Religion: Current Debates

Fall Term 2021/22

4 credits (8 ECT)

Lecturer: Vlad Naumescu

Schedule: Tuesdays 13:30 - 17:20
E-mail: naumescuv@ceu.edu

Course description

Questions of religion have been central to anthropology from its beginnings and
remain so today when religion reemerges as a global force. While the early
scholarship perceived religious phenomena through the skeptical lens of secular
science, recent critiques brought up anthropology’s own orthodoxies and the need for
theoretical and methodological renewal. Every new paradigm took up the challenge to
explain religion and its pervasiveness in human culture and society. The anthropology
of religion emerged out of this creative tension as a vibrant field of theoretical inquiry
and impressive scholarship. The course is structured around major themes that shaped
the study of religion: belief, ritual, tradition, time and temporality, morality, media
and mediation, secularism and modernity etc. They constitute focal points of intensive
theoretical debates and, at the same time, core analytical categories in anthropological
literature. We will examine these issues through a wide range of ethnographic works
from various parts of the world. This will allow us to discover the varieties of
religious phenomena and understand how key concepts emerged and have been
applied to specific cultural settings. Besides classical studies of local cults and small-
scale societies, we will focus on world religions and their historical dynamic
emerging from the tension between religious orthodoxies and charismatic authority,
between the local and the global.

Learning outcomes
By the end of the course students will: a) have advanced knowledge of key concepts
and theoretical debates that shaped the study of religion and learn to critically assess
them; b) be able to analyze contemporary religious phenomena by drawing on
available scholarship and developing their own arguments on the matter; c) realize the
breadth and scope of a sociological-anthropological engagement with religion and d)
develop an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective on religious phenomena.

Course requirements
The course consists of weekly sessions that alternate between lecture and seminar
format. They will heavily rely on students’ questions submitted prior to the class and
the discussion of assigned readings in class. The final grade is based on individual
participation/presentation (20%), 3 written responses to required readings or Perusall
contributions (30%) and a final research paper of max. 3000 words (50%).

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Recommended readers available in the CEU library:
Antes, P., A. W. Geertz eds. 2004. New approaches to the study of religion. Berlin,
de Gruyter.
Boddy, J. and M. Lambek. 2013 A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion.
Blackwell Companions to Anthropology. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell,,.
Bowie, F. 2006. Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
Lambek M. (ed.) 2002. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. Oxford & Malden,
MA: Blackwell.

Week 1. Introduction: problems of definition

The first class offers an introduction to the course and its thematic, focusing
afterwards on problems of definition between historicist and universalist approaches.
Is there such a thing as 'religion'? How was religion constructed as an object of
anthropological inquiry? How useful is the concept today when presented with a
variety of phenomena that defy a single definition?

Geertz, Clifford. 1966. Religion as a cultural system. In The Interpretation of

Cultures. New York: Basic Books (Reprinted in Lambek 2002: 61-82).

Asad, Talal.1982. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category. In

Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. pp. 27-54.

Week 2. The decline and revival of religion or how did sociology get it wrong?
Although classical accounts of modernity predicted secularization, the world seems to
be re-enchanted again, with religion fully reemerging in politics and the public sphere.
What are the historical premises of secularization? And what was supposed to be the
place of religion in modernity?

Casanova, Jose. 1994. Secularization, Enlightenment, and Modern Religion. In Public

Religions in the Modern World. pp. 11- 39. Chicago; London: University of Chicago
Press, 1994.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Secularism, Nation-State, Religion. In Formations of the Secular:

Christianity, Islam, Modernity, pp. 181-205. Stanford University Press.

See further:
Casanova, Jose. 2006. Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad. In Powers of the
Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, Scott & Hirschkind eds.
Stanford UP. 2006; pp. 12-31.

van der Veer, Peter. 1999. The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian
Britain and British India. In Nation and Religion: Perspective on Europe and
Asia, pp. 15-43, ed. by Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, Princeton.

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Week 3. Unspoken orthodoxies: anthropology's repressed Other
Recent reflections on anthropology's longstanding relationship with Christianity
exposed certain assumptions that shaped both theory and fieldwork. In recognizing
Christianity as anthropology's repressed Other, they rethought the foundations of the
discipline and sparked a new field of anthropological inquiry.

Robbins, Joel. 2007. Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture. Current
Anthropology 48 (1): 5-38. Including the Comments section.

Hann, Christopher. Personhood, Christianity, Modernity. Anthropology of this

Century (online), issue 3, January 2012.

See further:
Harding, Susan. 1991. Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant
Cultural Other'. Social Research 58 (2):373—93.

Robbins, Joel. 2003. What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of

Christianity. Religion 33: 191-99.

Week 4. Temporalities of salvation

Religions are grounded on distinct temporal ontologies that shape religious beliefs
and practices. Such temporalities influence perceptions of social continuity or rupture
and individuals’ becoming in history.

Guyer, Jane. 2007. Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic,
evangelical, and punctuated time. American Ethnologist 34 (3):409-421.

Robbins, Joel. 2001. Secrecy and the Sense of an Ending: Narrative, Time, and
Everyday Millenarianism in Papua New Guinea and in Christian Fundamentalism.
Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (3):525-551.

See further:’Cargo cults’ films on Moodle

Cargo Cults entry in Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Week 5. Accounting for the unaccountable: (more) epistemic challenges

Religious worlds are populated by invisible forces, super-natural agents and lead to
extraordinary encounters. Such experiences have always appeared as ambiguous,
unorthodox sources of power, and yet visions, dreams and miracles remain central to
revealed religions, shaping religious knowledge, authority and experience. How
should one study, theorize and write about these?

Orsi, Robert A. 2008. Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative

Modernity. Historically Speaking 9 (7):12-16.

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Luhrmann, Tanya. M. 2012. A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Toward an
Anthropological Theory of Mind. Current Anthropology 53 (4):371-395.
Week 6: National holiday (no class)/ Reading week

Week 7: The problem of belief

Anthropologists considered belief as central to religion but had difficulties studying it
for epistemological and methodological reasons. Debates around the concept
generated important historical and ethnographic work on the role of language,
embodiment, performance, socialization and learning in religious experience.

Astuti, Rita, and Maurice Bloch. 2013. Are Ancestors Dead? In Companion to the
anthropology of religion, edited by J. Boddy and M. Lambek. Chichester: Wiley
Blackwell, pp. 103-117.

Evans-Pritchard, E. S. 1976. The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events. In

Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande, pp. 63-83. Oxford, Clarendon

See further:
Sperber, Dan 1985 Apparently irrational beliefs. In On anthropological knowledge :
three essays. Pp. 35-63. Cambridge studies in social anthropology. Cambridge
; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ruel, Malcom. 2002. "Christians as Believers." In A reader in the anthropology of
religion, edited by Michael Lambek, 99-113. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Week 8: Beyond belief: media, mediation and the aesthetics of presence

Once the concept of belief came under strong critique for its Christian roots,
anthropologists sought alternative ways to approach religious phenomena. The shift
from meaning to practices and processes of mediation has brought together religion
and media in an innovative manner.

Keane, Webb. 2008. The evidence of the senses and the materiality of religion. Journal of
Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.):S110-127.

Meyer, Birgit. 2008. Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics, and Power Matter
in the Study of Contemporary Religion. In Religion: Beyond a Concept. Ed.
Hent de Vries. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 704–23.

See further: Jesus Camp (film)

Harding, Susan. 1987. Convicted by the Holy Spirit: the rhetoric of fundamental
Baptist conversion. American Ethnologist Vol. 14 (1), pp. 167-181.

Week 9: Meaning in action: ritual dynamics

In a narrow sense ritual has been taken as a specific (symbolic) activity separated
from ordinary action. In the broader sense of ritualized action it can be an aspect of
any human activity. Script, practice or process, ritual produces each time a different
social dynamics that affects structures, interactions, persons and objects.

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Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Enactments of Meaning. In Lambek, M. 2002. A reader in the
anthropology of religion, Pp. 447-467. Malden, Mass. ; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Mahmood, S. 2001. Rehearsed spontaneity and the conventionality of ritual:
disciplines of salat. American Ethnologist 28:827-853.

See further:
Asad, Talal. 1993. Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual. In Genealogies of
religion pp. 55-80

Mauss, Marcel. 1979 (1950). Body Techniques. In Sociology and Psychology: Essays,
edited by M. Mauss. London: Routledge.

Pedagogies of Prayer in South India (film and article, Vlad Naumescu)

Week 10: Morality, ethics and the disciplines of the self

Religion offers ethical models and practices that shape moral selves. The
anthropology of morality has for long dwelt in the Durkheimian and Weberian legacy,
but the recent ethical turn in the discipline brought a deeper understanding of the
relationship between morality and religion.

Mahmood, Saba 2005. Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Chapter 1. The Subject of Freedom
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/db78tc345 ( use CEU VPN)

Mittermaier, Amira. 2012. Dreams from Elsewhere: Muslim subjectivities beyond the trope
of self-cultivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (2):247-265.

See further:
Lambek, Michael. 2012. Religion and Morality. In A Companion to Moral
Anthropology: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Naumescu, Vlad. 2016. The End Times and the Near Future: The Ethical
Engagements of Russian Old Believers in Romania. JRAI 22 (2):314–331.

Week 11. Secular sensibilities in a postsecular age

This class returns to the public role of religion to ask questions about moral expectations,
religious claims and the failure of secular politics. What are the modes of secularism
and forms of religious mobilization predicated today?

Mahmood, S. 2009. Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?

Critical Inquiry 35:836-862.

Starrett, Gregory. 2009. 'Islam and the politics of enchantment.' Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute S1: 222-240.

See further: The Immanent Frame

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Week 12. Conclusions and final discussion