UPSC Sociology Mains Syllabus
Paper 1 – Chapter 8
Religion and Society:
(a) Sociological theories of religion.
(b) Types of religious practices: animism, monism, pluralism, sects, cults.
(c) Religion in modern society: religion and science, secularization, religious revivalism, fundamentalism.
Sociology of religion does not ask, whether god exists. Rather, sociology of religion asks, if people believe that god exists, ‘Why do they believe?’, ‘How do they come to believe?’ This is also the fundamental difference between theology and sociology, while theology takes existence of religion or god as given; sociology aims at studying it like other social phenomenon in a descriptive manner.
THE NATURE-MYTH SCHOOL
- It was a German School, dealing with Indo-European religions.
- It established that ancient gods were universally personifications of natural phenomena.
- Its main propounder was Max Muller who was a German linguist.
- Max Muller argued that with the passage of time the symbolic representations came to gain an independent identity of their own and became separated from that which they represented.
- The attributes or the symbols became personified as deities.
- According to Muller, human beings and nature stand in a relationship of awe, wonderment, terror, etc.
- Early human beings could not understand or explain the world of nature.
- They ended up worshipping it out of fear and awe.
THE GHOST THEORY OR DREAMS THEORY OF SPENCER
- Spencer shows the primitives to be rational though with a limited quantum of knowledge.
- Similarly they get the idea of a person’s duality from dreams, which are considered as real life experiences by the primitives.
- For them, the dream-self moves about at night while the shadow-self acts by the day. This notion of duality is reinforced by peoples’ experiences of temporary loss of sensibilities.
- The event of death is also considered by the primitives as a longer period of insensibility.
- This idea of duality is extended by them to animals, plants and material object.
- According to Spencer, the appearance of dead persons in dreams is taken by the primitives to be the evidence of temporary after life.
- This leads to the conception of a supernatural being in the form of a ghost.
- According to Spencer, the idea of ghosts grows into the idea of gods and the ghosts of ancestors become divine beings. Spencer’s conclusion is that ‘ancestor worship is the root of every religion’.
ANIMISM THEORY OF TYLOR
- Animism means the belief in spirits/soul. Rather than focusing on the idea of ghost, Edward B Tylor emphasized on idea of soul in his ‘Primitive Culture, 1871’.
- Animism refers to a given form of religion in which man finds the presence of spirit in every object that surrounds him.
- Animals, plants and other objects, which help or obstruct man’s activities, are also regarded to possess souls or spirits.
- The soul exists independent of its physical home the body and therefore arises the idea of belief in spiritual beings.
- Tylor says that these spiritual beings later develop into gods.
- Animism is the religion of simple hunting gathering societies.
- Tylor emphasises the element of rationality in magical practices as well.
- He argues that magic among primitives is based on observation and classification of similar elements.
- Whenever magic fails, its failure is rationally explained in terms of the practitioner forgetting to perform some prescribed act, or ignoring to observe some prohibition or some hostile magic has checked it in the way.
Evolutionary theories derive their understanding from studying of primitive societies like tribes and modern societies. Evolutionist understanding of religion seems to rest on two assumptions, namely positivism and intellectualism. Evolutionism based on the intellectualist assumption that religion is a matter of knowledge. The intellectualists tried to prove that the primitives were rational though their efforts to explain the natural phenomena were somewhat crude and false.
