ABSTRACT
The problem for anthropologists interested in the institution of economy has been that economics is a distinct and important academic discipline in its own right, one that not only antedates anthropology but that clearly overshadows it in academia as well as in the world at large. Melville J. Herskovits, of course, was not so much interested in "validating" economic laws as he was in trying to make sense of economic behavior in the societies anthropologists were studying. This chapter attempts to amalgamate the views on the nature and scope of religion proposed by some of the most illustrious scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and more. In other words the operational definition encompasses supernatural belief systems as easily as substantive encompasses formal. The chapter argues that the operational definition leads anthropologists to the observation that a belief system–a religion–provides an explanation of events, but it does much more.
