Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. (Cognitive Science of Religion Series.) AltaMira Press, 2004.

Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Anthropology and comparative religion have had a love-hate relationship with the theory of evolution. In the early days of both disciplines, attempts to apply Darwin's theory analogically to cultural development played a crucial role (Sharpe 1975). But they got it all wrong. Edward Westermarck (1906-1908) was one of the few who really understood the theory of natural selection operating on random variation as well as its implications for the study of human behavior. Then times changed; after a few decades cultural evolutionism seemed to be a dead horse (see D'Andrade 2000). Sometimes dead horses tend to rise from the dead, however. Currently an evolutionary perspective to human behavior figures prominently in such fields of inquiry as human behavioral ecology, gene-culture coevolutionary theories, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and even "memetics" (see Laland and Brown 2002). It is possible to study the biological constraints of human behavior, apply the idea of natural selection analogically to culture, or to explore how culture has changed human biology (cf. Ehrlich and Feldman 2003).

Whitehouse's book represents the so-called cognitive science of religion which is partly but only partly characterized by an evolutionary perspective (see Pyysiäinen and Anttonen 2002, Tremlin 2006). Whitehouse does not present explicit evolutionary arguments; on the contrary, he tries to show that religion cannot be explained merely by evolved mechanisms that are "triggered" under certain circumstances. He cites (20) approvingly Boyd and Richerson's (2000) view, according to which culture involves observational learning, although not everything people know is culturally transmitted. Yet Whitehouse neither makes explicit use of Boyd and Richerson's theoretical model nor even discuss it, although his own position vis-à-vis Pascal Boyer's evolutionary explanation of religion comes very close to Boyd and Richerson's gene-culture coevolutionary view (see Boyer 1994:266-287).

While Richerson and Boyd's volume aims to provide a lucid exposition of the authors' formal theory of coevolution to non-specialists, Whitehouse wants to develop causal explanations of how psychological factors and sociopolitical organization interact in the transmission of religious traditions. Or, as he puts it: "This book sets out a testable theory of how religions are created, reproduced, and transformed" (1).

The Modes of Religiosity

After obtaining his Ph.D. from Cambridge, Whitehouse published Inside the Cult (1995), a vivid ethnography of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea. This cult consisted of a large and uniform mainstream organization together with a temporary small-scale movement which was emotional and innovative. Whitehouse coined the expression "modes of religiosity" to describe the fact that all religious traditions tend to develop either towards large-scale organizations characterized by orthodoxy and dry ritual routine (doctrinal mode), or towards small-scale communities placing emphasis on emotionally arousing rituals without any sanctioned interpretation of their meaning (imagistic mode).

The modes theory has since been elaborated in a collective effort by scholars working in various disciplines. The theory was first evaluated by a number of anthropologists in a workshop at Cambridge University in December 2001 (Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004). In August 2002, historians and archaeologists of religion gathered in a workshop at the University of Vermont, USA (Whitehouse and Martin 2004). A year later, a third workshop was arranged with psychologists and cognitive scientists at Emory University in Atlanta (Whitehouse and McCauley 2005). In addition, Whitehouse himself has constantly been developing the theory in the light of the ongoing debates (Whitehouse 1995, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b, 2005).

The present volume was put together soon after the workshop in Vermont. Whitehouse tackles Boyer's challenge armed with the distinction between "cognitively costly" and "cognitively optimal" religion (see Atran 2002). Boyer (1994, 2003) has forcefully argued that religious concepts and beliefs are effectively spread...