Resumen de Variation in the structure and role of religious institutions: Examples from Pre-Columbian America
Alexander J Martin, Felipe Sol Castillo
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.
