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

by Robert N. Bellah

  92. “As all outsiders were from agricultural traditions and came by sea to coastal areas, it follows that the desert interiors of Australia would be the last places to have their old order disturbed. (Thus studies from the Central and Western Deserts written in the second half of this [twentieth] century can sometimes be legitimately said to describe Aborigines having minimal contact with the non-Aboriginal world.)” Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History ofAustralian Aboriginal Being (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 7.

  93. Ibid., 277.

  94. W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, Oceania Monograph 11 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1966), chaps. 4 and 5.

  95. Nancy D. Munn, Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representations and Cultural Symbolism in a CentralAustralian Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 23-24.

  96. Ibid., 24.

  97. Swain, A Place for Strangers, 22. Swain’s italics.

  98. Ibid., 4, 49.

  99. W. E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” in Cultures of the Pacific, ed. Thomas G. Harding and Ben J. Wallace (New York: Free Press, 1970 [1956]), 305. Christian Aborigines who have not been fully acculturated to biblical ideas of time imagine that Adam, Moses, and Jesus were all contemporary, all part of the Christian Dreaming. The idea of Heilsgeschichte, salvation history, has not penetrated their accustomed way of thinking.

  100. Nancy D. Munn, “The Spatial Presentation of Cosmic Order in Walbiri Iconography,” in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Anthony Forge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 214-215.

  101. Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self.• Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 54.

  102. Munn, Walbiri Iconography, 77-78.

  103. Munn, “Spatial Presentation,” 197; Swain, A Place for Strangers, 32.

  104. Swain, A Place for Strangers, 33.

  105. Swain describes how, among one Aboriginal group, “the newborn child is immediately placed in a small earthy depression from which it is then `born’-an act surely stating unambiguously that the child comes not from a mother but from a location.” Ibid., 44.

  106. See Nancy Munn’s description in Walbiri Iconography, 27-31; also Swain’s discussion of kinship and place in A Place for Strangers, 36-49.

  107. Both “Dreaming” and “Law” are English words now widely used by Aborigines. It is interesting that they do not use the word “religion” to refer to their deepest beliefs.

  108. Quoted in Frank Brennan, “Land Rights: The Religious Factor,” in Religious Business: Essays on Australian Aboriginal Spirituality, ed. Max Charlesworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169.

  109. We will find the metaphor of the Way used in many cultures with similar connotations.

  110. M. J. Meggitt, Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 251-252.

  111. Munn, Walbiri Iconography, 44.

  112. The best short treatment of Australian totemism is W. E. H. Stanner, “Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,” in Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, Aboriginal Man in Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965), 207-237.

  113. Meggitt, Desert People, 221.

  114. T. G. H. Strehlow suggests the truth of “totemism” in the very subtitle of his short book, Central Australian Religion: Personal Monototemism in a Polytotemic Community (Bedford Park, S.A.: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1978).

  115. Munn, Walbiri Iconography, 208.

  116. Swain, A Place for Strangers, 69.

  117. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 31-51.

  118. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” 307.

  119. Ibid., 313.

  120. Ibid., 309.

  121. Ibid., 306.

  122. Ibid., 313.

  123. Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), chap. 1; Wilhelm Schmidt, Ursprung der Gottesidee, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Munster: Aschendorf, 1926).

  124. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 10.

  125. Swain, A Place for Strangers, chap. 3.

  126. Ibid., 119.

  127. Ibid., 127-140.

  128. Tocqueville comments on the “instinctive love of country” that held the American Indians to their land: “‘We will not sell the spot which contains the bones of our fathers’that is the first answer they always make to anybody proposing to buy their land.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 323. This passage occurs in volume 1, in the famous chapter 10, “The Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States.”

  129. In this discussion I am relying on Swain, A Place for Strangers, chap. 4.

  130. Ibid., 183-184.

  131. M. J. Meggitt, Gadjari among the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, Oceania Monographs 14 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1966).

  132. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, 40-42, 80.

  133. Ibid., 43.

  134. Ibid., 170.

  135. Ibid., 53.

  136. David H. Turner, “Australian Aboriginal Religion as `World Religion,”’ Studies in Religion 20 (1991).

  137. David H. Turner, Life before Genesis; Turner, Return to Eden: A Journey through the Aboriginal Promised Landscape ofAmagalyuagba (Toronto: Peter Lang, 1996); and Turner, Afterlife before Genesis: An Introduction-Accessing the Eternal through Australian Aboriginal Music (Toronto: Peter Lang, 1997).

  138. Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an AboriginalAustralian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  139. See A. P. Elkin, AboriginalMen ofHigh Degree (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

  140. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion, 20.

  141. Munn, Walbiri Iconography, 16, 147.

  142. Swain in Tony Swain and Garry Trompf, The Religions of Oceania (New York: Routledge, 1995), 109.

  143. Stanner, “Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,” in Berndt and Berndt, Aboriginal Man in Australia, 218.

  144. Robert N. Bellah, Apache Kinship Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).

  145. Marshall Tome, “The Navajo Nation Today,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 9, Southwest, ed. Alfonso Ortiz (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 679-683.

  146. For the most traumatic events in Navajo history, as well as for the capacity of the people to deal with these events, see Robert Roessel, “Navajo History, 1850-1923,” and Mary Shepardson, “Development of Navajo Tribal government,” both in Ortiz, Southwest, 506-523, 624-635.

  147. The term comes from the work of Anthony F. C. Wallace. See his Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), 30-39, 157-166.

  148. David M. Brugge, Navajo Pottery and Etbnobistory, Navajoland Publications set. 2, Navajo Tribal Museum, Window Rock, 1963; and Brugge, “Navajo Prehistory and History to 1850,” in Ortiz, Southwest, 489-501. Brugge suggests that Blessingway was “new” in its structure and function, not that all its elements were new.

  149. What was then called the New Mexico Territory, which included the present states of Arizona and New Mexico, was formally ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848.

  150. An added difficulty is that there are several levels of ritual knowledge and the student trying to understand Navajo religion may not know what level the informant feels it is appropriate to reveal. Maureen Schwarz describes twelve levels of knowledge, each appropriate to particular persons of different age and status. See Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, Molded in the Image of Changing Woman: Navajo Views on the Human Body and Personhood (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 24-33.

  151. Notable among these efforts are Karl W. Luckert, The Navajo Hunter Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975); Guy H. Cooper, Development and St
ress in Navajo Religion (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1984); and, most recently, Jerrold E. Levy, In the Beginning: The Navajo Genesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

  152. Luckert, Navajo Hunter, 133-142. As an example of Luckert’s “pre-human flux” among the Navajo, Maureen Schwarz reports that in the First (underground) World, the male and female beings were not in their “present form” but would later become First Man and First Woman. “The other beings dwelling in this world were thought of as Air-Spirit or Mist Beings. They had no definite form or shape but were to change in subsequent worlds into humans, animals, birds, reptiles, and other creatures.” Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, Navajo Lifeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancient Knowledge (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 12-13.

  153. Luckert, Navajo Hunter, 142-148.

  154. Ruth Fulton Benedict, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America (Menasha, Wis.: American Anthropological Association, 1923).

  155. Although the Navajo do not believe they are born from the land in quite the way the Aborigines do, they have an intense attachment to place. The heroes in the curing ceremonials visit many named places in Navajo country, and some features of the environment are said to be the bodies of monsters slain by Monster Slayer. Keith Basso gives an excellent account of the importance of place among the Western Apache, the Apache group closest in culture to the Navajo, most of which probably applies equally well to the Navajo. See Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

  156. For a helpful comparative analysis of Pueblo and Navajo ceremonialism, see Louise Lamphere, “Southwestern Ceremonialism,” in Ortiz, Southwest, 743-763. 1 made some comparisons between the Navajo and Zuni Pueblo in my contribution to the Harvard Values Study volume. See Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Systems,” in People ofRimrock: A Study of Values in Five Cultures, ed. Evon Z. Vogt and Ethel M. Albert (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 227-264.

  157. Sam D. Gill, Sacred Words: A Study ofNavajo Religion and Prayer (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 84.

  158. Gladys A. Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950), 289.

  159. Gary Witherspoon, Language andArt in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 152.

  160. Reichard, Navajo Religion, 289-291.

  161. John R. Farella, The Main Stalk: A Synthesis ofNavajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 20.

  162. One might better say “absent among the Navajo in the past.” With the establishment of Navajo Community College in 1969 in Tsaile, Arizona, with a branch at Shiprock, and its development of a Navajo Studies Program, with the extensive use of materials written in Navajo, but also in English, the institutional basis for the development of Navajo philosophy and theology in a theoretic direction has been established. It seems to me that although Witherspoon and Farella both recognize the fundamental importance of narrative, their work represents a degree of systematization that reflects the inevitable rationalizing process when Navajo culture becomes conceptually “bilingual.” The work of James McNeley, cited below, can also be cited in this connection. See Gloria J. Emerson, “Navajo Education,” in Ortiz, Southwest, 669-670.

  163. Schwarz, Navajo Lifeways, 10, quoting Rik Pinxton and Claire Farrerr, “On Learning a Comparative View,” Cultural Dynamics 3 (1990): 249.

  164. I will greatly condense the narrative for Blessingway, relying largely on material from Leland C. Wyman, Blessingway (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970).

  165. Ibid., 11-112.

  166. Schwarz, Navajo Lifeways, 19.

  167. Levy, In the Beginning, 73. The Navajo understanding of the positive social function of delousing suggests a vestigial survival of primate grooming among Homo sapiens.

  168. Witchcraft beliefs are widespread among the Navajo, as they are among the Kalapalo and the Aborigines. The basic work on this subject is Clyde Kluckhohn, Navajo Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

  169. Schwarz, Navajo Lifeways, 20.

  170. Witherspoon, Language andArt, 17; Wyman, Blessingway, 398.

  171. Witherspoon gives a close linguistic analysis of the phrase sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh hozho in Language andArt, 17-27. Farella offers what might be called a metaphysical analysis of it in The Main Stalk, 153-187.

  172. Farella, The Main Stalk, 66-68.

  173. On completeness, ibid., 181; on wind, James Kale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981); on kin, Witherspoon, Language and Art, 88, where he speaks of “the Navajo ideal of relating to everyone as a kinsman.”

  174. Schwarz, Molded in the Image, 235.

  175. Wyman, Blessingway, 8.

  176. Gill, Sacred Words, 56, citing Katherine Spencer, Mythology and Values: An Analysis of Navaho Chantway Myths (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1967). See also her Reflection of Social Life in the Navaho Origin Myth, University of Arizona Publications in Anthropology 3 (1947).

  177. Schwarz, Navajo Lifeways, particularly chap. 3, “The Holy Visit of 1996.” Schwarz gives voice to some of the more somber warnings in her brief conclusion, chap. 7, “Final Thoughts.”

  178. The most extensive work on Navajo Peyote has been done by David F. Aberle. He estimates that 40 to 60 percent of Navajos were adherents of the Peyote religion in 1972. See his “Peyote Religion among the Navajo” in Ortiz, Southwest, 558. The fullest treatment of the subject is Aberle’s The Peyote Religion among the Navajo, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 42 (New York, 1966).

  179. It should be remembered that the Navajo, the Walbiri, and perhaps by now the Kalapalo, live in a symbiotic relation with societies with an advanced theoretic culture. For example, in the case of the Navajo and the Aborigines, a working relation has developed between medical doctors and native curers so that each refers to the other cases they feel they cannot treat. Modern education, to which tribal peoples are increasingly exposed, is also a conduit for theoretic culture. In the case of the Navajo the emphasis on bilingual education helps keep the traditional culture alive, but the inevitable dominance of a theoretic approach, particularly at the community college level, even in the Navajo Studies Program, suggests that there is no way to preserve mythic culture in a watertight compartment.

  4. From Tribal to Archaic Religion

  1. Frans B. M. de Waal, “Apes from Venus: Bonobos and Human Evolution,” in Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Evolution, ed. de Waal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 62.

  2. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  3. Ibid., 147, 163.

  4. Ibid., 10-11.

  5. Ibid., 60.

  6. Whether modernity represents still another turn (this time a downward turn in the degree of despotism) is a matter we can postpone until a later chapter.

  7. There has long been an argument over whether Herrschaft, as Weber uses the term, should be translated as “legitimate authority” or “domination.” In terms of my argument, depending on context, either translation could be appropriate. Further, though we usually use the term “domination” for the rule of the stronger, it does derive from the Latin word dominus, “lord,” often used for “the Lord God,” just as God in German is termed Herr Gott. Domination and legitimate authority are indeed hard to separate empirically.

  8. It is possible that both are found even among the primates. There is a debate over whether the alpha male chimpanzee, for example, provides any services useful to the group as a whole, or is only enhancing his own procreative chances. To the extent that the alpha male provides some leadership in the hunt and in conflict with other chimpanzee bands or breaks up fights between lower-ranking chimps, he can be seen as providing services to the group.

  9. Fred R. Myers, Pintupi
Country, Pintupi Self (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 22-23.

  10. Ibid., 224.

  11. Ibid., 240.

  12. Ibid., 255.

  13. Ibid., 246.

  14. Ellen B. Basso, A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 255. For more on the anetau, see Ellen B. Basso, The Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 132-153.

  15. Basso, The Kalapalo, 132.

  16. Basso, Musical View, 256.

  17. Basso, The Kalapalo, 132.

  18. A good place to begin if one wanted to consider these issues among the Pueblos would be Peter M. Whitely, Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988). Whitely finds that, in spite of previous ethnographic emphasis on Hopi egalitarianism, it is a rank society, divided between elite and commoners, the elite being defined by religious knowledge and ritual leadership. The highest ritual leader functioned as the village chief (similar to Tikopia below), but had no coercive power and made decisions in consultation with other clan and ritual leaders. As among the Kalapalo (and Tikopia), the differentiation into an elite and a commoner class, according to Whitely, was “unmarked by economic differences” (70).

  19. Patrick V. Kirch and Roger C. Green, Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in HistoricalAnthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  20. Firth had the good fortune to live in Tikopia for two years (1928-1929) when the traditional culture, and particularly the traditional religion, was still functioning. Tikopia is thus arguably the best ethnographically documented of any Polynesian society. Firth’s most famous book is We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (New York: American Book Company, 1936), but several other books of his will be cited below. We have the further good fortune that Tikopia has been the subject of an excellent archaeological study, Patrick V. Kirch and Douglas E. Yen, Tikopia: The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1982).