Dr Fenella Cannell, A610 and Professor Chris Fuller, A505

For MSc Social Anthropology, MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Anthropology of Learning and Cognition, MSc Law, Anthropology and Society, MSc China in Comparative Perspective.

This course covers selected topics in the anthropology of religion, focusing upon relevant theoretical debates. Reference will be made to ethnographies of the ritual, symbolism and religious knowledge of non-Western societies.

Various anthropological approaches to the study of religion, ritual and symbolism are covered. Key topics will include: some of all of the following: the religious representation of life, death, sex, morality and gender; the relation between cosmology and magical practice; typologies of thought; the religious, the aesthetic, the scientific; religion and the social construction of the emotions; the work of the symbol; myth and history; shamanism and spirit possession; theodicy and world religions; persons, objects and spirits in the process of conversion; the problem of religious belief; the category of ‘religion’; ritual.

Lectures AN402 weekly MT, LT, Seminars AN402.A weekly MT, LT.

M Bloch, Prey into Hunter: the Politics of Religious Experience; M Douglas, Purity and Danger; E Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft Oracles and Magic among the Azande; D Lan, Guns and Rain; G Lewis, Day of Shining Red; C Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind; M Bloch, From Blessing to Violence; J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance; P Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas; F Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines; M Bloch & J Parry, Death and the Regeneration of Life; T Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam; V Raphael, Contradicting Colonialisms: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under early Spanish Rule.

Detailed reading lists are provided at the beginning of the course.

There is a three-hour examination in the ST.