ANTH4049
ANTH 4049 - Religion and Culture (3 Cr.)
Anthropology (10950)
TCLA - College of Liberal Arts
ANTH 4049 - Religion and Culture (3 Cr.)
Course description
Our subtitle is “sacredness.” The operational presupposition of the class is that sacredness is more than a mental phenomenon: it involves objects and bodies. Modern perspectives on religion have long downplayed this “material” aspect as they privileged iconoclastic spirituality. The anthropology of religion aims to go beyond the material/spiritual opposition and asks how rituals employ objects and bodies in order to capture the effect we might call spiritual or mystical. Intellectually, this is an extremely difficult wisdom for the moderns to grasp because the binary oppositions between the spiritual and the material, between mind and the body, subtend modern society’s very sense of order and rationality. This class is successful if we can have even a glimpse of how much difficulty we moderns have in seeing beyond these binaries.
Take, for example, sacrifice. It is almost intuitive that the human condition abides in the requisition of sacrifice: redemption is found by suffering, abundance secured by loss, and the gift of life enabled by death. Such an intuition is as universal as its practiced intent is ambiguous to us. Ambiguous because the following questions immediately rise: For whom or in whose "eyes" is a gesture of sacrificial offering supposed to be accounted for? If one facilitates one’s own death in the hands of one’s enemy in a redemptive gesture—which is, arguably, the case of Jesus Christ—would the enemy part of the redeemed? We will raise the most impenetrable of such questions through compelling examples in contemporary politics, such as the post-9/11 category of so-called religiously-motivated protest suicide. As Talal Asad argues, one of the reasons the "suicide bombing" is so disconcerting to us is not because of the extent of its violence—which is not remarkable compared to technology-driven terror tactics—but because the act violates our dearest binaries: victim/victimizer, dying/killing, means/ends, and crime/punishment. At the bottom of these binaries, as we will see in this class, is the binary opposition between materiality and spirituality. This issue will be expanded into modern society in the latter part of the class.
There are no prerequisites for this class.
Take, for example, sacrifice. It is almost intuitive that the human condition abides in the requisition of sacrifice: redemption is found by suffering, abundance secured by loss, and the gift of life enabled by death. Such an intuition is as universal as its practiced intent is ambiguous to us. Ambiguous because the following questions immediately rise: For whom or in whose "eyes" is a gesture of sacrificial offering supposed to be accounted for? If one facilitates one’s own death in the hands of one’s enemy in a redemptive gesture—which is, arguably, the case of Jesus Christ—would the enemy part of the redeemed? We will raise the most impenetrable of such questions through compelling examples in contemporary politics, such as the post-9/11 category of so-called religiously-motivated protest suicide. As Talal Asad argues, one of the reasons the "suicide bombing" is so disconcerting to us is not because of the extent of its violence—which is not remarkable compared to technology-driven terror tactics—but because the act violates our dearest binaries: victim/victimizer, dying/killing, means/ends, and crime/punishment. At the bottom of these binaries, as we will see in this class, is the binary opposition between materiality and spirituality. This issue will be expanded into modern society in the latter part of the class.
There are no prerequisites for this class.
Minimum credits
3
Maximum credits
3
Is this course repeatable?
No
Grading basis
OPT - Student Option
Lecture
Credit will not be granted if credit has been received for:
01595
Typically offered term(s)
Periodic Fall