bypassing the question of belief as secondary to the worlds of embodied
practice and performance, as we have hinted in our earlier publications (e.
g., Stewart and Strathern 2014 : ch. 7). Connected to this point is that
cognitive theorists tend to concentrate on the mind in an almost Cartesian
way and havefixed on ideas and beliefs as products of the mind operating
under evolutionary constraints but not in terms of embodied engagement
with the world. In attempting to break out of the frame of culture-based
analysis they have actually taken their stand on a view of what culture is,
that is reminiscent of discussion prior to Thomas Csordas’s groundbreak-
ing arguments for the importance of the body (the mindful body, that is,
of course) (see essays in Csordas 2002 ). Cognitivists also construct tests of
memory recall and cognitive patterns that again remove them from social
action or participant observation studies, which remain the sphere of
ethnographers. The overall emphasis on mind is shown in the title of
one of Harvey Whitehouse’s many edited volumes, in which Boyer’s
chapter appears:The Debated Mind. Whitehouse’s own use of the issue
of memory is productive, because he has linked it to his hypothesis of
differential emphases in religious systems (e.g., Whitehouse 2000 ). He has
also consistently argued for a rapprochement between cognitive and social
anthropological approaches to explanation, respecting ethnography
because of his own early work in Papua New Guinea.
We will take here further contributions to this kind of debate using
materials from the intriguing volume edited by Whitehouse and Laidlaw
and published in our own Ritual Studies series (Whitehouse and Laidlaw
2007 ). Laidlaw stood out in this volume as a skeptic. Most contributors
were true believers. Whitehouse himself worked hard to accommodate
different viewpoints. We provided a preface to this book in which we
experimented with materials from Mount Hagen that couldfit in with
Whitehouse’s approach. We did so in a spirit akin to Whitehouse’s call for
a combination of cognitive and cultural modes of interpretation.
Lanman’s chapter in this volume ( 2007 ) illustrates some of the difficulties
in such an endeavor. He shows (ch. 4) that the versions of interpretation
of the killing of Captain Cook in Hawai’i presented by both Marshall
Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere rely upon partial inferences from the
available data. Sahlins thought the people considered Cook to be the God
of fertility, Lono, but were upset when he came back at an incorrect ritual
time. Obeyesekere argued that Cook was thought of as a chief, Lono, and
they killed him when he declined to give them military help in a local war.
Lanman applies available cognitive ideas to the data andfinds that these
7 RELIGION AND COGNITION 65