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Anthropology of religion

The anthropology of religion involves the study of religious institutions in
relation to other social institutions, and the comparison of religious
beliefs and practices across cultures. In the 19th century, cultural
anthropology was dominated by an interest in cultural evolution; most
anthropologists assumed that there was a simple distinction between
primitive and modern religion and tried to provide accounts of how the
former evolved into the latter. In the 20th century most anthropologists
rejected this approach. Today the anthropology of religion reflects the
influence of, or an engagement with, such modern theorists as Karl Marx,
Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. They are especially concerned
with how religious beliefs and practices may reflect political or economic
forces; or the social functions of religious beliefs and practices.

Anthropological approaches to religion reflect a more general tension within
anthropology: the discipline defines itself as a science in that all
anthropologists base their interpretations and explanations on empirical
evidence (and many anthropologists are concerned with developing universal
models of human behavior), and the discipline also defines itself in terms
of the seriousness with which it takes local beliefs and practices (see
cultural relativism), and its commitment to understanding different cultures
in their own terms through participant observation. Thus, although many
Westerners (including anthropologists) have rejected religion out of hand
as being unscientific, virtually all anthropologists assume that there must
be good reasons for the endurance and importance of religion and, by
implication, assume that religious beliefs and practices are in some sense
reasonable. In order to determine the reasons for the importance of
religion, however, anthropologists generally move beyond the literal claims
of any religion to look at its metaphorical meaning or latent social functions.

One major problem in the anthropology of religion is the definition of
religion itself. At one time anthropologists believed that certain religious
practices and beliefs were more or less universal to all cultures at some
point in their development, such as a belief in spirits or ghosts, the use
of magic as a means of controlling the supernatural, the use of divination
as a means of discovering occult knowledge, and the performance of rituals
such as prayer and sacrifice as a means of influencing the outcome of
various events through a supernatural agency, sometimes taking the form of
shamanism or ancestor worship,. Today, anthropologists debate, and many
reject, the cross-cultural validity of these categories (often viewing them
as examples of European primitivism). Anthropologists have considered
various criteria for defining religion ? such as a belief in the
supernatural or the reliance on ritual ? but few claim that these criteria
are universally valid.

In Western culture, religion has become more or less synonymous with
monotheism and the various moral codes that monotheism prescribes. Moral
codes have also evolved in conjunction with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs,
independent of monotheism. However, prescriptive moral codes or even
normative ethical codes are not a necessary component of religious beliefs
or practices any more than they are a necessary component of science and the
scientific method.

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