Religion: An Anthropological View

About the book:

This book, despite its attempts to make a comprehensive and wide-ranging treatment of religions and in that sense it is a text, can be seen as a statement of the issue which I think is the most salient in the many publications related to religion. My personal feeling is that social perspectives (including sociological and anthropological ones) tend to focus on the environment surrounding religion rather than on religion itself, and that religion can best be understood through a combination of psychological and cultural perspectives.

In order to be able to accomplish this task, I think it is necessary to bring all civilized and primitive beliefs, superstition, human, as well as spiritual and magical wisdom under the umbrella of religion. In addition to acknowledging some common features, I do not deny the differences between the liberal ideologies of the present day and the old sectarian groups. But my point of view tends to naturalism; Religion is a reality in nature, and in order to understand religion it must be seen as a product of the laws of nature that determine other natural phenomena. Religion is a form of human behavior. It is widespread, omnipresent, and culturally rooted in complex details, but it is not at all useful, from the technological point of view, for the accomplishment of basic human tasks; economic, domestic and political.

Accordingly; the program of the book aims at developing the psychological and cultural doctrine in five chapters. The first chapter briefly shows some traditional anthropological theories about religion. The second part undertakes an analysis of the categories under which religions fall and according to which religions are described, and an appropriate approximate classification of religious institutions and cultural spaces. The third chapter clarifies the main objectives of religious rites and clan means that contribute to achieving these objectives.

As for the fourth chapter, it presents some of the information currently available about the function of religion, whether in terms of considering religion a product of other social and cultural conditions, or in terms of considering it cause of other social and cultural conditions. This presentation focused on accurate data, especially ensuring the validity of statistics and cultural studies, rather than focusing on the more or the less likely quantity, generally controversial topics, clues as to the real social functions of religion in each society.

Finally, in the fifth chapter, we recounted the study of the long-term historical processes and the evolving changes related to religion, as well as the statement of the theory of religious rituals. The statement of this theory of religious rituals is partially laid down; because it is best understood after explaining the basics, as well as some historical data in the first four chapters, and because it is directly related to any intellectual speculations about the future of religion.