“State the reasons for the various religious beliefs and practices in pre-modern societies.” (2020)
In pre-modern societies, small, kin-based and technologically simple, religion was not a separate sphere but was fused with kinship, economy and politics. Scholars explain its many beliefs and practices by the needs they met: intellectual, emotional, social, moral and ecological.
1. To explain the world
- Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer saw belief in spirits and magic as early attempts to explain dreams, death and natural events.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, 1937) showed that witchcraft answered why misfortune struck a particular person, such as the man sitting under a granary when it collapsed. It was a coherent logic, not ignorance.
- Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (Primitive Classification, 1903) argued that religious schemes supplied the first categories for ordering nature.
2. To cope with uncertainty and crisis
- Bronisław Malinowski (Magic, Science and Religion, 1925) found that Trobriand islanders used no magic in safe lagoon fishing but elaborate magic for dangerous open-sea voyages. Rites restore confidence where technique ends, and mortuary rites steady the group at death.
- A. R. Radcliffe-Brown countered that ritual can create anxiety as well as relieve it.
3. To integrate the group
- Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912): totemic rites periodically unite the clan, and in worshipping the totem it worships itself.
- Radcliffe-Brown (The Andaman Islanders, 1922): ceremonies express and transmit the sentiments on which social order rests.
4. To regulate conduct and authority
- Taboos on food, incest and clan exogamy, backed by ancestral spirits, gave social control without a state.
- Religion legitimated elders, priests and chiefs, a point Karl Marx generalised as ideology.
5. To regulate nature
Totemic taboos and sacred sites restricted the use of species and forests, acting as unwritten conservation rules.
Indian illustrations
- Verrier Elwin (The Religion of an Indian Tribe, 1955) showed Saora shamans dealing with spirits in illness and misfortune, meeting explanatory and emotional needs together.
- Sacred groves, Sarna in Chotanagpur, devrai in Maharashtra and orans in Rajasthan, protected forest through fear of the deity. Madhav Gadgil and V. D. Vartak documented them as conservation institutions in the 1970s. In December 2024 the Supreme Court directed Rajasthan to map orans and classify them as forests, recognising this ecological logic.
Limits
Functional explanations risk circularity and ignore conflict and individual meaning, as Max Weber stressed. “Pre-modern” also hides great variety.
Conclusion
Religion persisted in pre-modern societies because one set of beliefs did several jobs at once: explanation, consolation, cohesion, control and ecological regulation. The legal protection of sacred groves today shows that these reasons still matter.