Survey of a wide range of historical and ethnographic writings, selected to familiarize students with classical and contemporary issues studied by the anthropologists of religion. Students will examine how these issues are approached in terms of researchers' theoretical assumptions and social context. Topics include questions of embodiment, worship, language, materiality, ritual, space, authority, and globalization.
This course examines a number of religious phenomena and forms of practice by looking at them from an anthropological perspective. This perspective focuses on a lived, embodied, and meaning-making religious experience which – when studied comparatively – represents not only a particular example of a concrete faith but also reveals patterns of similarities and differences in social conceptualizations of the moral/divine order. After taking this course, students will have a better understanding of the cultural diversity in human articulations of the religious worldview.
Anthropologists approach any cultural group from a holistic, comparative and global perspective. Using particular questions and ethnographic cases, students will learn to see aspects of culture as immersed in networks and interdependencies. With this perspective, students will work in their respective fields of ministry in a more competent, effective, and responsible way.
This course does not engage the Bible directly, but it does evoke some of the cultural practices described in the Biblical text and their contemporary equivalents among various Christian denominations.
Transforming people and communities may be done in a harmful way when pursued without an adequate understanding of the social and cultural complexity of their lives. This course is meant to provide students in their missionary work with a perspective that will make them more aware and appreciative of that complexity.
While trying to answer the questions of embodiment, worship, language, materiality, ritual, space, authority, and globalization, students will be using concrete examples and localities from different parts of the world. They will be reading ethnographic texts that discuss people and phenomena that are immersed in particular contexts.
A comparative perspective that is characteristic of anthropological inquiry as an academic field always contains an intercultural component.
This course includes assignments that make course material directly relevant to students’ experience by teaching students to identify and analyze a number of universal religious categories, such as ritual, taboo, initiation, asceticism, etc., and to apply them to their own religious practice. Understanding these categories improves students’ intercultural communication skills and allows them to develop frameworks for interpretation of religious practice in other cultures. On a more general level, students in this course will learn to organize and critically analyze various types of information, drawn from a wide array of written and visual sources, including religious texts and ethnographies.
Students will be required to do mini-fieldwork assignments that will result in short ethnographic descriptions that will foster their skills of observation and reflection.
