion” existed until recently among various groups of... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Musing on Modernity
There were several items in the news last week that got me thinking about the mythic typology that dominates so much of our thinking:Ancient Epoch Modern... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Consciousness & Agency Attribution
Over at aeon, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano presents what he calls a “new” theory of consciousness. Because it is a computational model that likens... Read more
Posted on 30 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Shamans as Schizophrenics
If we assume that what western clinicians call “schizophrenia” is a neurobiological condition, we would expect to find it among all humans. Read more
Posted on 24 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Modern-Primitive Saudi Culture
By the standards of cultural evolutionary discourse which tend to dominate our ways of thinking about the world, Saudi Arabia can be classed using any of these... Read more
Posted on 19 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Tech Worship: Eating Apples
The locus of social discipline has, in my estimation, shifted from the body to the mind. Before I explain this shift, which has been mediated by and through... Read more
Posted on 17 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Aborigines & Eliade
It has been difficult piecing my mind back together after having chunks of it blown away and apart by Tony Swain’s A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Primitive Facebook
In this Aeon article on the supposed mismatch between the ancestral past and modern life, we are told that we share too much online because our “privacy... Read more
Posted on 11 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Robert Bellah RIP
The sociologist and scholar of religion Robert Bellah has passed. He was a curious figure who leaves an ambiguous intellectual legacy. Read more
Posted on 08 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Angel of Science
Over at The New Republic, Steven Pinker has posted a powerful essay on science and its proper relationship to the humanities. The essay really resonates... Read more
Posted on 07 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Aboriginal Complexity
This is an encouraging start to an ethnography I started reading today:The culture of the Mardu, like all Aboriginal Australian cultures in some degree, is... Read more
Posted on 06 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY -
Cult of Progress
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. Read more
Posted on 03 August 2013 DEBATE, HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY