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The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion

2 papers in the library · publishing 2026

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An Unstable “Religion”

The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion February 19, 2026 Aparecida Vilaça

Abstract It is known that the first Europeans to arrive in Amazonia did not recognize Indigenous ritual practices as religious. Only in the nineteenth century, with the advent of anthropology, especially with the Taylorian conceptualization of animism, did shamanism, a practice associated with this ontology and widespread in the Amazonian world, begin to be recognized in the literature as...

Shamanism

The Oxford Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion February 19, 2026 Morten Axel Pedersen

Abstract Despite repeated pronouncements concerning its imminent death as a topic worthy of anthropological attention, shamanism has experienced a revival. However, it has not been subject to or the vehicle of much new and influential theorizing. Based on ethnographic work in Mongolia and Inner Asia, this chapter seeks to do some of the conceptual groundwork for a workable theorization of...