ABSTRACT
We have examined culture as ethnicity in a few chapters, where ethnic groups were either approached as highly compact or as having a low degree of compactness. Turning now to the analysis of civilization, the key problem is again that of compactness. Since civilizations are typically carried by huge groups, comprising many countries, they can only be coherent if they are founded on some single strong common component. We argue that religion could constitute such a cement. In fact, religion is the critical factor in identifying the major civilizations of the world. Ethnicity is the culture of a people, but, ‘people’ may stand for very different kinds of groups, which explains to some extent why ethnic theory has delivered controversial results. Let us turn to the other major entity in cultural studies — namely, religion.
