How Ritual an Animal? Harvey Whitehouse on Ritual, Trust, and Cooperation

Bibliographic Data

ID21875113
AuthorsKim Sterelny (0000-0003-3159-6698, Australian National University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume8
Issue2
Publication date2022-11-16
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2049-7555 • E-ISSN: 2049-7563
PublisherEquinox Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1558/jcsr.22515
OpenAlexW4320059524
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

Harvey Whitehouse documents the great variety of ritual in human life, while offering a unified framework. Ritual’s essential social role is to support social cohesion and cooperation, but it does so via distinct mechanisms: through social fusion and through social identification. For, despite variation, ritual clusters at two poles: rare, intense, often aversive rituals; and frequent, low arousal rituals. Those frequent rituals operate through social identification primed by mutual recognition of common doctrine. In principle, this mechanism is scale independent. Rare, intense rituals generate cohesion through social fusion, itself triggered by shared, congruent autobiographical memory. This is intrinsically a small-scale mechanism. In this paper, I (i) argue that cost-based analyses of the function of ritual have a larger scope than Whitehouse supposes, (ii) offer a modified view of social fusion and the role of autobiographical memory, and (iii) argue that the primary upshot of doctrinal ritual is the legitimation of hierarchy rather than social cohesion over large social scales

Doctrine · Epistemology · Political science · Social animal · Sociology · Cultural Differences and Values · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Social Psychology

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