3 - The prestige of the gods: evolutionary continuities in the formation of sacred objects

Summary

This is an attempt to reflect on some evolutionary connections between the formation of religious objects and what can be called prestige dispositions. I approach the topic as a historian of religion concerned with recurrences in pan-human behaviour, and also with integrative ways of explaining those recurrences such that compatibilities between biological and cultural frames of analysis can be exposed.

The study of religion shows patterned behaviours affected by the presence of stereotypical social representations. In terms of evolutionary theory, these are habitation behaviours that could be considered human versions of environment construction (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) and emergent symbolic cultures (Chase 1999), as well as essentialized cues that amount to dense forms of social eco-capital. Historians of religion and Durkheimian sociologists call them sacred objects and institutions, and forms of worldmaking. These objects have been given analytical value in terms of agency inference and relevance (Boyer 2001; McCauley & Lawson 2002), ritual invariance (Rappaport 1999), commitment devices (Sosis & Alcorta 2004), category boundaries as information-processing cues (Anttonen 2004), pollution avoidance (Boyer 2001: 212–15, 237–40), status (Milner 1994) and earlier, in the work of social anthropologists, kin affiliation and collective order (e.g. Mary Douglas). In broad terms, and in a way that might complement the above, I consider here the evolution of religious complexes as systemic forms of enculturated prestige. Perhaps it adds one more piece to the puzzle.