Transmissive Frequency, Ritual, and Exegesis

Transmissive Frequency, Ritual, andExegesis HARVEY WHITEHOUSE¤ ABSTRACT Certain aspectsof the relationsbetween ritual action and ritual meaning are determinedby socially regulated cycles oftransmissivefrequency, via the highly structured operationsof human memory. Evidenceis presented in this article that: (i) the relative scarcity ofspontaneous exegetical re ection and the relatively widedissemination of standardof cial exegesis in routinizedtraditions, may beexplained by the dynamicsof implicitprocedural memory andthe opportunitiesafforded by repetition for the spread ofstable theological/ exegeticalrepresentations encoded in semanticmemory; (ii)the relativescarcity or restricted distributionof of cial exegesis and the relatively high degree ofelaboration of spontaneous exegetical re ection in rare andclimactic rituals,may beexplained by the dynamicsof episodic memory. Thesearguments are shown to havepotentially signi cant implicationsfor epidemiologicalperspectives on cognition and religion. Religiousrituals around the worldassume a bewilderingvariety offorms andare attributed an even greaterdiversity of meanings. Increasingly, however,we have reasonto believe thatthere arequite precisely speciable cognitiveconstraints on what counts as a well-formedritual andon what sorts of meanings ofritual actions are likely tobecome widelyaccepted. For instance, Lawson and McCauley (1990)have argued persuasivelythat, lurking beneath the apparentplasticity of religiousrituals indifferent cultures, lies alimitedrepertoire of relations between natural andsupernatural agents, actions, and patients. Barrett and Keil (1996), Boyer (1994),Guthrie (1993), and Sperber (1996), among others (see Barrett2000 for a review),have meanwhile arguedthat many basic religiousrepresentations, and consequently much of the meaning attributed toreligious rituals, result from cognitive susceptibilities to particular kinds ¤The Queen’s University ofBelfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. c KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 2001 Journal of Cognition and Culture 1.2 ° 168 HARVEYWH ITEHOUSE ofconcepts. In short,ritual actions and ritual meanings arenot as plastic asthey mightseem. They aredirectly constrained and shaped by universal propertiesof human cognition, deriving from evolved neuralarchitecture. Thus,the general thrustof some recent research suggests that the acquisitionof certain aspects of religious knowledge is as natural as (for instance) the acquisitionof language. Human cognitive architecture has evolved insuch a waythat, regardless of cultural and other contextual variation,certain kinds of religious representations occur, rather than all the sortswhich are theoretically possible. This paper is concernedto show thatsuch an approachmay beenriched by attendingto the context dependency ofcertain cognitive operations, speci cally thoseconcerned withmemory. The rstpart of this article sets outthe general case forviewing cognitive operations as context-dependent. The secondpart presentsa particularepidemiological model that focuses on the contextual variableof transmissive frequency. The claimsof universality for the model presentedhere arein noway weakened bythe determinationto take into accounttransmissive context. On the contrary,the effectson memory of variationsin transmissive frequency, insofar as these arerelevant tomy model,are the same forall cognitivelynormal humans everywhere. But insteadof trying to show that a context-freecognitive apparatus sets the parametersof all religions,it willbe argued that the differentialactivation ofuniversal memory systems explains agooddeal of the variation among particularreligions over time and space. First Principles for ExplainingReligion Many aspectsof culture are materially constrained.For instance, it is ob- viousthat economic systems ofproduction, exchange, barter,and con- sumptionare constrained by statesof technological development andthat patternsof kinship and marriage are constrained by the natureof sexual reproductionand infant dependency inour species. The precisenature ofthe contraintsis a matterof contention, but the claimthat constraints exist isscarcely debatable.By contrast,it is quite common for religion to beenvisaged asrelatively freefrom material constraints. We nowhave a vast profusionof labels tocharacterize various aspects of religious thinking, suchas: revitalist, messianic, prophetic, nativistic, cargoist, salvationist, mil- lenarian,separatist, revolutionary, activist, syncretic, independent, and so TRANSMISSIVE FREQUENCY, RITUAL,A NDEXEGESIS 169 on.From these sortsof catalogues it mightseem thatthere areas many di- verse strandsto religiousthinking asto the untetheredhuman imagination. Typologiesof religious phenomena, of course, often have theirorigins in the concernsof religious communities themselves, andin the discoursesof politiciansand bureaucrats. These concernsand discourses are, however, oflittle explanatoryvalue. Itmay mattera greatdeal tocolonial authorities whethera particularreligious movement ismillenarian, nationalistic, and revolutionary,rather than congregationalist,passivist, and ecumenical. But forthe purposesof a scientic theoryof religion, that is to say atheory of the causes ofreligious phenomena and the variationsamong them, we requirea ratherdifferent method of carving up our subject matter. What wemust look for are direct material constraints on religion, no less signicant than the technologicaland reproductive constraints upon economicand kinship organization. There are suchconstraints and at least someof these arederived from human cognition. Indeed, patterns ofmental activity,rooted in the biologyof brain functions and their developmental contexts,have directeffects on the elaborationof all domainsof human culture — notonly the religious.As long ago as the 1960s,it was shown that the variety ofkinship systems isconstrained as muchby the limitationsof short-term memory for genealogical categories asitis by the so-called‘ factsof life’mentioned above (see D’Andrade1995: 42-44).More recent work in psychology on cheater-detection, altruism, cooperation,theory of mind, and other aspects of cognitionis showingwith increasingprecision that technologies of mind,at least asmuch as exterior technologies,constrain the patternsof economicand political activity found withinour species (see Boyer,forthcoming). And so it is with religion. What webelieve aboutgods, spirits, and ancestors is rmly constrained by whatwe can encode, process, and recall. And what we consider to be efcacious and necessary ritualsis shaped by deep intuitions concerning the fundamentalrelations between agents, instruments, and patients. Only oncewe begin to understand all thiscan we begin to disassemble and explain the constituentsof religion. Religion,like any culturaldomain, is a distributedphenomenon. Thatis to say, itconsists not merely ofthe thoughtsand feelings of an individualdevotee, but of the recognizablysimilar or complementary thoughtsand feelings ofa populationof religious adherents. Indeed, some 170 HARVEYWH ITEHOUSE ofthose thoughts and feelings presupposethat religion is distributed. For instance,the doctrinethat only ordainedpriests can perform ef cacious ritesof baptism presupposes thatreligion encompasses different categories ofparticipants, such as priests and candidates for baptism. Moreover, if specialistknowledge is possessed by differentcategories of of ciant, the reproductionof the religioustradition will depend upon cooperation. The problemof explaining religionis therefore a problemof explaining a particulartype of distributed cognition (cf.Hutchins 1996). Accordingto DanSperber (1996), the challenge isto explain the spread andpersistence of cultural (including religious) representations in much the same wayas some medical researchers seek toexplain the spread andpersistence of diseases. The latterproject falls tothe medical eld knownas ‘ epidemiology’. What werequire, then, isan ‘epidemiologyof representations’(Sperber 1985). Sperber, however, reminds us that the analogybetween the spreadof religion (or culture in general) andthe spreadof disease should not be taken toofar. Obviously, diseases are damagingto the organismsthey infect,whereas this is not (necessarily) trueof religions. But there areother respects in which processes of viral transmission,for instance, differ from processes of religious transmission. Germs aretransmitted directly from one body to another, and reproduce bymeans ofreplication. Religious thoughts and feelings aretransmitted indirectlyand are seldom exactly replicated.Even the mostpersuasive preachercannot ‘ implant’his or her thoughtsin my head.All the evangelist cando is toalter my cognitiveenvironment in sucha wayas to encourage me toprocess the inputsin ways that resemble hisor her representations ofthe world.Whereas inviral contagion, replication is normal and mutationrare, in religious transmission mutation is normaland replication extraordinary(cf. Sperber 1985). In Sperber’s view,cultural transmission issuccessful to the extent thatmutation can be minimized with the result thatideas and sentiments aresuf ciently similaras to seem tobe ‘ shared’ amongmembers of a culturaltradition. According to this approach, our rststep is to identifythe mechanismsthat reduce cultural mutation. ButSperber’ s argumentrequires slight modi cation. Culture in general,and religion in particular, does not consist simply of sharedrepresen- tations.What isimportant in some (but not all) formsof religiousactivity is the ‘sharing’of types ofexperience

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