Religion and the Evolution of Social Reality
The cognitive science of religion has made significant strides in explaining recurrent aspects of religion in terms of evolved propensities of the human mind. Recently, a debate has emerged over the extent to which cognitive science approaches should give consideration to a broader range of contextual factors (what Whitehouse has referred to as systemic and ecological primes) in their explanation of the form and evolution of cultural behaviour.
In this theoretical paper, I argue that the cognitive science of religion should not only take social and political context into account, but that it can provide key conceptual tools for understanding how this context itself evolves. To describe specifically what I am referring to as social context, I briefly outline John Searle’s ontology of social reality. The sustained existence of this social reality poses a cooperative problem that is not fully addressed in Searle’s work. The cognitive science of religion offers a solution to this cooperative problem, because the specific cognitive properties of religious agent concepts transform the nature of human social interaction, and enable the emergence of a social reality where none previously existed. To describe the subsequent evolution of this social reality, I introduce the concept of ‘socio-communicative systems’ as a significant, though not sole, unit of cultural evolution. Religious ritual plays a crucial role in sustaining and re-producing many of these systems, and the concept of ‘ritualization’ can be used to describe the degree to which individual actions are determined by the structure of a socio-communicative system. To study the long term cultural evolution of these systems, I then articulate an analytical method which characterises human behaviour in terms of three properties: formality, indexicality and utility. This method is particularly aimed at the analysis of material culture, as these properties can be used to describe variation in the creation and use of material artefacts. This method can therefore provide important insight into the evolution of socio-communicative systems even in the absence of written records.
Cognitive Anthropology of Ritual Policies (brief paper)
This paper is about exploring links between political economy, social stratification/organization, religious knowledge and human cognition. Despite fundamental changes in political economy and social stratification/organization over the two last centuries in Malagasy highlands, the same basic structure of the Merina circumcision ritual still occurs on two levels:
Despite innovations and transformations of certain ritual sequences, its core (ideological representations and elementary practices) have remained unchanged through history. So, the question is why?
To resolve this enigma, I will proceed in three steps by using some insights from the new Cognitive Science of Religion (Whitehouse, McCauley and Lawson, Sperber, Boyer, Barett), thanks to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss (canonical formula), Philippe Descola (analogist cosmologies) and cognitive psychologists such Deidre Gentner (structure mapping theory) and Keith Holyoak (multi-constraint theory of analogy). I will present the religious exegesis and patterns of ritual actions associated with the core of Merina circumcision, and I will suggest that they are the result of a specific and complex kind of analogical reasoning identical to the Levi-Straussian canonical formula which can be re-interpreted thanks to the theory of participants’ ritual competence proposed by McCauley and Lawson. I will assert that this kind of analogical reasoning specific to the central rituals (special agent rituals) is at once based on structural constraints resorting to the underlying cosmology and to the mapping process (these constraints are insensitive to the historical context), and based on semantic and pragmatic constraints which depend on recurring social situations and political stakes (i.e. embedded in political economy and social stratification/organization instituted at a given historical period).
It Takes Four to Tango: Frequency, Form, Tedium and Alarm in Ritual Modelling
I argue that four variables (minimally) are required for an adequate model of ritual. I employ multi-agent modeling scenarios to make my case. In and of itself frequency is not a predictor of anything other than perhaps the costs associated with ritual performance. Only with the three additional factors associated with CSR – alarm prompted by sensory pageantry, form driven by cognitive attractor basins, and a tedium factor challenging the potential hegemony of low-cost, high-frequency rehearsal – does one begin to craft a cultural landscape adequate to what we see in ethnographic data.
Ritual Cybernetics and Distributed Cognition (brief paper)
The emerging view of cognition “beyond the scalp”, dubbed distributed cognition (or variously, extended mind and ecological psychology) has provided a novel framework for describing how cognition as computation involves the propagation and transformation of representations across social and material media, rather than operations located purely in the heads of individuals. This has been particularly useful for understanding the coordination of social behavior and the systemic properties of cognition in adaptive, task-oriented scenarios (e.g., Hutchins, 1995; Hollan et al., 2001). However, in order to gain explanatory power, distributed cognition must also be able to account for pervasive, not-so-utilitarian domains of sociality that include non-empirical beliefs and ritualization.
In this paper, I examine an example of ritual activity as distributed cognition employing Roy Rappaport’s classic ethnographic study of the kaiko , a ritual cycle of the Tsembaga, a tribal society in Papua New Guinea. As a starting point, I use Rappaport’s description of ritual as a cybernetic system that regulates an “operational environment” comprised of a range of social and ecological states. I show that the coordination of these variables is not achieved through any individual agent’s global awareness of the ecological system but hinges rather, on sets of symbolic artifacts and social practices that distribute computational loads and communicate partial information about system states. Following Rappaport’s indication that the explicit goal of the kaiko ritual is to appease ancestor spirits through the repayment of debts, I show that the non-empirical postulates of the Tsembaga’s “cognized environment” are critical elements on which instrumental action and social-ecological regulation depend. In this respect, folk psychologies also operate as distributed patterns of behavior regularity in the ritual cycle, not only as propositional states in the head. These embedded features of ritual help us to rethink the cybernetics of distributed cognitive activity as well as the relationship between culture and cognition.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the wild . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hollan, James, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh. 2001. Distributed Cognition: Toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research, ACM transactions on computer-human interaction , 7(2). Pp 174-196.
Can a Ritual Make You a God? The Role of Cognition in the Apotheosis of Roman Emperors (brief paper)
The divine status of Roman emperors was ambiguous: after their postmortem deification, they were incorporated into the official Roman pantheon but were worshiped and interacted with in a wide array of diversified attitudes while they lived. An important role in the process of their postmortem deification was played by a complex ritual of an imperial funeral. This paper tries to answer a set of interdependent questions, for example 1) whether these rituals connected with an imperial funeral should be seen as symbolic or performative; 2) how the transition from human (or semidivine?) to divine status could be conceptualized and what role participants’ cognition played in this process, i.e. which biases or predispositions of the human mind could support the plausibility of the idea that dead mortals became immortal gods; and 3) how this message could be transmitted to and cognitively processed by a wider audience participating in the rituals of the imperial funeral.
Rituals and Memory
This paper deals with the effect of rituals on long-term memory. Two theories in the Cognitive Science of Religion have paid particular attention to that connection. Whitehouse’s modes theory and McCauley and Lawson’s ritual form theory have mainly dealt with procedural memory, flashbulb memories, the effect of the conceptualization of ritual agency on memory, and the distinction between episodic and semantic memory.
In my presentation I will suggest that some of the ideas about memory that have been used in the Cognitive Science of Religion are debatable, and it might be rewarding to focus on other, less sweeping theories about memory that are also better supported by empirical evidence. Two aspects of memory will be discussed, in particular: the effect of self-involvement on memorability and the connection between stress and the encoding of memories. I will show how these results can be used to rethink the above-mentioned cognitive theories of ritual.
Towards a Theory of the Incarnated Mind in Ritual Actions within Religions
The paper defines religious rituals as the coalescence of divine and human action. The paper takes as its departure the ritual form hypothesis as developed by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley. Based on their assumptions, research questions are formulated which aim at the role of emotions in rituals. For our research, we gathered data from Dutch participants in the (Catholic) World Youth Meeting in Toronto in July 2002. We focussed on the experiences of the participants of the open air mass celebrated with the Pope at the end of the World Youth Meeting. In January 2003 a retention test was conducted on the same participants. Some of the predictions of the ritual form hypothesis are corroborated by our findings. At the end of our paper, we will suggest some new venues of a theory of the incarnated mind in ritual actions within religions.
Pain and Coping in Rituals: Integrating Objective Measures and Subjective Assessment of Online Religious Activity (brief paper)
Both pain and religious rituals are complex phenomena. On the one hand pain is often understood as an object for natural science, but on the other hand pain is always defined as a psychological and subjective experience, leaving room for psychology and the humanities. Rituals, like pain, are framed by biological, psychological, social and cultural factors which indicate that a bottom-up and a top-down approach in the study of pain and religion should interact instead of co-exist.
This paper presents the initial framework of an interdisciplinary study of pain and coping in the religious mind. To understand the online religious activities and experiences of people participating in stressful and painful rituals calls for a methodology that integrates objective measures and subjective assessments. This research project involves functional imaging technology (fMRI), measures of physiological processes (EKG, blood pressure, cortisol levels) and objective and subjective measures of pain (pain tolerance, questionnaires and interviews). Furthermore, the social, cultural and historical context of these rituals is expected to play an important role in setting the frame and interpreting the results.
Shaping Information Environments in Play and Ritual: Comparing Evidence from Gaming and Religions in a Cross-disciplinary Perspective
Recent developments in interactive gaming have caused researchers to dust off the classics in ritual theory to describe phenomena like pervasive games, online gaming and adult role-playing. Furthermore, the apparently strong immersion and credulity among participants have led to speculations about the psychological and cognitive effects of engaging in certain types of play, and their possible use for manipulation or education.
With the combined use of library information science, cognitive psychology and recent theories on religion, we attempt to outline the implications of acquiring knowledge within highly controlled liminoid frames of experience, such as ritual and play. We examine the information processes at play within such environments as well as the effects of various meta-motivational stances taken by participants. This paper is based on recent research in game studies and our own fieldwork and experiments with adult role-players.
The Ritual Vortex (brief paper)
Ritual theory can be seen to be stretched out between two poles: action and meaning. The “action theories” focus on and explain the recurrence of ritual by focussing on the raw action. To this pole, the meaning is secondary to the essence of ritual, something that may or may not be there – any meaning will do. The “meaning theories” focus on the content or ideas associated with ritual. To these theories the actual action of ritual is secondary – any action will do. In this paper, I will try to show why these two poles are not mutually exclusive. Religious ideas and ritual, never the less, invariably seem to go together among all peoples of the world. To show why this is so, we will consider the cognitive effect of ritual action alongside important insights from fluid dynamics.
Appraisal, Communication and Religion: T-patterns in Human Interaction Involving Social Information on Religious and Secular Backgrounds (brief paper)
The rationale behind this empirical, pilot study is that a fruitful avenue for pursuing evolutionary questions on the origins of religion is to be found in basic, social communicative/exchange situations. The study focuses on how different types of information on social background enter appraisal of other individuals, viz. whether information on religious background is treated differently by human cognition than other such information of non-religious nature. To this end, Theme software was applied to detect statistically significant patterns in dyadic interaction (i.e. two people in information communication).
Theme is built on an algorithm that searches for hidden, repeated patterns (t-patterns) in behaviour and interactions (or any series of events in real time), based on a model of the temporal organisation of behaviour. Theme works by evolutionary principles, in the sense that only the most complete patterns are retained (survive), while partial detections are discarded. Theme can detect repeated patterns that are hidden to observers and very hard or impossible to detect with other available methods.
In each pair, one participant was primed with information about the social background of the other in three conditions: Religious, involving information on religious background; Secular, involving information on secular background; and Neutral, involving no information.
If systematic variation is found in the formation of t-patterns in the religious and secular conditions, that will be taken as an indication of different default, cognitive treatment of social information on religious background. This will leave open questions of whether adaptation or by-product is the basis for such different treatment. If religion was instrumental in human, social evolution with consequences for cooperation and appraisal of others, humans may be adapted to pay more attention to information on religious background (is a signal to the effect that person X belongs to another religion an especially clear and salient indication that s/he belongs to an alien, social group?). On the other hand, the association of another individual with an unfamiliar, counterintuitive world might make that individual more salient and ambiguous. This analysis is still on-going.
From Compulsion to Ritual Script: The Verticle Transmission of Meaninglessness in Religious Ritualized Forms of Action
In the late nineteen seventies, Frits Staal argued that ritual behavior (specifically in the South Asian agnicayana – Vedic fire ritual) was meaningless even though it involved structure. Using linguistic models, Staal proffered that ritual utilized similar cognitive systems that constrained ritual performance in the same way in which syntax is formed in language and communication prior to meaning; thus ensuring the ritual’s future performance. Many of the critics of Staal argued from the point that 1) either language is not like ritual or 2) ritual has meaning because it is social communication. However, meaning was located and generated by horizontal transmission from culture to culture, peer to peer.
In this paper I shall argue that the cognitive systems that inform and constrain ritualized compulsions and language may be similar; thus, giving a structure to ritual performance sans meaning. Nevertheless, any theories of ritual need to take into account the vertical transmission of ritualized compulsions into ritual scripts by professional cultural guilds only a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, Staal’s hypothesis might benefit from recent developments in the cognitive science of religion and culture, evolutionary psychology, and anthropologists/archaeologists concerned with pre-literate ritualized behaviors cross culturally.
Divination as Distributed Decision-Making (brief paper)
Distributed cognition and cognitive ethnography (as developed by Edwin Hutchins) undermine theories that privilege the spurious Cartesian subject/solitary mind. Distributed cognition highlights the emergence of thought and action from systems composed of multiple actors, practical know-how, and sets of tools. The appropriate unit of analysis, given these interacting elements, is the system, not the individual. Divination, a religious ritual that seeks to obtain hidden knowledge to assist in healing and decision-making, stands out as a prototypical case in which cognitive acts emerge from a well-orchestrated system. The global popularity of divination and its apparent usage far back into prehistory suggest the functionalist approach toward a better understanding of this phenomenon. While theories about divination have favoured structural-functionalist and symbolic anthropological approaches, this paper will develop a cognitive functionalist hypothesis. According to these arguments, divination persists because it is a very useful cognitive aid which elaborates into an interpersonal and transpersonal system for the making of especially momentous decisions. The employment of stochastic elements in many prominent divination techniques is a particular point that will be addressed.
Meaning in Action: Modelling the Minimal Meaning of a Ritual (brief paper)
A long line of research on issues of ritual and meaning has resulted in rather diverse theoretical models. By focusing on what it is like to execute ritualized behaviour from the religious agent’s perspective, I believe certain advantages are gained, which makes it possible to construct and test a model of the experiential and meaningful dimensions of online ritual performance – which I take to be one of the many possible meanings of ritual, maybe even its minimal meaning.
I will present the outlines of a model, which suggest that three semiotic dimensions structure the religious agent’s meaningful experience of enacting ritualized behaviour. According to this model, the online ritual meaning emerges through the interaction of a particular behavioural form and its fusion with perceptual cues, conceptual resources, and emotional modulation.
Finally, I will sketch a forthcoming implementation of the theoretical model in a minimal neural network, which can test the model and furthermore serve as a starting point for computational explorations in the phenomenon of ritual meaning.
Ritual agency, substance transfer and the making of supernatural immediacy in pilgrim journeys (brief paper)
Pilgrim journeys are popular religious phenomena that are based on ritual interaction with culturally postulated counterintuitive supernatural agents. This article uses results from an anthropological PhD thesis on the cognitive aspects of Hindu pilgrimage in Nepal and Tibet. Cognitive theories have been neglected in pilgrimage studies, but they offer new perspectives on belief structures and ritual action and call into question some of the current assumptions in this research field. Pilgrim journeys often involve flows of substance of anthropomorphic character. Transferring substance in pilgrimage means leaving material at the pilgrimage site and then receiving other materials to take home. Pilgrim journeys imply ritual interaction, intuitions and ideas regarding the management of sin, impurity and evil. They also imply reception of blessings along with divine agency. This paper investigates how assumptions about agency, psychological essentialism and contagion connected to supernatural agents provide an important selective pressure in the formation of beliefs related to pilgrimage. This paper shows that the transfer of substances is an operation on ritual instruments. It creates a supernatural immediacy effect in pilgrims, in the sense suggested by Lawson & McCauley.
Walking as a Cognitive Technique (brief paper)
Humans move to get around in the world. Generally speaking, when moving we want to get from one point to another with as little use of energy and time as possible. But in a range of religious rituals, bodily movements are deliberately altered to convey another function than just getting around. They become ways to express cultural ideals and religious values – that is, movements as embodiments of meaning. But more interesting, movements in religious rituals are stereotyped behaviour and they change the attention of the doer. In that sense such ritual movements may be seen as techniques that have perceptual and cognitive consequences – that is, movements are also vehicles of meaning. As such, altered ritual movements may be seen as cognitive techniques to influence the doer.
Imitation, Substitution and Cognition: Principles of Ritual Action in Koryak Hunting Shamanism
Often referred to as an “elementary form of religion”, shamanism offers a fertile ground to address the dynamics of religious rituals, cognition and culture. Since the 17 th century, the psychology of the shaman has received considerable attention among scholars and non-scholars, and shamanic “ritual art” has been the subject of numerous interpretative syntheses. But what happens when shamans are not necessary to shamanization, and when rituals become resistant to exegesis? What happens when the study of shamanism shifts from the mind of the specialist to the social and intersubjective dynamics between individuals? By focusing on the contemporary ritual experiences of coastal Koryak communities of Northwestern Kamchatka (Far-East Russia), this paper examines how a so-called “familial” type of hunting shamanism – involving primarily non-linguistic “play” activities (imitative dancing, melodic singing) – can be practiced effectively between ordinary people. Based on long-term participant observation in Kamchatka and on new developments in cognitive sciences (“Theory of Mind”, “Process of Active Intermodal Mapping”), it argues (a) that imitation constitutes a key principle of ritual action and can be seen as an “act of social cognition that requires both mental devices and relationships between the self and the other” (Dias), and (b) that imitation combines with substitution when ancestors tacitly “help fix” the imitative representations of game animals. Comprehended together, these two principles not only inform us about the nature of the ontological link between the actors of the ritual, but also about the mechanisms of cultural transmission among the Koryak.
