ABSTRACT
As noted in the previous sections, certainly by the time of the early Greek philosophers, people in the Western world were speculating on the origins of religion, and doing so through comparison with other cultures. Xenophanes had speculated on how people imagine gods in their own image and appearance, and Herodotus had noted how deities from a foreign culture had migrated to and been adopted by people in his own culture. To some extent these philosophers/historians were engaged in a sort of rudimentary anthropology of religion. However, the discipline of anthropology, as it is currently conceived, is a relatively recent phenomenon rooted in the spirit of the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment. As its name suggests anthropology (anthropos-human being + logos-study) is the study of human beings, persons, or humanity (or as encountered in older, now inappropriate, non-gender-inclusive language, the “study of man”). In telling ways the discipline of anthropology is also rooted in the age of discovery and colonial expansion, which began in the fifteenth century. The European contact with New World cultures, as well as with people from societies in Africa and the East, led to a fascination with the appearance, behaviors, and artifacts of these “others.” When conjoined with the emerging theory of evolution-for Charles Darwin had published Origin of Species in 1858-early anthropologists began to see their
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species to the evolution of societies in what is sometimes referred to as social Darwinism. Eurocentric attitudes concocted the notion that European societies (and Western monotheistic religion) represented the apex of an evolutionary process in which non-European societies and people could be seen as lower on the evolutionary ladder. Many early anthropologists were thus measuring skulls and other body parts of so-called primitive tribes to demonstrate how these meshed with the archaeological discoveries of prehistoric hominids. It was thought that people who lived in technologically simple societies, in a close interrelationship with nature (i.e. huntergatherers, or small scale agriculturalists), were physically, mentally, socially, and religiously closer to some ancient extinct hominids such as Neanderthals. Much of this kind of anthropology has mostly been abandoned, as the study of human biological evolution has been ceded to physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and biologists. From the late nineteenth century, anthropology began a shift in emphasis toward the study of human culture, and this is its defining characteristic today. The notion of social and cultural evolution is still promoted in various forms but is in tension with the prevailing theories that regard particular societies and cultures as developing according to their distinctive historical and environmental circumstances, and not as situated along some imaginary path in which high technology or large cities are necessary features of the evolutionary frontline.
