In 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids who worshiped something malevolent in the corn.
It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in [...]
Tags:agriculture·arousal·Aztecs·Children of the Corn·crucifixion·Daily Mass·doctrinal·Engels·episodic·Gatlin·Harvey Whitehouse·HRAF·imagistic·intensity·Linda Hamilton·Marx·memory·modes of religiosity·morphospace·Nebraska·neolithic·pagan·political economy·Quentin Atkinson·ritual form·Salah·Sarah Connor·scythe·semantic·Stephen King·Sun Dance·vision quest
There is no shortage of research projects whose aim is to “explain religion” or the “evolution of religion.” In addition to the Evolution of Religion Project which I interrogated in a recent post, anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse leads the “Explaining Religion” project based at Oxford University.
Whitehouse is interested primarily in religious variation and sees religions as [...]
Tags:doctrinal·episodic memory·Explaining Religion Project·Harvey Whitehouse·imagistic·modes of religiosity·Neolithic·Oxford·political economy·religious transmission·religious variation·ritual forms·semantic memory·shamanic
In the September issue of Discover, Kathleen McAuliffe has written a superb article on the shrinking human brain. Razib commented on it yesterday:
For several millions years up to ~200,000 years ago there was a study increase in hominin cranial capacities. I say hominin because it seems that this increase was evident in all branches of [...]
Tags:aggression·brain evolution·brain size decrease·Christopher Stringer·cranial capacity·David Geary·Discover·doctrinal·domestication·encephalization quotient·extended cognition·extended mind·Harvey Whitehouse·imagistic·intelligence·John Hawks·Kathleen McAuliffe·Merlin Donald·modes of religiosity·Neolithic Revolution·Razib·Richard Wrangham·The Incredible Shrinking Brain
Nearly 5,500 years ago or about 3,500 BCE, the Sumerians began writing about supernatural matters; in a sense, this marks the origin of what most people today understand as “religion.” This relatively modern and provincially Western understanding of religion is on full display in Paul Raushenbush’s article introducing HuffPo Religion’s new series on religious texts [...]
Tags:Bhagavad Gita·books·Buddhist·category of religion·Christian presuppositions·doctrinal·Edward Said·essentializing·Harvey Whitehouse·Hindu·imagistic·Jonathan Z. Smith·non-written traditions·orientalism·Paul Raushenbush·religion as academic creation·religion as text·religion as writing·religions of the book·religious writings·scriptures·shamanisms·shamanist·shamans·Sumeria·Sumerians·texts·The Word·theologians·theology·transcendence·transcendent·Vedic·word·writing
