Food Foragers and Institutionalized Religion

!Kung bushmen of the Kalahari

Today's lecture in cultural anthropology covered the characteristics of the food forager way of life.  Our ancestors carried on this way of life for at least 2 million  years before we began, a mere 10,000 years ago, producing food.  Midway through the lecture I was struck by something out of the blue. 

Before the momentous switch in subsistence, food foragers lived as those who still exist live now.  Today's food foragers live in small groups, cooperate with each other, share all their food, are egalitarian, have little to no personal possessions, are nomadic, and pursue for most of everyday what we would call leisure activities, including story telling, dancing, and singing. 

Sometime after the beginning of food production, when our populations became more sedentary and started to rise dramatically, we began to 'institutionalize' all sorts of things like politics and religion and markets. The thought bubbling under the surface today was that there are many many similarities between the food foraging way of life and the kind of life prescribed by many institutionalized religions today.

For example, it seems that institutionalized religions are intent on bringing adherents together into communities, many of which are at a small scale (a parish, for example), and the people of these communities are encouraged to cooperate with each other, and help each other out when and where possible.  Such religions also preach an equality of people under a god/s, or goddess/es, and some of them profess the importance of not getting too attached to material objects.  Such religions also have rituals that include story-telling, dancing, and singing. 

It seems that, at least in some ways, institutionalized religions attempt to bring us back as much as possible to the lives we spent as food foragers for over two million years.

And taking this a step further, I wonder about Judeo-Christianity's Creation Myth set in the Garden of Eden.  Adam and Eve are happy gatherers until the fruit is eaten, at which point they are banished to a life of tilling the soil and raising livestock, or in other words, food producing.  Perhaps within these pages we see the 'paradise' of food foraging, and the punishment of food production, and perhaps a religion's goal to bring people somehow back to a not completely forgotten paradise of the food foraging way of life.