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Bringing Ritual to Mind

Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms

Robert N McCauley author E Thomas Lawson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:15th Aug '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Bringing Ritual to Mind cover

Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious ritual systems.

Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the psychological foundations of religious rituals. Religious rituals exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance recollection. McCauley and Lawson use a wide range of evidence to argue that the explanation lies in participants' cognitive representations of ritual form.Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (the availability of literacy has little impact on this). But why do some rituals exploit the first of these variables while others exploit the second? McCauley and Lawson advance the ritual form hypothesis, arguing that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing evidence from cognitive, developmental and social psychology and from cultural anthropology and the history of religions, they utilize dynamical systems tools to explain the recurrent evolutionary trajectories religions exhibit.

'Bringing Ritual to Mind makes a substantial contribution to one corner of the cognitive field, the cognitive basis of ritual forms. The book extends and clarifies aspects of the theory of ritual competence presented in the authors' Rethinking Religion (1990).' Numen
'… a provocative and very stimulating set of ideas …'. Anthropos

ISBN: 9780521016292

Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 19mm

Weight: 405g

252 pages