ABSTRACT
Prestige attribution and status negotiation are part of the architecture and functionality of the human mind, a mind that is thoroughly social, built for communicative display and status behaviours, and thus intuitively geared to respond to religious objects. My aim here is to show that religious sacredness can be modelled – among other ways – in terms of permutations of social status display. As such, I shift the spotlight from conceptual cognition to social cognition, from “thought”, “knowledge”, “beliefs” and “representation”
to social communication, interaction, and behaviour patterns. Gods, in this sense, are strategic relationships.
