Publication details
Ecological approach to sacralisation of the environment among the forest nenets
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The presented paper starts from the hypothesis that religious thinking and practice between the members of the Northern societies depending directly on natural resources (i.e. the hunter-gatherers and pastorals) are closely related to the Batesonian cybernetics of the environment itself. The personal and social reflections of this cybernetics (obtained through the everyday activities in the environment) seem to be personalized by the people into the form of the supernatural owners of nature. Feedback action of the Nenets indigenous people towards the environment may take the form of religious ritual and the way of sanctioning of unproper behavior is also related to religious connotations. The reason for religious way of "coding" of the shared experience with the environment may rest in its complexity – it is only hardly expressed and shared in the verbalized form. The "Batesonian" ecological approach is put in contrast with the Cognitive Science of Religion, which represents an another powerful tool for the explanation of the basic religious phenomena. |
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