About the Book
The cognitive science of religion (CSR) does not have its own methodology, and yet from the very beginnings of the discipline, methodology has defined it not only in relation to the general study of religion in the humanities but also to the sciences interested in the mind. CSR scholars are using a wide range of methodologies, borrowing mostly from the cognitive sciences and experimental psychology, but also from biology, archaeology, history, philosophy, linguistics, the social and statistical sciences, neurosciences, and anthropology. This multi-disciplinarity, in fact, defines the cognitive science of religion. Such multi-disciplinarity requires hard work and truly interdisciplinary teams, but also continual reflections on and debates about the methodologies being used. In fact, no CSR study worth its name can rely on only one methodology. Triangulation is standard, but often even more approaches are used. This book consists of selected papers from the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion and the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Each chapter demonstrates a particular method or group of methods and how those methods advance our knowledge of the religious mind from the ancient past up to today.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Prelims
List of Figures viii-ix
List of Tables ix
Introduction Studying the Religious Mind 1-13, Armin W. Geertz
Part I: Fieldwork
1. Go WILD, Not WEIRD 17-43, Martha Newson, Michael Buhrmester, Dimitris Xygalatas, Harvey Whitehouse
2. Cognitively Informed Ethnography: Using Mixed Methods to Capture the Complexity of Religious Phenomena in Two Ecologically Valid Settings 45-67, Hugh Daniel Turpin,Mark Stanford
Part II: Experimental Study of Religion
3. Experimental Cognitive Science of Religion 71-76, Dimitris Xygalatas
4. The Experimental Study of Religion: Or There and Back Again 77-94, Jesper Sørensen, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo
5. Fast and Slow: Questions and Observations in the Psychology of Religion 95-114, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
6. The Embodiment of Worship: Relations among Postural, Psychological, and Physiological Aspects of Religious Practice 115-138, Patty Van Cappellen, Megan E. Edwards
7. Past its Prime? A Methodological Overview and Critique of Religious Priming Research in Social Psychology 139-163, Shoko Watanabe, Sean M. Laurent
Part III: Cognitive Neuroscience
8. Religious Experience in Mediterranean Antiquity 167-176, István Czachesz
9. Ritual Mourning in Daniel’s Interpretation of Jeremiah’s Prophecy 177-196, Angela Kim Harkins
10. Tours of Heaven in Light of the Neuroscientific Study of Religious Experience 197-216, István Czachesz
11. (Religious) Language and the Decentering Process: McNamara and De Sublimitate on the Ecstatic Effect of Language 217-228, Christopher T. Holmes
12. Do You Need Cognitive Neuroscience to Understand Religious Cognition, Experience and Texts? 229-237, Patrick McNamara
Part IV: Cognitive Historiography
13. What is Cognitive Historiography, Anyway? Method, Theory, and a Cross-Disciplinary Decalogue 241-256, Leonardo Ambasciano
14. The Rites of the Day of Blood (dies sanguinis) in the Graeco-Roman Cult of Cybele and Attis: A Cognitive Historiographical Approach 257-276, Panayotis Pachis
15. The Gendered Deep History of the Bona Dea Cult 277-301, Leonardo Ambasciano
16. Defilement and Moral Discourse in the Hebrew Bible: An Evolutionary Framework 303-335, Yitzhaq Feder
Part V: Big Data
17. Exploring the Challenges and Potentialities of the Database of Religious History for Cognitive Historiography 339-358, Brenton Sullivan, Michael Muthukrishna, Frederick S. Tappenden, Edward Slingerl and, M. Willis Monroe
18. An Introduction to Seshat: Global History Databank 359-370, Peter Turchin, et. al.
Part VI: Computational Approaches 19. Mining the Past – Data-Intensive Knowledge Discovery in the Study of Historical Textual Traditions 373-398, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, Ryan Nichols, Edward Slingerland
20. The Computational Science of Religion 399-416, Justin E. Lane, Fount LeRon Shults
Part VII: Open Science 21. Advancing the Cognitive Science of Religion through Replication and Open Science 419-450, Suzanne Hoogeveen, Michiel van Elk
22. Promoting the Benefits and Clarifying Misconceptions about Preregistration, Preprints, and Open Science for the Cognitive Science of Religion 451-478, Christopher Kavanagh, Rohan Kapitány
Part VIII: Consilience 23. The Arts Transform the Cognitive Science of Religion 481-500, Joseph Bulbulia
24. Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion 501-511, Edward Slingerland
End Matter
Index 513-525
About the Author :
Armin W. Geertz is Emeritus Professor in the History of Religions at the Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University, Denmark. Leonardo Ambasciano completed his Ph.D. on the cognitive and deep-historical re-evaluation of the ancient Roman cult of Bona Dea at the Department of Historical Studies, Universita degli Studi di Torino, Italy. In 2016, he was Visiting Lecturer of Religious Studies at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Luther H. Martin is Professor Emeritus of Religion, University of Vermont. Kristoffer L. Nielbo is a researcher and infrastructure manager at the Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University. Nickolas P. Roubekas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Valerie van Mulukom is Research Associate in the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour group at CABS, Coventry University. Dimitris Xygalatas holds a joint position between the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where he is directing the Experimental Anthropology Lab.
