Despite their frequent use, there is a lack of consensus on the definition of both terms religion and economics, there being more of a consensus on the meaning of economics than there is on that of religion. Most, if not all would agree that economic activities are about the use of scarce resources to produce, distribute, and consume goods and services and growth. There is less of an agreement on what makes an activity religious, which renders the term religion harder to define, so much so that a three-year-long high-level interdisciplinary conference held at Çatal Höyük, a significant Neolithic site in central Turkey, ended lacking a consensus among the participating scholars about the use of the term religion (Hodder 2010, 1). This, despite the fact that one of the key questions probed at the conference was whether “changes in spiritual life and religious ritual were a necessary prelude to the social and economic changes that led to ‘civilization’” (Hodder 2010, 18).
The participants in the study offered sophisticated definitions of religion and of the religious, such as:
A burial is religious “not because of its separateness from everyday life, but because it focuses, refers to broader imaginings and deals with the relationship between self and community” and, lived in houses are religious “in the sense that they” are “about imagining, remembering and interacting with past houses and those who lived in them” (Hodder 2010, 17).
“Religious dimension” is defined “as that emergent sphere of human life in which social groups tend to their fascination with and fear of ultimate boundedness, which shape and are shaped by all other dynamic modes of being bound – religion has to do with the way in which one is ultimately bound together with others” (Shults 2010, 77).
“What looks like religion may be the convergence of practices that produce effects of markedness and absence” (Keane 2010, 189).
“For some, religion may be the ultimate utility providing protection against misfortune, access to divine powers or guidance to good life” (Keane 2010, 191).
As the definitions of religion given above illustrate, the range of phenomena that has been put under the heading of religion in academic and in daily usage has been very wide. Such phenomena have included ritual, taboo, symbolism, morality, altered states of consciousness, and belief in supernatural beings (Sosis and Alcorta 2003, 264).
Of all these phenomena, belief in the existence of supernatural beings is probably the one that has been most widely attributed to religion. Tylor, one of the founders of the study of religion, made the remark that “the minimum sign for the presence of religion, is a belief in spiritual beings, in the supernatural” (Tylor 1958; cited in Bloom 2012, 212).
Supernatural beings have the capability to provide what humans cannot get through exchange with other humans or through productive labor. Gods are powerful supernatural beings with the additional powers to give and take away life, to control destiny, and to reward good deeds and punish the wrong.
Perhaps, the most important function of religion is to open up and to maintain communication channels with supernatural beings and gods, so that they will approach humans favorably and grant their wishes. We agree with Bloom that religion also has the mystical and civic dimensions as well. But these are also experienced in relation to the supernatural (Bloom 2012, 183).
We are going to define religion as the sum of the beliefs and actions aimed at obtaining favors from supernatural beings (Rossano 2006, 346). Religious actions include, among others, transcendent rituals, observing taboos, obeying dietary requirements, moral behavior, gifts, and sacrifice.
Supernatural beings are not always (probably never!) impressed with gifts and rituals and do not always (if ever!) fulfill the requests of their believers (even though at times, by coincidence, they may appear to be doing so). And, transcendent and civic aspects of religion seem to be lacking explicit economic goals.
Yet, the actions undertaken to win the favors of supernatural beings and the religious activities that are transcendent and civic are not totally void of economic outcomes, as such actions often trigger mostly unintended and significant economic outcomes. Religious actions and beliefs will last to the extent they contribute positively to the well-being of the community. Actions and beliefs that have negative impact may be encouraged by the dominant community in order to keep the negatively impacted community subservient.
In this book, we shall explore the myriad ways our worldly well-being has been affected by the unintended by-products of human efforts to gain the favors of the supernatural.
We start with an exploration of the beginnings of religion.
Archaeological remains related to the religion of our ancestors are rather scarce and consist of no more than some wall paintings and burials. In the absence of sufficient archaeological information, we seek clues about the religion of our ancestors in the religious practices of present-day humans, who have retained the way of life of our early ancestors. The assumption being that contemporary hunter-gatherers have largely (if not wholly) retained not only the way of life but also the religion of our early hunter-gatherer ancestors.
There are some problems with this approach. The size of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups is not uniform. There is no uniformity with regard to their beliefs and lifestyles either. And, contemporary hunter-gatherers inhabit marginal habitats, not exploited by agriculturalists, which was not necessarily the case with our ancestors.
Also, one should consider that even though their roots stretch back to early ancestors, extant present-day hunter-gatherer groups are not direct replicas of the early ones. Through millenniums, hunter-gatherer groups have experienced technological change and evolved and adapted. This would have happened through their own inertia and also in response to other groups and to the environment. Change would have accelerated in response to relatively recent contact with westerners and (mostly western) agriculturalists. For instance, some (the Hadza) have adopted new tools such as metal arrowheads and pots.
However, even though contemporary hunter-gatherers are not living fossils, they are pre-agrarian and they should therefore give us a good idea about the way of life of pre-agrarian communities at the end of the last ice age and about the selection pressures that many have suggested brought our species into being (Blurton Jones 1987).
Fortunately, there are groups like the Australian aborigines who were observed before their way of life was modified through contact with westerners. What is more, Australian aborigines are all descendants of the original migrants who arrived in Australia 45,000 years ago and managed to avoid contact with any outsiders thereafter.
Another group who are the descendants of the original migration from Africa to Australia and who did not have any outside contacts until very recently are the dark-skinned Andaman Islanders, who live on the Andaman island, in the Bay of Bengal, 120 miles off the coast of Burma.
Yet a third such group are the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, who belong to the oldest of the three lineages of humans who moved out of Africa.
Groups such as the three mentioned above, which had none or minimum outside contact at the time the observations about them were recorded, provide us with windows through which we can observe the existence of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Wade 2009, 98–100).
Hunter-gatherers have supernatural beings—who are not (as strictly) bound by the physical and psychological limits that humans are subject to, but who are not all-powerful and who do not know all, as the later powerful big gods would. Supernatural beings of the hunter-gatherers can be tricked by humans and influenced by other supernatural beings. There are no temples, no priests, no idols, and no regular meetings. Punishment of bad and the rewarding of good behavior are issues for the humans to settle among themselves—their supernatural beings are usually not interested in and do not interfere with the interactions among humans. Yet, these beings can reciprocate humans with rewards of their own, if they are approached with properly presented requests, and with calamities, if they are not (Norenzayan 2013, 122–23).
We propose that supernatural beings evolved out of the universal illusion that non-humans possess human features (animism). The efforts to communicate with and to propitiate the non-humans (to which human features have been attributed) through prayers and through rituals made up of synchronous movements, a capability unique to humans and through gift offerings, motivated by the human propensity to exchange, led to the beginnings of religion—with economic consequences.
References
- Bloom, P. 2012. “Religion, Morality, Evolution.” Annual Review Psychology 63: 179–99. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100334.
- Blurton Jones, N. G. 1987. “Tolerated Theft, Suggestions About the Ecology and Evolution of Sharing, Hoarding and Scrounging.” Social Science Information 26 (1): 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901887026001002.
- Hodder, Ian. 2010. “Probing Religion at Catalhöyük: An Interdisciplinary.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, edited by Ian Hodder, vol. 1, 1–31.
- Keane, Webb. 2010. “Marked, Absent, Habitual: Approaches to Neolithic Religion at Catalhoyuk.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization, edited by Ian Hodder. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
- Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Crossref
- Rossano, Matt J. 2006. “The Religious Mind and the Evolution of Religion.” Review of General Psychology 10 (4): 346–64. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.346.
- Shults, LeRons. 2010. “Spiritual Entanglement: Transforming Religious Symbols at Catalhoyuk.” In Religion in the Emergence of Civilization, edited by Ian Hodder, 73–98. Cambridge: Cambridge U...