Where Do You Go When You Die? A Cross-Cultural Test of the Hypothesis That Infrastructure Predicts Individual Eschatology

Abstract

Cultural materialism gives priority to infrastructure, that is, to productive and reproductive processes, in explaining sociocultural systems. It predicts that social structures and symbolic-ideational beliefs will be favored or eliminated depending on whether they enhance or impede these processes. The symbolic-ideational sphere of virtually every human sociocultural system contains an "individual eschatology" or theory of the fate of the human personality at death. Eschatologies are either "judgmental," in which the deceased is judged for acts in life, or "nonjudgmental," in which no such claim is made. Presumably, each is compatible with different infrastructures and structures. We hypothesized that societies with low infrastructural productivity lack judgmental eschatologies, whereas those with high productivity have them. The null hypothesis was tested using a study population of 271 sociocultural systems drawn from the Human Relations Area Files and rejected at the 0.0001 level. However, while strong, the relationship between eschatology and infrastructure is not deterministic. We used a logistic regression model for this non-deterministic relationship. This analysis revealed statistically significant effects on the probability a sociocultural system has a judgmental eschatology depending on geographic area (Africa, Circum-Mediterranean, Insular Pacific, East-Eurasian, and America), general evolutionary level (Pastoral, Plow Agriculture, or other), intensity of agriculture (None, Intensive/Irrigation, or other), and percentage of total subsistence activity accounted for by agriculture. We tentatively conclude that infrastructure predicts the nature of belief regarding the fate of the personality at death, a result consistent with the theory of cultural materialism.