tified as the "increased attention to local contexts, cultural logics, human imag-
ination and creativity in recent anthropological studies of consciousness."

In what may well be her only unprophetic statement concerning the future
direction of anthropology of religion, the late Annemarie de Waal Malefijt
( 1968: 103) wrote: "The greatest accomplishment of twentieth century anthro-
pology is the establishment of a clear distinction between man as a biological
organism and man as a creator and bearer of culture and thus also of religion.
The importance of this distinction cannot be overestimated." Since 1968, how-
ever, this once-clear distinction--if indeed it was ever truly established--has
again become blurred and spawned a myriad of theoretical and methodological
trends. The final three chapters address some of these recent theoretical and
methodological advances.

Charles D. Laughlin, Stewart Guthrie, and Jacob Pandian focus on intercon-
nections among religious forms, cognitive processes, and the fabrication of
meaning. In "The Cycle of Meaning: Some Methodological Implications of
Biogenetic Structural Theory," Laughlin provides a promising new synthesis of
anthropological and neurophenomenological theories of consciousness that will
have widespread implications for the anthropological study of religion. His pri-
mary achievement is in suggesting ways in which symbols operate neurocog-
nitively to channel meanings within cultural and religious systems.

Stewart Guthrie's "The Origin of an Illusion" updates major arguments con-
tained in his 1993 book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion and
could profitably be read in conjunction with James Lett's contribution. While
Guthrie's main thesis is simple, elegant, and far from new, few anthropologists
have taken his argument to its logical and forceful conclusion: that all religions
are essentially anthropomorphic because they postulate deities in or behind nat-
ural phenomena and credit nature with the human capacity for symbolic action.
In this assertion, Guthrie joins in a welcome--and in this century unprece-
dented-resurgence of interest in naturalistic explanations of religion ( Boyer
1993, 1994; Horton 1993). Guthrie, however, argues that earlier theorists did
not take the thesis of anthropomorphism far enough and that modern theorists
( Boyer and Horton) fail to recognize its full espistemic status and implications
(cf. Yonan 1995:31-34). Perhaps Guthrie's greatest insights flow from his keen
recognition that human beings never just "see" things but always "see as."
Everything is seen in terms of something else.

Guthrie, who began his anthropological career studying new religious move-
ments in Japan ( Guthrie 1988), takes issue with the classical position of Emile Durkheim
( 1912/ 1995: 45) who--in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life--
adamantly asserted that Buddhism was not anthropomorphic. Guthrie ( 1993:
191) emphasizes to the contrary--and in agreement with Todd T. Lewis--that
"Buddhism in fact has many gods from local bodisattvas to the Buddha him-
self."

Jacob Pandian "The Sacred Integration of the Cultural Self: An Anthro-
pological Approach to the Study of Religion" provides a fitting final chapter

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