Antistructure and the Roots of Religious Experience
The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo-Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs tha...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Open Library of Humanities$s2024-
[2020]
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| In: |
Zygon
Year: 2020, Volume: 55, Issue: 1, Pages: 125-156 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Kognitive Religionswissenschaft
/ Religious experience
/ Change of consciousness
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| IxTheo Classification: | AA Study of religion AE Psychology of religion AG Religious life; material religion |
| Further subjects: | B
homo duplex
B Religious Experience B Trance B Ritual B status functions B antistructure B collective intentions B Social Structure B conventional affordance B synchrony |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo-Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others' intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems. |
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| ISSN: | 1467-9744 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Zygon
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1111/zygo.12578 |