Event overview
Abstract: In his 'Belief, Language, and Experience' (1972), Rodney Needham remarked that anthropologists talk a great deal about the content of beliefs, especially 'cultural beliefs', but have no theory of what it means to ascribe beliefs to an individual or to a group. In fact, anthropologists have dealt with belief in subtle and insightful ways ethnographically, both before and after Needham’s book, but there has been no thoroughgoing attempt to develop an anthropological theory of belief grounded in ethnography. Instead, when they have addressed the question of belief explicitly, anthropologists have for the most part either rejected the use of belief concepts in their work, as Needham advised them to do, or they have adopted rather one-dimensional accounts from outside the discipline, such as Marxist 'ideology' and 'false consciousness', or the 'belief = information' equation that underlies cognitive psychology. I will explain why I think we need a distinctively anthropological theory of belief, and drawing on my own ethnographic work in northern China, as well as on other case studies, I will provide an outline of what such a theory would look like.
Biography: I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Apart from belief, my research interests include ignorance, and ethics. I have conducted fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, in northern China, where I was interested in the contemporary revival of Tibetan Buddhism, and in Taiwan and London, where I have been studying a Buddhist movement, Fo Guang Shan. I am completing the manuscript for a monograph on Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, 'Not Being Buddha', which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012, and my edited volume (with Ann Kelly and Casey High), 'The Anthropology of Ignorance', will be out next year, with the same press. From 2007 to 2011 I was a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College,
Cambridge.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 7 Dec 2011 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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