A study of Thomas E. Lawson's and Robert N. McCauley's Cognitive Anthropological Theory of the System of Religious Rituals

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Religion and Mysticism, Tehran University

2 PhD student of Cognitive Sciences, Social Cognition, Institute for Cognitive Science Studies;

Abstract

Cognitive anthropology studies human culture with the tools of cognitive sciences, and Thomas E. Lawson’s and Robert N. McCauley’s theory of the system of religious rituals is a pioneering work in this field. Lawson and McCauley try to provide a cognitive analysis of the structure of ritual as a type. They believe that such an analysis reveals the participants’ ritual competence, their largely unconscious knowledge, and their intuitive judgments about the nature of the quality of the rituals. According to them, rituals are actions, like other human actions, except that superhuman agents play a crucial role in them. Thus, the practice of religious rituals does not depend on theological knowledge, and an analysis of the action representation system and other systems responsible for reasoning about agents and actions is sufficient to discern the judgment of participants. This theory has at least six cognitive findings that, they believe, not only enable us to predict participants’ behaviors but also can be empirically tested.

Keywords

References

 
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Religions and Mysticism
Volume 54, Issue 2
March 2022
Pages 280-261

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