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Narratives and Religion: Particularities and Functions of Narration in Religious Context
Širl, Radim ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Lyčka, Milan (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse certain aspects connecting religion and narration (which is understood here as a common human faculty to think and express oneself in the form of narratives). The first part of the thesis is concerned with methodology; first of all, the issues of defining narrative are introduced and a more elaborate definition is presented. A complete methodology is then formulated with a help of several authors (mainly James W. Pennebaker and Mary Douglas) in order to distinguish particularities and functions of creating narratives in religious contexts. Two main points are stressed here: that the content of the narratives is often concerned with problematic aspects of experience and that the expression of these narratives is beneficial for their creators. The second part focuses on several religious institutions concerned with creation of narratives which are interpreted with the outlined methodology. In this manner, the act of confession in Catholicism, prayer in Christianity and certain healing rituals are described and interpreted. Conclusions of this thesis should help the reader get a basic idea of the way created narratives in religious contexts affect their authors.
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Navajo Ritual Healing
Galovič, Roman ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Kozák, Jan (referee)
In this paper I deal with two traditions of ritual healing in Navajoland, namely with the traditional Navajo ritual healing and the peyote healing of Native American Church. I introduce them in three dimensions when I consecutively describe a cosmological framework, a social organization and a specific example of a ritual. At the core of my analysis is the grid & group method that was developed by Mary Douglas, when I look for the correlations between cosmological notions and social structures, and the ways they are established by the ritual. This way I point out how the colonial oppression weakened community ties and created ground for the growth of Native American Church in Navajoland, because NAC is able to offer existential answers for life in such a desolate space. However this does not mean that the Traditional Navajo healing was wiped out by colonialism, and both traditions continue to exist side by side and are quite often combined by particular patients. I offer a way to interpret this medical plurality when I fuse Mary Douglas' method with certain traditional Navajo notions and psychological analyses by Friedrich Nietzsche. In this view, every person would be permanently situated in socially and phenomenologically heterogenic space, and particular healing traditions would heal different social...
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Critical review of Mary Douglas`s Witchcraft Theory
Vacíková, Tereza ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Záhořík, Jan (referee)
This diploma thesis has two aims. The first one is exploration of "Grid/Group Theory" as it was presented by its author Mary Douglas in "Cultural Bias" (1978). According to this theory the thinking in the idiom of witchcraft is a product of an perception of specific social structure by an individual. The crux of this thesis should be comparation of social structure of few African societies with their cosmologies according to the empirical materials. It should proof the validation of the theory and also show some dificulties which the student must face during the application. The second aim is description of witchcraft and sorcery phenomenon and attempt to determine its essence or function for society.
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Navajo Ritual Healing
Galovič, Roman ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Kozák, Jan (referee)
In this paper I deal with two traditions of ritual healing in Navajoland, namely with the traditional Navajo ritual healing and the peyote healing of Native American Church. I introduce them in three dimensions when I consecutively describe a cosmological framework, a social organization and a specific example of a ritual. At the core of my analysis is the grid & group method that was developed by Mary Douglas, when I look for the correlations between cosmological notions and social structures, and the ways they are established by the ritual. This way I point out how the colonial oppression weakened community ties and created ground for the growth of Native American Church in Navajoland, because NAC is able to offer existential answers for life in such a desolate space. However this does not mean that the Traditional Navajo healing was wiped out by colonialism, and both traditions continue to exist side by side and are quite often combined by particular patients. I offer a way to interpret this medical plurality when I fuse Mary Douglas' method with certain traditional Navajo notions and psychological analyses by Friedrich Nietzsche. In this view, every person would be permanently situated in socially and phenomenologically heterogenic space, and particular healing traditions would heal different social...
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Narratives and Religion: Particularities and Functions of Narration in Religious Context
Širl, Radim ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Lyčka, Milan (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse certain aspects connecting religion and narration (which is understood here as a common human faculty to think and express oneself in the form of narratives). The first part of the thesis is concerned with methodology; first of all, the issues of defining narrative are introduced and a more elaborate definition is presented. A complete methodology is then formulated with a help of several authors (mainly James W. Pennebaker and Mary Douglas) in order to distinguish particularities and functions of creating narratives in religious contexts. Two main points are stressed here: that the content of the narratives is often concerned with problematic aspects of experience and that the expression of these narratives is beneficial for their creators. The second part focuses on several religious institutions concerned with creation of narratives which are interpreted with the outlined methodology. In this manner, the act of confession in Catholicism, prayer in Christianity and certain healing rituals are described and interpreted. Conclusions of this thesis should help the reader get a basic idea of the way created narratives in religious contexts affect their authors.
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Religion and Society in the Quran and Their Relationship to Pre-Islamic Arabia
Oudová Holcátová, Barbara ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Ťupek, Pavel (referee)
My goal in this thesis is to concentrate on the origins of Islam as we can understand it from the Quran itself, without using other, later sources. At the same time, I am interested in the relationship between pre-Islamic Arabia and early Islam. My method will be based primarily on Mary Douglas and her grid- group analysis. This British anthropologist attempted to analyse different social situations, in which various systems of understanding the world are formulated, using the parameters of "group" (the degree to which the borders of a group are defined) and "grid" (the number of rules by which an individual is controlled). These two parameters then made it possible for her to classify different cosmologies according to their ideas and their social reality. Applying this method, I will attempt to extract from the Quran - not primarily a narrative text - a description of the change of early Muslims' social situation and development of their religious ideas which is connected to it, and I will attempt to use Mary Douglas' anthropology to explain how such a transformation happened and could happen. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Cosmology and Exile in the Wider Yamato Court
Kroulík, Milan ; Zemánek, Marek (advisor) ; Kubovčáková, Zuzana (referee)
Milan Kroulík Exile and Cosmology in the Wider Yamato Court Abstract (in English): The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first part I try to understand the society of Japan around the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries (Asuka to early Nara periods) with the help of a model proposed by Mary Douglas. This analysis is concerned with history, social organization, religion and the cosmology found in the chronicles it produced. These chronicles represent the world-view of the imperial family of the Yamato state, which was one of many in Early Japan. I conclude that the social reality of the aristocracy of this state was rather unstable, competitive and somewhat individualistic. In the second part I analyze myth sequences from these earliest extant Japanese chronicles. In this structural analysis I employ the knowledge gathered in the first part. It enables me to read the motif of exile as bridging a fundamental problem in a competitive society. Namely, in order for a person to become an emperor, he has to be fierce and transgressive. However as an emperor, the same person represents structure par excellence and has to be the opposite of transgression. While in exile, the formerly ambivalent character transforms into an acceptable form. The study of two chronicles yields two results. In one chronicle (Kojiki)...
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Critical review of Mary Douglas`s Witchcraft Theory
Vacíková, Tereza ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Záhořík, Jan (referee)
This diploma thesis has two aims. The first one is exploration of "Grid/Group Theory" as it was presented by its author Mary Douglas in "Cultural Bias" (1978). According to this theory the thinking in the idiom of witchcraft is a product of an perception of specific social structure by an individual. The crux of this thesis should be comparation of social structure of few African societies with their cosmologies according to the empirical materials. It should proof the validation of the theory and also show some dificulties which the student must face during the application. The second aim is description of witchcraft and sorcery phenomenon and attempt to determine its essence or function for society.
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Analysis of Biblical Texts Using the Grid-Group Method and Its Application to the First Epistle to the Corinthians
Oudová Holcátová, Barbara ; Chlup, Radek (advisor) ; Halík, Tomáš (referee)
In her book Natural Symbols (1970), the British anthropologist Mary Douglas discussed the question of why and how are certain trans-cultural religious phenomena combined into different systems of understanding the world. She sought the answer in various types of social situations in which the systems of ideas are formulated, and tried to analyze them using two variables, "group" (the amount in which certain group's borders are defined in contrast with the rest of the society) and "grid" (the amount in which the role of an individual in society is determined and in which the individual's system of classification is shared by others or determined by them). These two variables enable us to sort different religious cosmologies depending on what ideals they paint in these respects and what demands they make of an individual. Mary Douglas compares this theoretical concept with existing cultures, assesses how similar their cosmologies are in respect of these two points of view, and examines whether there are matching social arrangements, norms of action and the like. On one hand, she enables us to put otherwise isolated cultural phenomena in an overall frame of meaning, on the other hand the application of this approach to religious ideas opens many possibilities of finding connections between religions in the...
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