Variation in the Structure and Role of Religious Institutions

Examples from Pre-Columbian America

Bibliographic Data

ID7740404
AuthorsAlexander J Martins (0000-0002-5213-9421), Alexander J Martín, R Felipe Sol
Year2021
Volume62
Issue6
Pages692-716
Publication date2021-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/717777
OpenAlexW4200523339
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited95

Research on religious behavior has stressed its character as a cognitive complex that evolved during the Pleistocene to incentivize prosocial behavior and that serves roughly similar population management roles regardless of social context. To explore this idea, we reconstructed religious institutional structures for three pre-Columbian societies using a key feature of religious organization: the basal congregation size—a critical axis of population management and the creation of shared communal identities. Results show that in places where populations could fission to avoid intracommunity conflict, religious institutions show no real evidence of internal community management. In locations where large towns meant more internal conflict, religious institutions mapped themselves over the extended family, creating small congregations that provided the midlevel organizational tiers necessary to support larger communities. Finally, for populations organized into regional polities, religious institutions used large ritual assemblies and conspicuous paraphernalia to invoke our Pleistocene cognitive predispositions for altruistic and cooperative behavior toward close kin but redirected them toward the large non-kin religious community. This variation highlights the malleable and reactive nature of religious institutions, which interact quite differently with their constituent members or their cognitive predispositions depending on the social needs they look to resolve

Agency (philosophy · Context (archaeology · Geography · Political science · Population · Prosocial behavior · Religious organization · Social organization · Social science · Sociology · Variation (astronomy · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Law · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology · Social Psychology

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