杏吧论坛

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 China in Comparative Perspective 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,  an