Guest’s chapter on kinship describes a variety of ways that families are constructed around the world. It also discusses the impact of new technology and customs on the way that people define their families (Guest 349-391). As in the chapter on ethnicity, Kenneth Guest asserts that kinship is socially constructed rather than necessarily based on biology (Guest 237-267). There is a very interesting discussion of transnational adoption, an issue that has affected my home country (Guest 385). It is a subject that people often wonder about, since adopted Chinese children enter families that do not look like them, and share no heritage with them. Who will they think of as their family?
Benedict Anderson, in his introduction, defines and discusses his idea of imagined communities, which is his way of describing a nation in the modern sense of the word. He makes the point that nationalism is a recent phenomenon (Anderson 1-7). He also makes the point that Marxism was supposed to eliminate national distinctions (Anderson 3). All workers, according to Marx, were to be in solidarity with one another, rather than affiliated mainly with their country (Marx n.pag.). However, in recent centuries, as he notes and as one can infer from the news, nationalism has become more prominent than ever, even in countries with Marxist governments (Anderson 2)
Benedict Anderson’s chapter on the roots of nationalism asserts that there were two previous models for creating big communities. One was religion. More specifically, Anderson suggests that the great religions that had a special language associated with them were most successful at creating great big communities across great distances (Anderson 13). It was very interesting that one of these that he cited was Mandarin Chinese. This is still a major language in China.
The other model was what Anderson calls dynasty. This is the tendency of people to think that the right model for government is led by one person, with a hierarchy underneath him (Anderson 19). The author points out that at the same time that both religious communities and dynasties have lost power, nationalism has grown (Anderson 36). Thus, like ethnicity, is something that is not a biological characteristic (Guest 195). Instead it is something that has been created by people themselves.
The chapter by Talal Asad on the genealogies of religion is very complicated to read. It is also very interesting. It includes a great deal of analysis of the theories of other anthropologists on the subject of religious experience and authority. He concludes that religious symbols are not easily understood unless they are studied in the context of daily life (Asad 27-55). This actually sounds very much like the ideas that were discussed earlier in the semester from.
According to what has been previously assigned, what people do over and over again must have some positive relationship to their daily lives and the success of their communities (Salzman 30). Thus, the challenge is to understand how religious rituals, practices, and beliefs function in people’s lives.
Taylor’s chapter on secularism references other scholars and assumes the reader’s familiarity with at least one of the major world religions (Taylor 31-53). This makes it a bit challenging to read for someone who has few previous experiences of religion: none of them pleasant or fulfilling. The author also refers back to Benedict Anderson’s writing about the origins of nationalism in the decline of religion (Anderson 9-36). Here again, the author makes a case that a practice, in this case, secularism, has to function in order to persist. The author asserts that a new kind of secularism, one of “overlapping consensus” will replace earlier kinds of secularism (Taylor 52).
Both this and the earlier forms, it seems, from the writings of Salzmann, would have to function to benefit the community, in order to survive, like any other form of behavior (Salzman 30). Taylor makes the point that secularism was a way to avoid further Wars of Religion (Taylor 32). , and perhaps a new form of secularism of “overlapping consensus” will help to avoid future such wars (Taylor 53).
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Print.
Guest, Kenneth. Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.
Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” 2014. Web.
Salzman, Phillip Carl. Understanding Culture: An Introduction To Anthropological Theory. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 2001.. Print.
Taylor, Charles. “Modes of Secularism.” Secularism and its Critics. Ed. Rajeev Bhargava. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.