ABSTRACT
A notable early attempt to develop a technical – rather than relying on a common or folk – definition of religion as a universal human feature was that of the nineteenth-century anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) in his influential book, Primitive Culture (1871, 2 vols.; reprinted today as Religion in Primitive Culture). A ‘rudimentary definition of religion’, he wrote, ‘seems best to fall back at once on this essential source...belief in Spiritual Beings’. In this classic, minimalist definition we see the still common emphasis on religion as a private, intellectual activity (that is, religion equals believing in this or that, as if it is all about what goes on between your two ears) rather than an emphasis on, for example, the behavioral or the social components, as in Emile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) emphasis on public ritual and social institution in his still influential sociological study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). As stated in Durkheim’s often quoted definition: ‘religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them... In showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing.’ Unlike Durkheim’s sense of religion as something eminently social that you do with your body (making it public), for Tylor, religion is an eminently individual thing that you do with your mind (making it private).
