15/02/2010 by Jon.

My new website has just gone live at: www.jonathanmair.com.

I won’t be adding more material to this site, but I’ll keep it up for archive purposes.

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10/01/2010 by Jon.

 New reading lists for my S4 lectures on cognitive anthropology and anthropology of belief are available - links below. Look forward to seeing you at the lectures in February.

Anthropology of Belief Lectures - Reading List - J Mair

Cognitive anthropology lectures - reading list - Jon Mair

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01/12/2008 by Jon.

You can download the files for the recent lectures on the anthropology of belief from the links below. If you have any comments or questions, please submit a comment to this post.

Belief Lecture 1 Handout

Belief Lecture 1 Presentation

Belief Lecture 2 Handout

Belief Lecture 2 Presentation

s4-belief-reading.pdf

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28/11/2008 by Jon.

Read a short article on a debate about cognitive anthropology on the Guardian site here.

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04/11/2008 by Jon.

There’s a new collaborative website about cognitive anthropology at the address below: 

 http://www.cognitionandculture.net/

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27/10/2008 by Jon.

Updated files for the lectures are available by following the links below. Please feel free to post a comment if you have any questions.

Lecture 1 - The cognitive Anthropological Critique Lecture 2 - The New Cognitive AnthropologyLecture 3 - Cognitive Anthropology of Religion

Lecture 1 Handout

Lecture 2 Handout

Lecture 3 Handout

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08/02/2008 by Jon.

All the materials for the cognitive anthropology course are now available from this site - see the posts below. Please do use this site to post comments and especially to ask questions if you have any — I will do my best to respond. I will also continue to add posts if I come across anything relevant. If you want to be informed of new posts and comments, you can register and subscribe using the link in the menu bar (bottom left). 

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08/02/2008 by Jon.

Download lecture files:

Lecture 3 - Cognitive anthropology of religion - PP presentation

Lecture 3 - Cognitive anthropology of religion - handout 

We began this lecture by noting that contemporary cognitive anthropologists mostly deal with questions of religion. We mentioned five key theories in the cognitive anthropology of religion:

1. Minimally Counter-Intuitive (MCI) concepts (Boyer);
2. Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (HADD) and Theory of Mind Module (ToMM) (Barrett, Guthrie);
3. The Hazard-Precaution System (Boyer and Lienard);
4. The ritual forms hypothesis (MacCauley and Lawson);
5. the Divergent Modes Theory (Whitehouse).

In order to understand some of these theories, we looked at the modular theory of mind as it has been developed in the fields of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The following quotation from Pinker’s How the mind works sums this up nicely:

The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and out manoeuvring objects, animals, plants, and other people. This summary can be unpacked into several claims. The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation. The mind is organised into modules all mental organs, each with a specialised design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world. The modules basic logic is specified by our genetic program. Their operation was shaped by natural selection to solve the problems of hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our evolutionary history. The various problems for our ancestors were sub tasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation. (Pinker 1997:21) 

We then looked in detail at Pascal Boyer’s attempt to explain the universal distribution of supernatural concepts and anthropomorphism using the cognitive science model and ‘minimally counter-intuitive’ ideas…and at its extension by writers such as Guthrie and Barrett who attempted to explain the predominance of agent concepts among supernatural concepts in terms of the operation of the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device and the Theory of Mind Module.

Finally, we briefly noted the main categories of criticism that are levelled at this kind of work:

1. Is it good? - various moral or political objections to the cognitive anthropology/cognitive science project;
2. Is it good biology/psychology - methodological objections to the biological and psychological principles on which the subdiscipline is based.
3. Is it good anthropology? Anthropologists have objected that this project is simply irrelevant to many traditional anthropological lines of enquiry, and that it need not — as some of its practitioners suggest it will — supplant those concerns. See Laidlaw’s paper in Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007 for a sustained critique along these lines.

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07/02/2008 by Jon.

Cognitive science is unfortunately a JRD (Jargon-Rich Discipline) with lots of TLAs, some of which are explained here.

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01/02/2008 by Jon.

I have added links to the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast, and to the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology and Centre for Anthropology and Mind , Oxford.

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