Evans Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Talal Asad have all grappled with defining and characterizing religion anthropologically.
[citation needed] Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), sometimes called the “father of anthropology,” took an evolutionary approach to religion.
[3] James George Frazer (1854-1941), most well-known for his book The Golden Bough, also approached the study of religion from an evolutionist perspective.
Frazer's hierarchy of religions included different stages: first magic, then religious, and ending in scientific.
The society imparts the totem with its power, meaning, and existence, which in turn gives the god or the religion its significance.
In “Origins of Belief,” Durkheim argues that a totem symbolizes society, or as he calls it, the clan, and the god.
In her most famous book, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, she compares Western and “primitive” societies in showing that Western societies also relied on “magic” through rituals around purity and pollution, such as teeth brushing.
Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad publicly debated the “universal” nature of religion.
Influenced by Michel Foucault and Edward Said, Asad questions the conceptual assumptions involved in or undergirding the production of knowledge.
[4] This is what led Asad to question the existence of separate sphere of society that could be called or identified as “religion.” In undermining the existence of religion as a separate sphere, Asad points to Western modernity as producing religion as distinct from other parts of society.
Evolutionist perspectives were reflective of Darwinian theories of evolution and saw religious systems in a taxonomic and hierarchical way: some religions were closer to the truth than others and Christianity was always at the top of pyramid.
The anthropology of religion today reflects the influence of, or an engagement with, such theorists as Karl Marx (1818-1883), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Max Weber (1864-1920).
[8] At one time[vague] anthropologists believed that certain religious practices and beliefs were more or less universal to all cultures at some point in their development, such as a belief in spirits or ghosts, the use of magic as a means of controlling the supernatural, the use of divination as a means of discovering occult knowledge, and the performance of rituals such as prayer and sacrifice as a means of influencing the outcome of various events through a supernatural agency, sometimes taking the form of shamanism or ancestor worship.
[citation needed] According to Clifford Geertz, religion is "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
"[9]Today, religious anthropologists debate, and reject, the cross-cultural validity of these categories (often viewing them as examples of European primitivism).