Rationalist Approach To Anthropology Essay

Religious Anthropology can be traced back to the European Enlightenment between the 17th and 20th centuries. Societal breakthroughs such as the advent of the Scientific Method, as well as the Reformation helped to expand intellectual abilities to approach a subject with both an open and rational mind. Couple this with exploration, and Europeans began to see other cultures and societies and attempted to apply these new progressive ideas toward their interruption of them. With this came to main camps or Anthropological perspectives, the Rational and Antirational approaches. Rational, focusing more the scientific method and a linear evolutionary model and Antirational focusing more on the emotional human connections. Some of the prevailing rationalist of this time, including Marx, Tylor, and Frazer, and Weber, contended that the world was based on a linear evolutionary process. Edward Tylor felt that all societies progressed on a set road of progression. Primitive societies were savage and believed in animism. From there, a society advanced to barbarism and shifted to a polytheistic society. Finally a society reached civilization when it embraced a monotheistic religion. …show more content…
Here were saw 19th century anthropologist apply a more shrewd perspective on the understanding of human interaction. Rationalists tended to hold on to a linear perspective of civilization. That is, all society were on the same path moving toward the ultimate goal of “civilization”. For Marx it was communism, for Tylor it was monotheism. Rationalists tended to have an ethnocentric view, and would place their theories higher on the cultural hierarchy. Rationalists are unable to see any other mode for society rather than progression in the western sense. This does not allow them to the inherent value in societies other than their own, for they would mark them as “savage” or