AN419      Half Unit
The Anthropology of Christianity

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

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 examines 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, Christianity 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.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

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

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 4 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 (CUP 2000) W Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (reprint 1988);
• J Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance;
• R Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910;
• Deirdre de la Cruz 2015 Mother Figured: Marian apparitions and the making of a Filipino universal;
• J. Napolitano, Valentina. Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 248 pp.

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period