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

by Robert N. Bellah

  Although Navajo healing ceremonies purport to focus on “the patient,” the individual is not singled out for treatment. Instead, as Harry Walters notes, the “whole sphere” within which the patient is intimately connected on the personal, social, and cosmic realms is treated. “In the ceremony you don’t just treat the physical being, you treat the mental, plus the spouse, the children, the household, the livestock, you know, the air that the patient is going to breathe, the earth that he is going to walk on, the water he is going to drink, the fire that he is going to use. Everything, you know, like you’re, in this sphere you are one individual. So the treatment is to treat all of those, the whole sphere.“174

  Even Blessingway, whose uses include far more than curing, requires “one sung over” even if the purpose is preeminently for “the whole sphere.” As Wyman says, no matter what the occasion, the aim is “for good hope,” “to avert potential misfortune, to obtain the blessings which man needs for a long and happy life.”

  Blessingway practice therefore embraces birth and adolescence, the home or hogan, weddings, maintenance and acquisition of properties, protection against accident … No other ceremonial in the Navajo system offers the native assistance in every walk of life as Blessingway does … Its ritual is simple. It adapts itself to any emergency, dream, fancy, human frailty.175

  When we consider the relation between Navajo sacred narratives and ethics, we will discover that they present an explicit moral code no more than do those of the Aborigines. The Holy People neither give moral injunctions nor act as moral exemplars: if they teach, it is as often by what they do wrong as by what they do right. Nonetheless, again as in the case of the Aborigines, the narratives do serve not only to make sense of the world but to provide a conception of moral order. Sam Gill, drawing on the pioneering work of Katherine Spencer, puts it well when he says that the sacred stories “serve as a guide to the moral life”:

  Where in the era of creation the concern is with the establishment of proper places and relationships for things in the world, the era of the origin of the ceremonials is concerned with how one lives in that world. It deals with the boundaries of both places and relationships. It deals with the relationships which are necessary for life, such as the relationships between hunter and game, between a man and wife and women who are not his wife, between in-laws, between the living and the dead, between a Navajo and a non-Navajo, between a person and the plants and animals in his environment, between Earth Surface People and Holy People. The stories which tell of this era define the Navajo way of life. They deal with life in progress through time and across space. They test limits and thus reinforce those limits.‘76

  In her valuable book Navajo Lifeways Maureen Schwarz shows how Navajo religion as embodied in the sacred narratives is still the source of meaning for Navajos today. She gives a number of instances in which the Navajo bring an active interpretation of the myths to the understanding of difficulties they are facing, difficulties dating mainly in the 1990s. The outbreak of the deadly hantavirus epidemic in the Four Corners region killed a number of Navajo. This outbreak was interpreted as a return of the “monsters” of mythical time, whose devastation could be countered only by a return to traditional Navajo forms of behavior and an increase in performances of Blessingway. Relocation of Navajos from land that had been judged as belonging to the Hopi, illnesses arising from uranium mining, and the continued plague of alcoholism were further instances where the application of understandings derived from the myths helped in dealing with current challenges. Perhaps the most interesting instance arose from an “appearance” of two Holy People to a woman in a remote part of the reservation. Though many, including some top officials of the Navajo Nation, used this apparition as a stimulus for ethnic renewal and ethnic pride, leading to an unprecedented development of the pilgrimage of thousands to the site of the appearance, others pointed out that Navajo sacred narratives explicitly say that the Holy People, though they are all around us, will remain unseen. They further criticized the notion of pilgrimage and offerings at the pilgrimage site, when the proper thing to do is to give offerings in the sacred places near where one lives. This lively hermeneutical controversy gave evidence of the continued vitality of the tradition, though it also gave occasion for some warnings that the true tradition is being lost, with possibly devastating consequences.‘77

  What is remarkable is that with the increasing use of English by young people, who mainly work in nontraditional occupations, and with inroads by a variety of Christian denominations, including the Mormons, as well as the Native American Church (Peyote),178 the old ceremonial pattern survives as well as it does, attracting many of those who have ostensibly adopted other religions. Perhaps its history has given Navajo religion the flexibility to survive even under great challenge. The strong Pueblo component has provided a coherence to the narrative and ritual that more fragmentary hunter-gatherer religions in North America seem to lack. But the very fact that the tradition, though Puebloized, has not been pinned down to the specificities of calendrical time and particular place-that a Puebloized religion has remained portable, as it were-gives it the capacity for a continuing flexible response to the many difficulties that Navajo people face. If Navajo intellectuals, working with extensive written texts, develop the “Navajo philosophy” that is already in part implicit in the oral tradition, there is no predicting what the future may hold.

  Out of the enormous range of possibilities, I have chosen three to provide examples of how cultures, even today, can be organized primarily through narrative rather than theory, and how ritual, and its inescapably musical base, continues to provide primary meaning. The Navajo, indeed all three cases described in this chapter, suggest that cultures organized primarily in terms of ritual and myth can be effective in the present world, and that we must treat them as equals from whom we have much to learn.‘79 Even when theory becomes centrally important, as we will see, ritual and myth survive in surprisingly vital new forms. But before considering that, and to better understand how humans have gotten from mythic culture to theoretic culture, we need to see how narrative and ritual have coped with problems presented by much larger and more stratified societies than those we have considered so far, and bent but did not break as they did so. For that we must turn to societies that have moved beyond hunter-gatherer egalitarianism toward differentiations of power.

  The culture of ritual and myth described in Chapter 3 will eventually come in for dramatic attack-antiritualism and demythologization-from those seeking a more universal answer to the question of meaning (although the attackers themselves will never entirely escape from ritual and myth), but now we must consider how the resources for the production of meaning developed in tribal societies can be expanded to deal with much larger and more stratified societies through the development of new forms of ritual and myth, new understandings of the relation between cosmos, society, and self. These new understandings stretch the resources of ritual and myth to the breaking point but do not transcend them.

  The Disposition to Dominate

  In small-scale societies such as those we considered in Chapter 3, differentiations of power and status were minimal-but not lacking. If we now want to understand how ritual and myth help to organize large-scale societies, we can begin by looking more carefully than we have done so far at the differences of power and status that exist even in small-scale societies. But first we must consider what is most striking about small-scale societies-huntergatherers, but also many horticultural and pastoral societies-namely, how egalitarian they are. If we put Homo sapiens in evolutionary perspective, this is hardly what would be expected. All our nearest relatives, the several species of great apes, are more despotic than egalitarian, though we have seen that the chimpanzees have a qualified despotism. That is, they have status hierarchies that rank-order individuals from the strongest, the alpha male, or in the case of the bonobos, the alpha female, to the weakest. Chimpanzees and gorillas rank all males above all females; the b
onobos rank females higher than males, but this doesn’t make them less despotic or quasi-despotic, because they too have a clear status hierarchy. Among the chimpanzees, the alpha male not only on occasion physically abuses weaker males, he attempts to monopolize mating opportunities, mating promiscuously with the females in the band and preventing as far as possible the other males from mating at all. Under these conditions nothing like the family as we know it is possible. At most one can speak of long-term solidarities between mothers and children and some solidarity between siblings, but there is no continuing relation between parents and no significant relation between fathers and children.

  For all that we have in common with the chimpanzees and the bonobos, our form of family is indeed different. Frans de Waal has summarized succinctly the main differences: “Of three main characteristics of human society-male bonding, female bonding, and the nuclear family-we share the first with chimpanzees, the second with bonobos, and the third with neither … Our species has been adapted for millions of years to a social order revolving around reproductive units-the proverbial cornerstone of society-for which no parallel exists in either Pan species.”’ What accounts for this difference? The absence of a disposition for dominance? Not likely. Rather, a different kind of society has made possible a different kind of family. Here I want to draw on the work of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, particularly his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.2 Boehm argues that we share with the chimpanzees and the bonobos a tendency toward despotism, that is, a disposition toward dominance. We also share with them two further dispositions, the disposition to submit when it looks like confrontation is likely to fail, and the disposition to resent domination once one has submitted.’ But, Boehm asks, if we are a species with despotic tendencies, that is, a strong disposition to dominate whenever possible, how is it that the simplest known societies, namely the nomadic hunter-gatherers, are uniformly egalitarian, and probably have been so for thousands if not millions of years? Boehm’s answer is not that huntergatherers lack dominance hierarchies, but that they have what he calls “reverse dominance hierarchies”-that is, the adult males in the society form a general coalition to prevent any one of their number, alone or with a few allies, from dominating the others. Male egalitarianism is not necessarily extended to females-the degree to which females are subject to male despotism varies, even among hunter-gatherers. But what the reverse dominance hierarchy prevents is the monopolization of females by dominant males, and what it therefore makes possible is the family as we know it, based on (relatively) stable cross-gender pair-bonding and mutual nurturance of children by parents, precisely what is missing in our closest primate relatives.

  Boehm insists that human egalitarianism does not come easily, that it is not the absence of the disposition to dominate; rather, it requires hard, sometimes aggressive, work to keep potential upstarts from dominating the rest. Egalitarianism is a form of dominance, the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each. The hunter-gatherer band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition for the family as we know it. Boehm summarizes: “There appear to be two components of this kind of egalitarian social control. One is the moral community incorporating strong forces for social conformity … The other ingredient is the deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males.“5 I would add ritual as the common expression of the moral community without which the process of sanctioning would make no sense. Boehm is especially good on the way the sanctioning works. Potential upstarts are first ridiculed, then shunned, and, if they persist, killed. Boehm describes in detail how this system of increasingly severe sanctions works, with examples from every continent. He is perhaps less good at what I think is equally necessary, that is, the strong pull of social solidarity, especially as expressed in ritual, that rewards the renunciation of dominance with a sense of full social acceptance.

  Everything in Chapter 3 helps us understand what happened. When Boehm describes the essential basis of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism as the emergence of a moral community, he is pointing to what mimetic and mythic culture made possible. In this moral community, powerful norms negatively sanctioned despotic behavior and protected the family. Although culture is the key resource making such a reversal possible, Boehm insists that the reversal is not quite what it seems. Despotic tendencies in human beings are so deeply ingrained that they cannot simply be renounced. We did not just suddenly go from nasty to nice. Reverse dominance hierarchy is a form of dominance: egalitarianism is not simply the absence of despotism, it is the active and continuous elimination of potential despotism.

  But if egalitarianism is virtually universal among small-scale societies, how is it that with chiefdoms and particularly with the early state we seem to have a return of despotism more ferocious than anything to be seen among the great apes? There is a U-shaped curve of despotism-from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the reemergence of despotism in complex societies-that needs to be explained.’ Why the long history of egalitarianism based on the reverse dominance hierarchy came to an end in prehistoric times with the rise of despotic chiefdoms and early states, and why despotism, though challenged, has continued to some degree ever since, is a question we must address in this chapter.

  Although hunter-gatherers have, on the whole, successfully checked upstarts, subsequent human history is peppered with successful upstarts. Manyone thinks of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Mussolini, among others-came to a bad end, though some died in bed. The tendency of upstarts to try to monopolize females and undermine the family is illustrated by the ancient Hebrew upstart David, who took Bathsheeba to wife and had her husband killed, although Machiavelli warned potential upstarts not to fool with other men’s wives as that can spark instant rebellion. For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding of moral community and new ritual forms to express it, so that despotism becomes legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it, a consideration that leads to the next step in my argument.

  In order to understand why this U-shaped curve is not quite what it seems, we need to make a distinction between dominance (or despotism) and hierarchy, terms that get elided in most discussions-an elision that is hard to avoid, but that needs to be avoided if we are to understand what really happened. I want to use dominance (despotism) to describe the straightforward rule of the stronger and hierarchy to describe status differences that are actually sanctioned by the moral community-that is, I want to define hierarchy as legitimate authority.? It is part of the central paradox of human society that dominance and hierarchy have gone together from the beginning.8 Even though they always go together it is important that we separate them analytically. Boehm’s term “reverse dominance hierarchy” contains both elements: moral community justifies the hierarchical element (the group over the upstart), and the ultimate sanction of violence against the upstart has an inescapable element of dominance.

  I want to turn to the Australian Aborigines to consider how hierarchy and dominance work out in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society with which we are familiar from Chapter 3. Rather than discuss hierarchy among the Walbiri, however, I will consider a neighboring Western Desert group, the Pintupi, among whom Fred Myers has considered hierarchy more extensively than have any of the ethnographers who have worked with the Walbiri. Myers places his discussion of hierarchy in the context of the three major patterns of Pintupi social life. One is what he calls “relatedness,” which he defines as “extending one’s ties with others outward, being open to claims by others, showing sympathy and a willingness to negotiate.” Relatedness is essential for hunter-gatherers, among whom the isolated nuclear family would be far too fragile to survive for long. The second major pattern is autonomy, an unwillingness to be imposed on by others, and in particular an assertion of the ability of adult men and women to conduct
their family affairs as they wish. The third major pattern, which serves to mediate the inevitable tensions between the first two, is the Dreaming itself, a pattern of myth and ritual that has an authority that transcends the wills of individuals and provides stability in the midst of the constant renegotiation of which Pintupi society is composed. Myers emphasizes that Pintupi society is not by nature corporate, with discrete boundaries of membership. Relatedness extends far beyond local camps but consists of one-to-one ties more than common membership. It is only ritual and the norms that ritual affirms that create anything like region-wide solidarity.

  Though adults will defend their autonomy to the point of violence if necessary, there is one kind of authority that is always acceptable. Those who “look after” others, who “hold” them as a nursing mother holds her infant, have, at least within certain spheres, legitimate authority. Myers specifies the spheres of such legitimate authority: “Far from being absolute, such authority is situated primarily in the domains of ritual, sacred sites, and marriage where older persons can look after younger ones by passing something to them. In these particular domains, elders have considerable power over their juniors, but outside these areas, social relations are more egalitarian, access to natural resources remains relatively free, and there is no monopoly of Pintupi will always agree that one will have to “listen to” fathers and mother’s brothers, who have “taken care” of one since infancy. But more generally, it is not only senior members of one’s close family who have authority; it is elders in general, insofar as they “take care” of the younger generation by handing on to them the legacy of the Dreaming. Myers sums up how such handing on reconciles autonomy and authority: