1. Accomplishments

Membership
As of the November 2004 report from the AAA, SAR has 367 regular and 192 student members, for a total of 559. This is virtually identical to last year, when the membership was 550 at this time.

Finances
The finances of the SAR are very health, standing at October 31, 2004 at $21,648.62. Some expenses remain to be deducted from this amount.

Elections
In the spring elections, Ellen Badone was elected president-elect. Rebecca Lester was re-elected as secretary. Simon Coleman was elected to the second-half of a two-year term to which he had been appointed by the Executive Committee last year to fill a gap. Charles Hirschkind was elected to the Executive Committee and Adeline Masquelier and Susan Kenyon were re-elected. Jon Bialecki was elected student representative.

AAA Annual Meetings
Our program committee consisted of Sue Kenyon, Andy Buckser, Adeline Masquelier, and Michael Lambek. We submitted 27 sessions. Three of these were our invited sessions, one was a poster session,16 were sessions which had been submitted to us, and 7 were sessions assembled out of individually volunteered papers. In addition, Michael Lambek and Adeline Masquelier submitted a session, "Religion and the Social Imaginary in Times of Crisis," that received executive program committee status. Accepted sessions included the following:
--Religion and Media: New Questions for the Anthropology of Communication
--Strange (Sick)Bedfellows: Contexts of Conflicting Domains of Religion and Medicine
--Re-Enchanting the World: Religion and/as Media
--Crossing Borders: Religion in Transregional Contexts
--Explorations in Religion and Culture
--The Missing Secular in the Anthropology of Religion
--The Cultural Politics of Religion and Modernity
--The Return of the Repressed?: Religious Subjugation and Revitalization in Late and Postsocialist Societies
--The Politics of Religious Identities
--Good Missionary, Bad Missionary: Rethinking the Missionary Position in the Americas
--Reconciliation as Ritual Practice: Restorative Justice or Transmuted Violence
--At the Crossroads of Magic and Science
--Against Belief
--Ethnography and the Developing Canon in Science and Religion: Where are the Anthropologists?
--Ritual and Identity: Ethnographic Explorations I, II
--The Divine Supermarket: Testing the Model of Religious Economies
I know that Strange (Sick) Bedfellows did take place in Atlanta. I am not certain whether any other of our sessions did. In planning the 2005 AAA program we will take into account sessions that are rescheduled from 2004.

Spring Meeting
There was no spring meeting in 2004.

List-Serve
In November 2004 the SAR set up a list-serve based at UCSD. The address is . Jon Bialecki took the lead in setting this up and is running it for us. Deboarh Shepherd continues to run our web site.

2. Future plans

Spring Meeting, 2005
We are actively planning the meeting for 2005, to be held April 8-11 at the Chateau Granville Hotel in Vancouver. This hotel is unionized. The theme of the meeting is "Religion, Ethics, and Morality: Coextensive, Complementary, or Conflicting. Maurice Bloch has agreed to give the Roy A. Rappaport Distinguished Lecture in the Anthropology of Religion and a number of other plenary and local events are in the planning stages. Members of the organizing committee include Adeline Masquelier (chair), Simon Coleman, Michael Lambek, Susan Sered, and Andrew Walsh (drafted from outside the Executive Committee). John Barker and Janice Boddy are handling local arrangements.

Book Series
The SAR sponsored book series "Contemporary Anthropology of Religion," published by Palgrave-Macmillan and edited by Robert Hefner, continues to grow. Currently four books have been published in our series and four more are in the pipeline, with a fifth possibly about to be approved. Dan Varisco's book on Understanding Islam by way of a reading of the Anthropology of Islamm and Gabriele vom Bruck's book on Memory in Yemen should come out in the first half of 2005. Eva Keller's book on Madagascar Seven Day Adventists should appear in later 2005, Ron Lukens Bull has a book manuscript on
Islamic education in Indonesia (tentatively entitled "A Peaceful Jihad") that we have accepted and are awaiting revisions. Since the last AAA meeting, Hefner has reviewed three additional manuscripts for the SAR series that have been turned down and is waiting for reviews on two others.

Anthropology of Religion Section Officers, 2003-04

Michael Lambek, President lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca
Janice Boddy, Past-President boddy@eagle.ca, jboddy@telus.net
Rebecca Lester, Secretary rjlester@artsci.wustl.edu
Kathryn Geurts, Treasurer kgeurts@gw.hamline.edu

Executive Committee, 2003-04
Vimal Bhatnagar vmb5@po.cwru.edu
Simon Coleman s.m.coleman@sussex.ac.uk
Susan Kenyon skenyon@butler.edu
Bruce Knauft knauft@learnlink.emory.edu
Adeline Masquelier amasquel@tulane.edu
Joel Robbins jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu
Susan Sered susan@sered.name
Rosalind Shaw rosalind.shaw@tufts.edu


Editor for AN column
Simon Coleman s.m.coleman@sussex.ac.uk

Web site coodinator
Deborah Shephed sheph005@tc.umn.edu

List-serve coordinator
Jon Bialecki jbialeck@weber.ucsd.edu

SAR 2005 Spring Meeting Committee
Adeline Masquelier (chair) amasquel@tulane.edu
John Barker barker@interchange.ubc.ca
Janice Boddy boddy@eagle.ca, jboddy@telus.net
Simon Coleman s.m.coleman@sussex.ac.uk
Michael Lambek lambek@utsc.utoronto.ca
Susan Sered susan@sered.name
Andrew Walsh awalsh@wlu.ca

Book Series Editor
Robert Hefner rhefner@bu.edu

Nominations Committtee, 2005 Elections
Joel Robbins (chair) jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu
Ellen Badone badone@mcmaster.ca
Charles Hirschkind chirschk@uclink.berkeley.edu

Former Presidents
Tom Csordas tcsordas@ucsd.edu
Janice Boddy boddy@eagle.ca, jboddy@telus.net

submitted by Michael Lambek, Dec. 21, 2004