ANTH 145 - Sensing Religion: Body, Desire, and Emotion (RELS 145) (4)

Introductory course that takes each of the senses as an entry point into how practitioners experience their religious and spiritual lives and what moves them about their relationships and practices with the sacred. This anthropology of religion approach centers the body, as we examine emotion and affect, rather than belief systems or intellectualized arguments. When people sing or chant mantras, cook a meal for an orisha, touch the Torah scroll while dancing, decorate an altar in the colors that please a deity, or engage in visual mandala practice, these activities create intimacy, communal belonging, self-transformation, and other outcomes that defy dominant discourses and provide a lens into why religion really matters to many people. This class invites us to reincorporate our own embodied knowledge as part of the analytical learning process. Every other year.