Berkley Center

During the 2008-2009 academic year, the Berkley Center and the Department of Anthropology arranged a series of talks by well-known anthropologists of religion, culture, and political economy. The talks, based on fieldwork conducted in a range of ethnographic settings in Africa, India, Japan, and the United States, brought together anthropological work on religion and more recent work in the discipline on money, markets, and finance to consider the complex relationship between the economy and religion in the contemporary era. Departing from a long tradition in anthropology to investigate religion and economy as separate spheres of social life, speakers explored a range of themes that encompass the two domains, including monetarism and millennialism, economic reason and faith, hope and redemption, and philanthropic giving and the sacred.