The sacred values of a community are critical in understanding cultural conflict. When an attempt is made to trade a sacred value with a secular good, it evokes feelings of anger (tabootradeoff) but less so when that sacred value is traded off with another sacred value (tragic). Previous work has shown that participants who expressed sacred values for an issue were more resistant to taboo than ...

The emergence of the religious nones can create pedagogical challenges due to the multifarious and institutionally disaffiliated nature of this classification. Thus, this article supplies a potential pedagogical technique by revisiting Peter Berger’s sacred canopy metaphor. We submit that the religious nones can be understood functionally and structurally by employing “sacred metaphors” based o...

Sacred or protected values have important influences on decision making, particularly in the context of intergroup disputes. Thus far, we know little about the process of a value becoming sacred or why one person may be more likely than another to hold a sacred value. We present evidence that participation in religious ritual and perceived threat to the group lead people to be more likely to co...

The northern Ethiopian landscape is dotted with small patches of church forests that are religious centers for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC). These sacred groves are what remain of the once vast tropical Afromontane dry forest. Herein we review the landscape pattern of sacred groves in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, and their local scale nutrient status at two sites, Zahara and ...

Sacred natural sites have played important social and cultural roles in many cultures around the world for centuries. More recently, scientists have shown that sacred sites act as de facto protected areas. However , the potential for sacred sites to be integrated into conservation strategies depends on the motivations of people to protect them. The objective of this study is to understand peopl...

Sacred forest groves in the Western Ghats of India are small fragments of tropical forest that have received protection due to religious beliefs and cultural practices. These forest fragments are an example of community-based conservation and they serve as refugia for many forest-dwelling species in otherwise highly anthropogenic tropical forest-agriculture landscapes of the Indian Western Ghat...

Duran Bell and Cynthia Werner From the earliest days of the field, economic anthropologists have observed that material objects often are imbued with sacred qualities whose values can never be reduced to material necessity or monetary equivalent. In 2002, the Society for Economic Anthropology hosted a conference to reconsider these ideas in the world today. We invited Professor Maurice Godelier...

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggest...

This paper examines the development of sacred structures in rural Czechia (former Czechoslovakia). Sacred structures could be associated with the creation of important symbols and distinctive rural regional identities in Czechia. Rural Czechia is not uniform: it represents several different rural landscapes. This paper considers whether sacred structures support the idea of multiple and fundame...

In this article I provide an overview of the identity, role and function of sacred texts in Hinduism. Hinduism’s tremendous diversity extends to the numerous ways in which different types of texts have been identified as sacred and used by Hindu practitioners. It would be a mistake to attempt to summarise the role of sacred texts in the lives of Hindus, since different texts have had different ...