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.