Shamanic and doctrinal: Dunbar and the spiritual turn in contemporary religion

Robin Dunbar’s How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures rehabilitates the long-standing anthropo- logical view that religion evolved in two phases. The first, shamanic phase of religion consisted mainly of trance-dancing practices in hunter-gatherer societies, followed by a later stage in which beliefs about gods became more elaborate. Dunbar dates the transition to this later phase of “doctrinal” reli- gion as coming in with the agrarian settlements of the Neolithic period, 10,000 years ago. The first, practice-based phase of religion used to be called “primitive”, which implied a pejorative view of it, but there is no such condescension in Dunbar’s two-phase theory of the evolution of religion.We will focus here on the distinction between shamanic and doctrinal religion, and elaborate a theoretical position about the different modes of human cognition associated with shamanic and doctrinal religion. We will relate these two phases in the evolution of religion to the two different modes of cognition that have been identified in humans, sometimes called “experiential” and “rational” (Watts, 2020).In How Religion Evolved, Dunbar uses his evolutionary perspective on religion as an interpretive lens for understanding the current state of religion in Western society. We will here extend his approach to the distinction that is now often made between religion and spirituality, suggesting that the religion that is currently being rejected is a form of doctrinal religion, and that there is a turn to spirituality that in some ways (though not in every way) is like shamanic religion.Finally, we will compare Dunbar’s approach to the evolution of religion with the evolutionary Cognitive Science of Religion, suggesting that Dunbar’s approach benefits from the distinction between shamanic and doctrinal religion; from focusing on practices and experience as well as beliefs; and from taking a socially-embedded rather than an individualistic approach.