The interdependence of ancestors and their descendants

ABSTRACT

Ancestor worship, the communicated acceptance of the claim that dead ancestors influence and/or are influenced by their living descendants, has been documented in societies all over the world. Despite some researchers’ claims that ancestor worship was once universal, there have been relatively few attempts to explain how and why this behavior became so prominent in unrelated and geographically separated societies. A notable exception is the descendant-leaving strategy model that claims ancestor worship is a traditional strategy that had the effect of influencing the behavior of multiple generations of descendants of a common ancestor. This model describes the function of ancestor worship as promoting altruism and cooperation among descendants, even those who are only distantly related. Here we reframe the descendant-leaving strategy theory of ancestor worship in terms of fitness interdependence. In other words, ancestor worship is a descendant-leaving strategy that can explain interesting patterns of fitness interdependence, namely, ancestor-descendant and intergenerational cooperation, which led to the persistence of ancestor worship.

KEYWORDS:

• Ancestor worship
• altruism
• cooperation
• fitness interdependence
• kinship
• traditions

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Craig Palmer, Todd VanPool, Christina Pomianek, Dennis Kelley, Rob Walker, and Sean Prall for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. KC also thanks my Iban friends and informants for the many discussions of Iban ancestor worship that we shared during my fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Binah Yitzrit Foundation, the Graduate School and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri.