The comparative anthropology of religion, or the anthropology of religion compared: a critical comment

Abstract

In this commentary, I argue that we need to expose the multiple layers of historical thinking about the production of the category of religion that play into both our scholarly thinking and the way religion is lived, understood and fought for in the lives of our informants. We can no more take the contours (or limits) of any particular religion for granted, or as self‐evident, than we can take the category of religion, named as such, as a natural human phenomenon that is somehow free from the domain of culture.

Relations Between Religion and Multicultural Society

“…Pemakanaan ini semakin dipertegas dengan pendapat yang menyatakan bahwa agama secara teologis menginformasikan etos normatif dan pandangan individu terhadap keberadaan Tuhan, masyarakat dan alam semesta yang memengaruhi negosiasi penerimaan terhadap suatu agama (Tajdin, 2022). Agama dalam perspektif antropologis merupakan sebuah ekspresi manusia di dalam tanggapannya terhadap pengalaman supernatural dan merupakan ekspresi suatu bentuk ketergantungan pada kekuatan di luar diri personal yang merujuk pada kekuatan spiritual atau kekuatan moral (Hausner, 2020). Agama disejajarkan dengan bangkitnya rasa hormat dan manifestasi yang luar biasa dari suatu realita (Loewenthal, 2015).…”

‘Not as single spies’: a review of European Social Anthropology 2020

“…In a rich diversity of ethnographic observation, the special issue's contributors problematise the comparative situations of upwardly mobile believers in the United Kingdom and Kenya (Fesenmyer 2020) and Nigeria (Janson 2020); others analyse intra-Muslim difference manifest among practitioners of Islam mondain, or 'lived' Islam in India and Nigeria (Osella and Soares 2020), while further 'common ground' is established between Christian and Muslim communities in studies of joint marriage in Yorubaland (Nolte 2020) and of a form of mimetic prayer practised by a syncretic religious group in Guinea-Bissau (Sarró and Temudo 2020). A final article (Hausner 2020) identifies the hazard of counter-cultural (essentially secular) ritual, masquerading as religion, and how the nature of categories and boundaries, epistemic and otherwise, can become problematised in the field.…”