ANTH 671 - Cultural Analysis
Seminar: Religious Thought in Action (3 credits)
Spring 2010
Dr.
Anthropological studies of religion were foundational for Structuralism (e.g, Levi-Strauss’ four volumes on Mythologiques), which is less useful for studying religious thought in action such as encountered in societies like our own, where syncretism, movements, and changing relations of religion and society come to the fore. Key among these are hybridity and movements, thinking about which we this seminar will explore, starting with Max Weber’s classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and proceeding to turns in thinking about hybridity and about movements that may be applied to vernacular theologizing, discourses of and about religion as frameworks for 'making sense' of changing lives, and less obvious or dramatic developments such as piety movements among middle classes worldwide that provide a window on religion in the contemporary world. This seminar focuses on how ordinary people think religiously (which is not the same as what or how they think about 'religion'), on culturalist turns in the study of social movements, and on hybridity as new approaches to the 'iron triangle' of religion-commerce-politics. We will examine the methods and compare findings from a selection of recent studies such as: