Sally McBrearty, who has been especially prominent in arguing for a longer and slower development of “modern” physical evidence, has held that the earlier revolution idea was Eurocentric and ignored African evidence.12’ What is of particular interest from our point of view is that McBrearty cites evidence for red ochre and shell beads from well over 100,000 years ago. Of course we can’t know for sure what these were used for, but ethnographic evidence suggests that they were almost certainly used for personal adornment as body painting and bead ornaments. Archaeologists have argued that both kinds of adornment probably acted as signals of group membership, important where group membership had become larger than face-to-face groups and where it may be important to know the difference between ingroup members and strangers. Yet we can also use ethnographic evidence to indicate that such adornment could well have been used in collective celebrations or rituals, events for which participants usually “dress up.” Could such celebrations or rituals have developed from the capacity for play that is deep in our biological heritage, but must have been enormously enhanced with the attainment of language and related cultural developments?
We don’t know when modern grammatical language evolved, but we know that it occurred only among Homo sapiens at some point in its gradual speciation. In any case the study of contemporary human infants shows us the remarkable efflorescence of play behavior compared to any other animal, beginning before language use but then developing many new forms once language has been acquired.
Because play is central for my argument about religious evolution, I need to consider the prevalence of play among human children today, drawing particularly from Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby, and then speculate about the evolution of play, especially after the emergence of language.121 In my Preface, I wondered whether it might turn out to be functional to have spheres of life that are not functional. Gopnik, in summarizing and developing a great deal of recent work on the cognitive and emotional life of babies, suggests the same when she speaks of “useful uselessness”:
Adults and children spend their days differently-we work, babies play. Play is the signature of childhood. It’s a living, visible manifestation of imagination and learning in action. It’s also the most visible sign of the paradoxically useful uselessness of immaturity. These useless actionsand the adult equivalents we squeeze into our workday-are distinctively, characteristically, human and deeply valuable. Plays are play, and so are novels, paintings, and songs.126
She reminds us, and we should never forget it, that it takes a special kind of love to make this useful uselessness possible: “All the processes of change, imagination, and learning ultimately depend on love. We can learn from the discoveries of earlier generations because those same loving caregivers invest in teaching us. It isn’t just that without mothering humans would lack nurturance, warmth, and emotional security. They would also lack culture, history, morality, science, and literature.” 127
A particularly important feature of “pretend play,” in which children engage even before they can speak, is that it creates a whole range of “possible worlds,” a term Gopnik uses as the title of her first chapter. She begins that chapter by saying, “Human beings don’t live in the real world.” It is clear that she doesn’t mean that we do this all the time, but means instead that if we think of the importance of “dreams and plans, fictions and hypotheses,” which are “the products of hope and imagination,” then even adults spend a great deal of time in possible worlds that are not in the obvious sense “real.“128 Yet if adults spend a lot of time in possible worlds, children spend even more:
From the adult perspective, the fictional worlds are a luxury. It’s the future predictions that are the real deal, the stern and earnest stuff of adult life. For young children, however, the imaginary worlds seem just as important and appealing as the real ones. It’s not, as scientists used to think, that children can’t tell the difference between the real world and the imaginary world. It’s just that they don’t see any particular reason for preferring to live in the real one.‘29
Perhaps this is a moment as good as any to make a point stressed by Huizinga in his Homo Ludens-that the opposite of “play” is not “seriousness.” Play can be very serious indeed. In spite of the fact that we say, “Oh, he’s not serious, he’s only playing,” the noun “seriousness” lacks the substantive resonance of the noun “play.“1i° The right contrast term-though, as we will see, it too has problems-is not “seriousness” but “work,” as Gopnik indicates in my first quote from her above. Play is not, as Burghardt argued even with respect to animal play, the world of daily life, what Alfred Schutz called, “the world of working.” As Gopnik points out, it has nothing to do with “the basic evolutionary goals of mating and predation, fleeing and fighting.””’ Although some forms of play are comical and diverting, others, including the derived forms Gopnik has mentioned but also the pretend play of children, are serious indeed.
Freud recognized this fact, while making another mistake, from my point of view, when he wrote, “Every playing child behaves like a poet, in that he creates a world of his own, or more accurately expressed, he transposes things into his own world according to a new arrangement which is to his liking. It would be unfair to believe that he does not take this world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously; he spends large amounts of affect on it. The antithesis of play is reality, not But if the child is a poet, is poetry not real? Is King Lear not real? Far more real than an unfortunate domestic breakdown reported in the daily paper? So I will, along with James and Schutz, affirm the “reality” of “multiple realities.” If, for methodological purposes, we must affirm the world of daily life as the “paramount reality,” that does not mean that other possible worlds lack a reality of their own. Possible worlds, multiple realities, have consequences we could not live without.
Play and Ritual
Let us remember certain features of play as we turn to the question of the deep origins of serious play in human evolution. Play is delimited in time and space; Burghardt speaks of “play bouts,” which begin and end, and notes that they occur often in socially central areas where the danger of predators is least. Whatever the arguments between Frans de Waal and Michael Tomasello as to how genuine and widespread real cooperation is in animals, even in our closest primate relatives, animal play is impossible without cooperation. Tomasello finds that “shared intentionality” is basic to human cooperation. But even in nonhuman animals, play is impossible without shared intentionality. In social play both parties must agree, through a play bow or a play arm gesture or in some other way, that they are about to engage in play, not fighting or something else. And in the social play of children, if someone doesn’t want to play, or doesn’t take the play “seriously,” that is, doesn’t share the intention to play, she may just leave or else become a “spoilsport” and ruin the play altogether.
If shared intention is a basic premise of social play, so is shared attention. In the wild games of running and hiding that some animals and almost all children play, it is essential that one attend to the rapidly changing and unpredictable behavior of the playmate or one will not be able to respond quickly and appropriately. Another feature of animal and human play is the presence of norms-in more complex human play, rules of the game-that apply only in the time and space of the game, but are mandatory there. Although there are more common features of play that we could mention, there is one final, but very important, feature: play is a practice, as that term is used by Alasdair Maclntyre when he says that the good of a practice is internal to the practice, not something with an external end.133 We already saw that that was the case even with animal play.
Where all of this is heading in this book is pretty predictably that I think ritual is the primordial form of serious play in human evolutionary historyritual because it is a defined practice that conforms to the terms described in the previous paragraph, rather than religion, which is something that grows out
of the implications of ritual in a variety of ways that never leave ritual entirely behind.
Evidence for the early history of ritual is not easy to come by. I have mentioned red ochre as body paint and shell beads for body ornament as possibly having been devised for ritual occasions. Much more recently, perhaps 40,000 years ago, simple flutes turn up. Music is an ever-present accompaniment to ritual and almost always involves dance and song. Still we can’t build much on these archaeological remains, which could have many meanings. From the time that we think language as we know it developed, we can think about ritual in terms of the many rituals observed among huntergatherers, problematic though that inference is. But there is reason to believe that in that long period when members of the genus Homo were developing forms of consciousness and behavior that were more complex than those of the great apes yet less than those of modern human language speakers, some kind of rituals probably evolved.
Michael Tomasello has a lot to say about nonlinguistic communication among children before they learn to speak, and even among adults perfectly capable of using language but who find themselves unable to use it-for example, when they are in a foreign country whose language they do not speak, or where there is a noise level so high that words could not be heard, or where discreet nonverbal communication between friends is preferred because of the danger of being overheard. He calls this kind of communication “gestural.” 131 Merlin Donald, as we will see in detail in Chapter 3, has developed the notion of a mimetic culture in use before language, which involves gesture but also some kinds of vocalizations, song, and possibly some simple beginnings of language.
Ritualization in nonhuman animals is common and most frequently involves genetically fixed sequences of behavior that communicate intentions, usually in sexual or aggressive situations such as the fighting of the Galapagos Islands iguanas. But the kind of ritual that I am trying to understand as evolving from play is characterized precisely by a lack of genetic fixation, by the relatively free form and creativity that are features of mammalian play. So rather than turning to the iguanas for an example of nonhuman behavior that looks like incipient ritual, let us look again at our familiar cousins, the chimpanzees. Frans de Waal has observed chimpanzee events that he is willing to call “celebrations”:
When the chimpanzees see a caretaker arrive in the distance with two enormous bundles of blackberry, sweetgum, beech, and tulip tree branches, they burst out hooting. General pandemonium ensues, including a flurry of embracing and kissing. Friendly body contact increases one-hundred-fold, and status signals seventy-five fold. Subordinates approach dominants, particularly the alpha male, to greet them with bows and pant-grunts. Paradoxically, the apes are confirming the hierarchy just before canceling it, to all intents and purposes.
I call this response a celebration. It marks the transition to a mode of interaction dominated by tolerance and reciprocity. Celebration serves to eliminate social tensions and thus pave the way for a relaxed feeding session. Nothing even remotely similar occurs in species that do not share.‘ss
Although this kind of celebration is not designed by the animals but evoked by the arrival of bountiful amounts of food, it involves some elements of play behavior. Play events are often joyful and can look like pandemonium, though as de Waal points out in this case, they consist of meaningful interactions. Very significantly, there is a normative aspect to the event: it leads to a situation where hierarchy is (temporarily) overcome and replaced by “a mode of interaction dominated by tolerance and reciprocity,” something characteristic of play in often otherwise dominance-concerned animals.
Could we see among prelinguistic but mimetically communicating hominids the emergence of something like this chimpanzee celebration as a deliberately devised form of serious play-serious in its meaning, though not without the expression of playful emotions? We know, and this will be described in more detail in Chapter 3, that group size was growing during hominid evolution. Among the great apes, kinship provided much of the group solidarity, and dominance hierarchies maintained order, though they also, in the competition for dominance, created disorder. But in hominid groups that were too large for kinship alone to provide solidarity, and that were also, perhaps, already moving away from dominance hierarchies toward more egalitarian solidarities among both sexes, ritual might have been just the innovation to provide the solidarity that was necessary but not otherwise provided.
The play features of such ritual would be evidenced in the fact that they would be discrete events, with beginnings and ends, that they would take place at particular times, perhaps when food was plentiful, and particular places, perhaps some place that had significant meaning to the group. The egalitarian norms of play, so essential in dyadic play, which must be “fair,” would be in the case of ritual, as with the chimpanzee celebration, extended to the group as a whole. As in the case of dyadic play, the ritual would require shared intention and shared attention, developed well beyond the capacities of great apes, as both Tomasello and Donald point out.136 The intention would be to celebrate the solidarity of the group, attending to the feelings of all its members, and probably marking the identity of the group as opposed to other groups. In-group solidarity and out-group hostility are recurrent human possibilities at every level, from foragers to schoolchildren to nation-states.
The intensity of the feelings aroused by such a ritual led Durkheim to speak of a sense of the sacred. Prelinguistically, however, this must have been rather vague, if we can speak of it at all. In any case such a ritual was not “worship,” something that develops considerably later in much more complex societies, nor is there a worship of society, but at most a feeling of there being something special about the assembled group that, in the ritual, gave rise to what Durkheim called “collective effervescence.”
Huizinga, in discussing the primordial significance of ritual, insists that we not forget that it was at first, and to some extent always, play:
Archaic society, we would say, plays as the child or animal plays. Such playing contains at the outset all the elements proper to play: order, tension, movement, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture. Only in a later phase of society is play associated with the idea of something to be expressed in and by it, namely what we call “life” or “nature.” Then, what was wordless play assumes poetic form. In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, man’s consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression. Gradually the significance of a sacred act permeates the playing. Ritual grafts itself upon it; but the primary thing is and remains play.137
Huizinga derives myth and ritual from play and then a great deal else from them: “now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play”138
I think it is noteworthy that Huizinga never sees ritual in its early forms as devoted to a concern with “supernatural beings,” so often used as the fundamental definition of religion. He speaks of a consciousness of “a sacred order of things,” but in a nonverbal ritual it is hard to think that order was personalized. Nevertheless, especially after the appearance of fully syntactical language made narrative possible, characters in myths that were acted out in rituals could be other than human. Animals that can talk are found in myths and folktales all over the world. What are sometimes called “powerful beings” also often appear in myths, but it is problematic to call them “supernatural,” especially in cultures that have no notion of nature for them to be supernatural in relation to.‘39 It is especially dangerous to call powerful beings “gods,” because of the loaded meaning of that term in a culture deeply influenced by biblical religion. Powerful beings are certainly not omnipotent or omniscient-they may even be injured or killed. They have powers that humans don’t have, but are otherwise not significantly different. Often they are conceived of as
ancestors who continue to appear after their death but are singularly concerned with the problems of their own familial descendants. 140
Just how close powerful beings can be to humans is illustrated in the famous story in Genesis 32, of the occasion when Jacob wrestled all night with a man who turned out to be God, and Jacob was on the verge of winning when God touched him on the thigh and dislocated it. Still Jacob wouldn’t let go until God gave him a blessing, which he did, telling Jacob that he had a new name, Israel, which perhaps means “God rules.” Jacob then asked God his name, but God refused to tell him, blessed Jacob, and was released. We will find in Chapter 6 that “El” was the general Semitic word for a god, so that the tradition on which this story was based almost certainly did not refer to Yahweh, who did not give that name until his meeting with Moses much later in the biblical story. Yet El and Yahweh were merged, and later tradition saw them as names for the one and only true God. That the priestly redaction of Genesis left this story in is remarkable, because it surely shows God as a powerful being only marginally stronger than a very strong man, whom Jacob was reputed to be. In short, the idea of divinity was one of the many things that evolved in the history of religion, and the idea of “supernatural beings” was lacking in its early stages. Even in later history the distinction was often not obvious.
Because Chapter 3 is concerned with the evolution of ritual and gives detailed descriptions of rituals among three tribal peoples, it is not necessary to discuss it any further at this point. But I would like to follow up on Huizinga’s idea that play is a fundamental form of life, which I have related to the notion of multiple realities in James and Schutz, of cultural systems as Geertz used that term, and of practices as defined by Maclntyre.‘441 As such it is a model from which many other forms of life develop, ritual and the related practices that we call religion being a kind of mediating case providing the pattern by which play can be transformed into other fields.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 15
