John Lubbock (1834–1913), an English anthropologist, made an early attempt to combine archaeological evidence of prehistoric people, on the one hand, and anthropological evidence of primitive people, on the other, to trace the origin and evolution of religion. In this scheme, in the beginning there was absence of religious ideas and development of fetishism, followed by nature worship, and totemism (a system of belief involving the relationship of specific animals to clans), shamanism, anthropomorphism, monotheism (belief in one god), and finally ethical monotheism. This has foreshadowed, other forms of evolutionism, which were to become popular later.
In the late nineteenth century with the influential works of Max Muller, W. Robertson Smith, Edward B. Tylor, Marrett, and Sir James G. Frazer, anthropological study on religion grew at a fast pace. These scholars were first to suggest that tribal religions might be amenable to study, following the rules of scientific method, and to posit specific methodological procedures for the comparative analysis of religious beliefs and practices. All of them sought to understand religious belief and practices at most fundamental or basic level.
The anthropology of religion owes a great debt to Emile Durkheim who put forward the concept of sacred, profane orders, and the so-called supernatural and natural categories, which have proved to be more beneficial in better understanding the concept of religion. A strong impetus to subsequent application of Durkheimian theory is found among the British structural-functionalists, such as Radcliffe-Brown, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Melford Spiro, etc., who also made significant contributions towards understanding religion. They primarily focussed on the religion of tribal groups. However, many of the contemporary exponents of anthropology of religion like Clifford Geertz, Melford Spiro, Victor Turner, Sherry Ortner, Mary Douglas and Stanley , Tambiah have devoted bulk of their attention to local variants of major world religions – Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity and the impact of the world religions in developing countries like Java, Indonesia, Morocco, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Nepal, and Burma, instead of the religions of isolated tribal groups. Contemporary ethnographers concentrate on examining religious diversity in complex societies rather than providing further documentation for uniformity in tribal religions. Herein, you are provided with a brief account of each of the dominant theoretical perspectives of anthropology on religion.