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Home , Charles Laughlin, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Bulbulia

STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF RELIGIONS: ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

JOHN BALCH

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2015

To Gregory Bateson, who reminded us never to lose site of the connecting patterns

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks have to go to Danny Duffy, who has been my rock in my time in

Gainesville. His love and support have made me a better person and a better writer. My next thanks go to my family; my parents who taught me to think deeply about the world, and who helped me in my crazy decision to go to grad school, and my sisters who have always given me unconditional love and encouragement. I would also like to thank my friend Bradford Martins, who has tolerated my endless questions about the brain, and has been a constant voice of sanity in my life. And I thank my other friends, who have always inspired me to become more curious about the cosmos.

I have been extremely fortunate to have a wonderful series of mentors over the course of my academic career. I would like to particularly thank my committee members. Dr. Bron Taylor has constantly helped me grow as a scholar and thinker in my time at the University of Florida, and pushed me towards greater clarity and brevity in my writing. Dr. Robin Wright’s expertise and insight on indigenous religions has been invaluable in helping me navigate through tangled webs of ethnographers and animists. I also would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Jay

McDaniel, whose guidance allowed me to follow the path I’m on today.

Finally, I would also like to thank Cris Campbell, whose summer course first introduced me to evolutionary and cognitive theories on religion and whose online writings have been an ongoing source of insight.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 8

Prelude ...... 8 Steps to an Ecology of Religion(s) ...... 11

2 THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION: THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL VARIANCE ...... 16

Contemporary Origins for the Cognitive Theories of Religion ...... 16 Cultural Epidemiology and Stone-Age Minds ...... 17 The Standard Cognitive Science of Religion – Religion Explained? ...... 20 Not So Fast: The Return of Cross-Cultural Studies...... 26 Beyond the Western Mind – Opaque Thoughts and Ecological Reasoning ...... 29 Assessing the CSR Model ...... 34

3 FROM COGNITION TO COSMOLOGY ...... 36

Out of Our Heads-A Patterned Practices Approach to Culture ...... 36 Distributed Navigation, Epistemic Niches, and Entangled Agencies ...... 38 To Think the Unthinkable – Material Culture and Religious Concepts ...... 44 Alternate Realities – Seer Stones and Shamanic Caves ...... 49 Animisms Old and New ...... 57 Weaving the Lifeworld - Religion in the Society of Nature ...... 66

4 BUILDING A COSMOLOGICAL NICHE ...... 74

Religion as an Adaptive System: Big Gods and Big Problems ...... 74 Cosmology as Ecological Analysis Reconsidered ...... 80 Niche Construction – The Missing Process in the Evolution of Religion? ...... 90 The Historical Ecology of Religions ...... 93

5 CONCLUSION...... 105

Anthropomorphism or Sentient Ecology? ...... 105 Religion as Extended Phenotype ...... 109 Transactional Animism and Transcendetal Totemism ...... 112 The Return of Animism? ...... 119

REFERENCE LIST ...... 124

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 140

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF RELIGIONS: ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

John Balch

May 2015

Chair: Bron Taylor Major: Religion

In this thesis I examine the importance of ecological contexts for evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion. Specifically, I argue that a prevalent assumption by researchers that religions primarily involve interactions with supernatural or counterfactual realities has obscured the dynamic relationships religious communities form with local ecosystems. In many societies, religious beliefs and practices structure patterns of interaction with other organisms and environmental systems, which influences the ability of that community to survive. I propose that this process constitutes a type of niche construction, or alterations made to environments by organisms that impact evolutionary selection pressures. Consequently, debates over the evolutionary functions of religion should take into account the specific contexts in which religions lead to ecological success or failure. To explore these questions, I incorporate contemporary cognitive perspectives on the cultural scaffolding of cognitive processes, the “New

Animist” ethnographic interpretations of religious systems in foraging societies, and ecological research on long-term interactions between human communities and environmental systems.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Prelude

Two books published in the last 15 years by different French anthropologists begin with a very similar rhetorical strategy. In both Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer1 and Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola,2 the authors introduce the reader to a set of ethnographic examples that might seem strange or bizarre from a modern Western perspective; singing songs to plants and jaguars, protective charms against invisible darts, encountering the souls of hunted animals in dreams, and talking to an invisible omniscient agent. The goal of both authors is to uncover the logic behind these seemingly illogical practices.

In Religion Explained this “rich tapestry of folly” is presented as a by-product of

“properties of mind that are found in all members of our species with normal brains.”3 The apparent diversity and strangeness of human concepts and beliefs is reduced to a core of basic ideas that are favored by the way human minds were shaped by natural selection in the deep past.

These ideas, which Boyer likens to viruses, spread across human minds like an informational plague, carving out a local mental habitation for a set of “airy nothings.”4 Armed with the tools of cognitive science and evolutionary theory, Boyer sets out to demonstrate the “naturalness” of supernatural belief from a scientific perspective.

1 Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

2 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).

3 Boyer, Religion Explained, 2.

4 Ibid., 4.

The beliefs and practices Descola described, in contrast, demonstrate the way “certain

peoples…envisage their insertion into the environment in a manner altogether different from our

own.”5 He argued that Western people, not those in Amazonia or Siberia, are outliers in the manner they configure relationships between humans and non-human organisms. “In many regions on the planet,” Descola contended, “humans and nonhumans are not conceived as developing in incommunicable worlds or according to quite separate principles.”6 He claimed

that to understand the beliefs of the Achuar, the Cree, or the Itza’ Mayans, anthropologists

should take off the lenses of a rigid naturalist epistemology, and investigate the ways structures

of relations between humans and their environments lead to the compositions of common worlds.

At first blush, the different approaches taken by Descola and Boyer might seem to

represent another example of the division between the humanistic and scientific poles of the

social sciences. Since its inception as an academic field in the 1800s, anthropology has oscillated

between cultural and biological explanations of human nature. Although there is not an inherent

conflict between these approaches, anthropologists have frequently taken sides in the so-called

“science-culture” wars, particularly after the postmodern turn in the academy.7 Similar conflicts

have emerged in religious studies, leading to what Nathaniel Barrett described as a “tug-of- war…between highly detailed, context-sensitive accounts of lived religion…and comprehensive theories of human religiosity.”8 As Barrett noted, those who favor cognitive approaches to the

5 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 16.

6 Ibid., 30.

7 Maurice Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, 1 edition (New Jersey: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

8 Nathaniel F Barrett, “Toward an Alternative Evolutionary Theory of Religion: Looking Past Computational Evolutionary Psychology to a Wider Field of Possibilities,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 3 (2010): 585.

study of religion frequently accused humanists of clinging to dogmatic forms of relativism and

social constructionism,9 or in the words of Edward Slingerland; “wandering around aimlessly

down an endless hallway of distorting mirrors.”10

Such criticisms are often on target, as many cultural anthropologists and humanities

scholars continue to either ignore advances in psychology and biology or reject scientific

reductionism wholesale.11 As Barrett also pointed out, however, there is a troubling tendency of

cognitivist arguments to imply “that it is somehow anti-evolution, even anti-science, to emphasize the importance of historical, cultural, and personal context for the understanding of human behavior.”12

Descola’s assertion in Beyond Nature and Culture that a naturalist ontology is the

product of a lengthy process of separation between Western society and nature in some ways

resembles the relativistic arguments of postmodernism. Descola’s criticism of the predominance

of naturalist epistemologies in anthropology, however, does not entail a wholesale rejection of

science. Rather, at the core of his argument, is an insistence that cognition is inseparable from

natural and social contexts. Descola believed that cognition is molded through the interaction of

humans, other organisms, and environmental systems. All this he explicitly grounds in an

enactive version of the connectionist model of cognition favored by some cognitive and

9 Ibid., 586.

10 Edward Slingerland, “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 377.

11 See Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge; Armin Geertz, “Cognitive Scence and the Study of Religion,” Collegium Biblicum. Årsskrift 15, no. 1 (2011): 7–13; Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe, “Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 587–97.

12 Barrett, “Toward an Alternative Evolutionary Theory of Religion,” 586.

behavioral neuroscientists.13 Consequently, the disparity between Boyer and Descola is not based on a conflict between a humanistic and scientific approach. It emerges from alternate hypotheses about the way Homo sapiens perceive and engage with the world.

Steps to an Ecology of Religion(s)

The contemporary evolutionary and cognitive science of religion is rooted in the evolutionary paradigm that was forged by the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis of natural selection and

Mendelian genetics. During the 1990s, however, scientists began to pay closer attention to the interaction between ecological and evolutionary dynamics, which Thomas Schoener dubbed the

“Newest Synthesis” in biology.14 In this thesis I examine the importance of ecological contexts for evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion. Specifically, I argue that a prevalent assumption by researchers that religions primarily involve interactions with supernatural or counterfactual realities has obscured the dynamic relationships religious communities form with local ecosystems. In many societies, religious beliefs and practices structure patterns of interaction with other organisms and environmental systems, which influences the ability of that community to survive. I propose that this process constitutes a type of niche construction, or alterations made to environments by organisms that impact evolutionary selection pressures.

Consequently, debates over the evolutionary functions of religion should take into account the specific contexts in which religions lead to ecological success or failure. To explore these questions, I incorporate contemporary cognitive perspectives on the cultural scaffolding of cognitive processes, the “New Animist” ethnographic interpretations of religious systems in

13 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 101; Paul Smolensky, “On the Proper Treatment of Connectionism,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11, no. 01 (1988).

14 Thomas W. Schoener, “The Newest Synthesis: Understanding the Interplay of Evolutionary and Ecological Dynamics,” Science 331, no. 6016 (2011): 426–29.

foraging societies, and ecological research on long-term interactions between human communities and environmental systems.

As countless scholars have observed, the category of “religion” is fuzzy at best, and imperialist at worst.15 Borrowing from Andreas Roepstorff, I adopt a “patterned practices” approach to religion in this thesis, which looks for emergent realities that “arise from the continuous interaction of human actors, material artifacts, and formal institutions, rituals, norms, and beliefs.”16 To Roepstorff’s system I also add all other organisms and aspects of the environment that act on and are acted upon by human agents. In my opinion, these systems of interaction give rise to the worldviews that are conventionally defined as “cosmologies,” and I take this active definition of cosmology as a point of departure for my analysis.

In Chapter 2, I evaluate the theoretical underpinnings of the “standard model” of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) defined by Pascal Boyer. Building upon theories of cognition proposed by Dan Sperber and evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Boyer proposed that religious ideas were “minimally counterintuitive,” violating the evolved intuitions of human minds. This made them easy to remember, leading to their widespread dissemination.

Scott Atran built upon Boyer’s concept of counterintuitiveness by drawing attention to the role of costly signals and commitments in religious activity. The paradigm of CSR was further extended by Justin Barrett, who synthesized Boyer’s theory with previous work by Stewart Guthrie on

15 Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84; David Chidester, “Classify and Conquer: Friedrich Max Muller, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and Imperial Comparative Religion,” in Beyond Primitivism, ed. Jacob Olupona (New York: Routledge, 2004), 71–88.

16 Andreas Roepstorff, Jörg Niewöhner, and Stefan Beck, “Enculturing Brains through Patterned Practices,” Neural Networks: The Official Journal of the International Neural Network Society 23, no. 8–9 (2010): 1056.

anthropomorphism and religion. Barrett proposed that humans had evolved a Hyper-Active

Detection Device, which naturally led to the formation of supernatural concepts. The theoretical background of the standard model of CSR led to a focus on innate cognitive universals, neglecting the capacity of culture to fundamentally re-shape cognition. This is contradicted by recent research in psychology, however, that indicates complex patterns of cross-cultural

variation. Douglas Medin and associates, for example, discovered members of the Menominee

tribe were more likely than urban Euro-Americans to emphasize ecological relationships and

practice taking the perspectives of non-humans, leading to the formation of a relational epistemology. Based on the insights of cross-cultural psychology, the cognitive universals upon which the standard model of CSR depends are insufficiently established by data, and the field would benefit by adopting a more flexible perspective.

As anthropologist Maurice Bloch observed, all accounts of human behavior depend on either explicit or implicit cognitive theories.17 After rejecting the cognitive theory of standard

model CSR in Chapter 2, I outline an alternate perspective on cognition that focuses on the

dynamic interaction between culture, cognition, and environment. Specifically, Edwin Hutchins,

Andy Clark, and Lambros Malafouris highlight the ways cultural practices and external artifacts

enhance and extend the capacities of the brain, creating a mutual entanglement between human

and material agency. Several religion scholars have begun to analyze the role of material culture

in forming and sustaining religious concepts. These authors argued that artifacts are invaluable in

rendering visible the “unseen” aspects of religion, and connecting individuals to non-ordinary or

symbolic realms of reality. The origin of beliefs in alternate realities, however, is also tied to the

polyphasic nature of human consciousness and altered states of perception. Religious specialists

17 Bloch, Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, 8.

who can skillfully navigate between ordinary and alternate realms gain influence in their

community, which can either be used to help or dominate others.

In many societies, however, the supernatural and natural are not considered to be separate

domains. The ethnographic insights of the “New Animists” argues for a re-thinking of dichotomies between nature and culture, humans and other organisms, and self and environment.

The work of Nurit Bird-David, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, and Tim Ingold has reclaimed the term “animism” to describe the relational ontologies found in many foraging cultures. In these cosmological systems, artifacts and practices serve to stabilize concepts of the personhood of other organisms and non-living aspects of the environment. By rendering visible and personifying the invisible aspects of a community’s interaction with its ecological niche, animist religions allow for humans to enter into dynamic relationships with a variety of other agents upon which they depend for survival.

In Chapter 4 I turn to contemporary evolutionary theorists who argue that religion should

be considered an adaptive process. Theorizing religion as an adaptation often depends on the

assumption that religious systems increase levels of prosociality and cooperation, which give

some societies advantages over others. While this research has yielded some interesting results, it

often neglects the importance of the relationship between humans and eco-systems. In addition,

Kevin Laland and his associates have drawn attention to evolutionary processes of niche construction by humans and other species, or the way in which organisms re-shape their environments to increase their changes of survival. Niche construction thus provides a frame for investigating long-term processes of co-evolution and ecological change driven by the activities of biological agents. In archaeology and anthropology, this type of research has fallen under the umbrella of “historical ecology,” which analyzes development of socio-ecological systems at

multiple temporal and spatial scales. Using the lens of historical ecology, I present three case studies that indicate the complex interrelationships between religious beliefs, ecological practices, and social structure. Consequently, I conclude that the adaptive potential of a religious system is contingent on the ways it is entangled with local organisms and biological systems, which adds a new layer of complexity to theories on the evolution of religion.

The evolutionary and cognitive science of religion is one of the fastest growing areas of inquiry in religious studies. In only two decades, the field has developed from a small collection of scholars to the establishment of full-time research centers in the United States, Denmark, the

United Kingdom, and Canada. Research in biology began with the work of field naturalists, whose research was enhanced by the powerful reductionism of controlled experiments in the laboratory. There comes a point, however, when biological puzzles require a return to the field, to investigate the complex ecological webs that constrain and enable the ongoing evolutionary process. I believe that the time has come for evolutionary theories of religion to look for a new synthesis between lab and field, between evolution and ecology, and towards the refinement of knowledge that takes when the both are fully in play.

CHAPTER 2 THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION: THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL VARIANCE

Contemporary Origins for the Cognitive Theories of Religion

While evolutionary and cognitive approaches to the study of religion were a central part of the early academic programs in the 1800s, the cognitive approach fell largely out of favor until the end of the 20th century, when Stewart Guthrie published Faces in the Clouds. Drawing

on the provocative religion theorizing by David Hume, work from classical religion theorists like

E. B. Tylor, perspectives emerging from the cognitive sciences, and a wealth of anthropological

data, Guthrie proposed that anthropomorphism is “the result of a general, spontaneous, and

unconscious interpretive tendency” that lies at the center of religious belief.1 Guthrie developed

this argument from Robin Horton’s definition of religion as “the extension of the field of

people’s social relationships beyond purely human society.”2 Guthrie reasoned that since humans

are most familiar with patterns of human behavior, they naturally interpret unfamiliar patterns in

nature through a humanlike model. Although science attempts to eliminate anthropomorphic

explanations, the inclination towards them provides religious ideas with a strong cognitive basis.

Therefore Guthrie concluded that while “anthropomorphism by definition is mistaken,” it is also

“reasonable and inevitable.”3

At around the same time that Guthrie was developing this theory, Pascal Boyer began to

advance his own theory regarding the origin and persistence of religious perception. Boyer

focused on the memorability or “catchiness” of religious ideas. He laid out this theory in

1 Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 50.

2 Ibid., 33.

3 Ibid., 204.

Religion Explained, and his framework of cognition, culture, and evolution drew on two sources;

Dan Sperber, a cognitive anthropologist whose work has been extremely influential in the fields

of anthropology, psychology, and cultural evolution, and evolutionary psychologists Leda

Cosmides and John Tooby, who proposed that human cognition is best understood as a set of

modules that were shaped by natural selection in an ancestral environment.

Cultural Epidemiology and Stone-Age Minds

Dan Sperber argued that research in anthropology and psychology could be brought together by drawing an analogy between how the human mind receives and transmits representations and how the immune system receives and carries viral material. Rather than

viewing culture as a public system of symbols outside of individual minds, Sperber instead

argued that “widely distributed, long-lasting representations are what we are primarily referring

to when we talk of culture.”4 He recommended that research on culture should explain why

certain representations are “more successful in a human population, more contagious, more

‘catching’ than others.”5 Taking this approach, in Sperber’s view, allowed for a productive division of labor between anthropologists and psychologists; psychologists would uncover the innate mental mechanisms that favored certain representations, and anthropologists would investigate cultural configurations of representations as “ecological patterns of psychological phenomena.”6

Sperber further refined his definition of individual representations by drawing on a wide

range of psychological research on concepts and category formation. Based on the research of

4 Dan Sperber, “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations,” Man : A Monthly Record of Anthropological Science 20, no. 1 (1985): 74.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 76.

Frank Keil7, Susan Carey8, Susan Gellman9, Elizabeth Spelke10, and Lawrence Hirschfeld,11

Sperber contended

(W)e have an innate disposition to develop concepts according to certain schemas, we have different schemas for different domains: our concepts of living kinds tend to be taxonomic; our concepts of artifacts tend to be characterized in terms of function: our concepts of color tend to be centered on focal hues, etc. Concepts which conform to these schemas are easily internalized and remembered.12

Sperber’s argument here is an example of a Nativist position in the philosophy of mind, or the

assumption that humans are born with innate mechanisms for acquiring knowledge. The opposite

of the Nativist position is philosophical Empiricism, which holds that all knowledge must be

based in experience. Although each of these positions has a long history in philosophy and psychology, contemporary arguments for concept Nativism are based on linguist Noam

Chomsky’s famous “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument. Chomsky argued that the speed at which children gain linguistic competency exceeds what could reasonably be learned through exposure to speaking adults. In order to account for this discrepancy, Chomsky reasoned that all humans must be born with an innate faculty for the acquisition of language.13 Although

7 Frank C. Keil, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development (MIT Press, 1992).

8 Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, “Science and Core Knowledge,” Philosophy of Science 63, no. 4 (1996): 515–33.

9 Susan A. Gelman and Ellen M. Markman, “Categories and Induction in Young Children,” Cognition 23, no. 3 (1986): 183–209.

10 Elizabeth S. Spelke et al., “Origins of Knowledge,” Psychological Review 99, no. 4 (1992): 605–32.

11 Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

12 Sperber, “Anthropology and Psychology,” 82.

13See Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1987).

Chomsky’s argument was initially limited to language, research on infants by Keil, Carey, and

others offered support for the hypothesis that humans are born pre-equipped with a wide range of mental abilities. As with all Nativist positions, however, the question remains-if culture and perceptual learning are no longer required to furnish the mind with its conceptual grid-what process could have led to the development of these innate capacities?

The best approach to this problem, according to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, would be to locate continuities between aspects of the human mind and its evolutionary past. Their approach blended a nativist perspective on cognition with the style of behavioral research launched by the publication of Sociobiology by E.O. Wilson, which encouraged social scientists and biologists to investigate the genetic roots of human behavior.14 Leda and Cosmides were

critical, however, of what they saw as a “wrong turn” in sociobiology and human behavioral

ecology, which had erroneously attempted “to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms.”15 They explained what they considered to be the full research paradigm of evolutionary psychology as follows:

Human nature-the species typical information processing architecture of the human brain-is packed with content-rich adaptive problem-solving systems. Like expert systems, each is designed to deploy different concepts, principles, inference procedures, regulatory variables, and decision rules when activated by cues of its proper domain.16

14 Among other points, see Edward Osborne Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975).

15 Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106.

16 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation.,” Annual Review of Psychology 64 (2013): 202.

The mind/brain complex in Cosmides and Tooby’s view is therefore massively modular, or

divided into a large number of encapsulated and domain-specific information and perceptual

“mental organs”, or modules. In order to account for the existence of these modules, Cosmides

and Tooby proposed “these programs were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral

environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended.”17 Researchers in evolutionary psychology use this model by postulating the

existence of a domain-specific module within the human brain, testing it experimentally in the

present, and then proposing an evolutionary scenario in which the humans who had that module

would have had a significant advantage over those who did not.

The Standard Cognitive Science of Religion – Religion Explained?

Pascal Boyer brought together Sperber’s epidemiology of representations with

evolutionary psychology in order to develop a new cognitive theory of religion. Boyer proposed

that human minds are born fitted with an evolved intuitive ontology, or “a set of principled

expectations and inferential dispositions concerning various aspects of experience.”18 These

“aspects” can also be defined as “broad domains” such as PERSON, ANIMAL, PLANT, or

ARTIFACT. Humans are therefore predisposed towards a “set of definite intuitive expectations

about the observable features and likely underlying properties of different types of objects” that

goes “beyond objects actually experienced.”19 Therefore, Boyer proposed that religious

representations were minimally counterintuitive, that they were often similar to our intuitive

concepts but with one or two violations, which increased their memorability. Boyer extended

17 Ibid.

18 Pascal Boyer, “Cognitive Tracks of Cultural Inheritance: How Evolved Intuitive Ontology Governs Cultural Transmission,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 4 (1998): 876.

19 Ibid., 879.

Sperber’s metaphor of the epidemiology of representations, and he viewed religious concepts as

a type of virus that is “parasitic upon intuitive ontology.” arguing further that their success

depends on “mental capacities that would be there, gods or no gods.”20

Boyer’s theory of religion utilized a dual-process theory of cognition, and classified mental processes as either intuitive, “quick, automatic, and implicit,” or reflective, “slow, deliberate explicit, and general.”21 As a result, he stipulated that the mental processes connected

to intuitive ontology operate “beneath that Cartesian stage (of reflective thought), in a mental

basement that we can describe only with the tools of cognitive science.”22 Boyer’s model is

unidirectional, assuming that implicit or intuitive processing gives rise to the content and

structure of explicit and reflective processing, but not the reverse. Consequently, he rejected the

notion that repeated exposure to counterintuitive ideas “might have a feedback effect of people’s

expectations.” “There is no evidence for such an effect,” he contended, drawing on a study by

Sheila Walker among the Yoruba, which he concluded “showed how intuitions were not really

affected by the presence of familiar counterintuitive representations.”23 The explanatory power

of Boyer’s theory therefore depends on the postulate that universal human cognition is

instrumental for shaping and determining culture, but the same cognitive systems are immune to

ontological modification by experience or culture. From a research perspective, this permits

20 Boyer, Religion Explained, 202.

21 Nicolas Baumard and Pascal Boyer, “Religious Beliefs as Reflective Elaborations on Intuitions: A Modified Dual-Process Model,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 4 (2013): 1.

22 Boyer, Religion Explained, 18.

23 Ibid., 87.

Boyer and other cognitive scientists to largely side-step or overlook explicit or reflective accounts of religious belief or experiences.

Boyer’s theory was accentuated and extended by the work of Scott Atran in In Gods We

Trust, who focused attention on the so-called “Mickey Mouse” problem of minimally

counterintuitive agents. According to Atran, while minimal counter-intuitiveness could afford increased memorability to religious concepts, it cannot justify the commitment of religious believers to practices that are “materially expensive and unrelentingly counterfactual.”24 In

addition, Boyer’s model leaves no method for arbitrating between a Mickey Mouse, which adults

can entertain as a fictional character, and the Christian God, whom many believe is a real being

to whom they owe allegiance and commit extensive resources that, from an evolutionary

standpoint, are wasted. In order to solve this problem, Atran brought together three different

lines of evidence. First, echoing Guthrie, Atran argued that religious agents trigger “our naturally

selected agency-detection system, which is trip-wired to respond to fragmentary information,”

which evolved for “avoiding and tracking predators and prey.”25 Atran averred that religion also

provides an outlet for the existential anxieties caused by what he deemed “The Tragedy of

Cognition.” Due to our metarepresentational ability to become aware of our own mortality, Atran argued that a fear of death could engender “primitively powerful neurophysiological fear reactions,” which leads to the imagination of “minimally impossible worlds” of the afterlife.26

24 Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.

25 Ibid., 71.

26 Ibid., 67.

Third, Atran proposed that materially expensive religious activities could serve as “costly

signals” of commitment to a social group, providing protection from free-riders and defectors.27

Atran relied on many of the same psychological sources as Sperber and Boyer, and he shared their commitment to innate, domain-specific modularity and the theoretical methods of evolutionary psychology. Atran condensed the results of psychological research on innate mechanisms to three “panhuman mental faculties:” folkmechanics, “the mostly unreflective understanding of how whole objects physically move and interact”, folkbiology “the often automatic taxonomic assignment of any perceived organism to one and only one essential, species like group”, and folkpsychology, “the largely spontaneous attribution of intentional beliefs and desires to other minds.”28 Atran, along with the psychologist Douglas Medin, has

conducted cross-cultural research on folkbiological categories, and Atran has repeatedly argued

that humans possess an innate faculty for taxonomic biological reasoning.29 The clear separation

between this domain and that of folk-psychology meant for Atran that ascribing human-like

mental states to objects, plants, or animals is clearly a “misfire” of human cognition, although he

also paradoxically acknowledged that the Itza’ Maya beliefs in the sentience of the forest could

positively contribute to ecological management.

Justin Barrett utilized a modular perspective on folkpsychology to re-interpret Guthrie’s theory of anthropomorphism through the lens of evolutionary psychology. Barrett argued that

27 Ibid., 114.

28 Ibid., 12.

29 Scott Atran, “Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21, no. 04 (1998): 547–69; Scott Atran, Douglas Medin, and Norbert Ross, “Evolution and Devolution of Knowledge: A Tale of Two Biologies,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 2 (2004): 395–420; Douglas L. Medin and Scott Atran, “The Native Mind: Biological Categorization and Reasoning in Development and Across Cultures,” Psychological Review 111, no. 4 (2004): 960–83.

humans are equipped with a “Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device,” or HADD, which

makes them “prone to find agents…including supernatural ones, given fairly modest evidence of

their presence.”30 According to Barrett, HADD can combine with the natural human ability to

interpret other minds, which leads to the development of beliefs about the goals and attitudes of

disembodied agents. Barrett argued that this process was amplified by an innate human

propensity for mind/body dualism, naturally priming cognition for concepts of disembodied

minds. In order to transition from mere ascriptions of agency to a consistent beliefs and devotion

to spirits and gods, however, Barrett suggested minds require a cultural conceptual framework of

supernatural ideas that stabilizes this process. This framework can be reinforced by subsequent

triggering of HADD, and the combination of these processes is systemized by religious or

cultural lens that into a consistent series of beliefs about the nature of supernatural agents and

their place within the cosmos. Consequently, Barrett proposed that religion with “strong

conceptual control” over supernatural concepts, such Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, have an

advantage over religions with looser interpretive frameworks, like those practiced by shamans or

indigenous peoples.31

Boyer and Atran, and Barrett, as well as Ilkka Pyysiainen,32 E. Thomas Lawson, and

Robert McCauley,33 belong to what Boyer has deemed the “standard cognitive science of

30 Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 31.

31 Ibid., 88.

32 Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003).

33 Thomas E. Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert N McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

religion model” or CSR.34 Boyer’s definition reflected many of the themes I have already

identified so far-culture as an epidemiology of representations, evolved brains with “massively

similar conceptual architectures, composed of functionally distinct categories specialized in

different types of objects and problems,” the enhanced memorability of counterintuitive

concepts, the importance of intentional agents, the parasitic nature of religious morality, the

formation of “notions of souls and spirits of dead people that naturally result from animacy

systems and theory-of-mind systems,” and the potential of religious concepts for building in-

group solidarity.35 This approach has also sometimes been termed the “byproduct” hypothesis to

religion, which views the endurance of religion as a cognitive spandrel, or a side-effect of evolved psychological tendencies with no adaptive purpose.36 Boyer stipulated that the standard

CSR model model utilized “hypothetical descriptions of religious ontology, religious moral feelings, ritual form, or purity emotions that could be tested against the evidence in terms of (a) predicting the actual representations found in human societies and (b) being based on experimentally demonstrated mechanisms.”37

34 Pascal Boyer, “A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission,” in Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity, ed. Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N McCauley (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005); Pascal Boyer and Brian Bergstrom, “Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion,” Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008): 111–30.

35 See Boyer, “A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission,” 4–6.

36 See Joseph Bulbulia, “The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion,” Biology and Philosophy 19, no. 5 (2004): 655–86; Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Marc Hauser, “The Origins of Religion : Evolved Adaptation or by-Product?,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 3 (2010): 104–9; Geertz, “Cognitive Scence and the Study of Religion”; Edward, Bulbulia, Joseph Slingerland, “Religious Studies as a Life Science,” Numen 59, no. 5–6 (2012): 564–613.

37 Boyer, “A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission,” 6.

Rather than reviewing each of the claims of the standard CSR model individually, I

believe that it is more instructive to isolate several core claims and to evaluate their merits in

light of new research in cross-cultural psychology.. Returning to the major themes identified in

Sperber, Boyer, and Atran, the primary claims can be broken down as follows. First, cognition

can be divided into two categories or processes, which can be loosely described as

implicit/intuitive and explicit/reflective. Second, the implicit properties of cognition give rise to

explicit and reflective cognition, and are therefore significantly immune to conscious

introspection or awareness. Third, intuitive processes were molded by natural selection and fixed

at some point in humanity’s evolutionary past, and are therefore universal for normal Homo

sapien minds and not subject to modification by cultural variability.` Sperber described this

position as a form of cultural epiphenomenalism, and he asserted that while cultural

configurations “result from the fundamental properties of (cognitive) phenomena… they play no

causal role in the emergence and development of the phenomenon, and are not, therefore,

explanatory.”38

Not So Fast: The Return of Cross-Cultural Studies

The psychological research that provided standard CSR’s evidence for panhuman mental faculties has recently come under fire. A direct challenge to standard research methods in psychology came from Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan in their article “The

Weirdest People in the World?” in which they coined the term WEIRD (Western, Educated,

Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to encompass the demographic that was overwhelmingly

38 Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 47.

represented in the psychological literature.39 Henrich et al. argued that psychological claims

about universal mental faculties not only depended on “an extraordinarily restricted sample of

humanity,” but that a WEIRD sample group “may represent the worst population on which to

base our understanding of Homo sapiens.”40 In spite of this clear sampling bias, Henrich et al. found that psychologists did not hesitate to make “inferences about human mind and human behavior.”41 Furthermore, research on different cultural groups was often framed with a bias

towards Western subjects as a “normal” sample against which the deviation of other groups

could be measured. After reviewing available cross-cultural research from a more agnostic

perspective, Henrich et al. concluded that few cognitive tendencies had sufficient empirical

support to be considered “panhuman” or “normal,” and that psychologists were not in the

position to make solid conjectures about human nature. Cognitive scientists of religion should

therefore exercise more caution in ignoring cultural context, or extrapolating data from a WEIRD

sample base to explain presumably universal aspects of religious behavior.

Empirical studies have not confirmed Boyer’s assertion that cultural learning cannot

meaningfully alter the memorability of counterintuitive ideas. Early experiments by Barrett42 and

Boyer43 supported the theory that minimally counterintuitive concepts showed improved

39 Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 1.

40 Ibid., 82.

41 Ibid., 63.

42 Justin Barrett and Frank Keil, “Conceptualizing a Nonnatural Entity: Anthropomorphism in God Concepts.,” Cognitive Psychology 31, no. 3 (1996): 219–47.

43 Pascal Boyer and Charles Ramble, “Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross- Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations,” Cognitive Science 25, no. 4 (2001): 535–64.

memorability in different cultural samples. A follow up study by Ara Norenzayan and Scott

Atran, however, did not confirm Boyer and Barrett’s results.44 After redesigning the experiment,

Atran and Norenzayan found that coherent narratives with counterintuitive concepts embedded within them had an advantage over those with only intuitive concepts, and they concluded that the memorability effects of counterintuitiveness depended on a coherent context or background.45 Since then, research on MCI has remained divided, with some researchers continuing to focus on concepts in isolation46 and others concentrating on the role of context and cultural expectations.47 Afzal Upal has repeatedly argued that culture is a key variable for determining counterintuitiveness, and that “ideas that violate cultural schemas, scripts, and expert knowledge acquired through learning should also enjoy memorability advantages.”48 Upal found that contrary to the claims made by Boyer about the irrelevance of cultural experience, newly encountered ideas can eventually become “seamlessly embedded into a group’s cultural

44 Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan, “Religion’s Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, no. 6 (2004): 713– 30.

45 See the discussion in Atran, In Gods We Trust.

46 See Justin Barrett, “Coding and Quantifying Counterintuitiveness in Religious Concepts: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20, no. 4 (November 1, 2008): 308–38; Konika Banerjee, Omar S. Haque, and Elizabeth S. Spelke, “Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children’s Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts,” Cognitive Science 37, no. 7 (2013): 1251–89.

47 Michaela Porubanova et al., “Memory for Expectation-Violating Concepts: The Effects of Agents and Cultural Familiarity,” PLoS ONE 9, no. 4 (2014): e90684; M. Afzal Upal, “From Individual to Social Counterintuitiveness: How Layers of Innovation Weave Together to Form Multilayered Tapestries of Human Cultures,” Mind & Society 10, no. 1 (2011): 79–96; Benjamin G. Purzycki and Richard Sosis, “Our Gods: Variation in Supernatural Minds,” in Essential Building Blocks of Human Nature, ed. Ulrich J. Frey, Charlotte Störmer, and Kai P. Willführ (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 77–93.

48 Upal, “From Individual to Social Counterintuitiveness,” 82.

scaffolding,” losing any advantages for increased memorability.49 Psychologists Yvan Russell and Fernand Gobet have re-defined this problem as an “expertise” issue, and contended that

Boyer and Barrett’s MCI research ignores the role of skill and knowledge in structuring intuitive expectations. Russell and Gobet argued that expertise, rather than being a reflective process, instead should be defined as when “formerly unhabituated concepts become incorporated into a person’s knowledge and skill set”50 They used the example of chess players; a novice may see pieces as randomly arranged while an expert can immediately detect relevant patterns through incorporating past knowledge of previous arrangements of pieces on the board.51 Expert perception can therefore be fast and non-reflective, and Russell and Gobet observed that standard

CSR’s dual process model of cognition leaves no means to meaningfully distinguish between acquired and innate forms of intuitive processing.

Beyond the Western Mind – Opaque Thoughts and Ecological Reasoning

Research on folkpsychology, which is a central pillar of standard model CSR, has begun to point towards a complicated picture of cross-cultural variation in Theory of Mind. Theory of mind in children has long been tested with a “false belief” test, in which a researcher determines whether or not the participants can discern if others can harbor inaccurate beliefs about the world based on their limited perception.52 Extensive testing on Western children indicates that they

49 Ibid., 88.

50 Yvan I. Russell and Fernand Gobet, “What Is Counterintuitive? Religious Cognition and Natural Expectation,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4, no. 4 (2013): 743.

51 Ibid., 735.

52 The common method of ascertaining this is by having someone put an object in one container, having hem leave the room, moving the object to another container, and then asking the children where they will look for the object. On average, younger children will assume that they will look in the first container, but older children appreciate that the researcher will not know that the objects have been moved.

generally acquire this ability between the ages of 3 and 5 years old.53 Although some research

supports a universal perspective on the time of development, a review by Bethany Ojalehto and

Douglas Medin found that “children from non-Western or small-scale communities sometimes

appear delayed relative to otherwise consistent cross-cultural trends.”54 In particular, children in

Samoa appeared to be extreme outliers, with Ojalehto and Medin reporting that the average child

passed the test after they turned 8 years old.55 Ojalehto and Medin proposed that this delay might

correspond with ethnographic observations Polynesian beliefs about the “opacity of other minds”

which encourages a tendency not to infer knowledge about other’s inner mental states.56

A recent symposium led by Tanya Luhrmann proposed that Polynesian and Western

conceptualizations of the mind are two of at least 6 distinct cultural patterns, and anthropologists

and psychologists have started the process of identifying the psychological processes behind this

diversity.57 Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller have hypothesized that language plays a crucial

role in shaping how people think about other minds, and that cultures that pay less attention to

inner mental states have less corresponding “Mentalese” vocabulary.58 Similarly, Cecila Heyes

and Chris Frith have suggested that infants and children do not spontaneously develop a theory

53 bethany l. ojalehto and Douglas L. Medin, “Perspectives on Culture and Concepts,” Annual Review of Psychology 66, no. 1 (2015): 249–75.

54 Ibid., 261.

55 Ibid.

56 Eve Danziger, “Conventional Wisdom: Imagination, Obedience and Intersubjectivity,” Language & Communication 33, no. 3 (2013): 251–62.

57 Tanya Luhrmann, “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind,” Suom Anthropol. Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 53 (2011): 5–69.

58 Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller, “Cognition Is … Fundamentally Cultural,” Behavioral Sciences 3, no. 1 (January 4, 2013): 47.

of mind through observation, but that folkpsychological ideas are shaped by “what the novice is

told about the mind by the expert mind readers in her social world.”59 Heyes and Frith support this claim with a case-study on the spontaneous evolution of a sign language in Nicaragua, which correlated the ability to ascertain false-beliefs with the acquisition of mental-state vocabulary and not with age.60 It is not yet known how different cultural beliefs about the mind directly

influence cognitive development and variation on a neurological level. On the social level,

however, cultural variation in Theory-of-Mind structures how individuals behave in relation to other humans and their general conception of agency. If folkpsychology is not a stable universal category, then the challenge for the cognitive science of religion is to move beyond imposing a

Western framework of disembodied minds on other religious systems. Instead, research could

test how different models of the mind correspond to religious beliefs about the agency of

humans, non-humans, and supernatural beings.

Medin et al. claimed that the structure of beliefs and practices in several indigenous

cultures fostered distinct psychological traits that that can be measured quantitatively. Building

on several decades of research on Menominee Native Americans, they concluded that

Menominee children and adults did not conceive of humans as separate from nature, were more

likely to employ ecological models in their reasoning about nature, and consistently took the

perspectives of non-human animals.61 Medin et al. argued that these tendencies could not be

explained only from the close interaction of Menominee with nature, but that these modes of

59 Cecilia M. Heyes and Chris D. Frith, “The Cultural Evolution of Mind Reading,” Science 344, no. 6190 (2014): 4.

60 Ibid., 32.

61 Douglas Medin et al., “Culture and Epistemologies: Putting Culture Back into the Ecosystem,” in Advances in Culture and Psychology, ed. Michele Gelfand, Chi-yue Chiu, and Ying-yi Hong, vol. 4, 2014, 177–217.

thought were also structured by a non-anthropocentric cultural framework of religious belief and

practice. The Menominee, like many indigenous societies, “teach their children that Nature is

sentient” and regard non-humans as “intelligent social beings,” leading Medin et al. to propose

“these cultural axioms make it possible to observe and engage in a social relationship with other

beings.”62 Medin et al. also reasoned that the Menominee were not simply erroneously extending

anthropomorphic qualities to non-humans, but instead cultivating a non-anthropocentric

relational epistemology. Consequently, when Menominee fishers were asked to classify species,

they were far more attentive to ecological relationships than Euro-American fishers, who

preferred a taxonomic framework for reasoning about species. This result led Medin et al. to

recommend that psychological research on concept formation should move beyond the limited

domains of folkbiology and folkpsychology to domains that incorporate “process categories

(kinds of relationships) and systems-level principles (how diverse systems interact),” such as

folkecology or folk-sociology.63 Adopting this perspective has led Medin to draw attention to the limitations in his previous studies on folkbiological categories with Atran, particularly its exclusion of “natural inanimates such as soil, sun, wind, and water” which play important roles in cultural ideas about ecological relationships.64

In a separate article, Ojalehto, Medin, and Sandra Waxman utilized a similar argument to

criticize claims by Deborah Keleman that children have a “promiscuous teleology.”65 In several

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 bethany ojalehto, Sandra R. Waxman, and Douglas L. Medin, “Teleological Reasoning about Nature: Intentional Design or Relational Perspectives?,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 4 (2013): 166–71.

studies, Keleman observed that children often spontaneously attributed design and purpose to

natural objects, and she suggested these erroneous tendencies pre-dispose children towards

dualistic and theistic beliefs.66 Ojalehto et al. strongly objected to Keleman’s proposal, arguing

that in the case of the Menominee teleological reasoning does not result from a false attribution

of design, but instead “reflects a tendency to think through perspectival relationships within

(socio-ecological) webs of interdependency.”67 Consequently, individuals operating within a

relational epistemology are not mistakenyl ascribing agency or purpose to natural objects, but

instead reasoning through their possible uses for humans and non-humans. A cloud may not be

for “raining,” but its capacity for rain makes it relevant as an agent for humans and other living

things. There is a clear similarity between Keleman’s assumptions and those frequently found in

mainstream CSR, and Barrett has frequently cited her work as evidence that humans are pre-

disposed towards theistic beliefs. I believe that the issues that Ojalehto et al. raise with Keleman

can reasonably be extrapolated to the field as a whole. By taking Western notions of sentience,

epistemology, and agency as the standard for humanity, CSR researchers have consistently

overlooked the possibility that extending social concepts to non-human nature is not always

irrational or erroneous. As the research by Medin et al. indicates, ideas about the sentience of nature or social characteristics of non-humans can help shape methods of ecological reasoning, leading to greater insights about structures in nature. This is born out in by Medin et al.’s account

of several occasions when Menominee or other indigenous beliefs about plants and animals were

66 Deborah Kelemen, “Function, Goals and Intention: Children’s Teleological Reasoning about Objects,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3, no. 12 (1999): 461–68; Deborah Kelemen, “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’? Reasoning About Purpose and Design in Nature,” Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2004): 295–301.

67 ojalehto, Waxman, and Medin, “Teleological Reasoning about Nature,” 169.

proven correct after being initially rejected by biologists as unscientific, a common narrative in research on traditional ecological knowledge.68

Assessing the CSR Model

There is much to appreciate in the innovative CSR research advanced by Sperber, Boyer,

Atran, and the others. Their work has been a substantial contribution towards developing a robust naturalistic approach to the study of religion. By synthesizing ideas from different fields and proposing bold, testable hypotheses, they set a valuable precedent for future research efforts and destabilized the reigning post-modern attitude found in cultural anthropology and religious studies.

Hypotheses, however, must be adjusted in accordance with new data. A core postulate of

Mainstream CSR is that a number of panhuman mental tendencies have been identified that are immune to cultural context. Recent cross-cultural evidence, however, indicates that there is not yet sufficient data to establish the universal nature of these faculties. As a result, CSR research would be better served by reconsidering its claims about universal mental templates, allowing for a flexible style of analysis. As the research by Medin et al. on anthropomorphism indicates, taking a Western populations as a standard may obscure the interdependence between cognition and cultural frameworks.

The primary issues with the standard CSR model are not exclusive to the study of religion, but also apply to the core claims of evolutionary psychology itself, which is an unnecessarily limited view of human variability. Although appealing to innate evolved mechanisms seems inevitable when faced with a “Poverty of the Stimulus,” new cognitive

68 Medin et al., “Culture and Epistemologies: Putting Culture Back into the Ecosystem”; See also Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1999). for an expanded survey of traditional ecological knowledge

research has demonstrated that children can learn by a “bootstrapping” approach, building up to

complex models of the world through a few simple learning principles. Gaze monitoring, for

example, could be a simple perceptual tendency that is assisted by cultural cues and social

environments to a full-blown Theory-of-Mind.69 This position has recently been taken up by

Susan Carey,70 whose earlier research figured prominently in Sperber and Boyer’s claim for

fixed domain-specific cognition. As her shift on the issue of core cognition indicates, the

cognitive science of religion risks becoming outdated if it remains committed to psychological

theories that are no longer up-to-date with scientific research.

A developmental view of the mind is not fully incompatible with a modular view of the

mind, as boot-strapping can sometimes lead to the development of cognitive “modules,” or specializations. Taking development seriously, however, also opens the door to a view of human nature that is fluid and open to shifting environmental and social conditions. A dynamic and active view of culture allows for research to directly focus on the tools, structures, and social concepts that provide order and stability in the cognitive niche, and could provide a powerful means for re-orienting the cognitive science of religion towards the material contexts in which religious minds act and unfold.

69 Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark, “Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1509 (2008): 3563–75; Vladimir M. Sloutsky, “Mechanisms of Cognitive Development: Domain- General Learning or Domain-Specific Constraints?,” Cognitive Science 34, no. 7 (2010): 1125– 30.

70 Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2009).

CHAPTER 3 FROM COGNITION TO COSMOLOGY

Out of Our Heads-A Patterned Practices Approach to Culture1

Over the last two decades, there has been growing opposition to the study of cognitive processes in isolation from the interaction between an organism and its environment. A growing number of studies in have provided evidence that nervous systems do not simply passively receive sensory inputs, but are instead actively intertwined with and molded by their surroundings. Drawing on advances in the fields of epigenetics2, artificial intelligence3, and the social and affective neurosciences4, Greg Downey and Daniel Lende argued that the development of human brains is a fundamentally cultural process. Social practices such as language acquisition, coordinated group activities, and child-rearing have measurable neurobiological consequences, indicating that culture is not epiphenomenal to cognition, but instead can rewire the brain.5

To account for these new insights from the biological sciences, Andreas Roepstorff proposed anthropologists and psychologists should adopt a “patterned practices” approach to cultural behavior. He argued that cultural structures of activity corresponds to “a particular

1 Title partially inspired by Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).

2 Eric B. Keverne and James P. Curley, “Epigenetics, Brain Evolution and Behaviour,” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 29, no. 3 (2008): 398–412.

3 Matt Jones and Bradley C. Love, “Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the Explanatory Status and Theoretical Contributions of Bayesian Models of Cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 04 (2011): 169–88.

4 Shihui Han et al., “A Cultural Neuroscience Approach to the Biosocial Nature of the Human Brain,” Annual Review of Psychology 64, no. 1 (2013): 335–59.

5 Daniel H. Lende and Greg Downey, eds., The Encultured Brain: An Introduction to Neuroanthropology (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012).

patterning of neuronal processes.”6 These neural patterns in turn influence cultural behavior, generating a feedback loop between social practices and neural development. Roepstorff contended that shared cultural realities do not comprise of “social structures out there that are

learned by the individual,” but instead “arise from the continuous interaction of human actors,

material artifacts, and formal institutions, rituals, norms, and beliefs.”7 Religion scholars Armin

Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen have repeatedly endorsed a similar approach to the cognitive

science of religion, arguing that the standard CSR model proposed by Boyer is insufficient for

capturing the complex interactions between brain, body, and culture.8 A patterned practice

approach takes as its central unit of analysis the interdependence between group dynamics,

material culture, and individual minds. Cultural knowledge in this paradigm is not only a

collection of representations, but also the embodied knowledge that is transmitted by cultural

methods of seeing, moving, and acting. The perceptions of individuals is not the sole product of

neurons firing inside their heads, they also emerge out of larger cognitive processes that are

distributed among other minds and extended across material surfaces.

6 Roepstorff, Niewöhner, and Beck, “Enculturing Brains through Patterned Practices.”

7 Ibid., 1056.

8 Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Religion as the Unintended Product of Brain Functions in the ‘Standard Cognitive Science of Religion Model,’” in Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, ed. Michael. Stausberg (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 129–55; Armin Geertz, “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 4 (2010): 304–21; Armin Geertz, “Too Much Mind and Not Enough Brain, Body and Culture: On What Needs to Be Done in the Cognitive Science of Religion,” Historia Religionum. An International Journal 2 (2010): 21–37; Jeppe Sinding Jensen, “Cognition and Meaning,” in Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, ed. Armin W Geertz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 241–57; Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).

Distributed Navigation, Epistemic Niches, and Entangled Agencies

Edwin Hutchins developed a theory of distributed cognition in Cognition in the Wild, where he presented an innovative blending of cognitive theory and ethnographic research.

Hutchins originally set out to investigate “naturally situated cognition” on naval vessels, which grew into a study on “a wider dynamical process of which the cognition of an individual is only a part.”9 Hutchins realized that the coordinated activity of the naval crew exhibited emergent

properties that could not be reduced to the level of individual cognitive processes.10 Complex

cooperative activities are therefore distributed across multiple minds. In his analysis of naval

navigation and subsequent research, Hutchins has focused on breaking down these complex,

multi-agent processes down into more simple principles. One pattern he identified is “cultural

practices tend to reduce entropy (increase predictability) at all scales.”11 Hutchins highlights the use of star patterns in navigation techniques as a cross-cultural example. Memorization of these patterns can be bolstered by cultural practices like “calling the two stars on the lip of the big dipper the ‘pointer’ stars,” which provides an emotional and narrative anchor for “imagining particular trajectors on particular visible arrays of points of light.”12

Hutchins also argued that humans rely on technological aids in order to reduce entropy in the environment. Many navigational tools do not simply “enhance” or offload our cognitive abilities, but instead simplify processes for the human mind. Consequently, tools “permit us to

9 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, Mass.: A Bradford Book, 1996), xii.

10 See Lisa M. Osbeck and Nancy J. Nersessian, “Situating Distributed Cognition,” Philosophical Psychology 27, no. 1 (2014): 82–97.

11 Edwin Hutchins, “The Cultural Ecosystem of Human Cognition,” Philosophical Psychology 27, no. 1 (2014): 38.

12 Ibid., 41.

transform difficult tasks into ones that can be done by pattern matching, by the manipulation of

simple physical systems, or by mental simulations of manipulations of simple physical

systems.”13 Hutchins brilliantly captured the power of cognitive technology with the example of

an astrolabe, and his analysis is worth quoting at length:

The astrolabe is a memory for the structure of the heavens…it is possible for an individual navigator to learn an internal image of the heavens so rich that he can recognize arrangements of stars, and even imagine the locations of stars that are obscured by cloud or the horizon. However, it is not possible with such mental representations to control all those spatial relationships with the sort of precision that is possible in a durable external representation…the astrolabe encodes a kind of knowledge that cannot be represented internally. In this respect, it is a physical residuum of generations of astronomical practice. It is a sedimentation of representations of cosmic regularities14

This basic framework encapsulates Hutchins’ overall insight about the role of cultural practices and technologies. He concluded that practices that are built up over time cannot always be reduced to the knowledge base or cognitive abilities to one individual in motion. Instead, the success of the individual is dependent on the field of affordances that are provided by material equipment, coordination and parallel processing among groups, which simplifies the perception of structure in the social and physical environment. Powerful social scaffolding thus enables human agents to perform complex maneuvers in response to an ever-changing environment. The negative trade-off of these processes is the possibility that offloading basic computation onto tools or other minds may increase the dependence of that agent on the action mechanisms provided by society. While navigational tools may give a Westerner an edge over a Trobriander at sailing, for example, the Trobrianders have a superior ability to navigate without technical assistance.

13 Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 170.

14 Ibid., 97.

While Hutchins’ methodology emerged out of his attempt to capture the everyday

cognitive organization of a navigation crew, the theory of the extended mind arrived on the

psychology scene like a philosophical grenade. Although ideas about scaffolded or external

cognition can be found in the work of Gregory Bateson15, Merlin Donald16, Lev Vygostky17, and

others (including Hutchins himself), the specific extended mind thesis was set forth by Andy

Clark and David Chalmers in 1998.18 Clark and Chalmer’s proposed that cognitive scientists

should employ a parity principle, or “if, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions

as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part

of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive

process.”19 To illustrate this point, Clark and Chalmers used a simple example of Otto and Inga.

Inga uses her memory to find a location, but Otto, being an Alzheimer’s patient, relies on a

notebook to find the same location. Consequently, Clark and Chalmers reasoned that even

though Inga is using “internal” biological memory, and Otto is using an external prop, “the

essential causal dynamics of the two cases mirror each other precisely.”20 Clark and Chalmer’s

asserted that dearth of attention in cognitive science to the intertwining of mental processes with

external props is a side-effect of research that focuses on isolating specific cognitive or neural

15 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972); Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature : A Necessary Unity (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979).

16 Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

17 L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

18 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19.

19 Ibid., 8.

20 Ibid., 13.

processes in laboratory experiments, rather than analyzing the messy and pragmatic process of

human thinking on the fly.

Clark later argued that extended cognition allows humans reorganize their environment

for the purpose of epistemic engineering. He claimed that “we self-engineer ourselves to think

and perform better in the worlds we find ourselves in.”21 An extended view of cognition conveys

the power of simple tasks like labeling or spatial organization, which allows attention to “operate

on elements of a scene that were previously too ‘unmarked’ to define such operations over.”22

External symbolical marking is “a kind of augmented reality trick by means of which we cheaply and open-endedly project new groupings and structures onto a perceived scene.”23 Unlike

traditional views on cognition, the organizational process or epistemic engineering is not strictly

taking place inside the skull. Instead, the human agent first reorganizes their sensory field to

accomplish greater results with a simple cognitive process.

Long-lasting alterations to the environment, inherited group strategies, and cognitive

technology can become a form of niche construction. Clark defines this process as the way

organisms “act on their environments, and, in so doing, alter those environments in ways that

may sometimes change the fitness landscape of the animal itself.”24 Since these processes are

looped, they can cause rapid cultural evolution and environmental reorganization. In the case of

technological change, Kim Sterelny proposed that the development of “a fortuitous individual

innovation that gives access to a new resource” permits “the innovating animal and its associates

21 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 59.

22 Ibid., 46.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 61.

as the exploit that resource,” and this process “automatically alters the environments the

juveniles explore.”25 Therefore, Sterelny reasoned that the learning process of each generation

emerges from the structure of the last, affording the potential for sophisticated downstream

cumulative epistemic engineering.26 Just as in Clark and Chalmer’s example of Otto and Inga,

notebooks, computers, and axes provide the opportunity for the offloading of cognitive tasks

onto the environment. Furthermore like Hutchins’ astrolabe, these systems are themselves the

result of a recursive loop of cultural engineering. Therefore, extension provides a method for

unpacking how individual minds are entangled with their environments and a frame for the way

historical trajectories modify how cuultures train humans to extend into their environment. The development of Western navigational technology described by Hutchins, for example, was a process that involved “not just the development of the tools of measurement, but a passion of measuring and a penchant for taking the representation more seriously than the thing represented.”27

Extending cognition has important ontological consequences for theorizing interactions

between humans and matter. Human cognition does not project outwards onto inert objects fully

formed; it emerges from the creative entanglement of persons and material contexts. In

archaeology, Lambros Malafouris has outlined this relationship in his “Material Engagement

Theory,” a strong version of the extended mind thesis. Archaeology, in Malafouris’ view, has,

been biased by inherited conceptions of internal representation and individual agency. As a

consequence of this bias, artifacts are viewed as “merely external products of human thought

25 Kim Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012), 30.

26 Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice.

27 Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 115.

rather than integral parts of it.”28 In contrast to Clark, Malafouris argued that artifacts like Otto’s

notebook were not simply external versions of mental processes, but rather engaged fields for the

formation of new ways of thinking and being.29 Malafouris contended that the development of a

clay numerical system did not simply allow for humans to project innate concepts of number, but

instead that the interaction between humans and clay “brings forth the concept of number.”30

Engaging with a material interface provided the means for different levels of neural organization,

creating a feedback process that enhanced the ability for numerical thinking.31 Material signs and

artifacts should not only be seen as things that humans think “with,” as addendums, but also as

the primary field that humans think through.

Malafouris interpreted the ontological aspects of Material Engagement Theory as a turn

to material agency. If cognition requires the mutual constitution of “engrams,” or inner

neurobiological processes, and “exograms,” or external material structures and scaffolding, then

human agency cannot be untangled from its material contexts. In developing this perspective,

Malafouris relied heavily on Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory,32 which he claimed had re-

conceptualized agency “as variously distributed and possessed in relational networks of persons

and things.”33 Dividing agency into Intention and Background, Malafouris argued against the

dominant view of “the isolated agent, who acts upon the world, imposing shape and meaning

28 Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind (MIT Press, 2013), 3.

29 Ibid., 84.

30 Ibid., 116.

31 Ibid.

32 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

33 Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, 123.

upon inert matter.” Instead, he proposed that “in the human engagement with the material world,

there are no fixed roles and clean ontological separations between agent entities and patient

entities,” and that intentionality is inseparable for material affordances.34 In the case of material

activities like stone knapping, the worker does not impose a pre-scripted plan to stone, but rather the activity is shaped a sequence of actions that each set up the next, and the final product emerges out of sustained interaction between the material and the human.35 Malafouris named

this approach methodological fetishism, or the active suspension of clear lines of animacy or

anthropocentrism, contending that ‘what an entity (a car or a person) is in itself doesn’t really

matter; what does matter is what the entity becomes and where it stands in the network of

material engagement.”36 He recommended that in order to understand the entanglement of

humans and matter, it is better to remain agnostic when assigning agency, and to gradually

unravel the affordances provided by the context of action.

To Think the Unthinkable – Material Culture and Religious Concepts

When reviewing some of the central concepts of standard CSR, Mads Jessen drew

attention to a strange omission in Boyer’s theory of human evolution. In Jensen’s words, “where

is the human technological entanglement with the world in (Boyer’s) characterization? If one

attempts to pin-point the most distinct traits of humanness-in comparison with wombats, giraffe, and other animals-surely technology is of some importance?”37 While Jessen is being somewhat

glib here, his point is well-taken. Although Boyer, Atran, and the others are not ignorant of the

34 Ibid., 149.

35 Ibid., 174.

36 Ibid., 148.

37 Mads Jessen, “Religion and the Extra-Somatics of Conceptual Thought,” in Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, ed. Armin W Geertz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 321.

importance of tools in human evolution and adaptation, their focus on internal representations

has led to an emphasis on the development of the “mental tool-kit,” rather than the physical tool-

kit.

Jessen’s concern for the role of material culture in religion echoed earlier criticisms from

Matthew Day, who contended that the cognitive science of religion had not answered a simple question; “why do religions have the considerable material cultures that they do?”38 Drawing on

many of the ideas outlined by Hutchins and Clark above, as well as the archaeologist Steven

Mithen, Day argued that material symbols are an indispensible cognitive scaffolding for the

anchoring of counterintuitive or non-natural religious concepts. He reasoned that “the strategic use of structured environments (e.g., ‘sacred spaces’) and external representations (e.g., statues or likenesses of the gods)” could allow for immaterial realities to be operated on by basic sensory processes.39 Recently, Mads Jessen has built upon this approach by incorporating extra-somatic

elements of cognition into a framework for the development and transmission of religious

ideas.40 Jessen brought together insights from Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s theory of

conceptual blends41 and the embodied metaphor theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson42 to create a framework for religious ideas as “composite concepts.” According to

Jessen, composite concepts provide the means to use knowledge “from one experiential domain

38 Matthew Day, “Religion, Off-Line Cognition and the Extended Mind,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4, no. 1 (2004): 102.

39 Ibid., 117.

40 Jessen, “Religion and the Extra-Somatics of Conceptual Thought,” 321.

41 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending And The Mind’s Hidden Complexities, Reprint edition (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

42 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd edition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003).

onto another domain in order to reason about the latter.”43 Conceptual blending can therefore

enable a transition from concrete or embodied knowledge to the abstract modes of thought.44

Jessen drew particular attention to the physical environment as a “combined sphere integrating

both natural as well as cultural environments” as a core perceptual field for the development of

religious concepts.45 Certain types of environments provide the sensory material for the

formation of different types of supernatural concepts.

To illustrate this, Jessen analyzed the role of the Mjolnir (hammer) amulets in stabilizing

the concept of the thunder-god Thor. Hammers, when used in the common Norse practice of

smithing, would have shared two sensory aspects with lighting strikes-the sparks flying from the

hammer and the internal shockwaves generating from pounding an anvil.46 Jessen suggested the concept Mjolnir, by blending the two domains, “relates natural occurrences to human technological innovations, creating a novel conceptual space where the idea of a hammer bringing forth a particular weather situation arises.”47 The concept is further extended by the

Thor narrative, which provides a anthropomorphic agent behind the process. In Jessen’s view,

the combination of these two concepts thus provides the means for “the personification of the

non-actor-the weather,” and dampening the terrifying experience of the weather through

“implicit references to sensuous experiences that are found under ordinary, less angst-provoking,

43 Jessen, “Religion and the Extra-Somatics of Conceptual Thought,” 328.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 324.

46 Ibid., 330.

47 Ibid., 331.

circumstances-phenomena.”48 As a corollary to this argument, counterintuitive concepts do not

emerge out of nowhere, but rather are constructed from cognitive and emotional experiences of

the natural and social environment. In this way, Jessen proposed that “plain experiences figure as

the building blocks of an abstracted religious domain,”49 grounding the development of religious

cosmology in physical and somatic engagements.

Just as in Roepstroff’s “patterned-practices” approach to culture, the intersection of

material conceptual anchors, sensuous experience, and social narratives found here does not

generate a religious “system of symbols” to be learned, but rather shared cosmological domains

that “arise from the continuous interaction of human actors, material artifacts, and formal

institutions, rituals, norms, and beliefs.”50 Alterations to the physical environment or artifact

assemblies can therefore impact the religious beliefs to which they are mutually constitutive.

These changes come to the forefront in the processes of missionization and conversion when

material fields of perception are manipulated to trigger a change in religious allegiance. In a

different study, Jessen outlined how the transition of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity

was enhanced by the construction of churches. He reasoned “the priests engineered a conceptual

habitat which fitted their theological programme and in the process created a sacred space where

reconciliation between an ideological niche and a physical niche could be generated.”51 By

saturating the environment with Catholic icons and monopolizing ritual activities, Christian

48 Ibid., 334.

49 Ibid.

50 Roepstorff, Niewöhner, and Beck, “Enculturing Brains through Patterned Practices,” 1056.

51 Mads Jessen, “Material Culture and the Construction of Religious Niches,” in N-Tag Ten: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic TAG Conference at Stiklestad, Norway 2009, ed. Kalle Sognnes, Marek E. Jasinski, and Ragnhild Berge (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2012), 83.

priests could capitalize on the everyday experiences of individuals, making the religious domain

afforded by Christianity salient for grounded perceptual processes.52

Istvan Czachesz used the interplay between beliefs and artifacts to model a network

analysis of religion. Rather than accepting that symbolic beliefs are essential for establishing

perceptual relationships between unrelated artifacts, Csachesz argued “many beliefs as well as

connections among them that are represented in our nervous system can only be maintained

because a certain configuration of artifacts exists in our environment.”53 A simple non-religious example of this dynamic is the integration of different cultural and technological scaffolds

(microscopes, telescopes, computers, etc.) into the epistemology of modern science. In the case of religion, however, symbols and artifactsare also closely linked with emotional experiences of value, which Czachesz adds as a third sub-system in the larger system of religions.

In addition to their dependence on the interplay between artifacts and beliefs, religious concepts can also emerge through the interaction of belief and representational mediums. In opposition to Day and Mithen, Malafouris conjectured that religious carving and artifacts do not serve as anchors for conceptual blends already existing in the head, but rather that the process of external representation is the enactive cognitive act of blending. In the case of a lion-man

carving, Malafouris argued “the figurine serves as the tangible medium of integration between

the domain ‘human’ and the domain ‘animal’ so that the domain ‘supernatural creature’ can

52 Ibid., 84.

53 István Czachesz, “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religious Systems: Laying the Foundations of a Network Model,” in Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, ed. Armin W Geertz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 106.

emerge.”54 But this still raises the question-what cognitive pressures drove these kinds of conceptual integrations? One promising avenue seems to lie in the anthropomorphism highlighted by Jessen and Guthrie, which Malafouris proposed re-conceptualizing as expanding

“the boundaries of the social mind by incorporating into the field of social cognition inanimate elements and things,” which influences the formation of the agentive mind-matter assemblages that he thinks are basic.55 Religious cosmologies, however, can consist of thousands of

conceptual blends, which are also structurally organized. In order to account for this complexity,

there must be another component of cognition besides anthropomorphism that inclines humans

towards the unthinkable.

Alternate Realities – Seer Stones and Shamanic Caves

One possible mechanism for the formation of cosmological ideas is the ability afforded

by the development of symbolic thought to entertain alternate realities.56 Robert Bellah defended

this hypothesis at length in Religion and Human Evolution. Bellah argued that religious beliefs

and practices should be defined as the engagement of a social group with the sacred, or “a realm

of non-ordinary reality.”57 This interaction is an extension of the ability of humans to cognitively

alternate between the world of daily life, the world of Darwinian struggle and anxiety, and the

“relaxed field” of other possible realities. Although the ability to enter this relaxed field is rooted

54 Lambros Malafouris, “The Sacred Engagement: Outline of a Hypothesis About the Origin of Human ‘Religious Intelligence,’” in Cult in Context: Reconsidering Ritual in Archaeology, ed. Caroline Malone and David Barrowclough (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 9.

55 Ibid., 4.

56 See especially the discussion in Terrence Deacon and Tyrone Cashman, “The Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origins of Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3, no. 4 (2010): 490–517.

57 Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution : From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 1.

within the evolutionary heritage of mammalian play, Bellah reasoned that it could be restructured and expanded through the development of symbolic culture. Bellah argued that through the intellectual possibilities afforded by going “offline,” humans eventually allowed for the development of different levels of symbolic and abstracted thought, which culminated in the leading voices of the “Axial” moments in Israel, Greece, China, and India, all of whom Bellah identified eventually as “renouncers” of the ultimate reality of the world of work and survival in favor of a utopian world of “play.”58 Building on Bellah’s proposition, Ann Taves argued that religion can be further decomposed to three core processes; “processes of imagination, which allow us to generate both novelties and alternate realities; process of setting apart, which single out something as more salient than others; and processes of valuation, which assess their significance and oftentimes rank and order them.”59 A key element of determining the affordances provided by religious behaviors or artifacts is therefore their ability to connect between different layers of cultural reality, which can be highly contested by different religious interests.

Taves argued that cognitive approaches to religion that focus only on supernatural agents do not capture the complex interactions between these different layers of reality. Taves proposed that “the attribution of nonordinary powers to (unseen) animates” is only one node within cultural concepts of “a larger field of powers (ordinary and nonordinary) that people attribute to objects, artifacts, animals, and persons.”60 Power, in this perspective, can be decomposed into

58 Ibid., 575.

59 Ann Taves, “Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of ‘Religion,’” Journal of Cognition and Culture, In press, 18.

60 Ann Taves, “Building Blocks of Sacralities: A New Basis for Comparison across Cultures and Religions,” in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. Raymond F Paloutzian and Crystal L Park, 2nd Edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2013), 146.

three different capacities, the capacity to act intentionally, the capacity to act, and the capacity to

produce an effect. Certain special objects or persons can be ascribed affordances for actions that

would not be possible without them.61 The ascription of these abilities is often a contested field,

particularly after the emergence of a new religious movement. For the purpose of research, Taves

cautioned against dismissing these associations too readily as superstition, arguing that scholars

should “consider the extent to which the interaction between the individual and the object

enabled something new to occur,”62 a position that clearly echoes the methodological fetishism

proposed by Malafouris. In the case of Joseph Smith and the establishment of the Mormon faith,

she reasoned that he could “afford his followers access to new revelations that they otherwise

would not have had,” an ability that both he and they believed was further afforded by his

possession of the seer stone.63 Taves also highlighted the connection between the ascription of

religious value and power and authority. Joseph Smith’s presumption that the visions granted to

him by the seer stones constituted a new revelation placed him in direct conflict with members of

the clergy who strictly controlled ritual access to the divine.

Symbolic thought therefore provides one avenue for humans to entertain ideas of

alternate realities. Another aspect of cognition that is critical in the formation of supernatural concepts, however, is what archaeologist Charles Laughlin described as the “polyphasic” nature of human experience. Consciousness, in Laughlin’s view, is not limited to ordinary waking awareness, but encompasses a wide spectrum of experiences including “dreaming, trance states,

61 Ann Taves, “Non-Ordinary Powers: Charisma, Special Affordances, and the Study of Religion,” in Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, ed. William W McCorkle and Dimitris Xygalatas (Durham; Bristol, CT: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2013), 83.

62 Ibid., 94.

63 Ibid.

meditation states, drug- and ordeal-driven visions.”64 The relationship between altered states and religion has long been a source of scholarly speculation, with E. B. Tylor speculating that the origins of spiritual beliefs could be attributed to the perception of disembodied selves during dreams. Recent work by anthropologists Richard Sosis and Candice Alcorta, and Armin Geertz, however, has focused on the diverse ways that religion modulates consciousness on cognitive and affective levels. Sosis and Alcorta highlighted how ritual utilizes rhythmic mechanisms like music or coordinated movement to “entrain autonomic states and evoke congruent emotions” in participants, which “provides that basis for creating and synchronizing motivational states.”65

After intensifying and heightening emotional states, different religious rituals may trigger positive emotional experiences such as extreme joy or ecstasy, or intense negative arousal through fear and pain. Similarly, Geertz argued that ritual movements like dance and bodily practices like fasting “tug deeply at the psychological and somatic foundations” of individuals and “have the ability to arouse, shape and form emotions and mental states.”66 Geertz cautioned that although these effects can have positive physical and psychological affects, the hyper- suggestibility of individuals in these aroused states leaves them open to manipulation and control by the leaders of the ritual.

In addition to a heightened emotional state, religious and ritual practices can induce hallucinations or the perception of a non-ordinary reality. Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann

64 Charles D. Laughlin, “Consciousness and the Commons: A Cultural Neurophenomenology of Mind States, Landscapes, and Common Property,” Time and Mind 6, no. 3 (2013): 290.

65 Candace Alcorta and Richard Sosis, “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols,” Human Nature 16, no. 4 (2005): 337.

66 Armin Geertz, “Whence Religion? How the Brain Constructs the World and What This Might Tell Us About the Origins of Religion, Cognition, and Culture,” in Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2013), 48.

defined these experiences as “sensory overrides,” and noted that they are often heavily structured by cultural symbols and expectations. Since sensory overrides are “experienced as spontaneous and uncontrolled” yet contain salient religious or cultural content, Luhrmann argued that they are an example of how “cultural ideas and practices can affect mental experience so deeply that they lead to the override of ordinary sense perception.”67 Many of these overrides also require some sort of intense stimulation either by the use of a psychoactive substance, the rhythmic driving of ritual, or focused mental techniques like meditation. When paired with the emotional intensity of these techniques, perception of an alternate reality becomes intensely meaningful for participants, which may to conclusions that the supernatural realm they encounter has a more fundamental reality than the material world of ordinary consciousness.

Archaeologist David Lewis-Williams explored the possibility that altered states may have been a crucial element in the development of cave painting. After working on San rock art in

South Africa, he concluded “the paintings and engravings did not primarily signify natural objects in the world but…they depicted realities with supernatural potencies that were experienced in altered states of consciousness.”68 In later works, Lewis-Williams proposed that the origin of religions is fundamentally tied to perceptions of a supernatural realm during altered states of consciousness. Lewis-William’s position on human consciousness resembles Laughlin’s polyphasic model, and Lewis-William argued “human beings are not either conscious or unconscious…consciousness should rather be thought of as a spectrum.”69 Different cultures

67 Tanya Luhrmann, “Hallucinations and Sensory Overrides,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2011): 71.

68 Donald Wiebe, “The Natural Experience of a ‘Non-Natural’ World,” in Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, ed. Armin Geertz (New York: Routledge, 2013), 156.

69 J. David Lewis-Williams, Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 140.

may divide this spectrum of consciousness into different layers in a way similar to the cultural

distinction between visual colors. Through group exploration and engagement with these altered

states, Lewis-Williams contended that cultures developed models of a secondary supernatural

reality, which is the early basis for the development of religious cosmologies. Lewis-Williams

applied this model in a spectacular fashion to interpret Paleolithic cave art as the construction of

a shamanic cosmos, where “every image made hidden presences visible” by fixing certain spirit

animal essences.70 He proposed “there was thus a fecund interaction between the given

topography of the caves, mercurial mental imagery, and image-fixing by individuals and

groups,” gradually establishing the religious concepts from the “spiritual world both materially

(in the caves) and conceptually (in people’s minds).”71 For the shamanic painters themselves,

Lewis-Williams contended that the images were not “painted onto rock walls” as much as they

were “released from, or coaxed through, the living membrane that existed between the image-

maker and the spirit world.”72 Lewis-Williams provides a strong middle ground between

neurological origins of supernatural belief and the material agency proposed by Malafouris,

although with clear distinctions. While Lewis-Williams would agree with Malafouris’ statement that the development of a symbolic image was a means of “altering the world as to help make available a new way of thinking about it,”73 he also targets how this process was also one of

easing tension between an internal cosmos of experience (which includes dreams and other

altered states) and external reality.

70 J. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave : Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York, N.Y.: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 210.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., 188.

73 Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind, 194.

The importance of an alternate reality to the community Lewis-Williams describes, however, also provided the seeds for the development of specialists and hierarchies. In the case of the Paleolithic caves, Lewis-Williams conjectured that the shamans eager to control the bridge between the natural and supernatural worlds, would have restricted access to the inner sanctums.

In a recent article, Lewis-Williams and J. Loubser hypothesized that control over the passage between realms is a fundamental characteristic of religion. They reasoned “individuals and groups of people struggle to control bridges because they open the way to political and economic power,” turning sacred sites into “material, identifiable nodes of social conflict.”74 These bridges can come in architectural forms, like churches or temples, or in the case of the San, they can be distributed in a network across the landscape. As a result of this complex sacred geography, the

San do not clearly distinguish between the natural and supernatural elements of the cosmos, and

Lewis-Williams and Loubser describe their cosmology as a “spiritual map” generated by mythic narratives, carvings of symbolic patterns and supernatural beings, and altered states of experience.75 In addition to being masters of this religious geography, San shamans maintain their spiritual authority through the proficiency with a range of altered states, turning the body of shaman itself into a bridge between the spiritual and material realm.

Anthropologist Robin Wright has documented a similar relationship between shamanic visions and the spiritual landscape among the Baniwa in the northwest Amazon. The Baniwa jaguar shamans utilize a snuff called parika, which is a powerful psychoactive, in order to journey to immaterial levels of the cosmos. After ingesting the substance, the shamans are able

74 J. David Lewis-Williams and Johannes Loubser, “Bridging Realms: Towards Ethnographically Informed Methods to Identify Religious and Artistic Practices in Different Settings,” Time and Mind 7, no. 2 (2014): 110.

75 Ibid., 123.

to “communicate with the primordial beings who inhabit the sky,” who provide assistance for healing sicknesses as well as information about the spiritual and material realms.76 Wright conveyed that these visionary experiences are considered to be “fundamental to the restoration of the internal social order constantly threatened by both negative internal forces and exploitation” by the Baniwa.77 The accumulation of generations of shamanic experiences has led to the development of a complex religious cosmology that is closely intertwined with the landscape.

Central to this cosmology is the belief that many sites contain what Wright called the

“petrification of events form the Before World of the primordial past,” blending the present and the material with the potency of this non-material world.78 Connections to this past reality are provided by the parika plant and sacred flutes fashioned from a cosmic tree, whose fall the

Baniwa believe divided the spiritual from the material world. While parika provides access to the past through its psychoactive properties, the flutes are used to play specific melodies at different localities in the sacred geography, rhythmically and melodically triggering emotional and cognitive patterns that evoke ways of seeing the landscape. Consequently, cosmological knowledge among the Baniwa is not simply passed down in the form of discursive representations, but also through the skilled use of a sonic medium. Wright’s analysis of the

Baniwa reveals a complex and multi-nodal religious framework for cognitive traffic between alternate realities. In this case, although the highest levels of spiritual access is still restricted to the jaguar shamans, the Baniwa attribute this to the dangerous potency of the non-material realm.

76 Robin Wright, “The Fruit of Knowledge and the Bodies of the Gods: Religious Meanings of Plants among the Baniwa,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 143.

77 Ibid., 135.

78 Robin Wright, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 217.

The unique training of the shamans therefore allows them to act as conduits for the benefit of the

Baniwa, maintaining the balance of the entire socio-ecological system.

In the case of Joseph Smith and the Christian missionaries, the process of gathering followers depended on the use of material objects, although in very different ways. What both churches and seer stones have in common though is their ability to afford communication with an alternate reality, to conceptually link together the tangible human priest or prophet with the transcendent beings they claim to represent, providing a cognitive anchor for counterintuitive thought. What makes these cases tricky, however, is that they are both Axial religions, establishing belief in a spiritual (or symbolic) reality unmoored from the material world in a significant way. They therefore require extensive scaffolding and symbolic material, differentiating them from nature religions, which translate encounters with nature into terms of agentive forces. Both the San and Baniwa cosmological systems do not make clear distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the virtual and the material, and humans and non-humans.

These types of hybrid cosmologies have been the focus of a recent trend in ethnography that is sometimes called the “New Animism,” or the “ontological turn.” A cognitive approach to religion needs to account for the lives of those who live in what Tim Ingold has called a “sentient ecology,” or “based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities, and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in particular environment.”79

Animisms Old and New

The first systematic use of the word animism to describe a form of religion is found in E.

B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Consequently the origin of animism as a term is closely tied to the

colonial origins of the study of religions and non-Western cultures. Tylor claimed that humans

79 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 25.

all over the world accepted “an idea of pervading life and will in nature far outside modern

limits,” building on previous observations by David Hume.80 Tylor relied on a network of

imperial data and discourse that has been thoroughly untangled by David Chidester. A crucial partner in the development of Tylor’s theory was Charles Darwin himself, who speculated that the origins of beliefs in unseen agents could be traced to the same mental faculty that caused his

dog to bark at a flapping door.81 Based on a teleological theory of cultural evolution, Darwin and

Tylor both assumed that members of foraging societies were psychologically analogous to

animals and children. Consequently, Chidester contended “Darwin found it convenient to

substitutes dogs for savages, letting dogs stand in as representatives of indigenous people living

on the colonized peripheries of empire.”82 In Tylor’s opinion, however, the central factor in the development of religious ideas was the inability to distinguish between dreams and waking. This confusion led to a further conflation between matter and spirit, a cognitive error that Tylor argued was also being made by the Christians and spiritualists of his own society.83 An important

goal of Tylor’s criticism, Chidester observed, was to critique the enduring beliefs in Victorian

England that were incompatible with scientific materialism.84

Irving Hallowell attempted to reverse Tylor’s approach in his landmark ethnography on

the Ojibwa. In Hallowell’s view, the error made by Tylor was not only a cherry-picking of the

80 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (London: J. Murray, 1871), 260.

81 David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), 100.

82 Ibid., 103.

83 Ibid., 121.

84 Ibid., 120.

data, but also the application of a materialist Western ontology to cultures with dramatically

different conceptions of personhood and agency, like the Ojibwa. Hallowell proposed that

Ojibwa ontology did not use humans as the standard to define personhood, but instead placed

humans within a field of different sentient agencies that were constantly changing form.

Consequently the Ojibwa believed that powerful individuals held the capability of

metamorphosis, or taking on the perspectives of animals, plants, and rocks in dreams, visions,

and shamanic experiences. Hallowell contradicted Tylor’s assumption that animist beliefs arose

spontaneously from intellectual confusions between dreams and reality He averred that the

Ojibwa did not continuously or determinedly attribute animacy to inanimate objects, but instead

that the animacy of rock persons emerged during encounters in relation to a human agent. In

other words, Hallowell claimed that the Ojibwa “recognize, a priori, potentialities for animation

in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances.”85 Rather than applying the categories

and the beliefs based in Western epistemology and ontology, Hallowell’s interpretation of the

Ojibwa allowed local concepts of personhood to furnish the ontological structure of their

cosmology from the ground up. Hallowell’s research stimulated a number of ethnographers to re-

consider the ontological frameworks nested within cultural expressions, and to take seriously the

diverse ways in which humans represent themselves in relation to non-human organisms and the

material world.

By the end of the 20th century, ethnographers from different parts of the globe began to

realize that anthropology needed to develop a different theoretical lens to capture social patterns

and beliefs that went beyond customary modern dichotomies between nature and culture, self

and other, and natural and supernatural. Two solutions to this problem were offered in

85 A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Culture in History, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 24.

“’Animism’ Revisited” by Nurit Bird-David, and “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian

Perspectivism” by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which both sought to re-interpret indigenous epistemologies and ontologies using local terms and concepts.

Bird-David sought to rehabilitate the term “animism” from its colonial origins in E.B.

Tylor’s Primitive Culture, reappraising animist systems as “a relational (not a failed) epistemology…about knowing the world by focusing on relatedness.”86 She argued that those who assumed that animists were inaccurately projecting “agents” onto the natural world, like

Tylor and Stewart Guthrie, were themselves imposing a Modernist conception of agency and personhood on societies with significantly different understandings of those terms. Drawing on her own ethnographic work among the Nayaka, Bird-David held that their view of persons is

“composite,” or that the Nayaka “make their personhood by producing and reproducing sharing relationships with surrounding beings, humans and others.”87 The devaru, or Nayaka spirit beings, “objectify sharing relationships between Nayaka and other beings,” they are solidified concepts for anchoring Nayaka attentiveness to the active elements of their environments. In

Bird-David’s understanding, the Nayaka were entrained “within the practice of engaging with devaru characters in the pandalu (a Nayaka ritual) they are educated to perceive that animals, stones, rocks, etc., are things one can relate with-that they have relational affordances, that is, what happens to them (or how they change) can affect and be affected by what happens to people.”88

86 Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (1999): S69.

87 Ibid., S73.

88 Ibid., S77.

There are two key points emerging here that fit closely with the perspectives considered

so far. First, the Nayaka concept of animation in their environment depicted by Bird-David is

clearly one of material agency, in that it corresponds to agency-in-action, as the emergent property of the interaction of humans, non-humans, and matter, a property they reflexively to apply to their own agency. Second, the devaru, as linguistic and material symbols provide stable anchors for these relationship to be effectively cognized and replicated across time. The world of the devaru, as passed down form generation to generation, is then the mirrored world of the extension of the social into the natural; it provides personal faces to the abstract material relations upon which the Nayaka depend for survival.

Bird-David’s view of relational animism seemingly contains a paradox, for as the Nayaka religious materials render visible what would otherwise be invisible without them (to paraphrase similar ideas from Matthew Day and David Lewis-Williams), they also render visible crucial material relationships that may be invisible without them. The devaru, in this sense, are an interesting case of epistemic environmental engineering, bringing the complex sphere of ecological interdependence into the cognitive realm of social relations in ways that can persist and evolve over time. The Nayaka worldview cannot be easily equated to ecology, however, as the devaru represent lines of relation and coexistence to the Nayaka, and not an eco-systemic analysis of “Nature” as a realm outside of human activity.

At the core of Nayaka epistemology depicted by Bird-David is the fundamental incorporation of non-human perspectives, a tendency that has been extensively developed by

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro into a full-blown theory of perspectivism. Weaving together ideas that had been fermenting in Amazonian ethnography for some time, Viveiros de Castro proposed

that the defining characteristic of Amerindian cosmologies was their perspectival quality, or the assumption that just as humans see a world of animals and spirits;

(A)nimals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture- they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish, etc.), they se their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are.89

Similar to Bird-David, Viveiros de Castro stressed “animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto humans, but rather expresses the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves.”90 He argued that this worldview was the inverse of the modern intellectual ontology of naturalism, which presumes “a diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature,” claiming instead that perspectivism should be thought of as multi-naturalist, with many different objective realities united under the banner of a single cosmological culture.91 The key function of religious practices and shamanism in this schema is their mastery of metamorphosis and transition, humans utilize masks, clothing, and inscriptions to activate certain dispositions that non-humans share.

Fellow Amazonian ethnographer Terence Turner has contested the anthropomorphic assumptions in Viveiros de Castro’s model of perspectivism. Rather than humans and animals being united in a vast cosmological culture, Turner argued that the creation myths of Amazonian tribes depicted that it was “animals rather than humans who initially possessed prototypes of key

89 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 470.

90 Ibid., 477.

91 Ibid., 478.

cultural products,” and these different products were gradually stolen by humans for the formation of culture.92 Turner observed that in these myths and other stories that Viveiros de

Castro depends on, there is no clear indication that animals were once proto-humans or that humans and animals are undifferentiated. The interpretation of Viveiros de Castro that social and affective lives of animals perfectly mirrors humans projects an anthropomorphic lens on what should be considered a diverse field of subjectivities.

In a public debate with Philippe Descola, Viveiros de Castro claimed that he did not consider perspectivist “multi-naturalism” as only an anthropological theory, but also as a means for destabilizing the entire project of Western knowledge.93 Viveiros de Castro consequently appears as a postmodern mirror of Tylor; where Tylor utilized the image of the “savage” to purge the remnants of animism from materialism, Viveiros de Castro proclaims that the “pensée sauvage” of the Amazon is the means of undermining the project of modernism. By making this argument, however, Viveiros de Castro is placing himself in the questionable role of spokesperson for the indigenous perspective, wielding the cultural configurations of others as tools in his own philosophical endeavor. In addition, Viveiros de Castro has continually asserted that indigenous ontologies are inherently incommunicable and incommensurable, which Luis

Bessire and David Bond averred simply recreated the image of the indigene as the exotic

Other.94 Far from providing the postcolonial challenge Viveiros de Castro intended, Bessire and

92 Terry Turner, “The Crisis of Late Structuralism. Perspectivism and Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Spirit, and Bodiliness,” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7, no. 1 (2009): 20.

93 Bruno Latour, “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’?,” Anthropology Today 25, no. 2 (2009): 1– 2.

94 Lucas Bessire and David Bond, “Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (2014): 440–56.

Bond contended that perspectivist ontology “reifies the wreckage of various histories as the forms of the philosophic present,” obscuring the entanglements and degradations of colonial history by restricting the reality of the Amerindian lives to the realm of structuralist myth.95

Outside of postcolonial debates, ideas based in the New Animism have crossed into popular culture and activism through the work of authors such as David Abram and Graham

Harvey. In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram argued that animist views of nature were based in bodily perceptions that evolved “in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth.”96 Abram contended a long disconnection between symbolic culture and landscape began with the development of written language, with the end result of modern conceptions of a mechanistic and lifeless world. Bron Taylor has documented the influence of

Abram’s narrative among radical environmentalists, many of whom seek to defend the rights and agencies of all living things against the depredations of capitalism.97 Abram’s phenomenological approach bears a striking similarity to the work of Tim Ingold, who has been a central voice in the development of New Animist ethnography. The normative aspects of Abram’s argument, however, depend on dichotomies between categories such as animist and modern, oral and literate knowledge, cyclical and linear ideas of time. Although this can operate as a strong critique for the excesses of Cartesian inspired philosophy, these dichotomies can also result in

95 Ibid., 339.

96 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 22.

97 Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion : Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Ch. 4

reducing the diversity and breadth of human cultures into two categories, which again reify the

unfortunate distinction between the modern West and the ecological Other.98

Harvey attempted to synthesize the insights the New Animist ethnographers with Abram

and other voices in environmental philosophy and animal ethics. Drawing on the process

philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his followers, Harvey contended that animist

worldviews were a form of panpsychism, a worldview that identifies forms of consciousness all

the way down to the level of quantum particles.99 Furthermore, Harvey believed that an animist

worldview provides the means for living in harmony with diverse forms of personhood in the

world, developing practices of respect and connection with other life-forces. Both Harvey and

Abram overcome the rigid relativism of Viveiros de Castro by identifying animism as a form of

engagement with the natural world that is found all over the world, including its most modern

areas. The implicit endorsement of animism by Harvey as the solution to the problems of a

Cartesian worldview, however, nudges his work into the realm of normative theology. Though

there is not an inherent problem with works of religious production, Harvey’s interpretation of

animism created a layer of separation between the syncretic religion he embraced, and the

specific animisms, totemisms, and hybrid ontologies that the New Animist ethnographers

attempted to describe. Harvey and Abram may be the latest vanguard for an emerging form of

Euro-American animism. In order to understand this unique configuration of animism and naturalism, however, it is crucial to first take a step back and consider the patterns of ontology from an agnostic perspective.

98 See also Arne Kalland, “The Religious Environmentalist Paradigm,” The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London; New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005).

99 Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 212.

Weaving the Lifeworld - Religion in the Society of Nature

Descola has consistently retained an even-handed approach, arguing that rather than

privileging animism or naturalism, they should be acknowledged and analyzed as equal

possibilities. He defended an open-ended definition of animism as the tendency to “treat certain

elements in the environment as persons endowed with cognitive, moral, and social qualities

analogous to those of humans.”100 In contrast to Bird-David, Descola argued that animism

should not be considered a form of epistemology, but as a type of ontology, or mode of being in

the world. In his ethnographic work among the Achuar, Descola observed that the Achuar

worldview did not make a clear distinction between the realm of human society and nature,

which resulted in a pattern of beliefs and practices that structurally entangled the cultural and the

natural spheres of life.101 He built upon these insights in a later publication, Beyond Nature and

Culture, where he brought together ethnographic data from around the globe to propose that

animism was one of four distinct ontological structures for the organization of human

relationships to non-humans: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. According to

Descola, these ontologies grew out of more basic cultural concepts of physicality and interiority.

In an animist cosmology, humans and non-humans are presumed to share a basic interiority, but their mode of being in the world is thoroughly structured by their physicality. Notions of physicality in this paradigm often include a sense of ecological relationships, as the different

“packages of biological equipment” provide a means for success in different environmental contexts.102 The mirror image of animism for Descola is naturalism, which depicts a continuity

100 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 31.

101 Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia, trans. Nora Scott (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

102 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 134.

between physicality of humans, animals, and objects, but reserves subjectivity for humans alone,

In contrast to earlier definitions within anthropology, Descola described totemism as a cosmology organized around essentialized types, which are described as fixed in a primordial era and are shared among humans and non-humans alike. In a totemic system, the spirit beings that exert power over the world cannot be localized to any one plant or animal, but instead are more akin to general principles of reality. The final type that completes Descola’s paradigm is analogism, which he claimed “divides up the whole collection of existing beings into a multiplicity of essences, forms, and substances separated by small distinctions and sometimes arranged on a graduated scale.”103

Descola acknowledged that these structures are unlikely to be found in isolation, and that many cultures may employ different ontological strategies in distinct spheres of interaction with non-humans. He argued that the overall effects of an ontology, however, is the cultivation of

“psychic, sensorimotor and emotional dispositions that are internalized thanks to experience acquired in a given social environment.”104 The new goal of anthropology in this paradigm is to unweave the factors that give rise to each different process of “worlding,” as well as their potential consequences for the relationships between humans and nature. Culture, in an ontological view, is not just a frame pressed upon reality, but instead is a means of learning to see the environment in a meaningful way.

While Viveiros de Castro and Descola were developing their insights from Amazonian ethnography, Tim Ingold drew on the cultural practices of the circumpolar North to develop an active form of animistic culture. In his now-classic book The Perception of the Environment,

103 Ibid., 2201.

104 Ibid., 103.

Ingold urged anthropologists and biologists to “break the stranglehold that neo-Darwinian theory has tended to exert...on mainstream biological thought,” and instead to take a view of live that “is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the particular forms they do, each in relation to the others.”105 Ingold

contended that people do not simply acquire cultural representations of the world, but rather

“learn to see” through “acquiring the skills for direct perceptual engagement with its

constituents, human and nonhuman.”106 Culture then becomes a form of enskillment, training

along a series of paths through which a person develops their subjectivity in correspondence with

the agencies latent within the environment. Therefore, animist hunter-gatherer religions do not

refer to non-humans as persons or agents on a simply metaphorical level, but rather their status is

derived from the everyday cognitive and affective interactions between humans and animals.

These real interactions, however, are still framed within the figurative realm of human

experience, such as when Ingold’s description of a Cree encounter with a stotting caribou:

(A)t that crucial moment of eye-to-eye contact, the hunter felt the overwhelming presence of the animal; he felt as if his own being were somehow bound up or intermingled with that of the animal-a feeling tantamount to love and one that, in the domain of human relations, is experienced in sexual intercourse107

Similar to Viveiros de Castro, Ingold has argued that the cosmology of northern hunter-

gatherers, like the Ojibwa, “recognizes the reality of the experience of other-than-human beings,

all experience depends on taking up a position in the world, tied to a particular form of life,” of

which the human “it but one of many.”108 This process of perspective taking comes out directly

105 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 19.

106 Ibid., 55.

107 Ibid., 25.

108 Ibid., 108.

in the fashioning of masks, which are considered to reveal the true or inner face of the animal.

These masks capture the experiences of shamans and hunters who have crossed deep enough into

the animal world of perception to perceive that species as human.109

In addition to masks, Ingold draws attention to the extensive practices of carving small

animals out of different material, which he views as “a means of dwelling on the animals in

one’s thought,” and argued “these tiny objects are the material embodiments of thoughts, or more

strictly they are thoughts,” small enough that they “can be turned around in the hand as can

images in the mind.”110 Interestingly, Ingold insisted that animist carvers did not “seek to reconstruct the material world they know…on a higher plane of cultural or symbolic meaning,” but “to reveal, to penetrate beneath the surface of things so as to reach deeper levels of knowledge and understanding.”111 In a similar argument against anthropological interpretations that stress the symbolic or metaphorical relevance of the landscape, he wrote “we can surely learn from the Western Apache, who insist that the stories they tell, far from putting meanings upon the landscape, are intended to allow listeners to place themselves in relation to specific features of the landscape, in such a way that their meanings may be revealed or disclosed.”112

Ingold’s strict rejection of nature/culture dualism and emphasis on attending to the

lifeworld of cultural cosmologies is valuable. It is hard to parse out, however, what Ingold views

as a meaningful distinction between symbolic thought and direct perception. With a more

enactive view of representation like those offered by Clark or Malafouris, the formation of a

109 Ibid., 124.

110 Ibid., 127.

111 Ibid., 130.

112 Ibid., 208.

carving can be seen as a case of learning-in-action similar to stone knapping, and these externalizations of thought can provide a scaffold for further activity or reflection. In addition,

Ingold’s assumption that animist cosmologies involve a form of perceptual realism overlooks the fluidity of human perception and sensory overrides, which are in some cases vital for the shamanic perception of the human/animal faces that form the basis for the masks he describes.

I would like to conclude this section with a brief overview of the conception of artifacts

in animist cosmologies as a bridge from the perspective of an extended or distributed view of

mind. An emerging theme in Amazonian ethnography is the vitality and importance of artifacts

for the composition of human and non-human selves. Humans and animals are considered to be

artifactual beings, or assemblages of emotional dispositions and abilities that can be re-expressed

perspectivally as tools and clothing. This idea may be basic to certain Amazonian cosmologies,

which understand creation as the manufacturing of different species from distinct primordial

artifacts. Therefore according to Fernando Santos-Granero, there are “no pure species, but rather

a variety of species manifesting the affects and capacities of a diversity of other living beings.”113 This process is paralled in the development of individuals, whose abilities and

affective dispositions are nurtured over the course of a lifetime by friends, family, and non-

humans. Artifacts can also be treated as agents in their own right, and Santos-Granero described

the production of masks, which “are also believed to be the embodiment of the powerful,

monstrous beings or masters of different animal species,” as a complex, collective process that

seeks to bring to life a powerful unknown being into the realm of social interaction and

reciprocity.114

113 Fernando Santos-Granero, ed., The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 7.

114 Ibid., 18.

Drawing together the threads of extended mind, material agency, and conceptual blends allows for the possibility of unpacking the entanglement of animists with matter from a cognitive perspective.115 Recent research by Atsushi Iriki and Osamu Sakura’s on primates indicates that there is a neural correlation between incorporating an object into the self as a tool, or practical extension, and the cognitive process of objectifying the body itself as a tool. With the body so objectified, it seems a natural metaphorical extension to break down the bodies of animals into bundles of artifacts as a means of grasping their physical abilities and sensitivities. Artifacts, as

Laura Rival reminds us, are not produced in separation from the ecological affordances they provide. As she found in her work among the Huaorani, “hunting with a blowpipe and with a spear are two entirely different ways of socializing the environment and domesticating nature…these two forms of hunting embody two different ways of engaging and knowing the forest’s ecology.”116 In a similar vein, knowing the “clothing,” or the bundle of artifacts that compose an animal’s body, is also an understanding of the dynamic potential of that body within the local ecosystem. Engaging with other beings and artifacts is also processual and interactive,, it entails the more general acquisition of skills described by Ingold. Developing these skills involves the tuning of attention in order for our inner nervous system and the outer artifactual configuration to come together in an agentive practice within a complex material environment.

Therefore, a more open-ended or plastic view of the development of the human nervous system, with an accompanying focus on embodied practices, fits nicely with the animist conception of

115 Other authors have also noted the commonalities between the extended mind thesis and the ontological turn. See Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord, “Relativism and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43, no. 1 (2013): 3–23.

116 Laura Rival, “The Materiality of Life: Revisiting the Anthropology of Nature in Amazonia,” Indiana 29 (2012): 135.

the self as a bundle of artifacts and affective dispositions that are shared among humans and non- humans.

In a very basic way, perspectivist thinking provides a stable conceptual model for actively perceiving non-humans through their own desires and capabilities, which are systematically likened to human desires and capabilities. This slightly counterintuitive way of thinking is bolstered by material artifacts and shamanic narratives and rituals, which convey the permeability of subjectivity as well as visual depictions of the human-like face of different non- humans. The very powerful masks, which involve extensive collective effort to bring into being and act towards, provide a means for enactively rendering visible the invisible, they bring the abstract and cosmically fraught relationship between the group and a different facet of their environment into the emotionally tangible and the cognitively realizable. Rather than standing with Guthrie and CSR in saying that these masks or the Nayaka devaru are mistakenly attributed animacy, I tentatively venture that their treatment as agents is a concretization of the interaction between that social group and the agency of powers located within their environment. The potency of these beings within an animist cosmology, however, may sometimes lead to more suggestive or aniconic representations, such as those documented by Morten Pedersen among the

Darhad Shamans in Mongolia.117 Keeping with Ingold’s discussion about memory and landscape, these material symbols do not simply “represent” these relationships, but rather the active engagement and formation of these artifacts permits a deeper and more concrete grasping of these connections for those who engage in them. The organization of artifacts is instrumental for the organization of cultural beliefs, they are reciprocally constitutive rather than unidirectional in either direction. Finally, and most importantly, these different material symbols,

117 Morten Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

which each enable the representation of the socialization of discrete natural forces, are also themselves building blocks in the formation of an overall cosmological worldview. Keeping

Hutchins’ description of cognitive technology in mind, religious artifacts and concepts also often operate through simplifying and playing to the wheelhouse of human cognitive and emotional abilities, rendering the invisible or complex meaningful and salient. There is no reason to assume, however, that a tangible and affective engagement with the environment will benefit humans and non-humans equally. In the words of Roy Rappaport, “humanity is a species that lives and can only live in terms of meanings it itself must fabricate in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to natural law.”118 Where these meanings co-mingle with the fabric of our non-human environments, either creatively our destructively, requires taking a historical and ecological approach to religious cosmologies.

118 Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 406.

CHAPTER 4 BUILDING A COSMOLOGICAL NICHE

Religion as an Adaptive System: Big Gods and Big Problems

A major topic of debate in the evolutionary approaches to religion is whether religion can be considered to be an adaptation.1 The dominant position among scholars who belong to the

Standard CSR model outlined by Boyer is that religion is parasitic on evolved individual cognitive capacities, and it should consequently be viewed as an evolutionary by-product with negligible effects on human adaptation.2 A serious challenge to this position came from David

Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral, who proposed that the religion is adaptive at the level of

the group rather than the individual, and that an evolutionary science of religion should “treat the

organismic concept of religious groups as a scientific hypothesis.”3 Although Wilson’s position

was a minority one at the time Darwin’s Cathedral was published, research on group-level

selection and the adaptation of religion has grown steadily, with several different hypotheses

currently being tested.4

One influential theory is the costly signaling hypothesis defended by Joseph Bulbulia and

Richard Sosis, an adaptationist interpretation of similar concepts found in the work of Scott

1 See Joseph Bulbulia et al., eds., The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories & Critiques (Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press, 2008). for a comprehensive sample of both sides of this debate

2 Pascal Boyer, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as by-Products of Brain Function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 119–24.

3 David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral : Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1.

4 Joseph Bulbulia et al., “The Cultural Evolution of Religion,” in Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion, ed. Peter Richerson and Morten H. Christiansen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013); Richard Sosis, “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion: Five Misunderstandings of the Adaptationist Program,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 9, no. 3 (2009): 315–32.

Atran.5 Bulbulia and Sosis have repeatedly argued that expensive religious behaviors serve as a

means for individuals to authenticate their commitment to a social group. By sacrificing

resources that could be used for individual survival, a person reduces their own ability to defect

from the group. 6 Sosis and Bulbulia proposed that elaborate religious displays provided a

solution to the perpetual problem of free-riders and cheaters, who undermine the likelihood of others to sacrifice for the good of the group.7 Where Sosis and Bulbulia differ from by-product

theorists like Atran is found in their assertion that social groups with more elaborate costly-

signaling mechanisms have an advantage over others. Consequently Sosis and Bulbulia believed

that complex religious systems provide an evolutionary advantage at the group level, and that

religion itself should properly be understood as an adaptive system.8

Sosis and Candace Alcorta also argued that the emotional intensity of religious rituals

may provide another means for binding groups together. They found that “the incorporation of

painful and dangerous elements” in religious rituals is “positively and significantly correlated

with the incidence of warfare,” leading them to hypothesize a relationship between group ordeals

and social solidarity.9 Dimitris Xygalatas and Harvey Whitehouse have led quantitative research

on the connection between painful or dysphoric rituals and social solidarity in different settings.

Based on a combination of fieldwork and experimental methods, Xygalatas and his associates

observed that painful rituals were effective for increasing pro-sociality not only among

5 Atran, In Gods We Trust.

6 Joseph Bulbulia and Richard Sosis, “Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation,” Religion 41, no. 3 (2011): 363–88.

7 Ibid.

8 Sosis, “The Adaptationist-Byproduct Debate on the Evolution of Religion.”

9 Alcorta and Sosis, “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols,” 339.

participants, but also among spectators who belonged to their same social group.10 After

measuring the physiological reactions of spectators and participants, Xygalatas et al. found synchronized patterns of arousal, leading them to conclude that the emotional efficacy of rituals is not only limited to those undergoing the ordeal, but instead can be more widely distributed.11

Painful rituals may therefore be a powerful social technology for binding together individuals,

providing an amplified effect of pro-sociality at the expense of a few individuals.12

Over the past two decades, Harvey Whitehouse has developed a “modes of religiosity”

theory, which divides religious rituals into two distinct modes.13 The first of these types is the

“imagistic” mode, which describes rituals that are rarely performed, involve intense levels of

sensory arousal, and include painful and dysphoric elements. In Whitehouse’s view, these rituals

offer a form of cohesion in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, they “bind together bands of

brothers for the purposes of defense, bride capture, or hunting.”14 The other type of ritual, or the

“doctrinal” mode, omits the emotional intensity of imagistic practices in favor of frequent

routinized rituals that can standardize beliefs and ideologies across a large, anonymous social

10 Dimitris Xygalatas et al., “Extreme Rituals Promote Prosociality,” Psychological Science 24, no. 8 (2013): 1602–5.

11 Dimitris Xygalatas et al., “Quantifying Collective Effervescence: Heart-Rate Dynamics at a Fire-Walking Ritual,” Communicative & Integrative Biology 4, no. 6 (2011): 735–38.

12 Ronald Fischer and Dimitris Xygalatas, “Extreme Rituals as Social Technologies,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 14, no. 5 (2014): 345–55.

13 See Harvey Whitehouse, Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1995); Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).

14 Harvey Whitehouse and Jonathan A. Lanman, “The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification,” Current Anthropology 55, no. 6 (2014): 683.

group.15 In addition to his own fieldwork, Whitehouse used quantitative analysis of a large

ethnographic database to present the hypothesis that these different modes of social cohesion

provide an adaptive function for societies at different levels of organization.16

The common thread that unites these different approaches is an emphasis on how

religious rituals and behaviors foster cooperation and prosociality within social groups. The

connection between ritual and group identity has been actively theorized social sciences since it

was defended by the sociologist Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the Religious

Life,17 and it lies at the core of a number of key ethnographic works.18 The key difference

between these older studies and those of Sosis, Bulbulia, Xygalatas, and Whitehouse, is the

emphasis of the latter of quantitative measurement, testable hypotheses, and a more substantial

cognitive and evolutionary framework.

The evolutionary power of religion depicted in the recent studies depends on the

assumption that higher levels of cooperation give human groups an edge over other human

groups, a theory that is widespread in research on cultural evolution.19 An important problem identified by Paul Smaldino is the “implicit assumption…that cooperative or altruistic acts are completely general; that is, interacting with one cooperator is just as good as the next,” which he

15 Ibid., 679.

16 Ibid., 682.

17 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995).

18 See examples in A. R Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1952); Victor Turner, Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger; an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966).

19 Paul E. Smaldino, “The Cultural Evolution of Emergent Group-Level Traits,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 03 (2014): 243–54.

attributed to the reliance of evolutionary researchers on laboratory social dilemma games.20 In contrast to the general payoff structure of cooperation provided by these experiments, human cooperation in the field involves domain-specific skills and specialized payoffs, such as the mutually dependent relationship between a kayak-builder and a seal hunter.21 Both small and

large-scale societies, as a result, depend on the way “specialized individuals form an

interdependent network of skills, personalities, and experiences” in order to succeed, as well as

cultural scaffolds like technology, language, and apprenticeship.22

The danger of overlooking the structural complexity of cooperation in evolutionary

studies of religion can be seen in the ambivalent reception of Norenzayan’s recent book Big

Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.23 To the body of previous work on

evolution and religion from the likes of Boyer, Atran, and Sosis, Norenzayan added the

supernatural watcher effect, which has been a third major hypothesis in group-level theories of

religion as an adaptation. This hypothesis, which he simplified to the principle “Watched People

are Nice People,” draws on experimental evidence that people are more likely to respect pro-

social norms if they are primed with God or watcher concepts either through a narrative or visual

format.24 Norenzayan argued that this mechanism was instrumental in the transition from “bands

20 Ibid., 247.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., 248.

23 Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).

24 Azim F. Shariff and Ara Norenzayan, “God Is Watching You Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior in an Anonymous Economic Game,” Psychological Science 18, no. 9 (2007): 803–9; Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, “Like a Camera in the Sky? Thinking about God Increases Public Self-Awareness and Socially Desirable Responding,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 1 (2012): 298–302; Ara Norenzayan, “Does Religion Make People

of foragers…tied to each other with the tight bonds of blood and brotherhood driven by face-to-

face interaction” to the “large groups of anonymous strangers.”25 The rise of moralizing Big

Gods provided “order for free,”26 or a relatively inexpensive means of maintaining pro-social behavior.

Although Norenzayan’s hypothesis is well-supported by data for explaining general cooperation among undifferentiated agents, he runs into the problems identified by Smaldino when applying this mechanism to historical societies that rely on structural complexity and specialization. As a result, participants in a recent symposium on the book concluded that

Norenzayan’s “proposed thesis does not live up to the historical evidence as understood by professionals.”27 Major faults found in Norenzayan’s model included the over-simplification of the spread and survival of new religious movements,28 the neglect of relevant counter-examples such as the Roman empire, the success of which depended on “formal social instruments of organization and oversight” rather than supernatural watchers,29 and the lack of a middle ground

between small hunter-gatherer groups and large metropolitan empires.30 In addition,

Moral?,” Behaviour 151, no. 2–3 (2014): 365–84; Azim F. Shariff et al., “Religious Priming A Meta-Analysis With a Focus on Prosociality,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2015.

25 Norenzayan, Big Gods, 4.

26 To borrow a phrase from Stuart Kauffman

27 Michael Stausberg, “Big Gods in Review: Introducing Ara Norenzayan and His Critics,” Religion 44, no. 4 (2014): 604.

28 Ann Taves, “Big Gods and Other Watcher Mechanisms in the Formation of Large Groups,” Religion 44, no. 4 (2014): 658–66.

29 Donald Wiebe, “Milestone or Millstone? Does Norenzayan’s Book Live up to the Hype?,” Religion 44, no. 4 (2014): 681.

30 Armin Geertz, “Do Big Gods Cause Anything?,” Religion 44, no. 4 (2014): 609–13.

Norenzayan’s assertion that “the spirits and deities of foraging and hunter-gatherer societies is

that most of them do no have wide moral concern”31 is primarily derived from research on the

Hadza in northern Tanzania, and it is contradicted by ethnography on other hunter-gatherer

societies like the Koyukon32 or the Yukaghirs.33 Although it is true that the spirits in these

religious systems are not all-powerful, they are attributed significant control over the success of

cultural activities such as hunting, and they strictly enforce cultural norms like restraint and

reciprocity.34 Big Gods consequently reveals the difficulty of extrapolating from the lab to the field, and the importance of incorporating material and structural factors in the evolutionary

trajectory of religious adaptation. In addition, human societies are also embroiled in relationships

with configurations of matter and non-human agency, and therefore discussions of religion as an

adaptation should not exclude from analysis the specific ecological settings in which religious

systems operate.

Cosmology as Ecological Analysis Reconsidered

Speculation on the relationship between natural settings and religious ideas has a long

pedigree in Western thought. As early as the 16th century, Pierre Charron set forth the

controversial hypothesis that the desert climate of Arabia was a key factor for the development

31 Norenzayan, Big Gods, 7.

32 Richard K. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

33 Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007).

34 Berkes, Sacred Ecology.

of the monotheistic beliefs found in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.35 In the 1970s, a debate

between anthropologists Guy Swanson and Ralph Underhill focused on the relationship between

the monotheism and political or economic complexity. Building on the Durkheim’s theory that

religious belief closely mirrored social structure, Swanson conducted a quantitative analysis of

the data collected in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas36 and contended that there was a significant

correlation between monotheism and the stratification of social groups.37 Underhill interpreted the same data set from a Marxist perspective, and claimed economic complexity was the key substrate for the emergence of monotheist beliefs, as religious specialists used the image of a single deity to control labor and materials.38 A more recent analysis by Stephen Sanderson and

Wesley Roberts supported Underhill’s position, although Sanderson and Roberts also found that

writing and record keeping was correlated with different types of religious configurations.39

Other contemporary studies using the same data set have proposed a correlative link

between “high gods” and severe ecological conditions.40 A common element in all of these

35 See Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

36 George Peter Murdock, Atlas of World Cultures (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

37 Guy E. Swanson, The Birth of the Gods: The Origin of Primitive Beliefs (University of Michigan Press, 1964).

38 Ralph Underhill, “Economic and Political Antecedents of Monotheism: A Cross-Cultural Study,” American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 4 (1975): 841–61.

39 Stephen K. Sanderson and Wesley W. Roberts, “The Evolutionary Forms of the Religious Life: A Cross-Cultural, Quantitative Analysis,” American Anthropologist 110, no. 4 (2008): 454–66.

40 Carlos A. Botero et al., “The Ecology of Religious Beliefs,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 47 (2014): 16784–89.

studies is the assumption that the adaptive effects of a religious system are side-effects of the

organizational principles afforded by a belief system, rather than the intended result of the

religious adherents. Environmental anthropologist Roy Rappaport encouraged scholars to make a

similar distinctions between a culture’s “cognized model,” which he defined as “a people’s

knowledge of their environment and…their beliefs concerning it,” and an “operational model,” or “the same ecological system (including the people and their activities) in accordance with the assumptions and methods of the objective sciences.”41 Although Rappaport divided these two

spheres for the sake of analysis, he also recognized that they were intimately intertwined, with

mutual feedback loops between nature and images of nature. In contrast, many recent

evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion have focused exclusively on operational

models of religions, with insider beliefs and motivations relegated to the periphery. This

characterization applies equally to both sides of the debate on religion as an adaptation. Even for

scholars like Richard Sosis, who has repeatedly argued that religion is an exquisite adaptation,

there is a reigning assumption that religious beliefs are primarily concerned with a counterfactual

or supernatural reality, which precludes the possibility of an intersection between religious

cosmologies and natural ecologies.

In many animist cosmologies, however, religious belief and ecological knowledge are

difficult to tease apart. Drawing on his ethnographic work in the Northwest Amazon, Gerardo

Reichel-Dolmatoff argued that the religious cosmology of the Tukano contained “a system of social and economic rules that have a highly adaptive value”42 for their survival. According to

41 Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning and Religion (Richmond, California: North Atlantic, 1979), 97.

42 Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: A View from the Rainforest,” Man 2 (1976): 308.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, the Tukano model of the universe is organized around two major principles; the vitality of biological life is dependent on a circulation of limited solar energy, and “the entire

universe is steadily deteriorating.”43 As a result, the cultural intake of energy from nature is strictly restricted by cultural norms, such as lengthy preparation rituals for hunters designed to appease the “Master of Animals” spirit and avoid over-hunting.

Proper relationships between the Tukano animals and spirits are maintained by shamans, who Reichel-Dolmatoff viewed as a sort of “ecological accountants,” keeping track of the energetic input and output of their social group. Tukano models of adaptation and maladaptation are not imposed on nature from without, but rather from accumulated observations of plants and animals, which are considered “metaphors for survival.”44 Through analyzing and breaking

down different patterns of animal and plant behavior, such as “parasitism, symbiosis,

commensalism, and other relationships between co-occuring species,” the Tukano find models to

emulate.45

The eco-cosmology that emerges from these grounded observations is enactively

represented by the Tukano during large ceremonies, which involve the use of narcotics and a

“ritual re-creation of the universe.”46 A central theme of the mythic narratives presented during

these ceremonies is the unity of humanity and nature. In Reichel-Dolmatoff’s words; “man is taken to be a part of supra-individual systems which…transcend our individual lives and within which survival and the maintenance of a certain quality of life are possible only if all other life

43 Ibid., 317.

44 Reichel-Dolmatoff, “Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: A View from the Rainforest.”

45 Ibid., 311.

46 Ibid., 218.

forms too are allowed to evolve according to their specific needs.”47 Even though ritual requires

the ingestion of psychoactive substances and extensive engagement with an alternate reality, it

provides a symbolic field for the establishment of norms and beliefs that are crucial for material

survival. It is therefore difficult in this case to clearly describe the Tukano cosmology as either

counterfactual or as an evolutionary byproduct.

Philippe Descola recently revisited Reichel-Dolmatoff’s 1976 article in order to bring it

up to date with the insights of the New Animist ethnographers. In Descola’s view, Reichel-

Dolmatoff’s made an error by presenting the Tukano and their eco-system as a seemingly

timeless homeostatic and stable system, which replicated a stereotype of hunter-gatherer societies as ahistorical and unable to significantly alter their environments. Descola agreed that

Amazonian cultures have extensive knowledge of their ecological niches, but he asserted the

“orthodox calculus of allocation” that Reichel-Dolmatoff attributed to the shamans is “at odds with a cosmology where components of the ecosystem are not objectified as commodities.48

What Amazonian cultures share, in Descola’s view, is “the belief that some nonhumans are

endowed with a spiritual faculty akin to the one humans possess, allowing the latter to establish

with these entities some sort of personal relations,” which can be cooperative or competitive

depending on the circumstances.49 As I discussed in the Chapter 3, Descola argued that this type

of belief is not restricted to the extreme climate of the Amazon, as Reichel-Dolmatoff proposed,

47 Ibid., 318.

48 Philippe Descola, “Ecology as Cosmological Analysis,” in The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and the Perception of the Environment, ed. Alexandre Surrallés and Pedro García Hierro (IWGIA, 2005), 28.

49 Ibid., 31.

but can be found “widely distributed in the Americas, in Asia, in Oceania and, to a lesser extent, in Africa.”50

Alf Hornborg has proposed that variation in the ascription of personhood to non-humans is a key factor in structuring cross-cultural patterns of resource use. He compared Algonquin hunter-gatherer animism, “in which game animals agree to surrender to human hunters in exchange for sacrificial offering and observances of specific rules relating to the treatment of their remains,” with ecological economics, which conceptualizes the value of nature in terms of

“eco-system services.”51 In both cases, humans “resort to their specific understandings of social exchange in order to construct the relation between humans and non-human nature.”52 The differences between the two constructions flows from the basic understanding of a person, the

Algonquian focus on “concrete, contextualized subjects” whereas the ecological economists

“visualize abstract, decontextualized objects.”53 Hornborg’s dichotomy between animism and ecological economics can be nuanced by incorporating a third type of exchange, or the totemic ontology defined by Descola. In addition to animal subjects, cultures like the Ojibwa also enter into exchange with the Spirit Masters of different animal and plant species, which they believe may take the form of a plant or animal, but have a spiritual essence beyond any single organism.54 The central place of metamorphosis in an animist ontology also reflects that the

50 Descola, “Ecology as Cosmological Analysis.”

51 Alf Hornborg, “From Animal Masters to Ecosystem Services: Exchange, Personhood and Human Ecology,” in Imagining Nature: Practices of Cosmology and Identity, ed. Andreas Roepstorff, Nils Bubandt, and Kalevi Kull (Aarhus, Denmark; Oakville, Conn.: Aarhus University Press, 2003), 104–105.

52 Ibid., 106.

53 Ibid.

54 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 171.

distribution of energy and matter does not always involve an exchange between separate

subjects, but also the co-mingling of being. In Descola’s words; “vitality, energy, and fecundity

all circulate constantly between organisms thanks to the capture, exchange, and consumption of

different kinds of flesh.”55

In spite of their differences, all of these ontologies reflect the widespread human

tendency to visualize nature as an extension of social morality. As Donald Worster observed in

his classic history of ecological science; “the protean text of nature was becoming a bible in the

hands of many conflicting interpreters who could find a verse somewhere in its pages, often

within the same chapter, for any creed or dogma they professed.”56 This raises the question; are

there certain concepts of nature that are better suited to maintain a stable relationship with non-

humans than others? Although Hornborg did not reject the possible benefits of the measurements

offered by ecological economists, he argued that the disruption of concrete relationships between

humans and non-humans triggered by the objectification of nature was a key factor in the

degradation of the environment57

The importance of the ascription of personhood to non-humans to human patterns of resource use is supported by a pair of ethnographic studies on transitioning value systems in animist societies. Upon re-visiting the Nayaka in Southern India, for example, Nurit Bird-David

and Danny Naveh discovered that the adoption of agriculture and the domestication of animals

provided new insights into the contours of the Nayaka’s relational ontology. Bird-David and

55 Ibid., 134.

56 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Second Edition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 397.

57 Hornborg, “From Animal Masters to Ecosystem Services: Exchange, Personhood and Human Ecology,” 107.

Naveh found that “unlike their forest counterparts, domesticated animals and plants are treated,

sometimes quite aggressively, as objects, framed according to their use value.”58 Therefore,

rather than entering into either a reciprocal or dominating intersubjective relationship with the

domesticated non-humans, the Nayaka consistently reduced them to the level of inorganic

material, in sharp contrast with the overall respect they accord to non-human species in the

forest. Complicating this picture, Bird-David and Naveh also found that certain members of the

Nayaka occasionally extended a harsh and utilitarian attitude towards wild species as well. Bird-

David and Naveh argued that the key variable in the treatment of non-humans was their usefulness in distant networks of commodity exchange, which corresponded with increasingly levels of de-personalization.

In Guatemala, for a second example, le Guen et al. found a decline in animist beliefs among the Itza’ Maya corresponded with a decrease of ethnoecological knowledge and environmental decline. This study build on previous fieldwork from the 1990s59, during which

the ethnographers first apprehended the Itza’ view that “the forest is not a passive resource

waiting to be exploited, but rather an active player that is responsive to the behavior of others.”60

The recent study from le Guen et al, however, indicated that younger Itza’ Mayans have

significantly less ecological knowledge than their elders, which is correlated with an assimilation

58 Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David, “How Persons Become Things: Economic and Epistemological Changes among Nayaka Hunter-Gatherers,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no. 1 (2014): 76.

59 Scott Atran et al., “Folkecology, Cultural Epidemiology, and the Spirit of the Commons: A Garden Experiment in the Maya Lowlands, 1991–2001,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (2002): 421–50.

60 Olivier le Guen et al., “A Garden Experiment Revisited: Inter-Generational Change in Environmental Perception and Management of the Maya Lowlands, Guatemala,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4 (2013): 781.

to the cosmology and value system of the immigrant Ladino population. Le Guen et al.

moreover, identified two key aspects of Ladino cosmology that undermine ecological

knowledge. First, references to Itza’ Maya arux spirits, who are considered to be guardians of the

forest, have been replaced by the Ladino duende, trickster beings with no clear function as

mediators of the environment.61 Second, increased immigration and missionization has led to the

adoption by the younger generation of a version of Christianity that “favors humans over plants

and animals, unhinging humans from a complex system of ecological interrelationships.”62 The popular view of god among Younger Itza’ Maya and Ladinos is as “the one who gave the earth to people to exploit it.”63 These changes in cosmological orientation correspond with increasing levels of commodification of the environment, which is seen the development of cash crops and the adoption of Westernized forms of conservation discourse by the younger Itza’ Maya in the assessment of its ecological value. Both of these studies indicate that the ontological status ascribed to different aspects of the environment can have effects on how humans interact with different facets of their environment

One important corollary of ontologies that place humans within a “sentient ecology” is the possibility for mutual adaptation and adjustment over time. If the forest is an agentive partner, as in the case of the Itza’ Maya, then humans should enter into a dynamic relationship with it, rather than try to exercise rigid methods of control. After observing similar practices among the Cree, Fikret Berkes drew an analogy between this process and Adaptive Management techniques. Berkes argued that Cree beliefs in the agency of nature led to the development of

61 Ibid., 788.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

flexible ecological practices that engage in “managing the unknown,” constantly adjusting to an

unpredictable environment.64 By situating themselves in relation to nature and closely attending to it, Berkes contended that the Cree engage in a process of thinking with their environment, rather than attempting to dominate it. Berkes also conveyed that Cree relationships with non- humans were not always stable, and he related their account of an over-hunting of caribou in the

past, which drove the species away for decades. After realizing their mistake, however, Berkes

reported that the Cree were able to exercise caution and restraint in caribou hunting after they

returned.65 From the elders’ point of view, the Cree had previously reneged on their moral

responsibility to the caribou, which had caused the caribou to retaliate.66 The success of a

renewed relationship with the caribou therefore required the Cree to live up to the beliefs

embedded in their cosmology and treat the caribou as sensitive agents and partners, not simply as

a commodity to be exploited. The case of the caribou therefore captures the dynamism of Cree

ontology; their beliefs are not fixed ideas about an exterior reality, but instead structure an

ongoing relationship to non-human nature.

Descola’s taxonomy of a four-fold ontology serves as a reminder that “the modern

West’s way of representing nature is by no means widely shared,” and that for many cultures

“humans and nonhumans are not conceived as developing in incommunicable worlds or

according to quite separate principles.”67 The new target of analysis for Descola is “the different manners in which specific organisms inhabit the world, identify in it this or that property for

64 Berkes, Sacred Ecology, 126.

65 Ibid., 103.

66 Ibid., 90.

67 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 30.

their use and contribute to its transformation by weaving with it, and between them, constant or

occasional ties of a very diverse but not unlimited nature.”68 Viewpoints in anthropology that

consider organisms as dynamically intertwined with their environments bear a striking similarity

to a growing line of research in evolutionary biological and ecology, which emphasize agency,

feedback loops, and co-evolution through the lens of niche construction.

Niche Construction – The Missing Process in the Evolution of Religion?

Modern evolutionary theory is still dominated by the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural

selection and Mendelian genetics.69 Adaptation in this paradigm has been accurately described

by Scott Atran as “a set of phenotypic effects, in an organism, of genes that were modified under

selection to reliably produce such effects as led to the genes’ propagation in ancestral

environments.”70 Emphasis on the long duration of genetic mutation and natural selection is central to the claim of evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, who

contend that modern human nature is a relic of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer lifestyles.71 Causation

in the Neo-Darwinian framework is therefore unidirectional, or in the words of George Williams;

“organisms adapt to their environment, never vice versa.”72 This framework has long been

challenged by Richard Lewontin, who argued that evolutionary biology had lost sight of the

reality that “all organisms construct their own environment and…there are no environments

68 Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others, trans. Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013).

69 See Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

70 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 23.

71 Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology.”

72 In Kevin N. Laland and Kim Sterelny, “Perspective: Seven Reasons (not) to Neglect Niche Construction,” Evolution 60, no. 9 (2006): 1751.

without organisms,” which, in his view, has separated evolutionary biology it from ecology.73

Building on Lewontin’s argument, Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman have developed the

theory of niche construction, which they define as “the activities, choices, and metabolic

processes of organisms, through which they define, choose, modify, and partly create their own

niches.”74 Consequently, niche construction stipulates that “evolution is based on networks of

causation and feedback in which organisms drive environmental change and organism-modified environments subsequently select organisms.”75 A compelling example of niche construction

offered by Kevin Laland and Kim Sterelny is beaver dams, which “dramatically changes its local environment, affecting nutrient cycling, decomposition dynamics, the structure of the riparian

zone, and plant and community composition and diversity.”76 From an evolutionary perspective,

niche constructing events like beaver dams have three important effects on natural selection. A

niche construction can outlast the constructing organism, allowing for it “to modulate the impact

of environment on subsequent generations.”77 If the alteration to the environment is significant

and long-lasting enough, then it can cause alterations to the genome, as in the case of termites, for whom “almost every aspect of termite biology depends on their mound building,” a particularly impressive example of niche construction.78 Finally, niche construction feedback

73 Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 67.

74 Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Marcus W. Feldman, “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution, and Cultural Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, no. 01 (2000): 133.

75 Laland and Sterelny, “Perspective,” 1751.

76 Ibid., 1752.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

cycles can cause effects on either biotic or abiotic components of an eco-system, which in turn can cause ecological cascades depending on how these effects alter the selection pressure of other organisms.

I discussed the role of niche construction in scaffolding cognitive development in Cc.

Niche construction also provides an important means of re-conceptualizing cultural evolution and adaptation. Although the field of cultural evolution is not unified, many of its models are similar to the epidemiology of representations employed by Sperber, with cultural transmission characterized “as constrained by genes to operate like a (proximate) switch (akin to the buttons on a jukebox) to shift behavior and cognition from one pre-established program to another.”79

Niche construction also allows for an accelerated view of the evolutionary time-table that provides a role for human agency. As Laland pointed out, “human cultural activities over the last

15,000 years, through the domestication of plants and animals, have systemically generated selection for countless alleles”80 for digestion, which were also influenced by earlier genetic changes following the adoption of fire.81 Niche construction goes beyond the consideration of only genetic factors, however, by focusing attention on the ways humans are constantly involved in the re-shaping of their own selection pressures through extensive modification of their environments, which can be inherited by subsequent generations. Collaborative projects that require the coordination of multiple agents to construct and the cooperation of future generations to maintain, such as large-scale agricultural systems, should rightfully be viewed as group-level

79 Kevin N. Laland, “On Evolutionary Causes and Evolutionary Processes,” Behavioural Processes forthcoming (June 13, 2014): 5.

80 Ibid.

81 Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody, “Human Adaptation to the Control of Fire,” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 19, no. 5 (2010): 187–99.

adaptations that cannot be effectively reduced to the level of the individual. In addition, these

human projects operate in a larger field of the eco-evolutionary dynamics generated by multiple

species that construct their own niches, as well as the sun, the earth, and the rains, making non-

human agencies vital to the co-creation of the landscape. Taking these perspectives under

consideration, Richard Sosis and Joseph Bulbulia have begun to incorporate niche construction

into research on the evolutionary origins of religion.82 Their application of the theory thus far, however, has largely remained restricted to the way in which cultures structure patterns of religious behavior to scaffold processes of group consolidation and cooperation, and ecological settings and relationships with non-humans remain distinctly peripheral.83

The Historical Ecology of Religions

A key challenge of niche construction theory is that the environments that cultures

modify and depend on are the results of long and entangled histories of modification by humans

and non-humans. A similar assumption lies at the core of the research program that has been

christened “historical ecology,” namely that “the landscape is a place of interaction with a

temporal dimension that is as historical and cultural as it is evolutionary per se, if not more so,

upon which past events have been inscribed, sometimes subtly, on the land.”84 Historical

ecology, which has key continuities with environmental history and cultural ecology, is an

82 Joseph Bulbulia, “Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to The Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 20, no. 1 (2008): 67–107; Joseph Bulbulia, “Spreading Order: Religion, Cooperative Niche Construction, and Risky Coordination Problems,” Biology & Philosophy 27, no. 1 (2011): 1–27; Bulbulia and Sosis, “Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation”; Benjamin G. Purzycki and Richard Sosis, “The Extended Religious Phenotype and the Adaptive Coupling of Ritual and Belief,” Israel Journal of Ecology & Evolution 59, no. 2 (2013): 99–108.

83 Bulbulia and Sosis, “Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation.”

84 William L. Balée, “The Research Program of Historical Ecology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 77.

interdisciplinary approach with roots in archaeology that seeks to provide a long-term perspective on human transformations of eco-systems. One influential approach in this field developed by William Balée and Clark Erickson placed a strong emphasis on human agency in shaping the environment, taking as a core postulate that “the human species is itself a principal mechanism of change in the natural world, a mechanism qualitatively as significant as natural selection.”85 Balée and Erickson’s research on anthropogenic environments in the Amazon thus provided a significant challenge to theories of environmental determinism, which had previously been the dominant position in Amazonian archaeology.86

Balée and Erickson’s self-described anthropocentrism, however, pushes the pendulum

too far in the other direction. Erickson’s discussion of “domesticated landscapes,” for example,

presented changes in Bolivia as the result of “conscious activities, application of environmental

knowledge, and engineering” that carefully structured “the spatial distribution and availability of

economically useful species.”87 This perspective, in my opinion, comes too close to turning

nature into a set of commodities, seriously underestimating the entanglement of human and non-

human agency. To borrow a rhetorical technique from Michael Pollan, an edible plant’s

perspective on these landscapes might consider human activity as assisting their quest to out-

85 William L. Balée and Clark L. Erickson, eds., Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 5.

86 Clark L Erickson, “The Domesticated Landscapes of the Bolivian Amazon,” in Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands, ed. William L. Balée and Clark L. Erickson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); William L Balée, Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2013).

87 Erickson, “The Domesticated Landscapes of the Bolivian Amazon,” 244.

compete their rivals, not as a process of subjugation.88 In addition, while humans can be excellent niche constructors, the historical record is full of failed attempts to control and dominate nature.

The model of niche construction favored by Balée and Erickson resembles what Lisa

Asplen described as the “command and control” style of environmental management, which she claimed “attempted to impose static, socially defined outcomes on the natural environment.”89

According to Asplen, this style of environmental management has frequently resulted in misguided practices by North American foresters and park managers, such as the suppression of wildfires or the building of dams, which later had disastrous effects. Asplen compared the new style of adaptive management to Andrew Pickering’s classic description of the “dance of agency” found in scientific research.90 In Pickering’s words:

As active, intentional beings, scientists tentatively construct some new machine. They then adopt a passive role, monitoring the performance of the machine to see whatever capture of material agency it might effect. Symmetrically, this period of human passivity is the period in which material agency actively manifests itself. Does the machine perform as intended?...Typically, the answer is no, in which case the response is another reversal of roles: human agency is once more active in a revision of modeling vectors, followed by another bout of human passivity and material performance, and so on.91 The same logic can be extended to environmental management and niche construction, successful adaptations are always temporary, contingent, and worked out through engagement

88 Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002).

89 Lisa Asplen, “Going with the Flow: Living the Mangle Through Environmental Management Practice,” in The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (Duke University Press, 2008), 164.

90 Asplen, “Going with the Flow.”

91 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995), 21–22.

and entanglement between human and non-human agencies. In their attempt to overcome environmental determinism, By turning the humans of the past into the equivalent of modern environmental command-and-control managers, Balée and Erickson may actually be projecting the flaws of an anthropocentric relationship with nature onto societies that practiced a dynamic and adaptive style of management.

Fortunately, Balée and Erickson’s anthropocentrism by no means undisputed within the broad scope of historical ecology, and the dialectical approach favored by Carole Crumley closely resembles Pickering’s interplay of human and material agency.92 Less controversial is an

emphasis on “the interconnectedness of humans and nature” and the acknowledgement that

“influences and feedback mechanisms are active in both directions,” therefore challenging any

simple dichotomies between cultural and natural spheres of ecology and evolution.93

When considering the impacts of human actions on selection pressures, historical

ecologists take into consideration multiple scales and temporal sequences of adaptation. After

finding extensive ecological and ethno-botanical traces of pre-Columbian agriculture in the

environment of the Ka’apor in Brazil, Balée concluded that although many of these agricultural

practices were no longer in use by the Ka’apor, their “cultural influence on Amazonian

environments probably altered the distribution of…nearly universally useful resources among

Amazonian indigenous groups.”94 Therefore the success and survival of a social group can be

92 See Carole L. Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1994); Péter Szabó, “Historical Ecology: Past, Present and Future,” Biological Reviews (forthcoming) (August 30, 2014); Torben C. Rick and Rowan Lockwood, “Integrating Paleobiology, Archeology, and History to Inform Biological Conservation,” Conservation Biology 27, no. 1 (2013): 45–54.

93 Szabó, “Historical Ecology,” 14.

94 Balée, Cultural Forests of the Amazon, 127.

assisted or hindered by the collective labor of humans in the past. Alterations to the environment

can be preserved within different forms of historical memory. Balée and Denise Schaan have

argued that contemporary Amazonian mythical narratives and sacred geographies create links

between the present and the past, establishing a belief that “the whole territory where one lives

and circulates is full of historically, culturally relevant landmarks.”95

In other cases, however, there is no clear cultural continuity between the use of landscape

modifications at different periods in history. The extensive irrigation and agricultural system at

Vijaynagara in India, for example, was originally constructed to provide for the interests of the

city’s political and religious elites. After the collapse of the city in 1565, the canals were initially

maintained by the local population, and then restored and expanded to serve the purposes of the

British Raj after the colonization of India.96 The modified selection pressures provided by human

niche construction therefore includes both intentional systems of cultural inheritance and the

unintended effects of previous inhabitants, which may be positive or negative depending on

context. The economic implication of this process has been usefully captured by the

reappropriation of the Marxist term landesque capital by N. Thomas Håkansson and Mats

Widgren, which they define as the relational affordances provided from accumulated human

impacts on the landscape.97 Historical ecology thus provides a window for moving beyond pro-

95 Denise Pahl Schaan, Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia Historical Ecology of Social Complexity (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2012), 186; Balée, Cultural Forests of the Amazon.

96 Kathleen Morrison, “Capital-Esque Landscapes: Long-Term Histories of Enduring Landscape Modifcations,” in Landesque Capital: The Historical Ecology of Enduring Landscape Modifications, ed. N. Thomas Håkansson and Mats Widgren (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014).

97 N. Thomas Håkansson and Mats Widgren, Landesque Capital: The Historical Ecology of Enduring Landscape Modifications (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014).

sociality as the sole determinant of adaptiveness for religious groups to the consideration of a

wider field of possibilities and relevant variables. The new area of inquiry in this line of research

is the mechanisms through which religious systems contribute to the shaping of a socio-

ecological niche.

In Misreading the African Landscape, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach describe the

case of the Kissidougou in Western Africa, where the religious socialization of nature is closely

tied to the production and reproduction of forest islands within the savanna. This research

directly conflicted with the dominant conception of the forest islands by Euro-American

conservationists and ecologists, who believed that they were relics of a primeval forest under a

process of deforestation due to the activities of rural inhabitants.98 Ethnohistoric and ecological data, according to Fairhead and Leach suggested “in most cases villagers have formed and extended the patches around their settlements”99 through a variety of practices, generating a

savanna-forest mosaic that provides increased local biodiversity and significant material

advantages. The Kissidougou explicitly compare this process to the building of mounds by

termites, in whom they “recognize…a social world parallel to their own, one of male and female

chiefs, and different categories of worker,” which Fairhead and Leach recognized provided the

Kissidougou “a powerful metaphor for their own impact on vegetation.”100

The forests also serve, as Fairhead and Leach found, as mirror “villages” for the njna, or

spirits, whose assistance is sought in hunting and agriculture. The relationship between a village

and its local njna symbolically centers around “founder trees,” which legitimate political

98 James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25.

99 Ibid., 87.

100 Ibid., 91.

authority along lines of patrilineal descent.101 The mythology around these trees “recalls the

establishment of a relationship-almost a ‘contract’-with the area’s land spirits: a relationship

maintained ritually by a founder’s descendants.”102 Founding trees in this context are a powerful

living politico-religious symbol, as their growth and size enables a physical representation of the

community’s history. Kissidougou cosmology therefore seems to provide the means for an

intensive socialization of nature. Although they are “manufacturing nature” in the form of the

forest islands, this process unfolds as a process of mutual reciprocity between them and the njna,

generating a relational social framework for their long-term maintenance. Fairhead and Leach, however cautioned against analogizing relational aspect of this process to one of conservation, observing human interest in forest islands depends on their connection to a nearby village, since

these islands frequently abandoned if a community migrates a significant distance away.103 The entanglement between Kissidougou animist beliefs and their production of nature/culture hybrids however, is a clear example of an intersection between religious cosmology and the construction of a material niche.

J. Stephen Lansing’s research on water temples in Bali is a well-known example of an entanglement between religious belief and ecological success.104 Lansing found that the rice

terracing agricultural system that the Balinese had cultivated was closely regulated by activities

at different water temples and shrines that “make decisions which manipulate the states of the

101 Ibid., 89.

102 Ibid.

103 Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape.

104 J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).

system, as ascending levels in regional hierarchies.”105 Using computational modeling techniques, Lansing proposed that the different levels of coordination afforded by temple communities had developed a decentralized and dynamic complex adaptive system of resource management, challenging earlier hypotheses on the control of water in Southeast Asia.

One reason that previous research had failed to grasp the functional significance of the temples , Lansing argued, was a bias towards seeing the temples as solely serving ritual or supernatural functions. Water rites instead operate in this system as a form of “ritual technology,” they enable the regulation of a complex and abstract system through de-composing the process into simple, context-attentive rules (if environment cue A occurs, conduct ritual B), which provided strong material anchors in the form of the temples themselves. This process clearly fits the model of epistemic engineering or cognitive scaffolding as outlined by Sterelny and Hutchins, as well as collectively enabling the construction of a productive socio-ecological niche. The religiously-organized relationship between humans and nature in this case, however, differs markedly from those in animist societies. Although interactions with the gods seemingly provide a bridge for a social relationship with nature, Lansing observed that “the colorful and capricious personalities of the foreign gods are backgrounded in favour of the clockwork regularity of the temple rites and irrigation schedules,” reflecting the cultural belief that “it is the farmers, rather than the gods, who thus assert control over their engineered landscape.”106 The non-human facets of the landscape therefore translate into a cosmology of forces and flows, rather than partners of reciprocity and exchange for humanity.

105 J. Stephen Lansing, “Balinese ‘Water Temples’ and the Management of Irrigation,” American Anthropologist 89, no. 2 (1987): 338.

106 J. Stephen Lansing and Karyn M. Fox, “Niche Construction on Bali: The Gods of the Countryside,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1566 (2011): 932.

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Different visions of the relationship between humanity and nature can also lead to the

competition and hybridization between different systems in the formation of a religious niche. A

powerful example is provided by archaeologist Julia Shaw’s analysis of the processes of

Buddhist transformation and conversion in the socio-ecological landscape at Sanchi in central

India, which involved structural re-organization of the relationship between humans and nature.

First, the hilltops that the Buddhists chose for the construction of their monumental stupas were

local caityas, or shrines, which served as focal points for social interaction with the spirits of the

landscape. In Shaw’s words, “by occupying spaces in the landscape which in the minds of the

local populace were associated with revered local deities, the sangha was already making a

statement about its position in the local religious hierarchy”.107 Second, according to Shaw, the

Buddhists brought with them a “iconographic and stylistic conventions for representing nagas” as part of the “cultural package that accompanied the spread of Buddhism, urbanization, and state-formation” 108. The strong association of these spirit-deities with rainfall was exploited by

the Buddhists, who presented themselves as having gained a “monopoly over the ‘religious

business’ of weather control through an alliance with powerful naga deities.”109 Finally, and

most importantly, Shaw discovered that the Buddhist community at Sanchi was involved with

107 Julia Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, C. Third Century BC to Fifth Century AD (British Association for South Asian Studies, 2007), 42.

108 Julia Shaw, “Nāga Sculptures in Sanchi’s Archaeological Landscape: Buddhism, Vaiṣṇavism, and Local Agricultural Cults in Central India, First Century BCE to Fifth Century CE,” Artibus Asiae 64, no. 1 (2004): 51.

109 Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India, 57.

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the production of sophisticated dams and reservoirs designed for the irrigation of rice.110 In

addition to allowing the monastery to support itself, the monumentality of these dams and the

“ostentatious display of water-harvesting facilities at the Deccan rock-cut monasteries of western

India” indicate that “water management was central to Buddhist propagation.”111 Consequently,

the Buddhist sangha in Sanchi was involved not only in the systematization of worship of water

deities for the bringing of rain and agricultural surpluses, but they also provided evidence of their

power to the community through the harnessing of hydraulic resources and the introduction of

wet-rice agriculture.

Although Shaw’s hypothesis cannot be said to be proven, the presence of “monastic landlordism” in Sri Lanka and Buddhist control over irrigation and agricultural systems provides

support for this idea.112 Religious change, in this case, should be seen as the consequence of

strategic transformation of the material niche, and its success can be attributed to the utilization

of stable conceptual forms of representation, manipulation of pre-existing symbolic associations between spiritual power and water, and the increased material affordances provided by conversion. Adopting a belief in the power of the Buddhist monks and nuns in this situation is therefore far from counterintuitive, and once again there seems to be a clear feedback loop between material configurations and symbolic beliefs. From a different temporal scale, however, this process cannot be clearly seen as adaptive. While it provided the means for the success of

110 Julia Shaw and John Sutcliffe, “Ancient Dams, Settlement Archaeology and Buddhist Propagation in Central India: The Hydrological Background,” Hydrological Sciences Journal 48, no. 2 (2003): 277–91.

111 Julia Shaw, “Archaeologies of Buddhist Propagation in Ancient India ‘Ritual’ and ‘Practical’ Models of Religious Change.,” World Archaeology 45, no. 1 (2013): 100.

112 R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1979).

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this Buddhist community, it was one node in a larger field of landscape transformation in India, which led to the adoption of wet-rice agriculture in regions like Southern India that were ill- suited to maintain it.113

The evidence provided by these three case studies supports the hypothesis that religious beliefs and behaviors can function as key variables in the construction of a socio-ecological niche. Instead of absurd commitments to a counterfactual world, beliefs about the spiritual agency of trees, ritual actions in water temples, and giving offerings to religious specialists can serve powerful adaptive functions by productively structuring relationships between the humans, non-humans, and matter. The fact that religious practices can be adaptive, however, does not mean that they are always adaptive. Nor does it mean that they are always adaptive for all social groups. Nor does it mean that their function in aiding group survival can be separated from its ecological context. I propose that the critical question, therefore, is not if religion as a whole is adaptive, but rather in what context can religions serve adaptive functions, and which organisms or sub-groups of organisms (including humans) will flourish or diminish as a result of these processes.

Adopting this different frame of investigation still relies on research on religion that focuses on generalized aspects of cognition and group-level cooperation, which remain crucial factors in understanding the dynamics of social and ecological niche construction. Some of the theoretical underpinnings of this paradigm, however, such as the assumption that religious belief always involves counterintuitive and the counterfactual perceptions and beliefs, are less

113 See Kathleen D. Morrison, “Trade, Urbanism, and Agricultural Expansion: Buddhist Monastic Institutions and the State in the Early Historic Western Deccan,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (October 1, 1995): 203–21; Kathleen D. Morrison, “Dharmic Projects, Imperial Reservoirs, and New Temples of India: An Historical Perspective on Dams in India,” Conservation and Society 8, no. 3 (2010): 182.

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productive when applied to eco-evolutionary dynamics.114 Certainly, many religions include a belief in a transcendent cosmology that is seemingly un-moored from sensory experience, and this stance is characteristic of some of the religions with which research based on a WEIRD sample are most familiar. Taking these religions as the standard against which the evolution of all religions can be measured, however, is a theoretical commitment that is far more problematic, especially considering the reminder provided by Robert Bellah that transcendent religions are relative late-comers in human biocultural evolution.115 In addition, although religions that focus on transcendence from this world usually concentrate the cognitive attention of their followers on a non-physical realm, this activity still unfolds within the constraints of embodied selves and material ecologies, and a historical ecology of religions might explore whether transcendent belief leads to particular types of niche construction and environmental effects, and if so, whether certain types of environments lead or tend to lead to particular types of niche construction and environmental effects.

114 This is not meant to imply that this is a universal position, merely a common one. David Sloan Wilson is a notable exception

115 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.

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CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION

Anthropomorphism or Sentient Ecology?

Stewart Guthrie’s cognitive theory of anthropomorphism was partially inspired by Robin

Horton’s definition of religion; “the extension of the field of people’s social relationships beyond

purely human society.”1 Building on previous work by Tylor, Guthrie assumed that the

mechanisms that perceived human-like agents in nature were in error, a by-product of an

unconscious cognitive bias. The scholars who developed the “standard model” cognitive science

of religion, such as Boyer, Atran, and Barrett, shared Guthrie’s assumption about religious

beliefs, although they re-interpreted Guthrie’s more general cognitive model within the frame of

modular evolutionary psychology. Religion, in the CSR paradigm, was what Boyer referred to as

an “airy nothing,” it was simply a consequence of the mind’s tendency to detect agency,

remember the unusual, and interact with invisible minds.2 Belief in invisible worlds and agents

could sometime serve a function by receiving costly sacrifices, which operated as hard-to-fake signals that proved that an individual could be counted upon not to cheat or undermine the group.3 The counterfactuality of a supernatural reality was therefore its greatest source of utility,

leading Richard Sosis and Joseph Bulbulia to conjecture that religion was an evolutionary

adaptation for governing pro-social behavior and cooperation among humans.4

1 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds, 33.

2 Boyer, Religion Explained, 3; Boyer, “A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission.”

3 Atran, In Gods We Trust; Bulbulia and Sosis, “Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Religious Cooperation.”

4 Bulbulia, “The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion.”

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Most of these concepts take as a point of departure the basic evolutionary framework

proposed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby; that human minds evolved to solve problems in

the Pleistocene, when Homo sapiens lived in small bands of hunter-gathers.5 This raises the

question: What are the core issues that need solving in a foraging lifestyle? According to Scott

Atran, hunter-gatherers needed to evolve a “computational ability to keep track of social

obligations and monitor contractual violations” in order to maintain a “flexible regimen of social

exchange, collaboration, and reciprocation.”6 While Atran’s assertion is has some merit, it nevertheless is uncomfortably close to viewing foragers as akin stockbrokers, in this case, of the ancestral savanna, governed by the same economic calculus found in modern-day Wall Street

Justin Barrett’s concept of the HADD seems to provide another answer: Organisms who over- detected agency in the environment had a better chance of survival, resulting in the easily spooked human minds of today.

Do Atran and Barrett really capture the relationship between foragers and their niche?

Although there is limited utility in making generalized comparisons between contemporary foraging societies with those of the Pleistocene, they are still the only models available for understanding what foraging lifestyles might have been like. Many ethnographic studies of these societies have drawn attention to the mutual entanglement of Homo sapiens with the other species-a topic that rarely surfaces in contemporary evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion. In the words of Tim Ingold, foragers find themselves engaged with a world composed by other beings, who “do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing-in

5 Cosmides and Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology.”

6 Atran, In Gods We Trust, 37.

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threading their own paths through the meshwork-they contribute to its ever-evolving weave.”7

The animist way of being outlined by Ingold does not involve the sporadic detection of agency in the environment, but rather an immersion in a sentient ecology of multiple forces and intelligences to which one must be alert and attentive. Philippe Descola asserted that other beings are not always considered by animists to be competitors in a zero-sum game of Darwinian survival, but instead are often treated as “persons endowed with cognitive, moral and social qualities analogous to those of humans.”8

In the framework of the evolved intuitive ontology proposed by Boyer, the personhood of animals is dubious at best, and ideas about plants that can think or communicate would likely be considered counterintuitive. Boyer’s assumptions about animal and plant sentience, however, are being challenged by biological research, such as Marc Bekoff’s work in ethology9 and Stefano

Mancuso’s studies on plant communication10 Boyer or Atran might object that these

contemporary scientific perspectives are irrelevant to understanding Pleistocene cognitive

mechanisms. The cross-cultural research conducted by Medin et al., however, found that unlike

urban Euro-Americans, the Ngöbe clearly believed that plants are capable of communication, a

position that Medin et al. observed is more in line with scientific perspectives.11

7 Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought,” Ethnos 71, no. 1 (2006): 14.

8 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 31.

9 Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy--and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007).

10 Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015).

11 Medin et al., “Culture and Epistemologies: Putting Culture Back into the Ecosystem.”

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Who can arbitrate between these different positions on sentience? In my opinion, the

scientific questions about non-human sentience are not sufficiently established to reject the

opinions and beliefs of humans who closely engage with those beings in the wild. In addition,

even if one could take a completely objective and naturalistic position and describe these beliefs

as false, this would obscure the interplay between beliefs and reality. I agree with Roy Rappaport

that “the ecosystem concept is part of humanity’s means for maintaining ecosystems,” and that in

some cases this means an ecological or relational belief system can “bring into being and

preserve the form of organization it assumes.”12

Of course, the animist societies described by Ingold and Descola do not only attribute personhood to organisms, but also certain abiotic aspects of their environments, such as tools, rocks, the sun, and the earth. Agency in these cosmologies unfolds in a relational epistemology, such as the one outlined by Bird-David among the Nayaka.13 Concepts of sentience in plants,

animals, and artifacts are not imposed on forms in nature from outside, but emerge from a series

of subjective encounters, such as the emotionally charged encounter between Cree hunter and

caribou depicted by Ingold,14 or the maternal and seductive relationships cultivated between

Runa women and plants described by Tod Swanson.15 Similarly, artifacts such as the masks of

spirits or the devaru are not isolable configurations of matter, but instead, they contain agency as

enactive representations linking communities with otherwise unseen presences in their

12 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 459.

13 Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited.”

14 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.

15 Tod Dillon Swanson, “Singing to Estranged Lovers: Runa Relations to Plants in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 36– 65.

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environment.16 Encounters and experiences of agency are nurtured by cultural beliefs and practices, which provide conceptual and material scaffolds for perspectival and relational modes of thought and feeling. The religions described by Ingold, Descola, and the other New Animist ethnographers therefore cannot be said to arise from false detections of agency that are triggered by cognitive material. Instead, the cosmological framework cultivates the attention of individuals to the different patterns and modes of being within their ecological niche that are directly relevant for surviving or making a living.

Religion as Extended Phenotype

In several recent publications, Richard Sosis and Benjamin Purzycki have argued for re- defining religious systems as an “extended phenotype.”17 This term was coined by Richard

Dawkins to describe the relationship between genes and aspects of an organisms’ behavior that modify the environment, a process that is analogous to the concept of niche construction.18 Sosis and Purzycki disputed the claim of Boyer and the other by-product theorists that religious beliefs could not be explained by a set of cognitive biases alone. Instead, they proposed “the religious system is comprised of cognitive and emotional mechanisms that produce, retain, and motivate commitments to shared supernatural ideas, and behavioral procedures-rituals-that enact,

16 Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited”; Santos-Granero, The Occult Life of Things.

17 Purzycki and Sosis, “Our Gods”; Purzycki and Sosis, “The Extended Religious Phenotype and the Adaptive Coupling of Ritual and Belief”; Benjamin Purzycki, Omar Haque, and Richard Sosis, “Extending Evolutionary Accounts of Religion Beyond the Mind: Religions as Adaptive Systems,” in Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science: Critical and Constructive Essays, ed. Fraser N. Watts and Léon Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 74–91.

18 Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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reproduce, and encode these ideas.”19 The genetic predispositions of humans to religious perceptions are therefore channeled toward a certain set of supernatural beliefs by inheritable structures. Sosis and Purzycki also suggested that these structures evolved to meet specific

“socioecological problems,” including both the centralization of political authority (moral high gods), or rebellion against an oppressive system (charismatic movements).20 Although this new

attention to ecological contexts is a welcome, Sosis and Purzycki’s remain fundamentally

anthropocentric they fail to consider how religious systems might structure the relationship

between humans and the other living things and systems of their environment.

Sosis and Purzycki’s use of the motif of the extended phenotype echoed similar ideas put

forward by eco-psychologist Paul Shepard in Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Shepard applied the concept of an extended phenotype to the structure of human development in a foraging context. He proposed that the cultural elements of myth, ritual, and religion had evolved to make humans become “native to their place,” living within “a sacred geography that consisted of a complex knowledge of place, terrain, and plants and animals embedded in a rhythm of seasonal cycles.”21 Psychologically, this cosmos played an essential role in the healthy ontogenetic

development of an individual, which Shepard contended, required the “the opportunity to

explore, understand, and become intimately connected to the nonhuman environment” and

provided a set of cultural symbols and rituals that could anchor this process.22 Shepard’s concept

of the extended phenotype thus provides a bridge between the definition of a religious system

19 Purzycki, Haque, and Sosis, “Extending Evolutionary Accounts of Religion Beyond the Mind: Religions as Adaptive Systems,” 75.

20 Ibid., 84.

21 Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene (San Francisco: Island Press, 1998), 7.

22 Ibid., 47.

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provided by Sosis and Purzycki and the practices of “learning to see” and enskillment in animist

societies described by Ingold. A religious cosmology, viewed as the ontological practice of

“worlding” defined by Descola23, could therefore constructively be re-considered as a set of

cognitive and emotional systems that provide the framework for weaving an ecological niche

with the non-human agencies of that environment.

Long periods of human occupation also entail a gradual process of co-evolution, as other

organisms adjust to the patterns of human behavior. A clear example of this can be seen in the

development of fire regimes, in which human-set fires promote biodiversity and resilience. After

a sufficient period of regular burns, the cessation of this activity may cause severe ecological

disruptions, indicating the possible importance of humans in maintaining environmental

stability.24 Consequently, building a cosmological niche involves more than just organizing

human behavior; it can also entail the integration of non-human elements. This process is

conveyed in Frédérique Apffel-Marglin’s description of Andean and Amazonian ritual as a series

of actions “designed to focus awareness as to synchronize the awareness of the different

participants-humans, non-humans, and other-than humans-enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world.”25 Similarly, the musical rituals described by

Robin Wright among the Baniwa simultaneously represent and enact their cosmology, re-

23 Descola, The Ecology of Others.

24 See Don A. Driscoll et al., “Fire Management for Biodiversity Conservation: Key Research Questions and Our Capacity to Answer Them,” Biological Conservation 143, no. 9 (2010): 1928–39; Christopher D. O’Connor et al., “Human Pyrogeography: A New Synergy of Fire, Climate and People Is Reshaping Ecosystems across the Globe,” Geography Compass 5, no. 6 (2011): 329–50.

25 Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 164.

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connecting the material world with the spiritual powers that they believe underlie it.26 In Paul

Shepard’s words: “In dance and song, bodies, painted and adorned, move to deep rhythms that bind the world and bring the humans into mimetic participation with other beings and the truth of the multiplicity of all domains.”27 As a result of the intricate interconnections that form between humans and other organisms and the landscape, the “adaptiveness” of different religious cosmologies depends on formation of short- and long-term stable and interlocked systems of livelihood. Coordinated efforts may give groups an edge in the calculations of game theory, but a well-organized cooperative project such as deforestation or strip-mining is disastrous for the survival of humans and non-humans alike. Generally speaking, by enacting their cosmologies through intensive sensory rituals, animist societies illuminate the threads of the relationships that bind them to their ecological niche, providing a stable conceptual framework of interdependence that can be cognitively and emotionally processed by human minds.

Transactional Animism and Transcendetal Totemism

I do not mean to downplay the diversity of these cultures when discussing general tendencies and typical similarities among them. Philippe Descola’s system of four ontologies, for example, leaves room for hybridity, complexity, and diversity. In the case of animism and totemism Descola contended that the different modes of thought could operate at different levels of interaction with non-human beings. Accordingly, Descola believed that while the Amazonian cultures he studied were predominantly animist, and while he described interactions between humans and other-than-humans as an exchange between persons, he also noted that they used

26 Wright, Mysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon.

27 Shepard, Coming Home, 59.

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“totemic indexes to define particular sets of relations.”28 Descola used the example of the

Secoya, who employ “the ethological contrast between two species of birds . . . as a metaphorical

scheme for specifying gender differences and identities.”29 Another interplay between animistic

and totemic systems is found the relationship between humans and the spirit masters of plants

and animals. Descola observed that, in these encounters, “the typically animist relationship that

links a human person and an animal person is compounded by a special relationship between that

human person and the whole animal species.”30 Relationships between humans and non-humans

can simultaneously operate at different levels of exchange, from the immediate (forager and

single plant or animal) to the abstract (social group and all-in-one species being).

The spirit-master concept, which can be represented in masks, thus provides a means of

what Barsalou et al. referred to as the cognitive act of nominalizing, or “coercing processes into

noun concepts.”31 Barsalou et al. argued that human minds often simplify processes that are

“relatively amorphous” or not “clearly bounded physically or perceptually,”32 into nouns, which

“essentialize their referents, simplifying their representations by endowing them with inherent

invisible properties that constitute their true nature.”33 Although Barsalou et al. acknowledged that this is a valuable cognitive heuristic, they asserted that can become problematic if nouns are

28 Descola, “Ecology as Cosmological Analysis,” 32.

29 Ibid., 31.

30 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, 170.

31 Lawrence Barsalou, Christine Wilson, and Wendy Hasenkamp, “On the Vices of Nominalization and the Virtues of Contextualizing,” in The Mind in Context, ed. Batja Mesquita, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Eliot R. Smith (New York: The Guilford Press, 2010), 336.

32 Ibid., 337.

33 Ibid., 336.

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reified as “stable independent entities” outside of the “contextual systems in which they

constantly develop emergent form.”34

The concept of a totemic spirit-being provides an anchor for a contextual process, but this is not a method for simple objectification. The relationships between spirits and humans are intensely personal and emotional, and they are embedded in feedback loops of exchange with religious specialists in foraging and healing. Associating with totemic beings, however, seems to belong to what Maurice Bloch categorized as the “transcendental” social domain of human relationships. Bloch divided sociality into the “transactional,” the ongoing dynamics of

“continual manipulation, assertions, and defeats” found in human and animal societies, and the

“transcendental,” or the establishment of “essentialized roles and groups” enabled by symbolic imagination.35

The interplay between these two domains was depicted in a recent article by Willerslev et

al., who drew attention to the paradoxes of hunting and sacrifice among animist societies in

Siberia. According these researchers, hunters in these societies have to contend with “the

discrepancy between the ideal, in which the docile animal gives itself up to the hunter, and the

reality in which animals are manifestly capricious and bent on escape, and in which hunters have

to resort to brutality and deceit.”36 In response to Willerslev et al., Ingold argued that this

discrepancy could be overcome by a perspectivist interpretation of the spirit-masters, who would

see the hunt playing out in its idealized form as long as the hunters followed the ritual protocols

34 Ibid., 350.

35 Maurice Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1499 (2008): 2056.

36 Rane Willerslev, Piers Vitebsky, and Anatoly Alekseyev, “Sacrifice as the Ideal Hunt: A Cosmological Explanation for the Origin of Reindeer Domestication,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 1 (2015): 9.

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of hunting before and after the hunt.37 Adopting Bloch’s distinction between the transactional

and the transcendental, the bloody and dominating aspects of a transactional relationship

between human and non-human lives is buffered by a transcendental association of respect and

reciprocity. This dynamic is further exemplified by account in Willerslev et al. of the belief that

individual animals are regenerated if humans behave appropriately in the hunt, which

symbolically transforms the zero-sum act of killing into a long-term pattern of exchange between agents.38 On the flip side, however, beliefs in the infinite regeneration of game could possibly lead to processes of over-hunting and extinction.39

What can these patterns of interaction reveal about the more general adaptiveness of religion? Although I have criticized the assumption that religion always involves the supernatural and the counterfactual, this definition could easily be applied to contemporary religions that have billions of followers. Are animist and totemic religions that closely intertwine cosmology and local ecology exceptions to the rule? On this issue I simply turn to the point made by both

Shepard and evolutionary psychology, for the majority of its time on earth, the genus Homo lived

in small, foraging bands, a situation that was only changed following the development of

agriculture. Therefore, although I do not wish to ascribe either adaptive success or failure to the

diverse range of Pleistocene religions, it seems likely that their cosmologies would have involved

the types of enculturation described by Ingold and Shepard, which have as a fundamental

concern the entanglement, and proper relationships, between human and non-human beings.

37 Tim Ingold, “From the Master’s Point of View: Hunting Is Sacrifice,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 1 (2015): 25.

38 Willerslev, Vitebsky, and Alekseyev, “Sacrifice as the Ideal Hunt,” 10.

39 Hames Raymond, “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36, no. 1 (2007): 177–90.

115

As Bloch, Ingold, and countless other scholars have observed, however, agriculture

fundamentally altered the dynamic of human and non-human relationships. Drawing on Ingold

and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Archaeologist John Robb contended that the

Neolitihc transition is best understood as a gradual transformation of the human “landscape of

action” generated by mutually reinforcing processes of farming, sedentism, and material

culture.40 Robb proposed that these factors eventually led “toward a world in which material

relationships are invested in things that are increasingly localized, controllable in ever finer

ways, and enmeshed within…highly local social landscapes.”41 Robb further argued that the

European archaeological record indicates that the transition to agriculture was mostly

unidirectional, as the emerging structure of sedentary society was “easy to get into but hard to

get out of.”42

Of course, the formation of agricultural civilization could only occur through a

partnership of humans and a small collection of non-human organisms.43 Bron Taylor has

observed that such alliances tend to have an imperial character, and the spread of agricultural

societies entailed “killing or displacing through force already-present inhabitants or converting them, either through example, persuasion, coercion, or threat, to their own agricultural and religious lifeways.”44 I described one of these processes in Chapter 3, where the alliance between

40 John Robb, “Material Culture, Landscapes of Action, and Emergent Causation,” Current Anthropology 54, no. 6 (2013): 665.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid., 657.

43 Marijke van der Veen, “The Materiality of Plants: Plant–people Entanglements,” World Archaeology 46, no. 5 (2014): 799–812.

44 Bron Taylor, “Wilderness, Spirituality, and Biodiversity in North America - Tracing an Environmental History from Occidental Roots to Earth Day,” in Wilderness in Mythology and

116

Buddhists and rice allowed them to transform the human and non-human landscape of Sanchi.

This transition directly involved the coercion and incorporation of the local nagas spirits, thus

fundamentally altering the transcendental social relationship of the people of the landscape.

Although the damage that this caused to the biodiversity of the Sanchi landscape is unknown, the

long-term effects of the spread of rice agriculture in India led to massive erosion and

deforestation.

In Mesopotamia and Egypt, Bloch and Robert Bellah outlined how the increasing levels

of stratification caused by agriculture culminated in the development of divine kingship.45

According to Bloch, the ideology of kings explicitly co-opted the power of transcendental

sociality, disrupting local relationships with spirits or ancestors in favor of the supremacy of the

state. The founding myth is now the forging of a cosmic order from chaos by powerful

anthropomorphic gods, whose earthly counterpart is the king. Rather than interfacing directly

with totemic powers in their local ecologies, the new subjects are now dependent on the king and

his priesthood for maintaining balance and material prosperity.

At some point, however, the cosmology of the god-king was severed from his earthly

personification, and his realm became the transcendent Kingdom of Heaven. Bellah claimed that

this was brought about as part of the Axial transition in Israel, Greece, China, and India, as

different figures renounced the earthly world of work in favor of utopian visions.46 Drawing on

J. Z. Smith, Bloch focused on the development of the Judaic “longing for the unified, centralized,

Religion: Approaching Religious Spatialities, Cosmologies, and Ideas of Wild Nature, ed. Laura Feldt (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 295.

45 Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central”; Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution.

46 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 575.

117

holistic transcendental Mesopotamian city-states with Ziggurats at their center,” which became a de-localized vision following the loss of Jerusalem.47 The kingly centers of Mesopotamia and

Egypt enacted the ordering of a specific area and people, but the unmooring of this centralized

cosmology from geography allowed for a new cosmic center to be inscribed anywhere. Bloch

conveyed the power of this idea with the example of the Mormons, whose religion is a distant

descendant of the Hebrew cosmology, and who established as their religious center “a temple

that looks strikingly like a Ziggurat” in a desert on a different continent.48

I agree with Bellah that the so-called “world religions” of today are likely a product of

what he calls the Axial transition.49 The material symbols and mystical training of religions like

Christianity do not provide ways of seeing the powers that lie within the land, but those beyond

it. Although in some cases these religions have hybridized or incorporated local nature religions,

Christianity and Islam have persecuted those whom they saw as worshiping the created order

rather than the Creator.50 The conflicts found between Tibetan Buddhists and indigenous

shamans in modern-day Mongolia indicate that this dynamic may not be a uniquely Abrahamic

problem.51 There are a number of aspects of these religions that might have given them an edge

on the cultural market place. A trans-local faith does not need a specific biome to orient its

participants to its cosmology, and it allows for the building of similar ontological worlds in

vastly different ecological contexts, creating the means for solidarity in long-distance social

47 Bloch, “Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central,” 2059.

48 Ibid., 2060.

49 I have no desire to get into the intricate politics of defining “world religion” here. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

50 Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.

51 Ibid.; Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans.

118

network. In addition, as Bellah pointed out, the doctrines of the Axial reformers are antidotes for

the suffering generated by the new conditions of urban agricultural society, particularly the

increasing power of elites.52 The doctrines of equality propounded by Jesus or the Buddha make

sense in a stratified world of despotic emperors or rigidly controlled caste systems. In this way, I

have arrived at a version Sosis and Purzycki’s position, that religious beliefs in the supernatural

developed to deal with certain socio-ecological conditions, including both the supernatural

sanctioning of authority, and the equally powerful appeal to transcendent principles to galvanize

the downtrodden to overthrow the elite. As Roy Rappaport noted, however, channeling the attention of followers on an immaterial reality may blunt the ability of these religions to take corrective action to the injustices of the here and now.53

The Return of Animism?

As Mads Jessen pointed out, religious concepts are often built from personal cognitive and emotional experiences in the social and natural world. Similarly, Ingold argued that highly emotional face-to-face encounters with animals and the environment are key for the formation of animist concepts of other-than-human persons. Although the cultural framework scaffolds these encounters with other intelligences, it is not necessarily a prerequisite. In Dark Green Religion,

Bron Taylor described how face-to-face or eye-to-eye encounters with non-humans transformed the beliefs of Jane Goodall, Marc Bekoff, and Aldo Leopold into worldviews that are akin to animism.54 Goodall and Bekoff, who are both ethologists, experienced moments of deep

connection with animals that they were studying, causing them to fundamentally re-think their

52 Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 575.

53 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 447.

54 Taylor, Dark Green Religion.

119

assumptions about the sentience of non-human organisms. Leopold’s encounter with a dying

wolf he shot is particularly striking, as it inspired him not only to empathize with the wolf

herself, but also more generally to “think like a mountain,” taking on the full ecological

implications of a world of multiple perspectives.55 All three of these cases reflect the possibility

of the sudden emergence of an animist ontology, brought about by direct contact with the

personhood of a non-human. Taylor argued that the animist beliefs of Bekoff, Goodall, and

Leopold belonged to a wider current of nature spirituality emerging in global culture, which he

named dark green religion.

In the same way that Axial reforms emerged from the context of stratified society, calls

for a return to nature require a sense of separation from the wider sphere of biological life.

Feelings of disconnection have a long history in Western thought, and anti-urban sentiments and

valorizations of rural lifestyles can be found in Greek and Roman writings.56 Centuries later,

according to environmental historian Roderick Nash, the Romantic Movement in Europe and

America expressed similar sentiments, and indeed, it was a product of urban populations who felt

disconnected from the landscape.57 According to Taylor, however, nature-venerating religiosity in the West has intensified over the last two centuries for two primary reasons. First, the publication of Origin of Species in 1859 shattered the anthropocentric cosmogony of the world religions, providing a new scientific lens for humans to recognize their kinship with the rest of

55 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River, Enlarged (New York: Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, 1966).

56 Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.

57 Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

120

biological life.58 Second, the scale of environmental degradation since the Industrial Revolution

caused increasing alarm and felt urgency to overturn anthropocentrism.59 If Descola is correct,

and animism is one of four modes of being toward which humans are equally pre-disposed, then

Taylor’s analysis indicates that a form of it may be making a comeback. Contrary to Descola’s assertion that animism and naturalism are inverted ontologies, however, Taylor affirmed that that dark green religion can contain a form of “Naturalistic Animism,” which blends a scientific worldview with respect towards non-human intelligences in nature.

Both accurate and inaccurate scholarly and popular depictions of indigenous societies have inspired the development of dark green religious ideas and practices. Critics of environmentalists and conservationists have long condemned the enduring image of the

Ecologically Noble Other, which does not accurately depict life in many indigenous cultures.60

Certainly, there is no reason to presume a priori that an animist cosmology automatically entails

an ethic of preservation. At the same time, however, animist beliefs are directly tied into

feedback loops of interaction with non-humans, which can lead to surprising results. Descola

recounted how he failed in an initial attempt to persuade the Shuar federation to avoid adopting

large-scale cattle ranching. He attributed his lack of success to the Shuar view that “cattle

ranching did not disturb their cosmology of relatedness as long as there were animals to be

hunted and plants to be cultivated in the gardens.”61 The Shuar eventually halted the project on

their own, however, after they discovered the damage to the soils and the gradual disappearance

58 Taylor, Dark Green Religion, x.

59 Ibid., 13.

60 Raymond, “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.”

61 Descola, “Ecology as Cosmological Analysis,” 33.

121

of forest areas, which interfered with their normal patterns of relations with non-humans. In

Descola’s words, the changes wrought by cattle-ranching caused “the material basis of their

cosmology to crumble,” which led to an attempt to restore the previous dynamic.62

Consequently, while an animist ontology is inherently relational and not necessarily

conservationist, it depends on a stable system of associations between humans and non-humans.

Following a disruption of these relationships, there are no guarantees what steps will be taken. In

the case of the Cree and the caribou described by Fikret Berkes, society adjusted toward a more

conservationist stance in managing their relationships with a specific species. If the disruption

occurs due to forces outside of their control, such as the decimation of the bison by whites

experienced (and in some cases participated in) by members of the Blackfoot confederation, then

society might shift its focus to a different set of non-human organisms to engage with.63 What is almost certain to occur, however, is that the entanglement of human beings and their perceptions, beliefs, and practices, with the perceptions and behaviors of other organisms, will quickly generate lead to cultural changes in response. As in István Czachesz’ systems model of religion as belief-artifact-emotion, changes to the material conditions of a religion loops back to shape the type of religious beliefs that can be conceived with that environment.64

When it comes to managing complex environments, it seems to me that animistic beliefs

have the upper hand compared to the religious perceptions and beliefs typically found in the

62 Ibid., 34.

63 María Nieves Zedeño, “To Become a Mountain Hunter: Flexible Core Values and Subsistence Hunting among Reservation-Era Blackfeet,” in The Archaeology and Historical Ecology of Small Scale Economies, ed. Victor Thompson and James Waggoner Jr. (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2013), 141–63.

64 Czachesz, “The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religious Systems: Laying the Foundations of a Network Model.”

122

predominant “world religions.” Recently, some scholars and religious leaders have called for the

“greening” of religions, drawing on the motivational and affective power of those organizations

to galvanize environmental action.65 But what positive feedback loops with living things that are not human beings do transcendent religions really, or potentially, promote? The emergence of contemporary creationists who tend to deny both evolution and climate change exemplifies the difficulty of balancing these issues within one tradition. In this situation, feedback from the observation of nature that interferes with belief has been shut off entirely, leaving only a loop of supernatural interaction that is ignorant or indifferent to the destruction of other organisms. A comprehensive historical ecology on the spread of monotheism has yet to be written.

In addition to the potential problems caused by anthropocentric ideologies, E. N.

Anderson observed that one of the main difficulties in the social processing of environmental information is the sheer size and complexity of modern civilization.66 If Taylor is right, however,

feedback on global climate change and degradation of biological life may be generating a global

Gaian and animist movement to devise new ways of worlding in which other-organisms are

understood to be active partners. The “catchiness” of the resurrected trope Gaia, the Greek

personification of Earth, is perhaps an appropriate example of the seemingly inherent human

tendency to put a face on non-human environmental beings and forces, upon which they depend.

Rather than counterfactual “faces in clouds,” however, the true adaptive potential of religion may

lie in finding faces in trees, jaguars, and termites, and even the biosphere as a whole, allowing

for humans to actively engage with all of life as dance partners composing a common world.

65 Bron Taylor, “Religious Studies and Environmental Concern,” ed. Bron Taylor, Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London & New York: Continuum International, 2005).

66 Eugene N Anderson, Ecologies of the Heart : Emotion, Belief, and the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 122.

123

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

John Balch received his Bachelor of Arts from Hendrix College in Religion, Globalization, and

Culture in 2013 from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the formation of implicit and explicit nature spirituality among researchers in the natural sciences. He graduated with his Master of Arts in religion and nature from the University of Florida in 2015. His thesis focused on the interrelationship between religious cosmologies and environmental practices, neuroscientific and evolutionary approaches to the study of religion, and the theoretical perspective of the “New Animist” anthropologists.

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