I do like using religious rituals as the basis for definitions of religion and spirituality, but you raise excellent criticisms of this strategy.
To be honest, before we started this conversation, I never really looked at rituals and their place in evolution of human behavior. Thus, your claim that rituals are at the root of religions was initially a bit surprising. Now that I know how much I don’t know it makes a lot of sense. Still, as I see it, religious rituals seem to me like an offshoot (or specialization) of generic ritual behavior. Something in the vein of an ever growing and more complex fractal — the recursion becomes more deep but it follows the same pattern.
sacred vs. profane […] not all cultures have concepts for this dichotomy anyway
Exactly. Although animists clearly distinguish between spiritual and material world, there’s no sacred vs. profane dichotomy in their worldview. By our “western” standards, they consider everything as sacred (or pragmatically profane — depends on how one looks at it). As I have written in The Rise of Empires, there have to be a theistic religion with god(s) as “an instrumentality through which the wholeness of existence and its various aspects operate” for that dichotomy to emerge.
Let’s distinguish between nomadic groups that move regularly throughout an established territory from migration where peoples/tribes are permanently moving to new territories. So, that’s not that.
I would say that we cannot separate one from the other — moving to new regions most probably resulted from slow shifting of the whole migratory area. Here’s a great paper in this regard:
Two quotes merely from abstract:
“the maximum obsidian transfer distances for Pleistocene modern humans (~200km and ~400km respectively) correspond to the geographic ranges of the outermost tribal layer in recent hunter-gatherers.”
“The greater time taken to traverse the larger modern human tribal ranges may have limited the frequency of their face-to-face interactions and thus necessitated additional mechanisms to ensure network connectivity, such as the exchange of symbolic artefacts including ornaments and figurines.”
Although it’s hard to extrapolate the actual social behavior from that data, the exchange of obsidian for symbolic artefacts seems more like an act of showing the proper amount of gratitude than commerce in the modern, transactional sense. I would say that it very much resembles a visit of distant relatives when one brings some sweets for kids and a bottle of fine wine for the adults as gifts or “appreciation tokens”.
There’s plenty of documentation about the Yanomamo
Sure, I’m sort of familiar with “standard” tribes from Amazon. I was talking specifically about Pirahã due to their very unique language and culture — the absence of time (thus also creation myths and history beyond living memory), simple kinship system, no formal leaders, no concept of god, no use of entheogens (as far as I know), etc. Their original culture really seems to me more ancient than the culture of the rest of Amazonian tribes (similarly, compare Pygmies vs. other African tribes, or look at Aboriginal Australians).
And yes, I do consider gang conflict a form of warfare. It’s a violent competition for territory, political control, and resources.
I get you. But then it would be probably more appropriate to talk about evolutionary advantages of violence in general. What immediately strikes me is that all cultures (empires) based on coercion collapsed, and e.g. direct bloodline of Julius Caesar vanished c. 100 years after his (violent) death. Says a lot in my opinion. Thus, when it comes to violence, the jury already ruled that it’s the peaceful ones who win and manage to adapt and survive despite the rampage of the violent ones. Also, it’s worth to consider that e.g. the most violent chimps are (almost unambiguously) not alpha males — says a lot, too.
