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.
"We have in this volume a first-rate collection of insightful essays by leading anthropologists and historians that vastly enriches the study of Catholic practice and belief. The range of work spans home, body, theology, politics, healing, gender, ethnicity, and material culture. The result is an intellectual feast worthy of the topic. Yet the creative scholarship featured in this book will also serve as a model for the study of religion far beyond Catholicism."—David Morgan, Duke University "This is a great reader. The editors have done a sterling job of bringing together a range of classic and contemporary takes on Catholicism as imagined and as lived throughout the world. It deserves a place on the shelf of any serious student of religion."—Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
"Kristin Norget, Valentina Napolitano, and Maya Mayblin have curated a reader that both honors the canonical legacy of anthropology of religion and offers a compelling new vision for the ethnographic engagement with modern forms of religious life. They are attentive to the challenges of 'global Christianity' as well as to pressing theoretical questions about mediation, embodiment, materiality, and power. Juxtaposing excerpts from the classics with detail-rich ethnographic analyses, The Anthropology of Catholicism makes a critical intervention into the emerging academic studies of lived religions. Specialists, students, and general readers will all find captivating new insights and challenges in this volume."—Elizabeth Castelli, Barnard College
384 pp.6 x 9Illus: 13 b/w illustrations
9780520288447$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jan 2017