Learning Religion

As we enter the 21stcentury, it becomes increasingly difficult to envisage a world detached from religion or an anthropology blind to its study. Yet, how people become religious is still poorly studied. This volume gathers some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to offer a new perspective for the study of religion, one that examines the works of transmission and innovation through the prism of learning. They argue that religious culture is socially and dynamically constructed by agents who are not mere passive recipients but engaged in active learning processes. Finding a middle way between the social and the cognitive, they see learning religions not as a mechanism of "downloading" but also as a social process with its relational dimension.

David Berliner is an Assistant Professor at the UniversitT Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He received his PhD from University of Brussels (2002). In 2001 he was a visiting PhD student at Saint Cross College, Oxford, and in 2003-2005 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Ramon Sarr= is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon. He read anthropology in London (PhD 1999). In 2000-2002 he was the Ioma Evans-Pritchard Junior Research Fellow at Saint Anne's College, Oxford. His publications include Surviving Iconoclasm: Religious and Political Transformation on the Upper Guinea Coast (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

On Learning Religion: An Introduction	p. 1
Learning to Believe: A Preliminary Approach	p. 21
Menstrual Slaps and First Blood Celebrations: Inference, Simulation and the Learning of Ritual	p. 31
The Accidental in Religious Instruction: Ideas and Convictions	p. 49
On Catching Up With Oneself: Learning to Know That One Means What One Does	p. 65
How Do You Learn to Know That it is God Who Speaks?	p. 83
How to Learn in an Afro-Brazilian Spirit Possession Religion: Ontology and Multiplicity in Candomble	p. 103
Learning to be a Proper Medium: Middle-Class Womanhood and Spirit Mediumship at Christian Rationalist Stances in Cape Verde	p. 121
Copyright and Authorship: Ritual Speech and the New Market of Words in Toraja	p. 141
Learning Faith: Young Christians and Catechism	p. 161
What is Interesting about Chinese Religion	p. 177
The Sound of Witchcraft: Noise as Mediation in Religious Transmission	p. 191
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