1st Edition

The Anthropology of Religion

By Peter Metcalf Copyright 2023
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer’s Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin’s Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people’s most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people’s brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion.

    Introducing the Independent Thinkers

    1. "Such Turbulent Human Material"

    Part I: Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

    2. The Mirror of Modernity

    3. The Phenomenon of the Golden Bough

    4. If I was a Horse

    Part II: Definitions

    5. The Essence of Religion

    6. On the Uselessness of Ritual

    Part III: Religion and Science

    7. Einstein in The Outback

    8. Real Knowledge of Real Worlds

    9. Integrity of Science and Religion

    Part IV: Dismissing Diversity

    10. Laying Tylor’s Ghost

    11. Exorcising Freud

    Part V: Looking for Meanings

    12. What’s Only Natural

    13. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

    Part VI: Ritual and Rationality

    14. No One Believes in Things That Aren’t There

    15. Being Reasonable

    Part VII: Powers

    16. Invitations You Can’t Refuse

    17. Nature Does Not Work Independently Of Man

    18. Findings

    Postscript: Religion and Evolution

    Biography

    Peter Metcalf is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, USA. He has conducted fieldwork in central Borneo over many years and written extensively about its peoples and cultures. He has also written about issues in comparative religion, especially as concerns death rituals worldwide and throughout history.