Mean Streets: Paths to Rethinking "The Effectiveness of Symbols"
While it is conventional to ask "What do symbols mean? I am equally interested in the question "How do symbols mean?" Neuro-biologists are helping to provide the inside-out answer to this question by studying the symbol-producing and symbol-interpeting brain. As a cognitive anthropologist with a background in literature, I approach the question from a more outside-in perspective by starting with the structure of concrete symbols and moving them from the world into the mind. A cognitive semiotics seeks to understand the specific affordances that different kinds of symbols have for reframing perception and experience (a reframing that we grasp as "meaning").
The talk will be populated with examples from ritual, perceptual studies of religious art, and virtuosic symbolic play in texts by Shakespeare and Milton. Using these examples and others it will explore how the "cognitive affordances" of a variety of symbolic forms interact with key meaning-making capacities of mind to produce the symbolically reframed experiences we call "meaning."
Symbols are not viewed here as passive vessels containing "meaning," but as catalysts of specifyable cognitive transformations that we experience as meaning. Symbols may be said to "motivate meaning-making" in a variaty of ways we can attempt to clarify. Rather than vessels,
symbols are active co-agents of meaning making acting in concert with a human mind pre-adapted to key forms of symbolic processing.
Symbolization and de-symbolization in ritualized behaviour
Both anthropology and the science of religion have traditionally focused on the role and meaning of diverse types of ‘symbolic’ behaviour in cultural rituals. There is, however, hardly any agreement about how these alleged symbols should be interpreted (what they mean), the process by which they give rise to meaning (how they come to mean), or what constitutes a ritual symbol to begin with (what it is that means).
These problems have resulted in a number of influential studies criticizing ‘symbolist’ interpretation of ritual. From different points of departure, scholars such as Staal, Sperber and Humphrey & Laidlaw have pointed to central problems in understanding rituals as a type of symbolic communication. Often this has resulted in a total rejection of ritual having any kind of meaning — rituals are ‘meaningless’, to use the phrase of Staal.
This conclusion, however, might be premature. By means of recent cognitive theories of action representations, I will address how certain aspects of ritualization affect symbolizing processes. It will be argued that ritualized behaviour undermines established symbolic reference in order to direct ritual actions at particular pragmatic purposes. Ironically, this process of ‘de-symbolization’ will potentially lead to the construction of secondary symbolic interpretations, establishing more or less conventionalized symbolic meaning of particular ritual actions. Finally, I will propose that this cognitively based dynamism can explain certain developments in the history of institutionalised religious traditions.
Symbolic groups and non-reciprocal altruism: an experiment
With some notable exceptions, most recent work in the cognitive study of religion has focused on cognitive mechanisms underlying the transmission of religious information. Religion is typically explained through the perturbation of memorable concepts and behaviors. Yet the data in one important domain of religious cognition – religious experience – suggest the dominant approach is likely too restrictive. Religious experience is most commonly triggered by music; prayer; meditation; hallucinogenic drugs; sensory deprivation; body manipulation; and distress.
In this paper, I urge that the mechanisms underlying religious experience are inadequately explained by the study of how conceptual information affects memory. I then turn to the example of religious music to illustrate how an important and widely employed non-conceptual practice sustains religious attitudes and commitments. To understand religious symbolism, we must look, but also listen.
Problems with the “minimal counter-intuitiveness” (MCI) hypothesis: Manipulating causal integration eliminates MCI effects in narrative recall studies
A central claim of the cognitive science of religion is that religious concepts are widespread because their conceptual structure achieves a cognitive optimum for cultural transmission by being “minimally counter-intuitive.” That is, religious concepts violate a small number of intuitive ontological expectations about natural kinds, thereby grabbing our attention but remaining easy enough to process by means of domain-specific ontological categories. In short, religious concepts are widespread because they are interesting yet learnable. (Boyer 1994, 2001) And this hypothesis has been supported in several experimental studies (Barrett and Keil 1998; Barrett and Nyhoff 2001; Boyer and Ramble 2001; Owsianiecki et al. 2006).
However, we argue that these experimental studies were flawed because they did not control for causal integration levels in the narratives used as experimental stimuli. As such, what scholars have argued as an “MCI effect” might actually be a causal integration effect. In this paper, we report on a set of experimental studies conducted to test the MCI hypothesis against the causal integration hypothesis. Our data demonstrate that controlled manipulation of causal integration levels eliminates MCI effects in narrative recall studies.
The Concept 'Symbol'
Two distinctions must be kept in mind when we study concepts. First, there is a distinction between conception and concept, between the various conceptions we have of a concept and the concept itself. Secondly, there is a distinction between word and concept. Different words can be used to give expression to largely the same concept. And the same word can be used to give expression to different concepts.
In this present paper, I propose to make a modest contribution to our understanding of the concept 'symbol'. Keeping the two distinctions in mind, I make two sorts of enquiries. First, I investigate, in an Austinian vein, ordinary uses of the word 'symbol' and other words used in ways so as to give expression to the concept 'symbol'. Secondly, I consider the conception of 'symbol' as it appears in the often overlooked work by Ernst Cassirer on symbolic forms and his conception of man as the 'symbolic animal'.
I sketch what the meaning of the concept 'symbol' is that emerges out of this scrutiny. In Cassirer's spirit, it is a functional concept. And in Austin's Wittgensteinian spirit, it is a context-sensitive and open-ended concept. To illustrate this, I consider briefly the main thrust of Cassirer's The Myth of the State (from 1946!) and compare it with the invocation of religious symbols in contemporary political rhetoric.
Written Symbolization: A Selectionist Model for the Transmission of Biblical Fragments
Theories about religious symbols and concepts have primarily been interested in the mnemonic and communicative dimensions of oral signification, without developing robust theories for alternative technologies, such as writing. But an epidemiological model of memory and transmission would seem to be more applicable to written documents because they are physical artifacts and thus more conducive to the sensibilities of materialists.
Written language, too, 'evolves' over time, for epigraphers can trace clear lineages in various ancient written scripts over time. The alphabet evolved by a well known process from symbols of common public objects, like oxen, fish, and houses. Similarly, a text can evolve over time. For example, the process of storing, saving, and passing down texts in the form of scrolls and their fragments is now regarded by many Biblicists as a major mechanism by which the Bible came together around the 5th century B.C.E. But how did this work?
My paper will briefly try to address these questions by approaching the subject of the transmission of texts and textual fragments. I argue that cognitive theories of religion help explain this process. I adapt theories of Whitehouse and Sperber to apply to the transmission of written symbols and their vehicles, texts. In this model, symbols, texts and fragments compete with one another in terms of relevance (and other factors) in a fight for survival. Texts, which are more like genes than memes, degrade and fossilize over time, but if they are relevant or powerful enough, they are copied for future generations. Though the replications are often faithful, their fidelity varies over time, and often errors or mutations occur and become replicated in turn.
The meaning and meaninglessness of ritual action
Frits Staal by his controversial thesis on the meaninglessness of ritual has introduced a split between scholars who focus on ritual as symbolical communication and those who tend to see symbolical meaning as secondary, and instead insist on the essential formal nature of ritual action.
In my paper, I intend to present a part of a book project which both affirm the inherent ‘meaningless’ nature of ritual action and its basic semiotic character. This is achieved by stipulating the process of abstraction as common to both the formation of concepts and ritualization. A ritual norm ‘he should pour the water over the head of the neophyte’ is in content the same as the statement ‘he poured water over the head of the neophyte’ but with an added normative aspect. Ritualization is special in that the ritual person tries to become like the norm, not only to follow it, this in distinction to, for example, moral norms which merely regulate the borders of instrumental rationality. In achieving such a normlike status, the primary meaning of the ritual acts is the ritual norms, but the ritual person has in this way ascended to an abstract, ideal realm in which besides norms we find concepts (mostly personified), exemplary narratives and gods. These are represented in the ritual by ritualized objects and persons, and basic to ritual action is that these entities act upon each other according to a conceptual logic, for example, analogy amounts to partial identity. In nuce, ritualization makes the action normlike and thus meaningless, but at the same time it opens up a world of reified abstract entities which he or she can mould and be moulded by.
God in the Fractals: Recursiveness as a Key to Religious Representation and Behavior
This paper puts forward the hypothesis that the capacity of the human mind to employ recursion in a domain-general way accounts for a number of core aspects of religiosity. It will be argued that recursion is used to maintain ideas about distant social networks and that the concept of divine agency relies on this same mental process. The paper will also examine the use of recursion in conceptualizing boundless qualities, often attributed to divine agents as well as other counterintuitive entities, such as omniscience or eternal existence. Such qualities have not yet been successfully accounted for in the Cognitive Science of Religion. Finally, it will be suggested that recursion fulfils an equally important role in magical practices and may also contribute to the emergence of ritual behavior.
Symbolisation in linguistic cognition
This paper addresses two fundamental questions: what is symbolic cognition in language, and what (if anything) makes it different from symbolic cognition in other domains? The role of this process has been underestimated in cognitive science, including Cognitive Linguistics, where attention has focused on conceptual processes of analogy, metaphor, categorisation, blending, etc.
While these processes are not unimportant, I contend that they provide only part of the story. Exclusive focus on them is indicative of a failure to adequately incorporate the Saussurean sign, and thus a failure to distinguish a level of conceptualisation from the Saussurean level of the signified – leading to difficulties in the handling of meaning. This paper is a initial attempt towards an understanding of the fundamental properties of linguistic symbolic thought, and to outline some consequences to the shape of a cognitively informed linguistics.
The making of symbolic crossovers. A suggestion of the acquisition of new symbolization in intercultural and interreligious communication
In my view there is no doubt that symbolization is a property of individual as well as interactive minds. However, this paper questions how the individual interpretation links up to the interactive minds. How do various individuals acquire religious symbolization as to believing that they share the same meaning of the symbols?
This question becomes particularly crucial when discussing the acquisition of cross-cultural and /or cross-religious symbolization. Successful ‘cross-overs’ normally resembles something in both of the religions or cultures they cross over. However resemblance is interpretive. According to Terrence Deacon drawing an analogy is cognitively a process of recognition. My intention is to sketch out some ideas based on Deacon’s theory of how symbolic ‘crossovers’ become meaningful in the minds of new users.
Mithraic Grades of Initiation: Dead Symbols or Symbolization Alive?
The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of the system of Mithraic initia-tory grades in a process of establishment of the cult identity among its members. Mithraic grades that were for a long time regarded as mere relics of an archaic animistic phase of this supposedly Iranian religion are better understood as symbols suitable for expressing ideologi-cally apt views about the cult morals and ethos. These symbols, however, cannot be consid-ered as mere ‘icons’, because their apprehension by Mithraic initiates was deeply influenced by the form of Mithraic ritual activity and also by the working of human cognition.
Signs of Evil – The use of negatively charged symbols in culture and discourse
Every culture has its signs of evil and taboo. Sometimes they are indexes of real danger, and sometimes more complex metaphors and religious allusions. Signs of evil are used to create feelings of resent, aggression and anxiety in members of the symbolic community, and employed in religious and political discourse. In this paper I will examine the uses of pregnant symbols and metaphors for Evil, and their relation to cognitive mechanisms.
Taking basis in emotions of avoidance and aggression, I go on to examine the charging of certain symbols with negative connotation. I further discuss examples of use in religion and public discourse, and possible origins in cognition and culture.
Reasonable Irrationality and the Evolution of Religion: Cognitive Risk-Seeking in Colonial Contexts
A crucial question that any evolutionary account of religious symbolization must address is: How and under what conditions does the brain call and persistently apply religious concepts? A tradition going back to Pascal’s famous wager suggests that it does so because calling religious concepts is a relatively good bet. That tradition appears in contemporary scientific accounts of religion, both cognitive (Stewart Guthrie) and economic (Laurence Iannaccone). Empirical studies have established, however, that there are situations in which the human brain prefers bad bets to good ones. Specifically, although the brain tends to be risk-averse in the matter of gains, it tends to be risk-seeking when faced with losses. (These tendencies are not universal, but they predominate in any given population.)
This paper argues that there is a significant set of instances that we normally call religious that are characterized by cognitive risk-seeking. It draws its primary examples from geographically and historically unrelated anticolonial movements, such as the Ghost Dance in North America, the Righteous Harmony Society in China, the Maji Maji Rebellion in East Africa, and various kago movements in Melanesia. In all these cases, peoples faced with colonial destruction embraced counterintuitive claims that they would have normally rejected. Difficulties of quantifying religious choices aside, such observations pose at least two questions for the evolution of religious symbolization: how widespread is risk seeking in the interest of loss aversion (i.e. is it specific to certain species? to the human species?), and to what extent did such risk seeking contribute to the emergence of what we now call religious symbolization?
The Symbol of Twins in a Historical Perspective – From Duality to Dualism
The dual notion of symmetrically opposed twin brothers constitutes a core concept of dualist conception of two opposite principles underlying the existence of the world. However, it is not clear, whether the radicalisation of duality in this particular case occurred because of the endorsed religious notion violating the universal, and thus cultural independent, ontological category of Person in the expectation of psychological identity between individuals sharing identical physical traits. Or rather, the concept of ontological evil twin opposing his good counterpart observed in radical dualist religions, although parasitic on the common cognitive representation, nevertheless is an invention having a single, historical, and geographical origin.
This paper attempts to reconcile the structuralist and adoptionist approaches by looking at historical examples of narratives about twins through the prism of conceptualisation and cross-cultural communication.
Is Judaism Boring? The Role of Symbols in “Imagistic” Jewish Movements
Slightly reformulating and then applying the McCauley-Lawson model to Judaism predicts that traditional Judaism is a “boring” system of rites. This is why the new streams emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth century – Chassidism and the Yeshiva movement, as well as reform and orthodoxy – can be also viewed as attempts to reach a more balanced systems, besides their well-accepted social-historical explanations.
It will be, however, demonstrated that not in every case is a balanced system achieved through the introduction of special-agent rituals, as McCauley and Lawson propose – in fact, this solution is only typical to Chassidism. Other streams make use of different techniques, and the role of symbols will be emphasised in creating these new movements. Additionally, the role of symbols will be put into a network theoretical context in two different ways: the social network (cf. Bainbridge, 2006) and the network of concepts and symbols.
For the later, a CSR version of the Simulated Annealing for Optimality Theory Algorithm (Biro, 2006) will be used. In sum, the paper aims at demonstrating, how learning a shared system of symbols helps in the formation of a religious group with a balanced system of rituals.
Glossolalia - A cognitive-somatic approach to charismatic arousal
Within the cognitive science of religion which emerged during the last decades there has been much emphasis on cognitive processes and little attention to the body and the sensory awareness. Religious ideas and representations don´t make a religion without being transformed into perceivable forms. Symbols, signs and marks are not only produced and percieved through cognitive activity but need also to congeal into perceivable forms i.e. all kinds of devotional artefacts, as well as speech and body movement. Cultural and religious symbols construct our cultural environment and are not only in our brains but are “social facts” (Durkheim). These “social facts” need to be (re-)embodied through socialisation and incorporation. Both take place in rituals (every-day and religious) and both have to be “percieved” through our senses and bodies.
The aim of this paper is to present a wider perspective regarding the interrelations between cognition, symbolization and sensual perception within the study of religion. Therefore I would like to introduce an additional approach, the so called “aesthetics of religion”, which includes different approaches like the anthropology of the body and the senses (Sharman, Hardin). After the cognitive turn in the study of religion maybe it is time to risk the next one - the somatic turn. Not as a rival, but as an additional instrument for a wider and clearer perspective for future research.
Increasing Complexity in the Formation of Religious Symbols
The paper sketches a research program aimed at better knowing and organizing the evolution of religious symbols, throughout time and in different cultural settings. Following an idea from systems theory, evolution may be followed as a process of increasing complexity in order to better cope with environmental contingency.
This complexity can be seen in a twofold way: subjective and objective. On the subjective side, it expresses our difficulty to simplify its meaning and course of operation. That perception can be expressed in terms of contrasting pairs, as a unifying and dual code; as external and internal; as a costly and a not-costly process; as onto- and philogenetic; as cognitive and emotional; as conscious and unconscious; and as figurative and abstract.
The other side refers to the objective increase of complexity that can be assessed in religious evolution, from simpler to more elaborated models. A hard task is to establish patterns of comparative complexity in religious symbols. Some of the pairs described could guide this task,
but more patterns should be constructed to allow an analytic description of religious symbols throughout history, for example, levels of transcendence, of personal agency, of eschatological reference, of ethical value, of immanence vs. transcendence of God, and of gratuity.
Pigs in Space – Totemic Representations in Iron Age Scandinavia
One of the main characteristics of late Iron Age Scandinavia (500-1000AD) is the pervasive use of animal ornaments and representations. These can be found in a wide variety of media, ranging from ornamented jewelry and textiles to skaldic poetry and the arrangement of ritual space. A frequent motif is the boar. It presumably symbolizes a totemic relation between artifact, artifact user and the animal itself.
The boar as a totemic animal and/or object will be used as an entry-point into discussing the ‘nature’ of anthropomorphism in religious symbolization. Special emphasis will also be put into analyzing the cognitive mechanisms relevant in the transition of object into symbol and how material structures inform counter-intuitive thinking – i.e. the significance of material culture in religious symbolization.
Signs of the vulnerable body
Disgust is a moral emotion—it causes us to make judgements about the rightness or wrongness of things that otherwise might lack such a dimension, or be categorised simply as violations of social conventions. It is an emotion of rejection, a response to that which is to be spat out, quarantined, or eliminated altogether. Disgust is distinguished from shame and fear by its quality of contagion, and the creation of a need for distancing even in the absence of guilt or danger.
What is particularly interesting about this emotion for scholars of religion is that its primary triggers lie in reminders of our animal nature and mortality—those things which tie us to material existence, reducing us to mere creatures who bleed and sneeze and eventually will die. It is for this reason that Paul Rozin has described disgust as “the body and soul emotion.” Further, disgust can be learned and applied socially to enforce certain norms.
In this paper I will describe how these symbolic manifestations of the emotion in our cultural attitudes about sex, science, and other species construct a domain in which we become comfortably “supernatural.”
The Topographic Mind: An External Mind on Pilgrimage
In this paper I will offer a brief analysis of cognitive processes in pilgrimage, focusing on the role of topography role in these processes. In the light of the theories of ‘extended mind’, I want to show how the mind of the pilgrim is not just an internal entity and process, but is also external to the brain. The pilgrim utilizes topographic structures as cognitive resources by involving them in the actual process of cognition.
By integrating the perspective of ‘material anchor’ and applying it on pilgrimage, it can be shown how topographic structures help the pilgrim remember and understand religious narratives. They do that by stabilizing the conceptual integrations carried out by the pilgrim. Thereby the topographic structures become part of the pilgrim’s mind.
The aim of the paper is to show how topographic structures around the pilgrimage site can enhance the pilgrim’s cognitive process. Because the topographic structures around the pilgrimage site anchors religious narratives the pilgrim can achieve a better and firmer understanding of those narratives by interacting with the surrounding landscape.
Earth Seen from Space – A Symbol of Salvation
When images of Earth seen from space began to infiltrate the collective consciousness of earthlings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they quickly came to function as salvational symbols of heightened ecological awareness, peaceful human coexistence, the abolition of the nation state, and the emergence of a world government. In short, Earth seen from space became a symbol of the possibility of a paradisiacal utopia not unlike the typical apocalyptic vision of a new world order. But how exactly did this come about? Through an examination of various (more or less “religious”) interpretations of Earth-seen-from-space images - among these the postulate that these images signify a cognitive (sic!) breakthrough for Mankind - the answer to this question will be sought out. The theoretical framework in which this examination will be conducted is a combination of Lakoff and Johnson’s domain interaction theory of metaphor and Fauconnier and Turners blending theory.
Semantic Filling in: Towards a Cognitive Account of Esoteric Religion
It is argued that esoteric religion (esotericism) is a recurrent phenomenon. Hence, seeking a cognitive account is justified. Among the key components of esotericism are (1) the interpretation of signs (texts, iconography, ritual behaviour, etc.) and (2) the notion that this activity reveals hidden knowledge. With reference to these two points, it is suggested that the cognitive disciplines of interest are (1) semiotics and (2) the study of psychological essentialism.
The hypothesis is ventured that interpretative responses to esoteric signs are incomplete, prompting the cognitive system to compensate by filling in the interpretative gaps ("semantic filling in"), and that this process leads to an essentialised understanding of the sings-viz. that they are the "symptoms" of "something hidden"-an "essence"-which is their cause or, if you will, their meaning. If this account holds, it could explain the recurrent emergence of esotericism in various cultural contexts and its robustness as a cultural and religious phenomenon.
Symbols and Neurotransmitters
In Northern Greece, certain religious communities called Anastenaria perform firewalking rituals in honour of saints Constantine and Helen. The intense character of those rituals begs the question of motivation. Why are some believers willing to participate in ritual activities that seem dangerous or appalling to most people? In order to answer this question, I will look into intrinsic mechanisms of the human brain, as well as their social effects. My paper will show how the performance of high-arousal rituals can produce specific physiological and psychological effects. These effects, when coupled with the powerful religious symbols of the tradition, can create a unique subjective representation of reality, which provides motivation for participation in those rituals by triggering intrinsic reward mechanisms in the brain, independent of –and very different from– the explicit functions of the ritual.
