tion to ritual in general. Lawson and McCauley's Rethinking Religion (1990)
presents not only the view of ritual action discussed here but also a more gen-
eral view of how psychology can make sense of religious practices.
WHY DOCTRINES, EXCLUSION AND VIOLENCE?
The history of literacy and religious guilds is presented with
great wit in Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book (1989). On the effects of
literacy, the most important source is Jack Goody's Domestication of the Savage
Mind(1977) as well as his Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society
(1986). Harvey Whitehouse's Arguments and Icons (2000) is a vast survey of
the differences between doctrines and rituals, in terms of psychological and [333]
political effects. On fundamentalism, an indispensable source is the series of
volumes put together by the Fundamentalism Project (Marty and Appleby,
1991; Marty and Appleby, 1993a; Marty and Appleby, 1993b; Marty and
Appleby, 1994).
WHY BELIEF?
Michael Shermer's books Why People Believe Weird Things (1997)
andHow We Believe (1999) present a strong case for the idea of belief as mental
negligence. A psychological interpretation of why people believe in particular
kinds of spiritualistic or religious concepts is found in Nicholas Humphrey's
Leaps of Faith (1996). Tanya Luhrmann's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft is a fas-
cinating monograph that explains in great detail how people gradually make
sense of and accept what they considered ludicrous beliefs. This is based on a
thorough study of modern-day witches in London (Luhrmann, 1989). On sci-
ence versus religion, see Lewis Wolpert's Unnatural Nature of Science (1992),
an excellent survey of the psychological obstacles to scientific thinking. For a
more caustic approach to the debate, Richard Dawkins's witty writings make
for great reading—but the arguments are quite serious (Dawkins 1995; 1998).
Anyone interested in the prehistory of religious concepts should consult
Steven Mithen's brilliant Prehistory of the Mind (1996), a survey of how the
human mind evolved over the last four million years.
FURTHER READINGS