From Danilyn Rutherford’s essay on the “active belief” of anthropological work:
Anthropologists have shed light on the role of belief, hope, and other forms of expectation in the practices of people ranging from Azande witch-doctors to American fundamentalists, Fijian Methodists, and Islamic bankers (see Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937], Harding 2000, Miyazaki 2004, Maurer 2005). By extending this line of inquiry to seemingly non-religious texts and contexts, I hope to enlarge our understanding of what secular belief – or, more specifically, secular appeals to belief – might mean or do. We anthropologists need to stop worrying about the relationship between belief and action and start seeing belief as action. We need to start attending to practices of belief. And we need to undo the division between belief and knowledge that we still often implicitly presume. This approach to belief will enable us to grasp what’s at stake when people like Betty make explicit something that might otherwise be taken for granted: the embodied “acts of mind” on which their other practices rest.
Download the full essay from the Religion & Culture Web Forum website.
