LOOKING BACK AT THE three religious systems described above, those of the !Kung San, the Andaman Islanders and Australian Aborigines, they appear to have several common features, despite the fact that their observers were writing at different times and from very different perspectives. With all three peoples, religion was a major part of their daily lives. Religious practice involved all-night ceremonies with vigorous singing and dancing and intense emotional involvement. The emphasis was on ritual rather than belief. The justification of the religion was that it was practiced exactly as it had been handed down by the present generation’s forebears. And the central purpose of the rites in all three groups was to bind the community together and fortify the social fabric.
Given these distinctive commonalities, it seems more likely that the three peoples inherited them from the ancestral human population rather than that each developed them independently. If so, religious practice of 50,000 years ago would have consisted of vigorous singing and dancing, conducted in all-night ceremonies. The focus of these ceremonies could have been healing, or initiation rites or celebration of a successful hunt. But whatever the specific theme, the effect of the ceremonies would have been to raise or maintain group cohesion, resolve disruptive feuds, reaffirm the sacred narrative and its moral prescriptions, and energize the group for warfare.
The evolutionary advantages of religion are far clearer among primitive groups than in modern societies, in which religion has undergone profound cultural transformations. Before tracing these transformations, it is worth a short detour to understand why many anthropologists have come to regard questions about the origin of religion as an exercise in futility, and what has led them to such unnecessary despair. It was social anthropologists, after all, who recorded the religious practices of hunting and gathering peoples and invested considerable effort in understanding them, so why have so few of them recognized that religion might be an evolved behavior?
Anthropologists and the Origin of Religion
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars developed a serious interest in the origin of religion. Europeans were becoming familiar with the religions of people under their colonial rule, and were at the same time developing doubts about their own religion under the influence of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and the historical criticism of the Bible’s text pioneered by German scholars of the nineteenth century such as Julius Wellhausen. The first ethnographers, noticing that preliterate or primitive societies lacked the technology and material progress of Europeans, assumed that the primitive peoples’ thought processes were also backward. Thus they could trace the evolution of religion, they believed, by comparing primitive religion with that of civilized societies.
Edward B. Tylor argued in his book Primitive Culture, published in 1871, that religion began when primitive peoples connected death with the human images they saw in dreams. They inferred that when people die, a spirit leaves them but has continued existence without the help of a body. The appearance in dreams of people known to be dead seemed to confirm the existence of such spirits who, when not troubling people’s dreams, presumably lived in a supernatural realm. Our ancestors extended this idea to the natural world, imputing spirits to animals and plants, and then assuming the existence of especially powerful spirits whom they considered to be gods. Animism, the belief that spirits dwell in every living and inanimate object, was the origin of religion, in Tylor’s view.
James G. Frazer then took up Tylor’s approach, arguing in his monumental work The Golden Bough, published between 1890 and 1915, that there had been a steplike progress of cognitive thought from magic to religion to science. Magic was the characteristic mode of thought of primitive peoples, science that of advanced ones. Frazer and other writers assumed there was an early cultural origin of religion, which then evolved through successive stages, similar to those described by Darwin for the biological world.
A later generation of anthropologists repudiated this whole approach. Under the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish-born scholar who founded modern social anthropology, it became accepted that to understand other societies one had to live among the people for many months and learn their language. Anthropologists trained in the new tradition of fieldwork found unacceptable the airy theorizing of their predecessors, who had gathered their information from reports by travelers, administrators and missionaries. It was all very well for scholars like Tylor or Frazer to imagine how primitive peoples might have thought, but how could they possibly know for sure, given that they had never lived among them and lacked any historical evidence to support their conclusions?
With a dig at both the methods and upper-class origins of these early pioneers, the social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard derided them as armchair scholars. “I am sure that men like Avebury, Frazer and Marett had little idea of how the ordinary English working man felt and thought, and it is not surprising that they had even less idea of how primitives, whom they never had seen, feel and think,” he wrote.124
Evans-Pritchard was the author of two much-admired pieces of anthropological fieldwork. In his Witchcraft Among the Azande, he showed that for this African people witchcraft, far from being a mere superstition, embodied a logical system of thought and was used as a method of conflict resolution. He then turned to the Nuer, a pastoral Nilotic people of the lower Sudan, and uncovered by diligent fieldwork that they had a highly sophisticated system of religious beliefs.
“The great advances that social anthropology has made in and by field research have turned our eyes away from the vain pursuit of origins, and the many disputing schools about them have withered away,” Evans-Pritchard wrote in 1965 in his influential book Theories of Primitive Religion. 125
Evans-Pritchard included Durkheim in his criticism of the armchair theorists, even though he had a much greater respect for Durkheim’s insights than for those of Tylor and Frazer. Like Frazer, Durkheim had never lived among primitive people. He sought evidence for his theory that religion reflects the authority of society in totemism, largely that practiced by the Arunta tribe of Australia. Totemism is a system of classification in which a clan is associated with a sacred animal or object. Evans-Pritchard wrote that Durkheim’s thesis is “brilliant and imaginative” and right in seeing religion as part of something greater than the self. But he said the Arunta’s practices do not prove Durkheim’s point. “Totemism could have arisen through gregariousness, but there is no evidence that it did,” Evans-Pritchard declared. “It was Durkheim and not the savage who made society into a god,” he said elsewhere.126
But what he really seems to hold against Durkheim’s thesis is that it sought to explain the origins of religion. Evans-Pritchard converted to Catholicism at the age of 42.127 It’s hard to avoid the impression that he had no desire to see an analysis like Durkheim’s undermine his faith. The flaws in Durkheim’s theory, he wrote, were “due mainly to his pursuit of the genesis, the origin, and the cause of religion.”128
After Evans-Pritchard’s critique, few anthropologists dared to seek the origins of religion through analysis of culture. Evans-Pritchard was probably correct in dismissing the approach as futile: without historical evidence, there was no way to tell whether one aspect of religion had developed before or after another.
But that left biology. Why could anthropologists and sociologists not have explored the evolutionary roots of religion? A practical reason is that evolutionary biologists have only recently established some of the principles that underlie human social organization. But there was a theoretical reason too. Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest produced some ugly implications when applied by others to human societies, such as that might was right, or that government should not exert itself to help the poor. Colonial powers claimed they had a right to rule the tribal peoples they conquered. The eugenics movement of the first half of the twentieth century spawned a clutch of mistaken social policies in both Europe and the United States. The National Socia
lists in Germany persecuted Jews and other minorities on genetic grounds, asserting their own racial superiority.
In their disdain for the abuses of Darwin’s theory, many social scientists mistakenly threw out the theory as well. “After a brief and somewhat superficial flirtation of social science with the idea of evolution ... there developed among social scientists a sharp reaction against the idea of evolution,” wrote the sociologist Talcott Parsons. As a result, “for an entire generation most of the comparative research was carried out by anthropologists, whose thought was militantly anti-evolutionary.”129
In reaction against the claims of racial differences based on evolutionary arguments, social anthropologists emphasized the role of culture in differentiating human societies and played down the arguments based on genetics. Franz Boas, a German refugee who became the founder of anthropology in the United States, declared it was morally preferable to assume people’s minds were shaped by culture, not heredity, unless the facts showed otherwise. “Unless the contrary can be proved, we must assume that all complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary,” he wrote.130
Boas did not intend to evict evolution from the anthropologists’ sources of explanation. But in his emphasis on culture, writes Steven Pinker, “he had created a monster. His students came to dominate American social science, and each generation outdid the previous one in its sweeping pronouncements. Boas’s students insisted ... that every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture.”131 One of Boas’s students, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, is said to have stated that “Heredity cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history.”132
For social scientists to have excluded heredity, genetics and evolutionary biology from any explanatory role in human affairs, however well intentioned in the circumstances of the time, was scientifically unjustifiable, and no more helpful to their inquiries than it would be for chemists to reject Mendeleyev’s periodic table of elements. Evolution is the bedrock theory of biology and people belong inseparably to the biological world. Culture is not autonomous, as many of Boas’s students came to insist. Genetics and culture interact with one another over a timescale that extends to the most recent periods of history. Human nature is not a blank slate on which only culture can write. Many aspects of human nature and behavior are shaped for survival by the hand of natural selection, just as is almost every feature of the body. Darwin had already shown that some human behaviors, such as facial expressions of emotion, were constant from one society to another and therefore likely to be shaped by nature, not culture. There is now strong evidence, explored in chapter 2, for thinking that intuitive morality is wired into the brain’s genetic circuitry.
A disposition against studying evolution and human nature still persists in anthropology graduate schools, according to Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California. Despite the better prospects now available for studying human nature, “much of the resistance comes from long-standing, inadequately examined biases of cultural anthropologists,” he writes. “In my view, these attitudes derive from a subtly (or not-so-subtly) politicized tradition in many graduate training programs, a tradition that stems from humanistic biases about ‘evolutionism.’ ”133
In retrospect, anthropologists and sociologists tackled the problem of the origin of religion too early, before more fruitful conceptual approaches were available, and then through historical accident shut themselves out of exploring the roots of religion from an evolutionary perspective.
Nonetheless, it was the achievement of social anthropologists to have recorded and analyzed many features of primitive religion before they were eroded by Western culture. With their work in mind, it is time to trace how the religion of hunter gatherer groups was adapted to the very different needs of the settled societies that began to emerge some 15,000 years ago.
6
THE TRANSFORMATION
Ancient villagers conceived of dance as the most significant cultic activity, whose essence as a religious experience was expressed by the circle of dancers. The uniformity of the figures in the circle gives ideological expression to the equality of the members of the community.... Dancing together creates unity, provides education, and transmits cultural messages from one generation to the next.
YOSEF GARFINKEL, Dancing at the
Dawn of Agriculture134
The religions of today differ considerably from the ancestral religion practiced by hunter gatherers such as the !Kung San, the Australian Aborigines and the Andaman Islanders. The profound transformation from which modern religions developed came about because society itself changed and therefore religion had to change in response.
Hunter gatherer societies, as already noted, were egalitarian structures in which a coalition of the weak constantly thwarted would-be leaders. But this system became much more difficult to maintain once people settled down and started living in communities larger than the usual hunter gatherer band. The hierarchical side of human nature reasserted itself and powerful men established chiefdoms. A process of profound social and cognitive change began.
In these larger communities people began for the first time to acquire property and status. No longer being constantly on the move, or restricted to owning no more than they could carry, people were able to generate surpluses of crops and of goods. These items could be traded, marking the beginning of commerce. Concepts novel to foragers, such as commodity, price, number, quantification, value, capital, became part of everyday life.
Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. These more complex settled societies required a specialization of labor. Managers were needed to store and distribute the surpluses, or trade them with neighboring groups. Gradations of wealth emerged. The new societies became hierarchical, with leaders and led. But how were the new leaders to establish their legitimacy and persuade those they ruled to abandon the age-old principles of egalitarianism?
A central element of the solution was to co-opt religion, the time-honored source of authority and cohesion in hunter gatherer societies. Priesthoods were instituted, and these sacerdotal officials began to control rituals and to separate people from direct communication with their gods. Religious dancing was gradually suppressed. Though the new societies and the archaic states constructed civil institutions, such as bureaucracies and armies, they still depended on religion as an instrument of rule. Even the bureaucracies were at first run from temples, at least in Babylonia, so were religious rather than civil institutions. Many leaders of archaic states asserted that they had been appointed by the gods or, at the least, that they ruled with divine approval. Some assumed the office of chief priest. Leaders found this custom so useful that it has persisted throughout history. Roman emperors declared themselves pontifex maximus. Even in the United Kingdom today, the monarch is still supreme governor of the Church of England. Many rulers have claimed even more intimate associations with divinity. The emperors of Japan asserted into the modern age their descent from the goddess Amaterasu. Others, like the pharaohs of Egypt, were held to be living gods. Roman emperors generally had the modesty to postpone deification until they were dead. “Vae, puto deus fio—Drat, I think I’m becoming a god,” the emperor Vespasian joked on his deathbed.
The institutions made possible by religious behavior would have been invaluable to the first archaic states. Civil authority was rudimentary. Brute force was available, but highly inefficient. Religion was the solution, an accepted and traditional way of coordinating people’s motives. “The virtue of regulation through religious ritual,” writes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “is that the activities of large numbers of people may be governed in accordance with sanctified conventions in the absence of powerful authorities or even of discrete human authorities of any sort. As such, it is plausible to argue that religious ritual played an important role in social and ecological regulation during a time in human history when the arbitrariness of social conventions was increasing
but it was not yet possible for authorities, if they existed at all, to enforce compliance.”135
As a result of the new social forces operating in settled societies, hunter gatherer religion underwent several major changes before attaining a form more characteristic of today’s religions.
As noted, the ancestral hunter gatherer religion was focused on ritual, chiefly implemented through music and dance. Modern religions, in contrast, are centered on belief, and many have regulated music and banned or sharply curtailed physical movement.
In the ancestral religion people performed their own rituals. There were no priests or church: the community was the congregation. Modern religions have an often elaborate ecclesiastical structure and make a sharp distinction between the priesthood and the laity.
In the ancestral religion people communed directly with the supernatural world through dreams and trances, not through the mediation of priests. They asked their gods for practical help, such as good hunting, children, or health. In many modern religions priests direct people’s attention toward an afterlife, with instructions to focus their present lives on deeds that will secure rewards beyond the grave. In short, adherents of the ancestral religion sought to secure survival in the real world; those of modern religions are more focused on salvation in the next.
Given that a religion reflects its society, it is not surprising that the ancestral religion should have changed as people made the far-reaching transition from mobile to settled societies. The innate propensity to learn religious behavior would have remained much the same but the cultural content of religion could be adapted by each society to its needs. The cultural form of religion can be pushed only so far, however, without straining its genetic template. As is described below, the cultural transformation of religious behavior was so extreme that it set up a constant tension, which has surfaced periodically throughout history, between the ecstatic norms of hunter gatherer ritual and the restraints imposed by ecclesiastical rule.
The Faith Instinct Page 14