Winter 2020 - ANTH 311 - Seçil Daǧtaș  

Course Description 

This course will introduce you to the anthropological study of religion and its key themes, definitions, and approaches. While religion is normally thought of as a spiritual process or a set of beliefs and practices with clear and identifiable boundaries, in this course we examine religions in their social and political embeddedness. While we will consider the belief-centered approaches to religion, we will primarily attempt to understand “religions in practice,” as they are lived, embodied, felt, gendered, racialized, and politicized. Although our examples will be from a diversity of a number of religious traditions, the aim of this course is not so much to provide an extensive survey of religions in the world. Instead, we will use these examples to reflect critically on the meaning and usefulness of key terms such as “belief”, “religion,” “God,” “magic,” “modernity,” and “ritual.” We will learn about different anthropological approaches that have been used to understand a variety of practices, communities, texts, experiences, languages, and material cultures across the globe. We will discuss the kinds of questions anthropologists ask while studying religion, whether and how anthropology of religion differs from other disciplinary approaches, and how contact, conflict, and exchange among religions have shaped the world in which we live. In short, this course is meant to help you cultivate anthropological ways of thinking about and studying religion. 

Please note that our purpose in this course is not theological, but ethnographic. Students taking this course are asked to leave aside their own beliefs about religion (including atheism) and focus instead on what religion means today to the studied individuals and groups, and how it is lived, embodied, and materialized in relation to contemporary forces of modernity. 

Course Goals and Learning Outcomes 

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to: 

• Understand key anthropological concepts on religion and have the ability to apply them to diverse contexts. 

• Identify and analyze different anthropological approaches to religion and their historical and theoretical context. 

• Develop anthropologically-oriented critical reading, research, and thinking skills. 

• Observe and write analytically about religious aspects of culture with which you are familiar and critically engage scholarly sources. 

• Better understand how religion shapes and is shaped by global communities and cultures and the ethical connections between our own lives and those of others who are marginalized due to their religious affiliations.