Credits: 3 (3-0-0)
Description
What is religion? What role does it play in modern democratic societies? How does it influence the everyday life-world, belief system, and identity of an individual or a community? And, what are the relationships between the sacred and secular or religion and modernity? Addressing these questions, this course examines the various concepts, theories and debates in the sociology/anthropology of religion. Contrary to the predictions of the secularisation hypothesis, which envisaged the decline or privatisation of religion with the spread of modernity and techno-scientific rationality, it is observed that there is a religious resurgence or de-secularisation of the world. Religion has assumed a more public role. Given this, the course will examine the implications of religion’s resurgence and active public role for modern democratic societies as well as the broader process of social order and social change.