08/28/2024 – What is "religion"? Anthropology of Religion

Have you ever wondered what is “religion”? I’ve got your back because I’m a former community college professor of religion. We’re going to look at a number of lenses academic scholars of religion use to understand, interpret, and define religion, but… broken down into slightly easier-to-understand bits. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted about every two weeks at noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.

This is the second episode in a multi-episode series which I’m simply calling “What is Religion?” This is about understanding the academic field of religion including how it started and ways academic scholars of religion interpret, understand, and define religion. In the first episode we looked at some of the early stages of development and in this episode were going to talk about the anthropology of religion. In future episodes we’re going to get into the sociology of religion, psychology, phenomenology (or experience of religion), and finally the comparison of religion. Today, we’re going to take a look at anthropology and religion through the lenses of four important figures: E. B. Tylor, James George Frazer, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz. Let’s get into it.

Just a quick note of clarification to get started…basically, what is anthropology anyway? Anthropology is the study of humanity. The contemporary field of anthropology is divided up in into the four subfields of physical anthropology (the origin of our species Homo sapiens), archeological anthropology (artifacts and material remains of human activity), linguistic anthropology (the nature, history, and social function of languages), and cultural anthropology (the study of culture). Two other words which sort of get mixed in with all of these subfields are ethnography (which is cultural descriptions) & ethnology (which is scientific analysis of cultural or racial groups). When the field of anthropology was developing in the 19th century, however, it obviously didn’t have all of these distinctions. Back then, culture was a general concept which was always in development. In the last half of the 1800’s, there was a huge thrust towards interpreting many fields of study through the lens of an evolutionary model or process and this especially impacted anthropology.

Now the reason why we’re starting with E. B. Tylor is because he is considered by many scholars to be the “father” of the modern discipline of anthropology. Tylor has been widely credited with providing the first definition of “culture” in its modern anthropological sense: “[that] complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habit acquired by man as a member of society.” He also wrote the first proper anthropological textbook, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization in 1881. He also was the first person to be a full-time professional anthropologist when he was appointed at the University of Oxford in 1884. Tylor’s most well-known work is the two-volume Primitive Culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom in 1874. Modern anthropologists today don’t always talk about religion, but in Primitive Culture, examining religion literally fills half the book. Tylor saw religion as an evolutionary process and supposed that on the basis of its surviving remnants, one can reconstruct the society and culture of earlier times. For example, Tylor classified human life into roughly three great stages: Savage (the wild Australian), Barbaric (the intelligent South Sea Islanders), and Civilized (the English). He used the comparative method meaning he believed that everyone at the same stage had the same patterns of thought. Therefore, one could apply what one learned from one group of savages to another.

Another important concept for Tylor was a “survival” – something in a culture that did not make sense there in the present context but rather bore witness to an earlier stage. These were objects or traits or attitudes with a reason for existence in one stage that had become obsolete or misunderstood because they had, through social or religious conservatism, “survived” into a new, higher stage in which they were no longer functional. Thus, the magician’s rattle and the warrior’s bow and arrow had become children’s toys. He overwhelmingly used survivals to explain religion. Eventually the new school of functionalism swept away Tylor’s notion of survivals insisting that these practices must be serving a contemporary function. Later anthropologists, as we will see, also abandoned Tylor’s evolutionism.

But what was religion for Tylor? In a word, animism. Religion began when the earliest prehistoric people tried to solve natural puzzles. Some objects move naturally (like the sun) and others don’t (like rocks). Animated objects possessed anima, an invisible supernatural force. When people die, they initially look the same but are no longer animated. The “anima” has left and this became the “soul.” But if the “soul” left, where did it go? Could it still be contacted? This became the job of magic or religious specialists such as shamans and sorcerers. Thus, primitive societies believed in spiritual beings which included souls of individual creatures capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body as well as other spirits all the way up to the rank of powerful deities. He also said that belief in spirits originated from dreams – people dream about things and objects but they are not really there. Primitives extrapolated from that and thought that spirits must exist – someone dies and yet their presence may still occur in dreams. Tylor explained all of these “primitive” beliefs as the accumulation of rational answers to reasonable questions about the natural world.

And now on to James George Frazer, who was 19 years younger than Tylor, but had a friendly relationship and met frequently for a number of years. Now I have to make sure that I hammer this point home: to Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century – probably to the British most of all – it seemed obvious to them that their political, military, and technological superiority was the result of their occupying a higher rung on the ladder of social and intellectual evolution. At the end of 1800’s and well into the 1900’s, educated Europe believed in its “civilizing mission” and respect for the cultures of others barely even existed. Frazer, being one of these folks, believed we need to study the culture of “backward” peoples immediately before they disappear so we can understand the history of humanity on the planet. Enough said about that.

Frazer held a three-part cultural structure of magic, religion, and science. Magic is based on the assumption that particular actions always produce certain results. When these causal assumptions become viewed as invalid and discerned to be in error, people then turn to religion. This is marked by imploring spiritual beings and which can then accommodate or explain the unpredictability of outcomes, like using prayer instead of magic for example. But, for Frazer, an Age of Magic always comes before an Age of Religion. In his writings, one of the most popular themes was that of the dying god. He cited many examples from around the world in various historical cultures, but the reader must somehow put it all together, which leads me to his most famous work, or should I say works, The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough is a somewhat haphazard collection of stories which Frazer originally published as a two-volume work in 1890 titled, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. He later put out an expanded three-volume second edition, and then exploded it up to a 12-volume third edition. And there are multiple shorter single-volume abridged versions, so there’s a lot of versions of this one work. The second edition was The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in 1900 and the third edition had the same title and the 12 volumes were published from 1906-1915. Now, here's the catch, Frazer didn’t exactly go anywhere to gather the stories from these cultures and societies all over the globe. He was entirely dependent on missionaries, colonial officials, and others in various locations to provide him with ethnographic data. He was the epitome of the armchair scholar in his ivory tower. To make matters worse, in these volumes, great masses of “evidence” are presented when the relation to the subject is anything but evident. This convoluted writing style is the result of Frazer’s unwillingness to digress. When attempting to read any of the versions, it’s not easy to try to figure out exactly where one is in the argument of the entire work. Facts drawn from all over the world and throughout history are all too often held in place by tiny bits of speculative inferences and suppositions. So, it’s not really clear what exactly is the point of it all. But he became immensely popular by the time the third edition rolled off the presses because the European public were interested in the stories he relayed. After the third edition was published, newspapers told the well-educated that this was something any thoughtful person had to know about – at least in its abridged form – for its explanation of how society and religion had begun in primitive confusion and misunderstanding. The irony of this is that most professional anthropologists had now moved on to studying social function and structure as the main anthropological model rather than viewing cultures in a process of evolutionary hierarchy, and Frazer was pretty much irrelevant to them. But popular mainstream society viewed him as a hero.

Not long after, Edward Evan, or E. E., Evans-Pritchard came along and in one sentence basically flipped Frazer’s The Golden Bough on its head. His main theme was that primitive religious practices need to be seen within other factors within that society, not other times or other societies. While in Exeter College, Oxford from 1921-1924, Evans-Pritchard read Tylor’s Primitive Culture and Frazer’s Golden Bough and took an interest in anthropology. Evans-Pritchard was the first professional anthropologist to do proper, participant observation fieldwork in Africa. From 1926 to 1945 he was repeatedly in Africa for long stays studying a range of different groups in the Southern Sudan, with his main fieldwork with the Azande and the Nuer.

His first book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande in 1937, became a classic in anthropology and beyond. Witchcraft is an often-misunderstood idea. An act of witchcraft is a psychic act. Azande believe that witchcraft is a substance in the bodies of witches, a belief which is found among many peoples in Central and West Africa. What made Evans-Pritchard’s book so groundbreaking was his argument that despite the Azande being fundamentally in error about most things, they were no less rational than their European contemporaries. It was wrong to assume like Tylor and Frazer that the thinking of primitive people was ‘pre-logical’ and thus fundamentally different from our own. This mistake was made by exaggerating both the extent to which Europeans are rational and the extent to which primitive people are irrational. For example, a shelter collapsed and injured someone. Witchcraft is their explanation for a specific question: why did it collapse at the particular time it would injure that person and not at some other time? The concept of witchcraft provided the Azande with a natural philosophy by which the relations between people and unfortunate events are explained and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events.

In his fieldwork and subsequent writings, Evans-Pritchard was primarily concerned to prove the coherence and logic of “primitive” thought in order to show that the capacity for order and rationality was not limited to the Western world. The major cause of confusion among nineteenth-century anthropologists was not so much that they believed in evolutionary progress and sought a method by which they might reconstruct how it had come about. It is rather to be looked for in the assumption they had inherited from the Enlightenment that societies are natural systems, or organisms, which have a necessary course of development that can be reduced to general principles or laws. Logical connections were in consequence presented as real and necessary connections and typological classifications as both historical and inevitable courses of development.

Evans-Pritchard said that statements about a people’s religious beliefs must always be treated with the greatest caution, for we are then dealing with what neither European nor native can directly observe, with conceptions, images, and words which require for understanding a thorough knowledge of a people’s language and also an awareness of the entire system of ideas of which any particular belief is a part, for it may be meaningless when divorced from the set of beliefs to which it belongs. He thought the comparative method of Tylor and Frazer was a misnomer. There was precious little comparison, if we mean analytical comparison. There was merely a bringing together of items which appeared to have something in common. It was more of an ‘anecdotal method’. A large number of miscellaneous examples were brought together to illustrate some general idea and in support of the author’s thesis about that idea and the simplest rules of inductive logic were ignored. Evans-Pritchard’s other important books included three books on the Nuer, and Theories of Primitive Religion. He passed away in 1973.

Lastly, we’ll quickly mention Clifford Geertz who was an important American anthropologist that fairly recently passed away in 2006. His most popular works were two collections of essays: The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973, and Local Knowledge in 1983. He was known for adopting the idea of a “thick description” from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle and adapting it for anthropology. A thick description is an anthropological description of human social actions and behaviors which includes context provided by the participants as opposed to a thin description which is only observation from outsiders.

Geertz liked to talk about symbols and if you know anything about TenOnReligion I also like to talk about symbols and how they relate to religion. In “Religion as a Cultural System,” an essay in Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz provided his extensive definition of religion. A religion is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivation seem uniquely realistic. Now, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this definition which we obviously don’t have time to unpack, but one interesting idea he states is this: symbolic cultural patterns, of which religion is a huge part, possess double-meaning aspects. They give meaning by pointing to something, and they also simultaneously shape themselves by it. Humans shape the meanings of symbols and the meanings of symbols shape humans. Think of how true this is with regard to metaphysical concepts like God, or religious practices like prayer, meditation, or baptism. There’s a lot of symbolism-shaping going on both ways. As much as I like Geertz, I got to get this video episode edited. But I had to at least mention him because he’s so important to the topic at hand. I’ll put some Geertz books down below in the description as well as books relating to all of the figures we talked about today. I think we’re done for now.

Today we were answering the question “What is religion?” through the lens of anthropology using E. B. Tylor, James George Frazer, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz. So, what do you think about the anthropology of religion? Which figure did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Next up, the sociology of religion. It’s gonna be good! Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.