Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem Author(s): Jack Goody Source: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Jun., 1961), pp. 142-164 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/586928 Accessed: 12-04-2020 15:38 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Wiley, The London School of Economics and Political Science are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The British Journal of Sociology This content downloaded from 110.227.179.78 on Sun, 12 Apr 2020 15:38:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms RELIGION AND RITUAL: THE DEFINITIONAL PROBLEM Jack Goody tN THIS PAPER I want to explore the problem of what is in- | volvedincategorizingactsand beliefsasreligious, or ritual, or magico- Xreligious, with the purpose not onlyofclearing the way for subsequent treatment of my own empirical data concerning the toI)agaa of North- ern Ghana, but also of clarifying certain aspects of the analysis of social systems in general. For some writers such an investigation has appeared a profitless enterprise. At the beginning of Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, a book which as its subtitle suggests owes much to the work of Durkheim as well as to the English anthropologists, Jane Harrison comments on the erroneous approach of those inquirers who start with a general term religion of which they had a preconceived idea, and then try to fit into it any facts that come to hand.