The religious practices of most hunter-gatherers include music, dances, sometimes costumes, and lots of overt play. The most serious religious ceremonies, for most hunter-gatherer groups, are those that involve shamanic exercises. The primary serious purpose of such ceremonies is healing, but the ceremonies also provide an opportunity for band members to interact personally, in all sorts of ways, with members of the spirit world. Individuals who have the power to do so (the shamans) enter into trance states in which they take on the properties of, and/or communicate with, specific deities.
One researcher, Mathias Guenther, notes that this altered state is generally reached "without hallucinogenic substances, but through a combination of drumming, singing, and dancing, coupled with physical exhaustion." He writes further: "Often the shaman is a showman who employs rich poetic imagery and histrionics. He may sing and dance, trembling and shrieking, and speak in strange languages. He may also employ prestidigitation and ventriloquism. . . . Shamanic séances are very much performance events, not infrequently with audience feedback. They involve the shaman in role playing, engaging in dialogue with various spirits, each of whose counter-roles he plays himself."[3]
Among some hunter-gatherer groups the whole band is involved in the dancing, singing, and drumming; all of them, effectively, are shamans or at least contributors to the shamanic experience. Among the Ju/'hoansi, roughly half of the men and a third of the women are able to enter into shamanic trances. When spirits are called forth in such exercises, in apparently any hunter-gatherer group, they are not treated reverently; they are treated much as the people treat each other. The communication may involve mutual joking, teasing, laughing, singing, and dancing, as well as requests for healing.
Anthropologists refer to the shamanic and other religious ceremonies as "rituals," probably because that term has come to be used for any religious ceremony that has some sort of regular structure to it. But the ceremonies are clearly not rituals in the sense of strict, uncreative adherence to a prescribed form. In fact, some hunter-gatherer researchers have claimed that the religious "rituals" that they observed in the groups they studied were indistinguishable from play.[4] The ceremonies typically involve a great deal of the kind of self-determined, creative, imaginative, yet rule-guided action that fits the *definition of play*.
Hunter-Gatherers Do Not Confuse Religious Beliefs With Empirical Observations, and They Have No Concept of Heresy
Anthropologists have often described hunter-gatherers as practical people, not much given to magic or superstition. Shamanic healing seems to be an exception, but such healing may actually work to the degree that diseases have psychological components.
In general, hunter-gatherer religious ceremonies have more to do with embracing reality than with attempting to alter it. For example, in her book The Harmless People, Thomas describes how the /Gwi people (hunting and gathering neighbors to the Ju/'hoansi) use their sacred rain dance not to bring on rain but to welcome it and partake in its power when they see it coming. Living in the desert, where water is a limiting factor for all life, they might well dance to bring on rain if they thought it would work, but they do not believe they have such power. They can, however, rejoice in the rain and use its coming to raise their own spirits and prepare themselves for the bounty to follow. Another researcher, Richard Gould, in his book Yiwara, about a hunter-gatherer culture in Australia, makes the same point in stating that these people ". . . do not seek to control the environment in either their daily or their sacred lives. Rituals of the sacred life may be seen as the efforts of man to combine with his environment, to become ‘at one' with it."
From my perspective, such ceremonies are a form of play in which aspects of the natural world, personified in the deities, become playmates.
On the dimensions that distinguish religious liberals from religious fundamentalists in our culture, hunter-gatherers appear everywhere to be at the liberal end. Although hunter-gatherers find meaning in their stories about the spirit world, they do not treat the stories as dogma. Neighboring bands may tell similar stories in different ways, or may tell different stories, which contradict one another, but nobody takes offense. The sacred ceremonies of one band may be different from those of another, or may vary considerably over time. Hunter-gatherer parents do not become upset when their children marry into another group and adopt religious beliefs and practices that differ from those they grew up with. To leave one band and join another, with different religious practices, is in this sense like leaving a group who are playing one game and joining another who are playing a different game. There seems to be an implicit acknowledgment, among these people, that religious stories, while in some ways special and even sacred, are in the end just stories.
Hunter-gatherers value their beliefs about the spirit world, but they apparently don't let those beliefs interfere with their empirical understanding of the physical world in which they live. Here is an example of that, again provided by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. When Toma, a wise Ju/'hoansi, was asked, matter-of-factly, what happens to stars during the daytime, he responded, matter-of-factly: "They stay where they are. We just can't see them because the sun is too bright." But another time, in a religious frame, Toma answered the same question with a Ju/'hoan legend, in which the stars are antlions that crawl up into the sky at night and return to their sandy pits at dawn. He was apparently not the least bit upset by the contradiction between these two explanations. I wish that all religious people had Toma's wisdom when it comes to such foolish controversies as that of evolution versus creationism!
Religion Is Sacred Play, Which Gives Meaning to Everyday Life
A general function of all play is to give meaning to people's lives and to help them cope with the real world. As I described in an *earlier post*, play helps children come to grips with reality. Playing at being witches and trolls, for example, helps young children think about and understand aspects of their real world that would be hard to understand otherwise. This is true even though the children clearly recognize that the play world is imaginary, not real. In fact, play would not serve its purpose if children did not recognize that distinction.
Religion, properly conceived, is a grand and potentially life-long game in which people use the basic structures of the game--the story outlines, beliefs, and rituals--along with their own creative additions and modifications, to make sense of their real world and real lives. The stories and beliefs may be understood as fictions, but they are sacred fictions because they represent ideas and principles that are crucial to living in the real world and they may be held through all of life.
It is not surprising, from this view, that religious stories and beliefs everywhere reflect and elaborate on ideas and themes that are crucial to the society in which the devotees live their real lives. Hunter-gatherers depend on principles of equality and sharing, and so it is natural that their deities are not rulers but equals, who contribute and sometimes fail to contribute, as they will. Hunter-gatherers also depend, every day, on the whims of nature, which they cannot control, so it is not surprising that their deities are whimsical. The best way to deal with unpredictability is through humility and humor, and their religions foster those traits. Their task is to embrace nature, not to control it, and their religious play with the spirits of the natural world help them to do that.
