Anthropology 2013

Islam, Development, and Urban Women’s Reproductive Practices

By Cortney Hughes Rinker

Series: Routledge Studies in Anthropology

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Rabat, Morocco, this ethnography analyzes the relationship between neoliberal development policies, women’s reproductive practices, and popular understandings of Islam. In the 1990s, Morocco shifted its attention from economic to human development, as economic...

Published March 3rd 2013 by Routledge

Media and Ritual

Death, Community and Everyday Life

By Johanna Sumiala

Series: Media, Religion and Culture

This wide-ranging and accessible book offers a stimulating introduction to the field of media anthropology and the study of religious ritual. Johanna Sumiala explores the interweaving of rituals, communication and community. She uses the tools of anthropological enquiry to examine a variety of...

Published September 25th 2012 by Routledge

Christianity in Contemporary China

Socio-cultural Perspectives

Edited by Francis Khek Gee Lim

Series: Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy

Christianity is one of the fastest growing religions in China. Despite its long history in China and its significant indigenization or intertwinement with Chinese society and culture, Christianity continues to generate suspicion among political elites and intense debates among broader communities...

Published September 19th 2012 by Routledge

The Market and Temple Fairs of Rural China

Red Fire

By Gene Cooper

Series: Asia's Transformations

During the early communist period of the 1950s, temple fairs in China were both suppressed and secularized. Temples were closed down by the secular regime and their activities classified as feudal superstition and this process only intensified during the Cultural Revolution when even the surviving...

Published August 12th 2012 by Routledge

The Guru in South Asia

New Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Jacob Copeman, Aya Ikegame

Series: Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series

This book provides a set of fresh and compelling interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring phenomenon of the guru in South Asia. Moving across different gurus and kinds of gurus, and between past and present, the chapters call attention to the extraordinary scope and richness of the social lives...

Published June 17th 2012 by Routledge

The Anthropology of Islam Reader

Edited by Jens Kreinath

The Anthropology of Islam Reader brings together a rich variety of ethnographic work, offering an insight into various forms of Islam as practiced in different geographic, social, and cultural contexts. Topics explored include Ramadan and the Hajj, the Feast of Sacrifice, and the representation of...

Published November 8th 2011 by Routledge

Traveling Spirits

Migrants, Markets and Mobilities

Edited by Gertrud Hüwelmeier, Kristine Krause

Series: Routledge Studies in Anthropology

Maintaining and forging religious networks across borders have long been part of migrants' activities. However, due to the wide availability of communication technologies and the reduced costs of transportation, transnational social practices, including religious activities, have witnessed an...

Published August 14th 2011 by Routledge

The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism

Edited by Edmund Leach

Designed to provoke controversy, the papers in this volume concentrate on two main themes: the study of myth and totemism. Starting with an English translation of La Geste d'Asdiwal, which is widely considered to be the most brilliant of all of Lévi-Strauss's shorter expositions of his technique of...

Published November 10th 2010 by Routledge

Introducing Anthropology of Religion

Culture to the Ultimate

By Jack David Eller

Written by an experienced teacher, this basic introduction to the anthropology of religion explores key contemporary issues such as: definitions, theories, beliefs, symbols and language, and behaviour. The second part of the book analyzes religion in the modern world, violence, fundamentalism and...

Published July 15th 2007 by Routledge

Reframing Pilgrimage

Cultures in Motion

Edited by Simon Coleman, John Eade

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of...

Published March 31st 2004 by Routledge

Ecstatic Religion

A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 3rd Edition

By I.M. Lewis

Published December 11th 2002 by Routledge

Magical Interpretations, Material Realities

Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa

Edited by Henrietta L. Moore, Todd Sanders

'Magical Interpretations, Material Realities brings together many of today's best scholars of contemporary Africa. The theme of "witchcraft" has long been associated with exoticizing portraits of a "traditional" Africa, but this volume takes the question of occult as a point of entry into the...

Published December 12th 2001 by Routledge

A General Theory of Magic

2nd Edition

By Marcel Mauss

Series: Routledge Classics

First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called,...

Published May 17th 2001 by Routledge

Medicine, Magic and Religion

By W.H.R. Rivers

Series: Routledge Classics

One of the most fascinating men of his generation, W.H.R. Rivers was a British doctor and psychiatrist as well as a leading ethnologist. Immortalized as the hero of Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration trilogy, Rivers was the clinician who, in the First World War, cared for the poet Siegfried...

Published May 16th 2001 by Routledge

Myth and Meaning

By Claude Lévi-Strauss

Series: Routledge Classics

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science...

Published May 16th 2001 by Routledge