Armin W. Geertz

At the heart of this book is an exciting claim: that the evolved capacity to use narrative language is key to how we, as a species, have “abandoned solipsism” – this is the term used by neuroscientist Merlin Donald in his contribution, and highlighted by Armin Geertz in his opening chapter. Cognitive activity which appears to be carried out in isolation, the product of an individual brain and its mechanisms, consistently draws upon collective resources. Our own personal awareness is vastly expanded by making use of a range of social symbolic materials which enable us to reflect on ourselves, and others. In a chapter by Jappe Jensen, we see explained in great detail the significance of possessing a mind which narrates about the self and others, and even has the possibility of generating vicarious experiences, storing narratives of what happened to other people in such a way that they appear in our own episodic memories – “a most fantastic ability to have”. This is seen as crucial for our ability to interact and exist as “social animals”.

The account of narrative outlined here, then, is one in which we understand its role as recursive social communication, and through this role, the important part it plays in our cognitive development. Narrative is seen as crucial to understanding how we develop minds in relation to others, and approached in this way, it can be linked in to the broader study of the theory of mind – our ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others – and how this theory of mind has evolved and manifests itself in the human brain. Contributions by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and religious studies help us to consider the implications of this approach to narrative from a number of different angles.

Although religion and the nature of religious symbolism is, as one would expect, an area of reflection throughout the book, much of what is said in first seven chapters, which outline the theoretical basis for the cultural and cognitive study of narrative, deals with the place of narrative in the mind more generally. The particular focus on religious narrative emerges in a sustained way in the second half of the book, which consists of a series of engaging and original (if perhaps rather short) empirical studies. These case studies are wide ranging. We see, for example, a study of taboos in early Irish narratives and their role as emotional communication (Sjöblom); the dialogical nature of Indian epic literature (Hegarty); as well as studies of the Old Testament (Jensen and Feldt) and of parables in the New Testament (Gragg). These studies of historical texts are then complemented by a series of ethnographic studies of narrative in contemporary life, including Icelandic neopaganism (Markússon), astrology in California (Munk), and rituals in a 3D online world (Hansen). Perhaps a missing element here is the study of the reception of historic religious texts today; it would be interesting to see how the narratives studied from a historical perspective come to be understood by contemporary readers, and this would help to bridge the gap a little between the study of textual narrative and narrative as taken up in the minds and lives of people.
These case studies are very useful in showing how established work in the cognitive science of religion, which has sometimes been critiqued as unhelpfully reductive, can provide researchers with inspiration and tools for analysis when working on particular cultural cases. Nielsen, for example, draws on Boyer’s account of ‘minimally counter-intuitive’ features in religion (as well as Gell’s theory of extended agency in art) to help explain the particular character of the relationships between Georgian Orthodox Christians and their icons. Elsewhere, we see Gragg argue that there is a “striking analogy” between the cognitive shock that might have been experienced by listeners to Jesus’ parables, leading to spontaneous exegetical reflection, and the shock and subsequent reflection experienced by participants in rituals in what Harvey Whitehouse has termed the ‘imagistic mode of religiosity’. In short, what we see throughout are useful reflections on how theoretical work in the Cognitive Science of Religion can shine new light on the study of religious narrative. Nevertheless, this does not go as far as systematic hypothesis testing. The studies draw on the cognitive literature as tools for analysis, and are interesting for this reason, but they do not contribute in a substantial way to the empirical verification of the often far reaching claims made by scholars in the cognitive science of religion.

The book is full of richly rewarding material. That said, it does not always hang together as a coherent volume, and in particular there is a clear disconnect between the first and second halves of the book. The first half consists of a series of reflective and theoretical papers exploring the role of narrative in cognition and culture, but (with the exception of a chapter by Pyysiäinen) has surprisingly little to say on the established literature in the cognitive science of religion. Meanwhile the second part of the book is rich with reflections on Boyer, Whitehouse, Sperber, and McCauley and Lawson and others, but these papers do not refer back in a sustained way to the insights developed by the scholars in the first half of the book. There are many fascinating papers here that deserve to be read, but we must still wait for the theory building and hypothesis testing that the cognitive and cultural study of religious narrative requires.… (more)