Every society anthropologists have studied has beliefs and practices concerning powers beyond ordinary experience: spirits, ancestors, gods, sacred places, forbidden acts. Anthropology studies religion as a human practice. It asks what beliefs and rituals do for people and how they fit into the rest of life, without trying to settle whether their claims are true. This level looks at how anthropologists have explained belief, magic and ritual everywhere.

Early theories

Tylor offered a famously minimal definition in 1871: religion is "the belief in Spiritual Beings." Tylor defined religion, at its most basic, as belief in spiritual beings, and he called the earliest form animism, the belief that people, animals and things have souls. He guessed that it arose as early humans tried to explain dreams and death. James Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, collected customs from around the world and arranged them in a grand sequence. Frazer proposed that human thought moved from magic, to religion, to science. Both men worked from the armchair, and their ladder-like schemes fell with the rest of unilineal evolution. Yet they asked a question that has never gone away: why do people everywhere turn to unseen powers?

Some key words entered European languages through encounters with Pacific peoples. The word taboo comes from a Polynesian word, recorded in Tonga during Captain James Cook's voyage of 1777, for something set apart and forbidden. The Melanesian word mana, describing a sacred power that people and objects can hold, was popularized by the missionary Robert Codrington in 1891.

Magic and uncertainty

Malinowski noticed something revealing in the Trobriand Islands. Fishing inside the calm lagoon was safe and reliable, and people did it with skill alone. Fishing on the open sea was dangerous and unpredictable, and it was surrounded by elaborate magic. Malinowski observed that Trobrianders used magic for risky open-sea fishing but not for safe lagoon fishing. He concluded that magic is not a failed science. Trobrianders knew perfectly well how to build canoes and handle nets. Magic took over where knowledge and skill could not guarantee the outcome, and it gave people confidence to act in the face of danger. Anthropologists have since found the same pattern among baseball players and students preparing for exams.

Witchcraft explains the particular

The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied the Azande of central Africa and published his account in 1937. In one celebrated case a granary collapsed, injuring people who had been sitting in its shade. The Azande knew that termites had eaten through the supports. What they asked was why it fell at that moment, on those people. For the Azande, witchcraft explained why a misfortune struck particular people at a particular moment, a question that natural causes alone leave unanswered. Evans-Pritchard showed that Azande beliefs, including consultation of a poison oracle, formed a coherent system of reasoning, even though he did not share its premises.

Rites of passage

In 1909 the French folklorist Arnold van Gennep compared ceremonies that move people from one social status to another: birth, initiation, marriage and death. He found a common structure. Van Gennep found that rites of passage have three phases: separation, transition and incorporation. First people are removed from their old status; then they pass through an in-between period; finally they are welcomed back in their new role.

From the 1960s the British anthropologist Victor Turner, who worked among the Ndembu of Zambia, focused on that middle stage, which he called liminal, from the Latin word for threshold. People in a liminal state are neither what they were nor yet what they will become, and ordinary ranks fall away. Turner called the intense bond of equality among people sharing a liminal phase communitas. Military basic training, a pilgrimage and the first week of university all produce it.

Seeing ourselves as strange

Ritual is not only something other people do. In 1956 the American anthropologist Horace Miner published "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", describing a people obsessed with shrines in their homes, mouth rites involving hog hairs and magic powders, and powerful medicine men. Readers slowly realized that Nacirema is American spelled backward. Miner's essay described ordinary American habits in the language used for exotic peoples, revealing how strange familiar customs can look from outside, and how the tone of ethnographic writing can make any people seem odd.

Worked example: a graduation

Consider a high school graduation as a rite of passage. Separation: seniors finish classes and are set apart from younger students at a rehearsal. Transition: dressed identically in gowns and caps, with no class rank visible, they march together and share an emotional bond with classmates they barely knew, a clear case of communitas. Incorporation: each receives a diploma, the tassel is moved, and they are announced as graduates, a new status with new expectations. Meanwhile, some carried a lucky pen into their final exams. Malinowski would recognize that small act at once: magic appears where effort cannot fully control the result.