Since our last newsletter, the RCC has witnessed an exponential growth in size and in number of activities. It is almost impossible to keep up to date on developments. We have just updated our website and attempted to simply list and briefly describe what is going on. Please take a look at your earliest convenience at: http://www.teo.au.dk/en/research/current/cognition.
This newsletter will focus on a few crucial developments:
1. Distinguished Fellow, Professor Emeritus Merlin Donald is currently with the RCC in Aarhus for two months (October and November). Merlin is working on a book on the topic of “Cognitive Governance.” He is in Aarhus to learn about the way in which various religions have contributed to the process of cognitive governance, both in the intellectual life of society as a whole, and in the individual’s own personal mental life. A cognitive neuroscientist with a background in philosophy, he is the author of many scientific papers, and two influential books: Origins of the Modern Mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition (Harvard, 1991), and A Mind So Rare: The evolution of human consciousness (Norton, 2001). For those of you who are in Aarhus and want to get into contact with Merlin, send a mail to donaldm@queensu.ca.
2. RCC Distinguished Fellow, Senior Lecturer Joseph Bulbulia was with the RCC in Aarhus during the month of August. Busy as always and on his way to other places, Joseph found time to work closely with the San Pedro Firewalking expedition team at the RCC and CFIN. They are in the process of writing up the results of their analyses which should prove to be both surprising and exciting. We will keep you informed on the progress of their work. In the meantime, the team is preparing a similar expedition to Mauritius.
3. Along those same lines, the RCC has hired two MIND Lab post docs , Dr. Uffe Schjødt and Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas. They have both been hired to analyze and publish the results of the San Pedro Firewalking expedition. Along with that, Uffe is continuing his fMRI experiments, this time testing the effects of charisma on his subjects, and Dimitris is working on developing cooperative ventures with anthropological and psychological colleagues in neuroeconomics.
4. Associate Professor Jesper Sørensen accepted our invitation to become MIND Lab Associate Professor at the RCC. Jesper is well known to most cognitive scientists of religion for his groundbreaking work on magic ritual ( A Cognitive Theory of Magic , AltaMira 2007). Since then, he has spent time at Pascal Boyer’s Memory and Development Laboratory in St. Louis and has continued his work on ritual. His main job as MIND Lab Associate Professor will be to coordinate RCC involvement in the MIND Lab and to pursue team research on ritual behavior and agency. Together with a close colleague at the Anthropology Department, also a MIND Lab Associate Professor, Christian Kordt Højbjerg (known for his work among the Loma of Guinea), Jesper will explore the dynamics of laboratory and field methods in the analysis of ritual behavior and agency. Jesper is also involved in developing Master Degree educational packages for foreign students.
5. The RCC has had the pleasure of graduating two doctors . The first, Gretchen Koch, who was the first RCC doctoral candidate, has graduated with honours and is currently in Texas working on her book on moral cognition. The second is Uffe Schjødt, who also graduate with honours with his work on prayer, and is currently a MIND Lab post doc at the RCC and CFIN. Besides Jesper Østergaard, who was the third RCC doctoral candidate and is currently busily finishing his dissertation on landscape and cognition in Tibetan pilgrimage, we welcome Else-Marie Jegindø (prayer and pain), Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo (computational approach to ritual behavior) and Lars Madsen (philosophical grounding for a social cognitive science of religion). They are all top-notch scholars pursuing cutting edge projects. For pictures and links, see our Principal Staff Page.
6. The RCC became a Research Unit in 2009 at the Department of the Study of Religion in Aarhus. The designation “Research Unit” means that the RCC consists of junior and senior scholars (10 full time staff) pursuing groundbreaking research and teaching on all educational levels, from bachelor to doctoral levels. Besides teaching responsibilities in existing educational packages, the RCC is currently developing Master Classes in English for foreign graduate students. Individual educational packages, however, are already available as well as doctoral programs.
7. The RCC is Principal Partner in MIND Lab which will officially celebrate its establishment on January 15, 2010. The RCC is an independent research unit at the Faculty of Theology, but it participates in various research networks and is a Principal Partner in the research coalition awarded to Aarhus University (2009-2013) by the Ministry of Research and Innovation which is called MIND Lab , directed by Leif Østergaard and Andreas Roepstorff. MIND Lab consists of 120 researchers from six different faculties divided into five research sections or streams. One of the streams is called Cognition and Culture and is coordinated by Armin W. Geertz. The RCC is one of four groups in that section and one of the important results so far is that Associate Professor Jesper Sørensen has become permanently attached to the RCC. The other groups in the Cognition and Culture stream are Interacting Minds – A Biological Basis, a project based at CFIN, which is supported by the Danish Research Foundation Niels Bohr Professorships. The project is directed by neuropsychologists Uta Frith and Chris Frith, both situated in London, together with Andreas Roepstorff. The second group is called Agency and is directed by anthropologists Ton Otto, Christian Højbjerg and Andreas Roepstorff. The RCC is the third group. The fourth group is called Organizations and is directed by Børge Obel and Dorte Døjbak Håkonsson at the Aarhus School of Business together with Richard Burton (Duke University) and Linda Arogte (Carnegie Mellon). The fifth group is called Evidence and is directed by philosopher Uffe Juul Jensen.
MIND Lab is housed at the Danish Neuroresearch Center (Dansk NeuroforskningsCenter). MIND Lab is closely associated with the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN), to which RCC is also associated, and will become a part of the university-wide NeuroCampus Aarhus. The MIND Lab website is expected to be up and running soon.
8. The RCC conference situation for 2010 . The year 2010 is the year of the Quinquennial World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) which will be held in Toronto on August 15-21. The theme is Religion – A Human Phenomenon and will consist of papers, panels and sessions arranged in five different categories: description, interpretation, explanation, reflection and innovation. Instead of hosting an RCC conference in Aarhus, we will be hosting a RCC-MIND Lab panel in Toronto. Further information will be made available soon. We will, however, be hosting a MIND Lab seminar on Cognition in the Laboratory and Cognition in the Wild: Methodologies for the Study of Human Cognition in the cross-section between the human/social sciences and experimental cognitive science . The seminar will most likely be by invitation only, but further information will be made available.
9. The Religion, Cognition and Culture series at Equinox . The RCC established a book series with Equinox Publishing in London entitled Religion, Cognition and Culture . The editor-in-chief is Jeppe Sinding Jensen, and Armin W. Geertz is co-editor. The purpose of the series is to explore the role of religion and culture in cognitive formation. It is explicitly interdisciplinary and it encourages contributions from scholars in the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, psychology, social sciences and the humanities. It has taken a while for the series to get off the ground, but we can happily announce that the first three volumes are in press and all three will appear in 2010, the first two in time for the IAHR world congress:
A number of other volumes are in the works.
Come by and visit us if you are passing through Denmark!
Yours truly,
Armin W. Geertz
Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Jesper Sørensen
