AN301      One Unit
The Anthropology of Religion

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AN290 or AN390 or AN3A1 at any time on the same degree programme.

Additional requisites:

Students should have a substantial background in Social Anthropology.

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 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.
15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected.

Essay (1500 words)

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words in the Autumn Term and one formative essay of up to 1500 words in the Winter Term.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 3 of term.

• Talal Asad 2009, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam;
• 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;
• 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.

Essay (50%, 3000 words) in Winter Term Week 1

Essay (50%, 3000 words) in Spring Term Week 1

The summative assessment for AN301 consists of two essays, each of up to 3000 words in length. Each essay is worth 50% of the overall AN301 course mark.

Essay 1, based on content taught in Autumn Term, is submitted in Week 1 of Winter Term.

Essay 2, based on content taught in in Winter Term, is submitted in Week 1 of Spring Term.