ANTH 5440

This course takes a cross-cultural approach to religion, religious behavior and practices, worldview, cosmologies, and the supernatural in society. Rites of transition (passage), death and afterlife, ritual, religious leaders, traditional curing, religious movements, revitalization, cults, witchcraft, magic, trance, altered states of consciousness, and especially shamanism are critically examined. An investigation of religion is made from a cross-cultural, comparative, anthropological perspective