Review of S. Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(1): 199-200 (2004).
The ‘most stable and recurrent cultural patterns’, writes Atran in this readable and provocative book,‘are generated by specialized core adaptations of the human mind/brain’ (p. 170). Within evolutionary psychology, this is scarcely controversial – ‘stone age minds in a space age world’ is the fundamental idea. Where Atran differs from his colleagues is in attempting to glue this model to a very different one, in which social strategies, commitments, and institutions loom large. To explain religion, in Atran’s view, cognitive approaches will not suffice. Religion for Atran is more than a mass of internal representations flitting between brain and brain. Instead, he defines it as ‘costly communal commitments to hard-to-fake beliefs in the supernatural’ (p. 9).
I have never seen merit in the idea that biological, social, or historical facts can be psychologically explained. The currently fashionable tenets of evolutionary psychology therefore seem to me a poor substitute for interdisciplinary research into the origins and diversity of human social and mental life. If you believe that gods and goblins – like contracts and promises – are institutional facts, then it is ‘human social institutions’ whose evolution must be explained.Atran touches on institutions (p. 90), but only marginally and externally – as if the ritual institutions of religion were no more than ‘conduits’ for the f low of other-worldly concepts whose origins lay elsewhere. It is the passionate commitment of evolutionary psychology to repudiate Durkheim’s legacy in social science, and Atran does his best. But one has the sense of a scholar striving to reconcile the irreconcilable, as if seeking to make amends with that very tradition (Marxist, Durkheimian, social anthropological in the widest sense) which evolutionary psychology set out to annihilate and replace.
‘Religious ritual’, writes Atran in strikingly Durkheimian mode,
survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense,life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of co-operative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus. (p. 16)
What I find amusing is Atran’s studied refusal to acknowledge the paternity of such ideas. The book’s index lists Dostoevsky and Pope Gregory VII but omits Durkheim altogether. Moreover, it remains quite unclear to me how religious transmission’s acknowledged dependency on coercive institutions can be squared with Dan Sperber’s and Pascal Boyer’s antithetical notion which Atran also accepts namely, that ‘religious concepts need little in the way of overt cultural representation or instruction to be learned and transmitted’ (p. 96).
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Atran,Scott. In gods we trust: the evolutionary landscape of religion. xvi, 348 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford: Univ. Press, 2002. £39.50 (cloth)