Revision summary
Pre-modern religion served explanation, solidarity, kinship, and kingship. Tylor and Frazer: intellectualist accounts of soul and magic. Durkheim: group ritual; variety follows social morphology. Weber: theodicy and meaning. Marx: tribute and protest in religious form. Redfield: layered little and great traditions.
Model answer
Introduction
Pre-modern societies housed many beliefs and practices because religion did several jobs at once: explanation, solidarity, kingship, and seasonal work. Variety followed from ecology, kinship, and political form, not from a single superstition.
Body
Intellectual and existential reasons
- E. B. Tylor’s animism and James Frazer’s magic-religion-science sequence offered early intellectualist reasons: to explain dream, death, and crop.
- Max Weber stressed theodicy: suffering needs a meaningful cosmos.
Social reasons
- Emile Durkheim: ritual produces the sacred as the group’s ideal. Clans, tribes, and castes therefore differ as groups differ.
- Ancestor cults follow descent. Irawati Karve’s kinship types predict different funeral and marriage rites.
Political and economic reasons
- Kingship and priesthood dualise power. Karl Marx read much practice as a veil of tribute, yet peasants also protested in religious idiom.
- Agricultural calendars need festivals. Pastoral and forest groups need other spirits.
Why various, not one
- Diffusion, conquest, and little-and-great traditions, after Robert Redfield, mix layers.
- Pre-modern is not simple. Empires already had plural cults.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD NEED[Explain bind rule work] --> REL[Beliefs practices] GRP[Many groups ecologies] --> VAR[Variety] REL --> VAR
Conclusion
Various pre-modern beliefs and practices arose to explain misfortune, bind groups, organise kinship, and legitimate rule and work. Tylor, Durkheim, and Weber name intellectual, social, and meaning reasons. Variety tracks many groups and ecologies, not a single primitive mind.
Quick related
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