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Product details

File Size: 7856 KB

Print Length: 784 pages

Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 15, 2011)

Publication Date: September 15, 2011

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC

Language: English

ASIN: B006JX4TTU

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Robert Bellah attempts in this work to provide a “deep history” of religion, one that probes beyond the limits of recorded history, in an attempt to trace the evolutionary origins of the capacities that lie at the root of religion, and provide a synopsis of the interconnected and non-linear history of social and religious evolution up to the axial age. Since the axial age is defined as the period of history when our “cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us, all originate” (269) the book is really an attempt to trace religion from its earliest evolutionary precursors up to modern times, though the book ends before the development of Christianity and Islam. This is an ambitious project, and an exciting one, and perhaps even a necessary one, but I did not feel this book was successful in living up to its promise.The book can be divided into roughly three sections. The first section is comprised of the first two chapters entitled “Religion and Reality” and “Religion and Evolution.” In the chapter on “Religion and Reality” Bellah provides a preliminary definition of religion, based on the definition offered by Clifford Geertz, and he attempts to describe the relationship between religion and everday practical reality. Using the theories of Alfred Schultz and Abraham Maslow he tries to get at the distinctiveness of religion by drawing contrasts between the world of “practical or pragmatic interest” and “non-ordinary reality”, on the one hand, and what Maslow called “D-Cognition” (short for deficiency-cognition) and “B-Cognition” (short for being-cognition) on the other.In the chapter on “Religion and Evolution” Bellah discusses the notion of conserved core-processes (processes that have origins deep in evolutionary history and are conserved throughout later mutations, like metabolism), the evolutionary origins of empathy and play, and he introduces Merlin Donald’s three-stage theory of human cognition and cultural evolution. Merlin’s theory is one of the primary structuring principles of the book. Bellah’s history of religion begins with tribal religions, in which mimetic culture, where meanings are enacted through bodily movement and song, is primary, proceeds through the religions of archaic states where narrative and mythospeculation transform earlier mimetic culture, and terminates in the axial age where theoretic culture further transforms inherited narratives and mythologies.The second section of the book is comprised of the middle three chapters which are devoted to religious history in mimetic and mythological cultures. The history proceeds from the largely mimetic, and roughly egalitarian, societies of the Kalapalo Indians up to the mythological and hierarchical socieities of ancient Egypt and Shang and Western Zhou China. Bellah peppers his narrative with case histories of the Kalapalo Indians, the Navaho, the Tikopia of Polynesia and the Hawaiians among others. In each case history Bellah attempts to analyze the forces operative in the creation, maintenance and transformations of social institutions and he attempts to tie those to developments in religious thought and practice.The third section of the book is comprised of the last four chapters of the book and it consists in a fairly detailed analysis of the four axial civilizations: Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India. In these chapters, Bellah attempts to define in each case what the “axial breakthrough” actually consisted of and he attempts to tie those breakthroughs to the social conditions that prevailed at the time. This last section is over half of the book and seems to be the primary subject of Bellah’s book. The primary question Bellah seems to be addressing is: What accounts for the breakthrough to theoretic or critical thought and to an ideal standpoint in religion from which a criticism of existing social structures becomes possible?While Bellah offers plenty of interesting insights along the way the book suffered from many flaws. The first section of the book, where Bellah seems to lay the groundwork for a “theory of religion” in the true sense, plays very little role in the more historical sections of the book, with the exception of Merlin Donald’s theories. The notions of non-ordinary reality, B versus D cognition, core conserved processes and empathy do not really appear after the first two chapters (the last mention of “conserved core processes” is page 87, for example). Even the notion of play, which reappears in the conclusion, plays virtually no role in the historical sections, and it is never entirely clear how all of these concepts relate to religion in the proper sense. Readers who are looking for a new “theory of religion” that explains the evolutionary origins of religion, its adaptive or non-adaptive functions, and the causal relations between religion and other forms of social life are going to be disappointed.The book seems to lack a theoretical core. Bellah points to many fascinating correlations. For example, the historical and social context for the rise of the prophets in ancient Israel. However, it is never clear whether the causal arrow is supposed to run from material social relations to religious ideology or the other way around. I saw a panel on Bellah’s book online, at which Bellah was present, and he seemed to admit that he ignored the issue of causality because it was just too difficult to determine which way the causal arrow runs but, in my opinion, science is inseparable from the search for causal mechanisms and it is worth putting forward a causal story even if the story turns out to be wrong. The causal stories that Marx or Durkheim tell about religion are probably wrong, at least in some respects, but they both had a theoretical core - that took a stance on causality - and made it possible to criticize their theories and develop alternative theories. Bellah’s analysis seems to me to lack such a core and I think it suffers for that. I think being wrong would have been more interesting than not taking a stance on the issue at all.I was disappointed in the lack of theory but even the descriptive historical sections of the book fell short of what I was expecting. Much of the book is simply Bellah summarizing the work of other scholars. It is possible to learn something from these summaries but I constantly felt like my time would have been used more effectively by simply reading Bellah’s sources (which I intend to do). Bellah spends a fair amount of his time getting into esoteric scholary debates. For example, in the chapter on China, Bellah gets into the debate about whether ren or li was more important in Confucian philosophy. It was not at all clear to me that reaching a decision on that question was all that important for Bellah’s overall argument. It felt like Bellah was getting sidetracked and I think the narrative would have been better served if Bellah had spent more time going into the essentials of Confucian philosophy and the relationship between its tenets and social institutions at the time. This would have made the chapter a more satisfactory introduction to the subject for people like me who are not already well versed in ancient Chinese history and philosophy.Finally, I have to make a final comment about something that I just found bizarre. In the conclusion of the book Bellah raises what I think is an interesting question: What place does a metanarrative have in his analysis? Bellah is rightfully somewhat suspicious of metanarratives and one virtue of his book is that his history of religion is not a linear history of “progress”. However, Bellah argues that metanarratives are essential for our pragmatic engagements in trying to bring about a better world (599). I agree with all of this, but then Bellah goes on to say that the “primary practical intent” of his work is that humans need to “wake up” to the ecological crisis we are currently facing in the form of a sixth great extinction event. While I am in full sympathy with this “practical intent” it seems to me to come totally out of left field.Bellah’s book is about the history of religion, and the first time this ecological crisis is even mentioned is on page 602 (the book itself is 606 pages long), so it is not at all clear to me how anyone reading this book could ever have gotten the idea that the primary practical import of the whole thing had to do with our need to address our current ecological crisis or how this concern could possibly serve as a coherent metanarrative tying everything in the book together. This is perhaps a minor point but I think the bigger issue is: this book seemed to me to be a giant hodge podge. Bellah just threw everything he had in without worrying about whether it was coherent. The fact that he claims, at the very end of his story, that the major practical import of a book on the sociology of religion is inspiring us to take action regarding our current ecological crisis seemed to me to illustrate this bigger issue.I realize some very intelligent people reviewed this work very positively so any reader of this review will have to put my opinion into the scales with much weightier opinions. I am thinking of Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas in particular. I have a great deal of respect for both of them and partially out of deference to them I made every effort to wring whatever I could out of this book. I began re-reading sections early on because I was not getting as much out of the book as I expected based on the glowing reviews and I felt like I must be missing something, but eventually it began to feel like I was trying to wring water out of a stone. Ultimately, what this book gave me is a series of topics I would like to study in more depth, and a list of books to get me started, which is not nothing, but is a lot less than I expected.

The topic is interesting and timely, but it left me slightly unhappy. Reviewing my notes, it is clear that I over the reading of the book got the impression that the author wants to salvage an old notion of Karl Jaspers (one of the group of intelectualls meeting with Karl Weber in Heidelberg ascribed as one of the first religionsociologists). The notion being that all world relgions broke out to a theological about 500 BCE to 100 ACE. So on one hand the book is a tour de force of learning which is of great help for anybody interested in the historical roots of the larger religions as well as a very interesting discussion of what religion might have been in prehistorical times. On the other hand, the reinterpretation of what the religious doctrins evolved into, felt a bit as somebody wanting to see patterns which are not there. Or trying to fit Karl Jaspers round key into a square keyhole. Nevertheless, inspite of this feeling, the book was worthwhile and can be recommended to anybody who as I have a fairly shallow understanding of the history of th world relgions

I needed a less academic book. I couldn't finish this and gave up on subject for now. I think I needed the cliff notes version.

This book was a wonderfully ambitious undertaking, but it lacks a certain conceptual tightness I was hoping for. I appreciated the honesty of attributing many of his thoughts to the work of others, and to that degree, I can see this man does not have a large ego to feed and is willing to invite others to his dialog. And that he certainly did .... With the complexity and dense nature of the material, I may have missed it along the way, but I would have enjoyed more of his personal analysis and conclusions. I loved his discussion of play and the world of work, and how these two worlds can be woven together into the tapestry of life. His suggestion was that religion is merely an elaboration, at least in part, of the propensity of all creatures to engage in play. Although this may seem offensive to some, I got his point without agreeing totally with his (or his sources') analysis. Although I found myself wondering whether the content was consistently true to the theme of book, and I was tempted many times to simply give it up, I endured to the end and found some helpful focusing in the final conclusion. But even the conclusion was not what I hoped it would be. The author is undoubtedly a lot smarter than I am, and being put at a disadvantage if I analyze this, I give it 3 stars.

Incredible voyage. Buckminster Fuller said UNIVERSE is everything experienced so far by all of humanity... this book is a glimpse of the UNIVERSE touching a little bit from everything that is relevant in the HUMANITY'S VOYAGE of growth and of becoming...HUMAN. Rigorous, wide, scientific, humanistic and with a touch of EPIC

Religion in Human Evolution is a meticulously constructed academic tome (700+ pages) that effectively explores Bellah's understanding of how religion developed within the larger framework of human evolution from the paleolithic to the axial age. The account of religious beginnings and formation is interdisciplinary and comparative, displaying the author's incredible knowledge of the subject matter. Finally, the extended treatment of four axial cases (Israel, Greece, China, and India) provides a solid summary of recent scholarship while also displaying the author's humility (e.g., his appraisal of his own limited knowledge about ancient India prior to his research for this book - p. 481).

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