Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion - Hardcover

La Barre, Weston

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806123281 ISBN 13: 9780806123288

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991

Synopsis

Neoteny is the retention into adulthood of juvenile traits. In a charming epigrammatic style, Weston La Barre argues that human beings are largely instinctless, learning animals because we are highly immature, long dependent, and slow growing, and many of our unique cultural traits, both good and bad, derive from our anatomical and behavioural neoteny. In chapter 1 of these three essays in psychoanalytic anthropology, La Barre sketches the differing contexts of neoteny in other animal species; the functionally specialized trimorphism of male, female, and infant in the human family; the relation of hunting to early religion; the rise of marriage and the family and the dangers of our archoses, the nonrational, culturally inherited beliefs that contaminate our reality processing. In chapter 2, La Barre considers the nature of belief in miracle as a lapse in our knowledge of objective cosmic reality, and the projection of familial experience of parents into mistaken expectations of the nonhuman environment. Of particular concern are current beliefs that there is other intelligent life in the universe. La Barre demonstrates how believers in extraterrestrial intelligence seriously neglect the staggeringly complex nature of life and its vicissitudes in Earth's known geology. In chapter 3, La Barre examines the origins of animistic fallacies in the developmental history of the individual human being. Recent American presidencies furnish examples of the neoteny undergirding political systems. A study of individual ontogenetic development shows how systems of magic and religion remain emotionally plausible because at earlier developmental stages we experience success from these uniquely human dispensations. Appendix 1 is a brief history of speculations concerning other worlds. Appendix 2 adduces astronomical and evolutionary-biological arguments against extraterrestrial intelligence. Weston La Barre argues persuasively that the kind of animal we are determines the kind of culture we have and what we need and use culture for "Shadow of Childhood" is not only sound anthropology and psychoanalysis but also an intense, tersely reasoned environmentalist argument. Barre demonstrates that, statistically, life is so preposterously improbable as to have occurred once in an enormous and very old universe, so that it is imperative to preserve the only known environment where life occurs.

About this title

Synopsis

Neoteny is the retention into adulthood of juvenile traits. In a charming epigrammatic style, Weston La Barre argues that human beings are largely instinctless, learning animals because we are highly immature, long dependent, and slow growing, and many of our unique cultural traits, both good and bad, derive from our anatomical and behavioural neoteny. In chapter 1 of these three essays in psychoanalytic anthropology, La Barre sketches the differing contexts of neoteny in other animal species; the functionally specialized trimorphism of male, female, and infant in the human family; the relation of hunting to early religion; the rise of marriage and the family and the dangers of our archoses, the nonrational, culturally inherited beliefs that contaminate our reality processing. In chapter 2, La Barre considers the nature of belief in miracle as a lapse in our knowledge of objective cosmic reality, and the projection of familial experience of parents into mistaken expectations of the nonhuman environment. Of particular concern are current beliefs that there is other intelligent life in the universe.

La Barre demonstrates how believers in extraterrestrial intelligence seriously neglect the staggeringly complex nature of life and its vicissitudes in Earth's known geology. In chapter 3, La Barre examines the origins of animistic fallacies in the developmental history of the individual human being. Recent American presidencies furnish examples of the neoteny undergirding political systems. A study of individual ontogenetic development shows how systems of magic and religion remain emotionally plausible because at earlier developmental stages we experience success from these uniquely human dispensations. Appendix 1 is a brief history of speculations concerning other worlds. Appendix 2 adduces astronomical and evolutionary-biological arguments against extraterrestrial intelligence. Weston La Barre argues persuasively that the kind of animal we are determines the kind of culture we have and what we need and use culture for "Shadow of Childhood" is not only sound anthropology and psychoanalysis but also an intense, tersely reasoned environmentalist argument.

Barre demonstrates that, statistically, life is so preposterously improbable as to have occurred once in an enormous and very old universe, so that it is imperative to preserve the only known environment where life occurs.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0806123281
• ISBN 13: 9780806123288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192