Magic Witchcraft and Religion: A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion

Chapter 1: The Anthropological Study of Religion

1 Jack David Eller, Studying Religion Anthropologically

2 Melinda Bollar Wagner, The Study of Religion in American Society

3 Marvin Harris, Why We Became Religious and The Evolution of the Spirit World

4 Dorothy Lee, Religious Perspectives in Anthropology

5 Pamela Moro, Thai Buddhism and the Popularity of Amulets in Anthropological Perspective

Chapter 2: Myth, Symbolism, and Worldview

6 John Beattie, Nyoro Myth

7 Kirin Narayan, Across the Seven Seas: a Hindu Woman's Sacred Narratives

8. Eric R. Wolf, The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol

9 Clifford Geertz, Ethos, World-view, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols

10 Mary Lee Daugherty, Serpent-Handling as Sacrament

Chapter 3: Rituals

11 Victor W. Turner, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage

12 Michael Atwood Mason, “I bow my head to the ground”: Creating Bodily Experience Through Initiation

13 Barbara G. Myerhoff, Return to Wirikuta: Ritual Reversal and Symbolic Continuity on the Peyote Hunt of the Huichol Indians

14 Thomas J. Csordas, A Handmaid’s Tale: The Rhetoric of Personhood in American and Japanese Healing of Abortions

15 Deborah Kapchan, Moroccan Women's Body Signs: Henna and Tattoo

Chapter 4: Shamans, Priests, and Prophets

16 Victor Turner, Religious Specialists

17 Piers Vitebsky, Shamanism

18 Michael Fobes Brown, Dark Side of the Shaman

19 Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Training for the Priesthood Among the Kogi of Colombia

20 Mark R. Mullins, Aum Shinrikyo as an Apocalyptic Movement

Chapter 5: Altered States of Consciousness and the Religious Use of Drugs

21 M. Lewis, Trance and Possession

22 Sydney M. Greenfield, Hypnosis and Trance Induction in the Surgeries of Brazilian Spiritist Healer-Mediums

23 Peter T. Furst and Michael D. Coe, Ritual Enemas

24 Michael Harner, The Sound of Rushing Water

25 Scott Hutson, The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures

Chapter 6: Illness, Healing, and Religion

26 George M. Foster, Disease Etiologies in Non-Western Medical Systems

27 Elizabeth De La Portilla, Curanderismo: Healers and Their Clients

28 Anne F. Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

29 Susan Kenyon, Zar as Modernization in Contemporary Sudan

30 Lee Gilmore, Embers, Dust, and Ashes: Pilgrimage and Healing at the Burning Man Festival

Chapter 7: Witchcraft, Sorcery, Divination, and Magic

31 Felicity Thomas, "Our Families are Killing Us": HIV/AIDS, Witchcraft and Social Tensions in Namibia

32 Naomi M. McPherson, Sorcery and Concepts of Deviance Among the Kabana, West New Britain

33 T. M. Luhrmann, The Goat and the Gazelle: Witchcraft

34 Barry S. Hewlett, Searching for the Truth: The Poison Oracle among Central African Foragers and Farmers

35 George Gmelch, Baseball Magic

Chapter 8: Death, Ancestors, and Souls

36 Karen McCarthy Brown, Vodou

37 Peter A. Metcalf, Death Be Not Strange

38 Beth A. Conklin, Cannibal Epistemologies

39 Kristin Norget, Days of the Dead in Oaxaca

40 Margaret Lock, When Bodies Outlive Persons: Defining Brain Death

Chapter 9: Religion in a Changing World: Identity, Adaptation, and Activism

41 William F. Lewis, Urban Rastas in Kingston, Jamaica

42 Andrew Buckser, Social Conversion and Group Definition in Jewish Copenhagen

43 Homa Hoodfar, The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and Muslim Women

44 Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Islamic Law: The Foundation of Muslim Practice and a Measure of Social and Political Change

45 Mark Juergensmeyer, Religious Terror and Global War

46 Tanya Erzen, Religious Literacy in the Faith-Based Prison

47 Susan M. Darlington, The Ordination of a Tree: the Buddhist Ecology Movement in Thailand