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  1. Concluding Commentary: Schadenfreude, Gluckschmerz, Jealousy, and Hate—What (and When, and Why) Are the Emotions?Ira J. Roseman & Amanda K. Steele - 2018 - Emotion Review 10 (4):327-340.
    Schadenfreude, gluckschmerz, jealousy, and hate are distinctive emotional phenomena, understudied and deserving of increased attention. The authors of this special section have admirably synthesized large literatures, describing major characteristics, eliciting conditions, and functions. We discuss the contributions of each article as well as the issues they raise for theories of emotions and some remaining questions, and suggest ways in which these might be profitably addressed.
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  • Don’t Step on the Foul Line: On the (Ir)rationality of Superstition in Baseball.Amber Griffioen - 2013 - Logique Et Analyse 56 (223):319-32.
    Baseball is an exceptionally superstitious sport. But what are we to say about the rationality of such superstitious behavior? On the one hand, we can trace much of the superstitious behavior we see in baseball to a type of irrational belief. But how deep does this supposed irrationality run? It appears that superstitions may occupy various places on the spectrum of irrationality — from motivated ignorance to self-deception to psychological compulsion —depending on the type of superstitious belief at work and (...)
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  • The cultural evolution of shamanism.Manvir Singh - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:e66.
    Shamans, including medicine men, mediums, and the prophets of religious movements, recur across human societies. Shamanism also existed among nearly all documented hunter-gatherers, likely characterized the religious lives of many ancestral humans, and is often proposed by anthropologists to be the “first profession,” representing the first institutionalized division of labor beyond age and sex. In this article, I propose a cultural evolutionary theory to explain why shamanism consistently develops and, in particular, (1) why shamanic traditions exhibit recurrent features around the (...)
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  • Bronislaw Malinowski.Andrzej Klimczuk & Łukasz Tomczyk - 2017 - In Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1--3.
    Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, ethnographer, and sociologist. Malinowski is often considered as a pioneer in the ethnographic field research methods, such as participant observation, interviews, and statistics. His studies focused on beliefs and forms of social organization. Malinowski is often recognized as one of the founders of modern social anthropology and functionalism.
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  • Letting Go of “Natural Kind”: Toward a Multidimensional Framework of Nonarbitrary Classification.David Ludwig - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (1):31-52.
    This article uses the case study of ethnobiological classification to develop a positive and a negative thesis about the state of natural kind debates. On the one hand, I argue that current accounts of natural kinds can be integrated in a multidimensional framework that advances understanding of classificatory practices in ethnobiology. On the other hand, I argue that such a multidimensional framework does not leave any substantial work for the notion “natural kind” and that attempts to formulate a general account (...)
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  • Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.Stewart Guthrie - 1993 - New York and Oxford: Oup Usa.
    Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.
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  • Regaining the 'Lost Self': A Philosophical Analysis of Survivor's Guilt.Amber L. Griffioen - 2014 - In Alexander Gerner & Jorge Gonçalves (eds.), Altered Self and Altered Self Experience. pp. 43-57.
    Although there has been much discussion regarding shame and guilt, not enough has been said about the complexities of the relationship between the two. In this paper, I examine one way in which I take shame and guilt to interact – namely in cases of so-called “survivor’s guilt” among victims of trauma. More specifically, I argue that survivor’s guilt may represent a kind of response to feelings of shame – one which is centrally tied to the central philosophical notions of (...)
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  • Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols.Candace S. Alcorta & Richard Sosis - 2005 - Human Nature 16 (4):323-359.
    This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...)
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  • Narrative, Myth, and History.Joseph Mali - 1994 - Science in Context 7 (1):121-142.
    The ArgumentDuring the last two decades the debate on the use and abuse of narrative in historiography has taken a new form: ideological instead of methodological. According to poststructuralist critics, the representation of past events and processes in the form of a coherent story turns history into mythology, which is (or serves) conservative ideology. This is so because the fabrication of organic continuity and unity between the past and the present (as well as the future) of society depicts its most (...)
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  • Witchcraft Beliefs and Witch Hunts.Niek Koning - 2013 - Human Nature 24 (2):158-181.
    This paper proposes an interdisciplinary explanation of the cross-cultural similarities and evolutionary patterns of witchcraft beliefs. It argues that human social dilemmas have led to the evolution of a fear system that is sensitive to signs of deceit and envy. This was adapted in the evolutionary environment of small foraging bands but became overstimulated by the consequences of the Agricultural Revolution, leading to witch paranoia. State formation, civilization, and economic development abated the fear of witches and replaced it in part (...)
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  • (1 other version)Magic, religion, science, technology, and ethics in the postmodern world.Barbara A. Strassberg - 2005 - Zygon 40 (2):307-322.
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  • (Online) Spelling the (Digital) Spell: Talking About Magic in the Digital Revolution.Lionel Obadia - 2022 - Sophia 61 (1):23-40.
    The lexicon of religion has been widely used in the context of the social and cultural transformations associated with the ‘digital revolution’, whether in metaphoric or in realistic terms. The study of digital magic/magic in digital times, the other side of the coin of the Sacred 2.0, is still in its infancy. Yet, references to magic are made frequently in reflections about the rapid development of the digitalisation of society and culture, and they deserve more in-depth study. This paper tackles (...)
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  • Religion: Its Origins, Social Role and Sources of Variation.Richard Startup - 2020 - Open Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):346-367.
    Religion emerged among early humans because both purposive and non-purposive explanations were being employed but understanding was lacking of their precise scope and limits. Given also a context of very limited human power, the resultant foregrounding of agency and purposive explanation expressed itself in religion’s marked tendency towards anthropomorphism and its key role in legitimizing behaviour. The inevitability of death also structures the religious outlook; with ancestors sometimes assigned a role in relation to the living. Subjective elements such as the (...)
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  • Making sense of causal relations. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study.Olivier Le Guen, Jana Samland, Thomas Friedrich, Daniel Hanus & Penelope Brown - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • Belief, Apparitions, and Rationality: The Social Scientific Study of Religion after Wittgenstein1.Edward Berryman - 2005 - Human Studies 28 (1):15-39.
    The goal I pursue is to redefine the study of religious epistemology on the basis of an ethnomethodological extension of Wittgenstein. This approach shows that the nature of religious belief and its relation to facts, proofs, and empirical reality are matters that are dealt with by ordinary members of society. The examination of this lay epistemology reveals that -- far from being a settled and established entity -- religious belief is a polymorphous phenomenon. Religious belief is a pragmatic resource whose (...)
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  • Some Correspondences and Similarities of Shamanism and Cognitive Science: Interconnectedness, Extension of Meaning, and Attribution of Mental States.Timothy L. Hubbard - 2002 - Anthropology of Consciousness 13 (2):26-45.
    Correspondences and similarities between ideas in shamanism and ideas in contemporary cognitive science are considered. The importance of interconnectedness in the web of life worldview characteristic of shamanism and in connectionist models of semantic memory in cognitive science, and the extension of meaning to elements of the natural world in shamanism and indistributed cognition, are considered. Cognitive consequences of such an extension (e.g., use of representativeness and intentional stance heuristics, magical thinking, social attribution errors, and social in‐group/out‐group differences) are discussed. (...)
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  • Where Mourning Takes Them: Migrants, Borders, and an Alternative Reality.David P. Sandell - 2010 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 38 (2):179-204.
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  • Dogs and human beings: A story of friendship.Sophia Menache - 1998 - Society and Animals 6 (1):67-86.
    The wide consensus in research with regard to the modernity of keeping companion animals lies behind the prevailing conclusions about attitudes toward the canine species in pre-modern societies. These were reviewed mainly from a utilitarian perspective. Characterized, in part, by the protective shelter of the extended household and, as such, free of the tensions affecting the nuclear family in industrial cities, pre-modern societies supposedly lacked in the emotional stress and indigence that condition or encourage dog keeping. A careful examination of (...)
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  • Fengshui: Science, Religion, Superstition, or Trade?Yuanlin Guo - 2023 - Zygon 58 (3):591-613.
    Fengshui (also called Chinese geomancy) is a pre-modern tradition rooted in Chinese civilization. Chinese civilization is pre-modern and practice-oriented due to the domination of political power in China. In contrast, Western civilization is modernized. It witnessed the development of religion in ancient times, and the growth of science through reason (logic) and experiment in modern times. It is both rational and transcendental. It seems that Fengshui is an intermediate between science and religion. It is not science although its focus is (...)
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  • The Dead May Kill You.Claire White, Maya Marin & Daniel M. T. Fessler - 2022 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 22 (3-4):294-323.
    There is considerable evidence that beliefs in supernatural punishment decrease self-interested behavior and increase cooperation amongst group members. To date, research has largely focused on beliefs concerning omniscient moralistic gods in large-scale societies. While there is an abundance of ethnographic accounts documenting fear of supernatural punishment, there is a dearth of systematic cross-cultural comparative quantitative evidence as to whether belief in supernatural agents with limited powers in small-scale societies also exert these effects. Here, we examine information extracted from the Human (...)
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  • Introducing Absence.Brian Rappert & Wenda K. Bauchspies - 2014 - Social Epistemology 28 (1):1-3.
    Whether it pertains to what is not considered, what cannot be determined, what is not allowed to be known, or what is deliberately concealed, absences figure as the constant shadows of what is made present by social research. This article explores the relation between what is presented and what is not by treating it first as a vexing conundrum for representation and then as a vehicle for understanding. The matters under examination include what is written about the social world as (...)
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  • Temptation, Tradition, and Taboo: A Theory of Sacralization.Douglas A. Marshall - 2010 - Sociological Theory 28 (1):64-90.
    A theory of sacralization is offered in which the sacred emerges from the collision of temptation and tradition. It is proposed that when innate or acquired desires to behave in one way conflict with socially acquired and/or mediated drives to behave in another way, actors ascribe sacredness to the objects of their action as a means of reconciling the difference between their desired and actual behavior toward those objects. After establishing the sacred as a theoretical construct, the theory is sketched (...)
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  • Groups and Emotional Arousal Mediate Neural Synchrony and Perceived Ritual Efficacy.Philip S. Cho, Nicolas Escoffier, Yinan Mao, April Ching, Christopher Green, Jonathan Jong & Harvey Whitehouse - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:407912.
    We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The (...)
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  • Logic(s).Bryan S. Turner - 2006 - Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2-3):87-93.
    Logic is concerned with the design or structure of arguments. It describes the forms of valid argument and is concerned with the public presentation and reception of arguments. Hence it has a close connection with politics and the public sphere, and with rhetoric as the science of persuasion. Philosophers have analysed the objective conditions of validation, that is, the justifiability of assertions about the world. This quest for objective and scientific validity in argumentation about the nature of reality dominated much (...)
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  • Presence from Absence: Looking within the Triad of Science, Technology and Development.Wenda K. Bauchspies - 2014 - Social Epistemology 28 (1):56-69.
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  • Reducing the contingency of the world: magic, oracles, and machine-learning technology.Simon Larsson & Martin Viktorelius - forthcoming - AI and Society.
    The concept of magic is frequently used to discuss technology, a practice considered useful by some with others arguing that viewing technology as magic precludes a proper understanding of technology. The concept of magic is especially prominent in discussions of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Based on an anthropological perspective, this paper juxtaposes ML technology with magic, using descriptions drawn from a project on an ML-powered system for propulsion control of cargo ships. The paper concludes that prior scholarly work on (...)
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  • Where the Gods Dwell: a Research Report.Justin L. Barrett, R. Daniel Shaw, Joseph Pfeiffer & Jonathan Grimes - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (1-2):131-146.
    Are the places that superhuman beings purportedly act and dwell randomly or arbitrarily distributed? Inspired by theoretical work in cognitive science of religion, descriptions of superhuman beings were solicited from informants in 20 countries on five continents, resulting in 108 usable descriptions, including information about these beings’ properties, their dwelling location, and whether they were the target of rituals. Whether superhuman beings are the subject of religious and ritual practices appeared to co-vary in relation to both features of physical geography (...)
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  • Discipline.Bryan S. Turner - 2006 - Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2-3):183-186.
    There are broadly five interconnected meanings of the noun ‘discipline’. Disciplinawere instructions to disciples, and hence a branch of instruction or department of knowledge. This religious context provided the modern educational notion of a ‘body of knowledge’, or a discipline such as sociology or economics. We can define discipline as a body of knowledge and knowledge for the body, because the training of the mind has inevitably involved a training of the body. Second, it signified a method of training or (...)
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  • On the adaptive advantage of always being right (even when one is not).Nathalia L. Gjersoe & Bruce M. Hood - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):521-522.
    We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.
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  • False beliefs and naive beliefs: They can be good for you.Roberto Casati & Marco Bertamini - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):512-513.
    Naive physics beliefs can be systematically mistaken. They provide a useful test-bed because they are common, and also because their existence must rely on some adaptive advantage, within a given context. In the second part of the commentary we also ask questions about when a whole family of misbeliefs should be considered together as a single phenomenon.
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  • The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices.Ze Hong & Joseph Henrich - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):622-651.
    Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and we formally model the scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found (...)
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  • Gateways to Culture: Play, Games, Metaphors, and Institutions.Robert Scott Kretchmar - 2018 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 18 (1-2):47-65.
    In this essay I develop a case for games as a primitive form of culture and an early arrival at our ancestors’ cultural gates. I analyze the modest intellectual prerequisites for game behavior including the use of metaphor, a reliance on constitutive rules, and an ability to understand the logic of entailment. In arguing for its early arrival during the late Middle and Upper Paleolithic, I develop a case for its powerful adaptive qualities in terms of both natural and sexual (...)
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  • Shamanism: An Inquiry into the History of the Scholarly Use of the Term in English-Speaking North America.Peter N. Jones - 2006 - Anthropology of Consciousness 17 (2):4-32.
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  • Notes on the Fundamental Unity of Humankind.Wim van Binsbergen - 2020 - Culture and Dialogue 8 (1):23-42.
    The argument claims the vital importance of the idea of the fundamental unity of humankind for any intercultural philosophy, and succinctly traces the trajectory of this idea – and its denials – in the Western and the African traditions of philosophical and empirical research. The conclusion considers the present-day challenges towards this idea’s implementation – timely as it is, yet apparently impotent in the face of mounting global violence.
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  • Behind the Rhodes statue: Black competency and the imperial academy.Robbie Shilliam - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (5):3-27.
    Recent criticisms of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) Oxford campaign have problematized the presence of Black bodies within British higher education by reference to an ideal image of the impartial and discerning academy. In this article, I historically and intellectually contextualize the apprehension, expressed in the debates over RMF Oxford, that an intimate Black presence destabilizes the ethos of higher education. Specifically, I argue that much more than Rhodes’ statue implicates the British academy in the Empire’s southern African interests. I (...)
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  • Religion and Violence. Paradoxes of Religious Communication.Ilja Srubar - 2017 - Human Studies 40 (4):501-518.
    Religion and violence are related in an ambivalent, paradoxical way, for the systems of religious knowledge tend to prohibit violence and to motivate it at the same time. This paper looks for the roots of that ambivalence and reveals particular mechanisms that generate violence within religious systems and their associated practices. It argues that violence in religious systems is present in at least three forms: It is inherent to communication with the “sacred,” it is generated by processes of inclusion and (...)
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  • Nonreproductive Technologies: Remediating Kin Structure with Donor Gametes.Robert Nachtigall, Gay Becker & Jennifer Harrington - 2008 - Science, Technology, and Human Values 33 (3):393-418.
    This article examines the absence of biological relatedness in couples where the use of a third-party gamete donor casts doubt on the notion of conventional kinship. The authors observe that individuals who have used technology to create a family remediate relatedness through a dehistoricized idea of kinship in which the traditional concept is replaced with the concept of chance. The article also examines how inherited value is replaced by strategies that redefine the ways in which donor gamete parents can pass (...)
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  • From The Teachings of Don Juan to Travels with Tooy: One Anthropologist's Trip.Richard Price - 2011 - Anthropology of Consciousness 22 (2):136-158.
    This article was presented as the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 2010, New Orleans. It highlights four decades of changes in the anthropology of consciousness, US society, and the author's views of “religion.” It also interrogates the shifting ethics of writing about friends (or about anyone else) and the special responsibilities of ethnographers. It ends with a consideration of the challenge of writing about people in possession, a special case of the problematic representation of “native (...)
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  • Not Just Dead Meat: An Evolutionary Account of Corpse Treatment in Mortuary Rituals.Claire White, Maya Marin & Daniel M. T. Fessler - 2017 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (1-2):146-168.
    Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment that takes account of the unique adaptive challenges entailed by the death of a loved one. (...)
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  • Mortuary Rituals in Japan: The Hegemony of Tradition and the Motivations of Individuals.Yohko Tsuji - 2006 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 34 (3):391-431.
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  • Adaptive misbeliefs are pervasive, but the case for positive illusions is weak.David Sloan Wilson & Steven Jay Lynn - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6):539-540.
    It is a foundational prediction of evolutionary theory that human beliefs accurately approximate reality only insofar as accurate beliefs enhance fitness. Otherwise, adaptive misbeliefs will prevail. Unlike McKay & Dennett (M&D), we think that adaptive belief systems rely heavily upon misbeliefs. However, the case for positive illusions as an example of adaptive misbelief is weak.
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  • The center way out there: A review article of recent books on hindu pilgrimage. [REVIEW]J. E. Llewellyn - 1998 - International Journal of Hindu Studies 2 (2):249-265.
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  • The politics of paradigms: Contrasting theories of consciousness and society. [REVIEW]Bennetta Jules-Rosette - 1978 - Human Studies 1 (1):92 - 110.
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  • (1 other version)Notes on the Text – Perception of the Text, (Non)Violation of Expectation, Recipient vs Author.Ondřej Krátky - 2020 - Espes 9 (1):49-76.
    The following paper is based on a broad understanding of communication that considers as text basically anything that has been created within the framework of a cultural interaction by an author and that is perceived by a recipient. The first part of the paper introduces, explains and follows mostly cases in which the author’s violations of the recipient’s expectations have a communication value, i.e. provoke, in the recipient, a communication effect that matches the author’s intentions. In such cases, this effect (...)
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