The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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well as the conceptual basics of the anthropology of religion is not feasible in the present context, so the emphasis is more on salient highlights, updates, and productive areas of debate. More extensive overviews and resources are available in the various texts/ textbooks, and readers on the subject.3

Pioneering the discipline

Anthropology enjoys an ongoing dialectical tension between its scientific and humanistic sides. This is well characterized by James Peacock in his valuable introductory text on the anthropological enterprise: ‘Emphasis on culture and recognition of the subjective aspect of interpretation link anthropology to the humanities, yet its striving for systematization, generalization, and precise observation reflects the inspiration of the sciences’ (1986: 92). When Sir Edward Tylor (1832–1917) was appointed to the first chair in anthropology in Britain (in the United States, Franz Boas [1858–1942] is regarded as the founding father of cultural anthropology), the field was then described as the ‘science of man.’ Influenced by the rationalist and evolutionist views of the nineteenth century, Tylor speculated that humans developed the idea of a soul, and from that, spirits, who might also inhabit natural phenomena, in their attempt to rationalize mysterious experiences such as dreams, trances, and hallucinations (1970 [1871]). He postulated that this early human belief, which he termed animism, eventually gave way to polytheism and monotheism, although traces of spiritualism persisted in beliefs such as reincarnation and immortality of the soul.

French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw religious beliefs and concepts as the product of particular social conditions, rather than in intellectualist terms. In his classic work, Les Formes Elémentaires de la Vie Religieuse (Durkheim 1965 [1912]), he argued that religion, predicated on a distinction between the sacred and the profane, was an essentially social phenomenon. Like many of the pioneering functionalist and evolutionist scholars, he turned to what he perceived to be some of the earliest and most elemental forms of religion, namely the totemic beliefs of the hunting and gathering Australian Aborigines. He argued that totemic symbols were mystically charged emblems of group loyalties, and that ritual expressed and strengthened the social organism. In fact, the ‘collective effervescence’ experienced at these ritual events was, he proposed, at the heart of the religious impulse. Durkheim’s insistence on the holistic approach was critiqued by I. M. Lewis, who viewed it as a type of ‘social determinism’ that trumped any ‘historical determinism’ or questions about the origins of social institutions (1976: 52). It did, however, constitute a significant advance over the decontextualized, comparative approach of Sir James Frazer, in his landmark study of ritual and magic from classic texts around the world, The Golden Bough (1996 [1890]). Frazer believed there was an evolution in the ways in which people made sense of, and tried to control, their worlds, from magic, through religion, to science.

Frazer’s lack of recognition of the scientific knowledge of ‘primitive humanity’ was roundly criticized by subsequent scholars. For example, Mary Douglas argued that the primitive worldview was not compartmentalized, but far more integrated and holistic than modern thought (Douglas 1975). Moreover, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) challenged the ‘armchair anthropology’ of Frazer and other scholars of the time and became, in I. M. Lewis’ words, ‘the pioneer, bush-whacking anthropologist’ who turned fieldwork in exotic cultures into a doctrine and tenet of professionalism (Lewis 1976: 55–56). Based on the two years that he spent among the Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific, Malinowski explained religion and science in light of his functionalist theory of human needs (1954 [1925]). Magical rituals

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were performed when the situation was dangerous and unpredictable, such as fishing at sea, while religious rituals offered psychological assurance in the face of death.

Malinowski’s contemporary A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was more theoretically inclined and he developed the idea of ‘structural-functionalism’ (1952). From his viewpoint, social life was predicated on an orderly, organized foundation, and social organizations functioned in order to sustain social solidarity. His work spawned a whole generation of scholars. Drawing more on structural linguistics, French scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) promoted the idea of structures or patterns of culture existing at various levels of consciousness. These structures have functional significance, serving to resolve contradictions and binary oppositions in human life (Lewis 1976: 65–66). Later scholars, such as Luc de Heusch, have adapted structuralist Âprinciples to the complexities of religion elsewhere in the world (Heusch 1982).

With E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s still influential work on the thought of the Azande people of central Africa came a shift in focus from that of ‘structure’ to that of ‘meaning’ (EvansPritchard 1937). He was particularly interested in how their beliefs in witchcraft, oracles, and magic translated into the actions of their everyday lives and social relations. His study raised important questions about rationality and cultural translation, subsequently generating a body of literature on the similarities or differences between unfalsifiable, so-called primitive belief systems and supposedly rational scientific worldviews (see Gellner 1999: 29). Some of this discussion centered on the rationality of millenarian movements such as the ‘cargo cults’ of the Pacific region, in achieving political ends (Worsley 1968; Lattas 1998). Rodney Needham questioned the use of the term ‘belief’ in many non-Western cultures (Needham 1972). He preferred the notion of ‘idea,’ since it conveyed the embedded aspect of cosmologies, and did not connote distance between ‘observers’ and ‘informants.’

The intellectualist interpretation was given a new lease of life with Robin Horton’s classic, and much debated, article, ‘African traditional thought and Western science’ (Horton 1993). In it he demonstrates the ways in which traditional African cultures and Western cultures both seek to explain, predict and control events. In addition to the continuities, he argues that the former thought-system is more closed than the latter. Ultimately, Horton’s intellectualism and Malinowski’s functionalism were more positive about the role of religion than French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who contended that the thought of primitive people was pre-logical, as it did not distinguish between cause and effect.

From modes of thought to modes of practice

Viewing cosmologies as resources for, rather than determinants of, action can help lessen the persistence of evolutionist or binary thinking, argues Michael Herzfeld (2001: 192f.). It may also undermine the tendency to treat cosmologies in isolation, along with ‘religion.’ He advocates greater recognition of the role of choice and agency in how people (whether ‘primitives,’ ethnographers, or scientists) organize their ideas about the universe. Addressing the question of myth, Herzfeld is troubled by the ongoing distinction between mythical and historical narratives, as held by Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-Strauss among others, as it leads to larger social distinctions between primitive or archaic and modern, and literate and non-literate societies. It also fails to recognize the ideological manipulation in both, as in nationalist myths of origin. So, while drawing on the insights of some of the early functionalist accounts of myth as providing models for human behavior, explaining disorder and failure (theodicy), and creating ‘timeless temporalities,’ anthropology must be true to

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its comparativism, and turn its lens onto the cosmology of the West itself, revealing its own cultural specificities (Herzfeld 2001: 206).

In his remarks on ritual, Herzfeld again underscores the need to not get too predicated on rites as reordering and instrumental (ibid.: 257f.). He states that all rituals are about time and the passage of existence. This is well illustrated by Arnold van Gennep’s (1960) three-stage model of rituals (separation, marginality or liminality, and aggregation) which Victor Turner (1974) then gave more of a social interpretation. The latter argued that ritual could generate ‘communitas’ (the realm of anti-structure and the leveling of differences), allowing people to overcome uncertainty and ambiguity at the key transitional moments in their lives. Turner’s work remains very popular with religion scholars because of its attention to indigenous cultural notions, notably Ndembu symbolism and ritual, and broader humanist concerns (Gellner 1999: 30).

Current scholarship on ritual evidences the shift in focus from structure to agency, and the influence of practice theory. Catherine Bell prefers the term ‘ritualization’ over a more objectified notion of ritual, viewing it as ‘a matter of variously culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors’ (Bell 1992: 74). Thomas Csordas’ analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement serves as a fine example of the imaginative and complex ways in which ritual life can be interpreted (Csordas 1997).

From meaning to power

The emphasis on religion as a social institution by earlier anthropologists, notably of the British school, was given a new orientation in the 1970s by the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, in an influential essay entitled, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’ (Geertz 1973). Michael Lambek characterizes Geertz as ‘the major exponent of a Weber-inspired interpretive anthropology which attempts to understand religion within a broadly cultural/symbolic domain, but also with reference to public circumstances in all their messiness’ (Lambek 2008: 57). Geertz is well known for his advocacy of the need for ‘thick description,’ that is, interpretation of ‘natives’’ own interpretations of events, based on the anthropologist’s empirical knowledge. As noted by David Gellner (1999: 20), this change marked the move from ‘etic’ (looking at cultures from the outside and in the light of broader principles) to ‘emic’ (viewing cultures from the inside and in terms of their own categories) approaches.

An important counterpoint to Geertz’s interpretivist approach is the work of Talal Asad, notably in his well-known piece, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’ (1993: 27–54). In this trenchant critique of essentialist definitions of religion, he claims that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’ (ibid.: 29). To insist that religion has an autonomous essence, and is conceptually separate from the domain of power, is, he argues, a modern Western norm generated by post-Reformation history. This account, Lambek states, is ‘indicative of a shift away from a symbolic anthropology toward a poststructuralist one that is more centrally concerned with power and discipline and with the way that religious subjects (i.e. practitioners) are formed’ (Lambek 2008: 110). It also reflects efforts to contextualize ethnographic knowledge, notably in terms of the various colonial settings in which such knowledge was generated.

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Historicizing and problematizing

Similar concerns to problematize and locate dominant anthropological concepts are found in the historical anthropology of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. For example, in their edited volume on Modernity and its Malcontents, they state decisively at the outset that the concept of modernity ‘is profoundly ideological and profoundly historical’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xi). As with much of their influential output, they tie their theoretical strengths into exciting empirical explorations that relate to the subject matter of ‘religion’

– generally situated in colonial and/or post-colonial Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1992). The authors in the volume on modernity, all former students of the Comaroffs, share a common orientation,

that tries to dissolve the division between synchrony and diachrony, ethnography and historiography; that refuses to separate culture from political economy, insisting instead on the simultaneity of the meaningful and the material in all things; that acknowledges – no, stresses – the brute realities of colonialism and its aftermath, without assuming that they have robbed African peoples of their capacity to act on the world.

(ibid.: xi)

Their ‘analytic gaze’ is turned upon the role of ritual in African modernity/modernities. It yields some excellent studies of the persistence, even efflorescence, of occultism, magic, and witchcraft in late twentieth-century African communities, as paradoxical consequences of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ (ibid.). For example, based on her field studies of reports about witchcraft and other supernatural activities in the popular press in Onitsha, a large Igbo-speaking market town in south-eastern Nigeria, Misty Bastian argues that witchcraft is not seen as solely associated with the ‘traditional’ or the ‘village’ (Bastian 1993). In fact, it may even gain new power and meanings from the urban context, as it constitutes a useful medium for making sense of the complexity of West African life experiences (cf. Meyer 1999). Anthropologists have long believed that one of the most distinguishing characteristics of a society is the way that it deals with affliction and suffering. Witchcraft beliefs and practices offer a particularly illuminating window onto such existential questions. Building on, as well as contesting, the earlier analytical foundations laid by Evans-Pritchard (1937), and I. M. Lewis (1986), recent scholarship has generated some insightful analyses of the ways in which ideas about occult practice inform contemporary African social, political, and religious life (for example, Geschiere 1997; Bongmba 2001; Niehaus 2001; Ciekawy 1998; Hackett 2003).

The rethinking of the traditional/modern dichotomy in anthropological research is linked to the renewed appreciation for the historical dimension. Johannes Fabian argues that suppressing temporality allows investigators to ignore the fact that the people they study are actually living in the same time period as they are (1983). Contemporary anthropologists tend to be more interested in how various populations and interest groups use their images of the past to constitute or strengthen present interests, and also how far those who study such groups are themselves implicated in such processes. Herzfeld reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that ‘[t]he idea that we somehow stand outside our object of study is preposterous’ (Herzfeld 2001: 55, emphasis added). The adjudication of the accuracy of historical accounts is controlled by the powerful, whose own ‘literal’ records need also to be read as ‘interpretational devices’ (ibid.: 62).

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The reproduction of the past, or its suppression, through social and ritual performance, allows people to come to terms with ‘a discomfiting present’ (Herzfeld 2001: 58). In her illuminating and multi-layered work on West African slavery (which Herzfeld alludes to), Rosalind Shaw describes how ritual practices, namely divination, and images of pernicious occult powers, may be understood as ‘memories of temporally removed processes created by an Atlantic commercial system that spanned three continents’ (2002: 3). Interestingly, Shaw notes that, while divinatory skills lost favor in the light of the hegemony of a twentiethcentury Western education, they enjoyed renewed salience with the catastrophic failure of Sierra Leone’s economy and infrastructure during the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence and entrenchment of the rebel war. She shows how mnemonic stories of European cannibalism under colonialism and present-day popular stories of ‘big persons,’ namely national politicians and top civil servants, rumored to have gained their prestige through evil ritual practices prescribed by diviners, serve as social critiques. These stories draw on colonial and precolonial memories of power and its abuses. It is noteworthy that the memories of suffering and exploitation detailed in her study are condensed and expressed via ritual means, as well as highly charged sacred objects and locations. Stephan Palmié’s riveting study of AfroCuban religious culture also discloses how local forms of moral imagination constitute a response to the violent slave-trading past, rivaling Western understandings of modernity and rationality (2002).

Experience and experiencing

As with many other disciplines in the human sciences, anthropology experienced a ‘crisis of representation’ and the ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s and 1990s. In the wake of this critique, authors tend to be more transparent about their field experiences, even life trajectories. This is more than understanding positionality – frequently theoretical exploration is involved in trying to factor in the voices, or better still, knowledge, of women and indigenous peoples, or negotiate a balance between subjectivism and objectivism, for instance.4 Research on religion appears to compound these ethical and epistemological issues, yet such methodological reflection by scholars of religion has been less forthcoming (see, however, Spickard et al. 2002; Dempsey 2000).

As an anthropologist with comparative religion and philosophy strings to his bow, Michael Jackson has been exemplary on this question of reflexivity. In his much-praised book Paths Toward a Clearing (1989), he reflects on ‘the presumed coevalness that permits an ethnographer to have an understanding of the people he or she lives with and the images of radical otherness that pervade much anthropological writing’ (ibid.: x). Drawing on his skills as novelist and poet, and on theoretical ideas from the existentialist and pragmatist traditions, Jackson focuses on experiences which are shared by both ethnographers and the people they study. He sets out to probe the dialectic at the heart of the anthropological project, namely the tensions between the search for universal cultural patterns and the empirical diversity of social life. He does this in the context of his experiences both among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone and the Walpiri of Central Australia (Jackson 1995).

In the course of twelve years of intensive research and collaboration with a Haitian Vodou priestess and her family in Brooklyn, Karen McCarthy Brown felt the need for more integrity, honesty, as well as imagination in her work (Brown 1991). Coming to the conclusion that fieldwork was more of a ‘social art’ than a social science, she wove fictional and autobiographical threads into the overall ethnographical analysis.5 Similarly, Sam Gill,

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a professor of religious studies known for his work on the religions of indigenous peoples, develops ‘storytracking’ as an approach which allows him to trace the ‘colonialist underbelly’ of academic accounts of the Arrente, a Central Australian people, as well as to examine critically his own life and the challenge of living ‘responsibly and decisively in a postmodern world’ (Gill 1998).6

The anthropological study of experience and its inter-subjective expressions was seen by Victor W. Turner as a way of revitalizing a field that had become stultified by structuralfunctional orthodoxy. He drew inspiration for this new hermeneutical and humanistic direction from the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Turner and Edward M. Bruner (but which appeared after Turner’s death in 1983), several leading scholars discuss the intersections and disjunctures between life as lived, life as experienced, and life as told (V. W. Turner and Bruner 1986; see, also, E. Turner 1985). Drawing on their own ethnographic experiences, they document and analyze the symbolic manifestations and processual activities that are the ‘structured units of experience,’ such as the enactment of rituals, manipulation of images, performance of drama, or recitation of texts.

Experience is arguably central to the rich body of literature on spirit possession and shamanism. These staple topics of the field have generated a variety of cross-cultural and multi-perspectival accounts.7 Paul Stoller’s own experiences of sorcery and possession among the Songhay of Niger inform his body of writings (Stoller 1995, 1997). He is particularly attentive to the neglected senses (smell, taste, and touch) in Western anthropology (Stoller 1989, 1997), as is Constance Classen, who calls for a ‘sensory anthropology’ (Classen 1993; see also Meyer 2006). In fact, it could be argued that all issues of importance to a culture, including religious beliefs and practices, are infused with sensory values, while not forgetting that these same values may be used to express and reinforce divisions and hierarchies pertaining to race, gender and religion (Herzfeld 2001: 252–253). Dutch anthropologists Rijk van Dijk and Peter Pels underscore the need to deconstruct the ‘politics of perception’ at play in the relationship between anthropologist and interlocutor(s) (Dijk and Pels 1996). This lies behind the Western privileging of natural over supernatural, or observation over occultism or secrecy, rather than any given ‘objectivity.’ In fact, they provocatively, yet persuasively, claim that ‘the anthropological study of religion tends to reflect, more than any other anthropological topic, the preconceptions of the Western observer’ (ibid.: 247). This is probably the reason, they suggest, why so little has been written (except autobiographically) about fieldwork on religion.

Focusing more on the experiences of those who are petitioners and practitioners, Adeline Masquelier explores the ‘ritual economy’ of bori spirit possession cults (albeit a small minority) in the town of Dogondoutchi in south-western Niger, as they contest the rapidly growing Muslim community which has taken control of the trade networks and village affairs (Masquelier 2001). She demonstrates how bori allows people to remember an idealized past as to articulate and negotiate the problems of contemporary life: ‘to transform the experience of novel, ambiguous, or threatening realities into symbols of a shared consciousness’ (ibid.: 10–11). Masquelier, in searching for the appropriate interpretive lens for her case study, provides a helpful overview of the rich literature on spirit possession (Masquelier 2001: 11–31; see, also, Boddy 1994). She rejects those approaches which explain possession in pathological, biological, or functionalist terms, as in I. M. Lewis’s well-known claim that both spirit possession and shamanism must be studied as social phenomena primarily to do with power and marginality (Lewis 1989). Masquelier opts instead for an approach which does

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justice to the therapeutic and performative aspects of possession, and which analyzes both its ‘cultural logic’ and wider historical and political contexts.

Engendering and embodying the field

At the outset of Feminism and Anthropology, Henrietta Moore stresses that ‘[t]he basis for the feminist critique is not the study of women, but the analysis of gender relations, and of gender as a structuring principle in all human societies’ (1988: vii). For example, she looks at the relation between pollution beliefs and sexual antagonism in Melanesian societies (ibid.: 16–21). Susan Sered articulates well why anthropologists cannot ignore the role of religion in this and other areas of social life, ‘[t]he ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’ serve as complementary tools for naturalizing and sanctifying difference, prestige, and hierarchy’ notably in regard to questions of gender (1999: 9). In some societies, the ritual context provides for much greater fluidity and reversal of gender roles (Sered 1999: 231–245).

‘Mutually toxic’ is the way Rosalind Shaw described the relationship between feminism and mainstream religious studies (in the early 1990s) (Shaw 1995). She saw a collision between the ‘view from below,’ contextual approach of feminist anthropology, and the ‘view from above,’ sui generis tradition of religious studies, with its privileging of texts and beliefs. However, Fiona Bowie argues that it is both possible and productive to accommodate the contested (Western origins, pro-women) and contesting (critical, deconstructive) nature of feminism in the study of religion (Bowie 2006: 82–106). Dorothy Hodgson’s rich and cogent ethnography of the encounter of the Maasai and Catholic missionaries in Tanzania, The Church of Women (2005), proves that gender is a non-negotiable element of any such study.

One of the positive offshoots of the feminist impulse in anthropological scholarship has been a heightened attention to the social and cultural significance of the body (Lock 1997). Earlier social scientists, such as Durkheim, were interested in the relationship between the physical, social, and psycho-social domains. Mary Douglas stimulated an appreciation of the body for its symbolic properties (Douglas 1970). Michael Lambek and Andrew Stathern, in their inter-regional study of the relations between persons and bodies in Africa and Melanesia, attribute the burgeoning interest in the body to its ‘increased visibility and objectification within late capitalist consumer society,’ as well to shifts in academic focus to the domain of lived experience and the effects of the social realm on the body, to the body as signifier, and to mind/body holistic issues (Lambek and Strathern 1998: 5). So, as they rightly suggest, the body constitutes a type of centripetal concept around which current academic interests can be organized. They underscore the significance of embodiment as the model (supported by current scientific findings in brain/body studies) for discussing the interactions of body and mind, notably in the context of illness and health.

Michael Jackson is critical of prevailing tendencies in anthropology to interpret embodied experience in terms of belief and language, and to treat the body as inert and passive (1989: 122). Reviewing his earlier analysis of Kuranko rituals of initiation, which was unduly abstract and intellectualist, he now holds that ‘what is done with the body is the ground of what is thought and said’ (1989: 131; cf. Moore 1996: 3–12, 79–97). He also maintains that this focus on bodily praxis is more empathic and in line with indigenous interpretations, rather than being dependent on external experts in symbolic analysis.

Some studies highlight the intersections between the body, religious symbols, and political and economic power. Jean Comaroff shows how Zionist Christians in South Africa appropriated symbols of power from the dress of colonialists and missionaries, transforming

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these into messages of dissent and self-empowerment (Comaroff 1985). Two edited collections (Arthur 1999; Arthur 2000) provide a fascinating range of examples of how religious dress may be used, especially in the case of women, to negotiate new social environments, or to control sexuality and social behavior.

Closely tied to studies of the body are studies of illness and healing from a range of different perspectives (see Csordas 2002). René Devisch’s detailed analysis of a healing cult, mbwoolu, among the Yaka of Congo (formerly Zaire) demonstrates how, through the use of liturgy and figurines, an ill person is ritually induced to die in his former condition and be reborn into a new one (1998). The imaginary, transgressive, and intimate qualities of this esoteric trance-possession cult differ from the more public, daytime ceremonies of initiation. Bruce Kapferer’s impressive study of Sinhalese exorcism rituals in Sri Lanka stresses the critical importance of performance and ceremony (1991 [1983]). Some studies address the impact of exogenous forces. For example, Stacey Pigg’s original, multi-level analysis of local theories of sickness and healing practices in Nepal weaves in the role of the state and international development agencies (1996).

In a lucid theoretical piece, ‘Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body’ (1998), Michael Lambek stresses that it is important not to view the mind–body relationship reductively or incommensurably, but as a ‘central dialectic in the ongoing constitution of human culture, society, and experience (and hence of anthropological theory)’ (ibid.: 120). The celebration of the body, and the turn to practice theory, as useful as they have been in transcending problematic dichotomies, should not, he insists, lead us to forget that ‘contemplative reason’ is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, regardless of time and place (ibid.: 119). This assertion seems especially pertinent to the study of religious worlds, still haunted as they are by the specters of essentialism, reductionism, and Orientalism (unintended or otherwise).

New moves and movements

Because of the quest for holistic analysis, anthropologists have been drawn over the years to the study of small-scale societies. This is where they find what Peacock calls ‘the interrelatedness of meaning and life, culture and existence’ (1986: 18). However, to downplay the exoticism and primitivism commonly associated with the work of Western anthropologists, and to address new social and cultural flows, many younger anthropologists have shifted their focus to new locations and phenomena. Some may still retain an interest in qualitative research on smaller, popular groups of other societies (as opposed to sociology’s more traditional emphasis on the quantitative analysis of [our own] large-scale societies), but they are increasingly attuned to the national and global forces which shape communal identity and survival. Diaspora, travel, tourism, and transnationalism are now on the agenda, reflecting the fluid, multi-sited nature of contemporary anthropology (Vertovec 2000; Johnson 2002a; Tsing 1993). Syncretism and fetishism have also been experiencing a revival of interest in the post-colonial world of hybridized and creolized cultures (Shaw and Stewart 1994; Apter and Pietz 1993).

The rich body of work now emerging on global Pentecostalism and its local manifestationsÂ

illustrates these new trends exceptionally well (Corten and Marshall-Fratani 2001; Harding 2000; Coleman 2000; Meyer 1999), building on earlier work on religious change and innovation (e.g. MacGaffey 1983). Evangelicalism and (Christian) fundamentalism have also been subject to anthropological analysis (DeBernardi 1999; Nagata 2001), and there is

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ongoing interest in missionary activities (Hackett 2008; Hodgson 2005; Buckser and Glazier 2003), and the problematic of conversion and cultural translation (Veer 1996). Joel Robbins has been instrumental in formulating an anthropology of Christianity (Robbins 2003, 2004; see, also Engelke and Tomlinson 2006; Cannell 2004). There is no shortage of works on Islam in a host of different contexts, whether in the public spheres of the Middle East (Eickelman and Salvatore 2002), Indonesia (Hefner 2000; Bowen 2003), Egypt (Starrett 2003), or Mali (Soares 2005). Anthropologists have also ventured into the worlds of neo-pagan/Wicca (Luhrmann 1989) and new age religions (Brown 1997), while Talal Asad has recently called for an anthropology of the secular (2003). Some have turned to cognitive anthropology for naturalistic explanations about religion (see, e.g. Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004).

Material and media cultures

One of the most significant new areas in the anthropological study of religion is that of the visual and performing arts (Hackett 1996; Coote and Shelton 1994).8 Theorists in this field have done much to problematize the concept of ‘primitive.’ An early landmark text, linking ritual and cosmology to art and architectonics, was James Fernandez’s dense study of a Central African religious movement, Bwiti (Fernandez 1982). This has been followed by other scholars who have explored the relationship between the materiality and spirituality of place (see, e.g. Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003).

The French anthropologists who conducted extensive research on the Dogon of Mali were also attentive to the intersections of their elaborate masking and cosmological traditions (Griaule 1938). Greater attention to material and performance culture elucidates hidden cosmological and philosophical meanings (see, e.g. Abiodun 1994), although much more needs to be done on music and dance. Studies on secrecy (Nooter 1993) and on divination (Pemberton III 2000) illustrate this well. In fact, the findings have served to challenge prevailing Western understandings of power and aesthetics, for in some African art forms the least visible and least attractive art works may be the most spiritually charged. The magnificent study, A Saint in the City (and museum exhibition), of the urban arts associated with Sheikh Amadou Bamba, the Senegalese Sufi mystic, illustrates the devotional power of his sacred images for members of the Mouride order the world over (Roberts et al. 2003).9 Ways of the Rivers is a stunning example of the intersections of art, religion, and the Âenvironment in the Niger Delta (Anderson and Peek 2002).10

Analyzing the growing interest in Australian Aboriginal visual culture, Fred Myers and Howard Morphy reveal how contemporary Australian Aboriginal spirituality is (re)constructed in the commodification of contemporary Aboriginal paintings (Myers 2002; Morphy 1992). These and other studies consider how indigenous art works circulate transculturally due to the art and tourist trades, and museum exhibitions, and how this affects their (original) ritual meanings and use, and present-day artistic production.

An exciting new area of investigation for anthropologists in general, and especially for those who focus on religion – notably the newer and/or minority movements seeking recognition and expansion – is the burgeoning mass media sector. Long absent from the purview of mainstream anthropology because of their perceived hegemonic and homogenizing tendencies, the media, particularly local and indigenous forms, are now the subject of conferences and publications (Ginsberg et al. 2002; Herzfeld 2001: 294–315). An important new volume assembles the work of several scholars who are engaged on the intersections of religion and media in a variety of locations (Meyer and Moors 2005; see,

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also, Meyer 2006; Witte 2003).11 It is in the area of audience reception, practice, and agency that anthropologists, with their professed interest in everyday experience, can make their contribution to media studies (Herzfeld 2001: 17, 302f.). Comparative scholarship on Islam and the media is particularly well developed both substantively and theoretically (Anderson 2003).

Perduring and maturing debates

The changes in focus and content, adumbrated above, serve to raise old and new questions about the conscience of present-day anthropologists, and their purpose in a world plagued by conflict and injustice. The first of these perduring concerns is epistemological, in that it problematizes the relations of power and authority (both at the empirical and representational level) between anthropologist and the ‘other’ (Moore 1999: 5). A methodological stance of ‘principled modesty’ (2001: 67) and ‘reflexive comparativism’ (ibid.: 65), are favored by Herzfeld as they keep the core issue of sameness and difference in creative tension, obviating any lapse into reductive or hegemonic interpretations. Armin Geertz believes that ethnographically oriented scholars of religion should not capitulate to those voices that privilege insider authority, knowledge, and cultural competence. He opts for a dialogical relationship between scholar and consultant, which he terms ‘ethnohermeneutics’ (2003).

The critical insights of cultural anthropologists on these ethical and methodological questions should give pause for reflection, and perhaps, encouragement, to all those who engage in ethnographic work on religion. In his appropriately titled Anthropology with an Attitude (2001), Johannes Fabian expresses his frustration that his anthropologist colleagues seem more preoccupied with how they represent their data than with how they obtain it. He acknowledges that the application of hermeneutics and literary criticism to anthropology has produced valuable critical insights, but finds that texts, as produced by the ethnographer as records of verbal interaction in the field, have generated false assurances of objectivity. He would like to see more emphasis on how cultural knowledge is imparted through performance and action, rather than as discursive information. He is critical of the privileging of concepts and images derived from vision, namely, participant observation, in the production of ‘objective’ ethnographic knowledge. A more materialist, and inter-subjective approach in fieldwork can, in his estimation, erase the hierarchy between knower and known.

In his inimitably provocative way, Fabian also asks why ‘ecstasis,’ should not be included in our theories of knowledge. By this he means (and this links to the section on experience above) ecstatic initiation rituals, hallucinogens, alcohol, exhausting dances, and all-night vigils and wakes.12 For that matter, he adds, there should be room for ‘passion,’ or referring to Michael Taussig’s work on shamanism and colonialism in Bolivia (1987), ‘terror’ or ‘torture.’ For how, Fabian asks, ‘can we hope to deal objectively with peoples and cultures whom Western imperialism made the subjects of brutal domination as well as of ethnographic inquiry?’ (Fabian 2001: 32). Kirsten Hastrup, who is equally concerned with issues of discrimination and toleration (Hastrup and Ulrich 2001), argues in favor of the use of the ‘ethnographic present’ to go beyond the dichotomy of subjectivism and objectivism (Hastrup 1995: 9–25). She believes that it can convey both the creativity and inter-subjectivity of the fieldwork process and the written, more theoretical presenting of the ethnography, and their mutual imbrications.