Cultural Analysis

Abstract This chapter examines the ways anthropologists have defined culture and religion in relation to each other. Early definitions prompted a scholarly dialogue which has run energetically for a century and a half. Tylor’s “complex whole” (culture) and “belief in Spiritual Beings” (religion) gave rise to more complex and nuanced understandings of these categories and their interrelationship—as well as critique of the categories as historical products to which no universal definition could be applied. After reviewing the historical development of cultural analysis of religion in anthropology, including the outsized influence of Geertzian symbolic anthropology in the mid- and late twentieth century, the chapter discusses more recent approaches in which culture and religion are analytically reconfigured and rebalanced.