Ritual and Memory: Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion

by Harvey Whitehouse, James Laidlaw, J.D.Y Peel, David Shankland, Maurice Bloch

Overview

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these contributors differ in their methods, their areas of fieldwork, and their predisposition towards Whitehouse's cognitively-based approach, they all help evaluate and refine Whitehouse's theory and so contribute to a new comparative approach in the anthropology of religion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780759106161
Publisher:	AltaMira Press
Publication date:	08/18/2004
Series:	Cognitive Science of Religion , #6
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.82(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Queen's University Belfast. A specialist in Melanesian religion, he carried out two years of field research on a 'cargo cult' in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties. In recent years, he has focused his energies on the development of collaborative programmes of research on cognition and culture. He is currently the principal grant holder of a British Academy Networks Project on 'modes of religiosity' and in 2003 was appointed to a British Academy Research Readership. He is also co-editor, with Luther H. Martin, of the AltaMira 'Cognitive Science of Religion Series.' His previous books include Inside the Cult: religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea (1995), Arguments and Icons: divergent modes of religiosity, (2000), The Debated Mind: evolutionary psychology versus ethnography (2001), and Modes of Religiosity: a cognitive theory of religious transmission (2004).

James Laidlaw studied social anthropology at King's College Cambridge, with Caroline Humphrey as supervisor for his doctoral fieldwork in western India, between 1984 and 1990. Now University Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. More recent fieldwork has been in Taiwan and Inner Mongolia. Publications include The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994, with Caroline Humphrey), Riches and Renunciation (1995), and The Essential Edmund Leach (2000, with Stephen Hugh-Jones).

Table of Contents

1 Preface
2 Introduction
3 Divergent Modes of Religiosity in West Africa
4 Modes of Religiosity and the Legacy of Ernest Gellner
5 Is Image to Doctrine as Speech to Writing? Modes of Communication and the Origins of Religion
6 Ritual and Deference
7 The Doctrinal Mode and Evangelical Christianity in the U. S.
8 Embedded Modes of Religiosity in Indic Renouncer Religions
9 Conceptualizations From Within: Divergent Religious Modes from Asian Modernist Perspectives
10 The Doctrinal Mode of Religiosity: Some Ethnographic and Theoretical Problems
11 Religious Doctrine or Experience: A Matter of Seeing, Learning or Doing
12 Universalistic Orientations of an Imagistic Mode of Religiosity: The Case of the West African Poro Cult
13 Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion