Evans-Pritchard (1956) first recognised the symbolic aspect of religion, and this has inspired several anthropologists to approach religion through symbols, the meanings given by the participants to the elements of religion and rituals, and interpretations that anthropologists can offer. Victor Turner (1967), Mary Douglas (1970) and Clifford Geertz (1973) are the important anthropologists that have contributed for our understanding of religion from symbolic perspective.
Victor Turner’s work on the Ndembu rituals provides a highly detailed and enormous work on Ndembu religious life which consists of rituals falling under these two categories – Life cycle crisis ritual and ritual of affliction. His work shows that the Ndembu society is greatly marked by different ceremonies replete with symbolic meanings in every act and performance. Along with that his powerful analytic concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘anti-structure’ in analysing the Ndembu society brought about new dimension in looking at rituals and its symbolic relevance in ritual context.
According to Mary Douglas, there is an enormous literature on religion in the modern world, but little guidance on how to relate its understandings to the other branches of social thought. Douglas emphasises that the idea of the dangerous and powerful sacred is formed by living together and trying to coerce one another to conform to a moral idea. The sacred can be engraved in the hearts and mind of the worshippers in more than one way. It represents the society, as experienced; it is divine order, and what distorts it is unholy and polluting. Human body is the most appropriate symbol of the society; functioning of bodily parts represents the social order and disorder. For her, symbols fit well with the empirical experience of group and individual into a consistent whole. She also worked extensively in understanding about symbols. She says that symbol has meaning from its relation to other symbols in a pattern, the pattern gives the meaning. Therefore, no one item in the pattern can carry meaning by itself isolated from the rest. She further puts forward that a basic question for understanding natural symbolic systems will be to know what social conditions are the prototype for the one or the other set of attitudes to the human body and its fitness or unfitness for figuring godhead. What are the limits within which the disdain of organic processes can be used as an idiom for social distance? Douglas also has tried to show that dimensions of social life that govern the fundamental attitude to spirit and matter. According to her, symbolic acts accurately convey information about the intentions and commitment of the actor. She declares that anthropologists are in the habit of using ritual to mean action and beliefs in the symbolic order without reference to the commitment or non-commitment of the actors. Symbolic approach is one of the most popular approaches used by anthropologists to study about human religious behaviours.
Dissatisfied with earlier approaches, Geertz proposes religion as the part of the cultural system. For him, a symbol means any object, act, event, quality or relation that serves as a vehicle for a conception. His conception of religion rests on the notion that people act basically according to the systems of meanings that they have and the job of anthropologist is to interpret these meanings and provide for their description. The system of meanings engages continuous dialogue between the meanings acting upon people and people’s actions upon meaning – the cultural system shapes and gets shaped by the people. He says, “For an anthropologist, the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve, for an individual or for a group, as a source of general, yet distinctive, conceptions of the world, the self, and the relations between them, on the one hand—its model of aspect—and of rooted, no less distinctive “mental” dispositions—its model for aspect—on the other. From these cultural functions flow, in turn, its social and psychological ones” (1973:123).
The functional and symbolic approaches have dominated the anthropological study of religion in the late twentieth century as researchers have become increasingly concerned with the concept of meaning. Biological, neurological and cognitive approaches, which have not been dealt here, are gradually gaining popularity and may dominate the future studies in anthropology of religion.