Revision summary
Tylor and Frazer treated religion as explanation and stage. Malinowski tied magic to practical anxiety. Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown tied rite to the group. Geertz and Turner stress meaning and symbol. Asad warns that ‘religion’ is not a neutral universal box.
Model answer
Introduction
Anthropology has treated religion as error, as social glue, as meaning, and as power. Each approach catches one face of ritual and belief.
Body
Intellectualist and evolutionary
- Tylor’s animism and Frazer’s magic–religion–science ladder treated belief as explanation. The limit is the armchair stage.
Emotional and psychological
- Malinowski tied Trobriand magic to anxiety at the reef. Freud read ritual as neurosis. Useful for motive; thin for public structure.
Sociological
- Durkheim’s sacred and church, Radcliffe-Brown’s rites of solidarity, and Marxist opium-and-ideology readings stress group and class.
- Limit: belief becomes only social cement or only veil.
Symbolic and interpretive
- Turner’s Ndembu symbols and Geertz’s religion as a cultural system of moods and motivations.
- Lévi-Strauss read myth as logic. Risk: the villager becomes a text.
Later critical
- Asad historicised ‘religion’ as a Christian-secular category. Tambiah and Obeyesekere brought practice and person back.
- Feminist and postcolonial work ask whose spirits and whose priesthood.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD REL[Religion] --> TY[Tylor Frazer intellect] REL --> DU[Durkheim social] REL --> GE[Geertz Turner meaning] REL --> AS[Asad category critique]
Conclusion
Approaches to religion run from Tylor’s intellectualism through Durkheim’s church to Geertz’s meaning and Asad’s critique of the category. Use them as a kit, not as one church of theory.
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