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Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild

How Communication and Threat-Detection May Predict Spirits, Gods, Witches, and Shamans

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Abstract

Religions “in the wild” are the varied set of religious activities that occurred before the emergence of organized religions with doctrines, or that persist at the margins of those organized traditions. These religious activities mostly focus on misfortune; on how to remedy specific cases of illness, accidents, failures; and on how to prevent them. I present a general model to account for the cross-cultural recurrence of these particular themes. The model is based on (independently established) features of human psychology—namely, (a) epistemic vigilance, the set of systems whereby we evaluate the quality of information and of sources of information, and (b) threat-detection psychology, the set of evolved systems geared at detecting potential danger in the environment. Given these two sets of systems, the dynamics of communication will favor particular types of messages about misfortune. This makes it possible to predict recurrent features of religious systems, such as the focus on nonphysical agents, the focus on particular cases rather than general aspects of misfortune, and the emergence of specialists. The model could illuminate not just why such representations are culturally successful, but also why people are motivated to formulate them in the first place.

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Notes

  1. For instance, in a classic study, Ron Brunton (1980) pointed out that students of Melanesian religious representations produced coherent general principles from inconsistent specific comments made by informants, which suggests that Melanesian religions are “weakly integrated . . . subject to a high degree of individual variation and a high rate of innovation and obsolescence” (1980:112). In the same way, Evans-Pritchard states that talking about a “Zande theology” would be a gross distortion of Zande religious activities, which neither strive for nor achieve consistency beyond very general statements about spirits and witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard, 1936, 1963). In the same spirit, Rodney Needham argued that statements of causality (the spirits caused x) are not accompanied by representations of causal processes (Needham, 1976).

  2. For instance, this approach has provided us with models and hypotheses on such aspects of religions as concepts of gods and spirits and other superhuman agents (Atran, 2002; Boyer, 1994a; Pyysiainen, 2001); notions of death and immortality (McCorkle, 2010; White, 2016); recurrent features of rituals (Lawson and McCauley, 1990; Liénard and Boyer, 2006); connections between differences in religious doctrines and differences in cooperation (Baumard et al., 2015; Purzycki et al., 2016)—for general surveys, see Barrett, 2000; Boyer and Bergstrom, 2008; Xygalatas, 2014.

  3. This of course assumes an idealized game dynamic, a limiting case in which there is only time for one foraging expedition given the alternatives described.

  4. Note that in this model, people are more likely to follow a recommendation if it emanates from a source that has prior Good Source status, independently of that specific recommendation. This is the general phenomenon studied in formal models of advice-taking (Pornpitakpan, 2004; Sobel, 2013), distinct from those highly specific situations, in which an agent produces both a statement and a behavior that would be risky if the statement was false, therefore boosting their credibility (Henrich, 2009).

  5. This is not an exceptional situation in reaction to danger and misfortune. In a somewhat similar manner, people throughout history agreed to undergo medical treatments that brought about no clear benefits. Apart from some actually effective cures, based for example on empirical knowledge of plants, medicine until the beginning of the twentieth century had very limited therapeutic efficacy and in fact often compromised the patients’ recovery (e.g., in the case of bloodletting). Nevertheless, few people considered it a viable option to ignore medical prescriptions and let nature take its course.

  6. Note, again, the persistence of such dynamics in attitudes to medicine, even in modern contexts where practitioners make use of general findings from biology. In their interaction with patients, physicians do not derive their authority from their knowledge of the general facts of physiology and anatomy—which many biologists possess too, and sometimes in greater detail and accuracy. The authority of doctors is linked to clinical competence—that is, the presumed capacity to identify the unique features of each pathological case.

  7. Obviously, there may be reasons, other than Good Source dynamics that lead to this focus. For one thing, people may focus on the particular case because they need a consensus view on who might be responsible for the particular situation at hand (Boyer, 2020).

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Niklas Andersson, Nicolas Baumard, Pierre Liénard, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin, Manvir Singh, Human Nature’s editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous version.

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Research for this article was funded by a planning grant from the Templeton Religion Trust (#TRT0295).

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Boyer, P. Deriving Features of Religions in the Wild. Hum Nat 32, 557–581 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09410-y

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