Religion, Anthropology of
Simon Coleman, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This article traces the history of the anthropology of religion from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that a focus
on such questions as rationality and ritual was central to the emergence of the discipline. These themes, along with topics
such as witchcraft, belief, language, and the body, have remained of perennial interest. More recently, focus has also been
placed on the anthropologies of world religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism; on religion in relation
to globalization and diaspora; and on cognitive approaches to the workings of the human mind.
Emergence of the Subfield
The comparative study of religion formed a central building
block of anthropology as the discipline emerged in the nine-
teenth century and early twentieth century. In the light of social
evolutionary models of human development, religious practice
was perceived as providing a powerful index of the mental and
moral levels of so-called primitive peoples. James Frazer’s The
Golden Bough, first published in 1890, traced magical and reli-
gious threads throughout history and weaved them into
a pattern depicting the past and future progress of humanity,
claiming to discern shifts from magical manipulation toward
religious devotion and then ultimately in the direction of
purely scientific modes of engaging the world. Inherent in
Frazer’s work was also a juxtaposition that has reemerged,
albeit in very different form, in contemporary writings (e.g.,
Cannell, 2006): Christianity as an object of study but also
a mode of thought that has itself framed anthropological
understandings of religion, temporality, and culture.
The use of religion as a key site for the examination of
human rationality permeates E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft,
Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). In contrast to
Frazer’s evolutionary assumptions and reliance on scattered
examples drawn from around the world, Evans-Pritchard
focuses on a single African case study, showing interrelations
among religious, social, and political aspects of Azande life.
The book assesses the logic and consistency of Azande modes
of thought, and indicates how they might be translated into the
understandings of a Western readership. Evans-Pritchard’s
implicit interlocutor was the French ethnologist and philoso-
pher, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who had highlighted what he saw
as the ‘primitive’ mind’s inability to distinguish the supernat-
ural from reality. While refuting Lévy-Bruhl’s view, Evans-
Pritchard’s book also implies a comparison with Christianity:
his discussion of Azande explanations of misfortune echoes
biblical scholars’ attempts to explain the presence and direction
of evil in the world.
A further foundational strand in the anthropological study
of religion has been the investigation of the relationship
between religion and social order. In such work, the discipline’s
Durkheimian inheritance has come to the fore, in particular the
view of ritual as expression and promoter of societal unity,
alongside the more general assumption that religious ideas
provide the key to socially shared categories of understanding.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 20
Reflecting on the history of the anthropology of religion,
Michael Lambek (2002: p. 4) characterizes contemporary
research as drawing on a number of early sources: Franz
Boas’s tracing of connections between religion and language;
Émile Durkheim’s emphasis on the importance of the social;
Karl Marx’s pointing to forms of alienation, mystification,
and power; and Max Weber’s analysis of the place of religion
in transitions to modernity.
Definitions
Attempts to produce a sustainable, universal definition of
religion have prompted much debate. Not all scholars believe
that a definition is possible. Saler (2000: p. ix) asserts that
“Religion is a Western folk category that contemporary
Western scholars have appropriated.” A similarly skeptical
view is maintained by Maurice Bloch, who notes (2010:
p. 4): “‘Religion’ is a word that can only refer to a series of
historically created situations which, although continually
changing, have unique and specific genealogies closely
linked to the Abrahamic religions. In other words religion
is not a natural kind, by which I mean a category that has
a basis other than that given by an arbitrary definition.”
The earliest influential attempt at a definition was provided
by British ethnologist Edward Tylor, himself born into a Quaker
family. In Primitive Culture, published in1871, Tylor summed up
religion as “belief in spiritual things.” His characterization is
terse in comparison with Durkheim’s assertion in his book The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published in 1912, that a reli-
gion can be seen as “a unified set of beliefs and practices relative
to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden –
beliefs and practices which unite [into] one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”
(Durkheim, 1912: p. 44). We see here some characteristic
Durkheimian juxtapositions, such as the sacred and nonsacred,
and belief balanced by practice; but also the claim that religion
must be seen as linked to a social formation, a ‘Church.’ This
definition of religion as a certain kind of object of study there-
fore also points toward a specific method of study: the focus is
on what can be physically observed, and eschews assessment of
the truth value or otherwise of any given religion.
Durkheim’s depiction of social order proved highly influ-
ential for the British anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown,
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308 Religion, Anthropology of
who in the middle years of the century drew on such ideas in
developing the notion of ‘structural-functionalism’ – a view of
society as made up of, and stabilized by, interlocking and
complementary components, including religious institutions.
The emphasis on observable reality also informed Bronislaw
Malinowski’s stress not on the evolution of religion, but on the
importance of fieldwork in discerning the contemporary soci-
etal and psychological rationale behind ritual and magic. At the
same time, a Durkheimian approach still raised questions as to
(1) the worth of assuming that rigid distinctions between
sacred and profane existed cross-culturally, (2) the focus on
order and stability as a feature of social institutions such as
religion, and (3) the universality of any characterization of
religion.
In the 1970s, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz
combined a Durkheimian understanding of religion as
a collective social act with a more Weberian emphasis on
meaning and experience. For Geertz (1973: p. 4), religion was
“(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful,
pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men
[sic] 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 motivations seem
uniquely realistic.” Geertz’s humanistic, ‘interpretive’ anthro-
pology created intellectual distance from such figures as Claude
Lévi-Strauss, whose French ‘structuralism’ focused on very
broad cultural meanings divorced from the actions and inter-
pretations of specific people.
A later period of anthropology would express worries over
the cross-cultural validity but also the intellectual and cultural
politics of the very act of making definitions. The best-known
contributor to such debate has been Talal Asad (1993).
Brought up in Pakistan, Asad spent some time working with
Evans-Pritchard at Oxford before eventually moving to the
United States. Influenced by Michel Foucault and Edward Said,
he is acutely aware of the power relations involved in repre-
senting religion, and focuses on the need to trace ‘genealogies’ of
both religious and secular, Western and non-Western, ways of
viewing the world. For Asad, Geertz’s (1973: p. 29) definition
runs into problems in its attempt to capture a panhuman
phenomenon divorced from particular cultural, social, and
political contexts. In his view, the very act of defining must be
seen as the historical product of ideologically charged,
discursive processes. Similarly, the notion of religion as an
autonomous activity is regarded as emerging from a unique,
Western, post-Reformation history.
What, then, might be the solution to such dilemmas? Bloch
(2010) turns to ritual rather than religion in articulating his
comparative approach, arguing that the former can be found
in all types of society, and is a specific type of modification of
the way human beings in general communicate. Saler (2000:
p. x) takes a more pragmatic approach, drawing in part on
Wittgenstein’s discussions of ‘family resemblances’ to argue
that the different instantiations of what is called religion need
not all share one feature, or a specific conjunction of features,
but may possess certain overlapping similarities. In the
following, I adopt another pragmatic, inductive approach,
taking the anthropology of religion to be what scholars
actually do, no matter what definition of the subject they
endorse.
Enduring Themes
The following highlights some of the most prominent themes
in the anthropology of religion that have remained topics of
interest throughout the discipline’s history.
Belief
Asad’s skepticism as to the utility of belief as an analytical term is
not unique. Malcolm Ruel points to “the monumental pecu-
liarity” (1982: p. 100) and historical instability of Christian
notions of belief. He notes that both the original Greek verb
pisteuo and the Hebrew root mn express ideas of trust or
confidence in an agreement, indicating a fundamentally social
orientation. The noun pistis then acquires a special twist in the
apostolic writings of the New Testament, where it is often used
in the sense of being converted, denoting the ‘belief’ held
collectively by early Christians as a common conviction in the
resurrection of Jesus. Subsequently, the Protestant Reformation
hinges on a stress on the inward totality of Christian belief.
However, it is difficult to find equivalents to Protestant
notions of belief in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism.
Similar worries are taken up by Rodney Needham in Belief,
Language and Experience (1972). Needham discusses the
problems involved in discussing the statement “I believe in
God” with one of his Indonesian informants, who belongs to
an ethnic group called the Penan. As Needham puts the
problem: “The Penan had no formal creed, and.they had no
other conventional means for expressing belief in their God.
Nevertheless, I had been accustomed to say.that they
believed in a supreme god..Yet it suddenly appeared that I
had no linguistic evidence at all to this effect” (Needham,
1972: pp. 1, 2). One of the issues that Needham touches on
is crucial for much comparative ethnography: whereas
Western Christianity is premised on the possibility of opting
out of religious institutions or indeed denying belief, the
kind of religion described by Evans-Pritchard for the Azande
or Needham for the Penan is not a matter of choice for infor-
mants: it is an integral part of life.
What, however, of contexts where informants themselves
maintain a strong and self-conscious sense of ‘belief ’? Joel
Robbins (2004, 2007) examines the conversion to Pente-
costal Christianity of the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, and
shows how even the apparent assimilation of Christian cate-
gories can conceal a more complex relationship to belief than
might at first appear. The pigeon word ‘bilip’ is widely used by
Urapmin, but it means something specific. For the Urapmin,
Christian belief is not about mentally assenting to a set of
propositions about divinity, but rather a form of trusting God
to do what He promised.
Ritual
Anthropologists have often emphasized the importance of taking
into account embodied, ritual activity. Alexander Henn (2008)
notes that while Émile Durkheim emphasized the need to
explore functional aspects of ritual in the making of human
sociality and institutions, Clifford Geertz encouraged scholars
to interpret rituals as akin to texts that could be ‘read’ by
informants and analysts, and Victor Turner theorized ritual as

a dialectical process, moving between structure and anti-structure,
secular and sacred. These approaches Henn characterizes as
“normative,” “intelligible” and “dialectic,” respectively
(Alexander Henn, 2008: p. 11). They share a tendency to
emphasize the capacity of ritual to generate feelings of certainty
and continuity. Roy Rappaport has also produced an influential
discussion of ritual that sees it as primarily as “the performance
of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts” (1999: p.
24). Yet, questions of how informants’ interpretations relate to
those of the analyst remain, including debates over how
intentionality is linked to ritual.
Many analysts are still influenced by the work of a contem-
porary of Durkheim, Arnold Van Gennep. Van Gennep argued
that ritual has particular significance during critical periods of
transition in the life-cycle, such as attainment of adulthood,
marriage, and death. In his view, it helps the participant to
adjust to his or her change in role while also publicly
announcing such a change. Furthermore, such rites follow
a strikingly standard pattern across cultures, with the person’s
separation from everyday society followed by transition and
then incorporation back into the social group, now bearing
a changed social status. Turner finds particular inspiration in
considering the ‘liminal,’ threshold-like section of rites of
passage, arguing that they represent reversals of everyday
structure and draw on powerful ritual symbolism, such as
that of death, to symbolize the end of the old status. He
notes that in Ndembu initiation rites in Zambia, circumcision
of boys becomes a metaphor for killing, since it destroys the
childhood status of the initiate (Turner, 1967).
Bloch (1992) is also interested in the symbolic and literal
violence involved in many rites of passage, but applies
a broadly Marxist frame of interpretation, highlighting the
coercive powers of ritual. He agrees with Van Gennep
concerning the existence of a basic grammar underlying ritual
across cultures, and suggests that an irreducible core of the
ritual process invokes a violent conquest of the present world
by the transcendental, divine realm. Separation rites and rites
of incorporation expunge the initiate’s original vitality; but
what Bloch calls the rebounding violence of transcendental
conquest is contained in the return to everyday life, as the
person is transformed from being prey into being a hunter –
into a state where the powerful transcendent element
inherited from the ritual dominates the person’s identity. For
instance, in the Orokaiva ritual involving the initiation of
children in Papua New Guinea, participants are told they are
dead, and are then taught to play sacred flutes and
bullroarers that represent the voices of the spirits. After a time
of seclusion, they return to the village, shouting “bite, bite,
bite.” They are now transformed beings.
Such analysis emphasizes the political implications of ritual
experience in the service of order and hierarchy. More recently,
in a number of influential books on the Tshidi of South Africa,
Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1985) have analyzed ritual
that involves complex forms of resistance quite as much as
submission. Examining interactions between ‘traditional’ and
Christian missionary beliefs and practices in colonial and
postcolonial contexts, they show how Zionist churches have
provided Tshidi with forms of identity, realized in part
through new Christian idioms, which have allowed them to
adapt or subvert structures of colonial and capitalist authority.
Religion, Anthropology of 309
Anthropologists have worked more and more in urban and
Western contexts often associated with deritualization and
secularization, and with decreased need for common rites of
passage to define accession to social roles. Nonetheless, the
transformation and pluralization of ritual forms does not
necessarily mean that they are disappearing. Tomas Gerholm’s
(1988) ‘postmodern’ view of a Hindu funeral ritual in Trinidad
examines fragmentation of meaning and diversity of
experience. His piece describes a ritualized tribute paid by the
writer V.S. Naipaul to his deceased sister – an improvised
response taking place thousands of miles away from the
official funeral in the writer’s country of origin, and yet still
capable of carrying significance. If Gerholm suggests that it is
often difficult to locate the core of ritual practice in
postmodern contexts, Catherine Bell’s highly influential
approach in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) moves the
focus away from seeing ritual as an autonomous activity, and
proposes instead a notion of ‘ritualization’ that takes into
account links with strategic activities in social life in general.
Rationality
Frazer’s radical move in The Golden Bough was ultimately to
juxtapose Christianity with science, and to suggest the incom-
patibility of the former with the latter. More recent work has
taken the opposite step of proposing that Western science has
significant parallels with ‘traditional’ religious thinking. Robin
Horton’s “African Traditional Thought and Western Science”
(1970) argues that African religions link causes and effects in
much the same way as scientific practices. Religion in this
sense can be seen as deploying spirits as explanatory
principles much as a scientist might use atoms or molecules.
Horton’s assumption is that religion is fundamentally about
explanation, a so-called ‘intellectualist’ stance toward religion
that places him in the genealogy of both Tylor and Frazer.
The key contrast here is with so-called symbolist approaches,
which draw on a Durkheimian inheritance to emphasize how
religion, and in particular ritual, should primarily be
interpreted as made up of representations of the social order.
Despite such differences of opinion, the basic consensus
among anthropologists is that human capacities to think are
universally the same the world over. Another book published
in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss’s La Pensée Sauvage (1966: ‘The
Savage Mind’), denies that non-Western mental abilities are
inherently inferior to those of Western readers, even if
attitudes toward abstract thought may differ.
The Body
Durkheim’s and Radcliffe-Brown’s functionalist approaches
drew on a model of society as equivalent to a body, made up of
interlinked and mutually dependent parts. Other authors in the
Durkheimian school provided significant perspectives on the
physical workings and symbolism of the body. Marcel Mauss,
Durkheim’s nephew, developed the notion of ‘habitus,’ the idea
that certain elements of culture (habits, tastes, skills) become
rooted in the body over time. Within Anglo-Saxon an-
thropological circles, Mary Douglas’s combination of British
empiricism and French structuralism resulted in some highly
influential work on the function of the body as social and
310 Religion, Anthropology of
religious symbol. In Purity and Danger (1966), Douglas (a
student of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, and like him a Roman
Catholic) explored Western as well as non-Western contexts.
In her view bodies, like societies, can be seen as bounded
systems, whose integrity and boundaries often need to be
protected. What is considered pure and impure, however,
varies cross-culturally, and reflects the social experience of the
social group involved. Thus in Hindu society, high-caste
Brahmins and low-caste untouchables are often inter-
dependent in economic and social terms, but idioms of purity
and pollution regulate their behaviors toward each other in
very specific ways – for instance, through preventing them
from sharing food. A further implication of this argument is
that symbols or actions that defy categories or bridge them
may be seen as powerful, and under certain circumstances
even sacred, rather than polluting. We see here parallels with
the potent middle section of the rite of passage, where
initiates are passing ‘in between’ statuses.
Douglas has little to say about the actual physical experi-
ences of having a body that possesses senses and moves
through the world. A leading figure in the move toward a more
phenomenological view of the body has been the American
anthropologist Thomas Csordas (1997), in his studies of
healing, language use, and spatial orientation among
charismatic Catholics in America. Csordas has presented
a sense of the body as both ‘self ’ and ‘not-self, ’ both subject
and object, but also the very grounding of the human
experience of culture. Important work has also been carried
out on the relationship between gendered experience and
religious engagement (e.g., Austin-Broos, 1997).
Language
Language mediates much religious activity, ranging from spells
to prayers to texts. Some religious language seems not merely to
describe reality, but also to have ‘performative’ dimensions, in
other words to create material or social change through being
articulated by authoritative figures. An early piece by Bloch
(1974) explores his interests in the relationships between
ritual and authority by arguing that the religious oratory of
the Merina of Madagascar is expressed in a language that is
so formalized that it is difficult ever to argue against: we
might compare it with a Latin Mass, for instance, or with the
inauguration speech of a President.
Some of the broader issues relating to religious language are
explored by Keane (1997). For him, a fundamental question is:
What, if anything, is particular to religious language? He suggests
that such language may raise a particular kind of problematic:
the effort to know and interact with an ‘otherworld’ tends to
demand highly marked uses of linguistic resources. In religious
contexts the sources of words, as well as the identity, agency,
authority, and presence of nonhuman as well as human
participants in an interaction, can be especially problematic.
Witchcraft
Witchcraft has proved a resonant subject in part because it
invokes many of the themes evident in other areas of the
subfield. The witch represents an ‘impure’ challenge to social
order as well as to physical well-being, and embodies some of
the key anxieties of a given society. Evans-Pritchard’s classic
study of the Azande retains much of its power because his
argument is rooted in analysis of both social relations and
modes of thought. We follow Azande investigating why
misfortune appears to strike certain people at certain times,
while accusations are linked to tensions in relations among
equals. Subsequent work on witchcraft from the 1940s
onwards often examined it in the context of changing social
relations and periods of communal stress.
Later work has examined the question of rationality and
witchcraft under very different social conditions. Tanya Luhr-
mann’s Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1991) examines the role
of witchcraft – or Wicca – among middle-class Londoners in the
light of theories of the sociology of knowledge as well as of
conversion. Luhrmann traces the gradual emergence of
commitment to magical ideas among practitioners who have
easy access to alternative modes of thought, and who may
deploy very different systems of rationality in their work lives.
Some of the most recent work on witchcraft and wider notions
of evil and the occult links these again with forms of anxiety rising
from shifting and uncertain social, political, and economic
circumstances. Meyer (1999) analyzes notions of evil in the
context of the emergence of local Christianity and its relation to
changing social, political, and economic formations among the
Peki Ewe in Ghana. Her main argument is that, for the Ewe, the
Devil forms a hybrid figure, expressing people’s obsessions with
occult forces as a way to mediate the attractions and
discontents of modernity. Writing of the postcolonial period in
South Africa but also highlighting resonances with other
postrevolutionary societies, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff
(1999) explore occasions when vast wealth appears to
concentrate in the hands of just a few citizens, so that the
market seems to contain mysterious mechanisms of
accumulation and distribution. In such contexts, they argue,
disenfranchised people imagine new, magical means to attain
otherwise unattainable ends, even as they mistrust those who
appear to enrich themselves through illegitimate deployment of
the forces of production and reproduction.
Newer Themes
Despite predictions from secularization theorists that the
significance of religion would weaken around the world along
with modernization, religion has retained and even increased
its profile in many public as well as private contexts. To some
degree anthropologists have turned their attention to secu-
larism itself as a particular, historically constructed category.
The study of religion has generated new topics and methods as
well as building on more established ones.
Anthropologies of ‘World’ Religions
Although most anthropologists feel uneasy with the idea that
so-called world religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism,
Buddhism, and Hinduism can be regarded as autonomous
systems, there has been a move in recent decades for
researchers to identify themselves as ethnographers of
a particular religion. This development is a result of
a number of factors: the shift of fieldwork toward more

urban, plural contexts, where self-conscious religious
identification is occurring; increasing interest in past
encounters between Western missions and colonized peoples;
a new focus on the affinities of different religious forms with
‘modernity’; the relative success of Islam and Christianity as
missionary forces; and the self-conscious identification of
many informants with religions that have transnational,
including diasporic, referents.
A major theme in the anthropology of Islam that has recently
emerged relates to the emergence of ‘Muslim publics’ that have
been energized by migration, challenges to Western hegemony,
and access to new media technologies. Eickelman and Anderson
(1999: p. 1) refer to the emergence of a new sense of public
throughout Muslim-majority states as well as Muslim
communities elsewhere. They propose the existence of
a distinctly Muslim public sphere located at the intersections of
religious, political, and social life, operating outside formal
state control. The role of this sphere in the emergence of the
‘Arab Spring’ from the end of 2010 remains to be analyzed.
Hirschkind (2006) focuses on the role of the cassette sermon in
promoting Islamic revival. His argument that listening to
sermons links to ethical self-improvement forms a bridge to
another significant theme in the analysis of Islam: the
cultivation of piety. Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005) focuses
on a women’s movement in the mosques of Cairo. While
members cultivate embodied practices of personal piety that
appear to submit to the patriarchal logic of certain forms of
Islam, Mahmood indicates how informants are motivated by
dissatisfaction with both secularization and Westernization. At
the same time, her analysis critiques secular liberal assumptions
concerning the universality of aspects of feminist theory.
Anthropologists have studied examples of Christian
worship ever since the early days of the discipline, yet it has
received less attention than other religious expressions. One
reason may be the ironic one that Christianity is too close to the
culture of Western anthropologists, and so it was avoided or
perhaps simply not noticed as a valid topic of study. More
recently, the emergence of Christianity as an explicit object of
study has contributed to and resonated with many current
concerns of anthropology, including globalization, reflexivity,
and postcolonialism. A particularly fertile strand of research
has been a focus on materiality and its relationship with
notions of both transcendence and modernity (Keane, 2007).
Globalization and Diaspora
Some of the most effective work in this area has looked at past
processes of colonization, where religion has formed part of the
tangled encounter between colonizers and colonized, ‘moder-
nity’ and ‘tradition’ (Van der Veer, 1996). More recently,
religious communities have taken advantage of, and helped
to constitute, the globalization of culture. The years following
World War II have seen the reemergence of evangelical forms
of Christianity in many parts of the world. Although the term
‘diaspora’ has in the past most often been used to describe
the dispersion of Jewish populations away from the land of
Israel, in the last two decades in particular it has been taken
to refer to the creation of large South-Asian communities in
European and North American contexts (Vertovec, 2000), as
well as the movement of African migrants in search of both
Religion, Anthropology of 311
economic mobility and the possibility of ‘reverse mission’
within the secularized West.
Processes of globalization and migration, combined with
tourism, have ensured that pilgrimage has become an increas-
ingly visible dimension of religious activity in all faiths, and
also one that has attracted more anthropological attention.
Victor and Edith Turner’s seminal work, Image and Pilgrimage in
Christian Culture (1978), which deployed a rite-of-passage
model to emphasize the idea that sacred shrines should be
seen as liminal spaces, has been challenged by Eade and
Sallnow’s (1991) argument that such shrines are in fact
deeply enmeshed in everyday political and economic
processes. Coleman and Eade (2004) place anthropological
studies of pilgrimage in the wider frame of analyzing physical
and metaphorical aspects of movement.
Cognitive Approaches
In recent years, research on religion as a means to understand
human thought has received a striking new impetus within
cognitive approaches to the field. This work has blended the
findings of evolutionary and cognitive psychology with those of
anthropology. In contrast to the work of anthropologists who
emphasize the historical contingency of any given definition of
religion, researchers in this subfield have argued that there is
a biological basis to religious activity. An important strand has
also focused on how counterintuitive or surprising experiences
are recalled and transmitted over time (e.g., Boyer, 2001).
Salazar (2010) discerns two main orientations among
cognitive researchers. The ‘adaptationist’ argument states that
no human society can survive without language or religion,
and so there must be both a language instinct and a religious
instinct. The alternative approach is to see religion more as
a by-product of evolution. For instance, the so-called Theory
of Mind Mechanism can be seen as a cognitive tool enabling
humans to interpret a living organism’s movements in terms
of its inferred intentions: such construal of what is going on
in other people’s brains is clearly an adaptive skill. As a result
of this skill, humans have perhaps also become prone to
seeing intention in events, to see them as guided by
a controlling force, such as a divinity.
Overall
Both in the past and the present, the ethnographic study of
religion has contributed to numerous mainstream analytical
concerns, ranging from classic approaches to rationality,
symbolism, and social order to more recent studies of trans-
nationalism, materiality, and both cultural and evolutionary
change. The study of religion remains in a vibrant state, even as
scholars still wrestle with key questions of whether and how
religion can be seen as an autonomous area of activity in its
own right.
See also: Belief, Anthropology of; Body: Anthropological
Aspects; Carnival; Cognitive Anthropology; Death,
Anthropology of; Diaspora; Fetishism; Liminality; Magic,
Anthropology of; Ritual; Sacrifice; Shamanism; Syncretism;
Taboo; Witchcraft; Worldview.
312 Religion, Anthropology of
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