10/02/21 AN301/ AN402 - The Anthropology of Religion | Reading lists @ LSE

AN301/ AN402 - The Anthropology of View Online Religion (Lent Term 2021/22)

180 items

Synopsis (9 items) Through readings in contemporary ethnography and theory, the Lent term of this course will explore phenomena and questions classically framed as the anthropology of religion. We will consider topics such as shamanism, cargo cults, initiation, witchcraft and sorcery, cosmology, and human-nonhuman relations, primarily with reference to ongoing transformations of the indigenous traditions of Melanesia, Africa, Amazonia, Australia, and the circumpolar north. Recurring themes will be: transformations in the definition of ‘religion’ in relation to ‘science’; the nature of rationality; and the extent to which anthropology itself can be either – or both – a religious and a scientific quest to experience the wonder of unknown otherness.

Old idolatry” : rethinking “ideology” and “materialism - S Jarvis Chapter | Essential

chapter 4 Chapter | Essential

chapter one Chapter | Essential

A modified view of our origins’ - L Dumont Chapter | Essential

The end of the body’ - Jonathan Parry Chapter | Essential

Possession and shamanism’ Chapter | Essential

Introduction’ Chapter | Essential

Conclusions pages 495-508 plus Shamanism in Central and North Asia’ pp. 181-205 Chapter | Essential

The performance of healing - 1996 Book | Essential

Readings (5 items) The ‘Required Reading for Class’ should be read in preparation for class discussion.

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Ideally, these required readings should be tackled in the order in which they have been listed. I have divided the further readings for each topic under diverse headings (‘Ethnographic studies’, ‘Theoretical and comparative work’, ‘Foundational readings’, etc.). Typically, the literature under these headings is listed chronologically from most recent to earliest – these readings can be tackled in any order you like.

Unorthodox kin : Portuguese Marranos and the global search for belonging - Naomi Leite, 2017 Book | Essential

Muslim becoming: aspiration and skepticism in Pakistan - Naveeda Ahmed Khan, 2012 Book | Essential

John of God : the globalization of Brazilian faith healing - Cristina Rocha, 2016 Book | Essential

Spacious minds : trauma and resilience in Tibetan Buddhism - Sara E. Lewis, 2020 Book | Essential

Ripples of the universe : spirituality in Sedona, Arizona - Susannah Crockford, 2021 Book | Essential

Week 1: The Shaman; or, There and back again (12 items)

Orientation to Week 1 (1 items)

Questions: To what does the term shamanism refer? Is what we call shamanism somehow paradigmatic of religion in general? Or is it, as Viveiros de Castro seems to suggest, a modality of the fullness of being itself? Is the anthropologist a shaman?

Lecture: This lecture considers the concept of shamanism in its relationship to ongoing theoretical transformations in the social scientific study of religion. In the mid twentieth century, Mircea Eliade made shamanism central to his grand theory that all religion originates in personal experiences of ecstasy. In the late twentieth century, anthropologists questioned the usefulness of the category 'shamanism' for cross-cultural comparison and focused instead on culturally particular forms of healing. Today, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has made shamanism a key trope for the practice of anthropology itself. Viveiros de Castro's reliance, in this project, on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is examined in detail.

Discussion: The class readings pit Viveiros de Castro's new approach to Amazonian shamanism against Charles Stépanoff's critical response based on recent fieldwork in Siberia.

Required reading for class (2 items)

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The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits - Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, 2007 Article | Essential

Devouring Perspectives: On Cannibal Shamans in Siberia - Charles Stépanoff, 2009 Article | Essential

Ethnographic studies (5 items)

Not quite shamans: spirit worlds and political lives in northern Mongolia - Morten Axel Pedersen, 2011 Book | Background

Chapter 4. "The Healing Power of Shamanic Career Narration". - Suzanne Oakdale, 2005 Chapter | Background

Dialogues with the dead: the discussion of mortality among the Sora of eastern India - Piers Vitebsky, 1992 Book | Background

The art and politics of Wana shamanship - Jane Monnig Atkinson, 1989 Book | Background

Shamans, housewives, and other restless spirits: women in Korean ritual life - Laurel Kendall, c1985 Book | Background

Theoretical and comparative works (3 items)

Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies - E. V. de Castro, 2004 Article | Background

The Shaman: voyages of the soul trance, ecstasy and healing from Siberia to the Amazon - Piers Vitebsky, 2001 Book | Background

Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy - Mircea Eliade, Bollingen Foundation, 1974 Book | Background

Other Resources of Interest (1 items)

shamanism.org Website | Background | Check out the webpage for the Foundation for Shamanic Studies founded by anthropologist Michael Harner.

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Week 2: ‘Religion’ and its Others (18 items)

Orientation to Week 2 (1 items)

Questions: Is religion a universal phenomenon or a category specific to Euro-American history and informed by Judeo-Christian tradition? What are the opposites of religion and by what criteria? What is sacrificed and what is safeguarded by defining religion in one way or another? If religion and its opposites are all modern constructs, what was there before?

Lecture: This lecture offers three sets of observations in response to Talal Asad's late twentieth century critique of the concept of 'religion'. First, it suggests that Asad's critique has diverted the anthropology of religion away from indigenous non-Western contexts and towards the study of so-called World Religions. Second, it revisits the work of three influential figures – Friedrich Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, and Emile Durkheim – with a view to understanding what, according to Asad, made their theories of religion essentialist and why this might be a problem. Finally, it suggests that Asad's critique leaves us with an unanswered question about the ontology of religion: is it a relation or an essence, or somehow both?

Discussion: The required readings aim to lead students to consider Asad's critique as a myth of the origin of the religion concept and to interrogate the ontological implications of that myth via engagement with Scott's recent relational account of religion.

Required reading for class (2 items)

"The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category" - Talal Asad, 1993 Chapter | Essential

The anthropology of ontology (religious science?) - Michael W. Scott, 2013-12 Article | Essential

Some attempts at definition and critical responses (12 items)

The original political society - Marshall Sahlins, 2017 Article | Background

Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life - Tim Ingold, 2013-12 Article | Background

The inconstancy of the Indian soul: the encounter of Catholics and cannibals in 16th-century Brazil - Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, 2011 Book | Background | READ pp. 1-18.

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"Provincializing God? Provocations from an Anthropology of Religion" - Michael Lambek, 2008 Chapter | Background

The Formation and Function of the Category "Religion" in Anthropological Studies of Taiwan - Stephan Feuchtwang, Fang-Long Shih, Paul-François Tremlett, 2006-02-01 Article | Background

‘Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame,’ or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate - Bruno Latour, 2005 Chapter | Background

Problems of Definition and Explanation. - Melford Spiro, 1966 Chapter | Background

Religion as a Cultural System. - Clifford Geertz, 1966 Chapter | Background

Science as a Vocation - Max Weber, 1946 [1919] Chapter | Background

The elementary forms of the religious life - E ́ mile Durkheim, Joseph Ward Swain, 1995 [1912] Book | Background | READ: pp. 1-12, 34-44, 419-422 (Excerpt available in any edition of 'A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion', ed. Michael Lambek. BL256 R28)

On the Origin and Growth of Religion. I. On the Perception of the Infinite - Müller, Max, 1878 Article | Background

Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom, Vol.1 - Edward B. Tylor, 1891 Book | Background | Two volumes. Read the selections entitled ‘Religion in Primitive Culture’ in any edition of A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, ed. Michael Lambek, Chapter 1. BL256 R28

Introductory orientations (3 items)

Godless intellectuals?: the intellectual pursuit of the sacred reinvented - Alexander Riley, 2010 Book | Background | Esp. pp. 152-220

The science of religion in Britain, 1860-1915 - Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, 2010 Book | Background

In search of origins: the beginnings of religion in Western theory and archaeological practice - G. W. Trompf, 2005 Book | Background

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Week 3: Encounter with the other (20 items)

Orientation to Week 3 (1 items)

Questions: Is wonder in the face of unknown otherness a fundamentally religious experience? By what strategies do people attempt to draw unknown others into their cosmological schemas? How does alterity get mapped cosmographically? In what ways can 'aliens' and other categories of being articulate with various forms of social and political asymmetry? Are cargo cultists anthropologists?

Lecture: This lecture reconsiders claims, formulated by such thinkers as Plato, René Descartes, R. R. Marrett, and Rudolph Otto, according to which 'wonder' at the unknown is the origin of either analytical thinking in general (including modern science), or of religion in particular. Drawing on recent anthropological engagements with these claims, the lecture looks at how encounter with the unknown-especially encounter with unknown people and places-has been intrinsic to the history of anthropology, not only as a self-styled science, but also perhaps as a kind of religious quest. As stimulus to further discussion, it points to encounter between unknown others as the historical and ethnographic site of a classic focus in the anthropology of religion, namely so-called 'cargo cults' in Melanesia.

Discussion: The required readings offer ethnographic material relating to 'first contact' and 'cargo cults' in Melanesia as good to think about the relationship between wonder and religion.

Required reading for class (3 items)

"Prologue" - Kenelm Burridge, 2004 [1960] Chapter | Essential

Chapter 3. "First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World" - Bob Connolly, Robin Anderson Chapter | Essential

The Decomposition of an Event - Marilyn Strathern, 1992 Article | Essential

Film (1 items)

First contact - Bob Connolly, Robin Anderson, 2007 Audio-visual document | Background

Ethnographic studies (5 items)

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To be Makiran is to see like Mr Parrot: the anthropology of wonder in Solomon Islands - Michael W. Scott, 2016 Article | Background

Ultima Thule: Anthropology and the Call of the Unknown - Kirsten Hastrup, 2007 Article | Background

UFOs, Otherness, and Belonging: Identity in Remote Aboriginal Australia - Eirik Saethre, 2007-03 Article | Background

Chapter 2. "Sons of the Female Spirit, Men of Steel" - Jeffrey Clark, 2000 Chapter | Background

Chapter 7. "Mimesis, Transgression, and the Raising of White Children" - Andrew Lattas, 1998 Chapter | Background | Library note added to reading list item:The Library is unable to provide an electronic copy of an extract from this book due to copyright restrictions placed on it by the publisher.

Theoretical, historical, and comparative works (10 items)

How to capture the ‘wow’: R.R. Marett's notion of awe and the study of religion - Birgit Meyer, 2016 Article | Background

Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact - Ghassan Hage, 2014 Article | Background

Arts of wonder: enchanting secularity--Walter de Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy - Jeffrey L. Kosky, 2013 Book | Background

Alterity and Autochthony: Austronesian Cosmographies of the Marvelous - Marshall Sahlins Article | Background

On Wondering about Wonder: Melanesians and the Cargo - Garry Trompf, 2004 Chapter | Background

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics - Jane Bennett, c2001 Book | Background | See especially Chapters 1 and 2, ‘The Wonder of Minor Experiences’ and ‘Cross-Species Encounters’

Marvelous possessions: the wonder of the New World - Stephen Greenblatt, 1991 Book | Background

Ulysses' sail: an ethnographic odyssey of power, knowledge, and geographical distance - Mary W. Helms, 1988 Book | Background

Chapter 2. "Culture as Creativity" - Roy Wagner, 1981

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Chapter | Background

The sacred and the profane: the nature of religion - Mircea Eliade, 1959 Book | Background | READ: Esp. Introduction and Chapter 1.

Week 4: Explaining myth, ritual, and symbol: manifest versus latent functions (13 items)

Orientation to Week 4 (1 items)

Questions: If our myths aren't 'true' and our rituals don't 'work', what are they good for? Are they therapeutic, social, political, poetic, or variously all of the above? If so, why are they often so obscure about it?

Lecture: This lecture has two main components. First, with reference to classic examples from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Max Gluckman and Clifford Geertz, it establishes what functionalist analyses of religious phenomena tend to look like and illustrates the relationship between social and psychological functionalism. Second, the lecture demonstrates, based on ethnographic material from my current research, how difficult it is to come up with analyses of religious data that are not-in one way or another-essentially functionalist. This serves to raise the question: is it a problem if we ignore or discredit what people say their religious practices and experiences are about and always discover that they are really about something else (politics, economics, etc.)?

Discussion: The required readings juxtapose one analysis (Sangren) that is explicitly functionalist and one that is not (Comaroff and Comaroff) in order to bring into relief the implicit functionalism of the latter.

Required reading for class (2 items)

Dialectics of Alienation: Individuals and Collectivities in Chinese Religion - P. Steven Sangren, 1991 Article | Essential

Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony - Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, 1999 Article | Essential

Recent and classic ethnographic studies (7 items)

Engaging the Spirits of the Dead: Soul-Calling Rituals and the Performative Construction of Efficacy - Kirsten W. Endres, 2008 Article | Background

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The Sacred as Alienated Social Consciousness: Ritual and Cosmology - Terence Turner, 2001 [1997] Chapter | Background

The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu ritual - Victor W. Turner, ca.2002 Book | Background | READ: Esp. chapters I, II, & IV

Chapter VII. "The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action" - Godfrey Lienhardt, 1961 Chapter | Background

Chapter IX. "Myth as a Justification for Faction and Social Change" - Edmund Leach, 1954 Chapter | Background

Chatper 3. "Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa" - Max Gluckman, 1963 [1953] Chapter | Background

Myth in Primitive Psychology - Bronislaw Malinowski, 1948 Chapter | Background

Theoretical and comparative work (3 items)

Chapter 2. "Initiation" - Maurice Bloch, 1992 Chapter | Background

Theories of primitive religion - E. E. Evans-Pritchard, University of Wales, 1965 Book | Background | READ: pp 1-77

Chapter X. "The Effectiveness of Symbols" - Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1963 [1949] Chapter | Background | READ "The Effectiveness of Symbols", chapter X

Week 5: How anthropologists think about ‘primitive rationality’ (19 items)

Orientation to Week 5 (1 items)

Questions: What assumptions about human rationality have informed functionalist explanations of myth, ritual, and symbol? Are there alternative standards of rationality? Are some beliefs and practices simply irrational, or do different social contexts entail their own rationality? What attempts have anthropologists made to lay the problem of rationality to rest and have any succeeded?

Lecture: This week's lecture introduces my own analytical narrative of three major trajectories within the anthropology of religion since the early twentieth century, emphasizing how they continue to configure how anthropologists study religion. This narrative begins with a debate between Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl regarding the relationship between so-called 'primitive' and 'modern' mentalities, or rationalities. Durkheim argued for continuity between 'primitive' and 'modern' rationalities, regarding the former as foundational to the development of the latter. Lévy-Bruhl argued, in

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contrast, that the two are discontinuous and incompatible. In his day, Lévy-Bruhl lost the debate. Since then, two related but distinctive approaches to religion have emerged from Durkheim's position: cognitivist approaches and contextualist or hermeneutical approaches. At the same time, however, a third trajectory has remained in dialogue with Lévy-Bruhl's position and has re-theorized 'primitive mentality' in terms such as 'personhood', 'animism', relational ontology, and alterity. This narrative of three trajectories flowing from the problem of so-called 'primitive rationality' serves as a hinge within this term of teaching: it both builds on previous weeks' themes and structures our topics for the rest of the course.

Discussion: The required readings invite students to consider Bruce Kapferer as a currently influential anthropologist who has moved from the contextualist to the third or alternative trajectory in the study of religion. In the first reading ('Introduction'), Kapferer lays out his own analytical history of what he terms the problem of 'reason' and 'apparent unreason' in anthropology. In the second ('Sorcery, Modernity, and the Constitutive Imaginary'), he attempts to move beyond contextualist methodologies by analyzing the Sri Lankan Suniyama anti-sorcery ritual as a performance that contains its own reality and truth.

Required reading for class (2 items)

Outside All Reason: Magic, Sorcery and Epistemology in Anthropology. - Kapferer, Bruce, 2002 Article | Essential

Sorcery, Modernity and the Constitutive Imaginary - Kapferer, Bruce, 2002 Article | Essential

Ethnographic studies (4 items)

Witches' wealth: witchcraft, confession, and Christianity in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea - Ryan Schram, 2010 Article | Background

The bones affair: indigenous knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an Amazonian case - Carlos Fausto, 2002 Article | Background

Do kamo: person and myth in the Melanesian world - Maurice Leenhardt, 1979 Book | Background | Esp. Chapter 12: Myth

Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande - E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1937 Book | Background

Theoretical and comparative work (12 items)

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Virtuality - Bruce Kapferer, 2008 Chapter | Background

Chapter 3. "Belief and Worship" - Valerio Valeri, 2001 [1992] Chapter | Background

Did Lucien Lévy-Bruhl Answer the Objections Made in Les Formes élémentaires? - Dominique Merllié Chapter | Background

Chapter XII. "Participation and Myth" - James Clifford, 1982 Chapter | Background

Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim and the Scientific Revolution - Robin Horton, 1973 Chapter | Background

Apparently Irrational Beliefs - Dan Sperber, 1982 Chapter | Background

Rationality - Bryan R. Wilson, 1970 Book | Background

Theories of primitive religion - E. E. Evans-Pritchard, University of Wales, 1965 Book | Background | pp. 78-122

The notebooks on primitive mentality - Lucien Le ́ vy-Bruhl, 1975 Book | Background

Primitive mentality - L. Levy-Bruhl, L. A. Clare, 1923 Book | Background

Durkheim on religion - E ́ mile Durkheim, W. S. F. Pickering, c1994 Book | Background | READ Durkheim, "Review [of] ‘Lévy-Bruhl—Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures’ [i.e., How Natives Think]" and "Emile Durkheim—Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse Le système totémique en Australie", pp. 169-173

How natives think - Lucien Le ́ vy-Bruhl, Lilian A. Clare, 1984 Book | Background | READ esp. Part I

Week 6: Reading Week (1 items)

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Reading week.

Week 7: The cognitive science of religion (14 items)

Orientation to Week 7 (1 items)

Questions: Is religion best investigated in terms of psychological evolution and cognition? What are cognitive anthropologists saying about 'belief'? How do cognitivists define 'religion', implicitly or explicitly? What is the role of ethnography in the cognitive anthropology of religion?

Lecture: This lecture looks at the work of four contemporary cognitive anthropologists-Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, Maurice Bloch, and Harvey Whitehouse-in order to alert students to the internal debates that characterize this trajectory within the anthropology of religion. It is argued that Claude Lévi-Strauss stands as a key ancestral figure for cognitivist anthropology in general, and that cognitivist approaches to religion all, in one way or another, treat religion as a problem that remains implicitly a problem of 'apparently irrational beliefs'.

Discussion: The two required readings exemplify two different cognitivist approaches to the study of religion. Students are encouraged to attend to how the two authors use and/or generate ethnographic data differently.

Required reading for class (2 items)

Strong Words and Forceful Winds: Religious Experience and Political Process in Melanesia - Harvey Whitehouse, 1994 Article | Essential

Ancestors and the Afterlife - Rita Astuti, 2007 Chapter | Essential

Further reading (9 items)

Anthropology and the Cognitive Science of Religion: A Critical Assessment - Carles Salazar, 2010 Article | Background

Cargo Cults and Cognitive Science: The Dynamics of Creativity and Repetition in the Pomio Kivung - Andrew Lattas, 2010 Chapter | Background

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Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central - Maurice Bloch, 2008 Article | Background

The mind possessed: the cognition of spirit possession in an Afro-Brazilian religious tradition - Emma Cohen, 2007 Book | Background

Introduction. In "Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science" - James Laidlaw, Harvey Whitehouse Chapter | Background | READ "Introduction", pp. 3-34 - Unable to scan as another chapter from this book has already been scanned for this course.

A Well-Disposed Social Anthropologist’s Problems with the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion’ - James Laidlaw, 2007 Chapter | Background | Library note added to reading list item:Unable to scan as another chapter from this book has already been scanned for this course.

Chapter 7. "Nature versus Culture Reassessed" - G. E. R. Lloyd, 2007 Chapter | Background

Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function - Pascal Boyer, 2003-3 Article | Background

Radical interpretation in religion - Nancy Frankenberry, 2002 Book | Background

Foundational readings (2 items)

Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations - Dan Sperber, 1985 Article | Background

Chapter 3. "Claude Levi-Strauss Today" - Dan Sperber, 1985 Chapter | Background

Week 8: Cosmology and order (14 items)

Orientation to Week 8 (1 items)

Questions: What do we mean by cosmology? Does it necessarily imply a static bounded whole? What is the relationship among cosmology, ontology, and practice? Is everything one or many? What constitutes order and what constitutes chaos? How are order and chaos valued and how are they related to other oppositions?

Lecture: The previous lecture traced one line of intellectual descent from Durkheim through Lévi-Strauss to 'the cognitive science of religion'. In the present lecture, the theme of cosmology allows us to explore another line of descent via Lévi-Strauss-one that

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synthesizes structuralism with contextualist or hermeneutic approaches. Since the 1980s a number of anthropologists-especially Marshall Sahlins and several of his students-have emphasized meaning-making within cosmological systems and have sought to analyze the relationships among cosmology, ontology, and practice. Close examination of their work leads to the observation that, in some quarters, the study of cosmology is now merging into the third trajectory, i.e. the re-theorization of 'primitive mentality' as 'personhood', 'animism', relational ontology, and alterity (anticipated in week 5 and treated in the remaining weeks of the course).

Discussion: The required readings position Michael Scott's concept of onto-praxis as a development of Marshall Sahlins's concept of mytho-praxis and highlight the ways in which both anthropologists appeal to 'cosmology' as a context that both informs and is informed by social practices.

Required reading for class (2 items)

Chapter 1. "Supplement to the Voyage of Cook; or, le calcul sauvage" - Marshall Sahlins, 1985 Chapter | Essential

Introduction: Comparative Ontology - Michael W. Scott, 2007 Chapter | Essential

Further reading (8 items)

Cosmogony Today: Counter-cosmogony, Perspectivism, and the Return of Anti-Biblical Polemic - Michael W. Scott, 2015 Article | Background

Framing cosmologies: the anthropology of worlds - 2014 Book | Background

Contemporary Cosmologies, Critical Reimaginings - Allen Abramson, Martin Holbraad, 2012 Article | Background

Hybridity, Vacuity, and Blockage: Visions of Chaos from Anthropological Theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa - Michael W. Scott, 2005 Article | Background

Chapter 4. "Descendants of the One" - Michael J. Puett, 2002 Chapter | Background

Closure and Multiplication: An Essay on Polynesian Cosmology and Ritual - Alfred Gell, 1995 Chapter | Background

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Magical arrows: the Maori, the Greeks, and the folklore of the universe - Gregory Allen Schrempp, c1992 Book | Background | READ esp. Introduction and Chapter 3

The concept of flow in Rwandan popular medicine - Christopher C. Taylor, 1988-1 Article | Background

Some key monographs (3 items)

Cosmologies in the making: a generative approach to cultural variation in Inner New Guinea - Fredrik Barth, 1987 Book | Background

In the society of nature: a native ecology in Amazonia - Philippe Descola, 1994 Book | Background

Kingship and sacrifice: ritual and society in ancient Hawaii - Valerio Valeri, 1985 Book | Background

Week 9: Animism: from epistemology to ontology (19 items)

Orientation to Week 9 (1 items)

Questions: What makes the 'new animism' new? What –isms are not animism and why? Why has the study of animism moved from 'knowing' to 'being', and does this move solve the 'primitive rationality' problem?

Lecture: This lecture traces a third trajectory of ongoing fallout from the debate between Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl regarding the relationship between 'modern' and 'primitive' rationalities. Like the other two, this trajectory owes much to Lévi-Strauss, but also revisits Lévy-Bruhl's model of two incompatible 'mentalities', re-conceptualizing them as two conflicting ontologies: Cartesian dualism and animism. The recent contributions of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold are treated with a view to identifying similarities and differences across their understandings of the new animism and how it differs from the old animism of E. B. Tylor (discussed in lecture 2). Controversies within this trajectory are also highlighted, such as the question of whether reality is one or many, and the problems posed by reading non-Western ontologies through the lens of a Western philosophical tradition like phenomenology.

Discussion: The required readings invite students to look closely at a phenomenologically oriented re-conceptualization of animism. The Nadasdy reading also anticipates a theme in the further readings for week 11: the anthropology of extraordinary experiences.

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Required reading for class (2 items)

Chapter 6. "A Circumpolar Night’s Dream" - Tim Ingold, 2000 Chapter | Essential

The gift in the animal: The ontology of hunting and human-animal sociality - PAUL NADASDY, 2007-02 Article | Essential

Further readings, theoretical and ethnographic (12 items)

All my relatives: exploring Lakota ontology belief, and ritual - David C. Posthumus, 2018 Book | Background

Southeast Asian Animism in Context - Kaj Århem, 2016 Chapter | Background

Spirit of the Future: Movement, Kinetic Distribution, and Personhood among Siberian Eveny - Olga Ulturgasheva, 2016 Article | Background

The Return of the Animists: Recent Studies of Amazonian Ontologies - Luiz Costa, Carlos Fausto, 2010 Article | Background

Static Crosses and Working Spirits: Anti-Syncretism and Agricultural Animism in Catholic West Flores - Catherine Allerton, 2009 Article | Background

Ontology, Ethnography, Archaeology: an Afterword on the Ontography of Things - Martin Holbraad, 2009 Article | Background

Beyond Nature and Culture - Philippe Descola, 2007 Article | Background

Feasting on People - by Carlos Fausto, 2007 Article | Background

The attachment of the soul to the body among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador - Laura Rival, 2005 Article | Background

The Politics of Animism - John Clammer, 2004 Chapter | Background

Not Animal, Not Not-Animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs - Rane Willerslev, 2004 Article | Background

Chapter 7. "Totemism, Animism and the Depiction of Animals" - Tim Ingold, 2000

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Chapter | Background

Foundational readings for the new animism (4 items)

Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practic - Philippe Descola, 1996 Chapter | Background

Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism - Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 1998 Article | Background

Rethinking Animism: Thoughts from the Infancy of Our Discipline - Martin D. Stringer, 1999 Article | Background

'Animism' Revisited - Nurit Bird-David, 1999 Article | Background

Week 10: Ecology as ‘sacred’: the union of opposites? (18 items)

Orientation to Week 10 (1 items)

Questions: How has semiotics challenged the great divides between human and animal, biotic and abiotic? What does it mean to be alive? Can the world be 'enchanted' without recourse to the 'supernatural'? If so, what might that mean for the modern distinction between religion and science?

Lecture: This lecture continues to explore the latest developments in the third trajectory and argues that there are grounds for seeing these developments as, in and of themselves, 'religious'-anthropology becomes a field site for the anthropology of religion. Today, anthropologists such as Tim Ingold, Eduardo Kohn, and Deborah Bird Rose are challenging the conventional divides between meaning and materiality, concepts and things, organisms and environment, animate and inanimate in ways that arguably constitute a new form of 'pantheism' (the identification of everything with the divine). The ideas of two important precursors-Gregory Bateson and Charles Saunders Pierce-are discussed in detail as essential background for understanding these current innovations.

Discussion: The readings have been selected to provoke discussion of whether and how anthropological approaches to ecology may themselves be sites of religion.

Required Reading for Class (2 items)

Sacred Site, Ancestral Clearing, and Environmental Ethics - Deborah Bird Rose, 2001 Chapter | Essential

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Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought - Tim Ingold, 2006-03 Article | Essential

Further Readings (7 items)

On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene - Holly Jean Buck, 2015 Article | Background

How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human - Eduardo Kohn, 2013 Book | Background

Wild dog dreaming: love and extinction - Deborah Bird Rose, 2011 Book | Background

Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description - Tim Ingold, 2011 Book | Background

Will non-humans be saved? An argument in ecotheology - Bruno Latour, 2009 Article | Background

How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement - Eduardo Kohn, 2007 Article | Background

Ecology as Cosmological Analysis - Philippe Descola, 2005 Chapter | Background

Some theoretical precedents (8 items)

A legacy for living systems: Gregory Bateson as precursor to biosemiotics - Jesper Hoffmeyer, 2008 Book | Background | See Chaper 1: Angels Fear Revisited; Chapter 2: From Thing to Relation; and Chapter 13: Bateson and Peirce on the Pattern that Connects and the Sacred

Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred - Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson, c2005 Book | Background

We have never been modern - Bruno Latour, 1993 Book | Background

Form, Substance, and Difference - Gregory Bateson, 2000 [1970] Chapter | Background

Upside-down Gods: Gregory Bateson's world of difference - Peter Harries-Jones, 2016 Book | Background | Esp. Chapters 8 and 9.

Nature in the Active Voice - Val Plumwood, 2009 Article | Background

18/21 10/02/21 AN301/ AN402 - The Anthropology of Religion | Reading lists @ LSE

What is a Sign? - Charles S. Peirce, 1998 [1894] Chapter | Background

The varieties of religious experience - William James, 1985 Book | Background | Esp. Lecture 2.

Week 11: In search of being itself: anthropology as religion? (18 items)

Orientation to Week 11 (1 items)

Questions: How have their encounters with alterity inspired some anthropologists to rethink anthropological practice? Is there something intrinsically unethical about Cartesian ontology? If so, is anthropology necessarily unethical? Do anthropologists need to become nondualists? In what ways might some developments in the anthropology of religion be seen as a religious quest? Are some anthropologists smuggling a 'virtual' God back in by the backdoor?

Lecture: In week 3, the lecture considered whether there might be something fundamentally religious about the experience of encounter with the unknown, especially unknown otherness. It suggested that, to the extent that anthropology is historically rooted in European encounters with distant others, it can entail arguably religious qualities and experiences. This final lecture revisits these issues in two stages. First, I take a closer look at how encounter with otherness-or alterity, as it is often termed-has inspired some anthropologists to rethink the whole project of anthropology in ways that appear to make anthropology look more like religion. Second, I examine the criteria I use to justify this claim, conceding that many of them depend on the modern concept of religion that, as Talal Asad pointed out, is based on Christianity. This self-interrogation leads, in turn, to some closing reflections on the ongoing project of formulating an analytically viable and useful account of religion for the contemporary social sciences.

Discussion: Two recent articles by Martin Holbraad and Rane Willerslev have been selected to stimulate discussion about whether and how these anthropologists of religion are on a quest for the wonder of becoming-other.

Required Reading for Class (2 items)

Ontography and Alterity: Defining Anthropological Truth - Holbraad, Martin, Summer 2009 Article | Essential

Frazer strikes back from the armchair: a new search for the animist soul - RANE WILLERSLEV, 2011 Article | Essential

19/21 10/02/21 AN301/ AN402 - The Anthropology of Religion | Reading lists @ LSE

Further Readings (15 items)

Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation - Rane Willerslev, Christian Suhr, 2018 Article | Background | In this issue of HAU see also the rejoinders to this article by T. M. Lurhmann, Michael W. Scott, and Jacob Copeman and John Hagstrom, and the reply by Willerslev and Suhr.

Fictionalizing anthropology: encounters and fabulations at the edges of the human - Stuart McLean, 2017 Book | Background

Chapter 7. "Other Worlds or Ours? Sacred/Secular/Gnostic/Modern" - Joel S. Kahn, 2016 Chapter | Background

To Be a Wonder: Anthropology, Cosmology, and Alterity - Michael W Scott, 2014 Chapter | Background

Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously? - Rane Willerslev, 2013 Article | Background

Ontology’ is Just a New Word for ‘Culture’: Against the Motion - Martin Holbraad, June 2010 Article | Background

Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativity Beyond “Nature” and “Culture” - Stuart McLean, 2009 Article | Background

A Conversation with Philippe Descola - Eduardo Kohn Article | Background

Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘bomb’? - Bruno Latour, 2009-04 Article | Background

'Preface', 'Introduction' and 'Conclusion' in "Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice" - T. M. S. Evens, 2008 Chapter | Background

How to Learn in an Afro-Brazilian Spirit Possession Religion: Ontology and Multiplicity in Candomblé - Marcio Goldman, 2007 Chapter | Background

Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation - Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Article | Background

Reports from a wild country: ethics for decolonisation - Deborah Bird Rose, 2004 Book | Background

Being changed: the anthropology of extraordinary experience - Jean-Guy Goulet, David E. Young, 1994 Book | Background

20/21 10/02/21 AN301/ AN402 - The Anthropology of Religion | Reading lists @ LSE

The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention - Kirsten Hastrup, 1990-02 Article | Background

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