The cognitive foundations of cultural transmission

We shall explore insights our theory of religious ritual competence provides about aspects of religious ritual performance and their psychological foundations, addressing the complex relationships between religious ritual form, performance frequency, memory, motivation, and emotional arousal as well as the sensory pageantry in rituals that evoke it. In this chapter we focus primarily on questions of memory and its connections with performance frequency and emotional arousal.

These connections are vital to understanding the process of transmitting religious knowledge across generations. It is particularly easy to see why research on human memory may illuminate such matters when considering how non-literate societies transmit religious knowledge. The critical point here is not about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in the absence of books and printing. It is not even about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in circumstances in which the huge majority of participants are illiterate. The point is rather about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge when the only lasting public representations are iconic items such as skulls, skins, and sculptures, i.e., when the only lasting public representations are non-linguistic. Non-literate cultures bring these issues into high relief, but ultimately, even in literate cultures the transmission of rituals often rests not on consulting texts but on participants' memories of their ritual actions.

When non-linguistic public representations play such a central role in the transmission of cultural knowledge, questions about the faithful replication of that knowledge inevitably arise.