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B-Side Spirituality: An Empathetic Theory of Religion and Ethnographic Data About Spiritual (but Not Religious) Belonging
Abstract
According to some cognitive and neuroscientific theories, religion is not an evolved adaptation but rather an artifact, one that may lead to adaptive behaviors. Here I relate (a) an empathetic theory of religion with (b) a functional theory of musicality to clarify religion’s adaptive features. This theory contributes to previous research by explaining the link between spirituality and music and makes the nontrivial prediction that increasing numbers of people who are disaffected by traditional religious institutions will find modes of meaning-making and fellow-feeling in contemporary festival and live music scenes.
Zusammenfassung
‚Musik‘ ist ein elementarer, wenngleich wenig erforschter, Bestandteil religiöser Praxis. Daher wird in den aktuellen Stand der Religionsmusikologie als Teildisziplin der Religionswissenschaft sowie den neueren Forschungsstand eingeführt. Dieser wird anhand der zuvor aufgestellten Kriterien einer musikphilosophisch grundierten Arbeitsdefinition von Musik auf seine religionswissenschaftliche Haltbarkeit überprüft. Anhand der hierin festgestellten Desiderata sowie Monita wird daraufhin programmatisch entworfen, was die Religionsmusikologie für die Religionswissenschaft leisten kann. Hierfür wird die Bezugsdisziplin Musikwissenschaft sowie ihre relevanten Teildisziplinen inklusive der kulturwissenschaftlichen Atmosphärenforschung herangezogen, um einen Impuls für die religionswissenschaftliche Erforschung von Musik in religiöser Praxis zu liefern. Ausgehend von der Arbeitsdefinition von Musik als affektive Kommunikation, welche anhand etischer Termini intersubjektiv zugänglich gemacht und analysiert werden kann, wird dafür plädiert, einen diskursiven Ansatz zu wählen. Die intentionale Nutzung von Musik wird somit als klanglich-kommunikativer Aspekt religiöser Praxis anerkannt, dem – gemäß der Komplexität des Phänomens – mit einem breiten methodischen sowie theoretisch fundierten Instrumentarium begegnet werden muss, welches aus den musikwissenschaftlichen Bezugsdisziplinen geschöpft werden kann.
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archaeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution due to their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.
Although the term "shamanic" is used to refer to a diverse range of phenomena, it nonetheless reflects something empirical. Cross-cultural research illustrates that the concept of the shaman reflects the existence of similar spiritual healing practices found in pre-modern foraging and simple horticultural and pastoral societies around the world (Winkelman, 1992; 2000). This cross-cultural concept of the shaman was initially proposed by the renowned scholar of comparative religion, Mircea Eliade (1964). However, his various characterizations of shamans were in part responsible for subsequent confusion regarding their exact nature and function. While offering very general characterizations of the shaman as someone who entered a state of "ecstasy" to interact with "spirits" on behalf of the community, Eliade also cited many additional specific concepts of the shaman which some subsequent researchers neglected in their applications of this term. This paper presents the findings of cross-cultural and crossspecies research that provides a basis for describing shamanism, its relationships to human nature, and its deep evolutionary origins. Shamanism has its bases in innate aspects of human cognition, engaging the use of altered states of consciousness to integrate information across several levels of the brain to produce visual symbolism exemplified in visionary experiences. The deeper evolutionary roots of shamanism are found in the capacities for ritual, which provide the most important communication and integrative processes in lower animal species. The evolution of shamanism can be deduced from these bases and the similarities of shamanic practices to the rituals of chimpanzees. Drumming, group vocalization, and other displays were the foundations from which the uniquely human mimetic capacity evolved and provided a basis for shamanism.
The concept of cultural evolution was fundamental to the foundation of academic musicology and the subfield of comparative musicology, but largely disappeared from discussion after World War II despite a recent resurgence of interest in cultural evolution in other fields. I draw on recent advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution to clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in musical evolution, and review literature relevant to musical evolution ranging from macroevolution of global song-style to microevolution of tune families. I also address criticisms regarding issues of musical agency, meaning, and reductionism, and highlight potential applications including music education and copyright. While cultural evolution will never explain all aspects of music, it offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding diversity and change in the world’s music.
Drawing on the five-fold revision of the concept of “worldview” offered by the issue editors, I investigate whether some nonreligious modes of cultural production might be profitably investigated using such a typology. In my comparative study of religious and secular sustainability-oriented social movements I offered skeletal definitions of the categories “religion” and “sustainability,” and suggested ways in which public deployments of such terms might offer fertile ground for collaboration between individuals and groups with different value sets. In more recent work among particular rock music and festival scenes, I have found it necessary to offer a dramatically different understanding of the category “religion.” In a sort of thought experiment, I imagine whether the revised concept of “worldview” might be applicable, and indeed whether it offers some advantage over the category “religion.” My conclusions are that in general, in some cases the category of worldview may have some advantages, but it may also gloss over or ignore important cultural contestations over terms such as religion, and at best underplay important affective activators of belonging and identity. The notion of “ways of life,” or “lifeways” may offer a term which avoids some ethnocentric impositions, but would require greater elaboration to be broadly useful to ethnographers.
Significance
Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.
Significance
Which features of music are universal and which are culture-specific? Why? These questions are important for understanding why humans make music but have rarely been scientifically tested. We used musical classification techniques and statistical tools to analyze a global set of 304 music recordings, finding no absolute universals but dozens of statistical universals. These include not only commonly cited features related to pitch and rhythm but also domains such as social context and interrelationships between musical features. We speculate that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.
We conducted a limited exploratory study of the origins of children’s aesthetic and spiritual values in their experience of the natural world. We relied on a mix of research methods, including in-depth interviews, drawings, diaries, and observational studies of children, as well as conversations with parents about their children and their own childhood. Even though confident conclusions cannot be drawn from this study given the relatively small sample size, a number of preliminary results emerged that suggest the role of nature in the development of children’s aesthetic and spiritual values. These included children’s articulation of an aesthetic sense of beauty, pattern and order, wonder and discovery; and the expression of such spiritual attributes as feelings of solace and peacefulness, commonality and connection, happiness and feeling at one with and at home in nature, a power greater than oneself, and a sense of divine presence or mystery.
In this paper, we consider the idea that religion is a transsomatic adaptation. At the genic level, the religious system constitutes an extended phenotype that has been fashioned by natural selection to overcome socioecological challenges inherent in human sociality, primarily problems of cooperation and coordination. At the collective level, the religious system constitutes a cognitive niche. We begin our discussion focusing on the former and concentrate our attention on the “sacred coupling” of supernatural agency and ritual behavior. We detail the complex connections between genes, cognitive faculties, and their expression in religious contexts, followed by a discussion of how religious ritual functions to maintain relative social order. We conclude with a discussion about the relevance of niche construction theory for understanding the adaptive nature of religious systems.
Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. Here we describe the behavioral ecological approach to religion. We explain the theoretical motivations behind behavioral ecological research and discuss the methodologies employed to conduct this research. We argue that despite its limitations, behavioral ecology can offer important benefits to religious scholarship by providing a coherent and powerful framework for generating, testing and discarding hypotheses about specific aspects of religious behaviors and cultures.
The following reviews recent developments in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and argues for an adaptationist stance.
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Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (the availability of literacy has little impact on this). But why do some rituals exploit the first of these variables while others exploit the second? McCauley and Lawson advance the ritual form hypothesis, arguing that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing evidence from cognitive, developmental and social psychology and from cultural anthropology and the history of religions, they utilize dynamical systems tools to explain the recurrent evolutionary trajectories religions exhibit.
Behind its theoretical and scientific ambition, Pascal Boyer’s work mobilizes several ideas and notions (starting with that of “religion”) that belong to the old Western cultural tradition. It is precisely this ideological substratum and its indispensable cognitive “crutches” that this article seeks to identify.
Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our analyses revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.
The study of moral intuition has come to incorporate several disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, and moral psychology. Despite its interdisciplinarity, the study of moral intuitions nevertheless remains centered on investigations of emotional
cognition and evolved cognitive modules. Yet, there are difficulties in focusing so strongly on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie moral intuitions and so minimally on the social conventions that engender them. Furthermore, it is not clear that all moral intuitions reduce to evolved cognitive
modules, as many leading theories purport. To address these concerns, we advance the discussion of moral intuitions by building on research concerning moral foundations theory. However, in contrast to most moral foundation theorists, who emphasize modularity, we emphasize the role of social
conventions in the development of moral intuitions. We specifically argue that within religious communities some moral intuitions emerge from the dynamics of the religious system itself, rather than from a set of evolved cognitive modules. By advancing this argument, we discuss the advantages
and implications of the religious system for the study of moral intuitions.
The theory of mind hypothesis is the basis by which biologically based theories of religion typically explain beliefs in supernatural agents and, in turn, religion. Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that social cognition also involves the mirror neuron system and simulation. This paper summarizes these advances and offers an additional hypothesis regarding the neurological basis for supernatural agents and religion. According to this hybrid hypothesis: religion’s neurobiological basis is (1) the mirror neuron system and simulation based processes, which respond to expressive objects in the natural environment and produce embodied knowledge that imply sentience, and (2) inferential knowledge-based systems, which interpret these intuitions in terms of beliefs in animism and/or supernatural agents. This hypothesis places the mirror neuron system and simulation based processes (i.e. processes conjectured to underlie a direct embodied form of empathy) in an instigating role, and places inferential knowledge-based systems in a secondary, albeit crucial, role. Consequently, this hypothesis is an empathic theory of religion. Moreover, these processes are hypothesized to have selective value insofar as they help small-scale cultures manage their natural resource base more sustainably.
Every summer, thousands gather from around the world in the blistering heat of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for the seven-day celebration of art, community, and fire known as Burning Man. Culminating in the spectacular incineration of a wooden effigy, this festival is grand-scale theater for self-expression, personal transformation, eclectic spirituality, communal bonding, and cultural renewal. In this engrossing ethnography of the Burning Man phenomenon, Lee Gilmore explores why “burners” come in vast numbers to transform a temporary gathering of strangers into an enduring community. Accompanied by a DVD, which provides panoramic views of events, individuals, artworks, and, of course, the climactic final night, the book delves into the varieties of spirituality, ritual, and performance conducted within the festival space.
Cultural things, it is argued, are distributions of representations in a human population, ecological patterns of psychological things. To explain cultural phenomena is, then, to develop an epidemiology of representations. For this, representations have to be viewed not as abstract, but as concrete objects which can be of two forms: they are either mental representations inside brains, or public representations in the environment of brains. Just as an epidemiology of diseases has to be rooted in individual pathology, an epidemiology of representations has to be rooted in cognitive psychology. Drawing on a distinction between dispositions and suceptibilities, the relevance of this epidemiological approach to several domains of anthropological research (folk concepts, religious beliefs, oral narratives and institutions) is briefly discussed.
controversies have focused on the thesis that perceptual and linguistic decoding processes are modular, much more than on the alleged nonmodularity of thought / defend the view that thought processes might be modular too / articulate a modular view of human thought with the naturalistic view of human culture that [the author has] been developing under the label "epidemiology of representations" / show how, contrary to the received view, organisms endowed with truly modular minds might engender truly diverse cultures (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Th e primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. Th e dominant position in the fi eld is that religious beliefs and behaviors are byproducts of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and coordination. Here I survey fi ve critiques of the adapationist position and off er responses to these critiques. Much of the debate can be resolved by clearly defi ning important but ambiguous terms in the debate, such as religion, adaptation, adaptive, and trait, as well as clarifying several misunderstandings of evolutionary processes. I argue that adaptationist analyses must focus on the functional eff ects of the religious system, the coalescence of independent parts that constitute the fabric of religion. Keywords Adaptation, byproduct, evolution of religion, cognitive science of religion Th e fi rst question to be addressed by any evolutionary approach to religion is whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct of adaptations designed for other purposes. Lee Kirkpatrick, 2008 In January 2007, scholars from around the world gathered in Hawaii to attend the fi rst International Conference on the Evolution of Religion. Th e conference brought together scholars with diverse academic backgrounds and widely dis-parate views on the application of evolutionary theory to explain religion (Bulbulia et al., 2008). Th e conference served as a venue to present the latest research on the evolution of religion, but more importantly, it provided an opportunity for intense discussions about the primary challenges facing this emerging area of study. One of the most heated topics of discussion concerned whether or not religion should be considered an adaptation or a byproduct.
One of the great intellectual battles of modern times is between evolution and religion. Until now, they have been considered completely irreconcilable theories of origin and existence. David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral takes the radical step of joining the two, in the process proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations. The key, argues Wilson, is to think of society as an organism, an old idea that has received new life based on recent developments in evolutionary biology. If society is an organism, can we then think of morality and religion as biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than mere collections of individuals? Wilson brings a variety of evidence to bear on this question, from both the biological and social sciences. From Calvinism in sixteenth-century Geneva to Balinese water temples, from hunter-gatherer societies to urban America, Wilson demonstrates how religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could do alone. He also includes a chapter considering forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective and concludes by discussing how all social organizations, including science, could benefit by incorporating elements of religion. Religious believers often compare their communities to single organisms and even to insect colonies. Astoundingly, Wilson shows that they might be literally correct. Intended for any educated reader, Darwin's Cathedral will change forever the way we view the relations among evolution, religion, and human society.
Thesis--Columbia University. Bibliography: l. 484-494. Microfilm. s
This book provides an introduction to the cognitive science of religion, a new discipline of study that explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas and behavior on the basis of evolved mental structures and functions of the human brain. Belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology - in powerful, often hidden, processes of cognition that all humans share. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book describes ways in which evolution by natural selection molded the modern human mind, resulting in mental modularity, innate intelligences, and species-typical modes of thought. The book details many of the adapted features of the brain - agent detection, theory of mind, social cognition, and others - focusing on how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead people to naturally entertain religious ideas, such as the god concepts that are ubiquitous the world over. In addition to introducing the major themes, theories, and thinkers in the cognitive science of religion, the book also advances the current discussion by moving beyond explanations for individual religious beliefs and behaviors to the operation of culture and religious systems. Drawing on dual-process models of cognition developed in social psychology, the book argues that the same cognitive constraints that shape human thought also work as a selective force on the content and durability of religions.
“Dancing My Prayers: Material Culture and Spiritual Practices of Improvisational Rock Music Subcultures.”
- Johnston
“Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists’? Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature.”
- Kelemen
“A Well-Disposed Social Anthropologist’s Problems with the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion.’”
- Laidlaw
“Meaningless Surveys: The Faulty ‘Mathematics’ of the ‘Nones’”
- Ramey and Miller
“Diggers, Wolves, Ents, Elves and Expanding Universes: Bricolage, Religion, and Violence from Earth First! And the Earth Liberation Front to the Antiglobalization Resistance.”
- Taylor
“Religious Studies as a Life Science.”
- Bulbulia
“Primate Spirituality.”
- Goodall
“What Happens When We Name the Nones,”
- Ramey
- St. John