ABSTRACT
Religion seems to give the anthropologist more grief than does technology or social organization or practically anything else. Of all the practices on which the anthropologist reports, religion is most likely to raise suspicions that anthropologist has gone native. In every human society there is an ordered system of values, beliefs, relationships, and rules about such matters as death, meaning, sanctioned actions, and control of events. Anthropologists study culture, and culture–by way of what the anthropologists label religion–orders the universe, thereby eliminating chaos, meaning-lessness, and human helplessness. Anthropologists, it therefore follows, must not only study religion but must give the subject at least as much attention as they would give to any other dimension of culture. One may study slash-and-burn horticulture in West Irian whether one is a gardener oneself or has never touched a hoe; all that anthropologists ask or expect is that personal experience and personal beliefs play no part in the research or the later analysis.
