Ancestral Religion

Some questions raised by Wade's Chapter 5,
“Ancestral Religion”

The survival value of religion becomes much clearer if we go back to its earliest forms.

• The first signs of burials and art (both of which imply ritual process) appear in Europe around 45,000 years ago – but little other evidence has survived.
• We need to look at the rites of living hunter gatherers to learn about ancient religious practices.
• (Primitive peoples put so much importance on carrying out rites exactly as their forbears did, that religious practices are handed on with great fidelity.)

Ethnologists have studied the religious practices of three ancient peoples – the Andaman Islanders, !Kung San, and Australian Aborigines.

• These tribes’ religious practices may stem from a common source: the religion practiced before modern humans left Africa.
• Primitive religions have no hierarchy; they are practiced by the whole community.
• Rituals are characterized by rhythmic physical activity (as described in chapter 4).
• Sacred narratives convey moral or practical lessons relevant to the community’s survival.
• These narratives are integrated into rituals, and are not the focus of religious practice.
• Primitive religions focus on practical issues, not theology: initiation rites; problems of survival such as healing, hunting, and control of the weather; settling feuds between people in dispute.

The first ethnographers compared primitive religions to the religions of civilized societies.

• Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, never lived among primitive people, but still concluded that religion reflects a society’s authority.
• Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of modern social anthropology, argued that to understand other societies one had to live among the people.

Anthropologists assumed that all social activities are culturally determined, not inherited:

• Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States, assumed that all complex human activities are socially determined, not hereditary.
• Boas’ students insisted that all aspects of human life can be explained in terms of culture.

Evolutionary biologists have only recently established some of the principles that underlie human social organization.

• Evolution is the bedrock theory of biology, and humans are part of the biological world.
• Excluding heredity, genetics and evolutionary biology from any explanatory role in human affairs is scientifically unjustifiable.
• Human nature is not a blank slate on which only culture has influence; many aspects of human nature and behavior are shaped for survival by natural selection.
  

In retrospect, anthropologists and sociologists tackled the problem of religion’s origin too early, before more fruitful approaches became available. Nonetheless, it was the achievement of social anthropologists to have recorded and analyzed many features of primitive religions before they were eroded by modern western culture.