ABSTRACT

Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life had a great deal of influence and many sociologists and particularly anthropologists took up and applied his ideas. One such was A. R. Radcliffe-Brown who did much to establish functionalism as the dominant perspective in anthropology and sociology. Although influenced by Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown differs from him in a number of ways. Most importantly perhaps, he differs in not accepting the idea that religious ideas express a truth even in a symbolic way. He accepts that, for the most part, religious beliefs are error and illusion. Modern functionalists became aware that the existence of a social need for religion is not adequate to account for it and have attempted to complete their functionalist analyses by seeking to root religious belief and behaviour in certain fundamental aspects of human nature. Kingsley Davis’s textbook Human Society is a good example of the tension between the social and the individual dimensions in functionalist accounts of religion.