SHIFTING AIMS, MOVING TARGETS: ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION*

Abstract

For an anthropologist pushing 80 and feeling it push back, there seems little else to do on a ceremonial occasion of this sort [the 2004 Sir James Frazer Lecture], dedicated as it is to commemorating a marmoreal figure whom most people remember, so far as they remember him at all, as a cloistered Edwardian don who devoted his life to a Causabon-like compilation of the world's exotica, but to reflect upon one's own, rather different, but hardly less transient, career in a related line of work and try to suggest what time and change have done to it.Not that this will avail against what time and change have done, and will continue to do, to it.There is nothing so dead as a dead academic, and any Ozymandian dreams one might entertain will be quickly dissolved by the simple device of looking up the Collected Frazer Lectures, 1922-32 on the Amazon web-site bestseller list and finding them placed at 2,467,068.I want, I hope without undue self-reference or illusions of permanence, simply to put into the record a particular encounter with a particular time.And a particular subject: the anthropology of religion.Why I have spent so much of my time and energy since wandering into anthropology from the Humanities studying (in heavy quotation marks, here and throughout) 'religion' -in Southeast Asia, in North Africa, in the past, in the present, increasingly in the world at large -is not entirely clear to me, particularly as I have myself no particular religious background or -so far anyway, and as I say, it's getting late -commitment.Some of it, this concern, not to say obsession, with faith, worship, belief, sanctity, mystery, world-view, sorcery, propitiation, and the adoration of trees (on which, you will remember, Frazer has no less than five separate chapters) certainly has to do with that Humanities background: literature and philosophy do incline the mind to recherché subjects.But far more, I think, it is due to the continuing centrality of the description and analysis of myth, magic, rite, and spiritual tonality in anthropology from E.B.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.