Supernatural as Natural

A Biocultural Approach to Religion

Michael Winkelman, John R. Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317343721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a general introduction to the biological and evolutionary bases of religion and is suitable for introductory level courses in the anthropology and psychology of religion and comparative religion.

Why did human ancestors everywhere adopt religious beliefs and customs? The presence and persistence of many religious features across the globe and time suggests that it is natural for humans to believe in the supernatural. In this new text, the authors explore both the biological and cultural dimensions of religion and the evolutionary origins of religious features.

CHAPTER 1

Anthropology and the Study of Religion

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction: The Anthropological Study of Religion

Western Perspectives on Religion

The Development of Anthropological Approaches to Religion

The Four-Field Approach of Anthropology

Conclusions: The Biocultural Approach to the Study of Religion

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

• Describe the development of several Western approaches to studying religion, and show how these ultimately led to the anthropological perspective.

• Introduce the four-field approach of contemporary American anthropology, and demonstrate how each of these fields can contribute to an understanding of religiosity.

• Introduce several core evolutionary principles, and consider how these can help us to comprehend the emergence of religiosity.

• Describe the biocultural approach to the study of religiosity, and demonstrate how using both humanistic and scientific approaches can enable us to more accurately assess the manifestations of religiosity and the role these manifestations play in human life.

A YOUNG MAN TROUBLED BY DISTURBING DREAMS is led out of the village by an old man, who carries a rattle, a drum, and a blanket. They walk for two days and climb to the top of the “spirit” mountain. After spending a night drumming and chanting over the youth, the old man prepares to leave, taking with him all food and water. As he departs, he tells the youth, “When the spirits come for you, you will die. When you come back to life, then you may come back and live with us again.”

***

A monk sits calmly in the street amid the crowds of people and slowly pours a can of gasoline over his head, chanting in a low voice. The crowd parts, leaving a large circle of empty space around him. The monk then takes a box of matches and lights one as he continues his chanting. As the horrified onlookers watch, he bursts into flames.

***

The small room is filled with worshippers moving to the music played by the band in the front. Suddenly, a man lifts the lid off a box that has been sitting on the floor and removes a rattlesnake from within. Others come over and take snakes from the box as well. Some drink strychnine. Confident that the Holy Ghost will keep them safe, the worshippers hold the snakes in the air and shout “Hallelujah!”

Introduction: The Anthropological Study of Religion

Although we may have difficulty understanding the behaviors just described, it is not difficult to see them as expressions of religion. While all cultures have religion, the behaviors these religions justify are astonishingly diverse and seem to challenge the notion that there could be any elements common to every religion. Religion has effects on many aspects of our lives, including the personal, the social, the political, the economic, and even the artistic and the culinary. Religions can motivate people to undertake long fasts and to hold feasts, to engage in orgies, and to abstain from ever having sex. Some religions encourage their believers to risk their lives traveling to other countries to preach their religion to nonbe-lievers. Religions can induce people to lead better lives, and they can also inspire their followers to disobey laws, deny medical care to their own children, and even commit suicide and murder. Religions influence healing practices, define families, and shape political policies. They have provided the rationales for war and have given birth to international peace movements. Some of the greatest art and literature in history have been motivated by religion, and some of the most terrible deeds that humans have ever done have been justified by religion. The effects of religion are so extensive that some scholars regard religion as the very foundation of culture.

How is religion able to exert such a wide range of influences on peoples and cultures? Perhaps the easiest and most obvious answer is that religion deals with essential issues such as right and wrong, life and death. But right and wrong mean different things in different places, and although we all must die, not all religions teach their followers to fear or fret about this fact.

We will never understand religion if we regard it as simply a belief system about spirits or issues of ultimate meaning, as just a mechanism of social control, or as a means to allay fear. Religions do indeed serve these purposes, but they also do much more. Religions structure our perceptions of the Universe, linking the present to both the past and the future. Religions inform us about unseen beings and powers that are responsible for the phenomena we perceive in the everyday world, and postulate unseen aspects of our own nature that motivate our behaviors. To even begin to understand these complex aspects of religion, we need a comprehensive framework that views all manifestations of religion as expressions of deeper, more fundamental characteristics of the species we call Homo sapiens. Such a framework should provide a broad and integrative context that accounts for all types of religious beliefs and behaviors and provides a suitable approach for understanding them with the rigor and the objective attitudes of science. But it should also consider the perspectives and experiences of the insider—the believer—and it should do so with respect.

The one field that offers this comprehensive and yet respectful approach to religion is anthropology. Anthropology uses the ideas and methods of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, and social sciences, thereby combining the scientific with the humanistic perspectives. Anthropology is scientific because it focuses on the recording and analysis of observable phenomena and the development of theories to explain these phenomena. It is humanistic because it takes seriously the importance of the things that people experience and report, and attempts to understand their cultures through the information they provide about their beliefs and experiences. This broad approach has enabled anthropology to enhance our awareness of the diversity of cultures and to see more clearly the nature of the features that all humans share, including religion.

Anthropology and the Biocultural Approach

The word “anthropology” is derived from two roots: ánthrōpos (the Greek term for “human”) and logos (the Greek term for “word,” now used to refer to a field of study). As its very name indicates, anthropology is the scholarly discipline that studies humans. In a very real sense, anything about humans can be studied from an anthropological perspective. Many anthropologists travel to other countries to learn about such aspects of cultural life as family structures, political organizations, economic systems, the settling of disputes, and—not surprisingly—religions. Others carry out excavations to uncover information about ancient societies. Some study languages to understand how this important human capacity shapes the way we perceive the world. And some even observe other animals to determine which features we share with these animals and which are found only in our species. Of course, each of these topics may also be studied by researchers from other disciplines. What sets anthropology apart is that it brings together all of these different lines of evidence to provide an all-encompassing perspective for understanding the human condition.

In practice, most anthropologists focus on just one or a few aspects of what it means to be human. But they also integrate other perspectives into their work. They may make use of cultural, archaeological, linguistic, or biological data, and they also draw upon insights from other disciplines. Because they strive to take all relevant data into consideration, anthropologists tend to work from an interdisciplinary, holistic, and integrative perspective. As we shall see, this broad approach is very useful for considering one of humankind’s most unique traits: religiosity, our capacity for religious thought and spiritual experience.

This religious capacity is central to what it means to be human. Religion represents one of the central divides between Homo sapiens and every other species of animal alive today. The universality of religious beliefs in our species—but not in others—indicates that they arose after our ancestors had already taken their first steps down that unique path that has taken us ever further from the paths taken by other animals. Our beliefs, in other words, are products of something unique about human biology: our ability to develop culture. But if we trace our path back far enough, we can see that at least some of the behaviors associated with religion are present in other species, indicating that those behaviors arose before our ancestors parted ways with their ancestors. Such behaviors are products of our shared biology.

The biocultural approach to explaining religiosity that is the premise of this book is based on the insight that religiosity is a product of both our biological makeup and our socialization into a particular culture. This view is derived from a more far-reaching insight: the idea that humans are biological organisms whose most important means of adapting to the world is culture. The biocultural perspective attempts to explain both why humans have a natural, biologically based propensity for religiosity and how this propensity finds expression in different places and times.

The insight that religiosity is rooted in our biology does not mean that every one of us shares the same interest in religion or tendency to have spiritual experiences. All biological organisms differ from one another, so we can expect that religiosity, too, will be expressed differently from one individual and culture to the next. For example, some people are very susceptible to spontaneous extraordinary experiences that they may interpret as being religious in nature, while others spend their entire lives with their “feet on the ground.” Some people have a tendency to believe whatever it is that the people around them believe, while others are more likely to be skeptical about everything, no matter what anyone else may tell them. In short, the biological perspective of the biocultural approach views religiosity as the product of certain innate characteristics of our species that—like any other biological traits—are manifested in different ways in different people and in different situations.

The cultural perspective of the biocultural approach recognizes that the values, beliefs, and language of each society shape the way that religiosity will be experienced, practiced, and expressed by the members of that society. Culture provides the explanations that people who have extraordinary experiences use to understand their experiences and also tells its members why only some of them have such experiences. Because culture teaches us what to “naturally” believe in, our capacity for religiosity is molded by the same forces that shape the many other aspects of our thoughts and behaviors.

The integrative and holistic perspective provided by the biocultural approach also directs us to consider how biology and culture interact with and influence one another. As a consequence, the biocultural approach provides us with a framework that enables us to consider such questions as why only some people have certain religious experiences, which people are more prone to having such experiences, what functions religion plays in human life, how religions change, and when and why new religions emerge. The biocultural approach moves religiosity from an often marginal position—in which religion is seen as opposing science and is frequently viewed with skepticism—and instead places it at the very foundations of the evolution of human thought and culture.

Anthropological Approaches and Perspectives: Becoming Aware of Our Biases

Like anything else, religion can be viewed and interpreted only through some type of conceptual framework. Anthropology is unique because it looks at religion from both the outside and the inside, making it easier to understand the biases introduced by our own framework. Because it examines many different societies, anthropology also affords a cross-cultural perspective that makes it possible to understand the universal features of all humans as well as the ways these are expressed in each individual and in every culture. And finally, because it combines scientific, humanistic, and cross-cultural perspectives, anthropology offers a way past the cultural blinders that has affected many other attempts to understand religion.

Most people regard their own ways of doing things as “better” and “more natural” than the ways that people in other cultures do things. It is easy to understand why. Because the people around us typically tend to think and act much as we do, our interactions with them tend to reinforce our cultural world-view as being the best. Moreover, the things that we already know enable us to expect what will happen next and thus provide us with reassurance in an otherwise uncertain world. Consequently, it is entirely normal for us to interpret things from the perspectives of our own cultural knowledge and personal experiences. Indeed, what else could we do?

This tendency to view the world through the framework of our own culture is called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism, which is normal for individuals and for cultures, causes us to prefer our own culture over another. Consequently, ethnocentrism is an important force that promotes group cohesion. But it can also cause us to misinterpret what other people think and do. Because religions express many of a society’s core values, the ways in which people look at other religions are particularly susceptible to ethnocentrism. Over the course of Western history, feelings of cultural superiority have frequently colored the ways in which people have looked at and evaluated other societies and their religions. This effect has prevented us from achieving a fuller understanding of why people believe and behave the way that they do.

Western Perspectives on Religion

During the last 1600 or so years of European history, outside religions have provoked curiosity, disbelief, apprehension, scorn, and even hatred, but only rarely appreciation. An awareness of other religious systems can inspire us to compare these systems with our own and to consider their differences. But not all comparisons have the same purpose. Some people make comparisons in order to demonstrate that one particular religion is superior to all others. Others compare religions to identify their universal features. And others look at different religions to gain a greater comprehension of the diversity of ways that humans live and to uncover the reasons for this diversity. So that we may more clearly recognize the biases that are often brought into any comparison of religious phenomena, we will now briefly consider three perspectives th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Special Features
• Preface
• Introduction: Biocultural Frameworks for the Study of Religiosity
• 1 Anthropology and the Study of Religion
• 2 Our World and How We Know It
• 3 Consciousness and Spiritual Experiences
• 4 Ritualized Animal Behaviors and the Roots of Religiosity
• 5 The Origins of Shamanism and the Flowering of Religiosity
• 6 The Origins and Functions of Religious Healing
• 7 Religion and Cognition: How Religion Shapes the Way We Think
• 8 Religion and Emotions: How Religion Shapes How We Feel
• 9 Religion and Society: How Religion Shapes Our Relations with Others
• 10 Supernatural Evil
• 11 Conclusions: Religion in Evolutionary Perspective
• Appendix
• References
• Photo Credits
• Author Index
• Subject Index