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Faith and Social Science: Contrasting Victor and Edith Turner's Analyses of Spiritual Realities

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posted on 2023-05-22, 11:50 authored by Douglas EzzyDouglas Ezzy
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.

History

Publication title

Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance

Editors

G. St John

Pagination

309-323

ISBN

978-1-84545-462-3

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

Berghahn

Place of publication

New York

Extent

17

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Religion and society

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