Religion, Cognition & Culture

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Mvh. Anne Lundahl Mauritsen
PhD-stipendiat, Aarhus Universitet

survey.au.dk

Cultural Immunology as a paradigm for the study of resilience in religious traditions.

Invitation to join open session at the EASR conference in Pisa, 30 August – 3 September 2021
If you are interested, please contact Jeppe Sinding Jensen ASAP ([email protected])

Religious traditions are commonly conservative but they may also react creatively to changes in their environments by e.g. ignoring, incorporating, transforming or rejecting novel stimuli from inside as well as outside the tradition(s). Sometimes novelties are accepted, at other instances rejected. We want to know why and how e.g. religious ideas, myths, rituals and institutions act as they do when ‘under pressure’. When does resilience govern and when does it break down?

Understanding the mechanisms behind both positive and negative patterns of action may require explanations of many kinds and, thus, here we select a focus on immunological psychological functions of institutions in minds and on discursive immunological functions in sociocultural formations with a special emphasis on religiously validated social institutions. Our basic premise is that collective and individual agents require structurally stable socio-cultural patterns and scaffolding for their continuance and the maintenance of normative collective life. We consider ontological as well as phylogenetic occurrences of resilience in relation to changes in religious traditions, whether they ignore, incorporate, transform or reject internal or external actions. We shall also consider mediations patterns such as blends, hybridizations and syncretisms.

As applied here, the immunological perspective contends that any cultural system forms an ecology of concepts that aligns mental representations between members of a group. Such concepts facilitate communication and coordination of behavior and impose selective constraints on the acquisition of new ideas as a function of their degree of fit with already present ideas. Based on recent developments in cognitive neuroscience and theoretical biology we present an innovative model of (a) what cultural systems are and what they are good for, (b) how they attain resilience and stability with a special focus on religion, and (c) how they interact with other cultural systems and with social institutions. In short, we suggest a radical rethinking of the very ontology of resilience in the ‘cultural sphere’ as an immunology of cultural systems.

In that respect, the histories of religious traditions, as stable feedback loops, demonstrate how cultures arise and persist, how ideas spread and how and why transmission matters. Case studies in the epidemiology of representations show how cognitive attractor positions and predictive processing in individual minds are reinstating the importance of cultural systems in collective representations and the formations of cultural expectancies. Perceptual enactivism, distributed cognition, social entrainment and the emergence and stability cultural systems all point to the salience of a cultural immunology explanatory framework and the idea of culture as an immunological system coordinating organisms and limiting interpersonal prediction error. This latter is precisely what social institutions offer: stability and resilience of cultural systems. Religions provide ample and substantial examples here and we shall provide a range of them as prime instances of socio-cultural resilience.

Bidrag til forskning og vind gavekort til Salling!

Deltag i en spørgeskemaundersøgelse om værdier, traditioner og religion. Vi søger helt almindelige danskere. Du behøver ikke at have en særlig mening om religion for at deltage.

Klik på linket her: https://survey.au.dk/LinkCollector?key=7WF4LS8KSPCK

Besvarelsen tager ca. 10 minutter, og vi trækker lod om 20 gavekort til Salling på 200 kr.

På forhånd tak for din hjælp!
Mvh. Anne Lundahl Mauritsen

survey.au.dk

New (commentary) paper out today! 📚

"Competing Forces Account for the Stability and Evolution of Religious Beliefs"

https://tinyurl.com/yddmsc6q

Assistant Professorship in Nordic Religion - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Culture and Society - Study of Religion, Dept. of the, Aarhus University

https://international.au.dk/about/profile/vacant-positions/job/two-year-postdoctoral-position-the-minds-of-gods-and-the-socioecological-landscape/.

Two-Year Postdoctoral Position: The Minds of Gods and the Socioecological Landscape - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Culture and Society - Study of Religion, Dept. of the, Aarhus University

How is Coronavirus affecting your life? Now you have the opportunity to help the researchers. You just need to answer a questionnaire and you will help the researchers to understand what the corona epidemic means to the human psyche. Andreas Lieberoth is leader of this project!

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Join us next Thursday at our lunch meeting - all are welcome!

RCC lunch meeting - "Breaches of Trust Change the Content and Structure of Religious Appeals" Little experimental work has assessed whether or not socioecological pressures can generate systematic variation in the content and structure of specific beliefs. In this presentation, I ...

At RCC we embrace sound open science practices! We are also actively engaged in various research projects assessing the use of open science practices and other avenues for improving the scientific process. See for instance this newly published paper, which involved PhD fellow at RCC Theiss Bendixen: ”An empirical assessment of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices in the social sciences (2014–2017)”, published in Royal Society Open Science.

New article out today in Royal Society Open Science: ”An empirical assessment of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices in the social sciences (2014–2017)” At RCC we embrace sound open science practices! We are also actively engaged in various research projects assessing the use of open science practices and other avenues for improving the scientific...

https://rcc.au.dk/news-and-events/signle-events/artikel/why-painful-rituals-testing-the-costly-signaling-theory-in-the-lab/

Why painful rituals? Testing the costly signaling theory in the lab Martin Lang, assistant professor at LEVYNA, will present at this thurday's lunch meeting. Check Martin's work out right here: www.martinlang.cz

RCC is now on Twitter ! Let's hook up! 🎇

Religion, Cogntion and Culture (@RCC_AU) | Twitter The latest Tweets from Religion, Cogntion and Culture (). Official Twitter account for Religion, Cognition and Culture (Aarhus University). Aarhus, Denmark

Recent work from Theiss Bendixen:

New article from Phd-fellow at the RCC, Theiss Bendixen New article from Theiss Bendixen, Phd-fellow at the RCC: Sense or non-sense? A critical discussion of a recent evolutionary–cognitive approach to “folk-economic beliefs”