Remobilizing Religion in Utopian Studies

Quantitative Studies of Religion

If God does heal, then evidence can be sought in two ways. The first approach uses quantitative statistical analyses of groups of people; this is a technique with which we are familiar and is the basic principle underlying this book. The second method is to seek and document completely unexpected healing in an individual as a result of prayer in short, to recognise a miracle. Such an event is b...

Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities

Several authors have argued that religious beliefs are a way of communicating commitment and loyalty to other group members. The advantage of commitment signals is that they can promote intragroup cooperation by overcoming the free-rider problems that plague most cooperative pursuits. In this article, the author tests this idea using a database on 19th century utopian communes. The economic suc...

Reconceptualising Religion : A Philosophical Critique of Religious Studies as Cultural Studies

The aim of my argument (1) is to reconceptualise what is now called religious studies as the study of institutionalised values, and the relation between values and the legitimation of power in a specific society. Though I do not talk much about power here, it is always a fundamental issue in the study of specific social groups.The first assumption which I make in this paper is that the way anal...

The utopian Darcy Ribeiro archive.

The project in memory of anthropologist, writer and politician Darcy Ribeiro is analyzed, with emphasis on the relationship he had with his personal archives and the creation of the Darcy Ribeiro Foundation, established to give continuity to his 'legacy.' It highlights the influences present in the formation of his archive and presents an ethnography that seeks to restore the historicity of the...

Mythos, Memory, and Utopian Visions