ABSTRACT
A substantial and growing literature in the cognitive science of religion argues that religious transmission is shaped and constrained by implicit cognitive processes. A central feature of this approach is that it seeks to fractionate religious thinking and behaviour into myriad different components that are explainable in terms of a finite array of relatively discrete cognitive mechanisms. Cognitive scientists home in on some strikingly recurrent features of ritual behaviour around the world and try to explain each component more or less in isolation, before moving on to explain other aspects of the same ritual behavior. The cognitivist strategy is to begin by plucking out certain features that are found in rituals more generally, for instance: the fear of menstrual pollution, the overt concern with cleanliness and neatness, the emphasis on rules that have no known function.
