Religion Brain & Behavior最新文献

{"title":"Fertility and faith: The danger of a grand narrative","authors":"S. Walters, R. Sear","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.2023621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2023621","url":null,"abstract":"Philips Jenkins has produced an impressive and wide-ranging book, covering Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, several eras of history, and all regions of the world, from a perspective that borrows from multiple disciplines including history, anthropology, economics, demography, and sociology. Jenkins links the demographic transition—wherein societies shift from high-fertility, high-mortality demographic regimes, to low-fertility, low-mortality ones— with the rise of individualism, liberalism, gender equity, and resulting secularization. He describes the arising likely demo-religious shifts wherein “old” faith communities (especially in the global north) will increasingly be outnumbered by high-fertility societies of greater religious fervour (often originating in the global south), and wherein conflicts may arise over differing conceptions of religions’ role in regulating social and moral norms and expectations. In his conclusion, he outlines how organized religion needs to adapt to remain relevant and popular in the face of global demographic change. The grand narrative of Jenkins’ book—connecting “the demographic revolution” with the “transformation of world religions\"—is powerful and seductive. With his global scope and historical reach, he weaves a persuasive account of the “tidal shift” in the demo-religious landscape, which has huge potential geopolitical implications. Indeed, it is the credible seamlessness of Jenkins’ grand narrative, together with its potential ramifications, which render this book not only flawed but also potentially dangerous. In our commentary, we interrogate three core elements of Jenkins’ argument. First, we consider his demographic determinism, calling to account his underlying causal framework. Second, we show how Jenkins’ apparent marshaling of multiple disciplines and international history, belies a rather superficial engagement with those individual disciplines and historical processes. Third, we consider how Jenkins’ use of language and references demonstrate his particular partisanship, showing how his narrative is both dangerous and incendiary, with the potential to defend populist and racist ideas.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74682674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The agency of women in secularization","authors":"Callum G. Brown","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.2023616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2023616","url":null,"abstract":"Secularization confounds many faith scholars. Where once in the 1960s and 1970s it was accepted as a facet of modernization, the 1990s and 2000s witnessed the rise of a desperate religious assault on the concept as in itself secularist and atheist-inspired—an intellectual conspiracy of religions’ enemies. New theories abounded from the churched community to contain the intellectual threat: people believed but had stopped belonging; the mainstream churches were in decline but not popular faith; the parish structure of old Europe was disintegrating and making way for diversity— house churches, megachurches, pick ‘n’ mix faith; religiosity was giving way to spirituality; new age religion was dismantling denominationalism; and the majority secular people were now expecting the minority faithful to conduct the moral work of the whole community (Berger et al., 2008; Davie, 1994, 2000; Heelas, 1996; Roof, 1993; Wuthnow, 2007). Though such ideas still keep coming, if truth be told, what is happening to faith now takes second place to what is happening with nonfaith: the rise of morality without religion, growing proportions of people identifying as “nones,” atheists, and agnostics, and declining churchgoing and membership (Brown et al., 2022). And most bittersweet for the churches in the west is the waning of the faith’s most faithful: Christian women. Where once moral purity and sanctity of womanhood adorned the Christian family, feminist impulses have done much to de-sanctify morality. Scholarship has been slow to perceive the concatenation of moral, cultural, and demographic dangers that are unraveling the religious moral system hung in western nations upon female purity. New scholarship has already been sculpting this replacement narrative, and now Philip Jenkins’ book, Fertility and Faith, offers the latest and so far most comprehensive demographic understanding of secularization. The book inevitably must refocus attention upon the gender question in the declining social significance of Christianity and Judaism from the middle of the twentieth century onwards. We should all be grateful for his redeployment of a social-science lens upon the decline of faith in the western world—broadly Europe, North America, Australasia, and Japan, but his treatment also explores its consequences for other continents. But before considering the merits of Jenkins’ monograph, it is important to restate firmly that the study of religious decline is not, should not, and cannot be a demographic science alone. Without the fusion of quantitative and qualitative (some would argue postmodernist) methodologies, there can be no full understanding of the direction of the faith change that started in the third quarter of the twentieth century and which is now advancing—as Jenkins notes—with vigorous speed. It has taken scholarship some considerable time to place demography as a major conceptual tool with which to study secularization. The impetus began in the sociology of religio","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79285355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kiwi Diwali: a longitudinal investigation of perceived social connection following a civic religious ritual","authors":"S. Piven, Ronald Fischer, J. Shaver, Reneeta Mogan, J. Karl, Rebekka Kesberg, Amanda Richardson, Purnima Singh, Shruti Tewari, Joseph A. Bulbulia","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006288","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Religious rituals are ubiquitous. Recent research indicates they can powerfully affect social connection, increasing collective sentiments and behaviors. However, the extent to which these effects depend on religious commitment remains unclear. Here, we use longitudinal data to investigate this question in a natural ritual setting by comparing the responses of religiously committed Hindus and non-Hindus immediately after a public Diwali celebration in New Zealand, and for two weeks following. Effects of time and level of religious commitment are assessed on five targets that measure reported social connection of participants to themselves and to specific groups: “Myself,” “My family and friends,” “Work colleagues/university peers,” “People who celebrate Diwali,” and “Humanity in general.” We find that participation in the civic religious ritual affects social connection of all participants, with stronger effects among religiously committed Hindus. Private religious behavior appears integral to the mechanisms underpinning the amplification of solidarity at public rituals, as we find separation in the level of reported social connection to Diwali celebrants between practicing and non-practicing Hindus. Though religious commitment leads to greater perceived social connection, this study additionally demonstrates that in a religiously diverse democracy, a civic religious ritual may foster greater democratic unions across religious differences.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77675255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Henrich’s Weberian project","authors":"Ann Taves","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991457","url":null,"abstract":"traits. PLOS ONE, 8(8), e70902. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070902 Scheidel, W. (2009). A peculiar institution? Greco–Romanmonogamy in global context. The History of the Family, 14 (3), 280–291. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hisfam.2009.06.001 Schulz, J., Bahrami-Rad, D., Beauchamp, J., & Henrich, J. (2018). The origins of WEIRD psychology (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 3201031). Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. Retrieved from Social Science Research Network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3201031 Schulz, J. F., Bahrami-Rad, D., Beauchamp, J. P., & Henrich, J. (2019). The church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 366(6466), eaau5141. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau5141 Shaw, B. D., & Saller, R. P. (1984). Close-Kin marriage in Roman society? Man, 19(3), 432. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2802181 Shenk, M. K., Towner, M. C., Voss, E. A., & Alam, N. (2016). Consanguineous marriage, kinship ecology, and market transition. Current Anthropology, 57(S13), S167–S180. https://doi.org/10.1086/685712 Smaldino, P. E. (2014). The cultural evolution of emergent group-level traits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 243–254. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X13001544","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74619098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions","authors":"Robert N. McCauley","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991455","url":null,"abstract":"disease. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. Lightner, A., Heckelsmiller, C., & Hagen, E. (2021b). Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3, E37. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.31 Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2017). The enigma of reason. Harvard University Press. Morin, O. (2016). How traditions live and die. Oxford University Press. Petty, R. E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Goldman, R. (1981). Personal involvement as a determinant of argument-based persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(5), 847. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.41.5.847 Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., Mathew, S., Newton, E. K., Naar, N., & Newson, L. (2016). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, E30. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1400106X Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (1999). Complex societies: The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism. Human Nature, 10(3), 253–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-999-1004-y Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2008). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. University of Chicago press. Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1 Singh, M. (2018). The cultural evolution of shamanism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, E66. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S0140525X17001893 Smith, D. (2020). Cultural group selection and human cooperation: A conceptual and empirical review. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2, E2. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.2 Sperber, D. (1985). On anthropological knowledge. Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. (2018). Cutting culture at the joints?. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 8(4), 447–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 2153599X.2017.1323783 Spiro, M. (1992). Cultural relativism and the future of anthropology. In G. E. Marcus (Ed.), Rereading cultural anthropology (pp. 124–151). Duke University Press. Tucker, B., Tsiazonera, , Tombo, J., Hajasoa, P., & Nagnisaha, C. (2015). Ecological and cosmological coexistence thinking in a hypervariable environment: Causal models of economic success and failure among farmers, foragers, and fishermen of southwestern Madagascar. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1533. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015. 01533 Wimsatt, W. C. (1987). False models as means to truer theories. In M. H. Nitecki, & A. Hoffman (Eds), Neutral models in biology (pp. 23–55). Oxford University Press. Winkelman, M. J. (1986). Magico-religious practitioner types and socioeconomic conditions. Behavior Science Research, 20(1–4), 17–46.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81579981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"WEIRD Indeed, but there is more to the story: anthropological reflections on Henrich’s “The Weirdest people in the world”","authors":"A. Fuentes","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991458","url":null,"abstract":"In this massive tome Joseph Henrich’s goal is to explain how understanding patterns that shape global psychological variation can assist in understanding why contemporary WEIRD populations are so peculiar relative to other populations. In doing so he seeks to offer insight into how these WEIRD peculiarities facilitated WEIRD nations becoming “particularly prosperous.” Henrich’s conclusion is that a specific suite of social, historical, perceptual/ideological and institutional processes and patterns came together in Western/Northern Europe to create a distinctive cultural context with substantive, and evolutionally relevant, structuring impacts on the populations residing there. He asserts that it was the sequential processes of social, economic, and institutional changes related to widespread adoption of, and control by, the Christian church that shaped Western/Northern Europe populations’ worldviews, beliefs, and psychologies post 1200 and created those groups of humans he calls WEIRD. The flowchart in figure 14.1 on page 472 of the book does a nice job of laying out his argument for the trajectory of these psychological and structural patterns. Henrich’s overall theme is robust and the core theoretical and structural layout admirable. Few scholars have the capacity, community, and collaborative energy to carry something like this to fruition. One has to acknowledge Henrich’s book as a substantial amount of effort, insight, investigation, and analyses. Regardless of my critiques below, this is first and foremost a major contribution and sure to stimulate discussion, debate, and further research. To set the stage Henrich argues, and offers examples in support of, the assertion that the human mind is the product of coevolutionary forces. Psychologies vary across the globe due to the interfaces between the products of human evolutionary histories and distinctive historical and structural mixes of institutions, technologies, languages, and belief systems across the planet. This is reasonable well-trodden ground and resonates with anthropological, social psychological and evolutionary assessments and proposals across much of the last century (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Han, 2017; Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; Laland, 2017; Lende & Downey, 2012; Read, 2011; Tomasello, 2014, and of course Henrich’s previous work (Henrich, 2016). One can quibble as to whether or not Henrich includes enough variables and interaction/systemic dynamics in the overall model, and whether there is sufficient ethnographic depth in his examples, but his general conclusion is cogent. The major focus of the book concerns proposing and assessing assertions, drawing on the work of Jack Goody (Goody, 1983) and others, that certain threads of medieval Christianity gave rise to a collection of social norms and practices (in parts of Europe) that Henrich refers to as the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). Henrich argues the MFP redesigned kinship structures and the meaning of kinship, restructur","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78003749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive bugs, alternative models, and new data","authors":"J. Henrich","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991462","url":null,"abstract":"experiences of the peoples existing in the historical moments he describes are less in depth; people appear primarily as demographic descriptions, political, and economic timelines and historical accounts of political processes, declarations and church records.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74574926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"It’s WEIRD how much Joseph Henrich needs computational simulation","authors":"W. Wildman","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991456","url":null,"abstract":"the center of pre-modern states. The Catholic Church, conceived as a sort of “super-tribe” (p. 151), had a lasting effect of the mind of the West, he argues, because it instituted a new set of kinship rules. In laying out this comparison, my goal was to situate Henrich’s book in a Weberian lineage. Doing so, highlights the ambitious, comparative scope of Henrich’s work, its significance, and the need for critique by experts from many different fields. Like Weber’s work, Henrich’s thesis deserves rigorous and extended critique. But regardless of the fate of his thesis, his method deserves study as an updating of Weber’s comparative sociology, grounded in a firmer, more sophisticated understanding of the co-evolution of culture and cognition.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72728620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The success story of the west, perceptual art, and the challenges of the Global East","authors":"Fenggang Yang","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991461","url":null,"abstract":"Cosandey, D. (2008). Le Secret de l’Occident: Vers une Théorie Générale du Progrès Scientifique. Corrected Edition. Editions Flammarion. Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. W. W. Norton. Epstein, J. M. (2006). Generative social science: Studies in agent-based computational modeling. Princeton Studies in complexity. Princeton University Press. Greenblatt, S. (2011). The swerve: How the world became modern. W. W. Norton & Company. Henrich, J. (2009). The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution. Evolution and Human Behavior, 30(4), 244–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. evolhumbehav.2009.03.005 Henrich, J. (2020). The weirdest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Morris, I. (2010).Why the west rules—For now: The patterns of history, and what they reveal about the future. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Needham, J. (1969). The grand titration: Science and society in east and west. George Allen & Unwin. Shults, F. L., & Wildman, W. J. (2018). Multiple Axialities: A computational model of the Axial Age. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 18(5), 537–564. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340043 Turchin, P. (2007). War and peace and war: Life cycles of imperial nations (Annotated edition). Penguin. Weber, Max. (1934/1904-1905). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Mohr. Wildman, W. J., & Sosis, R. (2011). Stability of groups with costly beliefs and practices. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.1781","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73401325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A cognitive account of manipulative sympathetic magic","authors":"Ze Hong","doi":"10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.2006294","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Frazer’s theory of sympathetic magic has been extremely influential in both anthropology and comparative religion, yet the manipulative aspect has not been adequately theorized. In this paper, I formalize sympathetic magical action and offer a naturalistic explanation of manipulative sympathetic magic by attributing it to a combination of environmental regularities (i.e., things that are similar and/or physically proximate tend to co-vary) and human causal cognition (i.e., the tendency to mistake correlation as causation), and supply ample ethnographic and historical evidence for my arguments. In doing so I also specify the variables involved and re-classify sympathetic magic into four distinct types for analytic convenience.","PeriodicalId":45959,"journal":{"name":"Religion Brain & Behavior","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83856044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}