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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.