Browse

The evolution of American spirituality over the past fifty years is the subject of this book. The book uses in-depth interviews and a broad range of resource materials to show how Americans, from teenagers to senior citizens, define their spiritual journeys. The findings are a telling reflection of the changes in beliefs and lifestyles that have occurred throughout the United States in recent decades. The book reconstructs the social and cultural reasons for an emphasis on a spirituality of dwelling (houses of worship, denominations, neighborhoods) during the 1950s. Then, in the 1960s, a spirituality of seeking began to emerge, leading individuals to go beyond established religious institutions. In subsequent chapters, the book examines attempts to reassert spiritual discipline, encounters with the sacred (such as angels and near-death experiences), and the development of the “inner self.” The final chapter discusses a spirituality of practice, an alternative for people who are uncomfortable within a single religious community and who want more than a spirituality of endless seeking. The diversity of contemporary American spirituality comes through in the voices of the interviewees. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and Native Americans are included, as are followers of occult practices, New Age religions, and other eclectic groups. The book also notes how politicized spirituality, evangelical movements, and resources such as Twelve-Step programs and mental health therapy influence definitions of religious life today. The book explains the changes in personal spirituality that have come to shape our religious life.

A collection of classic and contemporary ethnographic explorations of Catholicism, by anthropologists and religious studies scholars. The book approaches Catholicism through a variety topics and across a wide range of geographical settings. Includes material whose theme is ‘religion’, as well as contributions that expand on Catholicism’s intersection with politics and economics, secularism and modernity, sex and gender, kinship and heritage, and technologies of mediation.

The author extends his path-breaking work in existential anthropology by focusing on the interplay between two modes of human existence: that of participating in other peoples' lives and that of turning inward to one's self. Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, he shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives. Through portraits of individuals encountered in the course of his travels, including friends and family, and anthropological fieldwork pursued over many years in such places as Sierra Leone and Australia, the author explores variations on this theme. As he describes the ways we address and negotiate the vexed relationships between “I” and “we”—the one and the many—he is also led to consider the place of thought in human life.

Reaching beyond sensational headlines, this book offers a three-dimensional portrait of Afghan women. In a series of wide-ranging, deeply reflective chapters, scholars, humanitarian workers, politicians, and journalists—most with extended experience inside Afghanistan—examine the realities of life for women in both urban and rural settings. They address topics including food security, sex work, health, marriage, education, poetry, politics, prisoners, and community development. Eschewing stereotypes about the burqa, the chapters focus instead on women's empowerment and agency, and their struggles for peace and justice in the face of a brutal ongoing war. A fuller picture of Afghanistan's women past and present emerges, leading to social policy suggestions and pragmatic solutions for a peaceful future.

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How are miracles something that are at once unanticipated, and yet worked for? Finally, what do miracles tell us about Christianity, and even about the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with those questions through an detailed ethnographic study of the Vineyard, a Southern-California originated American Evangelical movement known for believing that biblical-style miracles are something that all Christians can perform today. This book sees the miracle a resource and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, and as an immanently-situated and fundamentally social means of producing change that operates through taking surprise and the unexpected, and using it to reimagine and reconfigure the will. A Diagram for Fire shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices such as prophesy, speaking in tongues, healing, and battling demons; but it also shows how the miraculous as a configuration also ends up shaping other practices that seem far from the miracle, such as a sense of temporality, music, reading, economic choices, and both conservative and progressive political imaginaries. This book suggests that the open potential of the miracle, and the ironic constriction of the miracle’s potential through the intentional attempt to embrace it, has much to tell us not only about how contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity both functions and changes, but about an underlying mutability that plays an important role in Christianity and even in religion writ large.

Sociocultural anthropologists have taken increasing interest in the global communities established by Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, but the many streams of Eastern Christianity have so far been neglected. This book fills this gap in the literature. The chapters in this collection examine the primary distinguishing features of the Eastern traditions—iconography, hymnology, ritual, and pilgrimage—through ethnographic analysis. Particular attention is paid to the revitalization of Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches that were repressed under Marxist–Leninist regimes.

One of the critical issues in interreligious relations today is the connection, both actual and perceived, between sacred texts and the justification of violent acts as divinely mandated. Unfortunately, the connection has been relatively little studied in a way that makes solid text-based scholarship accessible to the general public. This volume begins with the premise that a balanced approach to religious pluralism in our world must build on a measured, well-informed response to the increasingly publicized and, sadly, sensationalized association of terrorism and other forms of large-scale violence with religion. The introduction provides background on the major scriptures of seven religious traditions. Eight main chapters then explore aspects of the interpretation of selected facets of scripture in seven traditions: Jewish, Christian (including chapters on Old as well as New Testaments), Islamic, Baha’i, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Sikh. Focus is on sacred texts often claimed, both historically and more recently, as inspiration for and justification of every kind of violence, from individual assassination to mass murder. A balanced approach to this complex topic also means that this is not merely a book about the religious sanctioning of violence, but about diverse ways of reading sacred texts.

The British and Foreign Bible Society is one of the most illustrious Christian charities in the United Kingdom. Founded by evangelicals in the early nineteenth century and inspired by developments in printing technology at the time, its goal has always been nothing less than making Bibles universally available. Over the past several decades, though, the Bible Society has faced a radically different world, especially in its domestic work in England. Where the society once had a grateful and engaged reading public, it now faces apathy—even antipathy—for its cause. These days, it seems, no one in England wants a Bible. And no one wants other people telling them that they should: religion is supposed to be a private matter. The culture is secular. Undeterred, staff at the society have gone about trying to spark a renewed interest in the Word of God. They’ve turned away from publishing and toward publicity to “make the Bible heard.” God’s Agents is a study of how religion goes public in today’s world. Based on over three years of anthropological research, Matthew Engelke traces how a small group of socially committed Christians tackle the challenge of publicity within (what they understand to be) a largely secular culture. In the process of telling their story, Engelke offers an insightful new way to think about the relationships between secular and religious formations more generally. More than the resurgence of “public religion,” what we’re witnessing today are the dynamics of religious publicity.

This book examines the intersections of social marginality, morality, and magic in contemporary Brazil by analyzing the beliefs and religious practices related to the Afro-Brazilian spirit entity Pomba Gira. Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. This book provides an account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gira and one of her devotees, Nazaré da Silva. Combining Nazaré's spiritual biography with analysis of the gender politics and violence that shapes life on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, it highlights Pomba Gira's role in the rivalries, relationships, and struggles of everyday life in urban Brazil.

This book examines the charismatic Christian reformation presently underway in Botswana's time of AIDS and the moral crisis that divides the church between the elders and the young, apostolic faith healers. It focuses on Eloyi, an Apostolic faith-healing church in Botswana's capital. It shows how charismatic “prophets”—holy hustlers—diagnose, hustle, and shock patients during violent and destructive exorcisms. The book also shows how these healers enter into prayer and meditation and take on their patients' pain, and how their ecstatic devotions create an aesthetic in which beauty beckons God. It challenges theoretical assumptions about mimesis and empathy, the power of the word, and personhood.

This book explores the vibrancy and variety of humans' sacred encounters with the natural world, gathering a range of stories culled from Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Mayan, Himalayan, Buddhist, and Chinese shamanic traditions. Readers will delight in tales of house cats who teach monks how to meditate, shamans who shape-shift into jaguars, crickets who perform Catholic mass, rivers that grant salvation, and many others. In addition to being a collection of wonderful stories, this book introduces important concepts and approaches that underlie much recent work in environmental ethics, religion, and ecology. The book prompts readers to engage their own views of humanity's place in the natural world and question longstanding assumptions of human superiority.

This ethnography examines the hopes, frustrations, and activist strategies of American evangelical Christians as they engage socially with local communities. Focusing on two Tennessee megachurches, it reaches beyond political controversies over issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and public prayer to highlight the ways that evangelicals at the grassroots of the Christian Right promote faith-based causes intended to improve the state of social welfare. The book shows how these ministries both help churchgoers embody religious virtues and create provocative new opportunities for evangelism on a public scale. The book challenges conventional views of U.S. evangelicalism as narrowly individualistic, elucidating instead the inherent contradictions that activists face in their efforts to reconcile religious conservatism with a renewed interest in compassion, poverty, racial justice, and urban revivalism.

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, which first began in the 1950s. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic, and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and Christian perspectives, including the New Tribes literature, interviews with New Tribes missionaries, translation practices and translated Christian texts, and the author’s own ethnographic field notes from her more than thirty-year involvement with the Wari’ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.

The Saint in the Banyan Tree is a nuanced and historically persuasive exploration of Christianity's remarkable trajectory as a social and cultural force in southern India. It skillfully combines archival research and anthropological fieldwork to explain how, from the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionary Catholicism was localized into Tamil institutions of caste and popular religiosity, while in the twentieth century, Christianity opened space for political assertions of those subordinated as “untouchable.” Mosse shows how caste was central to the way in which the categories of “religion” and “culture” were formed and negotiated in missionary encounters, and how the social and semiotic possibilities of the new domain of Christian religion incubated a politics of equal rights for dalits. In a way that has never been done before, this book shows the cultural impact of Christianity on everyday religious, social, and political life in rural south India. Connecting historical ethnography to the preoccupations of priests and Jesuit social activists, the book throws new light on the contemporary nature of caste, conversion, religious synthesis, secularization, dalit politics, and the pressing issues of the negotiation of religious pluralism and the struggle for recognition among subordinated people.

Wayward Shamans tells the story of an idea—the idea that humanity’s first expression of art, religion, and creativity found form in the figure of a proto-priest known as a shaman. Tracing this classic category of the history of anthropology back to the emergence of the term in Siberia, the book follows the trajectory of European knowledge about the continent’s eastern frontier. The ethnographic record left by German natural historians engaged in Russian colonial expansion in the eighteenth century includes a range of shamanic practitioners, varied by gender and age. Later accounts by exiled Russian revolutionaries noted transgendered shamans. All this variation vanished, however, in the translation of shamanism into archaeology theory, where a male sorcerer emerged as the key agent of prehistoric art. More recent efforts to provide a universal shamanic explanation for rock art via South Africa and neurobiology likewise gloss over historical evidence of diversity. By contrast, this book argues for recognizing indeterminacy in the categories we use and for reopening them by recalling their complex history.