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Disclaimer
Anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace has defined
religion as "belief and ritual concerned with
supernatural beings, powers, and forces" (1966,
p. 5). Like ethnicity or language, religion may
be associated with social divisions within and
between societies and nations. Religious behavior
and beliefs both unite and divide. Participation
in common rites may affirm, and thus maintain,
the social solidarity of a religion's adherents.
In studying religion cross-culturally,
anthropologists pay attention not only to the
social roles of religion but also to the content
and nature of religious acts, events, processes,
settings, practitioners, and organizations. We
also consider such verbal manifestations of
religious beliefs as prayers, chants, myths,
texts, and statements about ethics and morality.
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The supernatural is the extraordinary realm
outside (but believed to impinge on) the
observable world. It is nonempirical, mysterious,
and inexplicable in ordinary terms. It must be
accepted "on faith." Supernatural beings-gods and
goddesses, ghosts, and souls-are not of the
material world. Nor are supernatural forces, some
of which are wielded by beings. Other sacred
forces are impersonal they simply exist. In many
societies, however, people believe they can
benefit from, become imbued with, or manipulate
supernatural forces. Religion, as defined here,
exists in all human societies. It is a cultural
universal. However, we'll see that it isn't
always easy to distinguish the supernatural from
the natural and that different cultures
conceptualize supernatural entities very
differently.
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The Definition of Religion

• Like culture, religion is a difficult concept to
  define.
• Different approaches to defining religion have
  been used
• Analytic definition
• Functional definition
• Essentialists definition

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Origins, Functions, and Expressions of
Religion Definitions of Supernaturalism
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Supernaturalism suggests that there are natural
things in the universe and supernatural things,
beyond or outside of the natural. A
supernatural belief is any belief that transcends
the observable, natural world.
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Analytic Definition

• Focuses on the way religion manifests itself or
  is expressed in culture
• EX defining religion by stating that religious
  practices generally include rituals.
• Ninian Smart felt that there were 6 dimensions of
  religion

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• The institutional dimension (the organization and
  leadership).
• The narrative dimension (myths, creation stories,
  worldview).
• The ritual dimension (rites of passage and other
  important activities).
• The social dimension (religion being a group
  activity that binds people together)
• The ethical dimension (customs, moral rules)
• The experiential dimension (religion involving
  experiences of a sacred reality that is beyond
  ordinary experience).

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Functional Definitions

• Are concerned with the role that religion plays
  in a society.
• EX a religion might enforce social cohesion by
  bringing members together for rituals and
  providing a foundation of shared beliefs.
• EX religion might also function on the
  individual level to relieve individual anxiety by
  providing explanations and meaning.

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Essentialist Definition

• Looks at what is the essential nature of
  religion.
• It emphasizes the fact the religion is the domain
  of the extraordinary.
• Beyond the natural or physical world.
• On the basis of this idea we would say that a
  religion is a system of beliefs and behaviors
  that deals with the relationship between humans
  and the sacred supernatural.

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Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Religion

• The Evolutionary Approach
• Positivism
• Animism
• Animatism
• The Functional Approach
• Collective conscious
• The Psychosocial Approach

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The Evolutionary Approach

• Focused on questions of when and how religion
  began.
• Developed in the late 1800s when the focus was on
  the concepts of science, logic, and monotheism as
  the pinnacles of human achievement.
• Positivism was popular.
• Empiricism, or observing and measuring.
• The only real knowledge is scientific knowledge
  any knowledge beyond that is impossible.

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Origins, Functions, and Expressions of Religion
Animism
The founder of the anthropology of religion was
Sir E.B. Tylor (Primitive Culture
1871) Religion was born as people tried to
understand conditions and events they could not
explain by reference to daily experience. Tylor
believed that our ancestors and contemporary
nonindustrial peoples-were particularly intrigued
with death, dreaming, and trance. In dreams and
trances, people see images they may remember when
they wake up or come out of the trance state.
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Tylor concluded that attempts to explain dreams
and trances led early humans to believe that two
entities inhabit the body one active during the
day and the other--a double or soul--active
during sleep and trance states. Although they
never meet, they are vital to each other. When
the double permanently leaves the body, the
person dies. Death is departure of the soul. From
the Latin for soul, anima, Tylor named this
belief animism. The soul was one sort of
spiritual entity people remembered various
images from their dreams and trances-other
spirits. For Tylor, animism, the earliest form of
religion, was a belief in spiritual beings.
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• Tylor proposed that religion evolved through
  stages, beginning with animism. Polytheism (the
  belief in multiple gods) and then monotheism (the
  belief in a single, all-powerful deity) developed
  later.
• Because religion originated to explain things
  people didn't understand, Tylor thought it would
  decline as science offered better explanations.
  To an extent, he was right.
• We now have scientific explanations for many
  things that religion once elucidated.
• Nevertheless, because religion persists, it must
  do something more than explain the mysterious. It
  must, and does, have other functions and
  meanings.

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• In attempting to find a common thread in all
  religious systems, Tylor failed to discover the
  great variability among the worlds religious
  systems.
• Robert Marett developed the concept of a simpler,
  more basic, and more ancient supernatural force
  the he labeled animatism.
• He believed that this grew out of human emotional
  reaction to the power of nature.
• This belief in an impersonal supernatural power
  is referred to as mana.

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Mana

• Besides animism is a view of the supernatural as
  a domain of raw impersonal power, or force, that
  people can control under certain conditions.
• Such a conception of the supernatural is
  particularly prominent in Melanesia. Melanesians
  believed in mana, a sacred impersonal force
  existing in the universe. Mana can reside in
  people, animals, plants, and objects.
• Melanesian mana was similar to our notion of
  efficacy or luck. Melanesians attributed success
  to mana, which people could acquire or manipulate
  in different ways, such as through magic. Objects
  with mana could change someone's luck. For
  example, a charm or amulet belonging to a
  successful hunter might transmit the hunter's
  mana to the next person who held or wore it. A
  woman might put a rock in her garden, see her
  yields improve dramatically, and attribute the
  change to the force contained in the rock.

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One role of religion is to explain. A belief in
souls explains what happens in sleep, trance, and
death. Melanesian mana explains differential
success that people can't understand in ordinary,
natural terms. People fail at hunting, war, or
gardening not because they are lazy, stupid, or
inept but because success comes-or doesn't
come-from the super- natural world.
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The Functional Approach

• Asks the question What does religion do?
• Emile Durkheim saw society as problematic.
• Although sanction exists to keep people in line,
  he thought that this was not enough.
• He believed that the key lies in the collective
  conscious a system of beliefs that act to
  contain natural selfishness of individuals and to
  promote social cooperation.
• Collective representations (symbols).

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• Both Durkheim and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown saw
  society as being like an ogranism in which both
  parts act to maintain the whole. This is refered
  to as the Functionalist Model-
• theoretical interpretation in social science that
  search for the interconnections between social
  institutionshow they fit together and what they
  dorather that seeking causal explanations
• Radcliffe-Brown also thought that for society to
  survive, certain feeling need to be encourged in
  peoples minds.
• He thought that anything of great social value is
  seen as possessing supernatural powers
• Ritual functioned to express the basic sentiments
  of a society and to pass these ideas down from
  generation to generation.
• Religion, therefore, is seen as an integrative
  force in society.

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• Bronislaw Malinowski
• Looked at religion and other features of a
  society in terms of their purpose in meeting
  basic human needs.
• EX he stressed that magic is a logical system
  that people turn to in times of uncertainty or
  emotional stress.
• Magic function to provide control and certainty
  in an otherwise uncertain world.

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The Psychosocial Approach

• Concerned with the relationship between culture
  and personality and the connection between the
  society and the individual
• EX Sigmund Freud
• His model of the mind and his concept of defense
  mechanisms
• They are psychological maneuvers by which we
  distort reality in ways that help us to avoid
  conflict and reduce anxiety.