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Institutions and Social Structures

Religion

Cultural and Socialization Institutions

Considered sociologically, religion is a social institution built around a 'unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden,' in Émile Durkheim's canonical definition. Durkheim argued religion's essential function is not theological but social: it expresses and reinforces the cohesion of the group itself, uniting believers into a moral community, insisting 'there is no society that does not have religion.' Functionalist sociology built on this claim, holding that religious belief systems encourage social order and stability in ways rational knowledge cannot. Durkheim developed the theory through a study of what he took to be the most elementary religious form, Australian Aboriginal totemism, arguing that the sacred totem a clan worshipped was, at bottom, a symbol of the society itself. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own account
Cultural/normative institution (social-cohesion institution, in Durkheim's functionalist framing) 1
Emergence PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Not precisely datable as an emergence; Durkheim held religion to be effectively coextensive with organized society, studying Australian Aboriginal totemism as its most ancient surviving documented form and publishing his theory in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). 1
Religion
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Associated With

Source Wikipedia: Sociology of Religion

The gurukul system was fundamentally a religious institution, transmitting Vedic scripture, ritual and philosophy from guru to disciple in a residential setting.

The madrasa is an Islamic institution of religious learning, teaching Quranic study, jurisprudence and theology alongside other subjects.

Monasticism is a religious institution found across multiple traditions, organizing communities of practitioners around vows, discipline and shared religious life.

The parish system is the local territorial and administrative structure through which religious institutions, especially the Christian church, organize congregational life.

The sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, is a foundational religious institution of Buddhism alongside the Buddha and the dharma.

The seminary is the institution through which religious traditions, especially Christian denominations, formally train and ordain clergy.

The yeshiva is the traditional Jewish institution of religious learning, dedicated to the study of the Torah and Talmud.

Zakat is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, a religiously mandated institution of almsgiving administered as part of the broader structure of Islamic religious practice.

Informed By

Durkheim's functionalist account treats religion's essential role as social cohesion, uniting believers into a moral community.

Source Wikipedia: Sociology of Religion

Studied By

Source Wikipedia: Ali Shariati
Source Wikipedia: Auguste Comte
Source Wikipedia: Clifford Geertz
Source Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Ferdinand Tonnies
Source Friedrich Engels (Wikipedia)
Source Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Georg Simmel

Davie coined believing without belonging to describe a pattern of religious institutions losing membership while private religious belief persisted.

Source Herbert Spencer (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Jeffrey C. Alexander

Casanova Public Religions in the Modern World revised secularization theory, showing organized religion re-entering public political life rather than simply declining.

Source Jurgen Habermas (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Louis Althusser
Source Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Marcel Mauss
Source Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Wikipedia)
Source Encyclopedia.com: Max Weber
Source Robert K. Merton (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Robert N. Bellah

Wuthnow studies of American religious change tracked how religion as a social institution restructured after the 1960s toward looser, more voluntary forms of belonging.

Stark rational choice theory of religion modeled religious participation as a market in which people weigh costs and rewards much like other institutional choices.

Robertson early sociology of religion examined organized religion role in defining meaning systems before he extended that analysis into his later theory of globalization.

Source Ronald Inglehart (Wikipedia)
Source Roy Rappaport (Wikipedia)
Source Sherry Ortner - Wikipedia

Asad genealogical anthropology of religion and secularism reframed how the discipline studies religion as an institutionalized category rather than a timeless universal.

Source Thomas Luckmann (Wikipedia)
Source Wikipedia: Victor Turner
Source Encyclopedia.com: William Graham Sumner
Source Zora Neale Hurston (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Sociology of Religion
Wikipedia
  • Durkheim's definition and Functionalism section
  • Functionalism section, social order
    belief systems are seen as encouraging social order and social stability in ways that rationally based knowledge cannot.
  • synthesized from Durkheim discussion
  • Emile Durkheim section, definition of religion
    A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden
  • Emile Durkheim section, Indigenous Australians
    Durkheim, a secular Frenchman, looked at anthropological data of Indigenous Australians.
  • Informed By: Structural Functionalism, Functionalism section
  • Associated With: Emile Durkheim, Durkheim discussion, Functionalism section
View the Source
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Georg Simmel
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences)Studied By: Georg Simmel, Biography
Quote, Studied By: Georg Simmel, Biography
Simmel demonstrated this view by writing on the philosophy of such different objects as money, culture, the sexes, religion, and art.
View the Source
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Marcel Mauss
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences)Studied By: Marcel Mauss, Biography
Quote, Studied By: Marcel Mauss, Biography
In charge of the section on religious sociology, Mauss was one of its leading contributors.
View the Source
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Wikipedia)
Studied By: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lead
Quote, Studied By: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lead
The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history.
View the Source
Thomas Luckmann (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Thomas Luckmann, Lead paragraph, third sentence (defining contribution)
Quote, Studied By: Thomas Luckmann, Lead paragraph, third sentence (defining contribution)
His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.
View the Source
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences): Ferdinand Tonnies
Encyclopedia.com (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences)Studied By: Ferdinand Tonnies, Published works (selection)
Quote, Studied By: Ferdinand Tonnies, Published works (selection)
2010: Schriften und Rezensionen zur Religion, ed. Rolf Fechner, Profil, Munich/Vienna: Profil
View the Source
Encyclopedia.com: Max Weber
Encyclopedia.comStudied By: Max Weber, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Max Weber, Article text
Instead, he made the important decision to work on a large-scale comparative sociology of world religions that would examine the social foundations of religious beliefs and practices as well as the inner-worldly repercussions of religious doctrine.
View the Source
Encyclopedia.com: William Graham Sumner
Encyclopedia.comStudied By: William Graham Sumner, Article text
Quote, Studied By: William Graham Sumner, Article text
Out of the drive of sex-love grow the institutions of marriage and the family; from fear (Sumner usually spoke of it as “ghost-fear”) grow the elemental forms of religion.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Auguste Comte
WikipediaStudied By: Auguste Comte, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Auguste Comte, Article text
He came to view Islam and Islamic civilization more favorably, praising what he regarded as the religion’s doctrinal simplicity, communal rituals, and civilizational history, factors he believed made Islam especially suited to transition toward the “positive religion” he envisioned.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Victor Turner
WikipediaStudied By: Victor Turner, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Victor Turner, Article text
As a professor at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, Turner began to apply his study of rituals and rites of passage to world religions and the lives of religious heroes.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Louis Althusser
WikipediaStudied By: Louis Althusser, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Louis Althusser, Article text
Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called "ideological state apparatuses" (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organizations, and most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate.
View the Source
Herbert Spencer (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Herbert Spencer, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Herbert Spencer, Article text
He was to gain much notoriety from his repudiation of traditional religion, and was frequently condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and materialism.
View the Source
Sherry Ortner - Wikipedia
WikipediaStudied By: Sherry Ortner, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Sherry Ortner, Article text
Ortner's doctoral research, ethnography conducted between 1966 and 1968 in the Khumbu region of Nepal focused on rituals of religion and ordinary social life of the Sherpa community.
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Roy Rappaport (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Roy Rappaport, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Roy Rappaport, Article text
"Ultimate sacred postulates" form the top of the hierarchy, which are the most fundamental elements of religion.
View the Source
Zora Neale Hurston (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Zora Neale Hurston, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Zora Neale Hurston, Article text
Included are rare ethnographic evidence of the Hoodoo and Vodou religion in the U.
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Jurgen Habermas (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationStudied By: Jürgen Habermas, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Jürgen Habermas, Article text
In his book Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (Between Naturalism and Religion, 2005), Habermas stated that the forces of religious strength, as a result of multiculturalism and immigration, are stronger than in previous decades, and, therefore, there is a need of tolerance which must be understood as a two-way street: secular people need to tolerate the role of religious people in the public square and vice versa.
View the Source
Ronald Inglehart (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationStudied By: Ronald Inglehart, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Ronald Inglehart, Article text
Examining religiosity from a broader perspective and in a wider range of countries than have been done before, this book argues that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those in poorer nations and in failed states, facing personal survival-threatening risks.
View the Source
Friedrich Engels (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Friedrich Engels, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Friedrich Engels, Article text
Applying the method of historical materialism, Engels analysed the religious conflicts of the Reformation as fundamentally expressions of underlying class conflict, arguing that the peasant and plebeian insurgents, led by radical figures like Thomas Müntzer, articulated their social and economic grievances in religious terms.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Clifford Geertz
WikipediaStudied By: Clifford Geertz, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Clifford Geertz, Article text
Criticizing Geertz's theory of religion in general, Asad pointed out a gap between "cultural system" and "social reality" when attempting to define the concept of religion in universal terms.
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Robert K. Merton (Wikipedia)
WikipediaStudied By: Robert K. Merton, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Robert K. Merton, Article text
However, Merton also supplemented Hessen's analysis of the technological determinants of the fields of inquiry of seventeenth-century science with a study of the influence of religion (especially Protestantism) on the social legitimacy of science as a profession: the so-called "Merton Thesis".
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Wikipedia: Robert N. Bellah
WikipediaStudied By: Robert N. Bellah, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Robert N. Bellah, Article text
Bellah argues that contemporary American religion is not limited to churches but also includes a trans-denominational civil religion.
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Wikipedia: Jeffrey C. Alexander
WikipediaStudied By: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Article text
Alexander picks up specifically on Durkheim's suggestion that the religious processes observed in tribal societies are as pertinent in modern societies.
View the Source
Wikipedia: Ali Shariati
WikipediaStudied By: Ali Shariati, Article text
Quote, Studied By: Ali Shariati, Article text
He thought that there was no unity of religion and society, but rather there were many religions and societies.
View the Source

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