The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion

Robert A. Segal, Nickolas P. Roubekas, Robert A. Segal, Nickolas P. Roubekas, Robert A. Segal

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781394399604, 9780470656563
• eBook ISBN: 9781119092766
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Explore a rigorous but accessible guide to contemporary approaches to the study of religion from leading voices in the field

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion delivers an expert and insightful analysis of modern perspectives on the study of religion across the humanities and the social sciences. Presupposing no knowledge of the approaches examined in the collection, the book is ideal for undergraduate students who have yet to undertake extensive study in the humanities or social sciences.

The book includes perspectives from those in fields as diverse as globalization, cognitive science, the study of emotion, law, esotericism, sex and gender, functionalism, terror, the comparative method, modernism, and postmodernism. Many of the topics covered in the book clearly hail from religious studies, while others are grounded in other areas of academia.

All of the chapters contained within are written by recognized authors who show how their chosen discipline contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon of religion. This book also includes topics like:

• A comprehensive exploration of multiple approaches to religious study, including anthropology, economics, literature, phenomenology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology
• A review of various topics germane to the study of religion, including the study of the body, cognitive science, the comparative method, death and the afterlife, law, magic, music, and myth
• A selection of subjects touching on modern trends in extremism and violence, including chapters on terror and violence, fundamentalism, and nationalism
• A discussion of the influence of modernism and postmodernism in religion

Ideal for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students in humanities and social science programs taking courses on religion and myth, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion will also earn a place in the libraries of specialists working in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Science, History, and Philosophy.

PART I
Approaches

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1. 1 Anthropology of Religion
2. Fiona Bowie
3. 2 Economics of Religion
4. Rodney Stark
5. 3 Literature and Religion
6. Eric Ziolkowski
7. 4 Phenomenology of Religion
8. Thomas Ryba
9. 5 Philosophy of Religion
10. Charles Taliaferro
11. 6 Psychology of Religion
12. Roderick Main
13. 7 Sociology of Religion
14. Titus Hjelm
15. 8 Theology
16. Ian S. Markham

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CHAPTER 1
Anthropology of Religion

Fiona Bowie

The study of religion has been central to anthropology since its inception. As an inclusive, comparative study of human societies, from their prehistoric origins to the present, anthropology has sought to describe, classify, and explain religious beliefs and practices. At the same time the term “religion” is elusive and problematic. While some early missionaries denied that the “savage” peoples they encountered had any religion at all, others saw religion everywhere. There has also been a tendency to label anything we do not understand in other cultures, past or present, as religious. The term often lacks even an approximate translation in non‐Western languages, and scholars often fall back on the “I know it when I see it” line of argument.

Descriptions of the history of anthropology of religion commonly follow a chronological scheme that divides scholars and their views into broad theoretical categories, or “isms”: evolutionism, functionalism, structural‐functionalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, feminism, postmodernism, and so on. More recently we have been treated to a series of “turns,” such as the “ontological turn” and “material turn,” or simply “humanistic anthropology,” “paranthropology,” and “cognitive anthropology.” Each new development describes not the field as a whole but a sub‐set of ideas associated with scholars who, often in collaboration with colleagues in other disciplines, seek to extend and explore new ideas and their application to anthropology.

When it comes to religion, I am persuaded that we are often describing different parts of the same elephant. When the psychologically oriented theory of Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), who believed that religion enables people to cope with life’s vicissitudes, is contrasted to that of his rigidly sociological contemporary Alfred Reginald Radcliffe‐Brown (1881–1955), who saw religion as part of the structure of society, helping to keep it in some kind of equilibrium, one scholar is examining the elephant’s leg and the other its ear. The contention that religion has both a psychological and a social aspect, that it can both unsettle and stabilize, can be both illogical and rational, both formalistic and spontaneous, both devoid of personal significance and deeply meaningful, does not necessarily denote confusion or fundamental disagreement among scholars. Rather, it may reflect the complexity of the phenomenon “religion.”

My approach is to move around the elephant, pointing out some of its features on the way, with the aid of some of the scholars whose works have helped us understand particular features of this creature we choose to call “religion.” I begin with a survey of definitions and the context in which they originate, and then consider some of those features of religion that stir interest in a slightly different guise in each generation: the origin of religious thinking, the nature of religious experience, and the existence of different “mentalities,” or forms of thought.

Definitions and Perspectives

Attempts to define religion inevitably reflect the theoretical orientation of the writer. An early and influential attempt at definition was Edward Burnett Tylor’s “belief in spiritual beings.” Tylor (1832–1917) held the first professorship in anthropology in the world at the University of Oxford, created for him in 1896. Although raised as a Quaker, Tylor saw himself as a scientific rationalist. All religious ideas had developed, in his view, out of a primitive belief in the animate nature of physical phenomena (“animism”). Traces of earlier beliefs and practices could be seen in contemporary religions through a process of “survivals.” For Tylor, all religion is a mistaken attempt to make sense of the physical world in which we live, as rational as science but simply erroneous.

Bronisław Malinowski, sometimes considered the founding father of fieldwork in anthropology through his pioneering work in the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea in the early years of the twentieth century, focused on the individual, psychological function of religion. For Malinowski (1948), religion arose as a response to emotional stress. When technical knowledge proves insufficient, human beings turn to magic and religion in order to achieve their ends, and as a form of catharsis. By mimicking or anticipating the desired goal, rituals assert order in an unpredictable universe.

A third approach to religion is associated with scholars who take what is referred to as a symbolist view of society. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), drawing on data from Australian aboriginal societies, saw the group rather than the individual as the source of both profane, everyday norms and the sacred. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) Durkheim describes religion not as an individual response to life crises but as the embodiment of society’s highest goals and ideals. Religion acts as a cohesive social force and adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It is real, in that it exists in people’s minds and impels them to heed societal dictates, but what is perceived as external to society—God—is in fact a projection of God onto society and a reflection of society.

The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) has offered a definition of religion that combines Durkheim’s symbolic functionalism—religion as a collective social act—with Max Weber’s (1864–1920) concern for meaning—religion as a system for ordering the world. Unlike Tylor, Geertz does not define religion in terms of belief in God but rather as a symbolic system, the meaning of which can be decoded. Religion for Geertz is: “(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long‐lasting moods and motivations in men 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 1973, 4).

Geertz’s definition has been extensively criticized by the Saudi Arabian‐born, American anthropologist Talal Asad (b. 1932), who sees Geertz’s emphasis on the symbolic as too abstract, too far removed from the social, historical, and political context that gives a symbol its meaning. Asad challenges the assumption that religion can even be studied as a cross‐cultural category. He concludes that “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes” (Asad 1993, 29).

The English anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007), particularly in her Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970), has focused on the relationship between social form and religious expression. Her approach is more systematic than that of Clifford Geertz. She looks for predictive patterns that link social structure (grid) and group pressures (group)—or lack of these features—to a social cosmology that justifies the pattern of that society. For example, a society with clearly defined social boundaries and strong social pressures (high grid and high group) is likely to be formalistic, pietistic, and pro‐active in policing its boundaries, and to have a category of rejects. Douglas’s grid and group scheme has been applied to many different kinds of society, well beyond the religious sphere.

While many, if not most, anthropological approaches to religion are either agnostic or atheistic—wishing to study the beliefs and practices of others in emic, or indigenous, terms but without deeming them true—there are some scholars who adopt a more explicitly anti‐religious position in the name of science. Here the errors inherent in a religious mindset appear so egregious that to give them any credence at all in any society is seen as dangerously unscientific. James Lett, an American anthropologist of religion, for instance, rejects the “bracketing out” of questions of belief characteristic of a phenomenological approach, as exemplified in E. E. Evans‐Pritchard’s (1902–1973) oft‐quoted dictum that “there is no possibility of [the anthropologist] … knowing whether the spiritual beings of primitive religions or of any others have any existence or not, and since that is the case he cannot take the question into consideration” (cited in Lett 1997, 17). For Lett, “[c]onsiderations of disciplinary integrity, public welfare, and human dignity demand that religious claims be subjected to anthropological evaluation. … [A]nthropologists have an intellectual and ethical obligation to investigate the truth or falsity of religious beliefs” (Lett 1997, 104–105). Lett’s scientific approach to the study of religion leads him to conclude that “we know that no religious belief is true because we know that all religious beliefs are either nonfalsifiable or falsified” (Lett 1997, 116). According to Lett, scholars of religion have a duty to proclaim that fact. While Lett’s sense of obligation to separate the study of religion from science represents a marginal position within the anthropology of religion, a generally materialist view of the universe and a non‐transcendental, non‐revelatory view of religion is nevertheless common. The interpretive difficulties this view can pose for the ethnographer who has participated in the religion being depicted are discussed in the penultimate section of this chapter.

The Origins of Religion

When Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published The Descent of Man in 1871, the Church of England was outraged. Darwin appeared to be claiming that human beings are descended from apes, leaving no room for God’s direct creation of humans. Where was the order in creation, if a random interaction between the natural environment and biological organisms had led to the present variety of living creatures? Darwin was an agnostic, brought up in the Church of England, and no militant atheist. While his ideas appeared as an affront to religious belief, the notion of social evolution, later known as Social Darwinism, was well established by the 1870s, and proved much less objectionable (despite the use of Darwin’s name, he never espoused Social Darwinism). The leading Social Darwinian was the English social a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Contributors
• About the Editors
• Introduction
• PART I: Approaches
• PART II: Topics
• Index
• End User License Agreement