Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Donald speaks of enculturation as a third factor in development, besides genes and environment, one that is unique to our species. He calls it “deep enculturation” in contrast to the shallower enculturation common to many other species, because deep enculturation reaches “deeply into the heart of human nature”-in a word, it structures our minds.25 The entry point of enculturation turns out to be our old friend attention, which we saw was the key to episodic consciousness. For culture, the key move is the sharing of attention, and the very beginning of shared attention is when, in the earliest months of life, the human infant is able to return the parent’s gaze, to share eye contact, followed not much later by the capacity to look where the parent is looking.26 Donald describes the critical importance of shared attention in early infancy:

  During early infancy, cultural influence rests chiefly with certain figures, such as the mother, father, and other close family members. These are powerful forces in the mental life of infants because they influence attention. They do more than dominate attention; they also train infants to share attention with them. Perhaps the most important lesson they teach their infants during the first year of life consists of the basic rules of attention sharing. Once this process is well established it serves very well as a fast-track social learning instrument, in a variety of situations. Joint attention develops into a primary cultural guidance device. It allows children to follow cultural signals that will become increasingly more abstract as they expand their horizons.27

  It is important to remember that this early attention sharing is mimetic and not linguistic. This is as true for infants today as it was a million years ago. In describing the mimetic accomplishments of children, Donald suggests the nature of a period in human evolution when mimetic culture was all there was:

  Early in development, the child connects with a mimetic social network ruled by custom, convention, and role taking. The family is a small theater-in-the-round, featuring a series of miniplays, in which each member must assume various roles. Children understand these theatrical productions so well and so early that they can act out any role, within the limits of infantile acting. This is shown in their fantasy games, where they might chose to play the father, the mother, themselves, or even the dog or the family car. Children become excellent mime artists and actors, long before they can verbally describe or reflect on what they are doing.28

  Gesture is the most complex form in which mimetic culture can create shared attention. It takes many forms: expressing emotion, asking for help, warning of danger, and so forth. It is so close to syntax that it is probably the primary road to language, especially if we include, as we must, vocal gestures. But at the moment I want to focus on one primary form of shared gesture, one that is basic to the creation of social solidarity: rhythm. Rhythm, which is already evident in the simple reciprocal mimetic games that parents play with very young children,29 is the basis of group rituals that can mimetically define group identity and the roles of individuals within the group. Ours is the only genus with the capacity for “keeping together in time,“30 and this biological capacity has been essential for the full development of mimetic culture. Whether premodern members of the genus Homo had the capacity to mimic animals, and thus represent not only their social context but also significant aspects of their natural environment, we will never know, but animal mimicry is common among historically known hunter-gatherers.

  Mimetic action involves using one’s body to represent oneself and others in some kind of event. It moves beyond mammalian episodic (event) consciousness by representing events through embodied action, an event about an event, so to speak. But there is no reason to think that, because premodern members of the genus Homo did not have modern language, their mimetic action was silent (as the word “mime” might imply). On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that vocalization had developed well beyond the simple cries in use by the great apes. Donald argues that some form of voluntary voice modulation-what he calls prosodic control of the voicewas a necessary step along the way to the evolution of language. He writes: “Prosodic control of the voice-that is, regulation of volume, pitch, tone of voice, and emphasis-is logically more fundamental than, and prior to, phonetic control; it is much closer to the capabilities of apes than phonology. It is close to what Darwin thought might have been the origin of the speech adaptation, a kind of rudimentary song.””

  I will return to the question of song, but now want to turn to Leslie Aiello’s interesting distinction between speech and language, and his suggestion that they evolved separately: “Many of the unique anatomical features involved in the ability to produce human speech, as well as some of the cognitive precursors of human language, significantly precede the appearance of fully developed modern human language involving syntax, symbolic reference and off-line thinking.“32 Even Dunbar, who argues that language replaced grooming as the basis of social bonding as human groups grew larger, indicates that “a steady flow of vocal chatter” whose “content would have been zero,” in other words speech without language, might have been an intermediate phase between the conventional contact calls of the advanced Old World monkeys and apes and genuine language. And when he says “zero content,” he means zero abstract symbolic content, and not zero social content, for even “primate vocalizations are already capable of conveying a great deal of social information and commentary.“33

  If there was speech before language,34 as our several experts agree was likely, and if it was prosody-that is volume, pitch, tone, and emphasis that characterized this nonlinguistic speech, then if it was not “song”-and Dunbar gives a variety of reasons why song as we know it probably developed only late in evolutionary history-what was it?35 Steven Brown offers another interesting alternative that might stand up to scrutiny. Brown starts from the point that, though language and music today are clearly different in that their primary locations in the brain are different, nonetheless, even in terms of brain physiology, there is a great deal of overlap between them. He then suggests that language and music form a continuum rather than an absolute dichotomy, with language in the sense of sound as referential meaning at one end, and music in the sense of sound as emotive meaning at the other.36 From this continuum, from features of their overlapping location in brain physiology, and from parsimony in explanation, Brown argues that rather than music and language evolving separately, or emerging one from the other, the likeliest account is that both developed from something that was simultaneously protolanguage and protomusic, which he calls “musilanguage.“37 If we postulate that musilanguage was also enacted, that is, involved meaningful gesture as well as sound, then we could see ritual as a primary evolutionary example of musilanguage and note that even today ritual is apt to be a kind of musilanguage: however sophisticated its verbal, musical, and gestural components have become, they are still deeply implicated with each other. And, in terms of the argument of Chapter 2, we could suppose that play had developed many of these features as it formed the matrix out of which ritual developed.

  However committed to the idea that it was language that replaced grooming, and however doubtful he might be about the idea of musilanguage, Dunbar is ready to admit that words alone, even after the evolution of modern language, are inadequate to supply the solidarity necessary for human groups:

  Trying to hold together the large groups that the emerging humans needed for their survival must have been a trying business. We still find it difficult even now. Imagine trying to coordinate the lives of 150 people a quarter of a million years ago out in the woodlands of Africa. Words alone are not enough. No one pays attention to carefully reasoned arguments. It is rousing speeches that get us going, that work us up to the fever pitch where we will take on the world at the drop of a hat, oblivious of personal costs. Here, song and dance play an important part: they rouse the emotions and stimulate like nothing else the production of opiates to bring about states of elation and euphoria.38

  A society engaged in mimetic ritual, without l
anguage, would seem to be an almost pure case of Durkheim’s “elementary form,” for the bodies of those engaged in the ritual cannot represent much beyond themselves and the society they compose. Possibly the elation and euphoria that Dunbar mentions might point beyond society, but if so, inarticulately, to say the least. Because for Durkheim collective effervescence is an expression of society, here we would seem to have the pure case: society enacting itself. Still, can we say that society creates the ritual, or do we have to say that the ritual creates society? Mimetic ritual would seem to be constitutive of the very society it makes possible.

  In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression, such that pair-bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture-based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups-even cannibalism shows up in the fossil record-and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.39

  The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

  Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic

  It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness. Mimetic culture, as I have said, is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture, as we will see, is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible impor tance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are locked each in their own They are, as Donald says, solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in, could share, the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

  Further, mimesis is, though in many respects less efficient than language, indispensable in its own sphere. As Donald writes, mimesis “serves different functions and is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge; for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills.“42 Maybe not just rudimentary skills, for mimesis is basic for the teaching of quite complex skills in such fields as athletics, dance, and possibly other arts. Finally mimesis remains indispensable in “the collective modeling and, hence, the structuring” of human society itself43

  Mythic Culture

  We are so fascinated with ourselves as language users that we think discovering the origin of language is the key to understanding human evolution. It is one of the great virtues of Merlin Donald’s work that he takes culture, the ability to escape our solipsism and connect with a larger shared consciousness, as the key to what makes us unique. It is in this context that his idea that language “piggybacks” on culture makes Language acquisition in the individual is social: even if there were such a thing as a language module, it could become operative only in a socially provided linguistic context. Isolated children do not learn spontaneously to speak. Jerome Bruner, as Donald reminds us, has shown convincingly that language learning requires an external support system, a linguistic milieu, to be The question is, what was the “external support system” that made language possible in the first place?

  Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist and neuroscientist, in his book The Symbolic Species,46 subtitled “The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain,” tries to understand the emergence of language by Homo erectus, whose brains were not organized for language use, although, as we know, our nearest primate relatives can, with the most enormous effort and external training, be taught at least a rudimentary use of words. But, as Deacon puts it, “The first hominids to use symbolic communication were entirely on their own, with very little in the way of external supports. How then, could they have succeeded with their chimpanzeelike brains in achieving this difficult result? In a word, the answer is ritual.”

  Deacon makes the case for the parallel between teaching symbolic communication to chimpanzees and the origin of language in ritual as follows:

  Indeed, ritual is still a central component of symbolic “education” in modern societies, though we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbolic discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of [sign-sign] relations to the fore, a high degree of redundancy is important. This was demonstrated in the experiments with the chimpanzees … It was found that getting them to repeat by rote a large number of errorless trials in combining lexigrams enabled them to make the transition from explicit and concrete sign-object associations to implicit sign-sign associations. Repetition of the same set of actions with the same set of objects over and over again in a ritual performance is often used for a similar purpose in modern human societies. Repetition can render the individual details of some performance automatic and minimally conscious, while at the same time the emotional intensity induced by group participation can help focus attention on other aspects of the object and actions involved. In a ritual frenzy, one can be induced to see everyday activities and objects in a very different light. 7

  Although it would seem that Deacon is on the right track in arguing that ritual provided the “external support system” necessary for original language learning, one can see that it makes the most sense in the context of Merlin Donald’s version of the origin of language. The problem with Deacon’s story is that “ritual” seems to come out of nowhere, and if language is difficult for “chimpanzeelike brains,” so would ritual be. Donald’s idea of a very long period during which mimetic culture developed and the human brain reached something far larger and more complex than that of chimpanzees, provides what Deacon’s argument implies: ritual as an external support system for language.

  Deacon is surely right that the key to language is the ability to make signsign connections that abstract from the immediate connection of sign and object, but Donald is also right in his insistence on how deeply grounded language is, not only in mimetic, but even in episodic consciousness. Giving his own interpretation to the idea of universal grammar, Donald shows how closely language reflects event perception:

  How else can we represent space than by somehow specifying up, down, beside, and above? The parts of speech and the rules by which they are governed seem to emerge naturally from the progressive differentiation, or parsing, of event perceptions. In this case, we can say that language begins by simply putting labels on specific aspects of an episodic perception. In fact, it is the latter, episodic cognition, our vestigial mammalian inheritance, that has imposed this universal frame on

  Donald cites George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who argue for the fundamentally metaphorical nature of language: “Lakoff and Johnson have suggested that metaphoric expression taps a cognitive vein that is much more fundamental than language itself. In effect, met
aphor is a dead giveaway (to use a metaphor) of the episodic roots of language.“49 Donald writes:

  Linguistic universals spring from the context in which real-world languages are learned and, more important, in which they evolved. Like any other set of conventions, linguistic conventions are shaped by the situations in which they originated. They have mimetic origins. Thus, once we change our paradigm, the features of universal grammar emerge smoothly from a close analysis of gesture, mime, and imitative behavior. The “language instinct” exists, but it is a domain-general instinct for mimesis and collectivity, impelled by a deep drive for conceptual

  But why this drive toward conceptual clarification? Donald suggests that there was a need for a more coherent representation of the world than was possible through mimesis. “Therefore,” he writes, “the possibility must be entertained that the primary human adaptation was not language qua language but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.”” Myth is a profoundly ambiguous word, so it would be well to be clear what Donald means by it:

  Mythical thought, in our terms, might be regarded as a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors. The mind has expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control-myth constitutes an attempt at all three, and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.52

  It is because of, in a sense, the primacy of myth over language that Donald calls the stage after mimetic culture, mythic culture.

  Donald, in emphasizing the cognitive role of myth, approaches the view of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist who, more than any other, has emphasized the intellectual function of myth. Levi-Strauss, nonetheless, thinks of myth, not as a form of science or as a primitive precursor of it, but as having a different cognitive function: