The essays in this issue of Social Anthropology examine how religious ideas and actions become the object of reflection among the people holding religious beliefs and participating in religious activities. Reflexivity has become a popular term within current cultural and social sciences, and the exploration of religious reflexivity may be seen simply to reflect a more general ‘reflexive turn’. In anthropology the ‘reflexive turn’ is related to the self-consciousness of intellectual operations in a double sense as far as it has been concerned with the nature of both scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge. On the one hand anthropology has gone through a period of self-scrutinisation of scientific modes of representation, claims to truth and ethical standards. While taking itself as an object, anthropology has at the same time also been informed by phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches to the object of study, stressing self-knowledge, multivocality and the negotiation of meaning. It is probably no coincidence that the notions of agency, identity, personhood, experience, consciousness, etc. have gained priority in anthropological research carried out under the aegis of the reflexive turn. Conversely, the preference of reflexivity is due to more than paradigmatic constraints; it is commonplace to point out the inherently reflexive character of anthropology, even when it is carried out at home. As the minimal definition has it, anthropology is a means to see the other as self and the self as other.

Belief may refer not only to the content (knowledge, ideas), but also to the believer's attitude (i.e. belief in the dispositional sense – the believer's state of mind). Belief is not necessarily a matter of absolute conviction. It may well call up issues of religious reflexivity. There are degrees of commitment, shifts and changes of attitude. An unsuccessful attempt in a Sepik village to heal a man with joint pains provides here the main example to show how the participants' views about the healing ritual may vary and change. Among the factors identified are differences between public statement and private opinion; the effects of hope and suggestion; variations in attention and state of mind; change with perspective and time; whether to take things as meant literally or metaphorically.

Medical treatment almost anywhere may become a sharp source of doubt and question. Belief in healing has a long history of conviction, the wish to believe, and error. The search to avoid bias and subjective judgement led in biomedicine to the elaboration of a method for evaluating the efficacy of treatment – the randomised controlled clinical trial – which has gained wide acceptance. Despite differences of scope and attitude, some similar issues of authority and persuasion, experience and evidence are involved in the reflexive questioning of both religion and science.

Specialists of shamanism have often focussed on the symbolic transformations of the world that a shaman may realize by using ritual language. In this perspective reflexivity appears as an external way to comment upon the nature and effectiveness of ritual action. This article tries to show that the ritual use of language can be equally used to define the nature of the ritual performer. This pragmatic definition of the enounciator constitutes a kind of reflexivity, defined as the problem of self-definition of the ritual agents, included within the domain of ritual action. In conclusion, an hypothesis on the perlocutionary effect of this kind of ritual use of language is formulated.

This paper explores an overlooked dimension of religious transformation in so-called 'traditional' African religious practice - embodied scepticism. Manjaco youths mimic local religious traditions in playful ways. And they are quick to criticise the ritual practices and underlying beliefs of their elders. These sceptical youths have been at the vanguard of revolutionising village-level religious practice - pushing the community at large to modify or outlaw certain religious customs and to do away with certain village spirit shrines. Such youthful scepticism has often been explained in the literature as a symptom of 'modernisation' - as youth become more cosmopolitan, as they are exposed, as it were, to alternate ways of explaining the world, they lose faith in old ways and beliefs. I criticise this model by looking at the sometimes paradoxical ways that embodied ritual practice supports or undermines local religious beliefs.

Loma religion, involving masquerade and secret cult activities, has remained largely intact in spite of continuous suppression of local religious practices in the Republic of Guinea during the decades following independence. The article aims at explaining the apparent immunity to iconoclastic practices through the analysis of a ritual of sacrifice which illustrates how the Loma conceive of religious objects as artefacts and living kinds. The study elucidates a mode of reflexivity, labelled inner iconoclasm, which refers to people's ability to reflect upon their own religious beliefs as these are generated and unfold in the course of ritual action. It is argued that various aspects of reflexivity intrinsic to ritual action are main factors explaining the apparent immunity of Loma religion to iconoclastic practices. A second belief-generating mode of reflexivity is the objectification of religion resulting from the exposure of ritual secrets and the current politicisation of ritual practice and cult organisations.

This paper discusses conventional illusory enactments, largely recognised as such by those who undertake them, drawn from two Central African male initiation rites: the novices' dramatic execution on the one hand, and the purportedly painless sacrifice of the ritual's emblematic animal on the other. In doing so, it attempts to elucidate two related forms of religious reflexivity: ritual ‘dissimulation’, centred around the manipulation of persons, and ritual ‘simulation’ founded upon the manipulation of non-persons (animals, objects, spells, images, and so forth). The actors' commitment to such performances as necessary and appropriate ones is related in the first case to the interdependent relationship that is set up between the perceptions different categories of participants have of the event they are jointly involved in, and in the second case, to the way the mediating qualities of non-persons serve to embed the participants' actions within auto-referential circuits in which relations of causality and representation converge.

The extent to which religious rituals foster a reflexive stance is influenced by transmissive frequency. Highly repetitive rituals may be reproduced on the basis of largely implicit procedural knowledge, somewhat constraining spontaneous exegetical reflection (and related experiences of religious doubt and skepticism). Rare, climactic rituals are reproduced via explicit procedural schemas, fostering a rich but gradual process of exegetical reflection. This article presents a detailed model of these dynamics, drawing on a combination of ethnographic and experimental findings.