ABSTRACT
Like all items of culture, words and the concepts they are thought to convey have a history (such as the classification of, and the various associations and value judgments that we make when we hear, the name ‘Mount Everest’); not only spelling and pronunciation but meanings and usages change (sometimes dramatically) over time and place. So too, ‘religion’, and the assumption that the world is neatly divided between religious and nonreligious spheres (i.e., Church and State), can be understood as a product of historical development and not a brute fact of social life. Today, long after the modern usage of the word ‘religion’ was first coined, it is no longer obvious how it was understood in the past or how we ought to use it today. In fact, it is not altogether clear that scholars should continue to use it when studying human behavior. After all, just because a group of people use a concept as part of their own way of talking about themselves and the rest of the world does not mean that scholars studying these people must use it as well.
