The anthropological study of religion

The anthropology of religion is the comparative study of religions in their cultural, social, historical, and material contexts.

The English term religion has no exact equivalent in most other languages. For example, burial practices are more likely to be called customs and not sharply differentiated from other ways of doing things. Early Homo sapiens (for example, the Neanderthals at Krapina [now in Croatia]) began burying their dead at least 130,000 years ago. To what end? And how and why have such practices changed over time? What might they have in common with the multitude of burial customs—known to be associated with differing conceptions of death and life—among people in the world today; for example, what might embalming practices in ancient Egypt and 19th-century Bolivia have in common with each other and with 21st-century embalming practices in North America? How do these relate to secondary burials, involving the exhumation and reburial of the corpse or its bones, as in Madagascar and Siberia, or rituals of cremation, as in Japan, India, or France? Paradoxically, anthropologists’ documentation of the enormous diversity of human customs, past and present, puts into question the very existence of “religion” as a single coherent system of practices, values, or beliefs. Indeed, what constitutes “religion” may be hotly debated even among coreligionists. The study of religion in anthropology requires consideration of all these matters, including anthropologists’ own terms of analysis.

Scholars of religion throughout the world have long recognized what the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1902) called “the varieties of religious experience.” Since the mid-19th century, one of the first and most important contributions of anthropologists has been to extend the study of those varieties beyond the formal doctrines and liturgies of established religious institutions to include related customs, regardless of when, where, and by whom they are practiced and whether they are celebrated, suppressed, or taken for granted. The anthropology of religion is the study of, in the words of the English anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion [1965]), “how religious beliefs and practices affect in any society the minds, the feelings, the lives, and the interrelations of its members…religion is what religion does.” Although Edward Burnett Tylor’s classic Primitive Culture (1871) documented the wide-ranging doings of his fellow Europeans, most anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on so-called primitive peoples living outside Europe and North America, on the grounds that religion, increasingly defined by contrast to reason, was a historically early form of behaviour that was already giving way to science. Subsequent research has proved these assumptions to be wrong. As anthropology has grown to include the study of all humans on an equal footing and the field of anthropology is practiced throughout the world, anthropologists continue to confront their parochial biases.

So, what is religion from a comparative perspective? Tylor’s famous “minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings” betrays the origins of the anthropological study of religion in 19th-century debates over “religion” and “science” as alternative conceptions of reality. The very notion of “religion” as distinct from other human doings most likely originated in historical separations of church and state that—far from being universal—were specific to Europe and North America. Yet Tylor’s definition prompted ongoing efforts by anthropologists to achieve a more neutral vocabulary, to move from such particular terms as soul, spirit, belief, sin, god, priest, and so on (or in German die Seele or French l’âme, etc.) to other vernacular languages, and to the multilingual, multisensory interactions through which competing understandings of the phenomena in question are presented and debated.

Contrary to their earlier expectations, anthropologists have documented the increasing role of religion in public life throughout the world. Rituals, socially prescribed acts once thought to be the hallmark of religious behaviour, are now recognized as shaping human relations in many social contexts. Thus, the work of scholars like Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Caroline Humphrey, and James Laidlaw on rites of passage and ritualization may apply much more widely. Anthropologists now characterize religion in more open-ended terms, stressing family resemblances rather than categorical identities. They often focus on worlds, powers, forces, agents or beings that stretch or defy what is taken to be human, or humanly verifiable, and they emphasize imagination and speculation. Yet Tylor’s approach to religion as a mode of explanation and understanding (and his implicit comparison with science) persists to the present day, undoubtedly because the earlier questions about illusion and ultimate reality, and the ethical issues with which they are associated, remain open to debate.

The basic analytical premise of anthropological research on religion, articulated in the classic works on religion of 19th-century scholars like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber is that human modes of understanding, explaining, feeling, and relating are not simply derived from human anatomy or induced by patterns of external stimuli. They also originate in social forms—the division of labour, patterns of political hierarchy or equality, gender relations, and the like. Thus, whatever the ultimate reality of human suffering and death, anthropologists argue that moral insight and action derive from the efforts of human beings to understand their immediate reality in the shifting, ambiguous, contradictory, and conflictive patterns of the relationships in which they are involved and the larger order, or cosmos, in which these relations are set. The anthropology of religion thus entails a holistic approach, including attention to social-cultural, psychological, material, historical, and evolutionary dimensions of religious experience. Anthropologists’ early and enduring emphasis on the social reality of religion may have grown historically out of long-standing concerns, particular to the heirs of the Abrahamic religions of the Bible and the Qurʾān, over incarnations of the divine in human (or humanly apprehensible) forms as modes of revelation. Yet, as refined through decades of cross-cultural research, anthropologists’ studies of such phenomena as divinity, incarnation, immanence or embodiment, transcendence, sacrifice, prayer, preaching, prophecy, myth, prohibition or taboo, possession, divination, initiation, transgression and inversion, missionization, conversion, and mystification have made major contributions to the comparative study of religion. At the turn of the 21st century, topics at the forefront of anthropological research on religion included moral imagination, cognition, subjectivity, secularization, the changing relations of church and state, religion and science, religious pluralism, migration and pilgrimage, religion and ecology, ethics, and social justice.

Museum-based study

Museums—defined as places for the organized collection, study, and display of objects—began long before anthropology developed as an academic discipline. Since the 6th century bce at Ur, the 3rd century bce in Alexandria, and the 13th century ce in China, museums have collected objects illustrating daily life in diverse cultures, past and present. Today many of these broadly based collections are associated with the discipline of anthropology, especially those that include osteological specimens (human and prehuman remains) providing evidence of human evolution and diversity, archaeological artifacts providing evidence of past cultures, and ethnographic artifacts illustrating the lifeways of living people.

The collecting of artifacts from distant lands and possibly disappearing cultures began about the 15th century, during the age of exploration, with the travels of Western explorers, missionaries, colonial administrators, soldiers, scholars, traders, and tourists. Anthropological collections grew significantly in the 19th century as European and North American museums acquired—or, in many cases, looted—artifacts from colonized peoples around the world. In the United Kingdom, the British Museum (1753), the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1884), the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (1884), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (founded 1852), among others, acquired vast numbers of artifacts from colonies in Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Museums in virtually every European country, including the Ethnological Museum (1829; formerly the Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin, the Museum of Man (1878; formerly the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography) in Paris, and museums of ethnography in Leiden (Netherlands), Stockholm, Rome, and elsewhere, were formed to preserve utilitarian objects that were not considered to be part of the history of Western civilization itself.

In the United States most ethnographic artifacts were incorporated into natural history museums. Once the idea of natural selection validated ideas of evolution, in the mid-19th century, a theoretical justification developed for grouping the artifacts of anthropology with extinct animals and other natural history specimens. Ethnographic objects were seen as evidence of the gradual progression of human beings from “savagery” to civilization. Along with displays of living people at World’s Fairs and colonial expositions, they confirmed anthropology’s status as an empirical science and validated distinctions between Westerners and others. The Smithsonian Institution (1846) acquired the vast American Indian collections of the Bureau of Ethnology (eventually becoming part of the collection of the Department of Anthropology in the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.). Institutions such as the Milwaukee Public Museum (1882), the Peabody Museum of Natural History (1866) at Yale University, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (1885) at the University of Washington, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1887) in Philadelphia all included artifacts considered anthropological from their beginnings. The country’s first museum devoted entirely to anthropology was the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (1866) at Harvard University, followed in 1901 by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology) at the University of California. The Field Museum in Chicago (1893) was established (as the Columbian Museum of Chicago) to house the collections assembled for the World’s Columbian Exposition by Frederic W. Putnam, Harvard Peabody’s first director, and his assistant, Franz Boas.

With Putnam’s sponsorship, Boas joined the American Museum of Natural History (1869), New York City, in 1895. Before he began to devote all his time to work at Columbia University in 1905, Boas managed to shift the paradigm of museum anthropology from an evolutionary approach, in which objects from many cultures were grouped according to the evolution of specific technologies, to a culture area approach that focused on local histories and environments. While at the American Museum, Boas established a broad research agenda for museum anthropology, linking the study of artifacts to texts, photographs, musical recordings, and other nonmaterial aspects of culture.

Over the next century, as museums with anthropological collections continued to develop as research institutions, many of the anthropologists who worked there turned away from collection-based work. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists continued to use collections for study, but, until a late 20th-century revival of interest in the history of anthropology and museums and in studies of material culture and the anthropology of art, few cultural anthropologists worked actively with collections. Exhibits developed in the mid-20th century continued to reflect the culture area approach of Boas or the structural-functional model that had developed in Britain, focusing on social institutions and using objects to illustrate abstract points.

The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed great change in the practice of anthropology in museums. The civil rights and decolonization movements of the 1960s increased awareness of the politics of collecting and representation. Ethical issues that had been ignored in the past began to influence museum practices. By the turn of the 21st century, most anthropologists working in museums understood the need to incorporate diverse points of view in exhibitions and collections care and to rely on the expertise of people from the cultures represented as well as museum professionals. At the same time, many museums—such as the U’mista Cultural Centre (1980) in Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada—were established within the communities that created the objects on display. Anthropologists in museums also were concerned with issues such as the ethics of collecting, access to collections and associated data, and ownership and repatriation.

Starting in the 1930s, Western artists drew attention to the masks and carvings of non-Western cultures. These were admired not for their cultural meaning but for their form and aesthetic qualities. While museum anthropologists remain primarily concerned with the cultural context of artifacts, the boundary between art and artifact has begun to erode. Anthropology collections include the work of non-Western artists as well as artifacts from Western cultures. Artifacts representing the interaction of cultures throughout the world—including things made of recycled industrial materials or objects made for sale to tourists—are also part of the legitimate subject of museum anthropologists.