ANTH 241(S) Religious Movements and Utopian Communities*

This course will focus on religious movements and communities organized as critiques, forms of resistance to, or means of refashioning a dominant social order. Cases to be considered include: an indigenous South American people's westward migration in search of a "land without evil," which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Ghost Dance, a North American Indian millenarian religious movement, which played a role in the Lakota Sioux battle of Wounded Knee; Melanesian cargo-cults; early American religious communities, such as that of New Harmony in Indiana; and the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda. Issues to be discussed are the relation between dominant and subordinate groups in colonial encounters, the nature of ritual and religious belief, and the interplay between human action, agency and structural constraints. Format: lectures, films, and class discussions. Requirements: regular class participation, final paper. No prerequisites.

Hour:  OAKDALE