ABSTRACT
Lawson and McCauley’s Rethinking religion: connecting cognition and culture (RR) ‘launched the cognitive science of religion’; it ‘inaugurated the eld of cognitive studies of religion’ (McCauley and Lawson 2002: ix; Liénard and Boyer 2006: 817). It offers a ‘theory of religious ritual systems as well as a framework for a larger theory of religious systems’ (171).1 The book’s ‘principal theoretical object is the shared knowledge about their religious systems (both the system of ritual acts and the accompanying conceptual scheme) of persons who are participants in those systems’ (5). It proposes that human minds are constrained to think about action in certain ways and that religious ritual is subject to these same constraints. RR attempts to show how the resulting ‘symbolic-cultural systems’ can be explained scientically, i.e., ‘by means of systematically related, general principles’ that work at a different level from religious phenomena and that ‘are empirically culpable beyond their initial domain of application’ (2, 27; original emphasis). As a theory of religion, RR’s originality consists in its axiomatic connection between culture (the domain of relatively non-structured religious commitments) and cognition (the domain of structured representations of action): religion becomes subject to formal analysis when it extends from the former into the latter, above all in the case of ritual.
