Includes indexed bibliography arranged according to bo
Trade Review
"Michael Lambek has succeeded in putting together an impressive collection of key texts and essays." (Culture and Religion, July 2009)
"The most comprehensive anthology on its subject, this is a splendid tool for teaching and a matchless scholarly resource." (International Review of Biblical Studies, 2008)
Praise for the first edition:
"[A] reader that ambitiously attempts to represent the full breadth, depth, and complexity of anthropology's investigations into religion.... The masterly general introduction situates this anthology within the long and often difficult anthropological engagement with this most mystified and powerful realm of social action.... [A]n excellent text." (International Social Science Review)
"A major guide to both the history of the anthropology of religion and new trends in research.... Lambek has compiled an excellent anthology." (Journal of Empirical Theology)
Table of Contents
Preface to Second Edition xi
General Introduction 1
Part I The Context of Understanding and Debate 19
Opening Frameworks 21
Introduction 21
1 Religion in Primitive Culture 23
Edward Burnett Tylor
2 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 34
Emile Durkheim
3 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 48
Max Weber
4 Religion as a Cultural System 57
Clifford Geertz
Skeptical Rejoinders 77
Introduction 77
5 Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough 79
Ludwig Wittgenstein
6 Religion, Totemism and Symbolism 82
W. E. H. Stanner
7 Remarks on the Verb “To Believe” 90
Jean Pouillon
8 Christians as Believers 97
Malcolm Ruel
9 The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category 110
Talal Asad
Part II Poiesis: The Composition of Religious Worlds 127
Signs and Symbols 129
Introduction 129
10 The Logic of Signs and Symbols 131
Susanne K. Langer
11 The Problem of Symbols 139
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
12 On Key Symbols 151
Sherry B. Ortner
13 The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol 160
Eric R. Wolf
Structure, Function, and Interpretation 167
Introduction 167
14 Myth in Primitive Psychology 168
Bronislaw Malinowski
15 Folk Dialectics of Nature and Culture 176
Marshall Sahlins
16 Land Animals, Pure and Impure 183
Mary Douglas
17 A Jivaro Version of Totem and Taboo 196
Claude Lévi-Strauss
18 Text-Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre 206
Alton L. Becker
Moral Inversions and Spaces of Disorder 225
I
ntroduction 225
19 The Winnebago Trickster Figure 226
Paul Radin
20 Witchcraft and Sexual Relations: An Exploration in the Social and Semantic Implications of the Structure of Belief 238
Raymond C. Kelly
21 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression 253
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White
Conceptualizing the Cosmos 265
Introduction 265
22 Closure and Multiplication: An Essay on Polynesian Cosmology and Ritual 267
Alfred Gell
23 Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism 280
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Part III Praxis: Religious Action 299
The Movement in Ritual: Emergence 301
Introduction 301
24 The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action 302
Godfrey Lienhardt
25 Form and Meaning of Magical Acts 311
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah
26 Liminality and Communitas 326
Victor Turner
Gender, Subjectivity, and the Body 341
Introduction 341
27 “Jewish Comes Up in You from the Roots” 342
Barbara Myerhoff
28 Fate in Relation to the Social Structure 350
Meyer Fortes
29 Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience 356
Gananath Obeyesekere
30 Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance 368
Janice Boddy
31 The Poetics of Time in Mayan Divination 386
Dennis Tedlock
What Ritual Does: The Foundations of Order 397
Introduction 397
32 The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process 398
Maurice Bloch
33 Enactments of Meaning 410
Roy A. Rappaport
Part IV Historical Dynamics: Power, Modernity, and Change 429
Capitalism, Colonialism, Christianity, and Conflict 431
Introduction 431
34 New Heaven, New Earth 432
Kenelm Burridge
35 The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil’s Labor and the Baptism of Money 447
Michael Taussig
36 The Colonization of Consciousness 464
John and Jean Comaroff
37 Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion 479
Susan F. Harding
38 On Being Shege in Kinshasa: Children, the Occult and the Street 495
Filip De Boeck
Religious Ethics and Politics in the State, Public Sphere, and Transnational Scene 507
Introduction 507
39 Civil Religion in America 509
Robert N. Bellah
40 Shamanic Practices and the State in Northern Asia: Views from the Center and Periphery 519
Caroline Humphrey
41 “Using the Past to Negate the Present”: Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China 533
Mayfair Mei-hui Yang
42 Passional Preaching, Aural Sensibility, and the Islamic Revival in Cairo 544
Charles Hirschkind
43 Moral Landscapes: Ethical Discourses among Orthodox and Diaspora Jains 560
Anne Vallely
44 Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black: Re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian Religious Heritage in the Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia 573
Mattijs van de Port
45 Martyr vs. Martyr: The Sacred Language of Violence 590
Galit Hasan-Rokem
Afterword 597
46 Evidence and Presence, Spectral and Other 598
Stephan Palmié
Part V Research Tools 611
A Guide to the Literature 613
Bibliography 630
Index 673
