this, the question of what is intuitive versus nonintuitive begins to dissolve
away. If learning is customary or institutionalized, this in itself explains
why religious ideas are transmitted. Boyer recognizes this:“some religious
assumptions can become part of a cultural‘routine’”(p. 59). In fact, most
ideas do so; otherwise they would not come to be passed down. Boyer
would still maintain his general proposition: that the register of basic ideas
is quite small, indicating a unity of cognition. This is the cognitive scien-
tist’s equivalent of the old psychic unity of mankind hypothesis.
What, then, has been achieved? Some limited, but useful propositions
have been advanced. One is that core religious concepts are only minimally
counterintuitive. The validity of this is constrained by the point that
intuition itself may produce these concepts. A second is that counter-
intuition applies to the same domains as intuition, and is geared into
special uses, for example, when to think that a bird might be an ancestor,
and when sometimes it is really just a bird. Ethnographers can easily
enough identify such specifications. A bird may be seen as an ancestor if
it appears in a sacred place or it intrudes surprisingly into a social space of
humans in an unexpected and mysterious way.
At a more general level, it is easy to see that Boyer’s enterprise is to
introduce a degree of reductionist analysis into the study of religion,
focusing on why elements constantly appear in the cross-cultural record.
He argues that these correspondences stem from standard cognitive pro-
cesses and so are not products of any particular culture. Culture, however,
does not disappear so easily. It produces variation, and it is the way in
which notions are transmitted. Cognitive theorists, then, break the frame
of culture only to implicitly reinstate it or at least come to acknowledge it
at another stage of their argument.
Our own position here is that we see the merit in Boyer’s mode of
argumentation, but the question of what is intuitive or not intuitive is
bothersome because it does not have a clear basis for a demarcation of one
from the other. Boyer argues that the acquisition of intuitive concepts by
children is universal and is not triggered by language, but we may be
reasonably inclined to think that language must be involved because
children acquire language early on in their development and it plays an
important part in their socialization.
The last comment to make here is that the whole choice to concentrate
on beliefs as a category determines the way analyses will proceed, giving an
almost textualist aura to discussions. If one were to begin with emotional
orientations and link these with ritual theory, we mightfind ourselves
64 BREAKING THE FRAMES