ABSTRACT
Introduction In Religion in Human Evolution (2011), Robert N. Bellah (b. 1927) offers an account of the emergence of religion in broadly social constructionist terms, focused on certain elements, including the phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz’s notion that humans always inhabit ‘multiple realities’, sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’ and the ‘sacred’ as perennial human concerns, developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner’s emphasis on the ‘self as storyteller’ and the complex relationship that play has to all these factors (Bellah 2011, 3, 18, 34). Play is an example of the multiple realities that human beings straddle; it is a close relative of ritual (and therefore of the sacred, and collective effervescence), and a site of human sociability and the
imagination. In play, people participate in fictional narratives for non-utilitarian reasons. The early theorist of play, Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), emphasised that play is voluntary, creative and altruistic, tends to foster secrecy and community among the players, is temporary and repetitive, and takes place in ‘special’ places (1949, 26-45). These characteristics inevitably call to mind religion. Huizinga and Bellah are both concerned to locate the origins of religion in the human past. Huizinga’s theory is illustrated from the history of the West, ancient to modern (with excursuses into anthropological accounts of indigenous peoples); whereas for Bellah, ‘history’ has expanded to include the vast expanse of time in which humans evolved from primates. This is important as it connects human play with animal play, and emphasises those evolutionary biological capacities in humans that constitute the ‘tool-kit’ that enabled the creation of religion.
