To You, From Me

Why is it important to study religion and drugs? What scholarly approach would you take if you were doing research on the intersections on religion and drugs (e.g., study from a medical point of view, or ethnographic, or legal, or historical)? Religion itself has a limiting connotation, but in actuality anything can be religious depending on the context. A few of the key ideas of a religious culture include ritual activities, transcendence, cosmic revelation, and transformation, and in the practice of religion, the use of drugs can lead to a sacred experience for the adherents. Sacredness is one of the factors that differentiates religious groups because the idea of a sacred experience is always contested. It is important to study the use of drugs in achieving a sacred religious experience in order to see the effect of the drugs on the mental and emotional state of the adherents and how that shapes human behavior. From a medical point of view, drugs and religious cultures are he...

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema                   Having gone over this piece in my sociology 101 class, I had prior knowledge that nacirema is American spelled backwards and that this is a satirical piece about us. This piece shows the analysis of our society through a non-native, outside or ethnocentric perspective. The “body rituals and medical beliefs” that we do are made out to seem unreasonable and questionable.  For example,