Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories

by Benson Saler

How might we transform a folk category - in this case religion - into a analytical category suitable for cross-cultural research? In this volume, the author addresses that question. He critically explores various approaches to the problem of conceptualizing religion, particularly with respect to certain disciplinary interests of anthropologists. He argues that the concept of family resemblances, as that concept has been refined and extended in prototype theory in the contemporary cognitive sciences, is the most plausible analytical strategy for resolving the central problem of the book. In the solution proposed, religion is conceptualized as an affair of "more or less" rather than a matter of "yes or no," and no sharp line is drawn between religion and non-religion.

Genres: Anthropology, Religion

Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

Reviews

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressively multi-disciplinary book in which Saler draws together anthropology, philosophy, and scientific work on categorisation to assess how we should work out what is and is not 'religion'. He draws strongly on Wittgenstein's family resemblances and on prototype theory, and proposes a solution which acknowledges and works with the European origins of this concept, while also noting the existence of various more-or-less religion-y cases (an example he returns to several times is the health food movement).