Dr Fenella Cannell

Dr Yazan Doughan

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available on the MA in Modern History, MRes/PhD in Anthropology, MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Anthropology and Development Management, MSc in China in Comparative Perspective, MSc in Law, Anthropology and Society and MSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course covers current approaches to and reconsiderations of classic topics in the anthropology of religion, such as: myth, ritual, belief and doubt, supernatural experience, ethical self-cultivation, asceticism, sacrifice, authority and charisma. In the Michaelmas term, students will be introduced to debates concerning the ways in which ‘religion’ is said to influence or shape personal experience and collective public life in both western and non-western contexts. Students will explore some of the key concepts that inform contemporary understandings of religion as a force in the world, the history of these concepts, how they enter into various political and ethical projects, and the extent to which they predefine ‘religion’ as an object of anthropological study. Specific areas of focus may include: the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’; conceptions of ‘religious freedom’; conversion; inter-religious conflict; the ethnography of religious minorities; the anthropology of religious movements; and the comparative anthropology of ‘religions’. In the Lent term, students will be asked to rethink the category of ‘religion’  and its role in anthropological analysis. The guiding underlyng approach will be to ask; what is  the study of  ‘religion’  for the social sciences,  and what are the potentials and limitations of different answers to that question.  We will also be asking  where (if anywhere)  religion is located  as category,  practice and experience for a range of interlocutors,  and in different kinds of  analytic writing.    Topics facilitating this project may include some of the following: shamanism,  spirit mediumship,   death rituals and ritual theory,  magic and witchcraft,  ‘spirituality’  and new religious movements,  religion and kinship,   ghosts,  spirits and ancestors,  cosmology,  faith-healing,  life-cycle rituals, human-nonhuman relations,  and religion in disapora and social change,  religion and ‘ethics’,  problems of suffering and critical approaches to religion,  violence and inequality,  encounters with the divine and sacred, religion,  capitalism and the fetish,    religion,  gender  and the body,   religion and development,   implicit religion.   Examples will be drawn both western and non-western contexts,  and from both ‘salvation religions’  such as Hinduism,  Judaism and Christianity,  and other including so-called  ‘animist’  contexts.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the MT. 10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the LT. 1 hour of lectures in the ST.

This year, some or all of this teaching will be delivered through a combination of virtual lectures, classes and online interactive activities. The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. This course has a reading week in Week 6 in MT and LT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT and 1 essay in the LT.

• Talal Asad 2009, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam;
• Tomoko Masuzawa 2005, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism;
• Hussein A. Agrama 2012, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt;
• Mayanthi Fernando 2014, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism;
• Webb Keane 2007, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter;
• W. F. Sullivan, E. S. Hurd, et al. (eds.) 2015, Politics of Religious Freedom;
• Courtney Bender 2010, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination;
• Leigh Eric Schmidt 2000, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment;
• S. J. Tambiah 1992, Buddhism Betrayed?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka;
• A. Abramson and M. Holbraad (eds.) 2014, Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds;
• G. Bateson and M. C. Bateson 1987, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred;
• B. Kapferer (ed.) 2002, Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery;
• L. Lévy-Bruhl 1926, How Natives Think;
• P. Ingman, T. Utrianinen, et al. (eds.) 2016, The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion Versus Secularity Debate;
• D. C. Posthumus 2018, All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual;
• H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds.) 2007, Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science;
• R. Willerslev 2007, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs;
• D. E. Young and J-G. Goulet (eds.) 1994, Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience.

Detailed reading lists provided at the start of each term.

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the summer exam period.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.