ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Talcott Parsons's assertion is that he is so confident that it "has been completely confirmed by modem anthropology." It shows that anthropologists both modern and old-fashioned have expressed discomfort with many of the implications of the term. Naturalism and supernaturalism are both ways of adjusting to the universe". Supernatural phenomena must be clearly distinguished from natural phenomena, or the discipline totters. The dichotomizing of natural as against supernatural—whether it be expressed in terms of "explainable" as against "unexplainable," "ordinary" as against "extraordinary," "sacred" as against "profane," or even "symbolically expressive" as against "instrumentally effective"—remains invincibly ethnocentric and therefore unsuitable for anthropological analysis. The chapter concludes that Parsons need for the term–his sense of its utility and importance–made it necessary for him to dismiss all objections to its use. A common denominator in subjective states which the supernatural evokes is an attitude of apartness from the mundane.
