Pascal Boyer - Books
Religion Explained
May 2001, Random House (UK) and Basic Books (USA). Click here for more detail.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.
<>To understand religion, it may be a good thing to know what it is. (It is striking how few discussions of religion actually follow that principle). For example, most religion in the world is not about God, bot about immortality, and not about being rewarded for being good. The religions we are familiar with are only a small selection in a larger repertoire of supernatural ideas.People do not have religion because there is a specific need for it, or a special part of the brain that creates religion. Religious ideas and norms happen to be highly "contagious" given the kinds of brains we humans have.
You cannot hope to understand religion if you do not understand what is happening in the "mental basement": that is, in all sorts of cognitive processes that our conscious inspection cannot reach.
Naturalness of Religious Ideas
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."
Tradition as Truth and Communication
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."
