The RCC grew out of the Laboratory on Theories of Religion in the Department of the Study of Religion in Aarhus in 2002 when scholars set up the research program “Religion, Cognition and Culture.” The RCC is fully integrated into the department with research on religions around the world and throughout history, theoretical and philosophical issues, and at all levels of university education. The RCC is closely integrated with university-wide conglomerates in Aarhus, such as the research initiative MIND Lab , the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, and the Cognition, Communication, and Culture network, all consisting of researchers from the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, health sciences and the university hospital.
An abiding assumption of the RCC is that humans are simultaneously biological and cultural beings. In hominin history these two aspects of human biology and human culture have never been separate. Each newborn human is both unfinished and uniquely equipped, biologically and cognitively organised to flourish in socio-cultural environments that its genes could never anticipate. All this matters to explanations for how religious minds function. So a perspective on mind not limited to brains is required.
At the RCC, we approach cognition as embodied and distributed. We analyze religion by studying the functional organization of the human brain, its interaction with the social and cultural worlds that it inhabits and modifies, and its developmental constraints and flexibility. Humans are mental creatures as well as embodied agents, who interact with the world. Core features of cognition – for example our moral intuitions and epistemic hunger – are powered by interpersonal dynamics. Cognition happens not only inside heads, but between heads, among heads and without heads (i.e. in cultural artifacts and systems).
The pioneers of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have enriched the academic study of religion. In the RCC, we adopt many of their theoretical assumptions, methodologies, and results. We wish, in addition to their program, to proceed beyond cognition in individualistic and mentalistic terms and to expand the understanding of cognition as consisting of individuals in full interaction with culture. Thus, in Aarhus we draw on evolutionary biology, neurobiology, moral psychology, narrative cognition, cognitive semiotics, and the social and psychological sciences together with disciplines in the comparative study of religion. Whether we do ethnographic fieldwork, controlled experiments, narrative analyses or archaeological studies, we understand that all perspectives are partial and that science consists of more than experimental approaches. The results emerging from the field are so exciting in part for what they reveal, but also because they show us how much further we have to go. Exciting discoveries lie ahead!
