Anthropology and Religion: Reason, Magic, Technology

1 Course Unit

Is religion a private matter? How does it differ from science and politics? Are there convergences between religious thought and current technological developments such as artificial intelligence? Is there still a place for magic and spirituality in today’s secular politics? Questions around the nature of religion, its boundaries, and transformations keep animating people’s lives and their imaginations. Situating the study of religion in the broader history of the Enlightenment and modernity, this seminar will introduce students to the study of religion beginning with its emergence as a comparative discipline during the rise of European Empires. Tracing the role of religion in the history of colonization, the course will examine the ways both science and politics seem to have parted ways with religious thought in what is usually understood as a process of secularization. At the same time, students will familiarize themselves with early ethnological accounts from West Africa, their receptions as discourses about the "Other” of Europe that prompted the genesis of concepts such as “fetishism,” “animism,” and questions of media and mediation. Tracing how modernity came to be associated with progress, rationality and scientific thinking, this course will illustrate how the differentiation between magic, religion, and science became a core feature of modern theories of the human and their entanglement with racialization, accumulation of wealth, disenchantment, and the ecological transformation of the Earth for resource extraction. Alternative approaches to the study of religion, spirituality and magical thought will be explored through close reading of ethnographies of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In parallel, addressing current interests in the materiality of information, the class will explore the convergence between technoscientific materialism, generative AI, and spiritual traditions such as Vodu and mysticism. Fall Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 5025 1 Course Unit