Studying Religion Through Fieldwork

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.