I Theorizing religion and art

The ethology of art (and religion)

It is possible to view human beings from an ethological perspective if one accepts—as seems undeniable—that man is an animal species who has evolved and whose behavior as well as his biological organs and systems has had adaptive or selective value in that evolution. Human ethologists propose that certain ubiquitous behavioral features or tendencies in man’s life are an intrinsic, relatively unchangeable part of his nature and have arisen and been retained because they contribute positively to his evolutionary success, his survival as a species.

(Ellen Dissanayake, “Art as a Human Behavior: Toward an Ethological View of Art,” 398)

Even for those already familiar with the ethology of art, it will be worthwhile to explain precisely how I understand it in this context. Ethology is the general study of behaviors. The word comes from the Greek: ethos,

“character”; and -).oyia. -logia, as applied to all systematic studies. Properly speaking, it denotes the scientific study of animal behavior, a sub-topic of zoology. Applied to the study of culture and the arts, the ethological approach has gone by several names: biocultural criticism, a bioevolutionary approach, the adaptationist view, evolutionary aesthetics, literary Darwinism, and even “evocriticism” (Boyd 2009, 389). These often have more specific applications than the more general “ethology” that I prefer, but they all share the same assumption of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The more common “cognitive cultural studies” assumes that human cognition is a product of evolutionary processes and constitutes a very significant subset of the more general behavior of the species. The successful application of this ethological approach to literary criticism is a subset of its broader application to the arts in general.

The application of this approach to the study of art was pioneered by Ellen Dissanayake in her 1988 work, IVhat Is Art For?, although with numerous precursors.^- Since the appearance of Dissanayake’s book, a growing number of scholars have become engaged with this approach.³ More recently “cognitive cultural studies” has received significant attention (see, for example, Zunshine 2010). Despite risks, this “ethological” approach has much to contribute. In attaining a clear understanding of art and of religion the real problem lies not so much with ethology, which can be quite clearly described, but with its proposed object, art (and my object “religion"), neither of which can be easily defined. I will eventually make an attempt to stipulate specifically what the words “art" and “religion” are used to signify in the context of this book. First the two major strands of my argument—the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion—must be sketched.