Week 9 Flashcards

Question

Synchronic and Diachronic Methods | Can be used to

Answer 1

Synchronic and Diachronic Methods • Can be used to test these three hypotheses about the relationship between society and religion coevolution.

Answer 2

 Synchronic Methods: • Are like cross-sectional methods (i.e., studying lots of societies at the same point in time; snapshot of cultural variation) • For example, looking at descent systems (inheritance) and how they relate to subsistence (food gathering). • There is a hypothesis that cultures that rely in fishing for sustenance are more likely to have maternal systems (trace heritage through women, line of mothers). A synchronic approach to studying this hypothesis would be test the correlation between fishing and maternal lineage in contemporary societies. • The main advantage of this approach is that there is large databases of information about contemporary societies. • A problem with this approach is the Galton’s Problem (non-independence of cultural traits; it means that just because certain cultural traits appear together synchronically we cannot assume that they are causally linked). Note: there are ways to address and reduce the issue of Galton's problem (i.e., control for historical relationships etc.) • One author noticed that as societies become more complex they adopt patrilineal descent; they begin to trace descent through men rather than women. However, Galton critiqued their conclusion and stated that the association could be explained by many other factors than a causal relationship between paternal lineage lading to more complex societies. For example, societies which use paternal lineage and are complex may merely share a common ancestor with both of these traits or adopted them from another societies (borrowed). This association may merely be a coincidence. • The Second problem is that because the evidence is correlational we are not able to determine causality between to associated cultural traits. The association could go in either direction. • For example, if we find evidence of patriliny and social complexity are linked there are three possible relationships present: o Patriliny – social complexity o Social complexity – patriliny o Patriliny – social complexity and social complexity - patriliny Galton’s Problem: Historical relatedness means that traits cannot be assumed to have arisen anew in each population: data points may not be independent of one another. • Applying this issue of determining the direction of causation to the three hypothesis of religion-society coevolution: o Religion-society o Society-religion o Religion-society and society-religion • In all three cases these hypothesis make the same prediction that religious trait X will be associated with social Trait X which doesn’t help us in identifying which of these alternative hypothesis are correct (synchronic approach)

Answer 3

• Otherwise called longitudinal methods • Involve studying changes overtime within a given cultural tradition. • We could do this by using historical/archeological sources. • Its main advantage is that it can tell us about the order of causation. If one trait causes another then it must precede it in time. Therefore, identifying time sequence of trait evolution and can tell us which trait causes another. • Applying this method to the original three hypothesis we can see that each hypothesis makes its own prediction about the direction of the relationship between religion- society: • Religion-society = changes in religious trait X will precede changes in social trait X • Society-religion = changes in society trait X will precede changes in religious trait X • Society-religion and religion-society = social trait X and religious trait X will appear at the same time (one doesn’t precede the other) • A disadvantage of this approach is the paucity of data (i.e., it requires a lot of data which often isn’t available; is we are looking at early human civilizations then archeological evidence is all we have, which has a lot of missing data around the world, it can only tell us limited amount about historical societies; archeology deals with residues of behaviour rather than directly observed behaviour; we cannot ask them what they believe) • Another disadvantage is that biases are what gets preserved over time.

Answer 4

• Is an emerging field which combines synchronic and diachronic methods together. • It is based on the idea that cultural evolution has a tree like structure (phylogeny; like Darwin’s tree of life) where branches result in the split of human groups into smaller distinct groups over time; sometimes they also merge into larger groups which is why figure b is more accurate than figure a. • They assume that human cultural evolution has enough of a tree like structure for the approach to be beneficial.

Answer 5

• Are made up of nodes, branches and tips • Nodes are points in time where populations split into smaller distinct groups • Branches reflect populations evolving overtime • Tips represent contemporary populations (sometimes extinct ones) • Root is the first common ancestor of all the populations in the tree • Cultural phylogenic methods allows us to take data from contemporary societies, map them onto the tips of a phylogenic tree and reconstruct how they’ve evolved over evolutionary time.

Answer 6

• Pacific = the Austronesian-speaking world (a language family which largely inhabits the pacific but not all cultures in the pacific speak Austronesian and not all Austronesian speaking countries are in the pacific). • There are 1200 Austronesian languages which makes it one of the largest language families in the world. • It is thought to have originated in Taiwan and subsequently expanded into southeast Asia, then into neuroociania i.e., New Guinea and into remote Oceania • The early stages of this migration may or may not have included large groups of people (i.e., migration) and may just reflect cultural diffusion. However, the later stages of the expansion of Austronesian-language into new Oceania would have required mass migration. New Zealand was one of the last people to be reached was New Zealand, with new methods we now know that Maori inhabited nz 700,000 years ago and not 1000,000. Settling NZ was a huge achievement.

Answer 7

Austronesian language tree(s) Austronesian Diversity (social and religious) • Austronesian speaking countries are diverse (genetic and cultural) • Prior to colonialization these Austronesian cultures were more diverse than they are today. • Diversity takes many forms but we can see it more broadly in their scale: • Late 1927, when the Kwaio mountains were first pacified, the mean number of adult men per descent group was 3 to 20 – small even by the standards of seaboard Melanesia. • At the other extreme, we have Hawaii which upon captain cooks arrival had four kingdoms with over 100,000 people, 100 fold difference in group size/structure. • Diversity in religion, ethnic religions (paganism or animism or indigenous religions which are closely tied to a specific context) were very diverse in their beliefs and practices. Although today most of them are now Christian or Muslim due to conversion during colonialization (Recent development into world religions, independent of other cultural traits and shared by more diverse cultures).

Answer 8

Watts et al. developed the Pulotu database of Pacific Religions (Austronesian) which documents the beliefs and religions of these groups. It involved reading ethnographies and coding them into numerical data. Pulotu is a Western-Polynesian term for the abode of the gods.

Answer 9

 Whilst they were building the database Joseph Bulbia was working on supernatural punishment and political complexity in the Austronesian speaking world.  The supernatural punishment/policing hypothesis which claims that believing in a moralising god facilitated cooperation and deterred selfishness.  Some believe that prosocial religions, with their Big Gods who watch, intervene, and demand hard-to-fake loyalty displays, facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers. In turn, these expanding groups took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, further ratcheting up large- scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution. (Norenzayan, 2013, p. 8). Definitions: • Political Complexity: o The number of jurisdictional levels … transcending the local community … Different types of organization on the same level … are counted as one, and organizations not held to be legitimate, e.g., imposed colonial regimes, are excluded. (Murdock, 1967, p. 160) • Moralising High God: o Is an agent that created the universe, is concerned about human affairs and intervenes to reward an punish human behaviour (i.e., Christian, Judaism and Islam god is the ultimate creator and cares about how people treat him and others; belief in MHG’s is not universal). • Broad Supernatural Punishment: o However, supernatural punishment may not need to be administered by a moralizing high god to be effective! The BSP argues that any from of supernatural punishment for selfish behaviour promotes large-scale cooperation. Supernatural punishment by lesser deities or impersonal forces i.e., Karma. Two Alternative Hypothesis about Supernatural Punishment: • Moralizing High God (MHG) Hypothesis: o Belief in supernatural punishment promotes large-scale cooperation most effectively if the punishing agent is a Moralizing High God. • Broad Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis: o Belief in supernatural punishment promotes large-scale cooperation whether the punishing agent is a Moralizing High God. Research Question: • Which hypothesis; MHG or BPS is linked to the evolution of larger and more complex societies (indexed as political complexity) in Austronesian speaking world. Political Complexity: • Figure A: o Local communities are smaller groups of people engaging in face-to-face interactions. In premodern societies this was most common but in contemporary societies it is more common to live in integrated communities such as states. In historical local communities they were largely politically independent. If leaders existed they would only have authority of their local community. Figure A. with the dots reflecting the local community and its leader. • Figure B, o several local communities are united under one leader[s] = one jurisdictional level beyond the local community. • Figure C, o is a more complex organisation. Where multiple integrated local communities are linked together under one leader. There are now two jurisdictional levels beyond the local community. • Highly Politically Complex Socities: o Joseph Bulbia defined that highly politically complex societies where groups with 2+ jurisdictional levels beyond the local community. Method: • He used political complexity as the contemporary cultural traits which he mapped onto the tips of the Austronesian-language-family phylogeny tree and reconstructed the evolutionary history under two difference models (independent & dependant) to see which model was the best fit and what hypothesis it supported. • Independent Model: traits (i.e., political complexity and supernatural beliefs) do not co-evolve; they are independent. In otherwards, the likelihood of one trait being lost or gained is independent of another being present. • Dependant Model: traits (i.e., political complexity and supernatural beliefs) do co-evolve; one trait can be more likely to be gained or lost if another is present. • 0 = absent, 1= gained. Therefore, 0-1 means a trait has been gained, 1-0 means that a trait has been lost. • In the independent model, there are (4) transitions possible because there are two traits and either can be lost or gained. • In the dependant model, there are (8) transitions possible because each trait can be gained or lost at different rates depending on if another trait is present (4; combinations double). • If we run both models and the dependent model runs substantially better than this supports that the traits are co-evolving. However, if the independent model is better they evolved independently of one another-no causal link is present. Mapping the studies two traits (political complexity and supernatural belief) onto the independent and dependant model this is what we get: • We would expect high political complexity and supernatural belief to coevolve. This could happen through supernatural beliefs making political complexity more likely to happen/lost; other way around or any of these combinations. Results: • Showed that political complexity coevolved with both MHG’s and BSP’s. In both instances the dependant model out performed the independent model. • Left (dependant model for BSP-political complexity) right (dependant model for MHG’s political complexity) • The thickness of the arrows show the rate of which these transitions occurred. The dotted lines show transition which are not significantly different from 0. • The left diagram clearly shows that BSP is more likely to be gained (and no less likely to be lost) in high politically complex societies. • The right diagram shows that high political complexity makes MHG’s more likely to be gained, which is the opposite direction of what the MHG hypothesis predicts! Whether MHG’s makes higher political complexity more likely to be gained is less clear but the follow up analysis showed no evidence of this pattern being present. ONLY HPC lead to MHG’s; MHG’s did not lead to HPC! Conclusion: • These results provide support for the BSP hypothesis and NOT the MHG hypothesis. • Caveat: is that MHG’s belief is rare in Austronesian- speaking cultures, only 6/96 had them. Those that did had a long history with world religions. This indicates that MHG’s may have been borrowed from cultures outside of the Austronesian world.

Answer 10

(A) Toba Batak: example of MHG belief • Another characterization of Mulajadi na Bolon is as a judge. He is conceived as a totally just judge who impartially administers his law and rules without favouring anybody ... The impartial, unbending, and inexorable justice of the High God is tempered with mercy and forgiveness. (Sinaga, 1981, p 58) • They maintained their indigenous beliefs till late 19th century but they’ve had extensive contact with other world religions such as Islam and their god sounds a lot like our Christian god. However, we cannot ASSUME that this is due to borrowing outside of Austronesian cultures but it is a likely possibility. (B) Eastern Toraja • Pue mpalaburu was mainly concerned with punishing those offenses which affected the foundations of their society: incest, intercourse with animals, the breaking of oaths, lying, stealing, etc., and his punishments were violent and sudden. '... he orders a crocodile to devour the liar; he makes a falling tree crush the thief; incest he punishes with long drought or with severe hurricanes, and he makes his wrath about other transgressions known by earthquakes, earth-falls and landslides, by which extensive plantations on the mountains are sometimes destroyed' (II, 6; 1912: I, 270f.). (Downs, 1956, p 28). • BSP was more common: 37/96 societies had it. Eastern Toraja is an example, of a BSP. They share similar traits to MHG’s but differences as well. He is mainly concerned about punishing offences which disturb the structure of society and punishes moral transgressions through natural disaster, misfortune and death. (C) Ontong Java • Other examples might be given to illustrate the principle that the kipua are always ready to punish those who fail to do their duty towards their relatives … The belief in immortality thus plays its part in securing the execution of obligations between relatives, especially within the joint family. When a person is afflicted with disease the community at large discusses the question to see if he has fulfilled his obligations. (Hogbin, 1934, pp 150-151) • BSP are more commonly less powerful and intervening than Eastern Toraja. For example, they had smaller circles of concern. Dead ancestors monitored for violations to kinship obligations and could inflict illness, less server than Eastern Toraja, and punish people fail to meet their obligations for their family. When people get sick in the community they first look at whether they’ve filled their obligations. (D) Iban • Each member part of the universe, be it spirit, human, animal, or vegetable, belongs to the universal order and has its normal and appropriate way of behaving according to its nature. When it follows the order, it follows its particular adat … An offence against adat disturbs the universal order, producing disorder and the undesirable 'heated’ or 'feverish' state, angat. The results of disorder range from minor sickness to epidemics and crop failure. Lesser transgressions may affect only the bilek [family] concerned, although this is not necessarily so since an offence against adat disrupts the total order …. Serious transgression of adat invariably touches the whole community. (Jensen, 1974, pp 111-113) • Supernatural punishment can occur without being tied to a specific agent (person): o Like in Hinduism and Buddhism o Natural and social laws (adat; customary law) o Each person is a part of the universe; An offence against adat disturbs the universal order, producing disorder and the undesirable 'heated’ or 'feverish' state, angat. The results of disorder range from minor sickness to epidemics and crop failure. Lesser transgressions may affect only the bilek [family] concerned, although this is not necessarily so since an offence against adat disrupts the total order …. Serious transgression of adat invariably touches the whole community. (E) Tikopia • Indirectly, Tikopia pagan religion showed a moral element in the field of responsibility. The representative character of much ritual and the mobilization of individual effort towards the common ends did imply a moral responsibility of every person for the welfare of others … But though failure in behaviour might be regarded as a sin … little moral stigma did actually attach to it. Moreover, the Tikopia gods were not regarded as concerning themselves with morality in other spheres. Adultery, lying, theft, though socially reprehensible and incurring moral judgement, were not regarded as requiring exclusion of the offender from ritual participation. They might result in religious sanctions, according to accepted belief, but this would be because of appeal to the gods or ancestors by the offended party, not by automatic consequence of sin. A person's moral state was treated as being his own responsibility and that of persons related to or associated with him, not the responsibility of religious entities. (Firth, 1970, pp 24-25) • Although, supernatural punishment beliefs were common in the sample. Most societies did not have them (MHGs or BSP). It seemed that supernatural world were indifferent to the moral conduct of human beings. Supernatural beings which we moralistic but didn’t have a negative stigma attached to behaviour to the extent that they were excluded for ritual practices but could be sanctioned. The responsibility of being moral being is the humans individual responsibility, not of the community or the religious entity.

Answer 11

Human Sacrifice and Social Stratification in the Austronesian speaking world • Applied the same cultural phylogeny method to looking at whether human ritual sacrifice (supernatural related sacrifice to appease gods, and reduce risk to community) is linked to social stratification in Austronesian world. • Social Control Hypothesis: • Human sacrifice serves to maintain intragroup power differences. A mechanism used by elites to maintain and extend power through violence and threats of violence (supernatural directed; framed as an action done to appease the gods, and outside of the elites control; this makes it a very effective mechanism of control because the risk of retaliation is minimised). • Social Stratification (an institutionalized form of social inequality) *Hypothesis: societies with human ritual sacrifice would be more likely to gain than loose socially stratification • Three categories of social stratification index allowed for further analysis on whether the level of social stratification of societies mattered for human sacrifice Egalitarian: o Egalitarian societies were those in which there was little or no hereditary inequality. This doesn’t mean that there was no inequality at all, just that these inequalities were rarely passed on from generation to generation. Here is an example of one of the egalitarian societies in the sample. Men in Santa Cruz could achieve high status, but couldn’t pass this status onto their sons, at least not directly. It seems that status had to be acquired anew with each generation. o As in many so-called stateless societies, the person of political and social importance achieves his position of authority, not by inherited prerogatives and wealth, or by lineal succession, but by demonstration of his superior abilities. Here, the critical abilities are commercial acumen and skill in redistributing amassed wealth to assist others in social observances that are held in the highest esteem. (Davenport, 1964, p 90) o You’ll notice that we’ve only mentioned men. Gender inequality is present in virtually all societies, but this isn’t stratification because it isn’t hereditary - men and women are just as likely to have sons or daughters. Highly Stratified: o Highly stratified societies were those in which there were pronounced hereditary inequalities in both wealth and status between clearly delineated social groups, as well as restricted opportunities for social mobility. The quote here is about a highland people from the Philippines: o At the top of the social scale in Bontok is a class known as kadangyan... The main basis from which kadangyan status is derived is hereditary rank, or more strictly. descent through senior lines within the class; secondarily it is possession of wealth and performance of major kanyau (ritual) observances, involving animal sacrifices and public feasts ... Below this group are the main body of the villagers who hold lands of their own, a kind of middle or commoner class … At the bottom of the social scale are a class of people in a state of peonage, because of debts and other obligations to their richer fellows …. The traditional rates of interest and of crop division here as in so many other sections of east and south Asia make escape from this group, once in it, almost impossible so that the obligations tend to carry over indefinitely from generation to generation. (Keesing, 1949, pp 594-595) o Elites, middle class and subordinates (slaves) persist over generations Moderately Stratified: o Moderately stratified societies were somewhere in the middle. Hereditary differences in wealth or status existed between groups, but one or more conditions were present that softened these distinctions, like opportunities for social mobility. The excerpt here is about the Marquesas. There were at least two classes in this society, but was a degree of social mobility, and differences in living standards were not dramatic. o At the head of the tribe stood a chief who usually ruled by birthright, being the eldest son of a line of eldest sons, tracing their devious genetic pathway back to the gods. Chieftainship was not only a matter of birth, however, for a good warrior could and did assume the position by virtue of force, wars honors, or economic power ... Subtribal rulers were distantly related to the chiefly line. Tribal and subtribal chiefs received decidedly deferential treatment from their subjects but were not the pampered tyrants of Hawaii and Tonga. They seem to have dressed much like commoners and in general did not act in a particularly autocratic fashion. Visitors often noted that they could not distinguish the chief in a crowd by dress or manner. (Suggs, 1966, pp 13-14) Results: • Human sacrifice happened at least occasionally in nearly half of the societies in the sample. • There was an obvious pattern in how prevalent it was at different levels of stratification – the more stratified a society was, the more likely it was to have human sacrifice. This seemed to support the social control hypothesis, as did the fact that in ethnographic descriptions of human sacrifice, the victims were almost always described as low-status. However, this pattern could have been explained in terms of opportunity. Presumably it was easier and less risky to sacrifice low status individuals, and it would have been easier to find low-status individuals in stratified societies. • To test the social control hypothesis properly, we needed to know how stratification and sacrifice had coevolved over time. Method: • To investigate how human sacrifice had coevolved with social stratification in general, we combined moderately stratified and highly stratified societies into one category, ‘stratified’. • To look at the relationship between human sacrifice and specifically high levels of stratification, we combined egalitarian and moderately stratified societies into another category. • We mapped these traits onto the tips of our phylogeny and reconstructed their evolutionary histories under dependent and independent models. Results: • What we found was consistent with the social control hypothesis: • Human sacrifice co-evolved with both social stratification in general and specifically high social stratification. • Societies with human sacrifice were less likely to lose social stratification in general, but were not more likely to gain it. • Conversely, societies with human sacrifice were more likely to gain high social stratification, but were not less likely to lose it.

Answer 12

• Involved the relationship between religion and society. • Almost all Austronesian-speakers today are followers of world religions, primarily Christianity and Islam. The spread of Islam in Southeast Asia is not very well documented, but there’s abundant information on the spread of Christianity. We were interested in looking at whether the cultural traits of Austronesian societies influenced how long they took to adopt Christianity. Method: • Our approach was synchronic. We used a cultural phylogeny to address Galton’s problem, but did not attempt to reconstruct patterns of cultural change over evolutionary time. We were interested in how different societies responded to a singular historical event – the arrival of Christianity. • We tested two hypotheses about how cultural traits predicted conversion times. These hypotheses were based on two different views about how Christianity has spread over the past 2,000 years. • The top-down view o is that Christianity has spread through appealing to political elites. o We reasoned that if the spread of Christianity in the Pacific was top-down, higher political complexity would predict faster rates of conversion. o This is because in politically complex societies, more people are under the control of fewer leaders. • The bottom-up view o is that Christianity spread by appealing to underclasses through its egalitarian message. o If the spread of Christianity was bottom-up, we expected social inequality to predict faster Christianisation. o This is because by definition, underclasses can only exist in unequal societies. Sample: o We coded 70 societies, which were a subset of the 116 societies n the Pulotu database. o The sources we used were mostly missionary accounts, or secondary sources based on these accounts. Variables: o Our dependent variable was conversion time, which we defined as the number of years that elapsed between the time that missioniaries arrived and the time at which half of the population had adopted Christianity. One striking thing was how much conversion time varied The range was 1 to 203 years. The mean and median were 30 and 25 years respectively, which is intriguingly close to a generation. o In terms of our predictor variables, political complexity will already be familiar from the supernatural punishment study, and our measure of social inequality was very similar to the social stratification variable from the human sacrifice study. o We also included three other predictors: population size, isolation, and year of missionary arrival. In addition, we tested whether phylogeny and geography made a difference to conversion time – that is, whether societies that were culturally related or geographically close together had similar outcomes. Results: o We found that all of our predictor variables except for social stratification significantly predicted conversion times. o All of these except for population size were negative predictors – that is, they predicted shorter conversion times. o Phylogeny and geography had no effect. o The most interesting result in terms of our hypotheses was that political complexity predicted faster conversion, whereas social inequality did not. This tends to favour the top-down view of how Christianity has spread, rather than the bottom-up view. o Having underclasses made little or no difference to conversion time, whereas having powerful leaders did. These results are consistent with missionary accounts, which explicitly describe a strategy of seeking to convert powerful leaders – partly for protection, and partly in the hope that their dependants would follow. It would seem that much of the time, this strategy worked. o We did some follow-up analyses that provided further nuance. We noticed that the two societies in the sample that took the longest to convert – the Iban of Borneo and the Ifugao of the Philippines, which are clearly visible on the map - lacked any political authority at all. These were the kind of societies that anthropologists call ‘acephalous’ – they lack formal leadership. When we excluded the 11 acephalous societies from the sample, the effect of political complexity disappeared. This indicates that it’s not political complexity per se that influences conversion, but simply the presence of formal political leaders. Taken Together:  These studies seem to favour a reciprocal view of the relationship between society and religion: o In the supernatural punishment study, supernatural punishment beliefs influenced political complexity, and political complexity also had an effect on supernatural punishment beliefs. o In the human sacrifice study, we found that a supernatural practice, human sacrifice, affected the likelihood of societies becoming more or less stratified. o In our paper on the spread of Christianity, we showed that political authority made a difference to how readily societies adopted a new religion.  Religion can shape society, but the reverse can also be true.

Answer 13

 Cultural phylogenetic methods are a useful tool for studying the evolution of religion.  The Pacific is an ideal place for studying cultural evolution in general and the cultural evolution of religion in particular.  Cultural phylogenetic studies of religion in the Pacific suggest a reciprocal relationship between religion and other cultural phenomena.  A lot more remains to be illuminated though. Cultural phylogenetics is a useful way of getting at these questions, and the Pacific is a superb place to apply these methods.