Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hughes, Aaron W.
• McCutcheon, Russell T.

Titel

Symbol

Ist Teil von

• Religion in 50 More Words, 2022, p.251-256

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

United Kingdom: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• That an English speaker cannot tell the difference when hearing the words “symbol” and “cymbal” begins to tell us something about the complexity of how the former term might be used by scholars. For without hearing them each used in context (i.e., “The drummer played the cymbal”), or seeing them in written script, they are identical. This is despite the fact that someone claiming that each word symbolizes—a key term here—something entirely different. If we add to this the once dominant approach to the study of religion that claimed it to be a private experience that was only later expressed, then one can imagine the prominent role played by this term “symbol” throughout the history of the field. For many years a standard course in Departments of Religious Studies was often titled something like “Myth, Ritual, Symbol,” seemingly invoking the three domains in which these religious expressions were said “to take shape”: in narrative, in behavior, and in systems of abstract representation. (This might be a succinct way of describing the supposed field of symbology, in which it is said Prof. Robert Langdon worked—the fictional protagonist of Dan Brown’s once popular series of novels, which includes The Da Vinci Code [2003].) For example, a student might study the small colored dot that appears on the middle of the forehead of some people in India and now elsewhere, known as the bindi, and is surely bound to ask: “What does it mean?” This very question—a question of semantics or meaning—presupposes at least one approach to how those things called symbols are said to work. They are claimed to correspond to, and thereby directly represent a source, an association from which they gain their meaning. To return to our example of the bindi, if we follow Parvesh Handa’s book, Home Beauty Clinic (1989), then we will conclude that it is “a symbol, not only of beauty but of your Suhag too—an indication of a married woman …. Likewise, bindi is [also] a 252symbol of good luck and purity,” adding that “[t]oday even unmarried women use bindi” (60).