Lambek, Michael, ed. A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion.

• Author: Ragan, Elizabeth A.
• Position: Book Review

Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. 620 pages. Paper, $39.95.

This is another anthology in Blackwell's series on social and cultural anthropology, a reader that ambitiously attempts to represent the full breadth, depth, and complexity of anthropology's investigations into religion. Lambek characterizes these inquiries as a discourse--not only between Western and non-Western cultures (the traditional "Other" of anthropological inquiry), but also between anthropology and other interested disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

The masterly general introduction situates this anthology within the long and often difficult anthropological engagement with this most mystified and powerful realm of social action. Indeed, one of the most useful parts of the introduction is the section "Religion Itself," in which Lambek strives to explain in a few pages why anthropology has no widely accepted, universal definition of the concept "religion." This awkward situation--a subfield of study that cannot agree on the definition of its subject--is entirely explicable within anthropology, which has long recognized the critical role of culture in shaping the very ways that people experience the world. In Western worldviews, religion is a distinct sphere of activity, sacred and fundamentally separate from more profane categories like economics and politics; in other societies, such a division is utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless. In their ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists routinely confront such challenging perspectives; it is harder to find ways to interpret them for other audiences and integrate that knowledge into our developing understanding of human thought and action.

This has led to a complex "extended conversation" on religion, one "whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate"--Lambek's quotation from arguably the most influential American anthropologist of the late twentieth century, Clifford Geertz (p. 1). What Lambek tries to do is create a conversation in miniature within a single volume, allowing as many different voices as possible a chance to speak.

Part I, "The Context of Understanding and Debate," sets the field for this discourse. In the section titled "Opening Frameworks," four of the great classics are presented--extracts from the intellectualist nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Tylor; from the two early twentieth century sociologists who have contributed most...