Religion in Context: Cults and Charisma

Religious power assumes many strikingly different forms, which are often regarded both by believers and by students of religion as unique, unrelated, and even mutually exclusive. In this book, however, I. M. Lewis adopts a holistic approach and argues that to understand the nature of spritual power we need to appreciate how these apparently contradictory mystical manifestations are in fact part of a single complex of mutally defining and sustaining elements. Stressing the importance of rigorous social contextualization, he analyzes such seemingly disparate phenomena as spirit-possession, witchcraft, cannibalism, and shamanism, which are usually attributed to separate cults and even cultures, revealing the interconnections both between them and with the world religions, such as Islam and Christianity.
Besides presenting a critique of the treatment of religious phenomena as reified, Professor Lewis demonstrates - in an intriguing deconstruction of the classic anthropological fieldwork situation that he sees as itself a kind of shamanic initiation - the complexity of the problem of understanding other people's beliefs, and the way in which these beliefs often inadvertently become part of anthropological theory. He emphasizes the continuing strength in social and cultural anthropology of a comparative approach that constantly seeks to force anthropological 'theory' into a dialogue with ethnographic particulars, thereby encouraging the distillation of empirically more satisfactory theory. This illumination of critical aspects of religious power, a demonstration of the value of a comparative approach in the formulation of anthropological theory, will interest scholars and students of social and cultural anthropology and religious studies, as well as other readers concerned with the nature of religion in the modern world.