Religion: costs, signals, and the Neolithic transition
Date
2019
Authors
Sterelny, Kim
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Publisher
Routledge
Abstract
This paper extends the picture developed in Religion Re-Explained
(Sterelny, 2018) to groups in transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian
social environments, "big men" societies and their archaeological
equivalents. It begins by giving a more nuanced account of the
relationship between signals, rituals, and costs, showing that the costly
signaling model of religion is best seen as a family of models. These
vary in the extent to which they scale from smaller to larger social
worlds. Some are scale-independent; others can be scaled up, but only
by overcoming increasingly difficult signal broadcast problems; one is an
intrinsically small scale intimate social world model. These issues of
scalability are then integrated with transformations in the character and
function of ritual and belief, as ritual becomes an instrument for
competitive interactions within and across groups, and an expression of
unequal status and power, while also retaining in important ways earlier
roles of mediating social cohesion. Changes in ritual were both a
mechanism and an expression of the shift to a less equal social world.
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Source
Religion, Brain & Behavior
Type
Journal article
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Restricted until
2037-12-31