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Tradition as Body
Abstract
Coming from the perspective of embodied or enactive cognition, this article argues for the bodily roots of all tradition. Given that tradition entails a givenness inherited from the past meeting with interpretation/modification/construction in the present, it examines tradition as an aspect of self-organizing cultural, particularly religious, systems, including in situations far from equilibrium. Building upon Michael Polanyi’s idea that what we tacitly rely upon becomes incorporated into our bodies, the article takes a phenomenological approach to argue that traditions function as part of our bodies through which we meaningfully engage the world. As such, tradition sets limits to our critical penetration, as much of our knowledge is unspecifiable. The Enlightenment ideal that all tradition is thoroughly contestable – open to explicitation and needing justification – remains strong in the academy. The article examines both the pitfalls of critical reflection and when critical reflection is appropriate or necessary.
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Shaligrams are the sacred fossil ammonites of the Himalayas. Viewed primarily as manifestations of Hindu gods, these aniconic deities are obtained by pilgrimage to Himalayan Nepal and are then brought home, to families and communities all over South Asia and the Diaspora, to become both deity and kin. Shaligrams also act as conversants, if inanimate ones, during the course of ritual and everyday talk. Therefore, the semiotic separation of bodies and persons in Shaligram religious practice re-imagines individuals as represented by but distinct from their physical forms. This practice then links language and ritual objects with broader understandings of human and divine personhood in South Asia as it is conceptualized both within and between physical bodies.
This article offers a "comparative-informational" approach to the study of religion. It demonstrates how historical transformations in religious traditions are frequently intertwined with shifts towards new strategies of managing information, or "informational orders. " The article shows how two unrelated schools of thought-Neo-Confucianism and Kabbalah-were responsible for the construction and institutionalization of new information strategies in their respective traditions. The innovative discourses Neo-Confucians and Kabbalists established were characterized by "analytic" qualities that were co-opted from competing foreign traditions. As part of the Confucian and Jewish reactions to Buddhism and Greek philosophy, respectively, Neo-Confucian and medieval Jewish mystical discourses underwent considerable rationalization. Moreover, from an informational perspective, a major factor in the dramatic cultural transitions that Neo-Confucians and Kabbalists facilitated was the ability of these schools to restructure the canonical literature of their respective traditions. Such rare modificiations in a tradition's "informa-tional core" are here interpreted as adaptive strategies that drive cultural systems towards greater complexity and long-term resilience. BETWEEN the tenth and thirteenth centuries, the Chinese and Jewish traditions entered periods of acute ideological crisis. Though occurring
In this interview, Michael Winkelman and Martin Fortier discuss the extent to which consciousness is grounded in deep evolutionary mechanisms and can be enculturated. First, the main tenets of two neuroanthropological approaches to consciousness and culture are outlined. Next, the upsides and downsides of evolutionary psychology are examined; the fruitfulness of this approach in the study of cultural phenomena such as shamanism is debated. The authors then discuss the promises of the "big data" approach to the study of religion as well as evolutionary puzzles about religion. Turning to issues bearing on the taxonomy of consciousness, the interview explores how consciousness should be individuated and especially how many "modes" of consciousness should be identified based on what we know of the biology and phenomenology of altered consciousness. Winkelman's concepts of the "integrative mode of consciousness" and "psychointegrators" are subsequently examined. Next, the interview addresses both how alterations of consciousness are universally similar (the perennialist view) and can also be enculturated (the constructivist view). Finally, the authors discuss issues around the cultural use of hallucinogens (a.k.a. visionary plants): what is the best method to study them? And for how long have humans used them? keywords: altered states of consciousness, enculturation, evolutionary neuroanthropology, hallucinogens, shamanism. Your work is very multidisciplinary and spans several fields (at least the following: cultural anthropology, neuroanthropology, neurotheology, cognitive science of religion, evolutionary anthropology, medical anthropology and evolutionary psychology). What was your training like? Who were the most important inspirational figures in your intellectual development? I wandered from psychology to anthropology to cross-cultural psychology and cross-cultural studies (ethnology, holocultural studies) to Buddhist psychology, then the neurosciences and neurophenomenology and evolutionary psychology in the search
Chapter uses cross-cultural research to identify the universal aspects of shamanism and biogenetic structural and neurophenomenological perspectives to examine the bases of shamanic universals.
This paper aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion
from the common charge that such approaches are overly “reductionistic.” I will argue that “reductionism” is ultimately an
empty term of abuse—any explanation worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some sort. Drawing upon the work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what “good,” non-eliminative reductionism—one that recognizes
the reality of complex, emergent human-level structures of meaning—might look like. I will also argue that these human-level
structures of meaning should not be seen as possessing special ontological status, but rather must be understood as grounded
in the lower levels of meaning studied by the natural sciences, instead of hovering magically above them. Practically speaking,
this means that scholars of religion need to start taking seriously discoveries about human cognition being provided by neuro-
and cognitive scientists, which have a constraining function to play in the formulation of theories in religious studies.
Moreover, adopting a “vertically integrated” approach—grounded in a post-dualist, embodied pragmatist perspective—will help
the field of religious studies to get beyond the unhelpful, and intellectually paralyzing, social constructivist dogma that
continues to inform most of the work in our field.
This paper explores some of the differences between the enactive approach in cognitive science and the extended mind thesis.
We review the key enactive concepts of autonomy and sense-making. We then focus on the following issues: (1) the debate between internalism and externalism about cognitive processes; (2)
the relation between cognition and emotion; (3) the status of the body; and (4) the difference between ‘incorporation’ and
mere ‘extension’ in the body-mind-environment relation.
KeywordsEnaction–Extended mind–Autonomy–Sense-making–Emotion–Embodiment–Incorporation
This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.
In this ambitious, interdisciplinary work, Loyal D. Rue reassesses the value of deception in nature, and in human society, asserting that myths are essential to the health, and even survival, of a culture as a whole. Advancing his theory of the Noble Lie, he maintains that we urgently require a new myth to replace the religious beliefs rejected by the modern mind. Such a Lie, Rue believes, offers our only salvation from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of scepticism about the meaning of the universe and life. Rue holds our deeply ingrained western bias against deception up to rigorous examination, comparing it to what he calls the natural bias in favour of deception. Evolution rewards the successful deceiver, he maintains, and cites examples from the natural world and from psychological research indicating that strategies of deception and self-deception are essential to our personal well-being.
The chapter rethinks ‘spirit incorporation’, ‘possession’ and similar rubrics often casually applied in descriptions of Afro‐Atlantic religions, including Brazilian Candomblé. It inverts the order of spirits' appearance and then ‘expression’ in bodies, spaces and things, to consider how assemblages of bodies, spaces and things facilitate and even constitute the ‘presence’ of gods, spirits, or ancestors. The received presence of a spirit, ancestor, or god is, in this sense, generated by an assemblage of materials and bodies – all themselves agents or actants of varying kinds.
Insofar as studies of religious materiality include embodiment within their purview, they call for interdisciplinary collaboration with cognitive science, which in recent decades has taken an ‘embodied turn’. However, not only is the meaning of embodied cognition still unsettled, but some of the most prominent theories interpret the body as the fixed ‘ground’ of experience in a way that curtails the role of materials outside the body. In an attempt to clarify the issues at stake, this chapter explores the problematic concept of embodiment within cognitive science and marks an important difference between so‐called ‘radical’ theories of embodied mind and those that remain within the sway of functionalism. Insofar as the former are concerned with the dynamic emergence and context‐sensitivity of mental processes, they would seem to make ideal partners for studies of the dynamic character of religious objects and practices.
Cambridge Core - Theology - Atheism, Fundamentalism and the Protestant Reformation - by Liam Jerrold Fraser
A recent challenge by Edward Slingerland to the conventional view of Chinese thought is that China is no exception to the recent cognitive science hypothesis that dualism is an innate cognitive universal. However, a close reexamination of Slingerland's evidence shows that it is biased. Extensive evidence across philosophy and medicine suggests that a concept of degrees of substantiality rather than a distinct barrier between mind and body underlies both early Chinese afterlife beliefs and ideas about the xin-body relationship. In particular, medical accounts of the xin's dual role as the organ of thought and a physical organ does not reject the division between mind and body. A dualist claim, however weak, cannot explain China's traditional focus on the link between physicality and mentality, especially in medicine. The cognitive science-driven attempt to recast the conventional holist claim of Chinese thought is an overly hasty attempt to take refuge in science.
This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, "close" textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the "strong" holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative distinction between mind and body. In a series of follow-up studies, we show how three different machine-based techniques - word collocation, hierarchical clustering, and topic modeling analysis - provide convergent evidence that the authors of early Chinese texts viewed the mind-body relationship as unique or problematic. We conclude with reflections on the advantages of adding "distant reading" techniques to the methodological arsenal of scholars of religion, as a supplement and aid to traditional, close reading.
In this ambitious, interdisciplinary work, Loyal D. Rue reassesses the value of deception in nature, and in human society, asserting that myths are essential to the health, and even survival, of a culture as a whole. Advancing his theory of the Noble Lie, he maintains that we urgently require a new myth to replace the religious beliefs rejected by the modern mind. Such a Lie, Rue believes, offers our only salvation from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of scepticism about the meaning of the universe and life. Rue holds our deeply ingrained western bias against deception up to rigorous examination, comparing it to what he calls the natural bias in favour of deception. Evolution rewards the successful deceiver, he maintains, and cites examples from the natural world and from psychological research indicating that strategies of deception and self-deception are essential to our personal well-being.
Part One * Consciousness and the Scientific Observer * Proposals and Disclaimers Part Two * Neural Darwinism * Reentrant Signaling * Perceptual Experience and Consciousness Part Three * Memory as Recategorization * Time and Space: Cortical Appendages and Organs of Succession * Concepts and Presyntax Part Four * A Model of Primary Consciousness * Language * Higher-Order Consciousness * The Conscious and the Unconscious * Diseases of Consciousness Part Five * Physics, Evolution, and Consciousness: A Summary * Philosophical Issues: Qualified Realism * Epilogue
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In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how bodily practices are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on written, or inscribed transmissions of memories. Paul Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on bodily (or incorporated) practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has until now been badly neglected. An innovative study, this work should be of interest to researchers into social, political and anthropological thought as well as to graduate and undergraduate students.
I respond to the four symposiasts who commented on my recent book Religion Is Not About God (2005)—religious studies scholars Donald Braxton and David Klemm, philosopher William Rottschaefer, and cognitive scientist Leslie Marsh. Various general and specific points relative to the nature of religion and the future of religion are either clarified or defended. Among the issues that receive attention are (1) the status and adequacy of my proposals for religious naturalism: Can it motivate wholeness, and is it finally a form of pantheism? (2) ritual practices, particularly those of Christianity, reinterpreted within the framework of religious naturalism; and (3) the adequacy of any naturalistic position to account for subjective properties of consciousness.
Three years ago, I read Michael Polanyi's contribution—as a philosopher—to a symposium entitled Scientific Outlook: Its Sickness and Cure. In a brilliant, penetrating, and delightfully humorous criticism of R. W. Gerard's1 biological contribution, he unerringly diagnosed the sickness of medicine:
The fact that a so learned, ingenious and imaginative survey of living beings should deal so perfunctorily with some of the most important questions concerning them shows a fundamental deficiency of human thinking.... If a rat laps up a solution of saccharine, the rational explanation of this lies in the act that the solution tastes sweet and that the rat likes that. The tasting and liking are facts that physics and chemistry as known today cannot explain. Nothing is relevant to biology, even at the lowest level of life, unless it bears on the achievements of living beings... and distinctions unknown to physics and chemistry... The current idea of