The Anthropology of Christianity: Situation and Critique

EXPRESS: The psychological role of music and attentional control for religious experiences in worship

This study investigated the psychological dynamics during worship experiences under the influence of different music conditions. 60 believers were recruited to participate in experiments where they were asked to engage in worship and to connect with God while continuously ranking how strongly they sensed the presence of the divine. After each condition, they were asked to rate how well they were able to focus on God during the worship procedure. Based on a previously published feedback loop model that portrays global psychological mechanisms in worship, we deduced two hypotheses: (i) the ability to focus on God is positively associated with how strong the subjective religious experience becomes; (ii) and the different musical conditions yield varying degrees in the intensity of the felt presence of God. Our statistical analyses on the current sample demonstrate that both alternative hypotheses can be accepted. For the latter thesis, two further assumptions were at play: (a) we speculated that religious worship songs were associated with stronger divine experiences than with secular ones; and (b) it was assumed that if they could worship to their own selection of songs, the experience would be more powerful than with the ones that were provided by the research team. Whereas upon our investigation the former assumption can be deemed correct, the latter shows a positive but insignificant association.

‘Smell Your Sheep, Shepherd’: What Does It Mean to Be Catholic for the Dalit?

The anthropology of Christianity has emerged as an exciting field in the last decade or so. Themes of interest for us in India and South Asia in general include issues of caste, conversion and belief, the ideas of sin and morality, individualism, and the like. As part of this growing field, the issue of belief in particular has gained considerable importance. It has been argued that the strict reliance on belief is obstructive and counterproductive for the understanding of non-Western Christianity, particularly where religious affiliations may be shifting rather than stable. Moreover, it has been suggested that belief could be laid aside in favor of the notion of commitment, wherein the latter term encompasses presence, embodiment, shared social location, and the like. This paper argues that while the discourse oscillates between belief on the one hand and commitment on the other, the intermediating term between these might be community. There are social and spiritual divisions, which the available discourse does not immediately allow us to contend with. In the words of one Dalit Catholic, the church must be with its people, the Bishop-Shepherd must ‘smell’ his sheep. This paper will explore how it is precisely the absence of community that Dalit Catholics experience when they find that Christian equality becomes physical separation and Christian fraternity remains outside the social domain and will suggest the implications this has for the anthropology of Christianity.