71102.pdf

mediums generally control exchanges between their settlements and the outside world. With their specialization comes an ambiguou ...

services if another fails to solve the problem at hand. The way these specialists describe what they do and why it supposedly wo ...

the ritual. Their advice to each other is to try to "wring the neck" of their clients, that is, extort as much money as possible ...

standard situation was restricted literacy, in which only a small group of specialists handled written documents. In many places ...

more fragile than that of other groups. Specialized craftsmen often have no difficulty maintaining exclusive supply, either beca ...

power and offers supernatural justifications for the established order. This is true in the sense that many successful religious ...

one from one religious specialist to the next, a guild requires a description of what it offers. Obviously, putting forth a doct ...

well—that is, literate versions of the supernatural concepts that do not connect with any of the supernatural templates listed i ...

them into mountains or pillars of a house, with a general and abstract notion of salvationconditioned by moral behavior. Such a ...

compilations of oracles and moral rules—all this was a side effect of using scripts to store and retrieve data. But some changes ...

sometimes forced to participate. The history of early Christianity also includes many difficult conflicts between the competing ...

to distort the official message or to add all sorts of officially incorrect interpretations. This is in fact inevitable, because ...

asm. Indeed, many religious traditions seem to oscillate between the two poles. This oscillation has been documented for Islam a ...

Memory processes are not the only force driving religious institu- tions. The market for religious services also imposes particu ...

Again, however, appearances may be deceptive. The idea that com- mon gods result in a common identity seems fairly plausible bec ...

For the essentialist system, input conditions include the following: (1) some living things are presented as having common exter ...

ceive a difference, naturally in their group's favor, in terms of attrac- tiveness, honesty or intelligence. They are far more w ...

and others are not. We can usually work on the basis of such "gut feel- ings" because they are the result of subtle calculations ...

cues—coalitional intuitions, which are not made consciously but which give us precise guidance about what to do. This may seem s ...

tion is a threat to me even if it only directly hurts someone else is some- thing that most people grasp intuitively but cannot ...