Culture and Hope: Reflections on Bellah's Unfinished Project
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 978-0-231-56051-1
Year of publication: 2024
Pages: 159 - 181
Type: Book chapter
Abstract
In both Religion in Human Evolution and in the long prologue to his unfinished and unpublished book, Robert Bellah quotes Merlin Donald as follows: “Narrative and theory are the two highest cultural capacities that humans have attained, making use of language to culminate a history of new cultural capacities that began with episodic culture, the capacity to know what kind of episode one is in, followed by mimetic culture, by which one enacts or embodies meaning non-linguistically.” Then, complex narratives first emerged in the stage that he calls “mythic” and did not necessarily disappear with the onset of theoretic culture.