Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion

by Harvey Whitehouse, James Laidlaw, J.D.Y Peel, David Shankland, Maurice Bloch, Brian Malley, Susan Bayly, Leo Howe, Gilbert Lewis (St. John's College, , Cambridge), Jack Goody, Christian K. Hojbjerg

Overview

The international conference from which these 11 papers are taken, on modes of religiosity, was held in December 2001 at Cambridge University; it was the first of three, and the proceedings of the others are presented in other volumes in the series. Mostly anthropologists explore such topics as divergent modes of religiosity in West Africa, the doctrinal mode and evangelical Christianity in the US, Indic renouncer religions, and Asian modernist perspectives. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780759106161
Publisher:	AltaMira Press
Publication date:	10/15/2004
Series:	Cognitive Science of Religion Series , #6
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.82(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Queen's University Belfast. A specialist in Melanesian religion, he carried out two years of field research on a 'cargo cult' in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties. In recent years, he has focused his energies on the development of collaborative programmes of research on cognition and culture. He is currently the principal grant holder of a British Academy Networks Project on 'modes of religiosity' and in 2003 was appointed to a British Academy Research Readership. He is also co-editor, with Luther H. Martin, of the AltaMira 'Cognitive Science of Religion Series.' His previous books include Inside the Cult: religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea (1995), Arguments and Icons: divergent modes of religiosity, (2000), The Debated Mind: evolutionary psychology versus ethnography (2001), and Modes of Religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission (2004). James Laidlaw studied social anthropology at King's College Cambridge, with Caroline Humphrey as supervisor for his doctoral fieldwork in western India, between 1984 and 1990. Now University Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. More recent fieldwork has been in Taiwan and Inner Mongolia. Publications include The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994, with Caroline Humphrey), Riches and Renunciation (1995), and The Essential Edmund Leach (2000, with Stephen Hugh-Jones).

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	Introduction	1
Chapter 1	Divergent Modes of Religiosity in West Africa	11
Chapter 2	Modes of Religiosity and the Legacy of Ernest Gellner	31
Chapter 3	Is Image to Doctrine as Speech to Writing? Modes of Communication and the Origins of Religion	49
Chapter 4	Ritual and Deference	65
Chapter 5	The Doctrinal Mode and Evangelical Christianity in the United States	79
Chapter 6	Embedded Modes of Religiosity in Indic Renouncer Religions	89
Chapter 7	Conceptualizing from Within: Divergent Religious Modes from Asian Modernist Perspectives	111
Chapter 8	Late Medieval Christianity, Balinese Hinduism, and the Doctrinal Mode of Religiosity	135
Chapter 9	Religious Doctrine or Experience: A Matter of Seeing, Learning, or Doing	155
Chapter 10	Universalistic Orientations of an Imagistic Mode of Religiosity: The Case of the West African Poro Cult	173
Chapter 11	Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion	187
	Index	207
	About the Contributors	217