Artifact 5

Artifact 5 is from HUMN 571, Individuals, Society, and the Spirit, and is called “Reading and Reflection.” The excerpt is from the beginning of the paper. It is a reflection paper about the readings of HUMN 571, which included Max Weber’s Essays in Sociology, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, and Bellah, et al’s book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

The readings of HUMN 571 both challenged and enlightened me. Though familiar to me, these authors’ works are new to me. It is hard to say which of the works made the greatest impact on me; I enjoyed all of them at some level and they gave rise to thoughts I have never thought before. I will remember these works for a long time to come.

Thinking back, my lack of previous exposure to sociology limited my enjoyment of Max Weber’s Essays in Sociology. Sociology is an interesting subject which I hope to study more in the future. I learned how much of Weber’s work is still relevant today. He studied the governments of Germany (his own country), Russia, and the United States. I believe he thought the United States most interesting because of its functioning democratic republic, a system of government the world had never seen before. He found that people in the United States did not let themselves be led like sheep, but participate in the government, and to stay that way, they needed to stay participatory in the government. I fear that the people of our country are on the verge of letting themselves be led like sheep. Participation in the government is down, and civics is no longer being taught in schools, amongst other problems in our society.

I found William James’s work, Varieties of Religious Experience, more interesting. His insights on religion came from a psychologist’s point of view, which to me made it a fairer and more impartial look. He covered many of the characteristics of religion, such as belief, conversion, sacred texts, and so forth. James spoke at length about conversion, highlighting the processes with in-text stories. These stories were fascinating to me; I related to several of them. I also relate to the numb mind he highlights in one of his chapters. Battling depression every day, I could see how the people in that chapter felt. Mental health is not something taken lightly by anyone. Can “getting religion” help? Absolutely, but occasionally techniques like therapy and/or medicine should be considered. It took both for me, and my depression is now managed effectively.

Emile Durkheim’s study of the Australian aborigines’ religion in his book, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, struck me. I had not known about this primitive religion, and I read with awe at how Durkheim gleaned so much from others’ reports and essays. The totem of each clan is the center of the aborigines’ religion, dictating everything in the common life, from what to eat to whom to marry. Reading the traits of positive and negative cults and discovering they were the two sides of the same coin also fascinated me. There is a lot more to totemic worship than I had previously thought. I read this work while I explored more deeply the roots of my own religion. Though not totemic, Durkheim gave me the tools to look deeper at the core practices and beliefs of my religion to strengthen my faith. At its core, religion is a belief in something higher than oneself. And that’s as true for totemic religions as it is for “higher” ones as well.

The book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies by Margaret Mead was a brilliant study of three tribes of native of New Guinea, all within a hundred-mile radius of each other. Most fascinating to me is the fact these tribes lived so close together, yet their societies were so different. Mead concluded each society determined the temperament of the individuals in the society (with a few exceptions). The phrase “it takes a village” applies well here. Mead effectively concluded nurture, not nature, determined the temperament of each individual in the tribe, and thus the whole tribe. I first heard of the nature/nurture argument in an undergraduate psychology class and had thought a combination of both nature and nurture that determined an individual’s temperament. I believe people are basically good and are born that way. Mead does not account well for an individual’s genetics, which probably accounted for the outliers in each society: the violent ones among the Arapesh (a nurturing tribe) and the nurturing ones among the Mundugumor (a violent tribe). We do not have control over our genetics, but we do have some control over how we are nurtured, and if not, therapy can help overcome the wrong kind of nurturing, as it has helped me.

Robert Bellah, et al.’s book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, helped me understand why American society is the way it is, even though the book was written forty years ago. The issues written about then seem to be magnified a great deal now. My takeaway from the book is how individualism both helps and harms our society. One form of individualism inspires us to reach outside ourselves, to help our neighbor and others. Another form of individualism, which is rampant now, causes us to withdraw into ourselves in a selfish way and look out only for our own best interests. The selfish form of individualism leads to an unhealthy society. Indeed, examples of this abound in contemporary society. This interests me deeply because I live in society. The authors state the cure for our society is another big social movement like the Civil Rights movement. Perhaps this could happen if more people volunteer outside themselves. I volunteer with two organizations and wish I had time to volunteer for more. We have no shortage of people in need, and the more people who volunteer, the more social ills can be helped.

HUMN 571 taught me a lot about sociology, religion, anthropology, and civics. I had not studied these subjects in detail before but found them fascinating in conjunction with each other. I can see how these subjects fit together and overlapped each other in a way that highlights individuals, society, and spirit.

Works Cited

Bellah, Robert N., et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Internet Archive, 1965, https://archive.org/details/elementaryformso00durk_1

Gerth, Hans Heinrich and C.Wright Mills, translators. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. By Max Weber, Internet Archive, 1946. https://archive.org/details/frommaxweberessa00webe/page/n9/mode/2up

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Project Gutenberg, 2014, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/621/pg621-images.html

Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Different Societies. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977, https://ia601805.us.archive.org/7/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.191072/2015.191072.Sex-And-Temperament-In-Three-Primitive-Societies.pdf