Our research on “religion” covers a range of diverse phenomena, from world religions like Christianity and Islam to anticipated futures, myth, indigenous and diasporic traditions, violence, pilgrimage, materiality, transcendence, honor, shame, senses, speech, divination, conversion, possession, healing, humanitarian outreach, values, social change, power, social movements, religious politics, the legal treatment of religion, secularism, and anti-religion.
Religion is often a distinct space of reasoning and practice that cannot be reduced to any other. In many places in the world, understanding religion is also necessary for understanding issues like gender, processes of racialization, reasoning and state practices. Similarly, concepts and phenomena that are commonly associated with religion, such as ritual, prophecy and witch-hunts are central to social and political life in non-religious contexts, extending the relevance of anthropological perspectives on religion beyond explicitly religious domains.
To understand the dynamic role of religion, worldviews and ritual in the world today, and how it is entangled with social, political and ethical life, our anthropological approach is grounded in empirical research, both ethnographic and archival, and has a comparative, cross-cultural dimension spanning from Europe and South America to the Middle East and the South Pacific.
Researchers working on Religion and Ritual