Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem

Abstract

tN THIS PAPER I want to explore the problem of what is in| volvedincategorizingactsand beliefsasreligious, or ritual, or magicoXreligious, with the purpose not onlyofclearing the way for subsequent treatment of my own empirical data concerning the toI)agaa of Northern Ghana, but also of clarifying certain aspects of the analysis of social systems in general. For some writers such an investigation has appeared a profitless enterprise. At the beginning of Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, a book which as its subtitle suggests owes much to the work of Durkheim as well as to the English anthropologists, Jane Harrison comments on the erroneous approach of those inquirers who start with a general term religion of which they had a preconceived idea, and then try to fit into it any facts that come to hand. Instead she proposes no initial definition, bllt remarks that 'we shall collect the facts that admittedly are religious and see from what human activities they appear to have sprung' (I9I2: 29). It is yet more tempting for the inquirer into societies farther removed from our own tradition than that of ancient Greece to adopt a similar approach, and quietly to overlook the definitional problems. The dangers, however, outweigh the advantages. In refusing to define her field of discourse, Jane Harrison was far from escaping the problem she perceived; she was merely taking refuge in an implicit rather than an explicit judgment of what constitutes the 'admittedly religious'. It goes without saying that such hidden decisions may influence the investigation of particular events. It might be possible to examine the mortuary institutions of the LoDagaa without raising the wider issues were it not that the analysis of the specific data must depend, to some extent at least, upon the position which the investigator takes with regard to them. Moreover, the difficulties which arise from a failure adequately to delimit one's universe of discourse become much more complicated when comparative studies are involved. With these matters in mind, therefore, I shall try and deal with some of the general problems connected with the examination of what have variously and