Moralistic Gods and Social Complexity: A Brief History of the Problem

A cluster of persistent and contentious questions in the scientific study of religion concern when and why so-called “moralistic traditions” developed and how they have shaped human relationships. Is there an association between moralistic gods and the size and/or complexity of the society that might worship them? How cross-culturally ubiquitous are such traditions? Are people more willing to engage in cooperative behavior when they believe their god cares about morality? This chapter focuses on how these questions have arisen and how generations of researchers have struggled to address them. We first briefly examine the intellectual history of the problem, pointing to some of the troubling aspects of early observations of traditional societies and subsequent anthropological positions. We then address how early observations of small-scale peoples have populated cross-cultural resources that have informed and driven contemporary empirical projects. We finish by pointing to ways in which we might go about ensuring that the conversation continues with clarity and consistency.

Coding, causality, and statistical craft: The emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved

The target article from Turchin et al. assesses the relationship between social complexity and moralistic supernatural punishment. In our evaluation of their project, we argue that each step of its workflow -- from data production and theory to modeling and reporting -- makes it impossible to test the hypothesis that its authors claim they are testing. We focus our discussion on three important classes of issues: problems of data, analysis, and causal inference.

Z problematyki emigracji z Grecji do Polski Ludowej

The 1944–1949 Greek civil war between the supporters of the monarchy with the right-wing government and the left-wing forces with the Democratic Army of Greece resulted in the death of approximately 100,000 people and forced partisans and their families to migrate to countries of “people’s democracy.” It is estimated that the Polish People’s Republic accepted approximately 14,000 people (children and adults). The article describes the genesis of the conflict that led to the outbreak of the civil war as well as the increasing polarization of the Greek population. It presents the (political and social) complexity of the processes of emigrating from Greece to the people’s democracies and selected aspects of the organization of the Greek community’s life in the Polish People’s Republic.

Doctrinal Ritual, Identification, and Social Complexity

The doctrinal mode appears to have first emerged in world history with the advent of farming, helping to establish the first truly large-scale societies, in which identification with group categories became increasingly important, paving the way for new forms of political association. Many of the first states dominated by new doctrinal religions appear to have fostered extreme forms of inequality, epitomized by the deification of rulers and cruel practices, such as human sacrifice. But once societies exceeded a certain threshold in scale and complexity, the empires that seemed best able to flourish were those that adopted more ethical forms of doctrinal religion, mobilizing strong norms enforced as much by peer-to-peer policing as by top-down coercion.

Ritual’s Evolutionary Landscapes

Understanding the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity requires attention to many complex, interacting processes operating at different levels. This chapter attempts to sort these out into a coherent overarching framework by building on the ideas of British biologist, philosopher, and polymath C. H. Waddington, who put forward the idea of an ‘epigenetic landscape’ to explain how organisms develop. Waddington’s basic model can be extended to explain how cognitive-developmental and social-historical landscapes unfold and how all three kinds of landscapes interact. Adopting this overarching perspective on cultural evolution helps bridge the unnecessary divisions among branches of evolutionary theory and psychology that emphasize distinct but potentially complementary aspects of social learning and cultural transmission.

Commending a freedman. Virtues and masculinities in the recommendation letters of Cicero and Pliny the Younger

This article explores Roman freedmen’s masculine positions expressed as virtues, qualities, and ideals in the recommendation letters of Cicero and Pliny the Younger. It discusses whether there were specific freedman virtues, qualities, and ideals and what consequences their existence or absence had for freedmen’s constructions of masculinity. A critical close reading of the texts is applied, combined with theories of masculinity, where hegemonic masculinity is a key concept. It is concluded that there were no virtues or qualities that were specific or exclusive to freedmen. A distinct set of virtues for freedmen did not exist in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome, since much the same behaviour and qualities are seen as manly and desirable for freedmen as for freeborn male citizens of high birth. However, freedmen cannot comply with the hegemonic masculinity in full, since they cannot embody the Roman masculine ideal of the vir bonus and cannot be associated with the Roman cardinal virtue virtus, which was central in the construction of masculinity in the Roman world. This illustrates the complex Roman gender discourse and, on the whole, the social complexity of Roman society.