The comparative study of religion has generally focused on doctrine, on canonical texts and their interpretations. But what of religions without writing, much less canonical texts?
As E. B. Tylor noted in his seminal work, Primitive Culture (1871), "it is generally easier to obtain accurate accounts of ceremonies by eyewitnesses, than anything like trustworthy and intelligible statements of doctrine; so that very much of our knowledge of religion in the savage and barbaric world consists of acquaintance with its ceremonies" (1958 ed., vol. 2, p. 449). Such a di…
Émile Durkheim acknowledged the influence of Robertson Smith in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). However, unlike his evolutionist predecessors, his goals were not to uncover the original form of religion (which he rightly considered an impossible task) but rather the very essence of religion, its universal features. He accepted key evolutionary assumptions, nota…
The development of anthropology as an academic discipline in the first half of the twentieth century effaced the distinction between ethnographic description and theorization that characterized the work of the evolutionists, as well as Durkheim and Van Gennep. In the United States, Franz Boas and his students were especially critical of the speculative nature of their predecessors' theories…
The 1960s saw the emergence of sharply divergent currents in American anthropology, with some anthropologists focusing on the elaboration of cultural meanings while others stressed the relationship of behavior to ecology, with the interaction of humans with their environment. Marvin Harris was perhaps the most dogmatic of the latter, advocating a kind of analysis loosely inspired by Marx, which he…
In France during the 1960s, anthropological concerns with symbolism, spearheaded by Claude Lévi-Strauss, were far more centrally concerned with myth than with ritual. Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), a critique of French structuralist but also British functionalist approaches, proposed an alternative approach that devoted considerable attention to the analysis …
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Bateson, Gregory. Naven. 2nd ed. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958. Originally published in 1936. Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. Bloch, Maurice. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideol…
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