Reviews for Anthropology of Religion An Introduction

The average rating for Anthropology of Religion An Introduction based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-07-12 00:00:00 William Wilson I was given this book by a friend of mine, who is an academic bio-anthropologist. I am not an academic or a student. I read this book mostly because he gave it to me. I have a general interest in religion and the study of religion. My only prior reading in the Anthropology of Religion was James Frazier's 'The Golden Bough' which I enjoyed a great deal. All this to say that I am not the intended audience (non-academic lay person) for the book. I tried to assess the expectations I held prior to reading this book. They were vague, perhaps somewhere along the lines of 'a compilation or comparison of various religions and religious practices around the world from an anthropological perspective'. Bowie's writing style is engaging, if the overall threads are somewhat hard to follow at times. The book turned out to be be very heavy on the theory (not in an absolute sense, but relative to my expectations), in fact it functions almost as much as an intro to 20th century theory as the anthropology of religion. Many of the chapters are structured around a handful of, generally adumbrated, reports of fieldwork or practices of a culture which are then used to demonstrate various approaches of theory. At times there is a focus on the personalities of the field: Levi-Strauss, Jung, Freud, Mead, Saussure et al., their various schools and the dialectic of these schools. I'm torn because, on the once hand this does introduce and situate one within the academic world, but it also has little to do with the actual topic(s) at hand. There is, for instance, a fairly long section near the end on the Levi-Strauss' approach to dissecting myth which concludes by pointing out that structuralism has fallen out of favor and no longer has many followers. There is also a not-insignificant amount of time spent on Feminist approaches to anthropology and neo-paganism, at least more than I would expect in an introductory text. While these are important areas, I don't see how Carlos Castaneda can warrant as much air time as he receives in this book.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-13 00:00:00 Mary Schneider Read for an Anthropology of Magic, Science, and Religion course.