ABSTRACT
Typologies of cultural phenomena may be similarly constructed and prove similarly productive. Cultural phenomena may be classified by their function (e.g., subsistence vs. artistic activities) or by their forms (e.g., transhuman
pastoralism vs. nomadic pastoralism). And as is the case with biological kinds, cultural kinds based on function tend to produce explanations sensitive to particular contexts, times, places, or cultural ecosystems. Typologies based on the form of cultural phenomena may produce discoveries about cross-cultural recurrence and tendencies for particular form-function associations. The cognitive scientific treatment of religious rituals is a case in point (Lawson and McCauley, 1990; Barrett and Lawson, 2001; McCauley and Lawson, 2002; Malley and Barrett, 2003). Operating on the insight that cultural beliefs and practices must be represented in human minds (Sperber, 1985, 1996), scholars in the cognitive science of religion have shown that using the typical cognitive representational structures of cultural phenomena as their deeper structure (their form) produces theoretically motivated and empirically tractable typologies of cultural phenomena (Boyer, 2001; McCauley and Lawson, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Pyysiainen, 2004) Nevertheless, the rapid but disproportionate growth of the cognitive science of religion in some areas, coupled with the desire to meaningfully connect with more traditional, function-inspired classifications, has left the field with an incomplete and sometimes inconsistent typology of religious and related actions.
