Roy Abraham Rappaport was an American anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology.
17 Facts About Roy Rappaport
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In that book, and elaborated elsewhere, Roy Rappaport coined the distinction between a people's cognized environment and their operational environment, that is, between how a people understand the effects of their actions in the world and how an anthropologist interprets the environment through measurement and observation.
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Roy Rappaport served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
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Roy Rappaport was a past president of the American Anthropological Association.
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Roy Rappaport died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 9 October 1997.
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Roy Rappaport aimed to show the adaptive value of different cultural forms in maintaining the pre-existing relationship of a population with their environment.
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Roy Rappaport showed that this ritual served several important purposes, such as restoring the ratio of pigs to humans, supplying the local communities with pork, and preventing land degradation.
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Roy Rappaport found that a shrub called rumbim, was used to mark the beginning and ends of periods of warfare.
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In contrast to studying how culture and ritual could be adaptive, Roy Rappaport studied how the use of culture and ritual could be maladaptive or potentially harmful to ecological systems.
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Roy Rappaport argued that cultures sometimes serves their own components, such as economic or political institutions, at the expense of men and ecosystems [such that].
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Roy Rappaport explains the hierarchical demission of liturgical orders, in which he breaks down four elements of ritual.
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Roy Rappaport developed as a well-respected contributor to the field and its subsequent discourse by the coinage and adaptation of new anthropological concepts.
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Roy Rappaport is known for his distinction between "cognized models" and "operational models," in which the former looked at reality and adaptations in how a people's culture understands nature.
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The cognized model, according to Roy Rappaport, is the "model of the environment conceived by the people who act in it,".
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Roy Rappaport takes this model to represent for analytic purposes, the physical world of the group he is studying.
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Roy Rappaport emphasizes variables such as economic, social and physical properties, which all must be taken into account.
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Roy Rappaport provides an example of a hypothetical oil spill which severely damaged marine life.