Anthropologizing the Bible

Wouldn’t it be great if some really astute people trawled the web every day in search of the best writing? It is in fact great and it’s being done by the good folks over at The Browser. If you haven’t visited, Robert Cottrell provides some background in this piece. As if all this weren’t enough, The Browser has a sister website, Five Books, that is an embarrassment of riches. While these sites are free, we can support them either by donating one dollar per month or buying recommended books through their Amazon links.

While rummaging Five Books yesterday, I found this interview with Timothy Beal, professor of religion at Case Western. It’s a fascinating discussion of bibles in all their varieties, some of which were new to me. After recounting the basic textual and interpretative issues that have always surrounded (and problematized) biblical writings, he discusses The Woman’s Bible:

This was an historic breakthrough in biblical scholarship. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the great women’s rights activist, was the main editor. It’s a commentary on the Bible from a feminist perspective, published over a century ago and produced by women biblical scholars of the time. Its contributors were a small voice in the academic world and this brought their voices together. More than any other text on the oppression of women, this work had a profound influence.

The contributors re-read the biblical texts in ways that detach them from sexist and patriarchal interpretation. For example, Eve is seen as the mother of wisdom. She’s the first to be curious because, as the text says, she saw that the apple was good to eat and would make her wise. Adam, of course, just takes and eats: he doesn’t need a reason.

I discovered this Bible while working on the book of Esther. The way these women read that text, especially the character of Vashti, is quite profound. Vashti is the queen who Esther replaces. She’s essentially described as the first feminist, refusing to be ogled by the king and his friends at their big drinking party. She exposes their patriarchal insecurities.

The Woman’s Bible tackles many other passages, such as the one that says women should be silent in church, and undermines their use. In the New Testament, Paul interacts with Junia, an apostle in the church, and a couple, Priscilla and Aquila, who were Christian missionaries. The Bible acknowledges that authoritative leaders of the early church included women. A hundred years on, it’s still well worth reading.

For those (like me) who don’t have any stake in biblical or theological debates, this sounds stimulating. Over the past year, I’ve been playing with a roughly similar idea as a book project.

As I envision the project, I would read the biblical writings in serial order and then respond to, analyze, or frame them using four-field anthropological knowledge and techniques. Though I have read the bible several times in the past, I’ve not gone back to it since being trained in anthropology. I can see my reactions to it now being much different than they were in the past.

After reading each book, I would decide on an approach (i.e., evolutionary, archaeological, linguistic, biological, structural, comparative, etc.) that sheds new or unusual light on something and then write it. The resulting series of essays would be eclectic and hopefully stimulating in a way that demonstrates the analytical power and richness of four-field anthropology. This idea came to me last year while reading John Flight’s classic 1923 article “The Nomadic Idea and Ideal in the Old Testament” (it is behind a paywall but if you send an email, I’ll be happy to share).

We can’t leave this fallow field to people like the author of The Bible, Anthropology, and the Ancient Caveman: A Plausible Theory for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, who summarizes her study as follows:

Matthew 24:37 reads as follows: “But as the days of Noe were, so shall the coming of the Son of man be” One of the biggest hoaxes in history is the theory of evolution! God created man in His image, so why are there bones that show evidence of manlike beasts? Is there any plausible explanation for caveman? The answer is yes! There is a powerful link between the ancient Antediluvian scientists and the scientists of today. The Bible tells us that the last days will be like the days of Noah. Were cavemen real? If they were real, did God create them? Can an animal pass along human DNA? Is there any link between racism, biological classification, and evolution? Through a variety of brain-based activities, this guide will break down the biblical principles and the related scientific concepts. Both students and adults will garner a deeper understanding of science as it relates to the Bible.

These questions aside, it’s interesting to note that Professor Beal was “raised as an evangelical Christian.” His compatriot in critical-biblical or philological crime, Professor Bart Ehrman, was also raised an evangelical Christian. So was I.

There must be something about evangelical upbringings that leads to apostatism and academics. I’m not sure what.

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Enlightened Enchantment?

Over at The Atlantic, anthropologist Christine Folch wonders why Americans love science fiction and fantasy films, whereas Indians don’t. It’s Hollywood v. Bollywood, with the former dishing out endless fantasy while the latter generates lots of family drama. Folch suggests that the preferential difference is due to disenchantment: Americans allegedly are “western” heirs to an Enlightenment tradition that has rationalized life, making it more scientific and secular:

Why are we so into science fiction and fantasy? Nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber had a useful theory about this: The answer may be that we in the West are “disenchanted.” The world in which we live feels explainable, predictable, and boring. Weber posited that because of modern science, a rise in secularism, an impersonal market economy, and government administered through bureaucracies rather than bonds of loyalty, Western societies perceived the world as knowably rational and systematic, leading to a widespread loss of a sense of wonder and magic. Because reality is composed of processes that can be identified with a powerful-enough microscope or calculated with a fast-enough computer, so Weber’s notion of disenchantment goes, there is no place for mystery. But this state of disenchantment is a difficult one because people seem to like wonder. And so we turn to science fiction and fantasy in an attempt to re-enchant the world.

If it were true that Americans had become secular or scientific and disenchanted, this would be a plausible hypothesis. But it’s hard to make a case for “widespread loss of magic and wonder” in the face of these facts:

138,000,000 Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years;
120,000,000 Americans believe that Jesus will “definitely” or “probably” return to earth in the next 40 years; and
40,000,000 Americans believe that Obama either is or may be the Antichrist.

There is a great deal of “magic and wonder” in these figures, with about half of all Americans showing serious signs of enchantment. Weber’s thesis may have some validity for other western countries that are indeed more secular-scientific than the United States, but the Enlightenment message seems to have shipwrecked on these shores.

Though Folch may not have intended this, if we flip her narrative it suggests that Indians were more or less unaffected by the Enlightenment and have therefore remained enchanted. Because their lives are filled with (Hindu) enchantment, they don’t need any more fantasy from Bollywood. While this might possibly be the case, I don’t see the US as being that much different, except for our orientalist discourse about others.

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Ignoble Savages & Napoleon Chagnon

When I first began studying anthropology it was de rigueur to have an opinion about Napoleon Chagnon and his work on the Yanomamo. We couldn’t just read Yanomamo: The Fierce People and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of his theory and approach. We couldn’t just debate the ethnography for what it was or was not. Instead, we were invited to stake out a position that mirrored the tendentious and political debates that swirled around Chagnon. It was, on the whole, a shameful affair that discredited most who were involved. Incredibly, Chagnon still rouses ideological passions among (mostly older) anthropologists.

In the long meantime, those of us who don’t buy into the false dichotomies of culture-biology, nature-nurture, and science-humanities have assimilated Chagnon’s work and moved far beyond those unproductive debates. Yet there are still flareups, the most recent occasioned by Chagnon’s Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (2013) and his election to the National Academy of Sciences. The latter prompted another well-known anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, to resign from the Academy. While the older generation continues to play personal and political games, a younger generation makes four-field anthropology an altogether more vibrant and hospitable place.

Lost in all this stale sturm und drang is Chagnon’s actual work, which was the subject of a recent online symposium hosted by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, and Daniel Dennett. This is a fairly distinguished group and they engage Chagnon with the respect he deserves. It is odd, however, that these scholars apparently operate on the mistaken assumption that the Yanomamo are “primitive” exemplars of our evolutionary past. At the outset, Dawkins implies that the Yanomamo were somehow frozen in time or outside of history:

Chagnon came along at just the right time for the Yanomamö and for scientific anthropology. Encroaching civilisation was about to close the last window on a tribal world that embodied vanishing clues to our own prehistory: a world of forest “gardens”, of kin-groups fissioning into genetically salient sub-groups, of male combat over women and trans-generational revenge, complex alliances and enmities; webs of calculated obligation, debt, grudge and gratitude that might underlie much of our social psychology and even law, ethics and economics.

This is a classic example of gradistic thinking when it comes to culture. As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins should know better. As a matter of cladistic principle, all peoples and cultures are equally evolved. Appropriately enough for someone attuned to symbols and ideas, the linguist Daniel Everett catches this error and comments:

I could not disagree more with the idea that, to quote Richard Dawkins’s remarks at the outset, that what Chagnon has given us through his work is a “human tribe which probably ran as close to the cutting edge of natural selection as any in the world.” No people show us the effects of human evolution more than any other group.

The Yanomamö have had outside contact for centuries (in fact, their main food staples, bananas and plaintains originated in India and they eschew the main indigenous plant of Amazonia, manioc (also known as cassava). That is, even in their basic food choices the Yanomamö show the results of centuries of interaction with other societies just like all other groups on earth. In fact, the Yanomamö are strikingly sophisticated technologically, making an array of decorative and functional objects, including their xaponos—the unusually shaped group houses that Chagnon has made famous in his writings and films.

Everett is here alluding to R. Brian Ferguson’s compelling scholarship showing that the Yanomamo not only have a history, but that this history is in no small part the product of a long transformational process involving expanding empires and states. Unlike anthropologists who denounce Chagnon for political or personal reasons, Ferguson engages Chagnon in a scholarly manner (i.e., on the relative merits of the case).

In Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, Ferguson provides alternative explanations for the violence that Chagnon undoubtedly observed and meticulously chronicled. Ferguson has also published a series of open access articles on the same subject, with the gist of his argument being presented in “A Savage Encounter: Western Contact and the Yanomami War Complex” (open). It is also worth noting that Ferguson has ably dissected Steven Pinker’s progressivist argument that “primitive” violence was more prevalent in our prehistoric past. For those interested in the Whiggish ways Pinker massages his numbers to make modernity look so angelic, these skeptics have the scoop.

All this aside, the Chagnon symposium is worth a long (and critical) look.

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Secretariat as National Totem

On June 9, 1973 at the Belmont Stakes, a stunned track announcer uttered these inimitable words:

They’re on the turn, and Secretariat is blazing along! The first three-quarters of a mile in 1:09 and four fifths. Secretariat is widening now! He is moving like a tremendous machine!

If you’ve never seen or heard or felt this most famous of races, it’s amazing:

I was 9 years old at the time and watched in the company of my father, his friends, some relatives, and hundreds of others who had gathered at a local racetrack. Most of them cried, with joy or relief or disbelief or release.

Even then I knew it was something special. I have hazy memories of 1973 being a troubled time, with all sorts of awfulness hanging oppressively in the air: assassinations, war, demonstrations, Watergate, oil embargo, recession. Difficulty and division all around, rudely disrupting the bliss of childhood.

For a brief moment, with Secretariat and the Triple Crown, all this was forgotten: despite their differences and troubles, adults everywhere were united by this horse. I watched with fascination as they lost themselves in something larger, a metaphorical ocean created by an anthropic equine. They screamed and wept for reasons not entirely clear, either to them or me.

Looking back on it now, I better understand. Secretariat was a symbol: a magnificent horse totem. Like all totems, Secretariat was preternatural and sublime. In this classic ESPN documentary, person after person talks about Secretariat in supernatural terms, invoking God and perfection and transcendence so often that it can’t be coincidence:

All this does indeed approach perfection, at least in terms of narrative structure and social function. Of course timing and being a horse (rather than a complicated and flawed human) also helped. If Durkheim had recounted a story like this to prove his social point, I wouldn’t have believed it. But I do.

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Sourcing Hunter-Gatherer “Religions”

Last week I received an email from a graduate student whose research requires some knowledge of “hunter-gatherer religion.” He asked if I could recommend some books on the subject. After thinking about it a good while, I responded that there really were no such books. Over the course of a few emails I attempted to explain why, beginning with my concern that what we call “religion” is not an appropriate analytical concept for hunter-gatherers.

All historically and ethnographically known foragers are (or were) animists whose worldviews do not reduce to categories such as “religion.” While various aspects of these worldviews may (at times and in parts) have the look and feel of what we call “religion,” isolating those aspects for special analysis and calling them “religion” seems a dubious enterprise. Why? Because these isolated aspects (whether concepts or rituals) are deeply and inextricably embedded in a total way of being, perceiving, thinking, and acting. Hunter-gatherers did not have words, concepts, or categories that approximate what we call “religion.” They did not atomize or analyze their lives in this way. We cannot simply impose our historically contingent or analytically convenient categories on others and expect them to fit.

So the first step in understanding hunter-gatherer “religion” is to recognize they did not have it; they had all-encompassing worldviews (or totalized cosmologies) best described as “animist.” These worldviews are not “religions.”

This, in turn, could explain why there are no good books on “hunter-gatherer religion.” But I suspect not. Another problem is variation: foragers were spread widely in time and space, living in all parts of the world except Antarctica. Given this spread, we should not expect to find (and do not find) that any one hunter-gatherer or animist worldview is representative or typical of the others. While there are some commonalities, singling these out and reducing them to an essential or ideal worldview would be like saying that all religions ultimately reduce to the Golden Rule. While there are people who say such things, they are not very interesting or enlightening. Animist worldviews are not homogenous, and the differences between them are important.

Given this variation (and the limitations on what can be learned in a lifetime), most scholars focus on particular hunter-gatherers and regions. After a long course of specialization, they sometimes write synoptic books on “their people.” It is for this reason that we have some books that examine the “religion” of Aborigines, Bushmen, Native Americans, Siberians, Inuit, Amazonians, and Pygmies. These are the classic groupings of historically and ethnographically known hunter-gatherers. These are, however, larger-scale groupings that mask important variation. These groups not only differ from one another, they also differ internally from group to group or tribe to tribe.

World Map of Hunter-Gatherer Groups

With this in mind, I think the best way to approach animist worldviews is to decide on a region and people. For any given region and people, there will be a large literature ranging from primary to secondary to tangential sources. In most cases, this literature will have a chronological order that begins with traveler or explorer accounts and then moves to more detailed accounts given by missionaries, settlers, colonists, military people, and government agents. Academics and anthropologists are usually late-arrivals on the scene. Using all these materials, ethno-historians are sometimes able to generate excellent syntheses. As should be evident, the materials vary greatly in nature and quality.

The upshot of all this is that once you have decided on a particular people, there is a great deal of reading to be done. It is rare to find a book or two or even three that captures the complexity, richness, and nuance of something like “Aborigine religion” or “Bushmen religion” or “Native American religion.” When I began researching “hunter-gatherer religion” nearly a decade ago, I naively assumed there would some key books on the subject and it would not take long. I was obviously wrong. It took a few years to understand what was involved and required. So while I’ve read several books and articles on all known hunter-gatherer groups, this reading just skims the surface and amounts to general familiarization.

In this blog and conversation, I regularly (and awkwardly) refer to the totality of this reading as “the ethnohistoric-ethnographic hunter-gatherer record.” There is of course no such singular record and no book that could possibly encompass all of it. Realizing this, I’ve decided to call it simply the “Record.” Over the summer, I will progressively compile all the reading I’ve done in an effort to understand animist worldviews (or what some problematically call “hunter-gatherer religion”). It will be organized by group or region, and I will list the highest quality sources at the beginning of each section. Because I find that animist worldviews are difficult to understand in the absence of surrounding historical and ethnographic contexts, I will be listing those sources also. Hunter-gatherer lifeways and worldviews go hand in hand.

Some sections of the Record will be larger than others. Given my previous comments, it is not hard to understand why. After realizing that “hunter-gatherer religion” was a non-starter category, and that animist worldviews were so complex and variable, I began to focus on Native Americans. But this category is also too large for a summary or synoptic treatment, so I eventually narrowed further to Plains Indians. Even among this relatively manageable grouping of regional tribes, there is significant variation. The Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Blackfoot, Crow, Shoshoni, Pawnee, etc. did not have a uniform worldview that led to or resulted in the same “religious” ideas or “ritual” practices. It is my understanding that similar kinds of differences characterize the various Australian groups often lumped together as “Aborigines.”

Having said all this (and perhaps discouraged some), I should observe that hunter-gatherers the world over have enough in common for us to talk meaningfully about a generalized animist worldview that differs substantially from the worldviews of those who live in sedentary, agricultural, and industrial societies. Discovering these worldviews is not easy but it is rewarding.

In the future, whenever I refer to the hunter-gatherer or animist “Record” you will see a hyperlink. This link will open the bibliographic document that I have discussed in this post. This will be an ongoing project that will be updated frequently, so if the people in whom you are interested do not initially appear, they eventually will.

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Physics and Metaphysics

In a near perfect follow to my recent post on animist and quantum worldviews, Margaret Wertheim explains why physics — supposedly the most “hard” of all sciences — is bedeviled by difficulties. It is a lucid, patient, and brilliant piece of writing on a subject that is, for most of us, difficult. Despite the difficulty, Wertheim hits on all the key issues, beginning with her observation that physics is essentially Platonic:

Most physicists are Platonists. They believe that the mathematical relationships they discover in the world about us represent some kind of transcendent truth existing independently from, and perhaps a priori to, the physical world. In this way of seeing, the universe came into being according to a mathematical plan, what the British physicist Paul Davies has called ‘a cosmic blueprint’. Discovering this ‘plan’ is a goal for many theoretical physicists and the schism in the foundation of their framework is thus intensely frustrating. It’s as if the cosmic architect has designed a fiendish puzzle in which two apparently incompatible parts must be fitted together.

Equating physics with Plato may seem, at first blush, a bit odd. Plato is usually associated with the non-physical (or imaginary) world of ideal forms. According to Plato, these perfect or essential forms — which cannot be perceived — constitute the real or actual world and everything else, including all perceptions, is an imperfect reflection or facsimile of the forms. This is a quintessentially metaphysical viewpoint that lends itself especially well to religious thinking. Recognizing this, early Christian intellectuals imported Plato nearly wholesale into that tradition, a fact which prompted Nietzsche to quip that “Christianity is Platonism for the people.”

But if we reverse this common understanding of Plato, we can also see him as establishing a framework within which science could operate. As philosopher Scott Berman explains, we can also see Plato as a naturalist:

Plato took himself to be arguing that unless his view is right, science is not possible. The fact that we do have science now is confirmation that Plato was right, or so I think anyway. He thought that unless there exist things that can never change, there can’t be objects that are stable enough for knowledge, i.e., science. And so, he argued against Nominalism, that is, the idea that all that exists are spatiotemporal things, and Constructivism, that is, the idea that the measures or criteria of what things are can change. He argued that if there exist non-spatiotemporal things, then such things could be the objects of science and hence that science is possible. Laws of natures, for example, would be non-spatiotemporal things according to Plato and so aren’t located anywhere (because they are non-spatial) and can’t change (because they are non-temporal). If there truly is a science of some subject matter, then there has to be a non-spatiotemporal thing which is the measure of that subject matter.

With this, we can better understand why Wertheim contends that most physicists are Platonists. This is somewhat ironic, given that physics is usually considered the “hardest” or most real-material of sciences. Yet there is a tension here because physics starts with an assumption (i.e., that mathematics does not simply describe or approximate reality but actually constitutes it) which is thoroughly metaphysical. While modern physicists have attempted to separate their science from theology, these foundational assumptions may always lead them back to metaphysics. As Wertheim explains, this is partly a matter of history (it’s also partly a matter of method):

In its modern incarnation, physics is grounded in the language of mathematics. It is a so-called ‘hard’ science, a term meant to imply that physics is unfuzzy — unlike, say, biology whose classification systems have always been disputed. Based in mathematics, the classifications of physicists are supposed to have a rigour that other sciences lack, and a good deal of the near-mystical discourse that surrounds the subject hinges on ideas about where the mathematics ‘comes from’.

According to Galileo Galilei and other instigators of what came to be known as the Scientific Revolution, nature was ‘a book’ that had been written by God, who had used the language of mathematics because it was seen to be Platonically transcendent and timeless. While modern physics is no longer formally tied to Christian faith, its long association with religion lingers in the many references that physicists continue to make about ‘the mind of God’, and many contemporary proponents of a ‘theory of everything’ remain Platonists at heart.

Having kicked metaphysics and theology out the front door, physicists often bring them right back in through the rear. If you’ve ever wondered why theoretical physicists talk in ways that sound religious or mystical, this is the explanation.

This also explains why I have asserted a similarity between animist and quantum worldviews. At these ultimate or foundational levels, theoretical physicists talk in ways and describe things that may or may not be true, correct, or real. We don’t know and they don’t either.

But these descriptions are not at all unlike, and indeed are quite similar to, animist descriptions of the way things work. I am not asserting these worldviews are ultimately correct, only that they are — despite different idioms — structurally and functionally similar. By this conception, it is difficult to describe (or marginalize) animist worldviews as the product of “primitive” minds or cultures.

All this aside, be sure to read Wertheim’s piece. She deploys Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) in a particularly fruitful way. Despite having read Purity and Danger, I didn’t much care for it. Wertheim’s use of Douglas suggests that I may need to revisit it.

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Religion as Action & Belief

Over at the NYT, Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has posted a curious op-ed piece arguing that action rather than belief constitutes the larger part of being “religious.” It is curious because there doesn’t seem to be a large public audience for an argument that begins with a synopsis of Durkheim:

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

My only quibble with this is that Durkheim was not an anthropologist; in fact, he wrote Elementary Forms of Religious Life in opposition to the then-dominant anthropological model of “religion” as something that arose as a result of cognitive processes or propositional thinking. With Elementary Forms, Durkheim was determined to establish sociology as a distinct discipline that would displace anthropology as the leading science of humanity.

Luhrmann has done several years of fieldwork among American evangelicals, among whom I also did “fieldwork” of sorts having been raised by an evangelical parent. Our respective experiences of American evangelicals were obviously different and lead to different assessments. While I can’t agree with Lurhmann’s assertion that evangelical worldviews are filled with joy, I can agree that actions are just as important as beliefs:

To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Though she doesn’t quite say it, one implication of Luhrmann’s view is that purely mental or propositional analyses of religion will always fall at least half short of the mark. Evolutionary scholars who argue that “religion” is a cognitive byproduct tend to overlook this important aspect of the phenomena.

All this aside, it is important to note that the evangelicals I was around for over 15 years were enthralled and motivated by joy’s opposite: fear. In fact, it often seemed that the joy was predicated on fear and that both were required for the “fullness” of the evangelical experience.

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Religion Rabbit-Holes

Using the holiday as an excuse for not doing something more productive, I spent the morning delving into the rabbit-hole that is The New Yorker‘s copious archive. The search term “religion” pulls up 177 pages with 10 links on each page, for a total of 1,770 articles (many of which are accessible to non-subscribers). After a few hours of perusing, I got only to page 15. In the past, I’ve done something similar in The Atlantic‘s archives, which returns 4,680 articles when searched for “religion.” Yet another rich resource is Harper’s, which generates 4,140 hits.

I got started with The New Yorker today while reading about Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL sniper with the most confirmed kills (160) in military history. A troubled vet, he was shot and killed by another troubled vet in February of this year. Kyle’s story resulted in a million-copy bestseller (American Sniper) that is being made into what I’m guessing will be a rah-rah movie. I’m also guessing that they’ll leave this part out:

Like many soldiers, Kyle was deeply religious and saw the Iraq War through that prism. He tattooed one of his arms with a red crusader’s cross, wanting “everyone to know I was a Christian.” When he learned that insurgents had placed a bounty on his head and had named him al-Shaitan Ramadi—the Devil of Ramadi—he felt “proud.” He “hated the damn savages” he was fighting. In his book, he recounts telling an Army colonel, “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”

This view is fairly common in the military, which may appall many Americans who haven’t been impacted by the wars and don’t have to fight them. While I’m tempted to say this is tragic (which it is), it may also be an othering coping mechanism: it takes one to kill one (or 160).

These clashes of individuals are occurring, of course, in the context of a larger clash which Bernard Lewis tried to make historical sense of in 2001 shortly after the World Trade Center attack. I recall reading this article back then and thinking how good it was, especially on issues of Islamic history, identity, and jihad. While some of Lewis’ fears have not been realized, others are justified. In light of the recent Boston bombing and London attack, the story remains fresh. There is a long and deep history here and these issues aren’t going away anytime soon.

From the depressing we move to the hilarious: God’s Blog. I’m not sure how I missed this or didn’t hear about it, but it is one for the ages. God opens his blog with an UPDATE:

Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.

Twenty-four clever comments follow, including these gems:

Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart.

Disagree with the haters out there who have a problem with man having dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, the cattle of the earth, and so on. However, I do think it’s worth considering giving the fowl of the air dominion over the cattle of the earth, because it would be really funny to see, like, a wildebeest or whatever getting bossed around by a baby duck.

The “herb yielding seed” is a hella fresh move. 4:20!

Why are the creatures more or less symmetrical on a vertical axis but completely asymmetrical on a horizontal axis? It’s almost like You had a great idea but You didn’t have the balls to go all the way with it.

Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning.

If that doesn’t make you smile, nothing will.

In this 2006 review, H. Allen Orr does judiciously dissects Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Seven years ago, meme theory had few prospects; today it has none. The best part of the book is the section on theory of mind, which Dennett insists on rechristening as the “intentional stance.” But even this section falls short because it constitutes only a partial explanation of phenomena characterized as “religious.” Dennett’s conclusions are justified only because he uses a restricted definition of religion. His agent-centric ideas aren’t convincing using Marett’s broader definition.

These faults aside, Dennett’s book was more measured than several others which appeared in those heady new atheist years. A flurry by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens prompted this 2007 review from Anthony Gottlieb. The storm has thankfully passed, and except for some dedicated debaters, we’ve moved on to more substantive discussions.

In the following year, it was biblical scholar Bart Ehrman’s turn to vent, which he did in God’s Problem (a better title would have been Ehrman’s Problem with God and Suffering). James Wood ably sketches the problem of evil (“theodicy”) in his review, which contains this nugget:

Ehrman rightly dislikes the philosophers of theodicy, calling their work obtuse and disconnected from life, but he also, in a revealing moment, distinguishes himself from “recent agnostic or atheist authors.” Unlike them, he says, “I do not think that every reasonable and reasonably intelligent person will in the end come to see things my way when it comes to the important issues in life.” He is too polite to say it, but one of the weaknesses of otherwise useful atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that, lacking nostalgia for lost belief, they also lack the power to imagine why anyone would ever have professed it.

I’m not sure we need nostalgia but we at least need to recognize the multifactorial sources of religion, and understand they are not simply “stupid” and “barbaric.”

Ironically, the new atheist scholars are all Darwinians yet they never mention the work or life of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection. In this moving portrait of Russel, Jonathen Rosen explains why:

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that Wallace was one of the world’s great men because he led a revolution and then a counter-revolution. Having done as much as anyone to overturn traditional religious assumptions, Wallace proceeded to horrify his fellow-evolutionists by concluding that natural selection could not in itself explain the uniqueness of man. He never renounced his evolutionary theory, but instead made it the cornerstone of a theistic explanation of the universe. No wonder a later scientific generation, newly professionalized, ignored him in favor of his more austere and single-minded colleagues. But the twin impulses in Wallace’s work make him compelling and oddly contemporary. He combines both halves of the debate over the meaning of evolution, coolly articulating the materialist mechanisms by which the simplest organisms morphed into human beings while arguing that our existence offers evidence of divine agency.

Wallace has a great life story and there is a moral in it, not least of which is that his atheist colleagues worked hard to bring him the recognition (and pension) he surely deserved. They certainly didn’t call him dumb and they did so despite their disagreement with his religious views.

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Animist & Quantum Worldviews

Perhaps the most salient feature of animist worldviews is the way in which they construe and construct the world in relational terms: everything is connected. I first encountered the phrase “relational epistemology” in Nurit Bird-David’s work on animism, which in turn led to a discussion of Tim Ingold’s similar work. In Bruce Charlton’s post on animism, relational ontology plays a major role, and in my post on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, I observed:

Animist worldviews are totalizing cosmologies. They are distinctly non-dualist: there is no nature set apart from supernature or material distinct from the immaterial. Nothing is strictly inert because everything participates in everything else. All is connected. Lévy-Bruhl calls this way of conceiving and being the “law of participation.” Everything that exists – objects, events, landscapes, weather, animals, and people – participate in a world that is connected. Because of these connections or participations, nothing happens (or fails to happen) for strictly material or mechanical reasons. Given deep connection and participation, one thing cannot but fail to affect another thing. All these effects are relational, the result of enmeshment that entails impersonal agencies (i.e., powers or potencies) and invisible agents (of all varieties, including souls, ghosts, spirits, and gods).

Whenever I encounter these relational aspects of animist worldviews, I am constantly reminded of similar conceptions in theoretical physics. While I am not suggesting that animist worldviews are scientific precursors or that they reflect quantum understandings of reality, animist worldviews are eerily similar to quantum worldviews. The similarities may not be coincidental. There may be ways to experience, intuit, and conceive these workings without knowing anything about quantum physics. In The Way of the Human Being (2000), former Rutgers historian Calvin Luther Martin (what a name!) makes a strong case for precisely this kind of connection — he argues that animist worldviews have comprehended what physicists have only recently discovered. Martin links animist relationality to quantum relativity and notes that the experimental observer-effect in physics closely accords with animist ideas of participatory being. This is intriguing stuff and I recommend Martin’s book.

I was reminded of all this while reading a stellar review of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013) by Lee Smolin, a ridiculously smart theoretical physicist who argues that time is not simply a function of space but is instead a fundamental reality that we experience through consciousness. In this excerpt, the reviewer (James Gleick) explains Smolin’s heretical views:

For Smolin, the key to salvaging time turns out to be eliminating space. Whereas time is a fundamental property of nature, space, he believes, is an emergent property. It is like temperature: apparent, measurable, but actually a consequence of something deeper and invisible—in the case of temperature, the microscopic motion of ensembles of molecules. Temperature is an average of their energy. It is always an approximation, and therefore, in a way, an illusion. So it is with space for Smolin: “Space, at the quantum-mechanical level, is not fundamental at all but emergent from a deeper order”—an order, as we will see, of connections, relationships. He also believes that quantum mechanics itself, with all its puzzles and paradoxes (“cats that are both alive and dead, an infinitude of simultaneously existing universes”), will turn out to be an approximation of a deeper theory.

For space, the deeper reality is a network of relationships. Things are related to other things; they are connected, and it is the relationships that define space rather than the other way around. This is a venerable notion: Smolin traces the idea of a relational world back to Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: “Space is nothing else, but That Order or Relation; and is nothing at all without Bodies, but the Possibility of placing them.” Nothing useful came of that, while Newton’s contrary view—that space exists independently of the objects it contains—made a revolution in the ability of science to predict and control the world. But the relational theory has some enduring appeal; some scientists and philosophers such as Smolin have been trying to revive it.

This is awesome stuff that is intuitively appealing for people, like me, who take animist worldviews seriously (but not mystically). There is probably more here than meets the eye.

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Indigenes and Druids

With the semester having come to an end, it was refreshing to take a few weeks off from normal reading and writing routines. I’m in the middle of a long section on Durkheim and it has been nice to get him off my brain for a bit. It has also been nice to browse the local bookstore for nothing in particular but something different and less directly relevant to the book and blog. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of consuming a number of books that aren’t exactly summer reads but are a nice change of pace from late-Victorian to early-modern anthropology and sociology. In varying degrees, I recommend the following:

The Comanche Empire (2009) by Pekka Hamalainen: This book is a game-changer and eye-opener. If I could find other cliches that would convey its superlative nature, I would. For the past 5 years, I’ve been intensively reading Native American ethnohistories in an effort to gain a deep understanding of animist worldviews. I thought, as a result, that I had encountered nearly everything. I was wrong.

This book powerfully disrupts standard narratives of native history, and completely re-orients the prism through which we view that history. It is not, however, simply one of those well-intentioned attempts to give the natives a voice or tell the story from their perspective. In this compelling and amply documented rendering, the Comanches are an incredibly adaptive and highly sophisticated group that have much more than mere agency or voice: they are power brokers engaged with European imperial powers on their own terms. And for over 100 years, the Comanches won the imperial game.

Comanche Empire is the perfect antidote to the countless histories that present natives as simple, primitive, passive, or reactionary. The Comanche were anything but. This book also stands in stark contrast to the United States and Texas-centric accounts that utterly fail to address the geopolitical dynamics and imperial contexts in which the Comanches made their own history, shaped the region, and dominated nearly everyone on the periphery. They could not have done this for so long and so successfully if they were, as popular writer SC Gwynne claims in his massively flawed Empire of the Summer Moon (2011), simple hunter-gatherers who (as he states in this NPR interview) lacked “social organization or religious organization.” This is an astonishing and ridiculous statement.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Comanche Empire is the way in which the tribe was structured and bound together. Comanches were ecumenical: anyone could be or become Comanche so long as they spoke the language and treated other group members as fictive kin. That was it. They were not concerned with religion or “race” and didn’t use these to construct Comanche identity. This conception clearly disrupts the Durkheimian and group level selection idea that groups bind and adhere through “religion.”

This is a hugely important book written in a crisp, muscular style that is rare for serious works of history. Get it.

The Killing of Crazy Horse (2011) by Thomas Powers: This is another stunningly good book. Again, I thought I had read everything about Crazy Horse, Lakota culture, and the Sioux wars, so I wasn’t expecting much and didn’t think much could be added. Again, I was wrong.

This book is a lyrical tour de force that treats these issues kaleidoscopically, disrupting standard narratives and historical understandings at each step of the way. Aside from its sheer beauty, it is chock full of material that sheds considerable light on the complexities of Lakota culture, identity, and politics during the latter half of the 19th century. Powers has a distinctive voice that occasionally brings to mind Walt Whitman or Cormac McCarthy. This book really brings the Lakota to life and Powers revels in his subjects.

Another important book. Get it.

The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (2002) by Anna Reid: This book is part history and part travelogue. If you are not familiar with Siberian hunter-gatherers and the basics of their history, this is a good place to start. It does not have much to do with Siberian shamanism, which was fine by me because that subject almost been over-studied to the point of exhaustion. This is certainly a good beach substitute for the classic ethnohistory in this field, James Forsyth’s History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581:1990 (1994). Many will be surprised (or not) to learn that Siberian tribes have suffered largely similar fates to indigenes in America, Australia, and Africa. Despite all this cultural destruction, indigene societies on all these continents still remain and resist.

The Druids (1995) by Peter Berresford Ellis: This is a solid introduction to what is and is not known about the Druids. Without any neo-pagan or earth-worshipping woo, Ellis presents the Druids as an intellectual Celtic caste that fulfilled all manner of leading or “upper” social roles. They were not simply religious or spiritual leaders and there is no evidence, as the Romans speciously claimed, that they sacrificed humans. This is a comprehensive (yet short and readable) overview that also contains critical commentary on sources. This is a jumping off book with a good bibliography. It won’t interest Stonehenge spiritualists or New Agers. I count this as a significant plus.

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