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Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
by
Robert N. Bellah
3.98 · Rating details · 369 ratings · 40 reviews
Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition--a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.
How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.
Bellah's treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age--in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India--shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities. (less)
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Hardcover, 1st edition, 776 pages
Published September 15th 2011 by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
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This book is the opus magnum of the greatest living sociologist of religion. Nobody since Max Weber has produced such an erudite and systematic comparative world history of religion in its earlier phases. Robert Bellah opens new vistas for the interdisciplinary study of religion and for global inter-religious dialogue.Hans Joas, The University of Chicago and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Albert Ludwig University of FreiburgThis is an extraordinarily rich book based on wide-ranging scholarship. It contains not just a host of individual studies, but is informed with a coherent and powerful theoretical structure. There is nothing like it in existence. Of course, it will be challenged. But it will bring the debate a great step forward, even for its detractors. And it will enable other scholars to build on its insights in further studies of religion past and present.Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age and Dilemmas and ConnectionsRobert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution is the most important systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber. It is a page-turner of a bildungsroman of the human spirit on a truly global scale, and should be on every educated person's bookshelves. Bellah breathes new life into critical universal history by making ancient China and India indispensable parts of a grand narrative of human religious evolution. The generosity and breadth of his empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page. One will never see human history and our contemporary world the same after reading this magnificent book.Yang Xiao, Kenyon CollegeThis great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project. Robert Bellah first searches for the roots of ritual and myth in the natural evolution of our species and then follows with the social evolution of religion up to the Axial Age. In the second part of his book, he succeeds in a unique comparison of the origins of the handful of surviving world-religions, including Greek philosophy. In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study.Jrgen HabermasReligion in Human Evolution is a work of remarkable ambition and breadth. The wealth of reference which Robert Bellah calls upon in support of his argument is breath-taking, as is the daring of the argument itself. A marvellously stimulating book.John Banville, novelistBellah's reexamination of his own classic theory of religious evolution provides a treasure-chest of rich detail and sociological insight. The evolutionary story is not linear but full of twists and variations. The human capacity for religion begins in the earliest ritual gatherings involving emotion, music and dance, producing collective effervescence and shared narratives that give meaning to the utilitarian world. But ritual entwines with power and stratification, as chiefs vie with each other over the sheer length, expense, and impressiveness of ritual. Archaic kingdoms take a sinister turn with terroristic rituals such as human sacrifices exalting the power of god and ruler simultaneously. As societies become more complex and rulers acquire organization that relies more on administration and taxation than on sheer impressiveness and terror, religions move towards the axial breakthrough into more abstract, universal and self-reflexive concepts, elevating the religious sphere above worldly goods and power. Above all, the religions of the breakthrough become ethicized, turning against cruelty and inequality and creating the ideals that eventually will become those of more just and humane societies. Bellah deftly examines the major historical texts and weighs contemporary scholarship in presenting his encompassing vision.Randall Collins, author of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual ChangeIn this magisterial effort, eminent sociologist of religion Bellah attempts nothing less than to show the ways that the evolution of certain capacities among humans provided the foundation for religion... will be rewarded with a wealth of sparkling insights into the history of religion.Publishers WeeklyBellah's book is an interesting departure from the traditional separation of science and religion. He maintains that the evolving worldviews sought to unify rather than to divide people. Poignantly, it is upon these principles that both Western and Eastern modern societies are now based. What strikes the reader most powerfully is how the author connects cultural development and religion in an evolutionary context. He suggests that cultural evolution can be seen in mimetic, mythical, and theoretical contexts.Brian RenvallLibrary JournalReligion in Human Evolution is not like so many other 'science and religion' books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture--life, the universe, and everything...One need not believe in intelligent design to look for embryonic traces of human behavior on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. attempt to do just that, with the help of recent research in zoology and anthropology, results in a menagerie of case studies that provide the book's real innovation. Not only the chimps and monkeys evoked by the word 'evolution' in the title, but wolves and birds and iguanas all pass through these pages. Within such a sundry cast, Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected...Bellah is less concerned with whether religion is right or wrong, good or bad, perfume or mustard gas, than with understanding what it is and where it comes from, and in following the path toward that understanding, wherever it may lead...In a perfect world, the endless curiosity on display throughout Religion in Human Evolution would set the tone for all discussions of religion in the public square.Peter ManseauBookforumReligion in Human Evolution is not like so many other 'science and religion' books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture--life, the universe, and everything...One need not believe in intelligent design to look for embryonic traces of human behavior on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. attempt to do just that, with the help of recent research in zoology and anthropology, results in a menagerie of case studies that provide the book's real innovation. Not only the chimps and monkeys evoked by the word 'evolution' in the title, but wolves and birds and iguanas all pass through these pages. Within such a sundry cast, Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected...Bellah is less concerned with whether religion is right or wrong, good or bad, perfume or mustard gas, than with understanding what it is and where it comes from, and in following the path toward that understanding, wherever it may lead...In a perfect world, the endless curiosity on display throughout Religion in Human Evolution would set the tone for all discussions of religion in the public square.Peter ManseauBookforumEver since Darwin, the theory of evolution has been considered the deadly enemy of religious belief; the creation of Adam and Eve and the process of natural selection simply do not go together. In Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the sociologist Robert Bellah offers a new, unexpected way of reconciling these opposites, using evolutionary psychology to argue that the invention of religious belief played a crucial role in the development of modern human beings.Barnes and Noble ReviewOf Bellah's brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly... Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book's subject as well as its substance, and that is 'magisterial.'Alan WolfeNew York Times Book ReviewAn audacious project...Religion in Human Evolution is no simple effort to 'reconcile' religious belief with scientific understanding, but something far more interesting and ambitious. It seeks to take both religion and evolution seriously on their own terms, and to locate us within the stories they tell about the human condition in a way informed by the best emerging research on both terrains...The result is a grand narrative written in full understanding of the failures and limitations of recent grand narratives. Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the 'reflective judgment' of one of our best thinkers and writers...This is a big book, full of big ideas that demand sustained attention and disciplined thought. But in my view it repays a reader's effort in full...For over half a century, Robert N. Bellah has set his extraordinary mind out on the frontiers of human knowledge and has written back to make that knowledge accessible to the educated reader. This remarkable book finds him nearing the close of a long and fruitful life, and generously giving it back to us in love.Richard L. WoodCommonwealReligion in Human Evolution is a near-exhaustive examination of the biological and cultural origins of religion...Bellah gleefully plunges into the past, from the Big Bang to the first millennium B.C. in Israel, Greece, China, and India. For him, cosmology, cosmogony, mythology, ontogeny, and phylogeny all belong in the same chapter, or in some cases, the same paragraph, right alongside Hegel, Dawkins, and an astounding array of writers, scientists, sociologists, and philosophers. Although the tome stops short in the first millennium (leaving the last few thousand years for other scholars, or a future volume), its overall narrative does not feel incomplete. Expect to spend a long time reading this book--and expect to see the world differently when you finish.Benjamin SolowayThe DailyOne might best see this work as an attempt to do for the 21st century what the great sociologist of religion Max Weber did for the 20th in treating Judaism, China and India.Pheme PerkinsAmericaYou can't accuse Robert Bellah of thinking small. The University of California, Berkeley, sociologist set out to cover 'from the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age' and he does. (The Axial Age ran from about 800 BC to 200 BC when the first major religions got going.) The result is a deeply thoughtful discussion of how evolution and religion went hand in hand, each influencing the other, from humanity's earliest days. It's like a chat with a great thinker who takes one engaging tangent after another.Leigh DaytonThe AustralianReligion in Human Evolution is an immensely ambitious book on a topic only a scholar of Robert Bellah's stature could dare to tackle. It attempts no less than to explain human biological as well as cultural evolution in one sweep, beginning with early hominids and ending with the 'axial age.' Bellah engages evolutionary biology as well as cognitive psychology for the framing of his argument. This is a courageous move of transcending conventional disciplinary boundaries, for which he should be applauded...With Religion in Human Evolution Robert Bellah has given us a marvelous book written with the wisdom of age as well as youthful enthusiasm. Having discovered the importance of play in human evolution rather late in the writing process, Bellah nevertheless must have internalized it much earlier. All these rich chapters on ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India convey a certain playfulness and intellectual joy, which carry his narrative often beyond the needs of his argument, but stimulate and enrich the reader immensely.Martin RiesebrodtThe Immanent FrameThis book could really be regarded as Robert Bellah's 'State of the Species' address, after a life of scholarship and reflection. It is about everything: the nature of knowledge and meaning, and the history of our deepest yearnings and practices, as expressed in our religions. Posterity will decide whether he has succeeded, but the effort is magnificent in its own right. We all speak of doing difficult, disciplined, interdisciplinary thinking. Well, folks, this is what it looks like, down on the ground.Merlin DonaldThe Immanent FrameRobert Bellah's magnum opus does far more than just satisfy. It provides a transformative and thrillingly interdisciplinary account of the evolution of religion itself...So expert and simultaneously readable is Religion in Human Evolution--a model of academic writing--that it effectively banishes the paltry efforts of Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer and Robert Wright.Scott StephensAustralian Broadcasting Corporation's Religion and Ethics blogBellah's reexamination of his own classic theory of religious evolution provides a treasure-chest of rich detail and sociological insight. The evolutionary story is not linear but full of twists and variations. The human capacity for religion begins in the earliest ritual gatherings involving emotion, music and dance, producing collective effervescence and shared narratives that give meaning to the utilitarian world. But ritual entwines with power and stratification, as chiefs vie with each other over the sheer length, expense, and impressiveness of ritual. Archaic kingdoms take a sinister turn with terroristic rituals such as human sacrifices exalting the power of god and ruler simultaneously. As societies become more complex and rulers acquire organization that relies more on administration and taxation than on sheer impressiveness and terror, religions move towards the axial breakthrough into more abstract, universal and self-reflexive concepts, elevating the religious sphere above worldly goods and power. Above all, the religions of the breakthrough become ethicized, turning against cruelty and inequality and creating the ideals that eventually will become those of more just and humane societies. Bellah deftly examines the major historical texts and weighs contemporary scholarship in presenting his encompassing vision.Randall Collins, University of PennsylvaniaThe new magnum opus of a great contemporary sociologist...Bellah is one of those rare social scientists who not only studies the origins of our religions but who also participates in an active Christian congregation in his University of California neighborhood. Because he appropriates so wide a range of contemporary evolutionary sciences, in the 600 pages of this book a reader is likely to experience a great depth of gratitude for our debts as humans to our ancient lineages--to all the beings who are responsible for the explosion of our fellow species on our earth...If we read this book, adherents of every modern religion--especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims--will find vast new reasons for gratitude for our ancestors human and extra-human. We meet in these pages eloquent summaries of how the evolution of the human mind may be the greatest mystery of all.Donald ShriverTikkunInsightful and magisterial, it is the crowning achievement of a brilliant scholar who is sympathetic to religion and deeply attuned to the problems of modernity... draws on scientific explanations and historical facts to present and support a new multistranded theory of religion, one that places the human pursuit of meaning squarely in the context of our social history, which in turn rests in the context of our biological and cosmological evolution.Linda HeumanTricycleReligion in Human Evolution is an immense work; it would merit description as the achievement of a lifetime, were it not actually Bellah's second such achievement...What does it amount to? Quite a lot, actually: effectively, a history of the world up to about 2,000 years ago. The book has a James Michener-esque scope, proceeding effectively from the Big Bang forward. The only comparisons I can come up with are Hegel's magisterial but fragmentary notes for his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religions, or Weber's monumental works on the Sociology of World Religions (which got through China and India and ancient Israel, but no further). Bellah is definitely playing major league sociology...Both in the scale of its ambition, and in the degree to which that ambition is realized, this is a book that will outlast its critics...Each moment in his account invites further reflection, deeper immersion in the realities under study, a richer, more empathetic comprehension of what it is like to be these people. For all these reasons, I hope that future work in evolutionary theory and religion will learn from Bellah's example.Charles MathewesAmerican Interest --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Robert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
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Jan 17, 2017robin friedman rated it really liked it
Robert Bellah's Study Of Religion
The nature and significance of religion never ceases to fascinate. I became interested in reading Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution" (2011) as a result of a brief discussion on the book in philosopher Charles Taylor's recent work, "The Linguistic Animal" (2016), a study which shares much with Bellah's. Taylor praises Bellah's work for stressing the importance of play in understanding human development and in understanding religion. Taylor writes that play, in Bellah's study, is biologically based in that higher animals, at least, exhibit "play" behavior separate from their needs for food, shelter, or sex. According to Taylor, Bellah "points to the growing importance of play among these higher animals, especially among the young of the species, that is, their tendency to engage in mock fights (dogs) or mock captures (cats chasing a piece of string. There is an obvious analogy with human life, and Johan Huizinga, whom Bellah sites has done much to bring out the importance of play in human culture." (Taylor, p.335) In human culture, even more so than in animal behavior, play is valued for itself -- in games, literature, art, music and --- religion rather than as a means to something else.
Robert Bellah (1927 -- 2013) taught sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote extensively about the sociology of religion. His "Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic To the Axial Age" is, as Taylor described it, a "trailblazing" work with many insights, the chief of which, for me, was the importance it found in play. Bellah wrote the book over a 13 year period, and it displays astonishing erudition. The book is cross-disciplinary with lengthy, detailed considerations of psychology, cosmology, evolutionary theory, sociology, philosophy, and history, among much else. The book is long, difficult, insightful, and difficult to pin down. It seems to wander and get sidetracked and it is easy to lose the thread of the discussion. The subject of play is discussed in the first several chapters of the book before Bellah, by his own admission, loses sight of its importance in the latter chapters only to return to the subject in his lengthy conclusion, which is far more than a summation of the material that came before.
Bellah offers several provisional definitions of religion, including a definition derived from Emil Durkheim: "religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community." But a major theme of the book is the complexity of religion: Bellah argues that religions, in part, grow from their particular cultural settings. The nature of religion can best be seen at the end of a long study rather than at the beginning. Among the goals of the book, shared with the work of Charles Taylor and many others, is exploring the nature of religion in an age where some people believe that science is the sole means of legitimate knowledge. Bellah, of course, fully accepts science. The burden of his book is to argue against scientific reductionism, whether to physics or biology, in favor of an emergentism in which more complex forms of life acquire their own capacities which cannot be reduced simply to the movement or atoms or other component factors. So too, Bellah argues against a hard determinism in favor of the possibility that emerging forms of life gradually develop certain possibilities for free action. The possibility of play comes to the forefront. In the opening chapter of the book, "Religion and Reality" Bellah develops a pivotal distinction between the life of the everyday -- driven by the needs of survival- and a world beyond the pragmatic needs of daily life. As Bellah states, "one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time." (p.3) This insight and the entire opening chapter are critical to the book's argument.
Roughly the first half of the book explores the development of religion and ritual through insights derived from psychology and biology. This approach might seem to give a naturalistic tenor to Bellah's approach but that is not his goal. The argument still becomes difficult in places.
After exploring the development of religious impulses through psychology and biology, Bellah turns to show how religion develops in different types of societies. He explores many individual societies and types of societies with a great display of specifics and learning. He examines egalitarian hunter-gathering societies and moves on to large "archaic" societies such as the Kingdom of Hawaii just before European contact or the Kingdom of Egypt. Broadly, Bellah argues that in these early, highly structured archaic states there is a connection and a unity between the political and the divine. The distinctions that moderns tend to make do not develop until later.
The heart of the book consists of four long chapters about the "Axial Age" of about the fifth century B.C.E where four different cultures worked in different ways towards a separation of the human and the divine that remain pivotal to the way we understand ourselves. The four cultures are 1. Ancient Israel; 2. Ancient Greece, 3. China in the Late First Millenium BCE and 4. Ancient India. In each case, Bellah examines in detail the growth of separate, critical way of though from an earlier archaic culture in which religion was not clearly differentiated from human rule. Among the many points Bellah makes is that each case is different and understands religion differently. He wants to argue ultimately for a pluralistic approach to religious life in which individuals can learn from others without thinking that their approach to religion is the best or the only way.
The discussions of the four "Axial Age" cultures are lengthy but a joy to read. There is much to be learned from Bellah's explorations of the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Mencius, the Buddha in the texts of Theravada Buddhism and the extensive writings of the Hindus both before and after the Buddha, and of the Greek tragedians and --perhaps the figure closest to Bellah's heart -- Plato. With all the discussion which includes history, philosophy, and religion, the biological and psychological discussions in the earlier part of the book seem to get lost, as does the importance Bellah has ascribed to play. The book seems to me to become disjointed and more convincing in parts than as a unified whole.
I learned a great deal from Bellah's insights into cultures that I have studied to some degree -- the Greeks, Indians, and Ancient Israelites -- and about the Chinese, with which I was less familiar. Bellah argues that there are different ways of understanding reality, both the reality studied by science and the reality studied by culture and religion which differ among themselves. He writes early in the book, describing his project: as a "history of histories and a story of stories":
"I have become involved with many of the stories I recount to the point of at least partial conversion. In the extensive work that went into the four chapters dealing with the axial age .... I found myself morose as I completed each chapter, having come to live in a world I didn't want to leave but wanted to go on learning more about. Another way of putting it is that in each case I was learning more about myself and the world I live in. After all, that's what stories do." (p.45-46).
Bellah's book shows a life long love of history, learning, and of different forms of religious feeling and thought. From the earliest to the latest cultures, a theme of the book is that "nothing is ever lost."' If the book is less than fully cohesive, it is an inspiring work which rekindled my own love of the cultures and thinking it describes and encouraged me to learn more. Readers with a serious interest in religion will both struggle with and benefit from Bellah's book.
Robin Friedman (less)
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Apr 14, 2016Kaśyap rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history-biography, dharma, anthropology
A comprehensive historical analysis of human religion and thought, starting with the animal play and ending with the axial age breakthroughs. The major evolutionary theme being the development from the mimetic to mythic and narrative to the theoretic stage of the axial age. The ability to construct narratives that ultimately led to the development of “theoretic culture”.
More of a descriptive work rather than an analytic one, he considers the religious development from tribal to archaic to axial societies. The author presents anthropological case studies for tribal, archaic and axial age societies. For tribal religion, he considers the hunter gatherer societies from the Amazon, Australia and the America's from precolonial period rather than any prehistoric cases. He considers the precontact Hawaii as a case for the transition from tribal to archaic, and Egypt and Mesopotamia as cases for archaic societies.
The major bulk of the book though is given to dealing with the axial age societies of India, China, Israel and Greece. The transition from mythic narrative to theoretic culture occupies the bulk of this work. “Theoretical” breakthroughs and the evolution of universal ethics.
The scope of this work is grand and ambitious and I'm not doing any justice to it by this short and broken review. This book is clearly a product of a lifetime of research and learning. A very humanistic work on themes that are central to human experience. Highly recommended.
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Mar 29, 2012Michael Brady rated it liked it
This is strong piece of work. Bellah has assembled an imposing cathedral drawing brick by brick from cosmology, paleontology, archeology, biology, neurology, anthropology, mythology, philosophy, theology, politics, and literature to address the role of religion in human history. I found it very challenging to read and remain engaged with - it took me five months to complete its 606 pages - but I think it will sink in and become part of my thinking on the issues examined.
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Jan 30, 2017Thomas Ray rated it it was amazing
Shelves: trivia, history, prehistory, detailed-reviews
A history of human civilization, and religion's place in it. Small hunter-gatherer tribes have powerful beings that people identify with, whose aspects people take on during rituals. Only when human society evolves kings does religion evolve gods that are worshiped. Bellah is a sociologist. He sees religion's use to legitimate, and to criticize, authority.
Bellah does not see religion's power to build spiritual strength in the faithful. This is a little odd, in someone who's spent his life studying religion: he doesn't see what it's about, what it's for. Indeed, for Bellah, the distinction between philosophy and religion is artificial. Sociologists speak of an "axial age," mid-first milennium BCE, on which history turns. They characterize it as a moment when "thinking about thinking" emerges--when people become "like us." Which seems to mean, the moment when sociologists appear. Bellah's four embodiments of axial thought are: Deuteronomy, Plato, Confucius, Buddha. For "Deuteronomy," Bellah would've written, "Moses"--but he can't find any evidence that the stories of Moses were ever anything but fiction. Bellah is a huge fan of Plato.
Every known human society has gone through a period of human sacrifice. This is when the king has absolute power and is seen as divine. [For Bellah, this is history--but remember, every time a president uses the military, he is demanding human sacrifice of his own, and of the target people.]
Bellah's project is massively ambitious: to give a history of human civilization. He does a pretty good job.
Bellah died in 2013. (less)
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Aug 19, 2017Simon Lavoie rated it really liked it
Robert Bellah has a strong reach in contemporary sociology and social sciences. Among other things, his cultural analysis of American society is renown for having both sustained and strengthen Tocqueville's warning against democraties' proneness to soft tyranny (an all-encompassing control that settles together with the fall of civic commitment and the withdrawal in privacy).
Religion in Human Evolution is his last œuvre . It is a truly ambitious, remarkable piece of work spawning 13 years of effort.
Chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective that discard prior, taken for granted, distinctions (prehistory/history, animal/human, nature/culture). Bellah gives some glimpses on Big Bang Theory and emergence of life scenario ; then contrasts atomistic-pessimistic and emergentist-optimists cosmologies, and merges many stimulating bio-psycho-cultural concepts and hypothesis (niche construction, shared intention and attention, cooperative breeding, nurturance, animal play, enactive and narrative-self, unitive experience).
Chapters 3-9 carefully recollects rituals, myths and narratives, gathered from (roughly) the world over, that coincide with tribal (mimetic), chiefdom, archaic state (mythic), and axial (theoretic) religions.
Tribal-mimetic ones are reconstructed through the ethnographic studies of the Kalapalo (Brazil), Najavo (North America), and Warlbiri (Australia). Bellah shows how the durkheimian collective effervescence bolstered by rituals can rightfully be linked with gestural, prelinguistic communication. Danse, music and transe-state recapture the ways of Powerful Beings, by the mimesis of which group members gathers qua group members, going beyond the ordinary clivages (households and lineages) that pervade their day-to-day life.
Mythic cultures are reconstructed through the recollection of Polynesian cultures (Tokopia and Hawai'i), and of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chines cultures (Zhang and west Zou China). While mimetic, tribal cultures were egalitarian (or reverse-hierarchical, following Christoph Boem) – everyone participated in rituals and their preparation – the mythic stage shows the opposite. Only chiefs or priests perform rituals, in separate space. While gestural, music and danse still animate rituals in lineages and tribes, these no longer hold the day at the polity level. Secret speechs and formulas, sustained by sacrifice (be it of animals or of human) and by impressive constructions (temples or graves), underline and magnify the separateness of the Gods and of their human counterparts. Myths are narrative about the advent of order as it currently stands; its advent through the first, distant cohabitation of powerfull-god beings with human, cohabitation where sacred skills and knowledge where transmitted, cohabitation latter to be disrupted by a catastrophe (war, dispute, betrayal). Myths are global, pervasive way to see and act in the world, to produce and reproduce its order. A thinking where things stands in the words and representations itself (god is the word god – at least what is left of it after the orignal split ; saying is doing).
Axial age religions are reconstructed through the studies of ancient Isreal and Judea, of Greece, of India and China in the first millenium before common era. Whereas, in a way that recall Thom Scott-Phillips' argument against Chomsky, ancient cultures appear to be full of ambiguous terms, that hold for countless entities and processes, axial ones are still ambiguity-ridden, but overal, they are on the verge of a collapse toward specializing in many bounded meaning systems (our current iron cage, dixit Max Weber). Axial age is about a legitimation crisis of the state, where a universal ethics is precipitated against the hierarchical particularism of caste, and by theoretic thinking (logical thinking about thinking, propelled in large part by writing).
Preceded by a breakdown of kingdoms through invasion and conquest (echoing Peter Turchin's hypothesis in Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth) axial age's breakpoint is said to have been posthumous, brought by detached intellectuals, renouncers, who have lived like homeless and mendicant (Buddha, Parmenide, Plato, Aristotle, the isrealite prophets, Confucious' pupils – who where closer to office clerks). Seeing the social whole as if from the outside, preaching the formation of totally new individuals that can both disrupt the current order of things as it stands, and fit the universal dimension of moral (the Heaven mandate, the Dharma, the Reason, the Being, the Will of God), such is the Axial age as a legacy. Forming niches of believers (church, schools, universities), apart from the ordinary – day to day work and struggle, free to entertain and nourish their faith in such an advent of the moral realm without transgressing the order, is one of axial age's long lived consequences.
Chapter 10 is tatamount to Bellah admitting the fact that justifies the blend of admiration and lack of enthusiasm I feel towards . It fall shorts of working its empirical data (maybe not 3-9 but 4-9) following its thrilling perspective (chapter 1 & 2). Bellah admits of not having had enough time to work things out as intentend (niche construction, organism-steered evolution, new cooperation modes, and the like). The link with animal-play (see below) and the religious field is thin – only the images of gods as nurturant are there to recall. Chapter 10 makes justice to this hypothesis of a relaxed field prompted by nurturance and play. On another plan, it verses in a kind of dull acceptance of religious pluralism counteracted by an ecological anxiety (for the 6th extinction that still rages since 100 000, that is, since homo erectus began to make weapon and drive large mammal extinct wherever he went).
I shall be fair in saying that this book goes far beyond the ordinary, typological, abstracted-from-prior abstractions, way that sociologists build meta-narratives. In this regard, its lack could be seen as assets. Bellah certainly do not force datas to comply with one model / hypothesis. Few if any of the ethnographic and literrary cases studied can be said to match clearly with the cultural-cognitive stages borrowed from Merlin Donald (mimetic, mythic, theoretic). Bellah let the variability and in-betweenness nature of animal-human-social facts stands in their own throughout. That may be memorization and abstract un-friendly, but it is honnest and exemplar of a good humanistic science.
More on the perspective (spoiler) :
As mentioned, chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective, one of Big History. Such clusters of distinctions as Prehistory/History (the later equated with literacy, urban-setting, agriculture, states and army), Nature / Culture (the later equated with language, rules-norms, institutions) are said to no longer be tenable in the face of state-of-the art psychological and evolutionary researches. An abstract of the Big Bang theory and emergence of life is given as the best available grand narrative to which mankind has come. Atomistic-pessimistic views (Monod, Weinberg) are contrasted with emergentist-optimist ones (Deacon, Kaufman), and even more with religious naturalism. Credit is given to an organism-centered (as opposed to gene-centered) perspective on evolution coherent with Niche Construction. Organisms able to learn from one another through generations can bring about behaviors that modify and create new, enduring environments, which change the selective pressures these organisms are facing. These same pressures favor the morphological, anatomical, physiological and neurological adaptations that best fit the species-specific, created, environment (see Kevin Laland for a recent exposition of this thesis)). Hence organisms are not dispensable vehicles for genes' self-replicating mono-mania, but may be their own main steerer.
Kirschner and Gerhart's ( The Plausibility of Life ) Conserved Core Processes argument is taken as being of central value. Biological evolution does not discard or erase prior, primitive organisational properties, but adds one to another in a richly layered way, so that prokaryot remains basically the same (minus its prior self-sufficient replication) in molecules, which remains in cells, tissues, and so on. Likewise for psychology. At a child's earliest stage of development (following psychologist Jerome Bruner), suject and object, the experiencing subject and that which is experienced are not yet divided. This oneness, unitive experience which later psychological development unfold is never entirely lost. In fact, religion is perhaps best seen as an attempt to gain a double monopoly on the access to the unitive experience in adult, and on its (albeit self-contradictory) representation.
Religion in Human Evolution is presented as an attempt to track religion's transformations in the long run, going back to homo habilis and homo erectus, as replicating the ontogenetic – the individual's psychological stage of development, - and the phylogenetic – the evolutionary, niche-species in the making, emergence of new capacities for shared intentionnality. A position that is familiar to readers of Michael Tomasello.
« Many evolutionary biologists think human intelligence grew beyond that of any other species not because we were so clever technologically but because we developed very complex societies and the capacity for shared intention and shared attention that made an entirely new level of cooperation possible » (p.104)
Bellah provide such view with an extensive array of definitions – types of memories (begining with the ones we share with other mammals, episodic and procedural memories), types or representation (unitive, enactive, symbolic, poetic, narrative, conceptual).
Animal play is taken as an evolutionary forerunner of culture at large (and of rituals in particular). Nurturance allows teens to avoid selective pressures and to postpone engaging in agression, hunting, fleeing and mating. But while these behaviors are unrequired in their proper domain of survival, they are invested in an as-if , playful, way, using faint as behavioral signaling of intent (« I don't really want to chase you, I want to play with you in an as if chasing »), where truly hurting or truly mating turns the game down and out for all concerned. Echoing the Michael Tomasello and Franz De Waal debate, Bellah sees animal play as carrying both shared attention and intention outside utilitarian finality. There is indeed a shared attention and intention going on, but for an internally rewarding activity, not for a mutually productive one like hunting or gathering. Furthermore, animal play seems to have a fairness principle inbuilt in it, since the strongest partner willingly refrain to use his physical avantage to its fullest, but modulate and downgrade it in respect to the other's skill. Species with cooperative breeding like human (see Sarah Hrdy) get nurturance a long way farther compared to their un-cooperative counterparts, hence bolstering a whole new, creative, fair and variation-rich way to trigger and modulate adaptative skills.
Taken as stimulating unitive experience and claiming monopoly over it in the symbolic, representational and cognitive domains, Religion is likely be one of animal-play's most profuse and longlived offspring. (less)
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Aug 23, 2018Mohammed Khogir rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
I have a debated long on how to write a review of this book and came up with nothing but jumbled thoughts. This is truly a work to stand in front with nothing but awe. I cannot over-emphasize how much i learned from this book and in which ways it has changed my views and stimulated my thoughts. By spending 13 years working on this book, applying what i can discern from it a prodigious intellect, Robert Bellah has produced as objective analysis of the evolution of religion as can get. He grounds the capacity for religiosity in evolutionary biology through the evolution of play from ‘relaxed fields’ defined as the absence of evolutionary pressures for immediate survival. He then delineates how play later developed as ‘ritual’ was the basis not only of religiosity but rational thought, theory, and science. He discusses the development of religions and culture, inextricably intertwined and affecting each other, through tribal, archaic, and finally axial societies giving vivid and varied examples and details of each. At each stage of development the newer stage never loses what came before but integrates and reformulates its inheritance in novel ways. Ending with possible lessons and practical uses for the future this book has been truly remarkable (less)
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Apr 04, 2019Gokhan Balaban rated it really liked it
Shelves: general-philosophy-religion
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For the person who understands it, reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics can set off a subliminal dance.
Robert Bellah
In an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us.
Robert Bellah
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
Bertrand Russell
Robert Bellah’s lifetime pursuit of scholarly knowledge garnered for him a powerful source of reverence for humanity, and indeed for all of life, cosmos, and soul. Seek and ye shall find as the saying goes, and for a humanist like Bellah there was simply no limitation to how wide he sought. As Alan Wolfe said in his New York Times review of this book: “of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly. I never thought I would read a work in the sociology of religion that contained a discussion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. I now have.”
With commitment to the particulars of any given religion comes identity and belonging, enabling adherents to find security and comfort within the confines of the scripture and ritual that their religion entails. Benefits abound for the devotees, but we also know that religion may lead to inter-religious rivalry, sectarianism, and supremacist attitudes. Willful ignorance and prideful indifference seem to be the norm for our species, prone as it is to tribalism. Perhaps tribalism has simply served us well throughout our evolution. Whereas for scholars like Bellah a constant pursuit to seek and refine knowledge is like its’ own religious endeavor to empathize with man's condition, the masses focus on the self and group centered scope of their daily lives. Is scholasticism a more apt a vessel than religion to shake us out of our provincial proclivities into the embrace of humanity’s universal brotherhood? It certainly seemed so for Bellah.
Religion in Human Evolution begins with a discussion of religion’s psychological and evolutionary framework, citing the well-known work of scholars like Abraham Maslow, famous for his Hierarchy of Needs theory. An atheist may question why religion should even matter at all for a species like ours. Bellah calls attention to how much of life is embodied in religious representations, especially as it relates to what Bellah calls non-ordinary reality. Ordinary reality is the realm in which we fulfill basic deficiencies in our lives by delivering on pragmatic actions that motivate us. Going to work everyday is an illustration of this. Non-ordinary reality is refuge and relief from the real world. Religions consider this non-ordinary reality sacred. Religions represent and connect us to this realm symbolically. As Bellah puts it:
"Without the capacity for symbolic transcendence, for seeing the realm of daily life in terms of a realm beyond it, one would be trapped in a world of what has been called dreadful immanence. For the world of daily life seen solely as a world of rational response to anxiety and need is a world of mechanical necessity, not radical autonomy. It is through pointing to other realities, through beyonding, that religion and poetry, and science too in its own way, break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances."
In the instances when Bellah offers definitions for the word religion, a word that appears frequently is symbol: “symbols are basic to religion: religion becomes possible only with the emergence of language”. Bellah tries to persuade his readers that religious experiences are an integral part of life, embodying much more than what we commonly associate with religion. He gives an anecdote about an experience Abraham Maslow once had while attending a graduation ceremony at a university. Maslow had a vision while watching the students coming down the aisle. He imagined an endless procession of great scholarly figures from history, like Socrates and Freud, leading the procession of students at the ceremony. Bellah interprets Maslow’s vision “as an apprehension of the academic procession as a symbol, standing for the true university as a sacred community of learning, transcending time and space. If we no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse. If the university doesn’t have a fundamental symbolic reference point that transcends the pragmatic considerations of the world of working and is in tension with those considerations, then it has lost its raison d’etre”.
Bellah is well aware of critiques on religion, which sometimes are predicated on what he calls scientific triumphalism. The technological fruits of science have undoubtedly benefited mankind immensely, but Bellah states that technology can become “the victim of hubris and megalomania”. Scientific understanding must be integrated within other fields of knowledge, such as the humanities. The following excerpts from the book will illustrate his point:
"The Wikipedia article on Verstehen [a term Max Weber coined] describes it as ‘non-empirical, emphatic, or participatory examination of social phenomena’, but there is nothing non-empirical about emphatic examination of social phenomena. Such inquiry involves the effort to put oneself in the place of the person under scrutiny and try to see the world as they do. It is a valid effort to get at one rather central aspect of what is really going on among the people under study. One way of making the distinction between scientific and humanistic methodologies is to say that scientific explanations are concerned with the causes and functions of the activities under study; humanistic understanding is concerned with their meaning. Both kinds of methodologies are required in both science and the humanities".
"Scientific truth, about which I have no doubt, is an expression of scientific practice and has no metaphysical priority over other kinds of truth. When we find [Martin] Buber speaking of an eternal You, who shines through the faces of other humans, sometimes the faces of animals, even at moments through trees, rocks, and stars, it would be easy to try to find a scientific explanation of why he would say that. But such an explanation, which might be true, would in no way refute the truth of which Buber speaks. Science is an extremely valuable avenue to truth. It is not the only one. To claim it is the only one is what is legitimately called scientism and takes its place among the many fundamentalisms of this world."
Religion in Human Evolution elucidates the complex topic of religion in what one scholar said is the “most systematic and historical treatment of religion since Hegel, Durkheim, and Weber”. The same scholar adds that “the generosity and breadth of [Bellah’s] empathy and curiosity in humanity is on full display on every page”. It’s the kind of scholasticism that you can treat like a religious text, because besides the deepest of knowledge it also has a moral compass, a burgeoning sense that knowledge is the power to gain an upper hand on the temptations that drive us towards divisiveness with each other. (less)
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Mar 27, 2018Megan rated it liked it
Shelves: religious-studies, paleoanthropology
This is a dense book intended for the serious scholar instead of general readers.
If you’re interested in Religious Studies, this book studies why religion is a universal human phenomenon, found in almost all times and regions. Regardless of your belief in a single true religion, why so many religions have existed over time is an important question. Further, this book looks at the evolution of religion through the lens of ritual and social understanding of humans’ relationship with the divine. It does not look at the truth of religious beliefs or evaluate the validity of individual religions or religion in general. Christianity and Islam are not covered at all. The premise should be inoffensive to atheists and religious adherents alike.
The most interesting claim of this book to me is the argument that religious activity is related to play. Both ritual and play, the author argues, occur in a “relaxed field” that takes participants outside day-to-day existence (or, for much of our history, the ongoing struggle for survival). Humans have a psycho-social need for breaks of this kind. In some cases, the author talks of specific rituals “letting off steam,” especially in more oppressive societies.
Play and religious ritual, by taking people outside of daily life, also offer an important opportunity to more objectively evaluate society. This may serve to reinforce social structures, as was seen in archaic societies like Ancient Egypt, or it may critique them, such as occurred in Ancient Judah during the time of the prophets or India during the life of Gautama Buddha.
The author makes a well-researched argument that, if somewhat heavy reading, is ultimately persuasive.
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Oct 25, 2014Wing rated it it was amazing
Thirteen years in the making, and finished two years prior to his death, Professor Bellah's 600-page tome is, I think, a contemplation on the tension between the universalistic and the particularistic; the egalitarian and the hierarchical; the mythic and the mimetic; the empirical and the theoretical. The main backdrops are Greece, Israel, China, and India during the second half of the first millennium BCE, the so-called Axial Age. He discusses religious and ideological evolution in their sociop ...more
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Mar 10, 2012Jim Parker rated it it was amazing
This book takes much effort to read but the reader is rewarded, at least in my case, with a much improved understanding of how religion and society have changed together through the part of history covered in the text.
I was particularly impressed with how an ethical view of the world developed quite differently in different parts of the world but certainly bears a very common thread. Another thread I found very informative was how different cultures justify behaviors which are outside their moral framework.
Indeed no matter what part of the world we are from we are all human. (less)
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Apr 05, 2021Thomas rated it it was amazing
Shelves: archaeology, axial-age
Wow, there are few scholars in the world who could carry out a project like this. I'd like to read it from cover to cover, but for now I just had to skim it for the argument.
Notes:
Definitely want to have a short treatment of each of the four undisputed Axial Age regions: Israel, Greece, India, China. I think most people are unlikely to know much about more than one of these areas, and they are certainly not likely to see comparisons between them.
Axial religions as ends in themselves, aspirations towards an ideal society.
Axial religions as tools, strategies to achieve non-religious goals.
Briefly consider Merlin Donald’s 4 stages of human culture: episodic, mimetic, mythic, theoretical
What has ensued since the Axial age? A mixture of breakthroughs and breakdowns throughout time. The ideal is always before us, beyond us.
What made an Axial Age possible? Some degree of unease about the state of the world. Some kind of relaxed field in which people had sufficient time and energy to pursue something other than their subsistence. Renounced "work" as it was given to them and introduced certain elements of "play" in their utopian visions. Often quite serious play, but with many joyful moments.
In all four axial age movements, each was harshly critical of existing social-political conditions.
The axial transitions themselves were probably not simply parallel, though connections between them are hard to determine, but in subsequent history they all deeply influenced each other.
Religions don't differ so much in giving different answers to the same questions as in asking different questions. (less)
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Dec 18, 2012Miriam rated it liked it
The grand sweep of the book is breathtaking. Unfortunately, Bellah fell into the trap of authors who have enjoyed their research too much -- it was largely descriptive and did not live up to its analytical promise.
If you're looking for a one book review of the literature on the religious impulse in biological evolution, the modern academic understanding of the development of Judaism through to the later prophets, a history of Greek social and political development and how it led to Plato and Aristotle, the foundations of the various Chinese schools of thought including Confucianism, Daoism, and Mozi, and the development of Hinduism and the Buddhist split, then this is the book for you.
If you're trying to gain an understanding of the role religion played or how it was affected by the axial revolution, this can help. It's not front and center, though.
If you want to truly understand why the axial age is so significantly different from the archaic and hunter-gatherer, you'll need to work a lot harder to get that information. Yet, Bellah states that this is the typology that he's trying to develop. (less)
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Nov 22, 2020Daniel Goldman rated it it was amazing
Shelves: development-of-ideas
Loved this. For someone with such a huge knowledge he is very self-deprecating.
Major insights for me - religion and politics have developed in parallel over the ages. You may be able to formally or legally separate religion from state, but you cannot disconnect at a cultural development level.
Sadly, the book finishes its historic review 2,500 years ago. It would surely have been a wonderful opportunity to see the same writer analyse what has happened since. However, in many ways the point that he has chosen to end it is crucial. The time when societies begin to think about thinking. Religion begins to be an intellectual exercise in addition to the ceremonial etc.
Drawback of the book is the sheer immensity of its depth. It was hard for me to carry all of the different societies that Bellah reviewed in the second half, but the book was worth it even taking this into account. (less)
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May 06, 2020Jerry Pogan rated it really liked it
An incredibly dense historical text on the entanglement of religion and the development of society. This is not an easy read and is written in a very academic style that does not appear to be intended for the average reader. It is also a complete overload of information that really should be carefully read over a period of weeks instead of days, as I did. However, all that being said, it was quite interesting and informative, especially for someone like myself who has never been involved in religion. Although I've always been aware of the connection between religion and human development, I don't think that I ever realized how intimately connected they were. (less)
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Aug 03, 2012Tom marked it as to-read
Interesting interview with author in Hedgehog Review.
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_artic... ...more
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Mar 01, 2022Brett Williams rated it it was amazing
This book was so good I read it twice. This is the author’s magnum opus. Coalescing six decades of cultural and religious studies, he finished the book 2-years before he died at age 86 in 2013.
“As society became more complex,” writes Bellah, “religions followed suit, explicating, in their own way, the enormous differences between social strata that replaced the basic egalitarianism of forager tribes.” Egalitarianism was, however, a form of dominance, “the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each. The hunter-gather band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition of the family…” This is not to assume hunter-gatherers lived in paradise: “hunter-gatherers often had homicide rates higher than our inner cities,” although “war seems to be correlated with economic intensification…[and] an increase in economic surplus…does correlate with the growth of hierarchy and domination,” he writes. This economic intensification came with the Agricultural Revolution and the demise of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. After that, religion keeps having to catch up with changes in society. Religion as an innovation becomes a psychological compensator for too much change.
Bellah breaks this evolution into three phases he calls the mimetic (gestural communication), mythic, and theoretic (modern religions). All this springs from what he calls episodic culture, what neuroscientists call episodic memory: “I hit a nut like this one with a stick. It broke the nut. I got the meat. Let’s try that again.” The evolution of cognition requires Bellah to begin with our mammalian ancestors via studies of their mental processes by primatologist Frans de Waal and others; paleo-anthropological examinations of our hominid line of erectus, habilis, and early sapiens by Ian Tattersal’s clan; the sociological ruminations of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and their troop; and finally, neuroanthropologists like Merlin Donald. Bellah’s march of societies are subdivided into Neolithic tribal, archaic states (Mesopotamia and Egypt), and Axial Age states of Israel, Greece, India, and China.
It came as quite a surprise to me that “In the Beginning” there were no gods. Or so it appears. Spirits of the dead, animal powers, even of plants, but no gods. As human numbers grew thanks to ag, and got more unruly, the chief was invented who became the intercessor between the people and what we might call incipient gods as part of a new and asymmetric relationship; spirits suddenly worshipped. This was followed by divine-kings who fused the powers of spirit beings, nature, and society; a step in the simplification and coalescence of the countless powers loose on the world. The absolutizing of religious ideology, human sacrifice, and war were the sole prerogative of this type of king. What Bellah terms a “a U-shaped curve of despotism—from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the reemergence of despotism in complex societies…”
In the face of the new and intense Assyrian warfare of complete irradiation and deportation of survivors on the heels of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the axial way was a turn inward to find a way out: meditation (Buddha), prayer (Jewish prophets), analysis (Greek philosophers). With Israel, Greece, India, and China as the axil age cultures, we find new innovations in religion built on incremental steps of the past while still possessing some of their features. In Israel, we find a temperamental Yahweh not unlike Sumer’s Enlil, who eventually becomes universal to all creation, an idea seeded by the late Pharaohs. With concerns for justice as seen in Hammurabi’s law code, and with the later advent of Christianity, we find a developing concern for the individual as seen before in New Kingdom Egypt (1550-1070). “If we see the Moses story narrative, not as a historical account,” writes Bellah, “but as a character for a new kind of people, a people under God, not under a king, an idea parallel to Athenian democracy though longer lasting, then we might see Moses as a kind of ‘transitional object,’ as a way for a people who knew only monarchical regimes to give up the king and begin to understand what an alternative regimen might be like.”
With the retreat of democracies around the world, I couldn’t help wonder if we’re making another U-turn back to our primate origins. Notice how Bellah’s description of usurpers in ancient times sounds like our own: “For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding or moral community and new ritual forms to express it so that despotism becomes legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it…” Sound familiar?
A remarkable book that answered a thousand and one questions and generated many more. (less)
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Jun 11, 2020Tommy rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: history, religion
Most of this isn't about "religion", his understand is both to broad and narrow, but socio-political aspects in the emergence of the "axial age" more generally, which isn't a concept I totally believe in anyways. There's a ton of good citations in this but a lot of crappy post-structuralist and kinda pseudo-sciencey stuff as well.
I am aware that the position I am taking will make me liable to the accusation of Orientalism, of “essentializing” caste. If such a charge implies that I view all “Oriental” societies as inegalitarian, that is obviously not the case: Chapter 8 describes the profound egalitarianism of classical Chinese civilization. I am convinced that Islamic societies are also profoundly egalitarian. Of course, here I speak of ideology, as I do in the case of India-in practice no society since the hunter-gatherers has been very egalitarian. And even in ideology neither Chinese nor Islamic societies were egalitarian when it came to gender.
A lot of mushiness with words like this. (less)
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Apr 25, 2021Kath rated it really liked it
This is extremely well written and detailed. Can not take that away from Bellah. He does a good job at respectfully discussing religious origins too without offending. You don't need to be an athiest to appreciate this. However, it is hard going, and that's an understatement. I would say Bellah wrote this with theology scholars in mind instead of general readers and might struggle to engage some people. Took me a while to get through and by the time I got to the end had forgotton the beginning ! (less)
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Apr 11, 2019Khalid rated it really liked it
A very special and unique piece of work. That combines various branches of science put into one, for the sake of one subject that engulfs many things that all have one thing in common. They have all touched and impacted people’s lives for centuries, and religions that altered the very course of history and human civilization. Shedding the light on evolution in a different way. Such an eye-opening piece of work.
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Sep 07, 2019Paul Doherty rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
A very thorough study of how religion developed over the period in the sub-title. It's importance, in my opinion, is that it takes the objective view of a social scientist to unfold how much religion, and so religions, holds in common, which proves both fascinating and, if read openly, hopeful in healing the fractures we have created. This is a very long book, but Bellah's approachable writing style together with the insights provided make the effort worthwhile. Highly recommended! (less)
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Jul 25, 2019Waqas Khan rated it it was amazing
The book is now on top of my favourite list of all time. Robert Bellah's quote from a German novelist "Deep is the well of past" tells the whole story of religious evolution. A must read this book is, i would say.. (less)
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Mar 29, 2018Jake marked it as to-read
The stars I give this book very well may go down as I become better educated in the relevant fields.
This book felt like if Sapiens (Yuval harari), evolution of god, and a few other books somehow managed to make a baby. It is similar to sapiens in as much the book stresses the use of mythological structures as the functional manner by which humans created civilization. He uses different words to express a very similar idea. Harari puts more stress on economics, while Bellah does a similar thing but on religion(obviously). This book sketches out evolution in a more detailed manner, but shares a fundamentally materialist perspective on reality. I think Bellah has a much more academic view on religion than harari, and I expect understands religion in a lot more depth, but ill admit its been some time since ive read sapiens, so my intuitions may fail me. The really weird thing bellah did, which made me feel funky, was invoke memes. Yes MEMES. WHO REFERENCES MEMES!? this guy apparently. He heavily draws on memetics at certain points, or rather says the word meme in various conjugations over and over again. Twas cool..
Also it reminded me of evolution of god in as much as it traced the development of religion, BUT it did not have a super euro/jesus/abrahamic centric view on religion, and therefore there were parts talking about the classic pantheon of eastern religions.
Is this worth your time? Sure why not. It's certainty not groundbreaking in any manner, but it was a nice review and organization of many ideas..
Recommended for those interested in anthropology, religion, comparative religion (less)
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Feb 12, 2018Andrew Eick rated it it was amazing
Shelves: politics-and-philosophy, rhetoric-and-communication, science-and-nature, theology, anthropology
An absolutely fantastic read! Bellah's depth in this work is immense and it should be a must read for any student of the humanities. (less)
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Apr 09, 2013DROPPING OUT added it
I admit upfront that I have not read this book cover to cover but spot-read along the way, and for that reason I am not assigning a rating.
Bellah is a name known and admired in the social sciences, but this massive work did not move me, and for this reason.
People interested in "religion" can be said to fall in two major groups: those for whom religion is a social phenomenon, and those for whom religion plays an important part in their life. Of course overlap can and does occur.
But this book is largely a concatenation of suppositions made by other and earlier writers on the phenomenon we call "religion," and from pre-history, to a large part to boot.
Allow me to draw a parallel from my own life. I have always enjoyed studying languages and was convinced to major in linguistics when I was at university almost a half-century ago. To my amazement and horror, "theoretical linguistics" back then had little to do with languages as societies use them, but with philosophical ponderables that were really imponderable.
Aside from being "scholarly," I think a casual reader might get more out of the works of Karen Armstrong, such as A History of God and The Great Transformation.
The more spiritually minded might want to read Otto's The Idea of the Holy, or those denser works of Mercea Elieade. (less)
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Sep 22, 2012Lindsay Moore rated it liked it
Half way through this massive book. Charles Taylor mentions it near the end of his work entitled A Secular Age. I'm looking for something very deep about the nature of religion, religious experience, and its truth - if there is any truth in it....
So far, it seems that Robert Bellah thinks evolutionary theory will provide an insight. I find that less interesting and unlikely.
Mostly I am reading the book for his handling of the "axial age," that period that started around 500 BCE when all the great world's religions arose independently of each other. Karl Jaspers came up with the term "axial age." I read about it decades ago and was very impressed with the synchronicity of the religions arising together. (less)
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Jul 08, 2014Karen Blanchette rated it liked it
Shelves: sociology-religion
This book was long and dense so it took me forever just to get through it, let alone to really appreciate what he was saying. I appreciated the attention to each of the 4 civilizations and their approach to religion. It was cool to see how much overlapped between them all and how each civilization tells the same general stories over and over again. I really loved the conclusion, particularly his discussion on agricultural mass extinction and religious plurality. I felt it tied the contents in nicely. That being said, I can't really remember a whole lot of the details from each section mainly because there was so much information it was hard to really digest it all. (less)
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Nov 22, 2011Roy Kenagy marked it as to-read
Review - Richard Madsen at The Immanent Frame: http://bit.ly/s5vf25
"Bellah’s new masterpiece, Religion in Human Evolution is comparable in scope, breadth of scholarship, and depth of erudition to [Max] Weber’s study of world religions, but it is grounded in all of the advances of historical, linguistic, and archeological scholarship that have taken place since Weber, as well as theoretical advances in evolutionary biology and cognitive science." (less)
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Feb 20, 2012John Wylie rated it really liked it
A towering scholar! Very good in giving a sweeping and authoritative account of the "Archaic Age" in which gods appeared with special relationships with kings, transforming into the "Axial Age" represented by the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, Buddhist India, and Confucian China. I thought his evolutionary take quite lame and almost an afterthought. (less)
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Mar 30, 2012Lyndon rated it really liked it
Shelves: cultural-criticism
A book to be read when you're not in a hurry. Bellah draws and investigates from all kinds of angles, leaving the reader sometimes wondering what sort of book was he trying to write? Well, a large, generous and penetrating work that shys from simple analysis of pre- and axial ages where economics, religion and politics became dominant factors in human wellbeing and culture. (less)
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Jun 06, 2013David Alkek rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: philosophy
This scholarly tome takes the human saga from earliest times. It attempts to outline in a detailed way the development of religious thinking. It is especially good in the Axial age. However in order to be inclusive, Bellah has become pedantic, burdensome, and at times boring. A good reference if you don't want to read every word. (less)
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Deborah shepherd
5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution book
Reviewed in Australia on 31 December 2020
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It was Xmas gift
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Shaun Yip
1.0 out of 5 stars Impenetrable dross. A good example of academic writing gone bad.
Reviewed in Australia on 19 March 2021
As an archaeologist and ancient historian I was positively eager to read this. I must admit I barely survived the first 100 pages before setting it down with the sinking feeling that I'd read a lot of extremely dense prose, but understood barely anything. Thinking I ought not give up, I carried on after a break of almost two years and read a further 50 or so pages, before finally giving up in utter disgust. I've read 6000+ books, mostly on ancient history, archaeology and human evolution, but Bellah's book is one of only three books which I've never completed. Completely unreadable, even for one trained in an allied field.
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Seamus Sweeney
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnum opus in every sense.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 July 2015
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This is an absolute gem; full of insights. Despite its great size it is immensely readable. The range of erudition Bellah summons is remarkable. All those words like "magisterial" and "magnum opus" which are rather abused these days are amply earned by this book.
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Barry
3.0 out of 5 stars Religion
Reviewed in Canada on 29 July 2021
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When once asked of God why not have just one religion. Her answer was that all religions are precious. Why? Wouldn’t it be because they are all seeking to understand the greatest mystery in the universe? Love. What it is and what it isn’t. The essence of it is though, that it’s an infinite constant that will always be while existence is having an experience. Only love can command the particles of infinity which have memory and retain experience.
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Dr. Glockenspiel
3.0 out of 5 stars Enlarging the scope
Reviewed in Canada on 4 December 2017
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Robert Bellah has a strong reach in contemporary sociology and social sciences. Among other things, his cultural analysis of American society is renown for having both sustained and strengthen Tocqueville's warning against democraties' proneness to soft tyranny (an all-encompassing control that settles together with the fall of civic commitment and the withdrawal in privacy).
Religion in Human Evolution is his last œuvre . It is a truly ambitious, remarkable piece of work spawning 13 years of effort.
Chapters 1 & 2 set a broad perspective that discard prior, taken for granted, distinctions (prehistory/history, animal/human, nature/culture). Bellah gives some glimpses on Big Bang Theory and emergence of life scenario ; then contrasts atomistic-pessimistic and emergentist-optimists cosmologies, and merges many stimulating bio-psycho-cultural concepts and hypothesis (niche construction, shared intention and attention, cooperative breeding, nurturance, animal play, enactive and narrative-self, unitive experience).
Chapters 3-9 carefully recollects rituals, myths and narratives, gathered from (roughly) the world over, that coincide with tribal (mimetic), chiefdom, archaic state (mythic), and axial (theoretic) religions.
Tribal-mimetic ones are reconstructed through the ethnographic studies of the Kalapalo (Brazil), Najavo (North America), and Warlbiri (Australia). Bellah shows how the durkheimian collective effervescence bolstered by rituals can rightfully be linked with gestural, prelinguistic communication. Danse, music and transe-state recapture the ways of Powerful Beings, by the mimesis of which group members gathers qua group members, going beyond the ordinary clivages (households and lineages) that pervade their day-to-day life.
Mythic cultures are reconstructed through the recollection of Polynesian cultures (Tokopia and Hawai'i), and of ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Chines cultures (Zhang and west Zou China). While mimetic, tribal cultures were egalitarian (or reverse-hierarchical, following Christoph Boem) – everyone participated in rituals and their preparation – the mythic stage shows the opposite. Only chiefs or priests perform rituals, in separate space. While gestural, music and danse still animate rituals in lineages and tribes, these no longer hold the day at the polity level. Secret speechs and formulas, sustained by sacrifice (be it of animals or of human) and by impressive constructions (temples or graves), underline and magnify the separateness of the Gods and of their human counterparts. Myths are narrative about the advent of order as it currently stands; its advent through the first, distant cohabitation of powerfull-god beings with human, cohabitation where sacred skills and knowledge where transmitted, cohabitation latter to be disrupted by a catastrophe (war, dispute, betrayal). Myths are global, pervasive way to see and act in the world, to produce and reproduce its order. A thinking where things stands in the words and representations itself (god is the word god – at least what is left of it after the orignal split ; saying is doing).
Axial age religions are reconstructed through the studies of ancient Isreal and Judea, of Greece, of India and China in the first millenium before common era. Whereas, in a way that recall Thom Scott-Phillips' argument against Chomsky, ancient cultures appear to be full of ambiguous terms, that hold for countless entities and processes, axial ones are still ambiguity-ridden, but overal, they are on the verge of a collapse toward specializing in many bounded meaning systems (our current iron cage). Axial age is about a legitimation crisis of the state, brought by a universal ethics, detached of hierarchical particularisms, and by theoretic thinking (logical thinking about thinking, propelled in large part by writing).
Preceded by a breakdown of kingdoms through invasion and conquest (echoing Peter Turchin) axial age's breakpoint is said to have been posthumous, brought by detached intellectuals, renouncers, who have lived like homeless and mendicant (Buddha, Parmenide, Plato, Aristotle, the isrealite prophets, Confucious' pupils – who where closer to office clerks). Seeing the social whole as if from the outside, preaching the formation of totally new individuals that can both disrupt the current order of things as it stands, and fit the universal dimension of moral (the Heaven mandate, the Dharma, the Reason, the Being, the Will of God), such is the Axial age legacy. Forming niches of believers (church, schools, universities), apart from the ordinary – day to day work and sleep, free to entertain and nourish their faith in such an advent of the moral realm without transgressing the order, is one of axial age's consequences.
Chapter 10 is tatamount to Bellah admitting the fact that justifies the blend of admiration and lack of enthusiasm I feel towards . It fall shorts of working its empirical data (maybe not 3-9 but 4-9) following its thrilling perspective (chapter 1 & 2). Bellah admits of not having had enough time to work things out as intentend (niche construction, organism-steered evolution, new cooperation modes, and the like). The link with animal-play (see below) and the religious field is thin – only the images of gods as nurturant are there to recall. Chapter 10 makes justice to this hypothesis of a relaxed field prompted by nurturance and play. On another plan, it verses in a kind of dull acceptance of religious pluralism counteracted by an ecological anxiety (for the 6th extinction that still rages since 100 000, that is, since homo erectus began to make weapon and drive large mammal extinct wherever he go).
I shall be fair in saying that this book goes far beyond the ordinary, typological, abstracted-from-prior abstractions, way that sociologists build meta-narratives. So its lack could be seen as an asset. Bellah certainly do not force datas to comply with one model / hypothesis. Few if any of the ethnographic and literrary cases studied can be said to match clearly with the cultural-cognitive stages borrowed from Merlin Donald (mimetic, mythic, theoretic). Bellah let the variability and in-betweenness nature of animal-human-social facts stands in their own throughout. That may be memorization and abstract un-friendly, but it is honnest and exemplar of a good humanistic science.
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Wokker
4.0 out of 5 stars A detailed overview
Reviewed in Canada on 19 August 2019
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You can see the deep influence of Emile Durkheim on him. Furthermore, the classic "On Morals and Society" by Durkheim has in its latest edition an intro by Robert Bellah. It can get a little dense for moments but dissecting such a topic within the sociological structures that developed over the centuries, any minimal details left can make a big difference.
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1stein2
5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read!
Reviewed in Germany on 11 August 2013
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Das bisher beste Buch über die Rolle der Religion in der menschlichen Evolution. Ein schwerer Text, aber unwahscheinlich bereichernd. Wer sicher im Englischen ist, und wer wissenschaftliche Texte gewohnt ist, wird reich belohnt!
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