They share a tendency to emphasize the capacity of ritual to generate feelings of certainty and continuity. More recent work has taken the opposite step of proposing that Western science has significant parallels with ‘traditional’ religious thinking. /Length 4518 Anthropology and the cognitive science of religion: a critical assessment. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Boyer, P., 2001. ), 1991. What, however, of contexts where informants themselves maintain a strong and self-conscious sense of ‘belief ’? Durkheim, E., 1915. Turner, V., Turner, E., 1978. He discussed the peoples, customs, and religions of the Indian subcontinent. Eade, J., Sallnow, M. (Eds. Douglas, M., 1966. Meyer, B., 1999. Joel Robbins (2004, 2007) examines the conversion to Pentecostal Christianity of the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, and shows how even the apparent assimilation of Christian categories can conceal a more complex relationship to belief than might at first appear. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New, Guinea Society. The comparative study of religion formed a central building block of anthropology as the discipline emerged in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. (Eds. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the Azande retains much of its power because his argument is rooted in analysis of both social relations and modes of thought. Academic Press, London, pp. Lambek, M., 2002. Some religious language seems not merely to describe reality, but also to have ‘performative’ dimensions, in other words to create material or social change through being articulated by authoritative figures. Although most anthropologists feel uneasy with the idea that so-called world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism can be regarded as autonomous systems, there has been a move in recent decades for researchers to identify themselves as ethnographers of a particular religion. Language mediates much religious activity, ranging from spells to prayers to texts. His piece describes a ritualized tribute paid by the writer V.S. Routledge, London. Peter Lang, Frankfurt, pp. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. 4 0 obj James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, traced magical and religious threads throughout history and weaved them into a pattern depicting the p… Van Gennep argued that ritual has particular significance during critical periods of transition in the life-cycle, such as attainment of adulthood, marriage, and death. /Parent 2 0 R Salazar (2010) discerns two main orientations among cognitive researchers. One of the issues that Needham touches on is crucial for much comparative ethnography: whereas Western Christianity is premised on the possibility of opting out of religious institutions or indeed denying belief, the kind of religion described by Evans-Pritchard for the Azande or Needham for the Penan is not a matter of choice for informants: it is an integral part of life. Luhrmann, T., 1991. In the light of social evolutionary models of human development, religious practice was perceived as providing a powerful index of the mental and moral levels of so-called primitive peoples. Malcolm Ruel points to “the monumental peculiarity” (1982: p. 100) and historical instability of Christian notions of belief. An important strand has also focused on how counterintuitive or surprising experiences are recalled and transmitted over time (e.g., Boyer, 2001). Anthropologists have worked more and more in urban and Western contexts often associated with deritualization and secularization, and with decreased need for common rites of passage to define accession to social roles. Bloch, M., 1974. Allen & Unwin, London. Subsequent work on witchcraft from the 1940s onwards often examined it in the context of changing social relations and periods of communal stress. ), 2004. In recent years, research on religion as a means to understand human thought has received a striking new impetus within cognitive approaches to the field. Basic Books, New York. Symbols, song, dance, and features of articulation or is religion a extreme form of traditional authority? The word anthropology has a Greek origin. Current Anthropology 48, 5–38. Hirschkind (2006) focuses on the role of the cassette sermon in promoting Islamic revival. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Within Anglo-Saxon anthropological circles, Mary Douglas’s combination of British empiricism and French structuralism resulted in some highly influential work on the function of the body as social and religious symbol. Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. The witch represents an ‘impure’ challenge to social order as well as to physical well-being, and embodies some of the key anxieties of a given society. /Font << However, it is difficult to find equivalents to Protestant notions of belief in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. Needham, R., 1972. On ritual: a postmodernist view. The alternative approach is to see religion more as a by-product of evolution. endobj The role of this sphere in the emergence of the ‘Arab Spring’ from the end of 2010 remains to be analyzed. We see here parallels with the potent middle section of the rite of passage, where initiates are passing ‘in between’ statuses. These themes, along with topics such as witchcraft, belief, language, and the body, have remained of perennial interest. >> Some of the most recent work on witchcraft and wider notions of evil and the occult links these again with forms of anxiety rising from shifting and uncertain social, political, and economic circumstances. ), 1996. The Anthropology of Christianity. For the Urapmin, Christian belief is not about mentally assenting to a set of propositions about divinity, but rather a form of trusting God to do what He promised. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 1, 44–56. >> In such contexts, they argue, disenfranchised people imagine new, magical means to attain otherwise unattainable ends, even as they mistrust those who appear to enrich themselves through illegitimate deployment of the forces of production and reproduction. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Meyer (1999) analyzes notions of evil in the context of the emergence of local Christianity and its relation to changing social, political, and economic formations among the Peki Ewe in Ghana. Swain, Trans.). The following highlights some of the most prominent themes in the anthropology of religion that have remained topics of interest throughout the discipline’s history. ), Religious Organization and Religious Experience. Introduction: beyond norm, text and dialectics. %PDF-1.5 Tomas Gerholm’s (1988) ‘postmodern’ view of a Hindu funeral ritual in Trinidad examines fragmentation of meaning and diversity of experience. Other authors in the Durkheimian school provided significant perspectives on the physical workings and symbolism of the body. In other words religion is not a natural kind, by which I mean a category that has a basis other than that given by an arbitrary definition.”. He agrees with Van Gennep concerning the existence of a basic grammar underlying ritual across cultures, and suggests that an irreducible core of the ritual process invokes a violent conquest of the present world by the transcendental, divine realm. Comaroff, J., Comaroff, J., 1999. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. >> What is considered pure and impure, however, varies cross-culturally, and reflects the social experience of the social group involved. For Asad, Geertz’s (1973: p. 29) definition runs into problems in its attempt to capture a panhuman phenomenon divorced from particular cultural, social, and political contexts. Bloch, M., 2010. This work has blended the findings of evolutionary and cognitive psychology with those of anthropology. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. We see here some characteristic Durkheimian juxtapositions, such as the sacred and nonsacred, and belief balanced by practice; but also the claim that religion must be seen as linked to a social formation, a ‘Church.’ This definition of religion as a certain kind of object of study therefore also points toward a specific method of study: the focus is on what can be physically observed, and eschews assessment of the truth value or otherwise of any given religion. Bloch, M., 1992. Nonetheless, the transformation and pluralization of ritual forms does not necessarily mean that they are disappearing. In the early twentieth century, many anthropologists applied a functional approach to this problem by focusing on the ways religion addressed human needs. The ‘adaptationist’ argument states that no human society can survive without language or religion, and so there must be both a language instinct and a religious instinct. More recently, focus has also been placed on the anthropologies of world religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism; on religion in relation to globalization and diaspora; and on cognitive approaches to the workings of the human mind. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (J.W. Inherent in Frazer’s work was also a juxtaposition that has reemerged, albeit in very different form, in contemporary writings (e.g., Cannell, 2006): Christianity as an object of study but also a mode of thought that has itself framed anthropological understandings of religion, temporality, and culture.
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