religious studies and cultural anthropology. Be that as it may, the main critique
that ought to be directed at Lawson, McCauley, and other practitioners of the
cognitive approach has less to do with style or with difficulty, than with the
relative narrowness of their ethnographic evidence, most of which comes from
a small number of small-scale societies. Taking into account complex societies,
doctrinal systems, and, above all, history would undoubtedly dilute the rigor
of their analyses, but that may be a price worth paying if one is to do justice
to complex religious systems. Attention should also be called to Readings in
Ritual Studies, edited by Grimes (1996), an anthology that would be perfect
were it not for the absence of Maurice Bloch’s work.
After collective volumes such as Myth, A Symposium, edited by Thomas
Sebeok (1955/1958), and Myth and Mythmaking, edited by Henry Murray
(1960), the number of theoretical studies devoted to myth produced by scholars
based in North America has been limited. Kees Bolle, The Freedom of Man in
Myth(1968), deals with freedom as expressed through humor and mysticism.
Other volumes include an excellent collection of studies dealing with South
American mythology, Rethinking History and Myth, edited by Jonathan Hill
(1988); and Myth and Method, edited by Laurie Patton and Wendy Doniger
(1996). Meta-theoretical studies include William Doty, Mythography(1986/
2000) and Strenski’s Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. The
most important recent study is Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth(1999), which
deals with the political role of myth from Homer to Georges Dumézil, the old
master of Indo-European studies. (Robert Segal has written on the historio-
graphy of myth and on the relation between myth and ritual, but he is based
in the United Kingdom). After having been rendered useless by Edward Shils
(1981), the concept of tradition has been approached in a theoretically fruitful
manner in Pascal Boyer’s Tradition as Truth and Communication(1990) and
in Historicizing ‘Tradition’ in the Study of Religion, edited by Steven Engler
and Gregory Grieve (2005).Symbolization and cognitionUnlike the interest in symbolism that prevailed during the 1960s and 1970s,
at the height of Eliade’s influence and at the time when, in ‘Structure et
herméneutique’ (1963), Paul Ricoeur emphasized meaning against the struc-
turalist concern with syntax, the interest in symbols and symbolism has
decreased considerably. Besides the work produced in Great Britain by
Raymond Firth (1973), in France by Tzvetan Todorov (1977, 1978), and the
volumes edited in Europe by Haralds Biezais (1979) and Michel Izard and
Pierre Smith (1979), we may mention, in addition to Victor Turner’s work,
Philip Wheelwright’s The Burning Fountain(1968), Sherry Ortner’s influential
‘On Key Symbols’ (1973), and two collections of essays: The Interpretation252
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES