Anchoring Anthropological Categories in Simple, Translatable Words

“Art” and “religion” are classic categories of anthropological discourse. Both words can be seen as designating distinctive and profound categories of human action and experience and hold special significance not only for anthropology but also for sociology, history, archeology, and adjacent disciplines. Problematically, however, both words are untranslatable into many languages, and even within European languages, they have been subject to endless definitional debates. Many scholars have given up on definitions altogether. Swimming against the tide, we demonstrate that clear, coherent, and translatable definitions can be achieved using a defining methodology based on simple, cross-translatable words and show that this methodology allows us to shed light on the history and present-day polysemy of both concepts. Of course, for anthropological purposes, “art” and “religion” need to be given stipulative definitions to distance them from their everyday English senses. We further demonstrate, however, that anthropological definitions can also be cast in simple, translatable words and that there are multiple benefits from doing so. In wider perspective, we contend that if anthropologists are to use broad but abstract terms like “art” and “religion” (or “emotion,” “power,” “economics”) on a comparative scale, they need better semantic tools to define these as analytic concepts.