This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Social Sciences study human society and social relationships by systematic, evidence based method, the parent field several of this atlas's own disciplines already sit inside. The field gained an early program in 1830, when Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie Positive proposed a science of society modeled on the natural sciences, treating social behavior as something that could be observed and analyzed rather than only theorized about.
For an atlas of religion and belief, the social sciences are the broader field this atlas's own disciplines of law, archaeology and psychology sit inside, and its own political branch, already named elsewhere in this collection, studies how religious institutions engage with civil governance specifically. A religious community's structure, its membership patterns or its relationship to the state are, before anything else, social facts that Comte's evidence based method can observe and analyze on their own terms.
That inheritance is why the field matters here specifically, as the shared ground beneath several disciplines this atlas treats individually. A religious institution is a social institution as well as a spiritual one, and the social sciences supply the systematic method for studying it as one.