Evans-Pritchard
‘As far as a study of religion as a factor in social life is concerned, it may make little difference whether the anthropologist is a theist or an atheist, since in either case he can only take into account what he can observe. But if either attempts to go further than this, each must pursue a different path. The non-believer seeks for some theory - biological, psychological, or sociological - which will explain the illusion; the believer seeks rather to understand the manner in which a people conceives of a reality and their relations to it. For both, religion is part of social life, but for the believer it has also another dimension.’
E.E. Evans-Pritchard - Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford 1965), p. 121
