Participation

Externally-enrolled students should use the iLearn discussion groups in lieu of in-class attendance and participation. The links for the groups will be accessible via each week's iLearn section. The groups will be running from Monday to Sunday at midnight. This will give you plenty of time to listen to the lecture, to complete the tutorial readings, and to formulate your comments and reflections. Please note that late posts will not be assessed. 

Your tutor will start the discussion thread and pose some questions related to the weekly topic. We expect you to submit a minimum of 2 posts each week, one engaging with the questions that your tutor provides (minimum 200 words), and a second post engaging with other students' responses (no word count for this). Marks are only awarded based on the quality of your contribution, meaning that we are looking for clarity and a demonstrated ability to engage with the unit material. Your tutor will monitor the forum during the week and occasionally intervene in the discussion to get everyone to think about the topic in potentially new ways. Once the week has ended, the tutor will no longer monitor the discussion and you are expected to move on to the following week.

The forums are meant to be a place of peer-to-peer learning where the students engage with each other and with the lecture material/readings in an academic way. We will encourage interaction and thoughtful engagement between the students. For this reason, it is important to think of your contributions to the forum as not a ‘to-and-fro’ between the tutor and student, but as the starting point of engagement with other students. This means that you are expected not only to post your own contributions but also directly engage with the posts of other students in a respectful manner in relation to the course material.

You can also use the forum platform to ask your tutor or other students any relevant questions that you might have regarding the material or assessments. Alternatively, you can communicate with your tutor or unit convenor via email. Contact details have been provided on the main iLearn page.

Ethnographic Essay

For this assignment, internally-enrolled students will work in groups of 3 or 4 and attend a ritual activity that exhibits religion in practice. If possible, external students can also undertake this assignment in groups but we understand that this may not be possible, so you will have the option of working individually. 

The aim is to attend and observe a religious ritual or worshipping ceremony of your choice, which might take place, for example, at a local church, temple, mosque, synagogue, etc. Based on your observations of the ritual activity, you will then write an individual essay, which should analyse and discuss the following essay question: In what ways is ‘sacredness’ generated and expressed in this ritual event? 

Essays will be marked individually according to the marking rubric. When you conduct your observational activity try to take detailed notes. You might also want to sketch out a map of the social space and how people use it.  You should divide up the workload amongst the group. You may each choose to observe and record different things, or you may all decide to observe the same thing but from different angles. 

Quizes

You will complete two online quizzes, each containing 15 multiple-choice questions. These quizzes are based on lecture materials and tutorial readings. These are open-note quizzes, so if you take the time to listen to lectures and do the readings, you will be able to answer them.  

Quiz 1 will consist of questions that cover the unit material from Week 1 to Week 6 (included). Quiz 2 will cover the unit material from Week 7 to Week 12 (included). 

You will have 25 minutes to complete each quiz. The quizzes will open and close at a fixed time.

Take-home exam

The take-home examination is designed to assess your understanding of the material covered throughout the session. The questions are centred around the subjects explored in the course readings and lectures.

The examination comprises two sections. In Section 1, you are required to select any four out of seven questions and craft a 200-word response for each question. Section 2, entails a single question, and you are expected to provide a response of 500 words, with a permissible variation of plus or minus ten percent in the word count.

Special consideration

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a mark of '0' (zero) will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11.55pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical issue. This late penalty will apply to non-time sensitive assessment (incl. essays, reports, posters, portfolios, journals, recordings etc). Late submission of time sensitive tasks (such as tests/exams, performance assessments/presentations, scheduled practical assessments/labs etc) will only be addressed by the unit convenor in a Special Consideration application. Special Consideration outcome may result in a new question or topic.

This unit will be delivered via 13 lectures, 12 tutorials and an online forum. Every week, several scholarly but enjoyable readings will be made available to the students. Building on these readings in the anthropology of religion and the specialisation of the lecturers and tutors, the unit introduces students to anthropological approaches of studying religion.

In the lectures, we will explore multiple religious beliefs, meanings, experiences, expressions and practices across diverse sociocultural environments both in the past and within the contemporary moment. Topics to be examined include religious myths, symbols and rituals; material religion; religion and art practices; shamanism; secularism; and interplay between religion and politics.

During the tutorials and via a hands-on ethnographic observation exercise, students will learn how anthropologists conduct ethnographic fieldwork on the religious. Students will gain a sense of the range of challenges and issues that professional anthropologists engage with when doing extended field research on religious worlds and lives.

All lectures in this unit are delivered in person and made available via the ECHO platform.