Religious Institutions in Complex Societies

Difficulties in the Theoretic Specification of Functions

Bibliographic Data

ID4909403
AuthorsAllan W Eister (corresponding author)
Year1957
Volume22
Issue4
Pages387
Publication date1957-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2089155
OpenAlexW2321946218
LanguageEN
Citations received8

IMPLICIT in the methodology of structuralfunctional analysis, the prevailing theoretic convention among sociologists and anthropologists for describing institutions in their social context, is the demand for specification in the theory not only of the functional requisites of societies but also of functions which given parts of the whole are expected to perform in, or for, the system. The system ends are generally posited as (1) survival, and, as instrumental to this, if not an end in its own right, (2) the maintenance of homeostasis, or of dynamic equilibrium, within the system. The theories of Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Benedict, and Parsons may be regarded as examples of functionalist theories of this type. These theories usually envisage societies as social systems operating within a framework of necessity. They attempt to state explicitly what the requirements or needs of the social system are, usually as these are inferred from the conditions of human social existence, and then to trace out the implications of these and hence arrive at some idea of the functions that must (and will) be performed. Thus if religion does not perform the necessary functions, some other institution or institutions will. In addition to theories of this type, however, there are other kinds of theoretic formulations in which the theorists have also been concerned with the functions of religion but have been content simply to enumerate various consequences (which may be quite random or independent of each other) that religious institutions are found, or expected, to have in various societies.1 The latter kinds of theories have often taken the form of empirical generalizations in which a somewhat wider range of functions of religion is considered than is ordinarily done in closed system analysis. In both cases, however, there appear to be a number of difficulties that impede the effort to designate theoretically the functions that religion, or religious institutions, perform in complex societies such as our own. This paper holds that (1) specification of expected functions of religious institutions-either on purely logical grounds or on the basis of generalization from empirical evidence-is less precise and likely to be less readily accomplished than for almost any other major area of social organization (economic, political, family, communicational, institutions), and that (2) any attempt to apply most of the available functional theories of religion to complex

Epistemology · Sociology · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development

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