Blog Entry IV - On Religion...

Religion, I think, is a subjective name given to classify shared systems of thought that include narratives, symbols, values and applications that comprise what individuals interpret as an overall experience. Religion should not exclusively study the ways in which people express their religion, but rather should study why people express religion in these ways and what their religious experiences mean to them. Until recently, anthropologists have focused on particular stories, icons, and rituals, and how culture affects them, how they affect culture, and how they compare to the religions of other cultures. This method of inquiry is limited similarly in the way that ethnographic writing is limited, not taking into account the individual members of particular cultures, and religions in this case, and what and why they believe, think, and feel.

For two centuries, anthropologists attempted to define religion by separating societies and cultures into those that were civilized and those that were uncivilized, and used religion as a primary means to measure the level of advancement a particular society or culture displayed, and their advancement was accordingly demonstrated by the complexity of their religion. Anthropologists compared the spheres of “Western” religions to “non-Western” religions, as they similarly compared the relative intricacy and progression of “Western” and “non-Western” spheres of thought. Until the mid-twentieth century, anthropology and the study of religion endured a conceptual polarity between “primitive” and “civilized” modes of thought and inquiry. As in Edward Said’s “Orientalism”, scholars were constantly attempting to make comparative analysis based on the comparison of “Us” and “Them,” and on the Silk Road, anthropological concepts were derived from the ethnographic accounts of explorers and missionaries who originated from clear-cut religious traditions, and these accounts were assessed by scholars whose concepts were shaped by the same clear-cut religious traditions.

Current studies of religion still struggle to overcome the biases that anthropologists of religion established throughout two centuries of study, but current anthropologists have realized that the focus of their study should not be a comparison of religions and cultures, but to the way that religion is experienced by people as individuals, and how these individual people express religious experience. This idea is appropriately summarized as follows: “An important concept in the study of religion is that anthropologists fail to take religion seriously, and hence no matter their level of methodological sophistication, they simply cannot fully understand and appreciate the experience of people for whom religious experiences are real.”