Building Religions 23: Sex and Gender

In my post on Mary Douglas, I described some of the ways that religious societies create and enforce categories of thought, as well as their reactions to phenomena that transgress the bounds of those categories. My post today, which examines how to approach questions of sexuality as a worldbuilder, is to some degree an extension of that. Obviously, it's an enormous topic, and one that I won't even attempt to cover completely; instead, I'd like to focus on a few basic ideas.

Building Religions 21: Phenomenology

One of the challenges in approaching the subject of religion, whether creatively or academically, is that of recognizing one's own presuppositions about what religion is. In my post on the work of J. Z. Smith, I brought up the example of Spanish explorers in the New World who failed to recognize signs of religious life among native islanders because they couldn't see anything resembling a temple. They took their own experiences with religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and perhaps some knowledge of Classical paganism—and used those as the map by which to interpret the new situation in which they found themselves.

Categories: an Overview

Early on in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life, there's a detour into philosophy as he considers the question of how human beings organize their experiences of the world. He starts with two possibilities: one, that we order them according to pre-existing categories, some sort of transcendent framework by which we intuitively arrange the things that we know; two, that we each create our categories ourselves, building them up piece by piece until we have a more complete system. He dismisses both of these choices, though, once he's explained them.

Building Religions 6: Ritual

Building Religions 6: Ritual

I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theories -- the classics, so to speak. Most of what I have to say will be applicable primarily to fantasy settings, which tend to be a bit more ritual-heavy, and they can apply equally well to descriptions of religious or magical rites. As I've mentioned before, the boundary between the two can be fluid. Let's start by running through the authors that I've covered already and what they have to say.

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

Building Religions 2: Mircea Eliade

There's a lot that can be pulled out of Eliade's work. He was a major influence on the field of comparative religion, and even now, anyone dealing with that field at least has to reckon with his theories even if they don't agree with them. For these little bits of writing, though, I'm not so concerned with whether or not a particular theorist is right in their ideas; just with what it would look like if they were applied to worldbuilding.