AN4A1      Half Unit
Understanding Religion in the Contemporary World

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Pre-requisites:

Students must have completed AN490 before taking this course.

This course explores how religion manifests itself in a range of different societies, studying its relationship to broad social change including the rise of modernity and capitalism, the resurgence of nationalism and populism, as well as its codification in institutions such as the family, law, gender, and the state. We will critically evaluate the category of ‘religion’ and related concepts, paying attention to how these have been redefined in modernity, and how such definitions affect 'religious practice' across the world. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the ethnographic record, doing so by foregrounding research that has been carried out by members of the anthropology department.

The first and last week will be used to frame the course, to then explore the subject matter through eight carefully tailored research topics, each of which relates directly to the research of respective lecturers. Topics will relate to several ‘world religions’ and to forms of spirituality such as animism and shamanism, as well as to secularism.

Specific areas of focus may include:

Religious nationalism, religious freedom, contemporary millenarianism, trance and meditation, the power of prayer, religious conversion, doubt and conviction, martyrdom, spirituality and the land, atheism, and neo-shamanism.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars 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 taking AN4A1 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 AN4A1 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. 

• Allerton, Catherine. 2009. Static crosses and working spirits: anti-syncretism and agricultural animism in Catholic West Flores. Anthropological Forum. 19 (3)
• Banerjee, Mukulika. 2022. Sacrifice: Cultivating Faith. Chapter 5 of Cultivating Democracy. Oxford University Press.
• Cannell, Fenella. 2017. ‘Forever Families’; Christian Individualism, Mormonism and Collective Salvation. New directions in spiritual kinship: Sacred ties across the Abrahamic religions: 151-169.
• Long, Nicholas J. 2017. On the Islamic authority of the Indonesian state: responsibility, suspicion, and acts of compliance. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23.4 (2017): 709-726.
• Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2021. Frontier Dynamics: Reflections on Evangelical and Tablighi Missions in Central Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 63.1 (2021): 212-241.
• Scott, Michael W. 2021. How the Missionary got his Mana: Charles Elliot Fox and the Power of Name-Exchange in Solomon Islands. Oceania 91(1): 106-127.
• Steinmüller, Hans. 2010. How popular Confucianism became embarrassing: On the spatial and moral center of the house in rural China." Focaal 58 (2010): 81-96.
• Walker, Harry. 2015. Justice and the dark arts: law and shamanism in Amazonia." American Anthropologist 117.1: 47-58.

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