Ritual and Memory

Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion

Contributions by J.D.Y Peel, David Shankland, Maurice Bloch, Brian Malley, Susan Bayly, Leo Howe, Gilbert Lewis (St. John's College, Cambridge), Jack Goody, Christian K. Højbjerg Edited by Harvey Whitehouse, James Laidlaw

Publication date:

18 August 2004

Length of book:

230 pages

Publisher

AltaMira Press

Dimensions:

234x173mm
7x9"

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these contributors differ in their methods, their areas of fieldwork, and their predisposition towards Whitehouse's cognitively-based approach, they all help evaluate and refine Whitehouse's theory and so contribute to a new comparative approach in the anthropology of religion.

1 Preface
2 Introduction
3 Divergent Modes of Religiosity in West Africa
4 Modes of Religiosity and the Legacy of Ernest Gellner
5 Is Image to Doctrine as Speech to Writing? Modes of Communication and the Origins of Religion
6 Ritual and Deference
7 The Doctrinal Mode and Evangelical Christianity in the U. S.
8 Embedded Modes of Religiosity in Indic Renouncer Religions
9 Conceptualizations From Within: Divergent Religious Modes from Asian Modernist Perspectives
10 The Doctrinal Mode of Religiosity: Some Ethnographic and Theoretical Problems
11 Religious Doctrine or Experience: A Matter of Seeing, Learning or Doing
12 Universalistic Orientations of an Imagistic Mode of Religiosity: The Case of the West African Poro Cult
13 Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion