Bringing Ritual to Mind : Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms

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Summary: Beginning a Cognative Approach to Ritual
Review: McCauley and Lawson have big ambitions. Faced with a tradition of interpretation and study which focuses on primarily hermeneutic analysis of specific ritual traditions or social models, they want to instantiate a study of religion and ritual that anchors itself in the cognitive sciences. Although they are probably a little egotistical in saying that with their prior _Rethinking Religion_ that they "launched the cognitive science of religion," they certainly have been instrumental in creating a significant space for it within ritual studies. Their most recent study, _Bringing Ritual to Mind_, builds on the foundation they began in their prior work, and extends it to create a model of ritual action that will prove useful for future scholars and provide interesting reflection for ritual practitioners.

Their first chapter essentially brings the reader up to date with the material presented in their prior work, explaining their basic model of ritual action, which focuses on the centrality of a rituals formal relation to a culturally postulated superhuman agent (which they refer to throughout the book as a CPS-Agent). This is their jargon for "the Gods." Rituals, in this model, are examined in relation to two principals, the Principle of Superhuman Agency (PSA), which orients the ritual based on whether the CPS-agent is primarily present as an agent, patient, or object in the ritual, and the Principle of Superhuman Immediacy, which orients the ritual based on how far removed in the chain of ritual relations the CPS-agent is to a particular ritual.

In the second chapter they lay the groundwork for their argument, presenting psychological research on memory and discussing the relationship of relative ritual frequency and sensual pageantry in a ritual to the rituals mode a source of cultural memory. This makes interesting reading in itself, surveying some recent studies of "flashbulb" memory--that is, people's ability to remember details around highly significant events in their lives.

In the third chapter, then, they lay out their argument, which is presented in contrast to Harvey Whitehouse's theory presented in his books _Inside the Cult_ and _Arguments and Icons_. Basically, his argument posits an inverse relationship between ritual frequency and ritual pageantry--so the more often a ritual occurs in a system, the less its going to have all the bells and whistles. This is based on the assumption that the bells and whistles are needed to help people think of it as "significant" and so remember it. While they see some value in his explanation, McCauley and Lawson present a more sophisticated model which explains the relationship between ritual frequency and ritual pageantry based on the type of ritual being performed (what they call the special agent or the special patient type rituals--the distinction being on where the CPS-agent appears in the ritual). Chapter 4 is dedicated to exploring how their model works better then Whitehouse's.

Perhaps the most interesting Chapter, and the one that shows the real value of their work, is Chapter 5, in which they explore the implications of their model. Most significantly, they show how it helps explain different modes of ritual innovation and deviation in ritual systems.

As a reader the biggest challenge in this book is their willingness to use overly-technical jargon and abbreviations. One gets the feeling in their zeal to present a "scientific" study of religion, they have decided they need to adopt a jargon based language, even when it is unnecessary. This makes their text needlessly slow going at times, as the reader must either take notes, or flip back to remember exactly which each term references.

But their ideas and findings are interesting enough that it is worth it. And aside from fetishizing and writing in an almost caricatured scientific style, they do present a good model in this text of how a solid scientific study of religion can be done--and in their last chapter how it is a valuable supplement to interpretative and sociological studies of religion.