iences. One way of distinguishing prevalent interpretations
is between substantive conceptualizations that focus on what
religion is, that is, the cross-cultural attributes that distinguish
it from other social phenomena, and functional definitions
that are concerned with what religious does, that is, its role
in society (Rakodi, 2007). Another important distinction is between
those definitions we can roughly label as “static” and
“dynamic.” According to the former, which has been widely
adopted in classic sociology and anthropology, religion is a: