Publisher's Synopsis
It has often been said that the origins of religion, cognition and culture are beyond the ken of modern man. And yet, it is the most interesting, challenging and provocative of topics inthe natural and human sciences. Perhaps our origins are no longer as murky today as for previous centuries. The past twenty years have startled the world with major advances in a wide variety of disciplines and sciences: evolutionary psychology, cognitive archaeology, neuroscience, ethology, developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive linguistics, palaeo-anthropology and genetics. These advances have significantly impacted on comparative religion and have led to the establishment of a burgeoning new field called the cognitive science of religion. This new field has succeeded in casting new light on age-old problems. Efforts to discover and explain the evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens sapiens have led to a wide variety of hypotheses attempting to decide what is particularly human about human beings. We witnessed such memorable ideas as the Grandmother Hypothesis, the aquatic ape, man the tool-maker, man the hunter, woman the gatherer, crossing symbolic thresholds, the speaking ape, social intelligence, the Great Hominid Escape, mankinds epistemic hunger, the hybrid mind, and so on. All of these attempts to understand the origins of humanity have raised fundamental questions about the complex relationship between cognition and culture. Are they two sides of the same coin? Or is culture epiphenomenal to other more basic processes? And how does religion fit into the picture? 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? Together with the development of symbolic thinking, the role of material culture, written language and abstract thought in the development of religious systems are all central to the humanities and social sciences. 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 The papers in this volume were presented at a conference held in Aarhus, Denmark in 2006. Presented by an exciting group of internationally respected scholars as well as innovative younger scholars from Scandinavia and abroad, and from a wide range of disciplines, these papers explore the interstices of religion, cognition and culture and, in the process, put culture centerstage in the cognitive science of religion.
