Anthropology Of Religion Research Articles

Sensational Movies and the anthropology of religion: towards a comparative moral imaginary

This article examines the significance of Birgit Meyer’s work on the ‘moral imaginary.’ The first part of the article argues that Meyer has more in common with phenomenological anthropologists than she admits and endorses her approach to the current debate between ‘ontological’ and ‘cultural constructivist’ approaches. The second section invokes the moral psychology of Maimonides along with contemporary debates in the anthropology of Islam to argue that Meyer’s work should stimulate a broadly comparative approach to the whole topic of moral imagination. Do filmic media, for example, inevitably favor a dualistic conflict between personifications of good and evil over other, more monistic, religious positions? And how might the study of medieval moral psychologies enrich the contemporary ethnography of religion?

Time and difference in the anthropology of religion

J. D. Y. Peel’s Frazer Lecture of 2000, published here posthumously, presented his early thoughts about the three-sided comparison that would culminate his trilogy of works on Yoruba religion. Working through these arguments would occupy another decade and a half until the publication of Christianity, Islam, and Orisa religion: Three traditions in comparison and interaction (2016, University of California Press). As a historian and sociologist, John was by turns stimulated and exasperated by anthropologists. An ethnographic method was essential to comparison he accepted, but anthropologists were poor at temporality in a number of senses: when locating their own researches, the lives of those they met, the sources they used, their own notes; and when delineating what they meant by context, what it meant to their subjects, and where it came from; and most germane here, in recognizing the historical trajectories imparted to religions by their histories, discourses and practices. In short, for all they wrote a deal about it, anthropologists were practically poor when describing the consequences of humans being beings in time. The lecture proposes solutions to these lacks.

Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem

ABSTRACTThis article explores how religious communities actualize the virtual problem of temporality. Analysing two case studies from contemporary America, Mormon Trek re-enactment and a creationist theme park re-creating Noah’s ark, I argue that replication is a strategy for constructing a relationship with time in which a strict past–present divide is collapsed through affective means. This work contributes to comparative studies in the anthropology of religion and temporalizing the past.

Ethnography at its edges: The insistence of religion: A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek, eds. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 584 pp.

Ethnography at its edges: The insistence of religion: A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion. Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek, eds. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 584 pp.

Engaging the anomalous: reflections from the anthropology of the paranormal

This review article looks at some of the parallels between the contents of this special issue on the paranormal and insights from the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of consciousness, transpersonal anthropology and the anthropology of the paranormal. The paper introduces the history of anthropology’s engagement with the paranormal, from the early evolutionist perspectives of anthropology’s pioneers to the most recent experiential approaches of the anthropology of consciousness. The paper concludes by highlighting the potential benefits of a cross-pollination of psychotherapeutic and anthropological research on the paranormal.

Anthropology of religion: the basics

Anthropology of religion: the basics

Everyday things: an anthropologist’s take on emotion and the sense of the sacred in consumer rituals

I was originally trained in the anthropology of religion and did my first fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, studying a Melanesian people’s ritual and religious life and trying to understand their sense of the sacred. The work I’ve carried out the last eighteen years as a business consultant studying consumer culture has turned out to be not so very different from my previous work. This may give people in both anthropology and advertising pause, but to me, and to other commentators, consumer culture is often a search for meaning, not merely a search for material comfort or fun or pleasure or status or an attempt to satisfy basic necessity. The next thought may also give pause: that the search for meaning is often a search for the sense of the sacred in the everyday―the everyday product, the everyday activity. In categories as varied as pet food, bicycles, credit card use, food, and electronics, the successful product or brand often gives people a sense of what can only be described as the sacred in the everyday. This sense is a strong emotional benefit for consumers, the creation and evocation of which is an important objective of the rituals and routines that surround product usage. This emotional Page 1 of 10

Textbooks for teaching the anthropology of religion: a review

Written from the perspective of those who teach the anthropology of religion, the paper reviews a selection of texts commonly used in teaching. The authors find the texts are generally useful, although those written clearly and with good cross-referencing detail (index, bibliography, overviews) are the most helpful. One major finding is the range of views over what might constitute 'textbook’ - itself a fairly contested term more widely.

Understanding honor in religious, cultural, and moral experience: Commentary on “Diasporic Virginities: Social Representations of Virginity and Constructions of Identity amongst British Arab Muslim Women” by Howarth, Caroline; Amer, Amena; and Sen, Ragini

An important and timely topic in the study of the connections and divergences between culture and religion is the construction of concepts of honor in moral experience, and how these are expressed symbolically and socially. How can a moral concept such as honor be a sign of distinction and belonging at once, and why does honor remain important in a diasporic community, though not identical in meanings to honor in some other “home” cultures? How does one decide which beliefs, practices, and institutions to call religious? Which ones to call cultural? In this commentary, I pursue these questions from ethnographic and cross-cultural comparative perspectives, inspired by post-structural interpretive anthropology of religion, semiology, and phenomenology. Culture, not solely theological doctrine or dogma, defines religion. It is important to ask how particular definitions emerge and come to objectify their referents. The elaboration of context is a central feature of interpretation; a religion may look very different from one society and culture to another, and it may also look very different within the same culture and society, from one context to another. Yet moral experience remains central. Those among the British Arab Muslim women studied by Howarth et al. who value virginity in their concept of honor are creatively re-enacting their cultural/ethnic identity through their choices in sexual mores. Honor, as expressed in virginity, is in effect performed in the Goffmanesque sense of presentation of self in everyday life.

Continuity and Discontinuity

This article explores the cultural change generated by Pentecostalism among Liberian refugees in Ghana, who fled from their nation’s civil wars to a refugee camp in Ghana’s Central Region. Anthropologists of religion have argued that Pentecostal conversions have in large parts become popular because they enable a “break with the past.” Liberian converts, as well, seek to distance themselves from a past that is mired in conflict. To this end, they connect to global Pentecostal networks in an attempt to overcome their marginal status. In so doing, many of them reject aspects of their past, which they associate with the Liberian civil wars, for example traditional belief systems, ethnic identity, and the Liberian gerontocracy. Yet, as the ethnographic examples illustrate, this “break with the past” is rarely complete. This study’s findings are related to debates on whether anthropology of religion should focus on “continuity” or “discontinuity” in exploring religious conversions. The author argues that the religious experiences of Liberians in exile can only be understood by paying attention to the interplay and tensions between continuity and discontinuity.

On Atheism and Non-religion: An Afterword

We all have our conceptual bugbears, terms which, as anthropologists, cause us trouble. Over the past couple of years, an increasing number of anthropologists working in the anthropology of religion have had to face some newly prominent ones: atheism, godlessness, and (worst of all) non-religion.

The Cultural Kindling of Spiritual Experiences

In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (events of the body that happen in social settings but are only identified as religious in those social settings when they afford, or make available, an interpretation that makes sense in that setting); and striking anomalous events. We demonstrate that local cultural practices shift the pattern of spiritual experiences, even those such as sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences that might be imagined in some ways as culture free, but that the more the spiritual experience is constrained by a specific physiology, the more the frequency of the event will be constrained by an individual’s vulnerability to those experiences. We will call this the “cultural kindling” of spiritual experience.

Culturas terapéuticas: de la uniformidad a la diversidad

The aim of this article is to develop a comprehensive concept of Therapeutic Culture, in which sociology, social psychology, anthropology of religion and medical anthropology could meet. I suggest that this culture is not uniform but express a number of variations. In order to understand them, I describe four main dimensions: a conception of body and subjectivity, general beliefs that support therapies and social hierarchic models promoted. My research strategy is founded in ethnography and participant observation in therapeutic groups, expert and users interviews, and documental analysis of information sheets, publicity, brochures, books and web pages from Argentine, Spain and Mexico from 2007 to 2013. Supplementary, I review a large number of literature and secondary sources. The results show some uniformity in body and subjectivity conceptions and a great diversity in beliefs, therapies and relationship models. Empirical investigation permits to identify four different models of therapeutic relationship with different styles of exercise authority that contribute not only to conceive in different ways both health and disease, but also to practice the building of social relations.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion

A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion

Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies

In Santería priesthoods, practitioners are “made” into African diaspora bodies in what is called “making santo.” These embodied epistemologies reveal not only the complex historical practices that have emerged through processes of racialization and enslavement but also how a body logic resituates the formations of diasporic feeling and sensing. I argue that practitioners’ everyday acts redefine the capacities of and for action as part of a spiritual habitus. The various rituals, works, and spiritual acts in Santería thus culminate in a different form of bodily engagement with the world, operating in racial space. This article examines Santería body logics, showing how what I call copresences are activated in somatic racial ontologies. I suggest that these diasporic sensings resituate anthropological universalisms, arguing for a disruption in the debate between mediation and practice in the anthropology of religion. Rather than assuming notions of presence, copresence allows for an intervention that hails Santería’s embodied epistemology as a form of diasporic sensing.

Cough sweets and angels: the ordinary ethics of the extraordinary inSufi practice inLebanon

This article presents an ethnographic account of the social production of the miraculous inSufi practice inLebanon, including displays of bodily mortification. It examines the interdependence of the extraordinary and the ordinary/everyday, following, but problematizing,MaxWeber's classic discussion of charismatic authority. ForWeber the extraordinary lies outside the bounds of rules. Adopting the terms of some recent interventions in the anthropology of ethics, I claim on the contrary that the extraordinary has its ordinary ethics too. In so doingInot only add to the anthropology of wonder but also challenge those who would argue that anthropology's especial focus is on the ordinary, to the exclusion of its opposite. If this is not to be mere piety, sorting out what belongs to which category will prove challenging. Especially within the anthropology of religion, one can hardly do with one without the other.

Desafíos de la antropología de la religión en América Latina para abordar el tema del cristianismo entre pueblos indígenas

<p>El artículo presenta un análisis desde la antropología de la religión sobre las relaciones entre cristianismo y pueblos indígenas, analizando algunos documentos y declaraciones relacionados con el tema, tanto de parte de autoridades cristianas como de comunidades indígenas. Se busca, a futuro, fomentar el diálogo y la construcción mutua entre pueblos indígenas e iglesias cristianas, para fortalecer las posibilidades de desarrollo autónomo de los pueblos indígenas de América Latina.<br /><br /></p>

The Case for Chimpanzee Religion

Do chimpanzees engage in religious behaviors? To date this question remains unanswered. I use methods from religious studies and anthropology of religion that demonstrate an answer in the af?rmative. A comprehensive review of primatology reports reveals that chimpanzees do perform ritualized patterns of behavior in response to birth, death, consortship, and elemental natural phenomena. A structuralist analysis of these patterns shows that chimpanzees deploy similar formulaic action schemas involving recombination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic behaviors across all four of these life-situations. In the course of these performances, chimpanzees decontextualize and convert everyday communicative signals to express non-ordinary emotions of wonder and awe. The patterning of chimpanzee ritual behaviors evidences all the components of a prototypical trans-species de?nition of religion. These ?ndings support hypotheses that propose religious behaviors for other species, including hominins prior to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Opinion

AbstractANTHROPOLOGY IN THE CLASSROOM | “That Book Changed My Life” by Erin DeanMAXIMIZING SUCCESS FOR UNDERGRADUATE ANTHROPOLOGY MAJORS | “Missed Manners (Part One)” by Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz Reyes‐FosterANTHROPOLOGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE | “Climate Change Isn't Gender Neutral” by Merrill SingerGHOST ANTHROPOLOGIES | “Anthropology Fieldwork and the Third Man” by Samuel Gerald CollinsTHE WORLD IS CURVED | “California Dreamin’” by Michael E HarkinANTHROPOLOGY IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR | Sarah Ono, Heather Schacht Reisinger and Samantha L Solimeo, ed. “Reflecting on Words of Advice from a Consumer of Anthropology” by Heather Schacht ReisingerREGARDING RELIGION | “Blood Moons and Rapture Lunacy” by Daniel Martin VariscoANTHROPOLOGY AND ACTIVISM | “Grassroots & State‐Sponsored Activism in Ukraine” by Robert R SaudersKeywords:anthropology education, public anthropology, implementation science, climate change, migration, archaeology, activism, linguistic anthropology, anthropology of religion

Long-lost Brothers: On the Co-histories and Interactions Between the Comparative Science of Religion and the Anthropology of Religion

AbstractThis article briefly surveys and compares the histories of research in the comparative science of religion (beginning with Friedrich Max Müller) and the anthropology of religion. The article notes the close interactions between these two fields and argues that the comparative science of religion drew significant inspiration from anthropology and sociology during the twentieth century until about the 1970s when anthropology came under heavy fire from critics. The postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern wave did not have a significant impact on the comparative science of religion until the 1990s. But already during the 1980s a new approach to religion, championed by Jonathan Z. Smith, contributed to a theoretical and critical analysis of religion that neither bought into postmodernism nor into thesui generisapproach to religion. During the 1990s, another new approach began making an impact, namely, the cognitive science of religion, championed by E. Thomas Lawson, Robert N. McCauley (both scholars of religion), and Pascal Boyer (anthropologist). The article suggests in conclusion that the two disciplines can once again meet in the growing fields of experimental anthropology and experimental science of religion and in the need to explore and address how culture affects and rewires the brain. Furthermore, evolutionary theory is also beginning to serve as a common framework for thinking about religion.