5.5 Religion (the anthropological view)

The theoretical ladder: Tylor's animism → Frazer's magic-religion-science → Malinowski'sfunctionalism (magic where technology cannot guarantee — the Trobriand fisherman's lagoon- open magic vs deep-sea ritual: uncertainty's technology) → Geertz's interpretivism (religion as a cultural system — symbols clothing a worldview) → Turner's ritual theory (Unit 2.4's liminality and communitas) → the modern anthropology of religion as lived (healing, possession, conversion). Nepal as the laboratory (learn the layering): the great traditions in symbiosis — Hinduism and Buddhism's Valley synthesis (devi and Buddha in one pantheon; Newar Vajrayana as the fusion's monument); shamanism (the jhankri — diagnosis, soul-retrieval, community therapy — and its patient negotiation with biomedicine); possession and oracle traditions (the dhami-jhankri of the far-west; the kumaris — living goddesses as the state's own ritual institution); tantra and its ritual technologies; festival religion as civic order (Unit 2.4's jatra readings); and the conversion currents (Christianity's spread; the reform movements within Hinduism — Arya Samaj's Nepali moment). The law connection: secularism as constitutional fact (2015) amid ritual's public life; boksi (witchcraft) accusations — belief's dark side meeting criminal law (accusation-violence cases — Unit 8.4's ledger) — religion as the state's and the anthropologist's shared case- file.