Religion 38 (2008) 219–225

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Religion
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/religion

Conceptualizing religion: Some recent reflectionsq

Benson Saler*
Department of Anthropology, MS-006, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA

How might we best conceptualize or define religion? Or, for that matter, should we dispense with the term religion in favor
of something else? Proffered answers to those questions are not only relevant for marking out and sustaining a field of schol-
arship in the academy, but they relate more broadly to assumptions and theorizing about the human condition. In this paper, I
first briefly describe and evaluate three advocacies respecting the conceptual problem that are not discussed in my book,
Conceptualizing Religion (Saler, 1993, 2000). While these examples do not exhaust the diversity of available approaches to
conceptualizing and defining religion, they testify to that diversity. Second, I outline my approach. Third and finally, I discuss
a probable factor that works against an easy acceptance of my proposals for conceptualizing religion.

Three approaches to conceptualizing religion

Timothy Fitzgerald

The most radical of my three examples of how others deal with the conceptual problem is found in a book published by
Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), entitled The Ideology of Religious Studies. Fitzgerald notes that not all peoples have a word or con-
cept for what we call ‘‘religion.’’ He maintains, indeed, that ‘‘religion’’ is a distinctly Western term and concept, and that its
contemporary uses and meanings have been shaped in significant measure by their applications in promoting capitalism and
colonialism. Religion, he argues, is an ideological construct for the advancement of special interests in Euro-American soci-
eties. As such, it ‘‘cannot reasonably be taken to be a valid [panhuman] analytical category since it does not pick out any dis-
tinctive cross-cultural aspect of human life’’ (2000, p. 4). So-called religions, he writes, are ‘‘non-existent objects’’ (2000, x).
Support for this thesis, Fitzgerald suggests, can be derived from, among other things, an analysis of competing scholarly
efforts to define religion. Competing definitions of the sort that I call ‘‘essentialist’’ – that is, definitions that specify some set of
necessary features or conditions that must be met if something is to be properly labeled by the term – differ widely and priv-
ilege different things. And family resemblance definitions, Fitzgerald holds, are so promiscuous in what they include that they
can serve no steady analytical purpose. The very vacuity of competing definitional efforts, he avers, is indexical of the non-
existence of religion as a universal phenomenon. How, then, are we to facilitate the ethnographic exploration of real world
phenomena that are now conventionally (and mistakenly) assigned to the rubric of religion? Fitzgerald recommends that we
abandon the term religion and, in order to guide our studies, substitute three category labels of which he approves: politics,
ritual, and soteriology. As Frank Korom (2001, p. 109) points out in a review of Fitzgerald’s book, however, ‘‘one could make
similar cases for abandoning’’ those three terms as well.
In any case, having exposed to his own satisfaction the insubstantiality and ideological baggage of the category religion,
Fitzgerald maintains that the notion that ‘‘religion’’ is a subject matter that constitutes a justifiable field of scholarship in mod-
ern universities cannot be supported. He recommends that Departments of Religious Studies be remade into Departments of
Cultural Studies, where the phenomena to be studied are values and power realities, not ‘‘religions.’’
Now, the lack of concepts and terms for various things among some human populations does not ipso facto indicate the
absence of universal phenomena. Further, as we well know, many of our analytical categories are contested. Early in his
book, Fitzgerald himself explicitly recognizes this, for he writes that ‘‘I realize that many of the concepts that are used for

q This paper is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Universities of Bergen and Tromsø in September 2007.
* Tel.: þ1 978 369 0504.
E-mail address: B4saler@aol.com

0048-721X/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2008.03.008
220 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225

cross-cultural analysis and comparison are vulnerable to criticisms similar to the one I want to make about ‘religion’’’ (2000,
pp. 9–10). Later in the book, moreover, Fitzgerald writes that ‘‘the modern histories of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ seem to have
some similarities that cannot be ignored,’’ and he declares that both have had ‘‘a mystifying function in western ideology’’
(2000, p. 237). But while he seeks to jettison the term religion, he not only wants to retain the term culture, but he encourages
the rest of us to commit ourselves to ‘‘cultural studies.’’ As I have argued elsewhere (Saler, 2001), however, deciding how we
may best conceptualize ‘‘culture’’ is, if anything, an even more formidable task than attempting to do so for religion.
What ought to inform our conceptual and definitional efforts is a recognition of the inevitable lack of full transparency in
language (Saler, 2004, pp. 219–220). I am not certain that Fitzgerald appreciates this in any profundity. In any case, he does not
persuade me to drop religion as a convenient term for talking about certain things that I find interesting. That the term re-
ligion poses some problems is neither unexpected nor fatal. The same can be said for virtually all of the terms that label ana-
lytical categories in the social sciences. We need to recognize difficulties and then do the best we can in communicating our
thoughts as clearly as possible.

Peter Byrne

My second example of approaches to conceptualizing religion is found in a book chapter authored by Peter Byrne (1988).
Byrne, an Oxford-trained philosopher, recognizes the great complexity of what we call religion. In keeping with that recog-
nition, he aspires to formulate a family resemblance description of religion.
Byrne characterizes religion as an ‘‘institution’’ with four dimensions, the theoretical, the practical, the sociological, and
the experiential. These are themselves qualified by three differentiae: the object of the complex (‘‘gods or sacred things’’),
goals (‘‘salvation or ultimate good’’), and functions (‘‘giving ultimate meaning to life or providing the identity or cohesion
of a social group’’) (1988, p. 7). The explication of these three differentiae might have been incorporated into a cogent family
resemblance exposition had Byrne treated them as typical but not necessary features of religion – typical features, that is, that
are most likely to occur in what Western scholars tend to regard as the clearest or best examples of religion. But instead, Byrne
asserts that religious beliefs are concerned with ‘‘God, or the gods or more generally sacred things,’’ and he avers that ‘‘the
sacred’’ (in a more or less Durkheimian sense) enables us to distinguish between religion and other things. Fitzgerald
(1996, p. 216), rightly notes that Byrne’s use of the sacred seems to be a step in the direction of introducing a necessary
condition for identifying religion.
Byrne’s bow to necessity strikes me as an example of essentialist recidivism. Further, he does not otherwise do enough to
sustain successfully a family resemblance approach. An interesting question is this: why, despite his explicit intentions to
achieve a family resemblance conceptualization of religion, did Byrne fail? I suggest two reasons.
First, a family resemblance approach to religion is inadequate by itself for scholarly purposes. Without adequate concep-
tual constraints, a family resemblance approach may well encourage the promiscuity of inclusions that we have been warned
against by Fitzgerald and other critics. Constraint can be provided by the judgmental stipulation of central examples of what
we mean by religion. These central examples function as orienting models for a fuzzy category, a category, that is, that admits
of different degrees of membership.
Second, the lure of essentialism is great. But beyond essentialism’s intellectual attractions for classifying and boundary
maintenance, there are, I think, other factors at work. One such, I postulate, is a disposition to essentialism that is grounded
in the evolutionary development of our species. I will return to this idea at the end of the paper. Suffice it here to observe that
if such a disposition could be established or at least rendered plausible, it would lend support to Jacques Derrida’s claim that
we all ‘‘dwell within the telos of essentialism.’’

Lawson and McCauley

My third example of approaches to conceptualizing religion comes from one of the foundational works in the cognitive
science of religion, Lawson and McCauley’s (1990) book, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. In that
work, as Luther Martin (2003, p. 222) points out, Lawson and McCauley are largely concerned with developing and articulat-
ing ‘‘a naturalistic theory of religious action.’’
Lawson and McCauley (1990, p. 5) state that ‘‘For the purposes of theorizing we construe a religious system as a symbolic-
cultural system of ritual acts accompanied by an extensive and largely shared conceptual scheme that includes culturally
postulated superhuman agents’’. They go on to write that ‘‘we maintain that what is unique to religious ritual systems is their
inclusion of culturally postulated superhuman agents among the class of eligible participants’’ (1990, p. 5, emphases in original).
It is useful to compare Lawson and McCauley’s characterization of religion with the 1966 definition offered by Melford
E. Spiro. Spiro (1966, p. 96) defines religion as ‘‘an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally
postulated superhuman beings,’’ and he adds that ‘‘viewed systematically, religion can be differentiated from other culturally
constituted institutions by virtue only of its reference to superhuman beings’’ (1966, p. 98). Lawson and McCauley’s concep-
tual effort is both similar to Spiro’s and different from his in various ways.
An obvious and consequential difference is this: Lawson and McCauley substitute ‘‘culturally postulated superhuman
agents’’ for Spiro’s ‘‘culturally postulated superhuman beings,’’ and in their theorizing about agents and agency they make
important contributions to the emerging cognitive science of religion. Further, instead of actually describing religion as an
‘‘institution,’’ although their subsequent analysis arguably allows for such a characterization, they prefer to identify religion
 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225 221

as ‘‘a symbolic-cultural system,’’ in keeping with, I think, the strong emphasis in anthropology on such construals during the
years that intervened between Spiro’s definitional essay and their book. And while they clearly allow for Durkheim’s (1915
[1912]) ‘‘two arms’’ of religion, ritual and belief, Lawson and McCauley stress ritual in their characterization, in consonance
with the analytical focus on ritual in their book. While Spiro’s use of the expression ‘‘culturally patterned interaction’’ also
allows for ritual, Spiro’s emphasis is more on the intellectual or belief aspect of religion, for he writes that ‘‘the belief in
superhuman beings and in their power to assist or to harm man approaches universal distribution, and this belief – I would
insist – is the core variable which ought to be designated by any definition of religion’’ (1996, p. 96, emphasis in original).
In any case, and despite their differences, both Spiro and Lawson and McCauley suppose that they can separate out religion
(or some very significant part of religion) from all else. Lawson and McCauley aver that the inclusion of supernatural agents is
what is unique to religious rituals, and Spiro maintains that the institution of religion differs from other culturally constituted
institutions only by virtue of its reference to superhuman beings.
The textual quotations from Lawson and McCauley that I have thus far voiced give reason to suppose that Lawson and
McCauley’s conceptualization, like Spiro’s, is substantive (because it tells us what religion is) and essentialist (because it spec-
ifies some necessary feature that distinguishes the phenomenon described from all else). But when we read further, we can
discern another possibility, even though it remains sub-textual.
Thus, for instance, Lawson and McCauley speak of religious rituals that are ‘‘least controversially classified as such’’ (1990, p.
6, emphasis added). It is a universal principle of such rituals, they claim, that the participants presume, ‘‘indirectly at least,’’
that the rituals implicate superhuman agency. That is why the classification of these rituals is least controversial. But that
statement implies that the classification of some other action systems may be more controversial.
On the following page, Lawson and McCauley declare that religious rituals, although they pivot ‘‘on general features com-
mon to all actions,’’ nevertheless deserve ‘‘separate treatment’’ because of ‘‘the sorts of metaphysical commitments all reli-
gions share as well as. other features unique to the doxastic heritage of particular religions’ conceptual scheme’’ (1990, p. 7).
They then remark, ‘‘Of course groups such as Theravada Buddhists, Marxists, and secular humanists may prove troublesome
for our approach, but such cases are hardly prototypical by anyone’s lights!’’ (1990, p. 7).
I take Lawson and McCauley’s use of ‘‘prototypical’’ in the sentence quoted to mean that the three cases cited are not widely
thought to be good examples of what most people generally mean by religion. That reading is in keeping with technical uses of
the adjective ‘‘prototypical’’ and the noun ‘‘prototype’’ in what has come to be known as prototype theory. In that theory, a pro-
totype, as the psychologist Eleanor Rosch (1978, p. 36) describes it, is the adjudged best or clearest example of a category. Thus, for
instance, some people may judge a sparrow to be a better or clearer example of ‘‘bird’’ than a penguin, and some may judge a chair
to be a clearer or better example of ‘‘furniture’’ than a radio. Penguins are birds, and radios can be thought of as furniture, but for
many people they are not the best or clearest examples of their respective categories, just as Canonical Theravada Buddhism,
Marxism, and secular humanism may not be the clearest or best examples of how some people conceptualize religion. (Indirect
or circumstantial evidence to support my reading of Lawson and McCauley’s statement arguably can be found in the Acknowl-
edgments section of their book [p. ix], where they cite the linguist George Lakoff as one of the three persons who, they write,
‘‘provided especially helpful comments which have led to many improvements throughout the text.’’ Lakoff’s (1987) book,
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, contains a major exposition of prototype theory.)
Lawson and McCauley sometimes nod in the direction of prototype theory. They recognize that people may employ the
term religion in extended and multiple senses. But rather than describe religion as a fuzzy category that allows for degrees
of membership, Lawson and McCauley opt for an essentialist characterization that rests religion on a distinctive feature
claimed to be universal in all religions. To maintain such a position, moreover, they resort to a common ploy. They imply
that religions that minimize or lack the necessary feature are less than authentic religions. Thus, for instance, they write
that ‘‘’Religions’ without commitments to culturally postulated superhuman agents are (at least) extremely unlikely to
have rich, highly constrained ritual systems. In fact, they are unlikely to have much ritual at all’’ (1990, pp. 7–8, emphases
in original). In this passage, Lawson and McCauley put ‘‘religions’’ in quotation marks. They thus suggest that they are dealing
here with dubious metaphorical extensions of the term.
If we were to de-essentialize Lawson and McCauley’s conceptualizations, we could begin with their stipulated universal
feature, a feature that they deem necessary for the proper identification of religion. Instead of insisting on the universality
and necessity of ‘‘superhuman agents’’ – a universality and necessity created by definition – we could say that the postulation
of such agents is typical of what we usually mean by religions. Although typical, we accept the possibility that some phenom-
ena that we may think of as religions on other grounds may minimize or even lack functionally important postulations of
superhuman agents. In that regard, such religions are less typical of what we normally mean by religion, but we may never-
theless find it convenient and perhaps intellectually productive to treat them as religions.
The most typical religions, the best or clearest examples of what we mean by religion, are central to the category religion.
Less typical religions are more peripheral to that category. This conceptual strategy shifts the burden of conceptualizing
religion from the domain of metaphysical fiats to a consideration of how we may comfortably and productively use words
as they relate to our experiences, our sensitivities, our goals, and our penchant for analogies.

My recommendations for conceptualizing religion

My proposals for re-conceptualizing Lawson and McCauley’s characterizations of religion and religious rituals lead directly
to an exposition of the approach that I favor. Several considerations or principles guide me.
222 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225

First, while I deem definitions important, I do not think of them as ends in themselves. Rather, they are potentially useful
instruments for crystallizing and communicating to others some of our thoughts. The instrumental function of definitions is
all the more significant when projected against considerations voiced by the philosopher Karl Popper (1962). Definitions,
Popper says, involve us in infinite regress unless constrained. Words used to define some other word themselves require def-
inition in each definitional generation. The best that we can hope for, Popper remarks, is clarity in how we use our terms
rather than ultimate precision in defining them.
Second, the word religion, as Spiro (1966, p. 91) points out, ‘‘is a term with historically rooted meanings,’’ at least in
Western societies. Because that is so, Spiro advises, our definition of religion ought to satisfy ‘‘the criterion of intra-cultural
intuitivity’’ as well as being cross-culturally applicable. I deem that sage advice.
Third, religion is a very complex phenomenon. It is not merely or simply a matter of beliefs of a certain kind and rituals of
a certain kind. It also relates to intra-psychic conflict and growth, to aesthetic canons, to moral sensitivities and sensibilities,
and, broadly put, to principles and processes of social organization and cultural development. Religions, indeed, differ among
themselves respecting the mixtures of organizational principles and transmission practices that help sustain them, as the re-
search of Harvey Whitehouse (2004) has impressively demonstrated. A worthwhile goal to set for ourselves is the achieve-
ment of a conceptualization of religion that allows for the heterogeneity and complexity of religions.
Fourth, the ultimate phenomenal objects of our research are not religions. They are human beings. Religion is a construct,
a convention, for talking about certain expressions of human life, expressions that individuals manifest in different degrees of
complexity and intensity. We have reason to hope that research concerned with religion will inform our understandings of
the human condition, just as our growing knowledge of that condition in its evolutionary and existential aspects will inform
our understandings of religion.
The scholarly model of religion that I recommend is intended to harmonize with the considerations that I have just listed. I
propose a model not of any particular religion but, rather, of what some call ‘‘religion in general.’’ It consists of all the features
that our cumulative scholarship induces us to attribute to religion. Some of these features have a much wider distribution
among the many religions of the world than do others. Features with the widest distributions are likely to be regarded by
scholars as the most typical components of what we mean by religion. But less typical features must also be taken into ac-
count, and should be predicated of our model, since we strive to conceptualize and appreciate religion in its great complexity.
Not all religions will manifest all features of our general model. Different religions relate to the model differently. No single
feature or small conjunction of features is necessary to admit candidates to the group comprehended by the category religion.
The many religions of the world relate to one another by family resemblances, by similarities that differentially overlap and
criss-cross (Wittgenstein, 1958, I.67), not by sharing some essence.
I list the most typical features that should be predicated of the model. First, the postulation of ‘‘supernatural’’ or ‘‘super-
human’’ agents whose claimed existence is believed by religious persons to make a difference in their lives. Second, incor-
porative rituals undertaken to establish, sustain, or strengthen positive social relations with supernatural or superhuman
agents. Third, prophylactic or corrective rituals to contain, constrain, negate, or exorcise supernatural or superhuman agents.
Fourth, prayer or other instrumentalities for delivering messages to supernatural or superhuman agents. Fifth, ideas that the
moral code derives from, or is sanctioned and supported by, supernatural or superhuman agents. Sixth, proscriptions or
‘‘tabus’’ forbidding actions on the basis of postulated negative sacred sanctions, as well as enjoinments to do various things
that are claimed to have positive supernatural sanctions. Seventh, beliefs and practices concerning life after death, including
spatial associations respecting post-mortem life, conventions regarding the disposal of human remains, and efforts to as-
suage grief and repair tears in the social fabric occasioned by the death of social actors. Eighth, a dichotomy of objects
whereby some are regarded as set apart or ‘‘sacred’’ while others are deemed ordinary or ‘‘profane.’’ Ninth, religious special-
ists of various kinds, such as diviners, shamans, or members of religious guilds. Tenth, a sacred canon of some sort, either oral
or written or some combination of both (see B.K. Smith, 1987), including a corpus of central narratives or myths. Eleventh,
physiological techniques (such as drugs, hyperventilation, fasting, sleep deprivation, and so on) that are utilized to put people
into special states of sensitivity respecting supernatural or superhuman agents. Twelfth, song, dance, and instrumental music
that are locally assigned sacred significance. Thirteenth, sacrifice of one sort or another. Fourteenth, beliefs and practices
respecting soteriological goals. Fifteenth, teaching or encouraging others to adopt, sustain, and pass on religious practices
and goals.
The typicality features listed above – readers may add to them in keeping with their own scholarly research – require more
complex descriptions than those afforded here. Some of them, indeed, are controversial in the scholarly literature. Old de-
bates, however, may profitably be re-visited if we agree that the features debated need not be either universal or necessary.
Take, for instance, disagreements about a sacred-profane dichotomy. The most famous assertion of such a dichotomy is made
by Emile Durkheim (1915 [1912]), who supposes that a distinction between the sacred and the profane is universal in all
human societies and that it is essential for all religions. Some of Durkheim’s critics argue that his distinction is vague, and
that the specifics of what is sacred and what is profane vary substantially from society to society or may even be absent.
For these reasons, Durkheim’s critics contend, we cannot insist that ‘‘the sacred’’ is a unitary and universal phenomenon
on which to peg a definition of religion. While I agree, I also think that many religions do include some notion of ‘‘sacredness’’
or set-apartness. Furthermore, a sacred/profane distinction may be more important or more intense in some religions than in
others. Because of these considerations, I suggest that our most productive analytical procedure is to downplay the noun, ‘‘the
sacred,’’ while employing the adjective ‘‘sacred’’ in identifying certain of the elements that we associate with religion, as, for
instance, in cases of sacred music, sacred objects, sacred narratives, and so forth. The goal is to describe ideas and sensitivities
 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225 223

respecting sacred things where they are demonstrably important, without insisting that we are dealing with a universal
phenomenon that necessarily determines what we mean by religion.
One more aspect of my approach ought to be described here. I refer to the idea of ‘‘prototype’’ as applied to ‘‘religion in
general,’’ to the members of families of religions, and to the many elements that we predicate of our scholarly model of re-
ligion. By ‘‘prototype,’’ you may recall, I mean someone’s judgment of what constitutes the best or clearest examples of some
category: for example, sparrows and robins rather than penguins in the case of ‘‘bird,’’ and chairs (particularly kitchen chairs)
rather than radios in the case of ‘‘furniture.’’
For Western scholars, the most prototypical religions are in all probability those large families of religions that we call ‘‘the
Western monotheisms’’ or ‘‘the Abrahamic religions,’’ Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These prototypical religions, however,
while intellectually important for reference and comparison, do not by themselves suffice for formulating our scholarly model
of religion. That model depends on all that we have thus far learned about religions throughout the world, in all their
complexity.
Our prototypical religions, moreover, should be invoked with caution for comparison and model building. They gravitate
toward that ideal type of religious organization that Whitehouse calls ‘‘the doctrinal,’’ although they also accord some impor-
tance to what he calls ‘‘the imagistic’’ mode of religiosity. There is often, indeed, a disparity between the doctrinal teachings
and codifications of theologians, on the one hand, and the sentiments and understandings of ordinary religious persons on
the other. As Pascal Boyer (2004, p. 28) remarks :
‘‘For many understandable reasons, scholars of religion have generally established their basecamp in a thorough
knowledge of ‘‘world religions.’’ From this starting point they have tried to climb all the way up to a general under-
standing of religion in human kind. This, however, was not always very successful [.] Studying doctrinal religions
is all too likely to lead one onto a false trail, as far as religion in general is concerned. This is because doctrinal, so-called
‘‘world’’ religions are a secondary, derivative development of a much more general and deeply human tendency to
imagine important supernatural agents and to entertain precise descriptions of their powers.’’
Boyer, in my opinion, is right. But starting with what is most familiar to us, with what is closest at hand, is surely among
‘‘the many understandable reasons’’ to which Boyer refers in passing. Not only do scholars often start with familiar religions
and search the world for what may strike them as analogs, but those religions exhibit the greatest concentrations of features
that we have come to regard as more or less typical of what we call ‘‘religions.’’ Understandably, we are likely to continue
doing what we have done in the past. But now, thanks in significant measure to Boyer’s observations and warnings, we
are equipped to do it more cautiously and more realistically, and so we may hope to improve our comparative engagements
and our understandings of ‘‘religion in general.’’
Two further points can be usefully – and briefly – entered. Just as the religions of the world are linked by family resem-
blances, and just as some are likely to be judged more prototypical of the category religion than others, so, too, are members of
families of religions linked by resemblances, and so, too, are they subject to judgments about how well they exemplify their
families. There are many Judaisms, many Christianities, and many Islams, for instance, and different persons tend to judge
certain of them, respectively, as more Jewish, or more Christian, or more Islamic, than others. Further, the typicality features
that we associate with religion in general may each constitute a family and be subject to judgments of prototypicality. Such
judgments, at least among scholars, ought to take account of variable distributions of features among the religions of the
world.

Essentialism

I regard the approach that I have just sketched as realistic for two reasons. First, it incorporates many aspects of religion
and it does not rest a definition on some one feature. Second, it recognizes appreciable diversity among religions and it makes
explicit allowance for the fact that different religions express different combinations of the features that we predicate of our
scholarly model of religion. In my approach, the category religion is characterized by central tendencies, not by some essence.
It is difficult or even dubious, moreover, to declare with any precision where religion leaves off and something else begins.
Religion, in my view, is an affair of more or less, not a matter of yes or no. It is an analog phenomenon in a world that is mostly
analog.
My approach is addressed to resolving an old problem, a problem recently considered by postmodernists. Postmodernists
posed the problem this way: how may we reconcile our desire for stability in classification with the apprehension and appre-
ciation of differences? While different postmodernists offered somewhat different solutions to this question, their solutions
for the most part privileged the particular over the general. Such privileging included a distancing from so-called ‘‘totalizing
theories’’ or, more broadly put, a distancing from ‘‘metanarratives.’’ In a famous statement, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard
(1984 [1979]: xxiv) declared, ‘‘Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.’’ I imag-
ine that the readers of this essay have varying opinions about postmodernists. But regardless of how we may critically react to
postmodernist advocacies and rhetoric, I hope that we mutually agree that the problem of how to achieve stability in
categorization while simultaneously allowing for the apprehension of differences is far from trivial. My recommendations
for developing a non-essentialist conceptualization of religion are aimed at solving that problem, however incomplete, incon-
sistent, or difficult to implement my recommendations may be.
Should you accept my approach, despite any imperfections in the details? I think so. Can you do so? Not without difficulty.
224 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225

One source of difficulty is a fondness for essentialism. When I wrote Conceptualizing Religion, I supposed that essentialism
was nurtured and buttressed by Western cultures, and that overcoming a commitment to it would amount to a break with
a cultural emphasis. Since then, however, I have come to believe that essentialism is more deeply rooted than that. I now
opine that a cultural predilection for it is epiphenomenal to a biologically rooted disposition. Not only can a plausible
evolutionary scenario be imagined for such a disposition (Saler, 2008), but there is some evidence for it. Thus, for example,
cross-cultural research on folk plant and animal classifications by Brent Berlin (1992), Scott Atran (1990), and others suggest
a widespread preference for essentialism. A review of experimental and other studies leads the cognitive psychologists Medin
and Ortony (1989, p. 184) to conclude that ‘‘people find it natural to assume, or act as though, concepts have essences,’’ and
that ‘‘people typically endorse, at least implicitly, some sort of essentialism.’’ And the developmental psychologist Paul Bloom
(2004, p. 46) relates that many developmental psychologists believe that even very young children are prone to essentialism
and that an essentialist mode of thought is a human universal.
A biologically rooted disposition to essentialism could be a formidable impediment to the acceptance of a non-essentialist
conceptualization of religion. Our evolutionary endowment, however, sometimes enables us to override, transcend, or mit-
igate various urges or proclivities that are themselves part of our evolutionary heritage. The good news, in any case, is that
essentialism, however it may be rooted, can be overcome to a significant extent. Indeed, overcoming it has elsewhere
been of crucial importance for the advancement of science. The distinguished biologist Ernst Mayr (2001, p. 83), for example,
writes that ‘‘Darwin showed that one simply could not understand evolution as long as one accepted essentialism.’’ I think
that that is also true of religion.

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Benson Saler is a cultural anthropologist with particular interests in the anthropology of religion and epistemological issues,
especially as they relate to the development and use of analytical categories. He received a B.A. from Princeton University
(1952) and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (1960). He taught at The University of Connecticut
(1960–1963) and at Brandeis University (1963–2000); during the academic year 1978–1979 he was The Sir Isaac Wolfson Vis-
iting Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He retired as Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University,
in 2000.
His doctoral ethnographic fieldwork was among a Maya-Quiché population in the Pacific piedmont of Guatemala. The
most widely known publication stemming from that research is an article, ‘‘Nagual, Witch, and Sorcerer in a Quiché Village,’’
originally published in 1964 and subsequently anthologized and also republished in a Spanish translation. Later fieldwork
focused on the Wayuu or Guajiro Indians of northern Colombia and Venezuela. His principal published work based on
that research is a 120-page general ethnography, Los Wayú (Guajiro), issued in Spanish in 1988 by the Fundación La Salle
 B. Saler / Religion 38 (2008) 219–225 225

de Ciencias Naturales of Caracas in the third volume of a series (Los aborı́gines de Venezuela) dedicated to ancient and contem-
porary indigenous peoples of Venezuela.
In the 1990s Dr. Saler began ethnographic and library research on various aspects of American ‘‘popular culture,’’ and he
co-authored with Charles A. Ziegler and Charles B. Moore a book entitled UFO Crash at Roswell: the Genesis of a Modern Myth.
Published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1997, it was re-issued as a paperback in 2003.
Dr. Saler’s interests in the anthropology of religion and attendant epistemological issues are represented by a number of
publications over the years, including his book Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and
Unbounded Categories, first published by Brill in 1993 and then re-issued by Berghahn as a paperback with a new Preface in
2000.