asm. Indeed, many religious traditions seem to oscillate between the
two poles. This oscillation has been documented for Islam and various
Hindu and Buddhist movements as well as Christian movements.
According to anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, these different
modes of transmission in fact activate different cognitive processes,
and that may be why periodic outbursts of dissidence are inevitable.
For Whitehouse, there are in general two ways in which religious con-
cepts are acquired. One is the imagistic mode, where people perform
"loud" rituals with high sensory stimulation and vivid imagery. The
initiation rites I mentioned in Chapter 7 would be a good example of
[284] this mode. People go through dramatic performances that leave
salient traces in memory but the meaning of which is unclear to most
participants. Whitehouse contrasts this with the doctrinal mode of
transmission that is found in most religious guilds' activities. This pro-
vides no high drama but a coherent, systematic, and frequently
repeated set of verbal messages. This is usually characteristic of liter-
ate guilds, whose activities are based on a set of texts, although this
may not be the only circumstance where this mode of transmission is
given pride of place. Indeed, Whitehouse himself has described
Melanesian cults based on endless recitations of commandments and
exposition of their logical consequences, although without the help of
literacy.
Religious guilds provide many contexts for acquiring consistent
propositional messages through repetition and systematic teaching,
but very few contexts where salient episodes—what Lawson and
McCauley called "sensory pageantry"—can be recruited as an aid to
memory. A consequence emphasized by Whitehouse is that the guilds
may gradually lose their influence because of what could be called a
tedium-based decay function. That is, people become gradually more
and more familiar with the doctrine, but this very familiarity removes
much of the motivation for taking part in the guild's rituals and other
activities. As a consequence, the more religious institutions favor the
doctrinal mode of transmission, the more vulnerable they are to peri-
odic outbursts of imagistic dissent.^11
Religious institutions are invariably keen to support the doctrinal
activities and to contain the imagistic ones. Christian Churches have
always been happy to accept pastmiracle-makers into their fold but
rather reticent with new ones. Churches also embrace some displays
of religious fervor but try to contain them as much as possible. Why
should that be so?
RELIGION EXPLAINED