Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  What this new self-identity implies (“I am Kalapalo” as opposed to “I am Kambe’s daughter-in-law,” for example) is a moral sense of equality or “identity of participation.”

  Economically, it means that everyone is obligated to participate, but everyone receives regardless of contribution. Ifutisu, the most basic value of Kalapalo life (subsuming the notions of generosity, modesty, flexibility, and equanimity in facing social difficulties, and respect for others)74 is extended beyond the domain of family to all people in the community.75

  The world of this purely oral culture is clearly organized by ritual and myth. The Kalapalo cosmos is coherent: in the beginning were the powerful beings; they created the Dawn People with whom they lived at first; they now dwell in a “sky village,” near the sun rise, not far from the earthly habitations of present-day people who are descended from the Dawn People; after death, people go to the sky village and become powerful beings. This “cosmic history” has no great depth in time or space 76 But ritual overcomes even this rather limited sense of temporal unfolding, for the powerful people become now and us. Basso cites the philosopher of music, Victor Zuckerkandl, to show how music helps to provide this sense of union between self and world. For Zuckerkandl, music creates “a sense of `space without distinction of places’ and `time in which past and future coexist within the present,’ that is, of the movement of tones which is music itself.“77

  The Kalapalo use the very recurrence of mythic time as a subtle way of understanding their reality. What happened “in the beginning” can always happen. Strange behavior on the part of an individual can be likened to some action of a powerful being in a myth, and so interpreted. An eclipse of the sun or moon recalls stories in which the sun or moon are “being killed,” but also reassures in that in the stories they do not die, but return to their normal state. Basso argues that Kalapalo myth is not a kind of “charter,” as Malinowski thought, that provides a model or rule to be followed. Instead myth is an account of the way things are, a reference frame for understanding the world. She points out that Westerners, even anthropologists, are used to explanations that take a didactic, logical, or evidentiary form, and so think of mythic “explanation” as irrational, failing to note the subtle and complex uses to which narrative thinking can be put 78 We will see that this condescending attitude toward mythic explanation is typical of the theoretic mind, which is at best incipient among the Kalapalo.

  Basso gives plenty of evidence that life among the Kalapalo, whatever ritual is supposed to do, by no means runs smoothly. If it did, ritual would hardly be necessary. Some rituals focus on adolescence-puberty rites for both boys and girls are important, and are preceded by periods of seclusion involving ascetic practices and athletic training. By successfully completing the arduous and lengthy period of seclusion that precedes the puberty rite, the young person can turn him- or herself into

  a pleasing object, neutralizing the evil forces within, thereby becoming a cherished and respected person and in rituals the active symbol of a community’s moral worth … The Kalapalo adolescent can thus serve as a particularly apt image of moral as well as physical beauty … Yet in the myths these are the very people who most often provoke jealousy and anger in others and who in response withdraw from society or in various ways are especially responsive to the suggestions of powerful beings, thereby providing a test for themselves as well as for certain members of their families.79

  Closeness to powerful beings is ambiguous. Some, through dreams or otherwise, are called to be shamans, who, after a rigorous period of training and a major public rite, can serve as curers and diviners for the people, having the ability to visit the sky village where the powerful beings dwell.8° But the power of powerful beings is ambiguous. It can be used for evil as well as good, and the Kalapalo believe that there are witches who use this power to kill.81 Death sets off prolonged rituals of grief, during which suspicions as to those possibly responsible for the death are roused.82 Killing of suspected witches is not unknown.

  One place where conflict comes into ritual itself is the major rites performed by each gender alone. As Basso says, “the symbols [these rituals] call to mind emphasize the differences and antagonisms between the sexes through their reference to the dangerous powers inherent in human sexuality. Yet at the same time the music effects communication between the performers (of one sex) and the listeners (who are of the opposite sex), a situation of communicative control over these dangerous powers.” The worry about deceit, which is endemic in Kalapalo communication and a frequent feature of myth, enters into the ritual exchange. The performers try to move the listeners to a situation of shared feeling, but the listeners remain doubtful as to whether they can trust the performers.

  Yet the listener, who is also a participant some other time, has a double experience of assertion and doubt … Since music is multiply interpretable, it is effective when there is a need for communication between beings who cannot, or will not, bring to a communicative event the same presuppositions about the truth of what is being said. This multiplicity of interpretation and distinction between performer and listener emphasizes boundaries created by classification and opposition, while at the same time paradoxically fusing the bounded and opposed into a unity of performative discourse, a domain of discourse which the Kalapalo represent by their ideas about powerful beings.83

  Basso sums up her interpretation of Kalapalo ritual and myth by pointing out that ritual performance recapitulates the mythical relation of powerful beings and humans. Human life derives ultimately from the powerful beings, and both understand the primary mode of communication of the other: music and language.

  When people perform music, they have the ability to move powerful beings because the latter can thereby most clearly recognize something of themselves in humanity … In ritual performance, the unity of persons is effected through musical expression, wherein the body is an important musical instrument that helps to create a feeling about the motion of sounds in space, and understanding of a particular sense of time and of the most intense expression of life itself, which is the experience-however transient-that one is indeed a powerful being.

  Through sound symbols, ideas about relationships, activities, causalities, processes, goals, consequences, and states of mind are conceived, represented, and rendered apparent to the world. It is through sound that cosmic entities are rendered into being and represented by the Kalapalo-not as object types but as beings causing and experiencing action in a veritable musical ecology of spirit. 8`*

  The Kalapalo example illustrates much of the argument about mimetic and mythic culture developed earlier in this chapter. Though myth, by providing a framework for interpreting the world, does give the Kalapalo the “conceptual clarity” of which Donald spoke, Kalapalo ritual remains overwhelmingly mimetic, using wordless music, gesturally rather than linguistically. I chose the Kalapalo as my first example because of the mimetic nature of their ritual, but they are, though perhaps extreme, not unique. Not only is ritual always, by definition, mimetic, myth seldom lacks a mimetic dimension. In describing the formal recitation of myths outside of ritual, Basso emphasizes that though they are not sung (occasionally songs may be interspersed in the recitation), they have a strongly rhetorical (gestural) element. They are performances, rhythmical and poetic, requiring an audience skilled enough to participate with appropriate responses, sometimes with the equivalent of the “amen” with which an Evangelical congregation responds to a sermon, sometimes with questions that spur the reciter to more intense expression.85 If Kalapalo myth recitation, though clearly “speech” and not “music” even in their own classification of sounds, still carries mimetic overtones, so does almost all spoken language, even the driest of academic lectures.

  Thus Kalapalo ritual illustrates Rappaport’s condensed definition of ritual as involving “invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances,” but it also illustrates many of the broader features in his analysis. For our purposes, the most im
portant of these have to do with the creation of social conventions, a moral order, a sense of the sacred, and a relationship to the cosmos, including beliefs about what lies behind the empirical cosmos.86 Rappaport, like most other writers on ritual, is aware of the wide variety of actions that can be classified under this term. One defining feature of ritual for him is performance.87 In his usage of this potentially ambiguous term, performance carries the sense of what is called in the philosophy of language performative speech: something is not simply described or symbolized, but done, enacted. The sheer act of participating in serious rituals entails a commitment with respect to future action, at the very least solidarity with one’s fellow communicants. Thus, as Rappaport uses the term, it would explicitly not be the same as participating in a dramatic “performance,” where the actor sheds the “role” as soon as the performance is over, and the audience, however moved, goes away knowing it was “only a play.“88 On the contrary, serious ritual performance has the capacity to transform not only the role but the personality of the participant, as in rites of passage.89 The fundamental relationship between saying and doing Rappaport sees as establishing “convention in ritual” and the “social contract and morality that inhere in it.” This is the ground, he argues, for “taking ritual to be humanity’s basic social act.“90

  If we can see wordless ritual as mimesis at its most complex, because, through gestures, it comes close to narrative form, we can imagine how potentially liberating a fully linguistic narrative might be. Variations, alternatives, speculations become possible when myth attains a degree of linguistic autonomy, that would be far less possible in the “invariant forms” of ritual, still marked by its mimetic birthplace. The Australians, with their luxuriant development of myth, give evidence of some of these possibilities.

  The Australian Aborigines (The Walbiri)

  As anthropologists have pointed out, there are many tribes, clans, and local groups in Aboriginal Australia, and because particularity is a significant feature of their cultures, to lump them all together is to distort their reality. Still there are common features of Aboriginal culture that contrast with other hunter-gatherer cultures. I will follow a middle path by talking of Aboriginal culture and religion in general to some degree, but will use as my chief example a central Australian desert society, the Walbiri.91 My reasons for choosing the Walbiri are twofold. Although no Australian group has escaped the trauma of alien intrusion to the same degree as the Kalapalo, Walbiri culture was among the most intact of existing Australian groups when studied in the 1950s by M. J. Meggitt and Nancy D. Munn, the ethnographers on whom I am relying most.92 The second reason is that the peoples of the central desert, of which the Walbiri are one, are closer to what Tony Swain calls the “trans-aboriginal `architectonic idea’” than those of other regions vulnerable to a variety of outside contact earlier than the peoples of the central desert.93 I am not at all claiming that the Walbiri represent the ancient, unchanging, “true” Aboriginal tradition-everything we know about Aboriginal culture suggests it was, like all other cultures, always open to continuous change-but rather that the Walbiri and other central desert tribes probably tell us most about what the Aboriginal culture was like 200 years ago, on the verge of contact.

  Unlike the Kalapalo, who lived in a village (although they alternated between summer and winter villages) and combined horticulture with hunting and gathering, the Australian Aborigines were seminomadic hunters and gatherers whose society was organized primarily in terms of locality and kinship. Because intense attachment to specific localities is central to Aboriginal culture, we must understand what it means to be “seminomadic.” As Durkheim noted in Elementary Forms, Aboriginal society alternated in time between smaller foraging groups and larger ceremonial groups, but in neither case did they form permanent villages. They circulated in a fairly stable route among a number of camps that were usually associated with water holes. Very sacred locations that might be uninhabitable most of the year because of extreme drought could become the locus of large ceremonial encampments during the seasons when they were well watered and fertile. What gave people (the word “tribe” is particularly unhelpful in Australia) their identity was their relationship to “country”-to locations to which they had a particular ancestral affiliation-because they believed that they had themselves come from their country and would after death return to it. Thus it is impossible to understand Aboriginal society without getting into ideas that we would call religious.

  In Australia, myth and ritual normally entail each other. Although W. E. H. Stanner has described what he calls tireless myths and mythless rites, he believes that even in these cases the missing partner is The Aboriginal understanding of myth is usually expressed in the term “Dreaming,” although we must use the word with caution. In some central desert groups, including the Walbiri, the word for myth and the word for dream are the same, but this is not the case in many other groups. Even where the word is the same, the Dreaming that takes one into the world of ancestral beings is clearly differentiated from ordinary dreaming. According to Nancy Munn, the Walbiri “use the term djugurba, which also means `dream’ and `story,’ to denote … ancestral inhabitants of the country and the times in which they traveled around creating the world in which present-day Walbiri now The contrast term, yidjaru, denotes the ongoing present or events within living memory. It also refers to “waking experience in contrast to dreaming.“96 To use Schutz’s terms described in Chapter 1, yidjaru might be described as “ordinary reality” and djugurba as “non-ordinary reality.” The Schutzian terms help us overcome the idea that the difference between the two realms is primarily temporal, because although yidjaru refers to the ordinary present, djugurba also becomes present during ritual enactment or even when the myths are told. Tony Swain argues that Aborigines think of their world in terms of “rhythmed events” more than in terms of unfolding or even cyclical time, and that the Dreaming can be seen as a class of events, namely Abiding Events”-formative events that underlie reality without respect to time but are always located in specific places.97

  Swain further argues that the Aboriginal understanding of being is oriented not so much to space (undifferentiated extension within which particular things occur) as to particular places, understood as conscious and alive-as living traces of ancestral beings. An ontology of rhythmic and abiding events occurring in particular places obviates the necessity of thinking about time and history. It thus obviates any idea of cosmogony: the ancestral beings do not so much “create” the world, as Munn puts it, as form the world, for there is no idea of a beginning before creation, or even of creation. The forming activity of the ancestral beings is as much present as past. Swain retrieves an archaic word “ubiety,” “thereness,” to characterize Aboriginal ontology.98 Ubiety so obliterates time that in the Dreaming, past, present, and future are not differentiated: there is only, in Stanner’s apt term, “everywhen.“99 And even life in ordinary existence can be understood as a transition from birth out of the Dreaming to Death as a return into it.

  The emphasis on places is not, however, monadic. The Walbiri idea of country is indicated iconographically by circles, indicating water holes and camps, and lines indicating the tracks between them. Although in one sense the circles are “centers,” they are not seen, as in later archaic societies, as world centers. As Munn puts it:

  It should be noted that this centre symbolism, unlike that of cosmic models in some other cultures, does not refer to the centre of the world as a whole, but only to a single place. Walbiri country consists of many such life centres linked together by paths. There is no single locality that focalizes all the others. Walbiri do not really give conceptual shape to the world as a whole in the sense of a single, centralized structure, but conceive of it in terms of networks of places linked by paths.‘oo

  Fred Myers describes a similar attitude among the Pintupi, a people just south of the Walbiri:

  It is impossible to listen to any narrative, whether it be his
torical, mythological, or contemporary, without constant reference to where events happened. In this sense, place provides the framework around which events coalesce, and places serve as mnemonics for significant events. Travel through the country evokes memories about a fight that occurred at a nearby water hole or a death in the hills beyond. No temporal relation but geography is the great punctuator of Pintupi storytelling …

  Thus the world is socialized by the Pintupi, although they do not build a spatially centered cosmos of domesticated culture and wild nature as many more settled people have done. A social life with so much movement seems to preclude such a construction. Instead, they seem truly at home as they walk through the bush, full of confidence. A camp can be made almost anywhere within a few minutes-a wind break set up, fires built, and perhaps a billycan of tea prepared. Unmarked and wild country becomes a “camp” (ngurra) with the comfort of home. The way of thinking that enables a people to make a camp almost anywhere they happen to be, with little sense of dislocation, is a way of thinking that creates a universe of meaning around the mythologized country.’°’

  Because djugurba (Dreaming) means “story” as well as “myth” (as in mythos, the Greek original of our term “myth”), it is not surprising that even when Ancestral Beings are involved, the stories remain very close to daily life. Of the stories that women frequently tell to each other and illustrate with sand drawings, Munn writes:

  Occasional tales include behavior of an extraordinary kind, such as the transformation of a man into a snake, which Walbiri do not believe happens today; but such occurrences are exceptional. A large part of story behavior consists simply of the action patterns of daily life; food acquisition, mourning rites, ceremonies of various kinds …