71102.pdf

it cannot really create morality? As I said several times, we cannot hope to explain religion if we just fantasize about the way ...

is not a simple process of "downloading" notions from one brain to another. People's minds are constantly busy reconstructing, d ...

CULTURE AS MEMES The notion that what we find in cultures is a residue or a precipitate of many episodes of individual transmiss ...

certain set of notions and values (these would be the analogue of the genes). They come in different versions. These variants ar ...

ture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it! ...

we will find that quite a lot of what they do and think can be observed outside these groups. Many norms and ideas of American f ...

DISTORTION IS OF THE ESSENCE The notion of human culture as a huge set of copy-me programs is very seductive and it is certainly ...

torial in the British Spectatoronce urged the Conservative Party to acquire more of that selfish gene that Professor Dawkins tal ...

route E-mail is this: minds neverswallow raw information to serve it to others in the same raw state. Minds invariably do a lot ...

information around them; they actively filter it and use it to go well beyond what is provided. Second, they do not acquire all ...

bly true that hens in general lay eggs. In the same way, a five-year-old will guess that if one walrus gives birth to live cubs ...

[43] [ANIMAL TEMPLATES] Now the information in each of these boxes has to be filled out according to certain principles. You are ...

but an inference from that information. Even very young children can produce such inferences because they connect the informatio ...

Cameroon, where I did fieldwork, it shows great respect on some occasions. Concepts are different, but there is a general templa ...

the opposite. Acting as a centripetal force, inferences and memories lead to roughly similar constructions even though the input ...

various members of a group. To account for this is to explain the statistical fact that a similar condition affects a number of ...

APUZZLEMENT OF QUESTIONS When I started studying anthropology, theories of religion were thor- oughly confusing. People in my di ...

Why does religion prescribe rituals? Why are rituals the way they are? Why do most religions have religious specialists? Why do ...

or understanding a joke also engage this complex machinery (though in different ways). If you want to explain how human minds ac ...

2 WHAT SUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARE LIKE Are there any common features in religious con- cepts? A good way to start thinking about ...