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Popular religion is defined as a generally shared understanding of religious meaning including both folk beliefs as well as formal and officially sanctioned practices and ideas, operating within a loosely bound interpretative community. These formed part of a particular value orientation or culture: a generalized and organized conception of nature, of man's place in it, of man's relation to man and of the desirable and non-desirable as they relate to man's environment and interpersonal relations. This book is devoted to exploring these kinds of beliefs. It does so within the context of a local study of the London Borough of Southwark.

Experts familiar with both their content and representational system use cladograms to reason about species’ phylogenies. But for novices, these diagrams rather tend to cue folk narrative beliefs of evolution. This chapter offers a cognitive semiotic account of common misinterpretations of cladograms. Interview excerpts show how undergraduates map narrative structures of their folk beliefs as metaphors onto the spatial structures of the diagram; how folk beliefs, as well as knowledge of representational systems from other domains, create contexts for mistaken interpretations; and how specific manipulations of the diagram’s presentation (e.g., animation) reveal these interpretations to be flexible. Based on our findings, we describe the design and pedagogical affordances of an interactive diagram to address novices’ narrative intuitions.

This chapter situates temple priests in institutional networks and investigates a more conceptual, but equally critical, aspect of the funeral problem: the changing interpretation and unclear role of doctrine in mortuary practice. Specifically, it is examined here how “concrete” aspects of funerary Buddhism are transformed from institutional dilemmas into existential crises by influential sectarian scholars whose discourse guides the way Buddhist priests think about their vocation. The chapter then analyzes differing conceptions of funerary Buddhism within the activities of certain sectarian intellectuals and researchers in the Jodo, Soto, Shingon Buzanha, and Nichiren sects. This dilemma assumes a number of forms: from debates over the relationship between “true” Buddhism and folk beliefs, to concerns over the dissonance between the training of priests and the day-to-day work of local temples, and to irritation over institutional gaps between sectarian elites and local priests.

This chapter focuses on the ancient beliefs and folklore about the weasel. It shows the extraordinary quantity of unusual habits associated with the weasel, its symbolic meanings and connotations, and all the stories and legends in which this little animal was involved in years gone by.

This chapter illustrates a picture of a sacred human–animal hybrid in the form of the legendary yeti. Setting aside questions regarding the material existence of yetis, examining Tibetan folk beliefs reveal that yetis are thought to exist in a vaguely defined realm between human and animal and thus have simultaneous human and animal characteristics. When yetis are at their most human, they are gentle beings who may practice religion, and when they are mostly animal, it is because they are holy incarnations of local mountain gods. Yeti folklore thus demonstrates how sacredness appears as both human and animal at once, with varying results, and highlights the essential ambivalence with which humans approach natural forms.

This chapter examines nineteenth-century Russian writers who drew on the Gothic in order to explore the experience of death, existential terror, and the possibility of an afterlife within the bounds of literary realism. In Turgenev’s story ‘Bezhin Meadow’ and Chekhov’s sketch ‘A Dead Body’, Gothic language and imagery create a narrative frame that contextualizes an encounter between peasants and a traveller focused around a discussion of death. This chapter argues that the Gothic is juxtaposed with folk belief in these works, to underscore that both the peasants’ dvoeverie and educated Russia’s interest in natural sciences, materialist philosophy, and the pseudo-science of spiritualism represent attempts to systematise and explain the unknown. The Gothic mediates the tension between science and faith, the irrational and the prosaic, and the abject and the mysterious, while allowing these ruminations to remain ambiguously unfinalised for the reader.

In Japanese folk belief, inanimate objects used for 100 years are believed to be granted a spirit. They are called tsukumogami, or artefact spirits. Through personification of the spirits in recent popular cultural products, the belief of tsukumogami has been popularized among young people who are unaware of the folk belief. One of the most popular works utilizing personified tsukumogami is Token Ranbu-ONLINE-, an online web browser (2015) and mobile game (2016). It has been adapted into 2.5-dimensional plays and musicals, anime works, and other media forms. The article explores how tsukumogami of Japanese swords are adapted in the media mix strategy of Token Ranbu. It argues that those adaptations serve to provide a spiritual site where Japanese folk beliefs can be traced. Through her study, the author also shows how Japanese folk beliefs (a mixture of Shintoism, Buddhism, and Chinese philosophies) are constructed, consumed, and used in Japan’s contemporary popular culture.

Permissive and eliminative views are widely held to be entirely compatible with ordinary beliefs and intuitions about which objects there are. Those who think so will think that arguments from counterexamples equivocate between an “ordinary” and an “ontological” reading of relevant claims. This chapter argues that these compatibilist strategies rest on implausible and unsubstantiated psychological hypotheses. It shows that the strategies cannot be defended by appeal to charity or reference magnetism, and that they draw no support from the fact that nonphilosophers (e.g., students) are surprisingly receptive to permissivism and eliminativism upon being introduced to them.

This chapter introduces some of the cultural-historical background necessary to understanding the perspectives of educators in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the U.S. While recognizing the complex, evolving nature of culture, it provides an overview of some broadly shared, culturally embedded ideas about disability, stigmatization, and the self that are prevalent in East Asia and the U.S. In East Asian contexts, these include culturally specific folk beliefs, Confucianism, Buddhism, internationalism, and Westernization; as well as important historical events shaping modern educational systems put in place after World War II. In the multicultural U.S. context, common ideas and educational practices relevant to disability are shaped by ideas pertaining to individuality, independence, achievement, and internationalism, as well as important historical events such as the civil rights movement.

This chapter examines Russian Orthodoxy as a spiritual system and how that system is embodied in the Church’s focus on contemplative prayer in the liturgy, in icons and in the interior decoration of Orthodox churches that depict a progression from the heavenly to worldly realms. It explores Russian Orthodoxy’s types of monasticism, reception of waves of hesychasm, cults of saints and the profound change that occurred in the church from the 1660s, exemplified by the “Old Belief” schism (whose political and doctrinal causes are examined) and the influx of reformed Orthodox practices and imagery from Ukraine at the Kremlin court, particularly influential on the elite. The chapter also explores women’s spirituality, the endurance of syncretism in religious practice in East Slavic society, and the form that witchcraft took in Russia. It concludes reflecting on Russian Orthodoxy’s relatively weak tradition of religious missionary work.

This chapter reviews the history of colonial Tabasco. It studies cities and towns, slavery, piracy, militias, diet, medical practices, entertainment, and folk beliefs. The chapter then reconstructs the role of the Catholic Church. Service in the priesthood was difficult here, owing to the geographical challenges, the plethora of indigenous tongues, and the region’s overall poverty. The neighboring province of Yucatán dominated church hierarchy, and led to an overall weakening of the institution’s prestige and presence. Finally, the chapter studies the agricultural practices that comprised nearly the totality of Tabascan economic life. They included raising of subsistence crops like corn and beans; the logging of dyewood in swamps and riverbanks; the raising of cattle; and most of all, the cultivation of the cacao tree, whose seeds form the basis of chocolate.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Babylonian Talmud at Makkot 5b, which records the debate of a hypothetical in which a woman who has already produced two sets of perjuring witnesses attempts to produce a third set. One side believes the litigant loses the ability to produce a third set of witnesses; the other contends that witness credibility must be presumed. Wimpfheimer connects this legal discussion of perjury to Jewish folk beliefs about women who are twice widowed, referred to in post-Talmudic literature as “killer wives.” He argues that the example of the killer wife reflects a pattern of rabbinic thought in which the rabbis consistently characterize superstition itself as female-gendered. Both stories reflect the absorption of the myth of Pandora’s box into rabbinic culture and the relationship between rabbinic views of women and the views of their broader culture.