The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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176â Key approaches to the study of religions
The second ongoing area of debate is more teleological in that it addresses the purpose and outcomes of anthropological research. This is more than just applied anthropology, argues Henrietta Moore, it relates to the ‘reconfiguration of the boundaries between academic and non-academic practice’ and the recognition that anthropology is a disciplinary project which is part of ‘the practice of governmentality’ (1999: 3). In other words, there can be no more retreating into cultural relativism. Anthropologists still have to engage with theories that treat the commonalities, and not just the differences, between all human beings (ibid.: 17). Michael Jackson is concerned to find ‘ways of opening up dialogue between people from different cultures or traditions, ways of bringing into being modes of understanding which effectively go beyond the intellectual conventions and political ideologies that circumscribe us all’ (1989: x [author’s emphasis]; cf. van Binsbergen 2003). Similarly, Michael Herzfeld believes that ‘history from below,’ i.e. detailed ethnography or thick description, can offer ‘daily challenges to the dominance of certain political structures’ (and, we should add, religious structures) (2001: 75). Faye Harrison and her contributors to Decolonizing Anthropology are even more proactive in exploring how, as ‘organic intellectuals,’ they can contribute toward ‘social transformation and human liberation’ (Harrison 1991).
Some scholars are translating their concerns regarding ethics and pragmatics into new arenas or objects of interrogation, such as development, discrimination, or violence and conflict. It is well known that anthropologists have served in an advisory capacity to governments, and development and humanitarian organizations. Some are now reviewing this practice, and analyzing these institutions, occasionally with a focus on religious agencies (see, e.g. Bornstein 2005). However, only two of these emergent areas can be highlighted here, namely violence and conflict, and human rights.
There is no shortage of texts these days on the ethnography and theory of violence and suffering (Das et al. 2001; Herzfeld 2001: 217–239; Tambiah 1996). In Cynthia Mahmood’s estimation, the new interest of anthropologists in war and peace is generating ‘a much richer understanding of how human beings experience violence’ (Mahmood 2003). The area of conflict resolution has been particularly open to insights on culture. Clearly, the context of war and conflict compels the fieldworker to consider most carefully methods of communication, knowledge production, and representation. Such extreme contexts also tend to subvert conventional concepts and categories. For example, Swedish anthropologist Sverker Finnström, seeking to investigate the cultural practices whereby people in Northern Uganda both engage and try to comprehend existentially the realities of war and violence, and also struggle continuously to build hope for the future, opted for ‘participant reflection’ over ‘participant observation’ to reflect his more engaged relationship with his informants (Finnström 2008). Carolyn Nordstrom’s groundbreaking work on war-torn regions and the strategies people adopt to (re)generate meaning and community in situations of extreme suffering is germane here (Nordstrom 1997). Marc Sommers, an anthropologist who works on Rwandan and Burundian refugee communities in Tanzania, states revealingly, ‘[p]erhaps no aspect of African refugee society and culture is as overlooked by researchers and most humanitarian relief agencies as their religious lives’ (Sommers 2000: 18). Indeed, this aspect is often under-analyzed in otherwise praiseworthy works on social suffering (Das et al. 2001). However, in studies of the plight of indigenous peoples the religious or spiritual dimension may be more apparent (Adelson 2001).
Now that human rights constitute the new global lingua franca for victims of injustice and oppression the world over, anthropologists have to overcome their relativist leanings and respond to the call to ‘anthropologize’ and ‘historicize’ human rights (Booth 1999).
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This may necessitate more attention to the religious uses and interpretations of the human rights idea. Several European scholars have indeed set out in their volume, Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, to develop more ‘empirical, contextual analyses of specific rights struggles’ (Cowan et al. 2001: 21). They rightly argue that such an intellectual strategy permits them ‘to follow how individuals, groups, communities and states use a discourse of rights in the pursuit of particular ends, and how they become enmeshed in its logic.’ Empirical studies also raise important questions about who subscribes to and who benefits from this or that version of culture, community, or tradition – all of which can have significant ethical and legal consequences. Minority religious and ethnic groups continue to serve as the interface for the increasingly legalized and politicized battles over cultural identity and survival (Barry 2001; Nye 2001; Hepner 2008; Hussain and Ghosh 2002). More research is needed to understand the ways in which the human rights concept is generating new discourses of sameness and difference among religious groups. In other words, against the backdrop of rights culture, identity politics, and the logic of the market, religious formations are more differentiated, yet in another vein, also more standardized, in ever more competitive public spheres (Hackett 2005).13 Moreover, the current anthropological emphasis on practice is needed to compensate for the Western propensity for ‘belief’ in interpreting religious freedom issues, and to mediate rights conflict, such as between women’s rights and religious rights.
Conclusion
Current scholarship in the anthropology of religion is undoubtedly still indebted to those early monographs and frameworks developed by the likes of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz. However, the postmodern and post-colonial turns, compressions of time and space with globalization, and rise of ‘multiculturalist’ issues, have occasioned some significant rethinking and realignment. Determining the general provenance or parameters of religion in ‘exotic’ small-scale societies has ceased to preoccupy contemporary anthropologists. Some now see their contribution as being rather to reconsider modern, secular society as symbolically and culturally constituted, and as much based on the religious impulse as on reason.
Arguably, then, the increasingly composite nature of anthropological theorizing bodes well for more creative and critical explorations of religious expression, practice, and transformation in a variety of contemporary locations. Current notions of (anthropological) theory as emphasizing the salience of holism, context, practice, and relations of power, and incorporating ‘a critique of its own locations, positions and interests’ (Moore 1999: 9–10), are clearly invaluable for the academic study of religion more generally. In sum, as stated at the outset, anthropological theory and method appear increasingly well positioned to respond to such pressing social and cultural issues as identity, difference, conflict, and survival as they are mediated by religion(s) in our globalizing world.
Acknowledgments
I would to acknowledge the helpful feedback on this chapter provided by such good colleagues and friends as Allen Roberts, Mark Hulsether, Tricia Hepner, Omri Elisha, and Michael Lambek.
178â Key approaches to the study of religions
Notes
1The Society for the Anthropology of Religion was formally created in the American Anthropological Association in 2000 (http://www.uwgb.edu/sar/). Shortly after that, an Anthropology of Religion Consultation was inaugurated in the American Academy of Religion.
2It may also derive from personal ‘stock-taking’ by individual authors at the conclusion of their careers, and their concern to transcend latent interpretations of religion as irrational, as Sarah Caldwell indicates in her insightful review of five major publications in the 1990s (Caldwell 1999).
3For an historical survey of the field, see Morris 1987, and for accessible recent textbooks, see Bowie 2006; Morris 2006; Klass 1995; Klass and Weisgrau 1999; Bowen 1998; and for readers, see Glazier 1999; Glazier and Flowerday 2003; Lambek 2008; Hackett 2001. Note: there is a new attention to ‘world religions’ in the books by Bowen 1998 and Morris 2006.
4See, also, the various essays on their field experiences by religion scholars in a special issue of
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 13,1 (2001). A new journal, Fieldwork in Religion, also began in 2004 http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/FIR.
5Cf. my own reflections on the limitations of my early training in the academic study of religion for conducting field-based research on religion in Nigeria (Hackett 2001).
6Cf. Robert M. Baum’s piece on the ethical considerations of doing fieldwork on a secessionist religious movement in the context of a religiously intolerant state (Baum 2001).
7For helpful overviews of shamanism and neo-shamanism, see Vitebsky 1995; Johnson 1995 and van Binsbergen 1991.
8African Arts, published quarterly for academics and the market, is a rich indication of the current vitality and diversity of the field.
9http://www.fmch.ucla.edu/passporttoparadise.htm (last accessed March 11, 2009).
10The cross-cultural study of religion and nature has received a major boost from Bron Taylor’s and Jeffrey Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature project (New York: Cassell, 2005) http://www. religionandnature.com.
11The Journal of Religion in Africa has two thematic issues on media (26,4: 1998) (33,2: 2003).
12See, in this regard, the work of anthropologist/sangoma (diviner-healer), Wim van Binsbergen (van Binsbergen 1991) http://www.shikanda.net/index.htm (last accessed March 11, 2009).
13See the guest edited issue of Culture and Religion on ‘Law and Human Rights,’ edited by Rosalind I. J. Hackett and Winnifred F. Sullivan (6,1: 2005).
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Suggested reading
Asad, Tahal. 1993. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category, The Genealogy of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press. One of the best examples of the critical questioning an anthropologist can bring to categorizations and interpretations of religion.
Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Popular and imaginative study of Haitian vodou as experienced through the everyday lives and rituals of a Brooklyn-based family. A creative portrayal of a powerful Haitian priestess, with important reflections on participant-observation.
Evans-Pritchard, E. S. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford, Clarendon Press (especially Chapter 4: The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events).
This classic work by one of the founding fathers of the field examines how the Azande of Sudan interpret, and take ritual action to deal with, evil and misfortune.
Hefner, R. 1998. Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 83–104.
Examines from an anthropological perspective the changes impacting world religions in an age of globalization and late modernity.
Hodgson, Dorothy L. 2005. The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington: IN: Indiana University Press.
Excellent case study that cogently demonstrates how to do anthropology in situations of religious encounter (in this study, the Maasai and Spiritan Catholic fathers in Tanzania). Her work also illustrates well how to frame a research question, methodology, and theoretical concepts and follow them all through in a thorough and engaging manner.
Lambek, Michael.Âed. 2008. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, second edition.
Provides extensive resources, both classic and contemporary, on how anthropologists have investigated and interpreted religion.
Lewis, I. M. 1986. Religion in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Short, insightful, and never lacking in humor, this study both informs and provokes the budding anthropologist of religion.
Lowenhaupt, Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Original, dense, and widely cited ethnography on the mountain peoples who inhabit a South Kalimantan rain forest in Indonesia that weaves together a fascinating array of topics: marginality, movement, state and regional power, globalization, shamanism, and women. A very instructive and reflexive treatment of the construction of self and Other.
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Moro, Pamela, James Myers, and Arthur Lehmann. 2006. Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural. McGraw-Hill, seventh edition.
Useful resource for a range of accessible articles on the subject in terms of methodological approaches and topics (e.g. myth, ritual, and the various types of religious specialists).
Omri, Elisha. 2008. Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism. Cultural Anthropology 23 (1): 154–189.
Perceptive and clearly written study that exemplifies the merits of exploring new areas (domestic US) and new topics (evangelical mega-churches and humanitarian activism) for anthropologists of religion.