bands, tribes, and the origin of religion

Bands, Tribes, and the Origin of Religion

August 5, 2009

social structure bands

I had not realized the extent to which Émile Durkheim relied on Australian Aborigines in his argument about the origin of religion. He deploys it as his trump card as he works through various theories of religion. He explains on the very first page that by finding the most archaic religion in the world we can arrive at "an essential and permanent aspect of humanity." For Durkheim Aboriginal religion is the most archaic precisely because it has the most archaic social structure.

Now, clan-based organization is the simplest we know... Therefore, no society is more rudimentary—since I believe no trace of a society consisting of a single clan has yet been found. A religion so closely allied with a social system of such surpassing simplicity can be considered the most elementary we know. [126]

This idea allows him to bypass the encyclopedism of James Frazer and his Golden Bough. Durkheim will not amass a stack of details, but sweep aside that stack by an examination of the most archaic religion, which gets behind theories of animism or naturism.

It happens that it might actually be possible to think about human beings prior to clan or tribal organization. We just have to look for evidence from the past.. the deep past. The claim of The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie is that the cave paintings from a site like Lascaux or Chauvet make sense only if we imagine human beings living in bands. These bands would be self-contained and number no more than 40 people. They would have the age group spread of the picture at the top of this post. Guthrie's point is that for a band there was not yet any such thing as "us" and "them." Human social organization was on a scale that kept relationships personal and intimate. And what we see in the art of the caves is a preoccupation with animals and their realistic representation.. to the exclusion of much that we recognize as "symbolic."

Guthrie looks ahead to the Holocene and the changes in human social organization that come with it. Along with those changes in social organization comes a shift in artistic style, as is shown in Guthrie's illustration below:

tribal art - R. Dale Guthrie

These images are from different cultures, but they are instantly recognizable as being a long way from paleolithic art. The abstractions and stylization give away the added symbolic freight that these works are carrying, and point to the need to separate and differentiate one group from others.

You could say that a simple tribal organization is the starting point for Durkheim, who asks at one point what the origin of the totem might be:

It is obvious that for any kind of group an emblem is a useful rallying point. Expressing social unity in a material form makes it more tangible to everyone; for this reason the use of emblematic symbols must have quickly spread once the idea took shape. [175]

The totem for Durkheim is the ur-symbol, that spread and formed the human view of the world.. but it is possible to imagine religion a step more archaic than that in terms of social structure.