“Write short note: Origins of religious beliefs and practices in premodern societies.” (2005)
Nineteenth-century scholars believed that finding religion’s earliest form among “primitive” peoples would reveal its essence. Their answers fall into evolutionist-psychological, sociological and psychoanalytic theories, followed by a functionalist turn that set the origin question aside.
Evolutionist and psychological theories
| Theory | Thinker and work | Claimed origin |
|---|---|---|
| Ghost theory | Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology | Dreams of the dead lead to propitiation of ancestors |
| Animism | Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871) | Soul inferred from dreams and death, extended to all nature |
| Naturism | Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) | Awe at natural forces; names become gods through a “disease of language” |
| Magic to religion | James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890) | Failure of magic drives people to appeal to higher powers |
| Animatism (pre-animism) | R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (1909) | Awe of impersonal power (mana); religion “not so much thought out as danced out” |
| Primitive high gods | Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion (1898) | Belief in a supreme being among the simplest peoples |
All shared unilinear evolutionism, reliance on travellers’ reports, and the assumption that religion began as an individual’s reasoning or emotion.
Sociological and psychoanalytic theories
- Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) located the origin in Australian totemism. The totem is the clan’s emblem, and the sacred force felt in collective ritual is society itself.
- Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo, 1913) traced religion to a primal horde in which sons killed their father. Guilt produced the totem feast and the taboos on killing the totem and on incest.
The functionalist turn
- Bronisław Malinowski (Magic, Science and Religion, 1925) replaced origins with needs: religion and magic arise wherever anxiety, death and uncertain outcomes defeat technique.
- A. R. Radcliffe-Brown dismissed origin-seeking as conjectural history and studied how rites sustain social sentiments.
Evans-Pritchard’s verdict
E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion, 1965) judged the whole enterprise a failure:
- origins are unverifiable, so the theories are “just-so stories”;
- scholars committed the “if I were a horse” fallacy, imagining how they would think in the savage’s place;
- “simple” was wrongly equated with “earliest”;
- Durkheim leapt from the clan to religion in general, and Freud’s story had no evidence at all.
He urged studying religion through believers’ own categories, as in his Nuer Religion (1956).
Indian evidence
- Sarat Chandra Roy’s ethnographies of the Munda (1912) and Oraon (1915) show totemic clans, spirit cults and a supreme deity linked to the sun coexisting, so no single “first form” can be isolated.
- D. N. Majumdar’s account of the Ho bonga resembles Marett’s mana.
- Around 50 lakh people wrote “Sarna” in the 2011 Census religion column, and Jharkhand renewed the Sarna code demand in May 2026: these faiths are living religions, not survivals of an origin.
Conclusion
The search for origins is now regarded as unanswerable, yet it was not wasted. Each theory isolated a real dimension of religion, cognitive, emotional or social, and sociology’s shift from origins to meaning and function grew out of their failures.