This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer’s Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin’s Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people’s most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people’s brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion.
Introducing the Independent Thinkers
1. "Such Turbulent Human Material"
Part I: Nineteenth-Century Beginnings
2. The Mirror of Modernity
3. The Phenomenon of the Golden Bough
4. If I was a Horse
Part II: Definitions
5. The Essence of Religion
6. On the Uselessness of Ritual
Part III: Religion and Science
7. Einstein in The Outback
8. Real Knowledge of Real Worlds
9. Integrity of Science and Religion
Part IV: Dismissing Diversity
10. Laying Tylor’s Ghost
11. Exorcising Freud
Part V: Looking for Meanings
12. What’s Only Natural
13. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
Part VI: Ritual and Rationality
14. No One Believes in Things That Aren’t There
15. Being Reasonable
Part VII: Powers
16. Invitations You Can’t Refuse
17. Nature Does Not Work Independently Of Man
18. Findings
Postscript: Religion and Evolution
Biography
Peter Metcalf is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, USA. He has conducted fieldwork in central Borneo over many years and written extensively about its peoples and cultures. He has also written about issues in comparative religion, especially as concerns death rituals worldwide and throughout history.