Religion, ritual, and symbolism: rites of passage (Van Gennep), shamanism, magic and science
Anchor (Master): Turner, V. — The Ritual Process (1969)
Intuition Beginner
Every culture has religion — shared beliefs and practices that connect people to the supernatural. Anthropologists study religion without judging whether the beliefs are "true." They ask what religion does: how it binds communities, explains misfortune, marks life transitions, and gives meaning to suffering and death.
Arnold van Gennep discovered that rituals marking life transitions — birth, coming of age, marriage, death — follow a three-part structure. Separation means leaving the old status. Liminality is a threshold state — between statuses, neither here nor there. Incorporation is returning with a new status.
Victor Turner expanded on liminality. During this in-between state, normal social hierarchies dissolve and people form intense bonds of community he called "communitas." Initiates in the bush, monks under a vow of equality, pilgrims on the road — all share the same stripped-down condition.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard showed that Azande witchcraft beliefs are not irrational. They form a coherent logical system that explains misfortune. Witchcraft answers why this granary collapsed on this particular person, while science explains how granaries collapse in general. The two systems answer different questions.
Shamans — religious specialists who enter trance states to heal, divine, or mediate with spirits — are found in many indigenous societies. Syncretism, the blending of religions, produced traditions like Vodou (African plus Catholic), Santeria, and Candomble. Religion is not fixed; it merges, splits, and reinvents itself.
Visual Beginner
| Phase | What happens | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Separation | The person leaves their old social status | A wedding party departs the bride's family home |
| Liminality (transition) | A threshold state — between statuses, neither here nor there | Initiates secluded in the bush; monks in retreat |
| Incorporation | The person returns with a new status and role | The couple is welcomed as married into the community |
| Specialist | Characteristics | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Shaman | Part-time; enters trance; individually called | Healing, divination, spirit mediation |
| Priest | Full-time; trained; institutionally authorised | Conducting formal liturgy |
| Prophet | Charismatic; receives revelation | Challenging the existing order |
| Medium | Channels spirits during possession | Divination and counsel |
Worked example Beginner
Example 1: Ndembu initiation and the three phases
Victor Turner's study of the Ndembu of Zambia made Van Gennep's scheme concrete. Boys are taken from their mothers' homes (separation), sequestered in the bush under ritual instructors who strip them of their old identity (liminality), and return as men with new names, scarification, and responsibilities (incorporation).
During the liminal phase the boys are "betwixt and between." They have no status, no property, no rank. They share food, hardship, and sacred knowledge. This produces communitas — an intense solidarity that outlasts the ritual itself. Turner argued that this threshold phase, not the formal ceremony, is where the real transformation happens.
Example 2: Evans-Pritchard and the Azande granary
Among the Azande of Sudan, Evans-Pritchard asked a pointed question. When a granary collapses and kills the person sitting beneath it, why do the Azande blame witchcraft rather than termites and gravity? His answer reshaped the anthropology of religion.
Science explains how granaries collapse — termites weaken the supports, and gravity does the rest. But science cannot explain why the granary collapsed at the precise moment this particular person sat beneath it. Witchcraft explains that particular misfortune. The two systems answer different questions and coexist without contradiction.
Example 3: Syncretism in Haitian Vodou
Haitian Vodou emerged from the collision of West African religions, especially Fon and Yoruba, with French Catholicism under slavery. Enslaved people were forced to convert, but they preserved African spirits, the lwa, by mapping them onto Catholic saints. Legba, the gatekeeper spirit, disguised himself as Saint Peter, who holds the keys of heaven.
The result is not a corrupted version of either source. It is a coherent religion in its own right, with its own priesthood, cosmology, and ritual calendar. The same pattern — African spirits concealed behind Catholic iconography — produced Santeria in Cuba and Candomble in Brazil. Syncretism shows that religions do not simply replace one another; they merge.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
Defining religion
Anthropologists distinguish two broad strategies for defining religion. Substantive definitions specify what religion is by its content. Edward Tylor offered the earliest: religion is "the belief in spiritual beings." Emile Durkheim offered a contrasting substantive definition: religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things — things set apart and forbidden — that unite adherents into a single moral community. Tylor centres the definition on the supernatural; Durkheim centres it on the social.
Functional definitions specify what religion does. Durkheim is also the foundational functionalist: religion binds society together by generating collective effervescence — the intense emotional energy produced when a group gathers for ritual. On this view even secular spectacles — sporting events, political rallies, concerts — perform the same function, generating the solidarity that religion classically produced. The substantive-functional distinction is not merely classificatory. It tracks a deeper disagreement about whether religion is essentially about gods and spirits or essentially about society's need to cohere.
Magic, science, and religion
James Frazer proposed an evolutionary sequence in The Golden Bough (1890): humanity progressed from magic, to religion, to science. Each stage was a different strategy for controlling the world. Frazer's sequence is discredited as an evolutionary ladder, but the three categories he distinguished remain useful. The harder question is how they relate within a single society.
Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) provided the classic answer. Among the Azande, three forms of supernatural explanation operate together. Witchcraft is an inherited psychic power that dwells in certain individuals and causes harm unintentionally. Sorcery is the deliberate use of magic to harm. Oracles and magic are techniques — poison ordeals, rubbing-board oracles, protective medicines — used to discover and counter witchcraft. The three form a single coherent system.
The system's coherence lies in what each element explains. Witchcraft explains why a particular misfortune struck a particular person: the granary collapsed on this man because a witch's envy targeted him. Science explains the general mechanism: termites weakened the supports. The Azande accept both. What looks like irrational superstition from outside is, from inside, a logically consistent system that addresses questions science does not answer. Evans-Pritchard's demonstration that magical belief can be rational — internally consistent and empirically deployed — became a foundation for the anthropology of religion.
Rites of passage
Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909) identified a universal structure in rituals that mark life transitions. Every such rite — birth celebrations, coming-of-age initiations, weddings, funerals, even ordinations and graduations — passes through three phases. Rites of separation detach the individual from their previous social position: the funeral removes the dead from the community of the living, the wedding removes the bride from her natal household. Rites of transition, or liminal rites, place the individual in a threshold state — stripped of status, hidden from the ordinary world, undergoing transformation. Rites of incorporation return the individual to society with a new role and the recognition that accompanies it.
Van Gennep's insight was that the three phases need not receive equal weight. Some rites stress separation, others the liminal middle, others the return. But the structure is present wherever a society marks a status change. The scheme gave anthropology a portable analytical tool, applicable across cultures and across ritual types, and it remains the starting point for ritual analysis a century later.
Religious specialists
Anthropologists classify religious specialists by their mode of authority and relation to institutions. Shamans are part-time practitioners whose authority derives from a personal calling — often a crisis, illness, or vision — and whose defining technique is trance. They enter altered states to contact spirits, retrieve lost souls, divine hidden causes, and heal. Priests are full-time, formally trained, institutionally authorised functionaries who conduct liturgy on behalf of a congregation; their authority is office-based, not charismatic. Prophets receive revelation and speak with divine authority, often challenging the existing religious and political order; revitalisation movements typically form around prophetic figures. Mediums channel spirits through possession, speaking in the spirit's voice.
The shaman-priest distinction tracks a broader contrast between individualised, ecstatic religion and institutional, liturgical religion. Most societies feature more than one type. Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) argued that shamanism, with its soul flight, spirit helpers, and cosmological journeys, constitutes a single phenomenon with a Siberian origin and a global distribution. Contemporary scholarship debates whether the global category obscures local differences and whether neo-shamanism in Western societies amounts to cultural appropriation of indigenous practice.
Symbolic anthropology
Clifford Geertz defined religion as "a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence." Symbols do not merely represent the world; they shape how people feel and act within it. Geertz's interpretive method reads rituals, myths, and symbols as texts that encode a society's worldview and ethos — its picture of reality and its system of values.
Victor Turner analysed symbols as multivocal — each symbol carries multiple meanings accessible to different actors. He identified three fields of meaning: the exegetical (what participants and specialists say the symbol means), the operational (what people do with it in ritual practice), and the positional (what it means by virtue of its position among other symbols). Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (1966) treated pollution rules — what counts as dirty, forbidden, or anomalous — as classification systems that police the boundaries of a culture's categories. The pangolin, a scaly anteater, is anomalous among the Lele of the Congo because it defies classification: it is a mammal with scales, like a fish, and it climbs trees. Anomalous animals become sacred or taboo because they threaten the classificatory order. Edmund Leach extended symbolic analysis to the political uses of symbols, showing how ritual and symbolism encode and enact power.
Syncretism, revitalisation, and rebellion
Syncretism is the blending of religious traditions that results from sustained contact — through conquest, migration, enslavement, or mission. Melville Herskovits documented African cultural survivals in the New World, arguing that enslaved Africans preserved religious elements under the cover of Catholicism. Roger Bastide's African Civilisations of the New World (1978) analysed how African religions were transplanted, transformed, and sometimes officially maintained in Brazil and the Caribbean. The classic cases — Vodou, Santeria, Candomble, Macumba — combine West African deities with Catholic saints in systems that are neither corrupted Africanism nor corrupted Catholicism but coherent new religions.
Anthony Wallace defined revitalisation movements as "deliberate, organised, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture." Such movements arise during periods of stress, when the existing cultural system no longer adequately guides action and generates persistent individual stress. Wallace identified a sequence: increased individual stress, cultural distortion, the mazeway (the individual's mental image of society and its environment) becoming unsatisfactory, reformulation by a prophet, adaptation, and transformation. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians, cargo cults of Melanesia, and many charismatic Christian movements fit this pattern. Max Gluckman's "rituals of rebellion" — ceremonies in which the normal order is symbolically inverted — extend the analysis to rituals that channel conflict without overturning the system.
Key result: ritual structure and the logic of magical belief Intermediate+
The universality claim: Van Gennep's three-phase structure
Van Gennep's central result is a universality claim about ritual form. Wherever a society marks a transition in an individual's social status — birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, sickness, death — the ritual follows the same tripartite structure of separation, liminality, and incorporation. This is not an empirical generalisation from a sample of rituals; it is a structural claim about what a rite of passage must do to accomplish its work. To move a person from one status to another, a ritual must first detach them from the old status, then hold them in a state where neither old nor new status applies, then attach the new status and return them to the community.
The structure's power is its portability. It applies across cultures that share no historical connection, across ritual types that serve very different purposes, and across scales from the individual life cycle to the seasonal cycle of a community. Critiques of Van Gennep have focused less on denying the structure than on noting that the three phases are not always equally developed and that some rituals stress one phase so heavily that the others seem perfunctory. The structure remains the default analytical frame because no proposed replacement has matched its combination of simplicity and reach.
Turner's elaboration: liminality as the engine of transformation
Victor Turner's contribution was to show that the liminal phase is not merely the middle of a sequence but the engine of the entire transformation. In The Ritual Process (1969), drawing on his Ndembu fieldwork, Turner argued that during liminality the normal properties of social life are suspended. Initiates are stripped of rank, property, and distinctive clothing. They are treated as structurally equivalent — neither this nor that, "betwixt and between" categories. From this suspension two things emerge.
First, communitas: an intense, egalitarian solidarity among those who share the liminal condition. Turner distinguished spontaneous communitas (the immediate, felt bond of the threshold) from normative communitas (the attempt to preserve that bond in permanent institutions, which inevitably reintroduces structure) and ideological communitas (utopian programmes that model society on the liminal ideal). Second, the symbolic work of transformation: liminal rituals deploy symbols that destroy the old identity and construct the new. The Ndembu rituals Turner analysed use masks, secret objects, and bodily ordeals whose multivocal meanings do the work of recategorising the initiate.
Turner later extended liminality beyond the ritual cycle. He distinguished liminal phenomena — obligatory, collective, tied to life-crisis rituals in tribal societies — from liminoid phenomena — optional, individual, characteristic of complex societies' arts, sports, and entertainments. The liminoid is the secular descendant of the liminal: a play space where ordinary rules are suspended but no obligatory status transformation occurs. This extension made liminality a general tool for analysing modern culture, from theatre and sport to political spectacle and counterculture.
Evans-Pritchard: the rationality of magical belief
The second key result is Evans-Pritchard's demonstration that witchcraft belief can be as logically coherent as scientific explanation. The Azande system integrates witchcraft, oracles, and magic into a single explanatory apparatus. When the granary falls, the Azande know that termites and gravity explain the collapse. What they want to know is why this person died under this granary at this time. Witchcraft supplies the particular explanation; science supplies the general one. The two are not in competition because they answer different questions.
The deeper point concerns the system's internal logic and its resistance to falsification. Evans-Pritchard showed that Zande belief is structured so that apparent counter-evidence is absorbed rather than disconfirming. If an oracle gives a wrong answer, the failure is explained by faulty technique, sorcery interfering with the oracle, or the wrong questions being asked. The system has resources to explain its own failures without revising its core commitments. This is not irrationality; it is a closed explanatory system of the kind that all systems, including scientific ones, deploy to some degree. The result reframed the anthropology of religion: the question ceased to be whether magical beliefs are rational and became how the rationality of any belief system — including science — is constructed and maintained.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
Theoretical traditions in the anthropology of religion
The anthropology of religion has cycled through several theoretical programmes, each reframing the object of study. Tylor's animism — the belief in spiritual beings as the minimal definition and evolutionary origin of religion — and Frazer's magic-religion-science sequence framed religion as a primitive stage in intellectual evolution. Both were evolutionist, treating non-Western religions as earlier forms of thought that science would supersede. The framework is discredited, but the categories (animism, polytheism, monotheism; magic, religion, science) remain in use, detached from the evolutionary ladder.
Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) reframed religion as social function. Religion is not about gods but about society worshipping itself through the medium of sacred symbols. Collective effervescence — the emotional energy of the gathered group — generates the solidarity that holds society together. The framework made religion a dependent variable, explained by its social effects rather than its doctrinal content. Malinowski's psychological functionalism offered a complementary but distinct account: Trobriand magic functions not to bind society but to manage individual anxiety. Fishing in the dangerous open sea is preceded by elaborate magic; fishing in the calm lagoon is not. Magic flourishes where outcomes are uncertain and the stakes are high.
Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (1962) treated totemism and myth not as religion in Durkheim's sense but as a "science of the concrete" — a logical system of classification that organises the natural and social world through analogy and opposition. Totemism is not worship of animals but a mode of thinking that uses natural species as operators in a system of social distinctions. The structuralist programme shifted analysis from function to structure and from emotion to cognition. The symbolic anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s — Geertz, Turner, Douglas — synthesised these strands, treating religion as a system of symbols that is read, interpreted, and deployed rather than merely believed or felt.
Liminality and its contemporary extensions
Turner's concept of liminality has travelled far beyond its origin in Ndembu ritual analysis. Mikhail Bakhtin's work on carnival and the carnivalesque — the licensed suspension and inversion of social hierarchy in medieval and early modern Europe — provided an independent account of threshold phenomena that Turner drew into his framework. Carnival, like liminality, is a time and space where ordinary rules are suspended, hierarchies are inverted, and communitas (in Bakhtin's vocabulary, the "people's festive body") forms.
Turner's own extension distinguished liminal from liminoid phenomena. Liminal rituals are obligatory, collective, and tied to the life cycle in tribal and traditional societies; they transform status. Liminoid activities — art, sport, theatre, games, entertainment — are optional, individual, and characteristic of complex industrial societies; they play with the suspension of rules without obliging transformation. The liminoid is the secular, commodified descendant of the liminal. The distinction has been productive but contested: critics argue that it underestimates the obligatory character of participation in many liminoid activities (sport as religion, art as vocation) and overstates the voluntariness of liminal ones.
Contemporary applications extend liminality to migration and displacement. Homi Bhabha's "third space" theorises the in-between condition of postcolonial subjects as a permanent liminality — a threshold that is not traversed but inhabited. Refugees, undocumented migrants, and stateless persons occupy structural positions that fit Turner's description of the liminal: stripped of status, neither here nor there, subject to communitas with fellow travellers but excluded from incorporation. The concept has become indispensable for analysing conditions of permanent transition, even as it strains against its origin in a model of transition that is meant to be temporary.
Ritual theory: Bell, Rappaport, Humphrey and Laidlaw
Catherine Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992) argued that the academic category "ritual" is a Western construction that obscures more than it reveals. Ritualisation — the strategic deployment of formalised, differentiated action that sets certain practices apart from the ordinary — is the more basic phenomenon. Bell drew on practice theory (Bourdieu) to show that ritual is not a distinct kind of action but a quality of action: the way certain practices are made to feel different, obligatory, and efficacious through formalisation, traditionalisation, and invariance. The effect of ritualisation is to constitute power relations as natural rather than arbitrary.
Roy Rappaport's Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999) offered a contrasting, ambitious synthesis. Rappaport argued that ritual is "the basic social act" — the mechanism through which society transmits invariant canonical messages that no individual can alter. The structure of ritual obligations — the acceptance of a message whose content is fixed by tradition — is what makes social order possible. Ritual, on this account, predates language and religion; it is the evolutionary foundation of both. Rappaport's framework is formal and systemic, treating ritual as the solution to a problem of communication and commitment that every society faces.
Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw's The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994) challenged the assumption that ritual is a distinctive kind of action. They argued that what makes an action ritual is not its intrinsic properties but the way it is "ritualised" — the intentional stance of the performer. The same physical movement (lighting a candle, bowing) can be ordinary or ritual depending on whether the actor treats the prescribed form as constitutive of the act. Their account foregrounds what they call the "non-agentic" quality of ritualised action: the performer does not choose the form but enacts a prescribed sequence, and the meaning lies in the sequence rather than in the performer's intention. This reframing dissolves the ritual-everyday distinction and relocates ritual in a mode of engagement with action.
Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity globally
The explosive growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity — from a few hundred thousand in 1900 to hundreds of millions today, concentrated in the global South — has generated a substantial anthropology. Joel Robbins's Becoming Sinners (2004) studied the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, whose mass conversion to charismatic Christianity created a moral crisis: the Urapmin experienced themselves as sinners under a demanding new moral regime they could not fully satisfy. Robbins argued that conversion did not synthesise with prior culture but largely replaced it, producing what he called a "global" Christianity that breaks decisively with local tradition.
Birgit Meyer's work on Ghanaian Pentecostalism analysed the demand to "make a complete break with the past" — a rhetoric of rupture that requires converts to sever ties with family, with indigenous religious practice, and with what Pentecostals frame as a satanic traditional order. The prosperity gospel, which promises material blessing to the faithful, links salvation to economic aspiration and has generated debate about whether Pentecostalism fosters modernity or exploits it. David Martin's Tongues of Fire (1990) placed global Pentecostalism in comparative perspective, arguing that it functions in Latin America and Africa as a functional equivalent of earlier Protestant voluntarism in Europe — generating individualism, literacy, and voluntary association.
Simon Coleman's work on global charismatic Christianity traced the transnational networks — conferences, media, migration — through which charismatic practice circulates. The literature collectively argues that Pentecostalism is not merely a religion imported from the North but a genuinely global phenomenon, locally appropriated, that reshapes politics, gender, economics, and the relationship between the convert and the past. Whether it is a force for emancipation or for new forms of discipline is unsettled, and the ethnography shows that it can be both simultaneously.
Islam: piety, agency, and the question of secularism
The anthropology of Islam has been transformed by a body of work that challenges liberal assumptions about agency and religion. Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety (2005) studied the Egyptian women's mosque movement, in which women cultivate Islamic virtue through disciplined practice — prayer, veiling, comportment. Mahmood argued that these women's agency cannot be understood through the liberal frame in which agency means resistance to subordination. The pious women's project is not to resist patriarchal norms but to embody them, and their agency lies in the disciplined work of self-formation. The argument challenges the secular-liberal assumption that agency is necessarily emancipatory.
Charles Hirschkind's The Ethical Soundscape (2006) analysed cassette sermons in Cairo as a medium of ethical cultivation. Listening to sermons is not passive information transfer but an embodied practice of training the heart and the senses to respond virtuously. The cassette sermon, distributed through the informal economy, created a public sphere of ethical listening that operated outside both the state and the formal institutions of religion. Hirstkind's work, like Mahmood's, treats piety as a positive formation rather than a deficit of autonomy.
Lara Deeb's An Enchanted Modern (2006) studied Lebanese Shi'ite women for whom piety and modernity are not opposed. The women embrace religious practice and modern education, public participation and veiling, without experiencing these as contradictory. Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism (2012) studied Egyptian fatwa councils and argued that the secular state's regulation of religion generates the very category of "religion" it purports to manage. Naveeda Khan's work on Permanent Liminality explored the condition of Pakistani Ahmadi Muslims, whose contested status renders them perpetually liminal within the Islamic community and the nation-state.
Buddhism: modernism, transformation, and violence
The anthropology of Buddhism has moved beyond the classical distinction between "great tradition" textual Buddhism and "little tradition" local practice. Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere's Buddhism Transformed (1988) documented "Protestant Buddhism" in Sri Lanka — a reformulation of Theravada Buddhism under colonial influence that internalised Protestant patterns of individualism, textualism, and anti-ritualism while simultaneously presenting itself as the authentic tradition. The category is contested, but the underlying point — that Buddhism has been continually reshaped by encounters with modernity and colonialism — is widely accepted.
Melford Spiro's Buddhism and Society (1971) distinguished kammatic Buddhism (focused on karma and merit for a better rebirth), nibbanic Buddhism (focused on liberation from the cycle), and apotropaic Buddhism (focused on protection from spirits and misfortune). Most Buddhists, Spiro argued, practise kammatic and apotropaic Buddhism; nibbanic Buddhism is the preserve of monks and intellectuals. The distinction challenged the assumption that textual Buddhism defines the religion as lived.
Charlene Makley's The Violence of Liberation (2007) on Tibetan Buddhism under Chinese rule analysed how development and liberation discourse — both Chinese state discourse and Western Buddhist romanticism — produced new forms of violence and gendered dispossession. David McMahan's work on Buddhist modernism traced how Buddhism was reformulated through encounter with Western thought, science, and Protestantism into a "spirituality" compatible with secular modernity. The literature collectively shows that "Buddhism" is not a stable object but a continually reconstructed assemblage of practice, text, politics, and desire.
Religion and politics: Asad and the construction of religion
Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion (1993) argued that "religion" is not a universal human phenomenon but a modern Western category produced by the secular state. In medieval Christianity, Asad argued, there was no separate domain called "religion"; the sacred and the secular were integrated. The separation of religion from politics, law, and science — and the definition of religion as belief in the supernatural — was an accomplishment of post-Reformation European states that needed to manage confessional conflict. The category was then exported through colonialism, applied to non-European traditions that did not recognise the distinction.
Asad's argument has reshaped the field. The religion-secular distinction, once treated as a natural feature of modern societies, is now analysed as a contingent construction with political effects. Fenella Cannell's edited volume The Anthropology of Christianity (2006) noted the paradox that anthropology — which studies religion extensively — long neglected Christianity, treating it as the unmarked religion of the anthropologist's own society. Cannell's work on Mormonism examined a tradition that defies easy placement within the religion-secular frame. Adrian Hastings's The Construction of Nationhood (1997) argued that the modern nation-state itself was shaped by Christianity, particularly through the model of the chosen people and the covenant.
Robert Hefner's work on "civil Islam" in Indonesia analysed the relationship between Islam, democratisation, and the secular state. The study of jihadist movements and "pious modernities" (Lara Deeb) examines how religious movements engage with, resist, and reshape modern political forms. The common thread is that religion and politics are not separate domains that occasionally interact; they are mutually constitutive, and the line between them is itself a political product.
Secularism, atheism, and the non-religious
The anthropology of secularism, following Asad, treats the secular not as the absence of religion but as a positive formation with its own practices, sensibilities, and institutions. Cannell's The Anthropology of Secularism interrogated what secularism is and how it shapes the conditions under which religion is understood. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) — a philosophical rather than anthropological text, but widely engaged — argued that secularism is the condition in which belief is one option among others rather than the default. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini analysed the varieties of secularism and their differential effects on different religious and sexual minorities.
A growing literature addresses atheism, nonreligion, and secular identity as objects of anthropological study. Lois Lee's Recognizing the Non-Religious (2015) argued that the non-religious constitute a meaningful social category that deserves study in its own right, not merely as the absence of religion. Johannes Quack's work on disengagement from religion in India examined atheism and rationalist movements in a context dominated by religious pluralism. Vern Bengtson's research on intergenerational transmission studied how religiosity and nonreligion pass (or fail to pass) between generations. The category of the "nones" — those who claim no religious affiliation — has become central to the sociology and anthropology of contemporary religion, particularly in Europe and North America.
Syncretism revisited: the politics of authenticity
The concept of syncretism has undergone critical scrutiny. Charles Stewart and Rosalind Shaw's edited volume Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism (1994) argued that syncretism and its rejection are political acts. To call a practice syncretic is to position oneself for or against it; to denounce syncretism is to claim authenticity. The term is loaded: it has been used by church authorities to condemn the mixture of Christianity with indigenous practice, and by indigenous leaders to denounce corruption of tradition. Andre Droogers argued that the accusation of syncretism is always a power play — an attempt by one party to define what counts as authentic religion.
Stephan Palmie's work on Cuban Santeria examined the politics of authenticity in a tradition whose "purity" is itself a modern construction. The notion that there is an original, pure African religion that was preserved in Cuba and that contemporary practice either approximates or corrupts is, Palmie argued, a product of twentieth-century nationalist and diasporic politics. The "tradition" is as much invented as preserved, and the debate about authenticity obscures the creativity of contemporary practice. The broader lesson is that syncretism is not an aberration but the normal condition of religions in contact, and that anxieties about purity are themselves historically produced and politically motivated.
Religion and embodiment
Thomas Csordas's Embodiment and Experience (1994) proposed "somatic modes of attention" as the analytical frame for studying how religion is felt in the body. Religion is not merely believed; it is cultivated through bodily discipline — posture, gesture, fasting, breathing, sensory training. Csordas argued that the body is not a passive surface on which culture is inscribed but the medium through which cultural and religious experience is constituted. The framework has been applied to charismatic Christian healing, where the body's sensations — trembling, weeping, falling — are interpreted as the Holy Spirit's presence.
Michael Lambek's work on spirit possession in Mayotte and Madagascar analysed possession as a mode of ethical and social action. The possessing spirit speaks through the medium, addressing conflicts, injuries, and obligations that the medium's ordinary self cannot voice. Possession is not pathology but a culturally elaborated practice through which agency is distributed across persons and spirits. Janice Boddy's work on spirit possession in Sudan — notably "Wombs and Alien Spirits" (1989) — analysed how women's bodies become the site of negotiation between descent groups, spirits, and the gendered order. Paul Stoller's work on Songhay possession emphasised the sensory — taste, smell, sound — dimensions of embodied religion that textual analysis cannot capture.
Pilgrimage, ecology, and death
Pilgrimage has been a productive site for ritual analysis since Victor and Edith Turner's Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), which treated pilgrimage as a liminal phenomenon generating communitas among pilgrims who leave their ordinary social positions behind. John Eade and Michael Sallnow's Contesting the Sacred (1991) challenged the Turnerian view by arguing that pilgrimage is not a site of uniform communitas but a contested arena in which different groups pursue different agendas at the same shrine. Simon Coleman and John Eade's later work reframed pilgrimage in global and comparative perspective. Anne Feldhaus's work on pilgrimage in Maharashtra showed how sacred geography constructs regional identity.
The anthropology of religion and ecology has grown with the environmental crisis. Bron Taylor's Deep Green Religion (2010) and the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005) documented traditions — deep ecology, bioregionalism, neo-paganism — that sacralise nature. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim's work on world religions and ecology examined how different traditions construct the human-nature relationship. Studies of sacred groves in India show how religious protection preserves biodiversity where state conservation fails. Religious resistance to climate change — both denial motivated by theological convictions and activism motivated by stewardship ethics — is an emerging area.
Death rituals and ancestorship remain central. Maurice Bloch's Placing the Dead (1971) showed how Merina tombs in Madagascar organised the relationship between the living and the dead, transforming individual death into the regeneration of the descent group. Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf's Celebrations of Death (1979) provided a comparative survey of mortuary ritual. Sarah Lamb's work on aging in India showed how the status of the elderly and the dead depends on kinship and ritual structures that include both the living and the anticipated dead. Omosa Aborampah's work on Akan funerals analysed how elaborate mortuary celebration both honours the dead and negotiates the status of the living.
Connections Master
Connections to 31.02.01 and 31.02.02 (ethnography and fieldwork)
The classical monographs of the anthropology of religion — Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, Turner on the Ndembu, Geertz on the Balinese, Douglas on the Lele — are also foundational works of ethnographic method. The methods introduced in 31.02.01 and 31.02.02 (participant observation, the genealogical method, the emic-etic distinction, thick description) are the tools through which religious life is accessed. Geertz's thick description was formulated in the context of interpreting religious symbols; Evans-Pritchard's intensive fieldwork produced the data for the witchcraft analysis. The anthropology of religion and the methodology of ethnography developed together.
Connections to 31.02.03 (kinship and marriage)
Kinship and religion interlock. Ancestor worship presupposes a descent system that defines who counts as an ancestor and who must honour them; the Merina tombs that Bloch analysed are organised by descent. Initiation rites mark the transition to adulthood within a descent system, and the new status they confer is a kinship status. Marriage rituals have religious dimensions, and the legitimacy of unions is frequently adjudicated by religious authorities. Syncretic religions like Vodou and Santeria organise their pantheons around family-like relations among spirits, mirroring the kinship structures of their communities. The proposed successor links (31.02.03 to 31.02.04) reflect this interdependence.
Connections to sociology (30.x)
The anthropology of religion overlaps with the sociology of religion at every point. Durkheim is a founding figure of both disciplines, and his account of religion as social glue is as central to sociology as to anthropology. Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis — that ascetic Protestantism fostered the spirit of capitalism — is a complement to Durkheim's functionalism, emphasising the content of religious ideas rather than their social effects. The secularisation thesis — that modernisation erodes religion — is debated in both disciplines, with anthropologists contributing ethnographic evidence of religion's persistence and transformation under modernity. The study of new religious movements, fundamentalism, and religious nationalism is shared terrain.
Connections to philosophy of religion and science studies
The anthropology of religion contributes to philosophy of religion by providing the empirical material against which philosophical accounts of belief, rationality, and the sacred are tested. Evans-Pritchard's analysis of Azande rationality enters philosophical debates about the demarcation of science from non-science and about whether rationality is universal or culturally relative. Asad's critique of the category "religion" contributes to philosophy and to science studies, where the social construction of analytical categories is a central concern. The literature on secularism engages political philosophy's treatment of the public-private distinction and the place of religion in the liberal state.
Connections to psychology and cognitive science
The cognitive science of religion — Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, Harvey Whitehouse — proposes that religious concepts and rituals are shaped by the architecture of human cognition. Boyer argues that concepts of gods and spirits are "minimally counterintuitive": they violate one or two intuitive expectations (a being that is invisible, a being that knows your thoughts) while satisfying all the others, which makes them memorable and transmissible. Whitehouse distinguishes the doctrinal mode (frequent, low-arousal, verbal ritual that builds large anonymous communities) from the imagistic mode (rare, high-arousal, experiential ritual that builds small intensely bonded groups). The cognitive approach is in productive tension with the interpretive anthropology of Geertz and Turner, and the relationship between the two programmes is a live methodological debate.
Connections to political theory and postcolonial studies
The anthropology of religion intersects with political theory wherever religion, state, and sovereignty meet. Asad's genealogy of the religion-secular distinction is a contribution to political theory as much as to anthropology. Mahmood's rethinking of agency engages liberal political philosophy's account of freedom. Bhabha's third space and the literature on postcolonial liminality connect ritual theory to postcolonial studies. The study of religious nationalism — Hindu nationalism in India, Christian nationalism in the United States, Islamic political movements — is shared between anthropology, political science, and postcolonial studies.
Historical and philosophical context Master
Tylor and Frazer: the evolutionist foundation
Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) defined religion as "the belief in spiritual beings" and proposed animism — the attribution of souls or spirits to natural phenomena — as its original form. Religion, on Tylor's account, evolved through stages: from animism to polytheism to monotheism, paralleling the development from savagery to civilisation. Tylor's framework was intellectualist: religion is a form of thought, an early attempt to explain the world, and it evolves as explanation becomes more adequate. The evolutionism is discredited, but Tylor's definition (religion as belief in spiritual beings) remains in use as a substantive benchmark.
James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) extended the intellectualist programme with an evolutionary sequence of magic, religion, and science. Magic is the earliest stage: the belief that one can control nature through sympathetic correspondence (like produces like) and contagion (things once in contact remain connected). Religion is the recognition that magic fails and the turn to propitiating supernatural powers. Science is the further recognition that the gods too are unreliable and the return to natural causation, now correctly understood. Frazer's sequence is discredited, but his taxonomy of magic (sympathetic and contagious) and his insistence that magic is a system of thought with its own logic influenced Evans-Pritchard and through him the entire rationality debate.
Durkheim: the social function
Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) broke with the intellectualist tradition by treating religion not as explanation but as social function. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of Australian Aboriginal totemism, Durkheim argued that the sacred objects of religion — the totem, the churinga — are symbols of the clan itself. When the clan gathers for ritual, the emotional energy generated — collective effervescence — is experienced as contact with a power outside and above the individual. That power is society, worshipped through the medium of its symbols.
The argument's significance extends beyond religion. Durkheim provided a model for analysing any social institution by its function: what does it do to maintain social solidarity? Collective effervescence is not confined to religion; modern societies generate it through secular rituals — national holidays, sporting events, political spectacles. The category of the sacred was detached from the supernatural and relocated in the social, making possible the analysis of civil religion and secular ritual that has been productive ever since. Durkheim also bequeathed the sacred-profane distinction as the foundational binary of religious analysis.
Malinowski: psychological functionalism
Bronislaw Malinowski's Trobriand fieldwork, conducted through participant observation during the First World War, provided an alternative functionalism. Where Durkheim located religion's function in society, Malinowski located magic's function in the individual psyche. Trobriand magic, Malinowski argued in Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), is not a primitive science but a response to anxiety. The Trobrianders fish in two environments: the calm inner lagoon, where fishing is safe and productive and requires no magic, and the dangerous open sea, where fishing is risky and uncertain and is preceded by elaborate magical ritual.
The correlation is the empirical core of the argument. Magic flourishes where outcomes are uncertain and the stakes are high — not only in fishing but in warfare, illness, and weather. The function of magic is to manage the anxiety that uncertainty generates, restoring the fisher's confidence and enabling action. Malinowski's framework is psychological rather than social: the unit of analysis is the individual under stress, and religion-magic is the mechanism through which stress is managed. The Durkheimian and Malinowskian functionalisms are complementary rather than contradictory, addressing different levels (society and individual) at which religion operates.
Evans-Pritchard: rationality and the comparative method
Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) is the pivot on which the anthropology of religion turned. His demonstration that Zande witchcraft belief is a logically coherent system that addresses questions science does not answer dissolved the assumption that magical belief is irrational. The Azande are not mistaken scientists; they are participants in a different explanatory system that operates alongside their empirical knowledge of the natural world. The two systems coexist because they answer different questions.
The methodological innovation was the sustained, fine-grained analysis of a single non-Western system of thought on its own terms. Evans-Pritchard did not reduce Zande belief to a function (social or psychological) or to an evolutionary stage. He took it seriously as thought and showed how it works. The approach influenced subsequent analyses of rationality (Winch, Horton, Lukes) and established the principle that the anthropology of religion must understand belief systems from within before comparing them. Evans-Pritchard's later work on Nuer religion (Nuer Religion, 1956) extended the approach, treating Nuer conceptions of spirit (kwoth) as a sophisticated theological system.
Levi-Strauss: totemism as classification
Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (1962) dissolved totemism as a religious phenomenon and reconstituted it as a mode of classification. The earlier literature (Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown) had treated totemism as a form of religion — the clan worships its totemic species as sacred. Levi-Strauss argued that totemism is not religion at all but a logic: natural species are used as operators in a system of social distinctions because they provide a ready-made set of differences (eagle differs from bear as one clan differs from another). Totemism is the "science of the concrete" — a mode of intellectual mastery that organises the world through analogy and opposition.
The argument extended to myth. Myths, Levi-Strauss argued, are not naive explanations but instruments of thought that work through the transformation of binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture) into ever more complex structures. The analysis of myth became a formal enterprise — the identification of mythemes and the transformations linking variant versions. The structuralist programme shifted the anthropology of religion from function and meaning to structure and logic, and its influence on subsequent symbolic anthropology (Turner, Douglas) was mediated through the shared commitment to treating religious thought as intellectually serious.
Turner and Geertz: the symbolic turn
The symbolic anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s, associated principally with Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, synthesised the preceding traditions and redirected the field. Turner's Ndembu work analysed ritual symbols as multivocal operators that do work on participants: they condense multiple meanings, polarise ideological and sensory poles, and drive the transformation of initiates from one status to another. Liminality and communitas, formulated through the analysis of Ndembu ritual, became general tools for the analysis of threshold phenomena across cultures and across domains.
Geertz's approach, formulated in "Religion as a Cultural System" (1966), treated religion as a system of symbols that shapes perception, feeling, and action. A religion, Geertz argued, must do two things: it must formulate a worldview (a model of reality) and an ethos (a model for how to live), and it must make these seem mutually reinforcing — the way the world is must seem to require the way one should live. Geertz's interpretive method reads rituals, myths, and symbols as texts that can be analysed for their meaning. The approach influenced a generation of anthropologists and generated the methodological commitment to thick description developed in 31.02.02.
Mary Douglas, working in the same period, extended symbolic analysis to pollution and taboo in Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas treated what counts as dirty or forbidden as an index of a culture's classificatory system: things that fall between categories are experienced as dangerous and become subject to ritual handling. The approach connected ritual, symbolism, and cognition in a way that drew on Durkheim and Levi-Strauss while producing a distinctive analytical tool. The symbolic programme dominated the anthropology of religion from the late 1960s through the 1980s and remains influential.
Asad and the construction of religion
Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion (1993) initiated the most recent reorientation of the field. Asad argued that the category "religion" — the object that the anthropology of religion takes as its subject — is itself a historical product of post-Reformation Europe. The definition of religion as belief in the supernatural, distinct from politics, law, and science, was produced by secularising European states managing confessional conflict. The category was then exported through colonialism and applied to non-European traditions that did not recognise the distinction.
The implication is methodological as well as substantive. If "religion" is a constructed category, then the comparative study of religion risks comparing phenomena that share a label but not a nature. Asad's genealogy does not abolish comparison but requires it to be reflexive — attentive to the history of the category and to the political work it does. The argument has generated a large literature on secularism, the secular, and the religion-politics distinction, and it has made the construction of "religion" itself an object of anthropological analysis. The field that has emerged is more historically and politically attuned than its predecessors, more suspicious of universal categories, and more attentive to the ways in which the analytical vocabulary shapes what can be seen.
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