Carles Salazar

• Anthropologist
• Professor at University of Lleida

The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition...

The point of departure of this paper is Penrose's definition of conscious action as that in which stimulus and response are linked by a non‐algorithmic relationship, which Penrose defines as ‘understanding’. My purpose is to explore the nature of this understanding by means of a two‐step process. The first step is provided by Tononi's Integrated In...

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix...

I accept the main thesis of the article according to which representation of knowledge is more basic than representation of belief. But I question the authors’ contention that humans' unique capacity to represent belief does not underwrite the capacity for the accumulation of cultural knowledge.

Nobody doubts that human kinship has something to do with biology and reproduction and, at the same time, biology and reproduction are clearly insufficient to explain it. The unexplained part of human kinship by the biology of human reproduction is what anthropologists call ‘social’ kinship. Whereas the biology of human kinship does not seem to dif...

This is an attempt at linking consciousness, information, meaning and understanding. My purpose is to build bridges between the way the natural sciences and mathematics have dealt with the problem of consciousness and information, on the one hand, and the way in which the social sciences and the humanities deal with the problem of meaning. It is ba...

In this article I present a formal model for the cultural evolution of counterintuitive cultural messages, specifically, religious ideas. This model tries to account for the reproduction of counterintuitive religious ideas by introducing a new parameter: the means of cultural communication by which those ideas are transmitted. Means of cultural com...

In his 1995 ethnography Inside The Cult , Harvey Whitehouse argued that theorists have not been able to construct a satisfactory picture of religious behavior because they overlook “the way in which religion is handled cognitively” (1995, 194–220). In this essay, we will argue that, although Whitehouse's cognitive theory of “modes of religiosity” h...

The anthropological theory of religious meaning proposed in this paper is based on a multimodal approach to human communication. According to this approach, meaning originates not in a set of propositions about the world but in modes of experience of and engagementwith it. These modes of experience include different forms of communication in which...

Religion as a cultural phenomenon can take two different forms: erudite and popular. The first is the work of scholars of religion, particularly prominent in literate cultures, and it gives rise to cognitively costly and elaborate intellectual constructs. These can only be properly understood by a minority of initiates and their followers through a...

Why are humans so different from each other and what makes the human species so different from all other living organisms? This introductory book provides a concise and accessible account of human diversity, of its causes and the ways in which anthropologists go about trying to make sense of it. Carles Salazar offers students a thoroughly integrate...

The purpose of this paper is to advance a hypothesis that might explain the decline of religious belief and practice among the so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations. The main point of this paper is to postulate a causal relationship between two variables that appear to be significantly correlated: on o...

Popular religiosity manifests itself alongside a heterogeneous continuum of beliefs, behaviours, modes of thinking and modes of living that flows between two poles: the experiential pole and the normative pole. A central theme in this paper will be that all forms of religiosity originate in a combination of innate predispositions and cultural upbri...

The purpose of this paper is to assess Durkheim’s approach to religion and the validity of the time-honoured principle of the social determination of mental representations. The thesis to be defended is that Durkheim was essentially right in understanding religious ritual as a symbolic language. But he was wrong both in his social deterministic the...

The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world, as scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in ordinary life, beyond the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. The purpose of this volume is to analyze the relationships, possible articulations and contradict...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of religious belief by bringing in some qualitative evidence about the meaning of religious behaviors and ideas. Whereas mainstream cognitive approaches to the study of belief have traditionally focused their attention on the memorability of religious ideas, the problem of meaning has been someho...

A partir de las etnografías desarrolladas en Irlanda, Polonia y Cataluña, se lleva a cabo una comparación entre modos de religiosidad inscritos en el campo socioreligioso del catolicismo europeo contemporáneo.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the concept of community as a methodological tool in the absence of a face-to-face interaction context. Our perspective emphasizes the constitutive role of the researcher and his or her methods in creating communities in any kind of social research. In our case study of research that we conducted in a priva...

What are the theoretical implications of a universal genealogy? After the demise of relativism in kinship studies, there is much to be gained by joining old formal-structural analysis of kinship to recent cognitive-evolutionary approaches. This commentary shows how the logic of kinship terminologies, specifically those of the Seneca-Iroquois, can b...

Recent cognitive and evolutionary approaches to the study of religion have been seen by many as a naturalistic alternative to conventional anthropological interpretations. Whereas anthropologists have traditionally accounted for the existence of religion in terms of social and cultural determinants, cognitive scientists have emphasized the innate—t...

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of prayer in the everyday life of an Irish Catholic community. Prayers are mental acts that need to be actualised following detailed instructions. This is so because prayers have to be “authentic”, which means that there has to be a correspondence between the act of praying and the mental state of...

Landless farm workers have never been a very prominent feature of the social landscape of the West of Ireland. Even though they have contributed substantially to the reproduction of the farming community, their indefinite status makes them almost conceptually invisible. The problem is that farm workers are far from sharing a common social identity;...

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of prayer in the everyday life of an Irish Catholic community. Prayers are mental acts that need to be actualised following detailed instructions. This is so because prayers have to be “authentic”, which means that there has to be a correspondence between the act of praying and the mental state of...

This article examines the recent history of sexual morality in rural Ireland. My thesis is that this history can be defined as a process of structural change in which a normative model has been replaced by a cognitive model. Both models give rise to disciplinary systems but, I argue, they differ from each other in their respective objects: whereas...

In the west of Ireland, fosterage and adoption are correlated with illegitimacy. No one would be so cruel or foolish as to abandon one's own child unless there was a powerful reason for doing so. Conception out of wedlock is one such reason. This article attempts to carry out an analysis which is not theoretical but contextual or situational. It ex...

This paper provides a critical assesment of two major theoretical approaches to the anthropology of religion, the cognitive and the hermeneutical or symbolic approaches, with the aim of reaching some kind of accommodation or compatibility between the two. The paper starts by tracing the theoretical origins of the cognitive perspective to the so-cal...

The history of sexual morality in Ireland has been traditionally associated with repression. In the last two decades, however, repression seems to have given way to its exact opposite. But where did this "repression" originate? And how can we account for this sudden and sweeping transformation in sexual mores? Based on solid ethnographic and histor...

The history of sexual morality in Ireland has been traditionally associated with repression. In the last two decades, however, repression seems to have given way to its exact opposite. But where did this “repression” originate? And how can we account for this sudden and sweeping transformation in sexual mores? Based on solid ethnographic and histor...

In this paper we analyse the ways in which egg donors from a private infertility clinic in Barcelona try to render their new experience meaningful. Donors are striving to see their action as a contribution to the creation of a particular kinship bond – motherhood in another woman – by means of the abrogation of a bond that also looks very much like...

The structure/event dichotomy has been a bone of contention in anthropology for many decades. The so‐called “synchronic paradigms” such as functionalism and structuralism saw “structure” (defined in various ways) as the object of anthropological analysis, whereas “events” were left to historians. Recent trends in anthropological thought are eager t...

The troubles in Northern Ireland have been for a very long time a marker and a symbol of Irish national identity. Behind them there is a complex history of colonization and abuse that has divided the Northern Irish population and has given rise to one of the oldest ethnic conflicts in western Europe. This article seeks to integrate three different...

Social scientists interested in peasant societies have tried to make sense of their economies in terms of the "political" and "moral" economy paradigms. It is the aim of this paper to assess critically the applicability of such models to the informal sector of Irish family farms and, in so doing, to postulate the necessity of a different theoretica...

L'objecte d'aquest article és reflexionar sobre la relació entre religió i identitat etnonacional peramitjà de l'anàlisi de dos estudis de cas procedents d'Irlanda. En el primer estudi de cas s'estudien les desfilades protestants de Belfast tot plantejant una interpretació durkheimiana clàssica: les desfilades es defineixen com a expressions ritual...

ResumenIdioma Se aporta un debate teórico especialmente interesante no sólo para la definición y límites de lo religioso, sino también para la definición de estos elementos recurrentes que trenzan la trama de lo religioso en Antropología, en este caso la articulación de dos ideas distintas y relacionadas como "experiencia religiosa" y "experiencia...