AN319      Half Unit
The Anthropology of Christianity

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AN221 at any time on the same degree programme.

Additional requisites:

This course is intended for second and third year anthropologists,  therefore students normally have at least one year's  foundational anthropology.  External students are welcome to join the course and often do so;   depending on disciplinary background, external students may benefit from some additional contextual reading ( please consult the course teacher.)

The ethnography of local Christianities in the light of differing cultural and social situations including colonial conditions.The relationship between Christianity and the discipline of anthropology. The course will examine a number of anthropological and historical studies of local forms of Christianity, from a range including local forms of Catholicism, Mormonism, contemporary and historical Protestantisms including American Protestant forms and 'heretical' and other unorthodox Christianities.The course asks why anthropologists shied away from analysing Christianity long after studies of other world religions, such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, had become widely established. It looks at the relationship between Christianity and the history of anthropological thought,and locates the place of Christianity in the writings of Mauss, Durkheim, Foucault and others, in order to defamiliarise the religion which Europeans and Americans especially often take for granted. Issues examined may include the nature and experience of belief, conversion and the appropriation of Christian doctrines by local populations, the problems of writing about religion, Christianity and the state,  Christianity and colonialism, Christianity and politics, Christian charities and NGOs, Christianity and political theology, the nature of religious confession, Christian texts, and Scriptural reading practices, Christian objects and materialities, Christianity and women's religious and social experience (from Medieval women mystics to women priests), inquisitions and heretical beliefs, priests and alternative forms of mediation with divine power, miraculous saints, incorrupt bodies and 'non-eaters' and changing ideas about death, Heaven and Hell. Where possible, the course will include a student fieldwork weekend and forms of reflection and reporting on that experience. Please check with the course teacher in any given year whether this is planned as part of the year’s programme.

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

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

The contact hours listed above are the minimum expected.

Essay (1500 words)

Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

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

M Bloch, From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar;

F Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines ;

W Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (reprint 1988);  

William A. Christian Visionaries : The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ 1994

J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance;

J  R Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Phillippines, 1840-1910;

Mother Figured – Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal Hardcover – 1 Mar. 2016 by Deirdre De La Cruz; 

Valentina Napolitano, 2015 Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return :transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church

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

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in Spring Term Week 1