ABSTRACT
Evolutionary ethology of religion could reintegrate the insights of both art and religion. Focusing on the behavior that is ancestral to both art and religion, which can be seen in both art behavior and in religious behavior, brings valuable new insights to both fields. S. Brent Plate is a leading proponent of the study of religion as material culture, and his earlier anthology, Religion, Art and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader has been regarded as an essential collection of contributions to that study. Norman Girardot is a professor of Chinese religion. He has also been organizer and curator of a series of symposia and exhibitions featuring “outsider” and folk art, especially religious folk art. As Plate’s invocation of stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread shows, anything that is skillfully altered or applied can invoke the intensity of consciousness that in turn promotes the sense of a normative response.
