A reader in the anthropology of religion / edited by Michael Lambek.

A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion is a collection of some of the most significant classic and contemporary writings in the field. Updated in its second edition, this volume examines numerous aspects of religion in a diversity of cultures and expands upon the idea of what we mean by ‘religion’, linking it to some of the broader questions of culture and politics.

* Collects classic and contemporary articles from the major thinkers in both North American and British anthropology * Emphasizes the ongoing conversation among anthropologists with respect to central questions of religious behavior * Presents comprehensive coverage of theory and religious practice, through time and ethnographic regions, integrated by editorial commentary * Includes additional classic pieces by Pouillon, Burridge, and Meyerhoff, as well as more contemporary work by Harding, De Boeck, and Palmie; * Includes indexed bibliography arranged according to both ethnographic region and religious topics and practices.

Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

xii, 679 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm.

Second edition.

pt. I. The Context of Understanding and Debate -- 1. Religion in Primitive Culture -- 2. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life -- 3. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism -- 4. Religion as a Cultural System -- Skeptical Rejoinders -- 5. Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough -- 6. Religion, Totemism and Symbolism -- 7. Remarks on the verb "to believe" -- 8. Christians as Believers -- 9. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category -- pt. II. Poiesis: The Composition of Religious Worlds -- 10. The Logic of Signs and Symbols -- 11. The Problem of Symbols -- 12. On Key Symbols -- 13. The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol -- Structure, Function, and Interpretation -- 14. Myth in Primitive Psychology -- 15. Folk Dialectics of Nature and Culture -- 16. Land Animals, Pure and Impure -- 17. A Jivaro Version of Totem and Taboo -- 18. Text-Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre -- Moral Inversions and Spaces of Disorder -- 19. The Winnebago Trickster Figure -- 20. Witchcraft and Sexual Relations: An Exploration in the Social and Semantic Implications of the Structure of Belief -- 21. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression -- Conceptualizing the Cosmos -- 22. Closure and Multiplication: An Essay on Polynesian Cosmology and Ritual -- 23. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perpectivism -- pt. III. Praxis: Religious Action -- The Movement of Ritual: Emergence -- 24. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action -- 25. Form and Meaning of Magical Acts -- 26. Liminality and Communitas -- Gender, subjectivity, and the body -- 27. "Jewish comes up in you from the roots" -- 28. Fate in Relation to the Social Structure -- 29. Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience -- 30. Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance -- 31. The Poetics of Time in Mayan Divination -- What Ritual Does: The Foundations of Order -- 32. The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process -- 33. Enactments of Meaning -- pt. IV. Historical Dynamics: Power, Modernity, and Change -- Capitalism, Colonialism, Christianity, and Conflict -- 34. New heaven, new Earth -- 35. The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil's Labor and the Baptism of Money -- 36. The Colonization of Consciousness -- 37. Convicted by the Holy Spirit: the rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist conversion -- 38. On being Shege in Kinshasa: children, the occult and the street -- Religious Ethics and Politics in the State and the Transnational Scene -- 39. Civil Religion in America 40. Shamanic practices and the state in northern Asia: veiws from the center and periphery -- 41. "Using the Past to Negate the Present": Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China -- 42. Passional Preaching, Aural Sensibility, and the Islamic Revival in Cairo -- 43. Moral Landscapes: Ethical Discourses among Orthodox and Diaspora Jains -- 44. Candomble in pink, green and black: re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian religious heritage in the public sphere of Salvador, Bahia -- 45. Martyr vs. martyr: the sacred language of violence. -- 46. Evidence and presence, spectral and other.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 630-672) and index.