Abstract: 'Belief,' along with 'believe, beliefs,' and 'belief systems,' has served as a kind of 'odd job' word for anthropologists: a word commonly used for the analysis of a society's culture, religion, or ideas about the world, but seldom defined or explicitly theorized. Belief is often included in omnibus definitions of culture, such as Tylor's classic "Culture, or civilization, … is that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (1871, from Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 43) or Sapir's "culture, that is, … the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives …" (1921, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 47). The term often refers explicitly to religion, as in Tylor's minimum definition of religion as 'the belief in Spiritual Beings' (1873), but is used equally for claims people make about the empirical world or their social institutions.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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