DOCSLIB.ORG

University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF RELIGIONS: ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION By JOHN BALCH A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 © 2015 John Balch To Gregory Bateson, who reminded us never to lose site of the connecting patterns ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first thanks have to go to Danny Duffy, who has been my rock in my time in Gainesville. His love and support have made me a better person and a better writer. My next thanks go to my family; my parents who taught me to think deeply about the world, and who helped me in my crazy decision to go to grad school, and my sisters who have always given me unconditional love and encouragement. I would also like to thank my friend Bradford Martins, who has tolerated my endless questions about the brain, and has been a constant voice of sanity in my life. And I thank my other friends, who have always inspired me to become more curious about the cosmos. I have been extremely fortunate to have a wonderful series of mentors over the course of my academic career. I would like to particularly thank my committee members. Dr. Bron Taylor has constantly helped me grow as a scholar and thinker in my time at the University of Florida, and pushed me towards greater clarity and brevity in my writing. Dr. Robin Wright’s expertise and insight on indigenous religions has been invaluable in helping me navigate through tangled webs of ethnographers and animists. I also would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Jay McDaniel, whose guidance allowed me to follow the path I’m on today. Finally, I would also like to thank Cris Campbell, whose summer course first introduced me to evolutionary and cognitive theories on religion and whose online writings have been an ongoing source of insight. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................8 Prelude ......................................................................................................................................8 Steps to an Ecology of Religion(s) .........................................................................................11 2 THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION: THE QUESTION OF CULTURAL VARIANCE ............................................................................................................................16 Contemporary Origins for the Cognitive Theories of Religion ..............................................16 Cultural Epidemiology and Stone-Age Minds .......................................................................17 The Standard Cognitive Science of Religion – Religion Explained? .....................................20 Not So Fast: The Return of Cross-Cultural Studies................................................................26 Beyond the Western Mind – Opaque Thoughts and Ecological Reasoning ...........................29 Assessing the CSR Model ......................................................................................................34 3 FROM COGNITION TO COSMOLOGY .............................................................................36 Out of Our Heads-A Patterned Practices Approach to Culture ..............................................36 Distributed Navigation, Epistemic Niches, and Entangled Agencies .....................................38 To Think the Unthinkable – Material Culture and Religious Concepts .................................44 Alternate Realities – Seer Stones and Shamanic Caves .........................................................49 Animisms Old and New ..........................................................................................................57 Weaving the Lifeworld - Religion in the Society of Nature ...................................................66 4 BUILDING A COSMOLOGICAL NICHE ...........................................................................74 Religion as an Adaptive System: Big Gods and Big Problems ..............................................74 Cosmology as Ecological Analysis Reconsidered ..................................................................80 Niche Construction – The Missing Process in the Evolution of Religion? ............................90 The Historical Ecology of Religions ......................................................................................93 5 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................105 Anthropomorphism or Sentient Ecology? ............................................................................105 Religion as Extended Phenotype ..........................................................................................109 Transactional Animism and Transcendetal Totemism .........................................................112 The Return of Animism? ......................................................................................................119 5 REFERENCE LIST .....................................................................................................................124 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................140 6 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF RELIGIONS: ECO-EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION By John Balch May 2015 Chair: Bron Taylor Major: Religion In this thesis I examine the importance of ecological contexts for evolutionary and cognitive theories of religion. Specifically, I argue that a prevalent assumption by researchers that religions primarily involve interactions with supernatural or counterfactual realities has obscured the dynamic relationships religious communities form with local ecosystems. In many societies, religious beliefs and practices structure patterns of interaction with other organisms and environmental systems, which influences the ability of that community to survive. I propose that this process constitutes a type of niche construction, or alterations made to environments by organisms that impact evolutionary selection pressures. Consequently, debates over the evolutionary functions of religion should take into account the specific contexts in which religions lead to ecological success or failure. To explore these questions, I incorporate contemporary cognitive perspectives on the cultural scaffolding of cognitive processes, the “New Animist” ethnographic interpretations of religious systems in foraging societies, and ecological research on long-term interactions between human communities and environmental systems. 7 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Prelude Two books published in the last 15 years by different French anthropologists begin with a very similar rhetorical strategy. In both Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer1 and Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola,2 the authors introduce the reader to a set of ethnographic examples that might seem strange or bizarre from a modern Western perspective; singing songs to plants and jaguars, protective charms against invisible darts, encountering the souls of hunted animals in dreams, and talking to an invisible omniscient agent. The goal of both authors is to uncover the logic behind these seemingly illogical practices. In Religion Explained this “rich tapestry of folly” is presented as a by-product of “properties of mind that are found in all members of our species with normal brains.”3 The apparent diversity and strangeness of human concepts and beliefs is reduced to a core of basic ideas that are favored by the way human minds were shaped by natural selection in the deep past. These ideas, which Boyer likens to viruses, spread across human minds like an informational plague, carving out a local mental habitation for a set of “airy nothings.”4 Armed with the tools of cognitive science and evolutionary theory, Boyer sets out to demonstrate the “naturalness” of supernatural belief from a scientific perspective. 1 Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 2 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013). 3 Boyer, Religion Explained, 2. 4 Ibid., 4. 8 The beliefs and practices Descola described, in contrast, demonstrate the way “certain peoples…envisage their insertion into the environment in a manner altogether different from our own.”5 He argued that Western people, not those in Amazonia or Siberia, are outliers in the manner they configure relationships between humans and non-human organisms. “In many regions on the planet,” Descola contended, “humans and nonhumans are not conceived as developing in incommunicable worlds or according to quite separate principles.”6 He claimed that to understand the beliefs of the Achuar, the Cree, or the Itza’ Mayans, anthropologists should take off the lenses of a rigid naturalist epistemology, and investigate the ways structures of relations
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Biogenetic Structuralism'
    'BIOGE~TIC STRUCTURALISM'STRUCTURALISM" AND THE LOCATION OF STRUCTURES*STRUCTURES~'< In the heyday of 'high' structuralism it was sometimes argued, explicitly or implicitly, that the ultimate 'explanation' of cultural structures was to be found in the properties of 'the human mind'. This argument, it was perhaps felt, shifted the problem of explanation to the realm 'of philosophr, which many anthropologists considered outsiqe their concern. It was not surprising, therefore, that $ceptics ofaof, a more materialist persuasionpersuas'ion would critiofze structuralist analysis for being an essentially idea11stormentalistidealJtst or mentalist undertaking.undertakirig. Even so, the analytical value, of the notion of structures (in the Levi-Straussian sense,'hasbeen increasingly recognized, even by anthro­ pologists of a materialistmateria~ist stance (e.g. in the 'structural marx.i;sm'marx,j;sm' of MauriceNaurice Godelier (1973) and JonathanJonatl1an Friedman (1974),(1974)1 to the extent that nowadays only the most ardent 'vul¢ar'vul$ar materialists' feel they can do without it. This devefopment has not, however, done away with the problem of t~e locatiori of structures; the problem has only been push~d into the background, because other problems were.were felt: by most to be of more immediate concern. , .' ~ptwhether~f.lt'whether or not we have been bothered by the location problelflproblelf1 we should all welcome the pioneering work of two auth'prl;j,auth'prl;l, Charles Laughlin, an anthropologist, and Eugene d' Aqui!i, ~ psych~atrist, in which they lay the foundations " of aneW structural approach, 'biogenetic structuralism'. In the introduction to the book they state: !~ f f ., Th~majorTh~rnajor onttllbgical-:assumptiononttJlbgical-:assumption upon which biogenetic str\.ibturalismstr~bturalism is founded is that there exists no reality intervening between the central nervous system and the environment.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cognitive Science of Religion
    Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta Ústav religionistiky Martin Lang The Cognitive Science of Religion Connecting the Humanities and the Sciences in the Study of Ritual Practice, Prosociality, and Anxiety Dizertační práce Školitel: Mgr. Aleš Chalupa, Ph.D. Brno 2016 Prohlašuji, že jsem tuto dizertační práci vypracoval samostatně s využitím uvedených pramenů a literatury. ……………………………………… Mgr. Martin Lang V Brně dne 22. září 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS CZECH ABSTRACT I ENGLISH ABSTRACT II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS III PREFACE IV INTRODUCTION - 1 - THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION - 4 - Two Cultures and the Divide between the Humanities and the Sciences - 4 - CSR and Consilience - 7 - CSR and the Mechanistic Approach - 12 - EFFECTS OF RELIGION AND RITUAL ON PROSOCIALITY - 18 - RELIGION AND PROSOCIALITY - 23 - Introduction - 23 - The Religious Congruence Fallacy - 25 - What Religious People Say They Do - 26 - What Religious People Actually Do - 28 - Religion as Prime - 31 - Belief and Practice - 35 - Future Directions - 37 - Summary - 38 - MUSIC AS A SACRED CUE? EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS MUSIC ON MORAL BEHAVIOR - 40 - Abstract - 40 - Introduction - 40 - Materials and Methods - 44 - Results - 50 - Discussion - 62 - LOST IN THE RHYTHM: EFFECTS OF RHYTHM ON SUBSEQUENT INTERPERSONAL COORDINATION - 68 - Abstract - 68 - Introduction - 68 - Materials and Methods - 70 - Results - 74 - Discussion - 79 - Appendix - 83 - EFFECTS OF RITUAL BEHAVIOR ON ANXIETY - 84 - EFFECTS OF ANXIETY ON SPONTANEOUS RITUALIZED BEHAVIOR - 88 - Summary - 88 - Results - 89 - Discussion - 95 - Experimental Procedures - 98 - ANXIETY AND RITUALIZATION: CAN ATTENTION DISCRIMINATE COMPULSION FROM ROUTINE? - 100 - DISCUSSION - 103 - REFERENCES - 115 - SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL - 145 - CZECH ABSTRACT Náboženství je tradičním tématem mnohých humanitních a sociálních věd, jež při jeho studiu nabízí různorodé perspektivy a metodologické přístupy.
    [Show full text]
  • This Following Article Is of a Conversation Between Stewart
    CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, 10(21), 32-44. This following article is of a conversation between Stewart Brand, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead and was originally published in the CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, Issue no. 10, pp. 32-44. With very many thanks to Stewart Brand to reproduce it in: A. Kleiner and S. Brand, Editors, Ten years of coevolution quarterly, North Point Press, San Francisco (1986). Available at http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm For God’s Sake, Margaret Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were married in 1936. They had met and fallen in love in 1932 while both were doing anthropological fieldwork on the Sepik River in New Guinea (Margaret was at the same time with her second husband, Reo Fortune). In New Guinea Gregory’s unusual sense of theory met Margaret’s improved field methodology and sparked much of the quality in Gregory’s opus on the latmul tribe, Naven. Newly-wed in Bali, they spent two collaborative years in the most intense and productive fieldwork of their lives, developing, among other things, a still unmatched photographic analysis of the culture. Their daughter Mary Catherine, Margaret’s only child, was born in 1939 in the United States. Gregory and Margaret worked together on the result of their Bali fieldwork, Balinese Character - A Photographic Analysis, and then were separated increasingly by World War II and their own diverging interests. Download from http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/ 1 | Page CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, 10(21), 32-44. After the war they both were involved in starting the somewhat famous Macy Conferences (1947-53) that invented cybernetics.
    [Show full text]
  • Preparing for a Confusing Future
    Preparing for a Confusing Future Complexity, Warm Data and Education Nora Bateson, Sept 2018 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again. -Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Putting the world back together now from the fragmented, decontextualized and siloed bits it has been broken into is a challenge that rests on the possibility of intergenerational collaborative exploration. To form and find interconnections will require humility and a new kind of attention to interdependent processes in complex systems. New sensitivity will be needed, new perception, new language, new ideas. If the human species is to continue, the way in which we consider ourselves in relation to each other, and the environment must evolve. Imagine for a moment what it must be like to be a child in this era – looking into the future, what awaits you? Those of us who are over 25 probably cannot actually conceptualize the horizon that is in view for today’s kids. When they are asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” – what should they say? What are the current options? A programmer, a doctor, crypto-broker, an artist, a YouTube star, an ocean restorer? What kind of society will they be living in? And, what sort of education can they be given to prepare them for a future we cannot even imagine? More than an exploration of education, this is a recognition that the education system exists within and between other systems of employment, economics, culture, media, health, religion and within the larger ecology.
    [Show full text]
  • Measuring the Cultural Evolution of Music: with Case Studies of British-American and Japanese Folk, Art, and Popular Music
    Measuring the cultural evolution of music: With case studies of British-American and Japanese folk, art, and popular music Patrick Evan SAVAGE This is an English version of my Japanese Ph.D. dissertation (Ph.D. conferred on March 27, 2017). The final Japanese version of record was deposited in the Japanese National Diet Library in June 2017. #2314910 Ph.D. entrance year: 2014 2016 academic year Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Musicology Ph.D. dissertation Supervisor： UEMURA Yukio Supervisory committee： TSUKAHARA Yasuko MARUI Atsushi Hugh DE FERRANTI i English abstract Student number： 2314910 Name： Patrick Evan SAVAGE Title： Measuring the cultural evolution of music: With case studies of British-American and Japanese folk, art, and popular music Darwin's theory of evolution provided striking explanatory power that has come to unify biology and has been successfully extended to various social sciences. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how cultural evolutionary theory may also hold promise for explaining diverse musical phenomena, using a series of quantitative case studies from a variety of cultures and genres to demonstrate general laws governing musical change. Chapter one describes previous research and debates regarding music and cultural evolution. Drawing on major advances in the scientific understanding of cultural evolution over the past three decades, I clarify persistent misconceptions about the roles of genes and progress in definitions of evolution, showing that neither is required or assumed. I go on to review older and recent literature relevant to musical evolution at a variety of levels, from Lomax's macroevolutionary interpretation of global patterns of song-style to microevolutionary mechanisms by which minute melodic variations give rise to large tune families.
    [Show full text]
  • Implicit Cultures: Towards a Psychosocial Theory of 'Intuitive
    Implicit Cultures: Towards a Psychosocial Theory of ‘Intuitive Religious Beliefs’ By Timothy J. McVicar A Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington In Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In Religious Studies School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2011 2 If we threw a handful of children on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God (Barrett cited in Beckford, 2008). A child raised on a desert island…would come out as Geertz envisioned, something of a monster, something other than a fully human intentional and moral agent (Tomasello, 1999: 215). 3 Acknowledgements Many people helped ensure that this thesis reached fruition. The steady and always enthusiastic hand of my supervisor Joseph Bulbulia provided the necessary expertise, guidance, and inspiration needed to make the project achievable and enjoyable. I am grateful to him for this and for introducing me to the field in my undergrad years. His interest and enthusiasm directly stirred my own. My secondary supervisor, Michael Raddich, who came onboard in the final stages, offered timely expertise on writing style, structure, and content. My thesis would be poorer without the insight and precision he was able to bring. Thanks heaps. A thank you is also due to the Religious Studies programme administrator Aliki Kalliabetsos, who provided guidance and seemly endless tins of instant coffee. Thanks also to the academics in the Religious Studies Department: Rick Weiss, Paul Morris, and Art Buehler for informal discussions and direction. I would also like to thank my postgraduate colleges, Milan Magan, Lisa Eyre, Negar Patrow and Wil Hoverd, who ensured my time here has been an enjoyable, empathetic and intellectually enriching one.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices: the Case of Divination Author: Ze Hong A1, Joseph Henricha
    Title: The cultural evolution of epistemic practices: the case of divination Author: Ze Hong a1, Joseph Henricha Author Affiliations: a Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, 02138, Cambridge, MA, United States Keywords: cultural Evolution; divination; information transmission; Bayesian reasoning 1 To whom correspondence should be addressed: [email protected] 1 ABSTRACT While a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and formally model the scenarios under which individuals may over-estimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found that strong prior belief, under-reporting of negative evidence, and mis-inferring belief from behavior can all contribute to biased and inaccurate beliefs about the effectiveness of epistemic technologies. We finally suggest how scientific epistemology, as it emerged in the Western societies over the last few centuries, has influenced the importance and cultural centrality of divination practices. 2 1. INTRODUCTION The ethnographic and historical record suggests that most, and potentially all, human societies have developed techniques, processes or technologies that reveal otherwise hidden or obscure information, often about unknown causes or future events. In historical and contemporary small-scale societies around the globe, divination—"the foretelling of future events or discovery of what is hidden or obscure by supernatural or magical means” –has been extremely common, possibly even universal (Flad 2008; Boyer 2020).
    [Show full text]
  • Conscious Purpose in 2010: Bateson's Prescient Warning
    CONSCIOUS PURPOSE IN 2010: BATESON’S PRESCIENT WARNING Phillip Guddemi Bateson Idea Group, Sacramento, California ABSTRACT In 1968 Gregory Bateson hosted a conference on “the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation.” In his conference paper he warned that human conscious purpose distorts perception in a way which obscures the systemic (“cybernetic”) nature of both self and environment. The ensuing years have paid little attention to his analysis of both observer and environment as cybernetic systems whose systemic natures are dangerously opaque to human purposive thought. But his analysis is sounder than ever on the basis of scientific developments of the last forty years. Recent adaptive systems formulations in ecological theory have underscored how ecological systems, because of their systems nature, can be vulnerable to the unintended consequences of human actions. Modern neuroscience has also delineated many of the limitations of conscious thinking Bateson warned us against. In fact, new work on the cerebral hemispheres has pointed to epistemological biases, characteristic of the left hemisphere in particular, which fit Bateson’s portrait of the biases of conscious purpose. It seems that Bateson’s forty-two year old warning was prescient and relevant to our predicament today. Keywords: ecology, consciousness, cybernetics GREGORY BATESON, 1968: PRELUDE TO A CONFERENCE In 1968 Gregory Bateson organized a conference at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, with participants from the worlds of cybernetics, ecology, anthropology, the humanities, and education. The conference was under the auspices of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, an anthropological foundation, and it did not yield a proceedings volume. Instead, Mary Catherine Bateson, participant and Gregory’s daughter, wrote up a personal account of the interlocking discussions of the conference in a book, Our Own Metaphor (Bateson, M.C., 1972).
    [Show full text]
  • The Third Base
    Appendix The Third Base Donald Forsdyke If I thought that by learning more and more I should ever arrive at the knowledge of absolute truth, I would leave off studying. But I believe I am pretty safe. Samuel Butler, Notebooks Darwin’s mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell, and Darwin himself, both con- sidered the relationship between the evolution of biological species and the evolution of languages [1]. But neither took the subject to the deep informa- tional level of Butler and Hering. In the twentieth century the emergence of a new science – Evolutionary Bioinformatics (EB) – was heralded by two dis- coveries. First, that DNA – a linear polymer of four base units – was the chromosomal component conveying hereditary information. Second, that much of this information was “a phenomenon of arrangement” – determined by the sequence of the four bases. We conclude with a brief sketch of the new work as it relates to William Bateson’s evolutionary ideas. However, imbued with true Batesonian caution (“I will believe when I must”), it is relegated to an Appendix to indicate its provisional nature. Modern languages have similarities that indicate branching evolution from common ancestral languages [2]. We recognize early variations within a language as dialects or accents. When accents are incompatible, communi- cation is impaired. As accents get more disparate, mutual comprehension de- creases and at some point, when comprehension is largely lost, we declare that there are two languages where there was initially one. The origin of lan- guage begins with differences in accent. If we understand how differences in accent arise, then we may come to understand something fundamental about the origin of language (and hence of a text written in that language).
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Integration Or Social
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Integration or Social Control? The Evolution of Religious-Rituals A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology by John Manuel Aldecoa June 2016 Thesis Committee: Dr. Alexandra Maryanski, Chairperson Dr. Jonathan H. Turner Dr. Jan E. Stets Dr. Christopher Chase-Dunn Copyright by John Manuel Aldecoa 2016 The Thesis of John Manuel Aldecoa is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Integration or Social Control? The Evolution of Religious-Rituals by John Manuel Aldecoa Master of Arts Graduate Program in Sociology University of California, Riverside, June 2016 Dr. Alexandra Maryanski, Chairperson Scholars generally agree that religion is a social construct, but polarize along the line of what consequences religious-rituals actually have in society. Durkheimian and neo-Darwinian scholars argue that the religious-ritual evolved to integrate societal members and promote prosocial behavior. Critical theorists contend religious-rituals may not operate so much to create shared beliefs but instead to legitimate a structure of dominance within society. I argue that a nexus between these theories can be found with an examination of the underlying neurology of religious-rituals. The mirror neuronal system (MNS) is the foundation for the humanistic ‘desire’ for mimesis. Religious-rituals stimulate the MNS to promote empathy, trust, and integration. As societies grew, increasing social distance and differentiation (i.e., stratification) weakened empathetic bonding between religious specialists and the religious group. Reduced empathy lead to increased selfishness and other antisocial behaviors that benefited the social elite. I conclude with a discussion of the primary link between the integration and social control hypotheses: mimesis, synchrony, and emotionality.
    [Show full text]
  • The Fish That Got Away? Human Behavioral Ecology and the Study of Religion
    Religion, Brain & Behavior ISSN: 2153-599X (Print) 2153-5981 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrbb20 The fish that got away? Human behavioral ecology and the study of religion Richard Sosis, Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman & Uffe Schjoedt To cite this article: Richard Sosis, Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman & Uffe Schjoedt (2018) The fish that got away? Human behavioral ecology and the study of religion, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8:4, 351-353, DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2018.1523608 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2018.1523608 Published online: 26 Sep 2018. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrbb20 RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR 2018, VOL. 8, NO. 4, 351–353 https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2018.1523608 EDITORIAL The fish that got away? Human behavioral ecology and the study of religion During the growth phase of any academic field it is worthwhile to pause and consider the ways in which the field has developed. There are many reasons to attempt a stock-take: to gauge progress, diagnose problems, consider position relative to other disciplines, identify big challenges, spot opportunities, strategize, or simply to celebrate the field’s many achievements. Our previous edi- torials have variously attempted to address each of these tasks. Here, though, we would like to do something a little different. Instead of asking what actually happened to the field, we consider what might have happened: were there alternative, potentially more fruitful pathways in which our field, the biocultural study of religion, could have progressed? Were there missed opportunities during the field’s development? Rather than contemplating the fish in hand, how big was the fish that got away? By most accounts our field consists of at least two major subfields—the evolutionary study of reli- gion and the cognitive science of religion.
    [Show full text]
  • A Brief Comparison of the Unconscious As Seen by Jung and LéVi‐Strauss
    A Brief Comparison of the Unconscious as Seen by Jung and Levi-Strauss giuseppe iurato University of Palermo, [email protected] abstract Retracing the primary common aspects between anthropological and psychoanalytic thought, in this article, we will further discuss the main common points between the notions of the unconscious according to Carl Gustav Jung and Claude Levi-Strauss, taking into account the thought of Erich Neumann. On the basis of very simple elementary logic considerations centered around the basic notion of the separation of opposites, our observations might be useful for speculations on the possible origins of rational thought and hence on the origins of consciousness. keywords: analytical psychology, structural anthropology, unconscious, archetype, classical logic In the beginning, all the things were together; then, it came the mind (o υοὓf) and set them in order —Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ (Diogenes Lærtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 2, Chap. III) Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1908–2009) were two of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last century. The former was an eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, the first pupil of Sigmund Freud and then the founder of a new school of psychoanalytic thought called analytical psychology. The latter was an eminent anthropologist and ethnologist, as well Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 60–107, ISSN 1053-4202, © 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12032 60 on jungian and levi-straussian unconscious 61 as one of the primary leaders of French structuralism; he also made funda- mental contributions to philosophy and psychology.
    [Show full text]