AN490      Half Unit
Anthropology and Religion

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course covers selected current approaches to classic and newer topics in the anthropology of religion. The guiding underlying 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. Classic topics from which sessions are chosen may include 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, as well as the question of where (if anywhere) boundaries lie between what we call  'religion' and other aspects of social life such as kinship or politics.Specific areas of focus may include: the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’; conceptions of ‘religious freedom’; conversion; inter-religious conflict; religious solidarity; the ethnography of religious minorities; the anthropology of religious movements; and the history and consequences of different anthropological definitions of ‘religions'. 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; ghosts,  spirits and ancestors, and 'aliens'; cosmology; faith-healing;life-cycle rituals, human-nonhuman relations; 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 15 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

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

Essay (1500 words)

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

Students taking AN490 as an optional course will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from the course teacher.

Students on the MSc Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World) programme, for whom AN490 is a core course, will be informed of their formative submission deadline by their academic mentor early in term. These students will receive feedback on their formative essays from their academic mentor. 

• 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 Winter Term Week 4

To ensure the integrity of our programmes, students taking AN490 may be required to take part in an interview. The interviews will take place after the essay is submitted, and students will be asked about the process of researching and writing their essay. The expectation is that approximately 10% of students, or a minimum of five students, will be required to attend an interview.  This requirement applies to any student enrolled on the course whether or not it is the core course for their degree programme. Students who are selected for interview will need to make themselves available before their results can be confirmed.