Breaking the Frames

CHAPTER 7

Religion and Cognition

AbstractCognitive studies have offered an explanation of religion.
Important contributions to this discussion have been made by Pascal
Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse. Boyer argues that religious ideas are
minimally counterintuitive and therefore easily adopted. The argument
depends on what constitutes intuition and on the assumption that there
are standard cross-cultural cognitive processes, and that beliefs are the
main focus of discussion. Embodiment theory, by contrast, would focus
on practices and rituals. Whitehouse has argued for a combination of
cognitive and social modes of explanation. Whitehouse developed a robust
ideal-type dichotomy, postulating doctrinal versus imagistic modes of
religiosity. While his concept here comprises a dichotomous frame,
Whitehouse recognizes that the frame is broken in practice by the coex-
istence of these modes within a given system.

KeywordsBeliefs
Embodiment theory
Harvey Whitehouse
Intuition

Modes of religiosity
Pascal Boyer

Anthropological theorizing has always been the site of competitive take-
over bids. Evolutionary psychology has been briefly mentioned in the
previous chapter. As an analytical framework it is often linked with
approaches through cognitive science, which attempts to look beyond
any particular set of ethnographic materials to their deeper foundations

© The Author(s) 2017
P.J. Stewart, A.J. Strathern,Breaking the Frames,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47127-3_7

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