Dr Yazan Doughan, Dr Fenella Cannell and Prof Michael Scott

This course will first be available during the 2025/26 academic session.

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Singapore) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

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. 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’.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the AT.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected. This course has a reading week in Week 6 of the MT

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT

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; 

Essay (100%, 3500 words) in the WT.