Armin W. Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen

Abstract

Religious Narrative, Cognition and Culture: Image and Word in the Mind of Narrative (Religion, Cognition, and Culture). Edited by Armin W. Geertz and Jeppe Sinding Jensen. Sheffield: Equinox, 2011. v + 336 pp. ISBN 978-1—84553-295-6 (pbk.) Although this is not the first volume in the Religion, Cognition, and Culture Series, it nonetheless reflects the origins of the series and the program of the same name at the University of Aarhus. As noted in the preface, the volume emerged out of a two-year research project led by the faculty in the Department of the Study of Religion between 2002 and 2004. Most of the papers in the volume originated as papers at either the conference on “Image and Word in the Mind of Narrative” in 2003 or the conference on “Religious Narrative, Cognition, and Culture” in 2004 and, thus, a few are somewhat dated. Reflecting its status as the first religious studies program to embrace a cognitive approach, the volume takes up a topic – narrative – that is both integral to the study of religion and well suited to highlight the interplay between cognition and culture. Narrative, the editors argue, is not only a key to the complex relations between minds and social worlds but also a topic that highlights the formative effects of cultural knowledge. The volume is comprised of three sections. In the first section, each of the editors offers a theoretical perspective on religious narrative, cognition, and culture. Geertz’s essay focuses primarily on characterizing narrative, arguing that narratives lie at the center of “a matrix of relations between individuals, groups, cultural repertoires and social institutions” (p. 23) that can be studied at various levels: linguistic, which focuses on the structure of the narrative; psycholinguistic, which focuses on the social and pragmatic contexts of narration; and the neurobiological and the social psychological, which focus on the role of narrative in regulating our experience of ourselves and others. Jensen’s essay focuses more on features of religious narrative. In contrast to those who define religion primarily in terms of “minimally counter-intuitive agents,” Jensen approaches religion in terms of “world-making” both physical and imaginative (p. 38), stressing the crucial role that narrative plays in creating “shared, collective imaginary worlds” (p. 45). The emphasis on world making provides a particularly apt approach to narrative, highlighting important parallels between fictional and religious worlds. The second section illustrates five different levels of explanatory interpretation in more depth. Although three of the five chapters are edited versions of earlier publications, the section effectively brings together an eminent set of researchers each of whom argues for an intimate relation between cognition and culture at a different level of analysis: Terrence Deacon addresses the neural correlates of language; Merlin Donald, the phylogenic and cultural origins of language in cognitive communities; Chris Sinha, the links between cognition and the genesis of the “social imaginary”; Rukmini Bhaya Nair, the co-creation of narratives at the semantic level; and Ilkka Pyysiainen, the role of ritual in transforming imagined agents in seemingly real ones and, thus, in transforming “fiction” into “religion.” Nair’s consideration of novelists, such Pynchon, Lodge, and especially Rushdie, whose fiction elicited death threats from religious leaders, highlights the volatile relations between fiction and religion. Pyysiainen attempts to explain the difference. Drawing from the work of Daniel Wegner, he highlights three things that tend to make something seem real: perceptual detail, emotional impact, and