This course explores some fundamental questions about the role that religious institutions, practices and commitments play in shaping contemporary social, cultural and political life.

Attention to the diversity of human religious practice has been central to anthropology and remains a topic of considerable interest and continuing research.

The course will considers a variety of religious phenomena found throughout the world and the theoretical and methodological approaches anthropologists use to account for them.

Emphasis is given to the analysis of religious forms of representation, symbolic settings and social action, understanding how religious experience is perceived and interpreted by adherents, and highlighting the way in which individual and group identities are constructed, maintained and contested within religious contexts.

Tutorial paper (10%), tutorial participation (15%), research essay (35%) and take-home exam (40%).

2 hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week

Two first year courses to a value of 12 units in Anthropology; or Sociology; or Religious Studies.

This course may be counted towards an Anthropology or Religious Studies major.