| It is my thesis that the Judeo-Christian worldview promotes and fosters the dichotomization of the self into positive and negative attributes, associating the former with divine characteristics and the latter with satanic characteristics. I present a semiotic cultural analysis of how Saint Augustine and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. expounded upon the Judeo-Christian worldview in the Greco-Roman and American (U.S.) traditions, making the Judeo-Christian worldview relevant and significant in the conceptualization of self in the Greco-Roman and American (U.S.) traditions.;My thesis is a contribution to the anthropological scholarship on the study of religion, history, and self. Based on the seminal writing of Clifford Geertz (1968, 1973), Claude Levi-Strauss (1963, 1966, 1978), Elaine Pagels (1979, 1988, 1995), Jacob Pandian (1985, 1991, 1995, 1996), Marshall Sahlins (1983), Hayden White (1972, 1973), and Eric Wolf (1982), I examine how the Judeo-Christian worldview fosters the dichotomization of self, and show how Saint Augustine and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. became exemplary cultural models or archetypes of the Judeo-Christian self. |
