week:11-unit-11 Religion and Magic

WHAT IS RELIGION? Given the varied nature and worldwide scope of beliefs and behavior labeled “religious,” anthropologists know how difi cult it is to deine religion. In his book Religion: An Anthropological View, Anthony F. C. Wallace offered this definition: “belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces” (1966, p. 5). By “supernatural” he referred to a nonmaterial realm beyond (but believed to impinge on) the observable world. This realm cannot be verii ed or falsii ed empirically and is inexplicable in ordinary terms. It must be accepted “on faith.” Supernatural beings (e.g., deities, ghosts, demons, souls, spirits) dwell outside our material world, which they may visit from time to time. There also are supernatural or sacred forces, some of them wielded by deities and spirits, others that simply exist. In many societies, people believe they can benei t from, become imbued with, or manipulate such forces (see Bowen 2011; Bowie 2006; Crapo 2003; Hicks 2010; Lambek 2008; Stein and Stein 2011; Warms, Garber, and McGee 2009). Wallace’s dei nition of religion focuses on presumably universal categories (beings, powers, and forces) within the supernatural realm. For Émile Durkheim (1912/2001), one of the founders of the anthropology of religion, the key distinction was between the sacred and the profane. Like the supernatural for Wallace, Durkheim’s “sacred” was the domain set off from the ordinary, or the mundane (he used the word profane). For Durkheim, every society had its sacred, but that domain varied from society to society. Durkheim focused on Native Australian societies, which he believed had preserved the most elementary, or basic, forms of religion. He noted that their most sacred objects, including plants and animals that served as totems, were not supernatural at all. Rather, they were “realworld” entities (e.g., kangaroos, grubs) that, over the generations, had acquired special meaning for the social groups that had made them sacred and continued to “worship” them.

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