chapter turn on looking at complexities in assessing what is to be described
as doctrinal or imagistic. The overall effect of his discussion is to make us
realize that in actual practices elements may be mixed up together, so that
the ideal type disappears in such complexities. It is hard to see what the
application of Whitehouse’s dichotomy should be other than pointing to
differences, but if in practice these differences are blurred in the nuances and
details of social life, it becomes less clear what the value of the hypothesis is.
Reformulating the hypothesis, it seems fair to say that Whitehouse’sdoc-
trinal modeflourishes in circumstances of literacy, and the imagistic mode is
found in the indigenous oral religious patterns of New Guinea. But there is
always a cross-cutting element. Taboos, for instance, are doctrinal in char-
acter, but they may depend on imagistic ideas. The doctrinal/imagistic
dichotomous scheme turns out to have many exceptions, and yet it has
still helped to illuminate our thinking about ways in which religious prac-
tices are transmitted over time. Whitehouse’s distinctions have become a
part of the ways we think about the transmission of religious ideas and
practices. The distinction runs parallel to the old primitive/civilized dichot-
omy, but offers instead an operational pair of ideal-type definitions that
enable us to think about how these types interrelate and how one may shift
into the other over time, or the two may coexist.
We can see that this part of the cognitive theorizing about religion
stands on its own separately from the general cognitive theory of religion
as propounded by Pascal Boyer. We have also already seen that Boyer’s
own theory functions essentially as a just-so theory about how religion
began and how it fundamentally is generated at the individual cognitive
level, but it does not operate as a sociological argument about the group
aspect of how religions work. Durkheim’s model of the collective life as a
phenomenon in its own right is therefore left largely intact. His socio-
logical frame has been not so much broken as sidestepped or bypassed, and
the question that others have raised about how to relate the collective to
the individual aspects of practice is not addressed. Language is again
crucially involved here and in the next chapter we turn to discuss argu-
ments about its role in human life and its cognitive basis.
7 RELIGION AND COGNITION 67