TOPIC 9

2. ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
- Contents
- Methodologies
• References:
1. Tylor, Edward Burnett. (2016). Primitive Culture. Vol. I&II. Mineola, New York: Dover
Publications. (It is an unabridged republication of the second (1873) edition of the work
originally published by John Murray, London, in 1871.)
2. Moore, R.L., & Reynolds, F.E. (Eds.). (1984). Anthropology and the Study of Religion.
Chicago: Centre for the Scientific Study of Religion, pp. 1-55.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 1
 Anthropology of Religion
❖Anthropology of religion is concerned with the practice of religion
by particular communities.
❖It does not look at the idealized form of religion as described in
some theological or phenomenological approaches.
❖Some anthropologists have focused on the multiplicity within
religious traditions.
❖Hence, the anthropology of religion is a study focusing on the
practice of religion rather than on religion as an ideal and
abstract concept.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 2
 Cont…
• Anthropologists see religion to be associated and shaped by its
particular cultural context, and therefore, they find it very
difficult to separate religion from culture.
• The word “anthropology” is derived from two roots:
1.Ánthropos (the Greek term for “human”), and
2.logos (the Greek term for “word,” now used to refer to a
field of study).
• Anthropology is the scholarly discipline that studies
humans or anything about and related to humans.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 3
 Cont…
• Many anthropologists travel to other countries to learn about
such aspects of cultural life as family structures, political
organizations, economic systems, the settling of disputes, and
religions too.
• Anthropology can best be thought of as the science of the
diversity of humans, in their bodies and their behavior.
• The anthropology of religion is the scientific investigation of
the diversity of human religions.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 4

 Cont…
• The anthropological study of religion brings religion and culture into a
relationship with each other. Since culture is such a broad category,
religion may be regarded as a cultural system that is a subset of it.
• Religious history, beliefs, and practices form a distinctive set of
cohesive cultural elements for particular social groups. For instance,
when one begins to study the society and culture of the nation of
India (bound by a political-cultural system), one discovers that there
are large numbers of smaller social groups that one might examine
(which cohere due to other cultural factors), most of which overlap
and intersect with each other.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 5

 Cont…
❑EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR (1832–1917)
➢ He is considered a pioneer in the discipline of anthropology and in the
anthropological study of religion.
➢ His two-volume “Primitive Culture” introduces many of his ideas.

6
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu
 Cont…
• Edward Burnett Tylor, (born Oct. 2, 1832, London—died Jan. 2,
1917, Wellington, Somerset, Eng.), English anthropologist regarded as the
founder of cultural anthropology. His most important work, Primitive
Culture (1871), influenced in part by Darwin’s theory of biological
evolution, developed the theory of an evolutionary, progressive
relationship from primitive to modern cultures. Tylor was knighted in 1912.
He is best known today for providing, in this book, one of the earliest and
clearest definitions of culture, one that is widely accepted and used by
contemporary anthropologists. Culture, he said, is
• ...that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-
Burnett-Tylor
7
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu
 Cont…
➢Through the concept of animism, he hoped to explain the
origins of religion and its evolutionary development, as well as
to develop a science of culture studies.
➢Tylor argued that when our ancestors wondered about
differences among such states as sleep, dreams, and
wakefulness, and between life and death, they applied their
rational faculties to these observed phenomena, but were
impeded by a lack of correct supporting information.
➢They guessed that spirits or souls animated or gave life
to things.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 8
 Cont…
• Tylor regarded this belief in supernatural beings, which are thought to
reside in humans, animals, and the natural world, as the earliest form
of religious thinking.
• The separation of spirits, and their independent existence apart from
the living beings and other natural phenomena that they were
believed to inhabit, subsequently led to the development of
polytheistic beliefs, since certain individual spirits were raised to the
status of deities.
• Eventually, this assortment of disparate deities coalesced into the
concept of one overarching power, leading to monotheism.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 9

 Cont…
• Tylor had simultaneously been promoting the theory of the
cultural evolution of societies from savage (i.e. hunter-gatherer)
to barbarous (i.e. domestication of plants and animals) to
civilized (i.e. possessing writing).
• Thus monotheism was merely the animism of civilized societies.
• Tylor suggested that contemporary “primitive” (i.e. small-scale,
non-urban, technologically simple) cultures were akin to ancient
“savage” societies and would undergo inevitable stages of
development culturally and religiously.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 10

 Cont…
• It became commonplace among anthropologists to
think that the study of such “primitive people,” who
were regarded as somehow slow on the path of cultural
progress (and even mental development), would
provide clues to the past, revealing how the earliest of
our ancestors thought and acted.
• The quest for the origins of religion among human
beings was a vibrant theme in the early anthropology
of religion.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 11
 Cont…
➢Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), is considered as one
of the most influential contributors to the
anthropology of religion in recent decades
through his theoretical works.
➢He has been often regarded as the father of
interpretive anthropology.
➢His work “The Interpretation of Cultures”
contains a variety of topics that present his
approach.
➢In his “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz
offered a particularly useful definition of religion.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 12
 Cont…
❖Clifford Geertz, in full Clifford James Geertz, (born Aug.
23, 1926, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.—died Oct. 30,
2006, Philadelphia, Pa.), American cultural anthropologist,
a leading rhetorician and proponent of
symbolic anthropology and interpretive anthropology.
❖After service in the U.S. Navy in World War II (1943–45),
Geertz studied at Antioch College, Ohio (B.A., 1950),
and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1956). He taught or held
fellowships at several schools before joining the
anthropology staff of the University of Chicago (1960–70).
In 1970 he became a professor of social science at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he
retired as professor emeritus in 2000.
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 13
 Cont…
➢ At Chicago, Geertz became a champion
of symbolic anthropology, which gives prime attention to the
role of thought—of “symbols”—in society. Symbols guide
action.
➢ Culture, according to Geertz, is “a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means
of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
knowledge about and attitudes toward life.”
➢ The function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and
make it understandable. The role of anthropologists is to try—
though complete success is not possible—to interpret the
guiding symbols of each culture. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clifford-Geertz
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 14
 Cont…
• Clifford Geertz provided the most commonly quoted definition
of religion:
1. “a system of symbols which act 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 (impression) of
factuality that
5. the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 15

 Cont…
• Clifford Geertz has given a definition about the
anthropology of religion:
“The anthropological study of religion is,
therefore, a two-stage operation: first, an analysis
of the system of meanings embodied in the
symbols which make up the religion proper, and
second, the relating of these systems to social-
structural and psychological process.”
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 16
 Cont…
• Thus, anthropologists tend to focus on culture as a system of ideas
about the world and also on the ways people behave as a result of
those ideas.
• Religion in this approach is part of the culture.
• According to anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, religion is “a system of
beliefs and behaviors that formulates and answers questions
that are important, recurrent, and must be answered.”
• Professor Susan A. Johnston, Religion, Myth, and Magic: The Anthropology of Religion (The
George Washington University: Recorded Books, LLC, 2009), p. 8.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 17

 Cont…
• Firstly, religion is composed of both beliefs and behaviors.
That’s obvious, but it is worth saying anyway. It is partly
about what people believe and partly about what they do in
terms of those beliefs.
• In addition, it is a system. That means that it is embedded in
a network, in this case, culture itself and all its parts. It tends
to mirror culture such that, for example, if the society is
hierarchical then so is the religion.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 18

 Cont…
• Ideas about economic relationships, gender, or power are
usually also reflected in religion, such that the two support
each other.
• Further, as a system, changes in one part cause changes in the
other parts. If ideas about gender or power, for example,
change, so does religion, and changes in religion equally cause
changes in all the other parts of the system.
• Religion is a part of the culture and so reflects it and is
reflected by it.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 19

 Cont…
• Secondly, religion formulates and answers particular kinds of
questions. This means that religion not only provides answers to
questions, an idea that is fairly common in Western societies today,
but it also in a sense decides what those questions are.
• They aren’t just any questions, but rather questions that have
particular characteristics.
• First, they are important. That means that they are questions whose
answers are significant in some way, not trivial questions whose
answers don’t really matter that much.

December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 20

 Cont…
• They are also recurrent, which means they come up again and again,
not only in every generation but also across cultures in both time and
space. And they must be answered so that we can manage to live our
daily lives.
• The answers to such questions are needed for people’s psychological
well-being, and to make them feel in control of their lives. Some of the
questions religion commonly answers are things like:
➢Where did we come from?
➢Why is the world the way it is?
➢Why do bad things happen?
➢Why are we different from other people? or,
➢What happens when we die?
December 21, 2023 Dr. Fatmir Shehu 21
 Cont…

‫بارك هللا فيكم جميعا‬

MAY ALLAH BLESS YOU ALL

12/21/2023 RKUD 3230 - DR FATMIR SHEHU 22