Religion, he said, was “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” ĭurkheim’s analysis of religion emphasized the significance of spiritual beliefs for relationships between people. The sociologist Emile Durkheim recognized that religion was not simply a belief in “supernatural beings,” but a set of practices and social institutions that brought members of a community together. As researchers gained more information about other cultures, their ideas about religion became more complex. Tylor, was less dismissive of unfamiliar belief systems, but he defined religion minimally and, for some, in overly narrow terms as “the belief in supernatural beings.” This definition excludes much of what people around the world actually believe. In The Golden Bough (1890) Frazer dismissed many of the spiritual beliefs he documented: “I look upon not merely as false but as preposterous and absurd.” His contemporary, Sir E.B. As a result, he had only minimal information about the beliefs he wrote about and he was quick to apply his own opinions.
Frazer was part of the early generation of anthropologists whose work was based on reading and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and colonial officials rather than travel and participant-observation. One example of this problem can be found in the early anthropological research of Sir James Frazer who attempted to compose the first comprehensive study of the world’s major magical and religious belief systems. Imposing the definitions or assumptions from one culture on another is likely to lead to misunderstandings. To study supernatural beliefs, anthropologists must cultivate a perspective of cultural relativism and strive to understand beliefs from an emic or insider’s perspective. The divide between “religion” and related ideas like “spirituality” or even “magic” is also murky in some cultural contexts.
Concepts like “heaven,” “hell,” or even “prayer” do not exist in many societies. There are societies that believe in supernatural beings, but do not call them “gods.” Some societies do not see a distinction between the natural and the supernatural observing, instead, that the spirits share the same physical world as humans. For instance, leaving an incense offering in a household shrine dedicated to the spirits of the ancestors may be viewed as a simple part of the daily routine rather than a “religious” practice. Many cultures have no word for “religion” at all and many societies do not make a clear distinction between beliefs or practices that are “religious,” or “spiritual” and other habits that are an ordinary part of daily life. The word “religion,” which is commonly used in the United States to refer to participation in a distinct form of faith such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, is not a universally recognized idea. The first difficulty arises from the challenge of defining the topic itself. However, studying supernatural beliefs is challenging for several reasons. īecause ideas about the supernatural are part of every human culture, understanding these beliefs is important to anthropologists. They seem to express ideas about fertility or motherhood and may have been viewed as magical (Figure 2). A few thousand years later, collections of small clay sculptures, known as Venus figurines, began appearing across Eurasia. Thirty thousand years ago, artists entered the Chauvet cave in France and painted dramatic scenes of animals on the cave walls along with abstract symbols that suggest the images were part of a supernatural belief system, possibly one focused on ensuring safety or success in hunting (Figure 1). Fifty thousand years ago, human communities buried the dead with stone tools, shells, animal bones, and other objects, a practice that suggests they were preparing the deceased for an afterlife, or a world beyond this one. While it is impossible to know for sure how the people who lived thousands of years ago answered these kinds of questions, there are some clues. Humans have always wondered about the meaning of the life, the nature of the universe, and the forces that shape our lives.
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