Browsing by Author "Begley, Ryan O."

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    Ancestor Worship and the Longevity of Chinese Civilization
    (Brill, 2016) Coe, Kathryn; Begley, Ryan O.; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    Although an impressive body of literature is devoted to the practice of venerating ancestors in China and other places, there is little agreement on what ancestor worship is, where it is practiced, and whether it is an ancient and persistent trait. Ancestor worship, we argue, is an ancient trait that has persisted in China, as in other parts of the world, since prehistoric times. We also discuss its universal aspects, including those associated with teaching it and with encouraging its persistence across generations. We end by discussing the function of ancestor worship in China. Has it been an impediment to progress, as Christian missionaries and communists insisted, or, as Ping-Ti Ho claimed, has it promoted the “longevity of Chinese civilization”? We argue that both claims may be correct, depending on the definition of progress and the characteristics associated with China’s two forms of ancestor worship.
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    Totemism and Long-Term Evolutionary Success
    (APA, 2015-11) Palmer, Craig T.; Begley, Ryan O.; Coe, Kathryn; Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    This paper proposes that the clan Totemism existing in many traditional cultures, and described as religious by many ethnographers, provides evidence about the early evolutionary function of religion in the sense that it provides evidence of the effects of religion that caused it to become widespread in our species. However, this paper also proposes that evolutionary explanations of Totemism have failed to fully appreciate the reason clan Totemism acts as a kind of window into the past. This is the fact that the behaviors constituting clan Totemism could not have taken their form when first studied by anthropologists if they had not been copied from ancestors to descendants for many generations. This new multigenerational approach to clan Totemism combines 4 points about Totemism that have been recognized by others, but whose implications have not heretofore been fully comprehended.