As a student, I always found these criticisms less than perfectly
convincing. True, extant functionalist explanations were not very
good, but that was not sufficient reason to reject the general logic.
Functionalism is a tried and tested method of explanation in evolu-
tionary biology. Consider this: When faced with a newly discovered
organ or behavior, the first questions biologists will ask are, What
does it do for the organism? How does the organ or behavior confer
an advantage in terms of spreading whatever genes are responsible for
its appearance? How did it gradually evolve from other organs and
behaviors? This strategy is now commonly called "reverse engineer-
[26] ing." Imagine you are given a complicated contraption you have
never seen before. The only way to make sense of what the parts are
and how they are assembled is to try and guess what they are for, what
function they are supposed to fulfil. Obviously, this may sometimes
lead you down a garden path. The little statue on the bonnet of some
luxury cars serves no function as far as locomotion is concerned. The
point is not that reverse engineering is alwayssufficientto deliver the
right solution but that it is alwaysnecessary.So there may be some
benefit in a functionalist strategy at least as a starting point in the
explanation of religion. If people the world over hold religious con-
cepts and perform religious rituals, if so many social groups are orga-
nized around common beliefs, it makes sense to ask, How does the
belief contribute to the group's functioning? How does it create or
change or disrupt social relations?
These questions highlight the great weakness of classical function-
alism and the real reason it did not survive in anthropology. It assumed
that institutions were around so that society could function but it did
not explain how or why individuals would participate in making soci-
ety function. For instance, imagine that performing communal reli-
gious rituals really provided a glue that kept the social group together.
Why would that lead people to perform rituals? They may have better
things to do. Naturally, one is tempted to think that other members of
the group would coerce the reluctant ones into participating. But this
only pushes the problem one step further. Why would these others be
inclined to enforce conformity? Accepting that conformity is advanta-
geous to the group, they too might guess that free riding—accepting
the benefits without doing anything in return—would be even more
advantageous to themselves. Classical functionalist accounts had no
way of explaining how or why people would adopt representations
that were good for social cohesion.
RELIGION EXPLAINED