Prof Laura Bear

Dr Nick Long

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available on the MA in Modern History, MRes/PhD in Anthropology, MSc in Anthropology and Development and MSc in Social Anthropology. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission.

Students are welcome to take this course as a standalone half-unit. However, they may benefit from taking AN490 in the previous term.

This course explores how religion manifests 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 contemporary societies, and how such definitions affect ‘religious practice’ across the world. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the ethnographic record, including by foregrounding research that has been carried out by members of the anthropology department.

The subject matter will be explored through carefully tailored research topics, each of which relates directly to the research interests of respective lecturers. Topics will relate to several ‘world religions’ and to forms of spirituality, as well as to secularism. Specific areas of focus may include: religious nationalism, religious freedom, the interface between sexuality and religion, transpersonal psychologies, sacrifice, religious conversion, doubt and conviction, martyrdom, New Age spirituality, and anthropological perspectives on ‘the secular’.

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. 

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press

Bear, Laura. 2018. The vitality of labour and its ghosts. Terrain 69. https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.16728

Heil, Tilman. 2021. Muslim—queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: making sense of relational positionalities. Ethnography 22(1): 31-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138119859601

Hocart, A.M. 1970. Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Klin-Oron, Adam. 2020. The cultivation of ‘wild channeling’: lived religion as a normalising force. Journal of Contemporary Religion 35(2): 177-194. https://doi-org.lse.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/13537903.2020.1759899

Laycock, Joseph P. 2020. Speak Of The Devil: How The Satanic Temple Is Changing The Way We Talk About Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Long, Nicholas J. 2019. ‘Straightening what’s crooked’? Recognition as moral disruption in Indonesia’s Confucianist revival. Anthropological Forum 29(4): 335-355. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2019.1664984

Pelkmans, Mathijs (ed). 2013. Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies. New York: IB Tauris. 

Pierini, Emily et al. (eds). 2023. Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing. Oxford: Berghahn

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