The study of the religious notions of primitive people arose within the context of evolutionary theory. Besides their evolutionary assumption about religion, the followers of evolutionary theory show overwhelming Eurocentric biases. But it is true that they made valuable contributions to the study of religion.
E.B. Tylor, expounds in his book, Primitive Culture (1871), that animism is the earliest and most basic religious form. Out of this evolved fetishism, belief in demons, polytheism, and, finally, monotheism is derived from the exaltation of a great god, such as the sky god, in a polytheistic context. He defines religion in such a way that all forms of it could be included, namely, as ‘the belief in Spiritual Beings’. He firmly states that religion is a cultural universal, for no known cultures are without such beliefs. Belief in spirits began as an uncritical but nonetheless rational effort to explain such puzzling empirical phenomenon as death, dreams and possessions.
Herbert Spencer advocated ancestor worship, a relatively similar system to Tylor’s animism.
R.R. Marrett (1909), on the other hand regarded animatism as beginning of religious ideas. As discussed earlier, his derivation is from ideas as mana (power), mulungu (supreme creator), orenda (magic power), concepts found in the Pacific, Africa, and America, respectively, referring to a supernatural power (a kind of supernatural ‘electricity’) that does not necessarily have the personal connotation of animistic entities and that becomes especially present in certain men, spirits, or natural objects. Marrett criticizes Tylor for an overly intellectual approach, as though primitive men used personal forces as explanatory hypotheses to account for dreams, natural events, and other phenomena. For Marrett, primitive religion is ‘not so much thought out as danced out,’ and its primary emotional attitude is awe.
According to Max Muller, naturism in the earliest form of religion. In his own words the earliest people had an attitude of awe or love and reverence towards objects of nature. This attitude was a result of “diseased” mind and The associated “defective language”. All this invested lifeless things with life and all the power that is associated with life. This error of mind gave rise to such expressions as the “sunrises”, “the thunders sends rain”, and “the Trees bear fruits”. This gave rise to the belief in some power inherent in the sun, thunder, trees and so on and nature worship.
For Sir James Frazer human thought is best understood as a progression from magic to religion to science. By publishing his two volume book titled The Golden Bough (1890), he attempts to construct a universal theory of magic, religion and science. According to Frazer, magic is the primordial form of human thought. He further postulates early man was dominated by magic, which viewed nature as ‘a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency’. These magicians, according to Frazer, believed in nature and developed imaginary laws, which are of course, not real. However, in course of time the more intelligent members of the society, in the state of disillusionment, conceived of spiritual beings with powers superior to man, who could be induced by propitiation to alter the course of nature to his advantage. According to Frazer, this was the stage of religion. Later on this was seen to be an illusion and men entered the final, the scientific stage of development. Magic, according to Frazer, is based on the principle of contagion or on ‘sympathy’ or the notion of imitation, said to be the earliest form. In more advanced societies, Frazer contends, magic eventually is replaced by religion, and both are finally replaced by science.
For Durkheim, evolutionary advancement consists in the evolutionary sequence of Totemism , Animism , Naturism , Polytheism and Monotheism
Schmidt and Lang: According to Lang and Schmidt, the earliest religion is monotheism. They also believed that the religion of the most primitive tribe is the most ancient religion. After identifying the Bushmen, Eskimo and Andaman Islanders as the most primitive ones, they found that the religion of those primitives as monotheism. Therefore monotheism is the earliest form of religion.
Criticism and decline
Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroeber discredit the speculative evolutionary perspective and seek explanations for similarities of rituals, myths and symbols found in different cultures through culture contact. For them cultural dispersion, instead of independent evolution of religious thoughts and actions, is the reason for such similarities. They emphasise need for understanding culture as an integrated whole and interpreting the cultural elements in that pattern, including the religious activities, in a meaningful way.
But, there are others like Emile Durkheim who thinks that emotions of the individuals and collective consciousness in social environment shape the individuals’ religious feeling. While, on other hand, Max Weber believes that the beliefs and emotions have evolved into rational religion and higher thinking in religion. Others such as Meyer Fortes and Clifford Geertz also recognise the psychological component in religious behaviour. However, after the evolutionary perspective, psychological approach to religion based on Sigmund Freud’s approaches of psychoanalysis and neurotic symptoms has become a dominant approach to understand religion in anthropology.