In a few days Jesse Bering’s new book, The Belief Instinct, will be published in the United States. It has already been published in the UK as The God Instinct. The title change seems a bit odd and the opposite of what one might have expected. Something like ninety percent of Americans believe in God, [...]
Tags:anthropomorphism·autism·cognitive illusion·Faces in the Clouds·Jesse Bering·neolithic·Paleolithic·shamanisms·Stewart Guthrie·The Belief Instinct·The God Instinct·theory of mind
In 1993, the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie published his seminal book Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. One of Guthrie’s primary points was that humans have an innate tendency to perceive intentional agents in the environment, even when there are no agents. A rustling of leaves, shadows in the forest, movement of clouds, [...]
Tags:agency attribution·Ara Norenzayan·causal attribution·deception·Faces in the Clouds·HADD·hyperactive agency detection device·Justin Barrett·Pascal Boyer·pattern imposition·Scott Atran·Stewart Guthrie·theory of mind
Andrew Brown from The Guardian recently attended a talk by Tanya Luhrman, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford who is studying the charismatic Christian Vineyard churches in California. Having attended similar churches in my youth, I was particularly interested in the kinds of things an ethnographer might have observed. Brown’s report provides some context:
The Vineyard churches [...]
Tags:agency detection·anthropomorphism·charismatics·evangelicals·Stewart Guthrie·Tanya Luhrman
