Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture

Armin W. Geertz is Professor in the History of Religions, Director of the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit and MINDLab Coordinator of the Cognition and Culture Project at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is co-editor of Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture (Acumen, 2011).

• Introduction, Armin W. GeertzPart I Evolutionary Scenarios1. Whence Religion? How the Brain Constructs the World and What This Might Tell Us about the Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture, Armin W. Geertz2. Why "Costly Signalling" Models of Religion Require Cognitive Psychology, Joseph Bulbulia3. The Prestige of the Gods: Evolutionary Continuities in the Formation of Sacred Objects, William E. Paden4. The Evolutionary Dynamics of Religious Systems: Laying the Foundations of a Network Model, István Czachesz5. Art as a Human Universal: An Adaptationist View, Ellen Dissanayake6. The Significance of the Natural Experience of a ‘Non-Natural’ World to the Question of the Origin of Religion, Donald Wiebe7. Religion and the Emergence of Human Imagination, Andreas Lieberoth8. The Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture: The Bowerbird Syndrome, Luther H. Martin9. The Will to Sacrifice: Sharing and Sociality in Humans, Apes, and Monkeys, Henrik Høgh-Olesen10. Apetales: Exploring the Deep Roots of Religious Cognition,Tom SjöblomPart II Cognitive Theories11. Cognition and Meaning, Jeppe Sinding Jensen12. Wittgenstein and the Naturalness of Religious Belief, Mark Addis13. “Peekaboo!” and Object Permanence: On the Play of Concealment and Appearance in Cognition and Religion, Thomas Hoffmann14. Yogācāra Buddhist Views on the Causal Relation between Language, Cognition and the Evolution of Worlds, William S. Waldron15. A Resource Model of Religious Cognition: Motivation as a Primary Determinant for the Complexity of Supernatural Agency Representations, Uffe Schjoedt16. The Recognition of Religion: Archaeological Diagnosis and Implicit Theorizing, Peter Jackson17. Religion and the Extra-Somatics of Conceptual Thought, Mads Jessen18. Tools for Thought: The Ritual Use of Ordinary Tools, Pierre Liénard & Jesper Sørensen19. Care of the Soul: Empathy in a Dualistic Worldview, Gretchen Koch20. From Corpse to Concept: A Cognitive Theory on the Ritualized Treatment of Dead Bodies, William W. McCorkle Jr21. Anthropomorphism in God Concepts: The Role of Narrative, Peter Westh

"Geertz’s brilliantly interdisciplinary volume brings together many of today’s top theorists of religion in a well-balanced, accessible selection of cutting-edge humanistic and scientific approaches. It will be indispensable." – Stewart E. Guthrie, Fordham University"An interesting and important project” – Anthropology Review Database