Rethinking Religion
Rethinking Religion
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USDThis book develops a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors provide a lucid, critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are, rather, complementary and equally vital to the study of symbolic systems. Rethinking Religion deals with the relationship between cognition and culture in a novel manner, and introduces a method of analysis that will have many applications.
- An explanation of religious systems alongside substantive theory of religious ritual: an original
- Cuts across disciplines including anthropology, cognitive psychology and philosophy as well as religious studies
- Well drawn and creative analysis and assessment
Reviews & endorsements
"[The authors] do a splendid job of demonstrating how such a theory would have interpretive and explanatory capabilities that previous theories have lacked....their analysis truly connects the cognitive and cultural dimensions involved in all religious ritual systems." A. Javier Trevino, Sociological Analysis
"One certainly hopes that this impressive book will set the tone for future discussions of this topic. It provides an important theoretical framework that the anthropology of religion cannot possibly ignore." Pascal Boyer, American Anthropologist
"Lawson and McCauley's Rethinking Religion is a creative and carefully crafted book that both defends a general approach to explaining religious systems and develops in embryo a substantive theory of religious ritual. The book cuts across disciplines in a fruiful way, making contributions to anthropology, cogitive psychology and philosophy as well as religious studies more generally." Harold Kincaid, Annals of Scholarship
Product details
January 1993Paperback
9780521438063
208 pages
230 × 153 × 15 mm
0.345kg
19 b/w illus.
Available
