The Faith Instinct (18 page)

Another costly belief, at least for individuals, concerned conception. Aboriginal religious theory held that a woman became pregnant after a spirit-child, extremely small but fully human, had entered her body, usually when she went near special localities. True, intercourse was required to open up the body for conception but could not be sufficient, in the Aborigines’ view, because most acts of intercourse were without effect. Anthropologists have argued endlessly about whether the Aborigines were genuinely unaware of the father’s role in conception, some contending that aboriginal religious views no more implied actual ignorance of paternity than did the doctrine of the virgin birth among Christians.

The issue is clouded because the Aborigines seem to have shifte
d their views after contact with Western explanations of concep
tion. But the earliest accounts suggest there was no difference between their religi
ous and their practical views, as might have been predicted giv
en the overwhelming governance of their everyday life by religious belief. “Ad
ult male attitudes on the subject of procreation allow only for
spiritual explanations and actively oppose consideration of se
men as a relevant factor,” concludes Robert Tonkinson after exploring the view
s of Western Desert Aborigines.
¹²⁰
According to a leading expert on aborigin
al religion, the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, “The means, by which, in abo
riginal understanding, a man fathers a child, is not by sexual
intercourse, but by the act of dreaming about a spirit-child. His own spirit, during a dream ‘finds
’ a child and directs it to his wife, who then conceives.”
¹²¹

The spirit-child theory of conception is certainly a beautiful belief, and one that demonstrates the complete unity in aboriginal religion of the dreamworld and the real world. It explains another otherwise puzzling feature of Aborigine life, the men’s willingness to share their wives with others in a range of situations. In most other societies men go t
o extreme lengths to secure exclusive sexual access to their wi
ves, imposing sometimes draconian restrictions on women’s freedom of associati
on so as to ensure their paternity. However harsh and nowadays
unacceptable these measures may seem, they make perfect sense from a biological poin
t of view, given that a man who invests his resources in raising another man’s
child has in effect reduced his Darwinian fitness to zero.

The Aborigines divided their tribes into clans and obliged a ma
n to choose a wife from a clan other than his own, regarding it
as a crime tantamount to incest to have sexual relations with a woman of his own cl
an. But after a man had chosen a wife from the permissible clan
, all the other women in that class remained eligible for sexual intercourse on cert
ain occasions, even if married to someone else. “At times
a man will lend his wife to a stranger as an act of courtesy, always provided that
he belongs to the right class, that is, to the same as himself,” Spencer and G
illen observe of the Arunta.
¹²²
In a large number of tribes all of a woma
n’s tribal brothers have access to her. When men from other tribes visit to pr
epare for a ceremony, often staying for a fortnight, their gues
ts will make women available to them. Among the Urabunna tribe, party invitations we
re sent out with an RSVP that doubtless made recipients less li
kely to forget the date. When summoning distant groups to a ceremony, it was customa
ry to dispatch both a man and a woman. After the man had delive
red the message, all the men of the group being summoned had in
tercourse with the woman to signal their acceptance of the invitation, but spurned h
er if they decided otherwise.
¹²³

Under these circumstances, paternity for an Aborigine man would have been decidedly uncertain, although his group as a whole may have benefited by the vigorous influx of genes from neighboring groups. In terms of Darwinian fitness, it is very expensive for a man to let his wife bear children by other men, diminishing his own contribution to the next generation. The heavy cost imposed by the Aborigines’ doctrine of dream-driven, nonspermatic conception is worth noting in assessing the evolutionary origin of religion, because behavior that bore such costs is likely to have been eliminated by natural selection unless it conferred offsetting evolutionary advantages.

 

 

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?

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 the
n 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-Pritchar
d derided them as armchair scholars. “I am sure that men like Avebury, Frazer an
d Marett had little idea of how the ordinary English working man felt and thought, a
nd it is not surprising that they had even less idea of how pri
mitives, 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, a
nd 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 thesi
s is that it sought to explain the origins of religion. Evans-P
ritchard converted to Catholicism at the age of 42.
¹²⁷
It’s hard to avoid the impression t
hat 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 Socialists 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 somewh
at superficial flirtation of social science with the idea of ev
olution ... there developed among social scientists a sharp reaction against the ide
a of evolution,” wrote the sociologist Talcott Parsons. As a result, “for
an entire generation most of the comparative research was carr
ied 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