Wim Hofstee

This study examines Van der Leeuw's science of religion as it developed in the years between the two world wars. In the first chapter I give a theoretical justification for the questions I raise and provide a short historical introduction to the development of the history of religion in the Netherlands. The second chapter is a chronological account of the life and times of Van der Leeuw and his main publications. Chapter Three deals with the most important writings of Van der Leeuw on the history and phenomenology of religion and the problem of primitive mentality. The last chapier is a brief epilogue, in which I try to evaluate his work in terms of its meaning for the study of religion today. The study is based on personal and official archives, interviews and secondary sources. ... Zie: Summary

One of the most challenging researchers within the field of cultural anthropology at the moment is the American Clifford Geertz. His ethnographic work, based on minute research in Indonesia and Morocco, is impressive and testifies to a great stylistic ability. Geertz is a challenging researcher in the sense that he does not recoil from the necessary task of making a contribution to theory-development: his theory about culture and the role played by for instance religion äs a cultural System within it, can be regarded äs being the most intriguing theory anthropology has brought forth up to now. (Cf. Blök, 1982: 11—12). A theme which is increasingly running through Geertz's work like a thread is his preoccupation with meanings and Symbols and, connected with this, the issue of the wider purport of microscopic ethnographic research. For that matter, the first element can be recognized äs a 'trend' not only in (American) anthropology, one also finds people working within the fields of philosophy, literary criticism, psychology and linguistics paying more and more attention to the world äs it is lived and thought, instead of äs it is explained objectively. This means that much attention is being paid to Systems of Symbols employed by people, consciously or unconsciously, to order and understand their world of experiences, äs well äs to the 'common sense'-reality (Schutz, 1967: 55) and the structures of meaning in different cultural Systems. Such an approach has its roots in for instance the semiotic work of people like Charles S. Pierce and Susanne K. Langer, in the sociology of John Dewey and George H. Mead, in the language-philosophy of Gilbert Ryle and Kenneth Burke and in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz and Maurice MerleauPonty.

Van Baal's theory is based on the view that religion is a system of symbols by which humans communicate with their universe. These symbols enable individuals to overcome their inner solitude which is the inescapable result of their inability to solve the existential problem of being subjects opposed to and separated from their universe, as well as being part of that same universe and at the same time functioning in it.