Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005) focuses on a women’s movement in the mosques of Cairo. Routledge, London. More recently, in a number of influential books on the Tshidi of South Africa, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1985) have analyzed ritual that involves complex forms of resistance quite as much as submission. /Parent 2 0 R ), Religious Organization and Religious Experience. >> In Purity and Danger (1966), Douglas (a student of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, and like him a Roman Catholic) explored Western as well as non-Western contexts. Bronislaw Malinowski (1931), who conducted research in the Trobriand Islands located near Papua New Guinea, believed that religious beliefs met psychological needs. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana. Anthropologists have studied examples of Christian worship ever since the early days of the discipline, yet it has received less attention than other religious expressions. But as R.R. Meyer (1999) analyzes notions of evil in the context of the emergence of local Christianity and its relation to changing social, political, and economic formations among the Peki Ewe in Ghana. Despite predictions from secularization theorists that the significance of religion would weaken around the world along with modernization, religion has retained and even increased its profile in many public as well as private contexts. Robbins, J., 2007. The Anthropology of Christianity. Bloch (2010) turns to ritual rather than religion in articulating his comparative approach, arguing that the former can be found in all types of society, and is a specific type of modification of the way human beings in general communicate. Indian University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pp. Evans-Pritchard’s implicit interlocutor was the French ethnologist and philosopher, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who had highlighted what he saw as the ‘primitive’ mind’s inability to distinguish the supernatural from reality. In the 1970s, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz combined a Durkheimian understanding of religion as a collective social act with a more Weberian emphasis on meaning and experience. An important strand has also focused on how counterintuitive or surprising experiences are recalled and transmitted over time (e.g., Boyer, 2001). diverse and contentious. Her main argument is that, for the Ewe, the Devil forms a hybrid figure, expressing people’s obsessions with occult forces as a way to mediate the attractions and discontents of modernity. /Type /Page If Gerholm suggests that it is often difficult to locate the core of ritual practice in postmodern contexts, Catherine Bell’s highly influential approach in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) moves the focus away from seeing ritual as an autonomous activity, and proposes instead a notion of ‘ritualization’ that takes into account links with strategic activities in social life in general. Mahmood, S., 2005. Bloch, M., 1974. /F2 9 0 R Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. In: Wilson, B. In such contexts, they argue, disenfranchised people imagine new, magical means to attain otherwise unattainable ends, even as they mistrust those who appear to enrich themselves through illegitimate deployment of the forces of production and reproduction. Horton’s assumption is that religion is fundamentally about explanation, a so-called ‘intellectualist’ stance toward religion that places him in the genealogy of both Tylor and Frazer. The earliest influential attempt at a definition was provided by British ethnologist Edward Tylor, himself born into a Quaker family. Symbols, song, dance, and features of articulation or is religion a extreme form of traditional authority? Turner, V., Turner, E., 1978. Anthropology and the cognitive science of religion: a critical assessment. (Ed. Basic Books, New York. One reason may be the ironic one that Christianity is too close to the culture of Western anthropologists, and so it was avoided or perhaps simply not noticed as a valid topic of study. Some of the most effective work in this area has looked at past processes of colonization, where religion has formed part of the tangled encounter between colonizers and colonized, ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ (Van der Veer, 1996). Hume's theory explains religion in intellectual terms: as an account of the unknown causes at work in the natural and social worlds. Tomas Gerholm’s (1988) ‘postmodern’ view of a Hindu funeral ritual in Trinidad examines fragmentation of meaning and diversity of experience. ), 2006. Saler, B., 2000. Van Gennep argued that ritual has particular significance during critical periods of transition in the life-cycle, such as attainment of adulthood, marriage, and death. What is considered pure and impure, however, varies cross-culturally, and reflects the social experience of the social group involved. 131–171. In religious contexts the sources of words, as well as the identity, agency, authority, and presence of nonhuman as well as human participants in an interaction, can be especially problematic. As Needham puts the problem: “The Penan had no formal creed, and … they had no other conventional means for expressing belief in their God. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London. Henn, A., 2008. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. >> Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. It argues that a focus on such questions as rationality and ritual was central to the emergence of the discipline. Processes of globalization and migration, combined with tourism, have ensured that pilgrimage has become an increasingly visible dimension of religious activity in all faiths, and also one that has attracted more anthropological attention.

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