Case Study Model

All teaching is historically and regionally situated; it is embedded in specific curricular arrangements and local interpretations of disciplinary traditions as well as the larger politics of academic work.⁵ Jens Kugele brought the ‘case study model’ to my attention while he was teaching at the University of Munich, which offers a non-denominational Interfaculty Programme for the Study of Religion that engages historically and comparatively with various religious traditions. The program has been well known in Germany for its ambitious first-year introductory course since it was developed by Jürgen Mohn and Gregor Ahn at the turn of the millennium, and later refined by Anne Koch and Alexandra Grieser. On this basis, Kugele reconceptualized the course in 2009 and consecutively reworked and taught it together with Katharina Wilkens. In the following, I present my interpretation of the rationale behind Kugele's proposition to introduce a specific case study in introductory courses.

Two things are crucial to providing students with basic knowledge about the academic study of religion. First, students should be able to understand the disciplinary history not merely as a sequence of largely obsolete approaches that have been replaced by better options, but as an accumulation and plurality of more or less simultaneous yet nevertheless historically situated perspectives. Accordingly, introductory courses should catalyze students’ critical thinking about why some ideas, methods, and approaches prevail or mutate or have been—for good reasons—largely put to rest. The development of evolutionary approaches from the end of the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, in combination with insights from biology and psychology, is a good example here. Second, students should understand what the different approaches to the study of religion enable us to investigate and what their respective strengths and shortcomings are. More abstractly, the goal is to establish an archaeology of thought and knowledge within the study of religion.

To productively combine these two goals without losing sight of the students’ curiosity, this model proposes a ‘problem-oriented narrative’ that analyzes a single illustrative case study throughout the course. Different approaches and perspectives are applied to the case study in chronological order of their emergence and heyday. On this basis, discussions of disciplinary history can be combined with a critical contextualization of the strengths and weaknesses of particular approaches. Kugele explained why he chose the hajj to me by highlighting that it constitutes a particularly multifaceted ritual complex that allows for an illustration of the potential of psychological, anthropological, sociological, geographical, economic, political, and aesthetical approaches. It also engages with many more aspects, such as filmic representations of religion, architecture, clothing, cultural imagination, text, and social practice. Moreover, using one illustrative example throughout the semester fosters course coherence, and, in Kugele's experience, clearly demonstrates the variety of possible approaches to ‘religion(s)’ and where perspectives are distinct from each other, where entirely different aspects come into focus, and where seemingly different perspectives might overlap.

Students thereby become familiar with the hajj through a wide variety of methodological and theoretical lenses. This enables them to compare how different approaches are applied and the insights that they foster, as well as their blind spots. Students also acquire the practical understanding (not just the ‘dry’ theory) of how certain insights are preconfigured by how the object of inquiry is approached in the first place. A further learning outcome is increased competences, not only in terms of having the ability to assess different approaches’ strengths and weaknesses but also in being able to situate them within the history of the academic study of religion (and beyond), including the impact and exaggerations of various ‘turns’, such as the cultural, material, performative, spatial, visual, and ontological turn.

Accordingly, students learn how the approaches, as well as their findings, are embedded in historical, regional, and disciplinary discourses alongside the respective politics of knowledge. Such insights should enable them to adequately enter the academic study of religion as accepted representatives of their discipline.

Monograph Model

The second example draws on my experiences in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich where an introductory course to the study of religion is taught alongside introductory courses to economics and ecology, kinship and gender, politics and law, and material culture and art (second- and third-year Bachelor of Arts). In all these courses, students are required to read a book-length ethnography alongside other course material, as the Department considers ethnographies the hallmark and crux of social anthropology. Despite the apparent decline in the reading and writing of complete books, the intricacy of many issues demands book-length arguments. And students can then apply the tools and strategies they use to dissect the more complex monograph to other academic genres.

Moreover, monographs, particularly ethnographies, help instructors in at least two ways. First, somewhat similar to the ‘case study model’, they enable teachers to interrelate different topics and teaching sessions rather than treating them as bounded and self-contained blocks. Second, many monographs confront students with intriguing, relevant, genuine, real-life concerns that challenge them to question their presuppositions, rethink prior assumptions, and come up with new ideas. Additionally, most ethnographies not only offer detailed knowledge about individual case studies, but also combine a thorough study of ‘small places’ with the discussion of ‘large issues’, as Thomas Hylland Eriksen ([1995] 2015) suggests in his introductory book on social and cultural anthropology.

After testing a couple of different ethnographies, I chose Nathaniel Roberts's (2016) To Be Cared For. It describes and analyzes practices of religious conversion of Dalits (formerly ‘untouchables’) in a ‘slum’⁶ in South India, which he refers to as Anbu Nagar. The ethnography's central themes are situated in a historical discussion of caste and religion in post-colonial India and contemporary national discourses on conversion, which are dominated by Indian ‘elites’.⁷

In addition to fitting my own areas of expertise, the book won me over because it is extremely well written and accessible for students and non-specialists without compromising on depth and engagement with multifaceted debates. It captivatingly introduces the general matters at stake and provides detailed descriptions of important particularities. Moreover, based on thorough and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, it contains vivid descriptions of two religious traditions, Christianity and Hinduism. It accordingly helps many students critically examine a relatively familiar religious tradition while they gain insight into a tradition that would be somewhat alien to most of them. The book also presents a rigorous scholarly analysis that is sensitive, respectful, and sympathetic all at the same time. It fosters students’ understanding of how issues like gender, kinship, economy, and local as well as national politics are deeply intertwined with religious matters—for example, more married women convert to Christianity due to gendered income and debt structures—and are sometimes inseparable in the first place.⁸

In the following sections, I detail how I use the ethnography practically, beginning with a straightforward outline of my syllabus. This is followed by more abstract descriptions of the themes that run through many of my weekly sessions, including the implications of definitions, religion and modernity, and different disciplinary approaches toward and questions of decolonialization.

Outline of syllabus. This course takes place over 14 weekly 90-minute sessions, addressing between 60 and 80 students. Each session is based on the students’ reading of original texts and answers two guiding questions (see below). In the subsequent discussion we often interrogate the suitability of the questions themselves.

The key readings and the weekly lectures are chronologically organized and separated into three blocks. The first block (weeks 2 to 4) focuses on influential approaches, key terms, and debates in the history of the study of religion. During the second block (weeks 5 to 7), the lectures primarily engage with the ethnography To Be Cared For. The last block (weeks 8 to 12) introduces approaches and debates that are of major importance in the contemporary study of religion against the backdrop of the ethnography.

Issues of gender and post-coloniality are not addressed in separate sections but run throughout the course as a whole. With respect to the theme of decolonizing syllabi, and canonical texts in particular, I still struggle with balancing my aim to make students read influential scholars’ works with how I include alternative voices and perspectives (without escalating the level of reading for the students).

1. 1.Introduction: Why and how do we teach the anthropology of religion? Why did I compose the syllabus the way I did?
2. 2.Definitions and Their Dis/Advantages: What is religion? Do all humans have religion?
3. 3.Religion, Magic, and Modernity: What is the difference between magic and religion? Why do we discuss religion and modernity together?
4. 4.Ritual, Rationality, and Ethnography: Are religious beliefs and practices irrational? Are there different rationalities at stake?
5. 5.Disciplinary Differences: How do different disciplines approach religion? How do different anthropologists research religion?
6. 6.Contested Borders: Why are the borders between religious traditions contested? What is the relationship between religion, caste, class, and race?
7. 7.Contested Practices: What is the difference between materiality and spirituality? What is the relationship between religion and ethics?
8. 8.Religion as a Cultural System: What is a ‘symbol system’? What are the many meanings of religious practices?
9. 9.Colonialism, Orientalism, and Genealogy: Is ‘religion’ a Eurocentric term? What are its epistemological and political implications?
10. 10.Body, Materiality, and Emotions: How is religion embodied and materialized? How does religion smell?
11. 11.Secularization, Secularism, and Non-religion: Is religion losing importance? What would come after religion?
12. 12.Cognition, Evolution, and Psychology—Again (see week 2): What is religion? Do all humans have religion?
13. 13.Students attend a religious event (instead of reading a text and attending class). They write a short text in which they analyze their observations in light of one of the approaches discussed in the prior weeks.
14. 14.Exam

While each weekly session is focused on a specific set of questions related to the key readings, many themes cut across the sessions. In the following, I provide a discussion of three such cross-cutting themes.

Implications of definitions. James Bielo (2015: 2) has noted that he begins with definitions because whether and how scholars define religion “reveals important insights about their basic assumptions and commitments in the study of religion.” In the first class, I ask students to note their understanding of ‘religion’, which I invite them to reconsider at the end of the term. The central expression that emerges in the initial definition is ‘belief’, generally in combination with ‘God(s)’ (or the like). Hence, it has proven fruitful to start (in week 2) with Sir Edward Tylor's ([1871] 2008: 23) classic and still prevalent ‘minimum definition’ of religion as a “belief in spiritual beings” and to discuss its subsequent modifications, for example, as “belief in supernatural beings” or “belief in non-empirical entities” (cf. Goody 1961; Spiro 1966). Since such definitions are very closely linked to how most students in my classes understand religion, these definitions help to question their (often) unreflective assumptions and to establish the basis for later discussions. Is religion necessarily based on belief? Is belief opposed to knowledge? And, if so, where should the line be drawn? Who decides what counts as belief or knowledge? Does religion necessarily concern something ‘spiritual’? Is the core of religion invisible, intangible, internal, imagined, and irrational? What about ‘material religion’? What is ‘natural’ if religion is supernatural? Where do such understandings of belief, spirituality, invisibility, and naturalness come from? What problems can be seen in the underlying dichotomies?

Subsequently, we engage (in week 3) with further definitions and related attempts to distinguish between religion and magic and to clarify the relationship between religion and ritual. Here, the focus is predominantly on Émile Durkheim's ([1912] 2001: 3) attempt to reach “an understanding of the religious nature of man, by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity” via the study of “the most primitive and simplest religion,” which he famously introduces with the following proposition (ibid.: 4):

The most barbarous or bizarre rituals and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, whether individual or social. The reasons the believer uses to justify them may be, and generally are, mistaken; none the less, the true reasons exist, and it is the business of science to discover them. In reality, then, there are no false religions. All are true in their fashion: all respond, if in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.

This provides the grounds for many discussions to follow. Why and how does Durkheim grade religious traditions as ‘primitive’ or ‘superior’? In what sense are all religions ‘true’? Which ‘human needs’ need to be translated and which ‘conditions of human existence’ supposedly need an answer? We start such discussions, however, with the rather basic distinction between approaches that focus on the alleged ‘substance’ of religion compared to those more concerned with the ‘function’ of religion. For example, we look at how the ‘substances’ proposed as definiens of the definiendum ‘religion’, that is, God(s), spiritual beings, supernatural entities, or the sacred, frequently require explanations themselves and at times result in recursive definitions. The often proposed functions of religion—that it addresses alleged human needs by, for example, helping people cope with contingencies or that it unites communities or provides ultimate justifications—not only escalate the scope of the definition but also tend to ignore the many ways in which religion(s) may foster individual and social insecurity, disorder, and other sorts of malfunction.

Topics like these become particularly comprehensible if linked to real-life issues, for example, by discussing how such questions are grounded within the suggested ethnography (in weeks 5 to 7). First, Roberts (2016) forcefully outlines how the Indian elite discourse in general and lawmakers in particular assume that the main and positively valued function of religion lies in the unification of communities. This in turn is a major reason why the elites and lawmakers argue that religious conversion is “socially disruptive” (ibid.: 119). Roberts's ethnography shows, however, that this is not necessarily the case; conversions are not inevitably a threat to the public order in the communities in which they take place. Roberts found that “religion in the slum was not a matter of identity at all—neither national, ethnic, nor personal” (ibid.: 9), and that “slum dwellers identified individually as following one or the other of these mutually exclusive faiths” (ibid.: 153; original emphasis). Second, Roberts explains why and how people in the slum choose their religious practices primarily based on material concerns and worldly considerations. For them, Gods “existed to help people, and the benefits they provided were of a fundamentally worldly and moral, but not spiritual, nature. Neither Christianity nor Hinduism, as practiced in the slum, emphasized any sort of otherworldly telos” (ibid.: 9; original emphasis).

While he does not assume any simple differentiation between worldly, moral, and spiritual matters, Roberts (2016: 160) contends that the slum dwellers in Anbu Nagar inhabit a “theological realism” according to which Gods are causal forces “acting upon the world independently of human agency.” Hence, they “were engaged in trying to find out which gods were real and therefore worth worshipping” (ibid.: 10). Such theological realism contrasts, according to Roberts, with both mainstream anthropological and elite Indian understandings of religion. He argues that most anthropologists are “theological nominalists” in the sense that they see “particular gods as intrinsically linked to the human traditions that worship them” (ibid.: 160). Evoking the great influence of a Durkheimian position within as well as outside of academia,⁹ Roberts notes: “Unlike the people of Anbu Nagar, anthropologists do not ask which religion (if any) is right, because anthropologically speaking all are equally true in their own terms. Gods are a cultural reality for anthropologists; they are a social fact, and, as such, are as real as anything else, so long as people worship and believe in them” (ibid.).

Roberts (2016: 16) further illustrates how the understanding of religion as spiritual, and therefore opposed to material (and political) concerns, is part of “the intellectual trajectory of the Indian independence movement,” above all of Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi's worldview. In this perspective, the slum dwellers are devalued as being not genuinely religious since their motives are seen as antithetical to authentic spirituality and religiosity. Indeed, this view continues to play a profound role in elite common sense today, particularly in the Hindutva or ‘Hindu Chauvinist’ discourse. It has therefore also had an influential impact on anti-conversion laws in India. Such laws attempt to ban conversions brought about ‘by allurement’, that is, those based on hopes for material betterment. By outlining these ‘theological underpinnings’ of India's anti-conversion laws, Roberts manages to illustrate how the presumably secular Indian state thereby distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of religion and how this distinction happens to correspond with the distinctions between elites and slum dwellers and, hence, between upper castes and Dalits. All this goes to show how certain definitions of religion can be helpful in delineating one's object of inquiry but can also be epistemologically misleading and politically problematic.

Religion and modernity. Many introductory courses on the study of religion are based on performative self-contradiction. On the one hand, the curriculum, as well as universities’ disciplinary structures, distinguishes the study of religion, politics, economics, and so forth. On the other hand, within the anthropological study of religion, students are often taught that it is hard to delineate where religion starts and where it ends and that societies are not as ‘functionally differentiated’ as they appear at first sight—that politics, economics, and religion intersect and often are inseparable. To my mind, both are true on different levels. In one sense, Talal Asad (2003) is right to highlight that modernity gained its hegemony as a political goal that had far-reaching practical consequences, such as attempts to further establish functionally differentiated societies in many parts of the world. Consequently, religion is meant to be separated from politics and at times even relegated to the private realm of individual belief. In another sense, Bruno Latour (1993) is right that ‘we have never been modern’ since a closer (ethnographic) look generally reveals that this goal was not realized to the degree that modernist discourses suggest. Rather than a priori postulating or precluding the independence of a ‘religious realm’, the challenge is to explore, through detailed empirical studies, how relevant actors (in and outside of academia) attempt to establish, demarcate, escalate, challenge, or live without specific religious and non-religious configurations (Quack 2014).

Given the discursive and institutionalized power of modernist assumptions concerning the discreteness (and sometimes obsolescence) of religion, discussions about where religion begins and where it ends are initiated early in the course (in week 3), starting with how Max Weber and Émile Durkheim assessed the fate of religion within ‘modern societies’. Through an engagement with their different empirical sociological and historical approaches, we contrast Weber's pessimistic evaluation of antagonistic value spheres with Durkheim's assumption that a division of labor will strengthen social integration (Müller 1992). Against this background, we ask (in week 5) how distinct approaches within the study of religion attempt to delaminate a ‘religious realm’. We further ask whether anthropological approaches have a peculiar history and stance in terms of such matters, for example, given their traditional emphasis on ‘holism’ and their engagement with societies that lack equivalents to the modern understanding of religion.

While we return to the differences between disciplinary traditions in many of the later sessions (particularly in weeks 9 to 12), we also try to avoid overly simplistic and homogeneous understandings of disciplinary differences by further discussing distinct approaches within anthropology. In so doing, I introduce (in week 5) Jeanne Favret-Saada's Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (1980),¹⁰ which classically argues that in order to understand witchcraft, you have to become entangled in its fearful and potentially deadly practices in all kinds of ways, for example, by being afflicted or by engaging in sorcery. Gregor Dobler (2015) confronts this argument through an unintended and small-scale restudy of Favret-Saada's research in the north of France. Dobler was surprised to note that he “never once” encountered a “fear to speak about witchcraft” (ibid.), and that Favret-Saada's theory of witchcraft “was remote from the experiences of the people” he lived with (ibid.). On this basis, we discuss in class the methodological differences between Favret-Saada's and Dobler's studies. In particular, we discuss Favret-Saada's drastic switch from researching rural witchcraft beliefs through formal interviews as an irregular visitor from Paris to becoming a total insider entangled in witchcraft practices. Dobler, by contrast, entered the field by simply working as a farmhand. He thereby slowly became acquainted with people's lives and the ways in which witchcraft is only one aspect among, and interrelated with, many others (ibid.).¹¹

The course then returns to the more abstract questions that had been introduced earlier in the semester. Why should we treat witchcraft practices in particular and religion more generally as distinct realms with clear insider-outsider demarcations? Is religion a sui generis category that refers to an autonomous sphere with distinctive experiences and ways of knowing, to be approached in its own right? Or is such a perspective tenable only on the basis of ‘theological’ or ‘modernist’ reasoning? Does the separation of religion from politics, law, and science also remove it from “spaces in which varieties of power and reason articulate our distinctly modern life” (Asad [1993] 2009: 28)?

Moving back and forth between such abstract questions and more pragmatic concerns, the course then looks more closely at the reasons why Roberts conducted his research in ways similar to Dobler's approach. This also furthers our discussion on the implications of different methodological strategies in the study of religion. In this respect, Roberts (2016: 4) notes that most studies of religion focus primarily on ritual contexts and textual practices:

Relatively few look seriously at what people do when they're not “doing” religion, or what they talk about when they're not talking about it. They tell us little if anything about people's everyday struggles, at work and at home. Fewer still have attempted to grasp the systematic connections between religion and everyday life, or to show how what goes on in the street and in the home gives meaning to religion—not just the reverse, as commonly supposed.

An approach that is not only focused on rituals and texts but is primarily concerned with what people actually do in their everyday lives helps to question the supposedly clear-cut borders between religion and non-religious social realms. This does not mean, however, that anthropologists have to ignore hegemonic discourses and larger political developments that, for example, lead to the institutionalization of functionally differentiated social spheres. Indeed, To Be Cared For shows particularly well how a closer look at everyday life based on participant observation can be embedded in and related to a more encompassing assessment of such larger discourses and political developments.

Additionally and interrelatedly, we then discuss (mainly in week 6) how Roberts's (2016) ethnography challenges seemingly straightforward distinctions between religious traditions. Through the ethnography, the students come to an understanding of the degree to which it is problematic to argue that Christians and Hindus are distinct communities in Anbu Nagar (ibid.: 153). Indeed, ‘slum Christianity’ and ‘slum Hinduism’ are in many respects more similar to each other than ‘slum Christianity’ is similar to ‘elite Christianity’ or ‘slum Hinduism’ to ‘elite Hinduism’ (ibid.). Our respective discussions on the relationships between ‘global Christianity’ and ‘local Christianities’ build on students’ existing knowledge, making them realize how little they know about the plurality of beliefs, practices, and ways of life that are labeled as ‘Christian’ around the globe. We again return to modernist assumptions about religion, for example, by discussing ‘exclusivist’ understandings of religion that see people as either Christian or Hindu. But who says that ‘syncretism’ is an exception to the rule? Who sets these rules? And why?

Different approaches and the canon. What do different disciplinary approaches enable scholars to see and understand? What are their blind spots and other shortcomings? Similar to the ‘case study model’, the ‘monograph model’ tries to answer such questions by looking at empirical data through the lenses of particular approaches. With respect to the ethnography To Be Cared For, this works particularly well with approaches that are explicitly applied or discussed in the text or where I can make meaningful connections to the ethnography. This is the case with anthropological (particularly week 4), textual, comparative, economic, and sociological (particularly week 5), historical and genealogical (particularly week 9) approaches, as well as those labeled as material religion, aesthetics of religion, phenomenology, and gender (particularly week 10), and to some degree the study of secularity and non-religion (week 11). But there are, of course, also influential approaches that I am unable to meaningfully connect to this particular ethnography. This is a significant disadvantage of this teaching model. For example, I think an introductory course on the study of religion should also address psychological and cognitive-evolutionary approaches (week 12), given their growing influence within the field. The only way I manage to relate these approaches to the chosen ethnography, however, is by reflecting on the reasons why there seem to be no meaningful connections between them.

To better illustrate this point, the following paragraphs briefly demonstrate what I mean by making a ‘meaningful connection’ between an approach and the ethnography. To do so, I mainly talk about different perspectives on ‘caste’ (week 6). Scholars working with textual approaches (Indology, in this case) mainly argue that caste is a religious concept specific to Hinduism, which confines the term to the subcontinent (e.g., Dumont [1966] 1980). By contrast, scholars who employ a comparative approach discuss the differences but mainly highlight the similarities between concepts like caste and race (e.g., Berreman 1979). Ethnographic studies, for their part, often emphasize the varied ways caste is understood in different realms of society, for example, by outlining the dissimilar perspectives that distinct social groups have on caste. Roberts's (2016: 66) ethnography is a case in point since he investigates why and how the slum dwellers, “contra both Brahminical ideology and much anthropological theory,” did not relate caste differences to religious notions of purity and pollution. Rather, they “conceptualized resource monopolization and domination as in fact the very essence of caste” (ibid.: 65).¹² Roberts further engages with historical approaches that look at how practices and understandings of caste have changed over time.

On this basis, we discuss (in week 9) genealogical approaches with respect to the discursive and political conditions of contemporary understandings of caste and Hinduism in particular, but also of religion more generally. This also includes the question of how and to what degree the academic study of religion should itself be a central research object in the academic study of religion. The respective arguments are linked to Talal Asad's (1983) repudiation of Clifford Geertz's (1973) influential definition of religion,¹³ and Asad's ([1993] 2009: 18) suggestion that we turn our attention to the discourses and institutional conditions that shape our understanding of religion to enable “questions that are at once less tendentious and more interesting.”

Through this discussion, students learn, on the one hand, to debate whether the concept of religion itself—the way it is likely to be understood by most in the classroom—is a rather recent phenomenon with a distinct Christian as well as post-colonial history. On the other hand, it is helpful to base such debates on empirical studies, for example, on questions about the degree to which contemporary understandings of caste and Hinduism are colonial ‘constructions’ or ‘inventions’ (Lorenzen 2006). With respect to caste, we then debate how Roberts (2016: 111–151) uses genealogical insights in his discussions of why and how those who are today called Dalits have not always been seen as Hindus, and how and why high-caste Hindus began to argue for the inclusion of former ‘untouchables’ into Hinduism around the turn of the twentieth century.

On this basis, the course engages with more recent debates on the problems with canonical texts and the ways and degrees to which syllabi and academic life more generally should be decolonized. Accordingly, we return to our problematizations of terms like ‘primitive religion’, ‘magic’, ‘ritual’, ‘superstition’, and ‘animism’ (in sessions 2 and 3), and engage with the relationships between anthropologists, missionaries, and colonial authorities by discussing, for example, how colonialism shaped classic works, such as those by Evans-Pritchard (in session 4). We discuss the impact and the implications of debates around writing culture, reverse anthropology, anthropology at home, studying up, genealogical and post-colonial approaches, and the proposed blurring of disciplinary boundaries. We ask whether and to what degree anthropologists nevertheless continue to study the apparently ‘irrational beliefs’ and ‘exotic rituals’ of Others, and whether they are thereby part of an ongoing process of colonization that implies forms of epistemic and symbolic violence. And we reconsider the composition of the syllabus in this light. Why does this course engage with the so-called classics, mainly those of dead white men with impressive beards, and reproduce a stipulated canon nevertheless? What voices are thus marginalized, silenced, ignored, or excluded? Should these voices be included in the canon, or is the very idea of a ‘canon’ problematic?