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Religion: An Anthropological Perspective provides a critical view of religion focusing upon important but overlooked topics such as religion, cognition, and prehistory; science, rationality, and religion; altered states of consciousness, entheogens and religious experience; religion and the paranormal; magic and divination; religion and ecology; fundamentalism; and religion and violence. In addition, this book offers a unique and concise coverage of traditional topics of the anthropology of religion such as shamanism and witchcraft (past and present), ritual, myth, religious symbols, and revitalization movements. A vast range of findings from ethnography, ethnology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, prehistory, history, and cognitive science are brought to bear on the subject. Written in clear jargon-free prose, this book provides an accessible and comprehensive yet critical view of the anthropology of religion both for graduate and undergraduate students and general audiences. Its scope and critical scientific orientation sets Religion: An Anthropological Perspective apart from all other treatments of the subject.
List of contents
Contents: Anthropology and Religion - Religion, Cognition, and Prehistory - Shamanism - Altered States of Consciousness and Religion - Entheogens and Religious Experience - Witchcraft: Evil in Human Form - Magic and Divination - Religion and the Paranormal - Religion: Organization and Evolutionary Patterns - Religion and Ecology - Ritual: The Practical Dimension of Religion - Myth: The Narrative Dimension of Religion - Symbols: The Representational Dimension of Religion - Revitalization Movements and the Origins of Religion - Fundamentalism - Religion and Violence.
About the author
H. Sidky is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include the anthropology of religion, ecological anthropology, anthropological theory/history of anthropological thought, and scientific methods in anthropology. He has conducted ethnographic field research in Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Nepal, Easter Island, central Australia, and among the Tibetan exile community in northern India. Dr. Sidky is the author of numerous books, including Haunted by the Archaic Shaman: Himalayan Jhakris and the Discourse on Shamanism (2008), Perspectives on Culture: A Critical Introduction to Theory in Cultural Anthropology (2004), Halfway to the Mountain: The Jirels of Eastern Nepal (2004), A Critique of Postmodern Anthropology: In Defense of Disciplinary Origins and Traditions (2003), The Greek Kingdom of Bactria: From Alexander to Eucratides the Great (2000), and Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease: An Anthropological Study of the European Witch-Persecutions (Lang, 1997).
Summary
Religion: An Anthropological Perspective provides a critical view of religion focusing upon important but overlooked topics such as religion, cognition, and prehistory; science, rationality, and religion; altered states of consciousness, entheogens and religious experience; religion and the paranormal; magic and divination; religion and ecology; fundamentalism; and religion and violence.
