In what ways is ritual useful for articulating political goals?

Write a five-page paper on ONE of the following prompts:
RELIGION, STEREOTYPES, AND POWER: In Week 4, you saw how ideas of stereotypes and power can be used as a lens for examining Navajo Religion and Islam. How do each of these religions exemplify the dynamics of how partial perceptions of a certain group can become transformed into a representation of the whole group? In what ways do stereotypes around Navajo and Islam share commonalities? In what ways are they different? Drawing on the podcasts, the focused readings, and Prothero Chapters 10 and 7, provide and discuss examples.
RELIGION, RITUAL, AND POLITICS: In Week 5, you explored Hinduism and Confucianism under the theme of ritual and politics. How would you define ritual? In what ways is ritual useful for articulating political goals? How does religion figure in? How do you see ritual and politics interacting in Hinduism around issues of the Caste System? How do you see this working in Confucianism in terms of the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship with Confucianism? Drawing on the podcasts, the focused readings, and Prothero Chapters 2 and 8 provide and discuss examples for each religion.
RELIGION, LAW, AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: In Week 6, you examined the theme law and religious freedom against new religions in the United States. How do new religions complicate how religion gets defined in the U.S.? Relatedly, what are the various ways religious freedom is complicated by new religions? Drawing on the podcasts ands reading, provide and discuss examples from each of our case studies (Scientology and Atheism/The Nones).
FORMATTING YOUR PAPER:
At the top of your paper, please provide your name and what prompt your paper will address.
You may use whatever file extension you like. If I can’t open your assignment file I will ask you to resubmit it but I will also deduct 3 points from your overall grade for the assignment (NB– this policy also applies to situations where a student may have submitted the wrong file or a corrupted file).
In my experience .doc, .docx, or .pdf formats are the easiest for Canvas to open whereas formats like Google Docs are more unpredictable.
Length:
Papers are to be 4-5 double-spaced pages with 1-inch margins, using 12 point Times New Roman font. No cover pages.
Papers should be no longer than 5 pages. Papers shorter than 4 pages will receive a 2-point deduction per half page less than 4 pages. Papers do not need to end exactly at the end of the 4th page, but should extend to at least three-fourths of the 4th page.
Using and citing sources:
No outside sources are to be used in completing this paper. This is not a research paper. The course materials are sufficient for successfully writing this assignment.
In writing on your chosen prompt, you may only use course materials from the corresponding module. For example, if you write on prompt #2 (Religion, Ritual, and Politics) you may only use the readings and podcasts from the Week 5 module to complete the assignment.
Please use in-text citations according to the following format:
For readings, provide the author, title, and page number in parentheses at the end of the relevant quote or reference, e.g. (Martin, “Why do people fight so much about religion, 113).
For media (i.e. podcasts and videos), provide in parentheses the title and timestamp where the relevant quotation or reference begins , e.g. (“Who is a Jew,” 10:50).
No work cited, reference, or bibliography pages should be included in the assignment.
STRUCTURING/ORGANIZING YOUR PAPER:
Papers should begin with an a succinct introduction paragraph that presents a clearly defined central idea or thesis. Get right to the point. I don’t want papers that begin with overly general sentences like “Since the dawn of time, religion has…” and then meander to their point. Use the introduction to give me a sense of how your paper will proceed, and then proceed accordingly. The body of the paper should provide adequate support for the paper’s central idea in a clear and logical manner, utilizing standard conventions appropriate for study in English.
After the introductory paragraph, the paper should then discuss and reflect more generally on the theme of the prompt you’ve chosen. So, for instance, if you’ve chosen prompt #2 (Religion, Ritual, and Politics), write a paragraph that discusses issues relating to ritual and politics more generally. The general thematic issues you raise here should be reflected in the later specific paragraphs devoted to the particular religions.
After your theme paragraph devote a few paragraphs to each of the particular religions mentioned in the prompt you’ve chosen. Your discussion of each religion should be guided by the issues you raised in your general thematic paragraph. Think of the different themes in the above prompts as the individual topics for your paper and the individual religions as specific examples that allow you to think through these topics.
Conclude the paper by offering comparisons between the two religions as you’ve related them to the larger theme of the prompt.
GENERAL WRITING STANDARDS:
This paper is meant to show that you have understood the material from the textbook, focused readings, and podcasts AND are able to synthesize this material creatively and critically in answering one of the above three prompts. Papers should NOT simply repeat back to me the information from the course material, but demonstrate thoughtful and constructive engagement with these materials.
Remember these response papers are intended to get you to think critically and comparatively across specific religious traditions in terms of larger themes. Make sure you analyze the religions based on the theme of the prompt before comparing them directly to each other. For example, I am not interested in how Hinduism is different or the same as Confucianism based on a particular notion of Hindu ritual and politics. Rather I want to know how certain notions of ritual and politics are conceived of in Hinduism, how these are conceived of in Confucianism, and ONLY then how these understandings in Hinduism and Confucianism can be compared and contrasted to reveal something about how ritual and politics work more generally.
This isn’t high school, I don’t want a cookie-cutter, five paragraph paper with needless filler and lengthy block quotes! I am interested in an analysis that shows you have deeply engaged the course material. Aim for clarity and concision: 4-5 pages is not much space and you can’t say everything! This means you’ll have to be judicious in what you choose to highlight, the examples you include, and the quotes you cite in the paper. I want you to discuss selected examples with care and in-depth rather than trying to give me all the information about this subject in a summary and superficial manner.
Please take a few moments to PROOFREAD your paper before submitting it. Typos and poor grammatical constructions can significantly detract from the clarity of your argument. Egregious and numerous grammatical and syntactical errors will result in a 3-point grade deduction.

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