New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective 9781474252102, 9781474252133, 9781474252119

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New Patterns for Comparative Religion

Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation Series editors: Luther H. Martin, William W. McCorkle and Donald Wiebe Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation publishes cutting-edge research in the new and growing field of scientific studies in religion. Its aim is to publish empirical, experimental, historical and ethnographic research on religious thought, behaviour, and institutional structures. The series works with a broad notion of scientific that includes innovative work on understanding religion(s), both past and present. With an emphasis on the cognitive science of religion, the series includes complementary approaches to the study of religion, such as psychology and computer modelling of religious data. Titles seek to provide explanatory accounts for the religious behaviors under review, both past and present. Religion in Science Fiction, Steven Hrotic Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion, Radek Kundt The Mind of Mithraists, Luther H. Martin The Attraction of Religion, edited by D. Jason Slone and James A. Van Slyke

New Patterns for Comparative Religion Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective William E. Paden

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YOR K • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © William E. Paden, 2016 William E. Paden has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4742-5210-2 978-1-3500-5789-0 978-1-4742-5211-9 978-1-4742-5212-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paden, William E., author. Title: New patterns for comparative religion : passages to an evolutionary perspective / William E. Paden. Description: New York : Bloomsbury, 2016. | Series: Scientific studies of religion: inquiry and explanation | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016016225 (print) | LCCN 2016016371 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474252102 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474252119 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474252126 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Religion–Methodology. | Evolution–Religious aspects. Classification: LCC BL41 .P33 2016 (print) | LCC BL41 (ebook) | DDC 210–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016225 Series: Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents

Acknowledgments Publication History Introduction Part 1 Rethinking and Redirecting Classical Resources 1 2 3 4 5

Before “The Sacred” Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy Durkheim’s Reconciliation of the Social and the Religious Sacred Order World The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism

vii viii 1 17

19 33 45 63 81

Part 2 Some New Levels for Cross-Cultural Patterns

93

6 7 8

95

9

Elements of a New Comparativism Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations Theaters of Worldmaking Behaviors: Panhuman Contexts for Comparative Religion Comparison in the Study of Religion

107 121 139

Part 3 Responses to Evolutionary Sciences

161

10 Connecting with Evolutionary Models: New Patterns in Comparative Religion? 11 Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion

163 177

vi

Contents

12 The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects 13 The History of Religions and Evolutionary Models: Some Reflections on Framing a Mediating Vocabulary

197 215

Epilogue

229

Notes Index

235 251

Acknowledgments I have several people to thank for their roles in different phases of this project. First, my appreciation goes to Professor Emeritus Luther H. Martin, my astute colleague and conversation partner since the 1960s at the University of Vermont Department of Religion. Over the half century that I have known him, starting in graduate school, Luther’s adventures into a succession of realms of theory, though not identical with mine, supplied an exciting dialogical atmosphere for thinking about the intellectual foundations of the academic study of religion. As co-editor of this series, it was his encouragement that moved me to submit the proposal to Bloomsbury that was to become this book. I could also take on this project because of Steven Hrotic’s offer to help with manuscript preparation. Steven is a former student of mine, a PhD in Cognitive Anthropology, and is himself an author in the present series. His editorial assistance was extensive and invaluable and I am hugely grateful to him. There are others I would like to mention, as well. On evolutionary matters, both Joseph Bulbulia and David Sloan Wilson opened new avenues for me and encouraged the development of my ideas. Aarhus University scholars Armin Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen have made similar “passages” as described here and as such became collegial models along the way. Over the years, I have benefited richly from discussions on the phenomenology of “life-worlds” with departmental philosopher and friend, Richard Sugarman. And, I would like to express appreciation to those religion scholars who, as editors, had invited me to contribute articles to their books, where most of the following chapters first appeared. Their individual names are included in the sources listed below. My wife, Natasha, has supported and encouraged me at every stage over the fifty years together that we have just celebrated. From her own wonderful subject matter as a concert pianist she knows well the language of themes and variations, chordal structures, and patterns transforming through time. Finally, I wish to thank the following, respective publishers for their kind permission to reprint the articles that became the chapters of this book.

Publication History Chapter 1. “Before ‘the Sacred’ Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 3(1) (1991): 10–23. Also in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 198–210). Studies in the History of Religions, vol. LXII. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Chapter 2. “Durkheim’s Reconciliation of the Social and the Religious”; orig. as “The Creation of Human Behavior: Reconciling Durkheim and the Study of Religion.” In Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (pp. 15–26). Studies in the History of Religions, vol. XCII. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. Chapter 3. “Sacred Order.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(1/2) (2000): 207–225. Earlier version, “Sacrality as Integrity: ‘Sacred Order’ as a Model for Describing Religious Worlds,” in Thomas A. Idinopolus and Edward A. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 3–18). Studies in the History of Religions, LXXIII. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. Chapter 4. “World.” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 334–348). London: Cassell, 2000 [now Bloomsbury/Continuum]. Chapter 5. “The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism.” In Bryan Rennie (ed.), Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade (pp. 249–259). Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001. Chapter 6. “Elements of a New Comparativism.” In Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (pp. 182–192). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. © 2000 by the Regents of the University of California. Chapter 7. “Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations.” Numen 48(3) (2001): 276–289. Chapter 8. “Theaters of Worldmaking Behaviors: Panhuman Contexts for Comparative Religion.” In Thomas Idinopulos, Brian C. Wilson, and James C. Hanges (eds.), Comparing Religions: Possibilities or Perils? (pp. 59–76). Studies in the History of Religions, vol. 113. Leiden: Brill, 2006.

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Chapter 9. “Comparison in the Study of Religion.” In Peter Antes, Armin Geertz and Randi Warne (eds.), New Approaches to the Study of Religion, Vol. 2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological and Cognitive Approaches (pp. 77–92). (Religion and Reason Series, v. 43.) Berlin: Verlag de Gruyter, 2004. Chapter 10. “Connecting with Evolutionary Models: New Patterns in Comparative Religion?” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith (pp. 406–417). London: Equinox, 2008 [now Routledge]. Chapter 11. “Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion.” In Peter B. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (pp. 31–47). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. By permission of the Oxford University Press. Chapter 12. “The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects.” In Armin W. Geertz (ed.), Origins of Cognition, Culture and Religion (pp. 82–97). Durham, U.K. and Bristol, CT: Acumen, 2013 [now Routledge]. Chapter 13. “The History of Religions and Evolutionary Models: Some Reflections on Framing a Mediating Vocabulary.” Revised from Donald Wiebe and Panayotis Pachis (eds.), Chasing Down Religion: In the Sights of History and the Cognitive Science—Essays in Honor of Luther H. Martin (pp. 337–350). Thessaloniki, GR: Barbounakis Publications, 2010 [now Equinox].

Introduction

The following essays show some of the major steps, tracks, and turns I have pursued in thinking about comparative religion over the last two decades. Published in diverse venues, the essays are brought together here in one volume not only because I think they retain analytic or exegetical value individually, but because as a set they tell a story with a certain trajectory—that of an emerging evolutionary perspective. I have organized them here to show the progressive thematic routes making that evident. I came to teach at the University of Vermont Department of Religion in 1965 with a strong interest in the history and phenomenology of religion, sometimes called Religionswissenschaft, a tradition I still respect and have tried to integrate into wider perspectives as the decades passed. Today, our common knowledge of the world is marked more explicitly by the idea of evolution as we transition from religious histories to evolutionary, “deep” time and all that entails (Smail 2008; Martin 2014). I began to think that this should have a profound effect on how we think of religious life and the so-called science of religion. That said, as a pluralist at heart, I do not think evolutionist terminology is the only way to “read” religion; but I do think that it can bring out thematic dimensions, insights, and connections that will serve and augment our discipline as we inhabit the current century. Surely deep time should be part of the picture for us. We have always looked to adjacent fields and sciences for updated interpretive frameworks. It remains, though, that this book is first and foremost about comparative religion—its patterns, discourse, and interpretive frames—with evolutionary motifs as a connective and emergent subtheme. For a religious phenomenon is not just of interest because it is “there.” It is of interest when it signifies something to us, when it connects with something intelligible to us. This is why the history of the study of religion has involved

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so many explanatory enterprises, whether within the language of religion or in the language of academic sciences. In that latter sense, whether through gender studies or neuroscience, postcolonial theory, or rational choice theory, religion takes on new aspects in new contexts and for new audiences. In this Introduction, I offer an overview of what for me are the major themes and turning points represented in the collection. After that, I explain the particular role each chapter and section of the book plays in the story.

Turning points: Religion in the state of nature From worldviews to environments and habitats For me the phenomenological notion of one’s “world”—meaning the horizon of cues to which one responds—was becoming resonant with the idea of environments, and thus a gateway for thinking in terms of natural, ecological history. For example, in traditional religious studies and anthropology, one tries to understand the worlds of others from the inside out: that is, by learning their languages, categories of perception, practices, styles of value—and by listening to their own accounts of themselves and their myths, even living with them. One attempts to see the world through the eyes of the other. In a way, such worlds are the primary data that religion scholars try to explain or understand. Gradually, this classical, Verstehen-inspired idea of doing justice to the realities of others was starting to sound something like the work of behavioral ecologists who spend lifetimes figuring out the detailed life-world of a particular species. The phenomenologist’s “listening to the insider’s point of view” and the biologist’s attentiveness to the communicative signals of a pigeon or the life cycle of a hive were taking on a salient connectedness. If all organisms make their spaces and inhabit what they have built, and then act variously according to the shifting cues of the surroundings, is this not also a model for thinking of human actors as performers within their social and religious canopies? Such questions were starting to work their way; my conceptual network was expanding as I watched the culture versus nature distinction fading away. “World,” here, for cultural enclaves, was beginning to correlate with what biologists called niche construction—environments that organisms build, like

Introduction

3

beaver dams, which in turn put selection pressures on certain traits. Human worldmaking, with its webs and mounds of language and sociality, its hives of mythic imagination and ritual forms, its astonishing technologies, was coming to seem like part of a most ancient process indeed, in spite of its obvious, dramatic difference from the works of other life-forms. In these ways, the notion of multileveled, scaled environments and environmental niches was helping fill out my initial ideas about religious worlds. For environments would include not just general differences of beliefhorizons between groups, but also every “horizon” within a religious culture— such as a ritual—that impinges on individuals and that prompts responses. This means that for us in religious studies these life-worlds are not just physical, economic, or geographical surroundings, but also mental and imaginary realms. They include thought-forms of every kind: ancestral dreamscapes, voices of invisible spirits and ancestors, gods and demons, sacred protocols and practices. As environments, they shift from moment to moment and day to day; they are not just passive, fixed systems of group “beliefs” but also inputs that may impose themselves with the appearance of agency and urgency.

Comparative patterns: From culture-level topics to human-level behaviors Several of the essays here respond to the postmodernism in the early 1990s which challenged the traditions of comparativism. Critics claimed that crosscultural generalizations about religion were too theologically embedded and too Western, and that they suppressed the contexts of cultural differences. The idea of human universals and “the psychic unity of mankind” had become terms of derision; using English-language concepts to describe common features among all cultures was seemingly an unreflexive fool’s errand; nothing, the axiom went, is the same—all cultures are unique. If you want to compare anything religious, you will find yourself in a thicket of incomparables. Better just to study one culture (or one aspect of it) in depth, and get rid of grand, universalizing schemas. One of my responses to these concerns was to look for points of comparability at the level of human behaviors—verbs, as it were, instead of nouns—rather than at the level of cultural meanings. This meant looking at

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wider, generic actions, including things groups “do” such as transmit mythic pasts and ritualize life passages. There would be thousands of things humans and human groups do common to the species, and while many might seem obvious or trivial, they could still serve as points of comparison within the rich cultural examples that encompass them. So I was moving to this more generic level of observation in the process of thinking about how comparison works and thus also backing into the circle of evolutionary perspective. The shift from the realm of cultural topics to the realm of actions general to the human condition, and the enlarged idea of what is included in those actions, coincided with my readings in human ethology—the evolutionary study of behavior—and the prospect of expanding the repertoire of behaviors with which it normally deals (such as mating, aggression, foraging) to include religious behaviors. No “grand narratives” that suppress the data? So wait a minute. In fact our species is very much involved in a grand schema: the human race and its evolution; the natural history of a wild, creative human descended from phylogenetic lineages and heir to mental and social biases—with modifications, of course—over an enormous expanse of time. I believe we cannot exclude that level of our situatedness and behavioral commonality any more than we can exclude all those local cultural styles. And do not all humans and their groups share certain brain-based endowments, including their array of deeply social dispositions, along with the otherwise diverse shapings of cultures? In an embryonic sense, this behavioral approach was present as a dimension in my first book, Religious Worlds (1988, 1994 [2nd edn.]). There I took worldmaking as a common meta-behavior of what religious traditions do, though with no particular evolutionary reference. The idea was that religious cultures build their worlds in typical ways. I described four such behaviors: grounding life in the events of a sacred history or tradition, enacting periodic ritual displays, interacting with supposed superhuman beings, and monitoring systems of purity/impurity and right/wrong. In each case, I offered numerous illustrative cultural variations on such themes, showing how these common activities became embodied and distinctively expressed in local settings and values. Basic, but I still think this theme-andvariation model works.

Introduction

5

The impetus of new evolutionary and cognitive sciences of religion Meanwhile, over these last two decades, an impressive movement of evolutionary and cognitive scientists had begun to apply their frameworks to explaining religion (e.g., E. O. Wilson 1999, Boyer 2001, Atran 2002, D. S. Wilson 2002, Richerson and Boyd 2005, Dennett 2006, Martin 2014). I began to form my responses to these and explore ways that we in our religious studies field could integrate some of their insights, just as we had done in the past with other adjacent human sciences. I had always been intrigued—and amazed— by evolutionary time and what it might have to show us as we step back from local or “folk” ways of thinking and contemplate the unlikely larger parade of species with its equally improbable human theaters. Now, with much media and scholarly attention, the question was becoming a challenge: how is religion part of that theater and which cohorts of the sciences and humanities are in a position to decipher its evolutionary scripts and patterns? The cognitive science of religion had become a recognized field. I had some new tasks and adventures, along with a ton of homework, on my hands. Many evolutionary models point out that our brains developed especially to process social information. Our ancestors would have found it strategic for survival to pool resources for foraging, hunting, defense, information sharing, and child rearing. Evolutionists think that over countless generations we humans thereby adapted ourselves for living together—and that from this “in-group mutualism” based on sharing was generated not only language and the capacity to invent better tools but also more effective dispositions for cooperation, fairness, empathy and care, loyalty, respect, honor, and reciprocity. And we can add to that: the various forms of collective knowledge, cognition, and technologies … and religious worldviews. We not only invented spear points and ultimately villages and cities but also created systems of social messaging. Evolutionary science had come to this richer view of a heritable human, social psyche, replacing the limited “nature, red in tooth and claw” model. Nature now seemed much more interesting and promising when seen to entail emergent, culturally creative life-forms. The older view that to speak of evolution was to reduce human life to primitive forms seemed hopelessly outdated; the brave new world image seemed more apt, at least to me.

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“Evolution” was of course a word common among comparative religion writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It should be clear that my use and understanding of the word differs. Then, it typically meant tracing the origin and development of religious ideas from so-called primitive fetishism and animism to supposedly “higher” forms of monotheism. Theirs was really a story about cultural and religious progress—from savagery to civilization. By contrast, current evolutionist models, as referenced here, typically focus on the phylogenetic, ecological history of the way acquired social and mental dispositions or biases condition religious behaviors and traits. In reading through the material on evolutionary models of religion, I was attracted most to what they showed about social behaviors, not only about habitat building, but also about the phenomena of communicative signaling, including display behaviors, and the power of in-group markers and bonds. I found these to be among the most relevant connections with natural history and potentially profound mechanisms for understanding religious piety. All organisms, whether fireflies or Popes, signal in one form or another through rather endless kinds of media. Whatever else it is, the organic universe, as we have become so much more aware today, is a flow of information exchange, even among the bacteria in our bodies and the trees in the woods. For its part, religious life seems to fit right into this. It is replete with demonstrative communication—whether sending or receiving, for example, between people and spirits. As in nature, display behavior relies on strong messaging statements in stereotypic, recognizable form. The messages, often costly or extreme, communicate social virtues of various kinds to others, for example, one’s sincerity, trustworthiness, loyalty, holiness or any form of virtue, piety, or belonging. Many theories of religion explain gods as ways humans assign causes of things, but my main interest was in gods as interactive forms of social behavior, of exchange relationships. This appears throughout many of the following chapters where I typically take the term “gods” as shorthand for interaction with supposed superhuman beings of any kinds—ancestors, souls, spirits, buddhas, saints, demons and witches, and any genre of a god in the more common sense. I take this now as my basic way of characterizing “religion” as an area of culture: gods, among other things, would here be extensions of our

Introduction

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innate sociality and irrepressible communicative needs to send and receive information about our welfare. Finally, human sociality is also manifest in commitments to “one’s kind,” another evolutionary trait. Biologists had pointed out various ways that animals favor their genetically or environmentally related group— but whether for the sake of the genes, or the group, or the gene pool of the group, this bias seems to be an ancestral human heritage. It is interestingly applicable to religious groups, where in many traditions individuals see their essence or soul conveyed in or bestowed by the sacred symbols, rites, and gods of one’s tradition of place or ancestry, whether blood-based or not. This would underscore why mythic lineages are so sacred and defining in religion. Surrogates of “kind,” such as a nation, team, military unit, labor cohort, sorority, or ethnic affiliation, can trigger altruism, cooperation, and related virtues and depend upon “recognition behavior” displays. Once again, religious traditions can be brought into evolutionary frames—where, from bacterial “communities” to many of the colonies, herds, and packs of animals, working and sticking together has proven essential for success and survival. My shift to a Durkheimian framework, as will be shown in these essays, had given me a basis for appreciating the connection of “kind” and certain notions of the sacred. It seems to me therefore that the cross-cultural study of religious behaviors is the conspicuously missing part of the so-called Religion/Evolution confrontation. Surely we are not in the dialogue just to supply a variety of creation myths beyond the famous biblical account. Rather, with our global, historical perspective, we in comparative religion are positioned to point out that patterns of religious behavior are themselves part of the subject matter when exploring how we have evolved as social beings. For instance, what if, for our human species, transmitting accounts about the sacred foundations of one’s world is itself a natural niche-building behavior for holding one’s group together—and thus apiece with survival-fitness? This is quite a different framing than the old debates about whether creationism or science can best account for the overall existence of the world and its metaphysical design. Those are a few examples of how I was taking in parts of an evolutionary perspective. Accordingly, “nature” was taking on a much expanded meaning, not just as something contrasted with human culture (forests and plants,

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nonhuman life, what we see marked off in parks and zoos) but as something including culture—with ourselves as players in it. I saw nothing demeaning here about our phylogenetic descent and the emergence of distinctive human capacities and imaginative social habitats over time. Any form of emergence, whether a Devonian fish becoming a Nobel Prize winner, or even the humble, ontogenetic egg becoming an adult, seems plenty dramatic, if not magical and surreal.

The essays: Trajectories, passages I have organized the chapters into three parts: Part One, “Rethinking and Redirecting Classical Resources”; Part Two, “Some New Levels for CrossCultural Patterns”; and Part Three, “Responses to Evolutionary Sciences.” Here I briefly introduce some of the specific steps and tracks that each part and essay show for purposes of this book.

Part One: Rethinking and Redirecting Classical Resources Here (Chapters 1–5) readers will see historical and exegetical transitions underway, partly by moves toward a Durkheimian paradigm. The transitions also include some fresh interpretations of Eliadean notions of worlds. My construal of both these traditions shows how my thinking about religion was becoming naturalized and my idea of the sacred decentered and sociologized. The two Durkheim chapters span a decade and show a substantial change of outlook: the first tries to bring Durkheim out of his isolation from the field of religious studies and the second takes up his more comprehensive idea of social behavior as a source of religion. Two other selections in this part, “Sacred Order,” and “World,” are expositions of concepts that are pivotal for the book’s overall themes. All in all, readers will see how I take up certain classical questions, figures, and concepts that nevertheless then start to become directed toward the larger perspective outlined in this book. Chapter 1, “Before the ‘Sacred’ became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy,” first published in 1991, was a key step for me. It showed that before discarding the classic idea of “the sacred,” which was then

Introduction

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entwined in classical hermeneutics, we would profit by revisiting how Émile Durkheim used the term from his secular point of view prior to the Eliadean era. Durkheim had been off limits for ordinary religionists because of his supposed reductionism, and his polarization of “sacred/profane” had earned the skepticism of anthropologists who argued that real societies don’t divide up the world into those two zones. I try to clarify both issues and argue that it is time to be moving forward with our reading of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life with its several versions of how the category of sacrality is fundamental to much religious behavior. Chapter 2, “Durkheim’s Reconciliation of the Social and the Religious,” makes a telling contrast with the preceding chapter. Published in 2002, it reveals a major transition in my thoughts about Durkheim over the preceding ten years. Whereas I had previously bracketed his claims about the social source of the sacred, here I pay attention to his more capacious idea of society, understood to be the generator of all the roots of civilization, whether religious or scientific. In a sense, Durkheim’s “society” can be construed as in accord with my expanding notion of “nature.” Chapter 3, “Sacred Order,” develops a notion of how religious traditions protect themselves from violation through various codes for honor, purity, authority, role identity, and the like. In essence, sacred order is what upholds one’s world. Here the sacred is the act of treating certain things as inviolable, with defensive strategies of self-preservation and survival taking on continuities with the life-space and self-maintenance behaviors found in the natural world, including threat control, homeostatic regulation, and other immunological mechanisms of a social kind. Chapter 4, “World,” is another conceptual model that formed a bridge to notions of habitations and environments. In this essay, religious studies readers can see how the classical notion of worldviews, which more or less dealt with fixed beliefs and their contents, is to some extent moving toward the more flexible, existential view of worlds as pivoting horizons cuing behaviors. It also shows the strong influence of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), with its emphasis on the constructed nature of worlds, on my work. Chapter 5, “The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism,” is my take on how we can go forward with certain features of this notorious historian of religion’s work. I critique the standard dismissive

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interpretation that Eliade must only be understood alongside Rudolf Otto and the religious phenomenologists and point out some of his connections with the Durkheimian traditions. Some of his ideas are about perennialist symbols, yes, but some are about behaviors, for example, the imitation of mythic models; such themes may add to our understanding of structured ways humans behave in religious environments.

Part Two: Some New Levels for Cross-Cultural Patterns Chapters 6 through 9 trace the development of my ideas about comparativism over several years. They show a sequence of thinking about cross-cultural patterns, pivoting from the cultural level of comparison to the human-species level, and exploring increasing linkages with ethological and evolutionary levels and motifs of analysis. Chapter 6, “Elements of a New Comparativism”—based on a 1990 American Academy of Religion meeting paper and modified for publication in 2000—focuses on the viability of comparison after a postmodern age and advocates reconstructing the similarity/difference polarity on a more controlled canvas. Comparison always assumes something in common between the things compared, which then allows difference to be seen relative to the common theme. As well, the essay emphasizes that a key element in comparison ought to be an awareness that descriptive themes are always limited to an aspect of the phenomenon. The chosen point of commonality, the chosen theme or pattern, cannot represent the whole of the example that is picked to illustrate it. Chapter 7, “Universals Revisited,” makes my most straightforward case for using types of human behavior rather than cultural topics as points for comparison. For this, I was much inspired by anthropologist Donald Brown’s Human Universals (1991) and ethologist Robin Fox’s notions of a grammar of behaviors (1989). The chapter argues that we need to think of behavior as including group behaviors, which will thereby connect with what Durkheim and others construed as the bases for the elementary forms of religious life, such as ritual renewal of a mythic past. And it argues that thinking and believing, often distinguished from behavior in other contexts, can also be considered as behaviors themselves.

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Chapter 8, “Theaters of Worldmaking Behaviors,” continues the idea of panhuman behavioral dispositions but makes the move toward a specific evolutionary framework. I describe features such as “kin” recognition, stereotypic displays, reciprocal actions, status deference, and navigating environments—as points of correlation between religious and biological realms, and thus among some “new” patterns for comparative religion. Finally, Chapter 9, “Comparison in the Study of Religion,” surveys the general state of comparativist thinking surrounding the field at the time of publication (2004), including the exceptional, pace-setting analyses of Jonathan Z. Smith. I include this review here partly as a backdrop for contextualizing my ventures with the notion of panhuman patterns.

Part Three: Responses to Evolutionary Sciences Three of the chapters in Part Three (Chapters 10, 12, and 13) were originally invited opportunities to take up the claims and possibilities of the new cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion. The Durkheim essay (Chapter  11) gave me a chance not only to review his relevance again but also to do so in the  context of my interests in evolutionary frameworks. As mentioned, these were becoming vigorous in the early 2000s, but even before that, the published version of Walter Burkert’s Gifford Lectures, The Creation of the Sacred (1996), had had a decided effect on me. In situating such behaviors as hierarchy, rank, reciprocity, and communicative signs in the landscape of evolutionary perspective, from the point of view of a distinguished historian of religion, the book showed a connection with biology and the traditional study of religions that was fresh and revealing. Other early influences were E.O. Wilson’s Consilience (1999), which argued for the integration of humanistic and scientific knowledges, and biologist David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral (2002): a bold, sustained analysis of the study of religious systems as adaptive forms of group cooperativeness. Meanwhile, the cognitive science of religion movement was being advanced and given research settings by a number of religious studies scholars (e.g., Geertz 2004, Pyysiäinen 2004, Bulbulia et al. 2008) and becoming an exciting movement that could not be ignored. For their part, the cognitivists emphasized the many inferential, microprocessing programs that human brains had acquired as adaptations

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in the distant past and how religious life built itself as a by-product of them (Boyer 2001). Examples include dispositions and triggers for agency detection, memory retrieval, cheater detection, coalitional behavior bias, social reciprocity, awareness of other minds, and pollution avoidance. The idea was that the human mind is not, as often believed, a blank slate, but is full of inherited programs. For example, culture works as it does because of the brain’s wiring, not the other way around. Yet as it turned out, other cognitivists began to take seriously how culture affects genetic evolution (the so-called “dual inheritance” theory), wanting to show that there can be topdown influences and behavioral constraints from the side of culture and social histories (Richerson and Boyd 2005). These chapters show ways I began to respond to the above movements directly and identify levels of analysis commensurate with my interest in religious cultures and the integration of biological, cognitive, and social models of behavior. Essentially, I argue that we need to take the embodied effects of social and mythic environments into account for the study of religion as that is where religious life is played out. I did accept the pertinence of the cognitivist idea that the mind/brain has a highly heterogeneous nature, full of variegated subsystems, as religious activity is not driven by homogeneous motivations and responses but constitutes a bundle of disparate and situational behavior biases. Chapter 10, “Connecting with Evolutionary Models: New Patterns in Comparative Religion?” (2008), pulls together a fairly succinct overview. As such, some readers may even find it a useful starting point for the present volume. Chapter 11, “Reappraising Durkheim for the Study of Religion,” was written in the context of my emerging evolutionary interests, making connections with Durkheim’s ideas of sacred group identity, or identity of “kind,” and generally reviewing his most relevant contributions to the notion of sacrality. Chapter 12, “The Prestige of the Gods,” was based on my plenary talk at the 2006 conference on The Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. It focuses on a particular theme, prestige attribution and bias, first showing some of its phylogenetic continuities but mostly describing the way status display or “prestige ethologies” come to permeate religious groups and behaviors, including the enhancements of value that are intensified

Introduction

13

and transmitted in the processes of mythicization and ritualization. Prestige systems then take on a rich life of their own, distributing their currency in the forms of sacredness, charisma, and empowerment. This concept seems to me to account for large swaths of religious life and piety. Chapter 13, “The History of Religions and Evolutionary Models: Some Reflections on Framing a Mediating Vocabulary,” published in 2010, was a Festschrift article for Professor Luther H. Martin, a religion scholar and editor of this series who has worked on integrating cognitive science with his historical studies. The essay steps back and reviews on a broad scale the relevance of evolutionary models for those in the field of religious studies. It pulls together many of the ideas of the preceding essays and is an exercise in stocktaking for what can be gained by evolutionizing our vocabulary. What we can do, I claim, is build bridgeworks, not just as a concession to science, but also as a way to add more dimensionality and intelligibility to our understanding of religion’s richly diverse behaviors. I recommend that to redescribe religious behaviors as improvising upon the course of social evolution becomes “part of a perennial pursuit of frames that help organize and decipher an otherwise chaotic mass of data” (Chapter 13, p. 215). *** Readers should know that I am aware of what a limited part of the subject I have addressed in these essays. They may be construed as sketches, possibilities, forays. As for evolution, I claim only the basic notion of descent from prior animal ancestries with accompanying modification of genomic and phenotypic traits over biological time. It will be obvious that I am not equipped to deal with the technical side of evolutionary theory, including population genetics. Rather, the point has been to show how my thinking about comparative religion has itself evolved to the point of close encounters with evolutionary models in a general sense. Ontological discourse—which, in my view, comes down to taste and commitments—I leave aside. I do not see myself as advocating a particular school of “metaphysical naturalism.” If anything, I see the evolutionary frame as subduing and humbling the presumptiveness of totality thinking and claims. I am more interested in the human capacities and forms of religious life that emerge from natural history. My use of the term “nature,” then, is as a frame

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that may help expose connections otherwise overlooked, and not as a term for an order whose limits we know or can pin down in advance—or even explain by single concepts and metaphors. I am aware that not every reader will choose to take on these chapters in sequence—hence, these introductory explanations and outlines may serve as pointers and guides to sections and topics of most potential interest. I have kept the original essays intact, with only a modification of word or sentence here and there in the interests of clarity or editorial judgment. I have not tried to omit some of the overlapping content nor attempted to add updated references. In the Epilogue, I reflect on where this material has brought me and suggest some concepts that I have found particularly fruitful since these essays were first published.

References Atran, Scott. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyer, Pascal. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Brown, Donald. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bulbulia, Joseph, Richard Sosis, Erica Harris, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, and Karen Wyman (eds.). (2008). The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, & Critiques. Santa Margarita, CA: Collins Foundation Press. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. Fox, Robin. (1989). The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Geertz, Armin. (2004). “Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion.” In P. Antes, A. W. Geertz, and R. Warner (eds.). New Approaches to the Study of Religion, Vol. 2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological, and Cognitive Approaches (pp. 347–399). Berlin: Verlag de Gruyter. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co.

Introduction

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Martin, Luther H. (2014). Deep History, Secular History: Historical and Scientific Studies of Religion. Religion and Reason Series, vol. 54. Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Paden, William E.. (1994). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press. Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. (2004). Magic, Miracles, and Religion: A Scientist’s Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Richerson, Peter L. and Robert Boyd. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Smail, Daniel Lord. (2008). On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley : University of California Press. Wilson, David Sloan. (2002). Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books.

Part One

Rethinking and Redirecting Classical Resources

1

Before “The Sacred” Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy

We should also need to know what constitutes these sacred things … Here we have a group of phenomena which are irreducible to any other group of phenomena. Émile Durkheim (1975: 88) Critics have objected that the concept of the sacred as used in Eliadean phenomenology of religion is too theological and ontological to be appropriate for modern religious studies (e.g., Segal 1989; Penner 1990: chap. 1). They claim that the expression “the sacred” refers either implicitly or explicitly to an a priori religious reality—to an object that is transcendent, mysterious, wholly other, unknowable, and which therefore is not ultimately an object for analysis. Thus the linchpin concept that once defined, unified, and inspired the history of religions field—that to some extent gave it a reason for existing— appears now to divide it into opposing camps. On the surface, the division seems to have something to do with those who would imply some religious privilege for “the sacred” and those who would like to abandon the term and its overtones. Because much of the current debate about the irreducibility of religion is epitomized in this question of discourse about the sacred, this chapter examines some of the pre-Eliadean uses of the term among the Durkheimians, exploring how the question of irreducibility posed itself before “the sacred” became reified, and then drawing some contemporary conclusions. For Durkheim, “the sacred” (le sacré) is not synonymous with a transcendental, mysterious, unknowable object of religious experience. It is not a term for mystery, power, force, or mana. It is not an object at all. It is

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certainly not divinity, nor is it something that “manifests” itself. It is most certainly not the Wholly Other. In fact, Durkheim primarily uses the term as an adjective, as in “sacred things” (les choses sacrées). Here, it is not a term of revelation but an index of a system of behavior and representation which follows its own rules.1 Even apart from Durkheim’s sociological explanations, it is an intelligible category of description. Yet it was not Durkheimian language which was to form the predominant model of the sacred (or the holy) in modern religious studies. Rather, this happened through the work of those like the English anthropologist R. R. Marett2 and the Scandinavian religionists Nathan Söderblom and Edvard Lehmann. Whether from the anthropological or theological side, these and their descendants adopted “mana” as a prototype for “the sacred” or “the holy,” making such expressions synonyms for the supernatural object to which religious behavior was the response. Thus Söderblom (1913, 1914) and Lehmann (1914) construed religion as a set of patterned responses to “the holy” and had published works on this before Otto’s 1917 classic Das Heilige—forming a trajectory that was to become the mainstream phenomenology of religion movement. It is this second, object-oriented approach to the sacred that may be called the theological or supernatural model, and might as well be called the “mana model.” In it, “the sacred” is the name for the transcendent reality to which religious experience points and to which it responds. This mana model is the one that has come under criticism. The Durkheimian paradigm, though, sees the sacred not as a religious object but as a category of world classification and ritual behavior. And because Durkheim’s le sacré belongs in a different theoretic universe than Otto’s Das Heilige, this has ramifications for interpreting Eliadean categories—which are under some debt to the French school—and for interpreting the reductionism issue generally.

Rereading Durkheim on the sacred It may be hard for historians of religion to read Durkheim with fresh eyes, without the religionist frames that have pigeon-holed him and dismissed him

Before “The Sacred” Became Theological

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as a sociological reductionist. While everyone knows his definitions about the polarity of the sacred and the profane, few appear to have systematically analyzed his extended terminology on this or have identified the various linguistic and conceptual matrices in which he refers to le sacré. It is ironic that so many historians of religion have ignored the Durkheimian material, since it is precisely the French school that established the irreducibility of the category of the sacred and gave it such systematic elaboration. To begin, it is important to distinguish two different and alternating discursive contexts in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1965): the descriptive and the explanatory.3 In the first, Durkheim is concerned to establish and describe the existence of religious facts or phenomena. Sacredness is such a fact. It is part of the special nature and structure of religious data, a representation that is different in kind than other forms of valuations. But it is at a second, causalistic level that Durkheim tries to explain the data of the sacred by exposing its origins in the chemistry of collective power and symbols. Thus Durkheim’s method is first to describe religion, and then explain it; first characterize religious beliefs and practices, and then show their origin; first depict sacredness as a phenomenon, and then account for it in terms of collective consciousness; first point to the nature of religious experience, and then “the reality at the bottom of the experience.” While part of Durkheim’s initial, formal definition is that religions are group affairs, at that early point in the book this is not yet in itself an explanation, only an ostensibly descriptive characterization. Only later in the argument will Durkheim explain how collective life is the actual source of religion. Likewise, in his first chapter on ritual (in Part III), Durkheim provides a systematic, in many ways phenomenological, account of the logic and dynamics of the sacred/profane relationship, with little mention of sociological concepts until the end of his analysis. The descriptive value of this material on the nature of incompatible worlds easily stands on its own, independent of his concluding attempts to explain asceticism in terms of the subordination of individuality to social ideals or to account for the “contagiousness” of sacredness in terms of the fluidity of collective imagination. The 1898 treatise on sacrifice by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1964) had already created a prototype for analyzing the structure of a religious

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phenomenon prior to analyzing it sociologically. The essay focused on the formal structure and processes of the ritual negotiation of sacred and profane realms, and only in the last three paragraphs did it add the suggestion that religious facts should ultimately be seen as social facts. Unlike the condescending approach of Frazerian rationalism, for Hubert and Mauss the realm of the sacred here and in other places becomes a range of material not to be dismissed as primitive but to be impartially respected and systematically investigated. Co-creators with Durkheim of the Année approach to the sacred,4 they wrote in a time which antedated the split between the so-called phenomenology of religion and sociology, and certainly saw themselves as general students of the “science of religious phenomena.” If the essay on sacrifice represents the first nontheological, systematic use of the concept of the sacred/profane as a polarity of worlds or symbolic domains,5—a concept Durkheim later adopted—we should also note that the terms “sacred” and “profane” here are not intrinsically sociological and explanatory, but descriptive, structural, and even emic—obviously drawn from the grammar and vocabulary of religion (like the term “sacrifice”) and in turn reflecting its internal behaviors.

Elementary forms of Durkheim’s concept of the sacred There are two facets of Durkheim’s terminology to distinguish and consider here. In each, sacredness is understood as an irreducible factor in the description of religious life. In the first and widest usage, sacred objects are those that are separated from ordinary contact. In the second, “sacred” and “profane” are a reciprocal pair understood to represent the poles of either a separative or transformative process.

Sacred things By far the most prevalent use of the term “sacred” in Elementary Forms is not as a noun but as an adjective—most typically in Durkheim’s favorite expression, “sacred things,” but also in “sacred objects,” “sacred beings,” or the “sacred character” of a thing. Such phrases constitute the vast majority of all occurrences of the term. These generic expressions underscore the point that

Before “The Sacred” Became Theological

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the nature of the objects that are sacred is completely incidental to the fact that they are sacred to some group. That certain things are sacred to a culture is an accessible, visible observation of behavior; the content of what is sacred is a different matter and is “infinitely varied in relation to different periods of time and different societies …” (Durkheim 1975: 87). As early as his 1899 essay “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” Durkheim maintained that logically prior to any concept of gods is “a vast category of sacred things” which are the nuclear facts of religious life and thought (1975: 84–87). In his later, formal characterization of religion in the Elementary Forms, the first part of the definition still keeps this terminology, namely that a religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim 1965: 62, emphasis added). This adjectival usage of the term is central and functions to some extent independently of Durkheim’s other references to the polar, dichotomous nature of sacred and profane realms.6 For every society has certain entities marked off with special respect and power, and religious thought and behavior construct themselves around these privileged foci. While not all religions have gods, all have systems of respect for that which is sacred. The path of the monks in nontheistic Buddhism is holy (“the deliverance from suffering is a holy thing as is the whole of life which is a preparation for it” [Durkheim 1975: 87]), so is a humble totemic emblem, and so may be the principle of individual rights in a secular society. The mark of what is sacred is the inviolability that surrounds it and protects its profanization, and it could easily be shown that Durkheim built his concept of sacredness largely out of the notion of taboo.7 Here sacredness has no content of its own. It is purely relational. It is what is not to be profaned. As such, the term is metaphysically neutral. There is no ontological referent, nor are there dismissive rationalist insinuations or inflative romantic agendas. The sacred is simply whatever is deemed sacred by any group. Now if sacredness is a value placed on objects rather than a power that shines through objects because of their intrinsic, extraordinary qualities, then the difference between this aspect of the Durkheimian approach and the theological model could not be greater. The classical, religionist model was interested in kinds of objects that mediate the sacred by virtue of their inherent

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form or the inherentness of the supernatural in that form. Thus the typical format of phenomenologists of religion presented an encyclopedic hierarchy of levels of objects, grouped first according to patterns in nature: for example, sky, earth, trees, or stones, and then “higher” forms like gods. Places, objects, and times were understood as “expressions” of the holy or the supernatural. In essence, sacred things in this second model are sacred because they are modes or symbols of divinity, or in the older language, forms of “apprehending the Infinite”—and not because they have been “made” inviolable by the projected values of a group. Even when Durkheim maintains the connection of sacrality and collective, totemic objects, we are in many ways still in the realm of description rather than explanation. When Durkheim says that the totemic symbol is “the very type of sacred thing” and that “it is in connection with it, that things are classified as sacred or profane” (1965: 140), and when he presents the churinga as a prime example of sacredness, he is still analyzing sacredness descriptively as a socio-religious fact rather than causally as a social product (which he will of course go on to do). One does not have to be a sociologist to make the observation that among the kinds of things that humans deem sacred, those that specifically represent collective identity are especially representative.8 It is an observation about where sacredness is most intensely focused. Finally, once one has identified the existence of sacred things and the behaviors that go with them, then a basis for comparative differentiation between their contents becomes meaningful. The differences will be definable in terms of the varying cultural or religious ideals embodied in them, and Durkheim was clearly interested in the changing history of such values, just as historians of religion are.

Sacred/profane as a polarity The second Durkheimian vocabulary about sacrality posits the polar, interdependent relationship of sacred and profane states. Critics have rightly challenged those initial statements of Durkheim’s that define sacred and profane as exclusive realms.9 But the bulk of Elementary Forms shows that there is more to this notorious dichotomy than just a static

Before “The Sacred” Became Theological

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system of classification. As Steven Lukes points out, the confusion comes partly from Durkheim not having clearly distinguished between the sacred and the profane as (1) classes of things or realms, and (2) as relationships to things (Lukes 1972: 27). Certainly Durkheim’s characterization that religious phenomena “always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe … into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other” (Durkheim 1965: 56) can be read to imply that he is speaking of sacred and profane as fixed properties of objects. Yet throughout his book, Durkheim himself subverts his own assertions that religious worlds are forever divided by watertight dualities, showing that the profane state is subject to transformation. The profane can become sacred through rite and religious practice. Objects remain profane only as long as they have not been “metamorphosed” by “the religious imagination,” and society can “constantly create sacred things out of ordinary ones” (p. 243). Sacred and profane are ultimately relative to shifting situations. This is worked out in Book Three of Elementary Forms and its first chapter on ritual (esp. pp. 337–56). Here we find direct development of the concept of sacralization that was analyzed in the Hubert and Mauss essay on sacrifice, where the sacred and profane were described as two worlds that it was the purpose of sacrifice to mediate, and where the devotee’s ordinary, profane condition was shown to be transformed in the process. In this section, Durkheim shows how the sacred/profane opposition is not just an exclusionary, static distancing but the basis of religious passage or “modification” that takes place by way of the de-profanizing of the participant. The “profane,” here, is not an independent force in its own right but whatever is incompatible relative to the sacred. Durkheim thus begins to stretch the concept of taboo into the larger notion of relative incompatibility. Sacred and profane states cannot coexist at the same time. From an understanding of this incongruity, not from sociological analysis, he describes the rationale for the religious phenomena of sacred time and space, abstentions of all kinds, initiations, and all systems of asceticism, renunciation, and spiritual discipline. In Durkheim’s hands, interdiction ceases to represent savage ignorance or negative magic and becomes what could be called a basic system of religious logic. Because of their sacredness, some things—whether foods or secret knowledge—are forbidden to the profane

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person; but by the same token, some things because of their profaneness are forbidden to persons of sacred character. It works both ways. By construing the “forbidden” to mean “incompatible with,” Durkheim has pointed the way to the study of the relativity of purity and impurity within a system, as exemplified in Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966). The act of de-profanizing, which takes innumerable religious forms, is dispassionately spelled out in a way that is descriptively respectful of the nature of traditional religious behaviors. Going well beyond his Australian material, Durkheim clarifies a differentiating process or tension that is at the heart of religious life, and his vocabulary here is unreservedly emic. For example, “A man cannot approach his god intimately while he still bears on him marks of his profane life” (Durkheim 1965: 346). A system governed by the sacred/ profane dynamic does not confine itself to protecting sacred beings from vulgar contact; it acts upon the worshipper himself and modifies his condition positively. The man who has submitted himself to its prescribed interdictions is not the same afterwards as he was before. Before, he was an ordinary being who, for this reason, had to keep at a distance from the religious forces. Afterwards, he is on more equal footing with them; he has approached the sacred by the very act of leaving the profane; he has purified and sanctified himself by the very act of detaching himself from the base and trivial matters that debased his nature (p. 348).

So in spite of the language about an absolute conceptual duality, a main purpose of religion, by Durkheim’s admission, is actually to overcome the dualism through metamorphosis, sanctification, renunciation, or even “the sanctifying power” of suffering that “ennobles the soul” (pp. 350–55). Durkheim dwells on general examples of asceticism to illustrate the idea that holiness is the systematic rooting out of attachment to the profane world, as with Buddhist saints whose “sanctity” makes them “equal or superior to the gods.”10 This is a long way from construing the sacred/profane dichotomy simply as a wooden assertion that all religious people somehow believe the universe to be statically divided or rigidly classified in two and only two parts. Anthropologists have of course found no such thing. Yet sacred life as described by Durkheim is not just a representation, but a costly act of passage.

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Analysis and implications I am not advocating that the concept of the sacred is the only resource for describing and understanding religion, or that it does not have its own liabilities, but only that the term is not necessarily an ontologically privileged category. The French school created a secular discourse about sacredness, yet because of the subsequent anthropological taboo on talking about this category, the quarry has gone mostly unexploited. The term “sacred” here attempts to demarcate a range of behavioral phenomena; it is an etic category suffused not with metaphysical but with emic grounding and resonance. Where it does not fit the data, the concept should of course be reshaped. Where Durkheim is empirically challengeable, his inaccuracies do not take away from the point that his intention was to be descriptive. And yet there is something missing from the discussion so far, for isn’t Durkheim the great reductionist?

The question of explanatory reductions I have deliberately bracketed off what to Durkheim was the most important fact about sacredness: that it is an expression of collective power and should ultimately be explained in sociological terms. This was a legitimate theoretical move that can be argued philosophically,11 but represents a shift in level of discourse. It does not deny the fact that Durkheim has first, on another level, presented a set of data about sacrality. The famous reducer just happens to have been the one to have given us a phenomenology of the irreducible character of the sacred—penultimate to his act of explanatory reduction. Now what Durkheim as sociologue took as the source and ultimate content of le sacré is what the religious, theological phenomenologists call “the sacred” or “the holy.” Durkheim did not do what Marett was beginning to do across the Channel and what the phenomenologists (whether of the history of religions or the theological variety) were about to do, namely use the term “sacred” to refer to the object of religion. After all, the sacred was what Durkheim was trying to explain—and hence the reasoning would be circular. The animism and naturism hypotheses could not explain sacredness, but the totemism theory could. Collective force, the totemic principle, is what

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grounded sacrality. Yet Durkheim did not nominally or semantically identify “the sacred” with this force that he so passionately believed lay behind it. Rather, it is this force, or mana, that gives things their sacred character (Durkheim 1965: 229).12 While Durkheim could not resist calling the object of religion “society,” neither could the religionists resist calling the object of religion “the sacred,” a gloss for the supernatural. Neither the Durkheimians nor the religionists could face the data of sacrality without an act of metaphysical reduction. By the same token, religious life for both a Durkheim and an Otto had a sui generis character. Durkheim used the expression repeatedly, especially where he was speaking of religion as a collective form, but also where he was describing the realm of the sacred as distinguished from the realm of the profane or ordinary. Both interpreters tried to show that the sacred was not just explainable in psychological categories, that it has its own mode of experience. To Durkheim, the unique character of religion obviously derived from the unique power collective authority has over individuals, a power that lifted individuals outside themselves and transported them into another realm than that of their profane existence, giving them a higher, more intensive life. In addition, we should recall that for the Durkheimians the assertion that religion (or the sacred) is social did not mean that religion (or the sacred) was not real, or that it was not religious. To reduce religion to the social was in fact to ground it in reality, as over against rationalist theories that treated religion as a conceptual illusion and as over against theological theories that made the ultimate character of religious life inaccessible and transcendental. Everything that Durkheim says about the sui generis character of social reality can be said about religious worlds, since for the French school religious worlds are social expressions. (See Durkheim [1982] for many references to the sui generis character of social facts.) The worlds of collective symbols (such as religious worlds), “once born, obey laws all their own” (Durkheim 1965: 471). The battle for explanatory supremacy (e.g., what does sacredness “mean” either in general or in any particular culture?) will obviously go on, and it is unavoidable that one’s descriptive references to the sacred will still be governed by principles of selection related either to one’s own foundationalist groundings,

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or, in postmodern terms, one’s conversational circles. In many cases, the latter will involve pedagogical situations which deal with trying to comprehend cross-cultural materials, and it is here where the analytical, neutral approach to the sacred will probably continue to have some use. In contemporary contexts, questions about the nature of sacredness will most likely have to do with (a) accuracy in relation to specific cultural data, (b) the possibility of descriptive limitation or distortion due to explanatory (or hermeneutical) weightings, (c) the appropriateness or relativity of hermeneutical discourse and reductivity to audience purposes, and (d) the historicity of the concept itself.

Some implications Without elaborating, certain consequences seem to follow. First, there emerges the possibility of a middle, descriptive way that does not require taking the object of religion linguistically or hermeneutically captive by either the theological or sociological reduction. A careful phenomenology of sacredness, geared to understanding and depicting the worlds of religious insiders, could analyze ways that cultures negotiate sacrality and profanity, and do this without implying anything about “the sacred” as a metaphysical referent. Within a comparative, cross-cultural context, this level of analysis would examine religious systems without assuming them to be either right or wrong, and sacrality and profanity (or purity and impurity) could be explored as variables between and within such systems. Sacredness would not be reduced to a single phenomenology of otherness or taboo, but would be examined for the many ways, subtle or otherwise, that it is constituted in human behavior. For example, it is not only numen, forceful to the subject, but sacer, set apart by the subject as inviolate.13 It appears not only as “the extraordinary” but as the integrity and transformation of boundaries, the monitoring of the boundaries of culturally and religiously constituted profaneness. In such an approach, there is the possibility of a metaphysically neutral but theoretic, integral, phenomenology of sacredness that seeks descriptive justice to a certain range of religious practices and certain types of subject– object relationships. Each form of cultural activity (e.g., music, dance, science) has its own way of positing the world, and the sacred/profane dynamic is no exception.

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Finally, uncovering the pretheological and even asociological structures of Durkheim’s concept of the sacred will make it easier to detect them in Eliade, and easier to sort out the juxtaposition of neo-Durkheimian and perennialist elements in that author’s complex and syncretic discourse. Because of the influence of French social anthropology on Eliade, rereading the one figure to some extent requires rereading the other, and it seems to me that much in Eliade should be understood as continuous with the wider Durkheimian tradition as conveyed in the versions of Marcel Mauss and Roger Caillois.14 While that genealogy or French connection is apparently a task yet to be worked out, I am convinced that until it is done we will make little progress in understanding in any other than a hermeneutically preferentialist way the several linguistic matrices of Eliade’s notion of “the sacred,” or the context of his often-quoted statements about its irreducibility. Long before Eliade, after all, it was the Durkheimians who spoke of the heterogeneity of sacred and profane modes of existence, of sacred time and space, and of how the sacred requires “dying to the profane condition.” And it was they who labored to establish the way sacrality constructed worlds, worlds created out of the stuff of myth and ritual; and it was they for whom religious phenomena had to be taken as facts at their own irreducible level. The “sacred” is a term of some value in looking at how religious systems maintain their integrity, deal with profanity, and provide transcendence, and our vocabulary for exegeting the history and structure of religions worlds would probably be diminished without it. Perhaps it is a modest value, and perhaps there is less need now to overrate or overuse it. But in spite of our proclivities toward epistemic imperialism, in spite of our needs for hermeneutical loadings, it is not clear that the word must infiltrate an ontology of either the theological or sociological kind.

References Benveniste, Émile. (1973). Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd. Caillois, Roger. (1959). Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

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Comstock, W. Richard. (1981). “A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49 (4): 625–643. de Coulanges, Fustel. (1874). The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small. Boston: Lee and Shepard. Douglas, Mary. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Durkheim, Émile. (1965). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1975). “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena.” In W. S. F. Pickering (ed.), Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, trans. Jacqueline Redding and W. S. F. Pickering. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Durkheim, Émile. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method, Steven Lukes (ed.), trans. W. D. Halls. New York: The Free Press. Hamnett, Ian. (1984). “Durkheim and the Study of Religion.” In Steve Fenton (ed.), Durkheim and Modern Sociology (pp. 202–219). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss. (1964). Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Isambert, François-A. (1976). “L’Elaboration de la Notion de Sacré dans ‘l’Ecole’ Durkheimienne.” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 42: 35–56. Lehmann, Edvard. (1914). Religionsvetenskapen, I: Medning till Religionsvetenskapen. Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Forlag. Lukes, Steven. (1972). Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work. New York: Harper and Row. Marett, R. R. (1909). The Threshold of Religion. London: Metheun & Co. Marett, R. R. (1911). “Religion—Primitive Religion.” In Encyclopedia Brittanica (11th edn.) (pp. 63–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penner, Hans H. (1990). Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion. New York: Peter Lang Press. Pickering, W. S. F. (1984). Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Proudfoot, Wayne. (1985). Religious Experience. Berkeley : University of California Press. Segal, Robert A. (1989). Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation. Brown Studies in Religion, no. 3. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Smith, W. Robertson. (1956[1887]). The Religion of the Semites. New York: Meridian Books.

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Söderblom, Nathan. (1913). “Holiness (General and Primitive).” In J. Hastings (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, VI (pp. 731–741). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Söderblom, Nathan. (1914). Gudstrons Uppkomst [The Origins of Religion]. Stockholm: Sebers. Stanner, W. E. H. (1967). “Reflections on Durkheim and Aboriginal Religion.” In Maurice Freedman (ed.), Social Organization: Essays Presented to Raymond Firth (pp. 217–240). London: Frank Cass and Co.

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Durkheim’s Reconciliation of the Social and the Religious

Some will be astonished, perhaps, to see me connecting the highest forms of the human mind with society. The cause seems quite humble as compared to the value we attribute to the effect. So great is the distance between the world of the senses and appetites on the one hand, and the world of reason and morality on the other, that it seems the second could have been added to the first only by an act of creation. But to attribute to society this dominant role in the origin of our nature is not to deny that creation. Émile Durkheim (1995: 447) Previous generations of religion scholars eschewed what they took to be Durkheim’s reductionism and read The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life accordingly. Students were directed to the notorious quote about the god and society being “one and the same”; were given the section from the introductory chapter about all religious life being divided into two realms, and assured the idea was empirically wrong; and were warned of the danger of the idea that religion arises out of group effervescence. Neglect was also an option: Joachim Wach’s classic, Sociology of Religion (1949), mentioned Durkheim only once in passing and then only in order to warn against the “positivism” of confusing religious and social values (1949: 5). And a notable account of the history of comparative religion concludes its description of Durkheim in this negative way: Although widely read, Durkheim was so dominated by the desire to explain away the phenomenon of religion that his theories about the origins of religion are of little consequence. His failure to accept mankind’s belief in the actual existence of an unseen supernatural order—a failure in which he

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was to have many followers—led him into serious errors of interpretation … The student of comparative religion will, perhaps, read him less in order to acquire a knowledge of either the nature of religion or the thorny problem of the origins of religion, than to learn something of the standing of these theories in turn-of-the-century France. (Sharpe 1986: 86)

But times have changed, and the way we read the past is changing. The idea of the social formation of religion, far from being something of a tabued theory in Religious Studies, was already coming into its own in a post-theological age. At first, the return of the social came quietly through the influence on religious studies of neo-Durkheimians like Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Claude LéviStrauss, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah, and then with a certain vengeance through the challenges of cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and the general aftermath of Foucauldian thought. Elsewhere I have described the original standoff with sociological reductionism as a kind of Cold War (Paden 2001). The Berlin Wall of religious studies amounted to a methodological bulwark against the likes of Durkheim. In the 1960s and ‘70s, preserving religious ideology had its cultural function and affected academic programs (McCutcheon 1997; Wiebe 1999), for to accept the reduction of religion to social categories would seemingly have meant accepting a nonreligious worldview and ignoring the spiritual values and creativity of religious traditions. Durkheim, in short, was a threat to religion, as well as a threat to methodology. Like the political barrier in Europe, by the late 1980s this religious wall was being dismantled and reconciliations explored. The study of religion was becoming “socialized.” In the post-Eliadean generation, sociologies of knowledge constituted an intellectual environment in secular academia. And as the phenomenological approach once gave academic credibility to religious studies by virtue of its supposed objectivity, its cross-cultural perspective, and its bracketing of metaphysics, so now historians of religion also learned to make their subject more consistent with the sociologically oriented environment of the times that deemed knowledges and cultures to be humanly produced and negotiated. Thus, at a time when the conceptual terms of the “history of religions” are undergoing modifications, I address here some ways of reconceiving and recontextualizing certain Durkheimian ideas. With distance now on

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the Eliadean tradition and with a fuller historical perspective on Durkheim’s thought, I will suggest that there are emergent contexts for reading the two traditions in relation to each other and for recognizing points of convergence beyond the religiously constructed opposition of “the sacred” and its reductions.

Reconciling the dichotomy of the social and the religious The first issue to address is the old but now tired opposition “religious vs. social,” the original and primary obstruction to appropriating Durkheim’s work. On the one hand, Durkheim certainly intended to create an alternative to those explanations of religion that relied on superhuman forces—and the same may be said for all social science and all science, by definition, then and now. On the other hand, there was another alternative that he declined, and it is his rejection of this second alternative that is insufficiently understood by religionists. The approach he so adamantly opposed was the rationalist view that reduced religious life to projections of illusory belief and prescientific thought forms. By contrast, Durkheim labored to show that religion represented very powerful and enduring realities. It is a central irony of Durkheim criticism that what he is routinely accused of, namely not attributing “reality” to religion, is the very thing he so thoroughly set out to affirm. A central aim of The Elementary Forms was to show that religious forces are real, and Durkheim stated that the book’s purpose was “to comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity” (1995: 1). Thus, within his particular ideological horizon, Durkheim’s only choices were to explain religion (1) in terms of the supernatural, (2) as an illusory epiphenomenon of a materialist or rationalist worldview, which denied the validity of religion, or (3) as an expression of society and thus a fact and form of culture as important as any of the other activities and products of civilization, including morality, science, law, and the arts. In Durkheim’s vocabulary, “society” was not the lower term by which higher forms of culture were to be explained, but an all-embracing category for the matrix of human behavior—as enormous and rich a concept as was “nature” for a natural scientist. Indeed, it represented “the most powerful collection of

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physical and moral forces that we can observe in nature” (1995: 447). Society is then a process of innovation, self-transformation, and creative power, the “consciousness of consciousnesses” (p. 445). It is where notions of totality and world originate (p. 443). Durkheim does not so much think he is reducing religion to society as he is enlarging the idea of society to include its religious nature—its proclivity to form and practice sacred values. There is an interesting circularity here: society is itself defined largely in moral and religious terms; it is held together and thrives by those forces and ideals. This he sets out to show. Society generates all the great forms of culture, any of which may come to have a life of its own. Knowledges, arts, and conscious life are social activities and representations. As well—and pertinent to the viewpoint of this essay—systems of sacred objects evolved their own kinds of ritual and mythic behaviors and classifications. They formed worlds of time, space, cosmology. They generated systems of sacred authority and respect, of charismatic objects and performances. Once in play, religious ideas set in motion a world of patterned negotiation between sacred and profane statuses, attraction and repulsion, purity and impurity; and these assume a kind of independence, following their own laws (1995: 426). Society perceives itself through such self-positing languages and systems. Among those systems are the dynamics of the “sacred.” Sacredness is for Durkheim the defining feature of religion, and is generated by systems of social respect and value. Critics of phenomenological notions of the sui generis nature of the sacred should understand that that phrase is not a theological invention. Durkheim and others prior to Mircea Eliade and Rudolf Otto used the expression to refer to the distinctive features of social facts and forces, including the sacred (cf. Durkheim 1982). Durkheim could easily refer to “… those sui generis sensations of which religion is made …” (1995: 421), or the sui generis character of respect for religious objects (p. 56), or write that a “… special emotion gives it [the sacred object] the reality it has …” (p. 328). Durkheim did not need to reduce religion to society, because society already was religious. Durkheim’s schema not only provides for an account of that from which religion is formed but also allows for the notion that religion is itself formative. While it was not Durkheim’s particular interpretive focus, the dialect of phases

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of the “social construction of reality” described by Berger is consistent with Durkheim’s “society.” (For a summary of this process, see Berger [1967: 3–19].) Those phases not only encompass the social externalization of reality, but the subsequent ontologization, internalization, and recreation of it. Religion is not just “from” society; it makes and remakes it. We think with the language of our times, and Durkheim took a great deal of language about the equivalency of kinship and religion from William Robertson Smith (lived 1846 to 1896). I find it revealing that the phrases in the Elementary Forms that scandalized religionists were apparently borrowed, as was so much else, from that reputable Protestant scholar. For example—and this is not Durkheim, but Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (first published 1887): Indeed in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman’s life and the sanctity of the godhead are not two things, but one; for ultimately the only thing that is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferently, as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred blood. (Smith 1956[1896]: 289)

Similar formulations by Smith are common.1 In this context we can better understand Durkheim’s language about the coalescence of religion and society or about the totem as the symbol of both the god and the society. In more recent times, neo-Durkheimians were to play a mediating role between religious studies and social anthropology. Scholars like Mary Douglas and Victor Turner accepted the cultural importance and reality of religion and were nonthreatening to many religionists. Their “reductions” were not to some “lower” strata but to conceptualizations about the structures, functions, and processes of religion. As such “macro” reductions (cf. Strenski 1996: 98), they reduced upward to superordinate sociological categorizations where the wholes explain the parts rather than downward to cynical dismissals or theories of illusion. Like Durkheim, they seemed to authorize religion as a viable form of culture. Moreover, the question of metaphysical truth had become largely irrelevant. Many religion scholars found new allies here. “Society” was becoming less a reified entity and more a site for studying actions, roles, and

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structures. The notion of humans as participants or insiders in sociocultural systems was becoming an assumption shared by historians of religion. Even apart from the issue of whether “religious” and “social” are only artificially separate categories, reduction has by now become accepted as the necessary process of all knowledge and conceptualization. All thought reduces, forming generalizations that inevitably select out only certain generic features of particulars, ignoring other aspects and contents. As all concepts are reductions, historians of religion realized that they too were reducing their subject matter to certain themes and patterns. Reduction ceased to be a term of reproach.

Convergences I would argue that the above considerations—suggesting, among other things, that “religion/social” may be an unnecessary bifurcation—provide an interesting way of reading the relationship between Durkheim and Eliade. A salient parallelism between the two is the concept of humans as participants in an endless series of mythically and ritually constructed worlds, the contents and contours of which are formed by cultural environments, and the dynamics of which are informed by the way sacred objects function for participants and interact with their lives. Although Durkheim and Eliade obviously contextualized their descriptions of these worlds in different ideological discourses, they were both occupied with how Homo religiosus forms behavioral systems out of the category of sacrality. Here, then, “the sacred” is not a reified, divine object, but rather objects of any kind upon which superhuman value has been placed and around which mythic and ritual worlds form.2 Several of Eliade’s concepts are themselves part of an inheritance from the Durkheimian tradition.3 Though he eschewed what he took to be anti-religious constructivism, many of his central concepts run parallel to the French tradition: multiple universes constructed by sacred time and space; by mythic histories, cosmographies, and geographies; and the use of collective festivals to renew the world and reconnect with the “Great Time.” Recognizing the French connection would allow us to see Eliade not merely

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as the voice of the religionizing era but, as well, a link with the secular anthropological tradition. Eliade of course did not see the Durkheimian connection quite as I am asserting it here, since he gave conventional meaning to the word “social” and could only go so far as to allow that religion is socially conditioned. His few references to Durkheim typically focus on criticizing the idea of social origins. “Sociogenesis,” he says “like any other ‘genesis,’ cannot explain the functions of an existential symbolism” (Eliade 1969: 158); and “[o]ne must distinguish between Durkheim’s pertinent analyses of certain aspects of Australian and other archaic religions, which are extremely valuable, and his general theory of the social origin of religion” (Eliade 1973: 20–21, n. 32). While the religious studies tradition has pictured Durkheim and Eliade as opposites, I eventually came to find their commonality more intriguing. In either case, religions are structured symbolic systems based on mythic foundations, ritual renewal, the imitation of mythic archetypes, and the notion of sacrality—not to mention a generally sacramental model of how religious people relate to their world. Moreover, for each, “world” was not a given, a priori referent but a symbolic schema, a product of the modes through which it is apprehended.4 That is, a world is not an objectivity, but an insider’s surroundings, life space, and language, and thus revealed through endless cultural forms. For neither Durkheim nor Eliade do religious worlds tell us the way the world is, but rather they tell us a way the world is, to employ Nelson Goodman’s distinction (1972: 31). I find it instructive for comparative religion purposes—that is, for focusing on patterns of religious behavior—to read Eliade and Durkheim in tandem, viewing the one by way of the other, in spite of their differing hermeneutical “worlds.” Even with regard to their ideological differences, Eliade and Durkheim certainly share a common humanism. I would hold that the referent of religion for Eliade is not the divine but “sacred worlds” and “creations of the human spirit” (1969: 6–7). When discoursing in that vein, he even likened religious worlds more to the “creations” of artists than to any foundational truths (p. 5–7) and advocated a “philosophical anthropology” (p. 9–10). For his part, Durkheim is more than just a sociologist; he is a moralist who refers to “the religious nature of man” (1995:1), who speaks of how the powers that religions bring into play are “above all, spiritual” (p. 422), and who even admits

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explicitly to a Jamesian appreciation of the powerful functions of religious experience for the participant (1995: 420).

Beyond the Durkheim/Eliade dichotomy As with the parallax effect, objects’ apparent differences in position are actually the result of the different positions of the observers. Here, I choose to view Durkheim’s and Eliade’s descriptions of religious life within a broad concept of human behaviors. The religious behavior described by both interpreters no longer needs to be explained in the language either of late nineteenth century sociology or of mid-twentieth century religious hermeneutics. Each, in attempting to show the special “social” or “sacred” nature of religion, created unnecessary discontinuities between human behaviors and the state of nature. While Durkheim tried to find a place for social facts apart from biological reductions, and while Eliade wanted to find a place for religious facts apart from sociological reductions, I am going to assume that both of these ways of dividing up reality—while having historical, academic value—are also limited. Rather, a new naturalism that avoids the dichotomy of religious versus social can accommodate the contributions of both scholars.5 This approach would allow religious “creations”—to which I refer in this essay’s epigraph—to be acknowledged as activities of a naturally evolving human history.6 Behavior is an enormous category, as wide as nature herself, and as broad as all forms of social and cultural life. Human behavior is not limited to eating and sleeping, or to evolutionary traces of aggression or homemaking. All civilization is behavior, all language, all sociality, all acts of meaningattribution. Indeed, the following are but a few universals of sociocultural behavior: forming bonds and loyalties with a “kinship” group, ranking people within a group, learning reciprocities of cooperative relationships, making and following rules, defending/protecting group order, punishing infractions of order, socializing the young, recognizing social authority, endowing certain objects with superhuman status or inviolability, constructing pasts and reciting sacred histories, passing on cultural prototypes for imitation, regenerating social values by performing periodic rites and festivals, dignifying important occasions and roles with ritual behavior, classifying and mapping

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the universe, attributing significance to events and objects, modifying states of consciousness, disciplining the mind and body to effect certain results and kinds of fitness. (The most helpful survey of the anthropological notion of universal human behaviors, with an extensive annotated bibliography, is that of Donald E. Brown [1991].) The Durkheimian project contributed to understanding the role of religion in all of these, and the Eliadean project to many of them. Certainly many of the generic forms of human behavior just described are exemplified in their most inventive and intensified ways in their historical religious versions. Worldmaking counts among the universal human behaviors and, ethologically speaking, religious worldmaking is one of myriad, biodiverse forms of habitat formation. Eliade expressed a fascination with these forms and “ontologies” which, as I mentioned, he even likened to the universes imagined by artists. Durkheim was more sober here, realizing that religious worlds as such are neither wonderful nor wrong but simply reflect any of the sacred values humans choose to express, healthy or not (1995: 423). While practitioners of religious cultures are not generally conscious that they are participants in such etically or generically conceived human “behaviors,” the latter concept does not take away from the internal meanings of their worlds and performances, any more than the reduction “water” cancels out the “significance” or “meaning” of swimming or boating to the swimmer or boater. While “behavior” is clearly an outsider’s term, it does not deny the insider’s role and immersion in it. The description of meanings-tothe-insider continues to be an ethnographic challenge and phenomenological ideal, though scholars of religion of course also theorize the material in their own ways, as I am doing here. In all this, negotiating the interaction of sacred and profane states of life can be understood as part of the history of cultural behaviors. Both Durkheim and Eliade would agree that sacredness defines special human behaviors, epitomized by sacramental, ritual ways of relating to special objects. I would add that among the more brilliant sections of the Elementary Forms are those little read parts where Durkheim carefully describes the ways religious people approach sacred objects and states by modifying or eradicating the “profane” elements they might otherwise bring to them, a dynamic that governs much religious behavior (1995: 303–29).7

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In the Elementary Forms we can see how “society” can be understood as a large enough concept to embrace the most sacred forms of human behavior. That sacredness and holiness are essential parts of our human nature is wholly recognized by Durkheim. In this repositioned model, religion scholars will not only find new colleagues in the social sciences but will also gain confidence that they have something to add to the knowledges of the world outside their traditional, rather self-enclosed hermeneutical domains. Toward that end, Durkheim’s work is indispensable.

References Berger, Peter. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Caillois, Roger. (1959[1939]). Man and the Sacred, trans. M. Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Comstock, Richard. (1981). “A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion XLIX(4): 625–643. Dumézil, Georges. (1936). “ Temps et Mythes.” Recherches Philosophiques 5: 235–251. Dumézil, Georges. (1949). “Preface de Georges Dumezil.” In Mircea Eliade, Traite d’historie des religions (pp. 5–7). Paris: Editions Payot. Durkheim, Émile. (1982[1895]). The Rules of Sociological Method, Steven Lukes (ed.), trans. W. D. Halls. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1995). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1969). The Quest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1973). Australian Religions: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1982). Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, trans. D. Coltman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Goodman, Nelson. (1972). Problems and Objects. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Martin, Luther H. (2001). “Comparativism and Sociobiological Theory.” Numen 48(3): 290–308. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997). Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Paden, William E. (1994a). “Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion”. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (eds.), (pp. 198–210). Studies in the History of Religions, vol. LXII. Leiden: E. J. Brill (Chapter 1, this book). Paden, William E. (1994b). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (2000a). “World.” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 334–347). New York and London: Cassell. [See Chapter 4, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2000b). “The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism.” In Bryan Rennie (ed.), Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End of Mircea Eliade (pp. 249–262). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [See Chapter 5, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2001). “Durkheim’s Revenge: Transformations and Ironies in the American History of Religions Tradition.” In I. Dolezalova, L. H. Martin, and D. Papousek (eds.), The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War: East and West (pp. 253–265). New York: Peter Lang Press. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharpe, Eric. (1986). Comparative Religion: A History (2nd edn.). La Salle, IL: Open Court. Smith, W. Robertson. (1956[1894]). The Religion of the Semites (2nd edn.), J. S. Black (ed.). New York: Meridian Books. Strenski, Ivan. (1996). “Reduction without Tears.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 95–107). Leiden: Brill. Wach, Joachim. (1949). The Sociology of Religion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Wiebe, Donald. (1999). The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

3

Sacred Order

Though the concept of the sacred has come under attack for being too theological, sacrality as a factor or a set of factors in cultural behavior and in the way humans appropriate their worlds is too important to simply dismiss or ignore. In this chapter, I offer an example of a way in which certain features of sacrality can be reconstituted and applied within the framework of a postEliadean, academic study of religion. In the history of religions context, the concept of the sacred has for years been confined essentially to a single usage, even though it is potentially rich with other kinds and levels of analytical meaning. “The sacred” became basically a synonym for the supernatural, a label if not an epithet for a universal, transcendent reality which “manifests” itself in various places, times, and objects. Through the writings of R.R. Marett, Rudolf Otto, and the phenomenologists of religion, the terminology of “the sacred”—along with that of “mana” and “the holy”—came to describe a mysterious other power to which religious persons respond with numinous awe. The purpose of this chapter, however, is to present and explore a contrast between that classical formula, which I will term the “mana model” of sacrality, and a second model, here termed “sacred order,” which emphasizes not alterity but integrity and the absence of violation. The mana model of sacrality certainly has much descriptive importance, especially if it can be weaned from its quasi-theological context and used to identify those structured ways in which empowered objects (i.e., empowered by society) present themselves to religious subjects and vice-versa. Obviously such focalizing interaction is a central element in religious life. In this chapter, however, I will not attempt any involved post-theological reformulations of such a “mana model” but only refer to it in general terms in order to make a

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contrast with other complementary kinds of theoretical and analytical capital in the notion of sacrality. (For a critique of the theological function of the concept of “the sacred” and a call for strictly analytical usage, see Hans H. Penner [1989: chap. 1].) Notwithstanding Otto’s theological program to link the semantics of holiness with the experience of the numinous, the notion of sacrality actually contains wider, different ranges of application. Among these, and a common feature found in both the terms “sacred” and “holy,” is the element of inviolability. I would like to suggest here that inviolable or sacred order has a systemic nature which is as important a structuring factor in religious worlds as that of empowered, “manic” objects (like gods and their manifestations) and forms a concept that is equally useful in identifying and analyzing the constraining configurations of religious behavior. For its members, a religious world is simultaneously (1) a set of objects imbued with transhuman power or significance and (2) a matrix of obligations which upholds the world of those objects. In only focusing on the first aspect, the revelatory nature of objects, phenomenologists of religion have typically ignored the second aspect, namely, the sacrality of the system itself. A religious world operates not only through interaction with what is perceived as “other” power, but also through the constant monitoring and negotiating of the boundaries of its own integrity. It not only constructs windows to the gods through its language and observance, but must maintain the constitutional nature of its own universe, a universe stylized through diverse cultural genres of authority and territory. A religious world is both a system of numinous objects and a system of loyalties; it has only been our Western, biblical biases which have caused us to limit our notion of sacrality to the revelatory mode. The second template, based on the notion of sacred order, I understand broadly as the constraint of upholding the integrity of one’s world system against violation. Notably, such order is a potential factor in the constitution of all social worlds, whether religiously legitimated or not. The polarity of order and violation is indeed a version of the more generic, cognitive distinction of system/anti-system found in all social and natural life. Sacred order is then not a unique, privileged invention of religious cultures. It is linked with common human needs for self-maintenance, including the defense of

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territory, tradition, honor, authority, social bonds and roles, and other forms of status. Both religious order—which is that kind explicitly grounded in terms of supposed superhuman endowment—and secular order maintain worlds which operate through these same structuring force fields. At the same time, even though sacred order is a constraint in every collective world, the presence of transhuman legitimizations adds intensity and weight to its power, including the intimidation of retribution at the spiritual level. As Peter Berger aptly states, “To go against the order of society is always to risk plunging into anomy. To go against the order of society as religiously legitimated, however, is to make a compact with the primeval forces of darkness” (Berger 1967: 39). But because they draw on the same needs, understanding the power of religious versions of order also helps to expose the inviolability factor in secular order. Thus, where sacrality connotes inviolable order rather than numinous power-objects, a significantly different polarity between sacrality and profanity is formed. In the mana model, the sacred is the superhuman “other” and the profane is the mundane or natural, the secular zone “outside the temple” (pro + fanum). But in the context of sacred order, or the second model, the profane is not the mundane but the violative and transgressive. Sacred and profane in this second sense are dynamically oppositional. The profane is not just what is outside the temple, but rather what subverts it. Here, where the sacral is not what points to the beyond but rather to the ways world order is kept intact, profanity is isomorphic with whatever actively threatens or offends that order, such as moral or ritual pollution, dishonoring infractions, apostate disloyalties, ruinous moral lapses, or chaotic anomy. In this second model, sacred and profane are not different zones of experience but poles of a tension by which the system itself is kept honorable, clean and whole, and it is in this sense that the concept of integrity—in the sense of “unimpaired”1 or “a state or quality of wholeness”—comes into play and amplifies the notion of sacred order. That which has integrity is that which is kept intact, and while the thrust of the present study is theoretical rather than etymological, one cannot avoid observing that the notion of integrity may well be closer to the root of the term “holy” than the notion of otherness, and that even the Latin sanctus (“ordained or secured as inviolable”) is closer to the idea of sacred order than it is to the mana model. While the pre-Christian sense-development of the root of “holy”—the Indo-European hailo-2—is not entirely clear, “it is with some

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probability assumed to have been ‘inviolate, inviolable, that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be injured with impunity’” (Holy 1989: 318). Though biblical theologians appropriated the terms “holy” and “holiness” as attributes of the divine, the concept of sacred order in some ways resonates with these earlier, pretheological connotations of inviolateness. In exploring the theoretic value of the concept of sacred order, this chapter has three additional sections: (1) a general, further exposition and amplification of the concept itself, (2) an outline of ways that sacred order is structured through certain types of social constraints, and (3) an account of some implications exposed by the model. As a qualifier, no claim is made whatsoever that this conceptual lens should comprise an exclusive, monolithic or monothetic model for the description of religion. Religious cultures can and should be thematized in multiple ways, and the polarity of order/violation is but one example of these. At the same time, one of the purposes of this project is to question the hegemonic force of the mana model, with its tendency to usurp and hold captive all possible values contained in the notion of sacrality. Not all religion is about sacred order, and not all religion is about numinousness.

Ingredients of the model With its thirty-one meanings assigned to the noun “order,” The Oxford English Dictionary shows that term to have a wide and flexible range of use. While order can mean rank, sequence, methodical arrangement, a request for food or other goods, a command, or degree of complexity (mathematics), it can also mean the general constitution of things as in “moral order,” “spiritual order,” “order of the world,” or “order of nature.” Along with these latter, extended meanings, “sacred order,” too, can find its place as a descriptive concept in the study of religion. In the phrase “sacred order,” the modifier “sacred” indicates that the focus here is not on the element of mere orderly arrangement—as opposed to messiness, randomness, or chaos—but on that which must be defended from violation. Sacred order is then a particular kind of order. It does not imply belief in a harmonious or aesthetically designed universe per se, but rather

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describes a world of inalienable authority and the vigilant maintenance of its integrity. Not just another term for security, sacred order has both moral and cognitive dimensions. One must keep the world “right.” And if something is wrong with the world, it must be made right—understanding that rightness here does not have any a priori content but is culturally defined. In itself, this analytical use of the term “sacred” is morally and religiously neutral (rather like its direct antecedent, the Latin sacer), every cultural system filling it in with its own normative values. The degree to which order is sacred is seen in the weightiness of the rules and observances which guard its infraction, the state of confusion or despair ensuing when expectations are upset, and in the thoroughness and extremity of the purgative, restorative measures exacted once infraction has in fact taken place. The particular nature of any version of sacred order is illustrated in the kinds and styles of actions required to repair it when it is disrupted. On the one hand, order is maintained and defended through a system of obligations and threats of punishment, but on the other hand, once the system is in fact disturbed, the violating element must be removed, punished, or reconciled so that the world’s integrity can be reestablished.3 Disruption can be a cognitive-interpretive issue (is the illness caused by demons?) or a practical matter, where pollution-states automatically require specific, remedial acts of purification. If religions are not just occasions for the experience of otherness but systems which maintain integrity or consistency by their capacity to deal with profanity, then the system only keeps its self-definition in those very acts of preventing, negotiating, or purging what is offensive and foreign to it. Sacred order, then, is not simply a template for world design and organization but rather a dynamic process of self-maintenance in the face of threatened or actual impurity, wrongness, insult, or guilt. Such maintenance takes place at both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Whether in large-scale institutional power struggles with external enemies and internal schisms, or small-scale care with the distinctions of daily observance, the integrity model provides a context for showing how the world can be at stake at any point in time or place. In a system of order, any failure or corruption is at once the failure or corruption of the system, just as any infection can bring down the entire body. The issue of order and its violation pervades all dimensions and levels of behavior.

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The theoretical resources for a concept of sacred order are found primarily in the Durkheimian and neo-Durkheimian traditions. In Mary Douglas’s phrase, “The sacred for Durkheim and Mauss was nothing more mysterious or occult than shared classifications, deeply cherished and violently defended. That is not all: this idea of the sacred is capable of analysis” (Douglas 1987: 97). In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, that great, not-fully-mined quarry of ideas about sacrality, Durkheim stressed the synecdochic character of sacred objects, any one of which could stand for the whole or “totemic principle”— the world as constituted by the collectivity. Each sacred object here is a sociocultural construct containing the force of the society’s authority.4 Roger Caillois, articulating and expanding on the French school’s ideas in his Man and the Sacred (1959 [L’Homme et le Sacré, 1939, 1949]), presented the category of the sacred as bifold—as both a constraining, inhibiting, containing force of order and a creative, transgressive, liberating force which breaks through old forms and rigidities. Sacrality is both the tabued and that which destroys the congealed conformities of law and normativity.5 Some of that distinction echoed Durkheim’s double delineation of sacredness as (1) the interdicted and (2) the festive, collective transport of the corrobori. Mary Douglas’s work, with its suggestive equation of holiness and integrity and its “grid-group” typology showing how purity and pollution correlate with the cohesiveness of social boundaries, forwarded the notion of the systemic, boundary-sensitive character of sacrality (Douglas 1966, 1975). So did Louis Dumont’s studies of the connection between purity and social hierarchy (Dumont 1980), and Jonathan Z. Smith’s interesting typology of “locative,” bounded religious systems—where sacrality is a function of things being in their proper place— and those which are “utopic” or nonworldly and aspatial (Smith 1978: 129– 71). Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy showed in a most suggestive way that sacrality not only involves the polarity of ordinary/transcendent but also the maintenance of a nomic (from nomos, law) cosmos against “the terror of anomy” (1967: 26–28, 39). Hans Mol’s work (1976) presented sacredness as the force of legitimation and authority that counteracts social change—that which safeguards identity. François-André Isambert has argued for a distinction between le sacré as an unlimited term for the realm of religious objects on the one hand and sacrality as connected with specific hieratic structures on the other, even referring to “the sacrality of order in its totality” (1982: 270). An

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essay by Evan M. Zuesse on “Taboo and the Divine Order” (1974) proposed a broadening of the concept of taboo which would link it with the idea of the “defining” function of religious order. The work of the German philologist Walter Baetke (1942), which contrasted the holiness of collective tradition, cult, law/nomos, and obligation on the one hand with Rudolf Otto’s paradigm of awe and numinousness on the other, is also a useful resource. Veikko Anttonen’s recent work (1996) treating sacrality as a culturally dependent cognitive category linked with territorial boundary-separation connects well with the approach taken here. Although Mircea Eliade’s writings certainly embody features of the mana model, where the sacred “manifests” itself in the world, they also deal with the theme of establishing mythic order through cosmogonic rites, the sacralization of space, and worldmaking generally. (The best example remains Eliade [1959: esp. chap. 1].) One might gather that the aspect of order which interested Eliade was the creative act of founding and consecrating a world (understood as the work of the gods) in the midst of undifferentiated chaos. The effect would be an absolute, fixed point, a place that was linked with the divine, for example, a ritual focus represented by a world-center, temple, or sacred mountain. The surrounding uncosmicized space would be an amorphous space of “nonbeing.” At the same time, while Eliade showed how humans are compelled to organize worlds in the midst of chaos, his focus was more on the process of grounding those worlds in cosmizing myth than on the idea of system maintenance and defense. If interpreters claim to find a structuring concept at work in religion, but religions themselves have no categories that are isomorphic with it, one might be suspicious of the concept. But religions in fact abound with insiders’ or emic terms exemplifying the idea of sacred order. The Hindu concept of dharma is a particularly good, prototypal example. From a root which means to “uphold,” dharma signifies the eternal, divinely endowed socio-cosmic order and can also be translated as righteousness, duty, or even religion, implying that world order is in fact upheld by those human acts. Both religion and law are parts of the concept of dharma (which has an opposite, adharma). The antecedent of dharma in the Rig Veda was rta, the cosmic order which preexisted the gods— who derive their power from it—and which was maintained by sacrifices and protected by Varuna and Mitra. (Its opposite, again, was anrta, referring to what is wrong, crooked, or untrue.) Confucian tradition is replete with

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categories of sacred order, such as t’ien or “the order of heaven,” the concept of li or propriety, and in some contexts even tao, the proper “way” of things. Cosmic order is reflected in the order of society, and hsiao, or filial piety, upholds that order. In the biblical traditions, sacred order is found in notions of holy scripture understood as “the Word of God” and also more specifically in notions of faithfulness to the divinely revealed “covenants” and the bodies of religious law derived from them. Anti-order would be expressed in concepts of unfaithfulness, idolatry as betrayal, and sin. The concept of sacred order does not collapse all systems of religious order (e.g., Islamic sharia and Buddhist dharma) into meaning the same thing, but shows a common way such systems function—that is, to create boundaries which maintain the overall authority of the whole. As order refers to a function rather than a content, there is no insinuation here that a common worldview or design runs through its different versions. The content of order will be different in every case. If there is an obvious overlap between secular and religious order with regard to the factor of inviolable rules—the inviolable is the inviolable, whether connected to supernatural sanctions or not and whether connected to theocracies or to military governments—this is because of the strongly sociological character of sacred order itself. Some of those particular ways that sacred order and social order are intertwined and mutually reinforcing must now be examined.

The social structuring of sacred order Sacred order does not exist in a social vacuum. It is invested, maintained, and given texture through territorialism, tradition, bonding and solidarity, honor, authority, law, membership, respect for role-status, and other similar constraints and obligations. (For a pertinent set of essays on the general sociology of order, see Shils [1975].) Any of these can shape the phenomenon of inviolability. Although the classical phenomenologists of the mana model described their subject without the need of sociological categories, so predominant was their interest in the superhuman referent of religion that this cannot be the case with the concept of sacred order, where the construction of sacrality appears to parallel socially

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endowed and reinforced forms of constraints. The following outline therefore briefly identifies ways that social structures correlate with sacred order.

Territory Habitation is a fundamental form of life, and for humans territorial behaviors, “place,” and ownership take numerous genres. In these spaces, humans, like other organisms, make worlds prone to danger and ambiguous boundaries, and devise techniques for self-defense and for expelling invaders. Here, most evidently, “the sacred” is not supernatural but biological, driven by the circuitries and instincts of self-preservation and species-survival; here sociobiology and the study of sacrality join interests; here inviolability is a strategy of life-space and self-maintenance.

Bonding W. Robertson Smith described the first form of sacrality as “the sanctity of the kindred bond,” where “all sacred relations and all moral obligations depend on the physical unity of life,” and where the bond with the god is a reflection of the bond with the clan (1956[1894]: 47, 400). It is, he said, “… the one sacred principle of moral obligation” (p. 53). The very nature of belonging to a group has an elemental obligatory character, whether in ascribed membership in a family, clan, ethnic lineage, church, or nation, or in elective group affiliation. Nor is it surprising to find biologists maintaining that “the basic infrastructure of human solidarity is rooted in a biogenetic capacity and predisposition for bonding” (Bolin and Bolin 1984: 15). Loyalty to one’s survival unit is surely one of the primordial, albeit raw, forms of sacrality.6

Tradition By tradition, I do not mean a vague, disembodied worldview of ideas, but the behavioral commitment of “doing things the way they have been done,” and thus maintaining the normativeness of lineage-categories. In this sense, tradition, like territory, is best understood when disrupted. Traditionbehaviors replicate maps and scripts that ascribe defined identities and

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behavioral prototypes, and to break with these exemplars and guidelines is to rupture the world’s a priori coherence. For example, it is believed by adherents that since its founding in the tenth century, every initiated monk in the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism has faithfully practiced a daily iteration acknowledging the continuous transmission of the dharma from each and all of the successive teachers in that tradition. This obedient ritual chain of the “River of Consecration” has ostensibly never been broken. One could cite hundreds of examples of system-allegiance elsewhere. We have here, I think, an important modality of sacrality, but one paid scant attention in the works of the phenomenologists.

Hierarchy and authority Hierarchy creates the behaviors of fealty, submission, levels of unapproachability, scales of deference and loyalty, and degrees of status purity. The phenomenon of subordination and rank even has links with prehuman behaviors (Burkert 1996: 80–101). Political centralization ritualizes and mythologizes the sacrality of its own authority, the violation of which puts world foundations at stake.7 Obedience to the system’s representative— whether to a chief, ancestor, god, bishop, parent, guru, or Mafia boss—is synecdochic obedience to the system. Yet loyalty takes endless forms. In cases like the radical Protestant movements, which democratized religious authority in their refusal to be beholden to any sacerdotal authority, the factor of loyalty still continued to survive in notions of unwavering allegiance and obedience to “the Word of God” as formulated in church confessions and teachings.

Social roles and grids In traditional societies, essentialized internal classifications of social structure embody cosmic order, and these given, ordained roles constrain behavioral boundaries and program religious practices. Faithfulness to role and the sacrifice of individuality to its requirements are strong factors in the production of systemic order. “High grid” societies create strong internal gradations of status (Douglas 1982: 183–254; cf. also Dumont 1980). Role subversion provokes system subversion.

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Where traditional societies are upheld by the invariable, ontological nature of ascribed behavioral roles, a huge proportion of ritual behavior is focused on definition of role identity, for example the roles of kings and subjects, clergy and laity, males and females, old and young, ancestors and the living, foreigners and members. The more role differences in a society, the more present will be the controlling web of ritualization. Indeed, remembering that ritual is socially coded, it could be argued that in at least some ways sacrality is constructed by ritual itself. In Jonathan Z. Smith’s suggestive formula: “Ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual (the primary sense of sacrificium)” (Smith 1987: 105). If the stratified identities are lost, the system is lost, as the elements of the system are the system. The whole is then at stake every time a role enactment is subverted. To insiders, role subversion, like authority erosion, represents the end of a particular world order, underscoring why conservatives find changes like the ordination of women such a disastrous sin against the structure of the universe.

High-definition membership Where the importance of membership in a group or subgroup is intensified, the factor of sacred order is more pronounced. Where identity is created and defined by membership, one’s life is clearly differentiated from that of others by characteristic marks of belonging. Whatever behaviors critically protect and articulate membership must be kept from compromise. One thinks here of Mary Douglas’s hypothesis that boundaries will be consequential according to whether “groups” are strong or weak relative to the outside world, strong groups having the most highly defined purity rules for monitoring membership and where boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are among the most dominating of distinctions (Douglas 1982: 183–254). Disloyalty here becomes the greatest sin. Where membership is less articulated and heterogeneous, there are fewer lines to be potentially violated. The several kinds of highly defined religious membership show different ways that the separative character of belonging is fundamental. Priesthoods comprise a professional class of consecrated persons whose lives follow clearly marked constraints. Monastic groups construct standards of behavior

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demarcated from those of lay life and values. Separatist communities like the Amish differentiate themselves through such codes as special kinds of clothing, just as minority religious groups which survive in heterogeneous cultures— one thinks of Mormons, Sikhs, Hasidic Jews, or Parsis—depend generally for that survival on clear, visible definitions of their unique differences. Evangelical lay groups, of whatever religious persuasion, oppose themselves markedly to the values of secular humanism, creating sharply edged countercultural discourses which carve out a separate rhetorical stance in the midst of an otherwise alien, profane world (e.g., the rhetoric of “Creation Science” as opposed to evolutionary theory, or the distinctive language of being “born again” as opposed to the generalities of accommodated, liberal Christianity). New religious movements differentiate the actions and appearance of their adherents to mark their distinctive commitments, as when the neo-sannyasins of the Rajneesh movement did not hesitate to wear special “sunrise” colors and “malas” of their guru in the midst of their normal, secular occupational landscapes. While these are examples taken from religious cultures, the notion of sacred order is also built into any highly defined form of membership status. The religious examples simply show the phenomenon in more accentuated, visible focus.

Honor Finally, the notion of sacred order is also amplified by its connection with the phenomenon of honor,8 a concept the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers refers to as having a “sacred nature” (Pitt-Rivers 1968: 506). Here “honor” refers not to acclaim but to integrity maintenance. The relation of the compellingness of honor and that of sacrality is a promising area for research. Each requires an absolute allegiance, and the two concepts seem to be intertwined in ways not yet fully realized by religion scholars. Humans gladly lay down their lives and take on martyrdom rather than betray matters of honor or subject their identities to dishonoring, profaning insult. Religious systems become vehicles of honor as well as manic empowerment. The above categorical factors show how difficult it would be to speak of sacrality apart from the constraining patterns of sociocultural identity—

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patterns that the mana model often ignored with its focus on the ahistoric character of symbols of revelation. Clearly none of these factors that generate the possibility of sacred order are specific to religion. But religion puts its own cast on sacred boundaries through its preeminent superhuman ethos, its strong, persistent ritualization (which in itself imposes stability on a chaotic universe), and certainly its hypostasized and institutionalized emic rhetorics about the order of things. Note, too, that religions not only encode traditional social values, they can also change them. Religion combines both with social structuring and with social restructuring. It can enforce routine secular authority and social classifications, but can also be an antidote to them or reversal of them.9 Early monastic Buddhism defied Hindu classifications of the social universe; ethnic and national differentiations were leveled in St. Paul’s Christianity and Gandhi’s universalism; hierarchy became anathema in radical Protestantism with its “priesthood of all believers”; and antinomian mysticisms East and West pushed beyond allegiance to humanly fashioned sacralities and egoic notions of honor and territory, seeking freedom from the very social forms and constraints outlined above.10 In secular cultures of egalitarian individualism, the protection of individual rights and not-to-be-violated personal “space” become part of a new, dominant nomic order. Such societies offer their members liberties and mobility in place of fixed authority structure and ascribed roles. Indeed, sacredness becomes invested in basic freedoms, equality of opportunity, the dignity of human persons, and self-determination rather than with duties and allegiances or the protection of rank and status.11 A new kind of sacred order replaces the old.

Review and implications The concept of sacred order yields a number of implications and prospects for the study of religion: (1) Religion scholars need a broader model of sacrality that can describe and account for both the manic and nomic aspects of religious systems. Any religious object can be “sacred” in both ways. Even to the believer,

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the empowered objects which focalize one’s world are at once tokens of superhuman instrumentality and signs of a normative world-order. Sacred order has a force equal in urgency to that of the so-called numinous, and one might surmise that the ancient biblical figure who reached out to touch the holy Ark of the Covenant died instantly not only because of the ostensible mana of the Ark, but also because of the profound system-violation he committed. Power and order are intertwined and mutually conditioning elements of religious world-building. Each is a premise of the other. The gods presuppose the very system which invests them with their status as gods, even though the world-order may itself be perceived as a creation of the gods. The gods are then at once manic and nomic categories.12 The weight of inviolable order focused on holy objects lends mana to them, just as manic objects produce a circle of inviolateness around themselves. These two facets of sacrality—alterity and integrity—therefore compare to the textbook instance of that figure which can alternately be seen as a vase or as two facial profiles, depending on one’s configuring angle. One does not have to choose between these gestalts or make one of them into a theory which excludes the other. (2) Sacred order is a broader concept than religion. It is not a uniquely religious category (nor are “manic” objects), but religion is one of its primary and prototypical expressions.13 It is a structuring force, in a primordial sense,14 in every system on which some community’s or individual’s life depends. The religious versions of order, being so mythically and dramatically pronounced, help expose and delineate the notion of sacred order and its contours similar to the way the study of religious world construction helps us understand and analyze the general notion of world and multiple worlds. (I elaborate this in Paden [1994b].) (3) The concept of sacred order refers to a structuring polarity rather than to any particular content. By contrast, the mana model often insinuates a certain superhuman content to “the sacred.”15 Sacred order in itself is not something that is necessarily benign. Sacrality has its raw sides, and as a consequence of focusing on its revelational rather than social functions, historians of religion have tended to ignore its darker contents and possibilities.

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The history of sacred order thus shows not only what is ordinarily considered to have a civilizing value, but a history of political exclusion, fearful dogmatism, and social discrimination. It shows that religious inquisitions can work from similar impulses as Stalinesque political purges. Upholding a world is connected with the entire range of human self-interest and the gods can be made to legitimize the most banal, totalitarian, and brutal forms of system “purity.” There is nothing in sacred order which necessarily insulates the “order” of the gods from the order of tyrants, or from the baser, more paranoid human impulses. Order can be fanatic, dogmatic, fascistic, imperialistic. In evaluative terms, it can be a malignant disorder. If order, then, is not necessarily a pacific affair and not just a matter of pleasant notions about cosmic balance, and if it has a raw all-toohuman side where its defense has been limned in far too much blood and oppression, then it becomes a phenomenon for social criticism as much as for the descriptive study of religious systems. Though it is operative in every religious system, sacred order is not a concept that should be invested with any a priori religious privilege. (4) The concept of sacred order points to productive areas for research and thematic study which combine the otherwise separate interests of the history of religions and the social sciences. In what ways, for example, is the strength of sacred order directly related to concepts of the centralization of authority, or membership identity, or law and property, or male values, or social location within a given system,16 or ideological insecurity?17 What specific, local techniques do insiders practice to prevent and reconcile disorder?18 What would a history of religions look like that traced not just the history of presumed encounters with divinity but the history of the ability of religious systems to tolerate disorder, anomaly, or deviance—a history of sacrilege and heresy, of boundarymaintenance?19 If the severest punishments correspond to infractions where the system is most jeopardized, what would that reveal, in a way that doctrinal studies of religion would not, about the actual behavioral foundations of any given religious world? (5) The distinction of the mana model and that of sacred order does not exhaust the modes of sacrality, but only begins to suggest their

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complexity and variety. This initial, primary distinction points the way to still further possibilities, for not all religion is about revealing or conserving, about mana or nomos. To take the example briefly alluded to above, religion can also be impelled and configured by the desire for liberation from false order, where order has become negative, limiting, or profane. The possibilities of anti-order are potentially just as interesting as those of order. That would be another project. Dealienation, or emancipation from wrong order, can become as much a force of religious positioning as conserving the integrity of true order. Sacredness then becomes identified with the process of de-profanizing religious life from its contamination with these false contexts and values—and “purity” becomes a matter of backing out of the pollutions of profane order.20 In sum, moving the notion of sacrality beyond its first, monolithic, mana model project, and decentralizing it with a fuller consideration of its additional thematic values, will lead not only to a differentiation of its own important genres but also, consequently, to a better, more observant sense of the manysided character of religious world construction.

References Anttonen, Veikko. (1996). “Rethinking the Sacred: The Notions of ‘Human Body’ and ‘Territory’ in Conceptualizing Religion.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 36–64). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Baetke, Walter. (1942). Das Heilige im Germanischen. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Benveniste, Émile. (1973). Indo-European Language and Society, trans. E. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber. Berger, Peter. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday and Co. Bolin, Robert and Susan Bolton Bolin. (1984). “Sociobiology and Sociology: Issues in Applicability.” In P. R. Barchas (ed.), Social Hierarchies: Essays Toward a Sociophysiological Perspective (pp. 3–22). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caillois, Roger. (1959). Man and the Sacred, trans. M. Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Douglas, Mary. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. (1975). Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. (1982). In the Active Voice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. (1987). How Institutions Think. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dumont, Louis. (1980). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. M. Sainsbury, L. Dumont, and B. Gulati. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1965). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain. New York: Free Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane, trans. W. R. Trask. New York: Harcourt/Brace/Jovanovich. Fitzgerald, Timothy. (1993). “Japanese Religion as Ritual Order.” Religion 23: 315–341. “Holy.” (1989). In The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn.), vol. 7 (p. 318). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Idinopulos, Thomas A. and Edward Yonan (eds.). (1996). The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Isambert, François-André. (1982). Le Sens du Sacré: fête et religion populaire. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Levy, Leonard W. (1993). Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Milner, Murray, Jr. (1994). Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Mol, Hans. (1976). Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Paden, William E. (1994a). “Before ‘the Sacred’ Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 198–210). Leiden: E.J. Brill. [See Chapter 1, this volume.] Paden, William E. (1994b). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press.

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Penner, Hans H. (1989). Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion. Toronto Studies in Religion, vol. 8. New York: Peter Lang Press. Pickering, W. S. F. (1984). Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. (1968). “Honor.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences vol. 6 (p. 506). New York: Macmillan. Ray, Benjamin. (1991). Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda. New York: Oxford University Press. Shils, Edward. (1975). Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978). Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, W. Robertson. (1956[1894]). The Religion of the Semites (2nd edn.), J. S. Black (ed.) New York: Meridian Books. Stark, Werner. (1976–1987). The Social Bond: An Investigation into the Bases of Lawabidingness, vols. 1–6. New York: Fordham University Press. Stewart, Frank Henderson. (1994). Honor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zuesse, Evan M. (1974). “Taboo and the Divine Order.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42: 482–504.

4

World

The concept of “world” provides a tool for understanding and analyzing the plurality, contextuality, and self-positing nature of religious cultures. Thus, rather than viewing religions in terms of a given standard—whether religious or nonreligious—of what “the” world is and then seeing how they, the religions, represent “it,” here the assumption is that religious systems themselves create their own versions of world. Religions are one of culture’s primary systems of world definition, constructing universes of language, behavior, and identity with their own particular organizing categories. The concept “world” in some ways overlaps with the notions of belief system and worldview but has more textured, contextualistic, and behavioral reference. World encompasses all forms of habitation, action, and language, and not just viewpoints, ideas, or self-conscious doctrines and philosophies. Like the notion “environment,” a world suggests operating life space, actively negotiated by those inside it. This applies to any organism. In human cultures, there are multiple, alternating genres of world, or subworlds: for example, those of the military, business, arts, courtship, mathematics, and sport. World is then a systematic indicator of domain difference and specificity. The etymological meaning of the Germanic/English word “world” is “the age or life of man,” (from wer-, “man,” and ald-, “age”), as distinguished from the “age” or domain of the gods. In Christian cultures, where the Gospels had already introduced phrases like “my kingdom is not of this world (Gk. kosmos),” it became conventional to distinguish “this world” of human life in contrast to “the next.” As the long entry in The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) shows, the term “world” eventually invited extended uses to denote any sphere or realm, as in “the Old World and the New World,” “the world of plants,” “one’s own world,” “the world of the honeybee,” “the world of the Cistercian monk.”

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Now we have “the world of teenage romance” or “the cyberworld.” What is common here is the notion of a frame of reference or domain that constitutes the horizon of certain kinds of behaviors, objects, persons, or communities and thus differentiates those horizons from others so that one can pay attention to their particular contextualities. Applied to human life systems, then, a world is not just a matter of conceptual representation, but also a specific form of habitation and practice—the structure of meaningful relationships in which a person exists and participates. More fully put, it is the operating environment of linguistic and behavioral options that persons or communities presuppose, posit, and inhabit at any given point in time and from which they choose courses of action. Religious worlds, in particular, are cultural systems that organize language and behavior around engagement with postulated superhuman agencies. A person is “in” a religious world as one can be “in” the army, “in” a game, or “in” a relationship. As an analytical concept in religious studies, world is most definitely not just a term for “the totality of things” in general, but rather for the particular ways totalities are constructed in any particular environment. On the one hand, the idea directs attention to the lived context, categories, and realities of “insiders.” In the study of religion, this is critical for the goal of “understanding the other,” for ideally it checks the blatant imposition of foreign classifications onto other peoples’ self-representations. Yet, on the other hand, to label the insiders’ systems “worlds” is not to simply validate them, admire them, or give them voice. Rather, the analytic purpose is to be able to identify the internal relationships and functions of objects and categories within a given domain, as compared with the arrangements of other life-systems. Historians of religion investigate what beliefs and actions refer to as real in the classificatory perspectives of the adherents—while also asking what they refer to within their own very different and broader horizon of explanation. The notion of world then helps clarify the difference of insider and outsider points of view. Much confusion has resulted from scholars attributing their version of what religion signifies to that of the adherents themselves. What things “mean” in the world of the observer does not have to correspond to what things mean in the world of the insider. In anthropological terminology, emic categories represent terms entirely specific to a culture and its insiders. Etic categories, by contrast, represent the scholar’s own concepts that have been

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formed by generalization and comparative analysis (for analysis and debate about these concepts in anthropology, see Headland [et al. 1990]; as applied to the study of religion, see McCutcheon [1998]). The notion of world is itself an etic category—designed partly to direct attention to its emic versions. The concept of world therefore includes not only a descriptive function, but also a redescriptive one (McCutcheon 1997). That is, it not only is used to attend to the categories of the insider’s life-world, but also account for them within the broader conceptual resources of the outside scholar. The analyst or comparativist brings a general understanding of world formation and its shaping factors to the interpretation of any single world. In this sense, the notion of world includes and employs much of the theoretical capital of similar concepts described in Braun and McCutcheon’s Guide to the Study of Religion (2000, [in which this essay was originally published, pp. 334–47]), such as culture, discourse, ideology, cognition, structure, myth, gender, and classification—all of these being dimensional components or factors of world construction and lenses to analyze it. Any human world involves the variables of physical geography, language, social class, historical change, economics, and even individuality; any world is an open-ended, interactive process, filled with various and complex sensory and cognitive domains, encompassing both representation and practice, both imaginal objects and bodies-in-performance. As a concept, world provides something of an integrative matrix in which the particular, faceted contributions of various disciplines can find their places.

Background of the concept More than a loose figure of speech, world is a concept that has undergone specialized development as a tool of the philosophic human sciences. For example, the commonsense, descriptive move to unpack world into different domains may be accompanied by the epistemologically radical conclusion that no single one of them constitutes an absolute standard for describing the others; that the “universe” is always a product of a manner of description rather than an objectively determined referent; or that the concept of world does not assume a single, a priori system of knowledge in terms of which all human experience should be described.

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The idea that world is not just a common, ready-made entity that humans passively receive or discover, but rather something humans also produce and form, has a conceptual genealogy with many branches. In each, we find concepts that “the world” is a product of the instrumentations and modes through which it is apprehended and inhabited, and that world describes versions of life-space without reducing those versions to an independent norm. These traditions include but are not limited to Kantian philosophy, phenomenology, sociology of knowledge, social anthropology, and the history of religions model of Mircea Eliade. In the first lineage, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) described how the mind and its categories are factors that structure reality and that without these structures there is no access to reality “in itself.” From this, others developed the idea that concepts and symbol systems of all kinds become the different frames through which different kinds of “reality” take place. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), for example, in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 1923–1929), showed how disparate forms of cultural languages like art, myth, and science organize distinctive kinds of reality (1955). Nelson Goodman developed a radical form of relativism, summarized in his Ways of Worldmaking (1978), showing how the world only comes in “versions”: “None of them,” he writes, “tells us the way the world is, but each of them tells us a way the world is” (1972: 31). A musical score, a painting, or a scientific theory each compose one of these worlds, each realm with its own “schemes” (Goodman and Elgin 1988: 7). These are not versions of one and the same neutral, underlying world, for no version is the primordial descriptor of reality and each world version has an independence. Thus, seemingly conflicting assertions like “The sun always moves” and “The sun never moves,” while at odds on the surface, need to be read within their own systems of description as statements that are true in different worlds. Truth is then a function of system genre, some truths requiring denotational, empirical criteria, others, like various forms of aesthetic truth, inviting “rightness” and consistency internal to the requirements of the logic of their own domain. The second tradition is that of phenomenology, launched systematically with Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl developed the concept of a “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt), or the world as immediately experienced by subjects,

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as distinguished from the objectivizing conceptual world of science without human subjects in it. He focused on describing “the structures of experience” as they occur in consciousness and as they are “lived”—for example, to consciousness, time is not quantitative or homogeneous, but heterogeneous and qualitative. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) produced an extensive, original analysis of the human situation as characterized by one’s “beingin-the-world.” Again, this existential focus on the structure of “habitative” existence was an alternative to philosophies that pictured consciousness, mind, or subjectivity as independent of environments, and that had isolated subjects from their world fields. In the terms of existential phenomenology, what humans “are” is what they do as agents in their worlds, a world being here a mutually constitutive relation of subject and objects. Arguably in the phenomenological spirit, even the American philosopher William James had analyzed seven genres of “subworlds”—including the worlds of the senses, science, abstract truths, collective prejudices, individual opinion, religion and myth, and madness (1890: 291–95), noting that “each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention” (p. 293, emphasis in original). Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1967) and Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967)—which gave particular semantic currency to the terminology of “world-construction”—encapsulated another trajectory of the category of world, the so-called “sociology of knowledge,” drawing on the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Alfred Schutz (1899–1959). Marx and Durkheim had already developed the radical claims that the entire world of thought and knowledge, including “religion,” was a social creation. These creations are nevertheless very real in their effects. This approach went much further than just observing that thought and worldviews are “influenced” by social norms. Rather, it attested that knowledge is itself a product of human, cultural activity. Berger described a basic sociological dialectic in three processes. In the first, society externalizes itself, putting its categories—like language and institutions—out onto the world; in the second, such externalization then assumes the features and “facticity” of objective reality, and this is the “objectivation” process; and in the third, that reality is then internalized as

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normative by society’s individual members. Language, social roles, and identities, which are initially our products, thus take on the aura of factuality. “[T]he fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control,” Berger writes, “but in its power to constitute and to impose itself as reality” (Berger 1967: 12). Society is here a world-building enterprise that must always maintain and “legitimize” its own meaningful order, or nomos (Gk. “law”) (p. 19). Separation from the social world, in turn, constitutes anomy—essentially worldlessness (p. 22). Social institutions are endowed with an ontological status “to the point where to deny them is to deny being itself— the being of the universal order of things and, consequently, one’s own being in this order” (p. 25); nomos and cosmos then become “co-extensive” (p. 25). Religion, in Berger’s view, is what “cosmizes” and sacralizes this nomos. In the face of chaos, religions ground nomic institutions in a transhumanly legitimated realm. A fourth trajectory is that of social anthropology per se, which has emphasized the culture-specific construction of world, the autonomy of “collective representations,” worlds as cultural languages and mappings, and communities as systems. Representative are Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983) on the context-specific nature of cultural categories and Mary Douglas on the boundaried character of group definitions (1966). Others, like Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Talal Asad (1993), have drawn particular, nuanced attention to the role of “practice” in the “negotiation” of worlds. Finally, and particularly influential in the vocabulary of comparative religion, we have the work of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986). Eliade made programmatic use of the concept of world, applying it as a tool of the history and phenomenology of religion. Where sociologists and anthropologists established the role of social norms in the formation of worlds, Eliade attempted to show the specific role of religious myth and ritual. Religious and nonreligious people, he posited, represent different modes of “being in the world” (1959: 14–16), different “existential situations.” Thus, for Homo religiosus (the “religious person”) the universe is constituted by “sacred histories,” and sacred times and places that make the mythic realities present. What is taken as sacred becomes “the real”—it “ontologically founds the world” (1959: 21). To Eliade, religious world creation with its distinctive mythic style parallels the imaginal, creative systems of novelists and artists.

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In the Eliadean approach, religious worlds are those which interpret space, time, nature, and human existence in terms of transhuman meanings. Thus, traditional religious cultures oriented their worlds around certain fixed, sacred points—either natural sites such as mountains or caves, or constructions such as temples or shrines, or even portable sacred objects—in the midst of otherwise homogeneous space. These “centers of the world” also function as “openings” or points of communication with the transhuman agencies, which underlie existence. Where the symbolism is vertical, these points comprise an axis mundi (world axis), linking the world above with that below. The fundamental distinction of “our world” versus foreign, chaotic space reflects the opposition between organized and unknown territory. Eliade calls it a traditional “system of the world” (1959: 37) where one’s own world is at the center, is believed to be founded by the gods, and involves points of communication with the gods by certain breaks in the homogeneity of space. A second Eliadean category of religious worldmaking is the construction of time and history through mythic classifications. For a traditional religious world, time has a reversible quality. Religious actors orient themselves toward and define themselves in terms of the eternal “time” of the myth—the time of the great events recounted in one’s sacred histories. Ritual gives access to these realities. Eliade offers the example of cultures for whom the word for world is also the word for year, indicating that the annual time of the New Year festival is also literally the time when “the world” is reborn anew through the reempowerment of the mythic forces of creation (1959: 73). Traditional Homo religiosus also experiences nature as a manifestation of divine activity, so that sacrality is revealed “through the very structures of the world” (1959: 117). This is to say that the system of nature and its features—such as the transcendence and infinity of the sky, the life-death cycle of the earth, and the dissolving but purifying and creative nature of water—are all experienced as having a transhuman, cosmic value and signification. Finally, for Eliade, religious worlds are apt to incorporate all human activities, such as eating, work, art, and marital life within a cosmic or mythic framework of significance. It is the nature of the lens of mythic thinking to find its categories and archetypes manifest or divined in and through the ordinary

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world of objects. Transitions and events like birth, puberty/adulthood, marriage, and death are always ritually placed within an encompassing, sacred, worldview. Besides these five approaches to world-building, recent scientific models may also hold promise for religious studies, including “systems” analysis and complexity theory (Malley 1995), and biological concepts of “self-organizing systems” (Jantsch 1980). Varela, Thompson, and Rosch present a cognitive science model—influenced by phenomenology and Madhyamika Buddhist dialectics—which develops the idea that mind and world arise together in an “enactive” manner (Varela et al. 1991). Some cognitivists would maintain that the human mind is engaged in a “co-evolutionary relationship” with religious systems (Malley 1995: 7). Generally, renewed interest in the application of bioanthropology to religious behavior (Burkert 1996), in “human universals” (Brown 1991), and the cognitive basis of religious ideas (Boyer 1994; Malley 1995) may add significant conceptual resources to the notion of world-building.

Religious worlds: Features and dynamics Religious systems are topographies of language and practice in which humans construe the world as a place of engagement with superhuman beings and become actors in that culturally generated system. These same religious people may also, simultaneously, live within several other organizational and behavioral systems and roles that have no transhuman reference points, for example physical, social, and geographical worlds. Where a religious world version is in effect, though, one finds the language of superhuman agency, sacred objects, notions of an inviolable world order, and the process of periodically renewing the world through ritual observances.

Religion as world script A religious world is a particular way of seeing the world and acting in it through the matrix of languages or acts that engage transhuman agency. Religious language names the empowering forces of the world as gods, spirits,

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or god-like beings, evoking their presence, authority, and communicative possibilities. These beings also form the ingredients of cosmologies, mythologies, and sacred “histories”—which constitute a kind of semantic, categorial membrane around “one’s world,” explaining its origin and course, and why things are as they are. Such constructions of world and knowledge, believed to signify the realities behind appearances, create domains of experience within which human actors and religious objects evolve their interactive life. These mental mappings have been endlessly imaginative. They produce other worlds, future worlds, higher worlds, parallel spirit universes, heavens and hells, the worlds of gods and worlds produced by gods. The ordinary world, in juxtaposition with these others, accordingly may come to be seen as a place of illusion, a playground of the gods, a prison house requiring a savior, an exact mirror duplicate of “the world above,” or a laborious stage in an evolutionary series. Religious language, and thus its accompanying world version, is participatory and self-involving, unlike the language of scientific objectivity. It is itself a form of practice, involving various reciprocities of giving and receiving in relation to its postulated sacred objects; and a form of communication and performance—in some ways, a form of competency. In this sense, religious accounts of the creation and generation of the world are not just hypotheses about what happened in the past, but foundational charters and indices for how to behave in the present.

Empowered sacred objects Religious worlds form around particular objects believed to be sacred. The objects come in various genres—not only as names of gods and spirits, but as the manifestations of superhuman power or authority in places and times, endowed authorities, sacraments and rites, icons and symbols, scriptures and mythic words, teachings and precepts. Sacred objects may be tangible or mental, spatial or linguistic, but they will tend to have a centripetal, centering function, serving as openings to a nonmaterial zone. They thereby become forms of bonding and reciprocal empowerment. Around them, with all their mystery, charisma, inviolateness, and attention-demanding obligations, religious worlds and the logic of religious behaviors arise.

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None of this indicates that a religious world is not at the same time a social world. Religious objects receive their forms of sacrality from the authority of the collectivities they belong to. They are often marks of belonging. The Pope, the Ganges River, the mandalas of Soka Gakkai Buddhism, and the Qur’an are holy only within their own social frames, and not in others. The absolutes, the cosmic maps, the reigning authorities, and the holy of holies of one group are irrelevant or nonexistent in other systems. Thus, thousands of “Centers of the World” sit side by side. Each group or subgroup elevates and absolutizes its own authoritative objects.

Sacred order Religious worlds are not just about relations with objects but also posit normative, moral orders taken to be the cosmic order itself, and these determine proper and improper behavior. Such orders draw lines forming distinctions of good and evil, right and wrong, pure and impure, and endow these boundaries with the sanctity of superhuman legitimation. Not only domains for the experience of “the other,” religions are systems which monitor their own integrity by purging what is offensive, often through acts of purification. Sacred order is then not just a template for world design or a passive, aesthetic arrangement, but a process of self-maintenance in the face of wrongness and violation. The world must be kept “right,” and if something is wrong with the world, it must be made right—the polarity and procedure being relative to each system. Religion is here one of the more far-reaching forms of world stability in the face of an otherwise chaotic cosmos. Religious worlds, moreover, are highly defined and developed versions of the tendency of all human worlds to seek self-preservation against threats of violation. The act of defending territory, honor, tradition, membership, and collective loyalties is intimately linked with the inviolability of religious order (Paden 2000 [see Chapter 3, this volume]). Religions themselves have their own terms for world-order, such as the Hindu idea of dharma. Dharma, from a root meaning “to uphold” (dhr), signifies the eternal, divinely endowed moral order. It is synonymous with the concepts of law, duty, righteousness, religion. Its opposite is adharma. Chinese religions have the category of T’ien, or the “order of Heaven,”

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reflected in all social relationships, and even Tao, the natural “way” of things; and monotheistic traditions have conceptions of the revealed Word of God manifest in scriptures such as the Qur’an, the Torah, or the Bible. Religious order tends to become the guideline for all other forms of order, such as dietary, legal, and political life.

World renewal Worlds not only need to be defended but also renewed. Where the religious world is not kept up, the authority of the gods is diminished. Thus, periodic religious observances and festivals have become not only the shapers of time and calendars, but also acts that give continuing “life” to the superhuman powers. Ritual observance, then, becomes the matrix of world renewal, as Durkheim (1995 [1912]: 330–54, 374–91) and later Eliade (1959: 68–113) emphasized. Through regular acts of memorializing sacred objects and transmitting ritual behaviors, the social and mythic reality of religions is maintained as plausible and unchanging. Daily prayer for Muslims or puja for Hindus build the category of divinity into the heart of the day; the Judeo-Christian Sabbath and Sunday observances return time to God on a regular weekly cycle; great annual festivals like Ramadan, the Jewish New Year, and Easter regenerate the cosmos on a pervasive large scale. All major passages and events in life are given religious context. Thus, religious worlds are sustained and refounded periodically through commemorative and ritual practices that construct a kind of temporal geography. Without these normative, shaping intersections that mark and punctuate time, religious worlds would scarcely survive.

Varieties and dynamics of religious worlds Religious worlds get reshaped by adapting to environments. They grow, transmute, combine, subdivide, accommodate, migrate, die off. Buddhism completely reinterpreted what had previously been a Hindu cosmos, as Christianity did with Judaism, as Islam did with its Judeo-Christian predecessors, and as Protestantism did with Catholicism. Religions are fashioned out of the stuff of endless cultural locations and genres. Where

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culture is territorial, so is religion; where culture is individualistic, religion reflects it; where it is hierarchic, religion follows suit; where cultures combine, religion becomes syncretic; where culture is revolutionary, so are the gods. Likewise, religions themselves reshape cultures. They are not only reflections of social systems, but also create and recreate them, and they do this because they are themselves a formative agency of social life. New religious movements, numbering in the thousands when looked at globally, show how the language of spirituality constantly recreates itself to address the needs of emerging cultural identities and horizons. The enormous variety of these innovative systems shows the naturalness of religious worldbuilding, each group reconstituting a cosmology, manufacturing a revised version of history, offering a new set of ontological markers and new interactive objects of authority and communication. They will do this as naturally and inevitably as any species will form a habitat. Each purposive zone of culture, whether religious, medical, musical, commercial, or political, will have its “life”: its structures, styles of productivity, goals, and flow of activity. Any of them has a self-organizing flow of its own, following the logic and strategies of its own subject matter, availability of resources, opportunities, conflict and competition, and creative leadership. Each generates its own classifications of relevant knowledge, its own lenses for construing experience, its skill sets. In religious terms, one who devotes his or her life “to God” comes to encounter a range of significations, processes, and new experiences along the way, just as the same could be said for those who pursue other cultural genres, such as fashion designers, culinary experts, cellists, or tennis players. Some religions have a tendency to spread their effects through an entire world system, and thus to totalize and universalize their influence. This drive toward extension may either take the form of so-called “world” or missionary religions which set out to win the allegiance of all cultures and thus fill the planet with their globalizing norms, or take the form of extending influence within all the media—educational, political, scientific, legal, aesthetic—within their culture. The public is familiar with the way fundamentalist thinking about creationism tries to take on ownership of society even in the face of challenges by evolutionary science, or the way some sectarian religious groups

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will opt out of the secular system altogether and construct their own internally consistent and self-verifying cultures or niches.

Comparativism and religious worlds The notion of a world supplies a basis for comparative analysis because it constitutes a common, human activity in terms of which different cultural contents may be highlighted. The worldmaking model identifies both common forms of world-fashioning behaviors (e.g., inventing pasts) and historically different sociocultural contents of those forms. If all religious worlds create and transmit sacred pasts, construct sacred objects, absolutize or cosmicize their moral orders and forms of authority, and periodically renew their commitments to sacred objects with calendrical and passage rites, these features are also but mythically explicit versions of themes that appear in the worldmaking of many social traditions. Memoryconstruction, the absolutizing of values and objects, and renewal practices can be identified as comparative themes pervading the general human condition. Behaviors that otherwise might appear distant, primitive, or odd here take on a context of intelligibility as instances of common, familiar human activities. Yet in their content, worlds are different. If all have “pasts,” every past is a different genealogy than any other, even within a so-called common tradition: Pentecostalists and Catholics construct different Christian lineages, Shia and Sunni Muslims have incompatible readings of the succession of Islamic authority, Buddhist denominations affiliate with disparate lineages of teaching authority. Indeed, every traditional village, town, and city, like every family, is apt to have its own salient, chronicled memories (Braun 1999). And if all cultures have annual renewal festivals, nevertheless the content of those rites is not the same but rather a reflector of very different value orientations—such as hierarchic family relationships, moral conscientiousness, economic bonding, or male prowess. If all religions draw lines distinguishing behavior that is right or pure from that which is transgressive or impure, nevertheless what it is that is pure or impure is not the same. Identifying patterns of world orientation

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therefore can actually enhance or highlight differences relative to that pattern, showing what makes a world its own and not another.

Issues and evaluation The notion of world is open to various forms of problematizing and debate, which may be briefly summarized: 1) It may argued that the concept of world puts an artificial circumscription on an area that exists only in the mind of the interpreter, and thus gives a false sense of order or totality, imposing an intelligibility on things that is in fact not there. It could be said that every event is really a fluid, interdependent mixture of many networks, so complex as to be impossible to distinguish in any but an arbitrary way, and that humans essentially live in this chaos rather than in any bounded system. As anthropologist Renato Rosaldo points out, “order vs. chaos” is not the whole story of culture—there is an important, even less explored realm of behavior marked by “improvisation, muddling through, and contingent events” (Rosaldo 1989: 103). In response, one could show that the notion of world does not necessarily imply a fixed, boundaried system. A world can be a process of change, a form of interaction, even a momentary staging, as well as a durable institution, a long-range commitment, or a secure environment. One can be “in” a process as well as “in” a fixed order. Insofar as a world is also a product of language and consciousness, it can be switched on or off in the blink of an eye. Many worlds lie both close at hand and overlapping. 2) It has been argued that “religion” is not itself a viable analytical category but only a convention, and that religious life does not have cultural autonomy (Fitzgerald 1997). Every analytic concept, including that of “religious worlds,” has aspects of arbitrariness. But concepts may also direct attention to what would otherwise not be noticed. The notion of world points to the prospect of locating and sorting out the immense diversity of behavioral

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environments. A religious version of world is such an identifiable, intentional sphere or program of cultural experience, based as it is on interaction with supposed superhuman beings and the collective traditions based on them. 3) Another issue, alluded to earlier, is: whose religious world is being described? That of the insider or that of the interpreter? In the analogy from psychotherapy, the patient’s self-description may be altogether at variance from the therapist’s explanation. For the latter, the patient’s world may exhibit self-deception, mental illness, social dysfunction, paranoia. No Marxist would accept a religion’s description of its own world as a real account of that world. The two horizons of description are indeed discrepant but each has its function. The study of religion is not limited to simple reiteration of the religious insider’s self-description, but also involves a representation of that world, or aspects of it, within a broader repertoire of conceptual, comparative, and analytical resources (Paden 1994, 1996). At the same time, if one cannot identify how objects and relationships are constituted within the experience of the insider, one lacks the basic data: that is, the insider’s realities that are the very subject matter for explanation. 4) Is the notion of world reductionistic? Does the category of worldconstruction take away the elements of “otherness” in experience, as Paul Ricoeur worries (1980: 116)? Is world more than a construct? Certainly the concept of world is not reducible to the metaphor of building and fabrication. Worlds are not just built, as with hammer and nails. They are environments acted upon, responded to, engaged with, practiced, performed—environments to which one “attends” (Ingold 1996: 112–17). For religions, those environments come with superhuman beings as objectivities. It is the nature of religious worlds to provide contexts in which persons may pursue various forms of engagement with “the other,” with gods, with transcendence. “World” is then an open-ended affair that includes any imaginable content of experience. It presents itself through the matrices of its own designs and structures and through the receiving and configuring acts of its human subjects (Paden 1992: 110–35). This is why religious worlds are often

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replete with miracle, magic, and other supernatural features, from the point of view of their insiders. 5) Finally, there is the issue of whether the reference to multiple worlds ignores the reality of a common world. Does the world just melt down into world-versions? Is there no world in which all these other worlds subsist? The answer must be that there is, but our understanding of it as a totality will itself still only be a world version. The study of hundreds of religious worlds certainly leads to a larger sense of the kind of world in which these many worlds take place, and of the kinds of recurrent structures and environmental differences that condition the existence of multiple worlds. This common, underlying world then becomes the world of the interpreter, just as a physicist may form a world model that attempts to accommodate all the known data of the physical universe. The notion of world provides an integrative matrix for linking concepts, insights, and explanatory frames from the work of humanistic, social, and even biological sciences. It has the versatility to distinguish large-scale or small-scale regions of kinds of activity, and it can help demarcate insider’s and outsider’s frames of reference. It differentiates domains of behavior, helping us understand behavior in relation to the environment to which it is a response. In these ways, the concept of world may be productive when applied to religion, just as religion also becomes a productive subject matter for understanding worldmaking as a universal human activity.

References Asad, Talal. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Berger, Peter. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Boyer, Pascal. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Braun, Willi. (1999). “Amnesia in the Production of (Christian) History.” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 28(1): 3–8. Braun, Willi and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.). (2000). Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Cassell. Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. (1995). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vols. 1–3, trans. R. Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Douglas, Mary. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Durkheim, Émile. (1995[1912]). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. K. Fields. New York: The Free Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1959). The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Fitzgerald, Timothy. (1997). “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9: 91–110. Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford. (1983). Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Goodman, Nelson. (1972). Problems and Objects. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Goodman, Nelson and Catherine Z. Elgin. (1988). Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris (eds.). (1990). Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Ingold, Tim. (1996). “1990 Debate: Human Worlds Are Culturally Constructed.” In T. Ingold (ed.), Key Debates in Anthropology (pp. 99–146). London: Routledge. James, William. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, vol. II. New York: Henry Holt. Jantsch, Erich. (1980). The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Malley, Brian. (1995). “Explaining Order in Religious Systems.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 7: 5–22.

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McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997). “A Default of Critical Intelligence? The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65: 443–468. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1998). “Redescribing ‘Religion’ as Social Formation: Toward a Special Theory of Religion.” In T. A. Idinopulos and B. C. Wilson (eds.), What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations (pp. 51–72). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Paden, William E. (1992). Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (1994). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (1996). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 5–14. Paden, William E. (2000). “Sacred Order.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(1/2): 207–225. [See Chapter 3, this volume.] Ricoeur, Paul. (1980). “Review of Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking.” Philosophy and Literature 4: 107–120. Rosaldo, Renato. (1989). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. “World.” (1989). In The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn.), vol. 22 (pp. 554–560). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

5

The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism

Attackers and defenders have occupied a polarized center stage of the Eliade debate, giving the impression that the whole matter is an up-or-down, takeit-or-leave-it affair. But this disjuncture among historians of religion seriously risks stalemating the development of the very cause without which there cannot be any study of religion as such, namely comparative perspective. Fortunately, there are other alternatives than defending an old comparativism and rejecting any comparativism. Eliade’s work is not something that stands or falls as a whole. It is well understood as a basic quarry of thematic studies, some of which may be useful, some not, some of which may be dated, some not—an eclectic resource from which one may legitimately make selections and choices for the continuous rebuilding of the analytical study of religion, and not something one has to justify or reject as a package. There are many Eliades and many contexts in which to give significance to facets of his work, and there remains the possibility of relating some of his categories to a broader, more contemporary model of comparative study. Specifically, this essay draws on a major theme in Eliade’s work which I consider particularly germane for the ongoing work of comparativism.1 It is the concept of religious world habitation and the cross-culturally patterned ways in which such habitation takes place. This factor will become clearer if two discursive matrices are distinguished in Eliade’s writings, both linked with the concept of the sacred. The first is the one most commonly associated with Eliade, where “the sacred” refers to hierophanies of the transcendent, manifest through some part of the ordinary or common (in Eliade’s term, “profane”) world. It is this Eliade who

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sometimes speaks about “the fall and camouflage of the sacred” and who at places seems to associate his category of the sacred with the “Wholly Other” of Otto and other classical religious phenomenologies.2 In this model, religion begins with the revelation of the sacred, with the “opening” of a human world to something supremely other, to the transpersonal cosmos, to the work of the gods. But there is a second Eliade, a second voice, employing another model; it is this one I wish to focus on. Here are writings about the human capacity to constitute multiple worlds, where the concept “world” is clearly pluralistic and relativistic. Here is the language that every world is an “ontology,” a “universe,” a “cultural creation” analogous to the thousands of imaginal universes of art. Here Eliade is not theological at all, but postfoundationalist and to some extent postmodern. (Rennie [1996: 232ff ] also noted the postmodern aspect of Eliade.) Here sacrality is a human value, not an epithet for divinity. If the first matrix has both attracted and repelled scholars of religion, I am not impressed that the second one has been as fully acknowledged as it should be, or that its relevance for the study of religion has been grasped. I agree with Bryan Rennie that the first matrix perhaps struck religion scholars as the most obvious because of their own cultural and theological associations with “the sacred” (Rennie 1996: 22).3 One can see how Eliade’s writing would evoke the familiar overtones of the phenomenological theologies of Van der Leeuw and Otto. Readers scan texts in terms of the categories and horizons they already possess. The world-construction voice, though, has been less noticeable, if not obscured, because religionists on the whole have had little or no familiarity with the Durkheimian discourses about “the sacred” that influenced Eliade and that in fact have nothing to do with theological privileging.4 Though this is not the place to argue it, I would maintain that Eliade’s concept of sacrality ultimately owes more to the French school figures like Georges Dumézil, Marcel Mauss, and Roger Caillois than it does to the Dutch, German, and Scandinavian phenomenologies and that it is a serious misunderstanding simply to lump Eliade and Otto in the same “theological” camp.5 Caillois’s L’Homme et le Sacré (1939), in particular, gave Eliade a template for speaking of sacrality in a humanistic way quite at a remove from the trajectories of the Protestant phenomenologists.6 The very notions of the

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construction and maintenance of worlds by way of myth and ritual and that religious worlds form around the irreducible category of the sacred, resonate with the Durkheimian vocabulary. I am not grounding this essay on the analytic force of proving different historical or linguistic levels of Eliadean thought, and then maintaining that one of them is the “real” Eliade. Nor am I even certain that Eliade himself would have understood these distinctions. But I do find a constructivist, humanistic strain in his work that coexists with and often underlies his rhetoric about “the manifestations of the sacred,” and I do think that the relevant Eliadean discourse for our present secular, comparativist generation is not Eliade-the-monist for whom a monolithic religious reality termed “the sacred” grounds all and manifests through all, but rather Eliade-thepluralist interested in the myriad ways religious worlds are formed as cultural creations. With this distinction, and in this latter sense, I am presenting an alternative to those popular views which write off Eliade’s work simply as ontological essentialism.

“World” as an Eliadean category The first phases of religious phenomenology created inventories of the “forms” of its subject matter, expressions like mana, taboo, gods, prayer, priesthood, sacrifice, and myth. This was a necessary part of the evolution of religious studies and its self-creation as a field of study. Much of Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958[1949]), with its encyclopedic, serialized organization of topics, illustrated this approach. But something different was forming in The Sacred and the Profane (1959), whether Eliade was intending it or not. Here the act of worldmaking becomes a central theme. This is shown not by a listing of general religious topoi but by describing how a religious world per se is formed. For the constructivist Eliade, religious cultures create and inhabit their own “ontologies” through the media of space, time, nature, and human actions. This model does not presuppose a foundationalist reality that is then manifest in “the” world but rather describes multiple universes, or in Nelson Goodman’s

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(1978) terms, world-versions. It is the nature of a world to establish its own reality, its own mythic foundation, its own sacrality and archetypes. The history of religions shows an endless succession of such worlds, each grounded in its own categories of sacred time and space, each with its own calendars, its centering foci, and its pasts. Thus, when Eliade writes, “Every religion … is an ontology: it reveals the being of the sacred things and the divine Figures, it shows forth that which really is, and in doing so establishes a World which is no longer evanescent and incomprehensible …” (1960: 17–18), I would argue that these statements have nothing to do with any implicit ontology on the author’s part and that they are strictly existential descriptions of how cultures construct their lenses.7 Eliade writes often of religious worlds as “creations” analogous to those of novelists and artists. As such, they are novel configurative expressions of the human spirit (a factor rightly stressed by Rennie [1996]). This is a different point of emphasis than that of social scientists for whom a “constructivist” position means that the gods are “only” human inventions. Eliade wants historians of religion to understand these worlds in terms of their distinctive modes of behavior and worldviews—modes that are irreducible parts of religious world habitation.8 The analogy would be the need to understand the artist’s vision and not only his or her social circumstances. For Eliade a world is not just a symbol system but a life-space, built in the midst of chaos; a delineated region of habitation set apart from amorphous, uninhabited surroundings. The foundations of these spaces are ritually sacralized and given cosmic or supernatural significance and mooring. Humans create their worlds, inhabit them, and assume responsibility for them. Sacrality is therefore not just something that manifests or shines through worlds or through the symbolic structures like water, sky, earth, and trees, but also the factor that gives a world its standing against the forces of chaos. In this basic sense, Eliade is linking religious worldmaking with the process of human worldmaking itself. Several of Eliade’s key comparative categories are integrally part of this fundamental human activity of building worlds. For example, humans construct sacred histories, create orientational centers, and renew the world through periodic rites. In this model, where what religion is “about” is worldmaking, the wide recurrence of these patterns is not due to their

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manifesting a transcending “other,” but because they are the normal ways human organisms recall, focus, and renew their systems.

“World” as matrix for post-Eliadean comparativism It will be useful here to give a more formal characterization of “world.”9 A world is the operating, lived environment of behavioral and linguistic options which persons presuppose, posit, and inhabit at any given point in time and from which they choose courses of action. World here is isomorphic with system, environment, cultural context, place, horizon, and, to some extent, language and cognition. It does not necessarily imply systematization or sharp boundaries. It assumes that a world normally undergoes change, is syncretic, has moving and negotiable parts, and complex exchanges of power and gender relations. It is not a reification, but as an etic, comparative concept it directs attention to the discovery of the categories of the insider. It is metaphysically innocent. The pluralistic concept of world not only marks a clear shift to a posttheological model of comparativism, but also provides a foundational term for addressing the main issue surrounding comparativism, namely, doing justice to difference as well as commonality. For the primary limitation of Eliade’s comparative method was that while it identified common forms of world-building behaviors, it paid relatively little attention to what those behaviors showed about their specific worlds. He used data to exemplify the global ubiquity of the pre-defined patterns, rather than to direct attention to the way the examples illustrated differences in world composition among themselves. Thus, his examples are mostly replicas of the pattern he wishes to illustrate—copies, as it were, of the same archetype such as the Cosmic Tree, the Navel of the World, or the axis mundi. Even where he looks into subtypes of a theme—as in the case where ladders, towers, temples, ropes, and mountains are all shown to represent a central point of communication between earth and heaven—the method of comparison is the same. It is this process of using historical examples only to illustrate or reproduce patterned archetypes and subtypes, themes and subthemes—as if the history of religion were like rolled dough to be submitted to cookie-cutter molds—

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that shows the limits of the old-style comparativism. But as shown in the influential, wake-up-call works of Jonathan Z. Smith, comparison also should be a tool for yielding significant differences as well (1982: chaps. 1–2; 1987: 13ff; 1990: chap. 2). The idea of worlds gives a frame for seeing both commonness and difference. On the one hand, religious worldmaking is a recurrent human endeavor with patterned resemblances discernible at a transcultural level. Regardless of particular differences of mythic content, religions build pasts, cultivate sacred histories in which exemplary figures set out prototypal behaviors or guidelines, engage spiritual beings, absolutize and cosmicize their own sacred objects and authorities, and renew their worlds through periodic rituals and festivals. Everywhere cultures conduct rites of passage, linking its members with the world order. Everywhere humans construct forms of sacred, moral order and set boundaries between what is right and wrong relative to the standards of their world order. On the other hand, the notion of plural worlds can also underscore the difference between religious environments and make the plural nature of religious existence intelligible. It intrinsically locates religious activity in its own contexts, and it accommodates all the variables of sociocultural specificity that have been neglected by the old comparativisms. Every religious expression assumes a world, and it is the particularity of one’s world-location which informs religious behaviors with meaning and which gives special content, style, and nuance to any religious act. Thus, in identifying both common forms of world-fashioning behaviors and their historically different sociocultural contents, this proposal might seem to parallel in some ways Jonathan Z. Smith’s call for a comparativism based on “the integration of a complex notion of pattern and system with an equally complex notion of history” (Smith 1982: 29).10

Patterns of world construction In the context just outlined—worldmaking both as common human activity and as specific cultural creation—consider now three elementary forms of world construction that are basic to Eliade’s model but which need to be drawn

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out into broad daylight, as it were, and not hidden within his particularistic cosmological thematizations. I would argue that these categories are essential to the analysis of any religious system.

Constructing and performing pasts Historians of religion are finding a large body of sophisticated analysis in other fields that illumine or recontextualize the notion of “sacred histories” (cf. Boyer 1990).11 That societies select and build pasts and form ways of conjuring these memories seems to me a universal case of human worldmaking behavior. I say “behavior” because mythmaking is not just a linguistic matter of texts and stories in semantic space, but an act of commemorating, enacting, and displaying. Every society makes genealogies and traditions and devises ritual and oral practices for recalling them. In this sense, the study of sacred histories must be informed by historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of past-building and mnemonics. Eliade’s contribution, whatever his particular and controversial ideas about time, for example, archaic/cyclical myth versus historical time, is to have shown the mythic character of “histories” and the centrality of mythic pasts as a comparative concept.12 While making pasts is a common activity, every society makes a different one. On the one hand, in Eliade’s writing, the point of interest was the phenomenon that a certain culture ritually replicated its time of origins, that this group or that habitually stepped into the prestige of mythic time, or that a religion periodically recharged itself with the empowerment of its founding, divine words and acts. Yet on the other hand, the study of sacred pasts is not just a means to extrapolate universal themes, but also a key to revealing what makes a world its own and not another. Subgroups of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists divide among themselves according to different ways of reading their pasts: Pentecostals read Christian history differently than Catholics; Shias stress what Sunnis ignore; Buddhist denominations each have their regularly rehearsed, unique sacred lineages. The study of mythic memory then becomes a gateway to investigating the socially and politically specific nature and investment of the world-building process itself.13

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Spatial orientation Just as religious cultures construct pasts, they make focalized, centripetal places in their environments. Eliade had his own approach to this, typically giving examples of sacred space to show how it embodied cosmic archetypes. His Frazerian-style comparative method consisted of stating a theme, say, “Traditional kingdoms created worlds with a sacred Center and four directions extending from it,” or “the domestic house is homologous with an image of the universe,” and then citing the incidence of this in different cultures. But little or nothing is revealed about the cultures or any other functions of space. The examples merely illustrate what we already know about the topic. Thus, in a New Guinea village, the men’s house, standing at the center, has a roof that “represents the celestial vault,” and “the four walls correspond to the four directions of space,” just as the interior of a Byzantine church symbolizes “the universe,” and its altar symbolizes paradise, which lay in the East (Eliade 1959: 46). But a comparative study of space reveals social structure and values too. It shows hierarchy, subordination, gender roles, egalitarianism. It shows local and national memory. The space of a medieval cathedral, a Quaker meetinghouse, and a contemporary Southern Californian megachurch reveals very different forms of world habitation and social dynamics. Where Eliade was interested in what space showed “upwardly” and cosmically, contemporary historians of religions are more apt to explore what space shows “downward” and laterally into the actual forms of social existence. In correcting and going beyond Eliade’s formulas, J. Z. Smith showed just how potent and differentiated the concept of space can be in the study of religion, for example, demonstrating that the memorializing markings of the Australian Tjilpa and the royal constructions of the Babylonians are not reducible to a thematic axis mundi (Smith 1987: 1–23), as Eliade had implied.

Periodic renewal A third universal pattern of world habitation emerging from Eliade’s work is the periodicity of renewal rites. All cultures have periodic festivals or observances in which their central values are celebrated, made explicit, and given social catalyzation. These are times when the foundations of society,

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whether superhumanly endowed or not, are renewed. Again, while Eliade’s focus was that cultures returned to their cosmic foundations in regular festivals, this leaves the question of what it is each culture does and encodes that makes it different from other cultures. For the forms of world construction can be distinguished from their contents. Thus, it becomes of import not just to identify that cultures renew their worlds annually, though this does tell us something about the process of world habitation, but also that each system will have a different configuration of values that it is reaffirming. For example, what is revealed “downward” is that the actual content or focus of the rites may variously have to do with the sacrality of hierarchic family relationships, or economic exchange alliances between villages, or the display of ideal military values, or meditative intensity, or the dependency of laity and monks on each other, or the prestige of the founder. And the fact that these traits are so highlighted in the renewal rites in turn shows us something about the group’s central values. Far from the theme merely copying itself or obliterating historically contextual material, this newer approach to comparison delineates and underscores how worlds vary.

Conclusions The concept of plural world habitation receives some direction and vision from Eliade but is not limited to Eliade and needs to be worked out on a broader canvas. It supplies a matrix for negotiating both common human realities and different culture-specific embodiments, thus helping to resolve the conceptual dilemma of how comparativism can deal with context. World, as a holistic concept that excludes nothing constitutive of the habitative situation of any human system, includes and integrates within its horizon the theoretical capital and complexity of meta-notions like “language,” “history,” “culture,” “society,” and “systems theory,” and therefore connects what Eliade methodologically held apart. Religion here is shown to be a natural part of world experience: the comparative study of religious world habitation shows how natural it is that a religious world configures and experiences the universe through its own focal symbols and places, sees the whole of time in terms of its own history, finds

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the absolute in its own backyard shrines, and equates its particular moral order with the ultimate order of existence itself. Elsewhere [see Chapter 3, this volume, for a later version], I have argued that sacrality is a universal feature of world maintenance, and is synecdochically coded in boundaries, territory, bonding, social roles, and authority—and thus part of a tradition’s commitment to an order of things, to how things ought to be and must be.14 Indeed, the time may be coming for a reconsideration of the idea of universals—based partly on general world-building processes (e.g., making pasts, periodic renewals, rites of passage) rather than on shared beliefs about a common religious reality [see Chapter 7, this volume].15 “Religion” as a concept has too often been interpreted apart from its function in this natural schema of behaviors, a recent exception being Walter Burkert’s remarkable Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (1996). In uncovering the coexistence of multiple worlds, the process by which ontologies are devised and applied, and all that can mean for our understanding of knowledge, we are afforded, I think, overdue lessons about the relativity of world to place, and the ability of world to recreate itself in unending, placespecific forms of memory, each with its own patterned observances, mythic territories, and luminous objects.

References Anttonen, Veikko. (1996). “Rethinking the Sacred: The Notions of ‘Human Body’ and ‘Territory’ in Conceptualizing Religion.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 36–64). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Boyer, Pascal. (1990). Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caillois, Roger. (1959). Man and the Sacred, trans. M. Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Connerton, Paul. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Detienne, Marcel. (1986). The Creation of Mythology, trans. M. Cook. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Dumézil, Georges. (1936). “Temps et Mythes.” Recherches Philosophiques 5: 235–251. Dumézil, Georges. (1949). “Preface de Georges Dumezil.” In Mircea Eliade, Traite d’historie des religions (pp. 5–7). Paris: Editions Payot. Eliade, Mircea. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane, trans. W. R. Trask. New York: Harcourt/Brace/Jovanovich. Eliade, Mircea. (1958[1949]). Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed. Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books. Eliade, Mircea. (1960). Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet. New York: Harper and Row. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Hutton, Patrick H. (1993). History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Kearney, Michael. (1984). World View. Novato, CA: Chandler and Sharp. Mol, Hans. (1976). Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Otto, Rudolf. (1958[1917]). Das Heilige [The Idea of the Holy] (2nd edn.), J. W. Harvey, trans. New York: Oxford University Press. Paden, William E. (1994). “Before ‘the Sacred’ Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 198–210). Leiden: E.J. Brill. [See Chapter 1, this volume.] Paden, William E. (1996a). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 5–14. [See Chapter 6, this volume, for the most recent version.] Paden, William E. (1996b). “Sacrality as Integrity: ‘Sacred Order’ as a Model for Describing Religious Worlds.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 3–18). Leiden: E.J. Brill. Patton, Laurie L. and Wendy Doniger (eds.). (1996). Myth and Method. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Rennie, Bryan. (1996). Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. Albany : State University of New York Press. Rappaport, Roy. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Smart, Ninian. (1995). Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (2nd edn.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978). Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1990). Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Part Two

Some New Levels for Cross-Cultural Patterns

6

Elements of a New Comparativism

While comparativism in the study of religion for many has become associated with the sins of the discipline—colonialism, essentialism, theologism, and anti-contextualism—it simply remains that there is no study of religion without cross-cultural categories, analysis, and perspective. Knowledge in any field advances by finding connections between the specific and the generic, and one cannot even carry out ethnographic or historical work without utilizing transcontextual concepts. Like it or not, we attend to the world not in terms of objects but in terms of categories. Wherever there is a theory, wherever there is a concept, there is a comparative program. Though we cannot dispense with categories, we can fix them, change them, or make them better. I like to think that a certain reconstructed sense of comparativism is forming (see Chapter 9, this volume), and in this chapter I will draw out some of its elements as succinctly as I can. After an introduction sketching some new conceptual contexts of comparative work, the main section outlines five specific factors which form parts of an emerging program. These factors include attention to (1) the bilateral function of comparison, (2) the heuristic nature of the comparative process, (3) a conceptually expanded notion of the idea of patterns, (4) the controlled, delimitative function of comparison, and (5) the distinction of meaning-to-the-comparativist and meaning-to-the-insider. Brought together into a single picture, such features form a working framework for a broadly conceived comparative enterprise.

Contextualizing a new comparativism Exclusive attention to cultural specificity tends to overlook the salient fact that behind cultural variance we are all bio-human creatures who “do” universes.1

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Behind cultural formations, there are human actors, and here is one place where elements of comparability may be found. The act of forming a world or classifying its structures is not culture-specific, even though the content of a specific world is. In that sense, the plurality of cultural worlds does not bring the agenda of comparativism to an end, but enhances and recontextualizes it. There are diverse religious systems because humans are system builders and inhabitors, and societies build and inhabit these systems as naturally as birds build nests. It is not just “cultures” but humans as a species that make inviolable boundaries and objects, interact and communicate in linguistic fields with agents believed to be endowed with prestige and power, reiterate sacred histories and defend tradition, follow the examples of ancestors and leaders, and absolutize or cosmicize symbols of authority and moral order. These, to take only a few examples, are broadly general, comparable activities, though their cultural contents vary and may in fact be what interest us most. Such worldmaking, to borrow Nelson Goodman’s term (1978), points to generic human acts while also acknowledging unique social contents and contexts. World-formation is an open-ended concept. It is as metaphysically neutral as the notions of system or environment. It includes not only the theoretical capital of categories like language, cognition, and social power, but also the specific categories used in religious studies, like myth, ritual, and postulated experiences of otherness, numinousness, and gods. There is no end to the content of world-experience. Moreover, the turn from the hermeneutical interests of theological schools to those of the secular academy is reflected in the shift from the revelational model of “the holy” (where the sacred manifests itself in a variety of kinds of objects) to the world-formation model, in which one looks for both difference and continuity in the way humans inhabit their universes. Eliade’s comparativism represents the old but has some resources for the new. Classical morphological analysis compared variations on structures— like cosmogonic myths—in order to amplify the meaning of the structure. The staticism and noncontextualism of this has since become fully apparent even if its function as a formative taxonomic staging in religious studies has not been fully appreciated, and this formalism may be juxtaposed with the model shortly to be described. At the same time, Eliade’s thematic concern with world-construction adumbrates something more than just a slant toward

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timeless hierophanies. World orientation in space and time is presented here as a human act that is comparable with the imaginal creativities, renderings, and systems of the “universes” of artists. It is this constructivist strand in Eliade which presents humans as builders who form their histories and environments through patterned acts and cognitive dispositions, for example, kinds of spatial orientation and memory retrieval, and who shape and fill these acts with cultural-historical style and content. This is not just theologism or ontologism. It is an example of a basis for looking at comparable human behaviors in a way that may link the work of comparative religion with the human and cognitive sciences.

Elements of a new comparativism The bilateral nature of comparative perspective Comparativism misses its potential if it only collects parallels or only makes data illustrate an already conceived type. Rather, it should be a bilateral, twoway process that reveals both similarities and differences. The common factor in comparison is also a frame for showing differences relative to it. Only in relation to the point of comparability can difference emerge and become meaningful. The area in which one looks for difference is driven by the selective interests of the interpreter. As Jonathan Z. Smith puts it, levels of difference are always constituted “with respect to” some particular factor that concerns the observer’s theoretic interests (1990: 51). The more such reflexive awareness and refinement one brings to the notions “common factor,” “similarity,” and “difference,” and the criteria for determining difference, the more systematically grounded comparativism becomes.2 For an example of how a comparative category works in relation to both the differential and common nature of world formation, take the case of a pattern we may initially call “annual renewal rites,” a recurring type of observance with endless cultural contents. Most religious cultures have major, periodic, collective times in which values deemed sacred are made explicit and intensified. This general pattern would constitute a common factor. But at the same time, the content of these observances is different in every case. Each

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religious system will have a different world, a different configuration of values, that it is ritually reaffirming. Thus, the actual focus of the rites may variously have to do with the sacrality of hierarchic family relationships, or economic exchange alliances between villages, or the display of ideal military values, or exemplary meditative intensity, or the dependency of laity and monks on each other, or the prestige of the founder. In turn, any particular version of renewal can then be seen in differential relation to other versions, so that each adds a context to one’s perception of the others and to the common theme. The theme “annual renewal time” represents a form of behavior, not cultural content. A form, like a bowl, can have various potential shapes and fillings. Note how this reverses Eliadean terminology. For Eliade, the pattern or bowl is the content, the “transhistorical” content at that, to be extracted, and it has a meaning (e.g., the Cosmic Tree theme) that can be decipherable through sufficient variants. But in a bilateral comparativism where difference is important too, the content is equally understood as the historical, contextual configuration occupying the bowl. Thus, the pattern of annual renewal allows focus on kinds of difference not otherwise discernible without the presence of the pattern. For example, it has the function of exposing and highlighting values that are particularly salient in the constitution of social worlds. The pattern does not obliterate cultural content, nor are its contents just replicas of “the same thing,” à la the clones of a cookie-cutter mold. Where Eliadean comparativism states, “We compare or contrast two expressions of a symbol not in order to reduce them to a single pre-existent expression, but in order to discover the process whereby a structure is likely to assume enriched meanings” (1959: 97), the post-Eliadean approach would point out that the new “meanings” reveal not only something about the theme (that a tree may be a center, an axis mundi, or a symbol of regeneration), but about the cultures and contexts themselves. Religions are not just variations on religious themes but variations on different sociocultural environments, and different myths of origin not only show modalities of cosmogonic themes but also reveal culture-specific social codings and the idiomatic textures of indigenous memory. Just as the comparative pattern can bring into focus unforeseen differences, it can also bring into focus otherwise unrecognized connections. As LéviStrauss puts it, “[I]t is through the properties common to all thought that

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we can most easily begin to understand forms of thought which seem very strange to us” (1966: 10). Thus, rituals that might otherwise remain obscure behavioral oddities, embedded exclusively in the horizons of their adherents, may be seen in a context of wider intelligibility that links their expressions with recognizable, familiar patterns.

The heuristic nature of comparative categories “Points of comparison” are not static, essentialist entities, pinned down for all time. The initial choice of common factor—that is, the theme, concept, or pattern—once tested usually needs refinement, differentiation, or reconstruction, as each element of the pattern is confronted by historical data, new questions, or possible misfits. So the parts of the formula “annual renewal rites” would all come under scrutiny and potentially give way to more complex understanding. Just identifying patterns, therefore, is not the end of the matter but the starting point for investigation. This open-ended method addresses what is perhaps the main criticism of comparativism, namely that it overrides complexity and brings together incomparables. So a major function of comparative categories is heuristic: to provide instruments of further discovery. This includes the possibility of their own further differentiation, sub-typologization, and problematization through historical analysis. The comparative process is then a dynamic enterprise and not just a reiteration of fixed, Linnaean-style morphologies, and comparative patterns here are not timeless archetypes carrying ahistorical values or meanings which are simply replicated in historical material, but rather are exploratory and refineable. Thus, one would need to face the complexity questions surrounding a single “pattern” like renewal rites. These festivals may have different purposes and functions in different cultures. Each culture may have a variety of genres of renewal rites. Rites change over time and are reworked to meet different situational needs. Some of their features may be internally important, some incidental. Different participants or social cohorts may find quite disparate significances in these occasions. The observances may be driven by the interests of royalties or peasantries, priesthoods or householders, men or women, warriors or merchants, established regimes or counterhegemonic

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groups—or all of these—and thus contain different political and economic messages. Moreover, every individual will have a different experience of the same festival. The initial pattern being compared will also have a different cluster of features depending on which culture’s version of it we use as a prototype,3 for example, Chinese New Year or Russian Easter. The very concept of renewal rites will have a genealogy in Western, academic discourse that will profit from decoding. And so forth. Such factors give complexity and difficulty, but not impossibility, to the pragmatic, operationalist process of comparative work. Notice that for each shift in the analysis, for each new question or slant by which any pattern is pursued, the point of comparison shifts and is refocused too. So even where the scholar’s interest turns to more refined focusing—for example, how is renewal related to male power?—the basic function of comparison remains at work through a succession of thematic foci and mappings. Pattern analysis is not then the simple, univocal, and taxonomic pinning down or tagging of an already known phenomenon. The exemplifications of the topic and subpatterns continually modify and increase our understanding of the topic itself, including its limitations.

Enlarging the concept of “pattern” The third element is the need to expand the notion of a comparative pattern. While our initial data compose that dimension of culture we label religious, the so-called common factor in comparison is not limited to religious themes, but should be understood as including any number of kinds of topical, conceptual, or classificatory categories, with different degrees of complexity geared to theoretic purpose. Any concept creates a matrix for comparison. Thus the common bridging factor in comparison could be a large meta-concept like authority, power, gender, or discourse, or it could be a function like class-empowerment, or a process like urbanization, or a complex combination of features like “the factor of secrecy in sacred space with reference to hieratic, male, political power in late nineteenth century Korean annual renewal rites.” The latter case of a multiform nexus of analysis shows how the comparative template easily becomes configured or loaded with a network of particular variables

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that guide the scholar’s investigation. And this is the point: all such thematic material—not just a list of kinds of religious objects through which the sacred is supposedly manifest—constitute “patterns in comparative religion,” because the wider, academic task is not just to reiterate a morphology of overt, generic religious types like deity, sacrifice, or creation myths, but also to pursue a comparative study of religion. For this task, all language and concepts are at our disposal. Comparison, then, builds its extended repertory by operating in all manner of conceptual matrices and at all levels of description and understanding; this crisscrossing of religious subject matter with cumulative and newly generated reference points reshapes the evolution of religious studies itself. It needs to do this not only the better to engage the world’s complexity and inexhaustible contents and to counteract our habitual propensity for conceptually monolithic packagings, but also to provide the stuff of theory and interpretation. Moreover, this broader concept of “referent” categories helps reestablish the connection that has been lacking between religious studies and the other human sciences, joining the interests of comparative religion and social history/theory which otherwise have been so disjunctive.

Controlled, aspectual focus A new comparativism operates with an enhanced sense of conceptual selfcontrol. Fitz John Porter Poole states this remarkably well: “Comparison does not deal with phenomena in toto or in the round, but only with an aspectual characteristic of them. Analytical control over the framework of comparison involves theoretically focused selection of significant aspects of the phenomena” (1986: 414). By defining the exact feature of the object being compared, the exact point of analogy or parity, the comparativist understands that the object at hand may be quite incomparable in other respects and for other purposes. Two objects can belong to the same reference class in one stipulated respect, but differ from other objects in that class in every other way and for every other purpose. The comparative pattern picks out one point of resemblance that has interpretive utility and leaves untouched all other meanings and contexts connected with that object that are not intrinsic to the limited theoretic function of the pattern. Muslim and Catholic pilgrimages

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may be comparable in some ways, but are not the “same thing”—but although things are not identical in all respects does not mean they are not comparable according to specific features. This aspectualism challenges essentialistic categories in religious studies. “Religion,” “ritual,” and “myth” are not natural entities, but start-up words for looking into general, variegated areas of related phenomena. It is aspects of these conceptual building sites that we choose to look at, and the aspect chosen is already adumbrated by the lens of explanatory interests. Religious behavior draws on all varieties of human behavior and takes place in inexhaustible contexts of signification. The reason that there are dozens of theories of religious behavior is because it has the same range of complexity as human behavior generally and each theory addresses an aspect of the subject.

Distinction between comparativist and insider domains of meaning Historians of religion, with their wide-angled lenses, are positioned to recognize and understand relationships that the insider does not. We are not comparativists simply to repeat what religions say and do, or to recreate their particular worlds, but more importantly, to find amidst those systems linkages with what we have learned from all of them and to form generalizations. These perspectives and significations are not necessarily totalizing, colonizing, juggernaut-like suppressions of real, local peoples’ worlds, but can be understood as vocabularies that have their role and vision in the world and discourse of the interpreter rather than in that of the religious adherent.4 In William James’s terms, the crab does not see its crustaceanness,5 but the comparative anatomist does, along with the shared crustacean features of over 35,000 other subspecies. One could extend this and observe that the zoologist sees the relationship of the crustacean class with other arthropod classes, studies the various subclasses with their respective ecological adaptations, and analyzes their developmental and genetic trajectories. For “crustacean” substitute any etic category from our field like “the paradigmatic function of myth,” sacred kingship, or even “religiousness” itself. On the surface, James’s biological reference appears to be dehumanizing. It could be taken as a subordination of the uniqueness of “the other” to the

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interests of cold, scientific classification. But James would be the last person to devalue the individual’s experience. Rather, the example can be read as showing the relative place of insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives,6 and also showing the existence of continuities unobservable to the single species. The biological metaphor points not to dehumanization, recurrence of objectivism, or single-theory, scientistic totalization, but rather to liberation from the myopia of single-culture analysis and to an acknowledgment of the naturalness and structural variety of religious life on the planet. The crab’s point of view, that of a single religious world, does not do this.

Concluding points Comparativism here is not just the study of different religions set side by side or considered serially, not just a classification of types of religious categories, and not just a hermeneutic which reconstructs or universalizes “the sacred” for an otherwise desacralized age. Rather, it is the basic, proper endeavor of religious studies as an academic field of inquiry—finding explanatory linkages and differentials among religious expressions, at either regional or crosscultural levels, and seeking to discover otherwise unnoticed relationships among religious data. A new model, rather than taking a lopsided interest in privileging the generic on the one hand (i.e., classical phenomenology), or the ethnographically specific on the other (e.g., anthropology), evenhandedly defends the bilateral prospects and character of the comparative process. A new comparative frame will neither ignore resemblances nor simplistically collapse them into superficial sameness—and it will neither ignore differences nor magnify them out of proportion to the human, cross-cultural commonalities of structure and function, which run through them. In the end, the study of religion becomes an exercise in understanding what recurs, what is different, and why. This approach unavoidably involves the factor of reflexivity: self-awareness of the role of the comparativist as enculturated, classifying, and purposive subject (which does not mean that patterns are fictions without substance); a cleaner sense of the process and practice of selectivity; an exploratory and

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multileveled rather than hegemonic sense of the pursuit of knowledge; the need for ongoing category critique; and the production of new or revisionary thematic collocations. Finally, an expanded comparativism de-isolates the study of religion. The categories by which we typically scan religious worlds—for example, kinds of myth and kinds of ritual—turn out also to be templates for insight into human worldmaking generally, just as the categories of political authority and kinship bonding also become valuable tools for studying religious life. In this interdisciplinary way, comparative work pursues its fulfillment on a broader canvas and scale.

References Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1959). “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism.” In M. Eliade and J. M. Kitagawa (eds.), The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (pp. 86–107). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris (eds.). (1990). Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. Frontiers of Anthropology, vol. 7. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. James, William. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1966). The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Paden, William E. (1994). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (1996a). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8: 5–14. [NB. The current chapter is the most recent version.] Paden, William E. (1996b). “A New Comparativism: Reply to the Panelists.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 37–49. Paden, William E. (2000). “World.” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 334–347). New York and London: Cassell. [See Chapter 4, this volume.]

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Poole, Fitz John Porter. (1986). “Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54: 411–457. Saler, Benson. (1993). Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1990). Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

7

Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations

This chapter explores one way of addressing current skepticism about crosscultural comparison. The typical challenge to comparativism is that it either imposes or suppresses cultural meanings; religion, as a form of culture, is fully contextual and hence intrinsically incomparable. By contrast, I advance here a model that identifies panhuman forms of behavior shared by any culture. Differences in historical religious life can, in turn, be described as cultural versions and transformation of those default behaviors. Comparativism then finds a broader, species-level basis for both commonality and significant variation. The chapter explores various theoretic underpinnings and implications of this approach. Cross-cultural comparativism has faced two prominent criticisms. One is that its categories are impositions—often of a religiously or Eurocentrically imperialistic kind—that distort or obliterate contextual significations. The other quite different concern is that any valid generalization about cultural commonalities—for example, that all societies have decorative arts or make shelters—is bound to be so abstract as to be obvious or vacuous. Still, the questions do not go away: how to conceive of what recurs in human life, or in religious life? How can “difference” be found unless it is difference with regard to something that is otherwise similar or shared? How to find secular, post-theological bases for comparative perspective in the wake of a poststructuralist infatuation with diversity and conceptual reflexivity? The purpose of this study is to investigate one approach, among many of the possible avenues, to a response. I will build upon the primary idea that we have regarded the comparativism problem too much from the point

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of view of cultural categories, and that we would do well to reconsider the uses of a broadened notion of human behaviors underlying and shared by all cultures. As nonobvious as that might be to postmodernists who question the notion that one can speak of shared human attributes, it will be obvious to natural scientists for whom humans appear as a singular phylogenetic kind, with common genetic programming, social and mental predispositions, and infrastructural cultural behaviors. The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn had summed up a view of comparativism in 1953 that has the merit of making the distinction between the human and the cultural clear: Valid cross-cultural comparison could best proceed from the invariant points of reference supplied by the biological, psychological and sociosituational “givens” of human life. These and their interrelations determine the likenesses in the broad categories and general assumptions that pervade all cultures because the “givens” provide foci around which and within which the patterns of every culture crystallize. (Kluckhohn 1953: 521)

While I will substitute infrastructural “behaviors” for Kluckhohn’s language of givens and invariants, the primary distinction of human/cultural will be the same. Classical phenomenological comparativism, for its part, has bequeathed an enormous body of thematics, but a thematics tied to cultural categories, meanings, and institutions. The points of comparability are religious topics— that is, classifications of kinds of religious belief and behavior. Not surprisingly, the patterns—like “deity” or “salvation”—then become problematic when used as points of cross-cultural reference. They remain on the surface of culture, bound to their own folk origins and prototypes, and typically unconnected and unengaged with knowledges of the common human worlds described by the human sciences. They remain suspended in their own lexical, taxonomic past, as expressions of religious life. They fail to make the transition from being universal categories for the formal, academic comparison of religions (i.e., an organizational project carried out by Westerners) to being universal categories of religious behavior. By contrast, another way of finding points of comparability and recurrence other than through encyclopedic or morphological religious taxa is to shift focus from the topicalities of intercultural religious forms to the realm

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of panhuman behaviors—behaviors to which religious cultures add their differences of content. This approach involves identifying continuities in the kinds of things people do as humans—rather than collecting patterns of the beliefs or “meanings” they project as religious insiders. Behind all cultures and their products are genetically endowed human actors enacting and negotiating social universes, and constructing worlds in patterned ways.

“Universal” behaviors Part of the problem of the concept of universality is that it is perceived to hinge either on ontological, foundationalist assumptions, or on obvious biological functions, or on basic lists of cultural institutions identified by anthropologists—like incest avoidance, courtship practices, or rites of passage. Although the anthropological project went out of style in the age of interpretive anthropology (c. 1980s),1 Donald E. Brown’s book Human Universals (1991) effectively reopened the issue.2 Religion scholars, too, have begun to reconsider ways of addressing the notion of recurrence: that is, common species-level ways that human minds, actors, or societies engage the world. One direction is found in cognitive studies (cf. Boyer 1994; Lawson and McCauley 1990; Boyer 1994), another is represented in Walter Burkert’s (1996) work correlating religious behaviors with biological and evolutionary factors, or in Luther H. Martin’s (2001) paper on the universality of the category of kinship and its patterns. While there are many ways to find patterns that underlie culture, I focus here on the broad idea that common to all sociocultural life is a wide network of universal kinds of behaviors and behavioral dispositions upon which or from which religious life builds its activities and worlds. Note that the word “universal” here is an adjective rather than a noun or “thing.” In fact, the adverbial form would even be better, in the sense: “Behaviors general to the human species may be said to be found universally.” I therefore link the notion of generality and universality, implying that the formation of general concepts about universally recurring behaviors is both a human construction and also a construction about something that exists in some aspect. The behaviors on the following list—though they are but a small selection of the possible points of comparison—are particularly basic and salient for the

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study of religion. Indeed, they are informed by and are in some ways derived from the comparative study of religion. Hence, behavioral scientists and historians of religion alike should have something to say about them. I group them in terms of different behavioral modes or domains and characterize them all—and this is important—in their verbal, gerundial form.3 Some “universal behaviors”: Social behaviors Forming bonds and loyalties with a kinship group (whether actual kin or culturally constructed kin) Distinguishing between group and nongroup identity Ranking people within a group Learning reciprocities and etiquettes of cooperative relationships (or social give and take exchange) Making and following rules Defending/protecting group order Punishing or resolving infractions of order Socializing and initiating the young Recognizing authority and social power Communicating with others; asking, petitioning Sociocultural behaviors Passing on cultural prototypes for imitation as guidelines for behavior Endowing certain objects and persons with superhuman status, prestige, authority, inviolability, charisma Constructing pasts and reciting sacred histories Regenerating social values by performing periodic rites and festivals Marking and dignifying important occasions and roles with ritual behavior and special objects Conceptual behaviors Creating linguistic objects that have no visible existence, and acting toward them as though they were real and efficacious Classifying and mapping the universe, including time and space Attributing significance (including causation) to events and objects, whether mental or physical Self-modification behaviors Experimenting with or indulging in alternative forms of consciousness, trance, disassociation

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Disciplining the mind and body and forming constraining regimens of behavior in order to affect certain results and kinds of fitness; using ideas to guide behavior and sort out behavioral options Reflecting on perceived errors of thought and behavior, introspecting Reinventing selfhood and identities

Such behavioral genera are endless. The list invites any number of etic formulations, simple or complex. Its items are only suggestive of a behavioral phonetics that can be expanded and given analytic complexity,4 and—here is the comparativist issue—they form points of cross-cultural comparison that are neither vacuous, because of their rich and various historical applications and contents, nor intrusive, because of their transcultural nature. The ways religious cultures “do” these behaviors direct attention to difference and context; that they all do them forms points of comparability and invites theoretic interest. Any one (or more) of these behaviors becomes “religious”—using the term here simply as a nonessentialist semantic indicator—insofar as it involves interaction with supposed superhuman beings. I offer now a series of proposals about the uses and implications of this approach.

Uses and implications 1) Such categories constitute part of a “grammar of behavior,” a “behavioral repertoire,” or what some have called a kind of human “ethosystem.”5 They are surely some of the elementary forms of human continuity between cultures. Cultural activity, including religious activity, plays out and creatively improvises on their possibilities, exactly as actual language plays out the possibilities of an unconscious grammar. 2) The examples on the above list suggest that we should get past the demeaning semantic associations that “behavior” is just something having to do with rats or adolescents, or that it is just tantamount to a series of discrete acts like shouting or lifting. To speak about behavior is not to somehow reduce the extraordinary process we call civilization to something merely prerational or animalistic, for culture is not just

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4)

5)

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the result of behavior: it is behavior, with its constructions of order, language, and memory, and it includes everything that scientists, artists, politicians, comedians, and shamans do, just as it includes all the subtleties of communicative relationships. All civilization, in an enhanced behavioral model, is theater. Note that “meaning-making” (along with language) can and should be understood here as a behavior. Meaning is something the brain is always doing, always making, just as thinking, imagining, and speaking have a performatory character. In fact, one of the contributions of postmodern scholarship has been to draw attention to the way thought, discourse, and myth constitute forms of social practice. The behaviors listed above obviously have a high level of generality, referring not to discrete actions or cultural institutions but to generic functions and processes. They are etic reductions that identify an aspect of behavior occurring in common among otherwise separate sociocultural settings—an aspect of behavior referring to purpose or function.6 For example, as Robin Fox notes, bonding processes are universal but the “nuclear family” per se is not (Fox 1980: 7). Likewise, deferential behavior is universal, but may be instantiated by any number of culturally specific acts like bowing, lowering one’s eyes, or speaking in a certain tone. All societies form worldviews, yet no two ontologies are the same. All societies are inventive but not all invented the wheel or the microchip. Comparability, then, is with reference to functional analogies between otherwise different cultural activities. While the behaviors on the list are reductions, they do not as such cancel out what their cultural versions mean to participants, any more than the reduction “water” or H2O cancels out the significance of swimming or boating to the swimmer or boater. The reductions are neutral with regard to varying cultural and individual meanings. Religious or cultural associations to the insider are thus acknowledged as irreducible and to that extent conserved.7 Concepts about universal behaviors are themselves empty of meaning (like the word “water”) unless they are connected to other outside networks of theoretic significance. The behaviors on the list bear not only on religious histories but to rich bodies of socio-scientific theory.

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Thus, the behavior, “passing on cultural prototypes for imitation, as guidelines for behavior,” affords a linkage with studies of the importance of imitation and cultural transmission. Or the study of renewal-rites behaviors may bear on theories of the role of emotional loadings in the long-term memory process. Kin sociality and non-kin reciprocity behaviors obviously relate to and are illumined by strong research traditions in both biology and bioanthropology. “Representing supernatural agency” is primary data for cognitive science. The very distinction of many domains and logics of behavioral disposition connects with modularity theory. And so forth. 7) Religious practices—that is, those that are believed to have sacred, superhuman reference—give extraordinary historical instantiation and development to each of the universal behaviors on the above list, not to mention myriad others, often showing some of their more extreme, inventive possibilities. Indeed, the cross-cultural study of religious life has been a particularly rich source for exposing and illustrating recurrent functions and processes like these, functions that a chemist, say, might not naturally come up with as salient categories of “world” description. In that sense, comparative religion scholars should have special insight into the functioning and history of these behaviors—and the kinds of religious “ingenuity” with which they are often configured (cf. J. Z. Smith’s [1982] work on the concept of ingenuity or “cuisine”). Religious meaning-making is an outstanding application of how the mind organizes the environment into patterns; religious worldmaking shows egregious examples of how humans form universes of salient memories, time, and space; religious honor and loyalty might make clearer the nature of honor and loyalty as human dispositions. At the same time that religion can be linked with different genres of elementary behaviors, religious systems are formed from combinations of those behaviors. Indeed, one of the behaviors is world-building itself. Hence, while I think that the universal behaviors on the above list frame religion in a more generalizable way than do organizing schemas like “beliefs about transcendence, human nature, and salvation,” or even “myth and ritual,” it remains that the notion of behavioral ingredients does not take away from the fact that religious cultures,

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like all aspects of culture (e.g., warfare, sports, technology), establish and express their own kinds of environments with their own distinctive reference points. Hence I cannot agree that the concept of plural behavioral domains makes the concept of religion or “religious worlds” redundant (as affirmed by Fitzgerald 2000). But the plurality certainly does challenge hegemonizing notions that there is something called “religion” that is to be explained by the constraints of a single domain (Paden 1998).

Conceiving comparativism If one’s only purpose were to identify or collect general types and topics, these etic, abstracted versions of human behavior may appear to be trivial or merely classificatory. But as indicated above, the common functions in fact contain endless transformations and varieties of cultural, historical, and environmental contents relative to their default possibilities. Identifying comparable forms of behavior is then a pivot point for finding and examining the differential variations, contrasts, and cultural workings and reworkings of those common behaviors. In other words, comparative religion focuses on how religious cultures construct pasts, defend identities, negotiate reciprocities, distinguish kin (or “kind”) and nonkin, endow objects with prestige, mark significant times, discipline the mind, experiment with consciousness, engage linguistic objects as though they were entities, and map their universes. As with the case of language, “behavior” obviously has an illimitable and richly interesting history, developed from common, often unassuming grammatical possibilities and types. Thus, comparative perspective here moves back and forth between the continuity of common functions and the contrastable differentials of historical specificity and context. (I have elaborated some of this in my book, Religious Worlds [Paden 1994; see also 2000b (Chapter 6, this volume)].) The cultural versions are not just copies or replicas of a given meaning, as is often the case in the old comparativism where historical examples—as though they were clones from a given mold—only show tautologically what we already knew from the archetype. Eliadean versions of sacred space, for example, are typically illustrative of commonality and sameness of motif. By contrast, a

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reformed comparativism does not limit the variations on the theme to just representing expressions of the theme but also studies them to learn from their sociocultural, contextual differences. Why, for example, do Quaker meetinghouses, Hopi kivas, and Gothic cathedrals use space differently? As William James observed, classification (here, “making sacred space”) does not necessarily explain away particulars but allows careful comparison of their distinctive characteristics (James 1982: 24). The process of comparing versions of a single theme relates to Benson Saler’s description of the role of prototypes and the concept of resemblance, which he contrasts with the concept of universals (2001). In the prototype model, as I understand it, the kinds of behaviors on my list would each imply default cultural examples that best characterize the concept, and those examples would become the standards in relation to which versions of that theme become either better or worse instances. I agree that ferreting those out in any conceptual schema would certainly be a productive exercise. For example, behind the concept “forming cooperative bonds and loyalties with a kinship group,” one might be thinking of the model of the Mosaic covenant … or the Buddhist samgha, or the Mafia, or the biology of a beehive. At the same time, the question of prototypal precedence is partly a circular issue: is the concept (kin loyalty) formed inductively by regarding broad sets of examples like these? Or is one of the examples in fact the prototype that determines the selective range of the others? It is perhaps sufficient to be alert to both sides of the matter, depending on the genre, circumstances, and utility of the concept itself.8 To refer to universal behaviors is therefore not necessarily to override particularity. While an anthropologist might contend, for example, that the Western word “eating” obscures the interesting distinctions that Balinese culture makes with its many different terms for “eating” in different kinds of social and physical contexts (Hobart 1987: 39), it seems to me that one could also say that such diversity was itself discoverable partly through the very capacious genericism of the term. Analogous with eating, all societies make pasts, but do so with different contents and styles; boundary making is common but everywhere charged with complex, particular cultural values involving nuanced negotiations of status and honor; all peoples mark time with periodic festivals but specific festivals encode characteristic cultural values of every conceivable sort.

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If the study of “world religions” separated religious material into systems defined by different sets of beliefs, and if Eliadean-style typologies elaborated patterns of symbolic meanings, a more anthropologically inclined comparativism might differentiate religious data according to behavioral types, sets, and subsets. Identifying these domains and diverse functions also allows us then to more effectively get behind the clumsy, essentialized term “religion” in order to see what is taking place on the ground, and in turn, the study of such ground patterns may affect creative theoretic consilience (sensu Wilson 1999) with the wider work of the social sciences. Hence, there is both a theoretic program “upward” toward explaining the contextual variables of cultural difference and “downward” toward the realm of broader, connective, infrastructural generalizations and explanations about human behavior. I recommend, then, that we not limit comparative religion to illustrating religious categories and inventories, though this has its uses, but rather that we enlarge the concept of a “pattern” to include any number of thematizations of any degree of complexity—the better to describe the complexity and contextuality of religious subject matter and to avoid the tendency to monolithic conceptual packagings and single-concept foundationalisms. “Knowledge” will be a function of such thematizations and their controlled formations by and applications to empirical, historical variants. As I mentioned at the beginning, this model only describes one angle on comparison, albeit one that directly addresses key criticisms. Comparison per se is of course a tool of any conceptual endeavor and is not necessarily linked with the enterprise of identifying universal recurrences. For example, by a kind of inversion of the universalizing model, comparative analysis is also possible starting with particulars. That is, one could begin with what appears to be a set of common actions and then show ways that those actions (or symbols, etc.) take on different purposes and meanings in different cultures. Thus, one could set up comparison in either direction: similar function, different actions; or similar actions, different functions.9 To the contemporary concern that behaviors cannot be abstracted from cultural meanings and that all behavior is necessarily embedded or invested with cultural purpose, I’ve offered a distinction between generic, human behavioral

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functions and specific cultural actions. To be sure, these functions are etically conceived by someone other than the actor, but comparability—indeed, what we call analytical knowledge—requires such a level of abstraction and degree of removal. Generic behavior is what the scientist sees because he sees many versions of culture side by side. We should make no apologies for this. At the same time, the comparativist’s responsibility for the aptness or inaptness of his historical exemplifications remains. I do realize the complexity of what I’m proposing, and that both the question of human universals and the project to overcome the dichotomy of biological behavior and religious behavior are richer subjects than can be adequately addressed in a short chapter. Obviously, I find the distinction of nature and culture artificial, and agree with Michael Carrithers that “… there is no need to severe ourselves as a species from the larger book of natural history” (1992: p. 86, n. 17). In trying to think of religion and culture independently of nature and natural behaviors, I’m afraid we have in fact so severed ourselves. And in advocating that we close the gap it is not just my point that somehow behavioral science has now to inform religious studies but since religion is itself part of nature’s performance, the other way around as well.

References Boyer, Pascal. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley : University of California Press. Brown, Donald. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carrithers, Michael. (1992). Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, Timothy. (2000). The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Robin. (1980). The Red Lamp of Incest. New York: Dutton. Fox, Robin. (1989). The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Goodenough, Ward H. (1970). Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Hobart, Mark. (1987). “Summer’s Days and Salad Days: The Coming of Age of Anthropology?” In Ladislav Holy (ed.), Comparative Anthropology (pp. 22–51). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Holy, Ladislav (ed.). (1987). Comparative Anthropology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. James, William. (1982). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. Kluckhohn, Clyde. (1953). “Universal Categories of Culture.” In A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lawson, E. Thomas and Robert N. McCauley. (1990). Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopreato, Joseph. (1984), Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution. Boston, MA: Allen and Unwin. Martin, Luther H. (2001). “Comparativism and Sociobiological Theory.” Numen 48(3): 290–308. Nye, Malory. (2000). “Religion, Post-Religionism, and Religionizing: Religious Studies and Contemporary Cultural Debates.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12: 447–476. Paden, William E. (1994). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (1998). “Religion, World, Plurality.” In Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (eds.), What Is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, Studies in the History of Religions, vol. LXXXI (pp. 91–106). Leiden: Brill. Paden, William E. (2000a). “Prototypes: Western or Cross-Cultural?” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(1/2): 307–313. Paden, William E. (2000b). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” In Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (pp. 182–192). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Saler, Benson. (1999). “Biology and Religion: On Establishing a Problematic.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 11: 386–394. Saler, Benson. (2000). “Conceptualizing Religion: Responses.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(1/2): 323–338. Saler, Benson. (2001). “Comparison: Some Suggestions for Improving the Inevitable.” Numen 48(3): 267–275. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Smith, Jonathan Z. (1992). Differential Equations: On Constructing the “Other.” Thirteenth Annual University Lecture in Religion. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University. Tiger, Lionel and Robin Fox. (1971). The Imperial Animal. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Wallace, Anthony F.C. (1966). Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House. Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House.

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Theaters of Worldmaking Behaviors: Panhuman Contexts for Comparative Religion

The plea for radical contextualization in the study of religion has had its therapeutic necessity and effects. Yet the study of religion without connective, generalizing concepts only yields sets of unrelated data, with no continuity from one culture to another. For the postmodernist, there is little noticed about what recurs in human behavior, because human behavior is itself one of the suspect categories. Whose notions of human behaviors? Which humans are the models for human behavior? What is the social class, gender, or political orientation of the person who is describing human behavior and of the persons being described? To many, the notion of comparability seems simply not to have survived the erosive effect of these deconstructive interrogations. The challenge to comparability is genuine enough. Essentialist categories need to be exposed, cultural biases shaken, and religion needs to be seen as something real people do and not just as a floating topic. This is not to say that the topical approach is all wrong: the classical comparative study of religion did well to put the matter of recurring forms of myth and ritual on the table. Still, this brought problems of comparability, since comparativists seemed to be illustrating the meaning of those forms with examples deeply embedded in culture-specific significations. If one starts with culturally formed ideas taken from religious vocabularies, it is hard to do stable comparative work unless one self-consciously chooses to compare cross-cultural materials with clearly admitted cultural prototypes.1 In this essay, I propose that panhuman behavioral dispositions and functions, and not just religious topics, would be a good place to look for some bases of comparability. Panhuman can refer to what recurs cross-culturally, and it can

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also refer to evolved, species-specific, genetic dispositions for certain kinds of behavior, particularly our capacities for sociality. Without trying to adjudicate exactly what is cultural (or “learned”) and what is biological (or stimulated by innate genetic wiring), I do think that there are ways of construing patterns of religious worldmaking such that they can be shown to correlate generally with evolved biological or cognitive tendencies—that is, with our common organic ancestry. In this chapter, then, I explore a model that can constitute a productive, mediating bridgework between our subject matter and the human sciences.2 Practitioners of the natural sciences would be amazed to find that postmodern humanities folks find nothing to compare between human cultures, considering that those cultures are all invented and sustained by the same species. I have also found this interpretive model3—to be developed below—a useful way, though not of course the only way, of contextualizing the post-theological study of religion in the contemporary, secular classroom.

Worldmaking as a human behavior Getting behind the cultural level to the human level means taking a bigpicture, evolutionary view, stepping back from the particularities of religious contents and styles and looking at some of what seem to be our persistent behavioral infrastructures. This is not to limit our subject matter in some simplistic way: humans not only select mates, defend territories, and make tools, but also construct and transmit language worlds, and accordingly build systems of science, art, and religion. We are worldmakers. “Behavior” in the broadest sense then means not just specialized actions such as canoe building but also includes the larger, “silent” group behaviors related to the formation of cultural worlds.4 In this panoramic scope, all civilization, including religion, is a theater of behavior, and we are its actors. Cross-cultural or macroevolutionary patterns are invisible to the normal, culture-bound insider. It is natural to see the world through the boxed, insular categories of one’s own daily language. Even if our students are science majors, they live in a society that keeps science and religion in separate lexicons and compartments. Yet, awareness of the patterns that underlie cultural behavior, as studied by the evolutionary sciences, will help contextualize some of the

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otherwise kaleidoscopic variety that we see in the history of religion. These are the stabilizing and interactive patterns of social world-building and communication. Among these panhuman, infrastructural commonalities is worldmaking itself.5 In naturalistic language, worldmaking is habitat making and environment formation. Habitative behavior is a mark of any organism. It provides stability and continuity by forming a relatively controlled environment over against an otherwise chaotic universe. In this sense, the many human cultures and subcultures are all variants of the activity of environment selection, each with its language, social expectations, position in space, collective memory, and skills. Seeing cultures as habitats allows us to describe them both as natural eco-systems that are part of an evolutionary history and as systems of values and practices that have rich and interesting contents as experienced by their insiders. Looked at from the naturalistic, outsider’s viewpoint, they appear as niches, enclaves, ecological populations, hives, versions of hominid environments—but from the insider’s viewpoint, they are the world itself. From the outside, they look like theater; from the inside, the stage is reality. This double perspective on worldmaking allows us to acknowledge the very great difference between the insider’s and comparativist’s viewpoints. To the inhabitant, the world is a singular experience and has an absoluteness; to the observer, it is an instance of common processes of construction and function. In this sense, I find “worldmaking” an effective interpretive concept in the teaching process, providing a connective middle ground between the humanities and the natural sciences. Two realities are joined and become homologous in this notion: first, our biological inheritances as habitative lifeforms and social creatures who build niches in environments, and, second, our cultural inheritance as peoples who inhabit lived worlds of meaning (phenomenological notions of “life-worlds” have a long and important pedigree here, and a relevant application). As humans, our roots are in both. We are hominids and we are also Muslims and Pure Land Buddhists; we are organisms, and we are also Ukrainians and Chinese. Worldmaking, then, is not just a matter of building something, but also of inhabiting something, as beavers build dams and inhabit them, and as bees build hives and structure their society within them. We make worlds,

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and having made them, become players in them. The worlds are then at once human products but also environmental objectivities that leverage styles of cognition and responsiveness.6 They can also be changed or modified. Classic notions of sacred space and sacred time easily fit into this approach and continue to be effective illustrations of the subject in the classroom. Worldmaking, accordingly, can be seen as a group (and individual) behavior with variant cultural contents, and thus becomes a key comparative concept for the study of religion. That all groups form worlds is universal; the content of human worlds is cultural, in process, and always contextual from moment to moment. Likewise, that every group “invents” a past is universal; but the content of that past is always different from world to world, and even changes within the history of any one group. That groups invest certain objects with authority and charisma is universal; what the objects are is diverse. That groups defend and maintain their own order is universal, but what it is that constitutes “the order of things” varies completely. Social groupings within cultures form subworlds in their distinctive ways with their own expectations for behavior. Monasteries, marine training camps, chemistry labs, and tennis courts have their behavioral parameters and standards of performance. We alternate in such environments, each with its special terminologies and protocols. A world or subworld, here, is the horizon of language and behavioral expectation that any group, subgroup, or individual assumes at any time for its frame of reference—a kind of theater in which roles are played out and a place where the forms and experiences of that world can have revelatory power for its inhabitants. Religious systems are such domains. Conceptually and methodologically, “world” does not imply fixed entities “out there.” It does not imply that there are independently existing worldview containers with edges and transmitted as “wholes.” Worlds are the ever-changing precipitates of processes of selection and transmission by which individuals chose imagined continuities from the past and versions of that past applied to the present. As an etic term, a world is not a set of fixed meanings, but a content-less analytical concept referring to how one environment differs from another at any point in time in terms of behavioral contexts and expectations. It is an indicator of domain difference and specificity, directing observers to the kinds of settings in which subjects operate, the kinds of horizons that individuals assume and in which they participate, so that one can be more

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attentive to the particular contextualities and schemas self-constituted by those environments. “World,” then, entirely points to these differential contents, but has no template content in itself; as a concept, it does not override cultural and historical particularity, but exposes it. Worldmaking, as a verb, makes this into a behavioral process that recognizes worlds to be acts and choices of subjects.

Religion as human behavior Religious worlds, to form a simple, stipulative characterization as a starting point, are those where gods are interacted with in some manner. By referring to gods as the prototypal religious objects, I do so loosely, including in the notion any superhuman entities such as buddhas, spirits, ancestors, or souls. Religions, per se, would then be collective, organized systems of behaviors that reference such beings. Usually these are routinized ritual systems, and come into play during times of life passages, times of critical needs, or fixed, periodic times of regular services or festivals. Religious systems often interact with other behavioral zones, such as politics or art. Note that this definition does not assume the independent existence of gods, only that religious people assume them to exist. As linguistic and ritual objects, transmitted with ontological status, the gods activate an interactive realm of behavioral possibilities, both inspiring and constraining the lives and subjectivities of their populations. Religion and religious language, in this view, are normal forms of behavior that happen to be responsive to or directed to gods. If one zooms in from a wide-angled “generic kinds of behavior” (e.g., worldmaking) lens to a more microscopic focus, one sees that religious life draws on any kind of activity. Thus, if intended to honor gods, any of the following are “religious” (in my stipulative sense): walking on coals, bathing in a river, studying scripture, climbing a mountain, dancing, or chanting. Likewise, any number of presumably opposite behaviors could be religious: dressing up but also going naked, killing people but also refraining from killing people, being quiet or shouting, fasting or feasting, putting on a hat or taking a hat off. “Behaviors interacting with gods” does not imply that religion is good or socially functional. It is whatever humans do, raw or refined, dysfunctional or

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functional, in relation to god beliefs. There is nothing normative or idealized here, just behavior. This unadorned view of religion is one that observers and students of contemporary world affairs can often relate to. Referencing a god and holy scripture is exactly what was going on in the minds and piety of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, as described in Lincoln (2003), not to mention various abortion clinic bombers.

Ways of inhabiting the world The macrobehavior of worldmaking can be parsed into many panhuman dispositions. For illustrative purposes, I will discuss the relevance of the following for the study of religion: kin loyalty, giving sacred status to certain objects, making pasts, maintaining order, submitting to rank, social reciprocity, display behaviors, making meaning, and reflexive self-modification. All of these are expressions of our wiring for sociality, our phylogenetic experience of living in groups, our social brains. Obviously societies are different in terms of environmental and cultural adaptations, but they are all variations on sociality, and religions are themselves biodiverse forms of social experimentation and innovation.

Kin loyalty behavior A powerful, foundational, species-level behavior that religious life draws upon is kin loyalty.7 Readiness for loyalty to one’s group—whether a family, club, clan, team, gang, military unit, school, ethnic identity, country, religion, or any coalition of individuals that bonds them against nongroup threats— is a mental mechanism or bias that has ruled much of the history of our species and indeed, of many others. In the realm of human culture, “kin” behavior does not necessarily depend on close blood relations. It can also be a sociocultural construction, while still drawing on deep biological instincts. Moreover, when the disposition for group loyalty is fused with religious notions that “our people” and its institutions are sacred because endowed by divine authority, and when the group is designated with identity markers and “flags” (“Christians,” “Muslims”) and thus forms an essentialized entity in the

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minds of adherents, then one has a potent chemistry. Defending group honor, whether imaginary or not, is not only serious but sometimes noxious (the Third Reich rhetoric about “making sacrifices for our sacred, noble blood” is still in collective memory). Displays of loyalty become critical indicators of the strength and survival of the group.8 These dispositions, after all, have formed over millions of years. What we have here is Durkheim’s basic insight about the power of the group, but made compatible with the biological forces that were missing from his theory. From the notion of group-as-world we can more easily understand how it is that groups make certain objects sacred, construct “histories” (read: myths) to validate the foundations of their own institutions, and monitor behavioral boundaries to prevent the erosion of their social order.

Making objects sacred Groups place marked values on certain objects. The behavior that makes a record-breaking homerun baseball worth millions is the same kind of behavior that makes objects sacred, inviolable, or charismatic in religious contexts. Human groups clearly attribute esteem, status, and signification to objects way beyond their surface, pragmatic worth. Scan the many cultural worlds of time and space and one will see concentrations of activity around certain focal points. These hot spots, magnets, or basins of attraction are the objects that groups have made sacred—shrines, stones, authorities, scriptures, icons, places, rites. Around them a number of observances and precautions cluster. Like nuclei of cells, they appear to give orientation, stability, and empowerment to the group and its authority system, functioning as a kind of inviolable cultural DNA or placeholder for group continuity and survival.9 As identity markers, they are enhanced both by the force of collective tradition and by the supernatural aura surrounding them, an aura that is itself the result of a mythicization (itself a behavior) that elevates the prestige of the objects verbally and ritually. The sacred objects are immunized from harm by way of protective laws, ritual taboos, or other sanctions. Religious worlds form around these manifestations of the gods. In interaction with them arise many of the kinds of religious behaviors with which we are

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familiar: for example, pilgrimages, worship, festivals, and personal interactions such as vows and prayers. One can even speak of the revelatory function of these objects, just as one could of the “stuff ” of any cultural formation such as music, philosophies, literature, theoretical science, or human relationships. Here “the sacred” is not a matter of theology, but of ethology—the study of behavior, animal and human, in an evolutionary context. Attributing sacrality or prestige to objects is evidently a form of species behavior. Technically speaking, it is a manifestation of what is called the human phenotype—the expression of our genes, the genotype, relative to social environments. Again, I am here extending Durkheim’s secular treatment of “the sacred” (see Paden 2004; also 2002 [Chapters 1, 2, this volume]).

Making pasts Human worlds “have” pasts, but those pasts are “made” in acts of transmission just as worlds are. Someone, some “kin” group, put them there and keeps them there, as its family album, as its memory of key persons and events. As with the construction of sacred objects, forming a history is a natural group behavior. Past-making takes place through mnemonic acts of oral recitation, ritual and festivals, icons and chants, shrines, writing, reading, and styles of education. At those junctures, pasts are given meaning and interpretation. These “histories” are major ingredients—or in the present context, major behaviors—of religious worlds and weigh heavily on them. Each group transmits its history of the world in a way that reflects and grounds its place in the world. The histories function as repertoires of exemplary figures or precedents for legitimizing or inspiring one’s behavior. They are memories that must be recalled and reselected, or the world they held together would vanish. No past, no culture; no past, no myth. The sacred histories, the origins, are therefore remembered through their re-enactments. This collective mnemonics relies on repetition, whether of a constant reiteration, or in periodic, great festival times with their marked choreographies and often vivid displays, special foods and music, and other forms of body memory. Religions are in this sense elaborate memory machines, and nation states often parallel them in the way they transmit their traditions.10

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Maintaining order, punishing its violations Humans protect their worlds, as any organism will. A good deal of religious behavior, in fact, seems to be maintenance behavior: keeping to the existing order, enforcing tradition, obeying the precepts, avoiding infractions of the laws, performing ordained social roles, attending the rituals, bestowing or receiving punishment for any infractions of the order. Most religions have terms for sacred order, for example, dharma in Hinduism, t’ien or t’ienli in Confucianism, or sharia in Islam. Incentives for moral behavior and disincentives for immoral behavior rule the social world. Protective behavior also entails regulating or rebalancing—in some cases, purifying—the system when there is transgression (see Paden 2000 [Chapter 3, this volume]). Every society has its rules, but also its punishments. Keeping violation away is one thing, but dealing with it after it is present is another. The historical, cultural, and situational varieties here are endless—everything from public executions to mild apologies, from excommunication to bathing, from exorcising to repentance. Rules of purity and the removal of impurity keep social orders intact, and religions often require concentrated forms of these practices. In short, religions become instances of a rule of nature: system regulation.

Submitting to status and hierarchy In-groups not only evoke loyalty, but within them often evoke submission to rank. (For a masterful treatment of this idea, see Burkert 1996, chap. 4.) Dominance and submission relative to status are found throughout the human and prehuman worlds. In the case of religions, not only religious leaders, but also gods and religious heroes can take on the attributes of, so to speak, “alpha” beings. Like the queen bee, humans who are esteemed as kings and saviors have the identical genetic makeup of any of their kindred beings—the difference is simply that the group cultivates them through special behaviors for their special social role in the system. Again, in many religions, the disposition to respond to “status” seems to sometimes be blended with the disposition for allegiance to the group, particularly where the god of the group is both an object of status and authority, and a guarantor of the group’s tradition itself. Displays of subordination, humility, deference, sacrificial acts, and respect are of course

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the very stuff of large swaths of religious behavior and history of spirituality. Depending on their types of social structure, religious groups naturally vary in the way in which social respect for leaders and gods is displayed.

Reciprocity behaviors The disposition for reciprocal interaction, the heart of sociality, is also one of the great domains of evolved human behavior generally and is the subject of extensive research that may bear on the study of religion. (An evolutionary psychological account can be found in Cosmides and Tooby 1992.) Human life, and hence religious life, is lived in relationships and mutuality, and this includes giving and receiving, trust and confidence, communication, negotiation and appeasement, and in general, accountability. In religion, such mutuality is at the heart of relations with gods. Readiness for relationship, readiness to relate to objects as if they were person-like, readiness to talk to and listen to someone “out there” seem to represent a kind of default setting of the socially constructed human mind. From the earliest age, infants begin interacting and bonding with their caregivers, and one’s first love is indelible. Relationship is so important that humans will invent it if necessary, with pets, dolls, cars, angels, and other imaginary beings. We are prone to listening to the world and making a conversation with it, prone to bonding and forming stable relationships, prone to making and receiving signals. Enter the gods. Indeed, some cognitive anthropologists have noticed that spoken language is based on dialogue, and that this “dyadic premise” may be the foundation for the social construction of unseen powers, that is, gods (see Goody 1995: esp. 206–20). Onto these culturally transmitted objects, the gods, we attribute human, social minds—and cognitivist research, again, explains much about our disposition to perceive agency in the environment and attribute anthropomorphic qualities to it (e.g., Guthrie 1993; Boyer 2001). Religions, then, provide an interactive space, an environment, for idealized and intensified social behavior, a place to act out the deepest human hopes and fears. This clearly has an enduring function. Difference of culture or subculture will determine the difference of roles and interactive protocols, for example, whether these are hierarchic or egalitarian. The gods, in this sense, are reflections of cultural behaviors, but also models for them in that their behaviors can show

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exemplary instances of qualities such as mercy, righteous anger, stability of promise, sacrificial love, allegiance, or even care for the dispossessed.

Display behaviors Signaling is a fundamental behavior of life-forms at all evolutionary levels. As communicative animals we give signs, show our intentions, express who we are and what we want. We do this with our bodies, clothes, environments, images, collective demonstrations. We make overt displays of respect, power, authority, humility, loyalty, celebration, ecstasy, spectacle, rebellion. Religious behavior, for its part, is typically an enhanced and often dramatic illustration of the power and process of the language of display and signaling found throughout the natural world. It is conspicuously manifest in collective ritual and the construction of visual actions and spaces, but is also seen in the way individuals act out their religious roles. Ritualization, in particular, is in many ways a controlled focusing of communicative display. It “says” with actions, choreography, and iconic settings what could only be conveyed in embodied, dramatic fashion, and not simply in words. The same display effect can be seen in the most opposite kinds of contents or foci of ritual: for example, the tea ceremony but also the Penitente’s literal reenactment of Jesus’s Passion; or the silence of a Quaker meetinghouse but also the ordeals of a warrior’s initiation. And it is seen in the way ritual, with its controlled environments, constructs idealized display scenarios to be held up as models and memories, as with rites of passage or inaugurations. The public burning of a heretic or the destructive “statements” of terrorists are also display behavior, as is mimetic or sympathetic magic generally. Temple complexes as well as the decorated canopies built by the male bower birds of Australia (to attract females) each display attempts to impress, entice, please, accommodate.

Making meaning, making explanations The brain is always making meanings. We do this through speech, whether spoken outwardly, inwardly (thought), or in writing. In many ways, worldmaking is a linguistic enterprise, where the categories of language schemas, being prior to sensory experience, become the ineluctable lenses through which we perceive, conceive, and explain the world. Language converts

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whatever happens in experience into its own categories. We are, as one author put it, the “symbolic species” (Deacon 1997). Language is an outcome of our evolved, shared social consciousness (Donald 1991). Here my main point is to emphasize the way language and its derivatives, such as theologizing, can essentially be understood as behavior (cf. Jensen [2003], on interpreting religions as semantic universes). We make words and we listen to words. We explain and codify. Through words we simplify and reduce what is otherwise infinitely complex or chaotic. We imagine what we will, with ease. We say words over our misfortunes to alleviate our pain, explain illness by speaking of karma or divine punishment, make schemas for the origin of the world and for the causes of things, and write tomes to build elaborate explanatory universes. All of this is a form of “doing,” constructing, behaving. Religion is inconceivable without speech behavior and its interpretive power. Gods are part of that repertoire.

Modifying the self Behavior is not just external world-building, it is also inner world-building. It includes mental acts of reflexively acting back upon one’s own subjectivity, adjusting one’s interior environments. Regimens of self-construction illustrate the mind’s proclivities and abilities to monitor itself and introspect, and religious paths in particular contain extensive repertoires of ways to recondition the possibilities of selfhood, moral responsiveness, and emotion. Mental and emotional states can be scrutinized, modified, acted upon. This illustrates the macrobehavior of the brain’s capacity for learning to learn— learning to make changes or adjustments, to re-form its responses, to override some of its own cruder dispositions. Reflexivity, too, is part of our inheritance as evolving organisms.

Concluding points This has been a brief review of some kinds and aspects of behavior that figure into religion and how their roots may be linked with our scientific knowledge of the history of the species. Naturally there are endless kinds of evolutionary

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dispositions and social categories connected to religious behavior—and one could mention evolution-based research on subjects such as attachment (Kirkpatrick 2005), ritual form (McCauley and Lawson 2002), imitative or shared behaviors (Tomasello 1999), emotion (Damasio 1999), and memory (Whitehouse 2004)—but the above are basic and illustrative. Religion builds on, improvises on, and interacts with such mental and social hardware. Nature does not speak English. It speaks behaviors. We need to learn that language, just as previous generations of comparative religion scholars thought they needed to learn the language of hierophanies and symbols. There is nothing in the above behaviors—admittedly, characterized in broad strokes— that is not biological and that would not be understood by evolutionary science, and there is nothing about these behaviors that should be unfamiliar to historians of religion. Nor is there anything about them, at least in my mind, that tilts toward any particular ontology. The study of religious behavior feeds into our general understanding of human behavior, and the other way around. Nature, I imagine, makes no such distinction as religious versus nonreligious. Not only are there resemblances between Tenrikyo pilgrims taking home a thread from the kimono of their founder, Hindus taking home dirt from Govardhana hill, and Hajjis taking home water from the sacred well at the Kaaba, but there are resemblances between these and their secular analogues, where fans (of music, sport, or politics) bring home souvenirs and mana-laden emblems connecting them with their objects of devotion. Behavior patterns are not only a basis for constructive comparative work, but they are themselves also the result of comparative perspective. This is to say that these patterns would not be noticed in the first place if one were only familiar with a single society. The comparative study of religion is one of the few academic endeavors to have built scaffolding for forming generalizations about behavioral forms that connect the historical cultures of the world, forms that would otherwise be obscured or invisible. How, then, does this ethology of religion relate to postmodern criticisms of comparativism? Does the above program figure to extract all the juice out of lived religious and cultural life? Does it suppress difference? Does it reduce its subject to static, cookie-cutter molds? Are the exemplifications of these human behaviors robbed of their difference, their voice, and reduced to being

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instantiations of the “same” hierarchic thing? (For a review of these issues in the modern comparative study of religion, see Paden 2004 [Chapter 9, this volume].) While this chapter is mostly about restoring some bases of commonality, in the context of a very general exercise in conceptual modeling, it is not intended to exclude or subordinate the importance of difference. In the present endeavor, that would mean exploring the variations on the commonalities relative to changing environments. The variations, or improvisations, would show the extant range of possible historical human behaviors relative to the patterns—theoretically speaking, all the possibilities of “making things sacred,” all the possibilities of “self-modification,” all the possibilities of “maintaining order.” Of course the cultural versions themselves are all embedded in variables of political, class, and gender dynamics, as well as constant historical change. As such, there is nothing particularly bloodless or abstract about such a comparative process. Finding how groups “do” pasts, how they conceive and transmit them differently, indeed, how they may revise or dismantle received histories all require on-the-ground attention to cultural specificity and voices. Being part of a general behavior pattern does not make instantiations of that behavior “the same,” any more than the generic activity of “doing sports” makes soccer and swimming the same. A pilgrimage to Presley’s Graceland is not the “same” as a pilgrimage to Mecca, even though there are some shared behavioral aspects. All comparison, in other words, is aspectual. The abstraction that apples and oranges are both “fruits” (or even that they are both “round” or “edible”) calls attention to common patterns of function and structure but does not reduce apples and oranges to sameness. They are similar in some ways, not others. The common pattern or feature is not the “whole” of each of its instantiations, but a feature of it.11 This would be my understanding of the descriptive and explanatory use of the behavioral patterns outlined above. There is no foundationalism in the above model in terms of dependency on any particular evolutionist theory or any particular form of naturalism. But in understanding the diverse dynamics of religious behaviors, we can start to become free of the persistent tendency to reduce religion to single frames. We can also form a potential two-way street with the work and data of the human

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sciences. Empirical studies of any of the collective or communicative behaviors described above, and the historian of religion’s study of their recurring cultural expressions, can be mutually informative and productive. I have found this an apt interpretive framework for presenting the study of religion in the secular, liberal arts setting of a state university, where classes are filled with students from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities alike. Relating comparative religion to the language of species-level behaviors, including “worldmaking,” provides a kind of Verstehen in a new key. Here it is the archetypes of behavior, so to speak, rather than archetypes of meaning, that invite study, and that help students relate otherwise different and distant cultural expressions to “known,” intelligible human realities. As well, the notion of world versions helps contextualize and make normal the endlessly different languages about sacredness and gods. Translating religion into patterns of human behavior is of course not the only way to study the subject matter, and it is not the only basis or level of comparison, but I have tried to suggest some of its functions and opportunities.

References Atran, Scott. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, Peter L. (1967). The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Boyer, Pascal. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Connerton, Paul. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. (1992). “Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange.” In Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 163–228). New York: Oxford University Press. Damasio, Antonio R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. Day, Matthew. (2004). “The Ins and Outs of Religious Cognition.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16(3): 241–255.

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Deacon, Terrence W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Donald, Merlin. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus. (1989). Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Fox, Robin. (1989). The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Geertz, Armin. (2004). “Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion.” In Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (eds.), New Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 2 (pp. 347–400). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Goodman, Nelson. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Goody, Esther N. (ed.). (1995). Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Guthrie, Stewart. (1993). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Hinde, Robert A. (1999). Why Gods Persist: A Scientific Approach to Religion. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Jensen, Jeppe Sinding. (2003). The Study of Religion in a New Key: Theoretical and Philosophical Soundings in the Comparative and General Study of Religion. Aarhus, DK: Aarhus University Press. Kirkpatrick, Lee A. (2005). Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. New York: Guilford. Lincoln, Bruce. (2003). Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lopreato, Joseph. (1984). Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution. Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin. MacIntyre, Ferren. (2004). “Was Religion a Kinship Surrogate?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(3): 653–694. McCauley, Robert N. and E. Thomas Lawson. (2002). Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neville, Robert Cummings (ed.). (2000a). Religious Truth. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Neville, Robert Cummings (ed.). (2000b). The Human Condition. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Neville, Robert Cummings (ed.). (2000c). Ultimate Realities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Paden, William E. (1994). “Before the ‘Sacred’ became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy.” In Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 198–210). Leiden: Brill. [See Chapter 1, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2000). “Sacred Order.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(1/2): 207–225. [See Chapter 3, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2001). “Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations.” Numen 18: 276–289. [See Chapter 7, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2002). “The Creation of Human Behavior: Reconciling Durkheim and the Study of Religion.” In Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (pp. 15–26). Leiden: E. J. Brill. [Later titled “Durkheim’s Reconciliation of the Social and the Religious”; see Chapter 2, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2004). “Comparison in the Study of Religion.” In Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne (eds.), New Approaches to the Study of Religion, vol. 2 (pp. 77–92). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. [See Chapter 9, this volume.] Poole, Fitz John Porter. (1986). “Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54: 411–457. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saler, Benson. (1993). Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: Brill. Sosis, Richard, and Candace Alcorta. (2003). “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior.” Evolutionary Anthropology 12: 264–274. Sweek, Joel. (2002). “Biology of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14: 196–218. Tomasello, Michael. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tonkin, Elizabeth. (1992). Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehouse, Harvey. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Zerubavel, Eviatar. (2003). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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In many ways, the enterprise of comparison remains to this day both our greatest asset and our worst liability. On the one hand, most historians of religions would still want to argue that comparison—understood in the strong sense, as both cross-cultural and trans-historical—is perhaps our greatest claim to originality as an independent academic discipline, distinguished from other disciplines like theology or anthropology. But on the other hand, most would also be forced to admit that the confusion about just what comparison is remains perhaps our single greatest weakness and most acute source of embarrassment. It has long marked us, in the eyes of our colleagues, as a discipline that cannot define itself or defend itself against charges of crypto-theologizing, cultural imperialism or naive universalism. (Urban 2000: 340–341) As comparison is a facet of all thought and all methodology, and hence unlimited as an issue, in this chapter, I will focus solely on the primary site of the current debate: the problematic of cross-cultural categorization. I will also concentrate on the secular rather than the religious or dialogical forms that comparativism in religious studies has taken. The phrase “comparative religion” typically signified the study of all forms and traditions of religious life as distinguished from the study or exposition of just one. But how to do this? With which units of comparison? Which categories of classification? In what context does one compare? Every conceivable theoretic and religious enterprise has staked out its maps of the territory. While Mircea Eliade’s “history of religions” model created influential thematic analyses of cross-cultural topics like sacred space and cosmogonic

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origins, it did so within a religious and ahistorical framework that has been called into question by the current generation of more sociologically oriented religious studies scholars. Thus the Eliadean lexicons, epitomized in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958; first pub. 1949) and reflected in the Eliadeedited Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), have receded in their authority. Other phenomenologies have found themselves to be abandoned houses, too, but in many ways the problem of comparison has been posed as “the problem of Eliade.” While the above epigraph by Hugh Urban therefore summarily states the issue, attempted solutions have also evolved. For if, on the one hand, postmodernists have eschewed comparativism as a form of hegemonizing—an extension of Eurocentric, essentialized categories that erase local and historical contextuality—then, on the other hand, inspired by Jonathan Z. Smith’s critical essays written from within the history of religions tradition, the very problematic nature of comparison has spurred renewed attempts at conceptual reformulation. The following account elaborates on this state of affairs.

Challenges to comparativism Comparativism in the last decades of the century has been surrounded and put on the defensive from several sides. One is the critical ideological climate that questions conceptual hegemonies. There are several versions of this critique, occasioned by a poststructuralist, postmodern climate combined with an age of specialization and area studies. Yet another is from the scientific side, from voices that urge more theoretically sophisticated generalization.

Comparativism as imperialistic One argument is that the classifications of comparative religion are not neutral but have ideological, sociopolitical functions (McCutcheon 1997). To classify is to exercise the concerns of a particular culture, class, religion, or gender. Cross-cultural categories therefore replace the life of other cultures with the meanings and metanarratives of one’s own, suppressing the voices of others under the projected illusions of homogeneity. The objectivizing templates of the scholar thus make invisible the actual on-the-ground strategies and

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dispositions of the insiders (Bourdieu 1977). To compare is to abstract and to abstract is to control. Comparative thematizations can then amount to political arrogance and self-authorization.

Comparativism as religiously biased The most obvious ideological imposition onto comparative categories has been religion itself. Comparative religion has clearly been historically allied with various religious interests and assumptions. Generic to many of these is the universalistic idea that religious histories are “expressions” of the same foundational religious reality, for example, the Divine or the Sacred. Consequently, the many forms of religious life then become automatically construed as forms of spirituality or revelation. Other, conservative religious comparativisms are more judgmental, classifying religions according to their degrees of truth or adequacy and advocating a “unique,” normative religious truth as the ultimate frame of reference. By contrast, the need to distinguish the exposition of religion (even if it takes a “comparative” approach) from the critical study of religion has been made repeatedly (McCutcheon 1997; Wiebe 1999; Martin 2000).

Comparativism as anti-contextual Comparative concepts necessarily abstract from historical contexts. They therefore ignore what things “mean” to historical, religious insiders. Moreover, cultural systems function as wholes and hence their behavioral elements cannot be separately lifted out of that holistic context and meaningfully compared (Wiebe 1996: 27). That generalities cannot capture the particularities of culture has also been a longstanding axiom for many anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, for whom cultures need to be understood solely through their own terminologies and internal signification systems. The distinctive features of a culture are what are interesting, not the generalities they have in common (Geertz 1973: 43). The critique of comparativism has therefore gone hand in hand with a renewed affirmation of social contextuality as a site for the study and explanation of religion. Thus, cultural studies, gender studies, area studies, and postcolonial studies have likewise moved to define the field

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in opposition to the supposed synchronic, contextless, objectivizing nature of cross-cultural phenomenologies. A variant on the problem of context is that archetypal patterns—Eliade’s, for instance—are typically used to emphasize similarity at the expense of difference. That is, when historical examples are given, it is only to illustrate a given theme, and the risk here is that from the “example” one may not learn more than what one already knew from the theme—the latter resembling a cookie-cutter mold that simply clones itself. Thus, copies of the Eliadean “world center” or “cosmic tree” could be noted around the world as replicas of the archetypes, but the sociocultural, contextual meanings and differences of these “centers” would be ignored.

Comparativism as nontheoretical There is also criticism from an opposite direction, from those investigating new forms of scientifically grounded theory (Boyer 1994; Lawson 1996). Where postmodernism values cultural specificity and questions generalization, scientific concerns take the reverse position. The argument here is that comparativism has been too much a cultural apologetic and insufficiently theoretically rigorous. Hence, it is not that generalizations are bad, but that we have not learned how to give them proper, evidentiary grounding or explanatory power (Martin 2000: 48). Comparativism classically had operated solely at the level of positing and illustrating certain culturally derived themes, but this fails to ground the study of religion in infrastructural cognitive or behavioral processes that lie behind cultural meanings and it does not supply a reflexive, critical methodology of concept formation. For example, while postmodernism says that universal recurrence cannot be objectively certified, cognitivist approaches say we have not yet begun to find it at the right levels.

Jonathan Z. Smith on comparison Undoubtedly the prime catalyst for both challenging and reformulating the role of comparison in the study of religion has been the University of Chicago scholar, Jonathan Z. Smith (b. 1938). Among the reconstructive

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emphases and features of his work are the reflexive, tactical nature of data selection in theory-driven comparison; the distinction between universals and analytic generalizations; the strategic role of “difference” in comparisons; the need to find a balance and relationship between comparative, generic forms and historical complexity; the pertinence of understanding principles of comparison in other fields, such as biology, anthropology, and the various principles of taxonomy and classification; the important difference between homological (genealogical, derivative) and analogical (similarity of function rather than of origin) comparison; and the relationship of comparison to description, generalization, and concept formation generally. Smith’s influential work has amounted to a significant second-order tradition on comparativist methodology. While paralleling some of the postmodern objections to comparativism—for example, that “facts” are not objectivities but selected “exempla” for our own imaginative productions— Smith at the same time advocates the possibility of the responsible employment of comparative patterns applied to historical materials. Since the time of his Yale doctoral thesis on comparativist issues in Frazer’s The Golden Bough—and while relentlessly challenging pseudo-comparisons—Smith never abandoned interest in constructive issues of classification and comparativist theory. I expand here on several of Smith’s points that appear to have struck wide interest.

Comparison as natural activity Smith directs attention to comparison as a natural mental activity. The process of comparison is a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence. Whether revealed in the logical grouping of classes, in poetic similes, in mimesis, or other like activities—comparison, the bringing together of two or more objects for the purpose of noting either similarity or dissimilarity, is the omnipresent substructure of human thought. Without it, we could not speak, perceive, learn or reason. (1978: 240)

The question then is not whether to compare, but how. Moreover, to fail to classify or compare “is to condemn the study of religion to an inconclusive study of individuals and individual phenomena” (Smith 1996: 402).

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Modes of comparison Smith historicized and distinguished various genres of comparison, identifying four modes: the ethnographic, encyclopedic, morphological, and evolutionary (1978: 240–64; 1982: 19–35). The ethnographic is the impressionistic, subjective perception of similarities and differences relative to one’s own cultural assumptions. It is the typical mode of the traveler. The encyclopedic mode, by contrast, is the mode of the reader and arranges culled examples by topical headings, according to culturally based thematic and religious notions. Here the data simply and loosely “cohabit” the groupings. The morphological, epitomized by Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, identifies ahistorical, archetypal forms, like the regenerative, axial “World Tree,” or the “death and rebirth” pattern—forms that take variants and developments in time and space, but at base represent logical ideas. Eliade’s morphology is itself genealogically connected with Goethe’s ideas about “Urforms” (Smith 2000a). Finally, the evolutionary type classifies persistence and change over time. However, while fruitfully applied in biology, the human sciences illegitimately read history through previously conceived ahistorical archetypes which were then written into history as value-laden chronological developments. Smith considered none of these adequate, though the evolutionary had potential and so would morphology if it involved “integration of a complex notion of pattern and system with an equally complex notion of history” (1982: 29) and could avoid an ontological superstructure (2000a: 346–51).

Controlled comparison “Generalizing,” Smith writes, “is a comparative and taxonomic activity that intentionally focuses attention, across differences, on co-occurrences of selected, stipulated, characteristics while ignoring others” (2001: xii). there is nothing “given” or “natural” in those elements selected for comparison. Similarities and differences, understood as aspects and relations, rather than as “things,” are the result of mental operations undertaken by scholars in the interest of their intellectual goals. Comparison selects and marks certain features within difference as being of possible intellectual significance by employing the trope of their being similar in some stipulated sense. (2000b: 239)

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In this sense, comparison is metaphoric. It is not about the way things “are,” but a creative juxtaposition in order to make a point or discover a relationship, a “disciplined exaggeration in the service of knowledge” (1990: 52). The activity of comparison has a basic structure. First, there is a common term which makes comparison possible, and which is an expression of the scholar’s area of interest; but in addition there is a second, implicit term by which differences are addressed, also a term that directs the scholar’s area of interests. At the same time, because taxons (classifiers) are typically assemblages of elements rather than single features (i.e., polythetic rather than monothetic), comparativists should be careful about essentializing the taxon.

Description and redescription Smith stresses that what might appear to the naive eye as historical data, and hence subject matter simply awaiting the hand of the comparativist, requires several stages of analysis. The four moments in the comparative enterprise include description in two steps, comparison, redescription, and rectification (2000b: 239). Description first locates a given example in the texture of the environment that gives it its significance, but also gives “a careful account of how our second-order scholarly tradition has intersected with the exemplum” (2000b). For example, many of the so-called data have come to us pre-filtered by Western interpretation and historical invention. Also, in the phase of description the comparativist must recognize that religious objects are always moving and always changing—over against the natural tendency of the scholar to “freeze” a phenomenon through a generalization (Smith 1990: 106–9). When this “double contextualization” is completed, one can move on to a second example undertaken in the same manner. Comparison may then be undertaken “in terms of aspects and relations held to be significant, and with respect to some category, question, theory, or model of interest to us” (2000b: 239). “The aim of such a comparison is the redescription of the exempla (each in light of the other) and a rectification of the academic categories in relation to which they have been imagined” (2000b).

Examples Smith’s work challenged and tested received notions of pattern against closely  sifted historical data. An example is his analysis of Eliade’s

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attribution  of the “center of the world” motif to the portable pole of the Australian Arunta (Smith 1987: 1–23). Smith claimed that while Eliade interpreted the pole as a kind of “world axis” that could be carried place to place, allowing the tribe to remain “at the Center” and “in its universe,” a careful, descriptive examination of the matter showed that Australian notions of space (based on memorializing rather than “constructing,” and on “traces” and “tracks” rather than hierarchic edifices) significantly differed from Near Eastern prototypes—prototypes that featured centralized political control, vertical relations between upper and lower worlds, and constructed places. Smith concluded that “The ‘Center’ is not a secure pattern to which data may be brought as illustrative; it is a dubious notion that will have to be established anew on the basis of detailed comparative endeavors” (Smith 1987: 17). An example of Smith’s own imaginative, “redescriptive” comparativism is his treatment of the theme of “canon” (1982: 36–52). Here he showed how a comparison of the biblical notion with instances like Yoruba divination systems and Australian aboriginal ancestral design systems could illuminate the common idea of an authoritative list of fixed elements that one nevertheless creatively interpreted and applied to any occasion. In each case, we find the hermeneutical practice of exegesis and its “ingenuity.” Smith also demonstrated the use of ideal types, coining the terms “locative” and “utopian” to clarify the language and practice of two different forms of worldview (1978: 130–42; 291–94). The first, conservative form gives sacrality to things being kept in their proper place; the second features freedom or salvation from place. Locative worlds feature loyalties of home and kinship; utopian (“no-place”) worlds, often occasioned by diasporic situatedness, find order to be negative and turn to new or transcendent worlds (1978: xii–xiv). In the one, order and boundaries are positive; in the other, they are tyrannical or meaningless. Historical data, such as that of the early Christianities, will be construed differently depending on which of these is the operative analogy (1990: 110–15, 121–33). In sum, for Smith comparison is not an indulgence in religious archetypes— on the whole, his interest is in “dismantling … the old theological and imperialistic impulses toward totalization, unification, and integration” (1982: 18)—but a secular, reflexive endeavor to find intelligible aspectual linkages

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between phenomena and to find generalizations that make sets of historical data more intelligible. Smith’s work has begun to come under some review. Hugh Urban, for example, asserts that Smith has an “unarticulated and undefended” point of view which is “essentially a neo-Enlightenment view of the human being as a rational, pragmatic agent, who cannot stand ‘incongruity’ or cognitive dissonance in his worlds, and who therefore tells myths and engages in rituals in order to mediate the inescapable incongruities of his world” (Urban 2000: 362). Such a rationalist view placed on the world, according to Urban, makes all other worlds rationalist enterprises (364–65). Smith’s challenge to the generality of the archetype of “the center” has been responded to by the more cognitively oriented Lawrence Sullivan who argues that the notion of centering need not be limited to “the politics of empire” (2000: 228–29), but as shown in Sullivan’s own work on South American religion can be a “key to hydraulic systems, color schemes, tonal scales, anatomical functions, psychic life, and artistic expression,” and is also relevant to the brain sciences that address issues of attention and focus (2000). One could also point out that at least on the surface Smith’s emphasis on comparison as an act of imagination occludes potential linkages with the work of the human sciences that attempt to translate religious expressions into “real” transcultural human processes.

Rebuilding comparativism The issue of comparativism has of course been addressed by a range of other scholars, several of them influenced by Smith. For example, a specific response to the challenge of postmodernism is A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, edited by Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (2000). Fourteen historians of religion here address that theme. Smith’s classic essay “In Comparison a Magic Dwells” is reprinted at the beginning of the volume, and Smith adds an Epilogue summarizing his notion of the comparative method. The editors write: Recognizing that Smith used the term “magic” derogatorily, we do so, not as an act of defiance nor even one of irony, but rather to highlight a reenvisioned potential for comparative study. We reclaim the term “magic” to endorse

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and to extend his claim that comparison is an indeterminate scholarly procedure that is best undertaken as an intellectually creative enterprise, not as a science but as an art—an imaginative and critical act of mediation and redescription in the service of knowledge. (Patton and Ray 2000: 4)

While the essays are philosophically diverse, they all attempt to defend the prospects of comparativism in an age of relativism. Many of them distinguish between an older comparative religion that operates through commonalities and a newer comparative perspective that has the capacity to acknowledge difference as well as similarity. Another set of papers addressing the prospect of a so-called “new comparativism” was generated by a 1994 meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (Martin et al. 1996). The panel, responding to my position paper on “Elements of a New Comparativism” (Paden 1996b), probed whether theoretical and methodological reformulation of the concept of comparison can accommodate such issues as the politics of otherness, the new cognitivist views of mind/brain, and issues of contextual adequacy. Several of the emphases and directions of a contemporary comparativism may now be outlined as follows.

Conceptual control of comparison A particularly substantive statement advocating the notion of controlled selectivity is that of John Fitz Porter Poole (1986). Poole’s analysis identified ways in which comparison selects analogical aspects of phenomena. By focusing on and controlling the exact point of analogy, the comparativist understands that the objects may be quite incomparable in other respects and for other purposes (p. 414). “Comparison,” he writes, “does not deal with phenomena in toto or in the round, but only with an aspectual characteristic of them … Neither phenomenologically whole entities nor their local meanings are preserved in comparison” (pp. 414–15). Nor, because two or more things do not appear “the same” on the surface, or as wholes, does it mean that they are not comparable in some ways. A basic example might help: it could be said of two or more dogs that they are mammals, but such a generic point of parity does not deny that the particular dogs exist in their own interactive environments and significations, which are obviously unique, or that there

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are differences among mammals and among canines. Only a single common feature is selected for comparison and explanation. In Catherine Bell’s words, “Terms afford a useful focus on some things at the expense of other things” (2000: 11). Jeffrey Carter’s use of Bertrand Russell’s theory of logical types, applied to comparativism, is a similar case in point (Carter 1998). Carter argues that description and explanation constitute different genres of comparison. The first compares by describing something as having distinguishable marks of difference from its environment and from the known categories of the describer. Its object is to point to particularity. That includes comparison between members of a class. (In that case, one might say, “this particular dog is black and white, has three legs, likes raspberries, and has the name ‘Zeus.’”) By contrast, explanatory comparison, instead of specifying differences, connects and combines phenomena within an overall map of some kind (“this dog is a mammal,” or “this dog is a hunting dog”). The logic of the class membership of explanatory comparison is such that there is a fundamental gap or disparity between map and territory. No single map can portray the complexity of the territory. While there is a gap between explanation and description, because the former deals with maps and the latter with particularities, and because explanation is a higher logical type than description, in both cases there is a gap between the attribution and the actual “things” described/explained. One cannot draw conclusions about a class by referring to a member of the class—for example, where the class is “religion,” and the member is “Theravada Buddhism,” or inversely, where one can deduce from my dog the nature of all dogs. For Carter, there is then “a certain postmodern character” to this model. Explanation, for example, is “a constructive process that is contextual and purposeful, and is not simply authoritative, constant, or universal” (1998: 143). Likewise, with regard to descriptive comparison: In terms of a postmodern awareness of the plurality of experience and the ambiguity of language, description cannot … be understood as transparent, objective, or neutral. This is so because there is nothing in the world itself, in a particular object being described, that determines the differences to which a scholar will respond. Therefore, descriptions are always perspectival, necessarily incomplete, and to some degree arbitrary. During every act

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of description, we settle on some scale of detail, and choose a distinct perspective from which to gather it. (Carter 1998: 134–35, n. 2)

In these ways, all comparison is marked by contextuality of conceptual genre and academic circumstance. Historians of religion therefore need to always define the purpose and audience of their constructions and the level or scale of generality employed. Benson Saler’s work (e.g., 1993, 2001) has addressed comparativism through prototype theory and resemblance theory. Following H. H. Price (1971) and cognitivists like Eleanor Rosch (1978), Saler postulates that the mind constructs comparative concepts in terms of prototypical resemblances. Concepts imply exemplars, that is, standard instances of the concept. Comparability, then, means closeness or distance of resemblance to the prototype. Saler offers this approach as an alternative to boundaried, essentialized views of religious subject matter, where exempla are either deemed identical members of a conceptual class or not. He writes, “… while the term ‘universal’ may connote something ‘out there’ that is independent of cognitive mediation, ‘resemblance’ suggests a judgment that someone makes, and makes within a mediating framework” (2001: 7). Because comparison cannot rid itself of its cultural conditionings, it must acknowledge them in a disciplined way. Though the term “religion” must be recognized as a cultural category that has Judeo-Christian prototypes, it still may be useful as one way of showing family relationships.

Typologies of religious life Topical comparative studies certainly continue to be produced, and textbooks as well as encyclopedias that highlight cross-cultural forms of religion continue to reassemble synchronic ways that religious subject matters may be perceived. The Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade [ed.] 1987) became a major resource in this regard. In Ninian Smart’s work (cf. Smart 1996), religious life is broken down and cross-culturally illustrated in terms of nine forms or dimensions: the ritual, doctrinal, mythic, experiential, ethical, social, material, political, and economic. Similarly, Dale Cannon organizes his text (1996) around six “ways of being religious”: the ways of the mystical quest, reasoned inquiry, right action, devotion, shamanic mediation, and sacred rite. Tracing Common Themes: Comparative Courses in the Study

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of Religion (Carman and Hopkins 1991) focuses on comparative ways of treating themes like pilgrimage, sacrifice, healing, scripture, ethics, and mysticism. The Comparative Studies in Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion is another place to register “comparativist” thinking. In the last five years, it has sponsored sessions on cross-cultural subjects such as Light in Mystical Traditions, Healing, Shame and Guilt, Iconoclasm, Nudity, Ecstatic Dance, Food and Boundaries, Memory and Ancestors, and Secularisms. From England, edited by Jean Holm, Pinter Publishers has put out a series of texts on themes such as Sacred Place, Worship, Rites of Passage, Women and Religion, and Attitudes to Nature. Nancy Jay’s crosscultural case study (1992) of the male “ownership” of sacrificial cults showed how topical comparison can generate hypotheses that have strong theoretic claims. A methodologically systematic application of Smart’s typology to the comparison of symbols is Christopher Buck’s Paradise and Paradigm (1999). Lindsay Jones’s magisterial comparative study of the patterns and functions of sacred architecture brilliantly extends the Eliadean project within new conceptual frameworks (Jones 2000). When religious materials are compared in terms of types of religious behavior rather than in terms of whole traditions believed to be essentially self-contained, comparison brings together into a common frame what would ordinarily (or culturally) be perceived as separate. Thus, there are kinds of Christian practice that may have more in common with kinds of Buddhist practice than with other kinds of Christianities. One outcome of this point is that the old classification of Eastern versus Western religions begins to dissolve. For example, if in the classical comparative frames those traditions were assumed to be intrinsically different genres of religion, Barbara Holdrege’s comparative analysis of brahmanical “Hinduism” and rabbinic Judaism breaks down that separation. In a major study (1996), she analyzes the way the two traditions have significant affinities as elite “textual communities” that have codified the norms of orthodoxy in the form of scriptural canons; as ethnocultural systems concerned with issues of family, ethnic and cultural integrity, blood lineages, and the intergenerational transmission of traditions; and as religions of orthopraxy characterized by hereditary priesthoods and sacrificial traditions, comprehensive legal systems delineated in the Dharma-Shastras and

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halakhic texts, elaborate regulations concerning purity and impurity, and dietary laws. (Holdrege 1996: ix)

Moreover, in each tradition, scripture (Veda and Torah) takes on a comparable cosmological function. Holdrege concludes that “the comparative study of these traditions is of significance precisely because it provides the basis for developing an alternative model of ‘religious tradition’ founded on categories other than the Christian-based categories of interpretation that have tended to dominate our scholarly inquiries” (p. ix). Her work illustrates that comparative religion need not be based on historically and religiously biased folk beliefs and maps, but on common sociocultural forms of practice like “tradition” identity, purity rules, or law.

Panhuman commonalities, cultural differences As any particular culture is self-contextualizing and to that extent incomparable, critics of comparativism have good reason to question the imposition of common intercultural “meanings.” As if in response, new lines of interest have emerged to examine the species-level continuities of human behavior that lie behind any historical context or any culture. If behind all cultures are human beings, then recurrence may be found at infrastructural levels of cognition, gender, and panhuman forms of sociality. Wendy Doniger’s recent work (cf. 1999, 1998), focusing largely on gender and mythology, strikes a balance in the midst of the commonality/ particularity polarity. Her solution to the need to determine both similarity and difference is to take a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” approach. This means that instead of assuming commonalities regarding broad culturally infused topics like sacrifice or “high gods,” comparativists could find certain shared panhuman factors like gendered sexuality, body, desire, procreation, and their concomitant story motifs or shared human problems, and seek out individual diversity in relation to them (Doniger 2000: 70–71). This diversity is endless and includes individuality within given cultures. There is a “web” of human bonds—hence the title of one of her books, The Implied Spider (1998). Whether parallels in myth occur by way of historical diffusion or by independent origination, “a shared human predilection for some sorts of stories over others” may underlie either (1999: 7).

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My Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (1994) attempts to show that one of the functions of comparison is to exhibit cultural difference in relation to human, cross-cultural forms of world construction and world habitation. For example, all societies make pasts and form collective memories, but these pasts have different cultural contents or histories; all societies renew their pasts in periodic rites or festivals, but the content of what is renewed, that is, various social, moral, or economic values, differs; all societies make rules and boundaries, but the variation on what constitutes transgression and purity is remarkable and illuminating. Analogously, all humans are built to form and structure language, though languages themselves vary. Comparison then crystallizes around common processes and highlights salient differences and improvisations relative to them; as such, it hinges on human typicalities rather than cultural sameness or sameness of “meanings” (Paden 2001). Walter Burkert’s Gifford Lectures, The Creation of the Sacred (1996), turn to analogical relations between religious behaviors and those present in our “biological landscape,” examining behavioral patterns like deference, reciprocity, hierarchy, guilt, causality, and signification in their larger evolutionary contexts. For example, regarding rituals of demonstrative submission, referring to gorilla behavior, Burkert writes that the way to avoid damage by a charging silverback was to cower to the ground, touching it with one’s head, and above all to avoid staring. Assyrian reliefs show envoys to the king of Assyria assuming a strikingly similar position; the Akkadian expression was “to wipe one’s nose” on the ground. (Burkert 1996: 86)

The collapse of the distinction between nature and culture in cases like this invites new comparative agendas interfacing the behavioral, ethological sciences. Thus, it may be argued that the search for commonalities can lead to issues of the patterned ways humans form social and cognitive worlds that are not contingent on any culture, and it is in these ways that comparative religion may find new inspiration from the sciences and provide a “non-ethnocentric framework for analogical religious constructs” (Martin 2000: 54). As Luther Martin puts it,

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By paying attention … to the role that human biology, minds and social organization play in the production and constraint of cultural forms and expression, such empirical “mappings” of the architecture of human behavior and thought promise to contribute not only to our knowledge of the ubiquity of religion in human culture and its persistence in human history but to suggest also a formal framework of mental and behavioral constraints upon which might be constructed a theoretical explanation for the comparative enterprise that is so central to the way in which human beings organize their world and to academic generalizations alike. (Martin 2000: 55)

A new attention to the universals of human sociality, behavior, and language holds promise for comparativism (Brown 1991; Jensen 2000; Martin 2001), and the implications of neurophysiological baselines, paralleling the deep structures of language and even the genetic code, are receiving attention from scholars like Lawrence Sullivan (2000) and others (Boyer 1994) pursuing the insights of cognitive science.

Recapitulation A “new comparativism” (Paden 1996a, 2000) does not limit the common terms of comparison to culturally constructed religious topics. Any concept, with any kind of theoretic complexity, may constellate religious data. The terms of comparison in this sense need to be as rich as the subject matter. Simply to form Western-derived catalogs and encyclopedias of religious topics and parallels has become problematic. Religion can and should be seen through the lenses of all the concepts one would use to study human culture and behavior, thus creating linkages with the theoretical capital and categories of the human sciences. Historians of religion are beginning to realize that their role is not just to repeat the insider’s views or to compare one insider’s view with another. It is also to seek out what the singular, culture-bound viewpoint cannot see, that is, to see what recurs in two or more cultural expressions and also how difference becomes evident relative to what recurs. Such perspective is not necessarily a suppression of “the other” but simply a different etic task that necessarily

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requires abstraction as all concepts do and as all science does. Comparison is therefore bilateral. It works both in the direction of similarity and difference. It requires commonality as a basis for showing difference relative to that commonality. It does not inherently imply homogenization of disparate data. William James had shown long ago that “classification does not necessarily explain away particulars, but allows careful comparison of their distinctive characteristics” (1982[1902]: 24). At the same time, comparison can uncover commonality in the midst of what might otherwise appear different or distant, discovering relationships otherwise unseen and bringing those relationships into public view. Comparative categories and analogies should be understood in a heuristic sense. Points or nodes of comparison are not static, essentialist entities, forever fixed but have an open, evolving texture and life. They are instruments for further discovery, perhaps leading to a pivoting succession of unanticipated thematic foci, mappings, subtypologies, problematizations, and historical analyses. As Lincoln and Grottanelli write, It is not enough … simply to assemble a set of myths that display certain common themes and/or structures, although that might provide a convenient starting point for a comparative endeavor. For such an endeavor to bear fruit, however, there would have to follow a massive task of placing each myth within its total social environment and identifying its connections to other relevant dimensions of culture. Then, each of these contextualized myths would have to be considered with their proper historic moment, as part of an ongoing diachronic process marked by conflicts, contradictions, and dynamism. (Lincoln and Grottanelli 1998: 321)

A recent Boston University research endeavor, “The Comparative Religious Ideas Project,” edited by Robert Cummings Neville, has produced a threevolume study on the themes, “The Human Condition,” “Ultimate Realities,” and “Religious Truth” (see, e.g., Neville 2000), each using materials from six religious traditions and testing comparativist generalizations with the input of historians who are specialists in those traditions. A critical, salient factor in the entire process turned out to be the “corrigibility” of thematic material when confronted with contextual historical analysis. In Catherine Bell’s phrase, “[t]erms should not predetermine where we will end up” (2000: 14).

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Comparativism is clearly repositioning itself after the classical period and is attempting to avoid some of that generation’s uncritical liabilities. Hence, some of the criticisms of traditional comparativism no longer apply—for example, that comparison makes everything “the same,” or that it compromises contextual “territory.” As well, comparison now “unavoidably involves the factor of reflexivity; self-awareness of the role of the comparativist as enculturated, classifying, and purposive subject … a cleaner sense of the process and practice of selectivity, and an exploratory rather than hegemonic sense of the pursuit of knowledge” (Paden 2000: 190). The epigraph at the head of this essay mentioned that cross-cultural perspective was “perhaps our greatest claim to originality as an independent academic discipline.” Whether the new approaches will be able to revive that endangered status remains to be seen.

References Bell, Catherine. (2000). “Pragmatic Theory.” In Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (eds.), Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (pp. 9–20). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, Pascal. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley : University of California Press. Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill. Buck, Christopher. (1999). Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Baha’i Faith. Albany : State University of New York Press. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cannon, Dale. (1996). Six Ways of Being Religious: A Framework for Comparative Studies of Religion. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Carman, John B. and Steven P. Hopkins (eds.). (1991). Tracing Common Themes: Comparative Courses in the Study of Religion. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Carter, Jeffrey R. (1998). “Description is Not Explanation: A Methodology of Comparison.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 10(2): 133–148. Doniger, Wendy. (1998). The Implied Spider. New York: Columbia University Press. Doniger, Wendy. (1999). Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Doniger, Wendy. (2000). “Post-Modern and -Colonial -Structural Comparison.” In Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (pp. 63–76). Berkeley : University of California Press. Eliade, Mircea (ed.). (1987). Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols. New York: Macmillan. Geertz, Clifford. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Holdrege, Barbara A. (1996). Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture. Albany : State University of New York Press. James, William. (1982[1902]). Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books. Jay, Nancy. (1992). Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jensen, Jeppe Sinding. (2000). “On Universals in the Study of Religion.” In Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (eds.), Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (pp. 51–67). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jones, Lindsay. (2000). The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawson, E. Thomas (1996). “Theory and the New Comparativism, Old and New.” In Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 31–36. Lincoln, Bruce and Cristiano Grottanelli. (1998). “A Brief Note on (Future) Research in the History of Religions.” In Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 10: 311–325. Martin, Luther H. (2000). “Comparison.” In Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutchon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 45–56). London: Cassell. Martin, Luther H. (2001). “Comparativism and Sociobiological Theory.” Numen 48(3): 290–308. Martin, Luther H, Marsha Hewitt, E. Thomas Lawson, Donald Wiebe, and William E. Paden. (1996). “The New Comparativism in the Study of Religion: A Symposium.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 1–49. McCutcheon, Russell T. (1997). Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. Neville, Robert Cummings (ed.). (2000). The Human Condition. Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. Paden, William E. (1994). Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (2nd edn.). Boston: Beacon Press. Paden, William E. (1996a). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 5–14. Paden, William E. (1996b). “A New Comparativism: Reply to the Panelists.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 37–50.

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Paden, William E. (2000). “Elements of a New Comparativism.” In A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, edited by Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (pp. 182–192). Berkeley : University of California Press. [Revised version of Paden 1996a; see Chapter 6, this volume.] Paden, William E. (2001). “Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations.” Numen 48(3): 276–289. [See chap.7, this volume.] Patton, Kimberley C. and Benjamin C. Ray. (eds.). (2000). A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley : University of California Press. Poole, Fitz John Porter. (1986). “Metaphors and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54: 411–457. Price, H. H. (1971). “Universals and Resemblances.” In Charles Landesman (ed.), The Problem of Universals (pp. 36–55). New York: Basic Books, Inc. Rosch, Eleanor. (1978). “Principles of Categorization.” In Eleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum. Saler, Benson. (1993). Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Saler, Benson. (2001). “Comparison: Some Suggestions for Improving the Inevitable.” Paper presented at the 18th Congress of the IAHR, Durban, South Africa. Numen 48(3): 267–275. Smart, Ninian. (1996). Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs. Berkeley : University of California Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978). Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1990). Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1996). “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion.” In Harvard Theological Review 89(4): 387–403. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000a). “Acknowledgments: Morphology and History in Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949–1999), Parts 1 and 2.” History of Religions 39(4): 315–351. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2000b). “The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification.” In Kimberley Patton and Benjamin Ray (eds.), A Magic Still

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Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (pp. 237–241). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2001). “Foreword.” In Robert C. Neville (ed.), Religious Truth (pp. xi–xii). Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press. Sullivan, Lawrence E. (2000). “The Net of Indra: Comparison and the Contribution of Perception.” In Kimberley C. Patton and Benjamin C. Ray (eds.), A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age (pp. 206–236). Berkeley : University of California Press. Urban, Hugh. (2000). “Making a Place to Take a Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith and the Politics and Poetics of Comparison.” In Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12(3): 339–378. Wiebe, Donald. (1996). “Is the New Comparativism Really New?” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8(1): 21–30. Wiebe, Donald. (1999). The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Part Three

Responses to Evolutionary Sciences

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Connecting with Evolutionary Models: New Patterns in Comparative Religion?

One of the duties of the science of religion is to keep religion in connection with the rest of science. William James (1982[1902]: 511) The appearance of a major theoretical approach is a rare event in any field—and rarer still in the field of religious studies. Yet over the course of only a couple decades and still with a small number of people working in the field, the cognitive science of religion is already proving itself to be the most significant and fruitful approach to the subject ever undertaken. By probing the connection between the processes and products of the adapted human brain, cognitive research is laying the foundation for a science of religion capable of supplying a meaningful, testable description of one of the most fascinating aspects of human behavior. Todd Tremlin (2006: 9) Among the compelling interfaces in current theories of religion is that which builds on the redescriptive possibilities of consilience with the evolutionary sciences (Burkert 1996; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Dennett 2006). New work on the subject appears daily, new professional organizations are forming, and discussion of this “turn” has captured the interest of the media. In this essay, I suggest in broad strokes some conceptual conditions and sequences within which evolutionary models and the cross-cultural study of religion might develop salient linkages. Implicit here is the question of how generalizations about panhuman dispositions might reintroduce significant factors of behavioral or cognitive commonality among religious data in the

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wake of a postmodern era that in effect banished transcultural, species-level perspectives from the scene. Every age relates its understanding of religion to its understanding of the world. Today we in academia understand the history of the world through the evolutionary sciences. In the public schools, we teach not religion but biology and the modification of life and genes over eons of time. Until the cognitive science of religion movement, the relation of evolution and religion had tended to be dealt with in one of two ways. The first was to keep the two in separate domains as nonoverlapping areas of thought, or in the terms of Stephen Jay Gould, two “magisteria”—the realm of meaning and the realm of empirical facts (Gould 1999). This had the effect of keeping culture and nature neatly compartmentalized, and religious behavior, being part of culture, remained an insulated territory along with other supposedly unique human institutions. The second relationship has operated at the metaphysical level and has taken on theological issues of design, purpose, determinism, randomness, and the general consistency or inconsistency of naturalistic and religious worldviews per se. But the newer cognitive science movement is wholly different in focus: it explains religious behavior and thought directly in terms of their evolved infrastructures or adaptations. The point: to show that religion works in the same way that the mind works and that the building blocks of religious life reflect ancient, patterned ways by which the evolved brain of the species has learned to take hold of the world successfully. From the point of view of the history of religious studies, it is clear that this approach resurrects the study of presumed sets of structuring forms that underlie cultural variety and that once again the hoary questions of the origins of deity, rite, myth, magic, and sacrality are on the table. While the notion of evolution incites side-taking and triumphalism regarding matters of foundationalist explanations, my view is that evolutionary considerations may also be treated in selective, aspectual ways without a totalizing discourse on whole, ultimate meanings attributed to the human condition. For purposes of this essay, at any rate, I employ restraint on metaphysical discourse—easily done if one suspects that nature is not a fully known entity to anyone. Evolutionary psychology, with its branches in the cognitive science of religion, is but one of several models by which evolutionary theory can be

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applied to culture (e.g., Laland and Brown 2002; Plotkin 2003) and I will be suggesting here that the conceptual perspectives of behavioral ecology, including ethology and human ethology (see, e.g., Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989), will add important dimensions to a model for explaining religious behavior. The cognitivist approach is typically focused on mental processing rather than social behavior. Yet the mind is built for sociality, which suggests the viability of studying behaviors involving status, submission, communicative signaling and displays, kin selection/recognition, attachment and bonding, and imitation—these being only among the more obvious factors directly relevant to the study of religious patternings. Consequently, I outline in this essay four levels of analysis that provide a broader bridgework to the study of religion: the importance of behavior as an integrative level of analysis; the strategic role of social environments as forms of habitation; group-level constraints; and social interaction with prestige-laden objects. All of these are underplayed in standard evolutionary psychology but all will need to come to the fore for an integral evolutionary science of religion.

Behavior as an integrative level of analysis Scholars of religion cannot be expected to change careers and take genes and molecules as their working matrix of research but they will not be changing professions by taking behavior as a level of study. Whatever else it may be, the study of religion is surely the study of behavior. Behavior here is a comprehensive concept that includes physical as well as mental activity, individual as well as social formations. For purposes of succinctness, I will take “religion” to mean behaviors acknowledging gods.1 We do not see the gods— but we do see the behaviors surrounding them. Behavior is also one of the things biologists study: the observable activity of organisms responding or adapting to environments over time. Behavior is what we see going on all around us in so-called nature: plants grow roots; ants cultivate fungi; chimps groom; wolves mark territories. There is a worm “which lives exclusively under the eyelids of the hippopotamus and feeds upon its tears” (Dawkins 1998: 241)—and speaking of eyelids, there is the stroke victim who, unable to use any part of his body except his left eyelid, still signaled

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the letters of the alphabet and thus wrote his autobiography. Behavior is the interesting thing; it is the best and worst of life; it is the creative, novel part; it is the product of nature that concerns us most. “Nature,” as one evolutionist puts it, “has evolved creatures with a vast array of brilliant behavioral techniques” (Maxwell 1984: 27). Evolutionists, in distinguishing the genotype and the phenotype, take the first to refer to inherited genetic structure and the second to mean the expression or appearance of that structure in terms of physical and behavioral traits. The phenotype—from the Greek, phainein, “to show” (erstwhile phenomenologists of religion take note)—is then the visible properties of an organism, which are produced by the interaction of the genes and the environment. In this sense, everything humans or animals “do” is behavior and expresses various phenotypic traits, whether tracking prey or offering a gift to a god, whether making a tool or building a shrine, whether defending a nest or writing a novel. The concept of behavior, in short, removes the ostensibly unbridgeable gulf that one intuitively wants to place between culture and nature. Behavior is then a link between our biological inheritance as populations that form environments and our cultural inheritance as peoples who inhabit received and lived historical worlds of symbols and meaning. Cognitive psychologists will focus on the information-processing adaptations and actions that condition behavior; behavioral ecologists will focus on the role of the environment and its selection pressures; historians will examine the culturally varying formulations of those behaviors-in-environments; comparativists will study salient cross-cultural behavior patterns. Evolutionists cannot get to behavior by only studying genes. There is no oneto-one correlation of evolutionary disposition—or adaptive building block— to behavior because behavior is a complex product of the relation of genes to environments, including the cultural learning that environments provide. Every behavior is complex and every act implies combinations of adaptations. Cosmides and Tooby (1992) maintain that once one knows what to look for, namely the invariant, underlying functional architecture of the mind, then a way of organizing behavioral phenomena comes into place—otherwise they hold that behavior is too “kaleidoscopic” a level of analysis “to capture meaningful species-typical uniformity” (p. 64). One can see the point. Yet this bottom-up approach has its limitations if there is no absolute correspondence

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of adaptive genetic program to behavior, if numerous dispositional systems could be enacted in any action, if any information-processing “decision” is apt to become a cascading chain of many kinds of decisions, if adaptations build upon adaptations, and ultimately, as mentioned above, if inferential programs are subject to socio-ecological variables. One can also work backwards, as in reverse engineering, from transcultural behavioral patterns and their various aspects to infrastructural dispositions. Historians can then tack back and forth between their shifting ideas of what constitutes data and the findings of evolutionary sciences, just as they have done with any of the other bodies of explanatory theory.

Building environments, building worlds Humans and many other organisms don’t simply respond to environments— they build them. In this sense, human cultures are extensions of a process of habitat building which has been going on for three billion years, whether through sand particles, secretions, burrows, hives, or dams. That habitative activity continues in the construction of social and linguistic forms, and the artifactual inventions of signs, cities, technologies, and temples. In turn, with the evolution of human language comes the possibility to make representations of things and agencies whether they exist materially or not: enter the gods, their narratives and icons, and their virtual worlds. Along with social organization comes a built world of prestigious objects, status relationships, and sacred norms, so that religions, as systems of observances for negotiating welfare with gods, then become culturally designed forms of “natural” environments, spaces of the mind, and thus second environments parallel to the invention and uses of spear points, pots, and fire (Chase 1999). Once cultural systems are understood as evolving and adaptive scaffoldings of the social mind, a connection between the notions of niche construction (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) and human worldmaking emerges. The study of religion would appear to be back in business. As with the concept of behavior, the notion of a built environment is at once biological, historical, and humanistic. In the roughest formulation just given above, it shows in principle how we can get “here” from “there,”

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that is, from human culture to its evolutionary origins. But other links are necessary in order to explain religious systems within an evolutionary frame. Environments are not just nebulous accumulations of tradition but include the constraints of in-group relationships that play upon adaptive dispositions for loyalty and altruism. Such groups are environments within environments, and as such are the basis of systemic religious or moral identities, worldviews, myths, and rituals. I address this next.

Behavior in groups Evolutionary psychology has argued strenuously against what it takes to be the prevailing model in social sciences, namely that the mind is a blank slate onto which culture simply writes its scripts. But the dichotomy of group-agency versus the information-processing brain has been overplayed. Whereas groups per se may not be clearly defined, natural entities “out there,” long evolutionary periods of collective living and dependency have loaded individual psyches with a repertoire of social dispositions that are responsive to representations of groups. To be sure, social environments are made of individuals, but individuals work in sets with cooperative behaviors, rankings, identities, and goals in mind and individual minds are fully geared to respond to collectively represented signals with dispositions for conformity, imitation, deference, loyalty, and the avoidance of shame. Hence, while groups are made up of small self-interested components, among the brains of those components are dispositions for responding to group identities and accepting or trusting group ideas as objectivities (Plotkin 2003: 248–290). Groups may be “perpetually reconstructed output fictions of individual minds” but the idea of the group itself is not the only concept individuals share: they also project and internalize powerful ideologies that constrain behaviors and can have deadly motivational and causal force. Insofar as imagined communities, norms, or essentialized identities are believed to require cooperation, the “collective” factor then comes right back in through the dispositional backdoor of the individual mind. The notion of the construction of a social “reality” that functions as an objectivity is therefore not conceptually at odds with the notion that individual brains

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are doing the selecting and processing of its “input information.” Individuals also easily accept group norms as external constraints if there are negative consequences or costs of defection for not doing so. As well, where humans have a heavy investment in group identities they are prone to invest those identities with force or sacrality. Social cognition and individual cognition, top-down and bottom-up analyses, meet. Indeed, that groups exist only in the minds of its members was a point even made by Durkheim (1995: 211, 223, 351, 419)—supposedly the prime example of the “Standard Social Science Model” rejected by evolutionary psychologists. But one could make the link that Durkheim did not: these social dispositions have biological pedigrees as adaptations. Having mentioned social dispositions, one might also mention social rules. Sets of individuals build rules, such as the rules of a football game, driving a car, or observing a Catholic Mass—obligations that exert constraints on the behaviors of individuals practicing them. Collective norms in this sense, including those of religious systems, will then have effects on the alternative choices individuals will make within the behavioral domains of those norms. Kin selection is a well-known phenomenon in evolutionary science, in essence meaning that individual animals will be willing to sacrifice themselves altruistically for the greater good of their gene pool to the relative extent that their genes are the same as others in their group cohort. With social insects, for example, biologists have worked this out mathematically. Human group affiliation, for its part, is not limited to close biological families. Among humans, any group—given environmental circumstances—can function as a source of input stimuli for “kin”-like commitments; that is, the disposition for “family” loyalty can be evoked by any kind of culturally or environmentally constructed group setting, particularly where there is perceived competition for resources or territory: one could mention teams, gangs, platoons, fraternities, families, clubs, labor unions, national patriotisms, as well as various kinds of religious groups. Here is what I am leading to: religious beliefs, rites, and other markers, with their typical reference to lineage, ancestry, and collective tradition, can then be understood as variants of kin recognition cues for affirming relatedness and mutual trust. That is, one could hypothesize that some gods and ancestors, believed to be one’s “kind,” and thus types of patrons or caretakers, “activate kin mechanisms and motivate mutually altruistic

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behavior” (Kirkpatrick 2005: 248–249). Religion, some evolutionists then say, can thus become a “hypertrophied kin recognition process” (pp. 249–251). In this mode of religiousness, piety and sacred histories are linked with ancestries, with kind. Martyrdom becomes a display language advertising the honor of the institutions of one’s group species. Mechanisms for monitoring, defending, or purging violations of the group system, whether the threat is from the ingroup or out-group, become homeostatic strategies for group survival. The sacralization of group capital, its cultural DNA, enhances survival for both group and individual (Rappaport 1999). This points to another link in the religion/evolution chain: the construction of sacred objects.

The formation of sacred objects Given the above matrices for describing human evolution, it is possible to hypothesize how a natural history of sacred objects might have formed.2 By sacred, here I mean a quality of respect for objects deemed inviolable. How could an evolutionary account of sacred objects be construed? Several trajectories come to mind, all of them forms of social behavior, all implying biological adaptations or analogues.

Prestige goods The formation of systemic behaviors toward objects—and by extension religious objects—can be partly understood in terms of the evolution of the prestige that comes with social capital or status. The emergence of a “prestige bias” (Henrich and Gil-White 2001) and an economy of prestige goods would accentuate the rank and power of certain objects, persons, or virtual entities (e.g., ancestors, spirits) over others and would compel attention. Individual minds, in an in-group, will tend to acknowledge the values placed by others on such objects even though that status goes well beyond the object’s surface value. Within some groups, a record-breaking baseball, filled with baseball myth mana, may be worth millions of dollars; where supernatural power or presence is believed to be invested in an object, that object may have a priceless value. One can see a connection here with Durkheim’s totemic principle regarding

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the prestige, honor, mana, or “force” attributed to objects (1995: 209–211) and also with Murray Milner’s seminal work (1994) linking the concepts of sacredness and status; both can be linked with evolutionary perspectives.

Deference to the social dominant Much of social culture in human and some nonhuman species is based on deference displays toward ranking entities or alphas within the group. Several thousand mammal species have alphas, and this is not to mention the phenomenon of social insect queens. Acts of submission or appeasement have clear parallels between human and nonhuman primate species, just as acts of submission and appeasement toward gods have clear parallels with those behaviors toward nonreligious entities. Gods (or spirits, or ancestors), insofar as they function as ranked social beings, as versions of human alphas, are thus not only intellectual representations of causality or social information but interactive status objects activating deferential behavior displays relating to the construction of a conciliatory relationship and the avoidance of punishment, ill-luck, or shame. Much of the world of piety and practice can in this sense alone be understood as permutations of respect behaviors, just as much of the world of myth and ritual can be understood in relation to the display of status through enhanced (linguistically, in the case of mythicization) or stereotypical demonstrations of power and relative rank.

Serving role specialization To serve the vehicles of high role prestige—the gods, the rites—is to cultivate and defend investments in group-specific capital and its reproduction. Does this sound like a beehive? For rank status is not just a matter of the dominance/ submission complex between one entity and another powerful one but also involves general support for entities with specialized role functions. In human cultures, these are found in the essentialized categories of shaman and chieftain, patriarch and emir, but also certain ancestors and gods, understood as superior institutions. The service of patron gods is then the service of the welfare of the group. The duties toward the insect queens comprise an analogue. As the all-important egg-laying entities, the queens draw the servicing and defensive

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attentions of the workers. They are for many species a purely social construct in that the queens have no different genetic constitution than the workers but are “made” into their superior role and size by being served special foods much the way human groups “make” certain of their individuals, through ritual behaviors toward them, into chiefs, pharaohs, popes, presidents, and Dalai Lamas. If one of these dies, another is made. As with the insect queens, their status indicators—chemical (pheromones) in the case of the queens—could be said to activate dispositions in individuals to serve and protect them. Religious cultures, too, produce heavily invested objects and entities that analogously activate attentiveness, loyalties, and costly sacrifices. Those objects include rites, holy places of power, icons and other manifestations of gods, and so forth, any one of which may be believed to represent compellingly the enduring life or “fertility” of one’s kind, one’s social species, one’s group.

Enhanced cues and displays Many species are more interested in a pronounced or exaggerated copy of some biological signal or “key stimulus” than in the real thing. The cue could be visual, behavioral, or pheromonal. Herring gulls, researchers found, “will ignore their own eggs when presented with appropriately painted wooden models so large they cannot even climb on top of them” (Wilson 1999: 252). Tinbergen and other ethologists called these “supernormal sign stimuli” (Tinbergen 1951: 44–46). Chicks of the herring gull, used to pecking at the orange spot on the mother’s beak in order to stimulate the mother to produce regurgitated food for them, “will peck even more readily at exaggerated cardboard models of the spot” (Dennett 2006: 122). A likely question follows: are religious objects, including god representations, partly conceivable as such supernormal stimuli? Are they analogues of the stereotypic orange spots or painted wooden models which, in the human case, show enhanced or otherwise strong signals of status prestige and thus activate dispositions for social respect? Displaying to the gods may indeed be a way of describing the religious syndrome insofar as the gods constitute a physically absent though virtually present social “reference group” for individual behavior (Barkow 1989: 192). As evolution shapes our bodies, it also shapes our communicative behavior. We are disposed to “display” to others and to respond to signals from others.

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Some of this may involve the lineage of sexual selection (Miller 2000), the second key evolutionary process alongside of natural selection, but display behavior is a form of communication in many contexts, such as territorialism and defense, and indeed sending and receiving signals can take place in any social environment (Dissanayake 1992). Where the behaviors are costly “statements” to impress a god with signals of loyalty, praise, or sincerity, adherents might expect consequences to follow accordingly. The behaviors are then an investment or expenditure of social capital linking cost to benefits. St. Simeon Stylites, living his life atop a pillar, publicly signaled his fitness for the mythic kingdom of God and tens of thousands came to witness it. In that regard, biologists have studied a “Handicap Principle,” where extreme behaviors among animals are deliberately risky or costly in order to communicate status and excellence of qualities, which in turn redound to reproductive chances and social rank (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Costliness, so the idea goes, shows reliability. Prestige is not only an attribution to an object but an acquisition of a subject. It is something desired and cultivated as a form of status, and its negatives of dishonor, shame, guilt, and impurity are to be avoided. Much of what we think of as religion involves such dynamics: generating forms of honor, purity, and holiness through contact with prestigious objects (and “objects” includes ideas) and compensating for the inverse of these. Religious ritual and piety play on these exchanges. The notion of status processing therefore expands or runs parallel to the notion of information-processing.

Summation For integrating evolutionary dimensions with religious studies, I suggested that behavior patternings are the pertinent starting and ending point for a general level of analysis; that the concept of environments underscores the role of social and linguistic habitation in the case of humans; that in-group or kin-group behavioral dispositions and formations account for many of the formal features of myth, ritual, and sacrality; and that communicative behaviors toward prestige objects can be linked with certain phenotypic, evolutionary traits.

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The morphology of religion in this behavioral sense inverts the classical, top-down notion of patterns of the sacred understood as transformations of a primal form or essence. The patterns in the present case are the dispositions for various kinds of behavior; one could say that here one addresses not the archetypes of meaning but what amounts to the archetypes of behavior, in terms of which the edifices of meaning and value are built. The evolution model thus does religious studies the service of breaking down or parsing religious subject matter into varieties of behavior patterns with deep lineages such as agency detection, submission, reading other minds, kin recognition and trust, ritualization, status display, imitation, reciprocal altruism, the differential functions of schematic and episodic memory, and so forth. While scholars of religion for the most part have for years realized that religious life is polymorphic and employs all the human capacities for emotion, sociality, memory, and representation—one thinks too of the various legacies of Kantianism that focused on how the mind takes hold of the world—evolutionary sciences supply a yet more differentiated map that includes phylogenetic genealogies and thus points to the deeper connotation of “history” in the phrase “history of religions,” to borrow Joel Sweek’s interesting expression (Sweek 2002: 214). The differentiating of behavior zones continues the process of studying religious life “at the joints,” a goal implicit even in the classical tradition of those religious morphologies and phenomenologies which labored to classify their subject matter topically. While the notion of a “psychic unity of mankind” became an object of postmodern derision, the newer cognitive/evolutionary approaches to religion are a distinct move to recapture that psychic unity or commonality at a species level underlying the surface of cultural differences. At the level of culture, comparability of meanings flounders; it is the nature of culture and cultural location to be environmentally different with regard to systems of signification. But at the evolutionary level of human behavior, comparability abounds. Having ventured these points, I am of course aware that the identification of specific genetic dispositions is open to continuing debate (Buller 2006) and that my uses of the concept of behavior would require extensive argumentation. For purposes of a short contribution to issues for thought in Introducing Religion (Braun and McCutcheon 2000 [for which this essay

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was originally written]), my interest here has rather been to set out kinds of questions and categories that may be worth pursuing in relation to certain current developments in theory.

References Atran, Scott. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Barkow, Jerome H. (1989). Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boyer, Pascal. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Braun, Willi and Russell T. McCutcheon (eds.). (2000). Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith. London: Equinox. Buller, David J. (2006). Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chase, Philip G. (1999). “Symbolism as Reference and Symbolism as Culture.” In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, and C. Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View (pp. 34–49). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. (1992). “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 19–136). New York: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, Richard. (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. Dissanayake, Ellen. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus. (1989). Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Gould, Stephen Jay. (1999). Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group.

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Henrich, Joseph and Francisco J. Gil-White. (2001). “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22: 165–196. James, William. (1982[1902]). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. Kirkpatrick, Lee A. (2005). Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. New York: The Guilford Press. Laland, Kevin N. and Gillian R. Brown. (2002). Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maxwell, Mary. (1984). Human Evolution: A Philosophical Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Geoffrey. (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Doubleday. Milner, Murray, Jr. (1994). Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. (2003). Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Paden, William E. (2013). “The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects.” In A. Geertz (ed.), Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture (pp. 82–97). London: Equinox. [See Chapter 12, this volume.] Plotkin, Henry. (2003). The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweek, Joel. (2002). “Biology of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14: 196–218. Tinbergen, N. (1951). The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tremlin, Todd. (2006). Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House. Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. (1997). The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.

11

Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion

Interest in Durkheim has undergone something of a revival through the publications of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies in Oxford (Pickering 2001), and, following Pickering’s comprehensive work Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion (1984), the study of Durkheim’s views on religion in particular has proceeded apace (Allen et al. 1998; Idinopulos and Wilson 2002; Godlove 2005; Strenski 2006). Yet a previous generation of religion scholars had faulted Durkheim’s reductionism, just as anthropologists had challenged his ethnographic categories. Joachim Wach’s classic, titled Sociology of Religion, mentioned Durkheim but twice in passing—only to issue a warning against the “positivism” of confusing religious and social values (Wach 1949: 5, 95). Even a later textbook on the history of comparative religion republished in 1986 concluded its telling portrayal of Durkheim with these words: Although widely read, Durkheim was so dominated by the desire to explain away the phenomenon of religion that his theories about the origins of religion are of little consequence. His failure to accept mankind’s belief in the actual existence of an unseen supernatural order—a failure in which he was to have many followers—led him into serious errors of interpretation … . The student of comparative religion will, perhaps, read him less in order to acquire a knowledge of either the nature of religion or the thorny problem of the origins of religion, than to learn something of the standing of these theories in turn-of-the-century France. (Sharpe 1986: 86)

© Oxford University Press 2009.

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At the same time, social theory was starting to take hold. In the late 1960s came the influence of the neo-Durkheimians Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Peter Berger, Louis Dumont, Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, all of whom contributed theoretical and interpretive frames that religion scholars found academically legitimizing—and perhaps, as a benefit, religiously unthreatening. Through and after the 1980s, the “History of Religions” field—usually the methodological flagship of religious studies— was becoming “socialized” and anthropologized. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was transitioning in classrooms from being an instance of dated speculation to being recognized as something of a gold mine of theoretic capital and found its secure place on the reading list of courses on theory and method. Historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith was continuing the Durkheimian trajectory in fresh, critical directions (1978, 1987, 2005) and could write that while one may not accept “the answers Durkheim set forth to the questions he posed” nevertheless his questions and sociological vision continue to “establish our agendum” (1987: 36). The acceptability of the neo-Durkheimians was not only because they provided theory where theory had been lacking in religious studies, but because on the whole their conceptualizations were not dismissively antireligious or offensively reductive. Thus, from the point of view of the academic study of religion, the question of the ultimate referential reality of religion could conveniently be deferred or bracketed and the social construction of phenomenological reality could be adopted as a working matrix. Durkheim could therefore be read with a new slant: had he not stressed the enduring, effective nature of religious forces, albeit socially originated, over against rationalist views that dismissed them as mere illusions? This motif even became a major theme in the lengthy introduction of Karen Fields in her new translation of Elementary Forms (Fields 1995). Durkheim’s thesis, moreover, could be construed not as a reduction of religion to society, in the commonsense meaning of “society,” but rather as a special enlargement of the notion of society that focused on its intrinsically religious nature, including the irreducible, sui generis structuring and functioning of “the sacred.” Concurrent with the appropriation of sociological frames in religious studies was the general acceptance of the methodological point that all thought and interpretation, religious or scientific, is necessarily

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reductive, selecting out some features of the world for purposes of baseline analysis, while ignoring others. This chapter focuses primarily on ways that some of Durkheim’s ideas on religion have been and can be appropriated and developed, particularly his central category of sacrality—which is more heterogeneous than most observers take it to be, and a subject benefiting from differentiation, modification, and aspectual analysis. Not just a nineteenth-century or primitive archaism, the factor of the “sacred” continues to be observable wherever group identities are challenged and put at stake, as in conflicts over ethnic and national autonomy, in loyalty to tribes and sects, in human rights issues, and in domestic wars over such things as the inviolability of human embryos, marriage, and traditional gendered classifications. While post-structuralist thought has tried to replace ideal types and the language of universal patterns by turning attention to micro social behaviors of strategizing “habits,” the role of cross-cultural modeling does not cease to lose its value, particularly as studies of religion explore connections with the human sciences. Whereas Durkheim thought his elementary forms encompassed the basis of religion, today one is more methodologically circumspect and one is more likely to take structural types as addressing “aspects” of a phenomenon and not whole or total entities. The essay concludes with a discussion of the relevance of the sciences of evolutionary sociality for reappraising Durkheimian ideas of the social formations of religious behavior.

Differentiating the category of the sacred A key criticism of the phenomenology of religion tradition was that its grounding concept, “the sacred” or “the holy,” was explicitly or implicitly theological and metaphysical and thus completely inappropriate as an academic category. Here religious phenomena were often presented as “manifestations” of that transcendent power—a power that resembled divinity. “The sacred,” as a term, was essentialized and reified as an a priori religious reality—a reality experienced in countless ways and cultural forms. In sharp contrast, Durkheim’s le sacré was a social representation rather than a superhuman presence and thus functioned in an altogether different,

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unidealized theoretic universe. The sacred in this frame is a value placed on objects rather than a power that shines through them because of their extraordinary qualities. Much of the analytic potential of Durkheim’s theory of religion is linked to the applicability of the bedrock idea of the social generation of “sacred things.” Yet in Durkheim’s work this key concept seemed to vary in context and contain a variety of conceptual influences and levels. Thus, sacredness for Durkheim had one clear ritual prototype in the anthropological notion of taboo, following J. G. Frazer and W. Robertson Smith; yet this needed to be wedded to the discourse of the sociological binary of collective and individual realms of life—and, in turn, that representational level had to be connected with the origin of the sacred in the emotional experience of effervescent group gatherings. As well, all of this, in Durkheim’s mind, was linked with his sociological version of a neo-Kantian idea of obligatory, categorical morality. It follows that this repertoire of aspects of sacrality contains a range of possibilities. Is “the sacred” a prohibited object, not to be violated by any contact, or is it—as we learn halfway through Elementary Forms— discovered in a state of emotional, communal ecstasy if not pandemonium? Is it a cult of imperative morality and sacrifice inspired by the constraints of social authority, or is it a totemically “signed,” semiotic emblem representing differential identities among groups? Is it a realm of ideals or is it a status to be achieved through a deliberate process of self-transformation? Is it the prestige attributed to any object at any point in culture or is it a zone of culture always and everywhere found to be marked off from ordinary life? Is it a “force,” a kind of mana, that conveys itself by contagious association, or is it an embodiment of a social norm? To make it even more complex, Durkheim accepted W. Robertson Smith’s idea that the sacred contains its own binary of pure/impure (1995: 412–17). In Elementary Forms, the sacred is all these things, according to sequence or context. To be sure, while identifying each aspect separately, one must grant their interdependence on a circle of relationships—for example, the sacred is a mark of group experience and identity and thus acquires prestige, which means in turn that it contains a certain experienced force, which is a force that must in turn be managed through proper ritual protocols. The following sections sort out and discuss some of the key features of this process.

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The sacred/profane binary as principle of religious conduct Durkheim’s vocabulary about the “sacred and profane” as exclusive realms that repel and contradict each other has been thoroughly criticized and for many became grounds for rejecting the category of the sacred entirely. It is natural to address this issue first. Criticisms of the binary have been reviewed in detail by Pickering (1984: 115–49). The main charge is that so many cultures and religions do not keep these worlds separate, as Durkheim’s theory seems to require. Clearly Durkheim’s language about all religion forming a “bipartite” universe of sacred and profane (1995: 38) led to this problem and seems to be indefensible if by “profane” is meant an actual realm of life different from the sacred realm. But it can be shown that Durkheim’s binary refers to ritual relationships that regulate incompatible states, not static areas on the map of the world. That the sacred/profane is not a class of things but of relationships to things is a distinction Durkheim should have made clearer (Lukes 1972: 27). The sacred/profane binary can be understood as a cultic distinction referring to protocols of ritualized negotiation between two kinds of status. Notably, Durkheim’s prototypes of the binary refer to rites of passage where there is a costly process of transitioning from one state to another: initiation rites, the requirements of entering monastic life, the practices of ascetics in achieving sanctity, and even the phenomenon of religious suicide (1995: 37). There are two actions going on here: (1) keeping a boundary between things with more powerful status and things with less status, and (2) engaging in processes by which the latter can gain access to the former—as in the ordeals of initiation, in taking off one’s shoes before entering a shrine, or in having to bow before a king. This is a social, not a metaphysical, duality. Durkheim’s use of the sacred/profane binary—the sacred thing “is, par excellence, that which the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity” (1995: 38)—was profoundly shaped by the notion of taboo, a category that Robertson Smith and Frazer were linking with the term “sacred,” taking the latter to mean forbidden or restricted from common use (much as with the Latin sacer, forbidden). From this came the idea of the ambiguity of the sacred object as having a positive or negative force. But Durkheim’s theory of religion progressed well beyond the idea of the prohibitions of primitive

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thought, showing how separation could be conceived as “abstention,” and how abstentions could be shown to be the gate of access to achieving sanctity through such things as costly renunciations of the world of attachments. That “man cannot approach his god intimately while still bearing the marks of his profane life” (1995: 312) takes the idea of interdiction far beyond the notion of primitive taboo. Robertson Smith, too, had shown that the conception of holiness evolved from primitive connotations of danger to notions of purity of life (W. R. Smith 1956[1894]: 140–41).

The sacred versus “the divine” as general organizing category for studying religion It is possible to simply take the notion of sacredness in a less dynamic sense and refer to a class of objects that have been made sacred. Pickering thus argues (1984: 149–62) that Durkheim’s basic concept of the sacred is useful beyond its encasement in the dichotomous and controversially phrased sacred/profane binary stated early on in Elementary Forms. For Durkheim religion is a vast set of “sacred things,” the content of which is infinitely varied over time. One has to be careful here about just slipping into an equation of the sacred and the religious, where the former simply connotes some transcendental dimension of life that all religions have in common. Still, assuming that “sacred” here meant objects constructed by social prestige rather than just a placeholder term for “the nonempirical,” this would indeed be an alternative way of reading the history of religion—alternative, in the case of religious studies, to seeing history as just a succession of varying beliefs or ideas about the nature of divinity or reality. The compelling nature of those objects, which may or may not include gods, is a reflection of their status within a system; protectedness and inviolability are concomitants. Such an anthropologized history, among other things, would include attention to the emergence of certain secular values, understood as sacred, including the history of the sacralization of the idea of a human “person,” or other notions of a secular sacrality (Carrithers et al. 1985; Watts Miller 2002). A methodological assumption in this sociological model is that the “objective” world is what it is through collective representations, rather than construed as an a priori, existing reality which all religions and cultures aspire

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to describe with their symbols. As will be addressed below, such an approach would also ultimately converge with studies of the evolution of human sociality.

The sacred as a marker of shared identity Sacredness is not just an attribute of objects as such, but has a semiotic nature signaling the shared identity capital of a particular group. Thus, “things are classified as sacred and profane by reference to the totem. It is the very archetype of sacred things” (1995: 118). Whatever its original ethnographic viability, Durkheim’s model was that a “clan” is a group that has a unity based on its members sharing the same “name,” the same emblems of identity, and the same ritual relations with the same sacred objects—but it is not necessarily consanguineous or territorially based. The members then share the same “essence” by way of participating in what the totemic emblem represents, that is, their “kind.” The emblems are ways a group becomes conscious of itself and “perpetuates” that consciousness (1995: 233). As soon as one clan or group is differentiated from another, elements of this totemic identity come into play. Group-specific histories and rites follow suit. In Mary Douglas’s phrase, “The sacred for Durkheim and Mauss was nothing more mysterious or occult than shared classifications, deeply cherished and violently defended” (1987: 97). This concept has not lost its value and continues to describe the signature formations of new and traditional groups—where “group” here does not mean social environments in general, but rather the self-representations of specifically differentiated collective units or subunits. A group is a kind of linguistic construct that functions as an essentialized representation of aggregates of individuals and thus comes to have the effect of a “thing” or an objectivity. Benedict Anderson’s popular term “imagined communities,” though referring to modern ethnic and anticolonial national movements, would just as well describe any group (1991); indeed, it is Durkheim’s term, too: “the clan was possible only on condition of being imaginable”; “take away the name and the symbol that gives it tangible form, and the clan can no longer even be imagined” (1995: 235). J. Z. Smith’s work connected to Durkheim through this linguistic, classificatory feature of sacrality (1987; 2005: 102–8), a feature implicit in the notion of the totemic emblem—where the abstract “mark” on the churinga was the one factor that gave it its sacred character.

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Markers, or stereotypic signatures, of group definition come in many forms. One might think of the role of patron saints like the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe in constructing a national identity; the role of female circumcision as a strategic community membership sign in certain African communities; allusions to “remember Kosovo” for Serbian nationalists or to the iconic Western Wall for Jews; the identifying sign of headscarves for Muslim women or the differences between the way Sunnis and Shi’ites hold their arms in performing daily prayers. The notion of “axiomatic” community markers has been productively applied to the discursive formulations of evangelical groups that base themselves on biblical authority (Malley 2004). Durkheim’s clan “signs” can be endlessly ramified in the communicative displays of any historical social formations.

Sacred order and its violation With sign differentiation come boundaries and defending boundaries from violation. Sacredness can then refer not just to an object but to the whole order or system on which the object depends and to which it refers. Here sacrality is what keeps a world of representations in place—the representations of the group being at the same time the representations of its world. Social classifications and their ideological representations become a kind of property, and maintaining such territory against violation or compromise will draw upon the deepest instincts for self-preservation or survival. The “profane,” here, if one is to employ the term at all, is what violates or offends the system; it is not simply the mundane or what is outside the system. It is oppositional. The sacred is not set apart because dangerous but, as the Latin term sanctus conveyed, because ordained or secured as inviolable. Emic terms pointing to this aspect of the sacred order include Hindu dharma, Islamic sharia, and Confucian notions of li (propriety), t’ien (order of heaven), and hsiao (filial piety). In biblical tradition, “covenants” with God determine the order of the moral universe. The binary of order and its violation was developed in several ways. For example, Mary Douglas’s model of cognitive boundaries dropped the distinction of primitive and modern systems of order, showing how any group will have its own versions of pollution, danger, or anomaly (2002).

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In her terms, where there is an order of things there will be the prospect of impurity—famously, “where there is dirt there is system” (2002: 36). Order generates boundaries between and within groups, and the boundaries will be consequential according to whether groups are “strong” or “weak” relative to the outside world and according to whether the internal classifications (“grids”) of those groups emphasize strict internal role gradations or not. Strong groups, for example, will have the most highly defined purity rules for maintaining membership. Other neo-Durkheimian models have added to the theme. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1980) joined notions of purity with social hierarchy. Jonathan Z. Smith built a typology distinguishing “locative,” bounded religious systems—where sacrality is a function of things being in their proper place— and those which are “utopic,” nonworldly, and aspatial (1978: 129–71). Others have pointed to additional facets of symbolic order, such as nomos (Berger 1967), the sacralization of identity (Mol 1975; Rappaport 1999), hierarchy (Isambert 1982), systemic order (Paden 1996), and symbolic classification related to space (J. Z. Smith 1987; Anttonen 2000). The relation of sacred order to the notion of honor should be a productive research area.

Effervescence, regeneration, anti-structure Yet another salient dimension of the Durkheimian “sacred” is the effervescence of group gatherings in contrast with routine life. Durkheim tried to include this in his sacred/profane binary (the individual gives up his ordinary feelings and identity to participate in the group festivity) but its duality goes in another direction than those described above. It plays on the contrast of collective high arousal and ordinary habit. The sacred is generated through the feelings activated in ecstatic collective events. Others have shown that the festival moment contains the seeds of anti-structure behaviors that could potentially subvert the otherwise regulated, boundaried structure of the sacred. Breaking taboos, rather than keeping them, then becomes the gate of access to the sacred. The anti-structural but life-renewing aspect of the sacred was elaborated by Roger Caillois (1913–1978) and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), representatives of the so-called “left-wing” Durkheimian school and its Collège de Sociologie.

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This work extended the notion of the unrestrained “festival” or “expenditure” mode of the sacred and has had a revival of influence (Taussig 1998; Richman 2002). In Caillois’s synthesis, Man and the Sacred (1959[1939]), the sacred is ambivalent in the sense of being both a constraining, containing, inhibiting force of order and a creative, transgressive, liberating, sacrificial force which breaks through old forms and rigidities. It is both the “tabooed” and that which destroys the congealed conformities of law and normativity—both what is to be protected and what violates protected order when the latter wears out or becomes resistant. In Caillois’s view, war has taken over the function of festival paroxysm in modern society—“a total phenomenon that exalts and transforms modern society in its entirety, cutting with terrible contrast into the calm routine of peacetime” (p. 165). “The festival,” he proposes, “is in the same relationship to the time of labor, as war is to peace. They are both phases of movement and excess, as against the phases of stability and moderation” (p. 166). Bataille expanded upon the paroxysmal, even violent, nature of the sacred, as well as its relation to erotic effusion and ecstatic mysticism, festival reversals, the emptying of order, wealth-destroying potlatch, and “expenditure” (dépense) generally (Bataille 1985). For Bataille, the “right hand” of social conservation thus contrasts with the “left hand” of social expenditure. Michèle Richman’s major work (2002) on the concept of effervescence in theories of social dynamics explores the theoretical issues in the notion of regenerative upheavals and explosive contestations, events that contrast with the socialization of maintaining status quo civility and thus static notions of structure. Durkheimians argue that this “socio-logic of effervescence” can be distinguished from psychological notions of crowd psychology in its simply irrational, regressive aspects. Victor Turner’s (1969) concept of unstructured communitas had previously addressed aspects of this concept. Not just archaic and exotic, these regenerative moments become a permanent feature of social history. Thus Karen Fields notes “the tumultuous arrival in 1979 of Ruhollah Khomeini at Tehran airport,” and the “birth of a nation” in 1989 when Lithuanians returned the bones of St. Casimir to the People’s House of Culture, then reconsecrated as the Cathedral of Vilnius—or even Nazi and Ku Klux Klan rallies, “with individuals led to impute to themselves shared inborn essences and fabulous collective identities” (1995: xliv–xlv, xlii). One could also point to stadium-filled gatherings of sports fans or evangelicals, a million-man march on

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Washington, the national rites of mourning following the events of September 11, 2001, rave culture (St. John 2003), and even the shared emotion, community, and “sociomental bonds” between those who have never met face to face but who experience common events through common media events (Chakyo 2002). Michel Maffesoli has examined the notion of “postmodern tribes,” temporary social identifications and identities—distinct from institutional structures— which, despite their impermanence, still have a collective feeling or enthusiasm, a certain sympathy and power, an “immanent” transcendence (1996). Yet the same “regeneration” prototype indeed raises questions about how group violence, or social pathologies—lynch mobs, ethnic cleansing campaigns—fit into the template. The anthropologist Stanley Tambiah therefore asks of the Durkheimian model “how in the context of ethnic riots, participants accede to the call of violating and victimizing the enemy as a moral imperative, socially induced and legitimated” (1997: 303). It remains that periodic festivals, ceremonies, or collective observances also have a conserving, integrative, mnemonic function and as such comprise an infrastructure of most all religious systems. One can find the effervescence factor either in connection with high-stimulus sensory pageantry, recurrently choreographed, or in anti-formal groups that generate emotional ecstasy in formats expressing more personal involvement, or in marked periods, such as Ramadan, where strong social displays of nonordinary observances intensify motivation and collective commitment. In each of these, the totemic sacred is being kept “alive” and in memory over against the forces of its diminution and neglect. Studies of the dynamics and cognitive bases of memory and emotion in relation to ritual frequency and sensory stimulus add new interest and complexity to this theme (Connerton 1989; HervieuLéger 2000; Whitehouse 2004).

After Durkheim: Some trajectories Durkheim and religious studies The eclectic work of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986)—the major, classical figure in comparative religion who extended the range and modalities of data concerning the sacred as none other had—straddled the phenomenological

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and neo-Durkheimian worlds. Eliade explicitly recognized the influence of Caillois, and in widely read works such as The Sacred and the Profane (1959) kept the language of the heterogeneity of sacred/profane realms while also describing the ways religious cultures reunite them in time, space, myth, and ritual. As well, he developed Durkheimian notions of festivals as “openings” onto an eternal, “Great Time.” For Eliade, the sacred and the profane represent a simpler duality than Durkheim’s: they are respectively the cosmological realm of myth and the ordinary life-world. Otherwise put, these are the realms of supernatural archetypes and of nature. Where Durkheim was focusing on the exclusivity of two realms that required ritual transformation, Eliade elaborated more on the connectivity and integration of dualities—that is, the various ways that the mythic realm gave value to aspects of the human world. “Some of the highest religious experiences,” he wrote, “identify the sacred with the whole universe. To many a mystic the integrated quality of the cosmos is itself a hierophany” (1963: 459). While Eliade objected to sociological reductions, preferring to reconstruct the patterned “worlds” of religious insiders more at the level of existential phenomenology, both men imagined religion as plural systems of mythically and ritually constructed worlds— worlds understood not as objectivities but as symbolic schemas with a life of their own. Both believed that the study of religious worlds was relevant for contemporary people in the search for moral and spiritual values. A Durkheimian reading of Eliade, and vice-versa, would be mutually illuminating and a helpful way of reunderstanding the French connection in religious studies—a connection that has been implicit rather than overt in Eliade’s work (Paden 1994; 2002). At the same time, a post-Eliadean generation of religion scholars connects with Durkheim more in terms of the way collective classifications contain and authorize socio-political agendas and practices. “In keeping with the Durkheimian tradition of sociological studies on religion and myth,” writes Russell McCutcheon, “we could say that a social formation is the activity of experimenting with, authorizing or combating, and reconstituting widely circulated ideal types, idealizations or, better put, mythifications that function to control the means of and sites where social significance is selected, symbolized and communicated” (2000: 203). The Durkheimian/Maussian

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notion of mythology as containing classifications and hierarchies, and thus ideology in narrative form, is central to the work of scholars like University of Chicago historian of religion Bruce Lincoln, who take Durkheim as basic but add the critical, political edges of cultural theorists “from Antonio Gramsci to Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu” (1999: 147).

Evolutionary sociality: A new linkage with Durkheimian ideas? Recent developments have raised the prospect of narrowing the traditional gulf between Durkheimian sociology of religion and evolutionary biology (Dunbar et al. 1999; D. S. Wilson 2002). Insofar as Durkheim postulates universal social forms, and insofar as evolutionary thought has now provided extensive research on the evolution of human sociality and social cognition, it is an area worth investigating (Schmaus 2004). Of course Durkheim’s task, in context, was to propose and defend the autonomy and irreducibility of a sociological level of facts. Here the distinctiveness of humans, in contrast to nonhuman species, was their social life and representations; it would be a “vain quest,” Durkheim thought, to infer human sociality from animal life (1995: 62). Yet he also admits that a theory of religion must rest on the sciences, including “the sciences of nature … since man and society are linked to the universe and can be abstracted from it only artificially” (1995: 432). Today the formerly hallowed dichotomy of culture and nature is much less clear, and the picture of hominid sociality evolving through life in small groups and forming group-related cognitive and behavioral adaptations has widely replaced Durkheim’s late nineteenthcentury worldview. Thus, the intrinsic, inherited sociality of the human species includes dispositions for accepting group representations, biases for loyalty, coalition-making and conformity, capacities for reciprocity, cooperation and altruism, and—relevant to the Durkheimian notion of collective or totemic representations—responsiveness to signals of kin associations. All of this suggests new prospects for reading Durkheim. For example, in his ambitious work Darwin’s Cathedral (2002), the biologist D. S. Wilson drew on Durkheim to help explain how group selection might operate in some religious groups, particularly through the unifying power of moral commitment to sacred symbols.

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Recall Durkheim’s statement that “in all its aspects and at every moment of history, social life is only possible thanks to a vast symbolism” … . This statement may be ninety years old and well worn in various branches of the social sciences, but it is brand new against the background of modern evolutionary theories of social behavior, including human social behavior. It often seems as if the integration of biology and the social sciences is a one-way street, more a conquest by biology than a fertile interchange. Here is a case where the influence needs to flow the other way. (D. S. Wilson 2002: 226)

In Wilson’s model, sacred symbols command respect and affect behavior, which is to say, phenotypic variation, which in turn can influence survival and reproduction. Anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999) gave a sustained account of the factor of sacrality in social evolution, focusing on the function of inviolability in ritual and language as an adaptive necessity by which groups preserve their identities while also responding to change. “Sacred postulates” and invariable rites are posited as beyond any falsifiability, giving a transempirical quality that attempts to guarantee constancy. Sacred language, for its part, is an antidote to the subversive plasticity of language. “Sanctity’s role in human evolution,” Rappaport writes, “has been profound” (p. 416); it is “a functional replacement for genetic determination of patterns of behavior” (p. 418). Kinship behavior suggests another potential point of connection with Durkheim and evolutionary theory. For example, at the genetic level, “kin selection” or “inclusive fitness” theory means that individual animals—the first stage of research was on social insects—will be willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their gene pool to the relative extent that their genes are the same as those in the group cohort. While human group affiliation is not limited to close biological families, any group can function as kin equivalent, and it is possible that the social dispositions evolved in small group living can also be triggered by the circumstances of constructed group identities. “Kin” here becomes a cultural formation, and this was Durkheim’s point about clans. A disposition that evolved for in-group defense—whether of resources or reproductive line—or for favoring and trusting one’s “kind,” is then applied to “one’s group,” however defined: country, fraternity, club, clan, team, street

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gang, military unit, labor union, political party, school, family ancestry, ethnic tradition, or religion. As well, the markers of totemic identity, within an evolutionary worldview, might be understood as continuous with kin or in-group communication systems. In the natural world, animals sense affiliation by any number of pheromonal, visual, or behavioral “indicators”—and kin recognition cues, or phenotypic matching as a way of detecting relatedness, may be involved with the stereotypic identity signals and codes of human groups. The totemic principle and cult, with its patron gods and progenitors, then might be thought to activate kin mechanisms—amounting, as some evolutionists have put it, to a “hypertrophied kin recognition process” (Kirkpatrick 2005: 248–51). Likewise, ritually enhanced or “exaggerated” displays will stimulate extra feelings of respect, just as certain animals will respond more fully to an exaggerated representation of a sexual object—for example, made of cardboard or a painting—than to the real thing (E. O.Wilson 1999: 252). Mythic histories, then, would be the enhanced lineages of one’s “kind,” understood in both a sociological and a biological sense, and ritual would be the “cult” of reproducing its signals. As well, some evolutionary theory has shown that behavioral signals that are demonstrably costly or hard to fake (self-sacrifice, strict moral observance) would advertise an individual’s high commitment to the group, thus enhancing the commitment of others (Sosis and Alcorta 2003: 266–67). Another area of possible mutual interest between evolutionists and Durkheimians is the notion of prestige goods as social capital. Durkheim’s sacred objects are made of the stuff of social prestige. But the “prestige bias” is also understood as an evolutionary social adaptation (Henrich and Gil-White 2001). Persons of rank and status, and objects that represent rank and status, will compel attention; individuals in an in-group will tend to acknowledge the values placed by superiors on prestige objects. Such objects are sources of salient social information. Evolutionists have also pointed out the transition from primate dominance complexes to the coming of “human symbolic prestige” (Barkow 1989: 6, 183), and with the emergence of human artifact cultures, the extension of prestige to objects (Dissanayake 1992; Mithen 1999). An economy of prestige goods would have allowed tribal leaders to attract respect and gain hierarchical relations with competing groups. Religious systems would become the epitome of “symbolic culture” understood as an emergent

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evolutionary environment (Chase 1999: 42). Thus, the religious history of the species would emerge as a history of the attaching of prestige to various kinds of objects and institutions, ultimately producing the thousands of holy objects sitting side by side on the planet, each a priceless currency for its community, yet each irrelevant in other social landscapes. In large-scale groups, these “cult objects” (scriptures, hierarchies, sacred institutions and objects, gods) would become hypertrophied forms of prestige, taking on a life of their own— prestige generates prestige. The relationship to Durkheim’s views on the sacred as a construction of social prestige (1995: 209–11), and to his lectures on the sacred character of property and property rights (1958: 121–220), is there to develop. Likewise, Murray Milner Jr. (1994) has given a sustained argument— though not in an evolutionary context—that brings status relationships and sacral relationships into a common, integrated theoretical model. At the same time, evolutionary psychologists often refer to Durkheim as an exemplar of a social science model that ignores the inherited, adapted mechanisms of individual minds. This “Standard Social Science Model,” in their view, erroneously pictures the mind as a blank slate into which social norms are downloaded and reproduced. Yet in Durkheim’s case, at least, this is questionable (Schmaus 2004). Thus, in Elementary Forms we read: “The whole social world seems populated with forces that in reality exist only in our minds” (p. 228); “ideas can only release emotive forces that are already within us” (p. 419); the totemic principle itself “exists only in our minds” (p.  349); “society can only exist in and by means of individual minds, it must enter into us and become organized within us” (p. 211); sacred/profane representations are not in nature, but are based on “psychic antagonism” (p. 321), or “psychic mechanisms” (p. 325). One could argue that the edifice of social symbolism, for Durkheim, is maintained by the strength of “countless individual representations” (p. 210). Where evolutionary psychologists deny that culture and cultural worldviews are “things” that are just internalized in individuals, their point is important; yet a distinction should be made between amorphous culture in general and group-specific representations/identities in particular. While groups are indeed made up of individual, self-interested components, those individual components have dispositions for responding to representations of group identities and accepting or trusting group or “kin” ideas as objectivities

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(Plotkin 2003: 248–90). “Groups” may be continuously reconstructed “output fictions” of individual minds, and thus epiphenomena, but among those fictions are powerful ideologies that constrain behaviors and can have deadly motivation and causal force. In short, insofar as imagined communities, norms, totemic symbols, or essentialized identities are believed in by aggregates of individuals, the collective factor then comes back into play as a functioning social “ontology.” The notion of the construction of a social “reality” that functions as an objectivity is therefore not conceptually at odds with the point that it is individual brains which “select” for it and make decisions about its input information. The Durkheimian project of explaining the elementary forms of religious behavior as elementary forms of social behavior could therefore find a complementary project with evolutionary research on the social dispositions of Homo sapiens.

References Allen, N. J., W. S. F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller (eds.). (1998). On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. edn.). London: Verso. Anttonen, Veikko. (2000). “Sacred.” In W. Braun and R. T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 271–282). London: Cassell. Barkow, Jerome H. (1989). Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bataille, Georges. (1985). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berger, Peter. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Caillois, Roger. (1959[1939]). Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Carrithers, Michael, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (eds.). (1985). The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chakyo, Mary. (2002), Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

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Chase, Philip G. (1999). “Symbolism as Reference and Symbolism as Culture.” In Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight, and Camilla Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture (pp. 34–49). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Connerton, Paul. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dissanayake, Ellen. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: The Free Press. Douglas, Mary. (1987). How Institutions Think. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. (2002). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Dumont, Louis. (1980). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (rev. edn.), trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dunbar, Robin, Chris Knight, and Camilla Power (eds.). (1999). The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1958), Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. Cornelia Brookfield. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press. Eliade, Mircea. (1959). The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eliade, Mircea. (1963). Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed. New York: World Publishing Co. Fields, Karen. (1995). “Religion as an Eminently Social Thing.” In Émile Durkheim (ed.), The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (pp. xvii–lxxiii). New York: The Free Press. Godlove, Terry F. Jr. (ed.). (2005). Teaching Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press. Henrich, Joseph and Francisco J. Gil-White. (2001). “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22: 165–196. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. (2000). Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Idinopulos, Thomas A. and Brian C. Wilson (eds.). (2002). Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today. Leiden: Brill. Isambert, François-André. (1982). Le Sens du Sacré: Fête et Religion Populaire. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Kirkpatrick, Lee A. (2005). Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. New York: The Guilford Press.

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Lincoln, Bruce. (1999). Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lukes, Steven. (1972). Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work. New York: Harper and Row. Maffesoli, Michel. (1996). The Time of the Tribes. London: Sage. Malley, Brian. (2004). How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. McCutcheon, Russell T. (2000). “Myth.” In W. Braun and R. T. McCutcheon (eds.), Guide to the Study of Religion (pp. 190–208). London: Cassell. Milner, Murray, Jr. (1994). Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Mithen, Stephen. (1999). “Symbolism and the Supernatural.” In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, and C. Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View (pp. 147–172). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mol, Hans. (1975). Identity and the Sacred: A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Paden, William E. (1994). “Before ‘the Sacred’ Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy.” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (pp. 198–210). Leiden: E. J. Brill. [See Chapter 1, this volume.] Paden, William E. (1996). “Sacrality as Integrity: ‘Sacred Order as a Model for Describing Religious Worlds.’” In T. A. Idinopulos and E. A. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data (pp. 3–18). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Paden, William E. (2002). “The Creation of Human Behavior: Reconciling Durkheim and the Study of Religion.” In T. A. Idinopulos and B. C. Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (pp. 15–260). Leiden: Brill. Pickering, W. S. F. (1984). Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pickering, W. S. F. (ed.). (2001). Émile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading Sociologists, Third Series, Vols. 1–4. London: Routledge. Plotkin, Henry. (2003). The Imagined World Made Real: Toward a Natural Science of Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rappaport, Roy. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richman, Michèle H. (2002). Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie. Contradictions, vol. 14. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Schmaus, Warren. (2004). Rethinking Durkheim and His Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharpe, Eric. (1986). Comparative Religion: A History (2nd edn.). La Salle, IL: Open Court. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1978). Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan Z. (2005). Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, W. Robertson. (1956[1894]). The Religion of the Semites (2nd edn.), J. S. Black (ed.). New York: Meridian Books. Sosis, Richard and Candace Alcorta. (2003). “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior.” Evolutionary Anthropology 12: 264–274. St. John, Graham (ed.). (2003). Rave Culture and Religion. London: Routledge. Strenski, Ivan. (2006). The New Durkheim. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. (1997). Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley : University of California Press. Taussig, Michael. (1998), “Transgression.” In M. C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (pp. 349–364). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wach, Joachim. (1949). Sociology of Religion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Watts Miller, W. (2002). “Secularism and the Sacred: Is There Really Something Called ‘Secular Religion’?” In T. A. Idinopulos and B. C. Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (pp. 27–44). Leiden: Brill. Whitehouse, Harvey. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Wilson, David Sloan. (2002). Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House.

12

The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects

This is an attempt to reflect on some evolutionary connections between the formation of religious objects and what can be called prestige dispositions. I approach the topic as an historian of religion concerned with recurrences in panhuman behavior, and also with integrative ways of explaining those recurrences such that compatibilities between biological and cultural frames of analysis can be exposed. The study of religion shows patterned behaviors affected by the presence of stereotypical social representations. In terms of evolutionary theory, these are habitation behaviors that could be considered human versions of environment construction (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) and emergent symbolic cultures (Chase 1999), as well as essentialized cues that amount to dense forms of social eco-capital. Historians of religion and Durkheimian sociologists call them sacred objects and institutions, and forms of worldmaking. These objects have been given analytical value in terms of agency inference and relevance (Boyer 2001; McCauley and Lawson 2002), ritual invariance (Rappaport 1999), commitment devices (Sosis and Alcorta 2004), category-boundaries as information-processing cues (Anttonen 2004), pollution avoidance (Boyer 2001: 212–15, 237–40), status (Milner 1994) and earlier, in the work of social anthropologists, kin affiliation and collective order (e.g., Mary Douglas). In broad terms, and in a way that might complement the above, I consider here the evolution of religious complexes as systemic forms of enculturated prestige. Perhaps it adds one more piece to the puzzle.

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Prestige attribution and status negotiation are part of the architecture and functionality of the human mind, a mind that is thoroughly social, built for communicative display and status behaviors, and thus intuitively geared to respond to religious objects. My aim here is to show that religious sacredness can be modeled—among other ways—in terms of permutations of social status display. As such, I shift the spotlight from conceptual cognition to social cognition, from “thought,” “knowledge,” “beliefs,” and “representation” to social communication, interaction, and behavior patterns. Gods, in this sense, are strategic relationships. In the evolutionary psychology of religion, much advance has been made studying the mechanisms of intuitional ontologies, agency detection, forms of memory, ritual competencies, and conceptual inference generally. A second phase of the movement is exploring the factor of culture and its objects, the microprocessing mind being also an embedded social being, subject to roleplaying cues in fields of social value—fields and inputs that do not simply download into blank minds but that both play upon dispositions for social relationships and recreate them.

Attributing prestige Prestige is a status attribution applied to entities that gives them strategically high standing in relation to certain areas of performance. Its dynamics and adaptivity are relative to different social domains, circumstances, and ontogenic programs. In our own culture, charismatic figures and prestige institutions are found in sports, politics, technology, business, and so forth. Religion, for its part, seems to be a highly specialized, systemic form of prestige attribution and manipulation, where status and sacredness are intertwined. In it, prestige is connected with gods and their representations. The evolutionary study of status behavior has tended to associate it with dominance, mate attraction, competition, or information transmission. Barkow, for example, emphasizes how selection “transformed agonistic primate dominance into human symbolic prestige” and that sexual selection was the key process in that move (Barkow 1989: 6, 183). When dominance prestige transitions to symbolic prestige, it accordingly takes on the function

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of a resource investment for social security and productivity. Geoffrey Miller (Miller 2000) has laid out the continuity between mate attraction display and forms of human status display, though he did not include religious behavior in his otherwise extensive treatment of the subject. Human ethology scholars generally have focused on “prestige economies” evidenced in forms of status and rank competition, such as the potlatch or other displays of standing (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 297–314). Still others (Henrich and Gil-White 2001; Richerson and Boyd 2005: 124–26) have concentrated on the prestige mechanism as an information transmission enhancer insofar as it “favored social learners who could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them” (Henrich and Gil-White 2001: 165). For example, In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level, distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who seem generally “popular.” Building on social exchange theories, we argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by others. … In addition, we distinguish carefully between dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred deference). (Henrich and Gil-White 2001: 165)

These and other authors stress that among humans “prestige ethologies” are less a matter of force than of excellence in valued domains of activity. It is interesting that many of those who write about status behaviors, along the lines of Barkow, Miller, or even Eibl-Eisenfeldt and the ethologists, stop short of applying this line of analysis to religion. Hence my concern to examine some linkages. In most cultures, after all, religious prestige appears to be the highest form of status, whether manifest in the gods and ancestors or in their representative objects. I suggest here some ways of explaining this and then describe how religious systems might look from this point of view. How is it that religious objects, as it were, become new versions of alpha objects?

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Sources of religious prestige We may consider several factors as sources of religious prestige, all variants on the disposition for structured attentiveness to socially ranked objects and roles. Religious systems build on that attentiveness in environmentally shaped ways.

Deference and paying attention to social dominance It is a phylogenetic legacy and cognitive channel to pay attention to those around us who can effectively determine our success, fate, and any vital interests. Social animals—there are thousands of species with social alphas— pay special focus on those above them in rank and status within the group. Experiments show that male monkeys will give up food “for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual” (Adler 2004: 45), as people will pay thousands of dollars to attend a reception for a presidential candidate. Currently, a teenage boy meditating in a Nepalese jungle and believed to be the reincarnation of the Buddha draws more than ten thousand observers a day. That some religious behaviors may be understood as legacies of the submission strategies surrounding social alphas is a judgment made by many, not only popularizing ethologists (Morris 1984: 146–47), but also recently by E. O. Wilson (1999: 283–84), Burkert (1996: 80–101), and Atran (2002: 127). The behaviors referred to here include displays of various kinds of appeasement and deference in the face of the dominant individual. Here is E. O. Wilson: Behavioral scientists from another planet would notice immediately the semiotic resemblance between animal submissive behavior on the one hand and human obeisance to religious and civil authority on the other. They would point out that the most elaborate rites of obeisance are directed to the gods, the hyperdominant if invisible members of the human group. And they would conclude, correctly, that in baseline social behavior, not just in anatomy, Homo sapiens has only recently diverged in evolution from a nonhuman primate stock. It would be surprising to find that modern humans had managed to erase the old mammalian genetic programs and devise other means of distributing

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power. All the evidence suggests that they have not. True to their primate heritage, people are easily seduced by confident, charismatic leaders, especially males. That predisposition is strongest in religious organizations. Cults form around such leaders. Their power grows if they can persuasively claim special access to the supremely dominant, typically male figure of God. (Wilson 1999: 283–84)

Wilson’s cultural and theological allusions aside, it would have been an adaptive strategy to generate behavioral techniques for avoiding, at low cost, being the object of aggression or shame in the face of social superiors (Krebs and Janicki 2004: 134), including superiors capable of rending considerable harm if not properly submitted to. Submission and deference thus include displays of loyalty, gratitude, gift-giving and sacrifice, propitiation, and atonement for offenses—constant exchanges of social capital and constant ways of gaining approval and avoiding trouble.

The prestige of collective role function Rank status is not just a matter of one-on-one dominance and submission behaviors, but can also evolve as a function of social specialization, castes and guilds, and their role authority—in short, as a function of social structure. In human cultures, leadership patronage functions may be hereditary and involve specialty lineages, developing essentialized categories such as shaman, chieftain, priest, or patriarch. Here, as the object is institutionalized, deference becomes more routinized. We could hypothesize, then, that gods, spirits, and ancestors, and their lineages, become “castes” of human cultures, precipitates of the process of role differentiation and function. They become the brahmans, patrons, and kings, requiring tribute displays that keep the hierarchic world in place. Objectivized and sedimented in the world of language, given social reality by deference behaviors and anchored in an artifactual world of space and object, they function as live agencies. As the patrons and defenders of the group, arbiters of justice, producers of fate and success, the gods inhabit virtual, psychic space. The prestige of the social insect queens is a case in point about collective status roles and their strategic importance in the behavioral choices of the workers. Queens, as the egg-laying entities, draw the servicing and defensive

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attentions of the workers. For the most part, they are a socially constructed function and not just an individual who happens to have dominance characteristics. Indeed, queens, in most cases, do not have any different genetic constitution than the workers: they are formed into their role (and size) by being served special foods, much the way human groups “make” certain of their individuals, through ritual behaviors toward them, into chiefs, pharaohs, popes, presidents, and Dalai Lamas. If one of these dies, another is made. As with the insect queens, their status indicators—pheromones in the case of queens—activate dispositions in individuals to serve and protect them. Religions systematize status indicators and are structurally full of examples of such reciprocal practices as the Theravadin laity donating food daily to the monks—vehicles of the prestige of the Buddha—and receiving merit in return. To serve the vehicles of high role prestige—the church, the gods, the rites—is to cultivate and defend investments in group-specific symbolic capital and its reproduction. In the face of competition or threats to group honor, there would be a natural tendency to sacralize, perhaps to the point of a bloating effect,1 the prestige of the patron object or its symbol. That prestige of the flagship god or symbolic capital becomes the loyalty-inducing prestige of the in-group. Kin selection perspective, for its part, would indicate that readiness to sacrifice for an imagined—that is, socially constructed—kin group is an evolved program that may be activated circumstantially. As well, the notion of the inviolate transmission of certain social institutions as a kind of cultural DNA points to the dynamics of survival strategies (Rappaport 1999: 418).

Artifact prestige The extension of prestige to objects is natural with the coming of human artifact cultures (Dissanayake 1992). Human groups attribute values to objects in egregious excess of the objects’ material worth. This is what gives special status to an ancient piece of furniture, a winning football, a certain cancelled postage stamp, the bones or ashes of the deceased, or even a piece of monetary currency itself. Weapons, among the ancients, often had magical force and status. Archaeologists have argued

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that the emergence of an economy of prestige goods provided the means for leaders in chiefdom-level societies to attract followers and establish hierarchical relations with elites in neighboring polities, leading to the formation of permanent social ranking categories and hierarchical political structure … [P]restige goods originally appear as a response to increased competition for prestige, and operate as costly signals of high levels of skill and knowledge. (Plourde 2006)

Religious objects are variants on this process. It is an intelligible series of steps to the institutionalized holiness of totemic churingas, the Kaabas and shrines, the holy books of the religions. In relation to the complexity and size of their populations, and hence the emergence of social ranking in group behaviors, human cultures built systematic—one might say hypertrophic— forms and contexts of social attentiveness to these scaffolds, surrogates, and props for the gods.2 To that extent religious systems would represent the epitome of “symbolic culture” understood as an emergent evolutionary environment (Chase 1999: 42). Thus, thousands of holy objects have sat side by side on the planet, each a priceless currency for its people, each empowering, and each typically irrelevant or nonexistent in other social landscapes.

Trait display and enhancement Prestige traits can also be understood as part of the process of communicative display enhancement. Many experiments show that animals are more interested in a pronounced or exaggerated copy of some biological signal or “key stimulus” than in the real thing. The cue could be visual, behavioral, or pheromonal. Males of the silver-washed fritillary [a kind of butterfly] appear to have evolved to prefer the strongest expression of certain stimuli they encounter, with no upper limit. The phenomenon is widespread in the animal kingdom. While experimenting with anole lizards of the West Indies a few years ago, I found that males display enthusiastically to photographs of other members of the same species, even though the images are the size of a small automobile. Other researchers have learned that herring gulls ignore their own eggs when presented with appropriately painted wooden models so large they cannot even climb on top of them. (Wilson 1999: 252)

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The adult female gull has an orange spot on her beak, at which her chicks instinctually peck, to stimulate the female to regurgitate and feed them. Tinbergen showed that chicks would peck even more readily at exaggerated cardboard models of the orange spot, so-called supernormal stimuli. (Dennett 2006: 122)

Religious objects, including gods, may be such supernormal stimuli:3 enhanced, exaggerated, or otherwise strong expressions of social status in the ways they are represented and regarded. They become the stereotypic orange spots or painted wooden models built for maximum effectiveness in activating dispositions of social respect. Religious “spots and models,” however, are not necessarily exaggerated in physical size, though they can be grand, but are characteristically enhancements of signs of authority status and ritual precautions. Humble physical objects that nevertheless have high symbolic associations, such as relics or certain representative emblems of gods and ancestors, can therefore command the greatest prestige. Myth, icon, and ritual, for their part, become the ultimate display-language “enhancers” for religious cultures. The content of the stimulus signs will be mostly culture-specific. Note that the receiver of the signal is not always other humans. Humans also display to gods. Is that not the religious syndrome itself? Religious behavior is tuned to impress its object, as in the communicative lineage of the bowerbird. We build and perform to attract and impress. Where the behaviors are costly “statements” to impress the god with signals of loyalty, praise, or sincerity, adherents would expect the benefits to be greater. The statements are an investment in “religious capital” (Stark and Finke 2000: 281). St. Simeon Stylites, living his life atop a pillar, clearly signaled his fitness for the mythic kingdom of God—world renunciation being high currency in that fifthcentury environment. The “Handicap Principle” (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997) applies here. The Zahavis have tried to show that some extreme behaviors among animals are deliberately risky and costly in order to communicate status and excellence of qualities. Those qualities—for example, the ability to defend or provide for others—in turn redound to reproductive chances and social rank. Their point is that in order to be effective “signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly” (p. xiv). For example, by managing to

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find food and avoid predators despite its enormous tail, a peacock “proves that he is the high-quality mate that the peahen is seeking to father her future chicks” (p. xiv). Displays of high quality religious behavior and faith, for their part, would seem to redound, in the mental world of the adherents, to chances for eternal life and prestige among the gods. Notably, and the subject of much current research, they may also function as adaptive commitment devices regulating group cooperation (Bulbulia 2004; Sosis and Alcorta 2004).

Prestige and other social dispositions Prestige is buoyed by a number of other evolutionary dispositions. A conformity bias seems to be at work here—an adaptive mechanism that traditionally functions to make information acquisition more efficient (Boyd and Richerson, 2005: 83–97). Michael Tomasello’s work on the sociogenesis of attention sharing would apply (Tomasello 1999) as would cost-benefit or rational choice analysis, and even mirror-neuron theory. The cognitive optimum draw of counterintuitive objects, so well described by Pascal Boyer, might have applications to the formation of charisma attribution. And in Sperber’s epidemiological terms, cultural representations “replicate by causing those who hold them to produce public behaviours that cause others to hold them too” (Sperber 1996: 100). But memetic theory would also be relevant. Prestige is catchy. It is its own cachet, its own meme. If we are fascinated by people, it is normally because they are already deemed fascinating by others; we are intrigued by famous people not only because we are attracted to their special qualities, but also by the very fact that they are famous. Indeed, that may be the special quality itself. In the colloquial, nothing succeeds like success. So successful was Simeon’s prestige that 35,000 pilgrims would arrive daily to witness it and one of the largest basilicas in the world was built over his display site. Finally, Plotkin and others review a number of other psychological mechanisms that select for or induce group representations, such as described in social agreement theory, habitualization theory, docility theory, social force theory, automaticity of everyday life theory, and theories of various kinds of “morality” modules activated by moral norms and social situations (Plotkin 2003: 248–90; Krebs and Janicki 2004). While individuals may ultimately

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be the only agents, the world of prestige objects is given social existence by individuals agreeing on what is there and what its status is.4

Religions as prestige systems Among other things, religions can be seen as forms of culture that enhance objects by endowing them with superhuman attributes and that engender interactive relationships with those objects. To that extent they are contextualized by the processes described above. Here, in summary form, are some more illustrative ways that the prestige model can apply to religious behaviors.

Myth and ritual as prestige enhancers Mythicization and ritualization, in this framework, can be understood as ways that religions signal-enhance the social status and honor of their objects. This includes, most fundamentally, language that connects or endows the objects with supernatural attribution or miracle. Myth eternalizes its objects, a fundamental strategy for depicting value. The object is pictured as always existing, perhaps from the beginning of time or even before the beginning of time. It becomes an archetype not eroded by temporality. When a guru is described as an avatar of Krishna, this is a high mythic attribution and social enhancement. The most sacred cemetery in the Shiite world, the Valley of Peace in Najaf, is represented in legend as dedicated from the creation, and the emperor Justinian had believed the same of his Hagia Sophia. Many scriptures are regarded as eternal blueprints rather than as historically produced. Where founders and saints have historicity they are nevertheless linked with genealogies or lineages that go back to original, founding times. We see this in royal lines of kingship, too. Countries have their “eternal flames” honoring the sacrifices of their ancestors, and even folk heroes like Elvis Presley become ensconced with legends of immortality. Myth, then, preserves and insulates the status of its objects in a virtual, archetypal, eternal world. In addition, mythic prestige employs the language of honorific and superlative idealization. Protocols for addressing gods follow exceptional linguistic etiquette appropriate to their special social rank—often it is

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terminology that is only applied to god, or it is language specially transmuted into forms of chant and song. In short, mythicization—which could be called one of our grand phenotypic traits—uses the resources of language in every way to bolster the prestige of its material, and thus bestows a kind of alphahood on it. Much ritualization is also an obvious prestige booster, with its physical and emotional enhancement scenes and employment of group attention techniques. It differentiates states of purity and impurity at every level and regulates status through offerings and gift giving. Worship itself has been studied as a status process (Milner 1994: 172–88). Ritual can intensify the focus on an object by creating special configurations of space—altars, for example, or the “holy of holies”— and requiring degrees of behavioral preparedness to approach them. The Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan houses its sacred symbols at the center of seven concentric circles of access; every synagogue houses the Torah in a marked place of honor; cathedrals or pyramidal temples emphasize asymmetric, vertical relationships between the below and the above. For their part, festivals and other marked times give temporal punctuation to the prestige of the object by making it choreographed as “a time like no other time.” Special display behaviors also enhance the prestige of the object: kneeling, prostration, bowing, decorating, undergoing pain, processing, making pilgrimage, making special offerings of goods, dressing up in distinctive ways. The actions, the physical scenes, the ideal controlled environments, the frequency or infrequency of the observances—all shape the relative honor of the object just as they correspond to it.

Religious prestige becomes essentialized The power of the prestige, the substantiveness of the honor, makes the object an entity, a thing, an ontological kind, an object. So understood, the creation of the gods is not a mystery: with a nod to St. Anselm, if the object has the greatest prestige, it must exist. The social chemistry of honor becomes transformed into a world of representation, prototype, and concept, and essentialization is enhanced when the object is given an artifactual representation along with a linguistic one.

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Prestige as distributable and shareable Religious objects can take on the nature of a transmittable substance. Their prestige can be spread by contact and association in a network of relics, rites, saints, places, authorities, and ultimately individuals. We speak of someone “giving” their prestige to such and such an occasion, cause, or group. In a million daily Masses around the globe, the prestige of the god is substantively passed on in the consecrated bread and wine, and in millions of recitations of the Quran each day, the holy words of the god are disseminated. When the Ise Shrine is periodically disassembled its parts are distributed to other Shinto shrines through the land, just as pieces of the Kiswah, the black cloth that covers the Holy Kaaba in Mecca and is replaced each year, are annually carried to Muslim groups around the world. This is to say that prestige is not only something we attribute to objects, but also something we receive from them, something we benefit from, in a circle of mutual gain and contact. To some extent this acquisition of mental blessings, of grace, or darshan, is at the heart of religious behavior, ritual or mystical. It is shown directly in the phenomenon of faith healing, where actual contact with the prestigious object becomes the highpoint of religious reciprocity. Ritual structures thus set up ways of contacting “pieces” of the object and its charisma, where the part nevertheless contains the power of the whole. A holy woman believed to be the incarnation of the Mother Goddess and who has gained an international following by her habit of hugging devotees— sometimes thousands at a single event—thus gives the followers dramatically tangible contact with their spiritual object and its phenotypic embodiment. The founders of comparative religion called this the contagion of the sacred, noting its analogues with electricity. One might also think back to the analogies with pheromones secreted by social insect queens, where worker bees, for example, will lick it off the queen’s body or get it indirectly from other workers who have had contact with her (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997: 158).5 The “pheromone” for humans, here, is social prestige.

Prestige status as an acquisition of individuals We attribute prestige, we also want it in the form of status, recognition, and approval, and we need to avoid its opposite, shame. Individuals cultivate

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status by conducting themselves with group-defined genres of reciprocity, holiness, purity, or honor. True piety is then manifest in the social matrix of conspecifics and the watching gods. It was William James, in the Varieties of Religious Experience, who emphasized the point that saints, so-called, are such by virtue of the different kinds of social environments they inhabit. At the same time, note that the gods, spirits, and ancestors themselves constitute a virtual, if physically absent social “reference group” for individual behavior (Barkow 1989: 192). Much of the history of religious values and behavior can be construed in terms of differential qualities signaled to the gods relative to social contexts, whether those social contexts are on earth or in the “theosphere.” It is as though there were a kind of mate-choice effect going on here—and in some cases, a runaway effect—between gods and people. In religious contexts, display signals indicate any kind of phenotypic quality, such as patience, generosity, or altruism, but reliable signaling—the currency of value and prestige—is often in the form of self-sacrifice, martyrdom, suffering, or other extreme forms of devotion and self-denial. The initiatory ordeals of shamans and the perceived difficulty of their trance journeys are prestige producers; and the primary symbol of the Christian tradition is a demonstration of the Handicap Principle in the form of a man-god who willingly undertakes crucifixion and death to show his celestial power, quality, and reliability. The Desert Fathers practiced egregious humility behaviors, which displayed the sacrifice of pride in a kind of inverse potlatch. The need for religious status and approval has its “hypertrophic peaks” in various forms of ascetic altruism (Lopreato 1984: 188). The social opposites of prestige are shame and its variants such as guilt, impurity, sin, bad karma. Insofar as religious programs are largely designed to counteract these, most noticeably in the more overt theologies of redemption, it is often the sharing of the prestige of the alpha—as with accepting the power of the Vow of Amida Buddha—that brings this about.

The history of religions as the pivoting of prestige attribution Religious prestige can attach, alternatingly, to any number of domains within a culture—ancestors, current leaders, domestic sacra, public rites—as individuals

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find themselves behaving in shifting social environments and circumstances. It is also expressed in varying kinds of phenotypic traits. Dramatic prestige transmutations occur over historical time, witnessed in reformations and new religious movements where what is sacred one day is profane the next. Antihierarchical dispositions, which go back to the primate heritage and huntinggathering days (Boehm 1999: 10–12), take on a phylogenetic resonance. And the attribution of highest value to concepts such as human rights, individual conscience, and political liberty still continues to be anchored in notions that these are to be honored as divine, inalienable features of human life.

Concluding points Broadly sketched, I have suggested here some ways that prestige sociality might be modeled as a link between religious behavior and evolving social strategies, and how it might be productive to examine that continuity more fully. Among other things, the status behavior model has the function of recontextualizing in biocognitive terms a concept that has been at the heart of the history of religions field, namely, sacredness. Much religion is about the honor of its objects and negotiating the status of that honor, and much of myth and ritual is about prestige enhancement. At the same time, I am not presenting this as a theory of religion in any generic sense. It would be shortsighted to miss the point that religion, which is only a conceptual umbrella term, encompasses an enormous set of phenotypic traits, any one of which may have a different evolutionary pedigree. I have focused on just one trait, which could itself be parsed further. Social objects are full of information, and their prestige is a piece of it. Yet I have primarily drawn my analysis in terms of behavioral strategies rather than in terms of information-processing mechanisms per se. At the same time, depicting a theater of social displays, with its imagined environments of spiritual status objects, is not simply a “phenotypic gambit” (Smith 2000: 30) that thereby avoids adaptive or dispositional factors. It seems to me that the study of panhuman social behavior patterns, as instanced above, is able to capture some “meaningful species-typical uniformities.”6

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Responding to religious prestige—which is variably relevant in shifting environmental circumstances—is not a function of a single, task-specific program or decision-making formula. Inferential programs overlap and are subject to socio-ecological variables; adaptations build upon adaptations; environmental cues occur within other environmental cues; social frames and responses vary throughout the day; and any information-processing “decision” is apt to become a cascading chain of many kinds of decisions. “Any given unit of behaviour,” as Whitehouse summarizes, “involves the activation of numerous nuclear and global systems” (Whitehouse 2006: 22). The notion of prestige bias invites integration of theoretic resources and levels of analysis.7 Notions of charisma, status, and sacrality as analyzed in Weberian and Durkheimian traditions could find more direct evolutionary, ethological grounding here.8 All in all, this model can point up some interactions of cultural, social, and psychological levels of the evolutionary process while relating them directly to behavioral strategies in the construction of religious worlds.

References Adler, Jerry. (2004). “Mind Reading.” Newsweek (July 5): 44–46. Anttonen, Veikko. (2004). “Pathways to Knowledge in Comparative Religion: Clearing Ground for New Conceptual Resources.” In T. Light and B. C. Wilson, Religion as a Human Capacity (pp. 105–119). Leiden: Brill. Atran, Scott. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Barkow, Jerome H. (1989). Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boehm, Christopher. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson. (2005). The Origin and Evolution of Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press. Boyer, Pascal. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. Bulbulia, Joseph. (2004). “The Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology of Religion.” Biology and Philosophy 19: 655–686.

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Burkert, Walter. (1996). Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chase, Philip G. (1999). “Symbolism as Reference and Symbolism as Culture.” In R. Dunbar, C. Knight and C. Power (eds.), The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View (pp. 34–49). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Day, Matthew. (2004). “The Ins and Outs of Religious Cognition.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16(3): 241–255. Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking. Dissanayake, Ellen. (1992). Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Émile. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus. (1989). Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Henrich, Joseph and Francisco J. Gil-White. (2001). “The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission.” Evolution and Human Behavior 22: 165–196. Krebs, Dennis and Maria Janicki. (2004). “Biological Foundations of Moral Norms.” In M. Schaller and C. S. Crandall (eds.), The Psychological Foundations of Culture (pp. 125–148). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Laland, Kevin N. and Gillian R. Brown. (2002). Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopreato, Joseph. (1984). Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution. Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin. McCauley, Robert N. and E. Thomas Lawson. (2002). Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Geoffrey. (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Doubleday. Milner, Murray Jr. (1994). Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, Desmond. (1984). The Naked Ape. NewYork: McGraw-Hill. Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. (2003). Niche Construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Plotkin, Henry. (2003). The Imagined World Made Real: Towards a Natural Science of Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Plourde, Aimée. (2006). “Prestige and the Origins of Social Inequality.” Accessed December 1, 2005, at: www.ucl.ac.uk/ceacb/projects

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Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. (2004). Magic, Miracles, and Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richerson, Peter and Robert Boyd. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Sanderson, Stephen K. (2001). The Evolution of Human Sociality: A Darwinian Conflict Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Smith, Eric Alden. (2000). “Three Styles in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behavior.” In L. Cronk, N. Chagnon and W. Irons (eds.), Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective (pp. 27–48). New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Sørensen, Jesper. (2004). “Religion, Evolution, and an Immunology of Cultural Systems.” Evolution and Cognition 10: 61–73. Sosis, Richard and Candace Alcorta. (2004). “Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior.” Evolutionary Anthropology 12: 264–274. Sperber, Dan. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke. (2000). Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley : University of California. Tomasello, Michael. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tooby, John and Leda Cosmides. (1992). “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (pp. 19–136). New York: Oxford University Press. Whitehouse, Harvey. (2006). “The Cognitive Parsing Model: Nuclear and Global Psychological Systems in the Transmission of Culture.” Accessed August 1, 2006, at: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~pboyer/RelCognWebSite/WhitehouseModel Wilson, Edward O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House. Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. (1997). The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.

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The History of Religions and Evolutionary Models: Some Reflections on Framing a Mediating Vocabulary

The way we think and teach about patterns in comparative religion will sooner or later be deeply influenced by evolutionary worldviews that interpret religious behaviors in light of millions of years of ecological processes, a deep history shared by all humans and that has built our brains and our worlds out of the stuff of that process. At the same time that the comparative, historical study of religion—the “history of religions” field—begins to evolutionize its thematizations, it will also realize that it possesses a level of analysis that is different from the empirically based natural sciences. This is not only because of the rich heritage of its own but also because its natural interest and level of knowledge is human behavior in social environments—not genes, not molecules, not neurons. Speaking from the history of religions tradition, and its body of evidences of panhuman thematics, this brief exercise in stocktaking—it is hard to resist the opportunity—tries to sort out some ways of modeling consilience with evolutionary ideas. Because of its short scope and general tone, I offer it mainly in essay rather than research form. I will emphasize that comparative religion needs to build a vocabulary that accommodates evolutionary science, though it is not beholden to become a natural science. If the academic study of religion is not theology and not experimental science, still it does follow the criteria of disconfirmable historical evidence and analytic, controlled comparison—hence “the science of religion” as conceived by the founders—and it continues to draw ideas of theoretic application from whatever domains seem pertinent to the intelligibility of the subject matter. Connecting the categories of comparative religion

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with the categories of the human sciences is not new. We have always tried to redescribe the data of religion in terms of the pertinent philosophies, sociologies, and psychologies of the time and have done so since the late nineteenth century, showing ways that religious life reflects patterned ways that the mind, language, and sociality work. To describe religious behaviors as playing out or improvising upon evolutionary socio-mental infrastructures is then in itself not revolutionary but part of a perennial pursuit of frames that help organize and decipher an otherwise chaotic mass of data. So, in principle, translating religious patterns into evolutionary patterns is not out of methodological character, given the way we have routinely raided the toolboxes of other explanatory and interpretive theories—think Durkheim and Freud, existential phenomenology and neo-Marxism, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault. While none of those were based on Darwinian evolution, they were all about inherent ways that humans deal with the world—and by extension, about ways that religious life deals with the world. At the same time, integration with the evolutionary sciences does pose some new problems. Insofar as those fields address human life at all they are both technical—adaptivity issues go back to genetic research—and far from universal consensus. Within the sciences issues about the existence, number, or nature of cognitive modules are contested, as is the question of the biological basis of cultural evolution. As well, within evolutionary science are numerous fields, including behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, not to mention neuroscience, and these each have their own agendas and levels of analysis (Laland and Brown 2002). The historian of religion by definition is not a professional in any of these fields—all of which depend upon extensive professional training in empirical methodologies— and is then left with the role of picking models on the basis of convenient or theoretic applicability. Normally, this will mean keeping to a few thematic applications to religion, selected from an endless repertoire of potentially relevant models. The professional gulf between the history of religions and the natural sciences has its bridges, which I will focus on, but the most telling point of difference is that there is no direct explanatory route from genes to specific cultural behaviors—all behavior is a response of genes/brains to specific environments. It is behavior-in-environments that interests the historian.

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I organize my discussion around four conceptual matrices that I maintain are mediatorial between comparative religion and evolutionary science broadly understood: the concepts of behavior, environment, in-group marking systems, and the role of thematization. I explain these as ready-made conceptual hooks, from the history of religions side, for consilience.

Behavior and environment as levels of analysis Behavior is the primary level of analysis and interest for historians, where behavior includes practices and productions of physical, mental, linguistic, and social kinds. Thus, ritualizing is behavior and so is representing and building; emoting is a behavior and so is writing; collective formations of institutions and artifacts are behavior and so is an individual dreaming. Behavior is all the things humans do; it is all the things genes “do” when they find themselves in environments. In classic terms, it is the subject matter of phenomenology; in biological terms, it is the realm of the phenotype and especially in the human case, phenotypic plasticity. Behavior is thus a common ground between biological and human sciences. It is a place where theories and knowledges from either side can be communicated, sorted out, tested, applied. It is a matrix that links our biological inheritance as populations that build and inhabit environments with our cultural inheritance as peoples who form lived historical worlds of language and indulge in culture-specific meaning-making. Such worldforming amounts to niche construction where humans collectively build habitats, analogous to the extended phenotypes we call beaver dams, snail shells, and hives. Religious systems are then only one more version of this ancient, three-billion-year-old activity that characterizes the life of organisms. Niche construction, viewed by its biology proponents, is “not just an end product of evolution, but an evolutionary process in its own right” (Laland 2007: 36). I take this to be a major mediating concept between behavioral ecology and the concept of worldmaking in comparative religion. The concept of environment is a critical component in Darwinian natural selection, where it is the environment, in effect, that is doing the selecting regarding the survival value of the organism. The human brain itself, for such

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is its own adaptive nature, is built to be responsive to different environments, and this is how diverse cognitive infrastructures have formed. Cosmides and Tooby note that the developmental mechanisms of several organisms “were designed by natural selection to produce different phenotypes in different environments” (1997: 13). For example, they point out that certain fish can change sex: Blue-headed wrasse live in social groups consisting of one male and many females. If the male dies, the largest female turns into a male. The wrasse are designed to change sex in response to a social cue—the presence or absence of a male. (p. 13)

At the more complex level of human ecologies, “cultural variability,” as Joseph Bulbulia puts it, “selects for developmental plasticity—capacities to usefully interact with variable cultural resources and to build functional, behavioral dispositions from these local, varying resources” (2008: 78). Humans build, rebuild, and manipulate environments. Environments are not just savannahs and rain forests and not just cultural artifacts in general, but any specific object, frame, setting, situation, or medium that forms a horizon or stimulus-activating behavior. Where any mental or physical object can function as an environment for a subject, the object could be words, ideas, sounds, or images; dreams, stories, habits, delusions, or lies; ideologies and mythologies; other people’s opinions and invisible persons such as gods, demons, and ancestors and their variegated masks. The phenomenology tradition here emphasized how objects and subjects mutually constitute each other in distinctive kinds of experiences and consciousness. Every living brain has a piece of environment in play. In religious worlds, those “pieces,” for example, include representations of gods and notions of how to behave in relation to them. Religious environments are specialized spaces involving interaction with gods, hence they are both a language environment and a social environment. They put an interactive face on the universe. At the cultural level, any of these god-systems represents an ecology just as natural as the shifting seasonal flora on the Galápagos. They can have the force of a physical object and generate commitments that have deep social consequences; as mental objects they can motivate any emotions and actions. I might jump into a volcano if the god tells me to do it.

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Cultural evolution is marked by emergent, ratchet-effect platforms of social and intellectual institutions, values, and innovations, and while these play out and upon cognitive architectures, the behaviors they induce are not predictable from the default infrastructures. It is then the specifically religious versions or aspects of those environments and the specifically religious versions of behaviors activated by them that are the domains of interest of the historian of religion.

Systemic in-group environments Because sacred values and markers are group-specific, there can be no general science of religion without attention to group-level systems. Ingroup affiliations are particularly strong social environments. Evolutionary psychology is observant that “culture” or “society” in general underdetermine behavior and do not automatically download their norms into individual minds, but culture and society are not the same kind of social category as an in-group, a crucial distinction. Groups have membership constraints and a dynamic of the benefits of cooperation as social programs, drawing for their acceptance on deep cognitive intuitions for loyalty, mutualism, imitation, kin recognition, coalitionism, conformity, relevance, and status recognition in individual minds. Culturally constructed “kin” groups, such as teams, gangs, nationalisms, fraternities, and religions, then may trigger, play upon, and channel various of those evolved dispositions. This kind of group is not the same thing as an anonymous, low-stimulus backdrop of “culture” in general. Where “religion” may be well used as an umbrella term for any variety of interaction with gods, there is another term that is more specific: it is “religions,” for which “a religion” would be the singular. A religion here is not religion in general, which is only a semantic, classificatory phenomenon, but a historical group-level system marked by system-specific sacred beliefs and practices. It is, in Durkheimian terms, a set of persons that define themselves in terms of a common origin, symbols of that ancestry, and practices derived from it. These sets may be small clan-like associations or something like the billion-member Muslim Umma, or a sect or denomination within a larger cultural grouping. Popular or folk religious traditions sometimes lack this normative element,

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to be sure. The differentiating factor for religious groups is that the norms are understood as ordained by superhuman revelations. Historians and anthropologists of religion will be on their home turf in examining mythic niche construction. The human niche is one that configures life and habitation according to certain versions of time, space, authority, objects, and practices but religions endow these parameters with a superhuman basis. Membership in the religion is marked by certain ritual performances and practices—such as adult baptism, obligatory missionary work, or a bar mitzvah—markings that are signals of affiliation to other insiders as well as outsiders. Seeing the connections of religions with forms of biological groupcenteredness helps historians reorganize large swaths of data. The obvious example would be a shift from thinking of religions in terms of a world religions model, where beliefs and practices are lined up as representing ideas about reality in general, to thinking of religions as on-the-ground affiliations of “kin” or “kind” bound populations for whom their religion is a shared lineage not to be violated, a sacred history or mythic past that is specific to that group, a set of practices that reflect that chain of memory, and an ability to recognize kin by explicit markers. While the social nature of myth is a standard model in religious studies and in socio-anthropological work on religion, it remains to make the bridgework to evolutionary thinking. Beliefs then become “kin” or in-group behaviors in the form of language acts, recitation markers, speech performances, indicating affiliation. Religions thus make norms in the midst of an otherwise complex environment; among other things, they reduce social complexity “by strengthening and disambiguating signals of co-operation” (Bulbulia 2008: 87). The kinship paradigm points to the theme of conformity to “kind” by way of signaling and other communicative markers, including phenotypic matching, which so thoroughly configure religious systems. Stereotypic signals, practices of discriminating kin and nonkin, or in-group marking run throughout the natural world—there, some are genetic, and some learned or environmental. An example of the latter would be nest location (some animals show high degrees of “site fidelity”) or brood odors (E. O. Wilson 1987: 15). The markers are ensconced with a certain inviolability both because they are mechanisms of survival—the individual’s survival being linked in

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these normative cases with the survival of the group—and because of the authoritativeness of their superhuman origins, the honor of the group and of the god here being coterminous. It is an honor that must be maintained against the forces of subversion and transgression and maintained by systems of punishment, exclusion, policing, and shaming. Where the norm is under threat, the notion of sacred order applies (Paden 2000). Inviolability here is synonymous with one of the root meanings of sacrality, that is, things dedicated and protected from violation. As such, the concept of the sacred—in other contexts often taken as a term for the transcendental object of religion—is brought into alignment with evolutionary concepts of defense, territory, homeostasis, and survival, explaining why upholding the honor of one’s sacred things can be a life or death matter. In the Durkheimian tradition, in which the social and the sacred are not different categories, le sacré has always been a secular, behavioral, and analytical term without any resonance as an epithet for the divine; Rappaport (1999) and then D. S. Wilson (2002: 225–27) have moved that tradition into conjunction with group-level evolutionary models. If the honor of the god and of the group are undifferentiable, the focal protective points of survival are marked objects and practices themselves. If a group of Episcopalians breaks off from its parent church on the issue of gay marriage, but the authority of the god—presumably the same god—is the same for both groups, it would appear that a precipitating reason would be the schismatic group’s belief that the original church had broken the markers of tradition, broken the faith, violated the scripture—to the point that group identity had to be reconstructed. But this has nothing to do with the superhuman being—it has to do with breaking the magical circle of the community’s identity, of destroying or tampering with the “signs” of identity. We see it at all levels of groupings in society (families, nations) where gods may not be salient but not breaking the tradition and its flags is. Prestigious objects are in-group specific in their attractive power. Their prestige is a construction of the group. Gods and their vehicles command attention and respect, eliciting deference, loyalty, sacrifice, and devotion. Along with marked borders, then, there is also the magnetic power of sacred entities and commitment to them. Religious prestige here would be a form of social capital within the group and systemic in that sense. When the status is

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divine or superhuman, and thus hypertrophied, “supernormal sign stimuli” (Tinbergen 1951: 44–46) might cue the most egregious forms of commitment and expenditure along the lines of the ethological phenomenon that herring gulls “will ignore their own eggs when presented with appropriately painted wooden models so large that they cannot even climb on top of them” (E. O. Wilson 1999: 252). Gods may function as such painted wooden models, inputs that can drive their human servants to uncommon behaviors. As with the notion of inviolable social markers, the notion of the prestige of the gods when linked to evolutionary perspectives will add new thematic interest to the concept of the sacred.

Thematic bridges Another link or space between the study of religion and evolutionary science is the activity and function of thematization. Thematizing, normally related to theorizing in some way, has been the primary activity of comparison and comparative religion. With the now abundant litanies of evolutionary concepts as an emerging lingua franca, the comparativist’s repertoire of themes is instantly expanded and hence sets of cross-cultural data otherwise separated or kept insulated by the “world religions” map can take on affinities. The science of religion has rarely found religious phenomena of interest simply as things to collect or look at. Rather, the data are of interest insofar as they illustrate or instantiate some trait, idea, topic, concept, theme that is itself understood to be important or real, thus giving significance to the particular facts. Consilience here—adaptationist theories aside—means testing through comparative reference points and historical analysis the degree to which religious data can legitimately be organized by a particular evolutionary category. The study of religion has always gone hand in hand with thematizations, typologies, comparative categories. Classical themes were nonevolutionary: concepts of deity, rites of passage, origin myths, sacred space and time, sacrifice, the high god, sacred kingship, totemism, animism, and so forth. The history of religions could then be read in terms of these topoi and historical examples of them. G. van der Leeuw’s influential Religion in Essence and Manifestation found 106 types of religious action and

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representation; Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion similarly provided a thematic handbook by which to read groups of material, though with a different interpretive orientation; and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience differentiated several psychological dispositions for religious susceptibility. Anthony Wallace, to take but a single example from anthropology, held that religion should be understood in terms of verbs, rather than nouns, behaviors instead of institutions, and proposed a list of thirteen nuclear actions that he thought “alone or in combination” accounted for religious life. One could take these as pre-evolutionary attempts to parse “religion” into its natural joints. To some extent these theme-based phenomenologies seemed to parallel chemistry’s chart of elements, a list that identified the basic, irreducible building blocks of anything in the material world. Typologies have always been the coin of the realm and will continue to be, albeit in new theoretic languages. At one end of the spectrum of its functionality, a theme is organizational, a placeholder for a collection of examples that have something in common. At the other end, a theme takes on theoretic, explanatory functions, for example “kin selection,” “reciprocal altruism,” or “the totemic principle.” In between, functions themselves may be the theme, as in “the paradigmatic function of myth.” Themes have different currencies; they do the work of linking data at specific levels of analysis and purpose. Like its typological predecessors to some degree, a great benefit of what I am calling evolutionary thematics is the way it can parse into small units the otherwise clumsily essentialized notion of religion. I say it “can,” even though it does not always do this, so ingrained is the essentialism of “religion.” But religion is just a word, commonly now an umbrella term for the part of culture that involves interaction with gods. In itself it has no other intrinsic meaning or function. It may be countered that it is the “gods” part that we seek the origin of, but then that concept (gods) too breaks down into the thousands of behaviors and types of representations that attach to superhuman agents (which are themselves of endless genres—are gurus gods?), so that any explanation would have to be an account of one of those behaviors or types, or at best one combination of them, and not some imaginary whole. Categories subdivide (to put it positively)—or crumble (to put it cynically)—when held to the complexity of behavior.

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Because of the complexity of religious formations, good comparativism in religious studies means having at one’s command the widest repertoire of thematic frames and their theoretic pertinence, and the best judgment and versatility in their application. This latter also means knowing the limits of any theme, as the theme is never the whole; themes are always reductions from a whole. As evolutionary models produce greater and greater differentiation of their themes, those subthemes and differentials (costly signaling breaks down into many subaspects, for example, as does reciprocity, or kin preference) become co-opted conceptual capital for the comparativist’s pursuit of more refined depictions of religious behavior, one of its essential tasks. Evolutionary study as a whole provides a thematic alphabet that represents the inherited capacities of Homo sapiens. It is a very long alphabet indeed, ultimately something that would include every evolved human system that carried a genetically functional load or program. On the thematic surface, religious data could be selected to roughly align with these ABCs. For example, the study of submission to gods might line up with the study of submission/dominance behaviors including the phenomenon of alphas, the study of dealings with gods would line up with the study of reciprocal altruism and exchange relationships, and the study of group cooperation might line up with inclusive fitness. But the default or hardware column would include parental investment, conformity and prestige biases, imitative learning, status signaling, predator detection, intuitions about other minds, bonding and attachment, cheater detection, swarming intelligence, mate attraction and selection, metarepresentation, moral judgment, fear of contagion, kin recognition, coalitionalism, for starters, but also human capacities for every type of emotion (awe, shame, wonder, fear), memory, language, intelligence, altered states of consciousness, and sociality. Each of these is an ongoing research area for science, and as I am proposing, a thematic resource for expanding religious studies. It remains that the actual historical productions that at first appear to correlate with these hardware systems seem to get out of hand. They do not seem to just fill a priori slots but appear to also be theaters in their own right with rules of their own games. The history of religious systems takes on its own ratcheted up possibilities in terms of social organization, innovative cultural scaffolds (print, for example), and imaginative improvisation. Single-letter

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explanations do not explain the novel. As well, as Luther Martin notes, the relation between biological/cognitive archives on the one hand and culturally idiosyncratic meanings on the other is complex, for “the development of selfreflexivity among human beings means that biology is not determinative but that its default programming may be overridden” (2001: 303). Reduced to themes—and what is it that is not reduced to a theme?—the rules of comparison apply regardless of conceptual domain: close control of analogies, awareness of the role of prototype effects, aspectual selection, and generally critical checks on converting a notion about a piece of behavior into a generalization about the whole. Every phenomenon is an instance of more than one conceptual reference point—a fact that makes one to one causal explanation difficult. The new evolutionary forms add to but do not replace the thematic analysis of language forms, aesthetic modes, and institutional types. Comparative work on sacred space, for example, retains its value as a general category but stands to be enhanced and reworked with evolutionary perspectives. Comparative religion thus accrues multiple sets of grammars, criss-crossing the subject matter of religious history with conceptual material from every region of the human experience. In mentioning group-level symbol systems as an example, I have selected only one of many aspects of sociality— one theme, as it were. I end with a nod to some thoughts on history by the creator of the modern history of religions field. Mircea Eliade contrasts mythic and humanistic history. Both, he says, are a form of self-knowledge, of recapitulation, of memory or anamnesis. In the mythic version, the past is laden with the work of superhuman agencies and their creation-defining deeds that set the supposed human condition. By contrast, in the “historiographic” version of history or time we have a “vertiginous widening of the historical horizon” since the goal “is no less than to revive the entire past of humanity” which is all that took place in historical and prehistoric societies. Through this new historical anamnesis, this new version of memory, “man enters deep into himself ” (Eliade 1968: 136): A true historiographic anamnesis finds expression in the discovery of our solidarity with these vanished or peripheral peoples. We have a genuine recovery of the past, even of the “primordial” past revealed by uncovering prehistoric sites or by ethnological investigations. In these last two cases,

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we are confronted by “forms of life,” behavior patterns, types of culture—in short by the structures—of archaic existence. (1968: 136–37)

In a post-religious world, Eliade characteristically avers, the cosmic dimension is denied to us, but the modern man though living in the dominion of time and “obsessed by his own historicity” opens himself to reconstruction by increasingly broader understandings of history and thus himself. These remarks and the new “deep history” shown by evolutionary perspectives on culture (Smail 2008) show a certain unexpected continuity. I find evolutionary science to be like such a prodigious effort of anamnesis and finding ancient patterns within ourselves—and that, ironically, if one plays out this line of thought, our new history can even be said to have its own cosmic dimension.

References Bulbulia, J. (2008). “Meme Infection or Religious Niche Construction? An Adaptationist Alternative to the Cultural Maladaptationist Hypothesis.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20: 67–107. Cosmides, L. and J. Tooby. (1997). “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer.” Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Accessed November 20, 2008, at: http://www.psych.ucsb. edu/research/cep/primer.html Eliade, M. (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. R. Sheed. New York: World. Eliade, M. (1968). Myth and Reality, trans. W. R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row. James, W. (1985). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin. Laland, K. N. (2007). “Niche Construction, Human Behavioural Ecology and Evolutionary Psychology.” In R. I. M. Dunbar and L. Barrett (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 35–48). New York: Oxford University Press. Laland, K. N. and G. R. Brown. (2002). Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, L. H. (2001). “Comparativism and Sociobiological Theory.” Numen 48: 290–308. Paden, W. E. (2000). “Sacred Order.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12: 207–225. [See Chapter 3, this volume.] Rappaport, R. A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Smail, D. Lord. (2008). On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley : University of California Press. Tinbergen, N. (1951). The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Clarendon. Van der Leeuw, G. (1963). Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology (2 vols.), trans. J. E. Turner. New York: Harper & Row. Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, E. O. (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Random House. Wilson, E. O. (1987). “Kin Recognition: An Introductory Synopsis.” In D. J. C. Fletcher and C. D. Michener (eds.), Kin Recognition in Animals (pp. 7–18). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Epilogue

I offer these essays as a record of some of my explorations and findings in pursuit of the vocation of comparative religion. They are sequences and products of a journey through various theoretic environments, though do not themselves constitute a unified theory of religion. From time to time, I have likely wandered into a woods too deep. Clearly, it is all faceted and all work in progress. As one will find various conclusions or summations at the end of most chapters, I need not rehearse those. Nor will I try to describe the current state of resources about either comparativism or evolutionary approaches to religion as that would fall outside the book’s limited scope. I do hope to continue and update the material in Part Three in another book, as I believe the evolutionary model is here to stay. So I will offer some brief remarks about what I have done, and then mention some directions that interest me going forward. First, with an eye to the title of the book, let me comment on the themes of commonality and difference and how evolutionary perspective can balance that polarity. When facing a particular instance of religion, my first instinct is to think, Where have I seen this before? Why does this seem familiar? Admittedly, my own impulse to comprehend seems to seek the general behind the particular, to see specific cases as examples of types of human or religious behavior. As a student, I learned to see individual religious beliefs and acts as exemplifying comparative forms of religious life. There were many lists, collections, or anatomies of such forms. And did not all fields of study have typologies in terms of which one could map individual examples? But stepping outside the vocabulary of the field to interpret material within the field is a different move, albeit still a move toward the more generic; it is an added act of translation, outside the boxed catalog. Thus, concepts from afield, evolution, were becoming familiar reference points: religious life as an example of our evolved

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sociality, mythic habitation, communicative signaling, kin recognition, and the prestige syndrome, and thoughts about us being players in the theaters of natural history. Yet the big concepts need not suppress diversity and from an evolutionary perspective they are balanced out by the powerful role of diverse environments prompting diverse behaviors and versions of behaviors. So that does not reduce the human mind to sameness, or religion to a single trait, or override the role of cultural and gendered differences—all conventional criticisms of comparativism. Quite the opposite: the evolutionary outlook tends to carve up or fractionate “religion” into its individual dispositions in settings where human actions are typically and variously generated from learned cultural skills and not just from simple default, uniform instinctual reactions. The other side of “deep” history is fine-grained contextual work, as we see performed by historians, ethnographers, and ecologists. In this way, environments are factors of on-the-ground differentiation and a complementary contrast to what I said above about my “upward” pull to the general. I also came to see this idea of environmental differentials as supplementing or extending my previous thoughts on perspectivism and contextuality, so central to Interpreting the Sacred (Paden 2003:110–24). As well, there is an additional safeguard against excessive, top-down conceptual hegemony: a certain methodology, as I outlined in Part Two and try to observe. I think of it as “aspectualism.” The idea is that concepts ultimately point to just an aspect of a phenomenon, not the whole, not all of its features. Teaching courses on a range of theories of religion helped me to see how each explanation directs attention to a certain point of focus, thus excluding or downplaying the rest of the story, which then remains in the shadows. Since it is inevitable that we use concepts and categories—our minds can hardly do otherwise—it will be best to employ them deftly, with restraints on the totalizing urge.

Extending the idea of environments Here I would like to pull together some loose ends pertinent to the idea of environments, some of which I plan to develop in further work.

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An evolutionary perspective suggests that we can see thinking—yes, thinking—as a function of behavior-in-an-environment. We normally separate thought and action, or in religious terms, belief and practice. But in the broader naturalistic view, thinking and other forms of speaking are strategic ways of acting in response to a surrounding landscape. All creatures do this: scanning and responding to the relevant information within a given horizon. Thinking—or interpreting—for humans seems to me a comparable process of such environmental navigation. Indeed, much of our landscape is composed of not only physical objects, but also thoughts, ideas, print, speech, and language; we have learned to respond in kind—that is, to think or to speak—just as organisms whose fate is linked to pheromones learn to communicate in kind. A lion figuring out the best way to deal with prey, a theologian figuring out how to deal with Darwinism, a computer scientist figuring how to deal with the explosion of the information world, or an ancient priest divining a prodigy in the sky are all exercising their brains to construe the relevance of patterns in what is going on around them, as brains must do. To many, seeing thought as behavior (in environments) may well seem to be a category confusion. Yet I think that in the evolutionary study of religion, it will often make more sense not to separate belief and action, but to see believing (or theologizing, or imagining, for examples) as itself performatory, an act of speech, of interpreting, by a player in a context. Environments also contain threats peculiar to their setting: a key dynamic of “one’s world.” I outlined some of that motif in Chapter 3. Variations on defensive strategies—often ingenious and extreme—are one of the great, luxuriant thematic stories of the life and evolution of species. Trees will produce particular protective chemicals when subject to signals of dangers, and plants, as we know, have an impressive repertoire of tricks for avoiding noxious insects. Whether in religious systems or microbial life, both prevention and counteraction are at work. In many religions, we see the defensive analogues of spines, hard shells, flocking behavior, colorful stripes, rattles, briars, malodorous scents, displays of power. If there is an environment, there is danger to it; there are threats according to the particular nature of the world at hand. The evolutionary perspective allows us to see how human environments also include interior spaces, spaces in the mind, evolved for individuals to process choices, memories, learning, and the exercise of imagination. Neuroscientists

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tell us that even the simplest organism has “a boundary, an internal structure; a dispositional arrangement for the regulation of internal states so that those states are relatively stable” (Damasio 1999: 136). A work in progress, human evolution has built the potential for internal niches, soul zones, introspection, just as it has built social ecologies. Among internal environments is the activity of the unconscious. For decades, I taught a course called “Mysticism, Shamanism and Possession.” In examining the cross-cultural materials for these, I found it essential, as William James had done (1902), to refer to the unsolicited manifestations of the subconscious with its voices and other revelations. Much religious tradition issues from such prophetic or mystical inspiration and content, without which we would hardly have a history of religion as we know it. The human psyche, whether we call it the brain or the mind, with its unpredictable eruptions, then amounts to a kind of eco-system in itself, even though that does not fit our usual physicalistic notions of an environment. That the psyche is full of voices we also know through cases of the millions of mentally ill— unruly and imaginary, wild thought-schemas sitting cheek by jowl alongside of more rational, calculative brain programs. If the myriad demons and spirits don’t exist as entities outside the psyche, then for starters we would need to consider “their” activities as those of the unconscious—afflicting, directing, monitoring, revealing, and the like. In that framework, one piece of the psyche becomes an abusive demon, another an animal ally, another a remote observer, another an alternate personality, and yet another, a wiser self. At the same time, it is not enough just to say, “if the gods are not outside, they are inside.” For what is the inside? Organisms and their environments can hardly be disconnected. The psyches of prophets, shamans, and mystics like those of artists, performers, and thinkers are cultural as well as personal and play upon the scripts of inherited social ecologies or platforms. The human players then recompose, apply, and participate in the scores, information, concepts, and language that, so to speak, are already in the water. A mind, whatever its personal susceptibilities, is automatically ensconced in environmental settings, their cognitive forms and their gods, and the content and source of revelation reflects that. Whether the manifestation is the spirit of a whale, a Buddhist saint, the Virgin Mary, Uncle Joe, or a space alien inevitably reflects the different ponds that the mystics and prophets live in.

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I have come to think of gods (with all their variants) as environments, as “theospheres.” I see this in functional and behavioral terms, though in evolutionary time one can see that the theosphere is something cultures have built and transmitted, and one could trace its origins to shamanism and ancestor veneration. The behavioral aspect is the evolved human need to communicate by sending and receiving information. Since our brains are social brains, we intuit that the world is like us and that it is based on reciprocity, and given that setting, we would naturally want to signal with—and be susceptible to signals from—those agencies that affect our existential welfare. The eco-system theme is also seen in the weight of collective memory. Whereas for most organisms memory involves a genetic code or neural network, for humans religious and social traditions have some of that function with their strong ancestors and archetypes holding plotlines in place through “memory behaviors” such as recitation, ritual, icon veneration, commemorative festivals with special sensory stimulation and choreographic effects, and other forms of recall, repetition, and rehearsal. We live in such houses of memory of “one’s kind” with their imagined histories and ancestries, their dutiful recollections, whether we are secular or religious. Scriptures easily become contemporary mental landscapes for conservative devotees. Today, brain research and genetics are of course dominant innovative features of the evolutionary story and offer ways of thinking about our bodies and brains as micro environments. Bodies and brains: to what extent do they supply their own cues, primes, and reward mechanisms when it comes to religious behaviors? What, with regard to religious life, is the role of an individual’s genetic or epigenetic differentials? What is the role of those proteins—never mind, for the moment, all the mythic voices—in switching on or off, or (re-)constructing, our dispositions for religious experience? What about the molecules of trust and bonding? I have addressed none of this, but do assume that outer and inner, macro- and microenvironments form a continuum. Whether research along these lines will make an impact on comparative religion remains to be seen. One could add to these lists of operative ecologies. In this book, I have hardly mentioned the very relevant spheres of narrative and imagination, the arts (music, dance, and icons), altruism and moral dispositions, causal thinking, and the emotions, all of which are under examination by scholars of

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the evolution of religion. One can only pick one’s themes and offer one’s work to the necessarily larger, collective and ongoing enterprise.

Some reflections Religious life, like all our other behaviors and cultures, shows the kinds of unpredictable things that come out of our evolutionary adventures. Without seeing what has already emerged from our long descent from the microbes, we do not have a full picture of time and its open-ended character. One could observe that nature is as nature does. It continues to “do” all the things we have seen in history through the millennia, and not just what it “did” millions or billions of years ago. I have long been fascinated with the phenomenon of time and the improbable fact of existence itself. I continue to find those utterly astonishing, especially since we ourselves are apparently part of the marvel. Certainly that sense had a lot to do with my going into the field of comparative religion with its own extensive repertoire of mystical experiences and occult, cosmic environments. At the same time, for me this nonordinary, mysterious dimension doesn’t bring with it an ideological overlay; it doesn’t inherently contain a religious or scientific meta-interpretation about purpose, design, or meaning, or any secure thought about why the world should exist at all. I only sense that we are in a wondrous thing fraught with unimaginable extent. That said, natural history does add a certain magic to the picture, presenting a rather fantastical show of transformations—a fable-like environment that hovers over our otherwise daily and ordinary life.

References Damasio, Antonio R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. James, William. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House. Paden, William E. (2003). Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion (rev. edn.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

Ian Hamnett (1984) notes that Durkheim’s work anticipated structuralist approaches to “systems of symbols.” From a different viewpoint, arguing the need to investigate the “sacred” as a behavioral phenomenon, Comstock (1981) rightly maintains that Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction refers more to the regulation of behavior than to a metaphysical dualism.

2

See especially Marett’s The Threshold of Religion, first published in 1909 (though containing some earlier essays) and then in successive editions; and his Encyclopedia Britannica article of 1908 on “Religion-Primitive Religion.” In these writings, Marett apparently becomes the first major figure outside the French school (whose influence he acknowledges) to refer to “the sacred” as the generic object of religion.

3

I use this distinction here in a way that is parallel to that of Wayne Proudfoot’s (cf. 1985: 196–8), but is somewhat broader.

4

The significant contribution of Mauss and Hubert to Durkheim’s concept of the

5

It should be noted that W. Robertson Smith had used the phrase in his The

sacred is carefully reviewed and assessed in François-A. Isambert (1976). Religion of the Semites (1956[1887]), though not as systematically as the Durkheimians. Smith did develop a terminology about “holiness” as the concept that governs the ways gods and human relate, and referred to holy (or sacred) places, times, persons, and so on, in a way that anticipated and no doubt influenced later phenomenological vocabularies (cf. p. 140ff.). Durkheimian language about the sacred was essentially continuous with Smith’s, suggesting again that sacrality presents itself here in a phenomenological, descriptive mode and spirit and not just as a causalistic reduction. 6

I find W. S. F. Pickering’s (1984:149ff ) analysis supportive on this point. Pickering sees that the concept of the sacred, taken by itself, has considerable use and validity apart from the difficulties summoned up in the idea of an absolute sacred/profane dichotomy (p. 149ff ).

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Notes Durkheim could have chosen from many possible models to build his concept of the sacred, but following Frazer and Smith stuck to the notion of taboo and interdiction. It would be interesting to speculate what Elementary Forms might have become if Durkheim had made bonding or loyalty his models, or had even fully pursued his earlier concept that religiousness is about “obligation.” Moreover, when he comes to the phenomenon of collective effervescence as the typical sacred moment, Durkheim really seems to mix his schemas, as nothing could be further from taboo.

8

Recall that Durkheim’s teacher, Fustel de Coulanges, had drawn attention to the sacredness of health fires, domestic and national altars, and tombs (see de Coulanges 1874).

9

See, for example, criticisms of the concept by Stanner (1967) and Pickering’s (1984: chaps. 7, 8) summary of the issues.

10 Even in earlier writings, Durkheim had shown a fascination for the renunciative power of the so-called oriental holy man and had noted the mystical capacity to abandon “the ephemeral multiplicity of things” in order to find a holy reality within through meditation (see 1975: 82–83). 11 This point is consonant with Proudfoot’s (1985) distinction that explanatory reductions are free to differ from the insider’s viewpoint, whereas descriptive reductions are accountable to being corrected if they skew or omit important facts about religious experience. 12 In this sense, Durkheim too employed a “mana model,” but for him it was not a model for the sacred as much as it was an illustration of the religious force of society. 13 The bipolarity is a distinction which corresponds to what linguists like Émile Benveniste find to be two distinct kinds of words for the sacred in IndoEuropean languages. The one is the “negative” type, referring to that which is forbidden or consecrated and the other is the “positive” type, referring to that which is filled with divine presence, for example, weihen and heil, sacer and sanctus, yaozdata and spenta, hagios and hieros (see Benveniste 1973: 445ff ). 14 For example, the influence of Roger Caillois’s 1939 neo-Durkheimian synthesis L’Homme et le Sacré (trans. 1959) is impressive, and anyone who thinks Eliade’s notion of the sacred is closer to Otto than the French social anthropologists should reread it. Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (1956) appears to draw liberally from Caillois’s approach. For example, here are points Caillois refers to just in the first thirty-two pages: (1) the sacred is defined simply as the opposite of the profane; (2) Otto’s book is mentioned appreciatively but is said

Notes

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not to have gone far enough; (3) the distinction of real-unreal is made; (4) it is announced that the book will isolate several constants in man’s attitude toward the sacred; (5) “religious man” is referred to as a generic phrase; (6) the profane world is compared to the sacred “as nothingness is to being”; (7) the sacred is said to be “always more or less what one cannot approach without dying”; (8) the primordial state of chaos, fluidity, and license prior to creation is described; as are (9) the concept of the establishment of order by the ancestors; and (10) periodic regeneration; (11) “it is not merely the individual’s mind (that is fascinated by the sacred, but all of his being.” Caillois existentializes the Durkheimians, whose work he attempts to summarize. More than they, though, he uses “the sacred” as a noun and as the object of religion, indeed as a force that alternatively preserves and dissolves life, inhibits and transgresses—allowing Caillois to speak loosely of a “metaphysics of the sacred” that involves the polarity of stability and variation, matter and energy (pp. 136–38).

Chapter 2 1

For example: From this point of view the natural solidarity of the god and his worshippers, which has been already enlarged upon as characteristic of antique religion, at once becomes intelligible: the indissoluble bond that unites men to their god is the same bond of blood-fellowship which in early society is the one binding link between man and man, and the one sacred principle of moral obligation. (Smith 1956[1887]: 53)

2

Here I obviously differ from the common opinion about Eliade which typically reduced him to a theologian. I would argue that the sacred for Eliade is primarily, though not exclusively, a value found in objects, rather than a reified, independent reality. As if that is not heretical enough, I would also maintain that his notions about studying religion “at its own level” do not mean that scholars need to assert or intuit metaphysical reality, but rather that they need to identify the specific, characteristic kinds of objects and responses to them engaged by religious people. I have elaborated on some of this in “The Concept of World Habitation” (2000b, and Chapter 5, this volume).

3

The French genealogy links Eliade to the Durkheimians by way of his admiration for Roger Caillois’s work, L’Homme et le Sacré, first published 1939, the sponsorship of Georges Dumézil, and the writings of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (Dumézil had been his student). Dumézil, for example, edited

238

Notes and wrote a preface to Eliade’s major work, Traité d’histoire des religions (1949), even making the point there that the study of the sacred had already progressed from ideas about mana to the notion of religion as a system, an “explication du monde” (Dumézil 1949: 5). Dumézil, following Mauss and Hubert, had earlier expanded on the concepts of mythic time and space, “the Great Time,” festivals as “openings” onto mythic time, and other familiar Eliadean constructions (Dumézil 1936: 235–51). Caillois’s book, a neo-Durkheimian synthesis which also seemed to be the source of many of Eliade’s formulations, is available in English as Man and the Sacred (1959). Eliade says he knew Caillois “quite well” and said “I used his books and articles and quoted from them a great deal” (cf. Eliade 1982: 91). A full study of Eliade’s “French Connection” would be desirable.

4

For an overview of the concept of “world,” see Paden (2000a, and Chapter 4, this volume) and also my Religious Worlds (1994b), which attempted to combine the insights of Durkheim and Eliade regarding the construction of religious worlds.

5

Rappaport (1999) would be one example of this “turn.”

6

Notably, the resources of sociobiology have yet to be joined with Durkheimian sociology and history of religions theory. An impressive beginning is found in Luther Martin’s paper (2001) linking the religious and ritual concepts of kinship solidarity (including constructed or fictive kinship) with biological theories of kin-selection (e.g., those of William Hamilton) and showing ways of reading historical religious traditions through that approach.

7

This section, much neglected for some reason, counteracts the otherwise common view that Durkheim believes all religions divide the world into two watertight components, the sacred and the profane. He is quite clear here about the transformational character of sacred and profane states, where the latter can become sacred through the metamorphic force of purification, and where the very purpose of most ritual is to connect sacred and profane realms. I address some of this in “Before ‘The Sacred’ Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy” (1994a). Compare also W. Richard Comstock (1981). Comstock rightly argued, I believe, that Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction referred more to the regulation of behavior than to a map of two different realms of a culture.

Chapter 3 1

Note the derivation of the Latin integritas from in + teger (from tangere, to touch), hence “untouched.”

Notes 2

239

The Indo-European prototype of “holy” (by way of OE halig), present in Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic languages, is variously configured as kailos, koilos, xailax, or qailo. In addition to inviolateness, it had a semantic development of “well-being,” “health,” “hale,” and “good omen.” Regardless of how one traces the specific term “holy,” it is not difficult to identify both the mana model (supernatural power) and the sacred order model (inviolable bounds) amidst the histories of the various terms for sacred and holy (cf. Émile Benveniste’s etymological analysis [1973: 445–69]) showing how words for sacrality, in the Western tradition, lined up into two main semantic vectors signifying either (1) “to be marked off ” (e.g., sacer, hagios, qadosh) or (2) that which manifests health, power, good omen (e.g., heil, spenta, coel).

3

Were one to differentiate the sacrality of order, analogous to Otto’s treatment of the sense of the numinous where he distinguished the different “moments” of awe, mystery, and fascination, one could show that sacred order has the different active elements of (1) establishing, (2) preventing, (3) defending, and (4) restoring itself through purgative or punitive means, each with numerous cultural styles and techniques. But I leave this wider delineation of the many types and phases of sacred order for treatment elsewhere.

4

While Durkheim did have a sociological version of the mana model, where “the totemic principle” was understood as a kind of force—the very force that phenomenologists of religion were to equate with “the sacred”—for the most part he did not semantically equate that force/mana with the phrase, “the sacred.” A reconsideration of some of Durkheim’s contributions to the notion of sacrality is found in William Paden (1994a). See also Chapter 11, this volume.

5

The so-called “left-wing” of Durkheimian sociology, exemplified especially in the works of Georges Bataille, expanded on the transgressive, paroxysmal, even violent nature of the sacred.

6

For an exemplary case analysis (Japan) of the way religion/society is based on intense loyalty to the family-like, corporate group, see Timothy Fitzgerald (1993). An unusually extensive examination of all aspects of social bonding is found in Werner Stark (1976–1987).

7

The intrinsic connection of the concept of sacrality with the centralized authority of kingship is discussed in Benjamin Ray (1991).

8

An excellent, concise review of the notion of honor, in cross-cultural perspective, is Stewart (1994).

9

For an interesting study of the way religion can rearrange social status definitions, see Murray Milner, Jr. (1994).

240

Notes

10 For example, Mary Douglas speaks of “the Zen and Assisi” religious types which she places “off ” her grid-group graph of social constraints because of their ostensible transcendence of humanly structured discriminations (Douglas 1975: 228). 11 The Durkheimians were intrigued by the evolution of “the sacred character of the human person” and the emergence of the sacrality of human rights in modern societies. For a convenient review of their approach to this, see W.S.F. Pickering (1984: 476–99). The view of the American legal system that it is more profane to convict an innocent person of heinous crimes than to let a guilty person go free would be a significant datum in a Durkheimian history of sacrality—a history where the cultural definition or “content” of the sacred is a changing, evolving matter. 12 Isambert alludes to this paradox when he speaks of the circularity between the authority which grounds the reality of the object of belief and the object itself which grounds that authority (Isambert 1982: 270). 13 Eliade’s claim that the sacred is an “irreducible” element in the religiousness of a phenomenon has caused much unnecessary polarization in religious studies. One is often given the impression that there are just two contending camps here: those who support Eliade on this, and those who repudiate him and thus the whole concept of the sacred—on the grounds that it (the sacred) is a privileged and unempirical theological reification. Each side is partly right. On the one hand, sacrality (whether in nomic, manic, or other forms) is a distinctive factor in the logic of human behavior, but on the other hand, there is no reason to reify “the sacred” or to equate it strictly with religion. 14 Perhaps behind the notion of sacred order we can detect something that could legitimately and without romanticization be understood as a bioanthropological archetype. What could be more basically driven, along with the urge to reproduce and acquire food, than the need to uphold one’s world against attack and to construct ways of dealing with or removing the forces which would do violence to it? The universality of this phenomenon should interest cognitive psychologists, systems theorists, and like-minded religion scholars who are looking for a priori constraining structures that govern religious and cultural life. 15 Though its notion of the “ambiguity” of the sacred did suggest that mysterious power can present itself either as dangerous/demonic or as holy/divine, or both. 16 In the classical Hindu Laws of Manu, for example, killing a brahman is a major offense but killing a shudra is minor (the penance for which is the same as killing

Notes

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a lizard); and at the same time, many of the behaviors for which a brahman would be outcasted are not even offenses for a shudra. Cf. Georg Bühler, trans. and ed., The Laws of Manu, in The Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25, XI. 17 Germane here is the fundamental point stated so well by Peter Berger that the reality or “plausibility” of any world depends upon a specific social base, and that “The less firm the plausibility structure becomes, the more acute will be the need for world-maintaining legitimations” (Berger 1967: 47). Would the defensiveness generated by threats to a system’s plausibility structures then tend to produce more situations of violence and aggression? 18 Pierre Bourdieu draws attention to the possible discrepancy of the outsider’s conceptual templates and the insider’s own distinctive “strategies” (1977). 19 For an exemplary study of this, see Leonard W. Levy (1993). The work of Mary Douglas also begins to address this issue. 20 For a somewhat different use of the concept of de-profanization, referring to what I would take to be still another trajectory of the logic of sacrality, see Durkheim’s compellingly systematic treatment of the idea of “approaching the sacred by the very act of leaving the profane,” in Book III, chap. 1 of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1965: 337–56).

Chapter 5 1

My discussion of some prospects for such a model is found in Paden (1996a). The response papers by panelists Marsha Hewitt, Donald Wiebe, and E. Thomas Lawson, and my reply to the panelists, are in the same issue.

2

This is most overt in Eliade’s “Power and Holiness in the History of Religions” (1960: 123–54), first given as a 1953 Eranos Conference lecture.

3

Rennie tries to counteract the theological image of Eliade and builds an impressive case for looking at Eliade’s “the sacred” as a pattern of humanly perceived meaning rather than as a reified, independent reality.

4

For an analysis of Durkheim’s use of “the sacred,” see Paden (1994 [Chapter 1,

5

Dumézil, who had been a student of Marcel Mauss, makes the point that the

this volume]). study of the sacred had already progressed from ideas about mana to the notion of religion as a system, an “explication du monde” (1949: 5). Dumézil also had written about concepts of mythic time and space, the “Great Time,” festivals as “openings” onto mythic time, and so forth (1936).

242 6

Notes It will be evident to any reader of Caillois that Eliade’s notion of the sacred has more affinity with his book than to Otto’s Lutheran Das Heilige (1958[1917]). At the beginning of Man and the Sacred (Caillois 1959), there is even reference to Otto’s book, mentioned appreciatively but said not to have gone far enough in delineating the morphology of the sacred. Eliade appears to repeat this reference at the beginning of The Sacred and the Profane (1959), so that what innocent readers might conclude refers to a lineage between Eliade and Otto is more an unabashed textual link with Caillois. In fact, Caillois’s vocabulary, even in the first 32 pages, reappears in Eliade: the distinction of “real-unreal” in the context of the sacred/profane; the idea of “religious man;” the profane world compared to the sacred “as nothingness is to being”; the sacred as “always more or less what one cannot approach without dying”; notions of primordial chaos, fluidity, and license prior to creation; periodic regeneration; statements like “it is not merely the individual’s mind that is fascinated by the sacred, but all of his being,” and so forth. Otto is mentioned only twice in Patterns in Comparative Religion (Eliade 1958[1949]), neither time in reference to the concept of the holy.

7

From this angle, I think there is more to Eliade’s position in the history of comparativism than the ahistorical, “morphological” position assigned him in the schema of different forms of comparison present in Jonathan Z. Smith’s essay, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit” (Smith 1978: 240–64).

8

This gives context to Eliade’s controversial maxims about studying the phenomenon of religion/the sacred “in its own frame of reference.” Understanding the role played by sacrality as a behavioral and signifying factor in the apparatus of someone’s world view is a different idea than that of having to understand or accept a superhuman or “wholly other” dimension of reality in order to study religion viably. The first is a datum for analysis and comparative investigation; the second is a matter of religious intuition. I do not think there is much evidence that Eliade is asking religion scholars to have to “intuit” anything at all. Rather, his point is more that religious worlds have a sacred meaning to the insider and those meanings are categories that need to be understood as part of the structure of the very universes historians of religion describe. There is no privileged reality here, just the specific terms of the insider’s system. I suspect that many of those who object to Eliade’s idea of studying religion “at its own level” are doing so because of their mistaken assimilation of Eliade and Otto.

9

I am indebted to philosopher Nelson Goodman for the term “worldmaking” (1978), though the genealogy of the concept of world traces more to the philosophical phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger. See also Michael

Notes

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Kearney (1984). Kearney presents a cross-cultural model of worldviews, differentiating universal forms—self versus other, classifications, causality, space and time, etc.—from the cultural contents of those forms. Also worth mentioning in this context is Ninian Smart’s idea of religious studies as “Worldview Analysis” (1995). 10 Although clearly there are differences, too. I am taking “worldbuilding” as a model for dealing with human universals, and saying that the content of “world” and the content of the patterns of worldbuilding get constituted by unique historical environments. Smith, by contrast, is more interested in the systematic grounding of comparison and patterns in forms of historical process that are culturally contiguous. He thus advocates “historicizing morphology” in an approach that compares three levels: (1) general, shared worldview, holistic system of cultural, ideological, and mythic values and language; (2) individual national/religious systems or cultural complexes which give their peculiar stamp to this worldview; and (3) particular linguistic/textual manifestations of the interaction of the first two levels. Smith seeks a viable middle ground between the reduction of data to hierarchic, archetypal “essences” and comparing isolated motifs between religions. It seems to me that the notion of common, human behaviors of world-building supplies that kind of comparative matrix at another level. 11 Boyer challenges the vague use of terms like “tradition” and proposes a more empirical analysis of how actual cultures build worlds from actual practices and types of memory. On this, see also Detienne (1986), Connerton (1989). Hutton (1993) is a particularly fine overview of historical theories of the construction of the past. 12 Rennie (1996) does a fine job of sorting them out in chapters 7, 8, and 9, and his conclusions go in the direction of my own, namely that the construction of “historical” prototypes is a common human endeavor and not just an exotic belief of primitive societies. 13 On the power of historical recollection to encode social values, see the essays by Bruce Lincoln and Francisca Cho Bantly in Patton and Doniger (1996: 163–76, 177–207). 14 See Paden (1996b: 3–18). In the same volume, Veikko Anttonen (1996) examines sacrality from the point of view of cognitive boundary-marking. Hans Mol (1976) remains a suggestive study of the connection of the sacred and world formation; and Roy A. Rappaport’s magnum opus Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999) analyzes the function of ritual and mythic sacredness in the context of cultural evolution.

244

Notes

15 See Brown (1991) for a compelling response to the era of anthropological focus on single cultures only, with a useful review of the history of the issue, of kinds of universals, and a forty-four page annotated bibliography.

Chapter 6 1

The anthropologist Donald E. Brown’s Human Universals (1991) is an important reopening of the issue of what is generically human over against two generations of anthropological focus on cultural particularity. The notion of “worlds” is systematically related to comparativism in my Religious Worlds (1994) and “World” (2000 [see Chapter 4, this volume). Not only traditional philosophical phenomenology and sociology of knowledge, but more recent developments in cognitive psychology have also utilized the concept of “world” construction as a fundamental human activity. See, for example, Varela et al. (1991).

2

Jonathan Z. Smith’s compelling wake-up-call essays (e.g., 1982: 19–35) on the methodology of comparison focus particularly on the role of difference and challenge the arbitrariness and inventiveness of comparison of cultural materials not contiguous in space and time. I am proposing a model that allows for crosscultural analogies with regard to human activities but that also can, using Smith’s phrase, give “sufficient gravity to the historical encapsulation of culture” (p. 26). The cross-cultural factor here is not an occult “psycho-mental unity of mankind” that encodes “universal” categories of thought, but the continuity of actions by which humans form communities, honor authorities and charismatic objects, defend territory (which comes in many genres), classify the universe, and so forth.

3

For a thorough statement on the relevancy of prototype theory for the study of religion, see Benson Saler (1993, esp. chap. 6).

4

For a fuller response to the “colonization” problem, see Paden (1996b: 37–40). An earlier, embryonic version of the present essay, which has here been thoroughly rewritten, was published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (see Paden 1996a: 5–14). The same issue contained responses by Marsha Hewitt, E. Thomas Lawson, and Donald Wiebe; Paden (1996b) is my reply to the respondents.

5

James understood both the value and the limits of the scientific, classificatory mind. This particular example, however, illustrates the former, even though James appreciates the discrepancy of levels and ultimately acknowledges the value of the insider’s self-described experiences, too: “Probably a crab would be

Notes

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filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say; ‘I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone’” (1902:10). 6

Much as does the anthropologist’s distinction of emic versus etic language, the former representing the insider’s culture-specific discourse and the latter representing the categories of the outsider. On the definition and relationship of etic and emic perspectives, I find particularly useful Emics and Etics: The Insider/ Outsider Debate (Headland et al. 1990).

Chapter 7 1

For a representative postclassical review of the concept of comparison in anthropology, see Holy (1987).

2

Brown reviews the history of anthropological theories of universals and provides an extensive and useful annotated bibliography. However, he offers only a few narrow observations about how the question of human universals relates to comparative religion.

3

Years ago, the anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1966: 52–67) had also proposed that religion be understood in terms of verbs rather than nouns, behaviors instead of institutions, and came up with his own list of nuclear actions that he thought “alone or in combination” accounted for religious life. They were: addressing the supernatural, performing music (including dancing and singing), the physical manipulation of psychological states, exhortation, reciting mythic and moral codes, imitating or simulating, touching (mana-objects), not touching (taboos), eating and drinking, offering/sacrificing, congregating, becoming inspired, and the placing of symbolic objects—a very “rough and ready list,” as Wallace said, but on the right track. Recent work by Malory Nye (2000) also advocates approaching “religion” as a form of activity, paralleling the position I take in this chapter.

4

For example, one could utilize single-term concepts (denoting behaviors) like “learning,” “building,” or “performing”; or theoretically impacted concepts like “maximizing fitness”; or combinatory concepts, as Jonathan Z. Smith does in analyzing examples of the way cultures are constituted by the double process of “both making differences and relativizing those very same distinctions.” For his interesting account of this notion, which in my terminology refers to a kind of behavior, see J. Z. Smith (1992: 11).

246 5

Notes To use the terminology of Robin Fox (Tiger and Fox: 1971: 1–23; Fox 1989: 20ff, 116ff ). A particularly impressive attempt to link the study of religious culture and cultural universals with the study of underlying “behavioral predispositions” is Joseph Lopreato (1984).

6

My approach here, with regard to etic, functionalist universals, is similar to that of Ward H. Goodenough (1970).

7

The investigation of how worlds signify to insiders is always part of the ethnographic, historical, and case-specific study of religious expressions. It is also an area where certain types of phenomenological analysis apply.

8

I would think that “resemblance” could be understood either in relation to standard prototypes or to conceptual characterizations (like those on my list above, which have a certain plasticity). In neither case are “recurrences” matters of exclusive or homogeneous class membership. Universal behaviors are not essences but conceptual constructs about kinds of activities that allow endless cultural versions of themselves and allow for marginal cases. There are different ways of “forming cooperative bonds.” Prof. Benson Saler and I have had an exchange on the matter of transcultural versus prototypal concepts (Paden 2000a; Saler 2000: 328–332).

9

In this regard, Benson Saler (1999) made an apt response to Walter Burkert’s proposed analogy between human and animal “escape” behaviors. Burkert had compared sacrificial mutilations such as finger sacrifice with behaviors like those of a trapped fox that gnaws off its paw to escape, or a lizard that detaches its tail in the mouth of a pursuer. But Saler observed that the act of cutting off a finger can also have different meanings according to cultural contexts: for example, in some societies, it constitutes an institutionalized way of expressing grief at the death of a close relative; for others, amputation of a finger is a token of fealty to a leader. Neither of these could be called “escape behaviors.”

Chapter 8 1

As described by Saler (1993). Methodological issues of applying religious concepts to different historical cultures are examined in depth in the threevolume Comparative Religious Ideas Project, edited by Robert Neville (2000a, 2000b, 2000c).

2

This essay extends and amplifies an earlier sketch of these points that I published as “Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations” (Paden 2001

Notes

247

[see Chapter 7, this volume]) and anticipates a book-length treatment of the subject. I have been much inspired in this by Walter Burkert’s groundbreaking Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (1996). Earlier influences included Robin Fox’s work on “behavioral repertoires” and “grammars of behavior,” in The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality (1989: 20ff, 116ff.); and Joseph Lopreato, Human Nature and Biocultural Evolution (1984). Most books on human ethology, though, have little to say specifically about religion, for example, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s immense compilation, Human Ethology (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989). An exception is Robert A. Hinde’s Why Gods Persist: A Scientific Approach to Religion (1999). The newer “cognition and religion” movement is of course also related to this approach: see, for example, Atran (2002) and Boyer (2001), though these and other cognitivists focus more on the level of psychological computation and informational inference than on behavior. Although concentrating on explanatory issues, and thus different than my focus on comparative patterns, Joel Sweek (2002) also calls for an ethological approach to religion. An excellent overview of cognitivist developments as they might concern the field of religious studies is Armin W. Geertz (2004). 3

I use the term “interpretive” deliberately. I do not enter into the huge jungle of scientific debates about the relative role of culture or learning in evolution, or about any particular evolutionary theory. I do try to shift some of our hermeneutical repertoire in a way that indicates points of continuity between the history of religions tradition and the findings of the natural sciences.

4

In referring to “group behaviors,” I mean (1) the collective activities of sets of individuals for common causes and the precipitates of those activities in the form of language, values, technologies, and material culture that in turn significantly influence, motivate, or constrain individual behavior, and (2) the sociality of the brain that is predisposed to collective loyalty, conformity, submission to authority, reciprocity, etc., as these all form relationships between one or more individuals. This does not imply that cultural contents are simply downloaded into individual minds.

5

I take the term partly from Nelson Goodman (1978), whose philosophical considerations about “world versions” I share, but develop in terms of social, religious, and ethological considerations.

6

That a social construction can come to function as an objectivity, an ontology, is a basic concept in the sociology of knowledge as summarized in Berger (1967, chap.1). From a different, but very promising, cognitive science point of view,

248

Notes Matthew Day (2004) also examines ways cultural artifacts and practices can play a role in generating and maintaining religious cognition.

7

Kin selection is a well-known theory in evolutionary science, in essence showing that individual animals (and social insects are a representative illustration) will be willing to sacrifice their individual lives or needs for others to the extent that the genes of the others are the same. In mainstream evolutionary thought, though, the emphasis has been on individual self-interest rather than on group self-interest. For human groups, kin-like attitudes of loyalty and altruism can be generated by environmental circumstances. The relevance of kinship “belief ” for understanding religion is drawn out in Ferren MacIntyre (2004).

8

For interesting empirical research on the adaptational value of “costly” behaviors that “signal” group loyalty, see Sosis and Alcorta (2003).

9

Roy A. Rappaport develops this notion of sanctified objects as “functional replacement[s] for genetic determination of patterns of behavior” (1999: 418).

10 An excellent treatment of collective past-making, with examples from both secular and religious cases, is Eviatar Zerubavel (2003). On group memory and body memory, see Paul Connerton (1989); on the active nature of history construction, Elizabeth Tonkin (1992). 11 Fitz John Porter Poole’s essay on controlled, aspectual comparison remains a cogent analysis of the epistemological basis of comparative method (1986).

Chapter 10 1

I use “gods” here for shorthand, to include all superhuman beings with whom humans interact—ancestors, spirits, demons and witches, saints, buddhas, and so forth, as well as the varieties of types of deities.

2

I offer a fuller treatment of this theme in “The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects” (Paden 2013 [see Chapter 12, this volume]).

Chapter 12 1

One thinks here of the work of the social theorist Ernest Becker, who gave classic formulation to the notion that culture, for which religion is the prototype, functions as a bloated veneer of self-enhancement—including illusions of

Notes

249

sacrality, power, and immortality—built upon the fear of death or extinction. The negative side of this status seeking is the logic of killing others deemed to be threats to it. See his The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973) and Escape from Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975). 2

Matthew Day assesses the theory held by Steven Mithen that such artifacts were necessary cognitive compensations for “the computational challenges that are introduced when the gods appear on the scene” (Day 2004: 250). Day inclines to think that the artifacts are not cognitively essential for dealing with gods, but rather likely to be “content-fixing elements” in religious cognition, “an additional input class that exists alongside the traditional vehicles (narrative and ritual) for generating and transmitting religious knowledge” (p. 253).

3

The expression “supernormal sign stimuli” is found in N. Tinbergen, The Study of

4

Hence, this is not just a simple matter of downloading social norms into

Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951: 44–46). otherwise blank minds. Groups may be made up of small self-interested components, as evolutionary psychologists point out, but within those units are mechanisms for representing and respecting agreed upon rules and prestige institutions. Groups may thus be in some senses “perpetually reconstructed output fictions of individual minds” but among those fictions are powerful ideologies and authority attributions that powerfully influence behavior and thus can even have deadly causal force. Sacred norms may just be intermittent “signposts of behavioral tendencies” rather than shared norms that automatically replicate in individuals, as put in Atran’s terms (2002: 199), but the message on the sign can incite holocausts. 5

The Zahavis even suggest that having queen pheromone is a vehicle of relative prestige among workers, somewhat analogous to money in human societies (1997: 159), though there is apparently no experimental basis for this yet. Along these lines, I recall that certain followers of the Aum Shinrikyo sect were known to don electric headsets supposedly synchronized with the brain of their founder.

6

Tooby and Cosmides hold that behavioral levels of analysis ordinarily deal with too kaleidoscopic a range of phenomena to identify universal, functional mental architecture (Tooby and Cosmides 1992: 64). Yet communicative status behaviors are themselves grounded in adaptive mechanisms of a general kind.

7

Laland and Brown (2002) impressively interconnect the five major strands of evolution theory (human sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, memetics, and gene-culture co-evolution). For a helpful sorting out of the “explanatory complementarity” between the approaches of

250

Notes evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology, see Smith (2000). Extending the evolutionary psychology model to include more attention to externalized, cultural forms of cognition and their constraints is clearly underway among religion scholars (e.g., Day 2004; Pyysiäinen 2004; Sørensen 2004).

8

Prestige, as social respect, as honor attributed to objects, is a concept related to Durkheim’s notions of social force, the totemic principle, and mana. In the Elementary Forms, these are products of the representations of many individuals (Durkheim 1995: 210–11), thus giving them imagined autonomy, and it is the psychic properties of social respect that give it power (p. 209). There is therefore significant conceptual linkage between the model described in this chapter and Durkheim’s notion of the energy that social respect attributes to sacred objects. Connections could also be made with Weber’s three types of authority legitimation (tradition, charisma, legality). Milner points out that no sustained work has developed the connection of status and sacrality (Milner 1994: 291), though his own book, albeit without evolutionary reference, opens up the issue nicely. Lopreato (1984) and Sanderson (2001) also begin to close the gap between social and evolutionary theory.

Index

Locators followed by “n” refer to notes. Anttonen, Veikko 51, 197, 243 n.14 Barkow, J. H. 172, 198, 209 Bataille, Georges 185–6 Becker, Ernest 248–9 n.1 behavior as complex product of geneenvironment relationship 67, 116, 128, 166, 216 habitative nature of 123 in-group b. 168–70, 190–1 as integrative level between biology and humanities 133, 165–7, 217–19 language, believing and mythmaking as b. 87, 112, 131–2, 217, 220 panhuman behavior as level of comparability 107–38, 151–2 and the study of religion 107–38 thinking as navigational b 231 types of species-level b. 109–11, 174 Berger, Peter 37, 47, 50, 67–8, 241 n.17 Bourdieu, Pierre 68, 140–1 Boyer, Pascal 5, 11–2, 87, 130, 197, 205, 243 n.11 Brown, Donald 10, 41, 244 n.1, 244 n.15, 245 n.2 Bulbulia, Joseph 205, 218, 220, vii Burkert, Walter 11, 54, 70, 90, 153, 200, 246 n.9 Caillois, Roger 30, 50, 82, 185–6, 188, 236–7 n.14, 237–8 n.3, 242 n.6 Carter, Jeffrey 149–50 Cassirer, Ernst 66 comparison 95–104 commonality as basis of difference 97–9, 107, 114, 124, 132, 134, 152–4

conceptual control in; aspectualism 101–2, 144, 148–50, 164, 230 distinctions between insider and outsider perspectives 102–3, 122–3, 154–5 heuristic nature of 99–100, 155 panhuman behavior and culture as different levels of comparison 3–4, 107–35, 143, 152–4 postmodern criticism 133–5, 141–2 prototype theory 115, 131, 150 recent studies of 139–62 Smith, Jonathan Z. on 142–7 through concept of “worldmaking” 85–9, 96 through evolutionary patterns 163–75 typologies 150–1 Comstock, W. Richard 235 n.1 Dissanayake, Ellen 173, 202 Doniger,Wendy 152 Douglas, Mary 26, 34, 37, 50, 54–5, 68, 184, 240 n.10 Dumézil, Georges 82, 237–8 n.3 Durkheim, Emile 177–96 comparisons to Eliade 30, 38–41, 187–8 connection to Wm. James 39–40 defining religion 36 description vs. explanation in 21, 24, 27–9, 38 and evolutionary sociality 189–93 idea of the sacred: as adjective 22–4; collective force, effervescence 16, 20, 185–6; sacred/profane duality 24–6, 181–2; sanctification 26; as shared identity 183; as sui generis 28, 34; as taboo 23, 181

252

Index

issue of social vs. religious as nonreductive categories 35–8 new naturalism 40 and religious studies 33–44, 187–9 Eliade, Mircea archetypes vs. social context 85–6, 114–5 idea of anamnesis 225–6 idea of plural world construction 84 patterns of world habitation 68–70; constructing and performing pasts 87; mythic order 51; orientation in space 88; periodic renewals 88–9 phenomenology 19 and Roger Caillois 30, 82, 188, 236–7 n.14, 237–8 n.3, 242 n.6 sacred/profane duality 188 two discursive matrices 81–3; comparison with Durkheim and Durkheimians 30, 38–41, 82–3, 187–8; contrast with Otto and religious phenomenology 82 environments and collective memory 234 critical in natural selection 217–18 environments include mental objects 3, 218 extending the idea of 230–3 and human world-making 2–3, 167–8 in-group environments 168–9, 219–20 interior types 132, 231–3 niche construction 2–3, 7, 123, 167–8, 217, 220, 232 evolution and religion debates 7, 163–5 evolutionary behavior patterns deference and submission 112, 129, 171 displays and signaling 6–7, 131, 172–3, 204, 207, 209, 233 group survival and defense 45–62, 168–70, 221, 231 as human universals 109, 117, 121–35 interpreting environments 231 kin and in-group loyalty 7, 53, 126–7, 168–70, 190–1 kin recognition 170, 191, 220 navigating and interpreting environments 231 prestige attribution 170–3, 191, 197–213

reciprocity 130–1 ritualization 131, 206–7 significant objects 127, 170–3, 249 n.2 social norms and order 45–62, 129 supernormal sign stimuli 172, 204, 222 variety of hardwired systems 224 evolutionary models behavioral ecology 2–3, 11, 165, 216 ethological approaches 10, 111–14, 123, 128, 133, 165, 199–201, 216 evolutionary and cognitive psychology 11–2, 70, 154, 163–4, 166, 168–9, 192, 216–19 Fields, Karen 178, 186 Fitzgerald, Timothy 76, 114, 239 n.6 Fox, Robin 10, 112, 246–7 n.2 Geertz, Armin 11, 246–7 n.2, vii Geertz, Clifford 68, 141, 178 gods as affecting existential welfare 233 conciliatory behaviors with 171 endless genres of god behaviors 223 as features of an environment 218–19, 233 honorific language 207 includes superhuman beings 6, 111, 125, 248 n.1 and in-group social prestige 221 objects of display behaviors 172–3 signaling and receiving information 6–7, 204, 209, 233 as strategic relationships 198 and ‘supernormal sign stimuli’ 172, 204 theospheres 233 and the unconscious 232 as virtual reference group 209 Goodman, Nelson 39, 66, 247 n.5 Guthrie, Stewart 130 Holdrege, Barbara 151–2 Hubert, Henri 21–2, 25, 235 n.4, 237–8 n.3 Husserl, Edmund 66–7 James, William 39–40, 67, 102–3, 115, 155, 163, 209, 223, 232, 244–5 n.5 Jensen, Jeppe Sinding 132, vii

Index Kirkpatrick, Lee A. 133, 169–70, 191 Lukes, Steven 25, 181 Martin, Luther H. 1, 13, 109, 141–2, 148, 153–4, 225, 238 n.6, vii Mauss, Marcel 21–2, 25, 30, 50, 188–9, 235 n.4, 237–8 n.3 McCutcheon, Russell T. 34, 65, 140–1, 188 Milner, Murray, Jr. 192, 250 n.8 Otto, Rudolf 10, 20, 28, 45–6, 51, 82, 236–7 n.14, 239 n.3, 242 n.6, 242 n.8 Patton, Kimberley C. 147–8 Penner, Hans H. 19, 46 Pickering, W.S.F. 177, 181–2, 235 n.6, 240 n.11 Plotkin, Henry 164–5, 168, 192–3, 205 Poole, Fitz John Porter 101, 148–9

253

sacred objects 71, 127, 170–3 Durkheim on 22–4 sacred order 9, 45–60, 72–3, 129 codes of 52–7 contrasted with mana models 20, 45–8, 52, 57–60 as defined 46–8 group survival and the sacred 221 implications of 57–60 system and anti-system found in all natural life 46 Saler, Benson 115, 150, 246 n.8, 246 n.9 Sharpe, Eric 33–4 Smail, Daniel Lord 1, 226 Smith, Jonathan Z. 50, 55, 86, 88, 97, 113, 142–7, 178, 183, 185, 242 n.7, 244 n.2, 245 n.4 Smith, W. Robertson 37, 53, 180–2, 235 n.5 Sullivan, Lawrence E. 147, 154 Tinbergen, Nikolaas 172, 204, 221–2

Rappaport, Roy 170, 190, 221, 243 n.14, 248 n.9 religion, defined as interaction with ‘gods’ 6–7, 111, 125–6, 130, 165, 218 religions as collective interactions with gods 125, 130 as forms of culture 206 as forms of niche construction 218 as group-level systems of common belief and practice 219–20 history of, as pivoting of prestige attributions 209 as ‘kin’ populations 220 as routinized ritual systems 125 religion, the academic study of 133 cognitive/scientific approaches 142, 215–6 comparative approach 139–56(and throughout) critique of, as imperialistic 140–1 and evolution 122, 163–5, 215–16 redirecting classical resources 8–10 reductionism 27–9, 33–4 vs. religiously-motivated studies 141 and thematic study 108, 222 Richman, Michèle H. 186

Urban, Hugh 139–40, 147 Varela, Francisco J. 70 Whitehouse, Harvey 133, 187, 211 Wiebe, Donald 34, 141 Wilson, David Sloan 5, 11, 189–90, 221, vii Wilson, Edward O. 5, 11, 191, 200–1, 203, 220, 222 worlds and worldmaking 63–80 and behavioral ecology 2–3 as habitats and habitation 64, 123–4 as human universal 70, 122–5 niche construction 2–3, 7, 123, 167–8, 217, 220, 232 phenomenology 66–7 as point of comparison 85–9, 96 subworlds 124 through objects 71–2, 127–8 through ritual renewal 73, 88–9 through scripts and myth 70–1, 87, 128 from worldviews to environments 2–3 Zahavi, Amotz and Zahavi, Avishag 204–5, 208, 249 n.5