The Case for Chimpanzee Religion

Bibliographic Data

ID12901249
AuthorsJames B Harrod (International Society for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume8
Issue1
Pages8-45
Publication date2014-06-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Study of Religion Nature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-4907 • E-ISSN: 1749-4915
PublisherEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jsrnc.v8i1.8
OpenAlexW2170926513
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Do chimpanzees engage in religious behaviors? To date this question remains unanswered. I use methods from religious studies and anthropology of religion that demonstrate an answer in the af?rmative. A comprehensive review of primatology reports reveals that chimpanzees do perform ritualized patterns of behavior in response to birth, death, consortship, and elemental natural phenomena. A structuralist analysis of these patterns shows that chimpanzees deploy similar formulaic action schemas involving recombination of syntagmatic and paradigmatic behaviors across all four of these life-situations. In the course of these performances, chimpanzees decontextualize and convert everyday communicative signals to express non-ordinary emotions of wonder and awe. The patterning of chimpanzee ritual behaviors evidences all the components of a prototypical trans-species de?nition of religion. These ?ndings support hypotheses that propose religious behaviors for other species, including hominins prior to Homo sapiens sapiens

Action (physics · Epistemology · Homo sapiens · Primatology · Sociology · Wonder · Anthropology · Communication · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior · Philosophy · Primate Behavior and Ecology · Psychology · Social Psychology

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