AANA17102U Body & Soul. Subjectivity and sociality

How are ideas about body and soul articulated in religious ideas and rituals, as well as in social imaginations and philosophical ideas within different social and cultural contexts? The course will work with texts on what after Marcel Mauss has been termed the category of the person, and it will pursue ideas about the divide – or un-divide - between body and soul in different cultural contexts and historical periods. An ethnographic core of the course will be the Brazilian religion Candomblé and its derivatives, and it will rely on texts with topics ranging from African ideas about the person to the contemporary Candomblé and further on to the Christian tradition as for instance reflected in Pentecostalism. Texts on Western ideas about body and soul in a historical light with emphasis on European philosophical ideas and Christianity, including ideas about authenticity as elaborated in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s work, will also be included.

The course will thus provide an opportunity to discuss what Webb Keane has called a depth ontology, and in a broader sense how the interiority orientation that has been said to characterize post-Lutheran Christianity relates to ideas about the human body.

The course should be of interest to students who intend to work with anthropological approaches to subjectivity with a phenomenological inspired focus on the body, but it will also deal with sociality in a perspective that relies on a performance approach. And since religion and ritual will be the ethnographic core of the course, it can also be regarded as an advanced course in the anthropology of religion.