Towards a Realistic and Relevant "Science of Religion"

Abstract

In approaching country that some call the of I feel obliged to identify myself as a sympathetic alien. In light of cer tain of my research interests, moreover, I hasten to add that I am fully terrestrial. But my passport is from an anthropology department rather than from a department of While anthropologists sometimes use expression science of reli gion, it is my impression that we more commonly talk about the anthropology of religion. In doing so, we identify ourselves as anthro pologists with special interests in religion, just as other anthropologists have special interests in nutrition, law, economics, and so forth. In addition to resembling members of departments of religion by virtue of mutual interests in scholarly explorations of religion, anthro pologists of religion overlap with them in another way. That is, mem bers of both sorts of departments in modern, secular academy recognize an obligation to bracket judgments about truth-values of magico-religious claims (Wiebe 1988, 1990).2 In practice, however, schol ars in both groups sometimes resist or reject bracketing. Thus, for example, Evans-Pritchard relates much of his analysis in Witchcraft,