Category: anthropology

Yongho Kim
October 27, 2003
Anthropology (248) of Religion

Members of the Holiness Church (the Sign Followers) of Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere in the U.S., maintain that faith alone is not enough to prepare a believer to handle serpents, speak in tongues, heal through prayer, etc. Describe what is required of a believer before the person is fit to follow the mandate laid down in the New Testament Book of Mark, Chapter 16, Verses, 17-18. In our readings and discussions, have we encountered similar kinds of requirements in other cultural settings? What, where, and amongst whom?

According to Park Saylor, “Faith isn’t enough. You have to be anointed to handle snakes.” (Kimbrough 114) Anointing is the state occurring when “God transfers spiritual power to an individual”. Believers are careful in pointing out that the initiative does not come from the individual, but that it is “The Spirit [who] moves on you”, and you “cannot pump up [through music] for anointment” (25). Thus anointment is believed to be a passive process, in which the believer merely receives it from God.

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Yongho Kim
Anthropology (248) of Religion
October 20, 2003

Almost everywhere, religious beliefs and rituals blend with/reflect cultural constructions of gender. Why is this the case? And why is it so widespread that women are most vulnerable to accusations of harming others via their access to supernatural power? Try to analyze these puzzling situations using Pascal Boyer’s approach to religion–how might they be explained in the context of evolution?

Gender is closely related to religious notions, because of its social connotation. Gender is not only relevant because other members of society judge and expect certain behavioral patterns from the ego based on gender, but also because it is a basis in establishing relationships among neighbors and kin members. (more…)

Yongho Kim
Anthropology (248) of Religion
October 15, 2003

Choose any issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press or the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper and read the Obituary Section. Describe any consistencies/commonalities that you observe across the majority of the obituaries. If there are any significant differences in one or more of the obituaries, describe these as well.

I examined the Tuesday, October 14th edition of Saint Paul Pioneer Press, in the Obituary Section, Local News 4B and 5B. There was a shared format and regularity as discussed in class, but there were other patterns that arose based in age and economic class.

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Yongho Kim
Anth248: Anthropology of Religion
October 1, 2003

Boyer distinguishes ritual from other human action in that rituals follow a specific rule, and a performed in a specific manner and place, and with a specific instrumentation. (231) Failure to comply with scripts is believed to lead to a vague danger, and so practitioners follow ritual steps with particular zeal. (Boyer 236).

Although Boyer has not specified it, I believe that rituals create a sense of “urgency” precisely because the dangers of otherwise not following them are not specified. Because the danger is not described, and human imagination tends to fill in the details, the hyperreactive propensity of the mind (145) will most likely believe that a nonspecific danger is a risky danger.

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Yongho Kim
October 8, 2003
Anthropology (248) of Religion

Our author Hicks tells us that blood is a multivocal symbol, and this makes it particularly useful in ritual contexts. What IS a “multivocal symbol”? How have cultures used blood to transmit powerful religious concepts? (Use specific ethnographic examples to illustrate your discussion.) Can you think of another entity or substance that, like blood, is a multivocal symbol used in ritual context? (Illustrate your points with specific examples.)

A multivocal symbol is that which is referred to from different conceptual schemes. (Hicks 203) In Hicks and his choice of ethnographies, blood may be invoked to bring about the images of fertility, productivity, purification and forgiveness of sins, sexuality, initiation, and salvation.

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Film Review of Lumumba
Anthropology 258: African Societies
Yongho Kim

I have seen Lumumba as a traditional film containing the ten years before and immediately following the independence of DRC. In other words, the fact that the theme was based in Africa did not tweak the way in which the narrative itself was presented, as it happens often with other movies focusing in the “underdeveloped” nations. I especially liked the way in which the urban and rural Congo was depicted, because it didn’t fix with the notion of a barren land.

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Intro. To talk about current issues of gender inequality in China is to talk about the consequences of a quickly developing socialist society with a patriarchal, agriculturally intensive and confucianist tradition.

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