RELIGIOONIANTROPOLOOGIA
Anthropology of Religion

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the changes in post-WWII anthropology of religion focusing more in detail on the past three decades. Religion has been one of the core themes of anthropological scrutiny together with kinship, politics and economics since the birth of the discipline in the mid-19th century. Early anthropology in general, and the study of religion likewise, was characterized by evolutionary approach. In the first half of the 20th century, in turn, anthropological research was predominantly functionalistic. Since the 1950s anthropology of religion has been less concerned with grand theoretical schemes and big research questions, but more so with an in-depth analysis of different aspects of religious behaviour and beliefs. It could even be argued that anthropological theory, at least compared to the grand theories of pre-WWII anthropology, is „dead”.The decades from roughly 1950 to 1980 could be regarded as a period of transition from anthropological research based on grand theories to more contemporary anthropology of religion, characterized by eclecticism both in theory and in ethnography. Two theoretical approaches within anthropology or religion that stand out among others during this era of transition are structuralism, best exemplified in the approach by Lévi-Strauss, and symbolic anthroplogy of Clifford Geertz. The so-called rationality debate of the late 1960s is an exceptional return to grand theory and big research questions in post-1950s anthropology of religion. Since early 1980s, anthropology of religion has been characterized by three trends. Due to the so-called epistemological crisis in anthropology in general, anthropology of religion has become considerably more self-critical. This selfcriticism entails acknowledging the reductionistic nature of most earlier studies of religion in anthropology, questioning the objectivity of previous research, pointing to conceptual weaknesses in previous and present studies, and revealing the challenges inherent in the study of belief in general. The two other trends within contemporary anthropology of religion include increasing interest in macroreligious processes, i.e. religious changes in general and the rise of new religious movements in particular, and secondly, diversification of contexts of ethnographic research. The latter mainly refers to an increasing interest in the so-called ”world religions”, instead of the traditional anthropological interest in „tribal religions”. The sub-field of „anthropology of Christianity” has emerged as a particularly promising and novel field that serves as an intellectural bridge between anthropology, theology and comparative religious studies.

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