Includes bibliographical references (p. [630]-672) and index.

Pt. I. The Context of Understanding and Debate -- Opening Frameworks -- 1. Religion in Primitive Culture / Edward Burnett Tylor -- 2. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life / Emile Durkheim -- 3. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism / Max Weber -- 4. Religion as a Cultural System / Clifford Geertz -- Skeptical Rejoinders -- 5. Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough / Ludwig Wittgenstein -- 6. Religion, Totemism and Symbolism / W. E. H. Stanner -- 7. Remarks on the Verb "To Believe" / Jean Pouillon -- 8. Christians as Believers / Malcolm Ruel -- 9. The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category / Talal Asad -- Pt. II. Poiesis: The Composition of Religious Worlds -- Signs and Symbols -- 10. The Logic of Signs and Symbols / Susanne K. Langer -- 11. The Problem of Symbols / E. E. Evans-Pritchard -- 12. On Key Symbols / Sherry B. Ortner -- 13. The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol / Eric R. Wolf -- Structure, Function, and Interpretation -- 14. Myth in Primitive Psychology / Bronislaw Malinowski -- 15. Folk Dialectics of Nature and Culture / Marshall Sahlins -- 16. Land Animals, Pure and Impure / Mary Douglas -- 17. A Jivaro Version of Totem and Taboo / Claude Levi-Strauss -- 18. Text-Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theatre / Alton L. Becker -- Moral Inversions and Spaces of Disorder -- 19. The Winnebago Trickster Figure / Paul Radin -- 20. Witchcraft and Sexual Relations: An Exploration in the Social and Semantic Implications of the Structure of Belief / Raymond C. Kelly -- 21. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression / Peter Stallybrass and Allon White -- Conceptualizing the Cosmos -- 22. Closure and Multiplication: An Essay on Polynesian Cosmology and Ritual / Alfred Gell -- 23. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism / Eduardo Viveiros de Castro -- Pt. III. Praxis: Religious Action -- The Movement in Ritual: Emergence -- 24. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action / Godfrey Lienhardt -- 25. Form and Meaning of Magical Acts / Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah -- 26. Liminality and Communitas / Victor Turner -- Gender, Subjectivity, and the Body -- 27. "Jewish Comes Up in You from the Roots" / Barbara Myerhoff -- 28. Fate in Relation to the Social Structure / Meyer Fortes -- 29. Medusa's Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience / Gananath Obeyesekere -- 30. Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance / Janice Boddy -- 31. The Poetics of Time in Mayan Divination / Dennis Tedlock -- What Ritual Does: The Foundations of Order -- 32. The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process / Maurice Bloch -- 33. Enactments of Meaning / Roy A. Rappaport -- Pt. IV. Historical Dynamics: Power, Modernity, and Change -- Capitalism, Colonialism, Christianity, and Conflict -- 34. New Heaven, New Earth / Kenelm Burridge -- 35. The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil's Labor and the Baptism of Money / Michael Taussig -- 36. The Colonization of Consciousness / John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff -- 37. Convicted by the Holy Spirit: The Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion / Susan F. Harding -- 38. On Being Shege in Kinshasa: Children, the Occult and the Street / Filip De Boeck -- Religious Ethics and Politics in the State, Public Sphere, and Transnational Scene -- 39. Civil Religion in America / Robert N. Bellah -- 40. Shamanic Practices and the State in Northern Asia: Views from the Center and Periphery / Caroline Humphrey -- 41. 'Using the Past to Negate the Present': Ritual Ethics and State Rationality in Ancient China / Mayfair Mei-hui Yang -- 42. Passional Preaching, Aural Sensibility, and the Islamic Revival in Cairo / Charles Hirschkind -- 43. Moral Landscapes: Ethical Discourses among Orthodox and Diaspora Jains / Anne Vallely -- 44. Candomble in Pink, Green and Black: Re-scripting the Afro-Brazilian Religious Heritage in the Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia / Mattijs van de Port -- 45. Martyr vs. Martyr: The Sacred Language of Violence / Galit Hasan-Rokem -- 46. Evidence and Presence, Spectral and Other / Stephan Palmie -- Pt. V. Research Tools -- A Guide to the Literature.