In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Émile Durkheim defined religion as:
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Anthropology · Foundations
Religion
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In anthropology, religion A shared system of beliefs and practices through which a group relates to things it treats as sacred or supernatural; the OpenStax working definition is a shared system of beliefs and practices regarding the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena. Full entry → is a cultural system: a group's shared beliefs The ideas a group holds about the supernatural — what exists, what is true, how the unseen world works, and what it asks of people. Full entry → and practices about the sacred Things set apart and treated as extraordinary, distinct from the ordinary objects of daily life; Durkheim's term for what a religion marks off and surrounds with special handling. Full entry →. Anthropologists describe what religion is and what it does — it supplies meaning, builds community, and keeps order — without judging whether any religion is true. The classic views of Tylor (animism The attribution of souls or spiritual agency to things, including natural elements such as rocks and trees; Tylor treated it as the earliest stage of religion, a ranking later abandoned. Full entry →) and Frazer (magic A supposed system of natural law whose practice is believed to cause a transformation; Frazer analyzed sympathetic magic through the laws of similarity and contagion. Full entry → to religion to science) are history, not current theory. Religions change, like all culture. Religion, in one line: meaning-making made social.
Why this matters
Why should a course about people spend a lesson on religion? Because every human society has had beliefs about the sacred, and those beliefs shape daily life as much as economics or politics do. Academically, religion is where anthropologists watch a group's deepest assumptions about existence take visible form — in its practices, its specialists, and its symbols. Practically, understanding religion as a cultural system helps you read news, workplaces, and neighborhoods without treating unfamiliar belief as exotic or wrong. Forward-looking: as societies change, religions change with them, so the descriptive habit this lesson builds keeps paying off.
The college version
What religion is: the working definition
Anthropologists treat religion as culture, not as a verdict on the universe. OpenStax's Introduction to Anthropology offers the working definition: religion is a shared system of beliefs and practices regarding the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena. Two classic formulations frame the field. Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things — things set apart and forbidden — which unite those who adhere to them into a single moral community. Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence. Honest note: no single definition won the argument. The two sit at different poles, and anthropologists commonly cite both, because religion includes social structures, sets of beliefs, awe, and mystery at once. This lesson keeps the working definition and keeps the debate in view.
The elements of a religious system
Most religious systems combine four elements. Beliefs are the ideas a group holds about the sacred and the unseen — for example, that the river that floods every spring is watched over by a guardian spirit. Rituals are the prescribed, repeatable acts that express and renew beliefs, such as blessing the boats before the fishing season; ritual A prescribed, repeatable act or sequence of acts that expresses and renews a group's beliefs, such as a blessing, a feast, or a procession; ritual receives its own EliExplains topic. Full entry → is a sibling topic of this one, so here it counts as one element among four. practitioners The people who carry out religious roles for a group; anthropologists distinguish full-time priests, prophets who call for renewal, and part-time shamans who work with individuals. Full entry → are the people who carry out religious roles: full-time priests who officiate at recurring events, prophets who call for a renewal of beliefs, and part-time shamans who work with individuals on specific problems. Symbols are objects, images, or gestures that carry a meaning the group assigns, such as the red thread tied to a newborn's wrist that means protected. Durkheim's definition breaks religion into beliefs, practices, and social organization; Geertz's centers on symbols; the practitioner types come from ethnography. No element is optional in practice, though the mix varies enormously across groups.
What religion does: meaning, community, order
Durkheim's account is functional: it asks what religion does for a group, and the answer has three parts. Meaning: religion supplies shared conceptions of the order of existence — answers to where the world came from, why things happen, and what matters. Community: religion unites adherents into one moral community, gathering people who might otherwise have little in common into shared occasions and a shared identity. Order: religion establishes and reaffirms common value systems and forms of social control, from rules about sharing to standards of right and wrong. The three work together: the meaning a group shares is what makes its community feel like a community, and the community is what keeps the order alive.
The classic views: Tylor and Frazer
Two nineteenth-century schemes shaped early anthropology and are now taught as history. Edward Burnett Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1871), identified animism — the attribution of souls or spiritual agency to things, including natural elements such as rocks and trees — as the earliest form of religion, the starting point of an evolutionary ladder. James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1890), arranged human thought in a sequence from magic to religion to science, treating magic as a supposed system of natural law. Both schemes ranked societies, and anthropology abandoned that ranking; by the 1940s, classifying religions by level of development had fallen out of favor. Frazer's analysis of sympathetic magic and Tylor's term animism survive as descriptive tools; their evolutionary claims do not.
Religions change
Like all social institutions, religion evolves across time and cultures. OpenStax puts it plainly: religions adapt to changes in population size and to the reality of people's daily lives. Change runs in both directions. As societies grew more complex, religions institutionalized: state religions gained full-time administrators, written doctrine, and organized recruitment by conversion. And established religions keep adapting — a shrine festival moves its date when the harvest does, a community adds a commemoration after a disaster, a congregation reworks its gatherings for members who have moved abroad. Continuity and change run together; adaptation is how a religion stays alive, not a sign that it is failing.
The honest framing: description, not judgment
One discipline rule governs everything above. Anthropologists study religion descriptively: they record, compare, and explain beliefs and practices as cultural phenomena, and they do not evaluate whether any religion's claims are true. That is not indifference; it is method. Judging truth belongs to theology and the philosophy of religion, which other subjects in this library own; anthropology's job is to understand how belief works in human life. The reality check: religion is meaning-making made social. A group's beliefs about the sacred are its way of making the world understandable, and those beliefs become religion when they are shared, practiced, and passed on. Describe that well, and you have described one of the most universal things humans do.
Eli explains
The same idea, in plain words
Explain it like I’m 10
Religion is a group's shared way of making sense of the world and acting on it together. Every religion, anthropologists say, has four parts: beliefs (what the group holds true about the sacred), rituals (the repeatable acts that express those beliefs), practitioners (the people who lead or heal), and symbols (things that carry agreed meanings). Religion also does work for the group: it supplies meaning, binds people into community, and keeps order. One rule matters most: anthropologists describe all of this without judging whether the beliefs are true. That question belongs to theology and philosophy. To an anthropologist, a belief system that a group shares, practices, and passes on is simply culture doing what culture does — and it changes, as all culture does.
Picture it like this
Think of religion as a group's shared map of the unseen. The map shows what lies beyond everyday life — the beings, forces, and places people believe in — and it marks the routes: how to travel safely, what to do at the dangerous crossings, and who can guide you. Everyone in the group reads the same map, which is what makes it social; and the map is not the territory, which is why anthropologists study how people use it rather than whether it is accurate.
Where the picture stops working
The map breaks down because a map is a passive object you consult, while religion is practiced, felt, argued over, and performed — it changes the people who use it. A map that proved wrong would be thrown away, but religions that adapt survive for centuries. And a map implies one correct version, while real groups hold overlapping, contested versions of their beliefs at once.
Worked example
Every September, the fishing town of Saltport holds a blessing of the fleet. One evening shows every element of religion at once: the belief that the sea is watched over by a guardian spirit; the ritual itself, the procession of ribbon-decked boats around the harbor (the deeper analysis of ritual belongs to its own topic); the practitioners, led by the harbor chaplain; and the symbols, the ribbons and the iron anchor amulet hung on every prow. The evening also does Durkheim's work: families share the meaning of the sea's dangers, neighbors who barely speak all year stand together on the quay, and the oldest captain repeats the rule that the largest catch goes to the widow of a drowned sailor. When the fish stocks shifted and the fleet began sailing later in the year, the blessing moved to October — the religion adapted, as religions do.
Key takeaway
In anthropology, religion is a cultural system: shared beliefs and practices about the sacred that give life meaning, build community, and keep order. The discipline describes how religion works; it never rules on whether it is true. Religion is meaning-making made social.
Quick check
3 questions here, of 5 in this lesson’s practice set. Answers stay hidden until you check.
A healer in a highland community is called to help a family whose herd is failing. She drums through the night to journey into the spirit world, discovers which ancestor is offended, and prescribes an offering. She holds no permanent religious office and is only summoned when someone needs her. Anthropologists would classify her as:
Choose an answer, then check it.
Every autumn, the town of Saltport holds a blessing of the fleet: the harbor chaplain reads the story of the town's founding, families share a feast, and the oldest captain repeats the rule that the biggest catch goes to the widow of a drowned sailor. An anthropologist using Durkheim's functional account would say the blessing simultaneously:
Choose an answer, then check it.
Study tools & related lessonsYou’ll learn to · Common mistakes · Easily confused · Key vocabulary · Related
You’ll learn to
- Define religion as anthropologists study it, attributing the working definition to OpenStax and the classic formulations to Émile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz.
- Distinguish the elements of a religious system — beliefs, rituals, practitioners, and symbols — and give an original example of each.
- Explain the three functions Durkheim attributed to religion — meaning, community, and order — with an original example showing all three at work.
- Describe Tylor's animism and Frazer's magic-religion-science scheme as historical views that anthropology has since abandoned as explanations.
- Apply the principle that religions adapt, tracing how a religious practice changes when circumstances change, using an original example.
- Analyze the anthropological stance of describing religious systems without evaluating their truth, distinguishing description from judgment.
Common mistakes
Religion is private — it is what people believe inside their heads.
Anthropologists treat religion as a cultural system: shared beliefs plus rituals, practitioners, and symbols. A religion no one practices or passes on would not be the object of study at all.
Anthropologists are in the business of showing that religions are true or false.
The stance is descriptive: anthropologists explain how beliefs organize life in a group. Evaluating truth claims is the job of theology and the philosophy of religion — other subjects, and out of anthropology's scope.
Tylor's animism and Frazer's magic-to-religion-to-science scheme are still how anthropologists explain religion.
Both were abandoned as explanations. They are taught as intellectual history, and their terms survive only as descriptive tools, without the ranking of societies that came with them.
A real religion never changes; change means decline.
Religions adapt constantly — to population, migration, new media, new needs. Anthropologists see adaptation as how religions persist, not as evidence that they are weakening.
Every religion has a church, a holy book, and one god.
Religious systems vary enormously: some have no scripture, no building, no named deity, and no full-time clergy. That is why anthropologists work with a broad definition of shared beliefs and practices about the sacred.
Easily confused
Durkheim's definition of religion vs. Geertz's definition of religion
Durkheim defined religion empirically, from beliefs, practices, and the moral community they create; Geertz defined it symbolically, from the meanings and moods a system of symbols establishes. Anthropologists cite both because religion spans structure and meaning at once.
A priest vs. A shaman
A priest is a full-time specialist who officiates at recurring events on behalf of a group; a shaman is a part-time specialist who works with individuals on specific problems through direct contact with spiritual forces. The same society can have both.
Religion vs. Spirituality
Religion is shared affiliation with a structure, its beliefs, and its practices; spirituality is loosely structured personal feeling about the natural and supernatural. People mix the two, but anthropologists keep the terms distinct because the categories behave differently.
Key vocabulary
- religion
- A shared system of beliefs and practices through which a group relates to things it treats as sacred or supernatural; the OpenStax working definition is a shared system of beliefs and practices regarding the interaction of natural and supernatural phenomena.
- sacred
- Things set apart and treated as extraordinary, distinct from the ordinary objects of daily life; Durkheim's term for what a religion marks off and surrounds with special handling.
- beliefs
- The ideas a group holds about the supernatural — what exists, what is true, how the unseen world works, and what it asks of people.
- ritual
- A prescribed, repeatable act or sequence of acts that expresses and renews a group's beliefs, such as a blessing, a feast, or a procession; ritual receives its own EliExplains topic.
- practitioners
- The people who carry out religious roles for a group; anthropologists distinguish full-time priests, prophets who call for renewal, and part-time shamans who work with individuals.
- animism
- The attribution of souls or spiritual agency to things, including natural elements such as rocks and trees; Tylor treated it as the earliest stage of religion, a ranking later abandoned.
- magic
- A supposed system of natural law whose practice is believed to cause a transformation; Frazer analyzed sympathetic magic through the laws of similarity and contagion.
- mana
- An impersonal sacred force that can attach to people, objects, or places and make them sacred; the term comes from Polynesia and is used descriptively across traditions.
Sources & references
- 13.1 What Is Religion? — Introduction to Anthropology — OpenStax, Rice University
- Chapter 13 Introduction (Religion and Culture) — Introduction to Anthropology — OpenStax, Rice University
- Sir James George Frazer — Encyclopaedia Britannica — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Do Mountains Have Souls? — SAPIENS (essay by Justine Quijada, published 2022-11-15) — SAPIENS (Wenner-Gren Foundation)
EliExplains lessons are original prose written from the open, credible references above. See Copyright & Licensing.
Researched 2026-08-22
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