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Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner's Analyses of Spiritual Realities
Citation
Ezzy, D, Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner's Analyses of Spiritual Realities, Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, Berghahn, G. St John (ed), New York, pp. 309-323. ISBN 978-1-84545-462-3 (2008) [Research Book Chapter]
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Abstract
Academics engage in a form of reflexive sequestration of religious experience
in which they silence their own religious experiences, and the experiences of
those they write about. The social sources of this silencing are not hard to
identify. As Edith Turner herself notes, at the time that Victor Turner was
working on his PhD in the 1950s "almost everyone in anthropology was a
left-leaning atheist" (Engelke 2000: 847, the interview is reproduced in this
volume). The successful completion of Turner's PhD required that he sequester
his interests in, and accounts of, religious experience. In other words, an
endemic methodological atheism has been central to anthropological theory
and writing as a consequence of the constraining power of atheistic beliefs
of key anthropologists, rather than a product of the irrelevance of religious
experience to the cultures that anthropolOgists have studied.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Research Book Chapter |
|---|---|
| Research Division: | Studies in Human Society |
| Research Group: | Sociology |
| Research Field: | Social Theory |
| Objective Division: | Cultural Understanding |
| Objective Group: | Religion and Ethics |
| Objective Field: | Religion and Society |
| UTAS Author: | Ezzy, D (Professor Douglas Ezzy) |
| ID Code: | 52739 |
| Year Published: | 2008 |
| Deposited By: | Sociology and Social Work |
| Deposited On: | 2008-08-01 |
| Last Modified: | 2012-02-16 |
| Downloads: | 3 View Download Statistics |
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