Ritual, Religion, and the Scaling-Up of Society:
Insights from anthropology
Nels Hoffman
Anthropologists tell us that, until quite recently, most humans lived in small communities of less than a few hundred people, in which almost everyone was related to everyone else. Larger communities tended to be unstable, eventually fragmenting because of disagreements of various kinds. Such fragmentation was typical even though larger communities would have been beneficial, especially during times of warfare or environmental stress. How did humans eventually learn to live together in large communities, tolerating the presence of others who were not close kindred? Here again, anthropology gives insights. It turns out that powerful rituals and supernatural commitments played a key role in forming relationships of trust and dependence among otherwise distantly related persons. We'll look at how small societal groups in the past used ritual and religious belief to build bridges and mend broken bonds, and how that process sometimes -- though rarely -- continued to larger and larger scale.
Nelson M. Hoffman, PhD, is a physicist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the Plasma Theory and Applications Group of the Computational Physics (XCP) Division. He earned a B.A. in Physics from Rice University in 1970, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin in 1974. His research interests are mainly in the areas of laser-driven fusion and plasma physics, currently emphasizing ion-kinetic models for transport in laser-driven capsule implosions, gamma-ray diagnostics of such capsules, and statistical inference (“machine learning”) applied to data analysis. He has authored or co-authored more than 85 technical publications, which have garnered more than 2300 citations. Nels is a member of First United Methodist Church of Los Alamos, and is active in the Kairos Prison Ministry. He is a founding member and past president of the Los Alamos Faith & Science Forum (LAF&SF). Influenced by the writings on the history of science and culture by Toby Huff, Lawrence Principe, James Hannam, David Lindberg, Joseph Henrich, and many others, Nels believes it is highly likely that, without the crucial influence of Christianity in human cultural history, modern science would not even exist.
