Over at the Toronto Star, Rick Salutin salutes anthropology for providing keen insights into the human condition. In the process, Salutin astutely observes:
The strength of anthropology at the moment, I’d say, comes when it turns its eye to our own society as just another tribe or collection of humans trying to make symbolic sense of their experience — rather than looking back on other collectivities as if we alone have reached some satisfying, inevitable progress toward which those primitive versions are striving. It’s less about making sense of the past than casting an anthropological gaze on the present. This seems to unbewitch the level of “achievement” we’ve reached. We start looking like just another weird bunch of human creatures trying to make sense of their odd predicament, like Charlton Heston in “Planet of the Apes” when he finally gets it.
That’s good stuff. Any newspaper columnist who cracks the progressive “cultural evolution” code is money my book.
Speaking of money, this piece on stripping and resource extraction in the fracking boomtown of Williston, North Dakota is just that. The overall impression is one of isolation and desolation, terms which apply not only to the town and plains which surround it, but also to the people who live and work there. The stripper and gifted-writer of the story, Susan Elizabeth Shepard, paints a powerful portrait of alienation: people alienated from land and people alienated from one another. This is a stark and depressing contrast for those who know that the Williston area was, for many thousands of years, home to enormous herds of ungulates and Native Americans. There is nothing beautiful about the place now. Alien indeed.
Finally, over at Oxford’s Practical Ethics, Paul Troop meanders through some questions prompted by a Daniel Dennett lecture. While I won’t fault Troop for being a big fan of Dennett, I will laud him for considering issues that go beyond Dennett’s cramped cognitive playbook on religion:
It is difficult to exclude the possibility that untrue beliefs have a function that is not linked to their truth. Perhaps what is important is not whether religious beliefs are true, but that they are specific to that religion. That is, religious beliefs act as a ‘badge of identity’ for that religion that is difficult to fake. It would be easy for adherants to that religion to learn the weird and wonderful tenets of that religion, but difficult for outsiders. Thus beliefs could be the means of working out whether a person is safe to trust. If this was their function, they would necessarily have to be arbitrary so that they could not be worked out through logic.
In this excerpt, Troop has touched on two well-known theories of religion. The first, which is Durkheimian, it is empirically taken for granted that religious ideas and beliefs are untrue. But if they are untrue, how could they have persisted over evolutionary time? If these errors and falsehoods had no function or purpose, they would have been winnowed and eventually eliminated by natural selection. Yet this has not happened (and will probably never happen). Why? Because, as Durkheim argues in Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, religious rituals and ideas serve social-cohesive functions: they bind people together into communities.
The second is the costly signaling theory of religion, the best known proponent of which is anthropologist Richard Sosis. While signaling theory has its attractions and some empirical support, this support usually derives from high-cost and high-intensity religious groups that are relatively small and will probably remain small due to excessive costs. Whether these would have been operative in ancestral or animist environments is an open question.
Signaling theory is of course rooted in ritual, which is a cornerstone of Durkheiminan theories of religion. In The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2008), Robert Bellah has a brilliant chapter on “Durkheim and Ritual.” It would be hard to find a more sophisticated evolutionary analyses of ritual-religion than Bellah’s piece. I recommend it.
