Introduction: Dialogues with the Living and the Dead

Religion and Society is a journal that fosters varieties of dialogue. Commentaries, conversations, and responses populate our pages and sometimes extend across volumes. In this issue, we present a portrait of a historian who has exemplified the productive powers of dialogue throughout his work and life. Peter Brown's vivid observations on his encounters with anthropologists—on page and in person—are complemented by reflections from a younger generation of scholars as they highlight his continuing influence as teacher, writer, and thinker. In his contribution, Brown is munificent in highlighting the productive results of encounters with E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) and Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols (1970) in relation to his understandings of rationality and the links between religion and society. He also provides intriguing hints as to the suggestive interplays between biography, institutional location, and the academic imagination, referring for instance to the effect of reading Max Gluckman's Custom and Conflict in Africa in a pub on a Saturday afternoon in 1957, beneath the ancient tower of New College, Oxford. For a historian of Brown's scope and boldness, the experience seems to have led to a striking form of cultural and disciplinary dialogue between the (then) African ethnographic present and the European Dark Age, as well as between history and anthropology.