There is an important term that we need to associate with how one looks at the use of religion in different societies. This is something we can call a world view; this term is used to describe the way a person "sees" his or her world and his or her place in it.

The notion "world view" denotes a distinctive vision of reality that not only interprets and orders the places and events in the experience of a people, but lends form, direction, and continuity to life as well. World View provides people with a distinctive set of values, an identity, a feeling of rootedness, of belonging to a time and a place, and a felt sense of continuity with a tradition which transcends the experience of a single lifetime, a tradition which may be said to transcend even time.

A world view-provides a people with a structure of reality; it defines, classifies, and orders the "real" in the universe, in their world, and in their society. A world view embodies man's most general conceptions of order. If this is accepted as a working definition, then religion provides a people with their fundamental orientation toward that reality. If world view provides an intellectually satisfying picture of reality, religion provides both an intellectually and emotionally satisfying picture of, and orientation toward, that reality. Religion then carries the function of making endurable such unpleasant facts of the human condition as evil, suffering, meaninglessness, and death.

Case Study: Hopi

As you explore the Hopi World View try to analyze how this view is reflective of the environment in which the Hopi live.