Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse offers a sweeping account of how three ancient biases-conformism, religiosity, and tribalism-shaped humanity's past and imperil its future.

Through an examination of four Melanesian religious traditions, Whitehouse identifies a set of recurrent interconnections between styles of religious transmission, systems of memory, and patterns of political association. He argues…

Historians bound by their singular stories and archaeologists bound by their material evidence do not typically seek out broad comparative theories of religion. But Harvey Whitehouse’s ‘modes of religiosity’ theory…