**This is an old revision of the document!**
Table of Contents

Religion can change the world
Religion can change the world
Ryan Schram
Mills 169 (A26)
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
28 May 2015
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2667/12
Readings
Hertzberg, Michael. 2014. “The March of the Monks: On the Political Repertoire of Buddhist Monks in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.” In The Great Diversity: Trajectories of Asian Development, edited by Christopher M. Dent and Camilla Brautaset, 103–16. Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers.
Adams, Brad. Burma–Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma. Human Rights Watch. New York, December 2007. http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/burma1207web.pdf.
Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96 (1): 1-21. http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm
Hirschkind, Charles. 1997. “What Is Political Islam?” Middle East Report. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer205/what-political-islam.
Key points
From last week
- Should societies prohibit proselytising, and if so, by who?
- “Semiotic ideology,” a way of understanding how communication works, whether certain kinds of communication are more valuable or more effective than others.
- “Western” semiotic ideology
- There are always contradictions between communication and semiotic ideology.
Intersections of religion and politics
- “Political Islam” (see Hirschkind 1997).
- Civil religion (see Bellah 1967)
- Religion and social capital (Levitt 2001, 2007, Hertzberg 2007)
- Spiritual politics as a radical critique of society (Badiou 2003).
References
Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Fox, Jonathan. 2015. Political Secularism, Religion, and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
_. 2007. God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape. New Press.
A guide to the unit
ANTH 2667: The anthropology of religion—a guide to the unit