Joseph Webster, “The Anthropology of Protestantism: Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013)

In The Anthropology of Protestantism:Faith and Crisis among Scottish Fishermen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), anthropologist Joseph Webster takes readers deep into the lives of fishermen in Gamrie, a village perched above the sea in northeastern Scotland. It’s a place of great wealth and also poverty, a place of staunch Protestantism among many of the older people and reckless abandon or religious unconcern among the young and “incomers” – that is, new arrivals in the village. By tracing the millennialist faith of the village’s many Presbyterian and Brethren churches, this careful ethnography calls into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern societies. It asks, how do the fishermen of Gamrie experience life as both modern and enchanted?

Joseph Webster is Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. The Anthropology of Protestantism comes out in paperback in June 2015.

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