COURSE DESCRIPTION

Why does religion and religious attachment to supernatural entities persist in the modern world? This course aims to understand the role religion plays in social life. Religion, broadly understood, as institutions and practices that shape the perception of the relations between earthly world and other worlds, especially the ones that are not easily perceptible through human senses. Famously, Michael Lambek argued that religion, across cultures, provide explanations to transcendental questions in a society – simply put, to questions of creation, destruction, afterlives, and other things which human action cannot control.

Religion, in controlling the dominant social imagination of what is sacred and what is profane, is a source of social and political power. This power, throughout history, has been harnessed by certain sections of society to make meaning of the earthly world for other groups, fight with and dominate others (sometimes those who did not believe in the same religion), and generate a vulnerability among some to the diktats and rules and regulations provided by the former using the institutions of religion. The king-god amalgamation is a very old one, and continues to provoke power even in the milieu of modern secular democracies. Thus, this course will take us through topics and questions of 1) what religion is, 2) how it related to social and political power, 3) how it argues with and/or incorporates modernity, 4) social hierarchies and violences that carry religious sanction, 5) the persistence of religion in the modern public sphere, and its 5) relation to the concept of secularism. For the purposes of a BA(Hons.) programme, this course serves as the Sociology and Anthropology Major Core V at NLSIU, but it is also to be listed as a Survey Elective.