Throughout history, religion has been perhaps the most dominant force shaping human social and cultural life. It is out of religion and
ritual that human groups fashion their laws, morals, art, philosophy, indeed, the cultural frameworks within which they live meaningful
lives. This course is an anthropological investigation into the topic of religion and considers how religious beliefs and practices are expressed in a wide range of areas including witchcraft and sorcery, cosmology and origin stories, death and the afterlife, healing and many others. We will also look at topics that are deeply significant to the contemporary world, such as religious fundamentalism and violence, as well as trends toward secularisation and irrelgion. In addition to examining these various topics within the anthropology of religion, students will also be introduced to historic and contemporary theoretical trends within this field of knowledge and be shown how anthropological understandings of what religion is and what it means to people have undergone considerable change from the emergence of the discipline to the present day. As students will see, anthropologists are taking the spiritual and religious worlds of indigenous peoples increasingly seriously, with many no longer reducing them to made up worlds of cultural belief but rather appreciating them as compeltely different worlds with diffierent possibilities for reality.

Students will be required to read one article per week, which will be discussed within the tutorial sessions. All required readings will be made available as through the course Moodle page.