Religious Studies

The history and theory of a number of movements in the anthropology of religion—including the theories of Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim—are detailed in this introductory text.

This work includes the author's well-known critique of Geertz (see below), "The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category." Asad further declares that because “religion” itself is a product of specific Western discourses, there can be no transhistorical, transcultural definition of a phenomenon in its own right called “religion." This view is widely held by secular scholars of religion today.

In the early 1970s, noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz used symbolic anthropology and his own interpretive anthropological method to develop what he considered to be a universal theory of religion. This collection of essays includes Geertz's seminal work on religion, "Religion as a Cultural System."

Douglas discusses the ways in which cleanliness and uncleanliness reflect the structure of a culture.

Turner's book develops theories now famous about the ways in which rites of passage help to regulate cultures.

This well known author proposes discarding “ritual” as a unique phenomenon, suggesting instead that “rituals”—and, logically, “religions”—be considered instead as part of the wider continuum of human discourses and practices. In developing her own theory of embodied, "ritualized" human behavior, Bell draws upon a number of important social theorists, including Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Bell’s work is one of the most significant attempts to bridge the gap between “reductive” social and anthropological approaches and approaches that attempt to take “religious” or “supernatural” phenomena on their own terms.

The book argues that “religion” can not be understood apart from its social milieu.

In this work, the author critiques studies of totemism and develops his own theories of myth.