The Anthropology of Catholicism

Aimed at a wide audience of readers, The Anthropology of Catholicism is the first companion guide to this burgeoning field within the anthropology of Christianity. Bringing to light Catholicism’s long but comparatively ignored presence within the discipline of anthropology, the book introduces readers to key studies in the field, as well as to current analyses on the present and possible futures of Catholicism globally. This reader provides both ethnographic material and theoretical reflections on Catholicism around the world, demonstrating how a revised anthropology of Catholicism can generate new insights and analytical frameworks that will impact anthropology as well as other disciplines.

Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

Valentina Napolitano is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Maya Mayblin is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Anthropology of Catholicism
Maya Mayblin, Kristin Norget, and Valentina Napolitano

PART ONE. A GENEALOGY OF THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CATHOLICISM

1. Excerpt from “St Besse: A Study of an Alpine Cult”
Robert Hertz

2. Excerpt from “Tarantism and Catholicism”
Ernesto de Martino

3. Excerpt from “The Place of Grace in Anthropology”
Julian A. Pitt-Rivers

4. Excerpt from “The Dinka and Catholicism”
Godfrey Lienhardt

5. Excerpt from “Iconophily and Iconoclasm in Marian Pilgrimage” Victor Turner and Edith Turner

6. Excerpt from Person and God in a Spanish Valley
William A. Christian

7. Excerpt from “The Priest as Agent of Secularization in Rural Spain”
Stanley H. Brandes

8. Excerpt from “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century”
Caroline Walker Bynum

PART TWO. CONTEMPORARY WORKS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CATHOLICISM

9. “Complexio Oppositorum”? Religion, Society, and Power in the Making of Catholicism in Rural South India
David Mosse

10. Marking Memory: Heritage Work and Devotional Labor at Quebec’s Croix de Chemin
Hillary Kaell

11. Containment and Contagion: The Gender of Sin in Contemporary Catholicism
Maya Mayblin

12. Opulence and Simplicity: The Question of Tension in Syrian Catholicism
Andreas Bandak

13. The Paradox of Charismatic Catholicism: Rupture and Continuity in a Q’eqchi’-Maya Parish
Eric Hoenes del Pinal

14. The Virgin of Guadalupe and Spectacles of Catholic Evangelism in Mexico
Kristin Norget

15. The Rosary as a Meditation on Death at a Marian Apparition Shrine
Ellen Badone

16. A Catholic Body? Miracles, Secularity, and the Porous Self in Malta
Jon P. Mitchell

17. Experiments of Inculturation in a Catholic Charismatic Movement in Cameroon
Ludovic Lado

18. On a Political Economy of Political Theology: El Señor de los Milagros
Valentina Napolitano

19. Making a Home in an Unfortunate Place: Phenomenology and Religion
J. Michelle Molina

PART THREE. INTERVENTIONS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CATHOLICISM

20. “We’re All Catholics Now”
Simon Coleman

21. What Is Catholic about the Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis?
Robert A. Orsi

22. Possession and Psychopathology, Faith and Reason
Thomas J. Csordas

23. Catholicism and the Study of Religion
Birgit Meyer

24. The Media of Sensation
Niklaus Largier

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index