The Faith Instinct (19 page)

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 dominat
e American social science, and each generation outdid the previous one in its sweepi
ng 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 st
ated that “Heredity cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history.”
¹³²

For social scientists to have excluded heredity, genetics and e
volutionary biology from any explanatory role in human affairs,
however well intentioned in the circumstances of the time, was scientifically unju
stifiable, and no more helpful to their inquiries than it would be for chemists to r
eject 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. Geneti
cs 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 socie
ty 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 wir
ed into the brain’s genetic circuitry.

A disposition against studying evolution and human nature still
persists in anthropology graduate schools, according to Christ
opher Boehm, an anthropologist at the University of Southern California. Despite the
better prospects now available for studying human nature, “much of the resistanc
e comes from long-standing, inadequately examined biases of cul
tural anthropologists,” he writes. “In my view, these att
itudes derive from a subtly (or not-so-subtly) politicized tradition in many graduat
e training programs, a tradition that stems from humanistic bia
ses 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.

YOSEF GARFINKEL,
Dancing at the
Dawn of Agriculture
¹³⁴

 

 

 

T
he 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 lea
ders 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,” write
s the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “is that the activities of large numbers of
people may be governed in accordance with sanctified conventio
ns in the absence of powerful authorities or even of discrete human authorities of a
ny sort. As such, it is plausible to argue that religious ritual played an important
role in social and ecological regulation during a time in huma
n 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 socie
ties, hunter gatherer religion underwent several major changes before attaining a fo
rm more characteristic of today’s religions.

As noted, the ancestral hunter gatherer religion was focused on
ritual, chiefly implemented through music and dance. Modern re
ligions, in contrast, are centered on belief, and many have regulated music and bann
ed or sharply curtailed physical movement.

In the ancestral religion people performed their own rituals. T
here were no priests or church: the community was the congregat
ion. Modern religions have an often elaborate ecclesiastical structure and make a sh
arp 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.

Some of the best evidence for the transformation of religious practice comes from a remarkable series of excavations undertaken over 15 years in the Oaxaca Valley of southern Mexico by Joyce Marcus and Kent V. Flannery of the University of Michigan. It can be difficult for archaeologists to reconstruct the religion of a long-gone people, and they have sometimes been mocked by anthropologists for describing every item of unknown purpose as a ritual object. But in this case, Marcus and Flannery have uncovered a series of buildings that have an undoubtedly religious purpose. And the structures span a period of time—some 7,000 years—during which people’s social organization passed from the hunter gatherer stage, to small settled societies, to village chiefdoms and eventually to an archaic state. This unusually long and complete record has enabled them to describe quite precisely how religious practice changed as social structure developed.

These transformations in religious and social behavior occurred much later than the equivalent processes in the Old World—the first known settlements there, in the Near East, are 15,000 years old whereas village life in the Oaxaca Valley began only 3,500 years ago. But the religious changes in Oaxaca may have been fairly typical of those elsewhere, given that they accompanied the same general process, the transition from hunter gathe
rer society to archaic state, that occurred independently in many regions worldwide.

The earliest structure excavated by Marcus and Flannery looks like a hunter gatherers’ dance floor.
¹³⁶
The ground has been swept clean of stones and two sides are marked by parallel rows of boulders. The area is part of a campsite used by some 30 people and dated to around 7000 B.C. In a nearby cave, inhabited during the same era, there are remains of people who seem to have been beheaded, cooked and cannibalized, along with baskets of harvested wild plants. This could have been a ritual associated with harvest seasons and marks an early appearance of the human sacrifices that later became widespread in Mesoamerican cultures like that of the Aztecs.

By about 1500 B.C., maize had been sufficiently domesticated that people could plant crops and store enough food to live in villages all year. At least 19 such villages have been located in the Oaxaca Valley. People dwelled in houses whose walls were made of wattle—intertwined sticks daubed with clay. Each house had a pit for storing maize. The villages also had structures known as men’s houses. San Jose Mogote, a fortified village of more than 1,000 people, had several of them.

The ritual purpose of the men’s houses is evident from their orientation; all face 8 degrees north of east, suggesting that they were aligned with the sun’s path at the equinox. Assuming they were used like similar buildings in contemporary societies, they would have belonged to a group of families who claimed descent from a common ancestor. Only men who had passed tests and been initiated into secret rites would have been allowed to enter the houses.

The men’s houses mark a decisive step away from the communal religious practice of hunter gatherers. An important part of ritual life was no longer open to all but had become exclusive to a small group of men.

By about 1100 B.C., the social structure of San Jose Mogote included a new class—a hereditary elite who lived in multistoried houses, wore jade ornaments, and deformed their children’s skulls, a practice then fashionable among the nobility. As for developments in religion, the men’s houses began to be phased out and were replaced with temples, oriented in the same direction. The temples were probably run by part-time priests, marking a further increase in the exclusivity of the religious leadership. In the largest temple the archaeologists found obsidian stilettos which were used for ritual bloodletting, and the remains of two people who had been sacrificed.

From 650 to 450 B.C. there were some 80 villages in the Oaxaca Valley, and intervillage warfare reached a peak, as judged by the number of burn marks on the wattle housing. The main temple at San Jose Mogote was consumed in an intense fire. Sometime beforehand, however, many of the inhabitants had moved to a more easily defended site in the valley called Monte Alban, which was to become the first major city of the New World.

Stone monuments at Monte Alban show that its leaders measured time with two calendars, a 260-day ritual calendar and a 365-day solar calendar. The two calendars came into conjunction once every 52 years. Like other Mesoamerican peoples, including the Aztec, the leaders of Monte Alban assigned great importance to this interval, as shown by the fact that at least some of their temples were rebuilt every 52 years.