“Religion is not a native category. It is not a first-person term of self-characterization. It is a category imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture.”

— Jonathan Z. Smith

Relating Religion (2004), p. 179.

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Jonathan Z. Smith 1

American religion academic 1938–2017

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, review of A. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music, p.171, 167.

“The category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality.”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 488

“I have learned that success in business, and perhaps in most aspects of life, requires both self-discipline and objectively imposed discipline from outside.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

Good Spirits.

“Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Geert Hofstede (1928) Dutch psychologist

Source: Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values (1980), p. 25; as cited in Rüdiger Pieper (1990) Human Resource Management: An International Comparison. p. 130.

“[A class category is] a collection of classes, some of which are visible to other class categories, and others of which are hidden.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

p 513
Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991)

“The really fundamental aspect of the dialectic is not the tendency of the finite category to negate itself but to complete itself.”

J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925) British philosopher

Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896), p. 10.

“In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Comments on a court case in The Indian Opinion (25 March 1905)
1900s

“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.

“The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, § 1 : Presentness, CP 5.44
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: The quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the first category of the immediate as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety however is in them only insofar as they are compared and gathered into collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the others are absolute nothingness to it — or rather much less than nothingness, for not even a recognition as absent things or as fictions is accorded to them. The first category, then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught else.

“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.”

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) American artist

Cultural Confinement, 1972

“Religion is not a native category. It is not a first-person term of self-characterization. It is a category imposed from the outside on some aspect of native culture.”

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