Religio and the Definition of Religion
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Abstract
Despite caveats to the effect that a category denominated religion is of dubious analytical utility, and contrary to suggestions that would have us either drop the word religion from our investigative vocabulary (Smith 1962) or significantly curtail its usage (Needham 1981), many anthropologists continue to apply the term broadly and to proffer or otherwise support explicit definitions. It is perhaps the case that for some the category religion is analogous to the religion that William James (1929:8) discerns among many religionists: it "exists," that is, "as a dull habit." But for numbers of reflective anthropologists, there are at least two reasons that justify an ongoing, critical concern with how we define religion. First, as Spiro succinctly puts it, "while a definition cannot take the place of inquiry, in the absence of definitions there can be no inquiry-for it is the definition, either ostensive or nominal, which designates the phenomenon to be investigated" (1966:90). And, second, many arguments or seeming disagreements about theoretical issues pivot on, or sometimes reduce to, variant definitional commitments.