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.

Completion of this course will enable students to:

• Appreciate the centrality of religion to human social life and to the theoretical ambitions of the social sciences.
• Describe some of the enormous variability of religious phenomena.
• Explain the basis of anthropological critiques of taken-for-granted categories such as "religion".
• Place perspectives on the explanation of religion in the wider context of theoretical orientations in the social sciences.
• Appreciate the intimacy between conceptual and empirical issues in the questions in the social sciences.

By negotiation - 6,000 words

Two hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week