Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture

Attempts to understand the origins of humanity have raised fundamental questions about the complex relationship between cognition and culture. Central to the debates on origins is the role of religion, religious ritual and religious experience. What came first: individual religious (ecstatic) experiences, collective observances of transition situations, fear of death, ritual competence, magical coercion; mirror neurons or temporal lobe religiosity? Cognitive scientists are now providing us with important insights on phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes. Together with insights from the humanities and social sciences on the origins, development and maintenance of complex semiotic, social and cultural systems, a general picture of what is particularly human about humans could emerge. Reflections on the preconditions for symbolic and linguistic competence and practice are now within our grasp. Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture puts culture centre stage in the cognitive science of religion.

Armin W. Geertz is Professor in the History of Religions, Director of the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit and MINDLab Coordinator of the Cognition and Culture Project at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is co-editor of Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture (Acumen, 2011).

Introduction, Armin W. Geertz Part I Evolutionary Scenarios 1. Whence Religion? How the Brain Constructs the World and What This Might Tell Us about the Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, Armin W. Geertz 2. Why "Costly Signalling" Models of Religion Require Cognitive Psychology, Joseph Bulbulia 3. The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects, William E. Paden 4. The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religious Systems: Laying the Foundations of a Network Model, István Czachesz 5. Art as a Human Universal: An Adaptationist View, Ellen Dissanayake 6. The Significance of the Natural Experience of a 'Non-Natural' World to the Question of the Origin of Religion, Donald Wiebe 7. Religion and the Emergence of Human Imagination, Andreas Lieberoth 8. The Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture: The Bowerbird Syndrome, Luther H. Martin 9. The Will to Sacrifice: Sharing and Sociality in Humans, Apes, and Monkeys, Henrik Høgh-Olesen 10. Apetales: Exploring the Deep Roots of Religious Cognition,Tom Sjöblom Part II Cognitive Theories 11. Cognition and Meaning, Jeppe Sinding Jensen 12. Wittgenstein and the Naturalness of Religious Belief, Mark Addis 13. "Peekaboo!" and Object Permanence: On the Play of Concealment and Appearance in Cognition and Religion, Thomas Hoffmann 14. Yog-c-ra Buddhist Views on the Causal Relation between Language, Cognition and the Evolution of Worlds, William S. Waldron 15. A Resource Model of Religious Cognition: Motivation as a Primary Determinant for the Complexity of Supernatural Agency Representations, Uffe Schjoedt 16. The Recognition of Religion: Archaeological Diagnosis and Implicit Theorizing, Peter Jackson 17. Religion and the Extra-Somatics of Conceptual Thought, Mads Jessen 18. Tools for Thought: The Ritual Use of Ordinary Tools, Pierre Liénard & Jesper Sørensen 19. Care of the Soul: Empathy in a Dualistic Worldview, Gretchen Koch 20. From Corpse to Concept: A Cognitive Theory on the Ritualized Treatment of Dead Bodies, William W. McCorkle Jr 21. Anthropomorphism in God Concepts: The Role of Narrative, Peter Westh