Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion

by Harvey Whitehouse (Editor), James Laidlaw

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory , however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these contributors differ in their methods, their areas of fieldwork, and their predisposition towards Whitehouse's cognitively-based approach, they all help evaluate and refine Whitehouse's theory and so contribute to a new comparative approach in the anthropology of religion.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Anthropology

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really hit or miss and it would probably be useful to be familiar with Whitehouse's modes of religiosity model beforehand, even though bits of it are rehashed many times in the essays.