Anthropology of Religion

The anthropology of religion is the study of religion through fieldwork and cross-cultural comparison, attending to ritual, myth, magic, kinship, and symbol as they function within a living society rather than as abstract doctrine. It began in the Victorian era with grand theories of religion's origin and evolution, E. B. Tylor's account of religion as beginning in "animism," the attribution of souls to nature, and James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which arranged the world's myths and rites into a sweeping (and now much-criticized) progression from magic through religion to science. Twentieth-century anthropology largely abandoned these speculative evolutionary schemes in favor of intensive participant-observation of particular societies. Emile Durkheim reframed religion as fundamentally social, a system whose real object, behind the sacred symbols, is the community itself.

Later figures reshaped the field in turn: Bronislaw Malinowski analyzed magic as a response to uncertainty; Mary Douglas read purity and taboo as expressions of social classification; Victor Turner analyzed the dynamics of ritual and liminality; and Clifford Geertz defined religion as a "system of symbols" that clothes a worldview in an aura of factuality. The discipline is marked by a methodological stance of describing and interpreting religious practice on its own terms, in its social context, while bracketing the question of its truth.

The founders of the field did not do fieldwork. Nineteenth-century writers on religion built their comparative theories from reports sent home by missionaries, administrators and travellers, and the material arrived already shaped by the interests of the people who collected it. The results were confident, systematic and frequently wrong.

The methodological revolution was participant observation: living in a community for an extended period, learning the language, and describing practice as it is actually conducted rather than as a questionnaire records it. It transformed the evidence base and it remains the discipline's distinctive instrument.

It also brought its own difficulties, which the field turned on itself in the 1980s. A critique gathered around the writing of ethnography argued that a monograph is a composed text with a narrator, that the authority of the omniscient observer conceals the negotiation and misunderstanding through which the material was actually obtained, and that the people described had no voice in how they appeared.

The practical consequence has been procedural. Consent, community review of what is published, restrictions on restricted knowledge, and co-authorship with the people studied are now normal expectations rather than courtesies, and the older monographs are read with their conditions of production in view.

For the study of religion specifically that matters most where knowledge is deliberately withheld within a tradition, since publishing it is not neutral even when it is accurate.