Classical Anthropological Theories of Religion
RANDALL STYERS
As amply reflected in this volume, the concept of “religion” is a distinctive product of the modern West, a generic umbrella term that only took shape from the sixteenth century forward as European colonists, merchants, missionaries, and soldiers brought new information back to Europe about human cultural diversity. Through the Enlightenment, new forms of cultural analysis and critique took hold, and new humanistic approaches to the study of human identity and society began to emerge. A comparative approach to cultural history was developed by thinkers such as Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and David Hume (1711–76). Confidence in the value of secular rationality and in the forward trajectory of human social development—represented most vividly in the work of French thinkers such as the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857)—held sway among Europe’s leading intellectuals.
Within this context, “religion” became a significant question. Religion was increasingly seen as one discrete component of the larger social whole, and even if it displayed astounding heterogeneity, it was also widely understood as a cross-cultural aspect of human social organization. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new texts appeared in Europe recounting the mystifying practices of non-Christian religions, and a number of these texts began to seek the earliest stage of human religious development in order to identify religion’s ultimate nature. As secularism spread among Europe’s intellectuals, religion moved from being an obvious fact of life to a mystery in need of explanation. How did religion originate within human culture? What could account for its variety? What functions did it serve in human life? Particularly as religion became less obligatory for European intellectuals—as it became possible to imagine a secularized and disenchanted future—cross-cultural, comparative analysis emerged as a promising route to account for this widespread but highly divergent feature of human culture.
Within Europe, Romanticism spurred interest in folk practices, and new compilations of folklore and popular beliefs appeared. Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European scholars began the study of classical Hindu religious texts, archaeology provided new information about ancient civilizations, and interest in Indo-European languages and cultures grew. New philosophies of history sought to identify the broad developmental principles of human culture, and the great German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) produced his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (from a set of lectures delivered in 1827) utilizing a mass of comparative data to offer an elaborate and detailed account of the development of religion through human history.
By the later half of the nineteenth century, these various developments had coalesced into an evolutionary, historical approach to the study of religion. Scholars such as the German philologist Max Müller (1823–1900), who worked for much of his life in Britain, advocated a new “science of religion” that would use a comparative method to identify the laws governing human religious development. Using his work in comparative Indo-European philology, Müller argued that the source of religion was to be found in nature mythology, as the great phenomena of nature (the sun, the moon, storms, and so on) became personified in mythic form.1 During the latter half of the nineteenth century a whole new set of scholarly disciplines began to take shape (including comparative philology, folklore, ethnology, and anthropology), and religion was a central feature in various new social-scientific theories aiming to account for human cultural development.2
One of the central preoccupations in these early theories of religion was the question of its origins. Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology, had affirmed the theory put forth by the French writer Charles de Brosses (1709–77) in his Du culte des dieux fétiches, published in 1760, that religion had its origin in fetishism—the belief that particular material objects have supernatural power. Through the early decades of the nineteenth century fetishism was commonly seen as the defining feature of the religion of primitive peoples. An important challenge to this argument came from the British archaeologist John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury, 1834–1913), in his Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870). Lubbock here invoked newly accumulated ethnographic data in an effort to modify and correct Comte’s scheme of social evolution. Lubbock identified six stages of religious development (atheism, nature worship [or totemism], shamanism, idolatry [or anthropomorphism], the deity as creator, and finally religion joined with morality), and he argued that human cultures move through these stages in a unilinear fashion. Lubbock concluded that religion was not to be found among the lowest primitives (who were prone to magic and fetishism), since these groups lack the defining feature of real religion, respect for a deity. Rejecting the claim by de Brosses and Comte that fetishism is the origin of religion, Lubbock asserted that fetishism was better understood as an “anti-religion” since it seeks only to coerce and control supernatural power rather than to worship it.3
Lubbock’s mode of empiricist evolutionism was indicative of his era. Earlier in the nineteenth century, the English geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) had provided new empirical confirmation that the earth itself developed by the slow accumulation of small changes and that its history was much older than indicated in the Bible. This empirical foundation coupled with the evolutionary theory of Lyell’s friend Charles Darwin (1809–82) and the theories of social evolution put forth by one of their contemporaries, the philosopher and social theorist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), to bolster the position of evolutionism as the dominant scientific approach of the later nineteenth century.
Spencer applied his notion of social evolution to the analysis of religion, arguing that religion develops from false speculation first as primitive people identify figures in dreams as ghosts and then as the ghosts of dead ancestors are transmuted into deities. Over time, religion evolves from this simple initial stage of euhemerism (named for the ancient Greek mythographer Euhermeus) into more complex forms of polytheism and on to monotheism, advancing “from the simple to the complex” as do all other aspects of society.4 Spencer concluded that the final step in this evolutionary path is an agnosticism supported by a positivistic scientific epistemology. Spencer was a leading figure in promoting evolutionism as the key to social analysis, and his account of the origin of religion exemplifies the “intellectualism” that would dominate early social-scientific theories of religion; in this view, the earliest religion was a product of intellectual reflection that led primitive humanity to formulate religious interpretations of human experience.
These various evolutionary trends coalesced in the work of Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who is commonly identified as the founding figure of modern social anthropology. In his influential two-volume text Primitive Culture (1871), Τylor assembled a broad range of ethnographic material to set forth the principles of a new mode of scholarly inquiry into human culture. Anthropology, he said, is the “science of culture,” and culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”5 Tylor acknowledged his indebtedness to prior theorists of evolutionary development (such as Hume, Comte, and Lyell), and in Primitive Culture he formulated a theory of cultural evolution that aimed to account for the variation of human cultures as they moved through progressive stages of development.
When Tylor turns to consider religious evolution, he begins by declaring that the “minimal definition of Religion” is “the belief in Spiritual Beings.”6 In line with this definition, Tylor identifies the most primitive form of religion as “animism,” the belief in souls and other spiritual beings. He proceeds to offer an account of how primitive people arrive at this belief through the experience of figures in dreams and reflection on the difference between living and dead bodies. Rumination on these experiences leads the primitive thinker to formulate the concept of a “soul.” As this concept continues to evolve, religion develops to include the belief in an afterlife and eventually comes to manifest true worship and morality. While later religious systems will demonstrate enormous complexity and diversity, this core religious principle—the belief in souls and spirits—persists as the defining feature of even the most developed religious system. And, Tylor asserts, despite the reports of some writers to the contrary, there is no human culture so primitive that it has not yet attained the stage of animism.7 Religion, it would appear, is a foundational feature of all human culture.
Before proceeding, it is important to note a few of the most significant aspects of Tylor’s formulation here. First, Tylor demonstrates a key concern that will preoccupy early anthropology, the effort to define the contours of religion and to determine its position with the larger cultural whole. Religion is a particularly vexing object of study for these theorists since its boundaries can appear so amorphous, and a great deal of effort will be expended in the attempt to determine exactly what “religion” might be. Second, like many of his predecessors and successors, Tylor defines religion in a manner that is deeply informed by a distinctively Protestant Christian perspective. He localizes religion as a matter of interior belief (as opposed to emotion, behavior, ritual, community, or other features). Belief is the defining feature of religion, he says, and all other aspects are thus rendered ancillary. Tylor’s method was indicative of his era, as he compiled a mass of decontextualized data from various reports to support his evolutionary theory and assumed that contemporary “primitive” cultures gave meaningful information about prehistoric life. Further, Tylor’s account of how religious belief takes shape is deeply individualistic and deeply intellectual. He attributes a complex mode of conceptual analysis to primitive thinkers, and he asserts that each thinker—in widely different circumstances and cultural contexts—reaches the same fundamental conclusions about the existence of souls and spirits. Tylor will be known as a leading figure in the “intellectualist” anthropological tradition, because of his insistence on the prominence of these intellectual processes at the earliest stages of cultural development. But despite the many obvious conceptual flaws in his approach, it is important to recognize that, unlike many of his contemporaries who emphasized human racial and ethnic difference and the mental deficiencies of “primitives” (often in support of overtly racist colonialist policies), Tylor’s approach is premised on the psychic unity of humanity.
While Tylor demonstrates significant appreciation for the importance of animistic religion in the development of culture, he is far less sanguine about the present of magic. Tylor never makes a precise demarcation between religion and magic, but his entire scheme of social evolution depends on the distinction between religious beliefs and magical acts. In his account, magic arises from a misapplication of the principle of association of ideas, as mental connections between coincidental events are misinterpreted as causal connections. Further, he asserts, the spread of magical thinking causes significant intellectual and social disruption throughout history. While magic is chiefly characteristic of the lowest levels of civilization, it persists into more developed cultures as a “survival” (an element of lower culture that persists because of habit, ignorance, or superstition).8 Phenomena such as astrology and spiritualism, exhibiting new popularity in Victorian England, demonstrate the potential of magical thinking to revive despite scientific and social progress. Indeed, the very notion of cultural survivals poses a deep challenge to Tylor’s fundamental evolutionary scheme; he uses the concept in order to account for the variations in cultural evolution, but the persistence of these antiquated beliefs tempers his confidence in human progress. As Tylor acknowledges, while the history of magic is largely a history of “dwindling and decay,” the laws guiding this history are so variable that they often appear to be “no law at all.”9
Tylor’s theory that animism was the initial stage of human religious development quickly supplanted the earlier theories of fetishism and nature mythology, and it dominated anthropological theory for almost thirty years. But Tylor was not without his critics. Müller had argued that humanity has a fundamental inclination toward monotheism (a view in easier harmony with the biblical narrative), and this theme was developed by various scholars who proposed theories of primitive high gods. Most prominent among early anthropological theorists in this regard was Andrew Lang (1844–1912). In 1898, Lang published The Making of Religion, in which he offered an extended challenge to Tylor’s theory of animism by arguing that the earliest forms of religion were actually relatively high in their stage of sophistication. Primitive religion had its roots not in animism, he said, but in the belief in powerful high gods.10 Lang’s theory was based on rather thin evidence, but the theory of primitive monotheism attracted other prominent advocates, most notably the Austrian linguist and anthropologist (and Roman Catholic priest) Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954). Schmidt would develop the argument in a twelve-volume work, The Origin of the Idea of God, where he argued that monotheism could be found in the earliest stages of human cultural history. Even the most primitive peoples, Schmidt asserted, come to recognize the notion of a supreme being through their reflections on concepts of causation and agency. Magic and mythology, he argued, take shape only in later stages of cultural development, but the materialism and selfishness that characterize magic give it the power to corrupt the originary monotheism and lead culture on a path of degeneration.
Tylor’s theory of animism was also challenged by his fellow intellectualist anthropologist James George Frazer (1854–1941). Frazer’s major scholarly work was The Golden Bough, a study of sacred kingship that grew from its first edition in 1890 to twelve volumes by its third edition (1906–15). From the second edition of 1900 forward, Frazer became particularly engaged with the role of magic and religion in cultural evolution, and he offered an extremely influential typology of different forms of magic. In Frazer’s scheme, magic is divided into two basic species, homeopathic or imitative magic (based on the principle of similarity) and contagious magic (based on the principle of contact). In addition, he said, there is an important distinction between positive forms of magic and its negative mode (which he identified as taboo).
Frazer formulated a far more rigid scheme of cultural evolution than Tylor. He argued that human cultures move through a fixed set of developmental stages in a linear fashion: magical, religious, and finally scientific. In the initial magical stage, human beings see nature as regular and mechanistic, and they seek methods to control its operations through various ritualistic behaviors and practices. But in this early stage, human beings fail to understand the operative laws of causality, and their magical practices are largely futile. Both of the basic principles of magical thinking (similarity and contact) are misapplications of the proper association of ideas.
Despairing of these initial efforts at controlling nature, the wisest thinkers in a group begin to seek alternative explanations for the flux of nature. They come to surmise that instead of being mechanistic, nature must be under the control of powerful divine beings. As this new idea takes hold, culture moves to a new developmental stage as human beings seek to propitiate or sway these spiritual agents. In this religious phase, the natural world is understood as plastic and variable, subject to the personal intervention of divine beings. While earlier magical practices might persist and intermingle with new religious practices, Frazer argues that over the course of the religious stage, magic comes increasingly to be seen as a vain and vulgar encroachment on the prerogatives of true religion.
As the process of cultural evolution moves forward, the limits of the religious worldview become apparent, particularly to members of the priestly caste with sufficient leisure for observation and reflection. Reverting in part to the earlier magical worldview that looked for mechanistic regularity in nature, the intellectual elite begins to reformulate a new understanding of the laws of nature. Unlike the magical stage, the scientific phase of cultural development takes shape as more sophisticated and patient observation leads to accurate judgments about causality. But like magic, science sees nature as regular and uniform, determined “not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operations of immutable laws acting mechanically.”11 Through his account of these evolutionary developments, Frazer appears to see religion as a rather unfortunate detour on the path to an accurate understanding of the workings of the natural order.
Both because of the sweep of the material he incorporated into The Golden Bough and because of its broader themes, Frazer’s work remained extremely influential—particularly among a popular audience—for many decades. Despite the gapping conceptual flaws of his work, The Golden Bough had a wide impact in art, literature, psychoanalytic theory, and even various twentieth-century supernaturalist subcultures. Frazer’s basic typology of magic is still invoked by various writers, even if the broader contours of his theory of religious development are unsustainable.
A different type of challenge to Tylor’s theory of animism came from anthropological theorists who argued that magic and religion should be seen not as successive stages in a path of cultural evolution, but instead as two subsets of a broader category of supernaturalism. In his text The Supernatural: Its Origin, Nature, and Evolution, published in 1892, the American anthropologist John H. King argued that primitive human beings observe impersonal physical powers at work in the natural world, and in the face of these mysterious forces they begin to develop various techniques designed to control fate. The most basic human sentiment, said King, is a sense of “luck, fear of uncanny evil or the desire for canny good.”12 As human beings search for means to control these mysterious forces, they develop early forms of magic. Over time, simple varieties of religion begin to develop involving charms and spells, and specialists emerge, leading to the religion of the medicine man. Eventually more developed religious ideas take hold, and concepts of ghosts, spirits, and gods emerge. King thus argued that a sense of impersonal supernaturalism preceded the concepts of souls or spirit; counter to Tylor’s theory, magic precedes animism. And, King concluded, all forms of supernaturalism will eventually fade as intellectual development brings effective means of controlling the forces of nature and science comes to predominate.
By the end of the nineteenth century, new anthropological theories began to appear placing the origin of religion and magic in an undifferentiated and impersonal spiritual force (a broad view that some would label “dynamism”).13 R. R. Marett (1866–1943), a close friend of Tylor and his successor as reader in anthropology at Oxford, wrote a series of papers beginning in 1899 arguing that prior to the emergence of animism, there was a stage of preanimism, a wider and vaguer sense of impersonal supernatural power. Marett challenged Tylor’s intellectualism, arguing that this preanimistic stage was characterized more by emotion and instinctive motor response than by cogitation. As Marett explained, rather than understanding religion simply as a matter of belief, it is preferable to see religion as “a certain composite or concrete state of mind wherein various emotions and ideas are directly provocative of action.”14 Religion is thus a matter of emotion, thought, and behavior. As Marett framed in his most famous aphorism, “savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out.”15
In response to Tylor’s methodology, Marett pointed behind animism to a broader, amorphous emotive and behavioral stew that served as the “raw material of religion” long ignored in the search for religion’s origins.16 Marett argued that religion and magic should not be seen as successive stages in a path of cultural evolution, but as two subsets of this broader category of supernaturalism. Magic and religion both arise, he said, from “a common plasm of crude beliefs about the awful and occult,” from a fundamental emotional response of awe, fear, and wonder at phenomena of supernatural power.17 Only as this amorphous sense of supernaturalism develops into more specific and individuated forms can an animistic sense of souls or spirits take shape. But even as Marett pointed toward this undifferentiated sense of supernaturalism that was logically antecedent to animism, he disclaimed any pretense of offering a new theory of the origin of religion. As he explained, the early periods of human development are “in large part indecipherable.”18
Through the first decade of the twentieth century, Marett seized on the concept of mana as his primary idiom for the undifferentiated and impersonal preanimistic force field from which both religion and magic arose. Mana had first been introduced to Europe by R. H. Codrington (1830–1922), who in the 1870s served as head of the Anglican mission to Melanesia. In 1891 Codrington published a famous study of Melanesian culture, and mana featured prominently in his text. During the subsequent decade a number of ethnographers identified comparable notions of amorphous supernatural power from a range of other cultures, and in 1904 Marett declared that mana was “a category of world-wide application” for the scientific study of religion, designating a generalized, nonpersonalized sense of sacred power.19 Mana marks out a fundamental distinction between the sacred (the realm of extraordinary power that elicits awe and wonder) and the profane (the mundane world of ordinary, practical experience), and it designates the positive mode of this extraordinary power or energy (with taboo as the negative pole). Mana moves through the social field, he said, much like electricity.
Just as Marett rejected Tylor’s claim that animism was the initial stage of religion, he also rejected Frazer’s sharp differentiation between religion and magic, arguing instead that religious and magic elements are intermingled in the sense of supernaturalism and that only in more developed levels of culture is the human response to the magico-religious realm moralized (and magic stigmatized). Marett also rejected the theory of primitive high gods put forth by Lang and Schmidt, arguing that such a sophisticated religious concept must have a psychological prehistory.
Marett’s amorphous notion of supernaturalism became extremely popular during the early years of the twentieth century. It was adapted, in various forms, by theorists as diverse as the founder of psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the folklorist Sidney Hartland (1848–1927), the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), and the German anthropologist K. T. Preuss (1869–1938). In France, Marett’s French contemporaries Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) and Henri Hubert (1872–1927) also adopted mana as the preferred term to describe diffuse supernatural power in “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la Magie,” published in 1904. Mauss and Hubert argued that mana is the wellspring of both religion and magic and that religion and magic are differentiated only on the basis of the relation of each practice to the social group—religion is a collective and public phenomenon, while magic is secret and individualistic, taking place outside the organized cult.20
As developed by Marett, his contemporaries, and his successors, the concept of mana moved the origin of religion into a vague, emotional context of differential power, and it appeared to offer a method for recognizing the social contexts and implications of those power differentials. Yet mana gave only the illusion of conceptual clarity. The notion offered Marett and his peers a benign idiom with which to acknowledge human agency in relation to the supernatural realm, but it afforded few substantive resources for assessing or conceptualizing power. Thus the vague notion of mana served to mystify social relations by cloaking religious agency in an aura of primeval mystery. Mana was everywhere and nowhere; it remained potent as mana only so long as it remained incomprehensible. As Marett stated this theme, it is “of the very essence of mana that it should be indefinite and mysterious in its effect.”21 Any effort to account for mana leads to its dissipation. And this bind would appear to include not only the naive practitioner, but also the modern scholar. The mystery of the origin of religion could be explained only by recourse to an indeterminate primeval force.
Further, these various accounts placing the origins of religion in, in a sense, undifferentiated and impersonal spiritual power might dampen down the evolutionary fervor demonstrated by earlier theorists, but at the same time they had the effect of emphasizing the emotional and instinctive aspects of “primitive” lives rather than its intellectual accomplishment. Religion is no longer a great intellectual development but instead a collective emotional response to mystery.
Marett’s basic argument that a supernaturalistic emotional sense of the extraordinary produces religion and magic would remain quite popular for a number of decades. In one notable example, the American anthropologist Robert Lowie restated this basic theme in 1924, as he stressed a fundamental dichotomy in human experience between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Distinct from the mundane and ordinary, he said, there is a shared human “sense of the Extraordinary, Mysterious, or Supernatural,” and it is in this sense that one finds the roots of religion.22 He rejected Frazer’s effort to differentiate different cultural phases of magic and religion (since, Lowie asserted, both always coexist), and he objected to Mauss and Hubert’s claim that magic is always on the margins of society, since just like religion, magical practices require the acceptance of traditional social concepts and practices.
Building on the emotive component of religion’s origins, a further competing theory of religion came from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social scientists who sought the roots of religion in totemism or clan gods. In his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, published in 1889, the Scottish biblical scholar William Robertson Smith (1846–94) developed the work of his teacher J. F. M’Lennan (1827–81) to argue that the earliest form of religion involved the worship of various totemic creatures that were identified as the ancestors of the social group. Religion, Robertson Smith asserted, was born from the sense of reverence for these totemic figures. A number of important scholars came to accept the view that totemism was more fundamental than animism. So, for example, in his Introduction to the History of Religion, published in 1896, Frank Byron Jevons (1858–1936) argued that religion emerges through the development of social relations with a clan god (functioning as a totem). Only after religion is established can magic emerge as a transgression of the socially accepted sense of proper human agency and communal connection.
The notion of totemism would find its most influential formulation in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), one of the founding figures of French social theory. Durkheim begins by articulating what he sees as the core principle of religion, the division of the world between the sacred and the profane. Since both magic and religion fall within the scope of the sacred, Durkheim invokes the notion of totemism (and the basic conception of religion put forward by Robertson Smith and Mauss and Hubert) in order to define the boundary between them. As he explains, religion is the product of a social group, fostering unity and bringing together the members of a community. Magic, on the other hand, involves the use of sacred power for selfish or socially disruptive ends. Moving forward in this analysis, Durkheim concurs in identifying the “indefinite powers” and “anonymous forces” at work within the totemic principle as mana.23 He concludes that the ultimate focus of religion is actually the totemic social group itself, “since religious force is nothing other than the collective and anonymous force of the clan.”24 Or, more pointedly, in religion, society is worshiping itself. Durkheim’s totemistic theory contrasts with the individualism of other early social-scientific theories of the origin of religion by stressing religion’s fundamentally communal nature.
Working within these traditions of totemism and mana, the French anthropologist and philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) challenged intellectualist theories such as those from Tylor and Frazer by arguing that primitive thought is fundamentally different from modern thought. Lévy-Bruhl claimed that, far from demonstrating logical or causal thinking, the “primitive mentality” is mystical, instinctive, and emotional, deeply shaped by the communal and highly charged atmosphere surrounding totemism. As he explained it, primitive thought lacks individuality and entails a form of participatory affect that ignores distinctions between subject and object, cause and effect, nature and supernature. The primitive mind is thus unable to grasp even the most basic principles of scientific rationality, and it attributes all types of occurrences to magical and mystical powers.25 While even Lévy-Bruhl himself eventually dampened down some of his more extreme formulations, this notion of a “primitive mentality” deeply shaped by communal participation and emotion persisted in many quarters of social theory into recent decades.
Through all these competing theories, scholars worked to identify the origin of religion in the hope that by identifying its formative state, the ultimate nature of religion would become clear. But these competing efforts to penetrate prehistory proved futile, and through the early decades of the twentieth century, the preoccupation with identifying the origin of religion began to falter. By the 1920s scholars became more deliberate in separating the question of religion’s origin from the question of its essence, and through the 1920s and 1930s increasing numbers of theorists abandoned the search for origins and moved into new modes of social analysis in regard to the nature and function of religion. At the same time, methodologies in anthropology and the social sciences changed dramatically. By the turn of the twentieth century, armchair anthropologists (such as Marett and Frazer) recognized the need for ethnographic fieldwork, and a new generation of ethnographers brought that experience to bear in their theorizing concerning the nature of religion. In the wake of this new ethnographic focus and new forms of linguistic analysis, the evidence on which much of this early anthropological theory was based began to crumble, and the tendency to universalize notions such as mana or totemism began to fade.
These shifts in theoretical and methodological focus are readily apparent in the work of the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942). Malinowski pioneered ethnography among the Melanesians, and in his analysis of Melanesian culture Malinowski abandoned any search for the origin of religion to focus instead on its psychological and social functions. He argued in his essay “Magic, Science, and Religion” from 1925 that religion should be understood as a set of practices promoting social integration and interpersonal attachment among members of a group, providing a ground for psychic and social integration in the face of major life questions (such as death).26
This definition of religion is rather amorphous, and Malinowski seeks to give it more clarity by contrasting religion to magic. Unlike religion, which has transcendent and self-realizing objectives, magic is performed to accomplish specific practical objectives in circumstances where ordinary technical skill has reach its limit. Rejecting Lévy-Bruhl’s negative assessment of the “primitive mentality,” Malinowski stresses that human beings in even the earliest stages of cultural development have significant technical abilities and knowledge. But when that technology fails, magic provides ritual behavior that can increase confidence and optimism in situations of anxiety. Religion, in contrast, is focused on broader, more abstract concerns. It invokes traditions concerning the supernatural (spirits and demons, the power of the totem, ancestral spirits, and notions of life after death) in order to create more abstract social values and promote cohesion.
Through this theory of religion, Malinowski has no concern with religion’s origins. Instead, he is focused on its social function, working to identify the particular needs religion addresses in the lives of the members of a social group. In this mode, he identified the essence of religion in its focus on transcendent, nonpragmatic values. Malinowski’s stress on the commonalities between “primitive” and modern thought would be followed by a number of important later anthropologists. For example, Alexander Goldenweiser’s Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture, published in 1937, highlights the continuing role of superstition and magical thinking in modern society, but rather than see this as a troubling anomaly (in the vein of Tylor and Frazer), Goldenweiser concludes that supernaturalism is a vivid example of primitive ingenuity, “perhaps the most outstanding and certainly the most historically significant achievement” of the human imagination, serving a range of positive social functions.27
By the middle of the twentieth century, Marett’s most prominent student, E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–73), could reject most all the classical anthropological efforts to comprehend “primitive” religion. Evans-Pritchard disparaged these early theories as “just-so stories,” and he detailed many of their significant conceptual flaws.28 Anthropology would move in new directions and develop new methods (often with its early focus on religion supplanted by attention to kinship, economic systems, and other aspects of society). The most significant legacy of these early anthropological theorists lies in their naturalistic approach to the study of religion, as they bracketed questions of the truth of religion and looked instead to empirical data in order to investigate religion’s origins and nature. While the large portion of their presuppositions and conclusions about religion are unsupportable, these theorists succeeded in defining a new approach to the study of religion that would focus on its human, social history.
The explicit focus on social evolution that was so central to these early theorists became far more muted in later social-scientific theory, but basic evolutionist currents remain visible. Even today, many social scientists continue to frame human culture in terms of trajectory (a tendency reflected in recent theories of social and religious development, in the persistent theorizing about magical thinking, and even in the basic design of introductory textbooks in anthropology and comparative religion). Various more recent forms of structuralism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology follow the path of evolutionary thinking, even if their nuance surpasses their late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors.
NOTES
1. See Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1873).
2. On the emergence and development of anthropological approaches to the study of religion, see generally Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Fiona Bowie, The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
3. John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social Condition of Savages, 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 319.
4. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” in On Human Evolution: Selected Writings, ed. J. D. Y. Peel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 45; and see Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, ed. Stanislav Andreski (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1969), 171–73, 446–49, 575–87.
5. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom (New York: Henry Holt, 1889), 1:1, 1:410.
6. Ibid., 2:8.
7. Ibid., 2:4–13, 83–86.
8. Ibid., 1:16, 72, 112–13.
9. Ibid., 1:11, 116, 136–37.
10. See Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1900).
11. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 59.
12. John H. King, The Supernatural: Its Origin, Nature, and Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892), 1:5.
13. See Gregory D. Alles, “Dynamism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan, 2005).
14. R. R. Marett, “Pre-Animistic Religion,” in The Threshold of Religion (London: Methuen, 1914), 5.
15. Ibid., xxxi.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., xi.
18. Ibid., viii.
19. Ibid., 110.
20. See Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 1972).
21. Ibid., 91.
22. Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Religion (New York: Liveright, 1948), xiv–xvi.
23. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 229.
24. Ibid., 253.
25. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
26. Bronisław Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays, ed. Robert Redfield (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1948).
27. Alexander A. Goldenweiser, Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1937), 208.
28. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 25.