General Abstract:
One source of our ideas about religion is the
anthropology and sociology of religions, which took their first steps as modern
disciplines in the decades leading up to the First World War. In these
lectures, I'll explore some of the central ideas of the field in the work of
some central figures—Edward Tylor, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim—and go on to
argue that their ways of framing religions show up in more recent Darwinian
work on the evolution of religion. I'll end by discussing whether the study of
what we now call "religions" is helped or hindered by the conception
of religion the founding fathers invented. Along the way we'll consider the
great diversity of the people, practices, ideas, institutions, and identities,
we call "religious." The project is one on social ontology—trying to
characterize a kind of socially-produced object—and in the philosophy of the
social sciences that aim to explore that object.
"Gods and Other Minds"
Abstract: Modern anthropology in the anglophone
world, begins with the comparative, global study of what Sir Edward Tylor, the
first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, called "Animism." Tylor saw the projection of agency into the
non-human world as the heart of religion. We'll discuss that idea and begin to
think about some of what it leaves out.