ANT360H5F: ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION

Fall 2011


Instructor: Dr. T. Sanders (todd.sanders@utoronto.ca)
Location: IB250
Time: Wednesdays 10-12
Office Hours: Wednesdays 12-2, Anthropology 225A



Overview
It is commonly assumed that modernity rationalizes social processes and human beliefs.
Modernity, we are often told, supplants superstitionthose beliefs held (by us) to be
traditional, inexplicable, irrational, nonsensical and sometimes otherworldly. But why, then, do
religions and occult forms survive and thrive in our modern world? Consider, for instance, the
prominence of religions across the globe today. And how witchcraft, shamanism, spirit
possession, and other occult dealings are on the rise, not decline, across Africa, Asia and South
America. Similarly in Europe, North America and elsewhere, satanic child abuse cults,
conspiracy theories, New Age spirituality, witchcraft and neo-paganism all seem to have found a
new lease on life. Wherever they are found, in whatever form, religious and occult forms today
flourish and feature centrally in the western social imagination, even while we are told of their
eminent demise. But why? What sense could such things have for those who believe, and for
those who do not? How can such things endure in the midst of our supposedly modern world?

This course is about anthropological approaches to religion and religious phenomena. It aims to
explore a number of western and non-western practices and beliefs that challenge the idea that
modernity leads to rationalization. Each week we will evaluate different occult beliefs and
practices from an anthropological perspective: not to establish whether they are true or false,
sensible or foolish, but to see what insights they provide into contemporary social and cultural
processes and predicaments. We will thus treat religion and the occult as a window into other
significant social issues. In so doing, we will see that the ostensibly religious and magical
often make claims about, and provide a powerful critique of, modernitys claims to rationality.
By examining religion in a broad sense, the course thus compels us to reconsider what we think
we know about rationality, modernity and progress and the implicit teleological
assumptions that underpin them.


Objectives
This course has four main objectives. The first is to familiarise students with some of the ways
anthropologists have studied religion. The emphasis, thus, is on anthropological explanation of
religious phenomena, not on memorising the things people believe and do in other cultures. The
second course objective is to develop students active listening skills. There will be no
powerpoint presentations or movies, and lecture notes will not be made available on the web or
elsewhere. Students thus have to learn to listen actively to a lecture, for roughly fifty minutes,


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and to extract its main points. Not every word is essential; students should learn through this
method how to separate what is from what is not. The third course objective is to encourage
critical reasoning skills. This is why our readings sometimes argue opposite positions: to compel
students to develop their own arguments and positions and the evidence-based means to support
them. The seminar format, in which students engage directly with each another, should also
further encourage critical reasoning. The fourth course objective is to foster students research
skills through weekly engagements with the Universitys electronic journal collections.


Structure
Each class will be devoted half to lectures, half to interactive seminars in which students will be
expected actively to participate. Students must have read the required readings before class and
have thought carefully about the contents of those readings. What students take away from this
course including their grades will result in large part from what they put into it.


Blackboard
This course uses Blackboard. There you will find a copy of this syllabus, some of the readings,
information on plagiarism, your grades and course updates.


Tests
The course will have two essay tests, one hour each. The first is on 12 October 2011; the
second, which is not cumulative, will be on 23 November 2011. These tests will be based on the
readings, lectures and seminars. They will ask students to identify the authors central
argument(s), lay out what evidence s/he uses to make it, whether or not it is convincing, and
why. Tests must be taken on the date and place designated.


Essay
Students will write one 3000-word essay (significantly shorter or longer essays will not be
graded). This is not a research essay, but a critical evaluation of two course readings. The essay
is identical in form to the tests: you must identify the authors central argument(s), lay out what
evidence s/he uses to make it, whether or not it is convincing, and why. These essays are due 16
November 2011. Late essays will lose 10% per day.


Readings
There will be a fair amount of reading for this course and students who do not like reading would be
advised to consider taking another course. There is one required book, which is available in the
bookshop: West, H. G. & T. Sanders (eds) 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of
Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. There is also a set of articles
and book chapters you will need, all of which are available electronically. Those available on
Blackboard are marked with an asterisk (*); the rest you will find through the University of Torontos
electronic journal collection. This will save students from having to purchase expensive readers. Those
unfamiliar with the librarys online journal collections are encouraged to speak to a reference librarian.


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This syllabus also lists a number of additional readings for those with the time and inclination to
go further. While these are not strictly required, they will help students mark themselves out as
exceptional in class discussions and on the exams. This, in turn, will help separate those who
receive passing grades from those who receive outstanding ones.


Grades
Grades are not assigned arbitrarily but must be earned. This course follows the UTM marking
scheme outlined in your course calendar:

A- to A+ Excellent. Strong evidence of original thinking; good organization, capacity to analyze
and synthesize; superior grasp of subject matter with sound critical evaluations; evidence of
extensive knowledge base.

B- to B+ Good. Evidence of grasp of subject matter, some evidence of critical capacity and
analytic ability; reasonable understanding of relevant issues; evidence of familiarity with the
literature.

C- to C+ Adequate. Student who is profiting from their [sic] university experience;
understanding of the subject matter; ability to develop solutions to simple problems in the
material.

D- to D+ Marginal. Some evidence of familiarity with subject matter and some evidence that
critical and analytic skills have been developed.

F Inadequate. Little evidence of even superficial understanding of subject matter; weakness in
critical and analytical skills, with limited or irrelevant use of literature.


Final grades will be broken down as follows:

25% 1
st
Test
25% 2
nd
Test
50% Paper


Grading Rationale
It is assumed that students will know more at the end of the course than at its beginning, and that
their performance will reflect this (this is the standard learning curve). For this reason, students
are most heavily assessed in the latter part of the course when they are at their strongest.






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Course Overview

WEEK 1
7 September. Introduction: Anthropology and/of Religion

WEEK 2
14 September. Moral and Material Progress and the Enlightenment

WEEK 3
21 September. Rationalization, Disenchantment, Secularization

WEEK 4
28 Sept. Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Teleologies: Modernization and Development

WEEK 5
5 October. Multiple and Alternative Modernities

WEEK 6
12 October. Test #1

WEEK 7
19 October. Witches, Body Parts and Rumours in Africa

WEEK 8
26 October. Devils and Cults in the Americas

WEEK 9
2 November. Spirits and Political-Economies in Asia

WEEK 10
9 November. Western Conspiracy Theories: Government Cover-ups, X-Files and Aliens

WEEK 11
16 November. Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism

WEEK 12
23 November. Test #2






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COURSE READINGS

PART I: EURO-AMERICAN EPISTEMOLOGIES

7 September Introduction: Anthropology and/of Religion

Suggested Background Readings:

Lambek, M. 2008 (ed.) A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion. (2
nd
ed). Blackwell.

Cannell, F. (ed.) 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Geertz, C. 2000. Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

Morris, Brian 1987. Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.



14 September Moral and Material Progress and the Enlightenment

The 18
th
Century Enlightenmentalso known as The Age of Reasonushered into Europe and
North America new ways to see and understand the world. Rationality, Science and Progress
were all the rage, and it was believed that, at long last, Mankind was on the road to Reason and
Truth. This lecture considers some of the teleological tales people told themselves at the time:
tales of progressive movement from dark to light, religion to science, superstition to
understanding, subjective falsehoods to objective Truth.

Required Readings
Kant, Immanuel 1784. 'Answering the question: what is Enlightenment?" ("Beantwortung der Frage:
Was ist Aufklrung?" Berlinische Monatsschrift. [see: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kant-
whatis.html]


Additional Readings
Carhart, Michael C. 2007. The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany. Harvard University
Press.

Denby, D. 2005. Herder: Culture, Anthropology and the Enlightenment. History of the Human
Sciences 18 (1), 55-76.

Dupre, Louis 2005. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. Yale
University Press. (Robarts B802.D86 2004x)


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Ryan, Tom 2002. Le prsident des Terres Australes: Charles de Brosses and the French
Enlightenment beginnings of Oceanic anthropology. Journal of Pacific History xxxvii (2), 157-
186.

Munck, Thomas 2000. The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History 1721-1794. Arnold.
(UTM/Robarts HN373 M85 2000 [ERIN])

Sahlins, Marshall. 1996. The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western
Cosmology. Current Anthropology 37 (3): 395-428.

Schmidt, James (ed) 1996. What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-
Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foucault, Michel 1984. What is Enlightenment? (Quest-ce que les Lumires?), In The Foucault
Reader (ed.) P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.

Gay, Peter. 1969. Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. II: The Science of Freedom. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.



21 September Rationalization, Disenchantment, Secularization

Enlightenment ideas play out in many ways, including through social theory. This week we
discuss rationalization, disenchantment and secularization: all concerns that spring from Max
Webers works, and that have preoccupied sociologists, historians, anthropologists and others
ever since. Weber suggested that starting around the 16
th
Century, methods of rational calculation
increasingly came to dominate modern life. Consequently, he argued, Western civilization
increasingly found explanations for events within this-worldly experiences and by applying
human reason. Modern societies would thus be secular societies: previously-accepted religious
symbols, doctrines, leaders, institutions, mysteries and magicalities would vanish. But what
purchase do such theories give us over our so-called modern world, full as it is of religions and
magicalities? What is the relation between the secular and the sacred? Indeed, is there one, or are
there more productive ways to consider modernitys magicalities?


Required Readings
Mahmood, Saba 2009. Religious reason and secular affect: an incommensurable divide? Critical
Inquiry 35, 836-62.

Thumala Olave, Maria Anglica 2007. Notions of evil, the Devil and sin among Chilean
businessmen. Social Compass 54(4), 613-632.




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Additional Readings
Cannell, Fenella 2010. The anthropology of secularism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 85-
100.

Lee, Raymond L.M. 2008. La fin de la religion? renchantement et dsplacement du sacr.
Social Compass 55(1), 66-83.

Evans, John H. & Evans, Michael S. 2008. Religion and science: beyond the epistemological conflict
narrative. Annual Review of Sociology 34:87-105.

Gorski, Philip S. & Altinordu, Ates 2008. After secularization? Annual Review of Sociology 34,
55-85.

Detlef, P. and P. Gert 2007. Religious individualization or secularization? Testing hypotheses of
religious change: the case of Eastern and Western Germany. British Journal of Sociology 58(4),
603-632.

Cannell, F. 2005. The Christianity of anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 11 (2), 335-356.

Norris, P., Inglehart, R. 2004. Sacred and secular: religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Sellinger, Leah 2004. The forgotten factor: the uneasy relationship between religion and
development. Social Compass 51 (4), 523-543.

Sheehan, J. 2003. Enlightenment, religion, and the enigma of secularization: a review essay.
American Historical Review 108 (4), 1061-1080.

Asad, Talal 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1976. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford:
Clarendon.

Vasquez, M. A., and M. F. Marquardt. 2000. Globalizing the Rainbow Madonna: old time
religion in the present age. Theory, Culture and Society 17 (4): 119-44.

Voy, L. 1999. Secularization in a context of advanced modernity. Sociology of Religion 60(3),
275-288.

Stark, Rodney. 1999. Secularization, R.I.P. Sociology of Religion 60 (3): 249-73.

Horton, Robin. 1970. African traditional thought and Western science. In Rationality, edited by
B. Wilson, 131-71. Oxford: Blackwell.



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28 September Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Teleologies: Modernization and
Development

Enlightenment ideas are alive and well today. From the Second World War to present, there has
been much talk about development and modernization. These things have meant different
things to different people. However, one broad guiding assumptionfor both the general public
and academicshas been a certain teleology of social change. Much as Enlightenment
philosophers envisaged progressive movement from dark to light, superstition to rationality,
nonsense to sense, so have many recent theorists seen development as a unilinear movement
from tradition to modernity. The aim of this lecture is to consider the underlying assumptions
that inform such theories; what we mean by tradition and modernity, and how we might
understand the relationship between the two.

Required Readings
* Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Living in a Post-Traditional Society. In Reflexive Modernization:
Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, edited by Ulrich Beck, Anthony
Giddens, and Scott Lash, 56-109. Cambridge: Polity Press.


Additional Readings
Wallace, Andy 2003. Reason, society and religion: reflections on 11 September from a
Habermasian perspective. Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (5), 491-515.

Apter, David E. 1987. Rethinking Development: Modernization, Dependency, and Post-Modern
Politics. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Nash, M. 1965. The golden road to modernity: village life in contemporary Burma. New York:
John Wiley & Sons.

Pye, Lucian W. 1966. Aspects of Political Development: An Analytic Study. Boston: Little,
Brown and Co.

Rostrow, Walt 2000 [1960]. The stages of economic growth: a non-communist manifesto. In R.
Timmons and A. Hite (eds) From Modernization to Globalization. London, Blackwell.



5 October Multiple and Alternative Modernities

In the 1990s social theorists began discussing multiple modernities. This move was meant as a
critique of Enlightenment-inspired, unilinear notions of social change. Multiple modernities
thus aimed to interrogate teleological tales, and the extent to which the supposed march of
modernity was principally a natural and rational enterprise that made its effects felt
identically wherever it landed. The suggestion for many was that all peoples lived their own


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unique forms of modernity, each equally modern. But to what extent is this new paradigm of
multiple modernities guided by the very Enlightenment assumptions it aims to challenge? And
what new analytic challenges does multiple modernities create?


Required Readings
Hassan, Salah 2010. African modernism: beyond alternative modernities discourse. South
Atlantic Quarterly 109(3): 451-473.

Kaya, I. 2004. Modernity, openness, interpretation: a perspective on multiple modernities. Social
Science Information 43(1), 35-57.

* Ferguson, J. 1999. Global disconnect: abjection and the aftermath of modernism. In
Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings in urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt
Berkeley: University of California Press.


Additional Readings
Petrus, Wing Chung Ho 2008. Public amnesia and multiple modernities in Shanghai: narrating
the postsocialist future in a former socialist model community. Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography 37(4), 383-416.

Harding, Sandra G. 2008. Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities.
Durham: Duke University Press.

Schmidt, Volker H. 2006. Multiple modernities or varieties of modernity? Current Sociology
54(1), 77-97.

Lee, Raymond L.M. 2006. Reinventing modernity: reflexive modernization vs liquid modernity
vs multiple modernities. European Journal of Social Theory 9(3), 355-368.

Dirlik, Arif 2003. Global modernity? Modernity in an age of global capitalism. European
Journal of Social Theory 6 (3), 275-292.

Knauft, B. M. (ed.) 2002. Critically modern: alternatives, alterities, anthropologies.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Kahn, Joel S. 2001. Anthropology and Modernity. Current Anthropology 42 (5): 651-80.

Wittrock, B. 2000. Modernity: one, none, or many? European origins and modernity as a global
condition. Ddalus (special issue: Multiple modernities) 129(1), 31-60.

Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 2000. Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity,
Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure. Current Anthropology 41 (4): 477-509.



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Tambiah, Stanley J. 2000. Transnational Movements, Diaspora, and Multiple Modernities.
Ddalus (special issue: Multiple modernities) 129 (1): 163-94.

Englund, Harri, and Leach, J. 2000. Ethnography and the Meta-Narratives of Modernity. Current
Anthropology 41 (2): 225-39.



12 October Test # 1



PART II. NON-WESTERN RELIGIOUS FORMS


19 October. Witches, Body Parts and Rumour in Africa

In the past two decades, a wave of liberalization has washed across Africa markets and media
have been liberalised; governments have become multiparty and rationalized. At the same time,
medicinal murders, witchcraft and the marketing of human body parts for magical ends are all
rumoured to be on the rise across Africa today. What is it about this particular historical moment
that has given rise to and fuelled such rumours and suspicions? How can we theorise the
relationship between magical and material forces in Africas rapidly changing postcolonial
world? What do peoples fears and fantasies about the occult in Africa tell us about
contemporary conundrums in local, regional and global political-economies? And about social
change in general?

Required Readings
Bastian, M. L. 2003. Diabolic realities: narratives of conspiracy, transparency and ritual
murder in the Nigerian popular print and electronic media. In Transparency and Conspiracy
(eds) H. G. West & T. Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1996. Theft of life: organ stealing rumours. Anthropology Today 12 (3):
3-10.


Additional Readings
Bernault, F. 2009. De la modernit come impuissance. Ftichisme et crise du politique en Afrique
quatoriale et ailleurs. Cahiers dtudes africaines XLIX(3), no. 195, 747-774.

Haar, Gerrie ter and Ellis, S. 2009. The occult does not exist. Africa 79(3), 399-412.

Israel, P. 2008. Dchirures et rumeurs: la chasse au sorcier et lhritage idologique de la
rvolution socialiste au Mozambique (Muidumbe 2002-2003). Cahiers dEtudes africaines
XLVIII (1-2), 209-236.



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Sanders, T. 2008. Buses in Bongoland: seductive analytics and the occult. Anthropological
Theory 8, 107-132.

Bernault, Florence 2006. Body, power and sacrifice in equatorial Africa. Journal of African
History 47(2), 207-239.

Sharp, LA 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed
Self. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Green, M. and Mesaki, S. 2005. The birth of the salon: poverty, modernization, and dealing
with witchcraft in southern Tanzania. American Ethnologist 32 (3), 371-388.

Sanders, Todd. 2001. Save our skins: structural adjustment, morality and the occult in Tanzania.
In Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in
Postcolonial Africa, edited by Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, 160-83. London:
Routledge.

Moore, Henrietta L., and Todd Sanders. 2001. Magical interpretations and material realities: an
introduction. In Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the
Occult in Postcolonial Africa, edited by Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, 1-27. London:
Routledge.

White, L. 2000. Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. University of
California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2000. The global traffic in human organs. Current Anthropology 41 (2):
191-224.

Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction:
notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279-303.

Moore, Sally Falk. 1999. Reflections on the Comaroff lecture. American Ethnologist 26 (2): 304-
06.

Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial
Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.



26 October Devils and Cults in the Americas

In some parts of Latin America participation in new religious movements, and belief in contracts
with the devil, are on the rise. This raises several issues: what is the relationship between the
occult and the nation-state? Do state ideologies and practices generate occult beliefs and
practices? Can we see the latter as a critique of the former? Alternatively, are the nation-state and
the occult two sides of the same coin, both springing from a similarly modernist vision of the


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world? What are the implications for treating state and occult ideologies on equal analytic
footing?

Required Readings
Holston, James 1999. Alternative modernities: statecraft and religious imagination in the Valley
of the Dawn. American Ethnologist 26 (3), 605-631.

Taussig, Michael. 1977. The genesis of capitalism amongst a South American peasantry: devil's
labor and the baptism of money. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (2): 130-55.


Additional Readings
Londoo Sulkin, Carlos 2005. Inhuman beings: morality and perspectivism among Muinane
people (Colombian Amazon). Ethnos 70 (1), 7-30.

Whitehead, N. L. & R. Wright (eds) 2004. In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of
Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia. Durham: Duke University Press.

Palmi, S. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition.
Durhmam: Duke University Press.

Limn, Jos. 1994. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American
South Texas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Esp. chapters 8-9.

Cervantes, Fernando. 1994. The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.



2 November Spirits and Political-Economies in Asia

Across Asia new religious forms, occult beliefs and practices appear to be rising not declining.
These have expressed themselves, for example, in new ghost worship cults in Taiwan, and
increased popular interest in spirit mediumship and/or spirit possession in Thailand, Malaysia,
Korea, and beyond. This process has occurred side-by-side with a sudden burst of economic
development from the 1970s onwards in several Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs) of Asia,
in both capitalist and (post)socialist societies. What do such things tell us about development?
And about the introduction of novel forms of wealth; new regimes of production, exchange and
consumption; and globalization more generally?



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Required Readings
Goh, Beng-Lan 2005. Malay-Muslim spirits and Malaysian capitalist modernity: a study of
keramat propitiation among property developers in Penang. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 46(3), 307-
322.

Kendall, L. 2003. Gods, markets, and the IMF in the Korean spirit world. In Transparency and
Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (eds) H. G. West & T.
Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


Additional Readings
Kwon, Heonik 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chau, Adam 2008. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kitiarsa, Pattana 2005. Magic monks and spirit mediums in the politics of Thai popular religion.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6(2), 209-226. [available online]

Schrauwers, Albert 2003. Through a glass darkly: charity, conspiracy and power in New Order
Indonesia. In Transparency and Conspiracy, edited by Harry G. West and Todd Sanders.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [available in edited book]

Ong, Aihwa 1988. The production of possession: spirits and the multinational corporation in
Malaysia. American Ethnologist 15, 28-42. [available online]

Morris, Rosalind C. 2000. Modernity's media and the end of mediumship? On the aesthetic
economy of transparency in Thailand. Public Culture (special issue: Millennial capitalism and
the culture of neoliberalism) 12 (2): 457-75.

Geschiere, Peter. 1998. Globalization and the power of indeterminate meaning: witchcraft and
spirit cults in Africa and East Asia. Development and Change 29 (4): 811-38.



PART III: RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA AT HOME


9 November Conspiracy Theories: Government Cover-Ups, X-Files and Aliens

Americans have long been fascinated by conspiracies, especially in recent years: Who was really
behind JFKs shooting? Is the government hiding aliens from the public? Is the world run not by
open, democratic processes and actors but by wealthy businessmen and military elite from the
hidden depths of the Pentagon? Does the New World Order proposed by President George Bush
(the first one) really signal the advent of a tyrannical federal world government? Of late, such
ideas have captured large portions of the American popular imagination, and have been


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expressed in myriad movies and popular television shows like The X-Files. What does the
prevalence and popularity of such ideas tell us about Americans today? Does conspiracy thinking
provide critical commentaries on the operation of power in national and global forums? Are we
afforded any additional theoretical purchase by comparing occult cosmologies and conspiracy
theories, since both assume that hidden forces determine visible outcomes?

Required Readings
Dominic, Boyer 2006. Conspiracy, history, and therapy at the Berlin Stammtisch. American
Ethnologist 33(3), 327-339.

Campbell, John Edward. 2001. Alien(ating) ideology and the American media: apprehending the
alien image in television through the X-Files. International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (3):
327-47.

Brown, K. M. 2003. Making wanga: reality constructions and the magical manipulation of
power. In Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order
(eds) H. G. West & T. Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



Additional Readings
Pelkmans, M. and R. Machold 2011. Conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories. Focaal 59,
66-80.

Kapur, Jyotsna 2009. Fear on the footsteps of comedy: childhood and paranoia in contemporary
American cinema. Visual Anthropology 22(1), 44-51.

Knight, Peter 2008. Outrageous conspiracy theories: popular and official responses to 9/11 in
Germany and the United States. New German Critique 103, 165-193.

Fenster, Mark. 2008. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. (2
nd
edition).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Saethre, E. 2007. Close encounters: UFO beliefs in a remote Australian Aboriginal community.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, 901-915.

Hoon, Song 2006. Seeing oneself seeing oneself: White nihilism in ethnography and theory.
Ethnos 71(4), 470-488.

Battaglia, D. (ed.) 2005. E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Durham: Duke University
Press.

Buttle, Leslie 2005. Lipstick girls and fallen women: AIDS and conspiratorial thinking in
Papua, Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 20(3), 412-441.

Briggs, C. L. 2004. Theorizing modernity conspiratorially: science, scale, and the political


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economy of public discourse in explanations of a cholera epidemic. American Ethnologist 31 (2),
164-187.

Hellinger, D. 2003. Paranoia, conspiracy and hegemony in American politics. In Transparency
and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the New World Order (eds) H. G. West & T.
Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sanders, T. & H. G. West 2003. Power revealed and concealed in the New World Order. In
Transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order (eds) H. G.
West & T. Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Knight, P. 2001. Conspiracy Culture: American Paranoia from Kennedy to the X-Files. New
York: Routledge.

Melley, Timothy. 2000. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.



16 November Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism

The term fundamentalism has meant many things. Of late, it has featured conspicuously in the
North American cultural scene, and is often associated with the term Islamic. It has in the past
(and in some areas today) been associated with Christian, and is also commonly linked to
nationalism and other ideologies, as well as to certain forms of political activism, violence and
terror. Todays lecture aims to ask what we mean by fundamentalism, and to suggest that this is
a political, rather than analytic label. Yet ironically, it is a political label that often suggests an a-
political argument, one framed in terms of (im)morality and (ir)religiosity: good and evil; for us
or against us; civilization versus barbarism; freedom versus repression; rational versus irrational.
In this sense, to label someone or something fundamentalist is to impute a hidden evil among
us thatlike the African witch or the Satanic child abuserthreatens to undo the fabric of our
civilized, moral world. What does the popularity of labels like fundamentalism tell us about
the Euro-American cultural imagination today?

Required Readings
Hage, G. 2003. Comes a time we are all enthusiasm: understanding Palestinian suicide bombers
in times of exighophobia. Public Culture 15 (1), 55-64.

Harding, S. & K. Stewart 2003. Anxieties of influence: conspiracy theory and therapeutic culture
in millennial America. In Transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the New
World Order (eds) H. G. West & T. Sanders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


Additional Readings
Marranci, Gabriele 2009. Understanding Muslim Identity: Rethinking Fundamentalism. Palgrave
McMillan.


ANT360H5FSanders, 16 of 16



Asad, Talal 2007. On Suicide Bombing. Columbia University Press.

Kuznar, Lawrence 2007. Rationality wars and the war on terror: explaining terrorism and social
unrest. American Anthropologist 109(2), 318-329.

Emerson, Michael O. & Hartman, David 2006. The rise of religious fundamentalism. Annual
Review of Sociology 32:127-44.

Mamdani, M. 2005. Good Muslim, bad Muslim: America, the cold war, and the roots of terror.
New York: Three Leaves Press (Doubleday).

2005. Strathern, A., Stewart, P.J. and N. Whitehead (eds) 2005. Terror and Violence: imagination
and the unimaginable. Pluto. London.

Steinmetz, G. 2003. The state of emergency and the revival of American imperialism: toward an
authoritarian Post-Fordism. Public Culture 15 (2), 323-345.

Mamdani, M. 2002. Good Muslim, bad Muslim: a political perspective on culture and terrorism.
American Anthropologist 104 (3), 766-775.

Sluka, J.et al. 2002. What anthropologists should know about the concept of 'terrorism': a
response to David Price. Anthropology Today 18 (2), 22-23.

Mahmood, C. K. 2001. Terrorism, myth, and the power of ethnographic praxis. Journal of
Contemporary Ethnography 30 (5): 520-45.

Nagata, Judith. 2001. Beyond theology: toward an anthropology of 'fundamentalism'. American
Anthropologist 103 (2): 481-98.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2001. The McNamara complex. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (1): 171-77.

Weiss, Meria. 2001. The body of the nation: terrorism and the embodiment of nationalism in
contemporary Israel. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (1): 37-62.

Leach, E.R. 1977. Custom, Law and Terrorist Violence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.



23 November Test #2