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.
Malinowski gave a theory based on emotional stress, Sigmund Freud considers religion as a result of guilt, Frazer also gave a theory of ‘naturism’, Lowie considered it as a matter of feeling and foremost of them, Max Muller gave a theory based on emotional response of primitives to forces of nature.
EMOTIONAL STRESS THEORY
- Malinowski uses data from small scale non-literate societies to develop his thesis on religion and he chose Trobriand Island off the coast of Guinea for his field work.
- Like Durkheim, he saw religion as reinforcing social norms and promoting social solidarity, but he doesn’t see religion as a symbol of society.
- According to him, religion is concerned with specific areas of social life namely situation of stress which threaten social solidarity. Anxiety and tension tend to disrupt social life. Situations which produce these emotions include crisis of life such as birth, puberty, marriage and death.
- Death is most disruptive of them all.
- At the time of death and funeral, members of society support the bereaved and this expression of solidarity re-integrates society.
NATURISM OR NATURE MYTH
- It is the belief that the forces of nature have supernatural power.
- Man used to see forces of nature with various emotions – awe, fear, respect and so on. Max Muller developed the theory of naturism.
The attributes or the symbols became personified as deities (Indra Devta – for rain, Agni Devta – for fire and so on). - 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 out of dependency and as a token of respect.
A PRODUCT OF FEAR
- Crawley holds that religion or superstition pervades the mental make-up of primitive people who do not distinguish between religion and magic.
- They live in the world of mystery where subjective and objective realities are all mixed up into one.
- The main force behind primitive thought is fear of the danger in social relations.
- For example, while eating, the primitives feel particularly prone to danger. This is the reason why they have so many taboos around food.
- The idea of a world of spirits is the result of a sense of danger and the feelings of fear.
- In this way, his theory of religion is more or less built around taboo, a product of fear.
FEELINGS AND THRILL
- R:H. Lowie basing his thinking on his study of the Crow Indians (an Amerindian people of the region between the Platte and Yellow stone rivers), considers that for the primitives, religion is a matter of feeling.
- It is marked by ‘a sense of the Extraordinary; Mysterious or Supernatural’.
- Instead of religious behaviour, he writes about emotional responses of amazement and awe. Anything that gives rise to those feelings is characterised as religion.
- Thus, for Lowie, if magic is associated with emotion, it is to be called religion.
Classical evolutionary theories deem polytheistic religion as the religion of simple societies and monotheistic religion as the religion of the complex societies. Later more systematic ‘sociological theories of religion’ followed. While classical theories viewed religion as a response to various ‘needs of man’ (intellectual, emotional
etc), functionalists viewed it as a result of ‘needs of society’.
