Review

Author(s): Jacob G. Foster

Review by: Jacob G. Foster
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 118, No. 2 (September 2012), pp. 501-504
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666385
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 Book Reviews

sparked her interest in this project. She addresses the question of why,
on the 2001 census in the United Kingdom, 72% of respondents identified
as Christian in spite of the largely secular identity of the United Kingdom
and very low numbers of religious affiliation or religious service atten-
dance. Day situates her analysis in a larger literature about Christian
nominalism, a term that refers to individuals who label themselves Chris-
tian but reflect no other connection to religion. Day analyzes her interview
responses to suggest that rather than being an “empty” category, there are
three different types of “Christian nominalists”: natal nominalists, ethnic
nominalists, and aspirational nominalists. In each of these cases, identi-
fication as Christian represents a “performative” process of claiming iden-
tity. Natal nominalists identify “Christian” as an ascribed identity status
resulting from being born into a Christian family or being baptized as an
infant. Ethnic nominalists claim the Christian label as a marker of ethnic
identity. Conflating race with religion, ethnic-religious minorities are seen
as the “other” and “Christian” becomes an identity marker synonymous
with “white, English Protestant” (p. 183). Aspirational nominalists are
those for whom the Christian label represents an ideal they aspire to or
desire to be associated with, in spite of their reported distance from the
Christian tradition.
Believing in Belonging provides us with a new approach to theorizing
belief, making a place for both religious and social understandings of this
concept. Readers interested in the two belief orientations, anthropocentric
and theocentric, and the multiple dimensions of belief, will find this dis-
cussion presented in chapter 8. Including this chapter earlier in the volume
could have strengthened the book by providing a framework within which
to locate the themes that emerge from the interview data in chapters 3–
7. Nonetheless, the typology of belief serves as a useful tool for future
scholars wanting to take seriously the challenge of studying this topic.
The book makes an important contribution to the literature and moves
us forward in our study of beliefs and the roles they play in people’s lives.

A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. By Samuel

Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2011. Pp. xii⫹262. $35.00.

Jacob G. Foster
University of Chicago

Humans are remarkably cooperative creatures. Unlike most species, we

cooperate with nonrelatives and even strangers. Forgo cooperation for a
day and our interdependence becomes apparent—or did you grow that
the food you are about to eat yourself? In the book A Cooperative Species,
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis ask two related questions. Why do
humans cooperate? And how did we evolve to be that way? They draw

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American Journal of Sociology

on a staggering range of disciplines to explore these questions. Their

conclusions are intriguing and sometimes disturbing.
The authors are economists by training. Hence their answer to the first
question might come as a surprise. They claim that humans cooperate
“not only for self-interested reasons but also because they are genuinely
concerned about the well-being of others, try to uphold social norms, and
value behaving ethically for its own sake” (p. 1). They support this claim
with ample experimental evidence from behavioral game theory for the
existence of social preferences. These preferences motivate players to “sac-
rifice their own payoffs in order to cooperate with others, to reward the
cooperation of others, and to punish free riding, even when they cannot
expect to gain from acting this way” (p. 20).
This explanation stands in stark contrast to those favored by many
economists and evolutionary biologists, which transmute cases of altruism
(cooperation that reduces the fitness of the cooperator) into cases of “en-
lightened self-interest” (p. 3) or nepotism. Such alchemy is achieved by
expanding the accounting scheme to show how the apparent sacrifice
directly or indirectly benefits the cooperator. For example, I may help you
today, at some cost, expecting that tomorrow you will do the same (re-
ciprocal altruism). Or I may help my relatives, receiving an indirect fitness
benefits through our shared genes (kin-based altruism). Bowles and Gintis
grant that some forms of human cooperation are best explained by kin-
based or reciprocal altruism. But these mechanisms have limited scope—
cooperation with nonrelatives, in the case of kin-based altruism, and dif-
ficulties with “large group size, plausible degrees of behavioral or per-
ceptual error, and private information” (p. 77) in the case of reciprocal
altruism.
If social preferences provide the proximate explanation for many forms
of human cooperation, then we still face an evolutionary puzzle: not “why
people cooperate despite being selfish” but “why we are not purely selfish”
(p. 3). Bowles and Gintis have a two-part answer to this evolutionary
question, and the first part will please many sociologists. They lean heavily
on the presence of institutions that shield altruists from exploitation and
socialization practices that promote the internalization of prosocial norms.
The authors have an unusual take on these standard sociological con-
structs, however, embedding them in the framework of gene-culture co-
evolution. This approach emphasizes that humans create a substantial
portion of their selective environment through culture; while “genes affect
cultural evolution . . . culture affects genetic evolution” (p. 14) as well.
The authors develop fascinating mathematical and computational models
coupling genetic evolution (of altruistic social preferences and the capacity
for norm internalization) with cultural evolution (of institutions and norms
that promote altruism). For example, they analyze how a genetically trans-
mitted capacity for norm internalization can spread, even when costly,
by coevolving with a culturally transmitted, fitness-enhancing norm like
cleanliness. Building on this analysis, they show how individually fitness-

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 Book Reviews

reducing norms (including altruism) can “hitchhike” on fitness-enhancing

norms (p. 179) when there are socialization practices (like teaching) that
promote the fitness-reducing norm.
But why did altruistic norms, which reduce the fitness of individual
altruists but benefit the group, often prevail? The authors propose an
answer that goes back to Darwin: multilevel selection operating at the
level of social groups favored groups with altruistic members. These
groups tended to survive while other groups perished. Bowles and Gintis
admit that they “initially recoiled at [the] unpleasant and surprising con-
clusion” (p. 146) that generations of war may have been the price of our
exceptional sociability. They “stress intergroup competition for empirical
reasons” (p. 111) and arrive at this conclusion reluctantly and carefully,
providing a detailed exposition of multilevel selection models and refer-
encing a mountain of ethnographic and archaeological evidence about
early human society. These data paint a harrowing picture of our ancestral
environment, with something like 12%–14% of mortality due to warfare.
Yet this astonishing ancestral brutality makes multilevel selection strong
enough to favor the evolution of altruism, as “faithful members” (in Dar-
win’s terms) give groups an edge in high-stakes and apparently frequent
crises like war (or environmental disruption).
Bowles and Gintis tackle a complex topic in this dense and often dif-
ficult book. To their credit, they embrace this complexity and the limi-
tations it imposes on their modeling-driven approach. Their overall strat-
egy—take some factors as given while modeling the coevolution of
others—leads to a proliferation of loosely related models that collectively
capture the complexity of the problem. The price of this richness is co-
herence: because of its many moving parts, their argument never quite
fits together into a single explanation, and a sustained attempt in the final
chapter to recapitulate and synthesize these parts would have been help-
ful. Given their evolutionary orientation, it is also curious that the authors
do not draw on important comparative work on cooperation in infants,
young children, and great apes (e.g., Michael Tomasello, Why We Co-
operate [MIT Press, 2009]). Nevertheless, this is an impressive book. Its
empirical humility is refreshing, as is its resistance to overextending evo-
lutionary insights to the present day.
Sociologists will find much to take away. The modeling is inspiring and
inspired, a vindication of Gintis’s long-term effort to free the apparatus
of game theory from axiomatic self-interest and narrow conceptions of
rationality (at one point, the authors construct a utility function with terms
for shame and guilt). While many contemporary sociologists will be dis-
satisfied with the authors’ rather “classical” treatment of fundamental
sociological concepts like institutions and norm internalization, much
fruitful work could be done integrating their evolutionary perspective with
more nuanced approaches emerging in cultural sociology. Finally, as they
point out, group competition was suggested long ago by Talcott Parsons
as an important factor in the “emergence, proliferation, and persistence

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American Journal of Sociology

of novel human behaviors and institutions” (p. 111). This book makes a
strong case for returning as a discipline to this vexed theme. I can only
hope we do so with the analytical ingenuity and empirical humility that
Bowles and Gintis display.

Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s

Political Past and Present. Edited by Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug
Guthrie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. viii⫹329. $55.00
(cloth); $19.00 (paper).

Nina Eliasoph
University of Southern California

After Politics and Partnerships circulates as widely as it deserves to, many

unexamined truisms about civic associations will finally be lain to rest:
that the civic sphere is intrinsically distinct from, and separate from,
market and state; that more government funding causes less civic in-
volvement; that civic engagement is a tidy quantity that can be measured
like capital that rises and falls over time without dramatic difference in
its characteristics. In fact, “tidy” is the last word one would use to describe
this book’s contents, and that is its prime virtue. The chapters Elisabeth
S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie have gathered show how each step in the
American nonprofit sector’s development has been the result of a messy
compromise. Parts of the social body decompose and recompose, each
time stitching themselves together into a new, equally ungainly creature,
and so it lopes forward.
For example, Michael McQuarrie’s story starts with the breakdown of
a long-standing midcentury truce between elites and local activists, fueled
by steady growth. When the growth ends, so does the truce. By detailing
a complex history of scrimmages, this excellent chapter shows how con-
tenders reach a new provisional balance, agreeing to focus on developing
low-income housing. An apparent victory for the activists turns out to
mean that not only do the activists have to stop talking about economic
redistribution in the process, but also, the new nonprofit housing orga-
nizations end up operating very much like for-profit housing developers.
This chapter illustrates the book’s message: the nonprofit sector has al-
ways existed as a set of complex, provisional answers in an ongoing ar-
gument.
Chapters proceed in roughly chronological order. Johann Neem shows
how and why colonial-era civic associations crystallized American na-
tional identity. The central government assiduously regulated civic as-
sociations, while appearing to avoid dictating a substantive definition of
American identity. The penultimate chapter in the volume illustrates a
tension in this method of creating national identity: associations might
drive people apart as easily as they bind them together. When a wealthy

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