Final Exam Essay. Religion & Theology Assignment.

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1 Religious specialists are those who devote themselves to maintaining and performing organizational functions such as traditional practices about the specific elements of their religion (Daniels, 2013). In Turner's characterization of religious specialists, they are classified as priests, mediums, shamans, and prophets. Priests are those that as associated with performing and presiding religious rites of an organized and permanent religious enterprise about the influence of God in the daily lives of the people. A priest can only perform human to human interaction or an I-it relationship that links humans with the trans-humans (Daniels, 2013). Mediums, Shamans, and Prophets are the specialists that can perform human to human communication with trans-humans or the I-thou relationship using their bodies as the communication medium. Specifically, Turner classified mediums as the vessels of trans-human activity, the Shamans as the spirit mediums that have a certain level of authority over the spirits, and prophets that can dictate the drastic change that the divine bestows upon human communities (Daniels, 2013). Vitebsky had other characterizations with shamans. Vitebsky noted that Shamans cannot securely control spiritual entities and their mastery over the crafts needs assistance from various psychoactive plants to achieve the trance state. Therefore, shamans need to alter their conscious mind to channel their spiritual powers. There are also other specialized shamans like the Inuit and Sora Shamans that can use their spiritual powers to perform psychotherapy and socio-therapy (Daniels, 2013).
However, the problem with Turner’s sort of typology is that they don't specify culture-specific or emphasis on the local variety and local knowledge to which these classifications are found. Turner's typology is broad that the terms derived from a cultural context but the usage of the terms is used interchangeably from different cultures. In reality, the powers and functions of the typology are overlapping depending on the activity. Turner failed to include other religious leaders that have more specific functions in the community such as the healers. The Kyai, Dukun, and Ustadz, for example, are a variety of healers that are localized in the south-central part of Java, Indonesia that is specialized in ethnomedicine and connected with the local culture of the people (Daniels, 2013). Daniels (2013) approached the study of Kyai, Dukun, and Ustadz by combining the cognitive, symbolic, functionalist, and processual approaches to draw knowledge from these healers. He stressed the importance of understanding the healer's importance in understanding religious specialists because of the existence of illnesses that plagues man. There are two types of illnesses, the illnesses of God or the natural illnesses and the illnesses of man or the illnesses that are bestowed by witches, magic, spells, and spirits (Daniels, 2013). Because these illnesses of man exist, healers that specialized in countering these illnesses are needed for the successful classification and treatment. Healers specialized in different illnesses to increase ...