Your final research paper will focus on the analysis of a belief system in the form of a discussion that relates to religion and anthropology. You will research and write about the belief system that intrigues you (but that you yourself do not practice). Your final paper will be written based on the outline that you delineated in your proposal. Make sure to read the assignment rubric (in detail) before beginning your paper.
As part of the research that you must carry out for this paper, you need to:
- Give a brief historical contextualization to the belief system that you have chosen.
- Identify a particular issue in your chosen belief system. The main theme of your paper should be the discussion of a specific issue within the belief system. It is not enough to spend most of your paper giving a historical account of the belief system. You must use anthropological theory or anthropological ideas to explore issues of the supernatural within your belief system. For example, what aspects of this belief system fit into categories of ritual and magic? Even in Catholicism, the rituals practiced during mass index a magical aspect of wine turning into blood and bread turning into the body of Christ. Even though today most practitioners of Catholicism do not necessarily believe that this is actual magic, in its origins this ritual spoke to the supernatural possibility of drinking and eating Christ in order to have God within you. Every belief system gives consideration to the supernatural. You can touch on any topic that is of anthropological interest: healing, magic, animism, the function of a belief system, symbolism, etc.
- Explore the challenges and/or changes that the belief system has experienced in the past, is experiencing in the present, and/or might experience in the future. Think of possible challenges and how they might fit with the themes discussed in this course.
Your final paper must have:
- An abstract
- An introduction with a thesis statement—in this section you will describe the belief system that you have researched in detail, you will identify a particular issue (of a cultural, social nature) and you will explain how this belief system addresses the supernatural (all belief systems do).
- An analysis of the main ideas you will present as part writing about your belief system. Here is where you use content of the literature review that you wrote in your proposal to connect previously written work on your subject matter to your own ideas and analysis of your belief system. For example: Cook (1989) emphasized that many Muslim women outside of sub-saharan Africa posses the right to decide for themselves whether they want to wear a veil in public.
- A discussion section where you will identify the challenges and/or changes that the belief system is experiencing, and how it fits with the themes discussed in this course.
- A conclusion
- A references page
This assignment consists of a minimum of 2,000-words.
General guidelines:
- You must incorporate the concepts and theories that we covered in this course, and you will locate your discussion in a particular social and historical context.
- You will use a minimum of five sources, four of which must be academic, that is, research on belief systems written in academic publications and/or peer reviewed journal articles. This is library work and you must make sure to go to our library and ask the librarian to help you using the library’s research tools if you’re unfamiliar with them. Youtube or web videos and/or images cannot be counted as one of your sources.
- You will format your paper per APA guidelines.
- You will reference and use in-text citations following APA format. Please make sure that your References page is formatted correctly in APA, following the guidelines located here