A Taves
Biographic Data
| ID | 43689 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Taves |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Taves |
| SIGNATURE | TAVES A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2695-5337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 66 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Do People Think Abstractly Inside Cathedrals? The Role of Place Size and Religiosity on Construal Level
This registered report (N = 2,466; >90% power to detect d ≥ 0.13) tested whether imagining oneself in large and religious places, such as cathedrals, promotes abstract thinking. Participants imagined themselves in one of the four experimental scenarios varying in size (large vs. small) and type (religious vs. secular), wrote about their imagined experience there, and completed validated measures assessing abstraction (neutral vs. religious conten…
The Devil Sat on My Bed: Encounters with the Spirit World in Mormon Utah
A conceptual typology of presence experiences and corresponding mechanisms
Researchers who seek to understand the mechanisms that give rise to presence experiences are faced with a phenomenon that spans a wide variety of contexts, takes many forms, and is studied in various disciplines. In the absence of a conceptual typology that distinguishes different types of experiences in which physically absent persons or entities seem to be present, researchers have difficulty specifying the extent to which the mechanisms they p…
Reflections on a CSR manifesto from a CSR-adjacent point of view
What Counts as Religious/Spiritual Experience in the US and India
Nonordinary Experiences, Well-being and Mental Health: A Systematic Review of the Evidence and Recommendations for Future Research
Engaging the Deeper Shifts: Content Expansion and Scientific Engagement
One way to think about change in the discipline is to consider the various “turns” it has taken. In a recent review of a potential “normative turn,” Stausberg et al. (2023) listed many others, including the performative, spatial, aesthetical, material, queer, critical, and digital turns. These “turns,” which are largely perspectival, are characteristic of humanities disciplines, where new theoretical perspectives provide one of the traditional me…
The role of experience in making Gods and spirits real
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies, By Richard Saville-Smith
Journal Article Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies, By Richard Saville-Smith Get access Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies By Richard Saville-Smith Bloomsbury, 2023. 254 pages. $115.00 (hardcover), $103.00 (e-book). Ann Taves Ann Taves University of California, Santa Barbara [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2695-5337 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford…
O que é não religião: Sobre as virtudes de uma estrutura de sistemas de significado para estudar cosmovisões religiosas e não religiosas no contexto da vida cotidiana
Do original What is Nonreligion? On the Virtues of a Meaning Systems Framework for Studying Nonreligious and Religious Worldviews in the Context of Everyday Life. Secularism and Nonreligion, v. 7, n. 9, pp.1-6, 2018. O tradutor agradece pela gentil autorização dada pela autora e pelos editores do periódico Secularism & Non-Religion
Phenomena, Mechanisms, and Levels of Analysis in the CSR
This outstanding textbook provides an expansive overview of the sub-field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). White’s summary of the field’s core assumptions affords the opportunity – as does the book as a whole – to reflect on theory and method in the CSR and its implications for the evolutionary study of religion and/or culture more generally. Although White effectively summarizes the core assumptions using the “fractionation” terminolo…
Worldview Analysis as a Tool for Conflict Resolution
When we survey the current theoretical landscape, we find two distinct approaches to the analysis of worldviews. The systemic approach centers on responses to fundamental worldview questions (aka “big questions”); the cognitive-behavioral approach focuses on the processes that give rise to behaviors that express worldviews. If we think of worldviews as subjective representations of the environment, that is, subjective “worlds,” we can think of th…
Henrich’s Weberian project
Scholarly Values, Methods, and Evidence in the Academic Study of Religion
The Values in Scholarship on Religion ( VISOR ) project collected data on the preferred methods and values of scholars in the academic study of religion. This dataset supports comparisons between members of the American Academy of Religion ( AAR ) and partner organizations, such as the North American Association for the Study of Religion ( NAASR ), as well as members of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion ( SSSR ). The AAR -partner s…
Religion, Religious: Can Anti-Definitionalists Stay Tethered to the Study of Religion
Article Religion, Religious: Can Anti-Definitionalists Stay Tethered to the Study of Religion? was published on October 20, 2021 in the journal Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft (volume 29, issue 2)
Brian Rennie: An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior
Event cognition (not ecumenical naturalism) integrates individual and cultural differences
A Feature-Based Approach to the Comparative Study of "Nonordinary" Experiences
At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realize due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today,…
Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James
Mystical and Other Alterations in Sense of Self: An Expanded Framework for Studying Nonordinary Experiences
Although many researchers in psychology, religious studies, and psychiatry recognize that there is overlap in the experiences their subjects recount, disciplinary silos and challenges involved in comparing reported experiences have left us with little understanding of the mechanisms, whether biological, psychological, and/or sociocultural, through which these experiences are represented and differentiated. So-called mystical experiences, which so…
From religious studies to worldview studies
This essay uses the ‘big questions’ embedded in ways of life and implicitly answered in goal directed action to address the future of the study of religion. It locates Religious Studies as a subset of Worldview Studies, defined in terms of big questions, in order to offer an evenhanded basis for comparing religious and nonreligious worldviews. Defining worldviews in terms of big questions highlights the evolved world-making capacities we share wi…
What Do Religion Scholars Really Want? Scholarly Values in the Scientific Study of Religion
This article presents selected findings of the Values in Scholarship on Religion (VISOR) project. Conversations about the values and norms that ought to shape the academic study of religion are quite common but typically based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience. The goal of VISOR was to gather data that could ground debates about the values that scholars of religion prize. Here, we present statistical analyses of VISOR data that shed l…
(Revelatory) events: A response to commentators
I want to thank all five commentators for their careful, close readings of the book, their elaborations on various points, and their critical commentary. All approached the task in a very construct
Psychology, meaning making, and the study of worldviews: Beyond religion and non-religion
To get beyond the solely negative identities signaled by atheism and agnosticism, we have to conceptualize an object of study that includes religions and nonreligions. We advocate a shift from “religions” to “worldviews” and define worldviews in terms of the human ability to ask and reflect on “big questions” (BQs; e.g., what exists? how should we live?). From a worldviews perspective, atheism, agnosticism, and theism are competing claims about o…
What is Nonreligion? On the Virtues of a Meaning Systems Framework for Studying Nonreligious and Religious Worldviews in the Context of Everyday Life
Discussions of nonreligion or secularity face a central challenge that has long plagued scholars of religion – that of specifying an object of study. Although several suggestions have been made, I think we can most effectively capture the range of things we want to study by (1) adopting worldviews, defined in terms of “big questions,” as an overarching rubric that encompasses both religious and nonreligious outlooks and (2) nuancing our understan…
From religious studies to worldview studies
This essay uses the ‘big questions’ embedded in ways of life and implicitly answered in goal directed action to address the future of the study of religion. It locates Religious Studies as a subset of Worldview Studies, defined in terms of big questions, in order to offer an evenhanded basis for comparing religious and nonreligious worldviews. Defining worldviews in terms of big questions highlights the evolved world-making capacities we share wi…
Presidential Address: "Religion" in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University
Journal Article 2010 Presidential Address: "Religion" in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University Get access Ann Taves Ann Taves * *Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara, E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 79, Issue 2, June 2011, Pages 287–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr004 Published: 24 Marc…
No Field Is an Island: Fostering Collaboration between the Academic Study of Religion and the Sciences
We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary paradigm, (2) adopt a building block approach to the study of religion that distinguishes between religions and the more elementary phenomena that comprise them, and (3) operationalize abstract concepts as behavioral i…
A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Psychical, Occult, and Religious Phenomena, 1900-1909
In so far as researchers viewed psychical, occult, and religious phenomena as both objectively verifiable and resistant to extant scientific explanations, their study posed thorny issues for experimental psychologists. Controversies over the study of psychical and occult phenomena at the Fourth Congress of International Psychology (Paris, 1900) and religious phenomena at the Sixth (Geneva, 1909) raise the question of why the latter was accepted a…
Experience as site of contested meaning and value: The attributional dog and its special tail
Religious Experience Reconsidered was premised on the idea that experience is a site of contested meaning and value for subjects (and scholars). Although the concept of specialness has drawn considerable attention, my goal in writing the book was to update efforts to use attribution theory to bridge between religious studies and the psychology of religion. I intended the focus on micro-social processes to complement analysis at the macro-social l…
Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion
Journal Article Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion Get access Ann Taves Ann Taves Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 71, Issue 2, June 2003, Pages 303–326, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaar/71.2.303 Published: 01 June 2003
Spiritual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs
In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observed that "America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,-the autobiographies of escaped slaves." As Peabody went on to point out, "these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the workings of this great institution." As such, they have proved an invaluable resource for examining…
Ascription, attribution, and cognition in the study of experiences deemed religious
There have been two major approaches to the study of 'religious experience' in religious studies, which I refer to as the sui generis model and the ascriptive model. The sui generis model assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that there are specifically religious (or mystical or spiritual) experiences, emotions, acts, or objects; the ascriptive model assumes that there are not. I argue that the sui generis model holds little promise in terms of link…
Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of “Religion”
Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) distinguishing between (a) the generic elements that structure definitions and (b) the specific feature…
History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates
The Mormon claim that Joseph Smith discovered ancient golden plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York is too often viewed in simple either/or terms, such that the plates either existed, making Smith the prophet he claimed to be, or did not, making him deceptive or delusional. If we assume that there were no ancient golden plates and at the same that Smith was not a fraud, then the task of historical explanation is more complex. Building on…
Knowing Through the Body: Dissociative Religious Experience in the African- and British-American Methodist Traditions
Mothers and Children and the Legacy of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Christianity
Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. ... If you wait until the end of ma…
A Feature-Based Approach to the Comparative Study of "Nonordinary" Experiences
At the turn of the 20th century, researchers and clinicians compared case studies of patients diagnosed with hysteria and mediums who claimed to channel spirits based on alterations they observed in their sense of self. Yet, notwithstanding its early promise, this comparative approach to such "nonordinary experiences" (NOEs) was never fully realize due to disciplinary siloing and the challenges involved in comparing culture-laden accounts. Today,…
What Do Religion Scholars Really Want? Scholarly Values in the Scientific Study of Religion
This article presents selected findings of the Values in Scholarship on Religion (VISOR) project. Conversations about the values and norms that ought to shape the academic study of religion are quite common but typically based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience. The goal of VISOR was to gather data that could ground debates about the values that scholars of religion prize. Here, we present statistical analyses of VISOR data that shed l…
Big Gods and other watcher mechanisms in the formation of large groups
Norenzayan's effort to integrate genetic and cultural evolution is a welcome advance over previous efforts, as is the attention he devotes to different levels of analysis from cognitive mechanisms to large group interactions. The scope of Norenzayan's argument, however, is bound to leave many scholars of religion feeling uneasy. The content of his model, which is most likely over specified, will need further testing in light of historical evidenc…
Where (Fragmented) Selves Meet Cultures: Theorising spirit possession
Cognitive theories of religious experience, while helpful in explaining some aspects of spirit possession, do not provide a means of accounting for the experience of mediums whose ordinary selves are ‘absent’ during possession rituals. Using the late nineteenth-century medium, Mrs Piper, as a case study, I argue that hypnosis provides a means of inducing involuntary experiences similar to those experienced by possessed persons, and that models of…
The New Religious History
Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. ... If you wait until the end of ma…
The New Religious History
The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
Journal Article The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Taves. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. x + 197 pp. $17.95.) Get access Thomas E. Wangler Thomas E. Wangler Boston College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 74, Issue 1, June 1987, Pages 185–186, https://doi.org/10.2307/1908565 Published: 01 June 198…
Mothers and Children and the Legacy of Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Christianity
The Household of the Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
Spiritual Purity and Sexual Shame: Religious Themes in the Writings of Harriet Jacobs
In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observed that "America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,-the autobiographies of escaped slaves." As Peabody went on to point out, "these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the workings of this great institution." As such, they have proved an invaluable resource for examining…
Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England . Deborah M. Valenze
The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
California's Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-Protestantism, 1850-1910. Sandra Sizer Frankiel
Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey
Knowing Through the Body: Dissociative Religious Experience in the African- and British-American Methodist Traditions
Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination. Robert Bruce Mullin
Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James
Journal Article Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. By Ann Taves. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xiv, 449 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-691-02876-1. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0691-01024-2.) Get access Catherine L. Albanese Catherine L. Albanese University of California, Santa Barbara, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Amer…
From Religious History to the Cultural History Of Religion
1Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711
From Religious History to the Cultural History Of Religion
Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion
Journal Article Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion Get access Ann Taves Ann Taves Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 71, Issue 2, June 2003, Pages 303–326, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaar/71.2.303 Published: 01 June 2003
Where (Fragmented) Selves Meet Cultures: Theorising spirit possession
Cognitive theories of religious experience, while helpful in explaining some aspects of spirit possession, do not provide a means of accounting for the experience of mediums whose ordinary selves are ‘absent’ during possession rituals. Using the late nineteenth-century medium, Mrs Piper, as a case study, I argue that hypnosis provides a means of inducing involuntary experiences similar to those experienced by possessed persons, and that models of…
Ascription, attribution, and cognition in the study of experiences deemed religious
There have been two major approaches to the study of 'religious experience' in religious studies, which I refer to as the sui generis model and the ascriptive model. The sui generis model assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that there are specifically religious (or mystical or spiritual) experiences, emotions, acts, or objects; the ascriptive model assumes that there are not. I argue that the sui generis model holds little promise in terms of link…
Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things
The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for researc…
Assessing Theories of Religion: A Forum on Thomas A. Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion
IN CROSSING AND DWELLING: A Theory of Religion (Harvard, 2006), an important new attempt to theorize religion, Thomas A. Tweed draws from his research at a Cuban Catholic shrine in Miami to conceptualize religion from the perspective of movement and place. Taking up what he considers his “role-specific obligation to reflect on the field's constitutive term,” Tweed defines “religions [as] confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy an…
No Field Is an Island: Fostering Collaboration between the Academic Study of Religion and the Sciences
We can foster collaboration between the academic study of religion and the sciences, particularly the biological and psychological sciences, if we (1) construct a common object of study that can be positioned within an evolutionary paradigm, (2) adopt a building block approach to the study of religion that distinguishes between religions and the more elementary phenomena that comprise them, and (3) operationalize abstract concepts as behavioral i…
Experience as site of contested meaning and value: The attributional dog and its special tail
Religious Experience Reconsidered was premised on the idea that experience is a site of contested meaning and value for subjects (and scholars). Although the concept of specialness has drawn considerable attention, my goal in writing the book was to update efforts to use attribution theory to bridge between religious studies and the psychology of religion. I intended the focus on micro-social processes to complement analysis at the macro-social l…
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies
The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies is both informative and provocative, introducing readers to key debates in the contemporary study of religion and suggesting future research possibilities. A group of distinguished scholars takes up some of the most pressing theoretical questions in the field. What is a 'religious tradition'? How are religious texts read? What takes place when a religious practitioner stands before a representation of …
Religions, meaning making, and basic needs
Response to Russell T. McCutcheon's Review Essay: "Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture?" 78/4: 1182-1193
Journal Article Response to Russell T. McCutcheon's Review Essay: “Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture?” 78/4: 1182–1193 Get access Ann Taves Ann Taves * *Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 80, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 2…
Philosophy (46 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Epistemology (29 works) · Psychology (25 works) · History (23 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (22 works) · Religious studies (21 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Political science (13 works)