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Full Description
This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer's Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin's Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people's most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people's brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion.
Contents
Introducing the Independent Thinkers 1. "Such Turbulent Human Material" 2. The Mirror of Modernity 3. The Phenomenon of the Golden Bough 4. If I was a Horse 5. The Essence of Religion 6. On the Uselessness of Ritual 7. Einstein in The Outback 8. Real Knowledge of Real Worlds 9. Integrity of Science and Religion 10. Laying Tylor's Ghost 11. Exorcising Freud 12. What's Only Natural 13. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends 14. No One Believes in Things That Aren't There 15. Being Reasonable 16. Invitations You Can't Refuse 17. Nature Does Not Work Independently Of Man 18. Findings Postscript: Religion and Evolution
