Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography, written by Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sørensen

Abstract

Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sorensen (eds.) Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography (Religion, Cognition, and Culture). London: Equinox, 2011. xiii + 206 pp. ISBN 9781845537418 (pbk.) This is the second volume in the Religion, Cognition, and Culture series edited by Jeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin W. Geertz. As noted in the preface, this volume, edited by Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sorensen, emerged from an international symposium on the theme of “Past Minds: Evolution, Cognition, and History,” which was held at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast in May 2007. The volume is comprised of four sections with four theoretical papers on cognitive historiography in the introductory and concluding sections and nine case studies, drawn from ancient religions, in two sections devoted respectively to the Roman world and various other ancient civilizations. The papers are linked by an overarching interest in the transmission of tradition and the cognitive mechanisms that underwrite that process. Overall, the volume makes a case for the value of cognitive and evolutionary theories for explaining history at different levels of historical analysis. In the first of the four theoretical chapters, Luther Martin provides a historical overview of the relationship between historiography and evolutionary theorizing in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species, and of the search for generalizable explanations of historical events. In the second, Christophe Heintz discusses the importance of cultural epidemiology as a theoretical framework that allows historians to analyze and explain the distribution of cultural representations and material cultural forms. In the penultimate chapter, Don Wiebe worries that the Integrated Causal Model advanced in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992), the edited volume by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, may not leave room for complementary approaches and makes a case for explanatory pluralism. Sorensen’s concluding essay provides an analysis, first, of three potential ways of conceiving the relationship between history (the attempt to understand the relations between particular events), socio- cultural systems (the modeling of stable modes of social organization and public symbolic representations), and psychology (understood as the modeling of individuals’ neurocognitive systems) and, second, of the role of cognitive theorizing at three different levels of historical inquiry, which he refers to as micro, macro, and meso. Tooby and Cosmides’s widely-read chapter on “The Psychological Foundations of Culture” (1992); Dan Sperber’s Explaining Culture (1996); and to a lesser but still significant extent, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson’s Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) figure prominently in all four theoretical chapters, which provide a convenient point of entry into the case studies included in this volume. Our review, therefore, primarily focuses on theoretical issues pertaining to the underlying discussions of evolutionary psychology, cultural epidemiology, and gene-culture co-evolution in the theoretical chapters and more briefly with the individual case studies.