Religion and the Human Nest
Evolution is often represented as a blind, gradual process that fits organisms adaptively to fixed environments, as a key cutter grinds a key. But many organisms engineer their environments to better accommodate their needs. These constructed worlds moreover affect the evolutionary problems facing generations downstream, providing a non-genetic vehicle for inherited adaptation. In this talk I explore the role of ritual in the organization of stable, integrated, cooperative networks. I combine Whitehouse’s dual modes account of ritual with evolutionary game theory to highlight how communities build forms of religious consciousness that help them to functionally interact with their habitats, and most especially with each other. This account helps to make sense of a puzzling feature of many religious lifeways, namely their granite-like intergenerational durability.
I close by looking to the future, and to profound technological changes threatening religion’s endurance.
Keywords: Commitment, God, Group Selection, Morality, Niche-construction, Religion, Ritual, Signalling, Whitehouse.
Ritual, Possession Trance, and Amnesia: Perspectives from Anthropology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Recent accounts of ceremonial ritual have emphasized the role of ritual in memory formation. High frequency, low arousal doctrinal rituals are associated with semantic memory formation, while low frequency, high arousal imagistic rituals are associated with episodic memory formation (Whitehouse 2000). Many possession rituals resemble imagistic ritual practices, in so far as they use salient sensory stimuli and are associated with dramatic alterations in experience and behaviour. However, people undergoing possession typically report amnesia for the experience of possession, rather than vivid autobiographical memories. Hence, ritual possession practices raise questions for current models of the relations between ceremonial ritual and memory formation. In particular, why should the deployment of salient stimuli be associated with enhanced episodic memory in non-possession rituals, but amnesia in possession rituals? Evidence and arguments from Gilbert Rouget’s Music and Trance (1985) are considered in light of subsequent developments in cognitive neuroscience, including evidence from research into the social, cognitive, and neural bases of hypnosis and dissociation.
Theory of Mind and Empathic Simulation in Ritual Context
Theory of mind (entailing the inferential interpretation of another’s behaviour) and empathic simulation (entailing the feeling of being in another’s place) allow interacting parties to appreciate their and others’ actions as linked to their and others’ intentional and emotional states; this enables them to make sense of and to participate in the activities they jointly pursue. Generally speaking, these two communicative operations work in tandem. However, there are surely some circumstances in which one or the other is clearly favoured (contrast, for example, the situation of being the subject of a controlled laboratory experiment with that of appreciating a contemporary dance performance).
I wish to explore this issue by contrasting two different modes of ritualization. In both cases, participants’ attention is focused on how the performance of prescribed actions affects their intentional and emotional dispositions; in this sense, both types of practice deserve to be recognized as instances of “ritual”. In one case, as exemplified by most “classical” ritual enactments, the self-referential complexity that underlies the distinctive meaningfulness of ritual performance resides in the partially inchoate character of the actions being performed. In the other, as evidenced by much New Age and Neo-Pagan ceremonial, this complexity resides in the partially indeterminate nature of those who undertake them: while the prescribed actions themselves are readily graspable in ordinary terms, their performance remains largely determined by what the affected participants feel (actual or imaginary) others might be feeling. While the former type of ritualization is centred on the construction of exceptional, irreducible actions involving a condensation of opposite meanings, the latter is centred on the emergence of exceptional, enhanced agents, involving refracted subjecthood.
What roles do theory of mind and empathic simulation play in these divergent modes of ritualized behaviour? Illustrative material to be discussed includes contemporary first menstruation rites, fire-walking and the production of visualisations as a means of achieving one’s personal goals.
Ritual and Vigilance in an Unstable Environment: A Case for Precaution Biases
Why do human beings engage in rituals? Many accounts focus on the specific reasons for participating in ritual in specific cultural contexts but do not explain why we find so recurrently the general features that we commonly attribute to ritual such as rigidity and redundancy.
I propose to focus on a component we find in many rituals, a precisely characterized type of action, Ritualized Behavior. It consists in a specific way of organizing the flow of behavior, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity, redundancy, goal-demotion and compulsion.
Ritualized Behavior seems to be systematically associated with specific themes: protection against contagion, purification, and prevention of potential dangers, harm to self and others. Neuropsychological and developmental evidence suggests that such potential dangers could be handled by specific Vigilance and Precaution neurocognitive systems. These systems might be involved in individual ritualization but also in cultural ritual, though in a very specific way in the latter case.
Any cultural ritual is the outcome of a constant cultural selection process. Since variants of cultural institutions are constantly introduced by human memory and agency, ritualized behavior’s recurrent, stable features indicate that such sequence has some kind of cognitive optimum, that is, a series of features easily transmitted because of properties of the human mind. I will defend those claims using ethnographic data from my fieldwork amongst the Turkana of N-O Kenya. A large majority of Turkana cultural rituals are best understood in a cultural selection framework and in terms of the involvement of precaution biases.
The Deep History of Religious Ritual
Despite Darwin’s historicization of biology in the mid-nineteenth century, only recently have a few historians acknowledged an evolved biological substrate of Homo sapiens , which, they maintain, informs historical expressions and change. “Deep history”, they maintain, must acknowledge this genetic and behavioral legacy for any understanding of the minds and motivations of their subjects. Evolutionary and cognitive psychology, new advances in developmental psychology and innovations in neurobiology and neuropsychology provide a structural backdrop for such human behaviors as ritual. A number of recent researchers have emphasized that ritual is situated on a spectrum of ordinary evolved human behavior, whether expressed as developmental stage, as habit, as pathology, or as “religious”. What remains contested, however, is whether such demarcations represent cultural biases or whether they might express “bottom up” criteria for what makes any ritual behavior, for example, “religious”. What is interesting for the historian of religion are the mechanisms, behaviors and institutions whereby religious rituals violate, manipulate or modulate our bio-cognitive proclivities over time.
Ritual and Coping with Uncertainty: Religious Israeli Women’s Responses to War
Many scholars have argued that rituals serve to alleviate stress and help performers cope with challenges they face, especially challenges that arise under conditions of uncertainty. In ongoing research, I have been examining this claim with data collected on how Israeli women use rituals to cope with the stress of war and terror. Analyzing data from the second Intifada, previous studies (Sosis 2007, 2008) showed that among secular interviewees psalm recitation was positively correlated with perceptions of threat and negatively correlated with short- and long-term precautionary behavioral strategies, such as cautiousness following an attack and avoiding buses, restaurants, and large crowds. Here I extend these findings focusing on religious Israeli women’s coping strategies during the 2006 Lebanon War. I show that psalm recitation is associated with lower rates of depression, a more effective coping strategy than other religious practices employed, and only efficacious when stress is caused by uncertain conditions. These findings will be discussed in light of models that examine ritual as a coping mechanism that enables performers to gain some control of an otherwise uncertain situation.
Ritual Efficacy and “Things Set Apart”: Refining Sørensen’s “Sacred Domain”
This paper refines the way in which Sorensen (2007) characterizes the sacred domain in his cognitive theory of magic and elaborates some of the implications of this refinement for our understanding of ritual. Instead of characterizing the religious concepts that constitute the sacred solely in terms of counter-intuitiveness (Boyer 1994, 2001), I suggest that we characterize religious things etically as things that are considered so special that they are set apart and protected by taboos against comparing, mixing or trading them with finite or mundane things (Tetlock 2000, 2003; Anttonen 2000). Things are typically regarded as special either because they are viewed as exceptional (i.e., they have intuition-violating qualities) or exemplary (i.e., they are perfect or ideal specimens) (Sperber 1996), but not all special things are so special that they are protected by taboos. The magical actions used to relate to this distinct part of reality (as detailed by Sorensen’s theory) are logically necessary in order to relate to something set apart and protected by taboos. This alternative framing provides (1) another way to understand what makes a thing religious in addition to counterintuitive agency, (2) a way to distinguish between things deemed religious and rituals, and (3) a different way to understand why humans perform magical rituals, though leaving open the question of why people set things apart as special in the first place.
Citations
Anttonen, Veikko. 2000. Space. In Guide to study of religion , edited by W. Braun and R. McCutchen. London, NY: Cassell.
Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: A cognitive theory of religion . Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2001. Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought . New York: Basic Books.
Sørensen, Jesper. 2007. A cognitive theory of magic. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Why are perfect animals, hybrids, and monsters food for symbolic thought? Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(2), 143-69.
Tetlock, P. E. 2003. Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in Cognitive Science 7 (7):320-324.
Tetlock, P. E., O.V. Kristel, S. B. Elson, M. C. Green, and J. S. Lerner. 2000. The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 78 (5):853-70.
