"Religion" in Non-Western Cultures?

Abstract

I wish to suggest in this brief communication that most of the best-known anthropological writings on 'religion in non-Western cultures contain as their central assumption a proposition that is based on an error in reasoning. The proposition is that can usefully be thought of as existing universally, and the error in reasoning consists of an unacknowledged and apparently unrecognized switch of meaning for the term religion in the middle of the argument. My thesis may be summarized as follows: when the term religion appears in the ethnographies of non-Western peoples, there is always an implicit comparison with the West. But ethnographers use one set of criteria for determining outside the West and another set of criteria for determining in the West. If the ethnographer were to use the same criteria for the West that he uses for the non-West, the effect would be a serious undermining of current notions regarding the universality of religion. Let me now try to make a very brief inventory of the various ways in which the term religion is used in the social science literature. The one common denominator all usages seem to encompass is that of a relatively high degree of emotional investment on the part of the social actor. Following Howard Becker (1957), I shall call this the realm of the sacred.2 Within this realm there are two major types of action: what I shall call nacirema and sacred institution.