Introduction

The seemingly unavoidable tension between the beliefs of anthropologists and the beliefs of the people they study has been expressed over the years in many ways. Human societies differ in innumerable ways in technology, social relationships, values, beliefs, and, indeed, everything else, but all the efforts to arrange societies on some sort of continuum from "primitive" to "civilized" have crashed ignominiously. This chapter argues with theories about the religions of primitive peoples. Every theoretical stance ever fashionable in anthropology's intellectual history has been brought to bear on the subject of religion, and field researchers in every corner of the globe have tried to document or at least report back on the diverse beliefs and varied religious practices they encountered in their fieldwork. Every society on earth divides up work on the basis of constructed gender categories, and these categories are informed and enforced by religious dictum and practice.