Art and Influence, Presence and Navigation in Southern African Forager Landscapes

With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontological turn’ have now been in full swing since the mid-2000s. They make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the rock arts of numerous societies, particularly in their finding that in animist societies, there is little distinction between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, the sacred and the profane. In the process, a problem of perspective arises: the perspectives of such societies, and the analogical sources that illuminate them, diverge in more foundational terms from Western perspectives than is often accounted for. This is why archaeologists of religion need to be anthropologists of the wider world, to recognise where animistic and shamanistic ontologies are represented, and perhaps where there is reason to look closely at how religious systems are used to imply Cartesian separations of nature and culture, religious and mundane, human/person and animal/non-person, and where these dichotomies may obscure other forms of being-in-the-world. Inspired by Bird-David, Descola, Hallowell, Ingold, Vieiros de Castro, and Willerslev, and acting through the lens of navigation in a populated, enculturated, and multinatural world, this contribution locates southern African shamanic expressions of rock art within broader contexts of shamanisms that are animist.

Ossetian Ritual Feasts and Transpersonal Experience: Re-Description of a Religion as a Religious Practice

The protest of the North Ossetian nativist religious movement against discourses of dominant institutions in the public sphere involves as its necessary component ‘re-description’ of religion in general and ‘re-constructed’ religious systems in particular. Usually, this means revealing allegedly forgotten ancient meanings of indigenous customs, rituals and folklore texts through the use of various concepts taken from esotericism and/or practical psychology. The language for this re-description is provided by conceptual apparatus developed by New Age movements. Of particular interest in this respect is the language of ‘new science’, ‘alternative history’, ‘transpersonal psychology’, etc., employed as a tool for criticising the established system of Christian-centric understanding of what religion is and what its social functions are.

The Virgin Mary (Panagia/Theotokos) in Modern Greek Incantations: The Sacred Afflicted

Sacred personae of the officially recognized religious systems often appear in charms in order to enhance the therapeutic efficacy of the ritual. Their appearance is particularly common in Greek narrative charms where they often assume the role of the auxiliary agent who expels the malevolent factor and provides a cure to the afflicted person. In this context, the appearance of Christ, the Virgin Mary, Angels, Archangels, the Apostles, as well as various saints, is also quite frequent. There is, however, a peculiarity in terms of the role that the figure of the Virgin Mary (Panagia, Theotokos) assumes. This holy figure can not only assume the role of an auxiliary sacred agent who provides a cure to the afflicted person, but also the role of the afflicted, seeking healing treatment by another holy figure. Worth mentioning in the last case is that this affliction could have as its source another sacred figure such as the Apostles or even the Angels. In which particular charm-types does the Virgin Mary appear as the afflicted person? Which are the factors leading to the onset of this affliction and which are the symptoms experienced by the holy figure? How is this affliction cured and by whom? How could we, finally, explain this ambiguity of the Virgin Mary (Panagia) who appears to be standing in a liminal and transitional space between the sacred and the secular, divine and human, healer and afflicted? These are some of the questions that this article seeks to examine and answer.

Gods, Games, and the Socioecological Landscape

The social sciences have long recognized a relationship between religion and social ecology. Upon closer inspection, religious systems not only correspond to important features of a society’s social ecology, but also appear to directly address these features. In this article, we examine the prospect that these salient features may be framed as game theoretical dilemmas and argue that contemporary approaches that emphasize cognition and/or social learning at the expense of social ecology are inadequate in accounting for cross-cultural variation in religious expression. Using ethnographic examples, we show that religions alleviate the costs of such dilemmas in a variety of ways by: 1) fostering beliefs that motivate and sustain beneficial practices; 2) incentivizing cooperative ventures; 3) encouraging ritual performances that minimize costly conflicts and bolster territorial conventions; 4) providing institutional forums to coordinate resource distributions; and 5) maintaining important resource and species diversity.

Sacred Technologies: the Evolution of Religious Cognitive Niche

<p>Most cognitive studies of religion adopt a modular theory of cognition. The 'space'that is studied is often the 'space between the ears'. Culture and religion are viewed as by-products of more entrenched features of our brains. Although this 'Standard Model' explains many intuitive expressions of religious belief, it has trouble explaining (a) the variability of religious systems crossculturally (b) the uses of material culture (i.e. symbolic structures etc) in transmitting religious concepts. The following thesis presents a 'wideware mind' hypothesis for religious cognition. I urge that while our internal cognitive architecture is causally relevant to religious cognition, the material artefacts of culture must be viewed as cognitive properties in their own right. Hence any causal account of religious cognition must acknowledge the external features of minds and how our neurological resources interact with the artefacts of our world.</p>

Sacred Technologies: the Evolution of Religious Cognitive Niche

<p>Most cognitive studies of religion adopt a modular theory of cognition. The 'space'that is studied is often the 'space between the ears'. Culture and religion are viewed as by-products of more entrenched features of our brains. Although this 'Standard Model' explains many intuitive expressions of religious belief, it has trouble explaining (a) the variability of religious systems crossculturally (b) the uses of material culture (i.e. symbolic structures etc) in transmitting religious concepts. The following thesis presents a 'wideware mind' hypothesis for religious cognition. I urge that while our internal cognitive architecture is causally relevant to religious cognition, the material artefacts of culture must be viewed as cognitive properties in their own right. Hence any causal account of religious cognition must acknowledge the external features of minds and how our neurological resources interact with the artefacts of our world.</p>

The uniformity concept of urban design: impact of cultural traditions on the meaning of Balinese town

This study considers the conceptions of religion, tradition, and culture in the urban design process, to produce designs that become the identity of cities in Bali. A socio-semiotic approach is used to explore popular accounts of the conceptions of tradition operating in urban spatial arrangements from historical to contemporary periods. The case study in Gianyar City explores the meaning of urban space based on local wisdom that is still believed by Balinese people. Such exploration provides a basis for reconnecting urban designs with their cultural contexts, thereby promoting spatially expressed localism. Especially for Gianyar City, respect for religious systems, beliefs, and religions that have developed and are highly trusted by the public is expressed in symbolic elements that are embodied in the composition of space, and in fact, give rise to the concept of uniformity. This condition resulted in not achieving a more prominent urban cultural identity and being further damaged by the highly standardized process in the Indonesian planning system. However, the principles of religion and culture that are still alive make Balinese architecture alive, despite changing values, whether we realize it or not.

The Cultural Evolution of Religion and Cooperation

Since the earliest days of the social sciences, the relationship between religion and cooperation has been a central topic. In this chapter, we critically review some cultural evolutionary perspectives on religion and cooperation and consider how they frame the relationships among religious beliefs, behaviors, and the moral rules that motivate cooperation. We then offer an account of how religious systems can contribute to the stability of social life more generally, with cooperative dilemmas occupying a subset of a broader range of socioecological challenges that supernatural appeals might help resolve. We also provide a critical overview of popular methods used throughout much of the contemporary work on religion and cooperation. In doing so, we provide useful ways forward for testing how appeals to gods, spirits, and other supernatural forces can, in at least some cases, address locally important challenges to cooperation.

The Artistic and Religious Canon in the Christian and Muslim Traditions

The article presents a comparative analysis of the musical component of the artistic and religious canon in the orthodox direction of Christianity (Orthodoxy) and Islam. The author considers the concept of canon in a broad sense as a special type of holistic artistic-style system. In a narrow sense, it is considered as an artistic method with its own specific musical and ritual code. The musical beginning is an integral component of a religious cult and, consequently, of the liturgical canon in the Muslim and Christian traditions. Studying music as an artistic component of a particular religious tradition is one of the most popular trends in modern musicology.Religious art is canonical regardless of the ideological differences between religious systems. A canon as an integral art system is characterized by a number of patterns that manifest themselves at all levels of its structure, thus acting as a norm of tradition and, at the same time, as a way of preserving and transmitting this norm, and this transmission is of a variable type. In the article, the term “canon” is understood in the context of the culturological concepts of canon revealed in the works of V.V. Bychkov, A.F. Losev, Yu.M. Lotman, Yu.N. Plakhov, P.A. Florensky. The canon is understood as an artistic method, on the one hand, and as a special artistic and stylistic system (a set of rules that exist virtually), on the other.The article clarifies the theoretical ideas about the canon as a carrier of the norm of tradition in relation to the field of art.