|
Pascal Boyer |
Books |
 |
MemoryInMindAndCulture Edited by Pascal Boyer and James V Wertsch Forthcoming 2009 - New York - Cambridge University Press Contents: What Are Memories For? Functions Of Recall in Cognition & Culture, Pascal Boyer - The Role of Repeated Retrieval in Shaping Collective Memory, Henry L. Roediger, III, Franklin M. Zaromb, & Andrew C. Butler - Specificity in Memory, Dan Schacter, Angela Gutchess & Elizabeth Kensinger - Networks of Autobiographical Memories, Helen L. Williams & Martin A. Conway - Making History: Social and Psychological Processes Underlying Collective Memory, James W. Pennebaker and Amy Gonzalez - Cultural Life Scripts and Individual Life Stories, Dorthe Berntsen & Annette Bohn - Historical Memories, Craig W. Blatz and Michael Ross - How Does Collective Memory Create A Sense of the Collective?, Alan Lambert, Laura Nesse, Chad Rogers & Larry Jacoby - Collective Memory, James V. Wertsch - The Memory Boom: Why and Why Now?, David W. Blight - Historians and sites of memory, Jay Winter - Oral traditions as collective memories: Implications for a general theory of individual and collective memory, David C. Rubin - Cognitive Predispositions and Cultural Transmission, Pascal Boyer. |
 |
ReligionExplained The Evolutionary Foundations of Religious Belief Random House (UK) and Basic Books (USA), 2001 The main theme of this book is that we now have a better understanding of religious representations, their causes and their role in human cognition, simply because we have a better and more precise understanding of the mind-brain, its evolution, its structure and its specific dispositions. Theme[From Chapter 1] The explanation for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work. I really mean all human minds, not just the minds of religious people or of some of them. I am talking about humanminds because what matters here are prop-erties of minds that are found in all members of our species with normal brains. The discoveries I will mention here are about the ways minds in general (menís or womenís, British or Brazilian, young or old) function. This may seem a rather strange point of departure if we want to explain something as diverse as religion. Beliefs are different in different people; some are religious and some are not. Also, obviously, beliefs are different in different places. Japanese Buddhists do not seem to share much, in terms of religious notions, with Amazonian shamans or American Southern Baptists. How could we explain a phenomenon (religion) that is so variable in terms of something (the brain) that is the same everywhere? This is what I describe in this book. |
 |
TheNaturalnessOfReligiousIdeas Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Publisher's blurb: "Why do people have religious ideas? And why thosereligious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain. Experimental results from developmental psychology, he says, can explain why certain religious representations are more likely to be acquired, stored, and transmitted by human minds. Considering these universal constraints, Boyer proposes an exciting new answer to the question of why similar religious representations are found in so many different cultures." |
|
|
Cognitive Aspects Of Religious Symbolism Edited by Pascal Boyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, Pascal Boyer - Whither Ethnoscience?, Scott Atran - Computational Complexity in te Modelling of Cosmological Ideas, Janet Keller & FK Lehman - "Earth" and "Path" as Complex Categories: Semantics and Symbolism in Kwaio culture, Roger Keesing - Domain-specificity, Living Kinds and Symbolism, Maurice Bloch - Pseudo-Natural Kinds, Pascal Boyer - Sign into Symbol, Symbol as Sign: Cognitive Aspects of a Social Process, Christina Toren - Talking about Souls. The Pragmatic Construction of Meaning in Cuna Ritual Language, Carlo Severi - Cognitive Categories, Cultural Forms and Ritual Structures, E Thomas Lawson - The Interactive Basis of Ritual Effectiveness in a Male Initiation Rite, Michael Houseman. |
 |
TraditionAsTruthAndCommunication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Publisher's blurb: "Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr. Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition as a type of interaction which results in the repetition of certain communicative events, and therefore as a form of social action. Tradition as Truth and Communication deals particularly with oral communication and focuses on the privileged role of licensed speakers and the ritual contexts in which certain aspects of tradition are characteristically transmitted. Drawing on cognitive psychology, Dr. Boyer proposes a set of general hypotheses tested by ethnographic field research." |
|
|
|