240515 VO MM3 Anthropologies of religious belief and identity (2025S)

Anthropologists interested in ritual and social practice have raised concerns that “religion” might not be a useful analytical category for cross-cultural comparisons, and questioned the assumption that "belief in spiritual beings" (ancestors, ghosts, spirits, divinities, gods, and so on) is everywhere a defining feature of religion. These criticisms are justified insofar as ritual actions and their effects can be analyzed irrespective of religious belief (unit 1). Nevertheless the focus on systems of belief does highlight an important contrast between cosmocentric and anthropocentric religions. Whereas the first type of religious belief system offer an explanatory scheme of the world as a whole including people, the second type of belief system is concerned more specifically with answering questions of human existence and ethics, and leaves cosmology to science or philosophy (unit 2). Cosmocentric religions are literal-minded and do not separate belief from ritual, nor the sacred from the profane. Anthropocentric religions oppose religious belief and ritual to knowledge and science (such that understanding religion becomes incompatible with believing). With this contrast in mind, the course aims to familiarize students with four major anthropological viewpoints on religious belief. The assigned readings for each unit and student presentations will bear on selected chapters from recent book-length ethnographies in the anthropology of religion to illustrate these four theories indirectly. The first theory holds that religious belief involves either mistakes or radical alterity. The “erroneous beliefs” or incommensurable ontology is said to explain the world (intellectualism, unit 3), motivate rituals performed to bring about desired states of affairs (performativity, unit 4), or protected against contrary evidence by secondary elaborations (literalism, unit 5). The second theory of religious belief is symbolist. The symbolic meaning of religious beliefs is either hidden (when the believer is mystified, unit 6), metaphorical (when the believer understands the symbolism, unit 7) or absent (when the symbol has no referent / is meaningless, unit 8). The third theory explains religious belief in terms of an epidemiology of representations. It argues that certain cultural representations (such as religious beliefs) are capable of colonizing the minds of a population whereas other representations fail to be selected and transmitted. Individual units will discuss the contrast of ‘basic and reflective beliefs’ (unit 9), beliefs with ‘semi-propositional content’ (unit 10), and the notion of ‘minimally counterintuitive ideas’ (unit 11). The fourth theory of religious belief is normative and identity-based. The idea is that religious symbols and acts have determinate meanings no matter what individual subjects understand or believe. Religious belief is equated either with deference to authoritative opinions assumed to be true without understanding (unit 12), acceptance of sacred postulates indicated by public ritual without private belief (unit 13), or with collective responsibility for unfortunate events supposedly caused by witchcraft, magic or divine retribution (unit 14).