Opportunity, Challenge and a Definition of Religion

Authors

  • Stewart Elliott Guthrie

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v1i1.58

Keywords:

religion, nature, culture

Abstract

In assembling an array of disciplines to study religion, nature and culture, the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture presents an opportunity for progress through cross-fertilization and synthesis. In so doing, the Society also challenges us to communicate with each other despite our differing assumptions. Such communication requires, first, that we explicitly define our terms, not least the three terms central to the society’s name. Ideally, our definitions will be at once substantive, applicable cross-culturally, and explicitly embedded in theory. Fortunately, current scholarship makes such definitions appear possible. In the case of the term religion, for example, cognitive science supports defining it, broadly yet substantively, as a system of thought and action for interpreting and influencing the world, built on anthropomorphic premises. Anthropomorphism, in turn, may be theorized as the inevitable consequence of a strategy of perception for an ambiguous world: namely, guess first at what matters most. Similarly broad, substantive definitions appear possible for nature and culture as well.

References

Bekoff, M. 2006 ‘Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Cognitive Ethology as the Unifying Science for Understanding the Subjective, Emotional, Empathic, and Moral Lives of Animals’ (paper presented to the inaugural meeting of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Gainesville, FL., April 6–9).

Bering, J. 2002 ‘Intuitive Perceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary’, Journal of Cognition and Culture 2: 263-308.

Bloom, P. 2004 Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York: Basic Books).

Burkert, W. 1996 Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Durkheim, E. 2001 [1915] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (ed. M.S. Cladis; trans. C. Cosman; New York: Oxford University Press).

Feuerbach, L. 1957 [1873] The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row).

Freud, S. 1964 [1927] The Future of an Illusion (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books).

Gopnik, A. 2005 ‘Renaissance Man: The Life of Leonardo’, The New Yorker, 17 January.

Guthrie, S.E. 1980 ‘A Cognitive Theory of Religion’, Current Anthropology 21.2: 181-203.

A Japanese New Religion: Rissho Kosei-kai in a Mountain Hamlet (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies 1; Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies).

Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press).

a ‘The Sacred: A Skeptical View’, in T. Idinopulos and E. Yonan (eds.), The Sacred and Its Scholars (Leiden: E.J. Brill): 124-38.

b ‘Religion: What is It?’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35.4: 412-19.

a ‘The Origin of an Illusion’, in S. Glazier (ed.), Handbook of the Anthropology of Religion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press): 489-504.

b ‘Anthropomorphism: A Definition and a Theory’, in R.W. Mitchell, N.S. Thompson, and H.L. Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals (Albany: State University of New York Press): 50-58.

‘How is Religion Causal—And What is it Exactly?’, Historical Reflections/Reflections Historiques 25(3): 405-12.

‘Why Gods? A Cognitive Theory’, in J. Andresen (ed.), Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 94-111.

‘Animal Animism: Evolutionary Roots of Religious Cognition’, in Pyysiänen and Anttonen (eds.) 2002: 38-67.

‘Folk Religion in a Rural Japanese Hamlet: A Fieldwork Perspective’, Temenos 39-40 (2003–2004): 101-23.

‘Intelligent Design as Illusion’, Free Inquiry (April/May): 40-44.

Forthcoming a ‘Anthropology and Anthropomorphism in Religion’, in H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds.), The Salvaged Mind: Social Anthropology, Religion, and the Cognitive Sciences (Durham: Carolina Academic Press).

Forthcoming b ‘Gambling on Gods: Religion as Anthropomorphism and Animism’, in D. Wulff (ed.), Handbook of the Psychology of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press).

Hassin, R., J.S. Uleman and J.A. Bargh (eds.) 2005 The New Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Horton, R. 1993 Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Hume, D. 1957 [1757] The Natural History of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Jindra, M. 2003 ‘Natural/Supernatural Conceptions in Western Cultural Contexts’, Anthropological Forum 13.2: 159-66.

Kelemen, D. 2004 ‘Are Children “Intuitive Theists”? Reasoning about Purpose and Design in Nature’, Psychological Science 15.5: 295-301.

Klass, M. 1995 Ordered Universes: Approaches to the Anthropology of Religion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press).

Kroeber, A.L., and C. Kluckhohn 2001 Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press).

Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson 1999 Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books).

Leder, D. 1990 The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Lohmann, R. 2003 ‘The Supernatural is Everywhere: Defining Qualities of Religion in Melanesia and Beyond’, Anthropological Forum 13.2: 175-85.

Lukes, S. 1972 Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row).

Lutzky, H. 1993 ‘On a Concept Underlying Indo-European Terms for the Sacred’, The Journal of Indo-European Studies 21.3–4: 283-301.

Masuzawa, T. 1998 ‘Culture’, in M.C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 70-93.

Nietzsche, F. 1966 Werke in Drei Bänder, III (ed. K. Schlechter; Munich: Carl Hanser).

Preus, S. 1987 Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Pyysiänen, I. 2002 ‘Religion and the Counter-Intuitive’, in Pyysiänen and Anttonen (eds.) 2002: 110-32.

Pyysiänen, I., and V. Anttonen (eds.) 2002 Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion (London: Continuum).

Saler, B. 1999 [1993] Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives and Unbounded Categories (New York: Berghahn Books).

Schleiermacher, F. 1988 On Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press).

Schneider, J., and P. Schneider 2005 ‘Mafia, Antimafia and the Plural Cultures of Sicily’, Current Anthropology 46.4: 501-20.

Spinoza, B. 1955 The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (New York: Dover).

Tylor, E.B. 1873 Primitive Culture (London: John Murray).

Von Stuckrad, Kocku 2006 ‘Theorizing the Field’ (paper presented to the inaugural meeting of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Gainesville, FL., April 6–9).

Wallace, A.F.C. 1970 Culture and Personality (New York: Random House, 2nd edn).

Whiten, A.J., et al. 1999 ‘Cultures in Chimpanzees’, Nature 399: 682-85.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1974 Philosophical Grammar (ed. R. Rhees; trans. A. Kenny; Berkeley: University of California Press).

Published

2007-04-20

How to Cite

Guthrie, S. E. (2007). Opportunity, Challenge and a Definition of Religion. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 1(1), 58-67. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v1i1.58