3 Theoretical Approaches Toward the Study of Religion
3 Theoretical Approaches Toward the Study of Religion
Chapter 3 audio can be accessed on Soundcloud. Instructor resources are available on Canvas Commons.
Chapter 3 Learning Objectives
At the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to:
- Summarize and interpret definitions of religion made by foundational figures in social science and anthropology.
- Compare and contrast arguments about functions of religion in human societies.
3.1 Setting Goals for the Anthropological Study of Religion
Before we begin our discussion on the approaches that anthropologists and other social scientists use when they study religion, it’s important to understand that these disciplines are not interested in the truth or falsity of any given religion (Guest 2020, 61). Due to the very nature of religious phenomena as faith-based and scientifically unprovable, there is no way to examine which religions are “true” or “false,” or which types of magic “work” or “do not work.”
We are similarly not here to judge which religions are better or worse, because all religions make sense within their own culturally-specific contexts. So, as we examine the different beliefs that exist across world religions, it’s essential that you approach each with an open mind. Try to separate your own religious beliefs from your study of other religions and do not measure them against your own culturally-specific standards.
3.2 Edward Burnett Tylor
In the next sections of this chapter, we explore key questions and interpretive frameworks that anthropologists use when they study religion across human cultures. Themes we outline here reflect centuries of discussion and heated debate among social scientists. One of these social scientists was Edward Burnett Tylor, an early British anthropologist who lived from 1832 – 1917. Born in England as a member of a religious minority group called Quakers (a branch of the Christian faith), he grew up to view religions as cultural structures rather than systems of belief. This view prepared him to be one of the world’s first scholars on the matter of religion (Moore 2019, 4).
Tylor is popularly called “the founder of modern anthropology.” Among other contributions (see below), he was one of the early scholars in the social sciences who attempted a definition of “culture” that was clear enough to enable scientific inquiry but also broad enough to reflect the complexity of human behavior. He organized our field as an inquiry into human social systems (Moore 2019, 3-4), and separated this type of research and analysis (anthropology) from biological fields of study (Kuper 2014, 3).
3.3 Why Magic Works
Tylor examined the logic that existed within societies that he considered to be “less evolved” than his own in order to make sense of their beliefs in their own terms (Kuper 2014, 25). One topic of interest to Tylor was the widespread belief in magic (recall that the term magic was defined in Chapter 1). In order to explain why forms of magic were taken seriously in so man