During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the supposed exemplar of such religion came from the Australian Aborigines, and in the 1970s the south African Bushmen or San were added as exemplars. In addition to these two allegedly primordial paradigms, many viewed native American peoples as bearers of ancient supernatural traditions. Others thought that isolated Amazonian and Melanesian societies could shed light on the subject.

What many of these reconstruction projects have in common is the assumption that all such peoples were frozen in time and that their “religions,” which are not isomorphic with Western concepts and definitions of “religion,” did not change over time. We know, of course, that none of this correct — all such peoples have complex histories of migration, contact, and change. While some may have carried on in ways that more closely resembled ancient lifeways, this doesn’t mean their “religions” (a word and concept foreign to most or all of them) are static models of the Paleolithic past. At best, they can serve as rough analogues that may have more in common with ancient ideas than do modern or “world religions.” At worst, they are considered to be pristine exemplars of original religion.

While it might seem that anthropologists are aware of these issues, duly cautious, and provide the requisite qualifications, reminders are occasionally needed. One such reminder came in 1989 with the publication of Edwin Wilmsen’s Land of the Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, which ignited a major and acrimonious debate about the history of south African Bushmen. Wilmsen argued, with some ideological zeal, that the San were not pristine hunter-gatherers but instead were marginalized peoples who became foragers only recently and as a result of larger economic processes. For all the book’s faults, Wilmsen demonstrated that the Bushmen had a more complex history than was supposed and were not pristine exemplars of the ancient past.

Similar kinds of debates have surrounded Australian Aborigines, whose “religion” known as “the Dreaming” has long been the darling of scholars. Durkheim’s famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) relied on a sketchy construction of Aboriginal supernaturalism. While this construction was brought up to date by Mircea Eliade’s studies on “Australian Religions,” Eliade’s phenomenological commitments were distorting. Knowing this, several scholars have continued with the reconstruction or recovery process. While I haven’t followed the details, in 2009 whatever was happening prompted Max Charlesworth to issue some reminders:

Again, the radically ahistorical approach that Radcliffe-Brown introduced into anthropology de-emphasized cultural and religious change and development, and made it appear that Aboriginal societies and their religions were wholly static, conservative and ‘timeless’. However, in actual fact there is continual change and innovation in Aboriginal religions with sacred songs and rituals being exchanged and bartered between regional groups within the bounds of the foundation charters of the Dreamings of particular groups. Indeed, the various Dreamings have themselves often undergone change and innovation.

[I]n actual fact the Dreaming myths of many Aboriginal peoples have creatively assimilated elements from other groups. The most striking example of this is the influence of Muslim fishermen in Macassar in Indonesia on the Yolngu people of Elcho Island in northeast Arnhem Land. The Macassans were engaged in the collection of trepang and they came down with the trade winds each year from the early 1700s until 1907, establishing close economic and social relations with the Aboriginal people. As a result of this contact, an important Yolngu ritual about a Dreaming figure Walitha ‘walitha (in other words, Allah) was developed.

Here we have history impinging on our idealistic notions about what Aboriginal “religion” represents. In addition, there are problems of secrecy and translation:

Finally, a note about the role of secrecy in Aboriginal religions. For Western anthropologists observing the canons of scientific rationalism, there can be no ‘secrets’ since anthropologists are committed to public disclosure of their findings. However, for Aboriginal groups there are secrets not only between men and women but also between old and young, the initiated and non-initiated, and insiders and outsiders. Religious knowledge is ‘dangerous’ if it is divulged to the wrong people at the wrong time. [F]rom this point of view, the very attempt to investigate Aboriginal religion necessarily puts a public construction upon something that is essentially non-public.

The same is true of translating Aboriginal religious concepts into Western European terms. For example, the Ancestor Spirits are neither gods nor moral exemplars and one cannot use monotheistic language about them. In fact, the specific terrains, lands or ‘countries’ of the various Aboriginal groups are the crucial religious phenomena. As it has been put, Aboriginal religions are ‘geosophical’ and not theosophical.

To make a long, partial, and always changing story short, we must take our constructions of other traditions with several grains of cautionary salt.

References:

Charlesworth, Max. (2009). Anthropological Approaches to “Primitive” Religions Sophia, 48 (2), 119-125 DOI: 10.1007/s11841-009-0096-5

Eliade, Mircea. (1966). Australian Religions: An Introduction. Part I History of Religions, 6 (2) DOI: 10.1086/462538

For it to work, the group level selection story first requires a kind of systematic and organized “religion” that is historically rather recent. These are the kinds of religions which, through a variety of mechanisms such as intensified morality and supernatural surveillance, enable the formation of groups larger than prototypical hunter-gather bands.

Because these sorts of religions began appearing no more than 5,000 years ago in conjunction with the rise of the earliest city-states, it is reasonable to ask whether the dynamic being described has much to do with evolution, sensu stricto. Group level selectionists tend to conflate biological evolution with cultural change or what they call “cultural evolution.” Some simply jump from one to the other as if there were no differences between organisms and cultures, while others more subtly argue that biology and culture co-evolve.

These group level selection models assume a relatively homogenous and insular group of people who share the same religious beliefs, and that because of these beliefs (along with corollary institutions), the society is stable, competitive, and successful. It sounds good in abstract theory, even if it ignores the messy realities of the historical and human processes by which religions are constructed and contested.

On the surface, Saudi Arabia would appear to be perfect model for group level selectionists. It is an insular society that revolves around a single form of religion: Wahhabist Sunni Islam. The rulers champion religion, the clerics support the rulers, and the people believe. Saudi society, so the story goes, is bound tightly and ethically together by religion.

It’s a great story until one digs deeper and discovers some of the messy realities and variables which group level selectionists always ignore in their models. In this piece on the soon-to-be-without-head Saudi man who had the temerity to tweet about Muhammad, I was reminded of these realities:

While the most vituperative responses to the Hamza Kashgari affair are no doubt rooted in zealous conviction, the reality is that this episode, and particularly the government’s support for the case against him, has little to do with protecting the sanctity of Islam. Rather, the Saudi regime is playing a calculated political game, one that aims to oppress some critics, to outmaneuver others and to bolster its thin claims to religious legitimacy.

Kashgari was hardly a revolutionary, but his views most certainly were. The kingdom’s government is intolerant of free speech, especially anything that challenges political authority. Dissenting religious and political views, including those expressed by Kashgari, are widely shared inside the kingdom. Among the droves of death threats and the cries of angry critics, Kashgari also commands a sympathetic following. Thousands have rallied in his support. And the regime in Riyadh is well aware, particularly in an era of revolutionary upheaval, that a significant number of its subjects bristle against its authority.

The Saudi royal family has long leaned on the country’s senior clerics to stamp its temporal power with the imprimatur of religious legitimacy. But many in the kingdom see through the claim. Pious and agnostic alike consider the royal family corrupt and irreverent. It is commonly held that Riyadh’s assertion of Islamic authority is spurious, a fiction that the government peddles as an excuse to protect its personal fortunes and power. Whether genuine or not, the result has been the empowerment of a class of religious scholars who are committed to protecting their own authority.

It has long been my contention that when we talk about post-Neolithic religions and their effects on societies, evolutionary analyses aren’t very helpful or enlightening. Biocultural co-evolutionary models can neither capture nor describe things like economy, power, politics, cynicism, corruption, and dissent, all of which affect “religion.” Because religion is the key variable in group selection models, this is a problem.

When your primary variable is highly unstable, and can’t even be defined without making unrealistic assumptions about what religion is and how it works, chances are good that your model doesn’t describe anything real.

Post-Postscript

In this Nature article about Henry Markram’s controversial pitch for a $1 billion brain modeling project, he expresses concerns about modeling similar to those I have about the too tidy models favored by group level selectionists:

At the heart of that approach is Markram’s conviction that a good unifying model has to assimilate data from the bottom up. In his view, modellers should start at the most basic level — he focuses on ion channels because they determine when a neuron fires — and get everything working at one level before proceeding to the next. This requires a lot of educated guesses, but Markram argues that the admittedly huge gaps in knowledge about the brain can be filled with data as experiments are published — the Blue Brain model is updated once a week. The alternative approach, approximating and abstracting away the biological detail, leaves no way to be sure that the model’s behaviour has anything to do with how the brain works, said Markram.

Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”

With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:

[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.

Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.

Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:

But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.

I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.

Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.

It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”

It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”

If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:

They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.

This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.

Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

It was a normative and racist scheme based on the idea that small-scale or “primitive” societies found in remote areas of the world had somehow veered off this progressive track. Because “primitives” were developmentally arrested, they were viewed as exemplars or “survivals” of earlier cultural stages. By studying survivals, Tylor and Morgan thought they could reconstruct the evolutionary past. The eventual hero of this story is Franz Boas, who forcefully argued against this paradigm and encouraged anthropologists to abandon typology in favor particularity. Each society or culture was to be studied on its own, without being slotted into an imaginary evolutionary progression. Having carried the day, Boas’ illustrious students fanned out across the world and began the arduous process of collecting ethnographic data.

The missing person in this story is James George Frazer and the missing element is religion. In 1871 Tylor published Primitive Culture with the following subtitle: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. It was enormously influential and helped establish anthropology as a distinct discipline. Primitive Culture also caught the attention and fired the imagination of James George Frazer, who was a Cambridge classicist at the time.

Frazer was particularly inspired by Tylor’s argument that animism constituted the primitive or “primordial” religion for all peoples. The basic idea was that pre-civilized people perceived the world and everything in it as being filled with spirits and unseen forces that animated all things. By so animating the world, such peoples could accomplish two goals. First, they could ostensibly explain the otherwise inexplicable. Second, they could negotiate with the spirits and forces in an attempt to control them. The world would thus become a less bewildering and chaotic place.

Frazer was captivated by these ideas. He uncritically accepted three-stage cultural evolution (savagery->barbarism->civilization) and believed that cognitive evolution corresponded to these stages. He was particularly intrigued by Tylor’s theory of animism and used it as a springboard for a lifetime of research and writing about the the evolution of the mind and reasoning. According to Frazer’s scheme, there were three stages of mental evolution and these stages are applicable to the way in which people reason or ratiocinate. In the earliest stage, people explain and attempt to control using magic. In the second stage, people explain and attempt to control using religion. In the final and most advanced stage, people explain and attempt to control with science.

Like other cultural evolutionary schemes, the supposed progression from magic to religion to science was normative. Science, for Frazer, was always the goal and the product of rational thinking. It was a desired end state. Although magic was the earliest stage, it was for Frazer at least understandable. Frazer was sympathetic with “primitives” who were attempting to explain and control things in the manner of scientists but who lacked scientific understanding. It was the middle stage, religion, that Frazer held in special contempt.

Rather than directing unseen spirits or forces to do human bidding using magic, religionists begged and supplicated those forces. For Frazer, this was both pathetic and demeaning. His goal, therefore, was to demonstrate that all religions are rooted in magic and that primitive survivals, in the form of ancient folklore, can be found in all religions. Frazer’s famous (and infamously opaque) Golden Bough was an attempt to demonstrate this. In the process, he hoped to undermine religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Although hardly anyone reads the Golden Bough today and Frazer is almost never mentioned as a founder of anthropology, there can be little doubt that Frazer was a giant in the field and was recognized as such by his contemporaries. I suspect that he is ignored today because his methods and conclusions are as controversial today as they were in his time. For better or worse, Frazer was in fact a founder and the history of anthropology is incomplete without him.

We are quite fortunate that Frazer has been rescued from obscurity not by anthropologists or historians, but by an English professor whose interest in Frazer is inscrutable. For whatever reason, Frazer captured the imagination of Robert Ackerman and benefits not only from Ackerman’s wonderful explication of Frazer’s project, but also from his ability to render (in gorgeous language) the zeitgeist of early anthropology and life in late Victorian England. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read the Golden Bough or any of Frazer’s other works, I suggest Ackerman’s J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (1987). It is brilliant and fills a missing hole in the history of anthropology.

I remember thinking the book would appeal primarily to those who were vaguely hostile to religion, but didn’t know why. In Breaking the Spell (“BS”), they would find professional confirmation that their hostility was justified. But they still wouldn’t know why. At least they would be able to say that some really smart guy, a philosophy professor at Tufts, had somehow confirmed their suspicions.

During the ensuing years, I haven’t given the book much thought. I neither recommended it nor loaned my copy. Recently, however, I stumbled across Armin Geertz’s extraordinary review of BS: “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Geertz, professor of religious history and cognition at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, rips Dennett using language not often seen in academic journals:

A recent book by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) is a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious! Dennett seems to be hellishly bent on turning his readers off.

I used to think that philosophers by definition are sophisticated thinkers, gifted in the art of persuasive argument, valiantly exposing hidden assumptions and opaque meanings. But I am wrong. What Dennett has done is a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.

Geertz’s trashing made me wonder: What did others say about BS? They were not kind.

In The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Dennett to task for not distinguishing between the past and present: “And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins?  “Breaking the Spell” is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism.” This is a poignant question, one not contemplated by evolutionary scholars of religion who (mistakenly) believe that the current functions of religion explain past origins.

Dennett’s problem is he believes everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Like David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, Dennett thinks evolution is a unified meta-theory. It isn’t, for one simple reason: cultures are not organisms. While Darwinian monism may be simple and satisfying, it is wrong.

In another harsh review of BS (Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark), Daniel Hart explains why:

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative.

This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the presupposition that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer is of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect.

When evolutionary theory is applied to culture change, we are dealing in metaphors and analogues. Societies do not evolve; they have histories. The sooner we stop talking about memes and “cultural evolution” the better. Time to break the spell.

Reference:

Geertz, A. (2008). How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260232

It will be the latest in a string of books over the last decade which purport to explain the origins and development of what we today call “religion.” These books can be roughly divided into two types.

The first usually revolves around a particular author’s research specialty and generalizes from this focused research to religion as a whole. While these books contribute something of importance to evolutionary religious studies, religion is not going to be explained monocausally. The second type is an adaptive design metanarrative, in which religion holds the (magical) key to human evolutionary success. These books usually amount to mere storytelling.

If Bellah’s 1964 article on “Religious Evolution” is any indication, his forthcoming book may transcend this tired typology. While my hopes are high, I am not sure what to expect. I know that the Templeton Foundation gave Bellah a large grant for the book and Templeton grants are not disinterested.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Bellah confesses he is a practicing Episcopalian and metaphysical idealist (i.e., “Kantian-Hegelian”). This is the sort of sophisticated belief much beloved by Templeton grantors. It remains to be seen how Bellah’s a priori commitments affect his evolutionary account of religion.

Aside from Bellah’s grudging admiration for Nietzsche’s genius, this part of the interview caught my attention:

But dealing with a complex band of people you don’t know if you can trust or not, and you love some of them and you hate some of them—that’s a pretty high demand on your cognitive growth. I think the brain grows fast when groups get larger and more complicated and maneuvering yourself in a social world starts to be at the heart of what your life is all about.

This suggests there is a correlation between bigger brains and bigger groups. While there is some support for this idea, we have little or no evidence to suggest that hominin group size increased during the course of the Paleolithic in conjunction with increases in brain size.

Hunter-gatherer group sizes seem to be fairly consistent across time and space (varying primarily in accord with local environments and ecology). Group sizes increase only when people settle down and become agriculturalists. This began to occur about 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic Transition and was an uneven process. One thing is certain: this increase in group size was not triggered by an increase in brain size. In fact, human brains appear to have been getting smaller over the past 15,000 years.

I was reminded of this principle while watching a brilliant series of video shorts titled “Everything is a Remix.” The series creator or remixer is Kirby Ferguson, who rightly contends there is nothing new under the sun, only an endless stream of copying, transforming and combining. Simply delightful (if a bit depressing for those who aspire to originality):

These kinds of projects deserve our support.

I was reminded of this effect while reading an article about the “religious” beliefs and practices of a Scandinavian hunter-gatherer society, the Sami. The authors discuss these beliefs and practices using terms and concepts developed primarily in the context of Abrahamic religions. We are told that Sami “Religious practices included a variety of rituals and gestures connected to sacrifices. Offerings expressed veneration of the divine powers and established a relationship with the gods.” We also learn that the Sami worshiped a “sacred wooden idol,” which is considered to be a “deity” and tree carvings are “images of gods.” Elsewhere the authors talk about Sami “holy places.”

Sacrifice, divinity, god, holiness, idols, and deity sound suspiciously like Western rather than Sami constructs. Although we can trace these ideas back to the many polytheisms that first arose in Mesopotamia and then spread throughout the Mediterranean, they were systematically elaborated by the monotheistic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While it is possible that the Sami did in fact think and talk in these terms, there are several reasons for doubt.

The first comes from what might be considered naive or non-professional chronicling of native traditions. In most cases, our earliest knowledge of indigenous peoples comes from writings produced by explorers, traders, colonizers, and missionaries. They were not trained in ethnographic methods and inevitably recorded what they saw using concepts and language with which they were familiar. Our earliest accounts of indigenous people must be read with this in mind. The second doubt springs from the straightforward difficulties of language. Few of the earliest chroniclers were linguists and much was lost in translation. The third difficulty is the product of contact and diffusion. Ecumenical in their supernatural outlook, many indigenous peoples picked up on new ideas and incorporated them into their beliefs. Early chroniclers were often astonished to hear them talk about things that sounded suspiciously Christian, apparently without realizing that Christian ideas had long been in circulation.

Elsewhere in the article, we are told that Sami “religious beliefs were animistic, centered on animal ceremonialism.” While this seems simple enough, what does “animism” actually mean? I will confess to not having given this much thought until reading Nurit Bird-David’s superb history and analysis of the term. In “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology” (open access), she locates the origin of “animism” in E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and sketches a genealogy of its deployment since that time.

For Tylor, animism was the attribution of life and personality to plants, animals, weather, and landscapes. He considered it to be a “primitive” trait that originated in dreams and thus was a form of error. Although most of Tylor’s ideas have been abandoned or substantially modified, Bird-David demonstrates that his thoughts on animism have been uncritically accepted and incorporated into the anthropological and historical mainstream. She convincingly shows that animism is an ossified and untroubled category that needs substantial revision.

For Bird-David, the anthropomorphism that characterizes animism is a form of relational epistemology and when viewed this way, it makes considerable sense. Because hunter-gatherers are profoundly and daily affected by plants, animals, weather, and landscapes, putting them into a personal or social relationship — one that is some ways negotiable — is a valid way of understanding and knowing the world.

Having intimate and life altering contact with plants, animals, weather, landscapes, and most importantly other people, hunter-gatherer epistemology does not begin with the individualistic and detached statement “I think, therefore I am.” This Cartesian construct, so deeply embedded (and essentialized) in Western thought, makes little sense to hunter-gatherers who consider relationships to be of paramount importance. Their first principle might thus be stated: “I relate, therefore I am.”

Animism is not, when considered this way, a simplistic or “primitive” way of knowing the world. It is a much richer (and more complex) idea that requires the careful use of concepts which differ from those used to construct the Western world.

References:

Bird-David, Nurit (1999). “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology, 40 DOI: 10.1086/200061

Bergman, I., Ostlund, L., Zackrisson, O., & Liedgren, L. (2008). Varro Muorra: The Landscape Significance of Sami Sacred Wooden Objects and Sacrificial Altars. Ethnohistory, 55 (1), 1-28 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2007-044

In 1964 the sociologist Robert Bellah did just this in his classic paper, Religious Evolution. Taking as his premise Eric Voegelin’s idea that cultural history describes an arc that moves from “compact” to “differentiated” symbol systems over time, Bellah posits five stages in the history of religions: (1) Primitive, (2) Archaic, (3) Historic, (4) Early Modern, and (5) Modern. The kinds of religions that Bellah associates with each of these stages deserves a post of its own, but for our purposes the important points are that “Primitive” is shamanic, “Archaic” is diffuse cult polytheism, and “Historic-Modern” is textual and systematized. Most religions today are of the latter variety.

Despite cursory appearances, Bellah’s typology is neither progressive nor normative. As Bellah is at pains to emphasize, his is not a unilinear evolutionary model:

Of course the scheme itself is not intended as an adequate description of historical reality. Particular lines of religious development cannot simply be forced into the terms of the scheme. In reality there may be compromise formations involving elements from two stages which I have for theoretical reasons discriminated; earlier stages may, as I have already suggested, strikingly foreshadow later developments; and more developed may regress to less developed stages.

And of course no stage is ever completely abandoned; all earlier stages continue to coexist with and often within later ones. So what I shall present is not intended as a procrustean bed into which the facts of history are to be forced but a theoretical construction against which historical facts may be illuminated.

Because history is continuous and no stage is ever completely abandoned — each is incorporated into subsequent stages, we can find elements or traces of “Primitive” (i.e., earliest) religions in “Modern” (contemporary) religions. In concrete terms, this means that “modern” religions such as Christianity and Islam contain within them ideas and concepts characteristic of “primitive” religions, otherwise known as shamanisms. Shamanic beliefs and practices constitute the earliest forms of supernaturalism and prefigure all modern religions.

I was recently reminded of Bellah’s typology while reading about Sami shamanism and Phoenician polytheism. The Sami are (or were) hunter-gatherers living in the boreal forest areas of northern Scandinavia and Russia. They were known to the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote about them in 98 AD. At some point, the reindeer hunting Sami domesticated the animal and many became pastoralists. They interacted extensively with the Vikings, and were subjected to aggressive Christian colonizing beginning in the 1500s. Although their traditional ways of life had largely been destroyed by the late nineteenth century, there are numerous accounts of Sami beliefs and practices. In Bellah’s scheme, these would be characterized as “Primitive” or shamanic.

The Phoenicians were a trading and seafaring people who occupied the coastal areas of present day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and North Africa (Carthage). Organized into city-states which at times were in alliance and others in conflict, the Phoenicians dominated much of the Mediterranean from 1200 to 500 BC. Carthage persisted until 146 BC, when it was destroyed by the Romans in the final Punic War. Although it is unclear whether Phoenicians considered themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, they spoke a common language and developed the first phonetic alphabet. They interacted extensively with all Mediterranean peoples, prominently including the Greeks. In Bellah’s scheme, their religion would be characterized as Archaic (cult polytheism).

In “Varro Muorra: The Landscape Significance of Sami Sacred Wooden Objects and Sacrificial Altars,” Ingela Bergman and colleagues provide an introduction to the Sami, who believed that all things — animals and landscapes in particular — were imbued with spirits or spiritual power. Although the authors characterize this as “animism,” it is actually a kind of pantheism coupled with beliefs in a variety of major and minor spirits. This is precisely the sort of thing we would expect to find among people who are nomadic hunter-gatherers, and is in fact characteristic of such peoples across time and space.

What is unusual, however, about Sami supernaturalism is their intensive use of varro muorra, a concept that exclusively denotes sacred wooden objects. These objects included scaffolds that functioned as offering platforms and carvings that represented or contained spirits. While other hunter-gatherers are known for using wooden scaffolds (usually for mortuary purposes) and wooden objects (in medicine bundles), widespread and intensive usage of these items is uncommon in shamanic practice. It certainly makes one wonder whether earlier contact with Norse pagans and later interaction with Scandinavian Christians influenced Sami ritualism. It also demonstrates Bellah’s observation that a particular religion may be “compromise formations involving elements from two stages,” which in this instance would be Primitive (shamanism) and Archaic (cult ritualism).

Another example of mixed element religious practice comes from “Phoenician Cult Stones,” an article published by Eugene Stockton in 1974. Before surveying the many instances of Phoenician temples and cult stones proper, Stockton observes that sacred rocks belong to a “primitive substratum” of religion; indeed, unusually shaped rocks have long been a part of sacred shamanic landscapes and forager medicine bundles. Such rocks were often considered to be the residing place of ancient spirits. More recently but still before Phoenician times, incipient and early agriculturalists erected megalithic structures for ritual purposes. This appears to be a vestigial practice carried over from shamanic formations.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Phoenicians (and the Greeks) venerated stones, often erecting them in temples and other ritual spaces. Once in place and properly dedicated, the stones could either harbor deities or represent them. This is a practice with a deep history, one that manifests itself even in “Modern” religions. One need look no further than the ritual foci of Islam — the sacred Black Stone, embedded in the holy granite cube known as the Kaaba — to see this is the case. Indeed, the Black Stone most likely pre-dates Islam and was revered by nomadic Arabian pagans.

Where does all this leave us? First, it shows that Bellah’s stages are a useful heuristic for illuminating unsuspected or unnoticed connections between seemingly disparate religions. Second, it demonstrates that religious history is multilinear and diffusion works in two directions: from the “Primitive” to the “Modern” and vice versa. Finally, it attests to the fact that no religion is sui generis: all have a history and none stands alone.

References:

Bellah, R. (1964). Religious Evolution American Sociological Review, 29 (3) DOI: 10.2307/2091480

Bergman, I., Ostlund, L., Zackrisson, O., & Liedgren, L. (2008). Varro Muorra: The Landscape Significance of Sami Sacred Wooden Objects and Sacrificial Altars Ethnohistory, 55 (1), 1-28 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2007-044

Stockton, Eugene D. (1974). Phoenician Cult Stones Australian Journal of Biblical Archaeology, 2.3, 1-27

Jeff Schloss and Michael Murray have written a “target article” in Religion, Brain & Behavior entitled: “Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review”. Schloss and Murray’s argument is as follows. In recent years a wide range of adaptationist, byproduct, and memetic explanations has emerged for various recurrent features of religious belief and practice. One feature that has figured prominently in adaptationist accounts of religion is belief in the reality of moralizing, punishing supernatural agents.

However, there is at present no unified theory of what fitness-relevant feature of the selective environment this cognitive predisposition is adapted to. Schloss and Murray distinguish two divergent and often conflated approaches to supernatural punishment theory, which hypothesize that the adaptive value of beliefs in supernatural punishment arise either because they increase cooperation among group members (”cooperation enhancement”), or decrease the cost of incurring (real world) punishment for norm violations (”punishment avoidance”).

Although a number of scholars have provided comments to the Schloss and Murray article, Rodney Stark does not appear to be one of them. This is most unfortunate, given that Stark has written a classic article — “Gods, Rituals, and the Moral Order” — which directly addresses these issues and tests them with actual religious history (rather than abstract game theory).

Of supreme importance is the fact that “punishing, moralizing supernatural agents” (or gods) appear in very few religions, and those few in which they do appear are relative latecomers in religious history. Indeed, a strong argument can be made that a robust punishing, moralizing god originated with Judaism and is primarily associated with the Abrahamic faiths. Punishing and moralizing supernatural agents certainly are not associated with the many forms of shamanism that constituted the original “religions” of Upper Paleolithic humans.

If this is the case, it makes little sense to hypothesize about the “adaptive value” of the punishing and moralizing God of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and successor sects such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witness. While this localized and modern conception of God may make Jews, Christians, and Muslims more “cooperative” and “moral,” this says nothing about human evolution or the origins of “religion.”

Framing the issue in this way makes about as much sense as asking how the cognitive predisposition for nationalism (another late development in human history) is adaptive. I am not aware of any scholars who analyze nationalism by asking “what fitness-relevant feature of the selective environment it is adapted to.” Why? Because biological evolutionary mechanisms have minimal explanatory power in modern cultural and historical settings.

The adaptationist yearning for a “unified theory” results in an erroneous conflation of biological evolution with cultural history. The tools of the former are ill adapted to analysis of the latter.

While lab experiments may show that supernatural surveillance impacts behavior, this is precisely what one would expect in Western cultures permeated with the idea that God punishes moral transgressions. Such experiments tell us nothing about the evolution of cooperation or religion.

Reference:

Stark, R. (2001). Gods, Rituals, and the Moral Order Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40 (4), 619-636 DOI: 10.1111/0021-8294.00081