The literature on the anthropology of religion is now so extensive that it might well be described as ‘vast’. For over the past three or four decades, books and articles on the anthropology of religion have continued to be published by the hundreds, and even within the past decade several important anthologies have appeared (e.g., Glazier 1997; Klass and Weisgrau 1999; Lambek 2002), this in spite of the fact that the anthropology of religion was said to be in the ‘doldrums’ and to have been somewhat ‘marginalized’ within the anthropology curriculum. Given the impossibility of covering even a fraction of this literature within a single text, the present study has focussed specifically on the social anthropology of religion, namely, on those ethnographic studies that have followed the ‘dual heritage’ of anthropology, as Maurice Bloch described it, combining hermeneutics, the interpretation of religious beliefs and practices, with a sociological approach that situates religion within its socio-historical context. Recent religious-studies scholars have emphasized the need to study religion not only in its ‘own terms’ as a tradition but also in relation to the ‘wider society’. Social anthropologists, of course, have been thus engaged for over half a century.

In my earlier study (1987), I outlined the various theoretical approaches to the study of religious phenomena – intellectualist, psychoanalytic, psychological, interpretive, phenomenological, structuralist, as well as the various sociological approaches to the study of religion that derive from the seminal work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.