page_title: Andrey Korotayev
section_title: Cross-cultural studies
hierarchical_section_title: Andrey Korotayev / Contributions / Cross-cultural studies
caption_attribution_description: English: A map of the world, showing the major religions distributed in the world as of today. A different type of map which views only the religion as a whole excluding denominations or sects of the religions, and is colored by how the religions are distributed not by main religion of country etc.
context_page_description: Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, with major contributions to world-systems theory, cross-cultural studies, Near Eastern history, Big History, and mathematical modelling of social and economic macrodynamics.
  He is currently the Head of the Laboratory for Monitoring of the Risks of Sociopolitical Destabilization at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, and a Senior Research Professor at the Center for Big History and System Forecasting of the Institute of Oriental Studies Институт Востоковедения Российской Академии Наук Институт Востоковедения Российской Академии Наук as well as in the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
  In addition, he is a Senior Research Professor of the International Laboratory on Political Demography and Social Macrodynamics of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, RANEPA - First International Conference on Political Demography and Social Macro-Dynamics as well as a Full Professor of the Faculty of Global Studies of the Moscow State University.
context_section_description: From a complexity perspective Korotayev's establishes a key point, that of the bifurcations of social and kinship organisation that coalesced historically around the differential practices of the major world religions. It draws on the World Cultural database and the world religion as well as other variables. The Murdockian comparative approach, up to Korotayev, had developed to the point where the nonindependence of cultures was well-recognized, and ways of taking the larger configurations of cultural systems into account had been reckoned to lie, in the latest iteration, along lines of high-order proto-linguistic communities. Korotayev demonstrates the effects of breaking what might be seen as a ritual taboo of Murdockian comparison: Thou Shalt Not Code World Religion. By doing so, Korotayev releases the Murdockian spell that lingers over the comparative approach in anthropology, and goes on to demonstrate the powerful effects of world religious communities — dating from what Jaspers calls the "Axial Age" (800–200 BCE) – on the preservation and differentiation of distinctive social and political structures in Eurasia. His introduction and conclusion suggest that an objectivist natural history approach to human history, in which subjective factors are of local importance but fade out in terms of lasting effects over generations, is a valid approach to the "pre-Axial" condition of human societies, while a subjectivist history of consciousness is a necessary complement to the "post-Axial" condition. Korotayev succeeds in placing these two complementary approaches in context and showing their linkages in terms of how subjective and religious factors play out in human history alongside objective factors such as demography and ecology, each informing the other. He shows how it is impossible to arrive at valid inferential results from comparative approaches without an integration of the two, a situation he aptly calls "Galton's opportunity" for those are of century-old critiques of the comparative method. The reader will be surprised at the depth of empirical comparative findings in this short book. Following Murray Leaf's Man, Mind and Science (1974) this work is a major contribution to repair of the material/ideational rift in anthropology.
caption: Religions of the world
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