Anthropological interest in religion extends as far back as the nineteenth-century emergence of anthropology as an academic discipline. In nineteenth-century anthropology, religion was often opposed to *science, and placed in an earlier position on a universal model of human *evolution. Religion could, therefore, be used to mark out the non-rational, or non-modern elements in any society.
In the twentieth century, as social and cultural anthropologists freed themselves from the evolutionist assumptions of their predecessors, most field studies were of so-called ‘primitive religions’. The most important theoretical influence was †Durkheim, especially his emphasis on *ritual as a kind of collective action in which society celebrates its own transcendent power over its individual members (Evans-Pritchard 1965). But, from the 1950s in particular, ethnographic attention shifted to local forms of world religions such as *Islam, *Buddhism and *Christianity, and theoretical attention shifted from Durkheim’s *functionalism to †Max Weber’s comparative sociology of religion. More recently still, Weber’s theoretical assumptions about the place of religion in the modern world have been subject to historical criticism. Ironically, the anthropology of religion has now come full circle to return to the Western arguments about science and religion from which it first emerged in the nineteenth century.
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