Ritual And Religion In The Making Of Humanity Pdf

[Enrique Fats]

Thereis beyond this pragmatic perspective a far more difficult theoretical question, and this concerns the reception of the claims of a renewed ritual paradigm advanced in magisterial terms by Rappaport in Ritual, Religion and the Making of Humanity. This is a text that divides opinion between definite enthusiasts and those who regard it as an obscure, even obscurantist book. Why should there be this difficulty?

agency, capitalism, Critical Religion, deconstruction, democratic intellect, George Elder Davie, human condition, ideology, nihilism, postcolonial, religion, riots, ritual, shaman-ritual complex, theology, Timothy Fitzgerald

Indeed, this reader envisages Fitzgerald as a slaughterman repeatedly striving to confront the bull, avoid its horns, plant his bolt gun on the brow of the beast, pull the trigger and fell it for good.

The events of the past week in England show that fundamental issues pertaining to the legitimation of government, social justice, and societal stability need to be addressed, or the anomie now evident in riots on the streets may engulf us all. In my view, scholars in Religious Studies should not simply remain the reluctant but paid tools of an industrialised system of defective socialisation that initiates students into informed passivity, but the source of a truly critical discourse that broadens the imagination and enhances personal agency.

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The German monk Adam of Bremen wrote a similar account in 1072 about the sacrificial tradition at Gammel Uppsala in Sweden, where the temple was devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey. Here the Vikings also met every 9 years to ensure the goodwill of the gods. 9 males of all kinds of living creatures were sacrificed in a holy grove nearby. According to Adam of Bremen dogs, horses and humans hung from the trees. The number 9 was apparently of magical significance to the Vikings and was involved in a number of rituals.

There has been extensive debate over whether these accounts were real or simply Christian propaganda. Neither Thietmar nor Adam witnessed the cult activities themselves. They wrote their chronicles in the late Viking period and early Middle Ages, when Christianity had taken over and human sacrifices were no longer acceptable.

At Trelleborg a sacrificial site was found from the time before the Viking fortress was erected in 980-81. In five c. 3 metre-deep wells human and animal skeletons were found, together with jewellery and tools. Of the total of five human sacrifices, four were young children aged between 4 and 7.

It is very significant that the skeletons were found in wells. The Vikings attributed great symbolic importance to wells. Odin gained his wisdom from drinking at Mmir's well. In exchange he had to sacrifice one of his eyes to Mmir. But what could the sacrifice of a whole human being be rewarded with?

At Trelleborg a small enclosure was also identified near to three of the sacrificial wells. Here a sacrificial ritual may have taken place before the victims were deposited in the deep wells. Perhaps the sacrificial site belonged to the settlement that was located 300 m from Trelleborg. When the fortress was constructed, the cult site was dismantled and the sacrifices stopped. In the new Christian religion, which was becoming increasingly dominant, humans were not sacrificed.

A woman of high status, perhaps a queen, was laid to rest in a ship burial at Oseberg. Amongst her many precious grave goods was a fine woven tapestry depicting a procession. The participants are festively dressed warriors and women, who walk, ride horses and two of them sit in one of the horse-drawn vehicles. We know that the Iron Age fertility cult involved transporting the deity over the fields in a covered cart in order to secure the best yields.

The additional cognitive and behavioural mechanisms available through culture bridge this explanatory gap, but how did these cultural forms themselves come to be? And, how did we evolve into such profoundly cultural beings?

Starting with our psychological and behavioural toolkits that enable cultural dynamics for humans as the cultural ape: Psychological factors (and the genetic predispositions that may underpin them) that are implicated in cultural evolutionary processes include the attentional resources, social learning biases and predispositions towards learning from other conspecifics that appear to be at least somewhat unique to humans (Lyons et al. 2007; Brosnan et al. 2009; Jimnez and Mesoudi 2019; Mesoudi et al. 2010; Henrich 2009; Whiten et al. 2009). Products of human cultural evolution include material and non-material cultural forms such as toolkits, technologies, artefacts as well as norms, institutions, behaviours and beliefs. The accumulated learning over generations enables the ratchet effect, which makes it possible for humans to develop cumulative cultural innovations in complex toolkits, technologies and social systems that could never be invented by a single human without some degree of socialisation into the system (Legare and Nielsen 2015; Tennie et al. 2009; Mesoudi and Thornton 2018).

Importantly, forms inherited via cultural transmission pathways can be operated upon by Darwinian selection mechanisms (although these mechanisms operate in ways that rhyme with but are not a 1:1 correspondence to the dynamics that operate at the genetic level). Therefore, we can apply the logic of Darwinian selection to analyse the historical trajectories and social dynamics of sociological phenomena.

Ritualised behaviours are common around the world, and they appear to provide specific cognitive effects depending on how they are activated (Rossano 2009; Fogelin 2007). Although ritual and belief are often assumed to operate together, the singular focus on belief may have its cultural evolutionary roots in Protestant Christianity with less of a direct impact in other systems (Cohen et al. 2003; Cohen and Hill 2007; Taylor 2007). Ritual actions have long been linked to reduction in anxiety (Gmelch 1971; Malinowski 1948; Boyer and Lienard 2007; Homans 1941). More recent neuro-cognitive approaches show distinct effects of ritualised behaviours reducing anxiety responses, which may have formed an initial basis for their adaptive benefit in situations of great uncertainty (Lang et al. 2015; Karl and Fischer 2018). Paradoxically, impacts on individual wellbeing can be seen for both the more calm and introspective rituals such as prayer and meditation as well as the more activating, extreme rituals such as fire walking and other rites of initiation used in small-scale societies around the world (Atkinson and Whitehouse 2011; Fischer et al. 2014).

Although ritual can form discrete acts that are limited in time and space, religion often builds upon ritual to form socio-cultural complexes of rituals and beliefs (Purzycki and Sosis 2013; Purzycki et al. 2014). These belief and behaviour complexes create normative structures within cultural systems that can be the subject of cultural evolutionary processes at the level of individual beliefs and/or behaviours within the broader set, clusters or groups of beliefs and behaviours that form particular constellations of norms (McNamara and Henrich 2017a), or systems as a whole. Much of the scholarship on the cultural evolution of religion has focused on the impact of particular aspects of religious systems, especially in the form of supernatural agent beliefs and their impact on cooperation in large-scale societies. The supernatural monitoring hypothesis and the supernatural punishment hypothesis are two approaches that help to explain the cultural evolutionary success of world religions, especially Abrahamic faiths. These hypotheses both address the gap in explanation for the scale of human prosociality beyond what is feasibly sustained by individual relationships of kinship and reputational concerns alone (as discussed above).

Along these lines, perhaps the biggest adaptive benefit that arises from prosocial religious belief systems is their capacity to expand the definition of who belongs within an in-group (McNamara et al. 2016). The cues of belief and belonging from adoption of these religious belief systems ride on the signalling systems utilised in ritual displays to convey information about a potential interaction partner without the benefit of direct connection through kinship or interpersonal contact and reputation (McNamara and Henrich 2017a; Hruschka et al. 2014). These expanding inner circles also make interaction across societies smoother by creating a shared normative framework for interaction. This then allows for the adaptive dynamics of individual socio-ecological settings to create locally specific forms of religious belief systems that simultaneously support social life within local conditions and with interaction across more diverse groups (Purzycki and McNamara 2016; McNamara 2020; McNamara et al. 2021; McNamara and Henrich 2017a).

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