Clifford Geertz (1973:90) provides a succinct definition of religion from a structural perspective.
Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
The emphasis here lies on belief and the meaning of symbols—the manner in which belief serves to instill in people a sense of where they belong in society and the universe. In this sense, Geertz’s definition of religion is strongly informed by Durkheim’s conception of social solidarity. Rituals, in this conception, serve to enact or promote symbolic meanings in a format that the masses can easily understand. As phrased by Wallace (1966:102), “ritual is religion in action; it is the cutting edge of the tool. . . . It is ritual that accomplishes what religion sets out to do.” In this formulation, ritual is a form of human action determined or shaped by underlying religious views.
Of particular importance to a structural perspective is the idea that religion is a particularly stable and long-lasting cultural phenomenon. If religion is a relatively stable phenomenon, and ritual is the enactment of religious principles, then rituals must also be relatively stable over time. Thus, many scholars view rituals as a particularly anachronistic element of human societies (Bloch 1977, 1986; Connerton 1989). Just as many Christians continue to use the King James Bible, many societies continue to engage in rituals that employ archaic speech or actions. This is perhaps best illustrated in Bloch’s (1986) classic discussions of boys’ circumcision ritual among the Merina in Madagascar. Bloch demonstrates that the content and form of the ritual has been unchanged for almost two centuries, despite its shift from a small-scale village puberty rite to a large-scale ritual central to Merina identity.
The anachronistic and invariant elements of ritual fit well within archaeological approaches that employ historical and ethnohistorical sources. If religion is among the most stable and long-lasting cultural phenomena, then ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and historic accounts—even those that postdate the archaeological period being studied by several centuries—are a legitimate source for the study of ancient religious practices. Furthermore, given the richness of the symbolic, mythic, and doctrinal information available in these sources, it is not surprising that archaeologists who have a more structural understanding of religion tend to focus on these sources. Given the difficulty of determining the meaning of symbols in purely prehistoric contexts (Fogelin 2007a; Hayes 1993), assuming the stability of religion over the long term is a convenient research strategy. Recent trends in the anthropology of religion, however, have questioned these more simple formulations of historical memory.
World History
