Lecture One - The Question of Religion

Summary

Thank you so much for the invitation to be this year's Jensen Lecturer: it is a great honor to be here at Goethe University and in particular at the Frobenius Institute. And it is a great pleasure, too, to be with old friends and new here in Frankfurt: I have only recently arrived but I am glad to be both at the Institute and in this city, which I have seen sparkling in the distance. I know that the Frobenius Institute has long been at the heart of the intellectual and ethnographic aspects of Frankfurt's cultural offerings.

I am especially pleased to give a set of lectures named for Adolf Ellegard Jensen. In the context of these distinguished named lecture series, it is customary to spend a few moments on the accomplishments and legacy of the person for whom the series is named. Usually the lecturer then moves on to the topic at hand, after some brief niceties and an appropriate homage to a figure of old. But I hope you will excuse me if I spend a little more time with A. E. Jensen than lecturers normally do: I have come to know the work of Jensen over the past few months, and I have become quite charmed by him; Jensen's work is highly significant to the material we consider in the study of religion today. As the advertisers of his most important work, Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (1963 [1951]), put it at the time, Jensen's “sympathetic and richly documented” text is able to “demonstrate the importance of anthropology for the study of comparative religion.” Myth and Cult was published in German in 1951, and translated into English in 1963, but, unfortunately, it soon fell out of fashion: it has not been taught even in Germany in decades. And yet, to my eye, the intellectual project is one whose pertinence powerfully endures after almost seventy years.

So let us begin with a little excavation. In 1951, Jensen takes up the mid-twentieth-century question of religion, and shows how we, as anthropologists, can contribute to studying it. Significantly, he asks both what qualities religion has – that is, what qualities of humanity religion displays – and what form, or forms, religion takes over time.