Chapter 2: Religion and Society
Walk down almost any street in India and you will pass a small roadside shrine, a shop with an agarbatti burning in one corner, a bus carrying a sticker that asks for a safe journey, or a wall that people carefully avoid leaning against. Move into a different neighbourhood and the symbols change, but the pattern does not. Somewhere, someone is treating a certain object, time or place as special — set apart from the flow of ordinary life.
This pattern is not modern, and it is not Indian alone. As far back as the records go, and in every society that anthropologists have ever studied, people have held beliefs about powers beyond the visible world, performed rituals to approach them, and marked some things as forbidden. Even groups with almost no possessions carried rich systems of belief, ritual and taboo.
When the first sociologists noticed this, they asked an unusual question. Not “Is this religion true?” — that is the believer’s question, and its mirror-image is the scientist’s. Their question was different: what does religion do for society? Why does every human group build one? Whom does it draw together, and whom does it sometimes turn against? Out of that single shift in the question, a whole field of study — the sociology of religion — was born.
Diagram
Fig. 2.0-1 – a simple street scene placing several everyday markers of the sacred side by side: a roadside shrine, a shop with a small lamp, a bus with a protective sticker, and a tree tied with threads, captioned “the sacred, set apart from the ordinary”
This chapter will help you answer each of these questions.
2.1 Religion and Science
Human beings have always tried to make sense of the world around them — where it came from, why misfortune strikes, what happens after death. Two of the largest systems we have built for this purpose are religion and science. Before we can study how religion shapes society, we need to be clear about what religion is, what science is, and how the two differ. That is the work of this section.
2.1.1 Defining Religion
When you see a shopkeeper light a lamp before opening for the day, or a family fix an auspicious hour for a wedding, you are watching religion at work in ordinary life. Yet defining religion precisely is surprisingly hard, because it takes so many forms across the world.
A sociologist does not begin by asking whether a religion is true or false. That is the believer’s question, and its opposite. The sociological question is what religion is and what it does in social life — a stance that lets us study every faith fairly, without ranking one above another.
Scholars have defined religion in two broad ways. The first looks at what religion is made of — its content. The second looks at what religion does — its role in society.
The substantive approach
A substantive definition identifies religion by its core content, usually a belief in some power beyond the ordinary, observable world. The anthropologist E.B. Tylor gave the classic example. At its minimum, he said, religion is the belief in spiritual beings — souls, spirits, gods — that stand outside the natural order.
The word supernatural captures this: it means whatever is thought to lie above or beyond nature, not bound by its ordinary laws. On this view, a system counts as a religion when its followers believe in, and relate to, such supernatural powers.
The functional approach
A functional definition identifies religion not by what it contains but by what it accomplishes for individuals and groups. Émile Durkheim offered the most influential version. He divided everything in human experience into two realms: the sacred and the profane.
The sacred is whatever a community sets apart and treats with awe — a river, an idol, a book, a day, a place — and usually surrounds with rules of respect. The profane is the ordinary, everyday world of routine and use. As shown in Fig. 2.1-1, religion is the system that marks off the sacred from the profane and organises people around it.
Diagram
Fig. 2.1-1 – a two-part division of “the world of experience” into a shaded “Sacred” side (things set apart, approached with awe and rules) and a plain “Profane” side (ordinary, everyday, useful things), with religion drawn as the boundary and bridge between the two
For Durkheim, then, religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices about sacred things that binds all who share them into a single moral community. Bronisław Malinowski agreed that religion is best understood by its work: it is a mode of action as much as a system of belief, helping people steady themselves in situations they cannot control.
2.1.2 Defining Science
If religion is one great system for making sense of the world, science is the other. Science is an organised body of knowledge about the natural world, built up through careful observation, experiment and reasoning, and always open to correction.
The heart of science is that its claims are empirical — based on evidence that can be observed, measured and checked by others. A scientist forms a hypothesis (a testable guess), gathers evidence, and keeps the explanation only as long as the evidence supports it. Nothing is accepted simply because a respected person or an old text says so.
This openness to revision is central. A scientific “truth” is always provisional: if stronger evidence appears, the explanation changes. Yesterday’s confident theory can be overturned tomorrow, and scientists treat that self-correction as a strength rather than a weakness.
2.1.3 Religion and Science: Similarities and Differences
At first glance religion and science look like opposites, but they share important features. Both are human attempts to understand reality and to bring order to experience. Both are organised — each has its own specialists (priests, scientists), its own ways of training them, and its own communities of followers. And both are handed down the generations and shape how people actually live.
The deeper differences lie in what each rests on and how each treats knowledge. Religion is grounded in faith and the supernatural; science is grounded in evidence and natural causes. Religious truths are usually received as sacred and lasting; scientific findings are provisional and made to be revised.
Because they differ so sharply, people have argued for a long time about how the two are related. One view — the conflict view — holds that religion and science are natural rivals, and that as science advances, religion must retreat. Its evidence is the historical clashes over questions such as the origin of the universe or of human beings.
A second view holds that the two need not clash at all, because they answer different kinds of question. On this reading, science asks how the natural world works, while religion asks about meaning, purpose and right conduct — questions that no experiment can settle. Where the two are kept to their own domains, they can coexist, and many working scientists are themselves religious.
The honest limitation of both views is that neither fits every case. Science and religion have sometimes collided head-on and have sometimes lived quite comfortably side by side. Which pattern appears depends less on the two systems in the abstract than on the particular society, period and issue involved.
2.2 The Constituents of Religion
Every religion, however simple or elaborate, is built out of a few basic elements. There are ideas people hold about the sacred, actions they perform in relation to it, fearful habits that grow up around the unknown, and things they treat as strictly forbidden. Sociologists call these the constituents, or building blocks, of religion: belief, ritual, superstition and taboo. Fig. 2.2-1 shows how they fit together, and this section takes each in turn.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-1 – four interlocking blocks labelled Belief (the idea held about the sacred), Ritual (the sanctioned action that expresses the belief), Superstition (blind, fear-driven practice), and Taboo (the strict prohibition), all resting on a base labelled “the sacred”
2.2.1 Beliefs
A belief is an idea that a person or community holds to be true even though it cannot be proved by observation or experiment. In religion, beliefs are the convictions people share about the sacred, the supernatural and the deeper order of the world.
Beliefs cannot be tested the way scientific claims can. They are accepted on faith, kept alive in people’s minds, and passed on through the customs and stories of the group. One community may believe that an unseen power flows through all of nature; another that the spirits of ancestors watch over the living; another that the soul survives the death of the body.
Beliefs matter because they are the foundation on which the rest of religion stands. They give a group a shared picture of the world and its powers, offer explanations for things that are otherwise frightening or unexplained — illness, drought, death — and supply the reasons behind the acts people perform. Without a belief behind it, a religious act would be empty movement.
2.2.2 Rituals
If belief is the idea, the ritual is the action. A ritual is a prescribed, repeated and symbolic act performed in relation to sacred things — the practical, visible side of religion.
Rituals follow set forms: particular words, gestures, offerings, times and places, done in a fixed manner. A village that prays and offers grain to a local deity before the sowing season, a family that lights lamps on a festival day, a community that performs a yearly worship to keep away disease — all are performing rituals. Belief and ritual hold each other up: the belief explains why the act is done, and the act keeps the belief alive.
Rituals do real social work. They express and strengthen shared beliefs; they bring people together in a common performance and so reinforce the bonds of the group; they mark the great transitions of life — birth, marriage, death — and of the farming year, such as sowing and harvest; and they steady people in situations they cannot control, replacing helplessness with something to do.
2.2.3 Superstitions
A superstition is a belief or practice built on fear of the unknown, in which an action is thought to bring good or bad fortune even though there is no understood connection between the act and the result. It is often the blind, mechanical repetition of a practice whose original meaning has been lost.
Common superstitions are easy to recognise: avoiding a journey on a day thought unlucky, treating a certain number as dangerous, or reading a sneeze as a bad omen. The person follows the habit not because a belief system explains it, but out of a vague fear of what might otherwise go wrong.
This is what separates superstition from ritual, and the difference answers a question many people ask. A ritual is a meaningful, sanctioned practice tied to a religious belief and understood by the community; a superstition is a practice cut loose from understood meaning and driven mainly by fear of luck.
Superstitions are not always tied to religion, and they can have social roots of their own. Some may once have carried a practical purpose — a warning that hardened, over time, into a fixed dread. But they can also do harm, breeding unnecessary fear and loss of confidence, and a strong superstition can eventually stiffen into a taboo.
2.2.4 Taboo
A taboo is a strong prohibition that forbids a particular act, object, person or word, and treats it as dangerous or specially sacred. The word comes from the Polynesian tabu, meaning “forbidden”. Breaking a taboo is believed to bring harm — misfortune, illness, or supernatural punishment — either to the offender or to the whole group.
Taboos work almost like unwritten laws. In small societies they were among the strongest ways of keeping order, because everyone knew the rule and the fear behind it, and everyone could tell when it had been broken. Scholars often classify taboos by the purpose they serve, into three kinds, shown in Fig. 2.2-2.
Diagram
Fig. 2.2-2 – three panels labelled Protective (guarding the weak or the useful, e.g. children, elders, or an animal the group depends on), Productive (safeguarding farming and food, e.g. rules around sowing or the new crop), and Prohibitive (forbidding contact to prevent harm to people, animals or plants)
A protective taboo shields those who are vulnerable, or protects a resource the group depends on — for example, forbidding the killing of an animal the community needs. A productive taboo is tied to farming and food, hedging the crucial work of sowing and harvest with rules. A prohibitive taboo forbids certain contact to prevent harm, and overlaps closely with the protective kind.
Some of the most important taboos regulate kinship. The incest taboo — the near-universal prohibition on sexual and marital relations between close relatives — prevents confusion and conflict within the family and pushes people to marry outward, building ties between groups. Here the social usefulness of the taboo is plain even where members explain it only as a sacred rule.
Not every taboo is so easily justified, and some must be read critically. Certain communities have barred women from touching the plough or entering the dairy, explaining the rule in terms of “purity” or “weakness”. Sociologically, such prohibitions often had less to do with any real danger than with dividing labour and controlling valued resources — and they also reflected and reinforced the lower status of women. Seeing this is part of studying taboo honestly: a rule can hold a society together and still be unjust to some of its members. Because taboos guide behaviour through fear of consequences, they were an early basis of social control — an idea we return to at the end of this chapter.
2.3 Theories of Religion
Once sociologists and anthropologists began to study religion seriously, they asked a further question: how did religion begin, and why does it take the shapes it does? Several theories were offered. Some tried to explain the origin of religion in early human life; others explained its survival by the work it does for society. Fig. 2.3-1 maps the four theories in this section by what each treats as the root of religion. Keep in mind that these are attempts to explain religion, not the final word on it.
Diagram
Fig. 2.3-1 – four labelled arrows pointing to a central box “Religion”, from four sources: Animism (the idea of the soul), Naturism (awe of natural forces), Totemism (the clan and society), and Functional theories (human and social needs)
2.3.1 Animism
The earliest anthropological theory of religion was animism, put forward by E.B. Tylor. Animism (from the Latin anima, meaning soul) is the belief that souls or spirits give life not only to human beings but to animals, objects and the whole of nature.
Tylor pictured early people reasoning almost like philosophers. Experiences they could not otherwise explain — dreams, visions, the gap between a living body and a corpse — led them to the idea of a soul that could exist apart from the body. From the individual soul they extended the idea to spirits in nature and to the spirits of dead ancestors, so that ancestor worship became, for Tylor, one of the earliest forms of religion.
2.3.2 Naturism
A second theory, naturism, was proposed by the German scholar and Indologist Max Müller. Naturism holds that religion grew out of human awe before the great forces and objects of nature — the sun, sky, dawn, storms, rivers and moon.
Unable to explain these powers, early people gave them names, imagined them as living personalities, and worshipped them. This is anthropomorphism: giving human form and feelings to non-human things. Müller stressed the role of language — the names first given to natural forces gradually hardened into the names of gods. He pointed to the Vedic hymns, rich with deities of dawn, sun and sky, as an example.
2.3.3 Totemism
Totemism links religion to the organisation of society. A totem is an animal, plant or natural object that a clan (a group claiming common descent) treats as its special emblem and holds sacred — often something not to be killed or eaten. The clan takes its identity, and sometimes its name, from the totem.
The most influential account came from Émile Durkheim, who studied the totemism of Australian clans. He argued that when clan members revere their totem, they are really revering the clan itself: the totem is the emblem of the group, so worship of the totem is, at bottom, the group honouring its own unity. On this view totemism is the most elementary form of religion, and it reveals that the true object of religious feeling is society.
In India, as the ethnographer Herbert Risley observed long ago, the openly religious side of totemism has largely faded, but its social side survives: clan names taken from a totem animal or plant still mark group identity in many communities. That fits Durkheim’s point that the deepest work of the totem is social.
2.3.4 Functional Theories
The theories so far ask where religion came from. Functional theories ask a different question: what does religion do that makes every society keep it? The name comes from functionalism, the approach that explains a social practice by the useful work it performs for individuals and for society. Three thinkers — Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim — gave the classic answers, and they did not fully agree.
Bronisław Malinowski stressed the psychological function. Religion and magic, he argued, give people security in situations of danger and uncertainty, where skill and knowledge run out. They calm anxiety and restore confidence, especially at life’s crises such as death.
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown shifted the emphasis from the individual to society. For him, religious rituals express and renew the shared sentiments a society needs to survive, and teach individuals their dependence on the group. Religion’s real function is to maintain social order and solidarity.
Émile Durkheim, whose totemism study we have just met, drew the broadest conclusion. Shared beliefs and collective rituals — by dividing the world into the sacred and the profane, and gathering people to honour the sacred together — bind individuals into a single moral community and renew their solidarity. Religion, for Durkheim, is above all a social practice that holds a society together.
2.4 Functions and Dysfunctions of Religion
We saw that functional theories explain religion by the work it does. But religion does not do only one kind of work. It can hold a society together and carry individuals through hardship; it can also divide people and shield injustice. A function is a useful, order-keeping effect; a dysfunction is a harmful or destabilising one. Fig. 2.4-1 shows religion as this double-edged force, and this section looks at both edges.
Diagram
Fig. 2.4-1 – a two-sided panel with “Religion” at the centre; the left side labelled Functions (binds, comforts, guides, inspires) and the right side labelled Dysfunctions (divides, legitimises inequality, resists change)
2.4.1 Functions of Religion
Durkheim pointed to three great functions that religion performs for society. The first is social cohesion: by giving people shared symbols, values and norms, religion draws them together and produces social solidarity — the sense of belonging to one moral community. Festivals, pilgrimages and common worship are moments when this bond is felt and renewed.
The second is social control, which we take up fully at the end of the chapter. Religious ideas encourage people to follow the rules of the group, marking some acts as right and sacred and others as wrong and forbidden, so that conduct is guided from within.
The third is providing meaning and purpose. Religion offers answers to the hardest questions — why we suffer, what death means — and marks the great turning points of life, birth, marriage and death, with observances that give them weight. In the face of grief and loss, it can restore a person’s sense that life is not without order or hope.
Religion also does other important work. It is a powerful agent of socialisation, teaching the young the traditions and expectations of their society. And it has enriched culture immensely: the Bhakti and Sufi devotional movements gave India great poetry and music, while temples, mosques, churches, gurudwaras and stupas are among the finest works of art any society has produced. Nineteenth-century reform movements such as the Brahmo Samaj show religion feeding social and cultural renewal.
It is tempting to think religion only conserves the past. Max Weber showed that it can also transform society.
2.4.2 Dysfunctions of Religion
The same religion that binds one community can set it against another, and can be used to keep unjust arrangements in place. Effects like these are the dysfunctions of religion.
One dysfunction is division and conflict. Because religion draws a strong line between “us” and “them”, it can be turned into a badge of hostility. This is the ground of communalism — the political use of religious identity to set one community against another as though their interests were fundamentally opposed.
It is important to be precise here. Communalism is nurtured by politics, not by piety: a communalist need not be a devout person, and a devout person need not be communal. The problem lies in the political use of religious identity, not in faith itself. At its worst, communal mobilisation dehumanises the “other” community and leads to violence — one of the gravest harms a divided society can suffer.
A second dysfunction is the way religion can justify inequality. Karl Marx gave the sharpest statement of this view.
Religion and social inequality are also linked through gender. Many major religious traditions have historically been organised in patriarchal ways and have been used to justify women’s subordinate place. Yet the same traditions contain resources for equality, and reform movements within them have challenged that subordination — so here too the picture is mixed rather than one-sided.
A further dysfunction is resistance to inquiry and change. When a faith is held as the whole and only truth, it can discourage questioning and clash with new knowledge — the long-running tensions between some religious authorities and science are examples. In its rigid form this becomes fundamentalism: the insistence on a single tradition as the complete and literal truth, hostile to modern change, and often arising as a reaction to rapid social upheaval.
Religion, then, is neither simply good nor simply bad for society. It ties and it divides, comforts and constrains, conserves and transforms — often at the same time.
2.6 Summary
Sociologists study religion not by asking whether it is true, but by asking what it is and what it does in society. Religion has been defined in two broad ways: substantively, by its content (E.B. Tylor’s belief in spiritual beings), and functionally, by its role (Émile Durkheim’s division of the world into the sacred and the profane, binding believers into a moral community).
Science is a body of knowledge about the natural world built on observation, experiment and evidence, and open to revision. Religion rests on faith and the supernatural; science on testable evidence. The two differ in basis, method and stability of knowledge, and their relationship is debated — some see conflict, others see two systems answering different kinds of question.
Religion is built from four constituents. A belief is an idea about the sacred held on faith; a ritual is the prescribed, symbolic action that enacts a belief; a superstition is a fear-driven practice with no understood link between act and effect; and a taboo is a strong prohibition whose violation is believed to bring harm.
Taboos are commonly classified as protective, productive and prohibitive, and the near-universal incest taboo shows how a prohibition can preserve social order. Some taboos, such as those barring women from certain work, must be read critically, since they also reflected and reinforced inequality.
Several theories explain religion’s origin or survival. Animism (Tylor) traces religion to the idea of the soul; naturism (Max Müller) to the worship of natural forces; and totemism (Durkheim) to the clan’s reverence for its own emblem — and so, at root, for society itself.
Functional theories explain why religion endures. Malinowski stressed its psychological work of calming anxiety; Radcliffe-Brown its role in maintaining social order; and Durkheim its power to bind people into one moral community through shared belief and ritual.
Religion performs important functions: it creates social cohesion and solidarity, aids social control, gives life meaning and purpose, socialises the young, and enriches culture. Max Weber showed that religion can even transform society, as certain Protestant teachings helped drive the growth of capitalism.
Religion also has dysfunctions. It can divide people — the ground of communalism, the political use of religious identity against another community — and, as Karl Marx argued, it can make inequality appear natural and console the poor rather than change their conditions. It can reinforce gender inequality and, in its rigid form as fundamentalism, resist inquiry and change. Religion is thus double-edged: the feature that unites a community can also divide communities.
Morality is a society’s shared code of right and wrong, felt through conscience. Its descriptive side varies between societies, while its normative side points to universal human values; research shows that every society, however simple, has a morality.
Morality and religion are intertwined but distinct. A moral code concerns right and wrong between people, is sanctioned by society, and its violation is a wrong; a religious code concerns conduct toward the supernatural, is sanctioned by the divine, and its violation is a sin. Each shapes the other.
Social control is the set of means by which a society secures conformity to its rules. It is informal (custom, morality, shame, exclusion) and formal (law, courts, police). Morality, internalised through socialisation, and religion, lending the rules the authority of the sacred, work together with social control to keep a society ordered and its identity secure.
2.7 Key Terms
- animism — The belief that souls or spirits give life to people, animals and nature; E.B. Tylor’s theory of the origin of religion.
- anthropomorphism — Giving human form, feelings or personality to non-human things such as natural forces.
- belief — A conviction about the sacred or supernatural, held to be true without empirical proof.
- communalism — An ideology and form of politics that treats society as divided into religious communities with opposed interests and turns one against another.
- conformity — The tendency to match one’s behaviour and attitudes to those of the group.
- conscience — A person’s inner sense of right and wrong.
- dysfunction — A consequence of a social practice that harms or destabilises society.
- empirical — Based on evidence that can be observed, measured and checked by others.
- formal social control — Control exercised through official rules and bodies such as law, courts and police.
- function — A useful, order-keeping effect of a social practice.
- functional definition — A way of defining religion by what it does for individuals and society, rather than by its content.
- functional theories — Theories (of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim) that explain religion by the functions it performs.
- functionalism — The sociological approach that explains a social practice by the useful work it performs for society.
- fundamentalism — The rigid insistence on a single religious tradition as the complete and literal truth, hostile to modern change.
- incest taboo — The near-universal prohibition on sexual and marital relations between close relatives.
- informal social control — Control exercised through everyday social pressure such as approval, shame, ridicule and exclusion.
- moral code — The body of rules and principles concerning good and evil that a society expects its members to follow.
- morality — A society’s shared sense of, and rules about, right and wrong.
- naturism — Max Müller’s theory that religion arose from the worship of natural forces personified as gods.
- profane — The ordinary, everyday world of routine and use, as opposed to the sacred (Durkheim).
- religion — A system of beliefs and practices relating to the sacred or supernatural, shared by a community.
- religious code — A body of rules expressing right conduct toward the supernatural, whose violation is understood as sin.
- ritual — A prescribed, repeated, symbolic action performed in relation to sacred things.
- sacred — Whatever a community sets apart and treats with awe and respect (Durkheim).
- sanction — A reward or penalty a society applies to encourage or discourage behaviour.
- science — A systematic body of knowledge about the natural world, built on observation and evidence and open to revision.
- secular — Relating to the worldly rather than the religious; a secular state has no official religion and treats all faiths equally.
- social cohesion — The binding together of people through shared symbols, values and norms.
- social control — The set of means by which a society secures conformity to its rules.
- social solidarity — The sense of belonging to, and unity within, a single moral community.
- substantive definition — A way of defining religion by its content, usually belief in supernatural powers.
- supernatural — Whatever is thought to lie above or beyond nature and its ordinary laws.
- superstition — A fear-driven belief or practice with no understood link between an act and its supposed effect.
- taboo — A strong prohibition on an act, object, person or word, whose violation is believed to bring harm.
- totem — An animal, plant or object that a clan treats as its sacred emblem.
- totemism — A system in which a clan holds a special, sacred relationship with a totem; Durkheim’s theory linking religion to society.
2.8 Points to Ponder
Science keeps revising its truths, while religions tend to hold theirs as lasting. Does this mean that as a society becomes more scientific it must slowly leave religion behind — or does religion answer questions that science never sets out to touch?
If the very feature that binds a community together — a strong sense of a sacred “us” — is also what can turn it against a “them”, can a society keep the uniting power of religion without also risking its dividing power?
People today treat many non-religious things as almost sacred — a national flag, a sporting hero, a place of memory. Is Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane still useful for understanding a modern, less openly religious society?
Research suggests that every society has a morality, even where religions differ sharply or are weak. Can a person be fully moral without being religious, and if so, where would their sense of right and wrong come from?
In a small village, shame and the fear of exclusion once kept people in line; in a large city, law and police do much of that work. Has formal social control replaced informal control in modern life, or do both still shape how you behave every day?
2.9 Objective Questions
- E.B. Tylor’s theory that religion began with a belief in souls and spirits is known as: [1 mark]
- naturism
- totemism
- animism
- functionalism
- In Durkheim’s thought, the ordinary, everyday world of routine and use is called the: [1 mark]
- sacred
- profane
- supernatural
- taboo
- The theory that religion arose from the worship of natural forces such as the sun and the dawn was proposed by: [1 mark]
- Émile Durkheim
- Max Müller
- Bronisław Malinowski
- Karl Marx
- Which of the following best describes a taboo? [1 mark]
- an idea about the sacred held on faith
- a prescribed symbolic action expressing a belief
- a strong prohibition whose violation is believed to bring harm
- a fear-driven habit with no understood cause
- Match the thinker in Column A with the contribution in Column B. [4 marks]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. E.B. Tylor | i. religion as psychological comfort against anxiety |
| b. Émile Durkheim | ii. animism |
| c. Bronisław Malinowski | iii. religion as ideology serving the powerful |
| d. Karl Marx | iv. religion as a source of social solidarity |
- Assertion (A): Communalism is best understood as a political phenomenon rather than a purely religious one. Reason (R): A communalist need not be a devout person, and a devout person need not be communal. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
- Assertion (A): A ritual and a superstition are the same kind of practice. Reason (R): A ritual rests on an understood religious belief, while a superstition rests mainly on a fear of bad luck. [1 mark]
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true.
Fill in the blank: The near-universal prohibition on sexual and marital relations between close relatives is called the __________ taboo. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: According to Karl Marx, religion can act as an __________, making an unequal social order appear natural and God-given. [1 mark]
State whether the following is True or False: Breaking a moral code is understood as a sin, while breaking a religious code is understood as a wrong. [1 mark]
2.10 Check Your Concepts
Define religion, giving any one definition of it. [2 marks]
What is a taboo? Give one example. [2 marks]
State any two functions of religion. [2 marks]
Differentiate between a ritual and a superstition. [3 marks]
State any three differences between religion and science. [3 marks]
Explain the difference between a moral code and a religious code. [3 marks]
Briefly explain any two theories of the origin of religion. [4 marks]
Distinguish between formal and informal social control, giving an example of each, and explain how religion strengthens social control. [4 marks]
Describe the functional theories of religion associated with Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and Durkheim, and give one criticism of the functional approach. [6 marks]
Discuss the main functions and dysfunctions of religion in society, using Indian examples. [6 marks]
2.11 Passage-Based Questions
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. [5 marks] A family in a small town lights a lamp at the household shrine every evening and prays before beginning any new venture. The grandmother also insists that no one sweep the house after dark, “or wealth will leave the home.” When the youngest child asks why, no one can explain the sweeping rule; it is simply followed year after year.
- Identify which practice in the passage is a ritual and which is a superstition, giving a reason for each. [3 marks]
- What is the difference between a belief and a ritual? [2 marks]
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. [5 marks] In a locality, a shopkeeper is found to have used a faulty weighing scale. No case is filed against him, but neighbours stop buying from his shop and word spreads quickly through the community. Within a month he mends his ways and apologises publicly.
- Which type of social control is at work in the passage? [1 mark]
- How does it differ from formal social control? [2 marks]
- Explain how morality, learned through socialisation, supports this kind of control. [2 marks]
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. [5 marks] A religious festival in a town brings together thousands of people who share food, music and worship, deepening their sense of belonging to one community. In a neighbouring region, however, some leaders use religious identity in their speeches to stir suspicion between groups who had long lived side by side.
- Identify one function and one dysfunction of religion shown in the passage. [2 marks]
- Explain, in your own words, how the same feature of religion can both unite and divide. [3 marks]