Comparativism and sociobiological theory

While the "academic study of religion" is often considered to be synonymous with "comparative religion," little attention has been given by scholars o f religion to theories of comparison. When scholars of religion turn to the social sciences, as they often do in matters of theory, they find the situ ation with respect to comparison is little better. Recent attention to such theoretical reflections on comparative methods among some social scientist s have, however, reopened the question of "human universals," themes famili ar to scholars of religion from the phenomenology of religions but increasi ngly eschewed by them as ahistorical, at best, and theologically shaped, at worst. If, however, comparative studies are to avoid metaphysical musings and ethnocentric excesses, they might best proceed on the theoretical basis of natural, species-specific characteristics of human beings and demonstra te the relationships among the biological and cognitive constraints on huma n beings, on the one hand, and their social and historical constructions, o n the other. Whatever else "religion" may be, it is a social fact and human sociality seems to be one "universal" characteristic of human beings about which there seems to be some consensus among representatives of the variou s sciences. This paper looks at some of the biological and cognitive explan ations proposed for human sociality, outlines a social - and parallel relig ious - typology based on such explanations, and suggests in a preliminary w ay a "test" for this typological hypothesis against ethnographic/historical data from two ancient but disparate cultures, China and Greece.