Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

Ilkka Pyysiainen

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2006, pp. 341-353

(Review)

Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2006.0024

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199442

Access provided by Tulane University (6 Feb 2019 23:45 GMT)

BOOK REVIEW ESSAY

Memories: Religion and

Cultural Transmission
Ilkka Pyysiäinen
University of Helsinki

Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious

Transmission. (Cognitive Science of Religion Series.) AltaMira Press, 2004.

Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture
Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

A nthropology and comparative religion have had a love-hate relationship

with the theory of evolution. In the early days of both disciplines, attempts
to apply Darwin’s theory analogically to cultural development played a crucial
role (Sharpe 1975). But they got it all wrong. Edward Westermarck (1906-1908)
was one of the few who really understood the theory of natural selection oper-
ating on random variation as well as its implications for the study of human
behavior. Then times changed; after a few decades cultural evolutionism
seemed to be a dead horse (see D’Andrade 2000). Sometimes dead horses tend
to rise from the dead, however. Currently an evolutionary perspective to
human behavior figures prominently in such fields of inquiry as human behav-
ioral ecology, gene-culture coevolutionary theories, evolutionary psychology,
sociobiology, and even “memetics” (see Laland and Brown 2002). It is possible
to study the biological constraints of human behavior, apply the idea of natu-
ral selection analogically to culture, or to explore how culture has changed
human biology (cf. Ehrlich and Feldman 2003).

341
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

Whitehouse’s book represents the so-called cognitive science of religion

which is partly but only partly characterized by an evolutionary perspective
(see Pyysiäinen and Anttonen 2002, Tremlin 2006). Whitehouse does not pres-
ent explicit evolutionary arguments; on the contrary, he tries to show that
religion cannot be explained merely by evolved mechanisms that are “trig-
gered” under certain circumstances. He cites (20) approvingly Boyd and
Richerson’s (2000) view, according to which culture involves observational
learning, although not everything people know is culturally transmitted. Yet
Whitehouse neither makes explicit use of Boyd and Richerson’s theoretical
model nor even discuss it, although his own position vis-à-vis Pascal Boyer’s
evolutionary explanation of religion comes very close to Boyd and Richerson’s
gene-culture coevolutionary view (see Boyer 1994:266-287).
While Richerson and Boyd’s volume aims to provide a lucid exposition of
the authors’ formal theory of coevolution to non-specialists, Whitehouse
wants to develop causal explanations of how psychological factors and
sociopolitical organization interact in the transmission of religious traditions.
Or, as he puts it: “This book sets out a testable theory of how religions are cre-
ated, reproduced, and transformed” (1).

The Modes of Religiosity

After obtaining his Ph.D. from Cambridge, Whitehouse published Inside the Cult
(1995), a vivid ethnography of a millenarian cult in Papua New Guinea. This cult
consisted of a large and uniform mainstream organization together with a tem-
porary small-scale movement which was emotional and innovative. Whitehouse
coined the expression “modes of religiosity” to describe the fact that all religious
traditions tend to develop either towards large-scale organizations character-
ized by orthodoxy and dry ritual routine (doctrinal mode), or towards small-
scale communities placing emphasis on emotionally arousing rituals without
any sanctioned interpretation of their meaning (imagistic mode).
The modes theory has since been elaborated in a collective effort by schol-
ars working in various disciplines. The theory was first evaluated by a number
of anthropologists in a workshop at Cambridge University in December 2001
(Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004). In August 2002, historians and archaeologists
of religion gathered in a workshop at the University of Vermont, USA
(Whitehouse and Martin 2004). A year later, a third workshop was arranged
with psychologists and cognitive scientists at Emory University in Atlanta
(Whitehouse and McCauley 2005). In addition, Whitehouse himself has con-

342
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

stantly been developing the theory in the light of the ongoing debates
(Whitehouse 1995, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b, 2005).
The present volume was put together soon after the workshop in Vermont.
Whitehouse tackles Boyer’s challenge armed with the distinction between “cog-
nitively costly” and “cognitively optimal” religion (see Atran 2002). Boyer (1994,
2003) has forcefully argued that religious concepts and beliefs are effectively
spread because they are “cognitively optimal,” that is, because they automati-
cally trigger certain intuitive reasoning systems. This stands in opposition to
Whitehouse’s claim that religious doctrines and practices can only persist if they
are either repeated ad nauseam (doctrinalism) or are learned in the context of
“rites of terror” so that their memory is forever engraved in the mind. Such
“flashbulb memories” presuppose a high level of emotional arousal.
Whitehouse now accepts that there is “survival without modal effects”
(157-163); cf. Whitehouse 2001b). Although religion can be defined exclusive-
ly as consisting of cognitively optimal traits, these yet are often differentiated
from concepts and beliefs “that carry a heavier conceptual load” and thus
require mnemonic support. These kinds of representations are often more
highly valued in the world’s religious traditions, fairies being clearly differen-
tiated from the gods (45-46). It is in the “conceptually challenging bodies of
knowledge” that the plasticity of religion and its “revelatory potential” lie.
Thus, modal transmission is needed to pass on concepts that are difficult
to remember and process in mind. Without the modal effects, these would all
be lost and replaced by cognitively more optimal forms of religiosity (“super-
stition”). That the religion of the masses always differs from the religion of the
virtuosi and the clerics is of course known to every anthropologist (e.g.
Redfield 1956, Geertz 1960, Sharot 2001, see Pyysiäinen 2004a). What is sup-
posed to be new in Whitehouse’s theory is the claim that it provides a com-
prehensive explanation of why we have the two contrastive “forms of religious
experience” in the first place (Whitehouse 2002b:293-294). Whitehouse
emphasizes that his theory provides a causal nexus to explain why certain fea-
tures of religiosity tend to go together. Alas, this is also one of the most prob-
lematic claims in the modes theory (see Wiebe 2004, Boyer 2005).
Whitehouse characterizes the two modes by five psychological (cognitive)
and seven sociopolitical variables related to such things as frequency of trans-
mission, memory, social cohesion, leadership, and size of the group (74). The
model “explains the clustering of features in terms of a set of cognitive or psy-
chological causes” (74). If a ritual is performed for one and the same patients
only once in a lifetime or is repeated not more often than once a year at the

343
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

maximum, and if the ritual is emotionally arousing, it is effectively encoded

in episodic memory. Such rituals typify small-scale communities with only a
passive or even absent leader. Flashbulb memories of emotionally arousing
rites unite the participants into a community: it all happened to us. Yet there
is no official interpretation of the meaning of the ritual which thus triggers
what Whitehouse calls “spontaneous exegetical reflection” (SER), a life-long
process of trying to make sense of what happened in the initiation ritual. For
Whitehouse, the ideal examples of such imagistic religiosity can be found in
New Guinean traditions, especially in male initiations (see Barth 1975).
Experts on the local cultures, however, point out that Whitehouse may have
put too much emphasis on memory and the once-in-a-lifetime character of
the rituals (Barth 2002; Houseman 2002).
Imagistic rituals cannot unite such large masses of people as, for example,
all Christians of the world. Only a commitment to shared beliefs can create
the virtual community of cobelievers. This necessitates frequent repetition to
prevent the tradition from degenerating into cognitively optimal religion.
Religious doctrines are complex and cognitively costly; therefore their preser-
vation necessitates policing and orthodoxy checks. In claiming that “a great
deal of religious knowledge consists of cognitively costly concepts,”
Whitehouse (25) provides reference to my book (Pyysiäinen 2001:219) but I fail
to understand how this reference is supposed to back the claim.
I have elsewhere argued that we must distinguish between written theologies
and people’s actual religious thoughts and inferences; there is no reason to pre-
suppose that an average Christian, for example, knows the doctrine in all its
detail and uses it to generate inferences in everyday situations. Even theologians
have difficulties in this, much as scientists have difficulties in processing scientif-
ic knowledge in fast on-line reasoning (Rozenblit and Keil 2002, Keil 2003). The
modes theory thus might rather help us explain why particular groups of people
have the particular beliefs they do and not others, rather than to explain why
persons entertain “cognitively costly” ideas (Pyysiäinen 2004b:173-175).
Another important claim in the modes theory is that repetition leads to a
“tedium effect” (Whitehouse is not always clear whether he is speaking of rit-
uals or of doctrines, see Houseman 2002:20). This, then, must be somehow
counterbalanced by revivalist movements. The expression “tedium effect” was
coined by anthropologist Aarne A. Koskinen (1953:91-94) who argued that the
influence of Christianity remained superficial among the converted Pacific
Islanders. The conversions often were mass phenomena and Christianity was
at first very popular. However, “disappointment and tedium soon made their

344
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

appearance,” as the natives felt that they did not gain the expected this-world-
ly advantages from “white man’s magic” (see Whitehouse 2000:44-45, 142-
143; Pyysiäinen 2004b:198-188, 2005:159).
The situation is very different within established doctrinal religions, how-
ever. “Tedium” obviously does not lead Christians to abandon their rituals
(Malley 2002, 2004). The reason is simple: if neglecting ritual duties is consid-
ered to be immoral and even dangerous, tedium does not really matter
(Pyysiäinen 2004b:188). There is also experimental evidence showing that
repeated statements are rated as more true than new ones (Bacon 1979). Mere
repetition of a statement can lead to increases in the strength of one’s belief
that the statement is true (Begg, Anas, and Farinacci 1992).
Heavy emphasis on frequency, repetition, and memory seems to have led
Whitehouse to neglect other important factors contributing to religion. In the
modes theory, religion is just some weird thing persons try to keep in mind
using whatever mnemonic devices are available. But why? There is no answer.
The frequency of repetition and also the very foundations of religiosity itself
are thus left unexplained (see McCauley 2001:120).
However, once we place religious behavior in the broader context of folk
traditions as a whole, it is possible to study how religion is used in daily life
involving such things as hunting and food production, social exchange, illness
and health, sexuality, and so forth. The continuity of traditions does not rest
on the mnemonic capacities of individuals alone; traditions rather are regen-
erated every day when we work, eat, and make love. To borrow an example
from Richerson and Boyd (2005), you do not have to remember on which side
of the road one must drive; if you forget, just look around and do what oth-
ers do. Religious beliefs are, of course, of a more elusive nature; yet also they
are mostly embedded in what people do. One might object saying that this
only concerns the various folk traditions of the world (see Anttonen 1996,
2002; Temenos 2004) and that in literate religions we do find abstract doc-
trines quite removed from people’s daily concerns. This is true but it also rais-
es one more problem for the modes theory: religious ideas are transmitted
not only in rituals. Theological traditions exist and are remembered because
they have been written down (Pyysiäinen 1999, Goody 2000). Moreover, we
can now also listen to TV Evangelists, hear radio broadcasts, and chat on the
Internet. Religion is everywhere because there is communication everywhere.
It looks to me that the central problem in Whitehouse’s model is that he
asks questions as an anthropologist but tries to provide answers as a cognitive
scientist. Like Boyd and Richerson, he emphasizes cultural learning; yet he

345
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

also stresses the importance of memory in ways that are at odds with the cul-
tural perspective. Just as anthropologists have traditionally provided thick
descriptions of this or that culture, published in the form of a monograph,
also Whitehouse wants to capture the essence of religion in a single grand nar-
rative. But, as he also happens to think that only finding causal explanations
for material events is real science, he has turned to cognitive science for help.
“(E)xplaining religion is…a problem of explaining a particular type of distrib-
uted cognition,” Whitehouse (p. 16) writes, referring to Edwin Hutchins’s
“extra-cranial” view of cognition.
At the heart of the modes theory is the claim that the transmission of reli-
gion is based on special, that is “modal,” causal relationships. This is a very
different view than the “standard model” in the cognitive science of religion,
which emphasizes that there are no specifically religious cognitive mecha-
nisms (Boyer 2005). The view of causal explanation itself also remains relative-
ly vague in the modes theory (Wiebe 2004).
A further problem arises from the fact that the modes are defined as basins
of attraction in the sense that aspects of religiosity are supposed to coalesce
around either one of the two, imagism or doctrinality (8; see Sjöblom 2005).
The modes theory explains “the tendency for religious systems to gravitate
toward divergent attractor positions” (76). Whitehouse wants to be clear about
this because time and again it has been pointed out that most religious tradi-
tions seem to combine elements from the two modes rather promiscuously.
The modes theory is certainly not a typology of religions. Whitehouse there-
fore argues that, although individual behaviors cannot be simply imagistic or
doctrinal, the long-term reproduction of traditions results in “the coalescence
of features specified by the modal theory” (75-76).
This is a problem because we do not know what this long-term coalescence
of features empirically means and how it should be measured. What would
falsify the hypothesis? Whitehouse tends to ignore all empirical evidence
about imagistic and doctrinal features actually being found together, arguing
that this is only what happens at some point in history. In the long run all tra-
ditions will develop either towards pure imagism or pure doctrinalism. But
how long does this really take, as we have not yet seen anything like that in
the past 30,000 years or so (see Mithen 2004)? Actually, what Whitehouse real-
ly seems to be getting at, is something like the distinction between compe-
tence and performance. The point is not at all in the time scale need for pure
modes to develop, but in the fact that imagism and doctrinality are abstrac-
tions. The modes theory is a formal theory.

346
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

Take Chomsky as an example. His early linguistic theory predicted, for

example, that the truncated passive “The car was stolen” was more complex
in its transformational derivation than the full passive “The car was stolen by
the boys.” When experiments showed that the full passive was more difficult
to process than the truncated done, Chomsky argued that this was merely a
“performance issue” (see Sinha 2001). Similarly, when imagistic and doctrinal
features coalesce with each other, Whitehouse can argue that this is only on
the level of performance, while his theory concerns something analogous to
the level of competence (cf. also Lawson and McCauley 1990). This, however,
makes the ideal of empirical testing problematic. The best thing to do seems
to be to break down the theory into several independent claims and predic-
tions and to choose the best possible method of testing for each (Barrett
2005). This would make the theory more like a research program than a the-
ory or a single model. As such, it might turn out to be very fruitful.

Culture and Coevolution

Richerson and Boyd’s book is a non-technical exposition and application of
their formal theory of gene-culture coevolution (Boyd and Richerson 1985).
Yet it is not merely a popular book targeted at non-specialists only. All schol-
ars interested in cultural transmission and in human evolution can read it
with much profit. Richerson and Boyd think that culture is as deep a mystery
as the origin of life and has profoundly changed also the biology of our
species. They approach this question armed with concepts and models bor-
rowed from population genetics, game theory, and economics. The simple
and general models used are not laws but tools that provide conceptual clar-
ity “in the midst of mind-numbing complexity and diversity” (95).
The basic idea is that humans are an extreme example of the fact that
many organisms construct their own environment (so-called “niche construc-
tion”). We not only produce changes in our environment but intentionally
engineer it and also transmit the altered environment to the next generation.
Kim Sterelny (2003:146) even argues that the combination of biological group
selection, niche construction, and phenotypic plasticity turns humans from
social animals to cultural animals. Culture is the ultimate niche.
Perhaps the best known example of coevolution is the adult lactose diges-
tion. The majority of the world’s adults lack the enzyme necessary to digest
lactose. The ability to digest lactose seems to have evolved in response to the
emergence of agriculture and dairying. These are cultural innovations that

347
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

have altered human biology: those whose genetic make-up helped them bet-
ter digest lactose now could produce more offspring compared to those who
could not. The biological ability to digest lactose became more common
because it was adaptive in a cultural environment characterized by farming.
Richerson and Boyd argue that genetic evolution has created psychological
capacities that then have allowed for cultural evolution of adaptations that
affect the relative fitness of different genotypes in many ways (192-193).
Culturally evolved technology, for example, has affected the evolution of mor-
phology: modern humans are much less robust than earlier hominid species.
Culturally evolved moral norms, for their part, can affect fitness if norm vio-
lators are punished. In small-scale societies, men who cannot control their
antisocial impulses have often been exiled to the wilderness and thus have
been prevented from having offspring and caring for them. Genes may have
culture on a leash, as Lumsden and Wilson (1981:303) once put it, but “the
dog on the end is big, smart, and independent” (194).
Culture is based on the ability of individuals to learn and imitate. When
persons tend to acquire some cultural variants rather than others, “biased
transmission” occurs (66). When the beliefs of one generation are culturally
transmitted to the next generation, learning can lead to cumulative change
(“guided variation,” 116). Imitation allows organisms to learn more selective-
ly. Whenever individual learning is error prone or costly, selection favors imi-
tation (118). This requires that environments are neither too variable nor too
stable. When the environment changes too rapidly, there is no sense in copy-
ing past generations. For imitation to be beneficial, the environment must
change slowly enough to allow for the accumulation of socially learned infor-
mation. If, however, environmental change is very slow, then organisms can
best act on the basis of genetically encoded information.
Cultures may be understood as types of information stored in the brain.
Different populations are characterized by different kinds of cultures (204).
Richerson and Boyd claim that, although selection between large groups of
unrelated individuals is a weak force in organic evolution, group selection may
take place on the level of culture: the benefits of group-adapted beliefs raise
everyone’s reproductive success. Different groups may thus exhibit cultural vari-
ation that is not easily reduced by migration (as genetic differences are).
Variation between groups is maintained by “moralistic punishment” and
“conformist bias” within groups (204). A certain religion, for example, may
persist because nonbelievers are punished so that the costs of not believing
are higher than its benefits. Conformism means that young people are prone

348
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

to adopt religion because religious beliefs are widely held, fit with certain con-
tent-based biases, and are difficult to disprove. Moralistic punishment works
in large groups and can stabilize almost any behavioral trait. Conformist bias
operates in small groups characterized by a disposition to imitate what is con-
sidered to be common under circumstances where it is difficult to evaluate
the costs and benefits of alternative cultural variants (200-207).
Although Richerson and Boyd discuss religion only anecdotally, it is obvi-
ous that their model provides a good tool for the study of the persistence of
religion. As such, it also constitutes a challenge for Whitehouse’s memory-cen-
tered approach. The unbroken continuity of traditions does not rest on the
simple fact that individual bearers of tradition recall every detail just the
same. Individual variation does not necessarily rule out the possibility of the
continuity of tradition (see Henrich and Boyd 2002). Although memory is
important, it alone is not sufficient to explain how religious traditions are
passed on. Richerson and Boyd’s theories of learning, imitation, “social” and
“tribal” instincts, and reciprocity and cooperation could help explain why and
how religious behaviors persist as an integral part of culture.
Whitehouse (2005:218), however, prefers to think that there are some spe-
cial “mechanisms of reinforcement” among the components of the two modes
and that these can explain even such things as the first appearance of states
and “literary practices.” Notwithstanding Whitehouse’s explicit emphasis on
cognition and causal explanation, this actually seems to lead to a holistic and
antireductionist view of religion as somehow sui generis. Although Whitehouse
explicitly rejects the traditional sui generis views of religion, in emphasizing
the uniqueness of modal reinforcement and “revelatory” knowledge obtained
in rituals he risks attempts at truly reductive explanation in terms of mental
architectures and culture (see Boyer 2005).
Others, however, might say that explaining religious behavior in terms of
learning and imitation as well as modal reinforcement is more or less super-
ficial because religion emerges from a single panhuman psychological design
that strongly constrains variation (Bulbulia 2005). It is this psychological archi-
tecture that deserves serious study, although even a complete understanding
of it could not have predicted that a group would call their god “Jehovah,” for
example. I, however, think that Whitehouse is correct in arguing that ques-
tions of cultural variation are not trivial (see also Day 2005). Religion need not
be only an exotic backdoor to the secrets of the human mind; it is equally pos-
sible to use the mental architecture as a backdoor to the secrets of religious

349
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

behavior “in the wild” (Pyysiäinen 2004c:342-343). It all depends on which

questions it is one wants to study.
In trying to show the interrelatedness of cognitive and sociopolitical vari-
ables, Whitehouse’s work is a welcome balancing force in the cognitive science
of religion. It shows both the importance of cognitive science to the study of
culture and the need to study cultural evolution as not completely reducible
to biological evolution. The idea of the modes, however, is best understood as
a way of framing questions, not as a tool for empirical research and causal
explanation (see Barrett 2005). Richerson and Boyd, like Sperber (1996), offer
tools that are based on more solid theoretical foundations.

REFERENCES
Anttonen, Veikko. 1996. “Rethinking the Sacred: The Notions of ‘Human Body’ and
‘Territory’ in Conceptualizing Religion.” In Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan,
eds., The Sacred and Its Scholars, 36-64. Leiden: Brill.
__________. 2002. “Identifying the Generative Mechanisms of Religion: The Issue of Origin
Revisited.” In Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Veikko Anttonen, eds., Current Approaches in the
Cognitive Science of Religion, 14-37. London: Continuum.
Atran, Scott. 2002. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Bacon, Frederick T. 1979. “Credibility of Repeated Statements: Memory for Trivia.” Journal
of Experimental Psychology 5(3):241-252.
Barrett, Justin L. 2005. “In the Empirical Mode: Evidence Needed for the Modes of Religiosity
Theory.” In Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N. McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion:
Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religion, 109-126. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press.
Barth, Fredrik. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo &
New Haven: Universitetsforlaget & Yale University Press.
__________. 2002. Review of Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse. Journal of Ritual
Studies 16(2):14-17.
Begg, Ian Maynard, Ann Anas, and Suzanne Farinacci. 1992. “Dissociation of Processes in
Belief: Source Recollection, Statement Familiarity, and the Illusion of Truth.” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General 121(4):446-458.
Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson. 1985. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
__________. 2000. “Memes: Universal Acid or Better Mousetrap.” In Robert Aunger, ed.,
Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics a Science, 143-162. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
__________. 2003. “Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function.”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(3):119-124.

350
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

__________. 2005. “A Reductionist Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission.” In

Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N. McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion: Psychological and
Cognitive Foundations of Religion, 3-29. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Bulbulia, Joseph. 2005. “Are There Any Religions? An Evolutionary Exploration.” Method &
Theory in the Study of Religion 17:71-100.
D’Andrade, Roy. 2000. “The Sad Story of Anthropology 1950-1999.” Cross-Cultural Research
34(3):219-32.
Day, Matthew. 2005. “Rethinking Naturalness: Modes of Religiosity and Religion in the Round.”
In Harvey Whitehouse and Robert N. McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion: Psychological and
Cognitive Foundations of Religion, 85-106. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Ehrlich, Paul and Marcus Feldman. 2003. “Genes and Cultures: What Creates Our Behavioral
Phenome?” Current Anthropology 44(1):87-107.
Geertz, Clifford. 1960. The Religion of Java. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Goody, Jack. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
Henrich, Joseph and Robert Boyd. 2002. “On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why Cultural
Evolution Does Not Require Replication of Representations.” Journal of Cognition and
Culture 2(2):87-112.
Houseman, Michael. 2002. Review of Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse. Journal
of Ritual Studies 16(2):18-22.
Keil, Frank C. 2003. “Folkscience: Coarse Interpretations of a Complex Reality.” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 7(8):368-373.
Koskinen, Aarne A. 1953. Missionary Influence as a Political Factor in the Pacific Islands.
(Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia B; 78,1), Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia.
Laland, Kevin N. and Gillian Brown. 2002. Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on
Human Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawson, E. Thomas and Robert N. McCauley. 1990. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition
and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lumsden, Charles J. and Edward O. Wilson. 1981. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The
Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McCauley, Robert N. 2001. “Ritual, Memory, and Emotion: Comparing Two Cognitive
Hypotheses.” In Jensine Andresen, ed., Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on
Religious Belief, Ritual and Experience, 115-140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCauley, Robert N. and E. Thomas Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological
Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malley, Brian. 2002. Review of Arguments and Icons by Harvey Whitehouse. Journal of Ritual
Studies 16(2):5-7.
__________. 2004. “The Doctrinal Mode and Evangelical Christianity in the United States.”
In Harvey Whitehouse and James A. Laidlaw, eds., Ritual and Memory: Toward a
Comparative Anthropology of Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Mithen, Steven. 2004. “From Ohalo to Çatalhöyük: The Development of Religiosity during
the Early Prehistory of Western Asia, 20,000–7000 BC.” In Harvey Whitehouse and Luther
H. Martin, eds., Theorizing Religions Past: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on
‘Modes of Religiosity,’ 17-43. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. 1999. “Holy Book—A Treasury of the Incomprehensible: The Invention of
Writing and Religious Cognition.” Numen 46(3):269-290.

351
Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission

__________. 2001. How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion,
Leiden: Brill.
__________. 2004a. “Intuitive and Explicit in Religious Thought.” Journal of Cognition and
Culture 4(1):123-150.
__________. 2004b. “Corrupt Doctrine and Doctrinal Revival: On the Nature and Limits of
the Modes Theory.” In Harvey Whitehouse and Luther H. Martin, eds., Theorizing
Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition, 173-194. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira
Press.
__________. 2004c. “Bridge over Troubled Water: Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries.”
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 16(3):336-347.
__________. 2005. “Religious Conversion and Modes of Religiosity.” In Harvey Whitehouse
and Robert N. McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive
Foundations of Religiosity, 149-166. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Pyysiäinen, Ilkka and Veikko Antonen, eds. 2002. Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science
of Religion. London: Continuum.
Redfield, Robert. 1956. Peasant Society and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richerson, Peter and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed
Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rozenblit, Leonid and Frank Keil. 2002. “The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An
Illusion of Explanatory Depth.” Cognitive Science 26:521-562.
Sharot, Stephen. 2001. A Comparative Sociology of World Religions. New York: New York
University Press.
Sharpe, Eric. 1975. Comparative Religion: A History. London: Duckworth.
Sinha, Chris. 2001. “In Search of the Laws of Form.” Biblio: A Review of Books, 6(11-12):36-
37.
Sjöblom, Tom. 2005. “Storytelling: Narratives of the Mind and Modes of Religiosity.”
Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 31(2):235-254.
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sterelny, Kim. 2003. Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Temenos. 2004. Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion 39-40 (a special issue on
folk religion).
Tremlin, Todd. 2006. Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Westermarck, Edward. 1906-1908. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas I-II.
London: Macmillan.
Whitehouse, Harvey. 2000. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
__________. 2001a. “Transmissive Frequency, Ritual, and Exegesis.” Journal of Cognition
and Culture 1(2):167-181.
__________. 2001b. “Conclusion: towards a reconciliation.” In Harvey Whitehouse, ed., The
Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography, 203-223. Oxford: Berg.
__________. 2002a. “Conjectures, Refutations, and Verification: Towards a Testable Theory
of ‘Modes of Religiosity.’” Journal of Ritual Studies 16(2):44-59.

352
 ILKKA PYYSIÄINEN

__________. 2002b. “Modes of Religiosity: Towards a Cognitive Explanation of the

Sociopolitical Dynamics of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14(3-
4):293-315.
__________. 2005. “The Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity.” In Harvey Whitehouse and
Robert N. McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of
Religion, 207-232. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Whitehouse, Harvey and James Laidlaw, eds. 2004. Ritual and Memory: Toward a
Comparative Anthropology of Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Whitehouse, Harvey and Luther H. Martin, eds. 2004. Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology,
History, and Cognition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Whitehouse, Harvey and Robert N. McCauley, eds. 2005. Mind and Religion: Psychological
and Cognitive Foundations of Religion. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Wiebe, Donald. 2004. “Critical Reflections on the Modes of Religiosity Argument.” In Harvey
Whitehouse and Luther H. Martin, eds., Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History,
and Cognition, 197-213. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

353