The anthropology of religion is the comparative study of religions in their cultural, social, historical, and material contexts.
The English term religion has no exact equivalent in most other languages. For example, burial practices are more likely to be called customs and not sharply differentiated from other ways of doing things. Early Homo sapiens (for example, the Neanderthals at Krapina [now in Croatia]) began burying their dead at least 130,000 years ago. To what end? And how and why have such practices changed over time? What might they have in common with the multitude of burial customs—known to be associated with differing conceptions of death and life—among people in the world today; for example, what might embalming practices in ancient Egypt and 19th-century Bolivia have in common with each other and with 21st-century embalming practices in North America? How do these relate to secondary burials, involving the exhumation and reburial of the corpse or its bones, as in Madagascar and Siberia, or rituals of cremation, as in Japan, India, or France? Paradoxically, anthropologists’ documentation of the enormous diversity of human customs, past and present, puts into question the very existence of “religion” as a single coherent system of practices, values, or beliefs. Indeed, what constitutes “religion” may be hotly debated even among coreligionists. The study of religion in anthropology requires consideration of all these matters, including anthropologists’ own terms of analysis.
Scholars of religion throughout the world have long recognized what the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1902) called “the varieties of religious experience.” Since the mid-19th century, one of the first and most important contributions of anthropologists has been to extend the study of those varieties beyond the formal doctrines and liturgies of established religious institutions to include related customs, regardless of when, where, and by whom they are practiced and whether they are celebrated, suppressed, or taken for granted. The anthropology of religion is the study of, in the words of the English anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion [1965]), “how religious beliefs and practices affect in any society the minds, the feelings, the lives, and the interrelations of its members…religion is what religion does.” Although Edward Burnett Tylor’s classic Primitive Culture (1871) documented the wide-ranging doings of his fellow Europeans, most anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on so-called primitive peoples living outside Europe and North America, on the grounds that religion, increasingly defined by contrast to reason, was a historically primitive form of behaviour that was already giving way to science. Subsequent research has proved these assumptions to be wrong. As anthropology has grown to include the study of all humans on an equal footing and the field of anthropology is practiced throughout the world, anthropologists continue to confront their parochial biases.
Over the next century, as museums with anthropological collections continued to develop as research institutions, many of the anthropologists who worked there turned away from collection-based work. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists continued to use collections for study, but, until a late 20th-century revival of interest in the history of anthropology and museums and in studies of material culture and the anthropology of art, few cultural anthropologists worked actively with collections.
The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed great change in the practice of anthropology in museums. The civil rights and decolonization movements of the 1960s increased awareness of the politics of collecting and representation. Ethical issues that had been ignored in the past began to influence museum practices. By the turn of the 21st century, most anthropologists working in museums had understood the need to incorporate diverse points of view in exhibitions and collections care and to rely on the expertise of people from the cultures represented as well as museum professionals. At the same time, many new museums—such as the U’mista Cultural Centre (1980) in Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada—were established within the communities that created the objects on display. Anthropologists in museums also were concerned with issues such as the ethics of collecting, access to collections and associated data, and ownership and repatriation.
I just got a whole story for you to get it xD (I made some mistakes i think ;-;)
Hope this helps! ~ Kana ^^
