facilitate a critique of both Sahlins and Obeyesekere but do not help to
advance a superior interpretation. Moreover, the cognitivist ideas Lanman
advances are not different from standard anthropological stances. They
amount to saying that cultural themes are not the same as particular ideas
in people’s minds, and that there are no ideal forms of practical reasoning,
only specific attempts at such reasoning. In effect, these points coincide
with the typical views of Hageners (and others in Papua New Guinea) that
you cannot ascertain what is in another person’s mind. It follows that you
cannot use a guess about a person’s thoughts as a reliable explanation of
events they are involved in, although in practical social life people do this
regularly. The idea also leads to a stress on dealing with the consequences
of action rather than endlessly guessing why people acted as they did.
Lanman is avowedly a cognitivist himself, but his chapter indicates that
cognitive science is not a magic key to unlock the door to all explanations
of social phenomena. Moreover, the cognitive science he deploys is on a
par with the common sense of Mount Hageners in Papua New Guinea. In
rebuking Marshall Sahlins for supposedly equating cultural dogmas with
individual motivations. Lanman cites the cognitivists’“discovery”of“the
mind”(Lanman, p. 116). However, not only did the Mount Hageners
‘discover’this aspect of mind before cognitivism became popular in aca-
demia, but also the same kinds of observations are commonplace in social
anthropological writings.
Boyer’s theorizing has been found most productive in terms of the
general cognitivist explanation of religion. This is at least in part because
he is very careful to make his claims modest. His theory aims to explain only
a small part of religion, but it is nevertheless a critical part if we consider that
beliefs are central to religion. A problem in his theorizing is that, while he
aims to establish religious ideas as only minimally counterintuitive, the issue
remains of why such counterintuitive ideas emerge at all and what ends do
they serve? Of course, if we see religion as a product of the creative
imagination, whether intuitive or not, we obviate this conundrum.
Whitehouse himself is perhaps best known for his theory of the two
modes of religiosity, the doctrinal and the imagistic, each depending on
different modes of memory, semantic, and episodic. Like Weber’sideal
types, the two modes are not intended to identify whole systems–agiven
system may contain both modes (but how does this work in practice?).
Gilbert Lewis is a social anthropologist noted for his thoughtful and quiet
observations on large themes, from the vantage point of his own ethno-
graphic work in Papua New Guinea (Lewis 2004 ). Lewis’s thoughts in this
66 BREAKING THE FRAMES