Invisible humans and their gods

IF 3.6 3区 哲学 0 RELIGION
Pablo Albernaz, Miguel Farias
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

In her new book, Tanya Luhrmann (2020) offers a theory of religion of universal scope: effort is required to contact and sustain the presence of an invisible other, which is why people regularly pray and engage in rituals. Focusing one’s attention, through thoughts and behaviours, on the invisible kindles—like a small fire—the presence of the supernatural. The concept of kindling, like most of the other ideas and mechanisms cited to support her theory of religion, derives from a wide corpus of psychological science, from learning theory to the cognitive science of religion. The writing of this book is clear; it steers away from jargon or strips it to the bear essentials; in that sense, it is a joy to read and widely accessible to a large audience. Something exciting about it is that one can easily think of applications of Luhrman’s theory of religion well beyond the scope of the book. Take the example of secular rites surrounding nationalism, the efforts people are willing to undertake to feel that their nation is a real entity; or consider the success of mindfulness meditation as a secular religion, where individuals go through the effort of meditating twice a day to reach a pure state of awareness that changes their wellbeing and perception of the world (Kabat-Zinn, 2017). The list of examples can easily go on. It is precisely the ease with which one can—rather intuitively—think of applications of Luhrman’s theory that made us stop and ask: what does this theory exactly explain about which religions? There is a growing sense of discomfort within psychological science about universal claims; this is due to a greater awareness of significant cultural variations of how the mind works and of difficulties in replicating key findings, and also an acknowledgement of the biased samples used in psychological research (Henrich et al., 2010; Open Science Collaboration, 2015). If psychology, which has the ambition of generalizing its theories to all of humankind, is undergoing a more subdued phase, when it comes to the anthropological study of religion, the path towards universal claims has, for a long time, been a rocky one (to put it mildly). There are very good reasons for this distrust, as universal theories of religion tend to be inextricably associated with a difficulty in acknowledging other perspectives of experiencing the world that do not fit with our own categories. Luhrmann acknowledges the challenge of religious diversity in chapter 1, when she writes “... there is something quite culturally specific about the way that people in the modern West think about what is real” (p. 4), but she then very quickly evades the question by claiming that other people also differentiate between what is natural and supernatural. There is a wide range of nonWestern otherness that could be explored, but her examples focus mainly on the works of Viveiro de Castro and Aparecida Vilaça, who have studied indigenous peoples from the Amazon region. Luhrmann appears to be in a hurry to summarize the religious experience of the peoples we usually
隐形人和他们的神
Tanya Luhrmann(2020)在她的新书中提出了一种普遍适用的宗教理论:需要努力接触和维持一个看不见的他者的存在,这就是为什么人们经常祈祷和参加仪式。通过思想和行为,把注意力集中在看不见的火种上,比如小火——超自然的存在。点火的概念,就像支持她的宗教理论的大多数其他观点和机制一样,来源于广泛的心理科学,从学习理论到宗教认知科学。这本书写得很清楚;它避开了行话,或者将其简化为基本内容;从这个意义上说,它是一种快乐的阅读和广泛的受众。令人兴奋的是,人们可以很容易地想到鲁尔曼的宗教理论的应用,远远超出了这本书的范围。以围绕民族主义的世俗仪式为例,人们愿意努力去感受他们的国家是一个真实的实体;或者将正念冥想的成功视为一种世俗宗教,在这种宗教中,个人每天冥想两次,以达到一种纯粹的意识状态,从而改变他们的幸福感和对世界的看法(Kabat-Zinn, 2017)。这样的例子不胜枚举。人们可以很容易地——相当直观地——想到鲁尔曼理论的应用,这让我们停下来问:这个理论究竟解释了哪些宗教?在心理科学领域,人们对普遍的说法越来越感到不安;这是由于人们更清楚地认识到思维运作方式的重大文化差异,以及复制关键发现的困难,同时也认识到心理学研究中使用的有偏见的样本(Henrich et al., 2010;开放科学合作,2015)。如果说雄心勃勃要将其理论推广到全人类的心理学正在经历一个较为温和的阶段,那么当涉及到对宗教的人类学研究时,通往普遍主张的道路长期以来一直是崎岖不平的(委婉地说)。这种不信任有很好的理由,因为普遍的宗教理论往往与承认与我们自己的范畴不相符的其他体验世界的观点的困难密不可分。鲁尔曼在第一章中承认了宗教多样性的挑战,她写道:“……在现代西方,人们思考什么是真实的方式有某种文化上的特殊性”(第4页),但她很快回避了这个问题,声称其他人也会区分什么是自然的和超自然的。可以探索的非西方差异性的范围很广,但她的例子主要集中在维维罗·德·卡斯特罗和阿帕雷西达·维拉帕拉塔的作品上,他们研究了亚马逊地区的土著人民。鲁尔曼似乎急于总结我们通常所熟悉的民族的宗教经验
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.00
自引率
13.60%
发文量
93
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